Fullalove (14 page)

It was with these weapons that Carson set out to get into the pants of the wife of a man whose crimes had been excitingly dire
enough to be given maximum play on television and in the papers over the previous year and a half.

George Arthur (‘Joe’) Stires was the manager of a small refrigerated warehouse in Keighley, in West Yorkshire, that was used for storing live shellfish – crayfish, langoustines, oysters mainly from the west of Ireland, which went into large glass-fronted, oxygenated tanks. The cargoes arrived and departed at odd hours, and Stires had to be there to unlock the gates to let the drivers in and out. He had an old ottoman bed in a storeroom on the premises, where he lolled or lolloped like some great marine beast, some barnacle-backed crab or jelloid bottom-feeder. He whiled away the hours reading – he had a collection of books on judo, karate, palmistry, hypnotism, devilry, torture and Gilles de Rais, the Black Baron – and filing bits of scrap metal down into tiny needle-and scalpel-like knives, some of which he part-wrapped with strips of white cloth, which gave them the look of bandaged limbs or miniature, swaddled corpses; the others he inserted into two rag bands which, it was discovered when he was arrested, he wore tied lethally around his wrists.

Stires targeted as his victims young girls with ponies. The first two children suffered mysterious punctures and lacerations, but they – and their horses – survived the attacks. The third time he struck, though, Stires achieved what he had set out to do: girl and pony were both found dead in a field, with the pony’s cooling, milky-blue entrails coiled intricately around the girl’s neck. There were two more attempted murders, and two more actual murders conforming to the pattern of the first. Stires was arrested on his way home from the scene of the final killing, when police in a patrol car spotted him jumping a set of red lights and gave chase.

First question: Did Rachel Stires, who worked as a part-time lollipop lady in the nearest village, know she had been married to a monster? First priority: pictures – wedding pictures, holiday pictures, childhood pictures, any pictures. A job for the cavalry. Get Robin Carson up there –
like,
yesterday
– to hit her with his bullshit (‘He does a lot of shitting but his pants aren’t down,’ I
happen to know is Tosser’s private opinion) and give her a yea good –
yea
good!
– seeing to.

In the immediate aftermath of the news that the caring koi-carp rearer and dog-walker, the motorbike tinkerer and Gloria Hunni-ford devotee with whom they shared their lives was also a masked rapist and dismemberer of little girls, a strange tranquillity, a kind of bliss even, often descends on women like Rachel Stires, as if the body was pumping out its own opiates or fogging narcotics and analgesics. It can take a week or longer (sometimes it never happens) for the anguish and self-chastisement to kick in, and for the low operatics of the TV miniseries and dramadoc to manifest itself. When he can get this to happen, Robin Carson knows he is getting close to hitting pay dirt, and to check-out time.

Having extracted the subject from her home environment, with all its associations of familiar objects turned baleful and sinister, he commences the softening-up process the cult religions call love-bombing and Clit himself calls ‘TLC (‘tender loving care’). The consoling squeeze of the hand, the gentle stroke of the hair, the brushing of lips against forehead, the nuzzling of the ear … What started as a career-opening has mutated into an aberrant, highly esoteric turn-on. Carson has become addicted to the taste (he told me this; he tells everybody this; he dines out on the story) of licked-up salt snot and hot grief mucus and nectared/saline tears. He has become convinced the taste is hormonal, its aphrodisiac tang the result of some chemical released into the body – the morphising agent, perhaps – at times of soul-crunching suffering and trauma. If you could bottle it, he is fond of saying, it would make somebody rich many times over.

Carson is a narcissist, numb with self-love. We have all grown skins, performance membranes, insulating layers; a dense wall of
lontananza
between ourselves and the world. But Clit is desensitised to a degree that makes the rest of us look like the Little Sisters of Perpetual Sorrow. He is icily detached, deficient in genuine feelings of sadness. He inflicts a rehearsed, facetious kindness in the same way that a torturer inflicts physical pain to get his victims to open up. And I am his collaborator; his accomplice in most
regards. So what does that make me? Carson works the women over, coaxes them into a state of emotional free-fall, brings them on-side; but his talents end there. It is up to me to go in and point up the details of the broadbrush picture he will have provided, and package the out-pourings into some merchandisable form: ‘The meat’s on the hook, the money’s on the table.’

