Michael Todd was in typically confident mood at a black tie reception at the
Grosvenor House hotel in Mayfair this month. Amid the hundreds of guests of
the Community Security Trust, the chief constable of Greater Manchester
stood out as a professional at the top of his game.
Patrick Mercer, the Tory MP who was a fellow guest at the dinner 13 days ago,
said there was no hint of anything troubling one of Britain’s most highly
regarded police officers. “He was extremely ebullient. He gave me the
thumbs-up sign and a big wink,” Mercer recalled. “I told him what a great
job I thought he was doing up in Manchester. He grinned with pleasure and
then invited me to come up to visit the counter-terrorism unit. He was
obviously in great shape.”
Yet within a week Todd was parking his Range Rover in the village of Llanberis
at the foot of Snowdon in north Wales and embarking on a reckless climb
towards the 3,560ft summit.
He set off at 4pm on Monday into the teeth of the winter’s worst storm with
darkness drawing in. An experienced walker who had made the climb before, he
would have known the likely consequences of undertaking such an ascent in
freezing conditions with winds gusting to 80mph.
As he climbed, he sent text messages from his BlackBerry. One of those who
received them, a civilian employee of the Metropolitan police, was so
disturbed she contacted Manchester police. She is described by police
sources as a close friend rather than a lover.
Mountain rescue teams were called and a search began. It was hampered by the
conditions and by a false triangulation reading from his mobile phone
signal, which led the searchers first to scour an area on the Menai Strait,
14 miles to the north.
Their efforts were in vain. At 2.45pm on Tuesday a group of climbers found
some of Todd’s effects a few hundred feet from the summit. His body was
discovered nearby soon after, at the bottom of a scree slope known as Bwlch
Glas.
The coroner’s inquest, which opened on Thursday, reported that Todd had no
fractured bones and his internal organs were intact. The only visible
injuries were “superficial” cuts. He ruled out a fall from height as the
cause of death.
Blood alcohol readings showed that Todd was just over the drink-drive limit;
other analysis indicated that he could have been drunk several hours
earlier. A half-empty bottle of gin was found near the body, which was fully
clothed, though his outer jacket was nearby.
The coroner withheld a cause of death pending further tests.
Whether Todd died of hypothermia, which can be accelerated by alcohol, or some
other cause, his text messages and the foolhardiness of his climb suggest
that suicide was at the least on his mind.
In the aftermath of his death, affairs with women in Manchester and London
were exposed. There were reports that Todd’s distress had been triggered by
a forthcoming tabloid newspaper sting and a wronged husband visiting Todd’s
wife at the family home in Nottinghamshire. Were such personal problems
really enough to drive an outwardly tough-as-teak policeman to kill himself?
Former colleagues find his apparent suicide baffling. “We knew there was a
trail of women,” said an insider from Scotland Yard, where Todd was an
assistant commissioner for three years. “But surely there must have been
something more to cause him to take that long walk alone up the mountain.”
Investigations last week by The Sunday Times have, however, revealed a
sensitive man who had previously threatened suicide over crises in his love
life. A previously unknown lover of Todd’s discloses that he told her he
would kill himself if she made their affair public. She describes a man who
hid his frequent depressive episodes behind a cheerful exterior. It was
while forging his career in the Metropolitan police that Todd met Tracy
Clarke. After spells with Essex and Nottinghamshire police, he moved to
London in 1998. He met the then 28-year-old Clarke when she was working for
the Met’s internal complaints department. As a deputy assistant
commissioner, Todd was learning how to chair disciplinary boards for errant
cops.
She remembers flirting, but it wasn’t until February the next year that he
asked her for dinner at a tapas bar near her southwest London flat. After
the meal they strolled by the Thames and he admitted he was still with his
wife, Carolyn. They had married when they were both young. She lived with
their three children in Halam, Nottinghamshire. Todd stayed during the week
in a police house in Colindale, north London. It was an arrangement that
continued when he moved to Manchester.
Clarke was also aware of his reputation as a “shagger”. She wanted more. “I
wanted to see what his intentions were,” she said last week. “It wasn’t an
extramarital fling; it was an intimate relationship. There was a lot of
chemistry. He found someone he could open up to.”
As their relationship developed, his vulnerability moved and, on occasions,
alarmed her. “I really feel that Michael’s job was his medication for
depression; it was his absolute anchor,” she said. “Job pressure he could
handle – but he couldn’t deal with the emotional side.”
