Redemption Road

by Lisa Ballantyne

  Mortis. Labour. Birth.

  Again, Angus felt the horror and sickness of grief.

  He wanted to ask that she be treated carefully, respectfully, but as soon as Branx’s assistant arrived, Maisie was hauled into the body bag and lifted by crane on to Branx’s lorry. She was lifted like butcher’s meat, by the hook, the calf still inside her. Angus wondered about her burial, and if there would be one, and if the calf would be buried inside her.

  For a moment, as the midday sun warmed the skin on his brow and the last whiff of Maisie left the farm, Angus thought of Kathleen. As he watched the truck pull away, and the tremor of the black body bag, Angus wondered what Kathleen would think when she read his newspaper article the next morning.

  16

  Kathleen Henderson

  Tuesday 8 October, 1985

  Kathleen had not slept all night. She had not been conscious of sleeping since Moll was taken, but John had told her that she had slept a little.

  She got up when she heard the velvet thump of the newspaper against the doormat, pulled her dressing gown on and went downstairs. She opened the door and took inside the two glass bottles of milk that were set on the doorstep, then picked up the Journal and tucked it under her arm. Every second there was a pain in her throat; every moment, a horror – on her skin – like a shiver she couldn’t shake.

  When she was putting the milk into the fridge, Kathleen began to cry, silently. Pouring a glass of milk for Moll was one of the first things Kathleen did each day. Since Moll had been taken, Kathleen cried often, and so did not stop to experience the tears, but simply continued putting away the milk and filling the kettle as she wept. She cried with sharp intakes of breath, so that it sounded as if she were being stabbed. When she stopped crying the kettle was boiling and her face was completely wet. She seemed to have so many tears. She placed two hands over her face, took a deep breath and then wiped her cheeks and eyes.

  She had noticed that she cried more fitfully when she was alone. She had heard John breaking his heart locked in the bathroom, but in front of her he had been strong. Kathleen found it hard that they didn’t share their grief, anger, impatience and, most of all, fear.

  John had adopted Moll when she was a baby, just after they were married. He loved Moll like his own, yet Kathleen had always felt that her daughter was hers first and foremost. There was a sense that she and John were each afloat and separated in their suffering. They tried to comfort each other, but ineffectually. The other night John had tried to rub her neck and she had told him he was hurting her. She cooked for him but he had no appetite.

  She poured a cup of tea, heavily, mechanically, not sugaring it although she liked two sugars, and not adding milk because milk made her cry.

  She sat down with her weak, unmilked, unsugared tea and the local newspaper. She checked the clock. It was nearly 7 a.m.. She would normally be busy at this hour, supervising school uniform and making packed lunches and listening to the news while her tea went cold on the counter.

  Now she had the time to prepare and drink a hot cup of tea, but this luxury broke her heart.

  When she was alone, the worst fear consumed Kathleen. She would sit and imagine where her daughter was and how she was feeling. She wondered if she was bound; if she had been molested or hurt in some other way. When her thoughts turned to this horror, desperation would fill her and she would tremble with the desire to run to Moll, to physically save her, to protect her. But there was nowhere to run to, no way to know where she was and nothing, nothing at all, that Kathleen could do.

  They hadn’t said so in the news, but the police had told John that they were comparing the scant facts that were known about Moll’s abduction with those of other young girls from across the country who had been abducted and later found sexually assaulted and murdered. Even though John was part of a large group of volunteers searching the local area, the police had told them that they believed Moll would have been driven far away from Thurso soon after she was taken. With each day passing, the belief that Moll was still alive waned.

  The child abductions of the past few years bore similarities to Moll’s. All the children had been snatched in a public place. Nine-year-old Gillian Hardy had been taken while cycling to a nearby friend’s house, eleven-year-old Charlotte Martin was abducted crossing a bridge over the River Tweed, five-year-old Tracey Begg was snatched while playing outside near her home. All three of the victims had been dumped long distances from where they were abducted, but found within the same twenty-six-mile radius in England.

  The witnesses to all three abductions had been weak, but rough descriptions matched and were not dissimilar to those of Moll’s attacker: tall, dark, unkempt.

  The suspect for the Aberdeen abduction had been described by two separate witnesses as ‘scruffily dressed’ yet the three girls from Ravenshill Primary had said the man who took Moll had been wearing a suit. The girls had proved poor witnesses but each girl had separately remarked on the suit worn by the man. Because of the previous crimes and the bulk of accumulated evidence, police suspected a lorry driver or someone who drove for work and knew the network of national B roads. The suit was an anomaly, although the police were following up all leads.

  With a shaky hand, Kathleen took a sip of tea and turned over the newspaper. There was a photograph of her face on the front cover. It was the picture from the news conference she had given on the evening of Moll’s abduction. The police had told her it was best that she ask for the public’s help in finding Moll, and in their fraught state John and Kathleen had complied. It was the worst picture, but Kathleen was now used to seeing it: her hair was sticking up and her eyes were red and glassed with tears and her mouth was turned down at the corners. There was no place for vanity at the press conference on your daughter’s abduction by a suspected serial killer and paedophile.