It took the plods forty-eight hours of intensive questioning to satisfy themselves that Rachel Stires wasn’t implicated in her husband’s crimes. When they were sure, they installed her in the nurses’ hostel they had nominated as a safe house, where she lived in terror of being sniffed out by people exactly like us.

It was hard to get near the Stires story. Everything was shut off. But through the girl on the till at the local ‘8–Til-Late’ who he was using to take his messages for him (it is never safe to have messages left at the hotel), Clit was introduced to somebody who knew somebody who knew where Stires’s wife was being mothballed.

He hand-delivered the postcard of the giant reclining Buddhas of Polonnaruwa containing his usual snow-job to the nurses’ hostel on a Tuesday (‘You have to live your recovery. You are the programme’). By lunch time on Thursday, Clit and Rachel Stires were checking in under assumed names at the creeper-clad country hotel in Cumbria with the springer spaniels (mother and daughter) asleep on the steps and conical bay trees flanking the entrance and embossed matchbooks and Imperial mints and potpourri in venerable chipped bowls at Reception. It was the first of the five interchangeable establishments they checked into in the course of a week, always staying just one step ahead of the pack, who were in pursuit; and Rachel went on looking like a foundling, a member of the tragic army of the dispossessed, in all of them: uncomfortable with the menus and the deference and the carpeting (she had no carpets at home, except the narrow strip running in front of the sofa in the living room), she kept stealing away to have a brew-up with the pot-washers in the kitchen, or grabbing a duster and an apron and helping the chambermaids service the rooms.

Back at the terraced cottage that she had moved into on the day she was married, she let Clit clean her out of snaps of herself and the ‘Gymkana Monster’ (Ronnie Duncan still claims the credit for this); he left with plastic wallets, laminated folders, a perspex cube that had stood on top of the television, hand-decorated albums. The heat had been taken off the house by then – there were a few stringers and agency cowboys lurking about – and I spent a couple of days taking down the ‘My life with …’ material that would be the selling point of the eighteen-page, through-colour, pull-out section that we were going to get on the streets within hours of Joe Stires being sent down.

Rachel Stires was pleasant-looking in a skinny, country nutty, windburned lollypop-lady sort of way. She had her hair pulled back in a heavy pony-tail, and wore velour track suits and plastic flower-shaped ear-rings of the kind people used to throw darts and shoot down ping-pong balls to win at travelling fairs. I brought bottles of Blue Nun to the sessions, and she prepared trim triangular sandwiches garnished with potato crisps and cress and served with quality-weight paper napkins saved from one or another of the hotels where they had stayed. She had collected the matchbooks together in a soup bowl on the low table, where there was also a bowl of sharp-smelling pot-pourri with the satin bow from the original packet adrift in the middle of it.

There were some tears, not many (Clit had drunk deep), as I led her through the high-and low-lights of her, on the face of it, not very eventful life, year by bald year, from the cradle to the Old Bailey, all the time of course hoping to draw out of her the authenticating details that would convince (a) Howie Dosson, and (b) the readers that they were getting the hot poop, and that she would divulge it to nobody else. (Joe Stires, ten years her senior, had set his wife on a pedestal, said he considered her a goddess. ‘When I married you, I reached for a star and a farmhorse like me could never keep up with a thoroughbred like you,’ he wrote to her from prison. He had a fetish about washing himself in Dettol and had been impotent for most of their married life.)

At the end of the second session, she posed for a picture perched on the greasy arm of what had been her husband’s favourite chair. While the photographer was getting her to lower her chin, move her knee to the left a little, moisten her lips, I noticed for the first time that her wedding ring was missing from her left hand, although her fingernails retained their opaque rainbow shimmer. So when he’d got his snap, I switched the machine back on for a few more minutes and we covered that.

