Who Dies Beneath

by L. J. Hutton

  It wasn’t long after that that Charlie Houseman appeared driving Bill’s Subaru, with his pal’s plumber’s van in his wake.

  “Hello, gov’,” Charlie said, walking over with the keys. “Trev’s most envious of that motor of yours. Was quite peeved that I got to drive it and not him.”

  “Tell him to keep his sticky paws off it,” Bill said good-naturedly, glad to have something more normal to talk about, albeit briefly.

  “Do you need me to hang around?”

  “I don’t think so. The local DS seems more than capable, but I tell you what, if you could find a local pub and get something in the way of a takeaway for me – even if it’s only a sandwich – I’d be bloody grateful. I haven’t eaten yet, and I’m starting to fade. I don’t imagine they have local chippy’s out in the little villages, but New Radnor’s only just down the road, and they’re bound to have something open.”

  “Right you are,” Charlie said cheerfully, “I’ll see what I can find.” And he wandered back off to the van, which shortly afterwards vanished back off down the road.

  Bill got little respite, though, for no sooner had Charlie gone than Jane Stennett came back to him looking pale and holding out a set of protective coveralls.

  “I think you’d better come and see this, sir,” she said with a slight tremor in her voice.

  “Oh?” Bill queried as he struggled into the whites, wondering why they never seemed to make them for men of his build, because by the time he got into them he felt like a sausage in a skin.

  “There’s not one body ...there’s two.”

  “Oh bollocks.” Then he took in how pale she was. “Are you okay, DS Stennett?” She hadn’t seemed to be the fainting sort when she’d arrived.

  “Sorry, sir, it’s just that I’ve got a little girl of about the age of these two. ...Just hit a bit too close to home.”

  “Oh bugger, I’m sorry about that. One of my fellow DIs in Worcester has a disabled lad, and I know how the vulnerable young victims always hit him. I tell you what, while I go and deal with the bodies, why don’t you take a couple of tech’s and go up that track. I saw a cottage up there with a brand new padlock on it, so let’s get a safe path to it established and then get inside the place, because I’m already convinced that it’s connected to these two little souls.”

  “Thank you, gov’,” Jane said with relief, gladly handing him a torch to light his way, and then heading off to where more of the forensic team were unloading a van.

  However, as he picked his way across the rubble, following the forensic team’s markers, Bill started to get a faint tingling again. This time, though, it was more as if he was sensing someone watching them, and him in particular. At one point when he’d got both feet securely on the ground, he paused and looked upwards, shining the powerful torch beam up to the edge of the quarry. As far as he could tell there wasn’t even so much as a curious fox or deer up there, but one of the forensic team stood up and looked to where he was playing the light.

  “Bloody hell!” the technician gulped. “That’s a nasty drop! Look at all of those ragged outcrops. Christ, poor kids.”

  The technician reached out a gloved hand to help Bill over the last large boulder, then pointed to two separate colleagues. “Sammy’s with the girl you saw, but Carl is with the other one. When you look at where they are, we’re already thinking that it was just hitting that huge boulder halfway down the drop which threw the second girl the other way.”

  “I wouldn’t argue with that without reason,” Bill agreed, then got close enough to see what the technician had revealed.

  “I think this is a school uniform, sir,” a female voice said, revealing her to be a Samantha not a Samuel. “Look, even in this light, to me that seems like a blue tartan.”

  “Oh no,” Bill groaned, making them both look at him in surprise. “Sorry, guys, it’s just that while I was looking at the deposition site of Justin Pickersleigh, I was wondering what on earth had brought a nasty paedophile like him out into the wilds. So it occurred to me to Google schools in the area, and I came up with something worrying. Until I got here, I was going to check on it when I got back into the office, assuming that the two girls in the newspaper article had long since been found.” He rummaged under the protective suit and managed to pull out his phone. Bringing up the item he’d found, and then enlarging the photo, he asked, “Would you say that this is the tartan?”

  “Oh God,” Sammy sighed. “Yes. Obviously we’ll need to run tests, but going on first observations, yes, that’s a very good match.”

  Bill huffed, feeling a cold chill settling on him. “Then it’s a bloody good job that I asked DI Chesterton to come up here, because I think unless it gets proven otherwise, we’ve found the remains of Amy Winters and Sophie Granger.”

  Justin

  July

  JUSTIN COULD NEVER quite have said when he came to know Claerwyn, could never have said with any clarity where or how he met her. All he knew was that she filled his mind from dawn to dusk. Even scary Mr Franklin at the call-centre couldn’t stop his mind from wandering when he was at work, and God knew, Justin was scared shitless of Franklin and his ability to reduce strong men to tears. Not that Justin flattered himself by thinking himself strong. He’d been told often enough by his father that he was as weak as water, not even a decent boy let alone one who would become a man, not worth it.

  Who knew? Maybe that was when he started becoming attracted to children? If he was nothing more than a child, then there was nothing wrong with him liking other children, was there? And having been the one of all of his mother’s pregnancies to have gone to term and survived, he could still remember what it had been like to suckle at her breast, because it had only been him going to school at the age of five that had brought that to a stop. Back then he had found adjusting to the rowdy company of the other boys impossible. All he had been able to do was to hold on until he was let out, and then run to the comforting arms of his mother at the school gate, not understanding when he had tried to nuzzle at her for the comfort of her nipple, only to be brushed away.