  She glanced at the headline and by-line: I JUST WANT MY BABY BACK by Angus Campbell. Kathleen shook the paper in her hands to straighten it and took another sip of tea.

  She remembered Angus Campbell turning up at the door, unannounced, and persuading her to speak to him. She had disliked him intensely; thought him furtive. He had smelled like the inside of an old wardrobe. He had small eyes, and extremely small hands with bitten-down fingernails, and had a strange habit of constantly wiping his nose with the knuckle of his forefinger. She disliked how he took all his notes in shorthand, so that they were like a foreign language she had no hope of deciphering. She hadn’t liked him or trusted him, but she had decided to talk to him because of what he had said about community support and keeping Moll in the public eye. Newspaper interviews were the last thing she wanted to do, but she had forced herself for Moll’s sake.

  Not even a week since Moll’s disappearance, yet Kathleen was already becoming numb to the newspaper articles. She had been on television, and in the national press. Each teller regurgitated what the last had said; mistakes were made and then repeated. Kathleen was a Thurso local, then from Aberdeen. Some of the journalists wrote about the Moors murderers, as if these comparisons were helpful, when Kathleen knew they were just thrilling speculations to feed their readership. She didn’t know if she blamed the journalists, or the Madame Defarge appetite they fed.

  Kathleen took another sip of tea, steeling herself as she began to read.

  Six days since the abduction of seven-year-old Molly Henderson, her mother, Kathleen, talks of her heartache and desperation as she waits for news of her daughter. Exclusive to the John o’Groat Journal, KATHLEEN HENDERSON talks about their family, and how she and Molly’s stepfather, John Henderson, are coping with her disappearance.

  Kathleen frowned, leaning closer to the newspaper. This was the first time that John had been referred to as Moll’s stepfather.

  The article correctly summarised events on 2 October, stating the time that Moll was taken and repeating the rough description of the man and his car given by ‘three classmates’. The article gave a detailed description of Moll and stated her ag
e and also that she was a ‘bright, dedicated pupil at Ravenshill Primary’. There was a picture of Moll, and a reproduction of the artist’s sketch of the abductor.

  Before she read on, Kathleen jumped to another picture further down the page. She recognised it from somewhere, and stared at the black and white photo of a group of men in suits.

  ‘What on earth?’ Kathleen spread the paper out over the kitchen table and bent over it.

  She had not seen a picture of him for years: it was Big George McLaughlin on the steps of the High Court in Glasgow, with his brothers. Kathleen could not be sure, but she thought it was one of the times when Peter had escaped conviction.

  She could not understand what the McLaughlin family were doing in the John o’Groat Journal’s article on Molly’s disappearance. She flicked back to the beginning of the article and skimmed back and forth until she found the explanation.

  John Henderson has lived in Thurso for over fifteen years, moving to the town in 1970, and now has a management position at Dounreay. Molly Henderson was illegitimate, born to Kathleen Henderson nee Jamieson and George McLaughlin, in Glasgow in 1977. George McLaughlin is part of a notorious crime family from Glasgow, who collectively have stood trial for extortion, torture, moneylending and murder. George McLaughlin is pictured celebrating below on the steps of Glasgow High Court following his brother’s second murder trial, which was concluded with a not-proven verdict.

  While John Henderson married Kathleen Jamieson in 1979, and has acted since then as Molly’s father, the story of her real family background has only just come to light. George McLaughlin is not an official suspect at this time, yet Highlands Police are aware of the link and he is wanted for questioning in relation to his daughter’s disappearance.

  The search continues for young Molly Henderson who has now been missing for nearly a week. The investigation has swollen to 40 police officers and another 40 trained mountain rescue personnel, according to Detective Inspector Pat Black. Police are thought to have accepted a large contingent of 200 volunteers, who continue to search the Highlands.

  Volunteers have said their search is being hampered by difficult terrain, which includes mountain areas, forest, rivers and farmland. ‘There’s a lot of us here and we want to just do what we can to help and support,’ one female volunteer said.

  ‘The terrain is very difficult, there are acres and acres of forest, we’ve all got a bit of local knowledge but I don’t know how good that’s going to be.’

  ‘It feels like a needle in a haystack at times,’ another volunteer said.

  Highlands Police are coordinating with the national force, comparing details of this abduction with other open child murder cases.

  The Caithness community continues to offer staunch support for the family, as the desperate search for Molly continues.

  Kathleen pushed the newspaper away from her with such force that she spilled a little of her tea. She stood up and paced the kitchen, the back of her hand against her lips. She was furious at Angus Campbell for his intrusion into their lives. She considered calling the Journal to complain about him. Illegitimate, he had called Moll, as if it mattered a damn who her father was, or wasn’t, or if Kathleen had been married or not – when Moll was missing. Kathleen bit her lip.

