by Mark Pearson
‘Shit!’ he said as he took out the last remaining cigarette and crumpled the packet. Then he put the cigarette between his lips and scowled at the TV. ‘Shit it all.’
*
About seventeen miles west of where Melanie Jones and her cameraman were firing up the engine of their car was a stretch of woodland called Mad Bess Woods that lay between the towns of Ruislip and Northwood. Covering some 188 acres it had been compulsorily purchased by the local council from a highly disgruntled Sir Howard Stranson Button in 1936. It had been part of the new Green Belt initiative to contain the creeping urbanisation from London and so protect the countryside. And it worked, to some extent. But while the Green Belt might well have held back housing development it was no protection against the wicked desires of men or the foul acts they committed in pursuit of satisfying them. Some said that the Mad Bess of the wood’s name was the ghost of a headless horse-woman, some said she was a lunatic wife of a gamekeeper. The truth was that no one knew for certain. But Jack Delaney knew one thing very much for certain. There was a presence of pure evil in the air that morning, permeating the clearing in the heart of the woods like a sulphurous mist. He remembered that John Brill, a fifteen-year-old boy, had been murdered in 1837 just twenty yards from where Delaney now stood. Murdered for collaborating with the police, ironically enough, and the investigation into his killing had been the first time that Scotland Yard had ever sent an officer to assist a murder enquiry. Delaney thrust cold hands deep into his jacket pockets and shivered slightly. He knew that the palpable sense of evil in the air had nothing to do with the unquiet dead … but everything to do with a living man.
Peter Garnier.
*
Delaney pulled out his packet of Marlboros and snapped one into his mouth. He took it out, deliberated for a second, then put it back in his mouth and fumbled in his pockets for a box of matches. Sally watched amused as he lit the cigarette, seeing his frowning expression soften somewhat as he drew the smoke deep into his lungs.
‘I thought you were giving up, sir?’
Delaney grunted. ‘Thinking of giving up. I’m not a man to rush into things, Sally.’
Sally lifted an eyebrow. ‘That’s right, sir. You look up the word “cautious” in the dictionary and sure enough there’s Detective Inspector Jack Delaney’s photo right there underneath it.’
Delaney nodded. ‘And you look up the words “degenerate scum” and that dead man walking is right there too.’ He gestured with his cigarette. ‘Just the sight of him makes my skin crawl.’
Sally looked across to a clearing where a small army of police – uniformed, detectives, armed officers – stood by watching as Diane Campbell led a slight manacled man, with grey hair and thin stooped shoulders, across the wet ground. He was dressed in prison uniform and had wire-framed spectacles that made his pale blue eyes look larger than they were, like fish eyes. He glanced across at Delaney as if he had heard what he’d said, looking at him for a long unblinking moment. A shaft of sunlight breaking through the clouds made his spectacles shine and then with a quick reptilian flick of his head he looked down at the ground again. Scanning it. Remembering. Stirring the leaves with the toe of his shoe as though stirring his memories. His thin lips curving into something resembling a smile as his foot moved back and forth and the leaves rustled.
Peter Garnier.
*
In the summer of 1995 Delaney was just a few years out of Hendon, a foot soldier in uniform working at the Wealdstone police station near Harrow on the Hill. Practically every other lamp-post that he passed as he walked had on it a picture of the two children who had gone missing.
Samuel Ramirez was just ten days away from his tenth birthday. He lived next door to a corner shop in Carlton Row, a little side street a mile or so away from the main shopping centre of Harrow. It was within walking distance of a large bingo hall that had once been a cinema that his mother went to every Friday night. And every Friday night, she brought him back fish and chips from the shop next door to it.
