Wrong Way Home: Sunday Times Crime Book of the Month

by Isabelle Grey

‘Do you remember if the taxi had a logo?’ asked Grace.

  ‘Well, once I knew who it was I assumed it was one of Owen Nixon’s cars, but I can’t say now whether I realised that at the time or put two and two together later on.’

  Grace was pleased that Rondini was so scrupulous. If he was being so careful not to embroider, then they might safely rely on his testimony. ‘Can we show you some photographs?’ she asked.

  Blake opened the file he had brought with him. Both local radio and the Southend Echo had carried Grace’s appeal for photographs or people’s memories of the fire and been rewarded with both. Blake now handed Rondini copies of a couple of colour photos that had captured a Nixon taxi parked in the background.

  ‘Is that where the taxi you noticed would have been parked?’ she asked.

  Rondini lifted up his glasses and, holding the images inches away from his milky eyes, examined them closely. ‘Yes,’ he said, replacing his glasses and handing back the photographs.

  Grace hid her elation: Larry had said in an interview – and publicly on Freddie Craig’s podcast – that he had been driving past when he had spotted smoke coming out of the building. Catching him out in one lie would make it easier to unravel the others.

  ‘And you saw him enter the building?’ she asked. ‘It was definitely the man you saw running out of Cliff Gardens who then went in and rescued those boys?’

  ‘He was ahead of me the whole time. He scrambled through a hole in the fence the contractors had put up around the building and disappeared. I stood there like an idiot, trying to think where the nearest phone box was, and then someone else came running up and pointed to a call box right there on the corner. He went and called the fire brigade.’

  ‘Can you say precisely where you were when you saw him come out of Cliff Gardens?’

  ‘Just coming up to the point where I usually stop and head back,’ he said. ‘He must have come out of the westernmost gate.’

  ‘Can you remember anything about him?’ she asked. ‘What he was wearing, for instance?’

  ‘That’s not the sort of thing I notice, I’m afraid. I’ve always worn what my late wife told me to wear.’

  ‘It was a chilly night,’ she said. ‘Might you have noticed if he was only wearing a T-shirt, for example?’

  ‘All I can say is that nothing stood out.’

  ‘Was he carrying anything?’

  Rondini frowned. ‘You know, I think maybe he was. He was in front of me, but when I picture his movements, I can see him put something in the car. It can’t have been anything bulky or heavy, though.’

  ‘But you didn’t see what it was?’

  He shook his head. ‘If I’d had X-ray vision, maybe.’

  Grace laughed. ‘Any idea what he might have been doing in the park?’

  ‘I imagined he’d been relieving himself. I thought afterwards that that’s why he was running, to get back to work.’

  ‘And, later on, when you heard about the murder?’

  ‘What murder?’

  ‘A nineteen-year-old called Heather Bowyer.’ She glanced at Blake, hoping that they hadn’t overestimated the old man’s mental capacity. ‘It was reported at the time.’

  ‘That same night?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, in Cliff Gardens.’

  ‘So that’s why you’re here, not about the fire?’

  ‘That’s right. Your granddaughter didn’t explain?’

  ‘Maybe she did.’ Rondini removed his glasses and rubbed his eyes. Replacing his spectacles, he shook his head as if distressed. ‘He was running hell for leather. I just thought he was chasing the taxi.’

  ‘You described Larry as Owen Nixon’s boy,’ Grace said. ‘I imagine you’re a few years older than Owen, but not by much. You grew your businesses at the same time, in the 1960s and 1970s.’

  He nodded. ‘Before the package holidays nearly finished us off. We couldn’t sell ice cream fast enough in those days.’

  ‘Were you friends?’

  ‘With that snake? No.’

  ‘Why do you call him that?’

  Rondini pursed his lips in distaste. ‘My late wife never took to him. I always listened to her. Sixty years we were married, God rest her soul.’

  ‘You must miss her a great deal.’