It was as we were preparing to leave that she reached down behind the sofa without moving from where she was sitting and produced the tilt-headed cuddly toy which she asked us to place on the impromptu memorial to Roxanne Boothe, the last of her husband’s victims, something she didn’t feel able to do herself; the shrine was along a part of the rusticated fence surrounding the field where he had surprised the girl feeding her pony, and we had to pass it en route to the motorway and the long drive south.

We took a wrong turn four or five miles out of the village, and passed the same barn three times from different directions before finding ourselves suddenly merging right with the early evening traffic onto a sliproad of the M66. We rode in silence for some time, zipping down the fast lane, bullying the reps and snowy-shouldered middle-managers out of our way, feeling righteous, adrenalised, bringing home the bacon.

It wasn’t until we pulled into the services that we saw the nylon-plush puppy sitting at a tipsy angle on top of the blanket thrown over the photographer’s tripods and titanium carrying cases to shield them from prying eyes. The blank, generic face inside the heat-sealed factory wrapping seemed to belong to this no-place of machine-vended convenience snacks and strategically racked impulse buys and urgent fluorescent colours; contiguous with the high-gloss, the pristine finish, the charged over-lit spaces. Cloned members of its tribe or batch were almost certainly on sale inside the beckoning, islanded glass box, waiting to do duty as comforters to choleric, fractious children on monotonous motorway journeys. It was impassive,
inviolate; prescriptively winsome until moving lights, washing over the clear plastic wrap, fleetingly scrambled, unprettified, the features.

When we were back in London, the photographer made a detour to drop me off where I live. ‘Don’t forget this,’ he called after me after I had slammed the door closed (a light went on in a window of the house opposite). He groped behind him in the dark, just the way Rachel Stires had done five hours earlier, and held the puppy aloft in his right hand above the roof of the car. I could have walked around into the road to get it, but instead I pressed myself against the near-side window and reached across the frosting metal until, as I now imagine it, I must have looked like somebody stretching for something that seemed in imminent danger of being snatched away.

The cold of the street after the heat of the car had misted the inner surface of the bag – misted and moistened it like a microclimate of exhaled breath. It was as if there was something alive in there – some undefined yellow-orange thing, fat and plush – struggling to breathe. (Who wrote that our lives begin with a slither through a tight place and end with being pushed deeper and deeper into a black sack?) There was a card cheaply printed with a picture of bluebirds trailing satin ribbons taped to the cellophane protecting the dog. ‘A sweet little rose, loaned not given/To bud on earth and now blooming in heaven – I’m sorry. Condoalenses. R. Stires (Mrs)’, it said in fading blue biro.

‘I hope you’ll be very happy together,’ the photographer shouted as he sped away.

Reporting is a perversion of normal existence, Even was forever telling me. ‘You get to know them so that they feel relaxed with you, ask them questions you have no natural right to expect answers to, ask to see things you weren’t meant to see, they open a window on the most intimate parts of their lives, and then you walk away.’

Walk, run, hop it, skedaddle. Sometimes empty-handed, sometimes not. The world rushes on, the urgency is redirected, the appetite for catastrophe finds a new focus. And as the tide recedes, it leaves in its wake the material evidence. Without intending to I have put together a yellow museum of my infidelities, hollow promises, rank opportunism, cowardice and bad faith.

‘History in a hurry’. This is the definition of journalism that those of us up to our necks in it in the trenches tend to cleave to. ‘Hot history’. It offers the promise of permanence to something we know is written on the wind; it gives a gloss of respectability to what is often no more than meddlesomeness; it sanctions the thrust forward to the next front, with no thought for the casualties we are leaving behind.

To enumerate every item in my inglorious collection – letters unopened, unacknowledged and unread; pleas for help or information ignored; keepsakes unreturned; pictures cropped or otherwise mutilated beyond recognition, all of it dating back a dozen years – would take too long and would take self-laceration to the kind of lengths to which I am not prepared to go. But as a bore-sample of my crapitude and indigence, chew on these: