Ralph’s Children (11 page)

‘I’d like to bash the bitch,’ Jack had said.

Ralph said no.

‘Why not?’ Jack asked. ‘Bashing is simple.’

‘Things go wrong when there’s blood,’ Ralph had said.

They had all remembered her falling against the tree on Bartlet Down, and had given way to her greater wisdom.

Norton, Ralph had learned, worked for an insurance company in Bracknell, which was pleasing in itself, Ralph decided, since it seemed more likely that if their plan worked, Mrs
Norton would at least lose her job.

She placed Jack in charge of surveillance, and having observed her shopping habits for a fortnight, he’d followed Norton one day during her lunch break to a small chemist’s shop with
no CCTV, but with an alarm system and a sign in the window declaring:
ALL SHOPLIFTERS WILL BE PROSECUTED.

It was the simplest, most basic of strategies. While Simon – her appearance subtly disguised, like the others, in case of witnesses or hidden cameras – occupied the sales assistant
and pharmacist with questions about the side effects of a pain relief tablet, Roger attracted the Beast’s attention for long enough to allow Jack to steal some lavender toilet water –
its package tagged with an alarm activator – and slip it into her shopping bag.

Moments later, out in the street, they’d all watched as Norton passed through the detectors at the exit, setting off the alarm, and seconds later, the sales assistant and pharmacist had
rushed out and nabbed her.

‘This is outrageous,’ Simon heard Norton protest as the toilet water was retrieved from her bag. ‘I don’t even
use
that rubbish.’

She’d gone on to object violently as they’d escorted her back inside, had even kicked at the pharmacist’s legs, adding a possible assault charge, the group had decided
hopefully, though they’d all realized that a halfway decent brief might get her off, if charges were actually brought.

They’d hung around until the police had arrived.

‘Better than a poke in the eye,’ Pig had said afterwards.

‘I don’t think so,’ said Jack.

Roger had brought them the next candidate: a male officer at Hurstpark, a women’s prison in Gloucestershire that was on her voluntary visiting list – a man with a
reputation among inmates for cruelty to pregnant prisoners.

‘This isn’t personal, like Pig’s bitch,’ she’d said, proposing the screw to Ralph. ‘But he seems to be what the game’s supposed to be about these days,
don’t you agree?’

Ralph had. They all had.

Given his expert skills, Jack could probably have carried out their plan for the prison officer single-handed, but having them all involved, whenever possible, had always been part of the game.
So one evening while the new Beast and his wife were out at their local in Dursley, Pig had cut off the phones at the screw’s house and at his next-door-neighbour’s, before Roger
(wearing a cropped wig and blue contacts) had rung the neighbour’s front door bell.

I’m from the Dursley Residents’ Association,’ she began. ‘We’re getting up a petition because of this plan to buy up houses in your road for a drug rehab
centre.’

‘You’re joking,’ the other woman said.

‘I wish,’ Roger said.

Which conversation kept them both occupied while Simon sat in her car outside, keeping watch and ready to act as getaway driver, and Jack entered the back of the house, removing a VCR, Play
Station and silver framed photograph, before departing again, leaving no trace of his entry or exit.

Right after which he’d gone, smooth as silk, into the screw’s house and planted the stolen items in his upstairs spare room. Pig had reconnected the phones soon after, and next
morning Roger had made an anonymous call to the victim of the burglary to tip her off about her tea-leaf screw neighbour.

Still simple.

Still bloodless.

‘I
’m going to bed,’ Laurie had told her parents an hour ago. She had reminded them that she would be leaving early, had wished them
luck with the clearing up, said she’d be back as soon as she could manage tomorrow evening and would help all she could then.

‘After the worst is over,’ her father had said.

Her mother had said nothing at all.

Laurie knew she probably wouldn’t sleep. Excitement did that to her every time, and the only reason it mattered was because she wanted to be feeling bright and energetic in order to give
her son the best possible day out.

She lay on top of her bed, closed her eyes and pictured him.

Some people thought that all children with Down’s syndrome looked alike. She supposed she might have thought that too, once upon a time, if, that was, she’d ever thought about it at
all.

Sam Moon did not look like anyone else on earth.

