Past Mortem

by Ben Elton

‘And in each prayer I took the liberty of asking the good Lord that he might see fit to arrange for her to die in a manner that befitted her sins. I rather cheekily suggested that some form of scourging might be in order. The papers seemed to be hinting that acid was involved. You have to hand it to the Lord, don’t you? He certainly has a way with these things.’

  ‘Um, yes. Mrs Ahern, d’you think you could possibly tell me what you were doing on the eighteenth of June?’

  ‘That being the day when Farrah Porter went to hell?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I know exactly what I was doing. My husband and I were attending a Noraid benefit in Boston to buy bullets for British soldiers.’

  For a moment Newson was confused, knowing that Mrs Ahern was a staunch Irish Nationalist. Then he realized that these bullets were not intended to be offered as gifts. ‘Ri-ght…’

  ‘Your prime minister and those Judases in Dublin may think that the war ended with the Good Friday Agreement. I can assure you, Inspector, that it didn’t.’

  ‘Fine, good, well, thank you for your time, Mrs Ahern.’

  ‘Not at all. Good day to you, Inspector, and God bless.’

  Newson was grateful to put the phone down. As he did so he saw Natasha hanging her hat on the stand in the corner. It was another glorious sunny day outside and Natasha was always sensible about her skin. Her skirt lifted slightly as she raised her arm, and he admired the backs of her knees.

  ‘Annabel Shannon, or Ahern as she is now, has a very good alibi. She was with a bunch of Boston Republicans plotting the defeat of the British Army and the unification of Ireland.’

  Natasha turned to face him from where she stood. Her face bore a slightly bewildered but also defiant expression. One of her eyes was swollen black and bruised. ‘I was mugged,’ she said before Newson had time to comment. ‘Last night, getting out of the tube station. Somebody tried to grab my bag and they whacked me.

  ‘Shit, Natasha, that’s terrible! Are you OK? I mean, should you be in work?’

  ‘I’m fine. It’s a black eye. So what? Just wish I’d managed to grab the bastard, that’s all.’

  ‘Yes, yes, of course. Can I make you a cup of tea?’

  ‘Lovely, thanks. Yeah, I could do with one.’

  Newson got up and put the kettle on. ‘Actually you were in your car last night, weren’t you?’ he said gently. ‘You drove home.’

  There was a pause before Natasha replied. ‘Did I say tube? I meant I got whacked as I got out of my car.’

  ‘Right. Of course.’

  Natasha went to her desk and stared intently at the papers in front of her. She did not look up.

  ‘So,’ she said with a considerable pretence at good cheer, ‘let’s get on with it, shall we?’

  ‘Natasha — ’ Newson said.

  ‘I was mugged, Ed. Now can we please get on with our work.’

  There was nothing more to be said and so they turned their attention to the school details of Neil Bradshaw, which had just been emailed to both their computers from colleagues working in the next-door office.

  ‘Born in 1960, started nursery school at four,’ said Newson, viewing the education record set out before him, which stretched all the way through to Bradshaw’s postgraduate studies as an archivist. ‘However. I think that what we need to be looking at is what his classmates thought of him around ‘72 to ‘74.’

  ‘Glam rock?’ Natasha enquired.

  ‘Yes. That’s what old Farmer ‘I pay my tax’ Goddard said he heard wafting across the fields while Bradshaw was having his balls crushed in a vice. Great period: T. Rex, Slade, Mud, Sweet. Real speaker-blasting boulders of rock. Much underestimated because it never really caught on in the States. That’s the problem with this country, we don’t really take anything we produce seriously unless the Americans have sanctioned it.’

  ‘Shall you log on or do you want me to?’ Natasha asked.

  ‘I’ll do it,’ Newson replied with a defensive smile.

  Neil Bradshaw had attended a mixed grammar school in Leamington Spa, and once more a brief trawl through the various innocuous ‘remember me’ entries which included Bradshaw’s own, revealed another anguished soul who had elected to use the Friends Reunited site to point an accusatory finger back across the years. The entry, which had been made a year before, was entitled ‘An open letter to Neil Bradshaw’.

