Essex Boy (17 page)

‘He would sit on the end of the phone in silence; I would have to make conversation. I thought he was very odd,’ Steele told the jury at his trial.

When Nicholls was granted home leave from prison, he rang Steele to say that he owned some old engineering equipment he could have. Steele thanked Nicholls and arrangements were made for them to meet at a Braintree pub close to Nicholls’s house. The two men passed the time of day together but they had little in common apart from the fact they had both served prison sentences. Nicholls was childish, sly and devious; Steele sharp, mature and friendly, and extremely intelligent. In 1970, Steele had qualified as a pilot. He had achieved the Civil Aviation Authority instrument rating, which was the ultimate test of any pilot who wished to fly.

Describing himself, Steele said, ‘I think you can say that I am a detailed man, a precise man. I’m very fussy when I set about a task. If I clean something, I clean it well. If I’m going to build something to a dimension, it is to that dimension. I do not settle for second best.’

Jack Whomes had also maintained contact with Steele since their days in prison together. Whomes, like Steele, was a gifted engineer and the pair got on very well. As well as all things mechanical, they shared a common interest in boats. Whomes and his younger brother John could regularly be found down near the Felixstowe ferry port parascending or jet-skiing from the back of their speedboat. Steele would regularly visit Whomes’ home at Barham in Suffolk and, on occasion, they would go out to dinner together with their families.

When Nicholls was released from prison, he would often arrive uninvited at Steele’s home with his wife and children. As Nicholls was always claiming to be short of cash, Steele felt sorry for him and found him odd jobs to do at his home, his mother’s home and his sister’s. Within a very short period of time, Nicholls must have known everything there was to know about Steele’s habits, his hobbies and general way of life. Steele was not entirely fooled by Nicholls’s pleas of poverty; he knew that he had an array of different vehicles at his disposal and suspected that he was involved in drug dealing.

When Nicholls began turning down work that Steele offered him, he confided in Steele that his suspicions had been true.

‘I use suicide jockeys to import cannabis,’ Nicholls boasted to Steele. ‘I go to Holland on the ferry as a foot passenger with a bag of cash and purchase between ten and fifty kilograms of cannabis at a time. I pay pill heads, junkies and anybody else desperate for cash to drive a car out to Belgium or Amsterdam. I meet them, load the drugs into the car and let them drive it on the ferry back into England. If there are three cars containing drugs and one gets caught, it doesn’t matter because I will still make a lot of money from the drugs in the other two cars. In the unlikely event that two cars get stopped, I still get my money back from the profit on the drugs in the third car and if all three get through Customs without being stopped, then I am laughing all the way to the bank.’

Steele pretended to be impressed by the ingenuity of Nicholls’s operation, but he knew that it wasn’t anywhere near as foolproof as Nicholls imagined. If ‘pill heads, junkies or anybody else without morals’ were caught, the likelihood was that they would inform on Nicholls, rather than face a lengthy prison sentence.

When I shot Tate, Nicholls had gone to visit him at Basildon hospital, but he left deeply regretting his decision to do so. Tate had ridiculed Nicholls about a confrontation that he had had with one of his gofers, named Ian Spindler, who also happened to be at his bedside. Spindler had been in prison with Tate and Nicholls and following a difference of opinion he had offered to fight him. Nicholls had backed down and Tate had made it clear at the hospital that he was not prepared to forget such an act of cowardice.

Throughout Nicholls’s visit Tate kept goading him to fight Spindler, saying, ‘If you’re a proper man you will have it out with him now.’

Nicholls refused to take Tate’s bait and stood with his eyes fixed firmly on the floor, inwardly seething.

Later, Nicholls told Steele, ‘I can do that. I can shoot somebody. I often speak to myself about it.’

From that day on Steele, who had been unnerved by Nicholls’s ramblings, told everybody that, in his opinion, Nicholls was a schizophrenic. When Tate asked Nicholls to supply him with cannabis, it was hardly surprising that Nicholls would try to rip him off. Tate’s ego had probably told him that, despite the fact that he had humiliated Nicholls, his reputation would ensure that the deal would go ahead as planned. Unfortunately for Tate, Nicholls felt that he should be compensated for the embarrassment that he had been caused and sold Tate a shipment of dud cannabis.

