by Lucy Dawson
We swung onto the main road and Izzie blurted: ‘I’m sorry, Mummy. I didn’t mean to make him angry! I’m sorry. I was trying to kick as hard as I could.’
He’d shot her. ‘It wasn’t your fault, baby. What did he say to you when you were doing the pad work? You told him you didn’t want to do something?’ That had actually happened? He’d just shot her?
‘He wanted us to kick harder. He’d been mean to you,’ Isobel cut across me, ‘and I didn’t like it. I didn’t want to do it any more.’
‘What did he say to you though, darling?’ He held a gun to his shoulder and he aimed it at her.
‘He said: “none of your dirty English ways”.’ Isobel’s voice was soft and small.
Everything froze – crystallised for a second – then I actually felt the explosion of rage within me. Blood thundered against my eardrums and my ribcage. I swerved left and stopped suddenly in front of the Red Lion pub. The bastard, the mad, racist dangerous bastard. She was seven! SEVEN.
Running round to the back seat, I flung the door open. ‘Quick, darling! Jump in my arms again.’ She did as she was told and, this time, I barely noticed her weight as I wove my way unsteadily up to the front door, shoving it violently with my hip, praying that it would be open. It wasn’t – but it rattled enough in the frame for a shadow to quickly appear behind the glass as keys threw back in the lock.
The fifty-something landlord appeared clutching a tea towel, staring down at me holding Isobel in my arms.
‘Can I use your phone?’ I must have looked wild, deranged almost. ‘There’s a man at the leisure centre with a gun. He’s just shot at the children. I need to call the police.’
He’d obviously seen enough drama in his time not to ask stupid questions, instead just rushed me through the back, to a cold red-tiled hall adjoining the bar and the lounge where the payphone was attached to the wall between the ladies toilets and the closed pub kitchen door.
I set Isobel down who flinched at the chill on her bare feet, but didn’t complain. As I dialled 999, the landlord disappeared into the ladies loos, and came back with a hand towel, which he laid down at Isobel’s feet.
‘Stand on that, bab.’
He and Isobel listened as I told the call handler I needed the police. My daughter’s instructor had fired a gun in the sports hall. No, my daughter wasn’t injured, I didn’t think, but I wasn’t sure if he had any other weapons. Yes, he’d deliberately fired at the children in the enclosed sports hall. He’d said they weren’t working hard enough, his assistant had gone out to his car via the emergency exit and come back with a big, black machine gun and Jones had shot them. He was still there now with other parents and children.
‘It was Paul Jones who did it?’ The landlord was frowning as I hung up, white with fury and shock.
I nodded.
‘Well, there we go then,’ the landlord sighed, without passing any further comment. ‘You both need a drink.’
He took us back through into the empty bar urging us not to trip on the hoover lead snaking invisibly across the brightly patterned carpet, sat us at one of the tables in the window and gave Isobel a small bottle of orange juice with a straw and me a brandy. The winter sun was shining in through the glass so brightly it illuminated slowly swirling flecks of dust – hitting the highly polished mahogany table top with such a powerful glare it made me squint as I turned to Isobel to inspect her, gently turning her small head this way and that looking for marks or any obvious wounds.
‘My arm and my toe hurt,’ she confessed, lifting up her right foot.
I gasped as the landlord reappeared over my shoulder, and we both looked at Isobel’s big toenail – which was already turning black around a small circular blast hole right in the centre of the nail bed. An unmistakable shot wound.
‘Let me see your arm?’ I slipped her jacket back from her right shoulder to reveal her white vest and three small, angry and perfectly circular welts on her skin. One was bleeding where the skin had broken.
‘Ah – that’s pellet marks, they are,’ the landlord said.
‘In an enclosed area! Can you believe it?’ I exclaimed quickly. ‘He could have blinded them!’
‘I tried to run faster, Mummy,’ Isobel apologised again. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘You didn’t do anything wrong,’ I repeated. I pulled her to me and stroked her poor little head.
We heard sirens approaching and a flashing blue light went whizzing past the window. Good, I thought savagely, picking up my brandy and downing it in one. The back of my throat burned, and the landlord straightened up.
