Dream Detective Book pt 3

PART Two
MORE THAN A COINCIDENCE

CHAPTER TWELVE
One of the strangest things that happened to Chris started in the early December of 1990 and stretched out over the next eight months until the July of 1991. It wasn't a major media news story and wasn't earth-shattering in its consequences. For all that, it did help make a few people happy, and helped bring a killer to justice - although in an extremely oblique manner.
On 9 December Chris had a variety of dreams. There was a lot of activity and a great deal written down. But one part particularly stayed in his mind and Chris went to tell Paul Aylott about it: a man was being drowned in a bucket of water. Chris could feel his pain as the breath seared through the drowning man's lungs, bursting to escape from under the water; and he could feel the relief when the man managed to gasp a few deep breaths when his head was momentarily raised above water.
His killer was playing with him, and finally he plunged the man's head below the surface one last time, holding him down until there was no life left.
Somebody was calling the killer by name and Chris strained to catch it ...
When he woke up, he had written:
[Urqhy] Baby - drown him in a bucket of water Hold him under
Further down the page was written:
[Chicken or fish]
Black [Hairs] on a plate or eyelashes
Chris was convinced that the killer was a man called Urquhart, and that he was going to kill a man called Patrick Frater. Where the second name came from, he had no idea: it had popped into his mind as he looked over the dream pages, trying to make sense of them. He also knew that Frater was a black man — again, this had just come to him after the dream. It wasn't often that he got intuitive flashes like that, post-dream. Were they left-over dream images that he hadn't recorded and couldn't remember, slipping into his consciousness before finally being lost? Or did they represent some kind of precognitive power that didn't rely solely on dreaming?
At that point it didn't matter, and Chris didn't care. He already had a dream sequence running that required him to fax his dreams to Cambridge Special Branch as well as to Paul Aylott, so he got on with the task in hand, and pushed the drowning man to the back of his mind. But only temporarily . . .
Later in the day, when he had a chance to think further about it, Chris decided that he really had to tell Paul Aylott about this part of the dream in more detail. It was still imprinted firmly on his mind and had worried him throughout the day. So he sat down and wrote to Aylott, detailing everything he could remember about the dream and the fragments that had come to him afterwards.
Paul received the letter, and rang Chris.
'What's this about some black guy getting killed by a bloke called Urquhart?' he asked, puzzled. 'I mean, when's it going to happen?'
Chris shrugged at the other end of the phone, and paused to consider his answer. Finally he said, 'I don't know when, only that it is, and that this bloke Patrick
is the victim. I couldn't tell you what it's all about, but I do know that it's not some run-of-the-mill dream.'
'How come?'
'Because I've had a look back through all the dreams since last October, and there's not a single mention of the name Urquhart. It's never come up before.'
'So what does that prove?'
'It proves it hasn't just come out of my head . . . look, Paul, I don't know anyone called Urquhart, and I've never even heard of anyone with that name — I mean, it's not common, is it?'
Aylott admitted this, and said that he would keep the letter on file. After all, there was nothing in it to indicate when the killing would occur and Patrick Frater had no criminal record to make him known to the police.
It was the middle of December 1990, and in the Hockwell Ring area of Luton a man was sitting in his car. He looked out across the road and saw a man coming towards him: a man he recognised as the boyfriend of a girl he had once dated. The man was carrying a bag at an odd angle, and the man in the car felt a cold tingle shiver down his back. He had been waiting for his brother, but that was out of the question now: all he could think about was getting away before something terrible happened to him.
He fumbled with the ignition key, trying to shake the car's engine into life. It coughed, but the key caught on the way round. He looked up: the man with the bag was hurrying now, seeing that he was trying to get away.
The key turned again, and the engine spluttered into life. He revved it desperately and began to draw away. The man with the bag dropped it, revealing a shotgun. He fired at the car as he ran towards it.
The driver was hit as he pulled away. Not seriously, but enough for him to drive to the nearest casualty department, where he was detained and the police called.
It was not a major incident, and Paul Aylott didn't get to hear of it for some days. But when he did, it made him wonder about the letter from Chris . . .
The man who had been shot was called Danny Frater.
Nothing further seemed to come of this line of dream, and Chris had almost forgotten about it when his dreams of 19 January brought it back into sharp relief.
There were dreams of snow, connected with an on-running sequence relating to a bomb warning. Then suddenly everything changed. Chris could see himself back in Hockwell Ring, a large council estate on the edge of Luton built within a ringroad. He knew that something was going to happen, and also that it was connected to the dream of Patrick Frater, which was something he had consigned to the past. When he woke, he found that he had written:
[Marsh Farm] Flats across the road -
[lee bank] or Hookers Caught Phone police
Further down the page was written, 'Ring — [dia¬mond] or junk'.
A ring that he was selling - or pawning. In fact, it was being put 'in hock': Hockwell Ring. The names Marsh Farm, Lee Bank and Hookers Court were all blocks on the Hockwell estate. They prescribed an arc around a road called Acworth Crescent.
Chris knew that the murder would take place here, and that it would involve Patrick Frater. He phoned Paul Aylott, who was mindful of the event concerning Danny Frater when Chris mentioned the name. But there was little concrete for them to act upon:
'But when is it?' Aylott asked.
'Soon,' Chris replied, as frustrated as his friend.
'So what am I going to do — set a cordon round the Ring until some bloke comes along? You know I can't do things like that.'
'I know . . .'
For both men it "was a frustrating experience. Aylott knew that Chris was right at least 50 per cent of the time, and after the shooting of Danny Frater there was some reason to assume that Chris was on the right track. At the same time the Bedfordshire Police had to struggle with the same low levels of manning as any other force, and Aylott couldn't commit men indefinitely.
They left it with Paul promising Chris to try and sort something out. Perhaps this eased Chris's mind, because he didn't dream of Patrick Frater on the night of 20 January.
The following night, however, he did.
On the morning of 22 January he woke up to find, among the writings of the night, the phrase 'Plane-[2]-America — Spirits'. He knew immediately what this meant and phoned Aylott.
'Has anything happened to that guy Frater?'
'Not that I know of,' Aylott replied. 'Why?'
'Because I've just dreamt that he's dead, that's why.'
'I'll check up on it, but I don't think anything's happened to him . . .'
Aylott found that Danny Frater's brother Patrick was still alive and well. He phoned Chris and told him. It didn't make Chris feel any easier: something was about to happen.
On the night of 22 January Chris had a disturbed sleep, with a lot of dreams. Most of them made little sense, until at one point a West Indian appeared in front of Chris and grabbed him by the arms. He started to talk, wildly and incomprehensibly.
'Colin did it, he killed me,' the spirit babbled. 'It was horrible, man. There was the burning, and the things under the skin on my face. But it was Colin — he was the one.'
There was something more real about this than the dreams that surrounded it. There was a tangible taste of fear, and it jolted Chris out of his sleep. When he looked at the clock it was a little after three in the morning.
Eventually he went back to sleep for a few hours, finally waking up to be confronted by '[Colin] - spirit - [keep out]' in the middle of the page. He knew what this meant and called Aylott immediately.
'Pat Frater's dead,' he said when Aylott came on the line.
'How the hell did you know that?'
'Come on, Paul, do you really have to ask?'
'No, I suppose not,' Aylott sighed. 'There's not much chance of getting anything else on it, is there?'
'You know better than that,' Chris replied heatedly. 'I gave you the information I had. I've told you that the spirits - or whatever they are - don't like being ignored.'
'I didn't ignore them - or you,' Aylott said angrily. 'There just wasn't the time —'
'It's a bit late now for us to be arguing over it,' Chris sighed. 'So what did happen?'
Aylott told him.
Pat Frater was a West Indian who lived in Acworth Crescent with his girlfriend Laura Jowett. He liked to drink, smoke and party, but kept himself to himself, and was not a man to court trouble. The ongoing feud with which his brother Danny had become entangled worried him: he had a strong sense of family and so backed his brother, but he had two small children to worry about, and was inclined to wish the matter was all over.
Danny was in the middle ot a feud over his ex-girlfriend, Tracy Woodcock. She had left him for another man, and Danny had chased after her. There
had been a fight with her new boyfriend and Danny had beaten him. The man had friends, and matters had begun to escalate.
It was a month since Danny had been shot. Patrick knew what had happened and there was talk of revenge attacks. He was still willing to back his brother - but only so far. He didn't know that he had already been dragged in too far.
It was late at night on 22 January before Pat and Laura finally got to bed. So to be woken by a hammering on the front door only a couple of hours later was not the best thing that could have happened to them.
'What time is it?' Pat groaned as the hammering penetrated his sleep and pulled him into consciousness.
'Dunno,' Laura replied sleepily.
Pat Frater looked at the clock by the side of the bed. It was a little after two in the morning. He swore softly to himself.
'What sort of a fool goes around waking people up at this time?' he asked himself, dragging his legs out of bed.
Laura grabbed him. 'Don't go down,' she said.
'Why not?'
'Don't take chances — it might be to do with Danny.'
Pat laughed. The last thing he was expecting was either his brother, or people looking for his brother. Still, if it made her happy . . .
'Okay, I won't go down,' he said to her with a smile. Til just stick my head out of the window, see who the hell it is.'
All the while the hammering continued. The children had woken up. One was a toddler, and the constant noise had made her start to cry. Laura left the bedroom to see to their children.
Pat walked over to the window and looked out: there \v.is a car by the kerbside, engine still running. In the cold January night he could see the plume of the exhaust as it billowed into the air. The driver was revving the engine to keep it ticking over.
'Damn fool,' Pat muttered, thinking that the engine •would soon give out if it was treated in that manner. He looked down, flattening his face to the glass, but was still unable to see who it was hammering on the door.
He swore again softly and sighed. He had hoped to see who it was without having to open the window and let in the chill night. If it was Danny down there, then he'd have a few words to say to him, all of them obscene.
Pat Frater flung open the window and leaned out.
'Oi, what d'you think you're doing, man?' he yelled to the shadowy figure below.
Whoever it was stopped hammering on the door and stepped back. In the light of a street lamp Pat could see that it wasn't his brother. The figure looked up, and the light caught his face.
Pat recognised him, and in the same instant took in the shotgun that he was carrying. Took in that the gun had been raised.
'Oh God -'
He had no time to say anything else. The explosion of the gun was deafening, followed by an immense and cavernous silence. He felt the pellets from the cartridge rip into his face like molten pebbles, penetrating the first layer of skin so quickly that the pain was like a brief burn. Then the nerves were gone, and there was only the fire inside his head.
The sound of the shotgun brought Laura back into the room. She screamed, not believing what she saw.
Patrick Frater lay dead on the floor of his bedroom, thrown backwards by the impact. The front of his head was missing, blown away by the shotgun charge.
In the distance a car screeched away.
Chris knew nothing about tins when the spirit of Patrick
Frater came to him, shortly after his death, trying desper¬ately to communicate some information about his killer. Why Chris was chosen to be the one Patrick came to is something that has puzzled him ever since, just as he cannot tell why other spirits approach him. In this case he assumes that it was because he lived in the area, and that the spirit of Frater, desperate to capture his killer, sought out the nearest living person -who was somehow in touch with another plane of existence. Chris was — in physical terms —just down the road from Luton.
Whatever the reason, Chris knew that the message given to him was genuine, and that he must tell Aylott everything. The afternoon of 23 January saw him at Dunstable Police station, talking to Paul Aylott.
'I've passed on your letter to the investigating offi¬cers in Luton,' Aylott began. 'The date on it proves something — well, to me it does. But we really need to get something on paper about what you told me this morning.'
