Sweetie (37 page)

all five women were scratching, punching and kicking him. The garage was silent apart from the deep thuds raining down on George’s body. Blood squirted from his nose and ears, and his battered penis lay shrivelled and inert on his left thigh, covered in blood and semen.

Suddenly, in unison, the women ceased the beat -

ing. Potty wiped her mouth with the back of her jacket sleeve, and Sue began to laugh, silently at first and then hysterically.

Michelle dashed to her side and placed a hand over her mouth. ‘Shut it, you stupid bitch, or the whole estate will be in here.’

Gillian drew back, anguish on her face, but Grace slid one arm around her shoulders and pulled her sister close. ‘It’s OK, Gill, it’s nearly done.’ Grace looked up as if to heaven and said a silent prayer, closing her eyes for a few seconds and sucking in some much-needed air. Then, taking control again, she gathered them into a circle. ‘Right, girls, brace yourselves, we need to get ’im in the car.’

Sue, Potty and Gillian took his top half while Grace and Michelle scooped up his tree-trunk legs and hauled him towards his car. Somehow they managed to cram him in. Potty took control of the hose that she’d attached to the exhaust and slowly uncoiled it, feeding it through the open car window before winding the glass back up to leave only the smallest of gaps.

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‘Fucking hell, the poxy car key!’ screamed Sue then.

‘Shit! God Almighty, I forgot all about that,’

replied Grace, biting her bottom lip and trying to think fast. ‘Check his trouser pockets, I’m sure he went back in his flat and got the keys for something.’

Sue wrestled with his legs and forced her hand deep into his pockets. ‘Panic over, ladies,’ she said, raising one hand with a bunch of keys clasped in it.

Grace hushed the giggling triumph of the other women. ‘Before we start the engine, Potty, check outside and get Lizzie to start my car. Mich, you got the lollies, babe?’

Michelle produced a white bag holding six drumstick lollies, peeled the paper off each one and licked them thoroughly.

Then she reached across the limp body in the driver’s seat and squashed them heavily into George’s face. Quietly she whispered in his ear, ‘This one’s for my beautiful girl. Rot in hell for ever!’ as she pressed one lolly deeper and harder than the rest.

Gill, quieter and more sedate than the others, moved towards the garage door. She cleared up the mess as she went, placing everything in a stripy plastic carrier bag that they would get rid of later.

The whole place stank of blood, shit and paraffin.

‘We need to move it, ladies, time’s ticking by,’ she said.

Potty peeped out of a gap in the doorframe.

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‘Fucking Ada! It’s only that poxy kid Kelly Gobber and two of her mates.’

‘Quick, shut the door, Potty. Gill, stay still. Sue, Mich, don’t move a fucking muscle!’ Grace held them all to silence as they heard the clip-clop of three pairs of feet and the giggling laughter of the girls passing by. If those kids noticed anything strange, they’d be fucked.

For what seemed like an eternity, the five women held their breath and an eerie silence stretched.

Eventually the clip-clopping sounds faded, along with the giggling, and Grace exhaled.

‘That was too fucking close! Let’s start the engine and get the fuck outta here.’

Potty secured the garage door after them as well as she could. Grace arrived at the Jag to find Lizzie crouched down across the passenger seat, still hiding from Kelly and her mates. The girls had vanished, though, and once again the back street was quiet and empty. The low purring of an engine could faintly be heard, but no one would notice for a while. The women all scrambled into the car, each with her own thoughts and each deathly quiet. They knew George would die, and each of them believed that an all-seeing, all-wise, compassionate God would forgive them their actions.

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Chapter Twenty-One

The women went to ground the next day, keeping away from each other’s houses. It had been decided that they would carry on with their daily lives as normal and they had made a solemn oath not to tell their menfolk just yet.

Terry came back from Broadstairs with the girls, calmer and more resigned to his double loss, and he and Sue set about finalising arrangements for a quiet funeral for TJ. Terry felt more able to cope now.

Spending time alone with his girls had shown him that although he would never stop missing Wayne and TJ, there was comfort to be drawn from his daughters’ love and need for him. For a long time, Terry had lost his grip on family matters and put too much responsibility for them on to Sue. He had decided while he was away that he needed to become head of this family again.

