by Rod Madocks
It happened again two weeks later when another schoolgirl was seized at a bus stop and again an attempt was made to drag her into bushes, but a passer-by shouted a warning and the attacker ran off. More seriously, a few days later an older woman, returning home from the Green Shield shop in town, was grabbed again at a bus stop, her shopping bags dropping and spilling in the path as she was suddenly pulled with a fierce grip on her wrist. A thudding punch to the ribs left her winded and unable to call out. Off-balance and gasping, she tumbled into the lilacs of a civic shrubbery as the attacker, a dark shadow against the sun, crouched above her, clawing at her breasts and under her skirt with sharp-nailed hands. For a while she parried and pushed away his lunging grabs and he would shake her grip off with a twist of his wrist. She rolled out onto a path that went through the shrubby lilacs and he tried to pull her back. She turned onto her belly and reached out, seized a bundle of low branches and hung on as he pulled at her ankles to drag her back in the shadows. She found the voice at last to start screaming. He knelt on her back for a moment then she felt the weight go off and he was away, running, feet slapping in panic flight.
He was caught, of course, so distinctive and alien in this small town. Perhaps one of his schoolmates had responded to his description or neighbours became alarmed by his stare. Anyway, someone called the police after an account of the offences and a photofit, a wraith of Heinie’s image, appeared in the local gazette.
He was arrested and his father went with him to the station. Heinie quickly confessed and was charged with indecent assault and went before the magistracy. He received probation in those liberal, oddly innocent times and no one recognised the malevolent potential of the young man. Ada spoke of her shock and alluded covertly to the resulting pressure from the Witnessing society. Heinie was brought to the elders after his court appearance to be reproved by the judicial committee. Ada also spoke of the shame and her incomprehension of his behaviour. Heinie had few explanations; he began to blame being led on by lads, being shown dirty magazines by the garage apprentices. Oskar Grau’s suffering was great as he felt the disgrace keenly and perhaps he feared persecution in the community. Heinie was contrite and made promises. He was driven once a week by his father to see Mr Singleton, the probation officer in his Durham office. Singleton’s reports survive in the files, in the fading violet typescript of flimsy letter copies, fundamentally a young man with maturational problems … some strange ideas … a supportive family. Mr Singleton arranged for Heinie to start a gardening job in the council-run pleasure grounds that skirted The Castle, a Victorian hulk of a building on the outskirts of town. Heinie went to work there, raking leaves, clearing moss, going through a simulacrum of working as a park keeper but alive and alone with the thoughts in his head.
Heinie worked there through the winter and into the spring of 1974, dropped off each day by his father who called for him again in the evening. His supervisor also kept an eye on him and his hours were strictly regulated, although as spring swelled so did Heinie’s appetite and rage. Margaret Maywood had returned to the town the previous year having been reproved for her unchastity in running away with a young man, but she had been accepted back into the Witnessing community. She had given birth to baby Elisabeth and had stayed with her parents for a while. Showing a streak of independence, she had newly set herself up in a ground floor flat in a rented house at 19 Poulson Street. Heinie had gone to the same school as her and sometimes saw her in the evenings at Ministry School when texts were discussed and there were readings. She sometimes took baby Elisabeth with her and the congregation were helping her settle into her new flat. The Witnesses were good with things like that.
And so, one day Heinie pestered Margaret to let him help her with moving furniture to her new place and bringing down household items stored in the annexe to Kingdom Hall. Apparently Margaret reluctantly agreed saying, “Yes, tomorrow night after Book Study at the Hall.” Heinie waited through that next day, a Tuesday, filled with blindingly simple desire then in the early evening he loitered in the street outside her place. I also stood at No 19, a few hundred yards from Kingdom Hall and behind the backyard of The Lambton Worm pub, from where I could hear bottle crates being stacked. I imagined Heinie there waiting, perhaps shrinking from the footsteps of passers-by and hearing the music and voices and clatter from the pub. Now, as I looked at Margaret’s house in the blank daylight, it seemed much as it would have been in 1974, with its worn, red brick frontage, sparrows rustling in the gutters and a single path leading to the front door. Heinie had walked up this path for his appointment, a knife tucked in his waistband, his hand reaching for the brass, crescent-shaped door knocker.
