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When I left school I had to find some sort of job right away, because, having been brought up in a children’s home, I didn’t have the option of staying with Mum and Dad until I could make up my mind what to do with my life. The police appealed to me because I thought it was a job where I could feel that I was making a difference – keeping people safe, that sort of thing. I suppose it probably also provided me with the security of a big institution – a bit like the one I was leaving – and somewhere to live.
So I applied to join Thames Valley Police and was accepted on their training course. I spent three years as a beat officer in East Oxford, which I enjoyed very much, but while I was there I got dragged into the investigation of a murder case and that made me start to think that what I really wanted was to join CID. That was also the case that brought me into contact with Richard Paige for the first time, which probably also had something to do with it.
It didn’t start as a murder. At first we thought it was “just” a missing child. Of course, for the parents a missing child could never be less than terrifying, but we did assume at the beginning that there was a good chance that everything would turn out OK in the end.
I was involved from the start because it was a family that I’d got to know quite well through having several times had to escort one or more of its younger members home after they’d been found spraying graffiti on walls or sneaking magazines out of the corner shop without paying for them. There were five boys ranging from age seven upwards, with the oldest being fifteen. Their father had left home long ago and their mother was finding it hard to cope. She had to work long hours at various low-paid jobs in order to make ends meet and for most of the day, Michael, the oldest was left in charge of the younger ones.
These days they’d probably have ASBOs served on them and be given Community Service to keep them occupied, but this was back on nineteen seventy and things were different. Single mothers like Jenny were rather frowned upon by the middle-class matrons of more salubrious parts of Oxford, but on the other hand there was a certain amount of “boys will be boys” attitude that allowed her youngsters to get away with more than might be the case these days. I found myself giving them repeated reprimands, but it never got to the stage where I thought of charging them or giving them a formal police caution.
Actually, they were quite nice boys underneath – full of high spirits and, above all, loyal to one another – which is more than can be said of a lot of brothers! Anyway, with that history behind them, we didn’t take it very seriously when Ian, aged twelve, didn’t arrive home from school one evening. To be fair to the police, the family didn’t report it until the following day. Michael told his mother when she got home after a stint in the kitchens at one of the colleges and she dithered about telling anyone because she was worried that Social Services might wade in and take the children away from her if she had to admit that she’d left a teenager in charge of four younger siblings. So by the time we got the call, any trail that there may have been was cold.