by Paul Finch
However, there was one thing slightly different about them – their age-range.
Timmy was at infant school now, and finally starting to associate with other kids. But these were his classmates, and all were of a similar age to him. The children in the yard next door seemed to be all kinds of different ages. There were six of them in total, three boys and three girls, and they ranged from the youngest boy, who could only have been about three, to the eldest girl, who was ten at least.
That eldest girl was of particular interest to Timmy. He’d only been peeping on them for a couple of weeks when it struck him that she was the real object of his attention. She was tall and slim, with short dark hair, bright eyes and cherry-red lips. She was, Timmy would come to realise in later life, extraordinarily beautiful for one so young, but it wasn’t just this that attracted him. To the other children this girl was clearly the older sister they’d never had. She was the centre of every game, the decider of every issue, the giver of all instructions – though not in the harsh, threatening way that Timmy’s mother was. The rest of the children adored this girl, flocking around her in play, taking their cuts and bumps to her if they fell.
Timmy watched with envy at the love she showed them. But he’d long ago learned not to ask questions in which words like ‘why’ and ‘not’ featured – why did he not have that?, why did he not have this? As far as his mother was concerned, he already had too much – so he mutely accepted that the girl was no part of his life, and felt increasingly hostile to the rest of the children because she was so much a part of theirs. The thought that they were only in the care home because they’d suffered in some way, or had been abandoned, became a source of pleasure to him. He’d gloat to himself as he watched them, wondering excitedly about the things they might have experienced.
The idea that the older girl had also gone through something bad occurred to him as well. He didn’t gloat in her case, but it gave him a funny feeling all the same. A feeling that wasn’t totally displeasing.
*
The first person I came close to killing after the Falklands War was the sort of arrogant bastard who thinks it’s never going to happen to him but has it coming nonetheless.
Liam John Barlow was the type of bloke who thought that, when he’d had a drink or two, he could do anything he wanted to anyone and then go home, have a good night’s sleep and wake up in the morning without the slightest qualm. I don’t know what his background was. I don’t care. He was a habitual criminal and I was a new copper looking to make a name for myself, and that made him fair game.
It was early on in my service and I wasn’t entirely sure how to go about things, so in the end I went about them in the old army way and that, apparently, in the pre-PACE era, was good enough for my bosses.
I was six months into my probation at the time and working foot-patrol through the drab rows of tenements down Spitalfields. During my first half-year in the job I’d made thirty-six arrests – an impressive figure for a new boy, but most of them had been legless drunks or shoplifters who’d already been nabbed by store-detectives.
Barlow was a different kettle of fish. His record for violence was mainly against property – other people’s property it goes without saying – but, as he was nearly seven feet tall, his colossal rages inspired terror in his victims. At the time when I arrested him, he was persecuting a young woman called Milly Turpin, who lived with her widowed mother in a terraced house near Shoreditch station. Milly was an ex-girlfriend of Barlow’s, but now wanted nothing to do with him. Barlow, never a man to forgive when his ego had been bruised, had only grudgingly accepted this and, whenever he got drunk, which was most Fridays and Saturdays, went round to her house to bang and kick the door and throw the dustbins all over the street.
On the night in question, he met me there.
It was slightly off my usual beat, but my section sergeant had posted me there specifically after repeated complaints from Mrs. Turpin. It was likely to be a dangerous job as Barlow could “go a bit”, but the skip reckoned that if an ex-squaddie couldn’t handle it, no-one could.
The first thing I remember is being impressed by Barlow’s size. It was a cold, wet night, and he came lumbering up like something from a Frankenstein movie. He even had the square head to go with it, the barrel body and the great clodhopping feet. I was watching from an entry across the street, well concealed as I didn’t want to dissuade him from doing whatever it was he was planning to do. Not that I think he’d have seen me anyway; he wore thick, bottle-lensed glasses, suggesting restricted vision (which encouraged me all the more). First of all, he knocked on the door. I checked my watch – it was close on twelve. After that he began to shout. Soon he was pulverising the wood with his ham-like fists. I still hung on. I certainly had grounds for a breach-of-the-peace arrest, but, if possible, I wanted something better – a criminal damage or threatening behaviour.
