Wild Thing (29 page)

Around midday the Mercedes carrying the John Coffey lookalike pulled onto the Dock. Bryn took a 9-mm handgun out of his desk and walked outside. By this time the enormous man who had insulted Bryn’s son had got out of his Mercedes and was talking on his phone. Bang! A shot rang out and the man dropped to the floor clutching his leg. ‘You cheeky fucking nobody!’ Bryn shouted at the man. ‘Do you want to insult my boy again?’ Before the man could answer, Bryn shot him again in the leg, kicked him in the head and walked back to his office. The man crawled to his car, pulled himself inside and sped away. Bryn continued with his work as if nothing had happened.

When the injured man was interviewed in relation to Bryn’s murder, he had a cast-iron alibi and so was eliminated from the inquiry. Amongst the criminal fraternity loyalty is fickle. Feuds and greed divide gangs and leave festering sores that only revenge can heal. Thankfully a man closely linked to those who murdered Bryn has broken ranks after a dispute with them and given off-the-record information about the incident. Bryn’s family are hoping that the man will find the courage to make a full and frank statement about his associates, so that they can eventually face justice.

I had noticed that Margaret was becoming increasingly unhappy and depressed. I asked her what was wrong, and she told me that she was homesick. ‘I want to return to London,’ she said. ‘I used to like it out here in the countryside, but it’s such a lonely place, I have grown to hate it.’

I wanted to remain in Manea, so, after a lot of tears, we agreed to live apart. There was no way I was going to ask my wife to live in a place she hated, but there was no way I was going to return to live in London. A compromise of sorts was eventually reached. Margaret agreed not to move to London, and I agreed that if I liked the area she chose to move to instead, I would join her.

Margaret and the children eventually moved to a house she had found in Chatteris, Cambridgeshire. Our eldest son, Lewis, insisted on remaining with me. The property Margaret moved to was only seven miles down the road from where we were already living, but she insisted that it was a change nevertheless and the children would be able to continue their education at the local school. Constructive negotiation descended into volatile debate, and when all lines of communication eventually broke down between us, divorce papers were served. A few weeks later, when tempers had calmed, Margaret and I agreed not to get divorced and to try to improve relations between us. At first things went well, but I should have known from past experiences that any period of happiness was usually the calm before a storm.

I was in the house one morning catching my breath after a 90-minute workout when I heard the dogs barking and jumping at the fence. I went out to the front garden and saw a large young man leaning against my fence holding a racing bike. For some unknown reason he was shouting at the dogs and taunting them. I called out to him and asked him what he thought he was up to. He looked at me and shouted, ‘Fuck off, you wanker!’ before jumping on his bike and cycling away.

I went into the house, collected my car keys and drove up the road to try to catch him. I soon pulled in front of him, jumped out of the car and asked, ‘Who’s a fucking wanker?’ The man laid his bike on the road, rolled his sleeves up and squared up to me. I hit him with a left hook, which knocked him into a dyke. As he struggled to get back onto the road, I shouted, ‘Get up, you mug, so I can knock you out!’

The man scrambled back onto the road, got to his feet and began to fight me. Eventually I knocked him down and, as he lay on the road, I opened his legs and stamped as hard as I could on his bollocks. He rolled over in agony, so I began to jump up and down on his back. I heard a loud crack and saw that his elbow had broken and the bone was now sticking out of his arm. The man was screaming, ‘Please, no more! Please, no more! You’re mad!’

I’m not sure if I was mad or just irate, but I had definitely lost my temper. When I stopped jumping up and down on the man, he tried to flag down a passing motorist. As the car slowed, I shouted at the driver, ‘Fuck off and don’t get involved!’ Blood from a wound above my eye that had been caused by the man’s large sovereign ring was running down my face and had covered my shirt. The driver of the car looked at me, put his foot on the accelerator and roared off. My opponent was clutching his arm and begging me not to touch him again. I got back into my car and drove home.

