No Way to Say Goodbye

by Rod Madocks

  It was the 1960s; care agencies eventually noticed the family after neighbours saw the hungry, filthy children creeping in the yard. They were split up into care, and placed in council run homes which were run by paedophiles according to Lynch. They took him to houses in the leafy suburbs, Edgbaston and Selly Oak, to be buggered by more men. Then he was moved again, this time to a Catholic care home in the countryside, run by priests where again sex-hungry hands mauled at him. Eventually he was released into the world at sixteen, with no idea where his siblings were, back in his home city, fending for himself by stealing and scamming, already building to be a career criminal. He had also been in and out of prison and had been known by many names. Then in the late 1980s about when Rachel had disappeared, he had fled from Birmingham and washed up in coastal Norfolk settling in sleepy, seaside Burgh. He had survived by cheating the benefit system, by conning tourists and by house burglaries committed in all the little hamlets along the coast. He had probably been in Burgh while Irina and I had spent our first nights there.

  “More sinned against than sinning then, is he?” asked Bartram when we discussed Lynch in directorate review a week later. I was unsure about that, for when I interviewed him after reading his file he was pleasant and plausible enough. I was always looking for that lone shark who might have encountered Rachel outside the Paradise Stores and I needed to know more about his story. I had been shown to his cell where he was sitting on his bed after a ward meal with headphones on attached to a cassette player. He was nodding and crooning along to the music with his back to us. He sensed that we were there and whipped around, then pushed the headphones off his head and regarded us with alert, brown eyes.

  “Sure we can talk,” he had said pleasantly enough with a slight Brummie inflection in his speech. He paused for some reason and went to his basin and washed his hands carefully, almost over-elaborately, rinsing each finger like a surgeon ready for an operation. Then he accompanied me to an interview room, the same one where Kress and I had once sat. I took him through his story, checking for inconsistencies, wanting to get a feel for the man. He rattled through an account of his painful childhood, the relentless cruelty and the later betrayals, talking about it all glibly, easily, although there was a hesitation when I tried taking him off the path to clarify this or that fact or write down a name. He had recently reported his childhood abuse while in prison and belatedly, the system, which had been sensitised by other abuse scandals, had begun to arrest his previous tormentors, the police questioning retired people who had once worked in the care system. There had already been one suicide in custody of one of the accused; Lynch looked almost disappointed when he had heard about it.

  He asked about possible compensation for his childhood abuse and I felt that I could not begrudge him that. He spoke about his adult years quickly, plausibly. I noticed that he made discreet little sallies at getting information from me, asking about my “nice watch”, my accent, other things — “not a married man then are you?” Innocent-seeming questions, but I realised later that I had been almost imperceptibly tipped off course when asking my questions. He had a charm and a force to his personality, despite his rough exterior, and I felt that I had to work hard to hold my balance. I had to bring him back over his account to address the more obvious gaps in his story. He spoke of an early marriage in Birmingham and tried to skip over the narrative, but eventually acknowledged that he had married a woman who already had two daughters.

  He spoke more readily about Norfolk however, extolling the beauty of it, the peace of the sea and the long beaches, and of Burgh in particular, saying, “Do you know Burgh, Dr Keyse? Have you been there?” I nodded and he went on: “My favourite place there, where I sat out with friends is outside the Lord Nelson pub under the monument to Eliza Adams, to those drowned in the lifeboat way back when. That’s what I look forward to be doing, sitting again soon with a pint in my hand at the end of my sentence in the spring next year. You will write for me to probation? Won’t you? Can’t you move it along for me? You see, I want to go back to the loves of my life…” He responded to my interrogative glance with a playful smile.

  “Oh yes, Bella and Shauna. Who are they? My babies of course.” He fished around in his denim jacket and took out two tattered photos from a leather foldover. The pictures showed two large Alsatian dogs.

  “These are my babies in the backyard at Burgh. They are looking forward to me getting out. My wife is looking after them, but she doesn’t walk them properly.”

  “She’s the other love of my life, of course,” he added, quickly laughing.