  As Rondini sank further down into his chair, exhausted, Grace realised what an effort he’d been making for them. ‘We won’t keep you much longer,’ she said.

  ‘I don’t remember ever hearing about a murder. Not in relation to the fire, anyway. We always went home at the end of the summer season, back to Italy for a month to see my wife’s parents. If I’d known—’

  ‘Don’t worry about that, Mr Rondini,’ she said. ‘It’s not your responsibility.’ It worried her that, even twenty-five years later, it hadn’t taken much old-fashioned legwork to find this witness. What was the real reason DI Jupp had failed? ‘Just to finish off your memories of that night,’ she continued, ‘how long did you remain in the vicinity?’

  ‘The dog got frightened by the fire and all the commotion,’ he said. ‘We were only in everyone’s way, so we went home.’

  ‘Any idea what time you would have set out on your walk?’

  ‘Probably about a quarter to ten. With a business to run, you stick to a routine.’

  Grace knew from contemporary newspaper reports that the first call to the emergency services had been at seven minutes past ten, corroborating the timeline of Vincent Rondini’s testimony. He would make a convincing witness. At last, they were getting somewhere. And, finally, they had the new information they needed to be allowed to reinterview Larry Nixon officially, under caution.

  49

  As soon as Larry Nixon turned up at Colchester Police Station the following day, according to the conditions of his bail, and was told that he would be reinterviewed, the clock would begin ticking once more on how long he could be held in custody. Grace was eager to have everything she wanted to put to him – timeline, maps, photographs, witness statements – meticulously prepared. She and Blake ate sandwiches at her desk as they worked out their strategy and the order in which they would disclose the details of their case. They had always worked well together – and Grace was grateful to the pressure of work that pushed all other private considerations aside.

  They disagreed on only one thing: Cara Chalkley’s shoe. Blake reasoned that the shock value of producing the pair to a shoe Larry had stolen, plus the humiliating risk of his erotic fantasies being made public, might destabilise him enough for him to slip up and make a mistake.

  But Grace strongly believed that Larry would hold onto his trophies as long as he could, and feared that revealing how much they knew about the missing shoes would leave him with no choice but to destroy the only remaining physical evidence that could tie him to any of his crimes.

  Although Blake countered that Larry was far too smart not to have got rid of such incriminating evidence long ago, Grace remained convinced that the hold these fetish objects had over him would still be too strong for him to do so.

  They were still arguing when Duncan appeared at the entrance to her cubicle, a deep frown on his face. ‘Boss?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I realise we’re already up to our eyes,’ he said, ‘but something odd has come up.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘You know me, belt and braces – I wanted to tie up all the loose ends – so I requested a copy of Terri Nixon’s death certificate.’

  ‘And?’ Grace asked, as he paused dramatically.

  ‘Theresa Elizabeth Nixon, née Walker, born sixth of November 1949. There’s no record of her death.’

  ‘But her daughter told us she’d died of cancer.’

  ‘Well, there’s no death certificate,’ said Duncan. ‘I checked to see if she’d divorced, remarried, changed her name, anything that might account for it, but there’s nothing.’

  Grace had never had reason to doubt Duncan’s diligence. ‘How strange,’ she said. ‘Could it be some kind
of admin error? You could try asking the hospital if they still have any records of her treatment.’

  ‘I already did, boss. The main records department at the hospital in Southend has nothing on file. They suggested I speak to oncology, who usually keep their own records for research purposes. Nothing. They couldn’t rule out her records being mislaid, but they thought it more likely that she’d never been treated there for cancer.’

  ‘Even stranger,’ said Grace.

  ‘I asked if she might have been treated elsewhere, but, even if she’d gone privately, which seems unlikely, her GP should still have some notice of her referral. Again, no suggestion of cancer or any other terminal illness. No cremation certificate and no coroner’s inquest.’

  ‘So she could still be alive?’

  ‘I can run the usual missing person checks if you want, boss,’ said Duncan.

  ‘Yes, please.’