  I’ve often thought about going to the police and telling them about what happened to me. Even now, over thirty years later, I still dream of justice. But I suppose it would be no good. We were only twelve and thirteen, weren’t we? It’s all long gone now, isn’t it? Except not for me. For me it’s still as if it happened yesterday. Which is why I’m writing this now and putting it up on this notice board. Just to tell the other kids in our year that if they were thinking of contacting you they should think twice, because you are a cruel sexual predator and I was your principal victim. It started with bullying didn’t it? You asked me out and when I refused you started to bully me. Your favourite trick was to steal my packed lunch from my bag and put it high up on the skylight ledge so that if I wanted to get it down I’d have to put a chair on to a desk and climb up on top of them. Then you’d stand underneath, looking up my skirt to see my knickers. And you’d tell the other boys what colour they were and make up stories about how they were dirty.

  The details clearly recalled those of Neil Bradshaw’s murder. Whoever had starved Bradshaw to death had forced him to die reaching up for food while wearing a schoolgirl’s skirt and staring into a video transmission of the knickers he had been forced to wear beneath it.

  ‘Fuck,’ said Natasha, ‘this gets sicker every day, doesn’t it?’ She did not turn towards Newson as she said this. She was clearly all too conscious of the bruise on her face.

  Then you got braver, and you started to wait for me on my way home. I used to have to walk along the canal towpath with the hedges by the side and that’s where you’d lie in wait. Every day you grabbed me and pushed me into those hedges, groping me and putting your hands into my bra and knickers, squeezing me and poking me. Sometimes you managed to get your fingers inside me. I expect that any classmates reading. this will wonder why I didn’t do something about it. I’ve asked myself the same question for three decades. Why didn’t I tell my mum? A teacher? The police? I suppose there were the threats, that was certainly part of it. You said that you’d poison my cat, didn’t you, and I believed you, I really really did. And then there was your power. You were such a teacher’s pet, you were on every school committee and always got elected form captain. You really knew how to play everybody off against each other and always end up smelling of roses. Meanwhile, you were sexually abusing me. It was a short step, wasn’t it, from staring at my knickers to bruising my body, particularly when you found out that you could get away with it, and then finally you raped me. We were both thirteen and you raped me, and that was when it stopped because I stopped going to school. I became an adolescent anorexic and was in and out of hospital for the next five years. The breasts that you so loved to squeeze as you forced me down amongst the twigs and brambles all but disappeared. As did I. Mentally and physically. I’m better now, but still not entirely well. I’ve never been able to get on with my life properly and I’m still single. Pathetic, isn’t it?

  My closest relationship is still with you, Neil Bradshaw, and my hatred is undimmed. So if any of you old boys and girls were thinking of getting in contact with your old popular form captain, please try to remember Pamela White, will you, the quiet girl in the corner who left halfway through the third year. Because that bastard ruined my life.

  When they had finished reading Newson printed off a copy and added Pamela White’s name opposite that of Neil Bradshaw on his list of victims’ victims. Natasha took the hard copy of White’s essay from the printer tray and read through it once more.

  ‘The more I learn about the people who got killed the more I’m on the killer’s side.’

  ‘You can’t
think that way, Natasha. It isn’t helpful.’

  ‘But Bradshaw deserved what he got in that seed shed!’

  ‘You think so?’

  ‘Yes! Particularly because he was still at it thirty years later. Remember what I found out about that teenager who worked in the bookshop, the one who was sacked when she refused his advances?’

  ‘We don’t have the death penalty in this country, not even after a fair trial, so let’s not get misty-eyed about the deranged antics of a lunatic vigilante.’

  ‘I’m just saying that what goes around comes around, that’s all.’

  ‘Natasha, did Lance hit you?’ There. He’d said it. He wasn’t even sure that he’d meant to say it, but he had.

  ‘No!’ Natasha exclaimed, too loudly and too quickly. Newson did not reply and after a few moments Natasha got up and left the room. When she returned she had her speech prepared.

  ‘It’s not like you think it is, Ed. It’s not typical.’

