Worthington and Chapman were paralysed - a mixture of fear and utter incomprehension had rendered them immobile. Saunders was still sat in the parked car up the road. He couldn’t think straight. He wasn’t capable of accepting the picture that lay before him.
Sykes was waving the gun at Chapman, Worthington was still trying to pick himself up from that excruciating punch to the windpipe.
“Get back!” shouted Sykes, with a weak and shaky voice. He realised that the order sounded more like a feeble request. He coughed and tried to assert himself with more authority. His eyes hinted that he had no idea what was going to happen now. What he was going to do now.
“Get back I said.” The order sounded more authoritative this time. Worthington got to his feet and began slowly walking backwards with Chapman. Sykes was waving the gun around senselessly in their direction as he called out to the neighbours behind him.
“Colin, get my car and bring it here. The keys are hung up on the hook near the front door. Hurry!”
One of the bystanders, an older looking man followed the orders. He turned and ran up the close to Sykes’ house.
“You two, lie down on the floor!” Worthington and Chapman did as the gunman said.
“Put your hands on your head.” They did just that. They lay on the tarmac with their hands over their heads, praying that this horrendous situation would soon be over.
Sykes straightened up Karen’s body tenderly. An involuntary howl escaped him as stared at the pitiful sight. He had to look away.
The neighbour that Sykes had shouted to arrived with the car.
“Right, George.” Sykes was looking at his friend who was completely out of it. It looked very doubtful that George Dawson had any idea what was going on.
“George!” he bellowed with unmistakable urgency. He had got his friend’s attention. Dawson lifted his head slowly, averting his attention from the hand that he had been studying. His empty eyes fixed on Sykes.
“Come on George, let’s go.” Sykes’ voice was kind, caring - despite the clear panic and trauma that he was experiencing. He opened the passenger door for his friend. George walked slowly towards the car. He had no idea what was going on, he’d not really come round from the trauma of the car crash. Everything else had simply compounded his confusion.
“Come on George, faster.” Sykes was scared, it was completely obvious by his voice, his stance, his face. He didn’t know what he was doing, he didn’t really understand what had just happened. He needed time, some space to think things over. He also needed to get George out of the picture, get him away in a hideout of some kind.
George eventually made his way into the passenger seat. Sykes followed, limping backwards with the gun still pointing right at the two mortified detectives lay sobbing on the ground. He sat himself at the wheel, then suddenly pulled off. He called out to every single person in the street.
“I’m so sorry.”
Peter Sykes pulled the car door shut and turned onto the main road.
Chapman and Worthington bounced up like springs as soon as the car had disappeared from view. They began waving at Saunders who was still sitting in the car. He managed to pull himself together a little and start the engine. He raced down the street to his fellow officers. And his dead boss. The woman he adored, the woman he had just witnessed being shot through the head.
The car screeched to a halt by the body. Chapman jumped into the front seat, Worthington was shouting urgent instructions at the neighbours.
“Call 999, tell them that Detective Inspector Karen Ellis has been shot. Give the address. Do it.” He dived into the back of the car and Saunders raced off.
“I’ve already told them. They already know. I radioed.” Saunders was speaking slowly and quietly as though he was suffering with the flu.
“Just get me eyeball on that Merc. That’s all I care about now. FOOT DOWN!” Chapman had to shout the instruction, Saunders seemed in a daze, driving as though he was bringing a new-born home from the hospital.
“That’s better,” he said as Saunders pressed the accelerator to the floor. As they flew around the bend on Radcliffe road, the silver car came into view up ahead.
“Okay. There he is. Slow it down a little. Keep it steady.” Saunders was gradually gaining on the Mercedes, until there was little more than fifty yards between the two cars.
Chapman had no idea how this was going to work. He couldn’t visualise a scenario that would allow him chance to swoop, without the illegal hand-gun coming into play again. But he was determined about one thing. He was taking Sykes in, one way or another. Dawson had become totally irrelevant now.
The numbness that was presently being felt by all three of them was strangely comforting. It was a cocktail of anger, shock, grief, guilt, confusion and denial in their very early stages. They all knew that the moment would come, probably within the next few hours - definitely once the adrenalin rushes had died down, when the concoction would be ready to swallow. For now, they would make use of this numb, early stage.
Sykes must have spotted them, he simply must have known of their presence in the rear view mirror. If he hadn’t, then he must have been worried that he would be intercepted further along. Saunders spoke, filling the emptiness in the car with his analysis.
“He never meant for that. I could tell, I saw it happen. I saw him recoil as the gun went off. He isn’t a cold-blooded cop killer. He’s just got out of his depth.” Saunders’ vacant eyes were fixed on the road, on the silver Mercedes which was carrying the two murderers.
Worthington remained silent. Maybe he had already had a little sip of the neat guilt. Maybe the video-tape had begun replaying the moment in his mind. The video-tape which had no controls, but for the slow motion loop function.
Chapman wanted to talk, to push the words from his lips. It took great effort to translate the thoughts into words.
