The Dangerous Kind
Page 1
Contents
Friday 11 November Present day
Monday 28 November Present day
2002
Tuesday 13 December Present day
Wednesday 14 December Present day
2002
Wednesday 14 December Present day
Thursday 15 December Present day
2003
Monday 19 December Present day
2003
Tuesday 20 December Present day
2003
Friday 23 December Present day
2003
Monday 26 December Present day
Thursday 29 December Present day
Saturday 31 December Present day
Wednesday 4 January Present day
2003
Thursday 5 January Present day
Friday 6 January Present day
Monday 9 January Present day
2003
Tuesday 10 January Present day
2003
Thursday 12 January Present day
Monday 16 January Present day
Friday 20 January Present day
Saturday 21 January Present day
Monday 23 January Present day
Wednesday 25 January Present day
Thursday 26 January Present day
Monday 30 January Present day
2003
Thursday 2 February Present day
2003
Tuesday 7 February Present day
Friday 11 November 2016
Friday 6 October Present day
Went/Gone: Episode 6
Acknowledgements
Also by Deborah O’Connor
Copyright
For my brother Danny
Potentially Dangerous Person (PDP): a person who has not been convicted of, or cautioned for any offence . . . but whose behaviour gives reasonable grounds for believing there is present a likelihood of them committing an offence or offences that will cause serious harm.
Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO)
Friday 11 November
Present day
I follow him across the garden and out through a gate in the wall. Away from the manor house it is dark, the night sky bloated with snow that has yet to make itself known.
We keep walking, and before long we reach the foot of a muddy hill. He tackles the incline at speed. I do the same. The hill is steep, and by the time we reach the top we’re both panting. Ahead, a perimeter of ragged orange netting, held taut by iron posts, rings a copse. He lifts a damaged section of the netting into the air.
‘The broadband in this part of the country is rubbish.’ He nods towards the trees. ‘They’ve been digging. New cables.’
I duck underneath and he joins me on the other side. The edge of the copse is overgrown with weeds and brambles. Thorns catch on my coat as we push our way into a small clearing.
‘That’s better.’ He breathes in the cold air. ‘I can think out here.’
The moon is full but the canopied criss-cross of branches means that large patches of the clearing are in shadow. I head for the carcass of a felled tree, covered with moss: the brightest available spot. I’ve been waiting thirteen years for this moment. I want to be sure to see the look on his face.
I don’t notice the hole.
My ankle twists on the precipice. Unable to take my weight, the cliff ledge collapses beneath me and clods of earth crash into the puddles below. I scramble, trying to right myself, but the crumbling soil continues to give way. I am about to topple forwards, into the hole, when I feel his hand clamp my arm.
‘Watch it.’ He yanks me back to safety. ‘That’ll be the digging I warned you about.’
My legs are rickety. I stagger over to the mossy tree trunk and sit down, my breaths short and shallow. My bicep stings. I had forgotten about his hands. His grip. Strong enough to bruise.
He inspects the hole. ‘This must be one of the sites they have yet to fill in.’
I wait until I’ve stopped shaking, then join him at the edge. This time I make sure to keep well back.
The hole is the diameter of a child’s paddling pool and twenty feet deep, the bottom spotted with puddles. The walls are a sheer vertical drop, sliced clean where the machinery has dug down to the layers below, their surface punctuated by white knuckles, tree roots that have pushed out through the mud into thin air.
Now that my eyes have adjusted to the dark I see mounds of dirt lined up on the opposite side of the hole and that a trail of abandoned tools – spades, buckled plastic buckets and odd bits of metal – litters the ground all the way back to the edge of the copse.
‘Come on, then. Out with it.’ He steps forward into a square of moonlight. ‘Why are you here?’
I look at him, standing there in his suit and tie. His brogues are ruined, the tiny holes and scalloped edges clogged with mud. He’s in his late fifties, his features slacker than they once were, but overall he’s aged well. He’d always dressed smartly: chinos and polo shirts, jeans with a crease pressed down the middle of each leg. But this suit looks expensive. Something about the cut and line of the shoulders, the way the material hangs flush against his shirt.
‘Because it was wrong.’ I try to sound braver than I feel. ‘What you did. What you tried to do.’
He won’t look at me. Instead he looks slightly to the left of my head, at the trees behind. ‘Is it money? Is that what you want?’
I’d imagined this moment so often. How it would feel to see him again. Would I be angry? Scared? Now I’m here I feel something I had never anticipated. Disappointment.
‘I told you what happened that night. You promised to help. You lied.’
He scoffs and waves his hand in the air. Filled with a new sense of purpose, he starts to pace up and down, as though he’s dictating a letter and I’m his secretary, there to take notes.
‘I saw you as a favour but now I think it best if you leave.’
‘Times have changed. Back then, no one would listen. Now they’re all ears.’ The hole gapes blackly behind him. ‘I’m going to tell them everything.’ I pause. ‘So are the others.’
He stops pacing. ‘Others?’
‘You passed us round like we were nothing. I don’t care who you are now,’ I gesture back towards the manor house, ‘or who you’re going to be. It’s time you were brought to account.’