But at six-forty-five on this particular Friday night in mid-August his mother Laura Ramirez, a young widow and a nurse of English/Spanish descent, had sent him out to buy a fresh box of eggs, since she was making him pancakes for his tea. His favourite sort, with maple syrup, lemon juice and ice cream. He had passed his cycling proficiency test that day and his proud mother declared that he deserved a special treat because of it. Samuel Ramirez was wearing white shorts, a blue-and-white-striped T-shirt, a lime-green cardigan and a Mickey Mouse watch on his wrist. It was a thing he treasured because it was the last present that his father had given him before dying six months earlier from a brain embolism. He’d sit and watch the gloved hands telling him the time and he liked to think it was Mickey waving directly at him. Sometimes he’d even wave back.
Samuel Ramirez was never seen alive again.
The shopkeeper next door, Patrick Nyland, a single man of forty-two with a slight stammer and sometimes painful eczema that was visible on his hands, claimed that he had never seen the boy come into his shop when he was questioned by his worried mother ten minutes later. The police were called and an hour after Laura Ramirez had sent her son for eggs, Ellie Peters, another single mother, who claimed never to have known who the father of her child was and who lived three houses up from the Ramirez home, woke up from a liquid lunch she had been sleeping off and realised that her daughter was also missing. Alice Peters was nine years and five months old. With blonde curly hair and eyes like chips of sapphire flashing in bright sunlight.
Patrick Nyland was questioned exhaustively at Harrow police station on the Northolt Road, and the search for the missing children intensified. Nyland was kept in custody for twenty-four hours and his story seemed to stand up to rigorous interrogation. His house was searched and no sign of the children was discovered nor any evidence linking him to them. No witnesses came forward to say that they had seen the children, let alone to say they had been seen entering his shop. He was released without charge but events had been set in motion and his private life became the object of scrutiny – and not just by the official forces investigating the children’s disappearance. His shopfront window was smashed and the store petrol-bombed when information that he had been charged with a sex offence some years before became public knowledge. The policeman who leaked the information was never charged or disciplined for it. The fact that Nyland’s offence was not related to children – he had been found guilty of indecent exposure to a mature woman on the fields south of the medieval church on the hill – made little difference to an increasingly angry and vigilante-minded local populace. Two schools were near those fields where he had been exposing himself: a Catholic primary school and, of course, the more famous Harrow School further up the hill. In fear for his life, Patrick Nyland went into hiding while his insurance company fought his case. The police initiated an enquiry into the perpetrators of the arson but their efforts were minimal. All eyes, ears, feet, hearts and minds of the force were focused on finding the missing boy and girl. Television appeals were made, newspapers ran daily updates – genuinely keen to help, perhaps, but profiting nonetheless from the increased sales that their lurid headlines engendered. The children’s faces appearing in those papers were poster models of innocence. Samuel’s hair was every bit as curly as Alice’s but his was jet black and his eyes were the warm brown of rich caramel, and the hearts of the entire nation went out to the parents. Almost the entire nation. Many dark-hearted people looked at the pictures of those children with feelings very far removed from pity or compassion. Men and women both. Society waking up to the chilling knowledge that one in every four of those sexual predators was a woman. And one forty-seven-year-old man in particular collected the pictures as they appeared in the papers. He would cut and paste them into a scrapbook with hands sculpted by the harsh weather and salt air into cruel things. His eyes would glitter as he pressed the cuttings hard into the pages of the book, his hands stroking the children’s faces as he sm
oothed them flat, fixing them. They glittered with a green cast, like an old bottle, like the ocean.
A month passed and still there was no sign of the abducted children, no witnesses came forward. No contact or ransom demand was made. Although it was clear from the outset this was no abduction for financial gain. It was as if the boy and girl had simply vanished off the face of the Earth in a moment, in a heartbeat. Only of course it hadn’t been a heartbeat and every waking minute since they’d disappeared represented an eternity of suffering for the boy’s mother Laura Ramirez. Nightly she would seek peace in her dreams but found heartbreaking tragedy instead. She would see her son walking into her room, climbing into bed with her, snuggling up to keep warm and she would smooth his hair, realising it had all just been a nightmare. And then she would wake up and the horror of it all would hit her again, turning her stomach muscles liquid, her mind reeling so that she gagged and dry-retched, her body shuddering with the inconsolable pain of it. Ghost-walking through the days, her nerves shredded, she would look at every boy out on the streets and for a desperate moment she would dare to hope. And at home she would sit and look at the front door as though mesmerised, and at every knock she’d say a prayer and close her eyes before she opened it. The hope ate away at her like cancer.
