by Jane Jago
Graham looked at the floor.
The detective allowed a few seconds to pass. ‘In his interview, Danny said that you often talked about “getting a baby” and taking him away from his mother.’
‘Danny wouldn’t say that,’ he said, his eyes becoming wide.
Townsend’s silence reiterated the accusation.
‘He’s lying, Mum, he’s lying.’
Detective Grisham leant towards Townsend and whispered something to him. Townsend nodded thoughtfully and took a sip of cold tea. Anxious about the hushed words, Graham became tearful. ‘You don’t believe me.’
‘I want to, Graham.’ As he looked at the fragile, not unlikeable little boy, it was true. ‘But we need your help to clear this up. You need to tell us everything that happened.’
He grabbed fretfully at his mother’s arm. ‘We never took a kid, Mum.’
‘For goodness’ sake, Graham, talk to the detective and tell him what happened so it can all be sorted out. You’re already in trouble – shoplifting and truanting!’
‘We believe that you and Danny took the child to the wasteland by the docks and that you were both involved in his death.’
Graham’s parents listened in horrified silence, as the detective continued with his statement, registering for the first time the full extent of the allegations against their son.
Denis Harris gripped the table in front of him with two hands. The lawyer seemed to stir from some faraway meditation, a look of sick astonishment on his swarthy face.
Graham blocked his ears and wailed, ‘I never.’ He crawled across from his chair onto his mother’s lap and clawed at her neck. ‘I didn’t.’
‘Stop it, Graham. Sit up. It’s all right.’
‘When I left he was with Danny,’ he cried, hysterical now.
His mother prised his hands from her shirt. ‘Stop it, Graham.’ Tears welled in her eyes.
‘Then why didn’t you tell someone? Why didn’t you call the police?’ the detective persisted. ‘Why would you lead a lost boy all the way to the docks?’
Graham remained mute, his black irises flickering.
‘You said earlier that Benjamin had only got a bruise on him before you left him with Danny. Was he bleeding?’
‘No.’
The detective reflected for moment. ‘So how is it that you have blood on your jacket?’
At the mention of blood Graham became rigid with fear. He looked for a long time at his mother. Several seconds passed. ‘We did take him . . . but we let him go at the docks, that’s all.’
Christine Harris went limp and the blood drained away from her face. The thread of hope that this was all a tangled misunderstanding finally snapped.
He began to wail loudly. ‘I’m gonna get all the blame ’cause they say I’ve got blood on my jacket. They’re gonna put me away, Mum.’ He tore himself loose from his mother’s protective grip and launched himself at his father. ‘Dad, make them let me go home.’
Denis Harris restrained his son’s flailing arms and held him close to his body. ‘Be quiet, son, don’t say anything else.’
The solicitor took the opportunity to call time out to advise his client.
When the charges were read out, Graham was undoing the seal on a carton of chocolate milk, weeping only briefly as his mother slumped over the interview table and cried. Denis Harris left the room clutching his arm and collapsed in the corridor outside.
Danny was charged that same night. He responded by saying, ‘That was Graham, not me.’
Both boys’ accounts had been full of inconsistencies. Graham’s lies were more fantastical and elaborate and therefore more transparent; under pressure he admitted to most of them.
Danny, a veteran of brutality and intimidation, never wavered. ‘It’s him that’s got hold of his hand.’ To any questioning of his honesty, he responded, ‘I was there, and you weren’t.’
Graham’s extreme distress during the interviews convinced the investigating team that he was perhaps less culpable and more in need of help. Danny, on the other hand, was a hard, cold figure, with a tight lid on his emotions. Viewed from the outside he remained the unflinching embodiment of the evil seed. A born troublemaker with a criminal pedigree. His failure to act like a frightened child left little room for adult sympathy.
That Graham and Danny were two halves of the same aberration, who on their own would never have brought themselves to commit such brutality, was a far more complex psychological puzzle to contemplate. In a world full of iniquity there are lots of Dannys and lots of Grahams. Sometimes they find each other.