Predictably, Tate responded by running around making death threats, which Nicholls and half of Essex got to hear about. In fear of his life, Nicholls had asked a traveller named ‘Matty’ to supply him with firearms and it is accepted that at least one shotgun was sold to him. Another man from Braintree named Terry has since come forward and said that Nicholls had also asked him to supply a firearm.

Terry claims that Nicholls had said to him, ‘I don’t mind what the weapon is so long as it is reliable and holds plenty of rounds.’

Terry had criminal connections in south-east London and after making enquiries concerning Nicholls’ request he reported back that he could get him almost any type of weapon that he wanted. To his surprise Nicholls told Terry to forget about their conversation because he had already sorted things out himself.

In the weeks leading up to the murders, Steele had been busy working on Meadow Cottage, which he had finally purchased, in the hope of escaping what he claimed had been police harassment since his release from prison. The property had been little more than a shell surrounded by overgrown weeds, shrubs and trees.

On 2 December, Whomes and his son arrived at Meadow Cottage in a Transit van, behind which was a trailer carrying a JCB. The trailer belonged to Steele but Whomes had borrowed it to pick up the digger. Throughout the day Steele, Whomes and his son worked hard, clearing the site. All the rubbish, shrubs and trees were thrown onto a bonfire using the JCB. That night, Steele held a firework party for the children and plied all of his friends, who had helped him to tidy up the property, with food and drink.

The following morning, Steele and a friend used the JCB to strip the remaining grass and shrubs and load the remains of the bonfire into a skip. On Monday, Steele returned the JCB but when he arrived at Whomes’ yard nobody was there. Rather than unload the digger, Steele had left it on the trailer because he knew that it had to be taken elsewhere once Whomes returned. The following day, Whomes’ Uncle Dennis arrived in his yard because he wanted some work done on his vehicle. Dennis noticed the trailer and asked Whomes if it was for sale. After speaking to Steele, Whomes told Dennis that ‘the man who owned it’ wanted £400. Whomes wasn’t being entirely honest with either man. He had failed to tell Dennis that Steele owned the trailer and was willing to accept £300 and he hadn’t told Steele that he had accepted £400, but he saw no harm in making money on the sale for himself. Perhaps he felt a tinge of guilt after accepting the £400 from his uncle, because he agreed to repair his car free of charge.

Whomes was unable to work on the vehicle immediately as he had already stripped down an old Bedford van. He told his uncle to leave the car with him and take his brother John’s Astra van to get back home to Essex. Dennis wanted to take the trailer with him straightaway as he said that he needed it, but Whomes had already agreed to pick up a tractor for Steele with it the following day. Dennis suggested, and Whomes agreed, that he could take the trailer but it would be returned the following morning when he came to pick up his car. When Dennis did arrive to collect his car, he didn’t have the trailer with him. Whomes was adamant that he needed to pick up the tractor for Steele and so it was agreed that he could collect the trailer himself from Dennis’s home in Bulphan, a small village on the outskirts of Basildon.

When Whomes arrived at his uncle’s home nobody was in, so he left a note saying, ‘Bubby called, back tomorrow’. On his way back to Suffolk, Whomes called in at Steele’s home and explained that he had been unable to pick up the trailer, but he did offer to return to his uncle’s the following day. On the morning of the murders, Whomes was working hard on the docks, unloading soya beans from a ship. He finished around lunchtime and then busied himself with loading a ‘Dextor tractor’ onto a trailer that he had acquired to transport the machine to Steele’s home.

At approximately 1400 hrs, a friend of Darren Nicholls, named Colin Bridge, drove into the yard in an old Escort van. Bridge asked Whomes if he could borrow his trailer because Nicholls’s vehicle, an ageing Passat, had broken down at a pub called the Wheatsheaf in Rettendon. Whomes was apologetic and explained that he was using the trailer himself, but he did not think that Bridge’s vehicle would be able to pull it if it was loaded in any event. Realising that Bridge had no other options open to him, Whomes said that he would pick the vehicle up for Nicholls once he had dropped the tractor off at Steele’s house. Whomes asked Bridge for the location of the Passat and he had said, ‘It’s on the Chelmsford to Southend road, at a place called Rettendon. You will see a bright-pink Morris Minor at a pub called the Wheatsheaf. It’s there in the car park. It’s very visible, a beige Passat. The keys are under the seat.’