  Afterwards, I sat in my office turning the case over. I felt uneasy about the gaps in his story, that thread of truth that he had somehow hidden by his clever, swift answers. I was also suspicious of his plausibility and his charm. I decided that I would go to Burgh-Next-The-Sea and sniff around there a little, also unable to resist returning on the eroded track to the past. I rang his wife’s number that was recorded in the file under next of kin. A low hesitant voice answered with a murmurous Norfolk accent.

  “From the horspital? What you want me for?”

  “We like to involve family, in helping our patients, helping with rehabilitation.” There was a pause, an indrawn breath.

  “Getting out then, is he?” Her voice tailed off. I gave her an account of not being sure yet when he would be released, of needing to understand him, and about how everything discussed would be protected by confidentiality.

  “I suppose it’s alroight you coming to see me, so does John know? Is he alroight about it then?”

  I had pressed Lynch about going to Burgh and wanting to interview his wife and for the first time I saw his easy confidence slip. Initially a fearful look sprang up in his eyes and he became defensive.

  “I don’t think that is necessary, what you want to do that for?” he had said at first. But I had lulled him with talk of probation, of rehabilitation and preparing for a return to the community and he had eventually said, “Well I suppose so, but don’t let that Josie chatter too much, talks the hind leg off a donkey, that girl,” and he laughed uneasily.

  I drove east from the hospital and quickly crossed the flat alluvial lands speeding down the quiet roads. I clipped the papery red rags of road-kill as I swept into Norfolk. Gulls flickered across the road as I ran down that same coastal road from Hunstanton, watching the sea wind fitfully clearing the mist and briefly sighting the grey-brown Wash to my left in the winter sun. I passed a road sign for Walsingham and also thought, for a moment, of Irina bending over a candle saying, “Light one for someone you love who is no longer here.”

  At last I came to the edge of the Wash, the staithes where Hobman also had once brooded in his childhood, past Brancaster, the beach where Irina and I had walked and held each other, then on up the winding road to the shingled walls of Burgh. I found and followed the road where Lynch had lived called Eel Gill Close, it straggled through cheap housing then petered out in allotment lands that led on to the salt marshes. I parked and sat in the car looking over my notes. At a bend in the road behind me stood the Chandlery, an eighteenth century building with thick flint walls which had not kept Lynch from breaking in. In the car mirror, I could also see the slope-shouldered bulk of St Nicholas’s Church — the scene of his last robbery. He had kept his thievery brazenly close at hand, as if despising any attempt by his neighbours to stop him. In one of the files that I had brought were documents from the local police mainly relating to that final burglary. A police note read, this is a one man crime wave. I also noticed several reports of domestic incidents involving Josie and Lynch.

  I left the car and walked downhill through the estate towards the house. Bleached summer deck chairs sagged askew in one front garden. In another stood a Datsun Cherry with a sprung bonnet, its tyres melding into the tarmac. Lynch’s low two-storey council house had a patch of lawn and a large pampas grass blowing in the wind. Josie Lynch greeted me at the door. A slight, doll-like woman with a puff ball of auburn
hair, she was tremulous and frail-looking but once quite pretty, her blue eyes had the slightly yellow sclera of a drinker. There was a tremendous barking from the back yard as I shuffled into the house past bags of dog food and piles of old newspapers. Josie sat slumped and small, protected by the wings of a large tattered armchair with an overflowing ashtray perched on one arm. A TV flickered in the background with the sound turned down. I sat talking to Josie for several hours as the day darkened outside, and at some time, she got up to make tea in stained mugs, starting the dogs barking again. I saw large shaggy shapes jumping up at the back window.

  She described meeting Lynch at a night club in nearby Fakenham in the 1980s. She was a young, thin teenager, really quite childlike in those days. She took out a picture taken of her that first year they had met when they lived in a caravan by the salt marshes. I looked at it while she spoke to me and I found it later still tucked into my clinical notes. It showed young Josie sitting smoking in a sweat shirt surrounded by the same clutter in which they still lived. “I had to take proof that I was eighteen in them days so I could get in pubs and bars. I was so young-looking then. John was from Birmingham, he was much older than me and very confident with it. He always had cash and he swept me orf my feet I suppose.”