As to what happened then, we can surmise some things and we know the basic facts. Margaret let him in, babe in arms. He had brought the knife to subdue, not wanting another struggle as with the woman in the shrubbery. Perhaps a deluded part of him believed that he could possess this fallen woman, this unchaste one and that she would gladly give herself to him. What we do know is at one stage she got on her knees to pray because Heinie told the police that she did. But I wondered if when confronted by the raging, desperate Heinie, she had attempted to get him to pray with her to ask for help for himself. Heinie began to slash at her as she knelt, filled with anger and disappointment that he could not penetrate her any other way, not even Margaret the fallen one, tainted by Babylon. Seven wounds were recorded, at least one entering the chest and into the lung. Baby Elisabeth slipped from her mother’s arms and fell to the floor receiving minor injuries. Somehow Margaret got away, opened the front door and fell onto the path in the front garden. Neighbours found her crawling about on the narrow grass lawn.
Heinie remained inside the house for a minute as Margaret was pulled away. She could still speak and warned the neighbours about Heinie. As an ambulance was called, he fled by the back door, leaving baby Elisabeth crying on the bloodspattered hallway floor. He ran away towards the Castle. He crossed the bridge over the Wear, cast the knife into the dark water curling over the stones below, then hid in the undergrowth that surrounded the large building. At some stage he must have heard the ambulance siren wailing down the valley, taking Margaret to Dryburn Hospital in Durham.
In Casualty it was found that Margaret had acute blood loss of fifty per cent, and her haemoglobin levels were critical. Staff set up a plasma rig and they approached her for blood typing. She had remained conscious and firmly told staff that she was a Witness and would receive no blood and no plasma. At that time, faced with acute sudden blood loss, there was little else you could do apart from use a saline drip. It was then not possible to haemodilute or use gelatine solution to increase volume or inspired oxygen concentrations to raise haemoglobin. They hooked her up on saline but it was not enough, as she continued to leak blood from internal injuries. The nurses pleaded with her but in study class the text Genesis IX.3 was well known to her, “Only ye shall not eat flesh with its life that is, its blood. For your lifeblood I will surely require a reckoning; of every beast I will require it and of man.”
The Senior House Officer argued with her and rang the Registrar asking if he could treat her under Common Law but no, although pale, sweaty and fading Margaret knew her own mind. It is recorded that she was clearly told that she was going to die unless she accepted blood and she understood that but she held fast to the last. Despite her sins the Witnesses had taken her back and she clung to that loyalty. Margaret, alone in Casualty on that May night, stood by the promise in Acts of the Apostles so often gone over in Book Study evenings, Chapter XV. Verse 28 where St Paul instructed, “that you abstain from that which is sacrificed to idols and from blood and from what is strangled and from unchastity. If you keep yourself from these, you will do well, farewell.”
Farewell indeed Margaret. She died within the hour.
News reached the Graus quickly that night. Heinie had been seen talking to Margaret and she had named him while waiting for the ambulance. Their world crumbling, they waited with
a police car outside their door until acting on a hunch, at midnight Oskar went with the police to the Castle grounds on Lumley Hill and they cruised the sweeping park roads until they saw Heinie huddled under some lime trees. Heinie listlessly allowed himself to be delivered to the brightly-lit interrogation rooms in the police station where suddenly eager to please, he confessed readily saying that he wanted sex from Margaret but not to harm her, saying that he had struck out at her in a panic. He was charged with murder, later emended to manslaughter, and remanded to Durham prison.
