‘Will do—it’s on the kitchen table. I’m off, anyway.’
‘Have a nice day. See you tonight.’
I heard him leaving, and finished showering as quickly as possible before dressing and rushing downstairs like a small child on Christmas morning. The padded envelope was next to the fruit bowl, www.truecrimebypost.com emblazoned in red above our address. As I tore it open, the receipt fluttered onto the table, ignored. I pulled the book out, and studied its cover for long seconds.
A Mind to Murder, I read, Shocking Stories of Britain’s Most Unexpected Killers. By Linda Piercy. Visually, it could have been designed by an untalented ten-year-old on their class computer—dull red letters on a plain black background, surrounded by a handful of monochrome photographs. Only one leapt out and clamoured for my attention; the posed head-and-shoulders shot, the neat school shirt and tie, the large, pale, expressionless eyes looking directly into the camera. Everything about that cover was as tacky as it was tantalising—it would tell me nothing revelatory in its own right, could all too plausibly infer a great deal.
I made myself a coffee before sitting down, opening the book and lighting a cigarette simultaneously. The sharp, gluey scent of new paper combined with the smell of smoke as I scanned the index for the chapter on Rebecca. Then I flicked rapidly towards the page I wanted, and started reading.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
From A Mind to Murder by Linda Piercy, p. 75.
THE TEN-YEAR-OLD girl was crying. Across the living room, the young policeman who’d been sent to question her watched uncomfortably. Constable Brian Willings had known it would be far from easy to break the news that her best friend had been murdered, but at the same time, he had not expected to witness such obvious grief. Especially when he’d glossed over the horrific details with such care, understanding how unsuitable they were for an innocent child’s ears.
Nor did his surroundings do anything to put him at ease. Like most of his friends and family in the East Lancashire town of Teasford, Brian was accustomed to small, cramped houses filled with inexpensive furniture, and the luxury of this girl’s home made him feel awkward and out of place. Self-consciously, he asked the questions that he needed to, trying his best to speak in a gentle, soothing voice as he enquired whether she’d seen her best friend on the day of her disappearance.
Throughout the questioning, the girl’s mother had watched him with coldness and hostility, sitting beside her daughter and carefully monitoring her reactions. As the ten-year-old gave way to a fresh outburst of weeping, the woman rose imperiously to her feet. She was beautiful in an intimidating way: tall, blonde and perfectly dressed. As she addressed Brian furiously, the young policeman couldn’t help but remember who he was dealing with.
‘She’s told you already that she doesn’t know anything about it. Why aren’t you out catching that poor child’s murderer, instead of upsetting my daughter like this? You’ve taken up more than enough of our time already.’
He tried his best to defend himself, saying feebly that he was only doing his job. But the woman’s anger remained implacable, and finally he had no choice but to leave. Driving back to the station, he braced himself to tell his immediate superior what had happened, thinking that Inspector David Howard would order him to go back.
Far from it, however, Howard assured him that he had done the right thing. ‘I would have done the same myself, lad. She’s only a little girl; she doesn’t know anything. And I’m sure you know yourself, there’s no sense in getting that family’s backs up.’
Brian did know, only too well. Everyone in Teasford was aware of the Fishers. Dennis Fisher owned the town’s largest factory, and was reputed to be a millionaire several times over. His wife Rita, who had driven the young policeman out of their home, had been born into huge wealth herself as the only child of a tycoon and his socialite wife. While they had little to do with the town’s other residents, their distance from its daily events made them almost legendary figures. Exceptionally close as a couple, the sole tragedy in their lives had been their inability to have children of their own. But when they had decided to adopt, even that problem had been resolved. Angelically beautiful and exceptionally clever, Rebecca had proved to be the daughter of their dreams, and both Rita and Dennis were known to adore the child unconditionally.
‘Don’t go biting off more than you can chew,’ Howard advised the younger man wisely. ‘Go and talk to some of the girl’s other friends, instead. Surely one of them must have known something.’
Hugh Salter had been a pathologist in the East Lancashire police for almost fifteen years. It was not a job for a squeamish or faint-hearted man, and at the age of forty-one, he thought of himself as virtually inured to horror. He examined the victims of grisly car crashes and industrial accidents on an almost daily basis, and very little still had the power to shock him.
But when nine-year-old Eleanor Corbett’s body was discovered in the summer of 1969, even this hardened professional was appalled by what he saw. This had not been a tragic accident, but the brutal murder of a much-loved little girl, a pretty and vivacious child from a large, close-knit local family. Even at a casual glance, the ferocity of the attack left him sickened. Eleanor had been stabbed more than thirty times, the murderer continuing to desecrate her corpse even as it lay lifeless.
‘She was only nine, and barely looked seven, if that,’ he said later. ‘At first, we all assumed that she had been killed by an adult male. I’m not a violent man, but when I saw that poor child’s body, I could have torn him limb from limb with my bare hands.’
Of course, Hugh knew the details of where Eleanor had been found. The derelict house on the outskirts of Teasford, with its long-broken windows, set in overgrown gardens next to a wood. A large group of schoolboys had hung around the abandoned property when it had still had the thrill of novelty, but even they had tired of it long ago. While it still held their interest, however, one of them had captured an exceptionally large spider on the premises, which had since passed into local primary school legend. Ever since, the house had been known among Teasford’s younger children as ‘the spider’s house’.
It was, Hugh thought, hard to think of any place less inviting to children, particularly little girls. Still there was no doubt that Eleanor had entered it of her own free will, as she’d been seen going in on her own. Furthermore, the room in which she had been stabbed to death held bizarre traces of human habitation. One corner had been crowded with neatly arranged household objects, nearly all of which were damaged in some way. There were cracked pots and plates, and various items of cutlery. Most notably of all, the room had been lined with chipped vases of dead flowers, which seemed to have been arranged with some care.
Unofficially, Hugh was told of the assumption the police were making. They believed that Eleanor had been in the habit of going there with other children, who had brought the various items there as part of some innocent game. Then, on the day of her disappearance, they thought that she had decided to go there on her own, and seeing that she was unaccompanied, a murderous stranger had followed her inside. It didn’t quite seem to fit in with their assumptions that there were no traces of sexual assault. But Hugh was well aware that evil was anything but predictable, and while there might be general patterns to the behaviour of child murderers, they would never apply one hundred percent of the time.
Still, as he began the inevitable examination of Eleanor’s body, he was surprised to find other details which challenged his preconceptions. Behind the frenzied attack, there had been far less strength than he’d have expected from a grown man in a murderous rage, and the positioning of Eleanor’s injuries indicated that her killer had been smaller in stature than any man Hugh knew. As he worked in the pathology laboratory hours after Eleanor had been found, Hugh felt his certainties of this murder beginning to disappear.
At the same time, the scene of the crime was being meticulously searched by the police. Not just the house itself, but the gardens surroundin
g it. With sniffer dogs and a crowd of local volunteers, they were combing every inch of the area when the sound of frenzied barking brought two policemen racing over to a patch of bushes by the front doorway. One of the dogs had made a discovery.
The bone-handled carving knife had not been expertly concealed there. The random manner in which it had fallen implied that Eleanor’s killer had either tossed it aside casually or in a blind panic. Blood had dried thickly on the blade, and smears ran down the handle itself. Forensic examination revealed that fingerprints had been preserved in that blood, still clearly detectable to the scientists who studied it. The size of those fingerprints told them what Hugh Salter was beginning to realise himself as he examined the dead girl’s body.
‘At first, I couldn’t believe it,’ one policeman said later. ‘But, when we heard it from forensics and pathology, I knew it had to be true. Eleanor Corbett had been killed by another child.’
Rita and Dennis Fisher did their utmost to protect their adopted daughter, stating defiantly that, on the afternoon of Eleanor’s disappearance and death, Rebecca had been in her room the whole time. But their influence only extended so far, even in Teasford. And as details of the case inevitably began to leak out, it was rapidly becoming notorious throughout the country.