“It seemed to me that the situation had been planned. That’s what I thought as soon as Sykes started talking to Ellis.” A short silence came and passed. Ellis. It seemed hard to say, like there was suddenly a difficult pronunciation.
“He had obviously discussed the situation with Dawson, maybe some of the other neighbours. One thing’s for sure, that whole fucking thing had been set up. They had planned to take a hostage, buy some getaway deal. I agree with you though, he never meant for the gun to go off.”
Although in his heart, Worthington knew that what was being said was true, he felt a prang of betrayal rise up inside. He wanted his colleagues, his mates - to stick up for him. All the silence was doing was confirming the fact that Ellis was dead because of him. Because of him, and nothing else.
The Mercedes began indicating to turn left. It seemed quite surreal, the getaway car indicating. The brake lights lit up and the car was driven around the corner, onto another busy road, Countess Lane. The ten seconds that the car was out of view was enough. By the time that Saunders had accelerated to the junction and pulled around the corner, there was no sight of the silver car.
There were seven different options. Seven different ways the Mercedes could have turned along the road. Saunders instinctively turned left into the first adjacent road. It became obvious straight away that he had chosen the wrong option. He had pulled into Ashcombe Drive. A cul-de -sac. A dead end. Sykes’ car was not here.
Pop’s Story
Part Four
After the loss of Lisa and Alison, George had become the most respected of men amongst the people who knew him. With the support of his family, friends, neighbours and in particular Peter and Margaret from next door, George Dawson somehow managed to pick himself up and start to rebuild his life - for one simple reason, his youngest daughter Lisa.
Maybe it was her age, she could have been so resilient simply because she hadn’t actually understood what had happened. Not properly anyway. She was just nine years old when her elder sister and mother disappeared from her life forever. She just seemed to take it in her stride. She had her bad days, but
in the main, she generally had good days. George’s sister, and Alison’s brother were a constant presence, as of course were the close-knit community of Avenham Close. In those early months, George and Lisa were comforted with dignified, reassuring support.
George committed himself to Lisa one hundred per cent. Whatever he did, it was for Lisa. At first, he was admittedly neurotic. He refused to allow Lisa any slack. He needed to know precisely where she was and what she was doing at all times. George became obsessed with Lisa’s every move. He managed to mellow out in time though. He tried hard, and after some turbulent times, he realised what he was doing and why he was doing it.
It was Peter who sat him down and explained that he could not spend his life wrapping Lisa in cotton wool. He told George that he couldn’t live his life through her, that the time would come when Lisa had to make her own way, and if her father continued to manage her every move so cautiously - she would be ill-equipped to deal with life on her own. It was sage advice.
Peter had been fantastic, as had Margaret. George knew that he couldn’t have managed without their unwavering, constant support. A year after the tragedy, Peter told George straight,
“You need to get back to work, and if you don’t feel ready for that yet, you need to get an interest to occupy you.”
George wasn’t ready to face work again, not yet anyway. He was scared of the looks and sympathetic comments, the awkwardness that colleagues and pupils would feel around him. The school environment would only remind him of Sarah, and the misery she faced alone at her own school. His personal confidence had disappeared, and he just didn’t feel ready. So, in a bid to distract himself from breathing down Lisa’s neck and scrutinising the minutes and hours of her days, George decided to take Peter’s advice. He sat down and began working on ideas for positive things to do that would distract him from the past, and from interfering in Lisa’s present. It quickly became apparent to George that he had unfinished business. He couldn’t simply distract himself from what had happened. George realised, that in order to move on, he had to make a positive from the raw, emotional pain he was enduring. It wasn’t simply grief, it was a mixture of emotions that he was trying to tackle. Grief was a part of the pie, but also anger, frustration, despair, regret and hatred took up equal portions.
He began pressurising the local government departments involved in the employment of the teaching assistant who had abused Sarah. George worked from morning until night, trying to get to the bottom of how it had been possible for a convicted paedophile to be working in a school, getting unaccompanied access to children.
It wasn’t a campaign of blame. George wasn’t trying to make a nuisance of himself - he was a teacher himself, he recognised that there are failings. George just wanted to know, and fully understand where the failings were, and what could be done to ensure that this could never happen again. It wasn’t much that he was aiming for.
Despite launching his campaign for justice with excellent intentions, George soon realised that his polite, straight forward approach didn’t really get him very far. He received deeply apologetic letters from the education authority, with “assurances” that procedures had been tightened up. But it was a flimsy, wishy-washy response. It seemed to George that the local powers that-be wanted to keep a lid on the scandal, come hell or high water. They wanted Sarah’s abuse sweeping under the carpet. As polite, and sympathetic as the communications were, the response wasn’t good enough for George. He wanted nuts and bolts explanations, and solutions. They were not forthcoming.
But he was caught in a catch twenty-two situation. The difficulty George faced, was that he desperately wanted his beloved daughter’s dignity to be protected. The louder a noise he made about Sarah’s abuse, the greater the risk became that her memory would become no more than a statistic, a headline. He did not want his beautiful little girl to be remembered in that way. There was so much more to Sarah’s short life than the last few, hellish months.