Between them, the two men compiled a defini¬tive statement of what Chris had dreamt concern¬ing Patrick Frater. The information was then pas¬sed on to Luton police, who were dealing with the murder.
In Chris's evidence, there were two names: Colin, and Urquhart, or 'Urquhy Baby', as Chris had heard him referred to in the dream. Did these names mean anything to the investigating officers?
They certainly did: Tracy Woodcock, the girl over whom the whole affair had blown up, had left Danny Frater to go and live with another man. This man had a friend called Colin: Colin Nicholls.
Nicholls was known to the police, and had a repu¬tation as a man with violent tendencies. He had been under suspicion after the shooting of Danny Frater a month before, but there had been no evidence to make anything other than suspicion stick to him. And Nicholls had a friend called Andrew Urquhart, also known as 'Urquhy-baby'.
Was it possible that Chris Robinson had seen the murder of Patrick Frater in a dream, and that the spirit of Frater had come to him, naming his killers?
It was a proposition that would seem outlandish to anyone but Chris himself, or Paul Aylott, who now found nothing surprising in anything Chris told him. The question was: would the Luton police, and the officers investigating the murder, make something of it, or would they reject it out of hand?
At the time Chris had no idea: however, more than three years later, when he was asked by his then-contact in the Bedfordshire police, Detective Chief Inspector Alex Hall, to assist in the investigation of a man killed in a fish-and-chip shop, Chris came face to face with one of the officers who had investigated the Frater killing.
Asked to visit the site where the murder took place - a man had walked into a chip shop and simply blown away someone standing in the queue - Chris introduced himself to the officer in charge.
'You don't have to tell me who you are,' the officer replied, 'I worked on the Pat Frater case. That letter you wrote is in our office, in a frame on the wall.'
So what did happen?
Chris's information was passed on to the team investigating the murder. The names Colin and Urquhart meant something to the police concerned, who had already connected the murder with the shooting of Danny Frater and the long-running feud between what had become rival gangs. They also knew that Pat Frater had little to do witli this. If he had been shot as part of the feud, it was quite probably <\ mistake.
Further investigation ensued. It became apparent that neither Colin Nicholls nor Andrew Urquhart had an alibi for the night concerned. They were pulled in for questioning.
One thing soon became apparent: neither man had anything to do with the earlier shooting of Danny Frater. This made the detectives begin to question whether they were on the right track. Was it possible that Chris had led them down a blind alley?
A search turned up the shotgun, which could be linked to Nicholls. And the police were able to hold Urquhart on a lesser charge, pending further questioning, as he had been driving while disqualified.
The circumstantial evidence became too great and witnesses came forward who could identify the two men. It was a slowly built case, with no major breakthrough but, rather, a good example of persistent detective work piecing together a case: a case in which Chris's evidence had played a very real part.
Eventually there was enough to charge both Nicholls and Urquhart. Nicholls was charged with murder; Urquhart with manslaughter and the secondary charge of driving while disqualified.
The case came up before the Inner London Crown Court, where it was heard in front of Judge George Shindler, QC. At the trial it emerged that Nicholls believed Danny Frater to be staying at his brother's house. He went there with the express intention of shooting him, hammering on the door at 2 a.m. When the window was raised, and a head peered out, Nicholls assumed it to be Danny Frater and fired wildly.
Although there was murderous intent, in the dim street lighting and at that time of the morning, with a shotgun he was firing above his head, it was more by luck than good judgement that Pat Frater was hit full in the face. It was a cruel stroke of fate that he should be hit in such a random manner, and in mistake for his brother.
Both Nicholls and Urquhart denied the charges against them, but both were found guilty by the jury. The judge made a recommendation that Nicholls serve a minimum
of fifteen years for what he described as a 'brutal, cruel, callous and cold-blooded murder'. He was also given concurrent sentences of two years and four years for firearms offences.
Urquhart, who had acted solely as getaway driver and so charged with the lesser offence of manslaughter, was convicted and jailed for a total of four years. For driving while disqualified, he received a five-year ban.
The judge also ordered the confiscation of the firearms and Urquhart's car, which he ordered to be sold, the cash raised to be kept in a trust fund for Patrick Frater's children.
In many ways this was a pleasing result for Chris: the evidence of his dreams had helped to find the killers of a man whose spirit had come to him in great distress, crying out for help. In another sense, Chris would have preferred it not to have happened: if having no dreams meant that Pat Frater had not died, then that would have been a far better result.
It was at times like this that Chris began to feel the strain of having his strange gift. The night he had seen Frater die was etched on his memory. Even though it had actually happened more than a month earlier, he had carried around the feelings aroused that night. Curiously, his first dream had occurred around the time that Frater's brother Danny was shot.
In his initial dream, in which he had seen the death of Pat Frater, the method of murder had been by drowning. Although, in reality, Frater had been shot, his moment of death must in many ways have been similar to death by drowning: the shortness of breath and sudden molten inrush into the lungs giving as much burning pain as the shotgun pellets ripping into his face.
When Pat Frater had come to Chris shortly after his death, these intense emotions li.id been re-awakened and re-doubled: Frater was a soul in torment, only just departed from the earth and in search of someone who
could not only share his suffering but also try and help catch those who had perpetrated it.
Chris had been able to help, but at the cost of immense personal stress and anguish. Throughout the affair he had also been having dreams concerned with bomb warnings, which had been less emotionally anguished but still intense. Now he hoped that the spirit of Patrick Frater would rest in peace.
So he would: but not before he asked Chris for help one more time.
Between the first appearance of Pat Frater and the actual event of his death, Chris left the country and spent some time in the Philippines. While he was there something happened that showed the lighter side of being psychically gifted.
While he was staying at a bungalow, he was approached by a Sergeant Major in the Filipino army, who was acquainted with Chris's uncle and knew of his powers.
'I wonder if you can help me,' he said.
'I'll try,' Chris replied, wondering "what was coming next.
'I've got this problem with one of my men. He's lost his rifle, he claims . . .'
'Then you don't think that he has?'
The army officer shrugged. 'He says he has, but I don't believe him. I think he has another motive and something in mind. Something that could get him into a lot of trouble. I don't want that to happen. He's not a bad man, but a bit headstrong.'
'So what do you want me to do?' Chris asked.
'Maybe you could dream about what has happened, then tell me?'
Chris laughed. 'Maybe I can. I don't know - I can't guarantee results. But I'll give it a go.'
So that night Chris wrote a question at the head of the sheet of paper he was using to write down his dreams.
He asked simply for the spirits to show him what the soldier had done with his rifle, and why.
The dream that night was crystal-clear, and literal rather than symbolic.
It was a small village, and the evening had crept on. The air was still and humid, and an old woman sat alone in her hut. The soldier came into the hut and greeted the old woman: his mother, perhaps. The relationship wasn't clear.
What was perfectly clear was that the soldier had the rifle hidden under the floor of the hut. It was an M-16, easily identifiable. The soldier took the rifle and went out of the hut. Chris followed: it was as though he was an invisible tail, moving as he would in so-called reality, yet hidden from the eyes of the soldier.
As he followed, the idea behind the disappearance of the rifle became obvious: the soldier intended to frame a love rival for murder. He reached the home of the person he was going to kill.
Chris woke up, knowing what he must do. The next afternoon he met the Sergeant Major at a bar, as arranged.
'So,' the Sergeant Major asked, 'did you dream any¬thing?'
'I certainly did,' Chris replied, before telling the story of his dream. The Sergeant Major listened avidly, and when Chris had finished he said, 'I suspected as much.'
'So you believe me, then?' asked Chris with a wry smile.
The Sergeant Major nodded. 'I've been around a long time — it's not the first time I've seen something like this and it won't be the last.'
As he rose to leave, Chris stopped him. 'Why did you believe me so readily?'
'Sorry?'
'Most people don't take wh.it I say at such face value.'
The Sergeant Major smiled. 'You told me that the missing rifle is an M-16. That's not a common service issue here, only certain units have it. How else would you have known that?'
Several days passed before Chris saw the Sergeant Major again. This time it was by chance. He greeted Chris in the street and suggested that they have a quick drink.
When they were in the bar the Sergeant Major turned to Chris with a grin. 'You were right.'
'What — about the missing rifle?'
The Sergeant Major nodded. 'I confronted him with the whole story, and he broke down and confessed. He couldn't work out how I knew all about it.'
'What did you tell him?'
'I told him the spirits were on my side,' the Sergeant Major said with a broad grin.
Back in England, after the conclusion of the Patrick Frater case, Chris thought that he would see no more of the restless spirit. He was wrong.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The connection with Patrick Frater came back to haunt Chris — in more ways than one — in June 1991.
By this time Chris was no longer sending his faxes to Paul Aylott, who had moved on to another position in the Bedfordshire force, although he was still talking to Chris on a social level. Chris's contact was now Detective Chief Inspector Alex Hall, who had only recently taken over the job of handling Chris's dreams. They had already established a good rapport, and Chris \vas now in the habit of spending a certain amount of time each day at Bedfordshire Police Headquarters, cloistered with Alex as they tried to make sense of the dreams.
At one point, the dream page read: '[Premium Bond] 2QB - [9999] 2 one.'
At the side of the page, when he awoke, Chris had written 'ERNIE — random number generator — computer', followed by '2 [QBJ 999 call?'. He felt sure that the first four 9s inside a box meant that there should only be three, signalling a call to the emergency services. He was also sure that in his dream he had seen the computer whose acronym was ERNIE, which was used to select the winning numbers for Premium Bonds.
Further up the page he had written, 'Why [Eaton Bray]? Or is it THE AVENUE ?'
At first Chris assumed this was something to do with another bomb warning that he had running: yet
it didn't fit with the rest of the information he had received.
It was an incredible night for dreams: Chris had produced six pages of writing, and at the top of the fourth page he had written, 'Pat Frater - I am here — watch.' This was followed by a drawing of a watch face, with 'two doors on front — no strap'. Underneath was written:
Trouble - [£25]
In a [spirit] — is it Colin?
[Nunnery Lane] I promise I would not lie about that - [sweets]
Chocolate cups in a [sandwich] box Lots of baby bees in the street.
And on the last page was written:
Are the chocolates after [8] mints?
I do not like chocolates any more — you can have
all of them.
Beside this was drawn a broken chocolate bar. It was all incredibly cryptic when viewed on the page, but Chris could distinctly remember certain aspects of his dream that helped everything begin to make sense.
The random number generator had been shown to him by Patrick Frater, who had returned to Chris's dreams in order to introduce another spirit to him. The spirit was that of another black man, who came forward to Chris.
'I didn't commit suicide. Whatever happens, tell them that I didn't.' His voice was confused and garbled, and he was obviously in some distress. 'It's really cold - they've got me in a freezer,' he continued.
All this came flooding back as Chris and Alex Hall went over the dream page.
'That's incredible,' Alex said, 'how do you get all that from it? I mean, where does it tell you that he was black?'
'For a start, I remember seeing him — but look at this . . .' Chris drew Hall's attention to a section of the dream diary for that night. 'Right here, it says "chocolate cups". Chocolate is a sign for black people, right? And you should know already what cups mean: they signify dead people. Don't ask me why,' he added, seeing that Hall was about to ask. 'They just do. And you see this bit here about baby bees in the street?' He pointed out another of the key phrases. 'Bees are always black people - like a gang of them in this case. When they're angry and buz/ing about it means there's going to be trouble for someone black. Then, if you go over the page, there's this bit here about —'
About chocolate, and not liking it any more,' Hall said, noting the drawing of a broken chocolate bar.
