Random Acts of Unkindness

by Jacqueline Ward

  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.

  Giving up

  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’ busines
ses, 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.

  There were three things I could pin my hopes on here: Thomas writing back and his letter being passed to me, Thomas getting the letter and deciding he didn’t want to write back but letting the agency know, and no response. The problem was, they couldn’t tell you where the missing person was, only the result.

  Someone from London came to meet me in Manchester and took my details. She took my letter and read it to see if there was anything inappropriate in it, then she said that she would see if he had an address and didn’t really want to be found, and if he did, she would send it and see what happened.

  She told me they searched the electoral registers and benefits agencies for missing people, just in case. She told me she’d make enquiries and find out if Thomas had been mentioned in her letters. She’d also mentioned that she thought for crimes like this, people should be hanged. The poor girl had a blank look I recognised—the glazed look of someone that no matter how much the sun shone, there was always horror and pain at the back of your mind. I was glad that she wasn’t hanged. She was the only way I could find out if Thomas was murdered. My only chance. I tried to find out how to contact her, but there didn’t seem to be a way.

  Months later, the woman phoned me and told me that her letters didn’t contain anything different from her statements, as she didn’t want to incriminate herself more. She’d got herself a spiritual counsellor, someone who she could confess to, unburden herself. By all accounts, she was trying to say that she was under his control, his spell, and it was because she was in love with him that she did those things. That she’d been a woman who had been led astray. And because of this she was appealing for release.

  In all the time since Thomas had gone missing and then the babies, I’d never lost my sanity fully. I’d cried, and I’d talked to myself, and to the blackbirds. I’d lain on the grass at Daisy Nook and not spoken to another human being for weeks, but, on the surface, I was reasonably sane.

  The thought of her out of prison, free to walk around, near kiddies, free, made me ill. Thoughts of my daughter growing up with someone else being her mum, and the dead baby in the wardrobe. I didn’t eat for a while and I became very upset. Not depressed, because I was still doing my routine to a point, but I was very upset and angry.

  I looked at a picture of her, posed writing. I knew she’d been trying to get parole for a long time, and I knew it had been blocked. The developments recently, seeing her on the TV, in the papers, with people supporting her, telling us that it was his fault she did it, it didn’t wash with me. It did unsettle me, because it meant people were taking it seriously. She’d been able to do a degree, she’d become a Christian. She looked old.

  I looked in the mirror, and I looked a lot older than her, but I didn’t look my age. I don’t know if it was the routine or the slow pace of my life, but I’d aged well. I was still walking the moor every day, in the morning at dawn, going to see Thomas, paying my respect to a part of my life where I was imprisoned. After that first day, when I’d been so taken by the heather, I bought a little bit and planted it and looked up its meaning.

  Heath heather: A low evergreen shrub or small tree, native to Europe, Asia, N Africa and especially S Africa. (Genus: Erica, c.500 species. Family: Ericaceae.) Heather: A small, bushy, evergreen shrub (Calluna vulgaris), native to Europe, especially N and W; in Scotland it forms the major food source of endemic red grouse. A rare form with white flowers is considered lucky. (Family: Ericaceae.)

  Heathen: This word for non-Christian or pagan is common in all the Germanic languages. It appears in Old English as hâþen in the year 826. It clearly arose after Christianity, but had to be quite early for it to appear in all the Germanic tongues, sometime in the 4th century or earlier. Most words of this age have unclear etymologies, but this is not the case with heathen. It is believed to have originated in Gothic and spread to the other Germanic tribes. In the 4th century, Ulfilas, bishop of the Goths, translated the Bible into Gothic. In Mark 7:26, which reads "Now the woman was a Greek, a Syrophoenician by birth . . ." Ulfilas used the word haiþnô in place of Greek, or as it appears in the Vulgate gentilis, or gentile. Haiþnô literally means dweller on the heath. The heath is associated with the regeneration of life, and the Triple Goddess symbols of the maiden, the mother and the crone, where birth, life and death are symbolised in the life force. So the original sense is remarkably the same as the modern sense, someone living beyond the bounds of civilization and who has not received the word of God.’

  Sounds about right to me. Heathen. She was 58 and I was 74. Both of us had been allowed to age, yet both of us were still focused back in 1964, when children, who would now be middle-aged, suffered and died. They didn’t get any older. They were children forever. I still thought of Thomas as a teenager, because I had no other point of reference. I still looked for him everywhere I went, my eyes searching out young boys about his height, who look familiar. He wouldn’t look like that now, but in my mind he was still waving goodbye to his mam and he cycled to work. She was looking back down the years and trying to find a way to escape, to be free. Over my dead body, I thought. I still wanted answers from her. I needed to know exactly where she was.

  Just as I thought it, there was a knock at the door. I tied my hair back and sprayed air freshener round the room. I’d been smoking sixty a day again, and my visits to the moor had made me perspire. I suddenly realised that the room smelled like sweaty cheese, so I opened the back door to let some air in. If this was Thomas now, he’d wonder what the bloody hell had got into me.

  It wasn’t Thomas. It was Lizzie.

  ‘Bessy, love. I’ve just come to
tell you that Colin had a heart attack. He’s up at Ashton General and he’s asking for you.’

  I got my coat and followed her. Her son was driving her in his car, so we went up there. She didn’t speak to me all the way there. When we got out, she turned round and looked at me, right in the eye.

  ‘I’m sorry, Bessy.’

  I smiled.

  ‘Never mind that now, love. Let’s just see to Colin, eh?’

  I started to walk in, but she grabbed my arm.

  ‘I just wanted to tell you, he never forgot about Thomas. He spoke about him every day. And you. I should never have . . .’

  ‘Don’t worry yourself, Lizzie. It’s all water under the bridge now.’

  ‘But you never remarried. You never met anyone. I thought you might be still holding a flame for Col.’

  I snort.

  ‘Col? No. My life stopped when Thomas went. There was no room in my life for a man.’ I glanced at her son, leaning against a wall, smoking a cigarette. ‘Put it this way. Can you imagine if you came out if this hospital and he was gone? You never saw him again and no one ever knew what happened to him?’

  She paled.

  ‘I never thought of it like that. I just thought he’d run away.’

  I smiled.

  ‘Well, he might have. He might have had his reason to go, and all. Or he might have been murdered, by them two, or by someone else. It’s the not knowing, Lizzie.’

  ‘Did no one help you, Bessy? What about the police? Colin didn’t say much.’

  We’re walking along the hospital corridors now, hurrying toward the intensive care unit.

  ‘They did, but what could they do? They never found any clues, or a body, or him alive, so what could they do?’

  We reached the ICU and the curtains were drawn round his bed. Lizzie pulled them open and went to the side of the bed. There was a steady blip, blip, blip of a machine and I flashed back to our wedding day, all those years before. The man lying on the bed now was a faded version of Colin, someone grey and ever so slightly blue.