Beyond All Evil

by June Thomson

  ‘It’s okay, I know,’ he said.

  The emergency-service vehicles made the house alternate between shadow and light. I had so wanted to live in that house. My eldest son Shaun had long since left to build his own life and Ross was at an age when he would soon follow his brother. I had realised that one day little Ryan would grow up and leave. Until Rab had made it untenable, I had hoped that Muiredge was where my dear, innocent Michelle would spend the rest of her life.

  A rap on the police-car window startled me. It was another uniformed officer. He slid into the front passenger seat and said over his shoulder, ‘We’re going to the station now, June.’

  I nodded. The first officer started the car engine. In the half-light of a summer evening, on a day that had begun with such promise, the car, with its three silent occupants, made the short journey. By the time we arrived it was the gloaming of the evening – that half-light between day and night. I was assisted from the vehicle by the first officer.

  ‘My name is Scott,’ he told me in a quiet voice, adding, ‘I won’t leave you.’

  Inside the police station I blinked in the harsh, white light. More faces. The same looks. Was I a victim? Was I the perpetrator? The neon light revealed my blood-soaked clothing.

  ‘My clothes,’ I said.

  ‘We’ll get you a change,’ Scott said. ‘Come in here,’ he added, escorting me to an interview room.

  ‘Wait a second,’ he said, signalling to someone I could not see.

  A woman police officer materialised with a fresh set of clothes and clutching flat, empty bags. Scott retreated from the room.

  ‘Let’s get you changed,’ said the woman.

  I undressed slowly, discarding the bloody garments, which she placed carefully into the bags. Evidence, I thought. My clothes are evidence. When I had changed, Scott returned.

  ‘Sit down, June. We’re going to have a chat until the detectives arrive. Someone will bring us a cup of tea,’ he said. Scott guided me to the chair.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said, looking at him properly for the first time.

  His face was drawn, his expression strained. I knew instinctively that in the last few hours this young man had witnessed a scene that would haunt him forever.

  ‘I know your face,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah, I live and work locally,’ he replied.

  What I didn’t know then was that Scott was a part-time ‘special’ constable. He was also the local funeral director. Ironically, it would be Scott who would help me lay my children to rest.

  Since I had run from the house at Muiredge, I had been swinging wildly between hysteria and an unnatural calm. I was suddenly overwhelmed and began to weep. Scott leaned towards me and offered me a hankie. As I took it from his hand, the light glinted on my wedding ring.

  ‘God!’ I said, feeling as if my finger were suddenly on fire. ‘God!’ I repeated, dragging the ring over my knuckle and casting it into a waste bin in the corner of the room. ‘Bastard!’ I hissed.

  Scott made no attempt to retrieve it. It was the first time in 27 years of marriage that the ring had been off my finger. Even during the periods when I had left Rab, I continued to wear it. He would have killed me otherwise.

  I felt physically sick. How could I have allowed myself to have become so unutterably ground down, so unbelievably afraid of this man to have endured such a miserable existence? I had lived in an atmosphere of fear, afraid of what he would do to me if I dared to walk away.

  His threats had always been directed at me. It was always me who was punished. He had never raised his voice – or lifted a hand – to Michelle or Ryan.

  How could I have foreseen that his final, terrible punishment would cost them their lives? I leaned forward, weary, resting my head on the table in the interview room.

  ‘It’s okay,’ said Scott, who kept his promise and did not leave me.

  Even when the detectives eventually arrived to begin their endless questioning, he did not stray far. Before their arrival, in those few short hours I spent with him, I probably told Scott more about my life and marriage than I had ever confided to any other living soul. We sat close together, almost like a priest and penitent in a confessional. But it was not my sins I was confessing. It was Rab’s.

  I poured it all out, a litany of all the wicked things he had done to me. I could not stop. I cannot remember now a half of what I said, but it was a cathartic experience. At one point during that long, dark night of the soul, Scott excused himself, saying he had to leave the room for a few minutes. When he returned he said, ‘The detectives want to talk to you now.’

  Two of them came into the room. They addressed me with quiet, sympathetic voices.

  One of them said, ‘June, I’m Detective …’

  ‘What did he do to them?’ I interrupted.

  The other detective said, ‘I’m sorry, June, we can’t go into the details. We have to follow protocol. You have to understand. When the case goes to court, what you say here and now could be given as evidence.’

  I was determined.

  ‘I don’t care about evidence. I need you to tell me what he did.’

  ‘We can’t,’ said the first detective, more firmly.

  I knew that they probably thought it bizarre that I should be asking them about the murders. I had found my children. It was, however, as if the shock of it had blinded me, robbed me of my memory. Some part of my mind had shut down, as if to protect me from the horror. My only clear memories were of Michelle’s bloodied curls and the single rent in Ryan’s jumper.

  ‘Tell us what happened before you arrived at the house,’ said the second detective.

  I looked towards Scott and he gave me a reassuring nod. I began to describe my day, painfully and slowly, telling them everything I had done, and everything that had happened.

  At length one of the detectives said, ‘I think you need a break, June. You should rest. We’ll speak later. We’ll arrange for someone to take you home.’

  I was grateful to them. I was physically and mentally drained, and I so needed to be with my family. Another silent car journey, this time through the early-morning light. My sister and the others were waiting for me when I arrived at the house in Methil. It was no longer a safe haven. What a fool I had been to believe I could escape from Rab. His hellish vengeance had ensured that I would never again be free.

  Thank heavens for my family. They gathered around me, attempting to sustain me, but all they could do was watch me unravel and give myself up to a grief so consuming that it drove me to the brink of madness.

  We shared few words in the days that followed. What was there to be said about what Rab had done? How could we rationalise the acts of a maniac? The house was filled with family and friends who came and went, enveloping me with love. But I could find no comfort, no peace, in any of it.

  At times I could not even bear to look at my little nieces, Abbi and Beth, as they played at my feet. At other times I wanted to hold them forever and never let them go. Dear little Abbi was only six years old but she knew something terrible had happened to ‘her Ryan’. Abbi knew I was in pain. She was made wary by my tears, my seemingly endless anguish. One day she overcame her wariness, climbed onto my lap and gave me a cuddle. Then she took my hand.

  ‘It’s okay, Auntie June,’ she said. ‘Come and play with me.’

  The barriers fell away. I got down on my knees and helped her dress her dollies. Tears flowed down my face. She hugged me again and gave me a kiss.

  I thanked God that her uncle Rab had ordered her to leave Muiredge with me on that day. He hadn’t wanted Abbi to be one of his victims. But what if she had said ‘No’? The thought of it still haunts me.

  I lived out those days in a haze, punctuated by interviews with detectives and visits from doctors, who decided to send me to a psychiatric hospital. They did not know what else to do with me. They thought I might commit suicide. I sat in the hospital for one day, surrounded by poor souls who were suffering from true mental illness. I
felt like a fraud.

  I was not mad, I was sad, I told the doctors. I insisted that they allow me to go home. They did.

  I had to pull myself together, if for no other reason than to help the police build their case against Rab. It could not bring my children back to me, but I promised myself that I could at least help to ensure that the bastard would spend the remainder of his miserable, evil existence behind bars.

  I found new strength. The interviews with the police were long and arduous, but I focused, talking for hours in front of a video camera. The detectives told me that they would use my testimony in court if Rab had the temerity to claim he was innocent.

  ‘If you’re incapable of facing him in court or break down in the witness box, this filmed testimony will be vital,’ one of the officers told me.

  By now the police were fully aware that Rab had acted alone. The officer in charge, Detective Superintendent Alistair McKeen, would say later that his officers and the paramedics had never attended such a harrowing scene. They would, however, still not tell me precisely what Rab had done.