  ‘If Terri ran away because Owen was abusive,’ said Blake, ‘she’d have made damn sure no one could find her.’

  ‘And then what?’ Grace asked. ‘Rather than admit the truth, Owen made up the story that she’d died?’

  ‘Saving face, perhaps,’ Blake suggested. ‘Anyway, if you do manage to track her down, Duncan, then at least you can ask her to vouch for how many sons she has.’

  As Duncan went back to his desk, Grace turned to Blake. ‘Do you think Deborah believes her mother is dead?’

  ‘She said it was very quick. That makes for an easy story.’

  Grace stared out of the window, remembering how, when her father died, it had been necessary to produce a seemingly endless stream of paperwork in order to tie up his affairs. ‘Deborah was old enough to leave home soon afterwards,’ she said. ‘Old enough to grasp what was really going on if her mother did run away.’

  ‘Maybe she wanted to protect her,’ said Blake. ‘You saw the state Deborah was in at the funeral, the way she hid from her father. She was scared of him.’

  ‘So she might have accepted a convenient fiction to make sure her mother could stay safely lost.’ Grace thought of Deborah patting the angel brooch on her jacket, and then of the air freshener hanging in Owen Nixon’s taxi. Even though Deborah’s loyalty was to a family that had failed her, when pressed she had refused to speak out against them.

  ‘Why don’t we just ask her what she really thinks happened?’ he said.

  ‘Later,’ she said. ‘Right now, we’ve enough to get on with. All the same, I wish I understood a bit more about what kind of family we’re dealing with before we interview Larry.’

  ‘What makes a rapist, you mean?’ he asked. ‘Nature or nurture?’

  ‘Nurture?’ Grace echoed. ‘Not a word I’d readily apply to Owen Nixon.’

  50

  Welcome back to Stories from the Fire. I’m Freddie Craig, and in this episode I’m going to be looking into another murderous crime that took place twenty-five years ago in Southend.

  The circumstances of this crime may be distressing to some listeners, so please use your discretion.

  In the same month that Heather Bowyer met her death in Cliff Gardens, another young woman, sixteen-year-old April Irwin, was brutally beaten to death along with her unborn child. Officially, at least, this is not an unsolved crime. Forty-five-year-old Damon Smith was swiftly apprehended, convicted of her murder and sentenced to life imprisonment. However, from the moment of his arrest until his death in prison twelve years ago, he persisted in protesting his innocence.

  A new and unnamed source, someone who has never spoken before, has told me that Damon Smith may have been telling the truth.

  I’ve been talking to you recently about how a predator chooses his victim; about what makes a good victim. If you’re after vulnerability, someone unlikely to put up a fight or to be missed afterwards, then from what I’ve been able to discover so far about April Irwin, she was the perfect candidate. Shortly before her sixteenth birthday she ran away from home in Romford after repeated rows with her mother’s new boyfriend. She couch-surfed with friends for a few weeks until their patience ran out, and at some point arrived in Southend just as the summer season was getting underway. In a single phone call to her mum after she’d left, she said she’d found a job of sorts and somewhere to stay, but refused to say more. Her mother made no attempt to find her.

  A couple of months later April became pregnant. The police never discovered the identity of the father, but it wasn’t the man convicted of her murder, the man whose floor she’d been sleeping on for the previous four nights.

  She’d been punched in the face. Once she had fallen to the floor, she was kicked in the head and torso, breaking several of her ribs and causing internal damage. Her attacker then stamped repeatedly on her stomach. She was nearly five months pregnant. She had broken fingers on both hands as a result of trying to protect her unborn child. Later, one of the jurors at Damon Smith’s trial became so upset by the photographs of her injuries that he had to be excused.

  The story of Damon’s childhood and teenage years is strikingly similar. Perhaps that’s why he offered April sanctuary in his cramped bedsit. He came from a traveller family, but parted ways with his community after a falling-out. He never fitted in anywhere else and, functionally illiterate, drifted from hand-to-mouth jobs to burglary, theft and petty fraud. A probation officer, his only character witness at the trial, said he missed his close-knit family and would often make up for it by helping people he considered down on their luck.

  According to the account Damon gave at his trial, he came home after an afternoon in the pub to find April’s battered body on the floor of his rented room. He panicked and ran. He didn’t run far and it didn’t take the police long to pick him up. He was still wearing the same unwashed clothes stained with April’s blood from where, he said, he’d knelt beside her to check whether she was still breathing.

  He had no prior convictions for violence and no motive was ever put forward as to why he should have directed such violence towards April’s unborn child. They weren’t in any kind of relationship. Damon barely knew her and had merely offered her shelter because, he said, she’d been desperate.

  He maintained through thick and thin – police questioning, a trial and two attempts to mount an appeal against his conviction – that he’d spent that afternoon in the pub. His problem was that, when first interviewed by the police, he was a little hazy as to which pub and, when he did finally regain some clarity, was unable to name or describe the other handful of drinkers present. The barman insisted Damon had not been there that day.

  ‘When beggars die there are no comets seen, The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes’. I quoted those lines from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar when I first started talking to you. I never thought they’d come to carry such meaning, but, when I think about it, April and Damon were pretty much modern-day beggars. They certainly weren’t princes.

  My parents saw the fire on the night of my birth as a good omen. Now I’m not so sure. The more I investigate the events surrounding it, the more I see the inferno, the pall of black smoke and ash and the lingering smell as grim portents of the realities of life.

  The Marineland fire was not a sign of great things to come. They built a shopping mall on its ashes, now filled with cheap chain stores struggling to survive. The fire wasn’t a comet, it was a conflagration. If it celebrates anything, let it celebrate the death of beggars.

  April’s body – and presumably that of the baby she was carrying – was cremated. I could find no record of any memorial. Her mother applied for financial compensation for her daughter’s death under the criminal injuries scheme.

  Damon Smith died in prison of a previously undiagnosed cancer. He was fifty-eight and had been protesting his innocence for nearly thirteen years.

  I once heard a prison officer jeer that, to hear the inmates tell it, prisons are full of innocent men. Maybe Damon Smith was just another one of them, career criminals who declare ‘I never’ and give ‘No comment’ intervie
ws. But what if he wasn’t?

  If my birth on the night of the fire can do any good at all, then it is this: I want find out what really happened on the afternoon that April Irwin died. It’s of no use now to Damon for me to clear his name, but there are other people out there who know what happened, who have never told the truth, who may even be guilty.

  I want you to help me. If you’re out there and know anything about April Irwin, please get in touch via the website. Did you know her either before or during the few months she spent in Southend? Were you the father of her child? Do you have any ideas about who killed her, or why? Or were you one of the four other men in the pub with Damon that afternoon? If so, then talk to me. Walk down this road with me, be part of the journey. I’m Freddie Craig, and you’ve been listening to Stories from the Fire.

  51

  Larry Nixon looked up when Grace and Blake entered the interview room. ‘I was given to understand that coming here today to answer my bail would be just a formality,’ he said, ‘but they’ve taken my phone and only allowed me one call.’ He looked at his expensive watch. ‘Right now, I’m letting down important clients.’

  ‘I’m sorry about that, Mr Nixon,’ said Grace blandly, ‘but we do have important matters to discuss.’

  He smiled wearily, but said nothing. Although he had once more declined to have a solicitor present – Grace imagined he must believe this would somehow project his innocence more powerfully – she was certain he would have previously taken careful legal advice.

  ‘When we spoke to you last week,’ she began, ‘you gave us your account of your movements prior to the Marineland fire. We now have three witnesses whose statements differ significantly from yours.’

  He gave a soft laugh and shook his head. ‘From twenty-five years ago?’

  ‘The fire was a memorable event.’ Grace made a show of looking at her notes. ‘You told us that you approached the Marineland complex from the west, is that correct?’

  ‘So far as I remember, yes.’