Who Needs Flowers When They're Dead

by George Lincoln

  ‘Whoever brings ruin on their family will inherit only wind, and the fool will be servant to the wise.’ (Proverbs 11:29)

  Everybody out into the ridiculously over-sized family SUV – standard issue in these parts – then off on the school run. Usually back to the house around nine a.m. for some leisurely indifference. Then most days out again around eleven a.m. for the usual opportunities to be seen in the right places, the norm for those like her with no need to worry about such trivialities as money or having meaningful purpose. Droves of haughty women arriving at hair salons and day spas like an occupying force in a fleet of German-made SUVs, marching on to have loud lunches and café au lait in the most conspicuous locations. Then off to collect the kids from school around three p.m. and back home to reflect on such a tiring day as the children are immediately handed off to the new nanny. The whole charade made the boy feel sick.

  The morning after returning from the school run was his opportunity. He didn’t want to have to scar the children too badly this time. Unlike Colette’s two. They’d seen too much. The boy hadn’t intended this but he hadn’t anticipated just how loud and for how long a woman with a prolapsed rectum can scream. Errol had been the perfect animal. He just kept going and going, ripping and tearing as she tried vainly to fight him off. All part of the act, Errol assumed. He’d even had the brazen confidence to just sit by her bleeding, weeping body when he’d finally had his fill, only becoming vaguely concerned that perhaps he had misjudged the situation as she dialled 999 and just screamed into the receiver. Time to leave, Errol correctly realised, noticing the two children sat trembling with fear as he left.

  This time would be different, the boy said to himself. Quick and clean. But he had to act fast. He’d parked a distance away and lay in wait behind the large planter that the Evans had installed, mostly because it was bigger than the large planter the house next door had installed the previous summer. As she returned and drove into the remotely-opened garage, he slipped in behind her, his Drager X-plore 3300 half-face respiratory mask already in place. The next part was all about timing. He slid into the back seat as she applied the handbrake and the garage door closed automatically behind them. He quickly bound her hands behind her – she was too shocked and dignified to scream, just helplessly gasping in mouthfuls of the toxic exhaust fumes slowly filling the garage. With Anel secure in position in the driver’s seat, the boy lowered all four windows of the SUV. It was important that the ligatures around her wrists were not bound too tightly, as they could show tell-tale marks. This had to appear natural. Panic caused her to gasp in bigger mouthfuls of unhealthy air, until she stopped moving.

  And ye shall tread down the wicked; for they shall be ashes under the soles of your feet.

  (Malachi 4:3)

  CHAPTER 24

  The administrative leave continued, professional standards going into hyperdrive over the continued death of those recently in contact with David. Colette’s little night-time visitation by Errol hadn’t been connected to him in any way yet, but four apparent suicides within a few months of each other meant he appeared on the radar of people increasingly higher up the food chain. The kinds of people you might see doing press conferences with lots of crowns and wreaths on their shoulder.

  David’s recollection of events was patchy at best, his connection to these events increasingly vague. He had been careful. No phones that could be tracked to give away his historic locations. He knew all about Locard’s principle of exchange, that the perpetrator of a crime will always leave something behind at the scene. The clothes he had worn that day had been burned afterwards. Besides, he had divine help; he need not worry about the judgment of his fellow man.

  He sat staring over the precipice at Beachy Head, his favourite spot. He enjoyed the peace and serenity of knowing he was inches from death at any time, only his strength and will keeping him with the living. Barely thirty minutes before he’d arrived there had been significant rock fall as part of the cliff just fell into the sea.

  The advantage of being suspended was it kept his caseload down, so his victims were few in number. Just a few more to go now.

  One from the past.

  One from the present.

  And one for the future.

  Lloyd had never amounted to much, as is so often the case in children showing deviant proclivities at a young age. When children commit grotesque offences, society often struggles to comprehend its progeny. No case was this more apparent than the shocking murder of two-year-old Jamie Bulger in 1993 by Robert Thompson and Jon Venables. Parents who had separated; both boys had difficulties with attendance, learning and behaviour at school. They bunked off, they shoplifted, they were violent; all these pieces in a pattern that made up a pair of empty, broken young lives. Before their trial in November 1993, the press ferreted around the doorways and back alleys of Walton village, Liverpool, looking for anything that might determine that these two ten-year-olds were indeed evil or the product of evil. Neighbours told of pigeons having their heads shot off with an airgun, of rabbits being tied to railway lines, of dawn roller booting sessions. There were tales of charity collection boxes being stolen and of children being assaulted in the classroom.

  Exaggeration and gossip aside, a picture of neglect slowly emerged, a picture that focused on the pair’s ‘bad parents’. Ann Thompson was portrayed as an incompetent alcoholic, while Susan Venables was painted as a loose woman whose neighbours ‘noted a procession of men friends for Mrs Venables’. A narrative emerged of two childhoods influenced not merely by the flaws of parents or the absence of a father, but by the environment in which these boys lived, a world of social and economic deprivation, of trashy television and cultural poverty, inadequate social services, failed schooling and general confusion.

