by Paul Finch
I headed up the investigation, being already a seasoned detective. And if I couldn’t make ground on the murderer, nobody could, people said. They usually said that while giving me a conciliatory slap on the shoulder. I still remember those slaps, though I remember them more these days like the blows of a whip.
I reach the bottom of the slope – not without some huffing and puffing, because meadow-grass grows deep and tussocky at this time of year, and tends to be liberally laced with cocksfoot and creeping thistle, and as I’ve already hinted, I’m not the sprightliest sixty-seven-year-old. Anyway, I reach the bottom and the wood stands before me. Not that there is anything dark or sinister about it. Sunlight slants through its open spaces; its leaf canopy whispers in the breeze; somewhere in the higher boughs, a woodpecker jackhammers away. Rural idyll – it bespeaks pure rural idyll. Mind you, it probably did the same on that fateful day in 1975.
I press on in, having to tread carefully. Various pathways once wound back and forth through the miniature coppice; clear, well-trodden routes that served as ably for bicycle tyres as they did for sneakered feet. The fact that they are now largely invisible, submerged under dense profusions of thorns and bracken, tells its own story. There are sections of them I have to beat my way through, using my stick like a machete. Here and there my trousers snag, strands of briar conspire to tangle my ankles and try to trip me. But I am resolute; I will keep going – because all the way through there are melancholy reminders of what this place once meant. In a high elm quite close to the centre of the wood, a few mildewed planks lie balanced between the branches, one hanging loose from a rusted nail. These are all that remain of a carefully constructed treehouse. It hailed from an era long prior to my son’s, but consecutive generations adopted it as their own, each one making its own renovations and improvements. I remember Geoff telling me how he and his cronies put a carpet up there and cushions, and hung a polythene roof over the top of it. There was even a rumour that someone provided a stash of girlie magazines for it, snaffled from the barber’s shop by an understanding older brother.
Further along, I come to the pond itself. It occupies a low, shady hollow in the very centre of the wood, and at this time of year is only just filling up again, recovering from the annual dry season that is August. Already though, it has scummed over; it looks soup-like, stagnant – clearly no-one has been fishing here, or even poking about in it. One particularly wet year, when the surface of this pond had risen a foot or so higher than usual, Geoff and other kids like him – Andrew Conroy amongst them, I expect – built themselves a raft and spent the entire summer poling their way barefoot from one end of it to the other. High above it and now out of reach, a ravel of rotted strings are all that is left of the once infamous rope swing; more than a few youngsters came splashing down from that in their time, thankfully none injuring themselves seriously. These days, I imagine the weight of a squirrel would suffice to break it.
I carry on, hacking my way through swathes of vegetation, and sense the trees close in behind me, blotting out all visible traces of the grassy slope and the neat row of houses at the top. Just ahead, what was once the path will soon split into two, the left-hand route bending back on itself to loop around the other side of the pond, the right-hand route meandering deeper and deeper between the ranks of ash and juniper, finally terminating at the fence on the edge of the horses’ paddock. As I understand it, this was once the place for youngsters to come to if they’d wanted to watch the prize-winning animals get put through their paces, or to feed them lush tufts of elephant grass. Unfortunately, it has different connotations now.
I never cease to feel a cold breath on my neck as I approach this spot. You’ll understand if I explain that the first time I personally came here was to view a wide, taped off area with a police tarpaulin erected over it as a rainproof tent.
No evidence of that remains now, but the atmosphere is the same. In fact, in some respects it is worse, because the spiky hawthorn bush under which Andrew Conroy’s battered, violated body had been stuffed, has now grown up and out, turning into a young tree. This in itself is enough to create a menacing shadow in the once sunny glade, but to make matters worse, the small embankment along which the barbed wire fence was erected proved an insufficient anchorage for the growing tree’s spreading root system. As such, it tore loose from the ground some time ago and now leans backward across what was left of the open space, its upper branches intermingling with those of the adjoining hazel and alder, creating a partial roof through which scarcely a lick of sunlight can penetrate. Other items of underbrush have grown up along the fence beside it, thus blocking off any sight of the dressage field, and enclosing the forgotten murder scene in a den or hide entirely of its own.
I stand there, as I always do, gazing down onto the bare earth, and thinking about Andrew Conroy. He was a pleasing enough youth – red-haired, happy-faced. I didn’t know him so well. I don’t think he ever once came to our house. As I recall, he was a little bit backward in some respects; what they called a ‘remedial’ in those days, but now probably referred to as ‘special needs’. I’ll never forget watching him collected from school while I was waiting there for Geoff. Either his mother or his older sister would come, and they’d be all smiles as they walked side-by-side with him out of the yard, nodding and listening as he told them excitedly about his day.