Whomes left Suffolk at approximately 1515 hrs and arrived at Steele’s home at around 1600 hrs. After unloading the tractor, he explained to Steele that he was going to pick up a vehicle for Darren Nicholls and, therefore, wouldn’t be able to collect the trailer as planned from his uncle’s. Steele had not yet moved into his almost derelict new home and, therefore, needed the trailer to transport the tractor to and from his home when he wasn’t using it to prevent it from being stolen. Steele told Whomes that, as he needed the trailer, he would pick it up himself. After Whomes had left Steele’s home, he had travelled to a business associate’s address to discuss the hire of machinery.

Brian Wilson, the man he had hoped to speak to, was not in and so Whomes left a message with his son to contact him. By the time that Whomes arrived to collect Nicholls’s car from the Wheatsheaf pub in Rettendon, it was approximately 1840 hrs. After pulling in front of the vehicle, Whomes found the keys, unlocked the steering, winched the Passat up onto the trailer and tied it down by its wheels. He then tried to ring Darren Nicholls to inform him that he had picked up his vehicle but all he got was a static noise. The Wheatsheaf pub is located in a natural dip that makes mobile telephone reception poor. It was also snowing heavily and so Whomes didn’t bother ringing Nicholls again and headed home.

The following morning, Tate’s, Tucker’s and Rolfe’s bodies were found slumped in the Range Rover just a few hundred yards from where Whomes had picked up Nicholls’ car. Unfortunately for Whomes, the call he tried to make to Nicholls was picked up by the nearest mast to the murder scene. If anybody ever accused him of killing his former cell mate and his friends, the police would have scientific evidence that he was near the crime scene at the time the police say that they died. Jack Whomes was doomed, as was Mick Steele because he had travelled to nearby Bulphan to pick the trailer up from Dennis’s house. He and Whomes had made several innocent calls to each other throughout the day. If the police analysed these calls, they could have mistaken them for being calls between two men involved in a conspiracy. All the police needed was a man who was aware of all the information, to weave it together with a web of lies and the most infamous gangland murders since the reign of the Krays would be solved. For Whomes, Steele and the three dead men, life ended that night, but for Darren Nicholls, particularly now that Tate was out of the way, it was business as usual.

One afternoon, Nicholls had been drinking in a pub called the Sailing Oak near his home in Braintree, when he heard a voice from behind him say, ‘I know that you are a drug dealer.’ When Nicholls had turned around, he found himself face to face with Detective Constable Wolfgang Bird. Nicholls had never spoken to DC Bird but he knew who he was because their paths had crossed twice in the past. The first time had been when DC Bird had lent his car to three friends who had been drinking in the Sailing Oak. The car had left the road and one of the occupants had ended up in intensive care. The next time that DC Bird had entered the pub, Nicholls and a group of his friends had mocked the detective. On the second occasion, Nicholls had witnessed DC Bird unloading bottles of spirits from his car and taking them into the pub. Enquiries made by Nicholls among the regulars revealed that DC Bird supplied his friend, the landlord, with cheap booze, which he obtained at police auctions. As Nicholls glared at the policeman, who had just accused him of being a drug dealer, he was trying hard to think of something to say.

Before he had chance to open his mouth, DC Bird said, ‘I suppose that you are going to deny it? Everyone always denies it.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. All of that was a long time ago. You’re out of date,’ replied Nicholls, before turning and walking away.

Two days later, Nicholls received a call on his mobile from DC Bird. Paul, the boss of an electrical company Nicholls worked for, was a friend of the detective’s and he had given him Nicholls’s number.

‘What do you want?’ Nicholls asked.

‘I’m only telling you this because you’re a friend of Paul’s,’ DC Bird replied. ‘You’re about to get spun. The drug squad is planning a raid on your place because they reckon you’ve got a load of gear stashed there.’