Random Acts of Unkindness

by Jacqueline Ward

  ‘Just get here as quick as you can.’

  I switch the phone off. I make a deal with myself that I’ll check every door, try every lock, and then I’ll get out and wait for Mike. I know he’ll come. I try the window and although it’s locked, I could easily smash it.

  I’m on the ground floor, so this is my escape route. I open the door and move along the corridor, listening at the first door. No sounds and it’s locked.

  I turn the key and open it into darkness. It’s the same as the last room. All clean and tidy. Pristine. I try the next room and smell it before I turn on the light. Blood. Mixed with shit.

  My stomach lurches and I almost vomit at it. I turn on the light and the bed is stained with a deep, murky patch that has seeped over the whiter than white sheets. Blood splatters on the wall tell me, as if I didn’t know already, what’s going on here. No doubt this was the last thing one of those poor boys out there ever saw.

  I go on. I open several more doors. It’s an unlucky dip. Carnage or no carnage. But mostly carnage of one kind or another. Instruments of sexual torture, ropes and straps, even smaller hooks, replicas of the larger hooks outside, hanging from the walls.

  I vaguely wonder if I should have waited for Mike and reinforcements, but it’s too late now. This is like wandering through a nightmare, unable to wake yourself up. More rooms, some cleaned and disinfected, freshly painted, some waiting for it.

  I’ve reached the penultimate room now and I open the door slowly. The smell is different, somehow musky, but there’s no immediate movement. I flick on the light switch and at first I don’t see anything.

  ‘Is anyone there?’

  No sound at all. I step in and see something scraped on the wall, the white paint peeling around the letters.

  Help. Mum. Help me.

  My God. Someone was here just now. The paint chippings from the scrapings are on the pillow and the bed is warm. White paint under fingernails.

  I walk over and feel the wall. It’s thick with words etched into the plaster by previous occupants, covered by white paint. A whole wall of desperation. I turn round quickly and open a single wardrobe. It’s dark in there, but I can make out a shape. Skinny, shaven hair, handcuffed. Hands over head to protect himself from who knows what.

  ‘Aiden. Oh my God. Aiden.’ I pull him out of the wardrobe, but he rolls up into a ball, tight with fear. I pull his arms away from his head. ‘Aiden. It’s me, Mum. I’ve come to get you. Aiden, look at me.’

  The boy pulls his arms away from his face. It’s not Aiden. His eyes are ringed with shadows and he looks like he’s been drugged.

  ‘I want my mum.’

  My emotions finally collapse, but I can’t cry yet. Hold on, Jan. There’s one door left and I carry the boy outside and lay him in the corridor. I open the last door and see a gaunt face under the bedclothes. I’m pulling at the covers, but it’s no use. This boy’s unconscious and, from the looks of it, badly beaten. I lift him and pull the other boy to his feet.

  ‘What’s your name? Please, come on, lad. I’m here to help you.’

  He stares at me, his thin face past the point of fear.

  ‘Calvin. Calvin Wilson.’

  ‘Come on, Calvin. Let’s get out of here.’

  We rush along the corridor to the office room and I tell him to go in there and wait for me. Then I decide I can’t leave them and I smash the window and climb through, dragging the unconscious boy through behind me.

  Calvin climbs through and makes a run for it, but I catch him and drag him back. We’re both exhausted, but I get hold of him and hug him, I hug him as if he’s my own lost son. And he hugs me back, his fingers pinching my skin. It’s the first human contact I’ve had since I hugged Aiden just before he disappeared.

  Toward the front of the factory there are three blue lights. No doubt Mike had brought just a few cars with him, just in case I’d flipped. He’s running toward me as I carry the unconscious boy in my arms, and he catches hold of the other one.

  ‘It’s all right, son, I’ve got you. You’re safe now.’

  ‘Calvin. Calvin Smith, Mike.’

  The boy starts to cry. His skin is almost translucent in the daylight.

  ‘I want me mam. You don’t know what they did. You don’t know.’

  Mike looks at me.

  ‘Aiden? Is he here? Is he here?’

  A paramedic comes to take the boy from me. I shake my head.

  ‘No. No, he’s not. It looks like we’re too late.’

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The ambulances arrive now and I leave Mike to mark out the exit point ready for the senior officers. Jim Stewart would be here soon and I wanted to be gone by then. I run around to the front of the building, where there’s still mayhem as more and more police cars arrive.