'Right — it's going away, being sent away — "you can have all of them". It seemed like it was being pushed away from me, going away . . . like a spirit dying.'
'What about the chocolates being After-Eight's?' Alex asked, noticing the cryptic reference to choc¬olate mints.
'I wouldn't swear to it, but I bet that was about the time he died.' Chris paused, deep in thought. 'Have there been any dodgy deaths lately?'
'What do you mean by dodgy? Anything we have to look into is dodgy,' said Hall wryly.
'Well, this bloke claimed that he didn't top himself, so I suppose I mean any suspicious suicides in the last few days.'
'Not that I know of,' Hall replied. 'I can look into it, see if there have been any reported that look a bit strange.'
They moved on to the coded bomb warnings that might have been contained in the dreams, and the
matter was temporarily forgotten. When Alex Hall looked into the matter there had been no suicides in suspicious circumstances in the last few weeks.
Chris and Alex decided to concentrate on more immediate matters. But the suicide, Ernie, was not to go away.
Ernie stayed away until 6 July. There was a bomb warning in Hayes and the escape of two IRA men from Brixton prison: these were the subjects that occupied Chris's dreams at this point (and will be dealt with in a later chapter). There was little time and space in his dreams for anything other than this.
But by 6 July things were beginning to calm down, and Chris had the mental capacity for Ernie to make a reappearance. He signalled his presence by the meta¬phorical use of a spade: perhaps in many ways an insulting term when used to refer to black people, it was nonetheless one in common use, and Chris had long since found that his dreams drew from a language that ranged far and wide and were no respecter of political correctness.
In the dream, a woman called Maria had been made pregnant. Chris knew several women called Maria, but this particular one lived in a road in Luton called Arrow Close. Chris was sitting on her bed, talking to her and two other people. He heard about another girl - Lisa -who had also been made pregnant. When he asked who was responsible, he was shown a spade, such as is used for digging up a garden. When he asked where it came from, he was told that it was kept in another house in the road.
Looking at the dream page in the morning, Chris knew that the spade was a symbol for the black man — Ernie. He was also sure that Ernie lived in Arrow Close: and Chris had been told that the spade was kept in the same road as Maria's house.
Chris knew that Ernie desperately wanted to tell him something about the way he had died, and where he came from: he wanted Chris's help. And Chris would be only too glad to help a spirit in distress, if not for the fact that he didn't know exactly what Ernie wanted from him. The messages he was receiving were still too garbled. Perhaps it was because there were other things that he had to concentrate on; perhaps the spirits weren't letting Ernie come through properly because his need wasn't as great as that of the people threatened by bombs.
It was a thorny question and just part of a bigger puzzle that had often kept Chris awake: what was the purpose of his dreams? To what end was he shown all these things? Obviously to help someone: but who? An individual or some amorphous mass of'the public'? Why not both? Why shouldn't Ernie be able to come through as clearly as the spirits who were guiding Chris in his dreams about bombs?
It may have been this confusion that clouded his mind on 7 July, as nothing came through concerning Ernie. The following night, however, Chris had a startlingly clear message.
There was terrible trouble ahead: Chris knew this because he was surrounded by snow at every point in his dream. He carried a fridge down towards a stream, and it was heavy, as though it was full. Snow was falling and lay all around. He was camping in the country, and snow fell on the bare branches of the trees — even though it was really July, in Chris's dream it was winter.
He was chasing after an airline ticket that had fallen out of his pocket. It blew along the ground, and Chris chased it through the billowing clouds of snow, picking it up as it came to rest near his camper.
Looking up, he could sec there' were copper pipes on the roof of the camper, l.ishcd to it as though on a roof-rack. Although he hadn't seen them appear, he
knew — as a kind of dream-memory — that they had been put there by a traveller. He went inside the camper to get away from the snow, which lay all round.
Inside the camper was a machine. He'd never seen anything like it before, but he knew its function. He switched it on, and it began to measure the snowfall outside. It had a counter on it that actually recorded the number of snowflakes falling in an hour.
The counter whirred around, out of control. Chris looked out of the window and could see that the snow was falling as in a blizzard.
Abstractedly, even though he was actually dreaming at the time, there was a part of Chris that was conscious enough to know that terrible danger lay ahead for someone. Snow always signified danger, and it was months since he had seen it this bad.
In the camper there was a flap that held up one of the beds, and masked it from view. Chris felt that he had to let the bed down: as he did, Ernie appeared, sitting on the bed.
'It's cold here, just like in the fridge. I'm still there, y'know, still waiting. You just ask them about the fridge. You've really got to help, because I want them to know that it wasn't suicide. I didn't kill myself, it was someone else. It just looked like I killed myself
'What do you mean?' Chris asked. 'You keep turning up telling me this, but you don't really tell me anything that I can use. I don't know who you are, or what this is about.'
'Of course you do. You know I'm Ernie, and that I lived in Arrow Close. And you know that I'm supposed to have killed myself. I didn't - I did not commit suicide. It was two guys - they took me and made it look like that.'
'Then tell me who they are. If I knew that —'
'You could do what you did for Pat,' Ernie said, irtcrring to Patrick Frater. He shook his head. 'No, that won't do me any good, man. It can't take me back, can it? Why should they suffer? They know they did it, they've got to live with it. I just want them to know that I didn't commit suicide. You just ask them about the fridge.'
With that, the dream dissolved and Chris woke with his heart pounding. It was almost half-past three in the morning, and the whole page was a description of the dream. The last two sentences on the page particularly caught his eye:
not long ago?
Who committed suicide, ask about the fridge.
Chris wrote another two pages when he went back to sleep, and analysed these the next day with Alex Hall as he always did. But it was the dream with Ernie that really bugged him: there had to be something he could do to help this spirit. It was a very similar situation to the one with Pat Frater, inasmuch as there was a disturbed spirit from his physical locality who needed his help. Pat had wanted his killers named, whereas Ernie only wanted people to know that he had not committed suicide: he was refusing to name his killers, saying this wasn't important to him now.
But Ernie wasn't as forthcoming as Pat in other ways: although Chris knew that he lived in Arrow Close, he still didn't know Ernie's other name, or how he could contact anyone who knew him.
When he went to bed on the night of 9 July, Chris's main concern was with the escaped IRA men, and the question he wrote at the top of the clean page was about them. Yet he also wanted Ernie to come to him again and provide a little more information.
Ernie did appear again and the dream was so chilling that even now, almost half .1 decade later, Chris still shivers when he talks about it.
The first part of the dream was a confusion of jumbled images. Then it changed, and Chris was in a room with Graham Bright, then Parliamentary Private Secretary to John Major and Chris's local MP. The two men had been in touch frequently because of Chris's dreams, and it came as no surprise to see Bright represented in the dream. At first, Chris thought this would be a bomb warning, but it soon moved off at a tangent.
Chris handed Bright a steaming mug of coffee. He knew from previous dreams that a mug of coffee was another representation of a dead person — a mug being a large cup. And because it was coffee, he knew that it was a black person.
As he was dreaming, Chris knew that this was connected with Ernie.
Bright was sitting in a room at Chandos, a school that Chris used to attend. Chris walked along the roads surrounding the school, partly re-tracing his old route, carrying the steaming mug. There were school¬girls •walking along the road, and he stopped to look at them.
When he reached the school, and tried to hand the mug to Bright, the MP asked him to leave it outside for him and said he'd attend to it later.
Chris left the mug and walked off down the road. He came to a house and went inside. He could hear struggling from upstairs, and as he went up he could see three men on the top landing. There was a hatch leading into the loft, with a long ladder partly hanging down from it. While Chris watched, two of the men tied a noose to the third and hanged him from the ladder.
It was unusual for Chris to have this sort of dream: when he had seen a death previously, he had felt it and woken in distress. Not this time: this was like a re-enactment, a reconstruction. A play put on for his benefit. This was something that Ernie wanted him to see.
Chris was no longer in the house. Now he was walking around the streets with a bunch of school children. He was one of them, yet he was his real age. He had a hood over his head to try and cover this up. He knew that he should be looking for the name of the road where the house was situated: the house in which Ernie was hanged.
He was outside the school and saw the name Broomfield Road, which lay near Lyons Meade, both familiar names from his past. The school's headmaster got out of his car.
The dream changed again. Now Chris was with Graham Bright once more, and they were making a bet for five pounds about how long Bright would last in his job. They went up in the lift at a hotel with two other men and knew they were waiting for one more. Would he come?
The dream faded into nothing, dissolving as Chris woke up in the morning. It was then that he looked at the two pages he had written that night and felt his blood run cold.
Mug of [coffee]. Take it 2 Graham Bright. He is at Chandos. My old school.
I walk along the road 2 it - mug in my hand
That was at the bottom of the first page. Overleaf the dream continued.
Ladder in [2] the loft
too long to fit without being dropped down, in 2
the stairwell and then straight up into The Hatch.
There was then a sketch of a bouse, with a staircase and a ladder drawn leading from the top of the stairs into the loft. Two arrows indicated the area covered by the ladder
with the words 'ladder is longer than this'. Underneath, Chris had written, 'Look at the map. What road did I walk up when I went 2 school.'
Chris was sure that he now knew how Ernie had died. He had been hanged by two men, who had made the killing look like suicide. There was also a clue as to where it had happened, in the names of the roads along the route to Chandos School. As the only names he had noticed were Broomfield Road and Lyons Meade, Chris knew that it must be either one of these names or names that sounded like them.
The one thing that puzzled him more than anything else was when Ernie had died. Alex Hall had checked for him, and there had been no suspicious suicides around the time that Ernie had first appeared. Did this mean that it had taken time for Ernie to come through to Chris? Or
— and this was something that he found highly disturbing
— was this some kind of precognition and Ernie hadn't yet died?
It might seem strange to consider someone's spirit contacting a medium about their death before it had actually occurred, but there is a possible explanation for such a curious phenomenon.
If the current theories about time are correct, then time is not linear: that is to say, we don't start at point A (say 1900) and proceed to point B (say 1999) in a straight line. It seems this way to us, because of the way that we perceive time. In fact, everything that has happened or will happen is here right now. Time is more like a point than a line. It is therefore possible to see the future, as it lies all around us: it's just that our brains filter out everything except that which we need to survive. We live in what is called 'the information universe', and if we took in everything, we would experience a kind of sensory overload and would be unable to function.
Chris wonders if time proceeds like a series of curves and, as a medium, he is able to see across the troughs to each peak - this would account for the way in which his dreams seem to run in cycles of days and weeks, rather than be totally random.
If he was right, then was this what was occurring between Chris and Ernie? Was Chris able to see across one of those troughs to another peak in the curves of time? A curve where the dead Ernie was crying out to Chris about what had yet to happen?
Chris went to see Alex Hall as usual that morning but wasn't too forthcoming on the subject of Ernie and his supposed suicide. There were other matters that were more pressing: Chris's main purpose in reporting to the police was still to reveal his dreams about bomb threats.
It was an uneventful morning and the subject of Ernie was playing on Chris's mind when he reached home. He had only been in for a short while when the phone rang. When he picked it up, there was an unfamiliar female voice on the line.
'Hello - is that Christopher Robinson?'
'Yes?'
'You don't know me, but I've read a lot about you. My name's Jeannette, and I advertise in the local paper — that's where I've seen you. You might have seen my ad.'
Chris made encouraging noises: he hadn't seen her advertisement and had no idea who she was. He had, however, been in the paper quite a bit over the last year and a half with his predictions. He asked the woman to continue.