His photographs lay in a box in her locked wardrobe. One was brought out most nights before she went to sleep and put away again when she woke because that was one of the rules. In case Josie
– her mother’s cleaner – was to wonder who the boy in the picture might be.

Heaven forbid.

Laurie had long since given up pointing out that no one ever needed to come into her bedroom to clean, that she preferred doing it herself.

‘Even if you do,’ Shelly said, ‘it doesn’t mean they might not come in.’

‘I could lock my door,’ Laurie said.

‘That would look strange,’ her mother said.

Rules of the Moon house.

Sam was not photogenic. In photographs, he looked happy, but quite ordinary. In real life, however, he was spectacular, and Laurie didn’t really need photos to conjure him up, could just
shut her eyes anytime and whisk him up at will.

She smiled now at the prospect of seeing him in the morning, then returned her thoughts again to that brief, foolish fantasy about Dave, wondering what exactly that had been about, before
pushing it away again.

She plumped up her two pillows and lay back.

Closed her eyes firmly.

‘See you soon, Sam Moon,’ she said.

J
ack’s contribution had taken the game back to the level of physical roughness that had been absent since their assault on Rose Miller. His
chosen Beast was a woman he had seen at Kennet Shopping Centre abusing her frail, elderly mother, swearing at her and dragging her along, almost pulling her off her feet.

‘This one really deserves a taste of her own,’ Jack had insisted to Ralph. ‘And I’ll tell you straight, if you don’t let us handle this the way I want, I’ll
take care of her on my own, and it’ll be a bloody sight worse.’

They had all talked it over for a while, Simon wondering if this might have been a one-off event, if this woman really was a Beast.

‘We need to be certain,’ she had said.

‘I know an abusing bitch when I see one.’ Jack had been blunt. ‘But if you don’t want to take my word for it . . .’

‘I know what Sy means,’ Pig had said. ‘June Norton thought I was a rotten son for not kissing my mother goodbye.’

‘Appearances can be deceiving,’ Ralph agreed.

‘Jack knows what he saw,’ Roger said.

All together for once at a restaurant opposite Swindon Station because it was Ralph’s birthday and she’d been missing them so badly and wished for no present more than a real
reunion.

So she’d been there to observe the hardness in Jack’s eyes when he talked about ‘taking care of her’ himself, had caught a responding flicker of excitement in
Roger’s, and had realized that they were both out of her control.

Had recognized, too, that this was yet another opportunity to detach herself.

An opportunity she had not, of course, taken.

They had talked through the plan carefully, then left it to Ralph to work out the details and dovetail them with the Beast’s movements.

The daughter, she learned, travelled each weekday by train to work in Reading, which meant there was nothing more complex to take care of than choosing the right place, rehearsing split-second
timing and – with witnesses and CCTV on site – paying careful attention to their own disguises.

They decided to play the game on a Thursday afternoon, just after the daughter had alighted from her train at Newbury Station. Three of them moving into position as she and her
fellow passengers crossed over the stepped footbridge and started down to the opposite side and station exit. As the Beast began her descent of the final twelve steps, Jack slipped into place
beside the young man just in front of her, gave him a furtive but hard shove, then stepped neatly away as the man fell with a cry to the stone platform below.

‘
She
pushed him!’ Pig had shouted, pointing to the Beast. ‘Stop her!’

‘I didn’t
touch
him!’ the young woman protested in shock.

‘Call the police,’ Roger yelled, knowing that Simon – just outside the station – was already doing exactly that; then, as Pig melted into the throng on the platform, made
a grab for the woman’s arm. ‘Someone help me
hold
her!’

An elderly man, cheeks rosy with outrage, and a young female backpacker hurried forward to lend a hand, while a cluster of passengers gathered around the fallen man.

‘This is
ridiculous
,’ the Beast told the official. ‘I didn’t do anything.’

Out of the corner of her eye, Roger saw a uniformed official moving quickly towards the steps.

Releasing the Beast, she stepped back, passed unhindered through the small crowd, and went quietly on her way.

‘Was the young man all right?’ Ralph had asked later.

None of the four knew for sure, had been too focused, they said, on the Beast.