‘That’s it then. Chris Davies is on his way to sort it out. When you came in here a moment ago saying someone had shot people I thought it was Hungerford all over again.’
‘Thank you for these drinks,’ I interrupted hastily. I didn’t want Isobel to hear the horror of what had happened only three years earlier in a small, close community just like this one.
‘You must have thought so, too,’ he added kindly. ‘Thank God it wasn’t, eh?’
‘I didn’t know what to think, to be honest. It all happened very fast.’
I was already replaying the events in my mind – Jones holding the gun… and me just standing there. Why hadn’t I moved more quickly? I started to feel sick. It wasn’t the unaccustomed brandy on an empty stomach at that time of the morning, but horror that I hadn’t been fast enough to leap in front of the children. I watched someone shoot at my daughter and I didn’t protect her. A boy instinctively did it instead – the Vaughan child threw himself in the line of fire rather than me.
I had failed Isobel.
Nearly thirty years on, that self-disgust at my own inadequacy has not gone. Friends have been kind each and every time I have returned to that morning of 22 December 1990, asking myself how I could have let it happen to her.
I tripped – they tell me – it wasn’t my fault. The police assured me it’s a very natural reaction not to move at all, but rather to freeze completely. None of us know how we will react in moments of extreme trauma apparently, until it actually happens. Other people said that was complete rubbish. Of course a parent would move to protect their child: ‘I don’t care what anyone says, if there’s a gun pointing at my little girl or boy, I’m getting in between it and them, no questions asked.’
I tried to apologise to Izzie the night it happened – tried to explain how I’d fallen but that I would always be there to protect her: ‘Most of all, darling, I don’t want you to feel worried that it will happen again. It was really scary, but it wasn’t a real gun, Iz. It was a toy one.’
‘Then why did the police shoot him?’ She was sat up in her bed, pale, with wide eyes.
I swallowed. ‘Because they thought it was a real gun. Mr Jones was waving it around in the car park after we left, the police told him to put it down and he didn’t. They were worried he might hurt people.’
‘Do the police shoot everyone who doesn’t do as they’re told?’ Her voice went a little higher with fear.
‘No, no darling. The police are good. They look after us.’
‘But Mr Jones died when they shot him because they used real guns?’
I nodded, with difficulty.
‘Because we phoned the police and told them he had a gun?’
‘Yes, Izzie.’ I forced a smile. ‘But you’re safe now, darling, try to snuggle down and go to sleep.’
This being nearly thirty years ago, we weren’t offered counselling or anything like that. The best I had to offer Isobel was that she could come and get into my bed if she woke up feeling scared.
‘Will Mr Jones go to Heaven?’
I could see where she was going with this – what she was afraid of – and it broke my heart all over again.
‘No, my angel, he won’t. Daddy will be safe, don’t worry.’
She visibly relaxed. ‘And I don’t have to go to class any more on Saturdays? Because Mr Jones is dead?’ She was only trying to piece it all together, to make sen
se of it, but her childish factuality unnerved me, even though I have always encouraged her to be honest and open.
‘Yes, because he’s dead.’
After I called the police they went screaming round to the sports hall. An angrily defensive Jones – loading his kit into the boot of his car – refused to hand over his weapons, then pointed the gun at them and forced the police back. A sixty-minute siege followed, culminating in him being shot dead in the leisure centre car park. The month-long inquest afterwards determined that the two police marksmen who killed him acted lawfully, believing the gun he was waving around as he walked towards them was the real deal. The police repeatedly reminded everyone at the inquest that although all of the guns found at his flat afterwards were discovered to be replicas – in addition to the pellets found scattered in the sports hall – the marksmen involved believed the weapon was genuine, that they were in danger and so asked Mr Jones to put down the gun – which he did not. Jones’s parents were on the scene by that point, begging the police to let them talk to their son, insisting it was a replica weapon. They weren’t allowed to approach him – in Hungerford, one of the many people Michael Ryan had shot was his own mother.