'I've got a couple of people here who you might be able to help. You see, I practise alternative therapies and give Tarot readings, but I'm not a medium or psychic in any way — and I think that's what they need. It's about their brother.'
As she spoke, Chris felt a shiver run down his spine: could they have anything to do with Ernie?
'Can I give them your phone number?' the woman asked.
'They can come over and see me if they like,' Chris replied. 'I've got to go out in a little while, and I won't be back until around seven, but if they want to come over then, they're quite welcome.'
'I'll tell them that - shall I get them to ring if they are?'
'No need — just tell them to come. You've got the address?' Chris's address had been printed in the local paper, so he was sure that she would have it if she also had his phone number. Jeannette confirmed this and rang off.
Chris •was expecting to hear nothing further until the evening and was surprised when the phone went again, a minute or two later. When he picked it up, it was Jeannette.
'Hello, Chris? They're really grateful - their names are Dulcie and Paul, and they'll be over around seven
Chris had only just got home when there was a knock at the door. It took him by surprise, as it was exactly seven o'clock. Whoever these people were, they were certainly keen. It would be an amazing coincidence if they were related to Ernie, but then again, Chris was used to the improbable happening to him.
When he opened the door he was confronted by a man and woman of Afro-Caribbean origin.
'Thank God you're black,' he exclaimed, unable to suppress his surprise. The couple looked at each other in bemusement, and Chris felt that he had to explain further. 'Don't get me wrong: I'm not prejudiced, it's just that I've had a black man coming to me in my dreams, asking for help. I'm wondering if he's your brother.'
The couple looked nervous and confused: whatever else, they obviously hadn't expected a reaction like this.
'Look, come in and sit down. I'll put the kettle on and you can tell me all about it,' Chris said, doing his best to put them at their ease.
He led them into the sitting room and left them there while he went into the kitchen to make some tea. When he went back he was carrying the dream diary, which he had opened at the previous night's page. He put it on the coffee table and sat down opposite them. But he took care to keep the page with the drawing of the house turned towards him and partly masked with a newspaper, so that they couldn't see it yet: if Ernie •wasn't related to them, then it might be distressing if they saw the sketch and jumped to conclusions.
'I only know what that Jeannette woman told me on the phone this morning,' he began. 'You're looking for your brother, right?'
'No, we know that he's dead — well, he was my girlfriend's brother, really, but -' began Paul.
'Was his name Ernie?'
There was a silence, as Dulcie and Paul sat staring at Chris. Finally Dulcie nodded. There were tears in her eyes.
'I've had a man called Ernie come to me recently, telling me that everyone thinks he committed suicide. But he says that he didn't. He also keeps talking about being cold, and being in a fridge. Has he been buried yet?'
'No.' Dulcie shook her head. 'He's still in the mortuary. They haven't had the inquest yet. I know they say that he killed himself, but I don't believe that. I know him too well for that — he wasn't that type of man, you know? Sure, he's been down, and said that he might, but . . .'
'There's a big difference between saying and doing,' Paul added.
'Well, he's come to me and s.iul that two men killed him and made it look like a suicide. Hut he won't name
them. He says that it won't do anybody any good, but he just wants you people to know that he didn't kill himself.'
Dulcie began to cry.
'D'you know, I don't even know his surname,' Chris said softly. 'I know he's called Ernie, because another spirit told me - did he know Patrick Frater?'
Paul nodded. 'Yeah, we all knew Pat.'
'Well, he's the one who brought Ernie to me. Look, let's make sure we've actually got the right man. Would it be too upsetting for you if I told you how I thought Ernie died?'
Dulcie wiped away a tear and shook her head. 'No, tell us what you know.'
Chris took a deep breath before beginning. He didn't •want to upset them any more than was necessary — any more than they already were upset.
'I think that Ernie was found hanged from a ladder in a loft, coming out from the hatch. Can I show you something?' He waited until they both nodded, then uncovered the dream diary and turned the page towards them. 'I drew this in my dream last night. Ernie showed me what had happened. The house is in a road called Broomfield, or something that sounds like that. Does this make sense to you?'
Dulcie looked at the page, then continued to cry. Paul comforted her, then looked at Chris and nodded.
'That looks like the house. It's in Bramingham Road. That's where we found him.'
Ernest Bandoo was thirty-six years old and had disap¬peared from his home in Arrow Close, Luton during the first week of April. He worked as a painter and decorator, and had recently been working on a house in Bramingham Road, Luton.
The house had been empty for some time and it was .1 large-scale job to get it in habitable order. There had been other men working on the property with him, and all of them were discontented with the conditions under which they were forced to work: it had been several \veeks since they had last been paid.
Bandoo had four children, and to go this long without pay had been a severe financial strain. He was a man given to emotional extremes, and had been depressed about the situation regarding his employment and the resultant pressures on his family life. The lack of money was getting him down. In fits of temper he had talked about taking his own life, and had even claimed to his wife, Medina, that he had tried to hang himself with a belt. But no-one took him seriously: those who knew him said that he was prone to such outbursts, either of joy or depression. He blustered, but didn't act.
Bandoo and another worker had daubed graffiti on the walls of the downstairs rooms at Bramingham Road — among the graffiti was a hangman, which led to a strengthening of the suicide theory, as far as the coroner was concerned. It's much more likely, however, that the hanged man in the drawing was their elusive employer, abusively referred to in the rest of the scrawlings. Attempts to trace him and get the monies owed to his employees had so far proved fruitless.
When Bandoo stormed out of his house, his wife had a feeling that he would go and stay at the house in Bramingham Road. At first she did nothing about this: he was a man of quick temper, who had previously walked out after rows. He had always returned home within a few days.
But a few days turned into a week, then into two weeks. Finally, on 19 April 1991, Medina called Bandoo's sister Dulcie, and asked her and Paul Jacques, her boyfriend, to look tor Ernest. She told them that she had a 'cold feeling' that he had gone to the house in Bramingham Road, and that something awful had happened to him.
Dulcie and Paul went to the house on the evening of 19 April. It was dark and deserted. They let themselves in with one of the keys to the property that Ernest had left at home, and explored downstairs. There were several crushed beer cans and evidence that somebody had been drinking heavily.
With a feeling of dread they mounted the stairs to the first floor, where they could see something moving in the darkness: it was the hanging body of Ernest, already beginning to decompose and stirring softly as their footfalls moved the floorboards and walls of the house.
The coroner, Dr John Harte, called in the Home Office pathologist for an independent autopsy and ordered Luton CID to carry out a thorough investigation into the death.
This was still going on when Ernie turned up in Chris's dreams.
'You've got to ask Ernie, if you can,' Paul told Chris. 'We must know what happened. I know that Medina and Dulcie couldn't stand it if someone else was respon¬sible for Ernie's death and no-one did anything about it.'
Chris looked at Dulcie, who was still crying. 'I can't promise anything,' he said slowly, 'but I will try.'
That night he wrote the following question at the head of the page: 'Ernie — show what happened to you and tell me who did it.'
That night, Ernie came to see Chris again.
'I didn't kill myself,' he repeated, 'but there's no reason for me to tell you who did. What good is it going to do me? Look, if my brother and my family really want to find out who did it, they need to look for two guys who were at the house the day I walked out. That's all really. And remember the fridge. I'm in the fridge . . .'
Chris felt sure that the fridge was a cryptic clue that meant more than just being in a mortuary, but exactly what, he just didn't know.
On the pages of dreams he had written:
and I was murdered - when Glen comes back he will help you.
if Harry want him [2] catch them The Fridge is an important clue - so is [Ernie Bandoo]. Maps are spread out all over [his] bed
HAND PAINTED colour blue -
READ MY FILE at the police station - then you will understand - then I can come back to your friend and you — Rohip has made a hit.
Some of this was extremely confusing: Glen might refer to Glen Clements, who was Alex Hall's driver and had worked with Chris on some of his dream translations at the police station. He had been in the dream earlier, concerned with another matter. Did this mean that the next time he appeared in a dream it would be concerned with Ernie?
HAND PAINTED was a postcode clue: where was the HP postcode, and what did it have to do with Ernie? And who on earth was Harry?
This was less than Chris had hoped for. He rang Paul and Dulcie with a heavy heart, telling them that Ernie had once again said that he would not identify the men who had killed him, only that they should ask about two men hanging around the house the day that Ernie stormed out of his home.
He read them tin- rest of what he had written - and was stunned to he.ir th.it I'.rnie had a brother called Harry, who lived sonic dist.uu e .iway and would shortly be visiting Medina tor the inquest.
Paul and Dulcie thanked ('lins lor his attempt to help
them. He heard nothing more about the case until the inquest.
The inquest was held some time later, under the auspices of Dr Harte. The evidence of the Home Office pathologist showed that Ernie had been hanged with his own tie. In the opinion of the pathologist, he had done this himself — there was no evidence of struggle. He had been drinking heavily before he died and the corpse — which was naked from the waist up — had been hanging in the house for at least a week before it was discovered.
In her own evidence, Medina Bandoo claimed that Ernie would not have been alone in the house, as he hated to drink on his own: there must have been someone else there.
The investigating officer from Luton CID, Detective Inspector Garth Pestell, told the coroner that 'a medium called Christopher Robinson' had told the family to 'speak to a woman in Bramingham Road about two people who visited the house on the day that Mr Bandoo was found'.
Somewhere between Chris and the CID the message had been distorted. This was not what Ernie had said to Chris in his dream, so it came as no surprise to hear that DI Pestell had eliminated from his inquiries a woman and child seen knocking on the door of the house on 19 April.
Despite the evidence of the pathologist, there was enough uncertainty surrounding Ernest Bandoo's death for the coroner to record an open verdict.
To this day Chris believes that Ernie was murdered, but that he was able to rest happily knowing that his family was not stigmatised by his alleged suicide.
About a month after the inquest Chris was driving through Luton, on a route that he didn't usually take.
It took him past the cemetery, and as he approached the entrance a voice came over his shoulder.
'Come and see me, Chris.'
He recognised the voice as Ernie's. It was a request he didn't want to ignore, so he indicated and turned into the cemetery.
It is the main cemetery for the Luton area and covers a large area of land. Chris got out of his car and began to walk: he didn't know where he was going, only that he should follow his instinct. Eventually he came to a patch of recently dug graves. They were all unmarked. Without hesitating, he walked up to one.
'Hello, Ernie,' he said, sitting down by the grave. He had only been there a few moments when Paul and Dulcie came towards him.
'What are you doing here?' Dulcie asked, astonished.
'I was driving by and I heard Ernie's voice. He asked me to come and see him. I hope I'm not intruding, or anything.'
'Of course not,' Dulcie replied. 'You can come and see him any time - but how did you know where he was?'
'I don't know ... I mean, it's not marked yet, is it? I just came here automatically.'
'The stone won't be ready for a week or two,' Paul said. 'Did you know that Patrick Frater's buried here?' he added.
Chris shook his head. 'No, I didn't. Whereabouts?' Paul was about to speak when Chris stopped him: 'No, don't tell me — let's see if Pat does.'
They were in the middle of a series of graves, some of which had headstones, and some of which were too fresh. They stood in the middle of a row, and it was impossible to see mm h further than two or three rows either way.
Chris started to walk, u listing the spirits of Ernie and Patrick to guide him. I \c walked bai k five or six rows
from the spot where Ernie was buried, followed by Dulcie and Paul. He didn't look at any of the headstones until he stopped in front of one. He couldn't say why he stopped: he just felt that he should.
'This is it,' he said, looking down.