  The final hours in the life and death of my children continued to torment me. My nights, when I was able to sleep, were filled with broken dreams and nightmares, but my days were spent with the detectives. During one interview they informed me that my children would be the subject of a post-mortem examination.

  I was aghast.

  ‘Why?’ I demanded to know. ‘Everyone knows what happened. You all know how they died. Why do you need to violate them any more? Haven’t they been through enough?’

  ‘The pathologist has to do it,’ said one of the officers. ‘It’s part of the judicial process. I know it’s hurtful to you, June, but if it’s not done it could affect the case.’

  I also had to accept the situation that Rab had instructed his lawyers to demand a second, independent post-mortem. He knew it would add to my agony. He was right. I went to pieces. It was the final ignominy. I begged the police to stop it but it was his right under the law.

  The pain just seemed to go on and on, a relentless living thing that reinvented itself every day, finding new ways to torture me.

  It reached a zenith when the police revealed that they had recovered CCTV footage from one of the McDonald’s in Kirkcaldy, which had been recorded on the day of the murders. It showed the last hours of my children’s lives. Rab, Michelle and Ryan could be seen eating ‘Happy Meals’. It must have been his sick idea to give them a final treat before he killed them. The people around them were lost in their own innocent little worlds, paying no attention to another family on a Saturday afternoon outing. Who can see evil, even if it’s sitting at the next table?

  As the days passed, the police told me Rab had been discharged from Queen Margaret Hospital in Dunfermline, where he had been taken after his abortive suicide attempt. He was immediately taken into custody and, on 6 May, he appeared at Kirkcaldy Sheriff Court, charged with the murders of Michelle and Ryan. It was the beginning of the end for him. With Rab in jail, it would soon be time for me to reclaim my children.

  I was torn between my longing to see them and the dread of the moment. They had been given into the care of the Co-operative funeral home, where Scott was put in charge of laying them to rest. I couldn’t bear to go alone. Shaun, who had returned to Fife from Essex, went with me, along with one of Michelle’s carers.

  Scott was waiting for us when we arrived. He was kindness itself. After having unburdened myself to him at the police station, it seemed entirely natural that he should now be taking care of my Michelle and Ryan.

  ‘Will I take you to see them?’ he asked me.

  I couldn’t speak. I nodded.

  ‘I’ll come with you, Mum,’ Shaun said.

  ‘No,’ I managed to say. ‘I want to go in on my own, for a few minutes.’

  This was a moment I was unable to share with anyone, not even a much-loved son.

  A door in front of me opened and I stepped into the dim interior. The door closed behind me. Cool, quiet, peaceful, a room of whispers. I saw my children. They lay side by side. Michelle was serene. She might have been asleep.

  But my poor boy …

  He was in pain. Death had robbed his face of its softness. His expression was one of shock. Death had diminished him, made him smaller, more fragile. My lovely, sturdy, special gift was gone. I stood in the space between the two caskets, my left hand on my son, my right hand on my daughter.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I whispered. ‘I’m so sorry I wasn’t there.’

  I don’t know how long I spent with them, but eventually the mother in me responded to the needs of my other child. Shaun was still outside. He, too, needed to say goodbye. I retreated slowly, reluctantly. I opened the door and stepped out of the room. Shaun was waiting, his eyes bright with anguish. He walked past me, laying his hand briefly on my shoulder, and entered the room. The door closed behind him. I heard him howl, this soldier who had become so familiar with death on the battlefields of Iraq, where he had served with 13 Air Assault Regiment.

  I cried then, for my lost children and for the sons I still had, especially the son who had come so close to being a victim of his father’s murderous rage. When Shaun had arrived from England he had revealed to me that his father had called him two days before the murders.

  ‘He said he wanted me to help “fix the family”,’ Shaun told me.

  At the time, Shaun was utterly mystified by his father’s behaviour.

  ‘He begged me to come home; said he’d even pay for the flight,’ Shaun said, adding, ‘I nearly did come home, but there was just something so strange about it all, and the insistent way Dad spoke. It made me uneasy.’