Alex Reiser, 2008
In his retreat at the rear of the reference library, sitting at the head of a far table, with his laptop out and his papers spread in a fan around him, Alex Reiser copied a list of online newspaper articles onto his flash drive. He inserted the stick into one of the library computers, in the private study bay behind him, and sent the files to a central printer.
The pages, retrieved from the service desk, were the yield of a morning’s internet trawling. He laid them out across the table: instance after instance of children from across the developed world, killing other children, all telegraphed by graphic headlines. He felt increasingly perplexed.
BROTHERS FILM BRUTAL ASSAULT ON MOBILE PHONE – Footage shared with classmates.
INTERNET FEUD LEADS TO FATAL KNIFE ATTACK BY JAPANESE SCHOOL GIRL
FIVE-YEAR-OLD NORWEGIAN GIRL LEFT FOR DEAD IN SNOW. Killed by playmates
SIX-YEAR-OLD MICHIGAN BOY SHOOTS AND KILLS CLASSMATE
As he jotted down the key dates and details of what was by no means only a contemporary phenomenon, Reiser felt a rising sense of despair.
And then there were the school shootings: COPYCAT SHOOTER OPENS FIRE WITHIN DAYS OF COLUMBINE. He shook his head as he looked down a printed list of carnage carried out by gun-toting juveniles across America. It had continued pretty much unabated since 1860, when a Kentucky student had shot and killed a classmate who had threatened to shoot him. It was clear that children were capable of great cruelty. Born innocent perhaps, but also without the ability to reject, contain or suppress their instinctual reactions, impulses and curiosity. A conscience was developed over time. The mistake was in believing they were not capable of such things. The extent of violence children were capable of committing on each other was shocking, but it was the last headline that struck him most forcefully: ‘MURDER OF A CHILD BY BOYS. Two-and-a-half-year-old drowned in running brook by two eight-year-old boys.’ It had happened in 1861.
In a set of eerie similarities, more than a century earlier, two eight-year-old boys had led a trusting toddler away from the strip of wasteland where he was playing. Reiser felt the hair follicles on his forearms contract as he continued to read. ‘Taking him by the hand, the boys walked him through a patchwork of fields, brooks and reservoirs, along a secluded laneway where’, according to the coroner of the inquest, held at a local tavern, ‘seduced at the instigation of the devil, they did kill and willfully murder’ him. The coroner, in his summing up, had observed that, despite there being no fathomable motive for the ‘horrifyingly brutal’ attack, the boys had demonstrated the ‘capacity to commit the crime’ and had exhibited ‘mischievous discretion’ in luring the child to a secluded place, and in not disclosing events to any adults, despite the search for the missing baby, they had demonstrated proof of their ‘consciousness of guilt’. They were, he concluded, capable of distinguishing between good and evil.
As he scanned the dramatic prose, his attention was caught by the judges’ comments at the eight-year-olds’ subsequent criminal trial. He had advised the jury that they must ‘first satisfy themselves that the prisoners were capable of discerning between right and wrong. If so, “whether they knew the effect of the act they were committing”; if not, then the presumption of malice would be rebutted and the crime reduced from murder to manslaughter.’
When the jury wasted no time in returning a verdict of manslaughter, he addressed the
children in front of the packed courtroom: ‘You have been very wicked, naughty boys . . . I am going to send you to a place where you will have an opportunity of becoming good boys, for there you will have a chance of being brought up in a way you should be, and that in time, when you come to understand the nature of the crime you have committed, you will repent of what you have done.’ The sentence of ‘one month’s jail followed by five years in the reformatory’ was greeted with unanimous cheers of approval.
Reiser was surprised by the judge’s enlightenment, no doubt a product of the growing Victorian zeal for social reform, especially in regard to the betterment of children.