The headstone had a name on it: Patrick Frater.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

During the February and March of 1991 Chris had his first brush with the world of television. The experiment conducted was so effective and so accurate that it caused him a great deal of anguish, and also led to him being dropped from the programme for being too good.
It's not often that a psychic will be called upon to demonstrate their powers for the camera, and all too frequently these occasions are intended to debunk what is happening and to expose all psychic phenomena as fake. This was the situation in which Chris found himself.
On 28 February Chris was at home when the phone rang. He picked it up and found himself talking to a woman called Sue Walls, who announced herself as a researcher for Granada Television.
'We're doing a show on psychic phenomena, and your name was passed on to us by a policeman who says that you're really good.'
Chris wondered who the policeman was, since most of the forces he had worked with so far were understandably nervous about public reaction to the regular use of a psychic by the police. However, lie let this go and asked her what the show would be about.
'The show is hosted by James Randi, and we want to study and test the effectivness of psychics under experimental conditions.'
'Well, look,' Chris replied, Tin quite willing to do
this, but I won't be happy if you make up the test without consulting me about how it's done.'
'What do you mean?' Sue asked, no doubt expecting some outlandish condition of secrecy, which is the stock of many fake psychics who wish to preserve their secrets.
'It's like this,' Chris began. 'I have dream premon¬itions. They only really come to me in dreams. I don't hold seances, or anything like that. And I don't really practise psychometry — I might be able to pick something up from holding your watch, or whatever, but that's not really how it works with me.'
'Well, what do you do then?' Sue asked, puzzled.
'I just dream. When I go to sleep, I keep a piece of paper by the bed and I write things down on it. In the morning I look at them and try to interpret the symbols. Sometimes I remember the whole dream, and it's very literal. And occasionally the spirits of dead people come and talk to me in my dreams. But it all happens when I'm asleep, and then comes the hard slog of working it out. It's not exactly going to be riveting to watch, but that's how it goes.'
'Would you do any other kind of experiment for us?'
Chris sighed. 'That's what I've been trying to tell you. If you make me try and hold a seance, or hold someone's watch, then you're not going to get any result. I've had this happening to me long enough to know that most experiments try to impose themselves on the psychic, rather than testing them in the way they work. If you want to see if I'm genuine — which I assure you I am, but I don't expect you to believe me out of hand — then you're going to have to test me the way I actually work.'
There was a pause, while Sue considered whether she could actually do this for the show. Finally she said, 'Okay, I'll tell you what. Can you tell me tomorrow what will be on the front page of Monday's newspapers.'

'Which one?' Chris asked. 'There's a lot of dailies. I don't think I could do all of them — y'see, I actually write a question on the paper before I go to sleep, so I need to have something a bit more exact.'
'Urn . . . tell what will be on the front of Today — that's the paper I get anyway.'
'All right. I'll fax you what I've written first thing tomorrow morning — both the paper with the dream writing and my interpretation.'
'Even if you don't get anything?'
'Even if I don't get anything. It doesn't always work, and I'm not hiding that. It's the fact that it happens at all that gets me.'
Chris put the phone down, intrigued by his first brush with television.
The dreams that night were unclear: he was in a restaurant with swing doors, and read a horoscope to a friend called Barry Grayson - except he didn't read it straight, he paraphrased it.
There were glasses of milk on all the tables in the restaurant, and on a round table near the door somebody had left a carrier bag.
Things changed, and he was standing under a bus shelter, with a hail of penknives falling from the sky, talking to somebody he couldn't quite recognise about it being their birthday.
The knives became rain, and caused a flood. He explained to someone that the flood in the middle of the road was only rainwater, not a sewage pipe bursting, as they had proclaimed.
There was a young girl, getting into a Mini — but it wouldn't start and the gear lever was tight, jamming as he tried to get it out of neutral for her. So they took a scooter, and followed a car driven by a friend of his called David.
The car stopped, and they ran into it. When he picked
himself up, he saw that she was putting something into the back seat of the car. He turned the scooter round, asked her if she was all right and if she wanted to be taken home.
He was looking into the Mini — there was something wrong with the exhaust, and there was a black leather cover on the steering wheel that was in two parts. It came off the wheel, but the lining remained.
He took the driver of the car on the back of his scooter, and they had to push the machine to keep it going. Eventually they made their way to a police station, where he was asked for his driving licence. As he produced it, his teeth fell out. Since he was sixteen he has had false teeth on a bridge, replacing those he lost in a motorscooter accident. These were the teeth that fell out. He tried to put them back in, but they were covered in oily fingermarks, and three of them fell out again. He tried to piece them together as they left the station.
Suddenly he was outside a shop with glass double doors. They had been left open, even though the shop was empty, and he could see some strawberry cream cakes inside.
He sneaked in with his friend David, who had been in the dream since the scooter crash. As they started to eat the cakes, the shop manager appeared from the back of the shop, dressed in a brown coat. He had come to lock up, and was surprised and angry to find them there. He threatened to call the police unless David paid for the cakes . . .
When Chris woke, he showered and had some coffee before turning to the task of working out what his dreams meant. Looking at what he had written there didn't seem to be much that made any sense.
Although it had been more of a continuous and coherent dream than usual, the actual writing he had produced during the night seemed to reveal little. The
name of his friend Barry Grayson had been boxed, and he had written beside it 'read him his horoscope from a book — para phrase it.' The misplaced gap in the word paraphrase was perhaps significant: did it stand for Paras, as in Paratroop Regiment? It might be another IRA message, as 'Birthday Today' at the bottom of the page proclaimed by its capital letters that it was a postcode — BT for Belfast.
On the second page he had written 'Main Pipe under¬ground' , which he could interpret as MP or PM — Prime Minister underground. This might tie in with the codes for Special Branch and the postcode for Cambridge that appeared further down the page. There was also a cryptic reference to Chris's friend Bob Monkhouse, whom he had known since helping to install his private cinema in the 1970s. The girl in his dream had been putting what might have been a video tape on the back seat of the car, and he knew that Bob was having problems with tape that had been stolen from his car.
There was little on the third page apart from another reference to Belfast, and one to his friend Gary Simpson. But then Gary often turned up in Chris's dreams, as the men were very close. From the three teeth that had fallen from his bridge, Chris felt sure that three people would be hurt in Belfast, but there was nothing more definite than that.
Finally, the shop on the last page and the colour of the manager's coat suggested Sainsburys (whose employees wear brown uniforms) and that something being locked up was connected to them. What it was, Chris just didn't know.
It hadn't been a successful night. Chris reflected wryly as he faxed the pages to Sue Walls that it would turn out to be a quiet night the one time that he wanted it to be spectacular. There was lit¬tle chance of the television company wanting to use him now.
So he was more than a little surprised when he received a call later that day from Sue Walls.
'We found your fax very interesting and want to use you on the show,' she said.
'Really? There wasn't anything in it that I'd call particularly brilliant,' Chris replied.
'Oh no, we all found it all very interesting. Would you be interested in doing another test for us?'
'Well, of course I would — I might actually get a better result this time.'
'When you have a dream that you think will come true, and is outside your control, call us and fax it, too. Is that all right?'
'That's okay by me - I have some kind of dream every night.'
'Good . . .'
When Sue hung up, Chris sat down and wondered what was going on: as far as he was concerned, the previous night's dreams had been of little use, either to himself or as an experimental study. He considered it a failure.
What he didn't know at the time was that failure was exactly what the programme makers were look¬ing for . . .
James Randi is an American magician who has made a career out of debunking psychic phenomena. Starting as an illusionist, working on his own and for rock stars like Alice Cooper in the 1970s, he built up a considerable reputation. Like Harry Houdini before him, he became obsessed with the idea that all mediums and psychics are frauds, taking advantage of people's gullibility with their cheap tricks. He set out to expose them for the cheats they were.
The irony is that genuine psychics like Chris feel that people like Randi perform a valuable function. There are many fakes and frauds who purport to have psychic powers. Many of them do take advantage of people, charging high fees to deliver faked messages from deceased loved ones. These people need to be rooted out, for two main reasons: first, they are preying on people's grief and misery; second, they are obscuring the study of those psychics who do have a genuine gift.
Most fakes have a complete mythology and belief system to back up their frauds, be it a perversion of the Spiritualist faith, a reincarnation myth, or something they have cobbled together from a variety of sources. Genuine psychics, on the other hand, tend to have beliefs but are willing to admit that they don't know what is really going on. They are too busy trying to find out what is happening to them to set up as a small business.
So the prescience of a James Randi, rooting out the fakes in order to help recognition of genuine phenomena, is a good thing. However, like Houdini before him, Randi has let his obsession overtake him, to the point where he now believes that there are no genuine phenomena whatsoever, and that all so-called psychics are fakes. His stock-in-trade is to resort to even the weakest rationalisation to try and disprove everyone he comes into contact with — even when, as with Chris, there are numerous other people who can attest that something genuinely unusual is happening. The sad fact is that Randi really wants to find genuine phenomena, yet cannot accept anything less than 100 per cent accuracy in a result — and such a perfect result is never achieved in any experiment, psychic or otherwise.
It was therefore not surprising that Sue Walls — a researcher on Randi's show — was pleased that Chris's fax to her was so inconclusive: it was a perfect set-up for the show.
It was the second week of March 1991 •when Sue rang Chris again.
'Are you still willing to take that second test for us?' she asked.
'Sure. In fact, I've got one for you right now.' Chris prepared photocopies of his dream diary to send to Sue, and also to one Clive Seymour and his working partner S. Laws. They were members of the Association for the Investigation of Anomalous Phenomena, or ASAP. They had contacted Chris after reading about him in Psychic News and had agreed to monitor this experiment as part of their study of him.
The previous night Chris had written a simple question at the top of the page: 'Next IRA attack, please'. There had been a strong thread relating to bomb attacks running through his dreams during this period, so Chris thought this was what he would get for the Randi programme. He couldn't have been more wrong.
He was sitting in a plane, in the passenger cabin, watching a hostess demonstrate how to use the oxygen mask. It was something he'd seen a hundred times before and his attention was wandering. He got up from his seat and walked up the aisle towards the flight deck.
When he got there the pilot was waiting for him: Chris recognised him as the pilot of the plane involved in the Papa India crash at Heathrow, nearly twenty years before. It had always stuck in Chris's mind, because he had taken his mother and sister to the airport that day and had just been driving away from the airport car park when the plane came down in flames on the runway.
'Sit down, we're ready for take-off,' the pilot said.
Chris took his seat next to the pilot, and found himself taking control of the plane as it taxied to the runway and turned to begin its take-off run.
The noise in the cabin was intense: a roar that penetrated through the earphones he was wearing. 'I'he plane began to thunder down the runway, gaining speed. Chris watched the dials on the instrument panel: even though he had never flown a plane in his life, the situation didn't seem strange and he knew exactly what he was doing.
The nose of the plane began to lift, and Chris gave the engines full throttle, feeling the sticks buck in his hands as he pushed them forward, the plane protesting at being forced upwards. He had to push with all the force he could muster, sweat gathering on his brow.
The plane had full power and was beginning to lift off the ground: but there was something wrong. The engines were stalling, and he pushed forward even harder, trying to give the engines his own strength -for what it was worth - trying by sheer force of will to lift the plane off the ground.
It was in the air, but wobbling and veering danger¬ously. He couldn't hold it steady, and it began to dive towards the earth.
'The engines . . . it's a flame-out,' he heard someone yelling through the headphones.