The funeral was to be attended only by family and close friends, the people who had known and loved TJ the best. He and Sue agreed that they wanted to keep it simple, too tired and drained for another parade of grief on the scale of Wayne’s funeral.

Besides, TJ had been a quiet little soul who didn’t like 380

crowds. Sue was aware that the area expected more, but she had been a sideshow for them once already and felt she was doing right by her baby this time.

It was excruciating for all the women to try and carry on as normal, not knowing if George had been found or even if he was really dead. Every moment seemed to last an eternity, but they just went about their daily rounds, waiting for the story to break.

There hadn’t been much life left in his body when they’d finished with him in the garage, and the exhaust fumes would have done the rest, but they still didn’t know for sure . . .

News was hard to come by, despite Lizzie’s frequent trips to the shops for snippets of gossip and Potty’s radar on high alert at the hospital.

DCI Woodhouse had originally ignored the call-out to the garage, thinking little of it. He sent a junior detective and PC Watson along instead. He had so far made little progress with the Shoreditch robbery, and after TJ’s abduction and murder knew he had to concentrate all his efforts on finding the sex attacker.

Locals were disgusted by the police’s lack of progress on the case and had begun to taunt them, jeering at patrol cars as they moved through the streets and throwing stones after them. Relations between the police and the community had never been good hereabouts, but now they had sunk to an all-time low and Woodhouse was getting censure from above as 381

well. It had been the worst summer of his career. He felt it was only a matter of time before they pulled him off this case and replaced him with one of the flash young upstarts from West End Central.

Upon arriving at the garage and switching off the car engine, officers had to stand back for ten minutes to allow the carbon monoxide fumes to dissipate before they could get to the body. It was during this respite that Watson radioed back to the station for Woodhouse. Getting him on the line he said, ‘I think you’d better get down here and see this, sir. George Rush has been killed.’

‘Nobody move him or touch anything until I get there,’ Woodhouse instructed. ‘I’m on my way.’

He definitely wasn’t prepared for what he found in that garage. George Rush’s corpse had been subjected to a frenzied and vicious attack of a plainly sexual nature. It was immediately obvious to the DCI that Rush had suffered the same sexual violations that all the child victims had suffered.

There was dried blood around his genitals, and his anus was still leaking a sticky mixture of blood and what looked like soap. The same sticky mixture also trailed across the concrete floor of the garage, and matched the liquid used in the attack on the last child victim.

The dead man’s trousers were still down around his ankles and there were several wounds to his head which had dried into a congealed mass of blood and 382

hair. His body was covered in large raised bruises, probably from being kicked, and this had clearly been the work of several men as there was no way just one could have done all this.

But it was the six drumstick lollies stuck to the side of the corpse’s swollen bruised face that told Woodhouse everything he needed to know about the attack. This was the work of vigilantes through and through, the kind of thing that was anathema to anyone paid to uphold the law. But now, staring at the bruised and battered remains, Woodhouse privately decided that, provided they had got the right man, he felt nothing but relief. It seemed jungle justice had achieved what he couldn’t. Please God, just let it be the right man!

Of course, his superiors would want an investi -

gation, and as was the victim’s right he would have to instigate a full enquiry, but as he gazed at the disgusting remains of what had once been a human being, for once he felt absolutely nothing.

‘Watson, I want you to come with me when they’ve taken him away and sealed this place off.

We’re going to go through George Rush’s house from top to bottom,’ the DCI instructed.

The body was zipped into a bag and taken away in an ambulance in front of a crowd of onlookers who had gathered to see what all the fuss was about. There were a few muttered comments and some booing as 383

the police came out of the garage, but Watson quickly took control and dispersed the crowd. DCI Woodhouse instructed his entire team of officers to remain tight-lipped about exactly what they had found in the garage, which was padlocked before the scene was vacated.

Woodhouse and Watson then walked in silence –

ignoring the low-voiced criticism of the few remain -

ing onlookers – to George Rush’s maisonette where a patrol car full of crime-scene officers were waiting to receive Woodhouse’s permission to break down the door.

