by Claire Askew
She leaned back against the haphazard pillows, and closed her eyes. Her mind raced for an answer, but there wasn’t one. There was only Ryan’s school portrait face, hanging in the dark: the streak of his white shirt collar, and the black hole of his scowl.
21 May, 6.25 p.m.
Birch got back from her final briefing of the day in time to catch the end of the six o’clock Three Rivers news coverage. She’d finished up the meeting by grovelling to her team about how late she’d kept them. One week on from the shooting, and the workload wasn’t slowing – in fact, the workload was a literal pile of paper she’d had to slide her forearms under like a forklift and wedge beneath her chin. The team had largely given up on email: everyone’s inboxes were too clogged to make sense of, and things were being missed. Therefore, a new system: priority intelligence and updates were printed. Sensitive information was marked in red. The result was Birch staggering back to her office with a metric ton of paperwork, red ink on the cover of every cardboard file. So much for our paperless workplace targets, she thought. The stack of briefing documents landed on her desk with a thud, like a body hitting the ground. It immediately tilted and slid, its top layer spilling. Birch kicked the door shut behind her, and swore.
Now, on her tablet screen, the six o’clock news. She wished they’d stop running that same photo of Ryan Summers. It had been badly cropped – on one side, part of his ear was sliced off – and because of the crop his face seemed too close, filling too much of the screen. Sullen, Birch thought he looked. Not evil, just mildly pissed off and bored. He looked like the sort of kid who couldn’t bear to be bored. Or did she just think that because she’d read his profile?
She looked at it now, sitting at her feet, where it had skidded to the floor. It had been updated by Marcello and John, by Amy, and by various other members of the team who’d added notes and memos since she’d last looked at it. The front of the flimsy card file was stamped and re-stamped with the red ink denoting sensitive.
‘In other news,’ the voice inside her tablet said, and Birch flicked the screen off. She laid the tablet gingerly on the desk, watching the precarious stack of briefing files as she did so. It was an absolute pit in here. She’d never had her own office before – at Gayfield Square she’d worked in the open-plan bullpen with everyone else. Sure, her desk had never been the tidiest in the place, but she hadn’t realised until now the extent to which her former colleagues’ watchful eyes had kept her from sliding into the inevitable chaos that now surrounded her. Birch was glad that one-to-one style meetings had largely been abandoned with this investigation: it was much more efficient to get as many people into a room at once and put as much new information in front of them as you possibly could. Her only truly private interactions at the moment were with McLeod, and he preferred to have those in the comfort of his own office. It was, needless to say, much larger than hers, and also immaculate.
Birch stood looking at the slithered files at her feet; at the collapsed pile on the desk; at her overflowing in-tray, and at the lever-arches piled up on her swivel chair. Under the desk, the bin spewed brown-stained canteen paper cups.
‘Fuck,’ she said aloud, as she pushed her forearms under the remaining stack of paper once more, and huffed it backwards so it crashed against her ribcage, and she was able to lift it. She let herself half fold, half fall into a cross-legged position on the floor. Then she laid the stack down in front of her, and repositioned the already-spilled layer back on the top. The result resembled a ragged Jenga tower: one thousand paper-cuts waiting to happen. The pile was nearly as tall as Birch now that she was sitting with it – she stared it down like a chess opponent, like it might play some dirty move on her.
‘Fuck,’ she said again, this time with less fight.
This is your investigation, she thought. This. Looking at you. For a moment, she experienced what felt like the spins, as if she’d been out drinking all day. The sensation came over her whenever she thought too much about the big picture – whenever she or one of her officers got too near to the question, ‘What the hell are we doing?’ Because there was no way to ‘solve’ a crime like this: there was no logical end-point, no closure to be found. When Ryan Summers discharged his last round, he’d frozen time: he’d forever be the bad guy that no one could bring in. The girls he’d killed would forever be tragic victims: rain-spattered photographs pinned to bouquets at some vigil somewhere. Liz Gill would forever be the fallen martyr, Kerry McNaughton forever the brave girl who helped her classmates and died for her trouble. Abigail Hodgekiss: forever the first to die. Chantal Walker: forever the last.