There wasn't enough power to lift the plane, or to keep it on an even keel: something had happened to one of the engines, and the entire cabin turned on its side as the plane came back down towards the runway at an angle too acute to land. Inside there was chaos: paper and cups flew around, the instruments went crazy, with lights blinking on and off; the pressure in the cabin changed, and Chris felt as though he would black out.
The plane missed the runway and crashed down on to the grass alongside a main road.
The cabin exploded into flame and heat, a deafening roar and rush of air filling Chris's head until it reached a point where a vacuum was reached, and there was an eerie silence as the plastic and leather on the seats melted into the glass and metal ot the cockpit windows, the heat bubbling his skin as it began to fry in the crash conditions . . .
Then he was outside the plane, watching it burn. It was a British Airways jet, like the Papa India plane. Yet he knew that this was not right: the plane that would crash would not be a commercial flight. The pilot was standing beside him, gesturing at the crash and yelling into his ear above the noise of the burning wreck.
'There wasn't enough power. There was a flame-out,' he yelled - using the same words Chris had heard in his headphones.
'Who are you?' Chris yelled.
'I'm the pilot,' the flyer screamed in reply. He was wearing an RAF flying uniform.
'No, I mean what's your name,' Chris shouted back, struggling to make himself understood over the roar of the fire.
'You know who I am, Christopher,' the flyer said, suddenly in a very quiet voice. Despite this, Chris was able to understand him over the noise of the crash. 'I'm Steven,' he said softly.
Then an incredible thing happened. Chris was used to the unbelievable in his dream worlds, but this was all the more remarkable for never having happened again since.
The RAF pilot standing in front of him suddenly metamorphosed from an adult into a small boy. It was as though his shape changed in front of Chris's eyes, shrinking in stature, his clothes becoming those a child would have worn thirty years before.
'I'm Steven from next door,' he said in a boy's voice that Chris recognised.
Chris closed his eyes and shook his head, trying to make sense of what he had seen. When he opened them again, the flyer was once again a grown man.
'Who are the others,' Chris yelled hurriedly, 'and where is this going to happen?'
The flyer looked down the runway and pointed to it. 'His father built the runway,' he said cryptically. 'K ei n ember that — his father built the runway.'
The dream began to break up and become garbled — there were random images, but one in particular stuck in Chris's mind: he was a boy again, sneaking past the house of an old neighbour called Mrs Swan. She was looking out of her window, and he got past without her seeing him, heading for the back door of a nearby house.
The dream began to fragment again and everything became confused . . .
When he woke up, Chris was sure that there would be an air crash, and he thought he knew where it would be. The runway so close to the main road, with a few houses nearby, seemed familiar.
He looked at what he had written down:
During take-off - watch [Hostess] - oxygen mask demo
Plane take-off - full throttle Push both sticks forward — full power Crashes back on to? [Airport] Road Runway — fire — MELTS — Buildings
Engine — flame-out — Sitting in plane — British Airways
Stall — push sticks
Forward — not enough power — fire — His father built the runway.
There were other images, relating to later dreams that he couldn't recall, and at the bottom of the next page he had written:
Past Mrs Swans House — she is looking out of the window Go round to back door.
The dream of the air crash was so vivid that it became Chris's one overriding concern: he must work out what it meant — where and when the crash would happen.
Analysing the phrases he had written down, he could see a couple where the letters S and P began adjacent •words. This was the method by which he received postcodes. So which part of the country had a postcode that was either SP or PS? Looking on his postcode maps he could see that it was either Swansea or Peterborough.
He was pretty sure that there wasn't an RAF base in Swansea, but there was one near Peterborough. RAF Wyton lay near Huntingdon, and Chris had travelled that way recently: first, he had been to Huntingdon because of premonitions he had received concerning attacks on John Major, whose constituency was in the area; second, the local passport office for Bedfordshire was in Peterborough, and Chris had needed to renew his son's passport. To expedite matters he had gone there in person. On the way he had driven near Wyton, and he could remember the way in which the main road ran parallel to the runway, with a small clutch of houses nearby.
It was exactly as he could remember it in the dream. Now he thought he knew where the attack would occur. But when?
That was harder to answer. Some events came to him weeks before they happened. These re-occurred in repeating patterns over successive nights. Yet other events turned up three nights before they •were due to happen, or even the night before. The only way he would know for sure was if the crash either happened during the day ahead or he dreamt about it again that coming night.
One thing Chris was sure about were the names of the men involved in the crash: 'His father built the runway.'
This cryptic clue had something to do with the material the runway was constructed of: the flyer had pointed to it when he gave Chris the clue. Most runways and roads are built of tarmacadam - so Chris was convinced that the name of at least one of the flyers would be Adam, or Macadam, or have Me or Mac in it.
The identity of the pilot who had spoken to him was another thing of which Chris was certain. The pilot had changed into a small boy and said 'I'm Steven'. Then Chris had received a dream image of the place where he used to live as a boy. Thirty years before he had had a friend whose name was Steven — Steven Wilkinson. It was this boy that the pilot had changed into. What's more, Steven had lived next door to Chris, near old Mrs Swan.
It wouldn't be the same Steven Wilkinson - but it would be someone of that name.
Chris completed his notes to attach to the dream sheets and faxed copies of them to Sue Walls at Granada, and to Clive Seymour at ASAP.
This was on Sunday, and he spent most of the day wondering what would happen in his dreams that night. Would he get another clue concerning the crash? He hoped that it would not be like the actual dream of the crash, which haunted him all day.
Perhaps it was because the dreams of Saturday night had been so intense that he dreamt very little on the Sunday. Most of it was inconsequential, but there was one segment that made Chris think of the air crash when he woke up. Looking at what he had written, it said:
Half sunk — orange in colour. Rowing boat. Police launch — bring back a rowing boat Bottom cracked in halt - no good for him now Size of him lie should have a bigger boat.
There were also scver.il references on the page to words that began with (' .nul B — a Cambridge post¬code. By themselves tlu-y didn't have any particular
significance, but the dream of the rowing boat had a personal association that made Chris think again. He had a friend named Alan, who had an orange boat. This was moored at Hartford Marina, which was located at St Ives in Cambridgeshire.
Cambridge - RAF Wyton was in Cambridgeshire, and as Chris looked at his map of the area he could see that the road running along the runway would be the route he would usually take when he visited Alan on his yacht.
That was where the plane would crash.
Sue Walls rang him during the morning.
'When is this plane going to crash, then?' she said.
'I don't know,' Chris began. Then something made him change his mind - call it a hunch, a feeling . . . perhaps a premonition was penetrating his waking mind for once. 'I say that, but you just watch the nine o'clock news tonight.'
Sue's tone had been light when she first spoke to him, almost as though she thought him another of the fakes she had been directed to find. But there was something in Chris's voice when he said this that made her change her mind.
'You really think it'll happen today, don't you?'
'Well, it might not be today, but . . . yes, I really think it will.'
'Then why don't you do something about it?' she asked.
'So what am I going to do?' Chris threw back at her. There was a weariness to his tone: he'd had this asked of him so many times, and it always made him think of RAF Stanmore.
'I don't know - tell the police or something.'
'I do. All my dreams go to the police every morning. 1 tax them, like I do to you. But what's going to happen? Are they going to ring up the RAF at Wyton and say,
'Don't send up any planes today 'cause we've got this psychic who says one of them will crash'? They know as well as I do that the station won't listen to them out of the blue. It'd have to come from some RAF high-up, and how long is that going to take?'
'Then go there yourself
'You think I haven't tried that?' he replied. 'I've been there, and I know what they're like. I'm not going to get them to listen just by turning up.'
'But if the plane crashes -'
'I've learnt to live with things like that,' Chris replied shortly.
Chris sat down to watch the nine o'clock news that night with a sense of foreboding: it was soon justified, when one of the headlined items was an RAF Canberra vintage jet that had plunged to the ground just after take-off. The jet came down on the road at the side of the runway at RAF Wyton. Wreckage was strewn across nearby fields, but no vehicles or buildings were hit.
The crew of three were killed.
The phone rang as soon as the item had finished. When Chris answered it, he heard Sue Walls at the end of the line. She was in tears.
'You were right. You said it would crash and it did. Have you seen the news?'
'Yes, I've just been watching it, too,' said Chris quietly, trying to keep the emotion out of his voice. It was hard for him to know that this had happened — that he had known it would happen — yet he had been unable to do anything about it.
'I've got to tell my producer about this,' she said, beginning to calm down. 'We've got to have you on after this.'
'Yeah, that'd be good . . .' Chris replied distantly: the last thing on his mind was a television appear¬ance.
'I'll call you tomorrow, and see if you dreamt the names of the flyers,' she finished.
Chris put the phone down and was unable to con¬centrate on the rest of the news.
The dreams on the Monday night were confused and of little consequence. It was as though the anguish surrounding the plane crash was too much for Chris, and he couldn't focus on anything. When Sue rang him the next morning he was too confused by the dreams to give her exact names.
She asked him to look at the Teletext reports of the crash. He was astonished when he came to the names of the crew: the plane was piloted by Group Captain Reginald McKendrick, aged forty-five. Also on board was Flight Lieutenant David Adams, aged forty-eight. One name with a Me in it, the other Adams ... if you put them together it gave you Macadam, as in tarmacadam . . .
'His father built the runway.'
But it was the name of the other crew member, a 30-year-old Flight Lieutenant, which immediately caught Chris's eye. His name was Steven Wilkinson.
He read out his dream diary to her and she was astounded by the result. She promised to phone him back about the show.
A couple of days passed and there was no call. Still, Chris reasoned, it was a busy production office, and there was probably a very good reason for her failing to ring.
There was: the brief of the researchers on the Randi show was to be concerned with debunking all aspects of the so-called paranormal, from astrology to psychic activity. An inexplicable result like this, which couldn't be explained away in terms of trickery, was going to tie Randi in metaphysical knots.
The call came a few days later. Sue Walls was on the line and she sounded embarrassed.
'You see, it's like this,' she said. 'We don't think we can use you after all.'
'What?' Chris was astounded. 'But I told you there was going to be a crash. I told you where. I didn't say when, although I did suggest a day over the phone. I gave the complete name of one of the crash victims, and supplied you with the partial names of the other two. What more do you want?'
He was annoyed that they had asked him to take part in a test, expected him to fax them his dreams as they happened, got an extremely impressive result . . . and then decided to drop the whole idea.
There was a pause while Sue drew in her breath before speaking again. 'That's the problem, you see. You gave us too much.'
'How the bloody hell can I give you too much?' Chris raged.
'It's the producer,' she replied. 'He's told me that our brief is really to find people who are crap, so they can be shown up. What you've done is just too good.'
Chris •was stunned into silence: he'd been accused of being many things in his time, but this had never been one of them.
'I'm really sorry,' Sue continued. 'Speaking personally, I hope that someone does a documentary on you at some point, because I've never come across anything like this before. What you did was truly remarkable.'
It was scant consolation. As soon as she had put the phone down, Chris rang ASAP to see what they made of the fax he had sent them. After some time he was finally able to talk to Clive Seymour.
'Well, what did you think?' Chris asked him.
'It was mildly interesting,' Seymour replied.
'Mildly interesting?' Chris parroted in amazement.
'Yes. Quite a tew coincidences in there. I suppose it might be worth having a look ,it it.' His manner was offhand and disinterested.
'No, don't bother,' Chris said angrily. 'If you don't believe me, and think I plucked those names out of the air by chance, then just forget it.'
He slammed the phone down: he wanted what was happening to be investigated, but by someone who was actually showing a positive interest in what was going on. That didn't seem to be ASAP's attitude.
