Random Acts of Unkindness (22 page)

For a second I question my motives and wonder if Bessy’s story is true, and if Thomas really is buried on the moor with the other victims. I know that, at the time, searches were limited to digging small spots in a vast area and there is a strong possibility his body wouldn’t have been found at the time. But even if he is, where are all the other boys? I turn to the back of the file and tucked into the back flap of the folder, out of sight, is a handwritten letter.

It’s from Inspector Little. It’s his letter of resignation. Mostly that he is disappointed that leads were not followed up, that the number of missing children and teenagers from the area has substantially increased and that there should be an urgent enquiry into Thomas Swain’s case. That it should be reopened. That Bessy should be reinterviewed and Colin should be told about Connelly’s meddling in Bessy’s life, making her a spokeswoman for his campaign when there was never any proof that Thomas was a victim of the Moors Murders, or any other murder.

Even though she hadn’t recorded it in her notebook, Bessy had talked to Inspector Little about it, urged him to dig for Thomas and when he had pointed out that there was no proof she had become confused, telling him John Connelly had made her think there was. I was beginning to see a fuller story, one where Bessy had been more desperate then even her tragic story told, not knowing who to believe and begging for help. Poor Inspector Little resigned because he knew the truth and no one would listen to him.

Pinned to his letter was a photograph. At first it looks like it was the same photograph I had seen at the community centre, of John Connelly and Bessy outside the Gables. But then I see that Bessy is standing on the other side of Connelly and there are two other women beside her. I look more closely, back through the decades, and I see it. Behind Bessy is a telegraph pole and, dangling over the heads of the women, is a row of scarves and pairs of shoes slung over. Three mothers, three scarves, three pairs of shoes.

It’s dark now and I can’t put the lights on. I push all the papers and the exercise book back into the folder and go outside into the yard. Bessy’s yard is really a garden, complete with an army of bird feeders.

I go in her shed and find some grain. As I step outside, there’s already a huge amount of birds on the telegraph wires and on the top of the shed, all twittering away. As I put the grain in they make a swoop for it, filling the yard with flapping wings and beady eyes. Bessy’s friends, the blackbirds, hang back, sitting on the washing line and watching the greedy starlings.

I put the seed back and steer my bike out of the yard, pushing the file into the storage box at the back. I’m not so concerned about getting seen now. I ride up the main roads, looking upward at the cameras, taking my time in the evening traffic.

I ride through Northlands and take a right at the end, up toward the hills and away from the city. The road out of there narrows and splits, a fork where both ways lead to tragedy.

One way leads up to the moor, several miles on. I’ve been up there several times, not with work, but to gawp like the other five or six rubberneckers who are there every time I go up there. I toy with the idea of riding there now, giving myself more time to think before I embark on my next move. But the other road leads to John Connelly’s derelict old factory, where I’d seen Bessy standing outside on the photographs.

I sit at the crossroads and laugh. Let’s face it. I’m fucked. Jim Stewart warned me that if I carried on searching for Aiden on police time I’d be suspended. Then I’d probably have to resign. I wondered how many other coppers had resigned after suspecting the truth. Even now, it seems too big to comprehend.

Why would Connelly and his father before him be abducting kids? And why would some of them turn up as apparent suicides? It doesn’t make sense, except in the most horrible and grotesque of scenarios.

When Aiden went missing, and after I had recovered a little from the terrible shock, I spent an enormous amount of time wondering what he was doing, how he was eating if he hadn’t touched his bank account.

I pictured him selling the Big Issue in London, eating out of bins. God knows I’m used to seeing kids living on the street in Manchester, waiting outside McDonald’s and eating the half-eaten cast-offs of other people.

Like Bessy’s birds, swooping in for a discarded burger or milkshake, waiting just on the eye-line of passers-by, hoping they’d decide that the sandwich they’d just bitten into was horrible and bin it. Watching people eat through fast food restaurant windows, rooting in skips after the supermarkets close.

How was he washing? How was he going to the loo? How was he cleaning his lovely teeth, brushing his hair? How, how, how? If he was alive, like they all said he was, and he’d run away, how was he doing all this?