Nothing, Birch thought. That’s what the hell we’re doing. Nothing whatsoever of use. Any ‘end’ this investigation had would be purely bureaucratic: it would end when every last bit of paper had been filed away. When every last fact had been accounted for, when she and her colleagues knew literally all that they could know, then it would be done. There was no justice in that, she knew that only too well from Charlie’s case: her brother, the invisible man. When you can’t find the missing person, all you can do is file the report. When you can’t bring the shooter to justice, all you can do is obsess over his every move until you’ve got a timeline that’s to-the-minute precise. And McLeod was probably right: then there’d be an inquiry, the IPCC, coroners upon coroners, lawyers upon lawyers, the press – it could go on for years. But it still won’t help, she thought. There was nothing in this stack of paper that could bring anyone back from the dead, no matter how it was picked through. No matter how efficiently filed.
She closed her eyes. In the blackness, the image of the briefing stack still floated, taunting her. It was knocking seven. She could be here all night. McLeod had gone home nearly three hours ago.
‘Come on now, Helen,’ she said, aloud. Her first attempt to re-open her eyes seemed to fail, so she pushed out a short, hard breath and said, ‘Okay.’
When her gaze focused, Ryan Summers’ profile was still on top of the pile. She lifted it carefully: the file wasn’t entirely bound, and it had some heft. She laid it in her lap and flicked the cover. Paperclipped to the inside, that same photograph: Summers in his school tie, looking bored.
In the margin, Marcello and John had stuck their Post-its – standard dusky yellow for John, and lime green for Marcello – showing her where the newly added information was. She found the first green one and stuck her finger into the sheaf, flipping straight to Marcello’s intelligence.
Newly gathered eyewitness statements, the Post-it read. The handwriting was flamboyant and looped, but small. Section one: believed credible. Section two: credibility unclear. Section three: confirmed false. Scribbled at the top of the first printed page, in that same swooping hand: statements marked with an asterisk were gathered via the Crimestoppers helpline.
Birch looked at section one. It was by far the slimmest of the three – in fact, there were only two parts. She sighed: only two credible witnesses. She skimmed through Marcello’s introductory flourishes to get to the good bit of the first – it was dated ‘early April’, as the witness could not remember the date.
Eyewitness describes seeing a twenty-something male subject, approximately 6’2”, dark hair, and wearing a light grey hoodie.
Subject witnessed walking from Niddrie Mains Road onto waste ground [eyewitness referred to, quoting, ‘the scrub by the railway tracks’] between Craigmillar and Niddrie.
Eyewitness describes seeing the subject setting up targets (likely cans or bottles) and discharging two small firearms.
Eyewitness claims he was not alarmed at the time: this area is a popular site for [quoting] ‘kids with air rifles and stuff’.
Birch scribbled a note in the margin and looked at it, wondering if she’d be able to read her own handwriting later. Then she read on, to the second eyewitness statement, which was only a few sentences. This one was dated 21 April.
Eyewitness was cycling east on the Innocent Cycle Path in the area between Duddingston Golf Course
and Niddrie Mains Terrace.
Eyewitness describes hearing distant popping sounds, like cars backfiring.
Eyewitness describes seeing a tall man in light clothing moving around in undergrowth off the cycle path.
Section two was uninspiring – Birch knew that the words credibility unclear really meant, this might have been a Ryan Summers sighting, but we can’t tell and will probably never know. There was a well-known perp who’d come forward to say he’d sold modified ammunition to a tall young man with dark hair. Birch’s heart leapt, though she suspected – as Marcello obviously did, too – that this might be a fabrication. The gent in question was fairly desperate to get put back in jail, where he’d have three meals a day and access to all his old brethren. Recidivism, it was called – guys that were referred to as ‘HOs’, habitual offenders. More out of forlorn hope than anything, Birch underlined the old perp’s statement, and drew an arrow in the margin suggesting it be moved from section two to section one. FOLLOW UP, she wrote, next to the arrow. She’d give anything to find out where Summers got his ammunition from – it was a hole in that timeline she was building, and it was bothering her.
