Random Acts of Unkindness (25 page)

There’s a Guy Fawkes in a barrow and, to the right of the wall, a bonfire. A huge spiked gate, that has been bricked up now, gives me a clear view of the back of the building. I hold the photograph under the dim light in the shelter and look into the background. No additional structures. It’s exactly the same as when I saw it an hour ago.

Except for one thing. To the right of the back of the building a huge plume of smoke bellows from the ground. There’s a man standing to the side of it wearing what appears to be a rubber mask, hauling up a storm drain cover.

‘No smoke without fire. No smoke. Without fire.’

That’s what the pregnant Connelly girl had said, just before she went away. It’s almost too horrible to comprehend again. A human waste disposal unit. And hadn’t I just heard one of the guards tell his colleague that they would get rid of ‘them in there’ on Bunty Night? This the Connellys’ MO, using significant events to cover their tracks. Bunty Night. Bonfire Night. Guy Fawkes Night. A regular annual celebration of justice, of all things. Fires lit throughout the land. In this case, from the photographs, huge fires outside the Gables, for the community. Families. Children. All while other children burned in the distance, the huge fire and the sulphurous smell of fireworks covering the smell of death.

I can see the sun beginning to peep over the hills now, and morning is approaching. I desperately need to get back to the station, to get back home, to file this last piece of the puzzle. Then, whatever the outcome with Jim Stewart, I can start looking for Aiden again.

He’s after me for something about Ney Street and the baby. He must have the forensic report back by now and it’s linked me with a little wardrobe in a tiny terraced house where there’s been nothing but tragedy over the years.

It could all have been so different if someone would have listened to Inspector Little all those years ago. But, like Scholes said, without a body there is no murder. It’s slightly different these days with forensics, but even now, there needs to be a body for closure.

Then it strikes me. That’s why some of the boys turned up as suicides. If no bodies were ever found, this would draw attention to the missing boys. The fact that teenage boys with problems were sometimes turning up having committed suicide kept the spotlight off the missing boys and onto the boys’ own problems. Making it look like the boys had just given up, taken to a life of drugs and finally overdosed, with verdicts of suicide or accidental death would prevent them being linked, except by their social deprivation. The girls had simply disappeared. Looked into, but again marked as teenage runaways.

All lumped into a statistic, so anonymous that no one noticed the white paint or the chicken or the fact that they had all taken the same drugs. Run away and/or committed suicide. This was the first assumption made about Aiden’s disappearance, but I wouldn’t believe it. Just like Bessy wouldn’t believe it about Thomas. Just like the Mothers of the Missing wouldn’t believe it, but they were intercepted by something evil and manipulative, all so that high-profile perverts could get their kicks.

I curl up in the corner of the bench in the shelter and open Bessy’s notebook. Chances are that if Stewart has found out why I was really at Ney Street and what I found before I called it in I’ll have to give up the notes.

It might be a good idea anyway, just to show him how I knew so much about John Connelly. It’s not just me who pulls stories together, their ever-tightening threads pulling at the skin and bones of the truth.

Jim Stewart got where he was today by going the extra mile, a little bit further than was required by the operation. No doubt he’s been thinking, too, thinking about what I’m up to, thinking about Connelly, Operation Prophesy, hating me and loving me at the same time.

Now, with little left to solve, he won’t revel in the glory of solved crime, he’ll be waiting to snip off the loose ends of the tight threads, make sure nothing can come unravelled. That’s why he wants me. He knows full well I must have had help with this. I couldn’t have solved it without anyone’s help, and he’s got an inkling it’s to do with Ney Street and the baby.

He knows all right. But I’m not just driven by the same things he is. I’ve got extra. I’ve got my son to find. I want to march into ops and tell them all about the baby and the notes, drop the money on the desk, hands on hips and tell them it was all necessary, what did they expect me to do? When they asked what I was doing at Ney Street, look at them for longer than I should and tell them I was searching for my son, who by the way, is still missing.

