Death on a Summer's Day--The True Story of the Murder Britain Watched on Live Television by David Blackie

Author:David Blackie [David Blackie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781784185862
Publisher: John Blake Publishing
Published: 2015-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Meanwhile, once the search of Butsfield was under way (before it was curtailed by the explosives scare), Bob and I drove to Dryden’s home to perform a preliminary search for weapons. The information we’d received from Consett indicated that most would be at the rear of the house, in a wooden shed. We pulled up outside 26 Priestman Avenue – an unremarkable, unprepossessing 1950s semi-detached council house – and made our way around the side of building and into the back garden, where we found a garage and a shed.

As I walked towards the shed, I saw what looked like a piece of drainpipe leaning against the wall of the garage. On second glance, though, it was no ordinary piece of drainpipe; it had a flat metal plate at the bottom, and halfway up there was a carrying handle that had been welded on to the pipe at an angle of sixty degrees. It was a 3in plate mortar, for God’s sake!

‘Bob!’ I cried. ‘Come and look at this!’

Bob hurried over, and when he saw what I was leaning over, he paled. There was no doubt what it was – and there, not far away in the long grass, was another mortar.

My mind reeled at the thought that, if this was typical of Dryden’s handiwork, it was anybody’s guess what we’d find next.

We opened the unlocked shed door to find a rusting, jumbled mess inside, like the workshop of a maniac armourer. Inside, we found gunpowder, bullet heads, cartridge cases, rifle barrels, pieces of trigger mechanism and wooden stocks, although we could see no complete firearms. In one corner, we found an old coffee jar full of silver grains, labelled bizarrely ‘rocket propellant’, which made us chuckle, but then Bob reached underneath the bench and drew out what appeared to be a live mortar shell, which quite frankly put the wind up both of us. Realising then that we didn’t have the practical expertise for dealing with this particular piece of hardware, we withdrew and shut the shed door.

The rear door of the house gave way under a little pressure from Bob’s shoulder, and then we were in the kitchen, which was clean, tidy and straight out of the 1950s. We didn’t see anything untoward there, so we moved into the living room, and what we saw there stopped us in our tracks: more mortar bombs and a collection of shells arranged carefully on the hearth by a pair of men’s checked slippers, presumably Dryden’s. Very domestic. For all we knew, the munitions were live; neither of us was prepared to chance anything connected with Dryden.

We left the way we’d come and returned to the car, where we radioed through to Chief Superintendent Miller, who told us to take no further action until the premises at Butsfield had been checked out by the Army, who were there now. In the meantime, he said, he’d send a couple of uniformed officers over to the house to stand guard until the Army could check the place over.

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