Best Served Cold: A DCI Harry Grimm Novel

by David J Gatward

  At this, Harry snapped a look around to Jenny whose eyes were wide.

  ‘This wouldn’t happen to be Apache now, would it?’ Harry asked.

  ‘I’ve no idea what it was called,’ Mr Rawson said. ‘All I know is that they had everyone in that hall together to watch what amounted to little more than a horror film, with children being killed off one by one. It was horrific! And to think that just a few years later there was all that stuff going on about banning films because of their violence!’

  ‘So it was you, then,’ Harry said, remembering the school logbooks.

  ‘What was?’

  ‘In the school records,’ Harry explained. ‘I found mention of the film. That some parents hadn’t been too happy about it, one in particular because of concerns for his daughter. And that was you.’

  ‘Yes, it was me,’ Mr Rawson said. ‘Bugger all good it did!’

  ‘But why were you so worried?’ Jenny asked. ‘Couldn’t you just have kept Sally at home?’

  ‘Yes, we could,’ Mr Rawson said, ‘but we didn’t want her to be singled out. Can you imagine it? Being the only kid kept home because your parents didn’t want you to see a film that everyone else was watching? No, we couldn’t do that. It wasn’t fair. We were there to give Sally the best chance, and part of that had to be about making her life as normal as possible.’

  ‘But something went wrong, then,’ Harry said. ‘At least I’m assuming it did.’

  ‘Sally didn’t react well to it,’ Mr Rawson explained, and again Harry could hear the sadness in his voice. ‘In fact, at some point she ran out of the hall screaming, or so I was told. It was too much for her, what was being shown on the screen. She was sensitive to things, so much more so than anyone else. There was an innocence to her, and that film? Well, you may as well have just given her a puppy and then shot it in front of her, that’s how badly affected she was. Nightmares for weeks! It was horrendous! Horrendous!’

  ‘What happened afterwards?’ Jenny asked. ‘Did the school apologise?’

  Mr Rawson shook his head. ‘It wasn’t the school’s fault really,’ he said. ‘They were told to show it by the powers that be, so that’s what they did. I demanded to see it for myself and I was shocked. I’m not a prude, you understand, but really, at what point is a film like that ever appropriate to show to kids?’

  Harry absolutely didn’t want the conversation to drift off into the realms of censorship, but he could see that from Mr Rawson’s perspective, there was certainly an argument to be made. ‘So, afterwards, then, what happened with Sally?’ he asked. ‘I’m assuming she got over it eventually.’

  Mr Rawson turned his head slowly and the face which came to bare on Harry sent a shudder down his spine. There was a heat behind it, a fierce burning of years-old rage, and he had a sense that he was about to get a taste of what that was actually like.

  ‘Oh, she would have, I’m sure,’ Mr Rawson said, his voice a quiet, rumbling threat. ‘Yes, she would have, if it hadn’t been for those bastard kids . . .’

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Harry had an idea as to exactly who Mr Rawson was referring, but he wasn’t about to put words into the old man’s mouth. ‘Which kids?’ he asked. ‘What happened?’

  ‘You know which kids!’ Mr Rawson growled. ‘I don’t need to give you the names, I’m sure.’

  ‘Actually, you do,’ Jenny said. ‘We’re here to record what you’re saying, to ask questions. We’re not here to provide information.’

  Her reply was harder than Harry had expected it to be, but he was pleased by that. Whatever had happened to Mr Rawson’s daughter, they still had to maintain distance, to be objective, and to not be pulled in to being a part of whatever it was that was spooling out before them.

  ‘Capstick,’ Mr Rawson said. ‘John Bastard Capstick, and his little gang of Apaches! Yes, that was it, I remember now! They called themselves that after that godawful film, didn’t they?’

  ‘Go on,’ Harry said, encouraging the old man to keep talking, because even if Mr Rawson’s confession was a wonderful piece of fiction, he was pretty sure that the background to it wasn’t, and he had already learned a few things, so perhaps more was to come, which would help.

  ‘He was a bully,’ Mr Rawson said. ‘Sally was never on his radar because she was so looked after by the staff, by everyone at the school. And he obviously had other people he preferred to pick on. But when it happened, when she ran out of that hall? He must have seen her as an easy target.’