Having gained access, and told the SOCO crew to wait, he walked through the ground floor, taking in the bare furnishings and lino in the front room, then on into the kitchen where he gagged on the stench from the cat’s litter tray. Watson accompanied him.

He opened doors and windows to get some air through, in the hope of clearing the stench, while Woodhouse checked the food cupboard. It was something he always did. If he wanted to build a profile of a person then he needed to check their larder, and in George Rush’s he found Fray Bentos meat pies, tins of Whiskas, a couple of packets of tobacco and a white paper sweet bag from the newsagent’s containing four drumstick lollies.

He opened the fridge and reeled back as the smell of decay hit him full in the face. Inside it was half a pint of milk, virtually congealed, a block of lard and 384

a bag of off-cuts from the fishmonger which had evidently gone off.

Upstairs was just as miserable, with a few threadbare pieces of furniture and a bed with a big hollow in the middle where the mattress had given way, all covered by a grubby, stained candlewick bedspread.

‘In here, sir,’ called Watson from the second bedroom. Woodhouse stood in the doorway and could only stare at the wall in front of him which was covered by images of children, pasted into a collage that took up its entire length and breadth. He was speechless. They were not especially provocative images, but they betrayed a clear obsession. The whole room held the sour odour of stale semen and damp, long-forgotten laundry.

Watson was gingerly lifting stacks of magazines, muttering, ‘Oh, Jesus,’ and replacing them when a black card index box caught his eye. Thinking it must have been where Rush kept his addresses, he flicked back the top to find a series of envelopes carefully filed inside, with dates and times written on them.

‘Have a look at this, sir,’ he called to Woodhouse, still standing transfixed by the images on the wall, sick with the realisation that their man had been under their noses all this time, even briefly on their suspect list. Why hadn’t they caught him? They’d had some evidence – why hadn’t it led them to this sordid, threatening room? Woodhouse flicked through 385

numerous envelopes, all inscribed with different dates and times, going back years, and placed in date order. He took one out and looked inside. Bearing the date 22 June 1976, 4.15 p.m., was a blue Basildon Bond envelope containing what looked like tiny snippets of black hair; upon closer inspection he realised they were eyelashes.

He closed his eyes and images of the murdered black girl, Chantal Robinson, filled his mind. He opened his eyes again after a few seconds, gazed around him and knew that this enquiry would be a long one and that evidence-gathering would prove difficult and distasteful.

Woodhouse looked directly at the PC. ‘We need to get the ball rolling here, son. I’ll get back to the nick.

Don’t let any big-footed plod roam around the place until I have all I need officially.’

At that moment, he heard a purring sound at his feet. A cat had silently approached him, and was wrapping itself around his legs. He bent down and picked the animal up. ‘I bet if you could talk, you’d tell us a few things.’ He stroked the cat gently before placing it in the arms of a surprised Watson. ‘Get it to the animal rescue place. We can’t leave the poor little fucker here, can we?’

Later, when he was back at the police station doing his paperwork, Woodhouse’s phone rang and the duty sergeant informed him that it was a reporter from the
Hackney Gazette
on the line. In cases like 386

this there was usually a media blackout until a statement had been drawn up by the officer in charge, so the receptionist was surprised when Woodhouse said, ‘Put him through.’

If John had noticed anything different about Grace he wasn’t letting on. Life for them seemed back to normal. She moved about in the days after the attack in a trance-like state, going through the motions while endlessly debating with herself about coming clean and telling John everything. The women had sworn secrecy to one another, but still it seemed unnatural to Grace to have done such a momentous thing and not to share it with her husband. What would he think of her if he knew the truth? John had set her up high on a pedestal, bolstered by his love and respect. Did she really want him to think differently of her?

She was girding herself up to making a confession when he got back from work on Thursday night, but just as she got the children to bed and all went quiet the moment disappeared. John announced that he’d had a pig of a day and needed a pint. He was standing jiggling his keys in the hallway as she came down the stairs and she took this as a sign that now wasn’t the time. She fell into a fitful sleep, to be awoken by an excitable John at 1.30 a.m., smelling strongly of beer and shaking her shoulder.