Don't Let Me In Page 10
“No you don’t, Sarah,” he says and he picks up the fire engine and runs off up the stairs.
“Outstanding work. Another day in paradise.”
I glare at Henry but bite my tongue; I owe him too much to rise to this.
“I’m sorry, it just came out. Listen, why don’t you and Finn get the pizzas? I’ll skip dinner as I’ve got work to do.”
Henry juts out his bottom lip like a naughty schoolboy.
“Ah yes, your murderer and the doctor, the two most important men in your life right now.”
Silence. I give him my silence.
10
Podcast 5
Podcast Episode 5 – by Sarah Kelly - 15/11/2018
Imagine this. You’re a student studying in the UK. You love it here, the language, the relative freedom of the society compared to your Catholic upbringing, the diversity and cosmopolitan big city. You’re at home here, no, you’ve found your home here.
Each night you study a little and then maybe meet some friends for a beer, or one of your group – an eclectic mix of Spaniards, Portuguese, Brazilians, French and Arabs – will cook something, usually a traditional dish from back home. Everyone likes that and it also eases some of the homesick pangs. You live in a small place for sure, but it’s warm, it’s safe and secure, and to be fair the room doesn’t matter because you live here, in this city, this supranational entity that is bigger than the small country it is nominally the capital of, grander, a place of limitless possibilities and hunger, always needing more young people like you to be fed into its ceaselessly demanding maw.
You love it.
Each morning you and your friends who you share the flat with have the same ritual. You get up, and whoever gets to the radio in the kitchen first tunes it in to a local station; you all agree on Capital. It makes you feel like Londoners even if sometimes the music is laughably terrible and inauthentic. Breakfast doesn’t exist beyond a cup of coffee and maybe a piece of fruit, the city is awake and you need to move, always be moving in the pulsating energy of people making, creating, talking, the endless talking that never shuts down. Even when you sleep you can hear the background noise of a billion city conversations.
This morning, the morning everything changes, is no different to any other in the city except in one respect. You partied a little hard the night before and have overslept so you wake an hour later than usual, but it’s okay because your first lecture isn’t till 12 so you have plenty of time to walk to the Tube and then take the Northern Line before then. So, you make a coffee and as you drink your espresso you look out of the window of your first-floor flat.
It looks like a mild day, or it would if you were English. In this weather, what would pass for nothing more than a cool spring day in your country, you have seen English girls wearing bikinis in the parks, laughing and drinking as their pale mottled skin contracts against the weak sun.
You shiver involuntarily and as you leave the flat you grab the coat that your mother bought for you just before you left to come to this country. Mother knew you would feel the cold; she always knew how you felt, usually way before you knew yourself.
You zip the coat all the way up and open the door, letting in the chill air that masquerades as summer in this latitude and chuckling as you think of the sights this will bring out at the campus today.
Before you step out one more time, the last time, into an English day, you lean down, pick up and then strap on your backpack full of text books. It is heavy for sure but you are strong and the day promises much, so you hardly notice the weight as you slam the door shut.
Even though it’s past rush hour the streets are still busy, full of people charged like frantic electrons circling the nucleus of the city. You smile, you enjoy being part of this greater mass, maybe the most chaotic, supreme expression of civilisation yet. You are looking forward always and thus you never look back, never see the man with his worried, tense face, some thirty yards back whose eyes have never left you since you left the flat.
Today is your lucky day: the bus you catch to Brixton Tube Station to get you to Kilburn turns the corner to your bus stop just as you arrive. You board the bus. A few seconds later the worried-looking man boards too and he takes a seat three back from yours.
The journey passes quickly. You’ve got your headphones on listening to some funk carioca. It reminds you of home.
Then your luck changes. As you hop off the bus you can see that Brixton Tube Station is closed. Something to do with the bombings two weeks before. Your mind wanders to the horrific events of that day, images of bandaged faces like risen mummies from the depths of the city.
But the bus hasn’t moved; maybe your luck is holding?
You jump back on and the driver gives you a knowing wink. The city has felt like this since the bombs: strength in each other, the fear pushed out to the periphery of vision.
The next station is only a few minutes away and when the bus pulls in you see it is open. Stockwell is only one stop along so no harm done. You can still make your appointment in Kilburn.
You pick up a copy of the Metro in the station and then flash your Oyster card at the barrier. Running down the escalator – dimly aware of the people behind you doing the same – you can hear a train pulling in below.
The train is on the platform waiting for you to arrive as though it’s always been there. You spring on and take a seat next to a glass partition. One of the better seats, as no one can sit next you on one side.
Three men board and take seats nearby. It’s only then that you notice one of them is looking straight at you. You’ve been here long enough to know this is a breach of Tube etiquette. Maybe he is a foreigner?
And then a man is shouting behind you.
“He’s here!”
You turn and can see the man is pointing at you, and another three men board the train, but these men aren’t like the others, these men are carrying guns.
You stand up. What is going on?
Seconds later, eleven bullets are fired into you.