  ‘So he bullied her?’ Jenny asked.

  ‘Bullied is such a tame word to describe the abject torment that boy and his friends put our daughter though,’ Mr Rawson snarled, the words spitting out through the spaces between his teeth. ‘She’d been at the school a year, and they showed the film in the autumn of seventy-nine. She was never the same.’

  ‘How so?’ Harry asked.

  ‘She would wake in the night screaming,’ Mr Rawson said. ‘She started to wet her bed, and that was something she had never done before. Every night, too. It was awful for her. She would be sick before going to school, and when we did get her there, she would hide from the teachers, hide from everyone. You wouldn’t believe how many places there are for a small girl to hide in a school like that!’

  ‘And Capstick?’ Harry asked.

  ‘He singled her out,’ Mr Rawson said. ‘Picked on her at every opportunity. Made fun of her. Encouraged all the other children to do the same, and they did, because they were scared of him, scared of being victims themselves, I shouldn’t wonder. Then winter came, and the cold. It was like nothing we had ever experienced.’

  ‘Did the bullying stop?’ Jenny asked.

  Mr Rawson shook his head.

  ‘Sally loved the snow. I think it was because it made the world so quiet, you know? And it is magical, isn’t it? The way a blanket of snow can just quieten everything, silence the world, make everything pure for just a while. Like Sally, really. She was pure, in her own way. And for such a short time.’

  Harry couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen a decent snow fall. ‘If the bullying didn’t stop, what happened?’ he asked. ‘What did you do?’

  ‘In the end, we pulled her out of the school,’ Mr Rawson said. ‘Didn’t have any choice. It got that bad. But we made sure the school kept it as quiet as possible. I forced the head teacher to let me look at the records myself, just to make sure there was nothing in there that would follow her, you see? I didn’t want anything to haunt her, to turn up at her next school and be used as a rod to beat her with.’

  ‘You read the logbooks?’

  Mr Rawson nodded. ‘Of course I did! Obviously it wasn’t allowed but I wasn’t having any of it! There wasn’t much in there to worry about anyway. Except for one bit which was all about how we had taken her out of the school because of her reaction the film a couple of months previous. I had that scrubbed from the records. Did it myself actually. And rather enjoyed it, too.’

  Harry remembered then the crossed-out section in the logbook.

  ‘That Capstick lad was suspended a few times,’ Mr Rawson said. ‘Never expelled though. Don’t ask me why. I guess it was because there was never anything physical as such. He never beat her up. Nothing like that. But the verbal abuse, the way he had others rally against her, pick on her, make fun of her, ridicule her. It was awful. And his father? God, now if there was anyone to blame for anything, it was him!’

  ‘You had words then, I’m assuming?’ Harry suggested.

  ‘Words? Ha! I went round there and threatened to burn his house to the ground!’ Mr Rawson said. ‘I stormed in, wading through all that shit and muck in his yard, kicked his door open, and I had him! I had him with my hands around his throat, the bastard!’

  Harry watched as the old man reached out with his hands and squeezed them around an invisible neck, the fire in his eyes terrifying, despite his age.

  ‘He would’ve deserved it, too, for what his son had done to my girl! I wanted to kill him
! Just choke the absolute bloody life out of him!’

  ‘What stopped you?’

  ‘He did,’ Mr Rawson sighed, slumping back into his chair. ‘Look at me; I’m not a big man! Never have been. Anger only got me so far, and the element of surprise. He was drunk, but it didn’t matter. He was strong. Threw me out on my arse. Chased me across the yard with a stick. Threw a few rocks at me. But I wanted to go back, I tell you that for nothing. And you know why? Not because of what his son did to my daughter. No. But for what he said about her, to my face.’

  ‘When was this?’ Jenny asked.

  ‘The school arranged for a sort of parlay I suppose,’ Mr Rawson said. ‘Tried to get the parents together, to discuss what could be done. He turned up in his tractor, waltzed in, three sheets to the wind, and just started on at me, at my wife, at the head teacher, about how some kids just weren’t worth the effort, how some shouldn’t even be allowed to live. And he didn’t just mean our Sally either, but his own son! Can you imagine it? Evil, he was. The worst.’