Section three was several pages long, and it was where the nutters and time-wasters lived. There were people who claimed they’d seen Summers walking around, alive, in the days since the shooting. There were calls to say he was innocent, he was framed – I know who did it, or I know it wasn’t him because it was me, I’m the real Three Rivers gunman. There were plenty of calls from people with feverish theories about Moira Summers’ involvement in her son’s activities: fabricated witness statements putting Moira at the scene; casting Moira in the role of criminal mastermind, and Ryan as her helpless dupe. Birch could see from some of the wording that Marcello had quite enjoyed summarising the various weird and wonderful statements taken from walk-ins or from the Crimestoppers line. The eyewitness was really quite insistent, he’d written in one summary, that the young man in her dream was indeed Ryan Summers. Birch tried to raise a smile, but she struggled with this sort of stuff. Not only because it was a waste of police time – how long had it taken to transcribe all those Crimestoppers calls? – but also because it felt intensely personal. After Charlie’s initial disappearance, Birch and her mother had worked with the Missing Persons Helpline; they’d made posters and a website; Birch had driven to Glasgow, Dundee and Aberdeen to staple the posters to flagpoles and hand out flyers. She’d emailed the posters to friends in London to print out and put up anywhere they thought might help. At first, the calls they got were mainly from old friends of Charlie’s who hadn’t realised he was missing, and who were concerned. Reaching out. But then Lockley had got involved, and suddenly Charlie was in the papers. People started calling. Emailing. So many people that Birch began driving round and taking the posters down again. People called saying they knew where Charlie was, demanding a financial reward. People called to say Charlie was dead. The worst were the people who called and emailed pretending to be Charlie. Birch’s mother had been taken in a couple of times – trusting that surely, no one would do that out of malice. But they did. They had. As far as Birch knew, none of the correspondence that came through post-Lockley was genuine.
She was too annoyed to read the whole list, so she flipped through to the next Post-it: a yellow one, which read statements from known associates – newly added. Birch was familiar with this section of the file: it contained summaries of Moira Summers’ remarks about her son, taken from her various interviews over the past week. The slightly rambling audio transcript she’d given to Gibbie on the day of the shooting had been reduced to little more than bullet points: I cleaned Ryan’s room. I did not find anything suspicious there. I heard the first radio report about the shooting. Now, statements had been added from a handful of Three Rivers College staff, and she skimmed through them.
In practical elements, extremely adept, one read – Ryan’s mechanical engineering tutor. Ryan had an exceptionally keen understanding of how things worked and his practical assessments were always marked very high. I knew he was a bit of an inventor and he mentioned to me that he had a kind of workshop at home, where he made things. Outside of the practical, Ryan struggled a little. His academic work put him in the lower half of the class. He hated essay writing. I have long suspected Ryan was dyslexic. Myself and another colleague both referred him for a dyslexia test but he did not attend.
Birch turned the page. Next, a statement from one Mr Welsh: the introductory line told her he worked as a support tutor, and oversaw the Three Rivers Student Union.
Ryan was the TRSU rep for his engineering class. He attended union meetings reasonably regularly. He’d been a member of the TRSU for about six months. Ryan was a quiet presence, and would usually only join in discussions when prompted. But he was a functioning member of the group and I had no concerns about him. He never spoke to me about anything relating to violence of any kind and he never appeared to be unpleasant or antisocial towards his peers. I might have described him as a little withdrawn. Ryan did not enjoy reading and writing, taking minutes at meetings, for example, but he liked practical tasks. Ryan was a student I had been hoping to get to know better. It was my hope that I could bring him out of his shell.