  “No, Justy,” he remembered her saying in anxious tones, “not here! Not now! Wait until we get home.”

  But of course, the longer she went without feeding him the faster her milk had dried up, and by the time the year was out, all he could do was sit cradled on her lap, sucking at the dry teat. That was when his father had taken a hand.

  “For the love of God, Susan,” he remembered his father shouting, “stop it! The boy’s a laughing stock at school. You’re doing him no favours by letting him do that disgusting thing.”

  “It’s not disgusting,” he recalled his mother saying through her tears, and his father exploding,

  “Not for a baby it isn’t, but he’s five! He’s growing up. Let him!”

  Even so, whenever his father had to go away for work every few months or so, Justin would be allowed back into his mother’s bed at night for ‘our little secret,’ and that had carried on right up until he’d started to have wet dreams. At that point he’d been distraught at his mother’s disgust at finding the wet pyjamas and sheets.

  “I thought you were my sweet boy,” she’d wept at him. “I thought you’d be different to him. Promise me you won’t do that disgusting thing with a woman. Promise!” And though at the time he hadn’t been sure what he was promising, Justin had.

  It hadn’t taken him much longer, though, before the talk of the other boys in the playground informed him to what ‘it’ was. Worse, he’d been revolted by the biology lessons where he’d learned what his father and mother must have done to make him. Why would anyone want to do that? It wasn’t that he hadn’t felt urges by then, he’d got as many as the next boy, but in his case he couldn’t see the appeal of the girls in the upper school, with their push-up Wonderbras and sly giggling. For in truth he’d become torn. Part of him was drawn to the matronly ample bosoms of women who reminded him of what he’d been forced to give up with his mother. But anot
her part of him wanted the purity of the pre-pubescent girls. The sweet little things who teased him with their innocent hitching up of knickers in public, or running around in bathing costumes at the swimming pool where he could see their nipples just starting to protrude.

  It wasn’t until he was thrown out of the local swimming pool for watching the girls’ changing rooms that his father had become aware of which way his son’s tastes were turning, and his first response was to try and beat it out of him. That might have worked when Justin was little, but by this time he was sixteen, and as big as his father. They had fought, slaps turning to punches and kicks, and after Justin had sent his father sprawling, his father had given his mother an ultimatum.

  “You get that boy into a hospital now, or I’m leaving,” he threatened her.

  The shock on his father’s face when, without a moment’s hesitation, his mother had said, “Go on, then, leave,” had been priceless.

  What had the fool thought? Why wouldn’t his mother keep him? And though his mother wouldn’t let him move into her bed even after his father had left, they had settled down to a proper life, as Justin thought of it. Mummy kept everything just so in their house, making do on what little Justin could earn, because he’d never been able to focus enough at school to do well in his exams. And in return he treated her to the bits and pieces which made her so happy, like chocolate and bunches of daffodils. The things his oaf of a father had never thought to bring her. And in return Mummy never asked about the odd noises which came from Justin’s room as he discovered the delights the internet had to offer.

  It had taken him a while to dig deep enough to find the ones whose tastes were the same as his, but then there were an endless parade of his ‘little beauties’ to tantalise and gratify him. What he hadn’t expected, was to find that there came a point when he no longer wanted to just look. There was a part of him that wanted to touch, that wanted to feel their breath on his face, to feel those tiny hands closing around him. That was the stuff of his late night indulgencies when his mother was in bed and asleep, too doped up on her sleeping pills to hear his cries of pleasure.

  And that had been when he’d begun making enquiries as to what he needed to do to get a ‘dolly’ of his own. He had to be careful, because not everyone even on the dark websites he frequented was happy about doing more than looking. But he soon found a few who recognised his covert questions, and drew him into an altogether darker and more secretive world.

  “Don’t go for the smart junior schools,” one told him in their chat room. “Their parents are too clued up. You’ll find yourself in trouble with the filth if you do. Go to the poor areas. Watch for who doesn’t get picked up from school. They’re the ones you can lure away with you. Their parents don’t care – probably won’t raise the alarm for days.” And Justin was too desperate by now to stop and think that maybe these children were the very ones who needed protecting, the ones whose parents were perhaps both doing two jobs to stay solvent, and who couldn’t be around for their kids however much they might have wanted to be.

  Yet that was when Justin ran into an unexpected problem. He just wasn’t attracted to the darker skinned children, and they were in the vast majority in the inner city area he began trawling. The ones which set his pulse hammering were the natural blondes. The fair-haired ones with the peaches-and-cream complexions. They were the ones he lusted after – and he was now having to recognise that it was lust and nothing purer.

  Then just when he was beginning to think he was destined to never find his dream, he was taking Mummy on a drive out one summer’s day, when he discovered a small boarding school. He could scarcely believe his eyes. There were dozens of little angels to pick from! And out here in the countryside, they were let out unsupervised to go to the village shop. What a find! What a treasure trove of riches! And right there and then he began plotting where and how he would get them away.