  I walk through the front entrance, past two guys who have been arrested. One of them spits at me. I carry on mapping out the building in my head until I find my destination. Just off the bar area there is a door leading to a small office. I’d noticed it earlier as a potential site for guards, but now I was after something else. The paperwork.

  This place was some kind of mechanism of supplying youngsters, on these premises, to clients brought here, and there had to be some record. There had to be a website, some way of communicating with the clients.

  I push the door open and flick on the lone laptop. A quick look over it shows a few recent documents. It appears to have been wiped up until last week. I notice a printer with a tray.

  There’s a piece of paper with a photograph of a boy, around thirteen. It could be a school photograph, head and shoulders, no smiling. Underneath is his name. Calvin. It’s Calvin. I feel a little light-headed, but I carry on.

  I open the first filing cabinet drawer and pull out the contents. Receipts for credit cards, invoices. I need to hurry before someone comes to take all this away for investigation. I need to know the truth for myself.

  Finally, I find it. The second filing cabinet is locked, and I drag up the anger from the bottom of my being and kick the drawers. Then I find a steel stapler and wedge it in between the cabinet and the drawer and it finally springs open, hitting me in the shin.

  All the drawers are packed with files and finally I find a photo album. The room looks as if it’s been ransacked now, but I bring out two large books and lay them on the table.

  I open the first one, the least battered of them, and flick the pages back three months. Photographs of boys with their names underneath, and a number. Obviously relating to the files in the other cabinet.

  I turn the pages, searching each face for my son, searching each name. I go back three, then six months. Then I recheck. And again. He’s not there. Aiden isn’t there. It occurs to me that he’s never been here.

  I flick back to the front and see a picture of Darren, and a cross next to his name. And a comment. ‘Keep clean.’ Random boys marked ‘keep clean’ every now and then. I recognise some of them from the files I read on the suicides. No recent sexual activity. My head swims, because this proves premeditation. Girls too. Teenagers, hardly grown.

  I know how this stuff can go missing, like in Operation Hurricane. So I take some photographs on my phone, of the lists of client names, the boys, and the file markings.

  I hear footsteps outside, people digging deeper into the building and its horrors. Shouts and gasps.

  I pick up another book, a ledger, and read through a list of names, in date order. Some of the names I recognise, some only vaguely, and some I don’t know at all. A list of people buying into this depravity, paying for exclusive access to underage boys and girls to do whatever they want to them.

  I read through the names again, making sure I remember some of them at least, as evidence of this calibre has a habit of disappearing into the old boys’ network, then close the book.

  Someone else will have to deal with this. Someone else will have to weed out the abusers who visited this hellhole and made Connelly so rich. Connelly. Once again, con
spicuous by his absence. Not on scrap of paper, invoice, record or address has anything to connect Connelly to this.

  Although I know that he, and his father before him had initiated this crime house and kept it running through the decades as families suffered nearby and mourned their missing sons, there was no trace of him here. Or anywhere. That was the problem.

  Just as I’m about to leave I spot a box in the corner. At first it looks like rags, and I recoil. Is it the boy’s clothes, stored here for some reason? But then I realise what it is. Scarves. Hats. Trainers. The silent messages in an invisible world of crime.

  It suddenly strikes me. The colours signal availability, and the black scarves signal unavailability—and the need to find another victim. Outside this room, nothing spoken, nothing written down, just a secret language, high above the streets.

  Lisa was right. Unspeakable. I leave the books on the desk and leave the room. I’m suddenly among twenty or so police officers, standing around in the bar area. Two of them are vomiting, and the shock on everyone’s faces is visible. I go over to the young uniformed police officer, who is retching, and touch his arm.

  ‘There’s a bathroom over there.’

  He looks at me as I point to the edge of the dance floor, just right of the bar.

  ‘I saw them. I saw them in there. Just hanging there. Human beings treated like animals. They’re . . . they’re . . .’

  I put my arms around him. It’s the second time I’ve comforted someone today. The second time I’ve mothered someone. But not Aiden. I hurry back outside. Mike’s on his phone so I stand around, waiting for him to finish his call. I watch as the two guards I saw are led out by ashen-faced coppers who’ve seen almost everything. Mike turns to look at me.

  ‘Jim Stewart’s on his way. ETA five minutes. He’s asking after you. Something about that house on Ney Street. You’d think he’d have other things to think about.’