The Witnesses reeled under the publicity but comforted each other as best they could. Margaret was buried and baby Elisabeth cared for by her grandparents. Heinie was not thought mad by the court. His father attended the trial but Ada could not bear to see her son in the dock. He wore the same Sunday suit that he had put on for delivering a talk at Kingdom Hall five months previously. The defence plea was not guilty in that there was a new intervening act, novus actus interveniones, between the wounding and the death, namely Margaret’s refusal to take blood, hence bringing about her own death. The plea brought forth a judgement that would stand in criminal law, Regina versus Grau. It has been taught to generations of lawyers ever since. The judgement holds to the principle that you take your victim as you find them. This meant that in making Margaret his victim Heinie took on not just the physical woman but her religious beliefs also. This principle in law is also called the “thin skull rule”, whereby a light blow administered to the head which kills a thin-skulled victim still results in a death accountable in law. Heinie’s action led to a chain of causation and that made him guilty of the killing. Heinie was found guilty and sentenced to life. He went to prison and quickly deteriorated. He heard voices, felt persecuted by demons and was transferred to the hospital. The Witnesses closed ranks. The Graus continued to worship alongside Margaret’s parents. Heinie was formally disfellowshipped from the Witnesses, irrevocably cast out from the company of the saved. Oskar’s health deteriorated with cardiac problems, aggravated by stress and worry and he was dead within ten years. Heinie retreated into madness and remained sealed in the hospital. Baby Elisabeth grew up in the Witnessing tradition, married and eventually moved away.
On my way out of town, I stood on Lumley Hill below the Castle that had now been turned into a hotel with a sign saying “Private Road — Residents Only”. I walked under the limes thinking of Heinie’s last night there, whispering to himself, “der ist, der ist” and I looked out over to the huddled town to the east, circled by the glinting river.
That night, driving back, following the stream of tail lights on the motorway, I turned over all the reasons that could be given for what had happened. It was not just the schizophrenia burning in Heinie’s brain, nor the family’s alienation from the community, nor yet the obduracy of the Witnesses conflicting with the turbulent zeitgeist. Nor could it be only Heinie’s shock at realising his own ugliness as the world saw it, and which made women shun him. His malignant, dazed, sadistic personality seems to have just sprung into obdurate being without explanation. I had a feeling that, although Heinie may have been immersed in his dream of evil and moving alone in the world on his lethal purposes, somehow we were also all there, implicated, sharing and involved in it all. It was if he had filled a void — that place that we flinch from in all but our most unconscious thoughts and we have a strange responsibility for that state of affairs.
It seemed to me then that my journey could bring no explanation, only the husk of truth. For some reason I thought of the pamphlet I picked up in the Washington Tea Rooms, an account of the legend of the Lambton Worm, a ballad and Tyneside myth. “Whisht lads haad yer gobs An aa’ll tell yer boot the worm,” runs the ballad and the story goes thus: the young knight John Lambton, fished in the Wear one day while escaping from church attendance. He found an ugly, worm-like, writhing creature caught on his hook and thought he saw a reflection of himself in its glaring, goggling eyes. He threw the thing away down a well and tried to forget about it but, filled with obscure regret, he went on a long penance to the Holy Land. While he was away the worm grew and grew to form a giant creature that terrorised the neighbourhood, eating cattle and consuming children. It slept on Lumley Hill and its tail grew so large that it lapped the crest of Penshawe Hill. News reached the knight about the depredations of the great serpent-like creature that he had unwittingly unleashed and he returned home to consult a sibyl on how to defeat it. She told him that he must stand in the Wear in armour covered with blades of steel and wait for the “worm” to seek him out and destroy itself. Afterwards he was to kill the first living thing he saw otherwise a curse would fall on him and his family. Accordingly, the knight constructed a suit of armour covered in blades and stood waist deep in the river, warning his family to stay away. He also arranged for his most faithful dog to be unleashed. The worm sniffed him out, struck and writhed around him. There was an almighty struggle, but in the end it mortally slashed itself on the armoured blades until it weakened and dissolved, piece by piece and was carried off in the current away to the sea. Exhausted but victorious, the knight climbed out of the river to see his jubilant father coming to greet him. His father had forgotten to unleash the dog in his excitement. He flinched from striking at his father and instead severed the head of his faithful dog when he got home. Thus, although the worm had been destroyed, the Lambtons lived on to carry a terrible curse to nine generations for disobeying the sibyl’s instructions.