As for Alice’s mother, to the outside observer the loss of her child had seemingly little impact on her behaviour. She had been an alcoholic drug abuser before Alice had gone missing and the sad tragedy of her daughter’s disappearance had no seemingly redemptive effect on her. She sucked up the pity she was offered like she sucked up cheap wine, until she was tired of having to put on a brave face, and the charity of strangers that had at first fuelled her alcoholic emotional anaesthesia dwindled to frosty stares and muttered comments whenever her back was turned, comments loud enough for her to hear, whispered fingers of blame poking right at her. What kind of an addict falls unconscious and allows her angel of a nine-year-old daughter to roam the streets alone like that … Finally she had had enough. She changed her name and moved so that she could put it all behind her and forget she had ever lived in Carlton Row.
But human conscience is an organic and mutable thing. Wired differently in the individual mind so that two people could be almost from different species.
Two years after the summer evening in mid-August when Samuel Ramirez and Ellie Peters had disappeared into the ether, Laura Ramirez killed herself by stepping front of a high-speed train at a level crossing. Her existence wiped out in a thunderous moment.
Three weeks after that Peter Garnier was arrested.
It happened like this.
*
On a late Sunday afternoon Garnier had approached a small eight-year-old boy – who was seemingly on his own – in some wooded parkland bordering the Ruislip Lido. It was common land, like the Mad Bess Woods a mile or so away. The boy’s father, unobserved by Garnier, was in the trees attending to a call of nature. As he came out Peter Garnier moved swiftly away but when the father learned that the man had asked his son to help him look for a lost dog he swore loud enough to startle the boy and set off in furious pursuit. Garnier, seeing that he was being chased, took off at a fast run, but he was a slight man, never a sportsman, and was certainly no match for the enraged father, who was a plasterer from Northolt, a weekend footballer and a fan of the Sun newspaper. When he was finally pulled off him, Peter Garnier required hospital treatment for multiple injuries including internal bleeding, fractured ribs and a broken jaw. While being treated in hospital and unable to speak, his car remained on a road with no parking restrictions at the weekend but which came into force from eight a.m. the following Monday.
At ten past nine on that Monday morning Arthur Ellis, a fifty-nine-year-old traffic warden and chronic arthritis sufferer nearing retirement, was ticketing the car when he heard a soft whimpering sound like that of a small frightened puppy coming from inside the locked boot. Calling for assistance, he tried to open the boot himself. Becoming ever more frantic as the whimpering sound had faded away and now there was only a chilling silence. He tried to open the boot using a Swiss army knife that he carried but to no avail. He ran to the nearest door and banged on it but there was no reply. He ran to the next door along and had better luck. A puzzled middle-aged unemployed man in his dressing gown answered and let the traffic warden use his phone to call the police.
Ten minutes later and PC Jack Delaney, who had been on patrol with his sergeant Rosemary Dawlish, arrived. They prised open the boot with a metal bar, which they had confiscated fifteen minutes earlier from a bald-headed tattooed man who had been using it to smash up his lover’s car. The woman had been unfaithful to him with a number of people from his football team while he’d been in prison. The man was even then scowling at them through the barred windows of their patrol car, clearly eager to return to secure accommodation.
Inside the boot there was no puppy, but an olive-skinned seven-year-old girl with brown hair and almond-shaped hazel eyes was huddled against the back, looking up at the young constable. Her tired eyes were wide with fear and her tiny hands were clutching a large teddy bear as though it were a powerful talisman that could protect her from all the evils of the world.
