Life Sentence by Simon Gillard

Author:Simon Gillard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Random House Australia
Published: 2017-04-10T04:00:00+00:00

One day Brown took off on his pushbike for a ride from his house to a marshy area called the Warriewood Wetlands. A call came through to triple 0: ‘Help me. My name is John Brown. I’m a cop. I’m at Warriewood Wetlands.’ The story he told was that he had stopped near a bridge to look at the birds and someone had come up behind him and hit him over the head with a plank of timber, kicked him when he was on the ground, and then hit him again with the wood.

The police from Dee Why turned up first because it was in their precinct but they called Manly as they knew I was the investigator on the Brown matter and I got the message. I got in a car with two other detectives, Brad Foot and Briana Ellis, and we raced up from Manly. We had to find our way to the crime scene via a complicated route system through the bush. When we finally found the scene, we were greeted by six uniformed police and a senior inspector from Dee Why. The inspector, a big, fit muscular man, told me that Brown had been taken to hospital. A plank of wood lay on the ground beside obvious skid marks.

The inspector then turned on us. ‘Where have you been?’ he yelled, and then suddenly directed his attention to me. ‘Fucking detectives.’ He seemed agitated.

‘We went around the other way,’ I explained.

‘Fucking detectives,’ he said again, angrily moving towards me. Next thing he started iron-fingering me hard in the chest. Two fingers – bang, bang, bang – all the way down my chest, knocking me backwards.

I stood there gobsmacked, unable to speak. I didn’t know whether to punch him or pull out my baton and hit him with it. This was a very senior ranked inspector of police.

The police force is strictly hierarchical; I was a detective leading senior constable and my colleagues, who were both junior to me, stood there dumbfounded as they watched me being assaulted and humiliated. I saw Briana put her head down saying, ‘Oh my God.’

‘I’m sorry, sir, we went the wrong way,’ was all I could say. It was surreal.

The next day I reported the incident to my immediate superiors.

‘Are you serious?’ they asked, incredulous. Opening my shirt I showed them the six bruises like buttons on my chest. Colleagues commiserated; no one could believe it but the evidence was there and the incident witnessed.

At that stage I was pretty stirred up – Brown and now this inspector. At the time I was also dealing with a very difficult solicitor, who was representing three men who had been charged after a violent incident in 2005 involving a meat cleaver and death threats. Two were known criminals. The solicitor and I had a big argument after he called me an arsehole in front of his clients when I charged them.

He told me I was just a police monkey, and although I probably should have let it go over my head, I couldn’t resist telling him that he looked like a monkey.

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