The police questioned both parents closely, asking whether they’d seen Rebecca that afternoon with their own eyes. But, while they might do their best to protect the child they’d always longed for, the respectable and law-abiding couple still couldn’t bring themselves to tell a direct lie that would pervert the course of justice. Neither of them, they admitted, had seen Rebecca that afternoon at all. Dennis had been at work, Rita shopping for clothes in a nearby city. They had left the ten-year-old in the care of their housekeeper, who had been busy with various chores, and was also unable to verify Rebecca’s presence in the house.
The fingerprints on the knife were rapidly identified as Rebecca’s. When the police obtained a warrant to search the Fisher home immediately afterwards, the evidence against her became even more overwhelming. The knife itself was identical to several possessed by Rita Fisher, and had been bought from an exclusive department store as part of a set. Only its white bone handle had become stained, and Rita had thrown it away several months ago for that reason. In the same way, all the odds and ends that had been found in the derelict house could be traced back to the Fishers’ own, domestic objects that had been accidentally damaged, and which Rebecca had secretly retrieved from the rubbish before they could be lost for good.
While Rebecca continued to deny any involvement in her best friend’s death, she was surprisingly forthcoming on this subject alone. She admitted to taking the broken and chipped crockery and vases, as well as the cutlery which included the knife itself. She and Eleanor, she told the police, had liked to play a game of grown-up housekeeping in the abandoned property, and she had smuggled in these items to make it look more like a home. While she stubbornly refused to admit her guilt, the evidence against her was insurmountable. Rebecca Fisher was taken into police custody three days after Eleanor’s body had been found.
It was an extraordinary and unprecedented situation, which the East Lancashire police force had never imagined they’d have to deal with. A ten-year-old child suspected of the most appalling crime there was. As an adult she would have awaited her trial in prison, but as it was, that was clearly out of the question. At the same time, it was equally unthinkable that she should remain in her own home. Finally, the decision was made to keep her in a neighbouring city’s police station, which housed a number of individual cells. These small rooms were rarely used, and had been chiefly designed to restrain disorderly drunks overnight.
As news of her arrest became common knowledge throughout the region, details of her whereabouts were fiercely guarded. Public feeling against Rebecca ran dangerously high, and there were fears that a mob could attempt to force entry into the station where she was held. Nonetheless, it was obvious that she posed no immediate physical threat, and in the station itself, security around her was kept to a minimum. The door to her cell was generally left open, and while a female police officer always sat in the corridor leading on from it, this measure was taken more for procedure’s sake than for fear Rebecca would attempt to escape.
Most of the time, this responsibility fell to WPC Nicola Harris. At twenty-seven years of age, she was known to be good with children, and her responsible but friendly manner made her an instant favourite with most of them. In the months leading up to Rebecca’s trial, she talked to the little girl on a regular basis, and could not help but be surprised at what she discovered.
‘Of course, I knew that she’d killed Eleanor Corbett,’ she said later, ‘but whenever I spoke to her, it was almost impossible to believe it. She was such a quiet, sweet little thing, very well-behaved—I had two nieces of around her age, and both of them were far more trouble than she ever was. She talked about her adoptive parents a great deal, and I got the impression that she loved them very much. As far as I can remember, she never even mentioned that she was adopted, and I never brought the subject up myself. She always referred to them as Mummy and Daddy, and said how much she missed them. It was all she ever talked about at any length, now I come to think of it.’
Forthcoming as Rebecca could be on this subject, however, it was almost impossible to draw her out on any others. Particularly the all-important one of Eleanor Corbett’s murder. A police psychologist sent to talk to the little girl was bewildered and frustrated by her complete lack of cooperation. All she would say was that she had had nothing to do with her best friend’s death, even when confronted with the overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Following those fruitless sessions, she seemed anxious and disturbed, and WPC Nicola Harris noticed these moods of hers with some concern.
