Beyond All Evil

by June Thomson

  Stay calm. More people, civilians as well as medical staff. I didn’t stand out. Then I saw the sign – Ward 8.

  What was going through my mind? Bloody murder!

  I paused. Think about this, I told myself. I had brought no weapon. I would have to use whatever means were at my disposal. I could strangle him? Smother him? Drag the tubes, with their life-saving medication, from his body? I didn’t know yet how I would do it. I would know when the time came.

  My heart beat like a piston in my chest. Into Ward 8.

  He wasn’t there! I almost cried out. The newspapers had got it wrong. I thought at first that they had been lied to, that in fact Ash was in another hospital.

  ‘Giselle,’ a voice said. My heart stopped. I turned slowly, fearfully, towards the direction of the voice, to find an old friend.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ the person asked, eyes looking over my shoulder.

  ‘Ash?’ I said.

  ‘What?’ he replied.

  ‘Where’s Ash?’ I repeated. ‘He’s supposed to be in Ward 8.’

  There was a long moment of silence.

  ‘He’s in Ward 6,’ he said.

  ‘Thanks,’ I said, walking away.

  I followed the signs back along the corridors until I found the ward – and Ash. Green curtains around a bed. An arm handcuffed to a bracket on its side. A foot lying outside the coverlet. I would have recognised the arm, even if the handcuff had not indicated he was a prisoner.

  A police officer was by the side of the bed, sitting on a visitor’s chair. Watchful. I hadn’t expected this. I was gripped by a sudden fear but my feet had taken me into the ward, dragged there by an unconscious desire to get closer to Ash. The policeman looked in my direction. There was no hint of recognition in his eyes. I was just another visitor. He didn’t know me. Why should he?

  I was just another face in a gathering crowd. It was apparently visiting time and, standing barely 5ft tall, I did not make an impression. I caught the policeman’s eye. Something in my demeanour seemed to alert him. He raised his leg, propping his foot on another chair, barring my way.

  I cast my eyes downwards and kept walking, joining the crowd that was filling the ward. Individuals were breaking off to go to the bedsides of those they had come to visit. I kept going. How was I to get out of this? There was no throughway, no ‘back door’ to take me out of the ward.

  I was trapped, with no clear intent. Don’t stop, I told myself. Don’t attract attention. What was I to do?

  The crowd had started to dissipate. Patients and visitors were exchanging greetings. I was alone.

  Then I saw the old man.

  I looked around frantically.

  No one else had entered the ward.

  The old man lay alone. He obviously did not have any visitors. Heaven knows what instinct carried me to the side of his bed. If a late visitor did arrive to see him, the game would be up.

  I took his hand.

  ‘Hello,’ I said softly.

  I did not dare use a name. I looked back at the police officer. He was no longer looking at me and he had replaced his foot on the floor. I stroked the old man’s hair. Five minutes passed … then ten … then twenty. I never took my eyes off the green curtains. I watched a nurse disappear behind them, then a doctor. They both emerged minutes later after doing whatever it was they had come to do to sustain a life not worth saving. Thirty minutes passed. The policeman was immobile. Forty-five minutes.

  The old man in the bed had not stirred. The visitors in the beds adjacent to him smiled at me. If only they had known my true motive. It would have wiped the smiles from their faces.

  My eyes on the green curtain. Any second now I would be discovered, denounced and dragged away. It didn’t happen. But I could not sit here forever. Visiting hour was drawing to a close. All these individuals surrounding me would merge back into a crowd and make for the door.

  I decided I would go for the direct route – walk back up the ward and lunge suddenly at Ash, in the hope I could damage him before they dragged me off. I replaced the old man’s hand on the coverlet. He was still asleep, still oblivious to me. I stood up and walked slowly towards the green curtains. Something stirred in the police officer. His foot came back up onto the chair. It was impossible. I knew it was impossible. I knew that I could never barge my way past him. He would be too strong for me.