  ‘What do you mean, Natasha? It looks like a typical black eye to me.’

  ‘It’s not a typical instance of what you think it is.’

  ‘If you mean domestic violence, why don’t you say it?’

  ‘Because…because…Look, it’s only happened once.’

  ‘Oh, come on, Natasha. Listen to yourself.’

  ‘He’s only done it once!’

  ‘So far! They’ve all only ever done it once the first time they do it. Whether he does it again is entirely up to you.’

  ‘Look, Ed. Don’t give me any speeches, all right? I’ve been in the police since I was nineteen. I know about this shit. I dealt with it every day for years.’

  ‘Which is why you of all people should be aware that domestic violence is in most senses always typical and one of the most typical aspects of all is that the victim always tries to make out a special case for her abuser.’

  ‘I just said I don’t want any speeches! He was drunk.’

  ‘We were both drunk! He wanted to talk about us and I was too tired and I hadn’t seen him all weekend and then I got home and I only wanted to sleep, and — ’

  ‘Natasha, please! Listen to yourself.’

  ‘I’m just saying — ’

  ‘You’re just saying that it was your fault that he hit you, that’s what you’re just saying.’

  ‘I’m not! I’m saying that in a relationship both sides have to — ’

  ‘You’re saying that it was your fault!’

  ‘I don’t want to have this conversation, OK? I haven’t filed a complaint and this is not a police matter.’

  ‘I’m your friend.’

  ‘Then respect my right to deal with this in my own way.’

  ‘Have you thrown him out?’

  Natasha did not answer.

  ‘Have you thrown him out?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then will you insist that he seeks counselling immediately?’

  Again she did not reply.

  ‘Will you make him seek counselling, and if he refuses will you throw him out?’

  ‘I’ve just said I don’t want to — ’

  ‘Then it’s going to happen again.’

  ‘It’s not going to happen again.’

  ‘Natasha, if nothing changes it always happens again. You know that.’

  ‘Ed, we’re seeing the chief in just over an hour. If you want to complete your list before then we need to find out what fucking nightmare Warrant Officer Spencer left behind him from when he was at school.’

  And so, with a new and unfamiliar tension now existing between them, Newson and Natasha turned once more to the Friends Reunited site to summon up the details of Spencer’s years at school, which had lasted from 1980 to 1992, when he had left at sixteen in order to join the army.

  They had no musical clue to highlight a particular year, and they were forced to read through Spencer’s entire school career, which made up a grim catalogue of bullying and abuse. It seemed that he had formed the habit early.

  Do you remember Denis Spencer? half a dozen different ex-pupils at Spencer’s junior school had written.

  If you weren’t in his gang you were in big trouble. If you caught his eye the wrong way, POW!, you got both fists straight in the face. If it was your turn to get it you crawled home on your hands and knees. If you got out of line he put your head in a desk and banged the lid down.

  Again and again the same word came up.

  Bully. Bully. Bully.

  It was clear that Spencer had not been choosy about who he terrorized and by the time he got to his comprehensive school he’d really got into his stride. He was the number-one topic of discussion on the school’s virtual notice board. An appeal had been made for good Spencer reminiscences and the replies were many and varied.

  He flushed my head in the bogs…He twanged my bra strap every day in the dinner queue…He’d just kick you as you walked by…He held me against the wall by my neck…He stubbed his cigarette out on my satchel.

  A teacher had even made a contribution.

  I was so sorry and distressed to read of the way you all suffered at the hands of Denis Spencer. You must have felt that you should have been protected by the system. All I can say (and I cringe in shame as I write) is that we too were scared of him. Spencer was more than six feet tall by the time he was fourteen and he had two older brothers, one of whom was a policeman and the other a soldier. Spencer threatened me physically three times. He was bigger than me and once he actually grabbed me by the neck He told me that he knew where I lived and that if I went to the head I could expect a brick through my window. It would have been no use going to the head anyway, he was weak and scared himself. I don’t know if you recall Ms Simpson who taught art. She told me that he’d threatened her with gang rape!