I saw Mrs Jones in the street, six months after that fateful day, just before they moved away from the area. By then the whole town had read every detail of the inquest in the papers. They all knew Jones had asked me out for a drink just before the lesson had started. I’d said no… he was angry, Isobel had cheeked him – not my words – and he eventually lost his temper. Mrs Jones knew it was me that had called the police. Everyone did. She stopped on the opposite side of the street and stared as I hurried past her. She could have shouted something, abused me. But she didn’t and somehow her silence was worse. Without saying a word she made it crystal clear she thought I was responsible for what had happened to her son.
And if truth be told, I do sometimes feel a sense of disquiet about the phone call I made from the pub that morning. I don’t doubt in principle it was the right thing to do – when someone shoots a gun and people are injured, you call the police.
What I’ve never discussed with anyone, however, is that I saw the pellets on the ground – I knew it was a replica gun and I didn’t say that to the 999 call handler. I said Jones had shot the children – which was true – he did. But did I deliberately omit the fact that the gun wasn’t real because I was angry with Jones and wanted him punished? I just don’t know. I couldn’t say for certain.
No one else behaved as if I was to blame for Jones’s death. In spite of his warning to me that Izzie and I were regarded as unwelcome, the town couldn’t have been kinder to us. They wrapped us in their arms. We were looked after. Meals were made and brought round, reporters were shooed out of our front garden by cross, protective neighbours – we were supported. Timothy Vaughan rightly became a local hero for jumping in front of Izzie; it was a tragedy that kept the town busy for months. The press cast Jones as a psycho in waiting and regardless of his personal political stance – such as it was – everyone agreed that it was madness to take a gun into a class full of children, replica or not. Eventually the chatter quietened down… but it didn’t stop completely. Significant local events are never forgotten, they become woven into the fabric of the community – sometimes becoming luxuriantly embellished as time passes, or as has happened in our case, the stiches can appear simplistic and old-fashioned when viewed through modern eyes. Especially eyes that are desensitised by the violence everyone carries around in their back pocket these days, on those wretched tiny screens no one looks up from any more.
Mary Morgan was in the wool shop only this afternoon, talking about it all when I arrived to choose some buttons for Izzie. Busily shaking her head that next week would mark the twenty-seventh anniversary of the shooting. I could tell she was settling in for a gossip, not having heard or seen me come in, as she stood by the till with her back to the door.
‘Thing is – Paul Jones was always on the edge – even when we were at school, wasn’t he?’ She was addressing Ann, the shop owner. ‘He gave me a Chinese burn once and it really hurt. He wouldn’t let go – he just kept saying he could squeeze and squeeze and break my wrist if he wanted to and I think he would have, but my God – those eyes! He was a very good-looking man. He shouldn’t have taken that gun in where there were kiddies, I’m not saying that – but maybe he was just showing off again, a bit overexcited, like. Children use those BB guns all the time now – my own grandson shoots rats out the back barn when he comes to us. He loves it! It’d sting you, like, if one of the pellets caught you – but not hurt. Paintballing’s worse, you know? Gareth did that for Rich’s stag do and was covered in bruises for days after. I said you’re too old for that sort of lark, you daft sod! Anyway, when you think Paul Jones died because of all that.’
She had the grace to blush furiously when I coughed and she turned to see me standing there. ‘Eve! You all right? Oh lovey – never mind me. I’m not having a pop at you, but you know that, don’t you? It’s the police I’m talking about, what they did.’
I didn’t say anything, just held up the packet of buttons I’d chosen. ‘I’ll just take these, please Ann. Izzie’s keeping busy making a jumper,’ I looked pointedly at Mary, ‘as this time of year is always particularly tough for her.’
The two women pulled sympathetic faces and tutted.
‘Of course it is,’ said Mary. ‘I see you haven’t had any luck with selling the house yet then? I expect that’s unsettling too, isn’t it? Not knowing where you’ll be?’ She waited hopefully.
‘We’ll stay local,’ I confirmed. ‘Just not at Fox Cottage.’
