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I first made the acquaintance of PC Jonah Porter back in November 1979. I’d been a Detective Sergeant for about eighteen months and married to Angie for a month or so less than that. It was a Sunday morning and Angie was getting ready to go to church when the phone rang summoning me to attend a suspicious death in a multi-occupancy house in North Oxford. If you’ve ever lived in a university town, you’ll know the sort of thing I mean: a big Victorian semi-detached divided into rooms for students or young professionals with a communal kitchen and bathroom.
Richard picked me up from home in his car and we went together to the house. By the time we got there an ambulance was already pulled up outside and the front door was open. We rang the bell to announce our arrival, but we didn’t wait to be invited before we went on in. There was a very young-looking constable standing there in the hall speaking to a young woman whose face looked vaguely familiar, but which I couldn’t place. I worked out afterwards that I’d probably seen her at the hospital on some occasion when I’d dropped Angie off there for work or when we were investigating an assault and had to go to A&E with the victim. She turned out to be Dr Margaret Hulme, a Junior Doctor training to be a trauma surgeon. The constable was, of course, Jonah.
He showed us through to one of the bed-sits where a quite bizarre scene greeted us. There was the dead body of a young man lying naked in bed surrounded by a collection of apparently random objects. I don’t have my notes to hand, but I remember there being a pair of union jack underpants, a couple of mugs, a photograph in a frame, a fountain pen –and a cuddly toy! It sounds like the conveyor belt on an episode of the Generation Game, doesn’t it? We were standing there puzzling over what on earth they were there for when Jonah piped up to say that he knows what they all are.
That’s the point at which Richard really starts taking notice of the young copper. It turns out that Jonah has been seeing the attractive young doctor, Margaret, and that they’ve been doing a bit if detective work themselves in connection with some petty thieving that has been going on in the house. All the objects lying on the bed around the murder victim are items that belong to residents of the house. And they’ve all been stolen in the last few months.
Anyway, the upshot of all that was that Richard went upstairs to Margaret’s room to see what they’d found out about the thefts, while I was left keeping order among the other residents, who were all in the communal living room waiting to be interviewed.
After a few minutes, Jonah put his head round the door and called me out. He told me that DI Paige wanted everyone to be sent back to wait in their rooms so that he could interview them each individually in the living room. I organised that and then we talked to each of the housemates in turn. Richard allowed Jonah to sit in on all the interviews, although, as I discovered later, he wasn’t even supposed to be in North Oxford that day. He was only there because Margaret had called him personally, after dialling 999. I remember Richard having quite a lot of explaining to do to the officer who had assigned Jonah to patrol the troublesome Blackbird Leys Estate that morning! If Richard hadn’t been so senior – and so well-liked and respected within the force – Jonah might have been in trouble about that.
Richard made a bit of a speciality of spotting promising young uniformed officers and recruiting them into CID. He did that with me and I could see from the moment Jonah confessed to his amateur investigation with Margaret that Richard was sizing him up as another potential protégé. It was also obvious to me from early on that Richard had his eye on Jonah’s relationship with Margaret and was going to do anything he could to nudge it along.
He had a very romantic streak, had Richard, and he always hoped to be able to produce a happy ending when he saw young people falling for one another. I never could work out how it was that he never so much as asked a girl out himself. Well, actually, at the time I thought I’d sussed it, because I’d spotted a woman’s photograph in his wallet and I’d guessed that it was some old sweetheart from this youth that he’d never been able to forget. It turned out that I was wrong about that. It was actually his mother! She’d run off when he was only a kid and he’d treasured this old photo ever since. Bernie’s theory – which is probably right – is that he was so traumatised by that, and by thinking that it must have been his fault that she left, that he could never believe that anyone would care for him.
But I digress. This chapter was supposed to be about my first encounter with Jonah. So, where was I? That’s right! Jonah’s investigation into the petty thefts turned out to be crucial to discovering who had killed the student, Simon Coulter. This has all been dealt with elsewhere, so I won’t go into the details. The significant thing was that this Simon was a nasty piece of work who had victimised some of the others in a very nasty way. I particularly remember one of the other students – a postgraduate from Germany – describing him as creepy. I can hear his words now, as I think back.
‘Like most postgraduates he gave tutorials to undergraduates,’ he told us. ‘Last summer, just after taking his final examinations, one of these students jumped to his death from the top of the engineering building. Speaking about it afterwards, Simon did not appear at all concerned about the death of this young man. In fact, he said to me that he had told the student in question that he might as well give up the idea of doing a DPhil because he had no chance of getting a first class degree. I got the impression that he was rather pleased – proud even – to think that he might have contributed towards making the young man take his own life.’
It was only years and years afterwards, when Jonah and I compared notes, that I twigged that the student that jumped from the engineering tower was Bernie’s fiancé, Stephen. It’s a small world, as they say!
The other thing that sticks in my mind from that investigation is the way that Jonah allowed his single-minded pursuit of the culprit to lead him into making what was almost an accusation against Margaret. I could see it amused Richard no end to see him following a train of thought that inevitably led to the conclusion that she was a very likely suspect indeed. I can see him now, with a sort of half-smile on his face saying, ‘Well now, Porter, as I said, I’m impressed. You’re thinking like a detective. But a word of advice: unless you have ambitions to end up as an old bachelor like me, possibly you ought to be a bit more circumspect about accusing your girlfriends of murder to their faces. In my experience a lot of women take offence that that sort of thing.’
Margaret immediately backed Jonah up, which was exactly the right thing to do to get Richard well and truly on her side and rooting for them to get it together. It was no surprise to me when he invited Jonah back with us to talk through the case and plan our next move. And I was pretty certain by then that the next move, after the case was wrapped up, would be an application for Constable Porter to be transferred to Richard’s team in CID.