Delaney smiled at her reassuringly and stepped aside to let his female sergeant bring her out. But when the woman reached in with arms outstretched the little girl screamed, almost soundlessly, and backed deeper into the boot. She looked at Delaney, almost pleading for his help. The sergeant shrugged and stepped back.
‘Why don’t you give it a try, constable?’ she said.
Delaney stepped up, smiling reassuringly again. The girl scampered forward and climbed into his arms, hugging him around his neck. As Delaney stood up and brought her out a bright light flashed in front of them. The homeowner, still in his dressing gown, fired off another shot before a glare from Delaney made him lower his camera. The first picture, however, was on the front page of almost every paper the following day and the man in the dressing gown, whose breakfast had been so rudely interrupted, made more from the sales of it than he had all year.
The picture of Delaney holding ‘the girl in the boot’, as she became known, was wired around the world and earned him no small amount of ribbing from his colleagues. But Delaney didn’t care: that moment, holding the small, vulnerable, terrified girl, now safe in his arms, was exactly why he had joined the police force in the first place.
Later that day, the real horror of what might have been struck home to him as he stood guard watching as a SOCO team led by CID went through Garnier’s house. In the basement they found three boxes of photographs. All children. They found videos and Super-8 films. Home-made. In a locked cupboard they found several items of clothing. Children’s clothing. And they found a cardigan that had once belonged to Samuel Ramirez, the cardigan he had been wearing two years previously on the day he was abducted from Carlton Row.
Later they would find the bodies of six children aged between six and ten buried in the ground underneath his garden shed. None of them would prove to be either Samuel Ramirez or Alice Peters.
When Garnier awoke in prison the next day after being assaulted on the common he was arrested and moved to a secure unit. He would never enjoy life as a free man again.
The same day that Peter Garnier was arrested Police Constable Jack Delaney put in his application to join CID.
In the thirteen years since his arrest Peter Garnier had refused ever to disclose where the missing children were or where the girl in the boot had come from.
Five months ago he had converted to Catholicism.
Three months ago he had been diagnosed with progressive supernuclear palsy. A disease which over time could rob a person of the ability to walk, talk, feed themselves or communicate with the world around them. And yet their brain would remain alert.
Fourteen days ago he had agreed to tell the police where the children’s bodies were buried.
*
Delaney scratched another match to light a cigare
tte and watched as a team of forensic anthropologists excavated the ground that Garnier, after twenty minutes of deliberation, had indicated to be the place where the bodies of the murdered children were buried. Garnier himself was sitting on a fallen tree trunk some twenty yards away. His fishlike eyes watching dispassionately, glancing across occasionally at Delaney and Sally Cartwright. But no emotion showed on his face.
‘Does he know who you are?’
Delaney shrugged. ‘I doubt it.’
‘What happened to the girl you found alive?’
Delaney took a long drag on his cigarette. ‘We never found her mother or father. No relatives at all ever came forward and that degenerate slime refused to say where he had taken her from.’
‘Poor thing.’
‘She didn’t speak for six months and when she did it was in halting English.’
‘Where was she from?’
‘Eastern Europe somewhere. Originally, anyway.’
‘And where is she now?’
Delaney smiled at her. ‘Safe.’
Sally raised an eyebrow. ‘Wherever that may be nowadays.’
Delaney ground the half-smoked cigarette under his heel. ‘True.’
Diane Campbell came storming up, her eyes glittering with anger. ‘Give us one of those, Jack!’
Delaney fished out his cigarette packet again and handed her one. Then he stuck another in his mouth, smiling wryly. ‘I guess I picked the wrong day to give up smoking.’
Diane flicked her Zippo lighter under his cigarette. ‘Jack, you picked the wrong fucking life!’
Delaney nodded towards Garnier. ‘Anything?’
Diane Campbell shook her head derisively. ‘He’s just pulling on our chain. The sick bastard. He’s jerking us around – depend on it.’
‘Why now, though?’ Sally asked. ‘After all this time.’