Remember those weeks? Remember the fear? They say terrorists win if we let them terrorise us. I cry bullshit to that. Of course they terrorise us and our reaction to them terrorises us, but we understand it don’t we? The febrile time, that sense of the other coming for us, living amongst us whilst it plots our downfall. It led to the death of Jean Charles de Menezes on that July morning in 2005.
I said I would give you a motive for Lauren’s death but I can’t give you a Cluedo-type motive, not yet, but what I can say is this: I think the motivation for the investigation’s focus on Khalil Bukhari has to be looked at in the context of those weeks, the start of this miserable century, and that this isn’t just some political rant but rather it played out directly in leading to the conviction of Khalil Bukhari.
Listen to this. It’s an extract from the police recording of a phone call received a week after they released Charles Brownhill. If you know about the case you’ll know the name. The recordings a bit scratchy but you’ll get the gist:
CALLER: Hello, is that Detective Richardson?
RICHARDSON: This is DCI Richardson, who’s calling?
CALLER: I’d prefer, well (coughs), not to say right now, but you’re the police woman investigating Lauren Grey’s murder?
RICHARDSON: Police officer, but yes, that’s me. But I really need your name, Mr…?
CALLER: (nervous laugh) I saw you on TV apologising to that chap you arrested, the weirdo with the dyed hair. I don’t want to be on TV but I do have information.
RICHARDSON: I can assure you that anything you tell us will be treated in confidence but I really do need your name, sir. You can appreciate in an enquiry like this we get many nuisance calls.
CALLER: I’m no crank, I can assure you, but I do need to tell you something.
RICHARDSON: I–
CALLER: I was there on that night, at World’s End. I drove past and I saw him.
r /> RICHARDSON: Who did you see?
CALLER: The murderer of course.
RICHARDSON: (pause) When?
CALLER: The night she died.
RICHARDSON: Can you describe him?
CALLER: Of course. Six foot tall, muscular, late teens to early twenties and a Mohammadian.
RICHARDSON: Pardon?
CALLER: A Muslim.
RICHARDSON: Okay. And what did you see?
CALLER: I saw him walk into the bushes as my car approached the World’s End car park.
RICHARDSON: And what time was this?
CALLER: Around 12.30pm.
RICHARDSON: Were you alone?
CALLER: That’s all I have to say. I just want to be of assistance.
THE CALL ENDS
So, this call lands and you know what, I spoke to a friend of mine, ex-Met Police, and he told me that on a big enquiry, one that generates significant press interest, and this case most certainly did do that, you can expect upwards of a hundred calls from well-meaning souls who think they can help but don’t, often disturbed types who just want some attention and the occasional troublemaker who just wants to spit in the well for the sake of it.
Timothy Bowden, albeit Richardson didn’t know it then, turned out to be the opposite. He was the piece of prosecution gold in the dirt.
This was potentially a breakthrough in the case and confirmed what Richardson and the murder team were already thinking – that Khalil Bukhari was their number one suspect. The trouble was that it didn’t amount to evidence; it amounted to precisely nothing without the witness giving a statement.
And here’s where the police caught a break. I had assumed that they would have some sort of tracking device on the phones. They did, but then so did everyone else. It was called ringback but of course the caller had disabled it.
When Richardson told the team about the call it was WPC Langley who came up with the idea of speaking with her list of “customers”. WPC Langley was the beat officer for that part of the Wirral, the coastal stretch between Heswall and Neston, and she was familiar with World’s End and the type of late-night visitor it attracted, the “dope heads and the doggers”, as she told me when I spoke with her last week.
When she heard the tape recording she realised she didn’t need to speak to anyone else but suspected straight away who had made the call.
Enter Timothy Bowden. A doctor, fifty-three years of age, married to a local justice of the peace and known to WPC Langley as “Naughty Timothy” due to that moniker being given to him by a local prostitute, Dana Reed, who used World’s End as her office and who, one summer’s evening, when Langley had stopped her patrol car and shone her flashlight into a badly parked Ford Mondeo and asked, “Is everything okay in there?”, had replied, “Don’t worry about me, I’m just finishing off Naughty Timothy.”
On two further occasions Langley had had cause to ask Naughty Timothy to move along or she would arrest him for a breach of the peace, and each time Timothy Bowden had been almost overwhelmingly polite and correct in his manner and spoken to her like he was speaking to a sommelier offering him an array of options from the wine list.
Richardson and Langley visited Timothy Bowden at his practice and although Langley was coy on this point I think it is safe to say that they persuaded Timothy to put his name to a statement by referencing how unfortunate it would be if details of his proclivities made it into the public domain.
He agreed and he took part in a line-up two days later when he picked out Khalil from a group of six Asian men.
There was a problem with this line-up. The area was so demographically white that the police had to bus in Asian males from Liverpool to take part in the line-up. The Bukharis were one of only two Asian families in Heswall and although he denied it under cross-examination it was likely that if Timothy had ever seen a young Asian boy in his teens before then, it was highly likely to have been Khalil.
But the evidence was allowed in and on 3 September 2008 Timothy Bowden, when asked to identify the man he saw stumbling from the World’s End car park on the night of the murder, raised his right hand and pointed at Khalil Bukhari in the dock.