‘That’s it, then!’ Mary agreed. ‘It’s such a big old place for you. I’ve always thought that – and there’s some nice new houses being built. Some just across the fields from where you are now, aren’t they? You wouldn’t have to do a thing – all ready to move into! Although you won’t be able to do those artist whatsits when you move, will you? What do you call them?’
‘Retreats.’ I was starting to feel tired and wished that I’d not come in at all. ‘I’ve decided to stop the workshops and residential courses anyway. Izzie struggles a bit with lots of strangers in the house.’
‘Well, I don’t think I’d want someone I didn’t really know wandering around my kitchen either, to be honest. I think you’re brave to have done it at all, Eve. Does Adam Owen still use your barn to do his paintings?’
‘Yes, he does, but he’s hardly a stranger.’
‘Oh I know! That’s not what I meant. He’s a lovely boy. Is he with you most days then?’
I nodded.
‘Ah – that’s nice. Talk about committed. Ever since he was a little lad he’s been her shadow, hasn’t he? Bless.’ She smiled innocently at me. ‘So you think you’ll be hat shopping any time soon, Eve?’
I looked back at her steadily. ‘He is indeed a lovely boy. I’m very fond of him.’
‘Well, you’ve been good to him, too, since he moved out sharpish when his mam remarried that Craig Evans – and I don’t blame him!’ She shuddered. ‘Does he still see his dad much, though? Last I heard he was in Thailand of all places! Got himself one of those Thai brides, did he?’
‘Adam is busy concentrating on becoming an exceptional artist,’ I replied sharply. ‘He’s finally starting to get quite a lot of attention from some very good galleries.’ The latter was sadly not true, although it deserved to be.
‘Oh! Lovely!’ Mary nodded politely. ‘Does he paint people? Or fruit?’
God, she was a cretin. ‘Landscapes are his thing.’ Dark, bleak hills and stormy threatening seas – the poor boy. I didn’t tell Mary Morgan that, obviously.
‘Clouds and fields. Very nice!’ she beamed. ‘He’ll be sad when you sell Fox Cottage too, then?’
I gritted my teeth. ‘It’s going to be a big change, yes. But the right one, I think.’
‘Definitely!’ she agreed. ‘It’s funny really, Eve, but you know, Fox Cottage has
always been tricky. The people you and Michael bought it off – I don’t suppose you remember them, the Begleys, they were called – when they tried to run it as a pub again it didn’t work at all. The stress is what made Dave Begley have to sell up. He couldn’t take it any more. Sian, his wife, ended up hating the place. That’s why you got it so cheap, you see, when you and Michael bought it. They wanted rid and it had been on the market for years, hadn’t it, Ann?’
‘Oh yes,’ agreed Ann. ‘They had a bad time with it.’
‘Anyway,’ continued Mary, ‘my sister’s daughter-in-law used to clean there and it gave her the creeps a bit, to be honest. She IS sensitive to that sort of thing – she goes to those mediums, or psychics – whatever you’re meant to call them – and someone always tries to contact her. Anyway, when she worked at your place for Sian, a plug popped out of the wall when she was boiling the kettle! Do you ever find funny things happen?’
‘No, never. I simply don’t believe in rubbish like that,’ I said rudely, starting to lose my temper.
‘I don’t either, actually,’ she agreed, not remotely bothered. ‘I expect it was just wiring that wants doing. You’ll probably laugh about this too, but you know that big old hook in the beam what’s in your sitting room now? Well, that used to be the pub lounge bar, see – and when we were kids, someone started a story that the landlord hung his wife off it – when it was a really old pub, like – because she disappeared. Only the Begleys actually did find things buried in the walls when they did it up. A bloodstained woman’s shoe, bits of old letters. Love letters, I’d wager. The husband found out she was up to no good and did her in.’ Mary Morgan nodded at me knowingly.
I held her gaze. ‘Placing shoes inside a wall was a common phenomenon back in the day. People did it to ward off witches. It was probably bloodstained because it was ill-fitting. Although I appreciate that doesn’t support your story so nicely. Sorry.’
‘I have actually heard that too,’ said Ann. ‘You’re supposed to leave the shoes where you find them, aren’t you? It’s bad luck otherwise.’