Since then Chris has been tested on numerous tele¬vision and radio shows. He's never again been rejected for being 'too good'.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The dreams have been recurring with frequency and accuracy for over half a decade now. During this time Chris has established a rapport and understanding with the various police officers who have been appointed as his liaison officer. Other officers he has encountered have also taken easily to the truth behind the precognitive dreams. Yet despite this there have been certain forces, or individual officers, who have shied away from the idea of using a psychic, and have displayed a degree of scepticism that borders on the ridiculous. This is perhaps understandable: when initially confronted by a man claiming to be a psychic and to have dreamt about future events, many of us would probably be inclined to wonder, at the very least, about the man's credentials.
And yet there is one branch of law enforcement with which Chris has never had any problems. They listened to him from the very first time that he contacted them about a dream, and have always acted upon what he has told them. This is the department that enforces the laws of HM Customs and Excise.
The actual point of contact between Chris and Cus¬toms came several years before the dreams began. In the early 1980s video piracy - both witting and unwitting - was rife. Not only were there video pirates at work in Britain, there were also individuals and companies reproducing video titles th.it they believed they had obtained legitimate licences to copy. These licences were, in fact, fake, and several people were swindled
out of huge sums of money and also put in the unwitting position of being law-breakers.
At this point in time Chris Robinson was in a position held by relatively few people in the industry: he was both a retailer and distributor, via his small chain of shops in the Bedfordshire area; he was also a licence holder for various titles. Many of these licences emanated from Holland, where the bogus licences also originated. Because of his contacts, Chris was in a position to help the Customs and Excise department in their investigations when they asked for his assistance.
During the course of the investigation, Chris became friendly with the officer in charge, named Pete. After the successful conclusion of the case, Chris stayed in touch with Pete and the two men often saw each other socially. So when Chris began to have precognitive dreams, he told Pete about them - as he told everyone who knew him - in an attempt to gain support for what was an intially difficult situation.
As Pete knew about the dreams, and no doubt had followed up through his own channels what had happened about the dreams Chris had reported to the police, he was only too •willing to listen when Chris came to him with dreams that involved what appeared to be shipments of drugs, or offences that would be of direct interest to his department.
More than that: Pete knew Chris as a man and knew that, whatever Chris was, he was no liar.
Pete is not the officer's real name. He and his department have given us permission to include the following two cases in this book on condition that names are changed and no dates specified. This is because some of the people involved are still serving prison sentences, and officers are still work¬ing on cases that arose directly from the arrests made.
Despite this, the contents of this chapter are, in essence, as true as those of the rest of the book.
It was one of the most literal dreams he had ever had. So real that he at first thought he had woken on the plane and had suffered some kind of amnesia.
The stewardess was shaking those passengers who were still asleep, and when she got to Chris he asked her what was going on.
'Time to disembark, sir,' she replied softly, 'this is Heathrow.'
Chris stirred himself, stood up and stretched. He had no hand luggage and was soon walking down the metal ladder towards the bus that would take them to the terminal.
It seemed strangely old-fashioned: Chris hadn't dis¬embarked from a plane in this way for some time. And as he looked around, Heathrow seemed to be incredibly spartan compared to the bustle with which he was familiar.
He realised that this really was a dream and got on the bus with his fellow passengers, most of whom were Asian. As the bus pulled away, he looked back at the plane: it was an Air India flight. All these Asians, and a plane from Air India: that had to be significant.
The babble of voices on the bus made it impossible to make out any particular conversation, until Chris suddenly heard the driver refer to the flight number quite clearly - and then he told a man standing next to him that it was Thursday.
A flight number and a day: there was a reason that Chris had heard these, and part of his mind that was always conscious hoped that he had written it down in the dream diary.
The bus arrived at the terminal and the passengers filed in to collect their luggage from an old-fashioned baggage carousel that slowly wound its way round the room.
Chris stood there in the crush of passengers, suddenly aware that he had no idea what sort of case or holdall he
was looking for. So he simply stood and waited while the other passengers collected their motley assortment of old and new, battered and sparkling luggage, until there was just the one case left.
It sat on the carousel, a new case in leather with dark brown panels and tan surround. Even though it was the only one left, Chris also knew by instinct that this was the one he had to pick up. He walked towards the green channel, as he was sure he had nothing to declare.
'Excuse me, sir,' said a Customs official as he walked through, 'could I have a look at that?'
'But there's nothing in there,' Chris protested.
'I'll be the judge of that, sir,' said the official in a dry tone, as Chris put the case on the Customs counter and opened it.
There was a top layer of clothing, badly packed. It looked as though it had been thrown on top of a small mountain range, as the clothes in the case formed hills and valleys.
'Well, well, what have we here, then?' muttered the Customs official, as he removed some of the clothes. Underneath were a series of transparent plastic bags, filled with a brown powder. Chris knew what they were straight away: heroin.
'That's nothing to do with me,' he said, shaking his head as the Customs official advanced on him . . .
Chris woke in a sweat. It seemed so real that he half-expected to be in a cell. After taking a few deep breaths, he looked at the dream diary: as he had hoped, he had noted down a flight number and the day mentioned, and had also jotted down a few phrases about drugs and Air India. Best of all, he had written something about the suitcase, and had even drawn a sketch of it.
It was one of the clearest dreams he had lived through, and he was so excited that he rang Pete straight away.
'I hope you know what time this is,' said a sleepy voice at the end of the line.
'I don't, actually,' Chris replied, 'but you're going to love this.'
'Robinson? Christ, this had better be good.'
Chris described his dream to Pete, and read out to him what he had written. By the time he had finished Pete was fully awake.
'I want you to fax all that to my office now, and I'll want to see you later. This could be very interesting.'
Chill winds blew across the fields that separated the runways at Heathrow. In the crisp morning air, they made Chris shiver in his baggage-handler's uniform. He turned and walked back into the building where Pete and his men were sitting. Pete handed him some coffee.
'Thanks,' Chris said, sipping the scalding liquid. 'I still don't see why the hell you want me here all week. I told you it was Thursday and the flight number. What more do you want?'
'First thing is this: sometimes your dreams are a bit out. They get the substance, but not the detail, right?' Pete waited for Chris to agree before continuing. 'Second thing, then: you might be out on the day, and also out on the flight number. There are flights with similar arrangements of digits in their numbers all week. So we look at all of them, okay?'
'Well, yeah, I can understand that - but why do I have to be here?'
Pete grinned. 'If we're going to freeze out here all week, then so are you, my son.'
In actual fact Chris found that he was working too hard to feel the cold on the long stretches of open space out to the planes: loading the baggage proved to be strenuous and soul-destroying, as there was little sign of what they were looking for.
Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday all passed in a blur
of shifting luggage. It was on Thursday that Chris arrived to be greeted by a smiling Pete.
'You look pleased with yourself,' Chris said, knowing what Pete was about to say.
'You're the one that should look pleased, my son. It's Thursday, the flight number you wrote down is due in this afternoon, and although it's not an Air India plane, it is coming from Bombay.'
'I told you,' said Chris peevishly. 'I needn't have come here until today.'
'Maybe I just like making you work,' grinned Pete.
When the passengers had disembarked from the plane, the Customs men moved in to unload the baggage.
'My God, I've seen some things this week, but this lot tops it all,' Chris said, amazed at the junk that was in the plane's hold. There were the usual array of old and new cases, along with canvas holdalls. But there were also wicker baskets, parcels tied with string and plastic carrier bags. Many of these hadn't survived the turbulence of the flight, and foodstuffs were scattered across the floor of the plane, running into odd-smelling liquids that congealed in pools.
Picking their way around the detritus, the Customs men unloaded the baggage and took it to their temporary base. There they set about the task of trying to find the type of case described by Chris in his dream.
There were over 800 cases on the flight, and after a solid hour's work the team had narrowed it down to nine, which they put in a circle around Chris.
'Come on then,' said Pete, 'do your stuff, my son.'
'You what?' Chris replied.
'Tell us which one it is.'
'How the bloody hell am I supposed to know that?'
'Well, you're the psychic . . .'
"Leave it out - I saw this in a dream, didn't I?' Chris looked around at the nine cases. All of them were dark brown leather, and some of them had a tan trim. But was there one that looked exactly like the one he had carried in his dream?
There was: it was almost new, and he was sure that it was identical to the one he had carried through Customs. He pointed to it.
'That was the one I carried. It's almost identical.'
'You sure that's the one?' Pete asked. Their next step would be to open the case: that was something he didn't want to do without being certain.
'That's the one in the dream,' said Chris, 'but I reckon the drugs are in the one next to it.' He changed the direction of his arm, and pointed to an old battered case that stood beside the one he had seen in the dream.
'You sure?' Pete frowned. 'Why the change of mind?'
'I don't know - instinct, I suppose. But that's it. I'm sure.'
Pete shrugged and directed his men to take the case and open it. They placed it on a trestle table and used a skeleton key to pick the locks — not that this was really necessary, as one of the locks was broken, and the only thing really holding the case together was a piece of twine tied around it.
'Doesn't look a likely candidate, does it,' Pete sniffed, as he turned over the pitiful collection of clothes and belongings inside. 'But then again, you wouldn't expect it to be signposted . . .'
The contents of the case were emptied on to the table. They seemed too few for a case that had appeared so full. Looking at it closely, Chris could see that Pete had located a false bottom to the case. Carefully he lifted it up.
'Jackpot. Do not pass do, do not collect two hundred pounds - go directly to j.iil.' I'etc muttered to himself, as he pulled out several plastic hags filled with a brown powder. Making a small hole in one, he took some out,
placed it in a glass tube and poured in a chemical. It turned green.
'Smack. Nice one, Chris.'
The Customs officers were now left with something of a dilemma. The owner of the case was waiting in the terminal for his case to arrive, so that he could take it through Customs and enter the country. Out here, on the airfield itself, the case was not legally in England until it had been checked through Customs and its owner had walked through Arrivals and into the airport's main building.
They could earmark the case, and let the owner be caught going through Customs, in which case they would leave the heroin in the case. Or they could substitute bags of sand of a similar weight and colour, and let the smuggler walk out of the airport. The chances were that he was just a courier, and if they gave him a free hand, then they might be able to follow him to his rendezvous and snare part of a larger network.
Of course, if he was arrested at the rendezvous he would be carrying bags of sand, and this was hardly illegal.
Pete had to think fast. There are no hard-and-fast ways of handling such cases: there are, of course, guidelines, but officers in his position are given a free rein to use their own experience and judgement.
'Swap it for sand and let him walk,' he finally decided. 'I don't want anyone taking their eye off him for more than a second. He's got to be heavily tailed. There's a chance that we may be spotted, and he'll be left to take the rap on his own, but we've got to play those odds. I can't let that smack get away from us without being able to recover it, or at least giving us a chance to nick someone higher up.'
The case was passed through, and word sent to Customs at the airport to let the courier through unchallenged. It was hard for them to be unobtrusive and also keep a tight tail on the courier in such a crowded place, but somehow they managed.
The courier had obviously received instructions over the phone: he went to the Underground station and bought a ticket that would take him to the other end of the line. The Customs men followed at a distance, one always making sure that he was in the same carriage as the courier.
He changed at Covent Garden and finally alighted at Finchley. The Customs men followed him to a park, where he waited for several hours.
No-one came to meet him.
The Customs men were in radio contact with Pete, who finally conceded defeat and ordered that the courier be arrested. The people he was working for must have had an observer at the airport, who had spotted the Customs officers tailing the courier or had at least become suspicious. He was only a courier, and he was expendable.