Nine days later a dozen police officers arrived at my home. I asked Margaret, who happened to be at my house that day, to tell them that I was in London. The officers didn’t appear to believe her and said that they wanted to come into the house to look for me. The dogs were roaming free in the front garden and the police, reluctant to face them, asked Margaret to put them away. Quick thinking from Margaret granted me a temporary but much needed reprieve. ‘Only my husband can control them,’ she said. ‘You will have to come back later when he is here.’

Clearly disappointed, one of the officers replied, ‘Contact your husband and tell him we need to speak to him about a very serious matter.’ Margaret said she would, and the police disappeared.

I contacted a solicitor, who arranged for me to hand myself in at the local police station. Upon my arrival I was arrested on suspicion of assault and interviewed three times. I was at best economical with the truth, and the interviewing officer was aware of that fact. After considering all of the evidence, he eventually charged me with Section 18 wounding. I was bailed and told to attend court the following week.

Before I left the police station, an inspector came to see me. He said that the man I had assaulted was a leading member of the travelling community in the area and I would be well advised to take my family and leave Cambridgeshire. I smirked at him and shook my head. ‘Reputations have never impressed me. If the travellers want trouble, they can have it,’ I said before walking away. After appearing numerous times at the magistrates’ court, I was sent to Peterborough Crown Court for trial. The traveller I had fought, and who undoubtedly claims it is an unforgivable sin to inform on others, gave evidence against me and I was found guilty. Due to the seriousness of the charge, the judge told me to expect a custodial sentence, but because I was of previous good character, I received a suspended sentence of five years. I was also given 150 hours’ community service to complete and had to pay £500 compensation to the victim.

When Margaret served divorce papers on me this time, they were not withdrawn, and a divorce was granted. I will never blame Margaret for the breakdown of our marriage. We simply grew apart and fell out of meaningful love. I do and always will love her, but I accept that we can never be more than friends, which I hope we will once more be one day in the future.

 

SHORTLY AFTER OUR DIVORCE MARGARET AND THE CHILDREN RETURNED TO
live in London. Relations between the two of us deteriorated, until we stopped talking altogether. After all we have endured together, it breaks my heart that people I love no longer wish to talk to me. Time, I hope, will heal the rift, so that we can at least talk in the future.

Lewis and I moved to a house in Ely. The divorce had unsettled Lewis. He would stay out late at night and oversleep in the mornings. He was working at a local garage as an apprentice mechanic at the time, and his employer warned him about his poor timekeeping. Lewis failed to take any notice of the warnings, and inevitably he lost his job. I did my best to try to help him, but he started getting into trouble. My home was searched by police on four occasions. In an effort to try to make him pull out of the downward spiral he was in, I told him that he would have to leave my home and live with his mother.

Lewis failed to settle in London, and within weeks he had returned to Cambridgeshire and rented a flat not too far from me in Wisbech. Here Lewis met a girl named Alison Walde, and shortly afterwards they set up home together. Like all couples Lewis and Alison had their ups and downs, but they appeared to be relatively happy. Alison had two children from a previous relationship and wanted to move away from Wisbech so that she could sever all ties with her former partner and start afresh with Lewis. London, they agreed, wasn’t a suitable place to bring up children, so they decided to move to Littlehampton, a small picturesque coastal town in West Sussex, where Alison had originally come from.

They soon settled in, and Lewis became friends with a local man in his late 20s named Adrian Ede. At first relations between the two were good, but Ede was a domineering man by nature and soon he began to take liberties with Lewis. He would take his car for days on end without asking and then return it with hardly any petrol in the tank. He would borrow money and tools but never return either. Lewis told Ede that he didn’t want him taking anything from him again, but Ede just laughed and ridiculed him. Shortly afterwards Ede took Lewis’s car without his permission and refused to return it.

Not wanting to get involved in what would undoubtedly end in a violent confrontation, Lewis went to the police and explained what had happened. Adrian Ede was arrested as a result of this complaint, but for reasons known only to the police he wasn’t charged. Ede thought he was above the law and began taunting Lewis, calling him a grass and a nobody.