He wrote to his MP, who expressed sincere condolences for George’s tragic loss, and offered yet more assurances that things were being tightened up. “Lessons have been learnt.” Came the familiar mantra.
It was all very nice. But this impenetrable wall of closed ranks sparked something within George. Inadvertently, the constant flow of letters, phone calls and meetings with the people who were entrusted with Sarah’s care, with the people who had failed her so spectacularly, and their object refusal to fully open up about those failings only served to drive George on with greater determination. He just needed to know how a known paedophile had been employed by the school, so he could understand what needed to happen to prevent another horrific case ever happening. The louder the silence became, the more empowered he became.
George began researching. Morning, noon and night, in between looking after Lisa’s needs. The long hours, the grim reading and the disturbing facts that he learnt about the extent of paedophile re-offending, just within the Greater Manchester area alone depressed him greatly. He didn’t fall into a full blown depression, not like the one when he’d lost his dad. But he began to recognise the signs and felt that dreaded sinking feeling. The sense of pointlessness, the apathy - the loss of purpose, the notion of failure. These feelings were all getting stronger. He closed the file. He walked away from his campaign and turned his mind to something more positive. He had to keep busy, to stay positive.
George began helping out with a bereavement counselling charity, he picked up his guitar and started playing again. He also spent more time socialising with the neighbours, making a conscious effort to reintegrate himself to his community. He had to fight the cloud of doom that was hanging over him. It worked. George fought the illness off at the first sign of returning, and felt a great deal better for it.
Twelve months after closing his file, he felt mentally stronger, and more emotionally resilient to cope with the horrors that he had began unearthing. With Peter’s advice of strictly working for two hours a day on it, and keeping his weekends free, he started again. This time though, he tried a different tack.
George began writing letters to local newspapers to start with. Quickly, he began writing to national papers. His short, to the point letters were stark and brutal. A typical letter would appear between a letter about a disgraced MP, and a point of fact about a story that appeared previously in the paper. The kind of thing that George wrote, under the pen name A WORRIED PARENT, would read;
“Dear Daily Mail,
A word of advice to the parents and grandparents reading this. Great Britain currently has 60,000 known sex offenders roaming about our towns and cities. Half of those, some 30,000 individuals are paedophiles who target pre-pubescent children.
Be vigilant!
A worried Parent.”
Although it brought him enormous satisfaction to make such facts known to a wider audience, George soon realised that it was a pointless exercise. It wasn’t really going to make the kind of difference that he craved.
After a few months of writing letters, and getting a buzz from seeing their publication, George decided to have another crack at the local authority, and try to discover what progress had been made in ensuring that the new “procedures” were working.
There was much the same response. But the pleasantries seemed less sincere. Less pleasant. George sensed that he was becoming a nuisance. This angered him, and made him question why he seemed to be getting on the authorities nerves, when it was their failings, their useless fault that Sarah had been put in that indefensible position.
He quickly began to realise that those failings were accountable to certain people in well paid, well respected positions, and with such accountability, came ultimate responsibility, not just down at school and local authority level; but right up to the very top of the government. George was sickened to realise that from the authority’s perspective, if he were to pursue his questioning, continue with his search for answers, it became less about what happened to Sarah, and more about who woul
d be sacked, and how much flack the powers-that-be would receive.
He began getting ill again with it all. Lisa was happily leading her own life, and George was lonely, feeling quite surplus to the requirements of life. The mental health problems of old seemed determined to come back and floor George. It was like catching a cold that tires your arms and legs, makes you want to lie down and take a rest. Except it affected his mind, the tiredness was inside George’s head, it was affecting his soul. It wasn’t a few days bed rest he craved, it was a permanent rest, a way out of a punishing, unrelenting nightmare.
The depression was worse than ever and the thought of just giving it all up, the thought of taking his own life was nagging at him. It wouldn’t let up. George knew the drill, he recognised that it was the illness. He didn’t bottle it up. He went next door and told Peter exactly how he was feeling.
“You know Peter, I just want to go and get a gun and start shooting these fucking peado freaks. That’s the only way to stop them. The government couldn’t give a shit.”
Peter, as always was understanding, supportive and genuinely determined to help. He wanted George to get over this, and he recognised that this pursuit of justice for his daughter was only bringing the worst of his depression back.
“Well, if that’s what you really want to do, let’s get a gun, and start training. We can go off camping and learn to shoot. We can start with bean cans on a dry stone wall!” Peter was trying to reboot his oldest friend, trying to bump his engine, charge his battery. Peter was desperate to put a new idea, a new possibility into George’s head that would reverse his thoughts from those of darkness and despair. And it worked.
The seed that George had tossed onto the floor had been watered and germinated by Peter. At that very discussion in Peter’s front room, the colour began coming back to George’s face. His eyes seemed to wake up slightly. The troubled, worried expression on his face lifted, not completely, but it was clear that Peter had achieved his objective, which was to stop George from taking his own life. He had wanted to give him something to wake up for tomorrow. And that was how the campaign took on the dramatic, shocking new course.
One Man Crusade : DCI Miller 1: The Serial Killer Nobody Wants Caught Page 33