It came to that two seconds later. Barlow ran to the nearest parked car, twisted off its wing mirror and hurled it up at a bedroom window, which duly spider-webbed with cracks. A light came on and Barlow guffawed.
That was when I tapped him on the shoulder.
He sort of gawped at me, blinking through his rain-spattered specs. When I snatched his wrist and began to caution him, he jerked his arm back and launched a massive right hook, which I ducked with ease.
“If some fucking shithead hits you,” I remember being unofficially told at Hendon, “it doesn’t matter how soppy the blow, you hit him back as hard as you can. You’re fully justified. And even if you’re not, we’ll back you to the hilt. We’re not losing any more bobbies just because the likes of the London fucking Students’ Union says we mustn’t fight back!”
That’s what I did. I hit him as hard as I could. Well, first of all, I kicked him in the gonads. A real up-and-under, it was. He went down to his knees, choking. That brought him within fist-in-the-face range. The first shot smashed his glasses. And his nose. The second connected with his left temple, toppling him into the gutter, where he lay groggily, drooling blood and snot. As he tried to lever himself up, I drew my staff and walloped him across the elbow. He went down again hard, his face cracking on the corner of the kerbstone – I so love kerbstones. Blood welled from the resulting wound like blackcurrant jelly.
By this time, Milly Turpin – peroxide blonde, nice legs, big tits, but a little haggard round the boat-race – and her mum, a twenty years older identikit version, had appeared at the front door in teeny bathrobes, and were egging me on.
“Go on … kick his arse!” the younger woman squawked.
“Ne’er mind his arse,” the older woman added. “Kick his fucking head in!”
Who was I to disappoint?
I dragged Barlow from the gutter by his collar, whacking him repeatedly round the head with my truncheon. Soon he was screaming and blubbering like a baby girl, but I wasn’t finished. I kicked him in the guts and stamped on his ruined face and, taking his blood-slick hair in my hand, beat his skull against the bodywork of the car he’d attacked. And only when I got bored, did I call for prisoner transport. Oh – and an ambulance.
I got carpeted later on by the duty inspector. But only because I’d been careless. I’d leathered a scrote in the full view of two civilian witnesses. All right, it was unlikely Milly Turpin or her mother would testify against me if it got to court, but it was a risk I must never take again. On the whole though, they were pleased with the arrest. Liam Barlow was a known troublemaker and, when he came out of the ICU, they’d have him banged to rights on several strong charges.
That was the day I realised I was in the right job.
*
In the early to mid-1980s, there was a lull in the series. By 1985, investigators were daring to hope it had come to an end, the perpetrator either having died or been imprisoned for some other offence. By 1986, the taskforce created to find the ‘Giro City Strangler’ – as he was dubbed by the Greater Manchester Serious Crime Squad – had been scaled down conside
rably. Police overtime rosters returned to normal. Local women no longer feared to walk the streets at night.
Timmy continued to peep through the care home’s back gate until long after the age when such an activity was permissible. The older girl, who he’d nicknamed ‘Billie’ after a female character he fancied on Here Come the Double Deckers, wasn’t always out there. In fact, the older she grew the less often she appeared with the rest of the children, but that didn’t stop Timmy peeping through the planks at every opportunity.
One day, he found something else to attract his attention, though it wasn’t entirely divorced from his interests next door. His mother had a collection of books about the lives of the saints, and though he’d initially flipped through them because all the saint stories he’d heard had gory endings and he’d wondered if there were any pictures, he found himself returning again and again to one volume in particular, and one chapter in that volume, the one dealing with Joan of Arc.