I’d been thinking about it, a constant train of thought behind the classical conditioned reactions of driving, as I sped along the main roads early one morning. I remember it clearly; it was one of those early autumn days where the sunlight trickles through the darkened leaves.

Kicking the leaves with Aiden. Running through them and burying ourselves in the rusty piles. Picking up acorns and planting them the next year. Pressing the leaves in Aiden’s books. I must look for those leaves. Leaves that he had touched, suddenly so precious.

Then, out of nowhere, it hit me. I don’t know why, but the unspeakable came to me. He must have been getting money. He must have been working. What could he have been doing at fifteen? No, sixteen. Working. For money.

There was a screech and I almost hit the car in front of me. I sat there at a busy road junction, horns beeping all around me. Working. For money. For who? Doing what? No. No. No.

I sat there for a good ten minutes, until a police car arrived. Then I pretended that my car had stalled and it wouldn’t start so I had no choice but to block the road. I’d caused a backlog of nearly a mile by this time, but all I could think about was Aiden, my shy little boy, being forced to do unthinkable things.

What if he was being held against his will and abused? He must be. Either that, or he was dead. Because he’d never just run. Never. I knew him. He’d never do that.

I remember snapping out of it and starting my engine.

‘Thanks, officer. It’s fine now. Sorry about that.’

A mile and a half tailback, apparently, but I hadn’t cared. I was frozen in a frame of realization, one that I would never escape. I remember pulling over just further up the road and putting my head on the steering wheel to try to appease the physical pain I felt at my son going through that. Going through something I had fought to save him from. Protect him.

I remember clearly thinking that this must be the worst pain in the world, apart from identifying his body. What’s more, other people were probably thinking it. Before I even considered any harm coming to him, people would be silently wondering if he was part of some sordid sex ring, one where young men and women were abducted and forced to submit to perverts and paedophiles, living on a basic level, like an animal. And if they objected they were punished. Or worse.

I was completely amazed and sickened that I hadn’t considered this before. I was completely incensed that everyone around me had remained silent. It was so obvious now, the sad looks, the quiet nods whenever I wondered out loud where he was. They must have thought I was stupid.

Was it a mother’s built in defence system? Was it a way to save a mother from the crippling pain of her child suffering? I’d broken bad news to mothers for over a decade now.

I’d stood in a pristine lounge with Mike, heads bowed, as we delivered various grades of horrendous. Your son’s in custody for committing petty crime. Your daughter’s been arrested for assault. Your son’s been detained over a suspected rape. Your son’s been arrested on suspicion of murder. Your daughter is dead.

We usually get ‘It’s not her. She wouldn’t do that.’ Or ‘No. You’re wrong. I know my son. He wouldn’t do that.’ As the case progresses and guilt becomes clear, the crumbling of the parent is visible. Sometimes it’s emotional; tiny teardrops leaking out at first, followed by howling and keening. Or physical. Actual collapse.

One woman became so ill that she was admitted to the hospital. I’d had to visit her to tell her that her son had been found guilty of manslaughter. I’d asked the nurse if they had found out what was wrong with her.

‘No. We can’t find anything. Except that she’s so weak that she can’t stand. No previous medical conditions. She just keeps saying that she’s in great pain.’

I’d frowned at the nurse, and shook my head.

‘What do you think?’

She’d pulled me into a side corridor.

‘I used to work on an old people’s ward. Oldies coming in, weak as kittens. No diagnosis, no real sickness, just pain and weakness. The first thing we’d check was if they’d just lost their partner. One of them even told me that his wife had taken his soul with her when he died. I think she meant his heart.’

I’d sniggered at the time. Dying of a broken heart. Oh pleez. That’s just stupid, illogical claptrap. But now it was me.

As I sit here at the crossroads, wondering what to do, I’m hurting. I’ve made some terrible decisions. Taking the money, taking the file, leaving the archive room, going to see Pat Haywood . . . all these things seem crazy on the face of it but each of them put snippet of duct tape over my heart, pulling it together and stopping me creasing with the ever-growing pain and realisation about what was happening to Aiden.