‘When Rebecca came back from talking to the psychologist, she was like a different person,’ Nicola said. ‘Usually she was very self-possessed, but at those times, she seemed distressed and frightened. If I asked her why, she just clammed up completely and swore blind that she was fine. But when I was on duty outside her cell at night, it was obvious that she wasn’t. After those interviews with the psychologist, she nearly always wet the bed, and she seemed to have terrible nightmares. The cell door was always left open, and I often heard her talking in her sleep at those times. I can remember her repeating the same things over and over again. ‘Don’t tell them,’ she’d say, ‘you mustn’t tell them.’ When I asked her what she’d meant the following morning, she’d just look terrified and say she didn’t know.’
Perhaps it was simply a random collection of words, associated with a nightmare she’d forgotten. Or perhaps, instead, the pressure of her own guilt, as her subconscious mind told her that she could never confess to the evil of her crime.
Even in the weeks leading up to Rebecca’s trial, Rita and Dennis Fisher remained fiercely loyal to their adopted daughter, despite the fact that her growing notoriety made the loving couple targets of public hatred themselves. Two nights before the trial began, the fire brigade were called out to Dennis Fisher’s factory, where a clumsily-made petrol bomb had been thrown through a window. The fire was put out quickly and the damage was superficial. And as the factory had been deserted at the time, nobody was injured. But there could be no denying the implications of this attack, and it was all too obvious where Teasford’s sympathies lay. While Eleanor Corbett’s grieving family were treated as tragic figures, the Fishers were vilified as monsters, their financial status only serving to fan the flames of loathing and resentment within the deprived community.
Nor did their initial appearance at Rebecca’s trial do anything to increase their popularity. Photographers from every major newspaper in the country surrounded them as they walked up the courtroom steps, not touching or looking at each other, implying new anxiety was taking an immense toll on their previously happy marriage. The impression that Dennis gave was one of unemotional coldness, as he struggled to conceal his
true feelings behind a businesslike facade. Rita had constructed her own façade from her finest clothes and jewellery, instantly antagonising people who could not have afforded them in a million years. Perfectly made-up and expressionless, she appeared an aloof, snobbish figure, a woman with whom it was impossible to sympathise.
Nonetheless, Rita especially seemed protective of her adoptive daughter as the trial progressed. During recesses, she would appear instantly at the little girl’s side, imperiously demanding that the family be left alone with their barrister. It was unsurprising that she should be concerned for Rebecca’s well-being. Increasingly fidgety and nervous, Rebecca’s eyes would dart fearfully round the court while being questioned, and she answered in a monotone so subdued that, several times, the judge had to order her to speak more loudly. While she continued to deny any knowledge of Eleanor’s murder, she did so in an increasingly blank and perfunctory way that implied the exact opposite. She seemed to understand that there was no point in lying to the court, while remaining unable to bring herself to confess the truth.
Eleanor Corbett’s family were a visible presence throughout the trial. Her widowed mother and older sisters appeared bitter and suspicious, convinced that the Fishers’ wealth would enable Rebecca to escape justice. They knew that Rita and Dennis had engaged the best legal representation money could buy and resented it immensely. When the Fishers’ barrister suggested that the evidence against Rebecca could have been fabricated, Eleanor’s mother Eileen stood up in court and launched into a vicious outburst.
‘It was very dramatic,’ one court witness remembered later. ‘She shouted that it was a joke to suggest any such thing, and she didn’t know how he could sleep at night. Then she turned on Rebecca’s mother—the judge was banging his gavel furiously the whole time, but I think she was too angry to care. She told Rita Fisher that she was an evil bitch, and so was the little cow she’d adopted—I think they were her exact words. She said something about the Fishers’ marriage being a sham, that they couldn’t even have children naturally. It could only have lasted three or four seconds, what she said, but it was electrifying. It was only when the judge threatened her with contempt of court that she went quiet and sat back down. I think she’d said all she wanted to by then, anyway.’
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