Even the leading newspapers of the day were philosophically restrained, advising the public to ‘remember that these boys are only wild in the degree that all our boys would be without religion and education’. ‘Conscience admits of degrees, it is weak and has not arrived at its proper growth in children.’ One went as far as to declare it ‘absurd and monstrous that these two children should have been treated like criminals in the first place’.
It was a progressive view reiterated almost a hundred and fifty years later in the sad case of the five-year-old Norwegian girl, whose sweet, guileless face stared up at him from the printed pages. A cherished daughter, who had gone out to build castles in the freshly fallen snow with two six-year-old local boys and never come home. She had been beaten and left to die by her playmates. Reiser was moved when he read that the devastated community had rallied around all three families, protecting the surviving children. Incredibly even the girl’s distraught mother expressed her concern for the school-age killers: ‘They need compassion and must be treated as children, shown kindness and concern rather than vengeance.’ In a country where the age of criminal responsibility was fifteen, the event was seen as a collective tragedy, not a crime.
That the Norwegian press had maintained a united front in agreeing not to publish the young offenders’ names or descriptions further amazed him and, with his part in covering all aspects of the Allen case, gave him pause for thought. Remembering the vitriolic hostility and near-lynching mood that had surrounded the Allen case, Reiser saw that, while childhood violence seemed to cross national and social boundaries, the reaction to it was very much influenced by context and culture. He unstrapped his briefcase, pulled out a clutch of well-fingered notes and dropped them onto the table.
And then there was all this, he thought, spreading the paperwork around the already crowded table. Hyperbolic editorials and sensational coverage from the time of the Allen murder and trial: ‘FREAKS OF NATURE’, ‘Throw away the key’, ‘EVIL SEEDS’ and ‘A crime like this, committed by children, is unprecedented in history.’
He gave a little groan. How many times had he seen that gem between quotation marks? It made for sensational copy, but simply wasn’t true. Looking at the disturbing collage of child killers and victims spread before him, Reiser considered the unpalatable fact that children had been killing children for just about as long as adults had been killing them. It seemed to him that some communities were inclined to accept that nothing ever happened in a vacuum, that we were all co-authors of the environments into which children were born, while others were driven strenuously to project the ‘evil’ of the world back onto such children.
As far as he could ascertain, from a long career of looking into societies maladjusted, every crime was a coalescence of events and influences. It was this intersection between Fate and circumstance, genetic and environmental heritage that had fascinated him all his life. In a society that denied its own hand in the suffering of nameless millions, children were a symbol of innocence and purity, therefore children could never do what we as a species were entirely capable of doing: kill. Killing in the home, close up and personal, killing on the street, over trifles, killing in foreign fields, anonymously, killing in prisons and slaughterhouses, killing other people’s children in the name of democracy, killing for God. If not killing ourselves, then turning a blind eye to it through complacency, indifference and greed.
Meanwhile, held up as emblems of innocence, many children were simultaneously pursued on all sides by the forces of darkness. Starvation, neglect, psychological cruelty, Munchausen’s by proxy, genital mutilation, Ritalin, slavery, paedophilia, religious indoctrination, female infanticide: somewhere parents were doing it to their children. Statistics offered a dispassionate glimpse of the reality for many, and it was hard not to be numbed by them. Every ten seconds a child somewhere died of hunger or neglect, twenty-two thousand every day. Statistically their mothers were more likely to be killed by male partners than a stranger and they themselves had most to fear from the men closest to them to whom they were not biologically related. Apparently there was nothing more potentially deadly than a violent de facto parent.
Killing was primal. Not killing was a product of an amygdala-friendly environment and a complex web of social conditioning.
He lifted his glasses and rubbed his eyes. The subject matter was onerous and left him with a sense of responsibility: he must not gloss over any aspect of the crime. He looked up at the clock above the reference desk. The library was filling with high-school students, milling about the periodicals section and leaning over the backs of cubicles, chattering in low voices. Did any of the carefree faces hide the barely suppressed impulse to kill? The quiet one in the corner, who occasionally eyed the more boisterous youths with what looked like contempt: was he busy compiling a list of all those who had slighted him?
