Beyond All Evil

by June Thomson

  I looked in the direction of the voice. A drunk man, reeking of booze and sweat, was rolling on the floor.

  ‘You no’ talkin’ tae me?’ he repeated.

  ‘Go away!’ I said sharply.

  Something in my voice penetrated his befuddled brain and he fell silent.

  The police station was open-plan and I could see a flurry of activity, police officers huddled together, speaking in hushed voices and looking over their shoulders in my direction.

  It was at that moment that I knew something really terrible had happened. If it had been good news they would surely have told us, wouldn’t they? It had to be bad, but how bad?

  The drunk rallied. ‘C’mon, give us a song!’ he said.

  For some reason, I couldn’t allow myself to let him see me cry, to see the pain I was in. I couldn’t even speak to him. I looked at the group of police officers with a sinking heart. Not knowing was torture. Why couldn’t they just tell me? I looked through the glass at Katie. Her anxious face mirrored my own. It was as if she had read my mind, that a silent message had passed between us. She held up her hands, imploring. I shook my head. ‘I don’t know,’ I said with my eyes

  ‘Give us a kiss darlin’, c’mon,’ the drunk persisted.

  ‘Fuck off!’ I screamed in a voice I had never heard before.

  He retreated to the corner of the room, where he muttered to himself until he lapsed into sleep.

  I leapt from the chair. I had been in there for almost an hour and couldn’t stand any more. I went to the glass partition and stared into the foyer. Katie questioned me again with her eyes but I still had no answers. The police officers remained huddled together, but they had been joined by two new faces.

  These strangers disengaged themselves from the others and walked towards me. They opened the door and one of them said, ‘Will you come with us?’

  ‘Can Katie come with me?’ I asked.

  They shook their heads. One of them said, ‘No! We need to speak to you on your own.’

  I followed them into another room, a sense of dread overwhelming me. What was going on? Had Ash absconded with my babies as I feared he would? Taken them out of the country? What?

  ‘What’s happened?’ I begged.

  They remained silent and ushered me into an interview room, where they laid papers down on a table. I was asked to sit at the table and they pulled up their chairs opposite me.

  ‘Tell us everything that happened today, before you came to the police office, Giselle,’ one of the officers said.

  ‘I’ve already told the people at the desk. We’ve been here forever,’ I replied.

  ‘We just have to make sure,’ said the other officer.

  ‘What has happened to my babies? Tell me!’ I shouted, my voice breaking with frustration.

  ‘We have to verify certain things, Giselle,’ said the first officer in a quiet voice. ‘It’s easier if you just answer our questions. What were the children wearing the last time you saw them?’

  That was when I knew.

  The dam burst. I sobbed uncontrollably.

  My voice shrank to a whisper.

  ‘Please, just tell me what’s happened. I can’t stand this. Please, just tell me,’ I pleaded.

  One of the officers glanced at the clock on the wall.

  It was 7 p.m.

  ‘We’ve found two bodies,’ he said.

  June: God help us! We had become pawns in their hellish game.

  The house was too quiet.

  No laughter. Our two dogs were outside in their kennels, still barking a welcome to me. The sound was muted now that I had entered the house. My watch said it was one minute to seven o’clock. My anger over finding the dogs tethered, the chains wrapped around their throats, was dissipating in the deafening silence.

  Rab and the children had to be here. His car was still in the drive. Muiredge was too distant from anywhere for them to have ventured out on foot.

  The back door had been locked, unusual in itself during daylight hours, and I had been forced to forage in my handbag to find the key. Why was it so quiet? I listened. Deathly quiet. Something was wrong, I could sense it. No voices. The hairs on the back of my neck sprung up.

  I walked through the kitchen into the dining room, passing the debris of crisps and sweets. Into the hall. All the doors leading off it were closed. Into the living room. Ryan’s toys were scattered on the floor. His bedroom door was shut. I placed my hand on the handle and pushed it open, leaning into the room. My son was on the bed. Asleep.

  ‘Ryan,’ I said softly. ‘It’s Mum. Ryan? Ryan?’