  Harry had been wondering for a while just where all this was going. It was quite the story, for sure, and it was very clear that it had all been terrible for Mr Rawson’s family. But he still wasn’t any clearer about what it was that had led them to where they were now, years later, and with three dead men lying in freezer drawers in the mortuary down dale.

  ‘You’ve got that look,’ Mr Rawson said, glancing at Harry.

  ‘What look?’

  ‘You don’t believe me, do you?’

  Harry breathed deep, folding his arms across his chest. ‘Whether I believe you or not is irrelevant right now,’ he said. ‘I’m just not sure how all of what you’ve said so far brings you to us, now, to confess to three murders. It’s a tragic tale, yes, but three murders, Mr Rawson? That’s a whole world away from a kid being bullied and you having a scuffle with a drunk farmer.’

  Mr Rawson nodded thoughtfully. ‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘But the story isn’t finished, is it?’

  ‘Only you know that,’ Harry replied.

  ‘Like I said, Sally loved the snow,’ Rawson continued. ‘She loved to go sledging, to go exploring with her brother.’

  Harry sat up. ‘Brother? What brother? You never mentioned a brother!’

  Mr Rawson raised a hand to calm Harry. ‘Her older brother, by only a year,’ he said, ‘but he acted older, really looked after her. Really cared for her. And they were out together in the snow, you see? They’d been sledging in the morning, then that afternoon they headed off along the path down from Gayle to Hawes, you know the one.’

  ‘I do,’ Harry said, recalling his little run in with the local teenagers and their attempts at trying to be cool while smoking cannabis.

  ‘Sally was fascinated by the way the beck had cut its way through the snow. She loved to just stand and watch it, and her brother, James, well, he would just stay with her, look out for her, make sure she didn’t get too cold.’

  ‘So what happened?’ Jenny asked.

  ‘Capstick is what happened,’ Mr Rawson said. ‘Him and his little gang, they came along the path, sledging down all the steep bits to the beck, then I suppose they saw Sally and just couldn’t resist.’

  ‘You were there?’ Harry asked.

  Mr Rawson shook his head. ‘No, but James, he remembered everything. Every detail. Could never forget it either, which I suppose was why he did what he did.’

  Harry noticed a change in Mr Rawson’s intonation, the last few words coming out slightly different to the rest, almost as though he was referring not only to what his son James had done that day, but to something he did later. It confused him, but he wasn’t given a chance to ask, as Mr Rawson was still talking and clearly didn’t want to be interrupted.

  ‘All six of them were there, Capstick and his little band of followers. They started with snowballs, and that set Sally off. She started to scream and panic, so James retaliated, only that made it worse. So, he decided to bring Sally home, because that was the most sensible thing to do, but the thing was, Capstick, you see, well they blocked the way. No matter what James did, Capstick and his gang would run and stop them, throw a snowball, call Sally names. And James? Well, James got angry, didn’t he? And I don’t blame him for that. How could I? He went for Capstick, and I mean he properly went for him. Lamped him one hard on the side of his face. Nearly broke his wrist doing it, but he knocked that Capstick kid to the ground. The trouble was, he didn’t make sure that he stayed down, did he? And that was where it all went wrong. The rest of the gang grabbed him, Capstick was on him then, and they gave him a bit of a pasting. And all the time, Sally was standing there watching and screaming. So they went for her next.’

  ‘How do you mean?’ Jenny asked, her pen poised above the copious notes she’d taken. ‘What did they do?’

  ‘They chased her,’ Mr Rawson said. ‘Chased her right down to the beck, tripping her up on the way, yelling at her, forcing her on, herding her I supposed. And James couldn’t do anything about it, because three of them sat on him in the snow, forcing snow into his mouth, his nose, slapping him, laughing, and he could hear her screaming, not just in fear, but for him, screaming his name. Can you imagine what that must have been like?’

  Yes, Harry thought, I can.

  ‘Then the screaming stopped,’ Mr Rawson said. ‘Just stopped, like it had just been switched off. And then Capstick and the others, they just ran off. And after what they’d done, I’m not surprised, the little shits! The evil little bastards! They deserve to die, you know? For what they did! They deserve it!’

