Each month we will be featuring a guest writer and this month Quintin Jardine returns with a true story of terrorism in Scotland. Information on Quintin's books can be found here.

A True Crime Story
by Quintin Jardine

You want me to tell you a crime story? Okay.

Afterwards, they issued a communiqué, an awful, chilling, sneering, declaration of pride at the slaughter and mutilation of a dozen men and women, all but two of them ‘non-combatants’, even by their standards. They called it ‘military action’. They still do.

I know what it was, though. There and then, I called it murder; I still do. Today, I write crime stories, detective fiction. In two series of novels, I create characters then fill their lives with dangers, usually in the wake of some villainy or other. ‘Gritty realism’, reviewers have said of my work. They’re wrong, though. I know realism. I’ve seen crime close up. Big scale crime; the biggest ... Conspiracy ... Terrorism ... Assassination. God, along with a few hundred others, I was even a target.

I’ve stood among the wreckage of buildings and lives, welled over with anger, been part of the grief and horror, smelled the fear. But I’ve never yet been able to recreate it on the printed page. Better not; no. Better that my work keeps its escapist appeal.

Everyone who was there carries their own memories, and their own recollection of their reaction to the outrage. Me, I've always felt strangely guilty about sleeping through the Brighton Bomb. After all, the thing had been ticking directly over my head only a few minutes earlier. Christ, when it exploded I was only 200 yards away.

Dateline: the Grand Hotel, Brighton, 2:30am October 12, 1984.

The Tory Party was still exuberantly at play, on the eve of The Leader's annual keynote address to the faithful. She, and Her administration, were at the height of their powers, secure and confident in Government, Galtieri defeated, Scargill crushed, all their democratic opponents in disarray. Okay, the celebrants that night ... there were well over 100 of them, still in the Bar ... may have been a shade arrogant, but they’d worked hard for it, and anyway, most of them were pissed. They weren’t fuelled by alcohol alone; they were juiced up also on the heady liquor of politics. They were True Blue Believers approaching the climax of their year, their biggest act of worship.

The Leader’s Speech.

I was a party hack in those days; an apparachik ... although today I suppose they’d call me a spin doctor. Right on the half-hour, my remaining senses told me that it was time to go next door, to the Metropole ... not Headquaters Hotel for me, but near enough ... to grab some sleep in preparation for the toughest day of the week. My nefarious plans for later had been disrupted all through the evening, and eventually blown beyond recovery by the need to file news copy to save the neck of a journalist acquaintance, who, overcome by sudden inebriation, had missed a non-political story. As I left the Grand, I passed another friend and fellow Scot, David Healey, of the Press Association, deep in conversation in the doorway with a uniformed constable. Had the night been an hour younger, I would have stopped to chew some fat with him, but my office opened sharp on the day of Her speech. Ten minutes later, in the Metropole, I switched off the bedside light and fell at once into a dreamless sleep. And five minutes after that, the world exploded.

The light was on when I woke at 7am next morning. Odd; I remembered switching it off. I pressed my TV remote ... and there on screen was The Lady Herself. I was a good pro then; things which would have meant nothing to others, I registered automatically.

One. She was in a different outfit, not the one she had been wearing when I had seen her a few hours before. Not her style, either. Two. She was being interviewed leaving a building. That was enough to tell me that something was wrong. The Lady was rarely 'door-stepped' by television, and never during Conference week.

I listened. She was making soothing, reassuring noises. She referred to Leon Brittan, and at that moment he came into shot behind her, ashen and shocked. Then the scene changed; back to the studio, but not for long, as the presenter said, 'Live, to the Grand Hotel.'

They were digging Norman Tebbit from the rubble. A week earlier, I had been on the road with him on engagements in Scotland. Tough guy, Uncle NOrman; he had impressed me with his inner power and overall fitness. The man on the stretcher was wrecked. If ever there was a moment when live television reportage went too far, that was it. Mercifully, the director cut away, and I saw the chaos in the street for the first time. No need for explanations.

I dressed, as I watched. As I did, a reporter said that my hotel ... yes, the Metropole ... had been evacuated after the blast, and that a suspect package had been exploded against its side wall. My bedroom window looked on to that side. At that point, I tried to believe that it was all a dream, but I knew for sure that it was a reality which had been waiting to happen. Then, to confirm the truth of it all; on screen, my friend Harvey Thomas --- no-one could dream him up --- propped up on one elbow on a hospital trolley.

Harvey, a master of presentation, and of the appropriate quote. 'At first I thought it was an earthquake,’ he said, in his TransAtlantic accent, ‘but then I remembered; they don't have earthquakes in Brighton ... and never during the Tory Conference!'

Harvey, a born-again Baptist crusader, the only man I ever met who called The Lady, 'Margaret' and Billy Graham, 'Doctor': six feet four and eighteen stone, he was buried in rubble up to his chin for three hours. The average man would have been dead, but by ten am, he had stepped down from his trolley, and was back on duty, with his Leader.

I phoned home, to calm my family, then went downstairs. The first person I saw in the foyer was Jim Goold, then my chairman in Scotland. Normally controlled and confident, he had the bewildered look of a refugee. He was wearing a new suit, and carrying a second pair of shoes. Like a kid with a prize conker, he held them out to show me. 'These are Oulton Wade's.' That was all he could say. I gave him the key to my room and went outside, into a bright sunny morning and a day that no-one there will ever forget. I saw the horror first hand, I saw where it had happened, and I remembered David Healey, and his policeman companion. For some time that day, I was sure they were dead beneath the rubble, for Healey was not a man for brief conversations.

Not knowing was the worst part: the mental checklist of people, friends and colleagues, those who had accommodation in the Grand, or had been in the Bar when I had left. Tony, Matt, Ann, Gerry, Keith, Jane ... God, Jane, my nefarious plan gone wrong. 'Have you heard anything of ...' we asked each other, pooling what information we had; but for all that morning, with movement around the area restricted, every one of us had a 'someone' who we feared could be under that rubble. That afternoon, when I found Jane and she ... tough girl, Jane ... exploded into tears, I discovered that I had been a 'someone' too.

All of us who were there have memories as vivid as video recordings, some just bizarre, but most of them terrible. My tape includes images of a middle-aged woman running, hysterically and beyond comfort, again and again, at the police barrier. She fallen asleep beside her husband, but when she had awakened in the dust and darkness she had been alone, with half the room gone.

To Be Continued

© 1999 Quintin Jardine

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