  He wasn’t asleep. His eyes were open. Why were his eyes open? Then I saw his lips. They were blue, contrasting with the paleness of his skin. His face might have been sculpted from wax.

  His little hands were arranged carefully on his chest as if in an attitude of prayer.

  Blood. Blood everywhere.

  A scream, long and silent, ripped through my mind. Seeing, but not believing. A nightmare. I must awaken now, but I didn’t. I closed the door and opened it again. The scene had not changed.

  He was dead. My baby was dead. I raced to the bed, gathering him in my arms. He was so cold. I shook uncontrollably as my hands roamed over his body looking for injuries. I could find only a single rent in his new pullover, now stained deep red.

  Now I heard the deep animal howls, a dreadful guttural sound that came from deep within me. I had found my voice. I howled in anguish. Numbed, disoriented, I placed Ryan gently back on his bed.

  And then I realised.

  Michelle! God, no!

  I sprinted to her room, opening the door onto its familiar pink and purple décor. She, too, was lying on her bed. Her lovely curls, matted with blood, were spread in a halo on the pillow. Her eyes were open, her hands arranged on the bedclothes as if she were pleading for help. There was so much blood – on the walls, the carpet, her toys – great bloody red pools.

  I screamed for help.

  ‘No! No! Michelle! Ryan! Somebody!’

  Loud footsteps on the stairs. Ross. He had been in his bedroom in the attic.

  ‘Mum! Mum!’ he cried, his voice loud with alarm. ‘What’s the screaming for? What’s wrong?’

  I stumbled into the hall, covered in the blood of my children.

  ‘They’re dead! They’re dead!’

  Ross was dumbfounded.

  ‘In there!’ I screamed.

  The spell was broken. Ross ran into Michelle’s room, fled from there into Ryan’s room and then to the back of the house, where he burst through the door.

  Help, get help, I thought. Get their father. I went into the bedroom I had shared with Rab. He was lying semi-naked on the bed, motionless, his back to me.

  ‘Rab! Rab!’ I cried.

  And then I saw the kitchen knife, so familiar, with its huge blade and long black handle. He’s dead too! His wrists were red with blood. I was hysterical. My mind exploded.

  I knew.

  He had done this. He had done this. My instincts screamed it at me. In one sickening moment of clarity I recognised how Rab had decided to punish me.

  I raced back into the hall and grabbed Ross. We held each other.

  ‘Get help, Mum. Get help. You have to get help.’

  The phone. In my confusion I called Linda and not the police. She answered.

  ‘They’re all dead. The kids and Rab. They’re all dead,’ I screamed.

  ‘Call the police,’ she shouted.

  I managed to dial 999.

  ‘The children. My children. They’re dead,’ I told the woman who answered.

  Questions. So many questions. I was incoherent. I begged for help. Ross ran back to the top of the house, where his girlfriend, Kay, was still in the attic. She had been too terrified by the commotion to come down. The police operator kept me talking.

  Blue lights flashing outside, the sound of a dying siren, a car skidding to a halt. The police. The first officer through the door was the local part-time bob
by. I knew him.

  ‘Sit down,’ he said gently, his eyes bright with uncertainty as he prised the phone from my hand.

  More officers. Crowding into the house. More sirens, heavier vehicles drawing up outside. Ambulances. Paramedics in green coveralls invading the hall, clutching large bags of equipment that would be of no use now to Ryan and my Michelle.

  The police officers were looking at my bloodstained clothing, speaking to me, but I didn’t understand their words.

  ‘They’re dead. Ryan and Michelle. They’re dead,’ I kept repeating.

  They were wondering whether this hysterical madwoman was a killer. Their expressions flitted between sympathy and accusation, their mouths forming words I could not hear. All I heard was the jabber of radios and the sound of more sirens in the distance. Bedlam. The police officers were packed into such a small place, casting furtive glances towards rooms they were reluctant to enter.

  ‘Are they really dead? Are they really dead?’ I called out to the paramedics who had gone into the rooms. ‘Please save them, please save my children,’ I pleaded.

  I knew the plea was useless. I knew they were dead but I clung to any hope, however small.

