Gangbuster (5 page)

T
he gun was 2in from my face. The business end of a sawn-off, double-barrelled, up-and-over shotgun with enough firepower to splatter my brains over half of West London. And the eyes at the other end were cold, hard and desperate.

This was the moment I came face to face with one of Britain’s most wanted criminals, on the run from jail after the brutal murder of a bar manager and now holed up on my patch. Vicious James Baigrie was sleeping rough in the back of a white van in a select street in Earl’s Court, where I was then based in the local Kensington CID office and determined to make my mark as a good detective.

In the few seconds I was peering into the gaping twin holes of that shotgun barrel, I thought my mark was going to be my epitaph. Then instinct and training took over. I had taken Baigrie by surprise,
but I was equally as shocked. I had expected the van to be empty when I checked it out in Philbeach Gardens as part of a dawn search for the fugitive Scotsman. I had played a hunch. The police knew Baigrie had fled from Scotland to London, was living in the Kensington area, and was probably working as a builder. A check at a suspected hideout address had proved futile.

My team had been discussing the important issue of the day – where to have breakfast – when I spotted the white Transit van parked across the road. That, I thought, was the classic jobbing builders’ motor and was worth a quick spin. I peered through the windows. Too mucky to see much except some typical builder’s kit – paint pots, bucket, tools, some sand, that sort of thing. I pulled at the rear door handle, out of inquisitiveness really and – lo and behold – the fucking thing opened. I thought, OK, let’s have a nose around: pulled the door open and stuck my head inside. With that, I saw a slight movement and, all of a sudden, this balaclava-clad head popped up from beneath a blanket. I was totally taken aback because I hadn’t dreamed anyone would be kipping in there. I blurted out the first thing that came into my head which happened to be, ‘Good morning.’ That caused a few laughs later. Anyway my police training kicked in straight afterwards. I yelled at him, ‘I am an armed police officer.’ And no way was I bluffing. I was carrying a gun and I’d undergone intensive firearms training at the Metropolitan Police training centre at Lippitts Hill in Essex – I’d qualified with flying colours – I’d got a 007-style Smith and Wesson .38 six-shot revolver in my shoulder holster and I was ready to use it.

As I spoke Baigrie ducked down and, wallop, had grabbed something. In a flash he had pulled out the double-barrelled shotgun. It was obvious from the steely glint in his eyes that he was prepared to shoot me if needs must. We were in a ‘quickest on the draw’ shootout situation. Except this wasn’t the wild west, just West London. I had been caught unawares, I know, and this convicted killer had the edge on me. The dark glowering holes of the Winchester barrels hovered close to my temples. I was fumbling under my coat and into my shoulder holster to reach for my gun. I thought, Shit, he’s beaten me to it. I’m going to die. I was staring death in the face in the back of a Transit van. I only had one option. I ducked out of his line of fire and legged it up the road as fast as I could, shouting and screaming at my colleagues, ‘Look out, he’s got a fucking gun, leg it.’ They were close behind me and could be in the line of fire. They scattered for cover as well. They knew from my tone and the way I was running like a fucking maniac that this wasn’t one of my jokes. I dashed about 25 yards then dived under a car for cover. I got my gun out and shouted at Baigrie, ‘You are surrounded by armed police.’ That wasn’t strictly true because some of the team, notably my mucker with the other firearm, had already gone off for their bacon and eggs before I opened the Transit door.

It was now about 7.00am and Earl’s Court was just coming to life. We’d got an armed murderer trapped in a van in a busy street not far from Earls Court tube station, one of the busiest in London. What do we do now to ensure public safety? To make his getaway in the van he’s going to have to come out of the back door and get round the front to the
driver’s seat. Will he come out all barrels blazing? I made a decision there and then. If he comes out I’m going to shoot him, whether I see his gun or not. I’m going to put a bullet in him. If he crosses the line, he’s dead. I’ve got to stop him getting away and possibly shooting someone else. All these things were racing through my mind as I made my way towards the front of the Transit, out of the line of fire, from where I’d first been facing the rear. He’d got to come out of the van if he was going to start shooting and that gave me an even chance.