  She paused to light another cig and I noticed her hand slightly trembling.

  “I first had doubts a year in,” she continued, “my sister complained about him pestering her, she was only thirteen then. I didn’t believe it, didn’t want to believe it. He was really furious when I mentioned something about it and denied it and we soon moved from the caravan to a house, but we didn’t last long there either because it burned down. I now think he burned it himself for the insurance or because people were pressuring him to move on. We moved and moved after that, all the villages we lived in. I think sooner or later the villagers at each place realised he was robbing them week after week and doing other bad stuff and they would drive us out eventually.”

  I was struck how oddly trusting she was to talk to me like this.

  “What could I do? You see I loved him.” She looked at me hesitatingly and then fear surfaced, “What I say, you’re not going to put down are you? You’re not going to tell ’im I said these things?” I assured her about confidentiality, about how her information would be protected but it sounded hollow to my ears.

  She spoke of the beatings she had received from Lynch, at first reluctantly, then out it came in a flood. She held her face up to the light from her dusty windows to show me the thickened bridge of her once pretty nose.

  “He broke me nose,” she said, then held her nose and waggled it loosely. “The bone is gone. It’s just cartilage ’olding it on now, the doctors said.”

  “Once I made him go, made him leave. It was after he started teaching martial arts to the girl next door, four year ago. She were fourteen. He kept goin’ round there everyday. This place has thin walls. I could hear him sexing her. I told him, ‘I won’t stand for it.’ He cracked me in the face and left, didn’t see him for some months after that but I knew he was there somewhere watching me. A police sergeant once told me that John was the best burglar that they ever come across. I think he came in at night in this house and took things, stared at me while I slept. I just felt that he had and sometimes I woke up scared in the night, as if something had moved in the room but I couldn’t see anything. Once when we were first together, I woke to find him under the bed clothes at night with a torch staring at my privates. He is strange my John. Well, after the girl next door thing I threw him out but I began to sense that he was around. I got scared and called the police, but they were fed up on me and did nothing. One night I thought I heard something and got up and came downstairs.”

  She paused to light a cig.

  “It was dark. I called out his name then something went smash on the back of my head. I was spark out for hours then went round to the neighbours dripping blood and half-senseless. I got taken to horspital. It was him there that night who hit me. God knows why. I know of course it was him, though he later visited me in on the ward, acting all concerned like, with flowers.”

  And so it went on, her frightening story, how he came back, made promises that things would be better, and settled for a while. Then the unexplained cash would appear in big rolls in his pockets, the mysterious phone calls and his long absences at all times of the day or night. Then the complaints about him came to Josie’s ears, from whispers and rumours or from confrontations with angry neighbours. How Lynch had been seen hanging around little girls and teenagers. How he had struck up an alliance with the deck chair attendant on the summer beach, giving out ice creams and treats to holidaying children. How he was often seen around Abraham’s Bosom, a sandy hollow behind the pine knolls near the shoreline, approaching children, handing out presents that he funded by his burglary forays in the neighbourhood. He whiled away the hot summer afternoons, lounging on a bench outside Burgh toilets, near the hotel where Irina and I stayed. Offering rum and coke, ready mixed in a bottle, to giggling teenage girls; offering it to the young girls “in return for a feel in the toilets, like”.

  She reeled on with her story, spoke of more savage beatings and his long absences. Then his nemesis came in the shape of a pewter jug used for filling the font at St Nicholas’s church, and a few household items stolen from the nearby Chandlery on the same night. A holiday maker found his haul stashed in a sandy pit near Abraham’s Bosom on the beach and his fingerprints were identified on them. A search of the house revealed more incriminating items. It was a third offence and with three strikes against him he was given a longer sentence than usual.

  “Are you relieved he is away inside?” I asked and she shrugged in a resigned way then looked fearfully towards the front door.