  I almost wept.

  I came level with the green curtains. The handcuffed arm and the exposed foot mocked me. I was overwhelmed again by what Ash had done, how he had killed our children and how he was too cowardly to make a serious attempt to take his own life. I looked at the curtains that hid this useless creature who had no place in any decent world. He would not even know I had been here, would never realise how close he had come to dying.

  I turned my back and retraced my steps through the corridors into the reception hall, where people still did not recognise me or know my pain. I emerged into a day that was still summer and that still managed to be normal. The world went about its business and I returned to the dark place on the silent hill where my babies had been laid to rest.

  I would have to rely on the justice of others.

  Chapter 28

  Brutal and Merciless

  ‘To kill two children – each vulnerable in different ways ­– is almost unimaginable.’

  Lord Menzies to Rab Thomson, Edinburgh High Court, 3 October 2008

  June: Both of us had waited so long for the reckoning. Today, it was my turn.

  Rab stood in the dock, stony-faced, cold, remorseless, defiant – for the moment. It had been five months to the day since he had murdered our children.

  In the same court, three weeks earlier, he had admitted his guilt. There would be no trial. Now, he was appearing for sentence before Lord Menzies. He would know within minutes how many years he would spend behind bars. For a man like Rab, who had spent his life outdoors, any period of incarceration would be torture. I prayed to God that every second of every minute would hang like a rock around his neck, pulling him down into the abyss.

  I knew now what he had done.

  The awful truth had at last been revealed to me in the prosaic surroundings of a wood-panelled waiting room, where I had been taken by a woman from the Procurator Fiscal Service.

  ‘June,’ she said, ‘I want you to prepare yourself.’

  I think I have already said that it was bizarre that I remained unaware of precisely how my children had died, even though I had been the one to find them. On that dreadful evening the shock of it had blinded me.

  ‘You may hear things in there,’ she went on, referring to the court. She then told me what had happened to my children. Her quiet, measured tone belied the horror of her words. I learned that Rab had stabbed Ryan 14 times and Michelle 12 times. The revelations had sent me running from the room, into a toilet, where I screamed in pain.

  Now I was looking at Rab, this monster.

  Dr David Saddler, a forensic pathologist from the University of Dundee, had concluded that Rab had used three knives. The first had broken during the frenzy. He had gone to the kitchen and armed himself with a second. With a third – the largest – he had slashed his wrists and left the blade at his bedside for me to find.

  I was composed now, waiting to see justice be done. I was flanked by Linda and my brother Jim. I felt a pressure on my shoulder from behind. I turned. It was one of the detectives. He did not have to say anything.

  And then the judge spoke, telling Kevin McCallum, the Crown Prosecutor, that it was unnecessary to describe in graphic detail how my children had died. It was a kindness but it was too late. There was a pause as Lord Menzies adjusted his heavy red robe and turned slowly towards Rab.

  ‘Stand up!’ he ordered.

  Rab stood. His hands hung by his side.

  When Lord Menzies spoke again, his voice was flat and stern.

  ‘What you have done is indescribably awful. Your daughter Michelle was 25 but she had significant learnin
g difficulties. Your son Ryan was aged only seven.

  ‘Neither of them had done any harm to you and you were in a position of trust towards each of them.

  ‘Both were entitled to look to you for care, support and protection, yet on 3 May of this year you brutally murdered them.

  ‘For a man to kill his child is a ghastly, horrific crime. To kill two children – each vulnerable in different ways – is almost unimaginable.

  ‘I have read the various psychiatric and social enquiry reports to see if there is any explanation for your actions. They make bleak reading but they provide no explanation, far less any excuse for what you did.’

  Rab showed no emotion until Lord Menzies sentenced him to a minimum of 17 years and warned, ‘It is possible you may never be released from prison.’

  And then Rab cried, slumping forward, sobbing like a whimpering child.

  Linda and Jim held me in an iron-grip.