That memory alone is enough to bring a tear to my eye. As a murder detective, you only need to fail one victim and you’ve failed them all. From a distance, particularly when it is portrayed in the slick, overly dramatised way that it is on television, it must seem like a glamorous, heroic world, the Criminal Investigation Department. In reality, it isn’t like that at all. It is dark, brooding, intense and it can be utterly soul-destroying; it is also exhausting, physically, emotionally and spiritually – and the higher up the ladder you progress, the more serious the crimes you’re landed with and the more onerous the weight of responsibility, until finally you reach that ultimate zenith (and nadir): the Murder Squad.
Back in those days, we rarely used specialised homicide units. We tended to deal with unlawful killings as and when they occurred, forming separate investigation teams for each one, drawing our staff from the surrounding divisions’ most dedicated and experienced detectives. Of course, it doesn’t matter how experienced you are; the pressure of just one murder enquiry can be crushing, paralysing. Even when you’d done as many as I had … but no. This story isn’t about me. It’s about a little boy called Andrew Conroy, and how he spent the last moments of his life stranded on the edge of this wretched, desolate wood, probably knowing all the fear that every child everywhere has ever suffered, not to mention all the pain and humiliation. With nobody there to help. Nobody even to call out to. It’s also about the person responsible for that. And how he’s still walking around somewhere. And all because I failed in my police officer’s duty.
I stand there, dabbing at my eyes with my handkerchief. “Pathetic … hopeless, a futile gesture,” I hear you say. And you’re right.
I don’t need to glance down at the floor of the shrunken clearing and see the tiny, curved twig-like object. Or rather, not see it. As I have and haven’t on every occasion I’ve been here since 1975, including that very first day when the darkening woods were filled with radio static and the yipping of dogs and the hushed mumble of voices. I don’t need to look because it will still be there. And it won’t. As it always is. And isn’t. A tiny, curved fragment of twig. Easy to overlook in the heat and emotion of the moment and the general mass of forest rubble that litters our English woodlands.
As I amble back out of the trees, I feel the burden of guilt lift a little. Not because I’ve achieved anything by coming here – aside from my serving another day of penance – more because the proximity of events is that little bit further away. Because one more year has elapsed. Because the faces and the facts are twelve months more distant.
On the way out I pass more sad evidence of our modern, sophi
sticated age. As the wood thins out at the foot of the slope, I see the remnants of yet another den – this one at ground-level; in fact below it. Apparently someone’s dog once burrowed between the roots of an old sycamore tree in pursuit of a rabbit, and the rest of the gang quickly seized on the idea, going racing home for spades and trowels. All that remains of it now is a rank, caved-in recess, its innards cluttered with wads of dead leaves, its entrance deep in stinging nettles. When it was first finished they were able to conceal two or three of them in there at a time, I was told. They took in their own props and roof-supports, another roll of that ubiquitous carpet, not to mention candles, matches, boxes of apples and crisps and – yes, more well-thumbed girlie mags. I give a wry smile as I make my torturous way back up the hill. Girlie mags again … easy to see it now, but the kids back then weren’t quite as innocent as we like to think.
At the top of the slope, Geoff is still leaning on his car, reading. He glances up as I reappear. “Back in retirement then, are we?”
I nod, too breathless and my back too sore to think of a suitably witty rejoinder.
“You won’t do yourself any good with this, you know,” he says, shoving his newspaper into his pocket. “Better just to let the past go.”
I nod, as I always do, but say nothing as I climb into the car alongside him. I am in the usual conundrum; thinking about my possibly having overlooked a vital clue. But even if I were to suddenly throw caution to the wind, pick up the phone and tell someone about it – and even if they were to react positively, which is highly unlikely given that I’ve now been out of the job for eleven years, it would be very much a case of closing the stable door after the horse has bolted. That might be a forced rationalisation on my part, and an excuse, but it’s also true. And that, in the absence of anything else, makes me feel a little better.
Geoff was right in what he said earlier. I don’t have anything to prove. This was the only murder case I failed to solve. There were at least twenty others when I got the right result. When I retired from the job, I did so after thirty-five years of exemplary service, after making detective superintendent, which was probably the highest rank someone of my working-class background had any conceivable hope of achieving.
But then, my mind goes back to that little boy, who, through personal circumstances, I knew so well. And my heart bleeds for him. Then I think, isn’t it true that we’re really only as successful as our least successful moment? Aren’t we only ever as good as our worst failure? And couldn’t it also be said that if your failure owes to more than simple negligence, then that doubles, trebles, maybe quadruples your culpability? As Geoff drives me away again, I can’t help brooding on that tiny, curved twig, which I saw so clearly in the flesh on that first occasion and have seen again in my mind’s eye ever afterwards, but have always denied and rejected and disbelieved as meaningless and insignificant. That innocent-looking twist of organic matter, which instead of being a twig, might actually have been an apple-stalk – and if that was the case, which might indicate that whoever dropped it there alongside the body had the very odd and unusual habit of eating the whole apple rather than leaving the core.
Believe it or not, I feel relief as I depart this place.
Children don’t play here anymore.
And as my son still lives in the area, I find that a very great relief.