I have since read numerous newspaper reports about similar situations that have ended in tragic circumstances. The inquiry that follows always concludes that if the police had done their job at the outset and put the aggressor before the courts, the innocent victim would not have been forced to react. This is exactly what happened in Lewis’s case. Ede turned up in Parsons Close, where Alison and Lewis lived. Ede glared at Lewis, who happened to be on his way home from a local shop, and asked him if he had a problem. Lewis walked past and told him, ‘If you’ve got a problem with me, you know where I live.’

Ede removed his sunglasses, caught up with Lewis and said, ‘Come on then.’

More words of a threatening nature were exchanged, but Lewis just kept on walking. When he got home, Ede hung about outside his house. Hoping he would grow tired of his game, Lewis ignored Ede but eventually he decided that enough was enough. He didn’t want trouble with Ede; he just wanted him to go away and leave him alone. Lewis picked up a carving knife and ran out of the house to scare him. ‘Fuck you!’ he shouted. ‘Just go away and leave me and my family alone.’

Alison heard the commotion, looked out of the window, saw Lewis shouting at Ede and began shouting at him herself. Ede wasn’t concerned by Lewis’s threats or the fact he was armed with a knife. He fancied himself as a bit of a hard man, when he was in fact no more than a village bully. Instead of walking away from Lewis, Ede walked towards him laughing. Having no intention whatsoever to use the knife other than to scare Ede away, Lewis retreated back into his home.

Ede had stolen Lewis’s car and escaped prosecution. He had now made an armed Lewis back down. The bully thought he was above the law and invincible. Two weeks later, as Lewis and Alison were getting on with their lives, Ede turned up again in Parsons Close. Lewis was standing in the garden smoking a cigarette and saw Ede pull up in his car. When Ede saw Lewis, he said, ‘What’s your fucking problem?’ There was no point trying to hold any sort of civil conversation with this man. Lewis knew that the abuse and threats wouldn’t end until he had granted Ede’s wish and fought him. Reluctantly he walked over to his tormentor and a fight broke out.

Alison had been preparing a chicken curry in the kitchen when she heard the men start fighting. Without a moment’s hesitation she ran barefoot out into the street still holding the knife she had been using to chop up chicken. As she reached Lewis and Ede, the two men separated but started fighting again after Ede struck Lewis. A friend of Ede’s joined in the attack, and Alison tried to push them all apart. Ede punched Alison as hard as he could twice in the face, and she shouted, ‘Fuck off and go home!’ before pushing him away again.

Ede was heard shouting, ‘Fuck you, you bitch!’ and shortly afterwards Lewis and Alison went back into their home. Adrian Ede had sustained two stab wounds to his shoulder and regrettably died later in hospital. A post-mortem revealed that a 19-cm-deep wound had punctured his right lung, and this had proved fatal. Tests on his blood showed a high alcohol content, and there was also evidence of amphetamine and cannabis use. Despite this and the aggravating factors that led up to the incident, Alison, then aged just 21, and Lewis, also 21, were charged with 29-year-old Adrian Ede’s murder. The charge against Lewis was later dropped, but in August 2005 Alison went on trial at Lewes Crown Court for murder. The jury refused to accept that she hadn’t intended to stab Ede whilst trying to break up the fight; instead they believed that the stabbing was a deliberate act, and they found her guilty. Alison was sentenced to life imprisonment with a recommendation that she serve at least 12 years. Judge Anthony Scott-Gall told Alison, ‘You deliberately armed yourself with a knife to go to the assistance of your partner, who was fighting with the deceased. This was a deliberate and cold-blooded stabbing in order to cause the deceased serious bodily harm. However, I believe it was never your intention to kill him.’

I could so easily have ended up in the same situation following the intrusion onto my property by the traveller who was taunting my dogs. Farmer Tony Martin, who lives just 20 miles from me, was forced to endure a similar situation. He was charged with murder and sentenced to life imprisonment after shooting two burglars who were robbing his home. Martin’s murder conviction was later reduced to manslaughter following an appeal, and he served four years’ imprisonment before he was released. The laws in this country no longer favour the victim; they protect the aggressor, and in doing so mock those who have been wronged. Lewis and Alison wanted to live in peace with their children, but Ede intimidated and provoked them until matters came to a head on that tragic day.