  I make a run for it. I run up the road and into the dip where I’ve hidden my bike. I start it up and drive up the lane toward the crossroads. I see Stewart’s car rolling toward it, and zip past it. When I reach the crossroads I take the road to the moor. I haven’t even put on my crash helmet and my hair blows in the wind as I speed through the darkness.

  Oh my God. It’s not Aiden. It’s not my son hanging there. It’s not my son in one of those rooms. I feel desperately sorry for all the mothers who are going to find out exactly what happened to their child in the next couple of hours. And for those, like Bessy, who died never knowing. But it’s not me. Aiden wasn’t there. But where is he?

  I ride on, and down to the reservoir below Saddleworth Moor. I’ve probably passed Bessy on her way to the moor when I’ve been walking up here. I know this place like the back of my hand, but it’s hard to reconcile this bleak landscape as yet another site for dead children, even though I know full well it is. The way Bessy describes it.

  It’s dark, but I can see the outline of the hills above the moor on the skyline, lit by the moon. There’s a little shelter, built to house people who’ve been caught short on the moor, enveloped in the thick fog that descends quickly. There’s a light and a bench and even a drinks machine. I push in a pound coin and get myself a hot chocolate.

  Right. I need to think. I need to calm down and think. I pull the folder with the police files in it out of my bag, along with Bessy’s notes. I open the file and pull all the pieces together. I need to get all this straight in my head before I see Stewart.

  I need it not to be about Aiden, or Bessy. Connelly Snr must have started this racket years ago, somehow luring young boys into his lair. Keeping them there for the use of his clients. When he had no more use for them, killing them. He’d set up Mothers for the Missing as a way to steer those who had suspicions in other directions, like Bessy and Pat.

  Hadn’t Pat said that there was always something happening to keep the missing boys out of the news? Had Connelly made it that way? Had the boys been taken to coincide with other high profile crimes, like the Moors Murders, to hide them away and divert blame? Connelly Jnr had continued the family business, covering his crimes with the kitchen factory at Old Mill and lesser offences to keep us busy.

  The one thing that didn’t make sense was the bodies. Or lack of them. Some of the boys, like Darren, had been found in situations that could easily be interpreted as suicide. But Ted Scholes words stuck with me.

  ‘Hiding a body is practically impossible.’

  Hiding so many bodies was even more unlikely. What was he doing with them? What had Connelly done with the bodies? I pour through the files, reading every detail, rereading the cases that had been closed because no body had been found. I search through Thomas’s file, all the details that are still fresh in my head from Bessy’s story, all underlining the extent to which Connelly had everyone fooled, so much that the focus was on a completely unconnected set of incomprehensible acts.

  I look out onto the water and over to the moor. I’d first walked over there as a young teenager. There was nothing to mark the graves of the children, only a bunch of flowers brought by one of their mothers, of the boy who had never been found but that was definitely a victim.

  When I’d taken my first step into the undergrowth, through the thigh high heather, I’d been scared that with each step I was crushing the bones of the dead children who everyone said were still on the moor. Every twig that cracked, every slip in the peat, reminders that there was an underlying fear that surfaced in the minds of those who chose to walk here.

  But like Scholes said, it’s practically impossible to hide a body. True, some of the children have never been found, and there really is no way of knowing how many there were. The ones who were named were the ones whose parents entered a new nightmare of knowing what happened to their dead child. Out of limbo and into hell.

  But where were the bodies? I go back over the notes, then pick out the pile of news cuttings and photographs. Bessy and Colin, holding baby Thomas. A generation before Sal and I, but the same scenario. All smiles. Bessy and Colin with Thomas riding his first bike. Ditto. They feel like family now, like a long lost uncle and aunt, someone I know so well.

  Fast forward, Bessy in the local paper appealing for the whereabouts of her son. A policeman standing beside her, probably Inspector Little. Next, Bessy standing beside John Connelly at a rally to bring back capital punishment. She looks tiny beside his huge bulk, and he’s smiling widely. Bessy’s clutching her handbag tight. There’s a platform and several people gathered to the right.

  To the left, just at the edge of the photograph, I catch sight of something familiar. The trees on the skyline are poplars, and just in front of them I can make out the wrought iron work of the Gables. The rally is being held round the side of the Gables, outside the walls, on what is now a huge car park.

  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 distanc
e, 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.