Birch yawned. There was so little here, so little to be done. She knew that a large sub-section of the general public was desperate for some concrete reason why Ryan Summers had done the things that he did, some extreme characteristic or habit or historical detail. Something they could point to and say, ‘See, that’s why – he wasn’t like the rest of us, he was an outlier.’ And Birch knew full well that that wasn’t how things worked, but she realised that some small part of her was looking for it, too. If Ryan Summers really was just a bit of a shy kid who liked tinkering with things and happened to be very skilled at it – well, how many kids out there could that potentially be true of? If there was no definite why, that meant that the Three Rivers shooting simply came about because one seemingly ordinary young man found himself at the intersection of a very specific set of circumstances. That idea, that under the right circumstances, anyone is capable of this was terrifying. As much as she hated it, Birch understood why Lockley’s readers were so desperate for him to uncover something.
Maybe that something was here: Birch thumbed the pages until she came to John’s next yellow Post-it, which read, simply theobviouschild. Here was a copy/paste of all of this user’s posts from a partly buried sub-section of a fairly well-known MRA forum. For full threads, John had written at the top, with datestamps and replies from other users, see email. Birch sent up a silent prayer at John’s good sense in not printing out the entire shooting match. Marcello had shown no such restraint with the obviously fake witness statements.
theobviouschild: You lot always on here whining about feminists. You are always saying there needs to be a reckoning. So who’s going to do something then? Anyone here man enough to actually follow through on yr posturing?
John had typed in: [JS note: theobviouschild was not the original poster (OP) but replying to a post by username Cuck_Norris. theobviouschild’s reply was the sixth in the thread.] Birch read on.
theobviouschild: Even Elliot Rodger killed more men than women. He called it a retribution but he failed. Someone needs to actually do something.
[JS note: at this point theobviouschild goes quiet for several days, but these two comments attract replies from 17 different users, mostly goading him and asking what he plans to do himself.]
theobviouschild: I’m going to actually do it, is what I’m going to do. I am a college student. I am surrounded by women my age every day and I am invisible to them. I have been invisible since I was a kid. I am going to step out of the shadows and make them all remember me.
theobviouschild: I have access to three guns and I am going to use them. I am going to shoot as many of them as can’t run away. I’m going to count my rounds and when there is only one left I will put it in my head. Otherwise every round has a female name on it.
[JS note: with the above reply the thread became extremely busy. theobviouschild’s plan prompted a flurry of over one hundred replies, with some users goading him to do it, many doubting that he would, and some trying to talk him down.]
theobviouschild: Those of you saying I can’t can fuck off. I am an excellent shot and I’ve been training and practising for this event. I made these guns and I know them well and I know what they can do. I know everything about the building and I will work out a route through for maximum opportunity to shoot without being stopped. I won’t be stopped. Just wait.
Birch let her eyes drift down through the comments. There seemed to be a general pattern of call and response: theobviouschild stating his intentions – which, though horrifying, were maddeningly vague – and other users doubting his ability to follow through. According to John, the thread had gone back and forth in this way for several weeks, with theobviouschild posting only intermittently, and with each of his posts being left to accrue hundreds of replies in his absence.
Birch read and re-read the posts until her vision swam. Sticking her index finger in the file to mark her place, she flicked back to the paperclipped photo in the front of the file. She looked at the boy – and to her, he looked very much a boy, rather than a man – in the school jumper, wearing his petulant face. Though she knew that many people would be keen to, she couldn’t quite match that face to the frightening words that theobviouschild had posted; couldn’t quite convince herself that they were one and the same.
‘What were you thinking, Ryan?’ she said, aloud, to the boy in the photo. ‘I know it was in some way about women, but . . . seriously, what were you thinking?’
Birch listened for a while to the quiet that answered her. Then she gave herself a small shake. No, she thought. You don’t know it was about women. None of us knows anything yet. She didn’t want to get like McLeod, who’d said to her earlier, ‘I blame these violent video games,’ and she’d had to stifle a smile, because he sounded like someone’s gran. And she certainly didn’t want to get like Lockley. She remembered him in the college corridor the evening that he’d broken in, reeling off his theories.