‘Whatever it is you think you’re talking about . . .’ he lapses into silence, reaching for some memory, but it won’t come, or he discards it ‘. . . you’re mistaken.’
There is no sound. The temperature has dropped. A sudden hoar.
‘Think about your family. That’s why I’m here. To give you a chance to talk to them before it breaks.’
This was true, but it was more than that. Watching the after-effects on the news, him leaving a police station with his lawyer, harried and trying to cover his face with a newspaper, would not be enough. For my own sanity, I needed to be the one to confront him, to take back that bit of control.
He looks at his feet.
I relax a little. I’ve done what I came here to do. He reacted as I’d expected but now he seems to be taking me seriously. He is almost contrite.
He turns, and for the first time since I got here he looks me in the eye. I think he is going to apologise, to try and explain, but then he raises his hand and, whiplash fast, he slaps me.
I cradle my face. The skin under my eye is tight and hot.
He examines the hand he used to hit me. Adjusts his signet ring. ‘I’ll have Ennis drive you back.’
I flex my jaw, trying to disperse the pain.
He straightens his tie and it’s then that he notices the state of his shoes. He tuts and uses his heel to scuff
off the worst.
I step forward and, as he lifts his gaze, I give him a push towards the hole. He is confused more than surprised and only seems to understand what is happening to him at the last moment. He scrabbles with his feet and hands, but a little too late, and as he makes his descent, his head slams against one of the knuckled tree roots and bounces forward, cracking his chin into his chest. I fall to my knees and peer over the side, expecting to see him on his feet and angry, already trying to brush the dirt from his suit.
He is not moving. He’s lying on his back, his head at an angle, eyes closed, mouth open.
The puddles surrounding him are now curdled with ice.
I get to my feet. Frightened. Guilty. Something inside me seems to loosen and come away from itself. I start to shiver.
The sky finally decides to release its load. Snowflakes thicken the air. They catch on his eyelashes.
A crackle in the undergrowth. Someone else is here. ‘What have you done?’ A figure appears and then, as they approach the hole, they ask again, louder than before: ‘What have you done?’
Monday 28 November
Present day
Jessamine
The snow came on again around seven p.m. A band of white, for the third time in as many weeks, it quickly made its way from the bottom to the top of the British Isles, like a person pulling a duvet up and over themselves. On Oxford Street there was four inches and counting.
Inside Broadcasting House Jessamine Gooch was at work, preparing to go live on air. She usually liked to spend the hour before her radio show in the quiet of the studio on the second floor, going over the first few pages of the script. It contained a bust of Lord Reith, the founder of the BBC, and she found him a strangely calming presence. But there had been some technical issues of late and, while the sound engineers tinkered with faulty wires and widgets, she was stranded at her desk.
The change in routine was making it hard to concentrate. That and the cleaners who bustled about the place, vaccuming and emptying bins. No sooner would she read a line of text than it dissolved in her brain. To make matters worse, she could feel a hot flush blooming low in her chest. She fanned the sheets of A4 against her skin. Her instinct was to go outside to the cool air and do a lap around the block, reciting the script as she went. She’d done it once before during a fire drill. Somehow, walking had helped the words register.
But the snow.
It was deep and still falling.
Then there was the small matter of her footwear. As she’d left the flat tonight, Sarah, her daughter, had clocked the boots Jessamine was wearing and raised an eyebrow. ‘Suede in this weather? Really?’
She wiped the sweat from her temples and looked to the small square windows that faced out onto Langham Place. The corner of each pane was webbed with ice. She’d have to make do.
Blocking out the nearby hum of a vacuum cleaner, she tried again to get the opening salvo clear in her head.
On 2 October 1998 Henry Manners raped and murdered Eloise Shaw. Last seen on the Thorne Road in Doncaster’s notorious red-light district, Eloise’s body was discovered many weeks later in a stretch of water called Swainby Beck. She had been asphyxiated and beaten with a crowbar. She would be the first of three women murdered by Manners in a killing spree that ended when he was apprehended nine weeks later.
Until that day, although Manners had had various brushes with the police, he had never been charged with a crime. Yet many experts believe that the deaths of Eloise Shaw and the two other victims, Natalie Rigden and Chanelle Roberts, were entirely preventable. They claim that Manners’s actions did not come out of the blue, that throughout his life he left breadcrumbs, clear signs that, should someone have cared to pay attention to them, he could have been prevented from ever taking a person’s life.
My name is Jessamine Gooch and you are listening to Potentially Dangerous People, the radio show that takes you inside the criminal mind and asks if it is ever possible to spot and stop the individuals who will one day go on to commit murder.
Mouthing the lines under her breath, she used a pencil to mark the points at which she might pause or when to emphasise a particular word in her delivery.
Tonight’s guests were an ex-police officer, Charles O’Brien, and a criminologist, Professor Holly Humphries from Manchester University. O’Brien was a PDP regular and would be with her in the studio. Professor Humphries would contribute down the line, from a booth in Salford.