Like I did at the hospital, everyone around me was sniggering, wondering when I will man up and stop moping. After all, how bad can it be? He’s obviously run away, hasn’t he, because no one’s found his body? So, Jan, what’s wrong? Why are you crying? Why are you crumbling? Why are you doing everything you can to find him?

No one can feel what I’m going through, because no one else is Aiden’s mum. Even Sal doesn’t seem so concerned; he’s taking it in stride.

I know this is a kind of madness. I know my thinking isn’t rational or logical. It hasn’t been for six weeks, since I realised Aiden was gone. I’m working almost entirely on instinct now, or, as some people would call it, winging it.

Like I said, a little instinct is a good thing. I’m chasing the silent messages, the invisible crime scene, the hidden world I know is around here somewhere, waiting to be discovered if only I can make sense of all the signposts, all the patterns. Gut feeling. But now I’ve pulled the threads together and come to a conclusion, I’m wondering if I am actually mad. Mad with grief. Mad with anxiety. Or am I saner than I’ve ever been?

Day to day, policing and working with people makes you used to it. Used to the horror stories, used to crime. Sometimes the determination disappears and it’s all routine, bordering on the boring, and I have to get Mike to give me a metaphorical kick up the arse to remind me that this is peoples’ lives that are affected.

And vice versa. If he lacks motivation I give him a push. We always work best when we’re right up to the line. Working on that feeling in the pit of our stomachs, sitting in a bar afterward, with the suspect in the cells, drinking ice-cold lager. But this is more than that. I’ve crossed the line. My motivation is my son, the most important person in the world to me.

To make it worse, everyone else thinks I’m wrong. I’ve been in this situation before, with Sal. A couple of years into our marriage I was miserable. Our families were as pleased as punch that we had made a go of it. But I knew even then it would never work.

All my friends told me I was mad, that Sal was ‘The One,’ that I could never find someone so perfect for me. But they were all wrong. Sometimes it takes years to realize you are right, that the gut feeling you had was right all along, and in the end, when I got the divorce absolute and Sal snapped again and finally showed his true colours in front of all his family when he poured a drink over my head at a family party and called me all the names under the sun.

I just sat there, and Aiden walked out. I just sat there because it was a defining moment, something I’d made no effort at all to make happen. On the contrary, Sal had proved me right all by himself.

That’s how I feel now. As if I’m on the brink of something here, something that, for some reason, no one else had seen. Then it all starts to cascade into place. Maybe other people do know about it. Other people higher up, other people who could prevent Connelly from being found out.

Operation Hurricane. It seemed like it would be so successful, but shut down because somehow Connelly had found out all the information. All the ops, all the chasing information, all wasted. And paperwork disappearing. Reports that officers had sworn they had filed, gone. Data everyone, including myself, had seen, disappeared off the system overnight.

At first Jim Stewart thought it was some kind of virus, recoverable. After all, we were the police, weren’t we supposed to be secure? But it soon became obvious that it was gone, and we all began to doubt each other. If there was a small personality clash, it became a chasm of suspicion, where accusations of lies over how much work had been done and what had been reported was flying.

It had been chaos at the station for months, but when Jim announced Operation Prophesy informally, four weeks before its official launch, everyone relaxed a little. It was as if we’d get a second chance at Connelly, a chance to recover all the lost work and finally stop whatever was happening. I rationalise this with myself now. Isn’t that what I’m doing too, investigating Connelly’s wrongdoing?

I ride up the road to the derelict factory. The Gables. Tatters of age-old messages hang from the wires above me and my blood runs cold. It’s dark now and I might as well get this over with, find out for once and for all what is going on. If anything. Like Old Mill, this could easily be used for nothing at all. In the distance, the building certainly looks like it’s mostly derelict. It had never cropped up in our investigation before. Why would it? The records show that Connelly’s butchers went bankrupt years ago. No activity there, so far out of town, and derelict. I find a lane reasonably far away from the gates, away from any surveillance. I push the bike into the bushes and sit down on the cold grass and phone Mike. Two rings and he’s answered.