On the following day I returned to the hospital making my way through the bustle of Eaton Ward at the beginning of the morning shift. I was eager to see Heinie, to somehow communicate with him, feeling that in some way I now shared something with him. I saw him standing at the ward office door, holding a red plastic mug in his shaky hand. Heinie saw me and pulled at his fringe, giving a mock tug of his forelock. I gestured for him to stand in the ward review room, which had been left unlocked ready for the morning reviews. I told him that I had seen his mother the day before and that she sent her love and greetings. I saw a hardness creep over Heinie’s face. He swayed on his feet, gave an inward whistle of breath then exhaled, puffing a stale blast of tobacco-sour breath into my face.
“So you have been to see my Ma,” he said looking at me as if I was a betrayer. He swayed again very close to me then went on, “I am brave, me. I have the feet and hooves of an antelope, I am a beast me. Ma she wants to know me as I once was, verstehen? Not as I am.” He stared at me with his pebbly, grey eyes, then flicked out a hand and brushed it palm downwards over the hairs on my forearm where I had rolled up my sleeve. I recoiled from the intimate gesture and took a step back. Heinie continued to stare at me, “I’m not going to see you no more mister. I’m not goin’ down the block corridor to see you no more, not fer all Christ’s tears,” he said and turned and moved away as the nursing auxiliary shouted, “Hot water up!” Heinie shuffled after him waving his mug, calling out, “Coming boss.” He declined to attend that week’s therapy session and thereafter all appointments with me, and when he encountered me in the corridors or review rooms he would back away from me, placing a forefinger to his lips to signify muteness.
“What have you done to Heinrich, Jack?” asked Dr Bartram after observing one such episode. I shook my head, not answering, thinking of the Lambton Worm beating itself out on the cursed knight, writhing, severing and erasing itself on the current and being swept away.
* * *
The ambulance had come from the county hospital at Redford, crossing the seven miles of autumnal countryside on a dim, rain-swept, late afternoon. Its blue light flickered along the bare ploughed land and the two-tone siren raised a few lapwing and rooks to flutter up from the field margins. They turned the siren off when they reached the hospital and just rolled over the speed bumps, the blue light flickering silently over the lodge house frontage. There was no need for hurry and bustle. They had been called automatically by security response but Kress was long dead, hanging on a knotted lace in his room on Eaton War
d.
It had been JJ of all people who had found him, hooded, muffled JJ, who had sensed something as staff busied themselves with clearing away ward tea and preparing the meds trolley. It was shift handover, the most popular time for suicides in the hospital, when there was plenty of movement and distractions on the ward. JJ had taken off the towel that usually was draped over his head and stumped down the corridor and peered through the half-open door of the cell; he had blundered to the nursing station, mouthing and pointing, until staff followed him and began to run. JJ had then slumped back in his chair at the end of the corridor as staff rushed in and out of Kress’ cell and called 444. He gave up waiting to be attended to by staff and flopped his towel over his own face, grumbling and growling to himself as the ward teemed around him like an upended hive.
When staff had got to Kress’s cell they found the metal door ajar, and the room seemingly empty with a thin, late afternoon light falling from the barred window onto an unmade bed and the crumpled picture of a clipper ship taped to the wall. A red and white football shirt was thrown over the end of the bed, and there was a sealed meal tray with its plastic cover on the low bedside table. Kress was a shape in the corner, out of the line of sight of the door. The toes flexed downwards, one sock half off revealing a darkened sole. A pool of piss formed on the red floor tiles and a baggy leg of the tracksuit was soaked. The head was a tousled balloon jammed hard against a cupboard door, the face partly visible, plum-coloured with a noticeable swelling around the mouth.