“I suppose not,” Melanie agreed with a degree of hesitation in her voice.
“Listen, Melanie, we're not accusing you of anything. If Mark did have any secrets from you, it's hardly your fault is it? But if he was up to anything that wasn't strictly legal, it could have provided the motive for someone to have killed him, do you see?”
“He played poker,” Melanie just blurted out, without replying directly to Gable's question.
“Poker?” Gable asked. “Who with, and where and how often?”
“I honestly don't know,” Melanie sniffed as she began to cry, quietly. “He went out once, sometimes twice a week to meet his friends. He said they met at a pub in Crosby, I don't know the name. In the early days, I asked him who his friends were, but he just said they were some old school mates, and the only name I ever heard was one time when he answered the phone and he mentioned the name Johnny. I think that was probably one of his poker playing pals because once I overheard him say something about having a 'full house' next time. That's a poker term, isn't it?”
“Yes, it is,” Gable agreed, but thought it could also have been some kind of private code for something entirely different. “And you say you don't know the name of the pub where they met? You never heard any mention of the name, ever?”
“No, sorry, I've no idea.”
“Didn't you think it strange, Melanie, that your husband never told you where he was going or exactly who he'd be with?” Izzie Drake asked her. “What if there'd been some sort of emergency at home? How would you have been able to reach him? That really wasn't very thoughtful of him was it?”
Melanie Proctor's sobs had turned to serious tears now and Sam Gable reached across to the coffee table and passed the box of tissues that stood there to the weeping woman.
“Melanie, please be open with us. Nothing's going to bring him back is it? We need to know everything about Mark's life if we're to put a stop to these killings and find whoever did this to him. You don't really think he was playing poker do you?”
Sam Gable had spent three years working vice before joining Ross's team. She'd seen plenty of prostitutes who'd been subjected to vicious assaults and rape, and she couldn't help but feel a certain degree of empathy for Melanie Proctor. Somehow, the woman presented a similar vulnerability as those girls, trapped in a situation they had no control over, and having no one to turn to when things went bad.
Melanie slowly regained control of herself, and as she brought the tears to a halt, she looked up at Sam, and shook her head.
“I thought he was seeing someone else,” she said. “I loved him, but there was a too good to be true element about Mark. Do you know, he even went out on a Saturday morning to do the weekly shopping at the supermarket? I wanted to go with him but he always said I worked hard enough all week in the home and deserved to put my feet up for a couple of hours at the weekend. But he was gone too long. I would have done the shopping in about an hour at most, but he'd take at least two hours, sometimes longer. He'd joke about it if I asked him why he'd been so long and say he had a lousy sense of direction in supermarkets and ended up going down the same aisle time and again, and that he couldn't find certain things but he went every week so he should have known where most things were shouldn't he?”
Izzie understood the woman now. She must have spent years in denial, suspecting her husband of having an affair but believing excuse after excuse from him because she didn't want to believe him capable of such a thing. In fact, Izzie was now fairly certain he'd been guilty of so much more then marital infidelity.
“Listen, Melanie, I can't go into details with you at this time, but we don't believe Mark was having an affair.”
The woman looked at Izzie Drake, and as their eyes met and locked, realisation dawned on Melanie Proctor.
“You think he did something bad, Sergeant Drake, don't you?
What is it you think he did when he was supposed to be playing poker with his mates?”
“I'm sorry, I'm not at liberty to tell you, as I said earlier, but we do need to find his killers and you can help by telling us everything you can about Mark, right back to the time you first met him.”
Melanie had passed the point of no return. Her desire to protect the outward appearance of a happy marriage and a loving husband crumbled to nothing as she took another tissue from the box, blew her nose and placed the crumpled tissue in the pocket of her jeans, and with a steel-like resolve said,
“Tell me what you want to know.”