He was also little threat to them: he knew little English, and via a translator it soon became clear that he was a poor man who had been offered a sum of money that seemed enormous, simply to deliver a suitcase. In Britain he would have been paid and joined members of his family •who were resident in this country.
The courier stood trial and received a heavy prison sentence. He had been caught thanks to Chris's dream. It was just a shame that no other members of the gang were netted in the operation. But perhaps Chris had helped to dry up one line of supply for drugs being smuggled into the country.
Some time later Chris was in Cyprus on holiday. The night before he was due to tly home he had a dream in which three men carrying suitcases were arrested
for trafficking drugs. The three men were all dressed in soldiers' uniforms.
It was only a brief part of the dream, and soon it was out of focus, the dream having moved on to tell him something else.
When he woke in the morning he found a reference to the soldiers and the drugs in his automatic writing, but it was only the briefest of references in an otherwise full night of images and symbols. He was momentarily puzzled by the idea of soldiers carrying drugs, but thought no more of it and put the book to one side as he carried on with his packing.
It was only later, when he was at the airport, that it came back to him. The flight he was taking was a charter flight, and the passengers were all part of the same package holiday deal. Before they embarked, and the flight was ready for take-off, they all shared the same departure lounge.
Most of the people in the lounge were either married couples or families. There were only one or two people on their own. In such a setting, three young men travelling together stood out perhaps more than they would otherwise have done. Especially as the three men were fooling around, and being noisy.
Everyone's attention was drawn to them at some time, but Chris's more than most . . . The three young men were all in their middle to late twenties, quite tall, and had cropped and crew-cut hair. They looked uncannily like squaddies about to go on leave.
They were seated together, at the end of a row of chairs. As Chris watched in amazement, a man not in the charter party wandered into the departure lounge, carry¬ing a holdall that was identical to one carried by one of the boisterous young men. Without apparently noticing the man who had just entered, the crew-cut man slid his holdall to the end of the row of seats, where it stood slightly apart from the other baggage in the row.
The strange man sauntered past the end of the row and then put his holdall down on the ground in order to take something from his pocket. It was an air ticket. He looked at it and seemed to indicate to anyone looking that he had somehow wandered into the wrong lounge. He smiled to himself, put the ticket back in his pocket, picked up his holdall and walked out. It was the kind of thing that could happen to anyone: an honest mistake, all executed in the blink of an eye with a natural calm.
Except that the man had not picked up his own bag: Chris had been watching closely, and had noticed that he picked up the wrong bag. At first Chris thought that it might be a simple mistake: he was disabused of this notion when the crew-cut man reached out just a little too casually and pulled the strange holdall towards him. The giveaway was a slight glance around, to see if anyone had noticed.
Chris couldn't believe it: was it just his imagination? He looked round — no-one else seemed to have noticed anything going on. He turned to his wife.
'Here, did you just see that?' he asked her.
'What?' she countered, her attention momentarily distracted from the book she was reading.
'Over there,' he said, indicating the three young men. 'They've just switched bags with some bloke who wandered in and out.'
His wife looked at him askance: 'Are you sure about that?'
'Of course I am.'
'Well, I didn't see it. It was probably nothing.'
It may very well have been, but Chris wasn't so sure. He kept watching the three young men while they waited to board the plane, but nothing else suspicious happened while they were in the departure lounge. When the time came to board. Chris was still trying to persuade his wife that the men were dubious characters. She was convinced that his imagination was getting the better of him. However, he couldn't help remembering the soldiers in his dream.
The plane had been in flight for a couple of hours, and several of the passengers were asleep, including Chris's wife. But he was still wide awake, wondering if he should do something about what he had seen. Looking down to the front of the plane, he could see that the three young men were seated near the cockpit. That would make things difficult if he was going to carry out the plan now forming in his head.
As a stewardess passed by, Chris stopped her. 'Can I see the Captain?' he asked.
'I'm sorry sir, I'm afraid that while the plane is in flight -' she prepared to go into the little speech she had prepared for all nervous fliers who wanted to see the Captain. Chris stopped her with a ges¬ture.
'All right. But will you do something for me?'
'I'll ask, sir,' she said doubtfully, probably wondering if Chris was going to be awkward.
'Can you ask him to get through to Customs at Luton and give them a message?'
'I'm not sure he'll want to do that, sir,' she said. 'Right.' Chris nodded, and wrote down Pete's phone number on a piece of paper. 'Try and get him to do that, and get them to phone this man and verify who Chris Robinson is. I've got reason to believe that drugs are being smuggled on this plane.'
The stewardess's eyes popped out of her head. 'Are you with MIS or something?' she asked.
Chris suppressed a laugh. 'No, I'm not. I have had some dealings with — shall we say - certain agencies. Just ask him to do that, will you?'
The wide-eyed stewardess took the piece of paper and went off to the cockpit. Chris settled back into his seat to await developments. Even if nothing happened, at least he had tried to get something done.
It was almost half an hour before the stewardess returned.
'Can you come up front, sir - the Captain would like to see you.'
Chris looked towards the front of the plane. The three young men all seemed to be asleep, but he couldn't be sure. Someone - anyone - just going to see the Captain might seem a bit suspicious, and if Chris was right, then the last thing he wanted was for the young men to become suspicious.
'I don't want to alert the people I suspect,' he began, deliberately being circumspect. 'Is there some way that I could get up there with a legitimate reason?'
The stewardess pondered this for a moment. 'If I go up there now, and you follow in a minute or two, you could ask me for an orange juice. Then I could take you behind the curtain, because that's where the fridge is kept. That way you could slip in to see the Captain without anyone knowing.'
'Okay, we'll do that,' said Chris, and he settled back to wait as the stewardess walked back up the aisle. When she had been up front for a minute or two, Chris got up and went to join her. On the way he cast a quick glance at the three young men who were his suspects: two of them were asleep, and the other was looking out of the window, listening to his Walkman and paying little attention to what was going on around him.
'Excuse me, I wonder if you've got any orange juice,' he asked the stewardess, feeling faintly ludicrous. He hoped he didn't sound too false or loud, or that it didn't look like something from a bad spy movie. 'Certainly, sir,' the stewardess replied and led him into the Captain's cabin when the curtains were safely drawn across, hiding them from view. The Captain turned to greet Chris as he entered the cockpit.
'Ah, pleased to meet you, sir. I was wondering if you'd like to use the radio.' 'Sorry?' Chris felt bemused at this treatment: it was as though James Bond had stepped into the cockpit.
'I just wondered if you'd like to use the radio to contact Customs at Luton yourself. I can get you patched through.' 'Have you actually spoken to them yet?' Chris asked, a little confused. 'Oh yes,' the Captain replied. 'It was their suggestion that you call them yourself Chris shrugged. 'Okay, then. If you can get me through to them.'
He waited while the call was patched through to the Customs department at Luton airport.
'This is Chris Robinson,' he said when the mike was handed to him. 'Have you been told of my suspicions?'
'Yes,' came the disembodied voice. 'There's someone who wants to speak to you about it. Hang on while I patch you through.' Chris stood in the cockpit, mike in hand, feeling rather foolish while he waited. The Captain was watching him with interest, but Chris wasn't too sure what the pilot expected of him. He supposed that it wasn't every day that a charter-flight pilot ferrying package holidaymakers across the globe came across a situation like this: it was probably the greatest excitement the Captain had ever had on a flight. That was certainly true of the stewardess, who had hung around in the doorway to hear what was going on.
Finally the radio crackled into life again, and Chris heard a familiar voice.
'Robinson - what the hell are you up to now?' Chris grinned. 'Hello, Pete. You're not going to believe this, but I'm on my way home from holiday -'
and you just happen to have run into a trio of drug traffickers?' finished Pete's amused voice.
'How did you guess?'
Pete sighed audibly. 'All right, my son, run this one by me and see how it sounds . . .'
So Chris explained to him about the soldiers in his dream, and how the three young men in the departure lounge reminded him of them; and then how he had seen the bag switch executed.
He could see the Captain looking at him in disbelief. It seemed he was astounded to have put through a call to Customs because of one man's dream — and that they were taking him seriously.
'What do these three bozos look like?' Pete asked. Chris described them as well as he could, then waited while Pete disappeared from the end of the line. After a short while he came back.
'Yeah, they sound very familiar, and very interesting. Can you do me a favour? Can you keep an eye on them while you're on the plane, just in case they get wind of something and try to dump the bag? I'll organise something down here for when you land.'
'Okay, I'll do my best,' Chris replied. He handed the radio back to the Captain, who was looking at him with an expression that didn't know whether to be respectful or disbelieving. Chris wasn't surprised: it was a reaction he was used to encountering.
The stewardess, on the other hand, was plainly excited about the whole thing as she led Chris back to his seat. By now, his wife had woken up and wondered where he had gone. Chris whispered a hurried explanation to her as the stewardess disappeared. She came back a few minutes later, carrying a bottle of Champagne.
'If there's anything else you want, just ask,' she whispered, leaving him with the bottle.
The rest of the flight proceeded uneventfully and before long the approach to Luton airport began. The three young men strapped themselves into their seats without a care in the world, little knowing that Chris was keeping an eye on them from the back of the plane.
When the plane had landed and taxied to a halt, the passengers prepared to disembark. Chris and his wife gathered together their hand luggage, Chris all the while watching to see if the three young men were preparing to switch their holdall with someone else's. The three men were first off the plane, with Chris not far behind. They were still clutching their original hand baggage, and Chris breathed a silent sigh of relief when they touched the tarmac. They were no longer his responsibility.
He and his wife checked their baggage through Cus¬toms and went to collect his car from the car park. They didn't see what happened back in the Customs hall. The three young men had collected their luggage and were going through the green channel when they were stopped by a Customs official.
'Anything to declare, sir?' he asked politely of one of them - not the one with the switched holdall.
"Course not,' the young man said belligerently. 'I wouldn't come through here if I did have, would I?'
'Then you won't mind me having a quick look at your bags, will you,' the official said with a smile.
The young man sighed heavily but consented to having his luggage searched. He had no real choice in the matter, and besides he was not the one carrying the drugs. He submitted to the search with an ill grace, and smiled slyly when his baggage was passed clean.
The three men were about to leave when the Customs official called them back.
'What is it now,' sighed the man whose baggage had just been searched.
'Since you're so clean, you won't mind me searching your mates, will you?' the official said. The three young men suddenly became nervous, the tension beginning to crack. As they looked around, they could see that there were several men and women hanging around the Customs hall whom they didn't recall seeing on the plane.
They didn't want the bags searched, but they had little option. All the bags were opened, until finally the Customs official reached the switched holdall.
He removed some of the contents and then found a wrapped package at the bottom.
'Well, well, what have we here?' he said with a smile.
Pete rang Chris a couple of days later. 'Did you get a result?' Chris asked.
'Did we?' laughed Pete. Til say so. Not only was that holdall stuffed with gear, but these three jokers are guys we've had our eye on for some time. It's a nice little scam that some traffickers have taken up, using package holidays. After all, who'd suspect innocent families and holidaymakers of harbouring smugglers in their midst?'
'I would,' laughed Chris. 'At least, I would now.'
'Tell me, was it the switch or the dream that really put you on to them?'
'To be honest with you, I don't really know,' Chris replied thoughtfully. 'I don't know if I would have taken that much notice of the switch if I hadn't had the dream of the soldiers — they really did look like squaddies, and that's what made me notice them in the first place. I think otherwise I either wouldn't have noticed the switch, or would just have put it down to an accident.' 'Instead of which you helped nail three nasty little pieces of work. I hope you keep dreaming.'
'So do I,' said Chris. 'So do I.'