by June Thomson
The children were waiting for us in the playground, their little faces looking through the gaps in the railings. They blew kisses and waved their hands. Their teachers stood behind them, crying.
We came within sight of Riddrie Park Cemetery, where an even larger crowd of mourners had gathered by the gates. The cars slid past them and stopped high on a hill beside a freshly dug grave. Whatever composure I had maintained deserted me. I went to pieces and had to be almost carried to the graveside.
I could hear, sharp and clear, the words of the humanist minister as he recited the opening lines of Mary Elizabeth Frye’s poem, ‘Do Not Stand at My Grave and Weep’. As my babies were lowered into the ground, I heard no more, the words lost to my grief. I knew only that my babies embraced each other and my mother watched over them.
They were in the arms of an angel.
Chapter 26
Tell Me Why
‘Rab posed his children like angels. He thought of himself as a loving father – June was to blame.’
Ian Stephen
June: I know you felt differently but I had to see Rab. I had to have answers.
He was waiting for me.
The room was cavernous and spartan, bright lights shining down on ranks of tables. Battered plastic chairs sat on either side of each table. He was sitting at one of them, wearing what looked like a work shirt – some kind of prison uniform. I can’t remember its colour.
Three warders stood by a wall to our left, their hands clasped behind their backs. They looked into the middle distance. Their faces said nothing.
It was the first time I had seen Rab since the night he had been carried from Muiredge on a stretcher. The night he killed my children. I sucked in deep breaths, trying to still my mounting hysteria. Hatred, anger, grief, sadness and bewilderment chased each other across my mind. I had to remain calm, stay focused, if I were to get answers.
Rab did not sit straight in the chair – he reclined as far as its hard back would allow. His body language said he was at ease, perhaps even bored. His face was expressionless but for the beginnings of a smirk, the same smirk I had seen that night.
His eyes never left my face as I pulled an empty chair away from the table, making a loud, harsh sound that shattered the silence of the room and caused the warders’ eyes to flick towards me. I sat down and laid my handbag on the floor. It contained only my purse, my keys and the letter Rab had sent me.
Written in a near illegible scrawl it recorded the ramblings of a lunatic.
The silence grew between us.
He was exerting control, waiting for me to speak first. My eyes were fixed on a scar on the surface of the table, but eventually I looked up and into his eyes.
‘Why, Rab?’ I hissed.
‘What have you done to your hair?’ he replied.
It was the letter that had at last given me the courage to confront Rab. The dreadful missive had dropped onto the mat behind the front door, where it lay among the banal communications of everyday life, sandwiched between a gas bill and a letter from a bank I had never heard of, offering me a credit card.
I stood in the hall, transfixed, looking at my name and address which were rendered in black ballpoint pen. I recognised Rab’s handwriting immediately. I moved slowly from the hall to the kitchen, carrying the letter as if it were a dead rat. I laid it on the table.
My first instinct was to tear open the envelope, but I was suddenly afraid. I couldn’t touch it. What could he possibly have to say to me? What could I want to hear from him? It lay there for a long time, violating my home, as I sipped my morning coffee.
Then I realised that this might be what I had been yearning for. It could reveal the reason why my children had to die.
That was it.
Rab had finally come to his senses. He had at last been stricken by guilt and remorse, and had decided to explain the reasons for what he had done. I opened the envelope, extracting the thin sheet of prison writing paper which bore the logo of the Scottish Prison Service and Rab’s prisoner number.
I read his first words and I felt sick to the pit of my stomach.
I would give anything to share his exact words with you because they are the only ones which he has ever offered to explain his actions. In my opinion, they give a truly chilling insight into his twisted thinking about the dreadful events of Saturday 3 May, 2008. It may, however, surprise and outrage many of you to know that even monsters who slaughter their own children have rights.
I understand that if I reveal the contents of the letter, word for word, Rab can claim that I have breached his ‘copyright’. So I can only describe the effect of his bizarre missive.
I ignored the appalling grammar and strained to read the scrawl, a mixture of the cursive and block capitals. The room swam around me. I reached for the table to steady myself. It was as if I had been doused by a bucket of ice-cold water as I read how Rab found it very hard to forgive them … and me.
The letter fell from my hand onto the table. My body temperature exploded from cold to hot in a micro-second. I was drained of strength. Forgive me? Forgive them? The worst moment of my life had been finding my murdered children. On my deathbed, when I am recalling all that was good and bad in my life, those horrible words will be remembered as the second-worst thing that ever happened to me.
But the torture wasn’t over as he dismissed his murderous actions as ‘piss’ and went on to boast about his sex life and how many orgasms he’d had since his teens.
I read on, my rage increasing as each sentence revealed the bizarre mind of this monster who had calculated his sexual pleasures down to the last second. With each word, I believed madness had been unleashed and brought into my world. There could be no peace anymore. I cried. The tears falling onto the letter could never wash away the cruelty of those words.
I sat for hours, immobile, a rock, the letter discarded on the floor. In the course of the day the front door was knocked several times, briefly bringing me out of my trance. I ignored the knocks, slipping back into the reverie. Slowly, as the time passed, I came to a decision.