Like everything, it’s complicated. Complex. It’s easy to make a plan, one-dimensional and flat, with all the arrows pointing to home. But life’s just not like that. I’d tried to tell Jim and Mike about the messages, all excited about Connelly’s sky messages, trying to explain them in terms of secret codes and silent words—but before I’d even embarked on it, they were bored, tapping keys, checking text messages, yawning at my explanations of how complex a case is.

Jim knows I’m right. He knows. But he’s invested in his stakeholders, his budgets, his simplistic Venn diagrams, and evermore computerised flowcharting of operations. No room for something being found outside what we think we are going to find. For someone to turn over something new. Like he says, there’s no I in team.

No. It doesn’t work like that. There are no heroes, no one officer who gets away with something just because they’ve solved a case. We have to stick to the plan. I’m in a catch-22, I’ve dug myself into a real corner, one where on one hand, I’ve solved a crime, laid bare Connelly’s real, sordid, murderous business, but on the other, I’ve stolen evidence from a crime scene in order to do it.

I stare at the notebook. I need Bessy for just a little while longer, just until I know, deep down, that I can hand myself in, that I’ve exhausted every avenue in my search for Aiden. So I’ll stay here for a while, at least until the initial horror of the Gables has subsided, and let them do their job.

The sun is shining now and there’s dew on the heather, making a low mist. I can hear bird song and a tapping on the wooden roof of the shelter. A moment later a huge black crow flaps down in front of me, making me jump. It hops around and calls out, and soon a few more drop out of the sky and onto the scrub land.

A car backfires in the distance up on the Huddersfield Road and they startle and fly up onto the telegraph wire just above the shelter, weighing it down so that I can see them clearly, and they can see me. Nearer and nearer. I start to read Bessy’s story.

After the case was closed it got worse. Every week there was something else in the papers. Something about
him
and
her
, or about the families. I was still going down to the police station every week, but sometimes I didn’t go in, I’d just sit on a bench outside, knowing what they’d say.

I liked the routine. Same as breakfast, dinner, tea, and a drive out, the police station was what held my life together. The house where it all happened had been demolished long ago, but I’d sometimes go and stand where it was, like I did all those years ago, and try to get a sense of what happened.

John Connelly had passed away. They said it was a heart attack. He’d left me a large sum of money in his will, it seemed too much, but I didn’t argue. After all, he was very rich. He’d been very good to me, that man, and I won’t have a word said against him.

Because of his kindness I’d never done a day’s work all my life, always been looked after by him. I put the money in the bank, with the rest of the money he’d given me. I was getting state pension now, and that paid for my little car and my food and gas and electric. I put the money I had saved in a high interest savings account, and if I wanted something urgent, I would draw some of the interest out.

John was dead now, so there would be no more income. I knew I had to look after what I had so I pulled my belt in tighter. I didn’t go to his funeral, it wouldn’t have been right; but I’d always remember him. Instead, I sat in the house, cutting out all the news reports about
them
.

He’d
gone on hunger strike. It riled me that
he
still got attention in the papers. I wrote to the prison and told them to make
him
eat.
He
should be kept alive to remember what
he
did, all the harm
he
caused.

As I’d been following
his
life since 1964, I’d seen how
he
liked to live it up in the papers, say stupid things then say
he
hadn’t. Make confessions, then go back on it. When John had died, I’d sent for information on the murders and bought all the books that had been written, which were a lot. There was even one published by
him
, but I didn’t buy that one.

I sat and read them all through, and one thing stood out to me: in 1987
he’d
told a reporter that
he’d
killed five more people.
She’d
said that
she
knew nothing about it, but
he’d
said
he’d
killed more people.

I thought about it a lot, wondered if I should go and tell the police. The reports said that they had looked at all the other reports of people missing near the time, and nothing had matched up. What about Thomas? Had they forgotten about him? Had everyone, except me?