The unforgiving plywood chair pressing against his lower back interrupted his musings. He spread his arms out to gather up his notes and sighed.
Wanted
‘Sing, O barren woman, you who never bore a child . . .’
Detective Kendall, 2008
He turned over slowly, shifting his weight painfully from one hip to the other, threw back the blanket and placed a pillow between his knees. His pyjama shirt, wet with perspiration, clung to his skin.
A soft breeze moved the gauze curtain and fanned his face. Outside in the night a frog croaked. June had always said they were a sign of good luck. If he had any luck left at all, he thought, he would be joining her soon.
The pain in his left hip eased a little and Phillip Kendall drifted towards sleep, floating weightlessly down a warm red tunnel. As he touched the sides and swam effortlessly through a clear liquid that seemed to massage all the pain from his body, the phone rang.
Reaching across the bedside table to answer it, he overturned a tumbler of water and sent it crashing to the floor. The digital display on the clock radio read 11:49.
‘Hello?’
‘Mr Kendall?’
‘Yes, hello . . .’
A light went on in the hall outside his room, bleeding through the gap beneath the door. ‘Dad?’
‘It’s all right, Lauren. I’ve got it.’
‘You okay, Dad?’
‘Of course. I’m on the phone.’
‘Detective Kendall?’
‘Yes, who is this?’
‘My name is Grant Oliver. You probably don’t remember me but I was a constable at the time of the Allen case. I was involved in the search of the crime scene.’
‘I remember you. It was your second week as a constable.’
‘I’m a detective now, stationed at Observatory Hill. Something odd happened here tonight . . .’
Phillip Kendall swung his legs off the bed and sat upright in an effort to concentrate.
‘I got your number from Vic Saunders at Central Division. I’m sorry to call so late, but I think I’ve seen one of them.’
‘Seen one of who?’
‘I think we’ve just had Daniel Simpson here in the station.’
Phillip Kendall got to his feet in the darkened room. He switched on the lamp and stood by the bed. ‘What?’
‘We were staking out a park toilet after a series of bashings. We busted two guys in a cubicle. The younger one turned out to have a fake ID – it looked like he was unde
r age. We were holding the other one until we could check it out. Turns out the boy really was over sixteen, but the older one, there was something really familiar about him.’
Kendall fumbled in the bedside drawer for a pen. He clenched the phone under his chin and scrawled some notes on a paper napkin.
‘While we were holding him, this guy seemed very nervous, almost agitated. After he was released I checked his prints on the database and came up with a match, but the file was blocked.’
The elderly detective stopped scrawling.
‘I told my partner, who looked into it. An hour later he came back and told me the guy’s prints were not a match to prints from the earlier attacks and to drop it. When I quizzed him he bit my head off.’
‘Did you mention who you thought it was?’
‘No, I hadn’t made the connection then myself, but I couldn’t stop thinking about where I’d seen him before and why his file would be protected.’
‘You know how it works.’
‘Even the ages add up.’
‘What was he actually charged with?’
‘Offensive behaviour.’
‘The sex was consensual?’
‘Apparently.’
‘What is you want me to do? If it is him, his identity is protected, and for good reason.’
‘He had a knife.’
‘Did he threaten the boy?’
‘No, the kid corroborated that.’
‘Then I suppose it’ll get dealt with by a magistrate. If it was Simpson his parole officer will get a full account.’
‘You think so? Whoever he is, he’s not accessible on the system.’
‘People higher up will be taking care of it, Grant. He may be protected but he’s also monitored. It may not even be him. I’ll admit I’ve had moments myself where I second-guessed complete strangers of a certain age – I still have dreams about it, for Heaven’s sake. The case left us all marked.’
‘I just felt I knew him.’
‘What makes you so sure?’
‘While he was being fingerprinted I noticed his hands.’