Tomorrow, come what may, I would get in my car, drive to the prison and face down this demon. My demon.
The long walk from the reception area had not calmed me. I shook uncontrollably, dreading what was to come.
Minutes before, I had stood at the desk in front of a bewildered prison officer, pleading with him to be allowed to see Rab.
‘It’s outwith visiting hours, Ma’am,’ he told me.
‘I have to see him, I have to see him,’ I begged.
His face showed the resignation of one confronted by a madwoman whom he knew would not be dissuaded. He looked at me for a moment and said, ‘Wait here, please.’
He disappeared.
I waited.
I hadn’t slept since I received the letter the day before. Rab’s poison had filled the night with ghosts that terrified me in the darkness. I had lain on my bed, the words stabbing at me until dawn came. I rose, showered and dressed. I stepped out of the house into a dreary grey day that matched my mood. I saw nothing on the journey to Perth until the prison loomed before me. Somewhere in this stark and imposing building that housed the mad and the bad, Rab was waiting.
He had the answers.
I needed to know why my children had died.
From this distance in time, I know now that on that day I was unhinged. I realise that Rab’s letter had been constructed to harm me, to elevate my pain to another level. But I was so driven by my madness that I believed if I came here, if I looked into his eyes, if I asked him why, he would tell me what I yearned to know. I was not offering him more control. I had none left to give. He had already won the war and there were no more battles to lose. All I could hope for was that I might sneak under his guard. That he might reveal his secrets.
The warder returned. He knew who I was now. I was the child murderer’s wife. His face had softened from that of the bureaucrat to that of a man, possibly a father.
> ‘Please follow this gentleman,’ he said in a kind voice, indicating another prison officer who had appeared from nowhere.
I followed the second officer through a labyrinth of corridors, to the door of the visitors’ room.
‘I don’t like your hair like that!’ Rab said.
My hand flew to the side of my head, flicking strands away from my face. It was involuntary. I was self-conscious.
‘Why, Rab?’ I said again.
‘You’re wearing jeans again,’ he said.
‘Why, Rab?’
Sadness, remorse and anger combined to strengthen me.
‘Why, Rab?’
A mantra.
‘Don’t like them, the jeans. We’ll have to change that, and the hair,’ he said.
Still controlling. And I was still being controlled. For a fleeting second I thought I shouldn’t be wearing these jeans or have my hair this way – because Rab didn’t like it! It’s impossible to convey the level of control one human being can have over another.
‘Why?’ I demanded again.
His face was cruel. There would be no mercy for me here. I was distraught. I grabbed up my bag, pushed the chair away from the table and stood up.
‘Sit down!’ he said. ‘I’m not finished.’
I obeyed, as I had always obeyed.
I looked into his eyes. He was enjoying this. Another victory. When he wrote the letter he knew I would come. I was still the puppet, still dancing on his strings. God forgive me, but a part of me still needed Rab. Just saying those words horrifies me now, but I was so ground down, so needful of support, so anxious for someone to take charge, that I still saw him as the representative of some kind of order. This murderer, this maniac, still held my life in his hands. And now he was treating me as if we were sorting out our problems after a silly domestic tiff.
I steeled myself.
‘Tell me, Rab,’ I said. ‘Tell me.’
I was blinded by tears.
When he didn’t answer I made to stand up.
‘Sit down!’ he said.
I made a third attempt to leave – and for the third time he ordered me to sit. He was sitting upright in the chair now, glorying in the silence. I looked at his face. The smirk was permanent.
‘Why, Rab? Please! Just tell me!’ I whispered.
I was distraught, no longer sustained by my anger, and I felt weary to my bones.
He shrugged his shoulders, as if I had asked him why he was late home from the pub. I knew then that he was playing a game he had played so many times before. He was feeding on my pain.
He must have squirmed with delight when the prison officer had entered his cell and told him he had a visit from his wife. Another exquisite opportunity to torture me. This was not a man. This was a devil that had escaped from the darkest pit in hell and assumed human form.
I stood up. This time I was leaving. It was over. I would never know the answer to my ‘Why?’ Only he knew. I felt instinctively that he would never tell me. If he did, it might offer me some comfort – and he could never allow that. He was about to tell me to sit, but a warning look from one of the guards froze the words on his lips. I looked at him and tried to sum up the energy to ask him, one last time, why he had killed our children. I couldn’t.
The words wouldn’t come. I turned, dragging my feet towards the door.
I followed a silent warder back through the corridors. I passed the reception desk, and the first officer I had spoken to nodded a farewell to me.
Into the light. Deep breaths. The slow walk to my car.
I eased into the driver’s seat and began to cry as I had not done since the night my children died. I sat there for hours until it was dark. When I had no more tears, I placed the key in the ignition and started the engine. I drove out of the shadow of the big building.
I do not remember the journey home. All I remember are the last words Rab had spoken as I left the visitor’s room.
‘I hope you’re stoppin’ all this divorce shite now?’
Chapter 27
Revenge
‘Ash – like Rab – was thoroughly evil, although he would not perceive himself as being so.’