  Thank God Shaun did not come home. I have no doubt that he was destined to die as part of Rab’s hellish plan. I’m convinced he would have been the first victim. There would have been no way Rab could have managed to kill Michelle and Ryan if Shaun had been there, and still alive.

  Shaun realised that, too. ‘He would have tried to kill me, Mum,’ he told me. Shaun was well aware of what his father was capable of. He had witnessed me being beaten, heard me being raped. Now his words confirmed the awful truth of it all. I knew now that the deaths of my children had been no moment of madness, no sudden explosion of rage. This had been planned, coldly, calculatingly, and it had been executed with chilling precision.

  I wonder if Rab had decided to spare Ross. On the day of the murders, Rab sent him and his girlfriend on an errand. By the time they arrived home in the early evening, Ryan and Michelle were already dead. Ross had, like me, walked in to find the house silent. By then, Rab had showered and cleaned up, eradicating all the evidence of his dreadful deed. In fact, he had met Ross at the door, and went so far as to tell him that I had already been to the house and collected Michelle and Ryan.

  Ross and his girlfriend had gone to his bedroom in the attic, where they listened to music. They were wholly unaware of what had happened.

  With Ross in the attic bedroom, Rab went to his own bed, cut his wrists in a pathetic mock attempt at suicide … and waited. For my screams.

  All of these dark, dreadful thoughts were chasing each other across my mind. I was brought back to the present by the reappearance of Shaun, who had emerged from the little room where his brother and sister lay.

  He looked at me with unblinking eyes and whispered, ‘Evil … pure evil!’ I sensed anger rising in my son and I put my arms around him, calming him, defusing the moment.

  Scott, who was standing to the one side, cast his eyes to the floor. After a few moments he said, ‘Is there anything special you would like the children to wear, June?’

  I let go of Shaun, cupped his face in my hands and said, ‘Go to the car, son. I won’t be long.’

  I had known Scott would ask me that question and had spent hours going through Michelle and Ryan’s clothes. It would have been so easy to choose something plain, simple and anonymous. But when you say a last goodbye to your children you are somehow compelled to surroun
d them with the things from their lives that they have loved so much. The decisions were simple. A pair of my pyjamas with a cat motif for Michelle. Spiderman pyjamas for Ryan. They may seem strange choices to those who have not been forced to give up their children, but there was enormous comfort in the thought of having my Michelle dressed in those pink ‘jammies’. She had loved them, sneaking into my room and pinching them from my drawer because she so liked to wear them. I would go into her room and find her perched on the bed.

  ‘That’s my jammies!’ I would scold.

  She would laugh, that adorable innocent laugh, as if she had got something over on Mum. Now she could have them forever. It was unthinkable to me that she would go to her final rest wearing anything else. I would also have her feet wrapped in fluffy socks. In life, my girl’s feet were always cold. She would wear two or three pairs.

  Ryan would also go to his rest surrounded by his favourite things. His world revolved around his heroes, Power Rangers and Spiderman. The small comforts we take from life become so much more important in death.

  I had also gathered a collection of their toys and keepsakes to be placed with them in their coffins, including Ryan’s Bob the Builder pillow, which had been his ‘comfort blanket’ since he was little more than a baby. It was falling apart but I knew he would want it.

  ‘I don’t want the service to be sad,’ I told Scott. ‘I want to celebrate their lives.’

  For sentimental reasons, I chose music that included the Power Rangers’ theme and Elton John’s ‘Baby’s Got Blue Eyes’, the tune that had been playing when I first held Michelle.

  I told my family and friends that I did not want the mourners to wear sombre clothes. I asked for bright colours. Michelle had so loved glittery things. It would be the saddest day of our lives but I did not want it draped in black.

  Scott understood. ‘Go home now, June,’ he said to me. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow.’

  Tomorrow came after a night without sleep. I rose from my bed, weary beyond any physical tiredness. I dressed in my bright-red top and a trouser suit, and sat at the kitchen table, waiting.