It was in the papers that the mothers of the children they had murdered had all either gone mad, had to be sedated, or went on Valium. I wasn’t surprised. Some of them had got divorced. I knew, firsthand, that their lives could never be the same.

They’d had to sit through the trial, and all the reports in the papers about those two, they were like celebrities now, with that Lord saying she was innocent and him making out he’s insane, then him trying to get it proved he was sane.

All the time, there was a set of people living in the North West of England whose lives had been ruined. Those poor families would never forget about what happened, and worst of all, there were probably more bodies up there. Maybe Thomas?

All those reports were all for attention. Losing a child was terrible, especially in those circumstances. It’s the worst thing that can happen to you. One minute they’re there, joking and arguing, even being a nuisance, but they’re there. Next minute they’re gone. I was starting to think that something was wrong with me, too.

It wasn’t so much how I felt, because I was always in the most amount of pain I could be, and everything else was just an echo. It was more how people were looking at me. I’d stopped having my hair cut at the hairdressers, and begun to trim it myself. It had gone completely grey now, and I shouldn’t wonder why with all my worry.

I didn’t wear makeup anymore, and I always wore practical shoes and clothes. I was clean and tidy, and I didn’t think it was my appearance. I’d noticed that sometimes when people were speaking to me, I’d be able to listen for a minute, then I was distracted by my thoughts, my wanting to get home in case Thomas was there.

Some people had asked me outright if I was OK, and told me I seemed ‘off with the fairies.’ I suppose I was really. I was somewhere in an imaginary world where my son was safe and alive and here, beside me, carrying my shopping bags.

As for
her
,
she
made a documentary that was shown on the TV.
She
said that
she
wished
she’d
been hanged. I know that was what John Connelly wanted. He’d campaigned to bring back capital punishment, wheeling me out as an example of the suffering caused by ‘those bastards’ as he called them.

Beside the campaign stand there were always advertisements for his shops, and for other peoples’ businesses, but on the whole he was kind. In the years before he died, he started to call it a road show and had music blaring out. I didn’t hold with this, but who was I to say anything? He knew what he was doing, did John. How would I live otherwise?

The TV documentary said that
she’d
written hundreds of letters to someone describing what had happened. With John gone, I had nothing to stop me contacting people, so I phoned the papers.
They
were in the papers, so why shouldn’t I be? I spoke to some stuck-up teenager who asked me if my son had been murdered. When I said I didn’t know, she said she’d get back to me. She never did.

I looked some organisations up in the phone book and told them what had happened. It turned out that there were lots of missing people, thousands of them. There was a new organisation that matched up missing people with unidentified bodies, and lots that searched for your missing person and sent them a letter. The Salvation Army did that as well, so I wrote some letters to Thomas and sent them off. I wrote them in the best way I could, emphasising that he wouldn’t be in trouble if he came back now, that I’d understand.

Dear Thomas,

I’m writing this because you’ve been missing now for a long time, and some people have offered to help me to try to get in touch with you. I’ve been looking everywhere for you, and think about you every day. I still live in our house on Ney Street, and you can come round any time you like. The past is the past, love, and I won’t even mention it if you don’t want to. I’d just like to see you again.

I do love you very much, Thomas, happen a bit more than I should, because it seems other people recover from this. I haven’t met anyone yet who has, but that’s what they say.

If you do want to get in touch, let these people know. If you don’t for whatever reason, please remember that your mum loves you and I’ve kept your bedroom just as it was. There are birthday cards and Christmas presents, all in the sideboard, for when you do come back.

I’ll sign off now, love, and I hope I will see you soon.

All my love, Mum

I practiced writing it over and over again. It didn’t seem enough when I read it back. How could anything be enough, though? There weren’t really any words that could tell him how I felt, how I had fretted over this for the best part of my life. If I put about the crying and his dad, it would sound like I was blaming him. I worried over it for days, then left it at that.