  ‘My God,’ said Natasha, ‘what a thug!’ Eventually they found the letter they were looking for, the one that linked an event in Spencer’s past to the manner of his death. It had been posted by a classmate called Mark Pearce.

  I’d always managed to stay out of trouble with Spencer. Maybe it was that that made him suddenly decide to have a go at me. They do say bullies are cunning like that, don’t they? Anyway, I’d never have risen to his bait if it had been just me, but he was clever and he had a go at my bird. I wonder if you’re reading this, Mandy? Do you remember what I suffered for you? It didn’t make you stay with me, though, did it? Not after I ended up in hospital with suspected brain damage. You slag. One lunch break That’s all it took, and my life got well and truly fucked. We were walking down the corridor, me and Mandy, hand in hand. Mandy was fit and everybody wanted to have her, so maybe Spencer was jealous or something. Whatever it was, it wasn’t my lucky day, because he and his boys barred our way and surrounded us and he started lifting up Mandy’s skirt and saying to me that I should hand her over to him for the lunch hour as payment for him not giving me a smack in the mouth. Well obviously I had to try and stand up to him. I’d have probably got done in whatever I did and I had to try and defend my bird, didn’t I? What would I have looked like if I hadn’t? So I told him to piss off and he said in that case I’d be the one who’d have to pay. So they sat me in a chair and started whacking me on the head with their atlases. Maybe you remember those books, of course you do, we had to lug them to geography twice a week, not that anybody ever learnt anything from them. Well, Spencer had his gang whack me on the head with the books for an entire lunch break, fifty-five minutes. Think about it. They hit me hundreds of times. By the end I was nearly unconscious and couldn’t fucking walk I had neurological damage, they said, and I was dizzy for months after. Luckily I was young and the brain is quite resilient when you’re young but I was still in bed for a month. I decided I wasn’t going to let him get away with it, so I told on Spencer and his gang and there was a piss-weak investigation, and of course they all denied it so it was their six words against my one. They’d kept people out of the form room while they hit me, so no one else saw, not that anyone would have had the guts
to speak out. Well, obviously after snitching on them I couldn’t go back to school, so I had to go somewhere else, which really messed up my exams. What with that and the headaches that went on for years afterwards I ended up not going to tech, even though I wanted to be an engineer, but that was all fucked, obviously. I’m fine now, got a job and a life I like, but I had a very rough time for a year or two back then and all because I happened to be walking down the corridor just at the time that Spencer was looking round for a bit of fun. Well, that’s my story but, Spencer, if you’re reading this I’m telling you now that it ain’t over. Oh no, it ain’t going to be over till you get yours. I’ve got a plan, see. Want to know what it is? Don’t worry, you’ll find out soon enough. Oh yeah, and Mandy? Like I said, you’re nothing but a dirty slag.

  Newson’s list was complete.

  VICTIMVICTIM’S VICTIM

  Adam Bishop William Connolly (compasses)

  Neil Bradshaw Pamela White (sexual assault)

  Christine Copperfield Helen Smart (tampon)

  Angie Tatum Katie Saunders (harelip)

  Farrah Porter Annabel Shannon (ginger)

  Denis Spencer Mark Pearce (book)

  He was ready to attend his meeting with Chief Superintendent Ward.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Good Lord, Detective Sergeant Wilkie. What the hell happened to you?’

  ‘I was mugged, sir. I’m fine.’

  ‘What a bloody awful world we live in, eh? Just what kind of bullying bastard would punch a defenceless woman like that?’

  Newson did not look at Natasha, but he could imagine how much this comment hurt. His heart ached for her.

  ‘All right, Newson, let’s get on with it,’ the chief said testily. ‘This situation seems to me to be out of hand. We have a swathe of unsolved murders which you have chosen to presume are connected. One of these murders at least is highly media sensitive. I’m thinking in particular, of course, of the killing of Farrah Porter, which has caused alarm at the highest level in the Home Office. It’s put me personally under a lot of pressure. I don’t like having MI6 looking over my shoulder and badgering me for results. What’s more, we now have to add to this catalogue of failure the grotesque complication of yesterday’s death and your connection with both the victim and one of the suspects — ’