Tok
Paul Finch
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Tok
After they’d hacked and slashed the two bodies for several minutes, they danced on them. The firelight of a dozen torches glittered on their wild, rolling eyes, on their upraised blades, on the blood spattered liberally across the carpet of smoothly mown grass. Their shouts of delight filled the seething night. But when the little girl came out and stood on the veranda, there was a silence like a thunderclap. For a moment she seemed too pure to be in the midst of such mayhem, too angelic – a white-as-snow cherub, who, for all her tears and soiled nightclothes, brought a chill to the muggy forest by her mere presence, brought a hush to the yammering insects, brought the frenzied rage out of her captors like poison from a wound.
If it wasn’t the little girl herself, it was the thing she held by her side.
The thing they knew about by instinct.
The thing they’d seen only in nightmares.
*
It was late afternoon when Don and Berni drove onto the estate. Not surprisingly, there were police everywhere: patrol cars parked on the street corners, uniformed officers traipsing door-to-door with clipboards. Don’s blue Nissan Micra was subjected to a stop-and-check.
“Don Presswick,” he said, after powering his window down. “This is my wife, Bernadette. We’re visiting my mother for a couple of days. She lives at The Grove.”
The officer, who was young with fair hair, but wearing a grim expression, gave them a curt once-over. “I don’t suppose you’ve got any ID, Mr Presswick?”
Don didn’t have, but Berni rooted in her handbag and handed over a couple of credit cards. This seemed to satisfy the officer, though he still didn’t smile.
He passed the cards back. “You’re aware what’s been going on?”
“That’s why we’re here,” Don said. “To babysit Mum ’til it’s over.”
“Good idea.” The officer tapped the roof with his fingers. “Okay, that’s fine.”
“Listen …” Don adopted a confidential tone. “How’s it going? The investigation, I mean. Obviously it’s a concern, with my mum living on the estate.”
“Sorry Mr Presswick, there’s nothing I can tell you.”
“I’m ex-job. Don’t know if that makes any difference.”
The officer shrugged. “I can’t tell you anything because I don’t know anything. Enquiries are ongoing, as you’ll understand. We’ve a lot of bodies working on it.”
Don thanked him and drove on.
“Bloody woodentop,” he said.
“You were only a PC,” Berni reminded him.
“I had a lot more experience than him.”
“They all have to start somewhere.”
“Suppose so. Just wish it wasn’t on Mum’s estate, at this moment.”
It was only the third time Berni had visited The Grove since she’d married Don, but again she was reminded how lovely an old property it could be.
A large, five-bedroom detached, built well before the rest of the housing estate, it had been constructed in the Jacobean style – though it was actually Victorian – and was almost entirely clad with white plaster and black beams. Much of this was now weathered, the little you could see of it thanks to the high wall surrounding it, not to mention the tall trees in its front, rear and side gardens. Glimpsed through the red autumn foliage, the plaster had turned green and was flaking; the beams were covered in lichen, those sections that weren’t being eaten away by a shroud of crawling ivy. The roofs, which stood at numerous levels and angles, were also eroding: crabby with moss, their guttering packed with birds’ nests.
“Such a shame,” Berni said.
“All be yours someday,” Don replied, getting out to unlock the large timber gate.
“Assuming there’s anything left of it by then.”
Don eased the Micra through, climbed out again and closed the gate behind them. From here, the drive circled around the front garden to the rear of the house. Don only had a key for the back door, so that was where he usually parked. But before they’d driven more than a couple of yards, the front door opened and Helga, his mother’s cleaner and cook, emerged, wearing her mackintosh and brandishing her bag. Don applied the brakes, his tyres crunching gravel.
Helga was a burly woman with broad, heavy cheekbones. Her dark hair was shot with grey. Untidy straggles of it hung loose from the bun at the back of her large, square head. Not for the first time, Berni wondered why Don’s mother, Miriam, needed a cleaner at all. She lived here alone, in a house that was patently too large for her, and despite being we
althy, led a frugal existence. What there was for Helga to do all day, apart from cook the occasional meal, was a mystery. No doubt Helga didn’t complain, though it was understandable that she didn’t want to hang around at The Grove now it was getting dark. Don and Berni climbed from the car, Berni suggesting quietly that Don give Helga a ride to the bus stop on the edge of the estate.
“Thank Heaven!” Helga said brusquely.
She might be employed by Don’s mother as a domestic servant, but she never behaved that way. Quite the opposite. Her tone seemed to imply how ridiculous it was that they hadn’t been here several hours earlier, though they’d only been able to leave Stockport once Berni had finished for the day at the legal firm where she worked as a secretary, and in that respect had made good time.
“The heating’s on and there’s plenty of hot water,” Helga said. “I’m afraid I haven’t had time to prepare any tea for you.”
Don waved it away. “That’s fine, we’ll just …”
“I’m supposed to be in at nine tomorrow,” Helga interrupted. “Though I must tell you I’m not happy, the way things are.”
“So … you won’t be in tomorrow?”
She shrugged. “We’ll have to see how it goes.”
“Okay … if that’s what you want.”