  It was a place that left a moral vacuum for two children who would go on to kill and leave the unanswered question: why did they do it? Thompson was a member of what can only be described as a terribly dysfunctional family. The fifth of seven children, he proved as difficult to his mother as the rest of her brood. Ann Thompson had been deserted by her husband five years before the killing of Jamie Bulger, and in the week after he left, the family home burned down in an accidental fire. Left on her own, Thompson sought consolation in drink and was often to be found in the bar rather than looking after the children in her chaotic home, where bedlam ensued. The boys, it was later reported, grew up ‘afraid of each other’. They bit, hammered, battered and tortured each other.

  In summary – children are a product of their environment.

  Venables later developed his interests beyond slaughtering toddlers towards the sexual exploitation of them, his moral compass forever askew. Why people do the things they do will always be the subject of academic and social debate.

  The boy wasn’t interested in any of that. He never even saw what had happened to him as being particularly harmful. But he had seen enough adult abuse of children to know it was wrong.

  ‘Then shall ye return, and discern between the righteous and the wicked, between him that serveth God and him that serveth him not.’

  (Malachi 3:18)

  These people were mercifully predictable, Lloyd having grown up in an environment not dissimilar to Thompson and Venables. Lack of ambition combined with lack of aspiration kept him firmly entrenched in the mire of social deprivation he had grown up in. Finding him did not prove difficult, barely two streets from the council house he grew up in. He lived alone, an absent father to several children scattered around the estate, replete in de rigueur tracksuit bottoms and trainers. Not that he did any sporting activity that might require stamina or determination, the boy noted in his preparations.

  The beating he delivered would be his crowning moment of pure, unadulterated rage. Lloyd lay helplessly on the hallway floor as blow after blow rained down on him from the boy’s Slugger baseball bat, the dark crimson seeping into the tired old carpet. There were bound to have been other victims. Other children forced to partake in h
is sordid proclivities. Each blow to the head was a blow in return for each of his victims over the years. The boy had no intention to kill Lloyd that day. Lloyd would discover his fate in due course.

  ‘Do you know who I am?’

  ‘No, I’ve never seen you before, please stop. I’ll give you money, whatever you want,’ begged Lloyd, blood oozing from various cuts around his head and his left eye half-closed from swelling.

  ‘You will give me something. But first you need to understand who I am. Look again.’

  Lloyd wasn’t lying; he didn’t have a clue. The boy looked very different standing before him that day from the scrawny nine-year-old boy he was the last time they met. There had been others over the years.

  ‘I don’t know who you are. I’m sorry for whatever I did.’

  He dragged Lloyd onto a nearby chair. The boy reminded him of that visit to the waterworks all those years ago. Lloyd’s face sank. He didn’t remember but knew it was something he had done to others. Trying desperately to think of some way to appease his attacker, Lloyd panicked and said the last thing the boy needed to hear:

  ‘I didn’t hurt you, did I?’

  He needed Lloyd awake and conscious for what followed. No abused person ever needs to hear their abuser try to justify or excuse their actions. It only makes things worse. Lloyd fell to the floor from the force of the blow that followed.

  The boy was using his elbow now; the bat would cause severe concussion and most likely death if he had carried on using it. The mistake many amateurs make when they try to hurt somebody is they punch like they’ve seen people do in movies. Big hay-makers with loose fists crashing into the skull, the hardest part of the human body. The boy had seen plenty broken wrists and shattered pinkie-fingers over the years to know this. He knew it was far more effective to use the hardened tools your body has given you – knees and elbows. These bones don’t break so easily.

  The boy dragged Lloyd onto a chair for the next part of the punishment. Lloyd was bleeding heavily now and beginning to lose consciousness. The boy produced a list of websites from the so-called dark web, a sordid underworld of narcotics and child pornography on sale for the customer who knew how to find it. With the Slugger held to his right cheek, Lloyd was instructed to enter specific search terms on his own computer.

  ‘rim job, child’

  ‘anal fisting eight-year-old boy’

  ‘torn vagina, five-year-old girl’

  And so it went. Lloyd forced to watch each degrading, humiliating act in full, having paid for the privilege to do so using his own credit card. His only alternative was to die a slow, painful death, the boy explained to him.

  The abuser’s mindset is completely self-centred, thinking only of the pleasure they receive from a situation and nothing of the misery and humiliation they inflict, even just passively by paying others to carry out the acts for their titillation. Watching these children suffer as they were forced to commit unspeakable acts, Lloyd wanted it to stop. Sure, over the years he’d had a few kids wank him off and on one occasion got a blowjob from a twelve-year-old girl, but nothing on the scale of depravity he was being forced to watch now. He wasn’t a monster. Lloyd prayed it would soon be over.