Chapter 27
Under the influence
Gerald Byrne looked slightly incongruous as Ross greeted him in his office. Having agreed to the suggestion by Christine Bland, he was dressed casually, as she'd suggested, in a simple t-shirt emblazoned with the words, Jesus Loves You in bright red against a black background, a pair of blue denim jeans and black trainers that made him look anything but a Catholic priest. Ross led him to the office of D.C.I. Porteous, who had given up the use of his own inner sanctum when Bland had expressed a need for somewhere private and relatively comfortable in which to carry out the session. The profiler had asked that she be allowed a few minutes in private to prepare Byrne and to 'put him under' and Ross reluctantly agreed to wait outside the door, having wanted to see exactly how Bland achieved the act of hypnotising her subject.
“You can come in now, Inspector,” she said as she opened the door ten minutes after she and Byrne had disappeared into Porteous's office. Ross found what followed engrossing. Unlike various TV dramatisations, Gerald Byrne didn't regress to talking in a childish voice or give any outward indication he was under hypnosis at all. However, what he revealed was illuminating to the detective. First of all, Christine Bland asked him to recall his days as a junior in the Lower School at Speke Hill. Most of the information that came from the priest was routine and irrelevant but certain passages of his memories struck a chord with Andy Ross.
“Nineteen sixty-four? Oh yes, the year of the Moors Murders, Hindley and Brady. We were being constantly reminded of the dangers to children at morning assembly in school and during services in the chapel. At first the children were reported as missing and the bodies weren't found until later, upon Saddleworth Moor.
Father Mullaney was especially concerned that those children who were allowed out of the grounds to go to the local shops or on Saturday trips to town were chaperoned at all times. There were always a couple of adults, usually priests or nuns to accompany the children, but if a couple of kids wanted to visit a store to buy something with their pocket money, well, the adults couldn't be everywhere at once, so it was made a new rule that we could only be apart from the grown-ups for a maximum of twenty minutes and there had to be at least four children together, two Uppers and two Lowers, so that the older boys or girls could take care of the young ones. That was around the time poor Keith Bennett went missing. Of course, nobody knew he was a victim of Hindley and Brady until they confessed to his killing in the nineteen eighties. The poor boy's body has never been found, you know, even after so many years.”
“Do you remember Matthew Remington and Mark Proctor being together on any of those trips to town, Gerald?”
“Oh yes, they were usually together from when we got off the bus until we returned to Speke Hill.”
“And they had two older boys with them if they went off on their own, away from the adult staff?”
“Yes, that's right.”
“The older boys, Gerald, do you remember their names?”
“No, sorry, I don't.”
Damn, Ross thought. He now had an idea that the two boys who took Remington and Proctor under their protection all those years ago could well be the two senior members of whatever weird, perverted association that eventually led to them eventually becoming serial rapists, if his theory held up.
Christine Bland, however, carried on, unfazed by Byrne's inability at this stage to identify the two elder boys.
“Tell me about Angela, Gerald. How did she feel about the awful case
of the missing children?”
“Angela was three years older than me, of course so she probably understood a lot more than me about it. She didn't say much about it, as far as I remember, except to say that the children who'd gone missing were all from around Manchester and she didn't think we were in real danger in Liverpool. I remember the two of us going into a record shop, with two older girls. Angela bought Have I The Right by the Honeycombs. They were her favourite group at the time. She loved the fact they had a girl drummer and said one day she wanted to be just like Honey Lantree and play the drums in a pop group. It was just a childish dream, of course. I think I wanted to be like Billy J Kramer when I was seven years old. The girls in Angela's dorm had saved their pocket money for ages and clubbed together to buy a second-hand Dansette record player at the market in town. Sister Thomasina was the nun in charge of their dorm and was a dab hand at fixing things, and she made sure the record player worked properly for the girls. Anyway, a loft of the older boys were jealous because at that time, I think only one of the Upper boy's dorms had a record player, so sometimes, in the evening, a group of boys could be seen gathered on the grass outside Angela's dorm. The girls would place the record player as near to an open window as they could, and play the latest records for the boys to listen to. Funny really, when you think about it, all those lads jigging about on the grass and the girls dancing to the music inside the dorm.”