Trials in England aren’t filmed but I’ve seen enough movies, read the court transcript and spoken to people who were in the courtroom, so I know how a pointed finger at an accused man goes down. This is someone without an axe to grind choosing, in the knowledge of what this means, to place a person who denies being there at the scene of the crime in the time period when the murder was carried out. Boom.
So, what did the defence do? They played the man.
Timothy Bowden, on the face of it a respected member of the community, doctor, parish councillor and family man, was a swinger and habitual user of prostitutes. The police knew this and it didn’t take a lot for the defence to find out his history. You see, the doctor had a nom de guerre in the swinging world and was well known in the local swinging community as Doctor Dick. Okay, stop the sniggering back there.
Unfortunately for the good doctor, who had thought that the only way of covering up his other life was to give evidence, the opposite happened. The defence went for him. The attack line was how could he be trusted if he led a secret life frequenting dogging sites like World’s End. But Naughty Timothy/Doctor Dick hit the defence barrister’s line of questioning for six; turns out his wife knew all about it and occasionally, although you get the feeling it was like going with her husband to reluctantly watch the football, partook herself, if the weather was nice. The jury lapped it up, his urbane politeness in the face of what must have come across as dirty tactics by Khalil’s QC. When he finished his evidence one of the journalists wrote that you could see the jury felt that there was only one sordid person in the exchange between Doctor Dick and the lawyer, and it wasn’t the doctor.
Timothy Bowden came out of it looking like what he is: just someone wanting to do his duty, someone who, as the prosecution pointed out, had no axe to grind.
But what if he did?
Back to Jean Charles de Menezes, shot in those febrile hot weeks in July 2005. Just after 7/7, another failed bomb attempt, the country was on high alert. Nightly news bulletins showing pictures of Asian men wanted for murder, terrorist plots – you might remember the fear.
Once the police had Khalil picked out in the parade it was a matter of record that they didn’t pursue any other leads. They had their man as far as they were concerned. The defence tried to attack the doctor; they focused on his peccadilloes and they failed.
What they didn’t know and what we now know is that Naughty Timothy did have an axe to grind, maybe not with Khalil but with Islam in general.
I’ve got hold of some old screenshots. When I say old, they are MySpace account pages. For those of you who don’t remember, MySpace was like a Neanderthal predecessor to Facebook. In full disclosure, I can tell you that these were acquired by a firm of private detectives working on Khalil’s appeal. They purport to show an account in the name of Reginald de Chatillon. That name by the way is the name of a Grand Master of the Knights Templar, a monastic order who participated in the Crusades.
The account is message after message of Islamophobia, one after another, equating Islam with terrorism and blaming all Muslims for the actions of terrorists.
Here is a typical message; it was posted on 2 September 2008. That’s the day before Timothy Bowden gave evidence. I have to give a trigger warning here; this could upset some of you so here goes:
“Mohammed fucked nine-year-olds and slaughtered Jews and non-Muslims for Arab imperialism. The bombs in London, Madrid and New York are just more of the same. Islam is fascism.”
And there’s more of this stuff, well, lots of it, and I’ll be posting it to the website if you want to take a look, but you’ve been warned. The account is long dormant but it’s there in the fossilised record of the Internet, dead but not forgotten.
And you’ve guessed where I’m going with this: Reginald de Chatillon was an anonymous account but o
nly if you don’t understand that accounts have signatures. With MySpace it was associated email accounts. Reginald’s account was linked with an email address. It was just a Hotmail account, sweetipeie26454@hotmail.com, but here’s the biggie: that email is also linked to a current Facebook account, that of one Timothy Bowden. So, no axe to grind? Take another look. If the defence had had this evidence would the jury have been so keen to believe Naughty Timothy?
But maybe they would have ignored it. He had an issue with Islam, so do a lot of people, and that doesn’t necessarily make him a liar.
But what if I could show he lied? Here’s how the prosecution should have done it. Timothy Bowden was asked on the stand whether he knew Khalil Bukhari. I mentioned before that there just weren’t that many Asians living in the Wirral at that time. He said, “No” and everybody believed him, but he lied.
For two years before he was arrested Khalil Bukhari went to Timothy Bowden’s house every day five days a week.
He had a paper round you see. He didn’t know that one of the houses belonged to Timothy Bowden – it never came up at trial – but listen to this. It’s a tape recording I made of a conversation with a man called Gerald O’Brian (he runs a newsagents in Neston), and Khalil worked for him for three years before the murder.
GB: I remember Khalil; he was a nice kid. For what it’s worth I always thought he didn’t seem the type who would commit a murder, but they all say that afterwards don’t they, ha ha!
Me: So on his round he delivered to Timothy Bowden. He had a house in Little Ness near World’s End?
GB: Yeah he did. Naughty Timothy took him The Telegraph.
Me: And did Timothy Bowden know Khalil?
GB: Know him? I couldn’t say, but I know he left him a Christmas tip, I remember he brought it into the shop, coz of what he said.
Me: What did he say?
GB: It stuck with me. He said, “Can you give this to the Mohammedan boy who brings me my paper?”
Me: When was this?