Ian Stephen
Giselle: And we were so alike, you and I, yet so different. You wanted answers. I wanted Ash dead.
I went to the hospital to kill him.
I did not want answers. What would they mean? There was nothing in the world that Ash could have said to me – no excuse, no reason, no rationale. He could not blame a disturbed mental state. He could not talk to me of stress or anger or frustration. Nothing mattered to me. How could I, or any normal person, fathom the mind of a monster that was capable of brutally killing his own children? Even if such a creature were to break his silence and offer a warped explanation for his actions, how could any of us make any sense of it? Why would we want to?
His death would be answer enough.
This was a beast I had never known, not the man who had once brought me flowers, showered me with gifts – the charmer who had won the affection of a naïve young woman.
I knew only that when he arrived at my home on that dreadful day – when he had filled his sons with such a sense of excitement at the prospect of going to play football – that he was planning to kill them. He had smiled at me. He had asked for an extra nappy for Jay-Jay and bottles of diluted Ribena for the two of them to drink on the car journey to the place where he would end their lives.
Had he always been the monster? If he had, I had been unable to see behind the mask. I saw only a weakling, a dreamer. My greatest regret – June’s greatest regret – is that we could not foretell the future. We suffer every day because we believe that, somehow, in some way, we should have seen some sign.
Don’t believe there wasn’t a small part of me that wanted to know the reasons why. But my hatred was so great that I was prepared to live with not knowing why, if only I could avenge my babies.
I had seen what Ash had done to them, how he had defiled them. That’s what made me determined to kill him. The anger had not ensnared me immediately. It would arrive later. In the aftermath of the death of my sons I was too numbed to feel anything. I was in the dark place. In the world, but not of it. My loved ones and friends encircled me, protecting me, offering words of comfort that had no hope of reaching me.
And then one day a tiny part of me emerged from the crippling grief. The anger came. It was such a fierce thing, the awesome power of which I had not realised could exist within me. It began as a slow-burning flame, then, as the days and weeks passed following the loss of my Paul and my Jay-Jay, it became an inferno, consuming every fibre of my being. I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t sleep. At last I knew what I wanted to do.
I would kill him.
The old man’s eyes flickered but he didn’t wake up. I had never seen him before in my life, but I held his hand, stroked his hair and soothed him with words that might have been spoken by a dutiful and much-loved grand-daughter.
That was clearly how I was being perceived by the other visitors to Ward 6 of Glasgow Royal Infirmary on the day I went to kill Ash. The visitors’ eyes found mine and they smiled at me. I returned the smiles. My devotion to the old man who lay comatose on the hospital bed was obvious to them.
But he was only my ‘cover’.
Monitors bleeped constantly and reassuringly above his bedside cabinet but they couldn’t distract me. My eyes rarely left the bed at the end of the ward. The one hidden by the green curtains and guarded by a police officer.
I willed the policeman to take a comfort break or to think what a nice idea a cup of coffee would be. Anything that would take him away from the bed where Ash lay, recovering from the injuries he had inflicted on himself after killing our sons.
I fingered the gold medallion that hung around my neck on a chain long enough to allow the medal to touch my heart. It was my talisman, inscribed with the names of my dead sons. I held it and prayed the policeman would leave, if only for the few moments I
needed.
Just long enough for me to take Ash’s life.
‘I can’t tell you, Giselle.’
‘You have to,’ I told the woman. She was a friend of the family who had once been a nurse at the Royal Infirmary. I could see my question made her uncomfortable. I had passed through the grief that had overwhelmed me and I was now driven by something infinitely darker and more sinister.
‘I shouldn’t say,’ she repeated.
The newspapers had recorded that Ash was in the Royal, but the Royal was a huge building and one of the largest teaching hospitals in Europe.
‘He’s in there, somewhere,’ I said.
‘Why do you want to know?’
‘I just have to …’
She looked at me long and hard. ‘It’s no great secret,’ she said. ‘People with burns go to the Burns Unit. Ward 8.’
Ward 8, I repeated in my mind.
I left a warm summer’s day at the gates of the hospital and made my way to the door of the imposing Victorian building. As I entered, the reception area was alive with people. I imagined everyone must know why I was here and what I intended to do, but I soon realised I was invisible. A patient? A visitor? How could anyone tell what I was?
The strangest thing was that I could sense Ash was here, somewhere in this building. Don’t ask me how or why, but my senses seemed to be heightened. I was operating at some hitherto unknown level.
Ward 8. Find Ward 8.
I couldn’t ask anyone. It might provoke questions I could not answer, not if I didn’t want to be carried off in a police van. I was dressed smartly. I had taken particular care of my appearance. I didn’t want to stand out. A nurse passed me, smiling. Did she know? How could she?
I looked for any indication of the location of Ward 8.
Two doctors passed, deep in conversation, and I almost asked them for directions. Even with murder in your heart, it is hard sometimes to suppress the real you. I found a sign with directions. I walked along the brightly lit corridors with their high ceilings, slowly at first, but my steps quickened with each overhead sign that pointed the way to the Burns Unit.