I once knew an eccentric Englishman who wrote a book about himself and his life. His name was Martin Bengtsson and the book was called: “If You’re Not In Bed By Ten, Come Home” – advice his father apparently gave him when he first discovered girls as a teenager. I worked with Martin from time to time or, rather, he imposed himself on me on a regular basis. Frankly he was a bit of a nuisance. But always entertaining. His fund of stories, about himself of course, was endless. And what a colourful life he had led. An extraordinary man. Last I heard of Martin, he’d moved to a small-holding in Ireland to play with his horses and his dogs. And Irish TV were making a documentary about him.
Martin Bengtsson became the blueprint for my detective character, Barrington Percival Shakeshaft. (I hope you don’t mind, Martin. In fact you should be flattered. I’m sure you will be).
Shakeshaft’s sidekick – the Dr Watson to his Sherlock Holmes if you will – is the crime reporter Logan Hunter. Something of an autobiographical representation. The storyline, too, is drawn from my past. In April 1968 a Kingston Grammar schoolboy, Roy Tuthill, disappeared on his way home from school. At the time there was a radio programme, called “Scotland Yard Calling”, which was broadcast nightly on BBC Radio 4. As a young press officer at the Yard, I was one of the presenters and, that day, led the radio news bulletins for several hours with an appeal for the distinctive Austin Westminster car, the driver of which had been seen talking to a boy of Roy’s description. Three days later the child’s body was found dumped in a beech plantation near a private road on the slopes of Box Hill. His school uniform was draped over him. He had been raped and strangled with a rope ligature. The pathologist declared that the boy had been dead for two or three days but the body had not lain at the spot where it was found for very long. One of the other roles I performed within the Public Relations Department at Scotland Yard in those days was to act as the in-house producer for the weekly crime appeals programme “Police Five” fronted by Shaw Taylor and broadcast on ITV. Two years after the murder of Roy Tuthill we prepared and filmed two fifteen minute “Police Five Specials”. One was about Great Train Robber Ronnie Biggs, then on the run in Australia. The other was about the notorious armed robber John McVicar who had also been on the run from prison for two years. The Biggs programme was broadcast but three days before the second programme was due to go out the Flying Squad captured McVicar, making any public appeals for information completely pointless. Faced with the need to find a replacement programme at short notice, I contacted Det. Ch. Inspector Paddy Doyle, the Surrey Police officer in charge of the hunt for Roy Tuthill’s killer. He agreed to take part in the show and arranged for his son, who was the same age as Roy had been at the time of his death, to wear the dead boy’s school uniform and retrace his last steps for the cameras. The Irish detective also revealed a number of fascinating aspects of the case – vehicles and people seen at a pub nearby when the body was dumped, insect migration which pinpointed precisely how long the body had lain in the position where it was found, unusual marks on the body indicating that it had been transported in the boot of a car, tyre tracks near where the body was found, and a multicoloured thread which indicated that the body had been wrapped in some kind of brocade material. The programme produced a huge response from the public but the case was to remain unsolved for thirty-three years until, in 2001, a sixty-five-year-old man, Brian Field, was stopped for drink driving in Birmingham and a gave a routine DNA sample which matched DNA taken from Roy Tuthill’s body on the National DNA database. Field admitted the murder and was jailed for life.

The cover blurb for my book “The Green-Inker” based on the Tuthill case and featuring a private detective modelled on Martin Bengtsson reads: ‘English eccentric Barrington Shakeshaft has retired from a colourful life of swashbuckling adventure to live in a caravan in the paddock of his daughter’s home in Sussex and tinker with his two most prized possessions – a Harley-Davison motorbike and a Caterham7 sports car. He amuses himself by perpetrating benign hoaxes on gullible journalists and duping greedy art dealers with forged paintings done in the style of famous painters.
When police announce a fresh appeal for witnesses on the first anniversary of the unsolved murder of a schoolboy, Shakeshaft comes up with a new prank. He decides to telephone a newspaper claiming to be the killer. But when he reveals the plan to Logan Hunter, chief crime correspondent of a Sunday newspaper with whom he occasionally has contact, the journalist points out to him the foolishness of such an action and the effect the false claim would have on the bereaved parents.
Filled with remorse at his own stupidity, and determined to bring justice to the parents, Shakeshaft sets out to find the killer himself.
The extraordinary investigation which follows breaches all the rules and accepted conventions of normal police work. He devises imaginative and bizarre methods of acquiring and examining forensic clues and draws on the experience of daring escapades and dubious enterprises he engaged in as a younger man to trick witnesses into telling him more than they should.
Shakeshaft teams up with Hunter and their inquiries lead them into the murky world of a sinister secret society, which practises the ritual abuse of young boys.
With the occasional grudging co-operation, but often bitter opposition, of Detective Chief Inspector Paddy O’Shaughnessy - the policeman in charge of the murder investigation - they solve the crime. Or do they? There is an intriguing twist at the end of this tale. This is an old-fashioned whodunit with a distinctly modern flavour’.