  ‘Say nothing!’ Jim hissed.

  I was torn between two emotions – the savage delight at seeing Rab brought to heel and my disappointment at the sentence.

  I heard a sharp intake of breath from behind me. I looked at the detective who had sought to comfort me and his expression was furious. Several of his colleagues were staring in disbelief. Detective Superintendent Alistair McKeen, the head of Fife Constabulary CID, leapt to his feet and left the court. Later, he would tell the waiting reporters, ‘This was the action of a deeply embittered and twisted individual who could not face losing control of the family he had dominated for so long.’

  The police had supported me so faithfully throughout my ordeal. I felt dreadful on their behalf, as well as my own.

  Richard Baker, then the Shadow Justice Secretary to the Scottish Parliament, was also shocked by the apparent leniency of the sentence.

  He said, ‘These were horrific murders. This wasn’t just a domestic tragedy. This was wanton evil.’

  His colleague Tricia Marwick, the Member of the Scottish Parliament for Central Fife, added, ‘It was a particularly heinous crime and it deserved a bigger sentence.’

  Within days, the Crown announced their intention to appeal the sentence.

  At the hearing, Alex Prentice QC, on behalf of the Lord Advocate, told Lords Osborne, Eassie and Malcolm, ‘The Crown position is that the judge erred. He did not take into account the merciless nature of the attack. Child murder might well attract a punishment of 20 years and, in this case, we have a double murder in particularly brutal circumstances.’

  To my utter disbelief, the Appeal Court judges ruled the sentence was not ‘unduly lenient’, in spite of the ‘heinous nature of the offences’. The detectives who had worked on the case regarded the judges’ decision as almost a betrayal.

  ‘He never for a second showed remorse,’ one detective told me privately. ‘He would hardly speak to us and he kept saying, “No comment, no comment”.’

  The officer told me that Rab also refused to explain the strange ‘suicide note’ he had left behind. It read, ‘Too much pain, lies and hurt. Don’t blame yourself. I will look after them. Just like your mother. Move on alone. Love Rab xxx.’

  The detectives were mystified by the reference to my mother. I wasn’t. It was a final barb, a message for me alone. Even after he had robbed me of my children, he had to play the puppet-master. Rab could not resist goading me over my strained relationship with my mother. If the suicide note provided an insight into his warped mind, two psychiatrists would offer me the opportunity to lay aside at least a little of my burden.

  When the courts were trying to establish if Rab was sane and fit to plead, he was sent for assessment to Scotland’s State Hospital for psychiatric patients. As part of the process I was visited by two doctors who wanted to know about our life together. I told them that I was tortured by the belief that I was somehow to blame for what had happened – if only I’d had the strength to stay, to do what Rab wanted, perhaps he would not have gone over the edge.

  As they left my home, after hours of conversation and note-taking, one of them paused at my front door and told me, ‘You do realise, June, the truth is that he has been like this since he was a child …’

  When I closed the door, I wept. No matter what they said, I would always believe that the price of my freedom was my children.

  Chapter 29

  Cold and Evil

  ‘The victims were defenceless and in your care. No doubt they loved you and assumed you would care for them as a father should.’

  Lord Brailsford to Ashok Kalyanjee, High Court sitting in Paisley, 20 September 2009

  Giselle: And this was my day when the justice of others would be done. There was as little comfort for me as there was for you.

  It would not be my justice. My justice would have been to send Ash to a grave rather than to a prison cell. Had I been granted the opportunity in the hospital when he lay helpless in a bed, he would not be here.

  He would not be standing in the dock, posturing in his smart grey suit. He would not be looking with defiant eyes at the judge who, today, would decide his fate, almost a year and a half after he killed Paul and Jay-Jay.

  This justice of others had been such a long time coming. It had been ten months since he appeared in court to confess what he had done. He had offered his guilt but not his remorse. The judge had wanted background reports prior to sending him to jail. The sentencing had been repeatedly delayed and it had been nearly a year, rather than a matter of weeks, between his guilty plea and justice being served.