  Time had ceased to have meaning. The paramedics wanted me to leave in an ambulance, but I struggled with them and the police, clinging to the chair, the curtains, anything I could grab. I could not leave my children with strangers. They needed me. I was exhausted. My body was limp and I could no longer resist the strong arms guiding me to the ambulance. I leant back against the interior wall of the vehicle and hands fussed over me, sliding a thin blanket over my shoulders.

  ‘It’s okay, it’s okay,’ said a soft male voice.

  I looked up but I could not see his face. I was straining to see over his shoulder as the other paramedics left the house carrying a stretcher. My heart leapt. Someone was alive!

  ‘Michelle! Ryan!’ I shouted. ‘Ryan! Michelle!’ I shouted again.

  And then I saw him. Rab. He was alive.

  Now I recognised his hellish plan. Lying on the bed. Pretending to be dead. Enjoying my screams. The sick bastard! The knife on the bedside cabinet, the blade he had used to kill our children. He had left it there for me to find. He had engineered this shocking scenario, believing that, in my grief, I would stab him to death. My children would be gone – and I would be in a prison cell for his murder. It was the perfect resolution to a demonic scheme. The ultimate control.

  I was suddenly filled with the strength of madness and I launched myself from the ambulance. Police and ambulance men grabbed at me, dragging me back. Somehow I still managed to get within touching distance of the stretcher that was bearing Rab to an ambulance. I wanted to tear him to pieces.

  ‘Evil, evil bastard,’ I screamed. ‘I’ll kill you!’

  Dear Christ! The expression on his face. He was smirking. Christ help me, the bastard was smirking. I collapsed. Rab had won and we both knew it. The words he had earlier used to taunt me flooded into my mind.

  ‘What are you going to do when you’re left on your own … with nobody to love?’

  I watched the ambulance take him away as if through a fog. It would take him to hospital, where he would be treated for wounds that were no more than superficial. Much later, a friend, who was a nurse, would tell me that within hours he was sitting up in bed, watching the television coverage of what he had done.

  He was eating his dinner.

  Chapter 23

  Mummy Can’t Fix It Now

  ‘Ash thought of himself as superior. His superficiality covered up the evil therein.’

  Ian Stephen

  Giselle: You know why I had to see my babies – no matter what everyone said, I had to see them.

  Antiseptic smell. The smell of sickness and death. It assailed me as I walked through the door of the dark and forbidding building.

  ‘Giselle! Are you all right?’

  I looked at the policeman called John but I did not need to answer. It had been a rhetorical question. He knew the answer. I wouldn’t be all right, ever again. Three days since my babies had been taken. 72 hours that had passed in a dismal fugue induced by grief and Valium. Everyone – my family, my friends, the police – had told me I shouldn’t come here. But no power on earth could have kept me away.

  What had he done?

  My babies, my lovely lost boys, were here, somewhere in this Victorian mortuary, waiting for me.

  ‘Okay?’ said my brothers Tam and Alex in unison.

  They flanked me protectively. I did not reply. I was focused. All I could think of was being with my sons.

  John the policeman and Jackie, the family liaison officer, were about to ask the same brief question but thought better of it.

  We had all been arguing for days. My family and the police had done their best to dissuade me from coming here but I was adamant.

  ‘You don’t have to put yourself through it. The official identification has been done,’ Tam told me.

  ‘Why don’t you want me to see them? What did he do to them?’ I asked Tam.

  ‘It’s nothing to do with that, Giselle. We just think it’ll be too much for you,’ he replied.

  ‘I have to …’

  My family was afraid that if I saw my babies I would be so traumatised that I would make another attempt to kill myself. I had already tried and failed, on the day my sons died. I hated God! He had taken my babies and allowed the monster who killed them to live. There would be no justice in the world ever again.

  Three days earlier, when the policemen eventually told me they had found my sons, everything I loved had been taken from me. I don’t remember how I got home. It must have been in a police car. I had the vaguest recollection of Katie’s face being close to mine and her voice saying, ‘Oh, Giselle …’

  I don’t remember going into the building, only the cold, silver-steel wall of the lift against my face as it made its slow progress to my floor. I do remember Katie taking the key, which had somehow found its way into my hand, and opening the door.