Ralph had scoured the
Reading Evening Post
every day for the next week and the
Newbury Weekly News
after that, certain that if he had been badly injured it would have merited
mention. It pained her to think of an innocent man’s suffering, brought back her own grim times after her accident, pricked at her conscience.

It relieved her just a little to find that she still had a conscience.

She wondered sometimes if the others ever thought about the novel that had sparked off their games, if any of them were aware that there were certain points of comparison between the evolving
nastiness of their own adult games and that old tale of children becoming savages. She supposed they did not dwell on it any more and was, she thought, glad of that.

Bad enough that she noted similarities and was chilled by them.

And exhilarated too, of course.

She had, by then, come to accept that sickness in herself.

* * *

T
he great and irrevocable change had come with the Mitcham game.

More complicated and, ultimately, much more violent than any of them, even Jack, had intended it to be.

Alan Mitcham had been Simon’s beast. A teacher at the primary school where she worked as a teaching assistant.

‘He has no business being a teacher,’ she’d said, fiery tears in her eyes as she proposed him to Ralph. ‘Or working with children at all.’

Mitcham, a single man, appeared, Simon said, to dislike children and to have scant respect for their parents. The incident that had helped turn him into a candidate had begun when Simon had
witnessed him being unkind to a six-year-old with learning difficulties. The child’s mother had come to school next morning to complain to the head, but had encountered the teacher first, and
Mitcham had retaliated by humiliating both mother and child.

‘Right there, in front of everyone,’ Simon had said. ‘Made her feel completely inadequate. Poor woman turned tail.’

‘Why didn’t you report him to the head?’ Ralph asked.

‘I might have,’ Simon had answered, ‘if that had been the only thing.’

It had, in fact, been the least of it, because a few days earlier Simon had caught sight of something in Mitcham’s locker just before he’d slammed the door.

A photograph of a naked child, unmistakably pornographic.

‘I only caught a glimpse,’ she said. ‘But I know what I saw.’

She had felt shocked, sickened.

True Beast.

Two days later, Jack had confirmed Simon’s suspicions, breaking into Mitcham’s flat in Barton and finding photographs so revolting to him that his first impulse had
been to lie in wait and give the scumbag a beating he’d never forget.

The group met the following week in a private room over a Didcot pub.

‘I’ve been thinking,’ Jack said, ‘that it’s time to rev up the game.’ He was having trouble blotting out the images of the children in Mitcham’s
collection. ‘We have to make this filth really
do
a crime,’ he said. ‘Like a robbery, something heavy.’

‘That sounds complicated,’ Ralph said, on speaker phone.

‘Not really,’ Jack disagreed, ‘because we’d be making sure he
didn’t
pull off the job, wouldn’t we?’ He paused. ‘But it’s gotta be
something big enough so we’d know he’d get seriously banged up.’

‘Maybe we should just shop him, after all?’ Simon was growing doubtful. ‘I mean, we’re not vigilantes, are we?’

‘No, we’re fucking not,’ said Jack.

‘We’re a lot smarter than that,’ Roger said.

‘And shopping him wouldn’t be the
game
, would it?’ Jack pointed out.

‘But how can we possibly make anyone do a robbery?’ Pig had asked.

‘Blackmail,’ Roger said flatly. ‘Make him realize he either does what we tell him, or he ends up doing ten years as a nonce.’

‘Maybe that’d be the right punishment,’ Simon said.

‘Maybe it would,’ said Ralph, from the speaker.

‘And what if he found himself a good brief who got him off?’ asked Roger.

‘At least he’d be finished as a teacher,’ Simon said.

‘You can’t be certain of that,’ Roger argued. ‘Anyway, it wouldn’t be nearly enough.’

‘He’s your Beast,’ Jack reminded Simon. ‘The biggest dirtbag we’ve had.’

‘Jack’s right,’ Pig agreed.

‘Biggest dirtbag,’ said Roger, ‘biggest game.’

‘It’d have to be armed robbery,’ Jack said. ‘I can get a gun, no sweat.’

‘No guns,’ Ralph’s voice said promptly.

‘But nothing less would really do it, would it?’ Roger backed Jack up. ‘Not if we want to make sure Mitcham gets a long stretch.’