“And did Angela ever have any problems with the boys at that time, Gerald? You know, did she ever tell you about any of them bothering her or making unwanted suggestions to her about doing things she knew were wrong or indecent?”
“No.”
“So, you never heard Angela screaming in the night, or found her being pinned down on the grass by Matthew Remington, Plug you called him, and Mark Proctor?”
“Oh no, nothing like that.”
Convinced by now that nothing untoward had taken place in the time frame suggested by Byrne's nightmare, he used hand signals to indicate to Christine Bland, urging her to move forward in time. She now asked Byrne to fast forward to his teenage years. She asked him the same question regarding any form of assault on Angela.
This time, the answer varied slightly.
“Nothing ever happened to Angela, no.”
Something in those words alerted both Bland and Ross's
instincts. Both profiler and detective knew from the way Gerald Byrne spoke of nothing happening to Angela, that he was in effect saying 'but' as though somewhere in his mind lurked a memory of an incident relating to another girl, one that had become subconsciously entangled in his mind along with other recollections of his sister to form the basis for his current nightmares.
“Did something bad happen to another girl, Gerald? One of Angela's friends perhaps? Try and think. Let your mind take you back, you saw something, didn't you, or maybe it was Angela who saw it and told you, her little brother, all about it?”
Christine Bland waited, as the priest drifted away once again on a tide of buried memories, and all she, and Andy Ross could do, was wait to see where, and at what point in time Byrne's mental rewind stopped. Gerald's breathing intensified for a few seconds and then very slowly returned to what appeared to be a normal rhythm. His eyes, previously cast downwards, now shone brightly as he appeared to be focussing on something, an event from the past?
“What is it Gerald? Where are you? What do you see?”
Without hesitation, Byrne replied to Christine Bland's questions.
“I was walking across to the girl's dormitories. I'd arranged to meet Angela after tea, just to go for a walk around the grounds. We often did that, so we could talk in peace and privacy. Before I got there, where Angela would be waiting outside as usual, Father Rooney called to me from the doorway to the Admin block as I passed it.”
“Okay Gerald, that's good. Describe what happened next. How old were you at this time?”
“Not sure, but I remember we all loved a song that was in the charts that year. It was called Nobody's Child and was about a blind orphan boy who nobody wanted to adopt. All us kids thought it was kind of like us being stuck here in Speke Hill. I must have been about twelve, thirteen perhaps. There was another song I liked, Bad Moon Rising.”
Ross knew that one. Creedence Clearwater Revival was one of his favourite groups from the sixties, having discovered them much later, when he was in his own teens, having heard the song when it was featured during a very scary werewolf transformation scene in the film American Werewolf in London. It would be easy to pinpoint the exact year Byrne was talking about as long as he was talking about the time both songs were current in the U.K charts.
“Alright, Gerald. So, Father Rooney called to you. What happened next?”
Now it was as though Byrne had slipped through a time warp in to the past as he relived the next few minutes of his youth.
* * *
“Gerald Byrne, please, wait a moment,” the voice of Father Rooney halted the young Gerald in his tracks. He turned to see the priest calling to him from the Administration Building.
“Hello Father,” he called in return.
Father Rooney walked down the three shallow steps from the building entrance to the path and approached Byrne who waited for the priest to catch him up.
Slightly out of breath, Father Rooney smiled as he stopped in front of the young lad.
“Thanks for waiting, Gerald,” he said. “How would you like to earn yourself a shilling?”
“A shilling, Father? All for me?”
“All for you, Gerald, and just for doing me a small favour.”
“Okay, Father. What do I have to do?”
“Nothing arduous young Gerald. I collected the first fifteen rugby kits from the laundry today and dropped them off at the pavilion, ready for tomorrow's match with The Blue Coat School. I've a meeting to go to later and I just realised I must have left my motorcycle gauntlets in the pavilion. I have some important marking to do and can't spare the time to run down there right now. Would you be a good boy and run down and get them for me and bring them back here?”
“I was just going to meet my sister, Father.”
“That's alright, go and meet her and she can keep you company. Tell her there's sixpence in it for her too. That won't interrupt your plans too much will it?”
“Oh no, Father. We just meet and go for walks around the grounds some evenings, that's all. We can easily go down to the sports field and the pavilion to get your gloves.”
Rooney smiled.
“Gauntlets, Gerald. They're called gauntlets. You know what they look like, don't you?”
“I think so, Father, big black things with like, kind of flap things that stick out and cover your wrists when you're riding your motor bike?”
“Yes, I suppose that's a decent enough description, young Gerald. At least you know what you're looking for. They should be in the changing room where I unpacked the clean shirts and hung them up on the team hooks ready for the tomorrow. Here's the key to the pavilion.” Father Rooney tossed the key to young Gerry Byrne who deftly caught it in his right hand.
“Okay, Father,” Byrne said to the motorcycling priest, probably his favourite among the ecclesiastical members of staff at Speke Hill. Father Rooney, probably because of his love of motorcycling, seemed more 'with it' than the other priests and nuns, Gerald thought.
Leaving Father Rooney to return to his marking, Byrne skipped off happily to meet Angela who was waiting patiently outside her dormitory building, one of two large buildings allocated to the girls of Speke Hill. She was sitting on the grass, her knees tucked beneath her as she waited, a small book in her hand.
“What kept you?” she asked as Gerald arrived, slightly breathless from running the last few yards.
“Father Rooney,” he replied, and explained Rooney's request to his sister.
“Okay, come on then,” said Angela, holding a hand up so her brother could help her to her feet.”
“What's the book?” Byrne
asked his sister as they walked.
She handed it to him.
“The Observer's Book of Birds,” he read from the cover.
“I borrowed it from Maggie Miller,” Angela said. “I love birds, Gerry, and thought it might be nice if I could identify them when I see them. We might see some down on the sports field, looking for worms and things.”
“But we only get sparrows and blackbirds round here, Angie.”
“Don't be daft. I've seen greenfinches, robins and lots of birds I don't know the names of.”
“Oh well, if it makes you happy, that's okay.”
It was quite a walk from the accommodation block to the far side of the sports field, where the grandly named 'pavilion' stood. It was a small, wooden building, with two cramped changing rooms for opposing teams, whether it be for cricket, football, rugby or whatever, and a small central area where a small refreshment table could be set up when entertaining visiting teams from other schools as would be the case the following day. Though the school had considered installing showers for the players the cost of installing the necessary plumbing had been prohibitive and so the pavilion retained a rather dated air, with its overhanging roof that provided cover over the small raised outside wooden terrace and steps that led down to the field.
As brother and sister drew closer, Angela suddenly spotted a flurry of avian activity in the bushes that formed the border between the playing field and the adjoining field belonging to a local farmer and currently lying fallow.
“Oh, Gerry, look,” she enthused. “Maybe there are some birds I haven't seen before. Do you mind if I go and creep up quietly and see what they are while you go in and get the Father's things?”
“Go ahead, Angie,” Byrne replied. “I'll only be a minute though, so don't go far.”
“Okay, I'm only going over there,” she pointed.
“Angela quickly skipped away, book in hand, and Gerry Byrne strode up the steps, unlocked the door and entered the pavilion. He moved automatically into the changing room to the left, knowing it was used as the 'home' changing room. Sure enough, as soon as he walked in he saw Father Rooney's gauntlets where he'd left them on one of the wooden bench seats that ran along the wall under the hooks that held each freshly ironed rugby kit, ready for the Upper's big match the next day.
All Saints- Murder on the Mersey Page 24