  That was all over now. The system had been played and Ash had lost. I looked at this coward and I hated him. I hated him with a fierceness that terrified me.

  I heard a voice – deep, sonorous and authoritative. Lord Brailsford was speaking to me and my family. He wore a kindly expression. He said he appreciated how heart-rending this was for us.

  His face darkened as he turned to Ash and said, ‘You have pleaded guilty to the murder of your sons. This crime was premeditated, planned and organised.

  ‘You used deceit and lies to persuade the children’s mother and the children to go out with you. You purchased the murder weapon in advance and acquired petrol in a can, apparently to incinerate yourself and the victims.

  ‘The victims were defenceless and in your care. No doubt they loved you and assumed you would care for them as a father should.

  ‘One of the victims witnessed what happened to his brother. I cannot imagine the suffering that child must have endured before his own murder.

  ‘This is as grave a crime as can be imagined. I do not know what caused you to commit it. You were clearly under some form of psychological stress – but you have been found sane and fit to plead.

  ‘There is no mitigation for a crime of this enormity. The sentence of the court is one of life imprisonment. I am required to fix the punishment part of that sentence – the minimum period you will remain in custody. That period will be 21 years.’

  It was over. He would be nearly 70 before he was released. This justice of others demanded two decades of his life. It was a shorter sentence than I had received. I would be imprisoned by my loss for the rest of my days.

  Throughout the judge’s deliberation, I had watched Ash closely, searching his face for something, anything, that indicated sorrow or remorse. There was nothing. Any normal person, who had just been told he would spend the next 21 years behind bars, would have at least betrayed a sense of shock, some hint of emotion.

  One of the two gaolers who were flanking him placed his hand on Ash’s shoulder and tried to turn him towards the door that led from the court and down to the cells. Ash was reluctant to go. Then it struck me. He was enjoying himself. Knowing him as I did, everything about him screamed that he loved being the centre of attention. It was as if he were playing the role of the lawyer rather than the convicted killer. In his warped mind he had at last ‘made it’. Ash was finally important. I watched him disappear through the door.

  I felt hands on me. My father, my
brothers and my sisters grasped me firmly but gently.

  ‘Stand up, darlin’,’ my father said softly, taking my arm.

  ‘I’m fine, Da,’ I told him. And I was.

  In the beginning I had tortured myself.

  Would Paul and Jay-Jay still be with me if I had acquiesced to Ash, had given in to his demand that we live with his mother? I had gone beyond that now. My eyes had been opened by the revelation that Ash had been leading a secret life of drinking and gambling away thousands of pounds.

  He had, it seemed, been living in a house of cards that had tumbled down, driving him over the edge. That was what caused the ‘psychological stress’ the judge had referred to. I had caught a glimpse of the drinking because of the rambling phone calls in the night. I had not, however, realised the extent of the problem until police interviews with Ash revealed he had been drinking a bottle of spirits a day.

  He also confessed to them that he was addicted to gambling. With each revelation, it was as if I had been handed the missing pieces of a jigsaw. I remembered that on one occasion he told me he had won a ‘fortune’ at the casino but that the money was gone because he owed a lot of cash to ‘bad men’. I hadn’t believed him.

  Such behaviour seemed so out of character for a man who professed to be clean-living. I was wrong. His world had been crashing around his ears and, knowing him, he would have been horrified at the thought of his mother learning the terrible truth. That was why he had been at such pains to leave behind the message on the dictaphone that had been thrown from the car before he set it on fire. It was an exercise in justification by a self-indulgent weakling.

  In the months and years that have followed his conviction and imprisonment, such narcissism has become Ash’s hallmark.

  He once paid dearly for his arrogance. Reports indicated that he had been scalded with hot water thrown in his face by another prisoner. Ash had apparently told him, ‘They were my kids. I can do what I like with them.’