I had dived down under another car and was quickly joined by my police colleague who by now, amid the action, had for some reason lost a shoe. One had come off as he scrambled to a safe position and was lying in the middle of the road. As more police units raced to the scene for what was rapidly becoming a major incident, there was no movement from the the gunman. It was obvious that he believed my warning about being surrounded by armed cops. Now we had a tense and dangerous siege situation which was to last for the next 44 hours.

I could see Baigrie moving about in the van. I saw him close the back door. I didn’t know what his next move might be. Should I reposition myself again to get a line of sight through the back doors? But I knew the might of Scotland Yard would soon be descending on Philbeach Gardens to seal it off. I thought, Bollocks, I’ll stay where I am. I don’t know where he might go, so I remained prone on the ground with as much of me tucked round a parked car as possible and just my head, hands and gun out for exposure. I wanted to present him with as small a target as possible if he did come out shooting.

By now, all hell had broken loose. People had heard that something big was going on and, human nature being what it is, had come to have a look. That’s the last thing I wanted. I’d got a maniac killer with a sawn-off shotgun in a van in a busy street and members of the public could be in danger. One young woman, I think she was Asian or Mediterranean, had started walking towards me, oblivious to what was happening. I’d hidden myself away as much as possible because I wanted her to get past me and out of the line of fire. She was right between him and me. That’s not where I wanted anyone to be, I wanted them behind me.

I whispered to my colleague to keep quiet and let her walk up, walk up, walk up until she was safely past us. Suddenly, she looked down and saw me on the ground with a gun and she froze, absolutely froze rigid. I said, ‘Move, move quickly, I’m a policeman.’

She still stood there frozen solid. In the end I just levelled my gun at her and yelled, ‘Just fucking move, will you?’ At which point she did and legged it off down the road at a rate of knots. She looked petrified but it was for her own good.

As other people came out to see what was happening, I was shouting at them, ‘Stay indoors, stay inside, there’s a siege going on.’ I lay in the middle of the road behind the car for about an hour-and-a-half, keeping my gun trained on the Transit and its dangerous occupant. It was March, early morning and it was cold so I had to keep changing my gun from one hand to the other because it was freezing cold and I’d got to keep my trigger finger warm. Fortunately I can shoot reasonably proficiently with both hands but I had to keep
blowing on them one at a time to keep some movement just in case the situation blew up and I had to take a shot. An hour-and-a-half is a long time in one position in this crisis situation and my gun began to feel like a ton weight. It was as much as I could do to keep it levelled towards White Van Man. I was mightily relieved when armed officers from Scotland Yard’s SO19 firearms unit eventually made their way through the rush-hour traffic and took over from me and my colleague. I went off to brief senior officers who had arrived to take charge of the siege along with trained negotiators who would try and talk Baigrie out of doing anything rash.

We first knew about Baigrie when police in Scotland phoned to ask us to check an address in Philbeach Gardens and had warned us then, ‘He’s top of our wanted list. Watch out, he’s very, very dangerous.’ He was a 37-year-old hard case who had escaped from Saughton Prison near Edinburgh in October 1983 while serving a life sentence for blasting a pub manager to death with a sawn-off shotgun. He’d also got a lot of form for armed robbery, so he was a tasty villain by any standards.

He’d made a fantastic escape from prison, which was as maximum security as you could imagine, by removing a plaster cast from a broken arm, using it to smash a window without making any noise, and going over the wall. He’d been on his toes for well over 18 months and nobody had got a sighting of him. Officers in Scotland searched the address of Baigrie’s best friend and went through it with a fine-tooth comb for clues to his whereabouts. They accounted for every item of correspondence, every article, except for one telephone number, a London number.
The Scottish detectives did a subscriber check on it and traced it to a flat in Philbeach Gardens. It was just an unaccounted-for telephone number at that stage, nothing particularly significant. It might have been an old mate or ex-girlfriend, but they wanted it checked out. A colleague of mine traced it to a house which had been divided into flats which had all been rented out. He asked me what I thought we should do. The phone checked out to a man called Fred Robertson so we weren’t all that confident it was connected to Baigrie. As it happened, it was a moody name he was using.

We arranged a search of the flat the following morning in one of the Yard’s famous ‘dawn raids’. Two of us would be armed – myself and DS Jim Clarkson – and we were to exercise the utmost caution in view of Baigrie’s past history of violence. I’d always wanted to be a firearms officer and had worked hard on my course to be as good as possible. I was confident I would have no qualms about shooting someone dead if the circumstances merited it. I was a qualified marksman and proud of it.