  What he needed was somewhere quiet, somewhere where nobody would interrupt him, and in that at least, the school was ideally placed, for it was out on the edge of the Welsh border. Sitting between Presteigne and Kington, it was one of those huge old rambling Georgian mansions which had long since had its heyday. Too big to be economically viable as one house, it wasn’t pretty enough to attract the mega-rich, and too out of the way to be worth converting into flats. And so it had slid into shabby old age as a girls’ preparatory school.

  For several weekends, Justin went out with his binoculars and his camera with the huge telephoto lens. If nothing else, he thought, he would get some exclusive shots of these darlings. It was so exciting just to think that nobody else need ever see these. They would be his, and his alone. But then another part of him recognised that he could sell some of them to supplement his failing income. So he decided he would pick the very best and keep them for himself, but then sell the rest on.

  Yet it was far harder than he thought, getting clear images, and in the end he set the camera up to do multiple shots at a time. They never kept still, never posed nicely for him, and that he found frustrating. When I get you alone, he promised one little girl who he kept coming back to, you’ll do as I say. You’ll sit and be nice. None of this shrieking and running around. You’ll behave yourself.

  What he never realised until it was way too late was that he himself was being observed. Not by any of the teachers – they were too busy trying to keep a hold on things at the school, because the tight budget meant that there were never enough of them on duty at any one time. Only long after he had spirited his girls away would he realise that Claerwyn had spotted him.

  However, oblivious to that at the moment, Justin had begun looking around for somewhere to take the girls. It mustn’t be anywhere too close to the school, if only because he didn’t want them running back and telling on him. So it took a couple of months during the summer for him to finally decide that he would be better crossing the border into Wales, for the hills of Radnor Forest were far more deserted than on the English side. And then he found it, a deserted quarry right on the edge of a Forestry Commission plantation. The serried rows of tightly packed dark conifers made for a brooding and slightly gloomy setting – and Justin really had wanted something more romantic for his ‘dollies’ – but the old cottage just up the track from the quarry was perfect for what he needed.

  It had only ever been a single storey house, or maybe even just the site office, so there were no stairs to go rickety, and because of its sheltered position its roof was still largely intact. A few hours with some nails and a tarpaulin had made it fully watertight, and then it had just been a case of taking some essentials up there. And now he was grateful to the modern world. Who knew that mattresses could come rolled up in a convenient bundle, and that you just let them puff up when they got unpacked? Not as good as his mattress at home, mind, but good enough for what he wanted them for. And there were two rooms with solid doors on them, and to these he added bolts and padlocks. He had his one ‘lovely’ earmarked, but he wanted to be prepared in case he found another. There was no way he was risking having anyone escape. And so he watched and waited, taking advice from the other online predators, and covertly purchasing some Rohypnol which he put into the soft sweets he’d bought to use as a lure.

  When the day finally came, he could scarcely believe his luck. His chosen girl was sneaking off from some sports-day event with her friend, and he watched like a spider, waiting to lure them into his web. As they came closer, he made sure he looked respectable, and then sat on a wall, letting them come to him. “Don’t go in too hard,” he’d been advised. “These days the kids are wary of men coming up to them, so let them come to you.” And so he’d waited until they were close enough to see him clearly, then seemed to take one of the sweets out of the bag and put it in his mouth. It was actually one from a separate bag in his pocket, but the unsuspecting girls didn’t know that.

  By the time he’d chatted to them, and then had another sweet, they were happily putting their hands into the paper bag a
nd pulling out sweets of their own. In fact they went back for seconds before the drug had even had chance to fully kick in, and he began to have anxious fluttering as he wondered what would happen if they took a third and fourth? How much of this stuff would they have to take before they never woke up? He didn’t know, and realised he should have found out.

  But then almost in unison they gracefully slid down onto the ground, completely oblivious. Now all Justin had to do was to pick them up and put them over the wall out of sight while he went and got his car. And they were light enough that it was easy to lift them onto the back seat, before driving off, and on this rather humid and sultry Thursday, there was not another soul around – that was one of the benefits of working for a company that wanted its phones manned seven days a week, because Justin was happy to work the weekends if it got him time off in the week when everywhere was quieter.

  “Just a daddy out for a drive with his two little girls,” he giggled, looking at the sleeping girls in his rear-view mirror, and that’s just what it looked like. Two kids, worn out from playing were snoozing in the back of the family car. But by the time he’d gone a couple of miles, they had slumped down and weren’t visible to anyone outside anyway.

  And that meant that he got them up and into the old cottage without passing a soul. At that stage he had to lock them in with some food and water and go home, because he now had to put his plan into action. He’d made sure that work only ever had a mobile number for him, and he rang them now to say that he’d come down with a terrible stomach bug. Once at home with his mummy, he told her that he’d been asked to go to another call-centre to cover for the week because people were off sick there. There were the tears he knew would come, but he made sure his story was straight for the carers when they came in that night, and also for the morning shift, who saw him leaving in his suit and with a case.