Clarke recalls that his mood would change when they talked about his childhood
and marriage. “Even his closest friends weren’t aware of the effect of his
mum leaving him when he was nine years old.” He told her his mother went off
with a neighbour and his daughter, leaving Todd and his brother Stephen with
their father.
Clarke became alarmed when, early on in their relationship, Todd admitted to
having suicidal thoughts and wondered who would care if he followed through
with them. She reminded him of his children. “You don’t think of that when
you are in the grip of depression,” he replied.
Clarke says she urged Todd to get professional help. “He would not entertain
[it]. I said it was private and confidential, but he said he would see
himself as weak.” In summer 1999, under stress from a corruption
investigation – she was later cleared – and concerned by the uncertainty
surrounding the affair, Clarke ended it. They remained in contact and Clarke
hoped he would leave his wife. He did, briefly, but chose not to reignite
the affair.
Every so often Clarke would ask if things were fine. Only occasionally would
the veil slip. In one e-mail from Todd, dated March 1, 2000, he wrote: “Back
in the land of the living for a day. Not pear-shaped again! . . . Like
British Rail used to say, ‘We’re getting there’. A mix of good and bad
really.”
Her concern for him came to a head during an employment tribunal she brought
against the Met, which she thought was restricting her promotion after
officers found out about her affair with Todd. He was concerned that she
would name him at her hearing in April 2001. Late one night she received an
anguished phone call. “[When he called] I asked him what was wrong. ‘I need
to know, are you going to name me?’ I said I didn’t know.” It was then that
he became really distressed.
Clarke had experienced Todd in this mood before but now something was
different. He said he was in his car with some paracetamol. Clarke recalls
asking how many and Todd’s response was disturbingly precise: “Two boxes of
500 but one of them wasn’t full.” She said she would not name him and he
pulled back from his threat. She lost her tribunal.
When Clarke left her job in the Met as an intelligence researcher last August
and moved abroad with her new husband, Todd agreed to give her a reference.
Speaking this weekend from her new home, she said of the apparent suicide:
“I’ve been expecting it ever since that call . . . He really couldn’t see
that he could have weathered the storm and the thought of an exposé would
have crucified him.”
Todd certainly continued to risk exposure. On moving to Manchester in 2002 he
kept up his ladies’ man act. Last week a series of affairs, with fellow
police officers and a journalist, were alleged. Only one has been confirmed
by the other party involved.
In 2005 he met Angie Robinson, chief executive of the Greater Manchester
Chamber of Commerce, at a business function and they kept up a relationship
until last year.
Police sources said last week that a tabloid reporting team was known to be in
Manchester investigating Todd’s private life. Other unconfirmed reports
suggested that Robinson’s husband had driven to Halam last week to tell
Carolyn Todd of their spouses’ affair.
By now Todd had more to lose if he were exposed. He had built an excellent
reputation in Manchester. In the wake of the 9/11 attacks on America, he was
one of the first to spot the fact that Al-Qaeda was targeting Muslim men in
the provinces as potential recruits to terrorism.
He halved the number of burglaries in Manchester and cut overall crime by 20%,
while increasing detections. They were the sorts of figures that made home
secretaries sit up and take notice, and Todd was widely regarded in the Home
Office as a serious contender to succeed Sir Ian Blair as Met commissioner.
“He said he never wanted to come back as commissioner,” said Lord Stevens, who
was Todd’s boss when he was at Scotland Yard. “But because of his
accomplishments and his talents and who he was and his real feel for
policing generally, I think he would have been one of the contenders without
a doubt.”
Was it the prospect of losing this chance that drove him to make his doomed
walk up Snowdon? Or was there another reason? Yesterday it was announced
that Manchester police had asked their West Midlands counterparts to examine
Todd’s private life to ensure it had no impact on his work conduct.
We will never know what was in his mind, but the testimony of those close to
him suggests that such a man would have been devastated by the blow to his
career and his pride that exposure would have brought. “He was a very proud
man,” said Stevens. “He was very proud of being a police officer, of what he
had achieved in policing. Whoever’s given him an indication that something
might go against his reputation, he’d find that very difficult to handle.”
His family are left to try to rebuild their lives. Carolyn Todd issued a
statement suggesting she would have stood behind her husband. “I loved
Michael very much and the last time I spoke to him he told me that he loved
me too,” it said. “We had been married for 27 years and eight months. The
whole family is struggling to come to terms with his death.”