We steamed into the flat at the crack of dawn the next day, smashing down the door and went in with guns drawn. It was a twin-bedded room, one of which was occupied by a young guy in his late teens and the other was empty. We got the terrified lad out of bed at gunpoint and started to search the flat. He told us he shared the room with a ‘lovely bloke’ who was a builder who had gone out the previous night, pulled a bird and hadn’t come home. He gave the name of Baigrie’s suspected alias, Fred Robertson. But there was still no firm evidence that this really was our man. So I nicked an old photograph of ‘Robertson’ I
found in a drawer with a view to sending it to Scotland to see if the lads up there could identify it as Baigrie. That’s as far as we could take it at that moment, and with such an early start to the day breakfast became a more pressing objective. That’s when I spotted the Transit van over the road. And James Baigrie suddenly loomed very large in my life.

The siege went on for two days with our negotiators setting up a telephone link with Baigrie inside the van in a bid to talk him into surrender. But Baigrie did not respond positively, saying he was going to ‘shoot his head’, to use his own expression, rather than surrender. In an attempt to break the stalemate, the police decided to whack a couple of Ferrett CS gas canisters through the rear windows of the van to force him out. But only seconds later, there was a muffled bang from inside and Baigrie had left his brains dripping off the roof of the Transit. Baigrie had ended the siege the way he had predicted. I wasn’t surprised. All he’d got to look forward to was going back to prison for the rest of his life and he must have reckoned this was the best option. He’d enjoyed himself since his escape. He’d re-established his lifestyle, got a new ID, had a good time, crumpet, booze, earning a few quid as a builder. His options were very limited.

I’d been long gone from the scene when the shooting happened. In fact, I was at a black-tie CID function at a big hotel in Kensington and was chatting to some pals when a uniformed police officer came in. I thought, what’s a helmet doing here? He tapped me on the shoulder and said he wanted a word outside.

‘It’s all over at Philbeach Gardens,’ he said, ‘your
man has just topped himself.’

I was told later that the trained psychologist at the scene had become increasingly concerned that Baigrie was going to kill himself and our lot had only decided to go for the CS gas option in an attempt to save Baigrie from himself. It was the first time that CS gas had been fired by the police on mainland Britain. Baigrie had put both barrels of the gun to his head and pulled both triggers. They asked me if I wanted to go to the scene afterwards for a look but I knew what it would probably be like so I declined their generous invitation.

I suppose it could easily have been my brains splattered over Philbeach Gardens. When they examined Baigrie’s gun, they found the firing pin had only discharged one cartridge. The pin had hit the other cartridge but had failed to fire it. One superintendent had the theory that the first trigger could have been fired when Baigrie pulled out the gun and pointed it at me in the van. I don’t know to this day whether that was a possibility but I count it as another of my nine lives taken care of.

It transpired that Baigrie was only in the van because the landlord of his bedsit had tipped him off. We’d spoken to him the previous day and he thought it was a load of rubbish because his tenant was such a lovely, hard-working bloke who always paid his rent on time. The Old Bill had got it all wrong, he reckoned. He told Baigrie – or Fred as he knew him – that we’d been in looking for him and Baigrie had decided to level with his young roommate about his dodgy background over a few pints before clearing off in the Transit. They went out and got absolutely arseholed. Baigrie went out and got in the back of his
van expecting the cold to wake him up at the crack of dawn and he’d hoped to be long gone before we arrived. But he obviously got so pissed he overslept and his alarm clock turned out to be me coming in through the back doors at first light.

There were quite a lot of people, like the civil liberties lot, who thought the police might get a bit of a kicking over it, what with using CS gas and ripping off the van doors with grappling hooks fitted to a Land Rover. I was mightily relieved when the coroner who heard the inquest into Baigrie’s death said the police had done everything right to try to get Baigrie out alive. He said I hadn’t done anything to prompt the siege and had acted in the best traditions of Scotland Yard in everything I did. What he was saying was that I could have started letting off bullets, trying to take him out without giving the geezer a chance. At the end of the day, I’m glad it was his gun that killed him, not mine, though I would have had no qualms about it if it had come down to a him or me shoot-out.