At first he didn’t even know who Joan of Arc was, or care, but he was fascinated by a painting of her kneeling at a church altar in a suit of armour. With her short, dark hair, lovely eyes and handsome, noble profile, she looked remarkably like ‘Billie’ – so much that the warm feeling he usually got in his tummy when he saw the real girl could soon be replicated just by looking in this particular book. He became so fascinated that he actually read the chapter on Joan of Arc, even though his reading at that time wasn’t good. He was well-rewarded for his efforts. The passages where Joan wept tears of fright when the English showed her their torture chamber, and where she gave out a piteous cry when the first flames began to lick at her on the stake, sent shivers of excitement through him.
One day, his mother asked him why he was always poring over the book.
“Are you thinking of becoming a priest, or something?” she asked, for once affectionately. She knew that his schoolwork was poor, and was always voicing a worry that he might “end up on the dust-carts”.
Timmy looked down at the page in front of him. According to the text, many of the men who had interrogated Joan, binding her and beating her, and calling her “an apostate whore”, had been bishops and priests.
“Maybe,” he said.
*
It’s an odd characteristic of modern humans that we seem to care more about animals than we do our fellow men. A succession of celluloid celebs have ensured their own immortality in a way their paltry movie efforts never could by appearing on news photos with baby seals or fox cubs. Pop stars have embarrassed audiences at award ceremonies by unexpectedly using them as platforms to speak out against hare coursing, whaling, even the use of animals in circuses. I remember a famous TV writer – a faded hippy, by the looks of her – almost weeping on a television news programme over the fate of calves facing transportation in veal crates. On the same bulletin, we’d seen tiny children, wounded and emaciated, fleeing war-ravaged towns somewhere in the Third World, yet no-one made a special guest appearance to cry over that.
Yet, I feel that way too. I care more about animals than people.
Once, I was sent to a Bethnal Green council house, the OAP occupant of which owed several weeks’ fines on a library book he hadn’t returned. When I got there, the place was in silence, all the curtains drawn on its windows. No-one replied to my repeated knocks, so I spoke to the man in the next house, a painfully thin specimen with long hair and stubble, who answered the front door dressed only in tatty jeans and showed arms pitted with needle-tracks. He shrugged when I asked him if he’d seen the old guy or if there were any relatives I could contact.
Eventually I forced entry, expecting the worst.
What I found was worse than the worst.
I gained access by smashing a ground-floor window, but the stench hit me like a sledgehammer as I climbed over the sill. It wasn’t just putrefaction – it was shit as well, vomit, flyblown offal. I’d been in the job several years by this time and had learned to prepare for all eventualities, so I stuffed pieces of cotton wool into my nostrils from the wad I always carried, and was able to continue.
I’d expected a shrunken, mummified thing slumped in an armchair or curled up in some downstairs bed. That was the way you usually found them. Not this time. The lounge looked like a bomb had hit it. Smashed crockery, torn newspapers and shredded upholstery strewed the dirt-clogged carpet. Every item of furniture was overturned, and in the middle of it all lay the old fella, or what was left of him.
He’d been laid bare to the bones. A few scraps of skin and chunks of gristle remained, but virtually all the soft tissue had gone, apart from a couple of lumpy black objects, which I later found out were diseased organs. Even the skull had been cracked open and the brain dug out. Stiff, brown bloodstains caked everything.
At first I thought I was looking at the scene of some bizarre ritual killing, and for a second I wanted to go and beat fifty colours out of the junkie next door. Then I heard the snarling – and it all became clear.
A dog – the old man’s lab – foaming and slavering at the chops, eyes crimson-rimmed, lay on its belly under the overturned armchair. No amount of coaxing would tempt it out. It slashed and snapped if you went within a yard of it. The wretched thing had gone off its rocker, and eventually had to be shot.
Later on, they discovered some undigested hunks of newspaper in what remained of the old man’s stomach and gullet. Crippled with arthritis and abandoned by society, desperate hunger had finally driven him to eat whatever he could get past the brown stubs of his decayed teeth. The coroner reckoned he’d choked to death about two months before I found him.
Sad tale, eh? Still, at least his dog hadn’t starved.