  “He will be back. It wouldn’t surprise me to see him now at any time, on any day. He always gets his own way my John,” and I found myself glancing nervously towards the door as well for a moment imagining Lynch’s shadow at the mottled glass.

  The afternoon darkened outside and in the room I could hardly make Josie out as she huddled in her chair. Her story had slackened and petered out. I had coaxed out of her as many names and dates as I could, but now she had fallen silent as if exhausted and empty. I told her I must be heading back.

  “Wait, afore you go, I want to show you something,” she said. She got up and opened the back door and called out, “Shauna … Bella!”

  I felt a stab of fear as the two large dogs ran in and circled stiffly around me with rumbling growls and the hair ruffed up on their necks. I rose from my chair in alarm but Josie shouted at the dogs, the growling subsided and they began to turn and turn around me, barging against me and sniffing at my legs.

  “Give me your hand. I want to show you something,” she said. Her cold hands grasped mine and she pressed my fingers into the stiff, thick fur of one dog’s neck.

  “Run your hand over. Can you feel it?” I couldn’t feel anything at first as I nervously prodded at the harsh thick fur of the dog which stood stiff and tense, its head averted. Again, she pressed my fingers deeper under the fur, onto the dog’s skin and then I felt a running lattice of distinct welts and nubs and scars right along its neck and flanks.

  “What is it?” I said squeamishly, removing my hand.

  “He says he dotes on them, but he would take them out night after night on the Buttlands, the dunes out there. Would take his air pistol and shoot at them as they ran about. Plugging them again and again. They’d come back whimpering and bleeding most nights. He would never admit to it but I knew he done it. That’s my Johnny, he hurts the things he loves.”

  The dogs milled near me as I rose to leave and I could hear their barking as I walked away. I made my way down to the harbour end of town, stopped by Dogger Lane and walked to the harbour wall. The Lord Nelson pub sign creaked in the sea breeze as I stood by the sea wall, built after the 1953 floods, the same tide that had killed Kress’ sister. I walked a little further and passed the
rocket station for the maritime distress maroons and watched a late fishing boat unload a few dripping boxes of mussels, whelks and crabs. The sheds and rope makers’ yards were vacant now and one local, in a hooded jacket, stood with a fishing rod and seemed to be watching me as gulls flitted above me in the murk. As I walked, I wondered, why did Lynch like the monument so much and that view from the Lord Nelson pub? And then I looked landward to see the public toilets and behind them a children’s playground with swings and parallel bars, deserted now in the dull misty light.

  Ah yes, of course, I realised then. It was a place for holiday meat and I imagined the summer scene, the crowded playing fields, the little girls on the swings and Lynch sitting there watching with his pint from the Lord Nelson. I walked back to the car now shrouded with droplets of sea mist, accompanied by the clanga clank sound of wind-slapped rigging in the harbour.

  I drove back west on the coastal road past Brancaster beach and past those long erased footsteps of Irina and I. As I drove I had the feeling that Lynch’s reality had now almost eclipsed my own tender memories of that first night in Burgh. It was so hard to hold on to what was good, and perhaps it was somehow easier to deal with a present evil than dwell on the hurtfulness of lost love. So, I turned over the problem of Lynch as I drove on the darkening road back to the hospital, and began to plan what to do about him.

  I fixed him soon after. I did it for all victims that I had encountered, for Josie and for the purposes of my own revenge of course. I made checks, found that in his first marriage in the 1980s he had been suspected of abusing his step-daughters in Birmingham but had flitted away to Norfolk and escaped investigation. I collected his aliases told to me by Josie, listed those victims she could name, circulated the details and found out new information about him from other police forces. I informed Probation and Child Protection Police Liaison about his activities and wrote a damning report. I recommended transfer to the new sex offenders unit whose high, corrugated walls had just been built as an annexe to the hospital, where there was no prospect of removal unless he could show that he had been cured of his dangerous desires. Lynch was thus sucked into the psychiatric system, where he thought he would have an easy time and while away his short sentence.