  ‘Oh God!’ I moaned like a wounded animal.

  My babies’ breakfast plates were on the kitchen table, their clothes strewn on the settee in the living room, their toys and DVDs abandoned on the floor. I leapt forward and grabbed their pyjamas, pressing them to my face, inhaling my sons’ smell. I collapsed onto the sofa. Katie gathered up the debris of my babies’ lives, sheltering it from me. What, in the name of God, had happened …?

  I don’t know how long I sat in a dream state. The meaningless passage of time was punctuated by the phone ringing incessantly and the constant buzzing of the entry door downstairs. The media had picked up on the story. I was under siege. I didn’t know then that, on the other side of the country, June’s tragedy was mirroring my own. She, too, would be besieged. I wasn’t the only mother whose life had ended.

  No one had ever witnessed such a horror in a single day – two mothers, two monsters, four murdered children.

  Katie fielded the press inquiries, telling them we had nothing to say. What could we say? Words were useless, now. How can you express devastation? I knew my babies were gone, but I still did not know why or how. All I knew for certain was that Ash had returned to a place where I had been so happy and robbed me of my sons.

  There was a lull downstairs and the buzzer remained silent until a doctor arrived. A woman doctor. It may sound bizarre but I cannot to this day remember whether she was a stranger to me or from my own GP’s practice. Katie buzzed her into the building and a few minutes later she came through the front door. Even in my own grief, I felt sorry for the woman. Her eyes were haunted. She couldn’t have expected this type of home visit.

  ‘Giselle,’ she said in a quiet voice. Sorrow welled in her eyes. ‘I can’t begin …’ she began, her voice trailing off.

  She knew there was nothing to say that would offer me any comfort. She rallied, wrapping herself in professionalism, and went on in a stronger voice.

  ‘I can give you something to hel
p you sleep.’

  ‘Please give me a lethal injection,’ I begged.

  ‘What?’

  ‘A jab, a jab. I know you can do that.’

  She was struck dumb.

  ‘I want to be with my babies. Please! Please!’ I begged her.

  ‘Giselle …’ she said.

  ‘I won’t tell. No one will know. Please! End this!’

  Katie said, ‘C’mon, Giselle, c’mon.’

  The doctor foraged in her medical bag. Pills in her hand. What good were pills? Would they bring back my sons? I accepted them. Within a few minutes I felt myself slipping into a black hole from which I hoped I would never return. My drug-induced sleep was fractured by nightmares and beautiful dreams. In the nightmares, my boys were screaming for their mummy. I could see them, but I could not reach them. What was happening to them?

  In the good dreams, I was playing with them, holding them in my arms, feeling their warmth, singing soft, sweet songs to my Paul and Jay-Jay.

  I did not so much awake as emerge from my comatose state. The realisation that my sons were gone overwhelmed me. I howled. I was still clutching their pyjamas. Nothing had changed. My cries brought Katie to her feet. She was in a chair, having cried herself to exhaustion. My brothers emerged from the kitchen, their faces white masks of pain. I tried to rise, still befuddled by the drugs.

  ‘Where are you going?’ Tam asked.

  ‘Bathroom,’ I said.

  ‘You want Katie to go in with you?’

  ‘No, need to go to the bathroom.’

  I didn’t need to go to the bathroom. In that moment of awakening I had decided to kill myself. I hadn’t been left alone since I heard the dreadful news. I felt suddenly crowded. They were trying to protect me, I knew that. But no one could protect me from the pain.

  ‘Hurry up, pet,’ Tam said.

  I walked to the bathroom in a daze, knowing their eyes were on me. I tried to appear in control. I didn’t want anyone to know what was in my heart. This would bring an end to it. I’d be with my boys soon. When I closed the bathroom door behind me I slipped the bolt and looked up at the window. So small. I felt a moment of peace. This was what I wanted, what I needed to do. The doctor wouldn’t help me. It was up to me now. I moved forward and released the window catch. We were so high up there would be no doubting the outcome when I fell. A rush of cold air hit my face. I clambered up onto the sink, brushing aside bottles of shampoo and toothbrushes. They clattered to the floor.