*
A 15-year-old schoolgirl joined the tragic list on July 31st 1987, when her naked body was found under bushes in Delaney Park, Hag Fold. She too had been viciously raped. The cause of death was either her fractured skull, or the bootlace knotted around her neck. Both assaults, investigators concluded, had been potentially fatal.
By the time Timmy was in junior school, he no longer saw ‘Billie’ playing in the yard with the other children. He’d stopped peeping anyway because he was finally becoming self-conscious about it. On one occasion, one of the women who also lived at the home had come out and asked him what he was doing. He’d had to think of something quick, and had blurted out that he thought he might have kicked his football over there.
It had worked on that occasion, but he was sensible enough to know that it wouldn’t work again. In any case, he now had an alternative way to spy on the girl. A week previously, his mother had begun taking him to a different church on Sundays. Apparently, the new priest at St Bartholomew’s was an Irishman, who during his very first sermon – on Easter Sunday morning no less – had preached fondly about the Easter Rising. In her own words, Timmy’s mother was “not standing for that”, so now they went to neighbouring St Andrew’s, which, to Timmy’s delight, turned out to be the church attended by ‘Billie’ and the other kids from the care home.
They always stood at the back of the building, preened and smart and very attentive, ‘Billie’ – their captain – in the middle of them, usually holding hands with two of the younger children. Whenever his position in the pews would allow it, Timmy would gaze lingeringly at the group, at ‘Billie’ in particular. He’d get as close as he could while following them up the aisle to Communion. To see ‘Billie’ right in front of him, kneeling at the altar rails, hands joined – the way Saint Joan had been in that book – was almost too much for him.
On one occasion, when she’d received the wafer and turned to head back down the aisle, he deliberately blocked her path – not in an aggressive, menacing way – but kind of clumsy, as if he didn’t know which way to move. As a ploy, it worked, and for the first time their eyes met, though there was no recognition in the girl’s. If she knew him as the boy next door, or perhaps was even interested in him for any other reason, she didn’t show it. Instead, she smiled politely – rather sweetly, Timmy thou
ght – and waited for him to move, which at length he did.
That was a special day for Timmy, but not just because he met ‘Billie’ face-to-face – because he found out her real name. On the way home, Timmy’s mother parked outside the newsagents to buy a newspaper and, as a treat, allowed him to come in with her to choose a Spiderman comic. ‘Billie’ and the other kids were already in the shop, buying sweets with their pocket money. They were filing out just as Timmy and his mum were going in. Again he met ‘Billie’ face-to-face, and again she smiled – though this time with recognition. Okay, she was probably only thinking of him as the donkey who’d got in her way at Communion, but it was better than nothing. It got better still a moment later, when one of the other children who’d been left behind came scurrying out after the rest shouting: “Erika … wait for me!”
‘Billie’ turned and waited.
Erika. Her name was Erika.
It was unusual, certainly – you didn’t hear it often in Manchester, but Timmy liked it a great deal. It sounded exotic, mysterious. And very appropriate. After all, how many martyrs did you hear about with names like Billie?
*
There’s a rumour that mass killers always start out by being cruel to animals. Peter Kürten buggered and mutilated sheep before going on to slaughter nine women and children, while Jeffrey Dahmer famously hacked off a dog’s head and put it on a stick in the woods behind his house. But it isn’t a hard and fast rule. One November, two kids at my school were expelled for jamming a lighted banger down a cat’s flea collar and another one up its arse. One of the little sods went on to become a banker; the other now works in a library.
As I’ve already said, I’ve never been able to stand people who deliberately injure animals. One day I was in the area-car round Haggerston Park, when this frantic woman came hurtling out of her house to flag me down. It turned out she’d just got home and found the place ransacked; at least ten grand’s worth of antiques were missing. More to the point as far as I was concerned, her two German Shepherds were lifeless heaps of blood and fur. Neither was dead, but the burglars had worked them over good-style. Probably with mallets or coshes. One animal had suffered so many fractures it would need to be put down. The other one was permanently in shock, and would hide by its owner’s feet, whimpering and shaking, whenever anyone came to the front door.