  ‘What did they do?’ Harry asked.

  ‘She was on the edge of the beck,’ Mr Rawson explained, his voice quieter now, slower, sorrow and memory and shock and anger all twisting his voice into a distant thing, something lost to time and horror. ‘And she fell. They frightened her so much, kept pushing closer and closer, until she just fell. Into the water. In winter. James ran up to where she had fallen in. The river was running fast as well, under the snow, fed by the melt water from the fells, and he jumped in, went after her. It could have killed him, too, but he got snagged on a rock, then someone spotted him, from the bridge over the beck, you know, the one in town? And they rushed around, got some help, grabbed him. If they hadn’t I would have lost both children that day. In many ways, I think I probably did.’

  ‘What about Sally?’ Harry asked, not really wanting to, knowing that he had to.

  ‘She wasn’t found for two days,’ Mr Rawson said. ‘She made it over the waterfalls, disappeared under the ice, and just got swept downstream. Can you imagine the terror of it? The cold? The helplessness? Knowing she was going to die? Can you imagine that at all?’

  ‘So,’ Harry began, keeping his voice level and calm, ‘are you saying that all this has led to what’s been happening these past few days?’

  ‘My wife, Jean, she was the next casualty,’ Mr Rawson said, his eyes on Harry. ‘Burying your own child, it’s the worst thing, Mr Grimm, I promise you that. Nothing is worse. Nothing! And Jean, she broke apart that day and I just couldn’t put her back together again. Drink took her in the end, two years later. Sometimes I think it was probably for the best. She was never the same. We none of us were. God, I miss her.’

  Harry said no more, instead leaving it to Mr Rawson to continue in his own time, the memories now washing through him relentlessly, tears starting to fall.

  ‘Next was James.’

  ‘Your son?’ Jenny asked. ‘Oh, dear God, I’m so sorry . . .’

  ‘He did well, to keep going at all,’ Mr Rawson said. ‘After what he saw, what happened, he blamed himself. Nothing we said made a dent in the guilt he carried. He was a shell from that moment on, kept saying how he wished it had been him who had died. He changed. Drew into himself. Put on so much weight, just eating because it made himself feel better, sort of a comfort thing, I guess. He got into fights at school, usually ended up on the wrong end of it all. But he was bright, and he managed to pass his exams
, and head off to university. And that was the last I ever saw of the boy I called my son.’

  ‘Do you mean he just never came home?’ Harry asked.

  ‘He called me one night,’ Mr Rawson said. ‘He was the most lucid that I had heard him in years. He sounded calm. Happy almost. Said that he knew what it was that he had to do and that I wasn’t to worry. Said he was sorry that he hadn’t been able to protect Sally and that he hoped what he was going to do would make up for it.’

  Harry suddenly felt sick, his stomach knotting itself up, his own experience on the job, the hell and anguish he’d witnessed over the years more than enough to guess where the story ended.

  ‘The police came the next day,’ Mr Rawson said. ‘A letter was found in his room in the halls of residence. They found his clothes by the river, which was only a walk away from where he was staying.’

  ‘Suicide,’ Harry muttered.

  ‘I’m afraid so, yes,’ Mr Rawson said, the sadness in his eyes so deep, Harry could tell the man had spent years drowning in it. ‘The note was what he had said to me the night before on the phone, almost as though he had read it to me before heading off to do what he did. So, in the end? I lost my whole family. Because of that boy. Because of that gang. Because of what they did.’

  Harry leaned back in his chair, the weight of what he and Jenny had heard seeming to almost push him back, and his breath felt suddenly short, taken away by the sadness that now sat with them in the room, the cloaked figure of death leaning on them all.

  ‘So it all comes down to revenge,’ Harry said. ‘All of this. Everything that’s happened. It’s revenge for everything you’ve told us.’

  Mr Rawson sat up straight, as if to display pride in what he had come to confess. ‘It was Sally’s birthday on Saturday,’ he said. ‘Or would have been. Every year it comes around I think about what happened. This year, though, it’s a little different. You see, I have cancer, detective. Stage four. I won’t see her next birthday. I needed to do something, to see some sense of justice.’