  Eventually enough. The damage was done, wheels set in motion. The boy and Slugger melted away into the night. Lloyd spent the next few weeks passing blood in his stool and urine, as internal wounds slowly healed. He decided not to go to the police, realising they would soon be coming anyway. Every internet user has a unique internet protocol (IP) address; the boy knew any of the forbidden sites he had forced Lloyd to access would flag up immediately and his arrest would duly follow. These were absolute offences. The charge sheet would simply read on day/date/time/place you downloaded illegal content. There was no defence, no justification. When eventually released from prison he would forever be on the sex offenders register, a minor inconvenience. What worried him more was the promise of further vengeance the boy had made him.

  ‘It is mine to avenge; I will repay. In due time their foot will slip; their day of disaster is near and their doom rushes upon them.’

  (Deuteronomy 32:35)

  CHAPTER 25

  He was getting close now. The past had been dealt with, for now. Lloyd would spend the rest of his days looking over his shoulder, sleeping with one eye open. Professional standards had fished around enough to allow David back to work. The only connection the victims had was circumstantial in the sense that they had been David’s recent cases. But so had hundreds of others in the past and what the Met needed more than anything was boots on the ground, foot soldiers to investigate the six-fold increase in reported cases of child abuse since the publicity surrounding the Saville enquiry. David was fully reinstated without prejudice. Now he had an internal matter of his own to deal with.

  Gary was a violent prick who beat his wife repeatedly over their two-year marriage. An architect by trade, his use of steroids and endless hours in the gym after work gave him a very unpredictable temperament his Cuban wife Marisa came to know only too well. The black eyes, the broken noses, the bruised arms and lower back. Many trips to hospital, ‘I fell’ she would always say, too afraid of the consequences of reporting anything to the police. Like so many women, trapped in a loveless violent marriage because she hadn’t the strength to escape. David didn’t have much sympathy with people like this.

  If you choose to sleep in the lion’s den, don’t be surprised if he bites you once in a while.

  Eventually Marisa found the strength to leave Gary, taking their two-year-old daughter with her back to her native Cuba. Gary was incandescent with rage. The law surrounding parental abduction by removing your own child from one country to another is complex, to say the least. If the child concerned is a dual national, there is very little anyone can do to bring the child back, beyond making a polite request through diplomatic channels. This would be the case with any country but even more so with a country like Cuba which hasn’t always enjoyed entirely harmonious relations with the West and where trust between the two is often a scarce commodity. None of this helped Gary’s rage at losing his daughter.

  Although Marisa had never found the courage to report the matter herself, some friends and close neighbours had tried to help. Without a victim willing to substantiate, the police could do very little in the past. Just another ‘domestic disturbance’ the report would say. The existence of so many third-party reports did not go in Gary’s favour, however, when he came to report his daughter’s abduction by the mother.

  ‘Good on her, he’s a complete wanker,’ Kath shared with the office.

  ‘Got what he deserved,’ another jumped on the bandwagon.

  David wasn’t going to publicly agree with Kath on anything, even if deep down he felt a fair outcome had been achieved. He knew the damage growing up in a violent home could cause and was happy for the daughter who would be spared this indignity.

  David understood what made violent men tick, having seen so many. He had been allocated quite a few cases like this over the years in recognition of this fact, his ability to establish rapport with violent lunatics had not gone unnoticed. With the right amount of stage-management, they could be useful in certain situations.

  ‘Kath, do you think you could help me out on this case?’

  David’s question in front of the whole office caught her completely off guard. They had barely acknowledged each other’s existence for months. But when a colleague asks for help, even someone you don’t particularly like, it would reflect badly on her if she refused. To serve without fear or favour, they had all signed up for after all.

  ‘No problem.’ Kath seethed through gritted teeth.

  Angry men who beat their wives usually don’t respond well to haughty women interfering and telling them what they think. David just needed to set the scene. He agreed with Kath to visit Gary alone in the first instance to establish rapport, then they would go back together later for a full statement. David had had plenty of people accuse h
im over the years of being blunt, too direct or even rude sometimes – ninety percent of the time this came from weak people who couldn’t handle the truth. He didn’t expect to have any problems with Gary.

  ‘Hello, Gary, we spoke on the phone. Just need to run through some details with you.’

  ‘No worries, come in.’

  Gary had dressed for the occasion. Bare-chested and shorts only. It was his home they were in after all; why should he make an effort? The message he was sending to David was clear.

  Do not fuck with me.

  David explained the legal position to Gary and ran through the various potential outcomes, the main one being it was unlikely they could bring his daughter back to the UK. They could seek to extradite his wife and prosecute her for child abduction, but this would take a long time. Gary was belligerent, to say the least.

  ‘I don’t fucking care. I want that fucking cunt to pay for what she has done to me.’

  Now you’re the victim, David thought to himself. These morons are full of sympathy for themselves when things don’t go their way, but have no regard for the law or for other people any other time. Everybody wants to be a victim these days.

  ‘Absolutely, we will do everything we can, sir.’

  David then explained what might slow the process down a little.

  ‘You see, Gary, I have to work within a team of professionals who all want to do the best they can for the children first and foremost. You understand this?’