Mr O’Brien, even if the police had been able to identify Henry Manners as a potentially dangerous person, would they have ever had it in their power, realistically, to stop him committing these crimes?
O’Brien could have called in tonight’s interview from home. The show’s eleven p.m. start time meant guests often did – the listeners didn’t care if the experts were in the studio or on the other side of the world. But the ex-detective superintendent always made the effort to be at Broadcasting House, regardless of the weather. He said it made for a better show, but Jessamine suspected there was more to it.
A giant of a man, O’Brien hailed from Cork and, although he had lived in Kilburn most of his adult life, he still spoke with a brogue that erupted into staccato ‘Ha-ha-ha’ laughter at the most unexpected moments. Once, in the early days of the show, he had asked Jessamine out on a date. She had turned him down, claiming it would be inappropriate (in truth, at that time, she had already been in a relationship of sorts) but O’Brien was undeterred. Even now he would bring her small gifts: a posy of jasmine (a reference to her name), which he produced, petals bruised, from the depths of his backpack, a pen that transformed at a touch into a knife or a torch (‘It’s a pen, a light and a weapon, all in one’) and then just last week, most random of all, a leg of air-dried ham that he claimed to have picked up for a song in Lidl.
The cleaner reached Jessamine’s group of desks and began hoovering under the desk opposite hers. It belonged to her producer, Mick, and as the woman pushed the nozzle into the hard-to-reach spot by the footrest, she banged the side of the desk a little too hard. A porcelain frame, containing a photo of Mick, his wife and their three children, wobbled and fell to the floor with a smash.
‘Not again.’ The cleaner picked up the broken frame. ‘Last week I spilled some cold tea on his keyboard.’ The top of the frame had ‘FAMILY’ moulded across it in pastel colours, and as she tried to join the two pieces back together the M crumbled to nothing.
Jessamine looked at Mick, thirty feet away in the glass-walled studio. Standing next to the bust of Lord Reith, he was supervising the sound engineers, oblivious to the fate of his family portrait.
Jessamine took the broken frame from the woman, then kicked at what remained of the M, dispersing the shards into the carpet. Returning to her desk, she opened her bottom drawer, placed the frame inside, winked and put her finger to her lips. The cleaner mouthed, ‘Thank you,’ unplugged the machine and made herself scarce.
Peace and quiet settled across the second floor. But the respite was brief. No sooner had the vacuuming stopped than the lift dinged and a man emerged. Wearing a navy wool coat, his shoulders were flecked with rapidly melting snowflakes, his glasses fogged. Jack Flagley, senior counsel to the topmost tier of BBC brass. He was headed towards the controller’s office. In the past his presence there at this hour would have been a cause of concern. He would have brought with him an expectation that something big was about to break, something that couldn’t wait till morning. But the corporation had experienced such a volume of controversy lately that seeing a lawyer convening an emergency midnight meeting was really quite commonplace.
Jessamine again looked towards Mick. He, too, had noticed the lawyer’s arrival. He met her gaze and widened his eyes, as if to say, ‘What’s it going to be this time?’ then knocked Lord Reith’s head twice for luck, and went back to fixing the fault.
Jessamine was less blasé. Lining the wall next to where she sat was a series of framed photos of newsreaders, journalists, presenters and DJ
s who graced the BBC’s airwaves. She sought out her own picture, sandwiched between a World Service veteran and a Radio 1 bright young thing. Taken not long after she’d won the first of three Sony Radio Academy awards, it showed her with brown hair pulled back into a low ponytail, her trademark fringe cut blunt to just above the eyebrows. She had what her father always described as a Very English Face, the jolt of her cheekbones like the curve in a teacup handle. At the time, she had been on the brink of forty, twinkly-eyed and smiley, unable to contain the pride she felt at being part of an organisation for which she had nothing but respect and admiration.
The eleven intervening years had changed her in more ways than one. Her jawline wasn’t as tight as it had been, and although she had kept her fringe, she now preferred to colour her bob a pale ash blonde (better to hide the grey). As for that proud smile . . .
Recent events had brought to light a series of historic child sex-abuse cases, some involving the corporation’s disc jockeys and presenters. Senior management’s initial handling of the affair had left a stain she found hard to ignore and, these days, her feelings towards her employer were a little more complex. She was still in awe of its breadth and impartiality, but now when she walked around the studios and corridors she had once held so dear, she wondered what horrors had been perpetrated there and what secrets the walls might contain.
Back to the script.
Professor Humphries, you’ve studied the criminology of Henry Manners. In some ways his life story was a textbook case and echoes many of the patterns we have come across on this show before: domestic violence, petty theft, a chaotic employment history. In your opinion, was it inevitable that Manners would one day do this, that he would one day come to murder?
The professor would answer almost certainly in the affirmative. Then Jessamine would play an interview, recorded last week, with Manners’s ex-wife. In it she described how during their courtship she had seen only the affable, considerate side of Manners but that when they had moved in together he had changed and several times had tried to strangle her. She would go on to explain how, although on numerous occasions she had been frightened enough to call the police, she had always decided not to press charges.