  There was no great revelation in the article and she did not worry about others reading its contents. John knew about Moll’s father, and Kathleen had even told Moll herself, so that the child had a vague notion of who her father was. But the article was insinuating that George McLaughlin had played some part in Moll’s disappearance.

  Kathleen held on to the back of her kitchen chair. Would George have taken Moll? Kathleen considered for a moment, incredulous. George was incorrigible. He wasn’t as dangerous as her parents made out, but they had been right about one thing: he was no father, no husband. He would be twenty-six years old now, and probably still a bigger wean than Moll.

  Big George. Georgie Boy. She had loved him like no other. He was tall and heavy, with the blackest hair and the bluest eyes, and a smile that had made her heart skip the first time she saw it.

  They had started seeing each other when they were just thirteen years old, not long before George got kicked out of school. By the time they were sixteen he had persuaded the good Catholic girl that she was to sleep with him, and he had told her all his secrets.

  Even now, Kathleen could still remember the weight of George’s head on her chest, feeling blessed that his mind and his thoughts had chosen her as a place to rest.

  He was beautiful and everyone agreed, but he was also bad and everyone seemed to be in agreement about that too. But Kathleen knew that George was as afraid of his family as everyone else. He was guilty by association, but she knew the kind, beautiful person that he was inside.

  ‘Are you glaikit?’ Kathleen’s mother had said, pinning her to the wall with the sleeve of her jumper, when Kathleen admitted she was pregnant with George’s child. ‘You’d have no life and your child would have no life either. It’s death you’ve chosen, death.’

  Kathleen had not chosen anything at all, because the pregnancy had been an accident.

  Even now, at the age of twenty-six, standing in her thick cotton bathrobe, in her four-bedroomed stone house in Thurso, Kathleen could still remember, exactly, how it had felt to be nineteen and in love, and pregnant, to Big Georgie Boy McLaughlin.

  There had been no one else she had wanted. He had been everything to her, and she knew that he had been sincere in his affections towards her. She had never felt so needed as when she and George were together. They had been deep, deep in love, so that leaving him had hurt her physically, as a rip or a tear, and then a scar, as time passed. She still remembered him walking into the room and kissing her, and how time had stopped and stretched out, so that now was an elongated sweetness, like soft toffee pulled. He had taken her into adulthood. He had taught her about herself. They had taught each other how to love.

  Kathleen remembered grave family meetings in her family’s tenement, talking about adoption and single parenthood, and – God forbid, abortion – over countless cups of strong tea. She remembered George getting down on his knees in Glasgow Green, after the hardest rain, so that she could almost feel the cold wet that must have soaked through his jeans as he proposed to her, and was refused by her, again.

  ‘You might love him, but let me tell you,’ her mother had said, pursing her lips as she always did in moments of truth, ‘the McLaughlins come as a package and believe you me, you don’t want that package!’

  Kathleen had been grateful that Georgie had been there for the birth but she remembered being exhausted, watching George take Moll into his arms and sing to the baby with his whisky breath, twirling her around the room. Her daughter was newborn and so small and yet he was spinning her as if he couldn’t understand how fragile she was and how precious.

  Walking away from George had broken her heart, but her mother had been right.

  John had loved Moll and Kathleen had grown to love him and life had been so easy and so without grief, she had thought that the possibility of loss had been evaded. Yet no one escapes loss, and Kathleen knew that now, as she had always known it. In the beginning she had often thought of George and how her life would have been different if she had said yes to him.

  John had been a widower, known to her parents and their friends. At a family dinner he had taken a shine to Kathleen right away. She had found him kind.

  Over time, she had come to admire many things about John Henderson: his calmness and methodical approach to life, his love of industry and his generosity of spirit, his leanness, the fine sinews of his body. He had a weakness for soft-centred chocolates and she loved to buy him violet creams, which he would eat on a Saturday night if they were watching a film. He liked solid gold or silver cufflinks and Rolex watches and good-quality umbrellas and tweed caps. He liked to brush Moll’s long hair after a bath, before Kathleen tied it back for bed. He liked reading stories to her: Peter Rabbi
t, Blackberry Farm and Aesop’s Fables. He would lie on top of the covers and Moll would tuck herself into the crook of his arm.

  More than once Kathleen had found him asleep in the child’s bed with a storybook in his hands. ‘Don’t wake him up, Mum,’ Moll had whispered, suddenly wide-awake. ‘I like him here.’

  John… John was wonderful, and Kathleen was grateful.

  But George, George, Georgie Boy, he was still special in her heart. She could only whisper his name to herself, it was such an admission. It was as if he had whittled out a little place for himself, etching the detail of their young, intense love. It was memorable because it had been unfinished. It had not been destroyed, but had merely ended. Sometimes Kathleen wondered if it still lived on in some uncharted psychic space between them both.