Random Acts of Unkindness (12 page)

‘Come out, Mrs Swain, Mr Swain. We just want to talk to you.’

The neighbours had chased them off. Colin’s mother had been twice, but, for once, he ignored her. We got through more than a hundred Park Drives, and when the police finally arrived and I opened the front door, a cloud of smoke wafted out into the October sunshine.

Little had walked in flanked by two other plainclothes, and sat down at the table with us. When I saw him I was shocked, he looked poorly. Again, the minute between us sitting down and him speaking seemed like an hour.

‘It’s not Thomas.’

We both exhaled and Colin flexed his neck.

‘Bloody hell. What’s happened?’

Little stared at the table.

‘Can’t say, Col, but believe me, it’s bad. The worst thing I’ve ever seen. Grown men crying. A young lad, he’s been . . .’

I couldn’t hold it in any longer and I ran to the sink and vomited. No one helped me; they all just sat at the table, staring silently. I wiped my mouth and sat back down.

‘So what happens now?’

My voice was small in the room and Ken Little stared at me.

‘Well, we’ve told his parents and we’ve arrested the man who did this. There’s further investigations going on.’

I shook my head.

‘No, I meant about Thomas. What happens now?’

There was silence in the room and I felt the tension grow, until Colin finally snapped.

‘Bloody hell, woman, there’s a young lad lying in Ashton hospital mortuary, not bleeding cold yet, murdered in cold blood, and you’re mithering straight away about our soft lad whose probably in the pub having a pint, or with a lass. Alive.’

I stood up and shouted back.

‘I know, Colin, but it’s not right. No one’s looking for him. I want to know where he is.’

Ken Little stood up.

‘We are looking, Bessy. Look, it’s going to be hard for you both now, with this lad being a similar age to your Thomas, but if you want anything, let me know, just come down to the station. And we will keep looking for him, but at the moment we’ve got bigger things to look at.

I nodded and they left. Colin was seething and pacing around.

‘Why did you have to say that? You’re obsessed, woman. Haven’t you no respect for the dead? Some bastard’s murdered a young lad and all you can think about is yourself.’

‘I was worried about Thomas. If one lad’s been killed, how do we know there isn’t more? Ken said right at the beginning that kids had been going missing from round here. What if that bloke’s had them all, and murdered them?’

Colin sat down.

‘Well, I don’t know about that, but you showed me up, Bessy. You need to calm down. Forget about Thomas for a bit, and think about that poor family whose son’s dead. Only time will tell, won’t it? Only time will tell.’

Our lives went on and we never discussed it again until the paper came a week the following Wednesday. The police had arrested a man at first, then a woman, for the murder of poor Edward Evans.

There were pictures of
them
in the paper and sickening rumours going round about what
they
had done to that poor lad. I had nightmares about Thomas being snatched off the street and subjected to a series of horrible attacks.

When we read in the paper that some of
their
stuff had been found and
they
had taken some other children, I saw Colin’s mask slip for a moment, and his lip tremble. Me, well, I never once spoke either of their names. I couldn’t. That would make it real.

I got my coat on and we went to the police station, but Ken Little was off sick so we saw another Inspector we didn’t know. In a way it was worse, because at least we were used to Ken. This other officer sat us down and told us, in a very clinical way, what had happened.

‘It’s common knowledge now. We know
they
took three children, Edward Evans, Lesley Ann Downey, and John Kilbride.’

My hand went to my mouth and Colin looked satisfied that I was devastated. I thought about Mr and Mrs Kilbride, mirror images of my tortured soul, finally knowing what happened to their young son. I’d seen them often, out shopping or visiting, but in reality looking everywhere for their lost child.

Of course, I’d heard all the rumours about how the children he mentioned had been killed, and there needed to be no more words about that. None of us spoke for a while. The officer closed his file and stood.

‘So it appears that we are no nearer finding your son. Or any of the other young men who’ve gone missing round here. I’m sorry. But I expect it’s good news that he’s not one of the kids tortured and murdered and buried in a shallow grave by those two monsters.’

He rushed out of the room, his face red and his eyes shining with tears. It was only then that I really realised what had happened, what had made grown men cry. The rumours were true and this was more than a straightforward murder you see in the films.

It was children, kiddies, who had been used for the depraved pleasure of a man and a woman, and then killed. My heart hardened a little bit more, if that was possible, at the thought of this, and for once, I wasn’t thinking about Thomas, but what had really happened, right here in our town.

We’d got used to our cellars and dustbins being checked for missing kids, but this was horrific. I was in my late thirties but I felt a piece of my wonder at the world, my innocence about what people were capable of, snap off and splinter on the floor. Colin didn’t speak for a week.

Weeks went by and Colin took to going out every night to search for Thomas. He wouldn’t admit that he thought those two bastards could have taken him, mainly because his mother was adamant he was shacked up somewhere, possibly in the upstairs of a pub, with a girl.

Even so, he went off searching and often didn’t come back until morning. I listened silently to the rumours about the Moors Murders, as they were now called. The murderers’ names were on everyone’s lips except mine, and everyone held their child’s hand a little tighter. When it came out that
they’d
made a tape recording of that little girl asking for her mam, I sat and cried all day.

I wondered if Thomas would have asked for me at the end. Or, if he was alive, if he ever looked up at the clouds and remembered me. I knew it was selfish, but I couldn’t stop thinking about him. I could never talk about him, because in everyone else’s eyes I was disrespecting the dead children by mentioning my runaway son, but my heart was fuller than ever of Thomas.

One particular day I had the radio on and someone was talking about how they’d dug up the moor and how the little girl’s mother had been there. She wasn’t there when her body was dug up, but she’d been up there, high above Oldham, at the final resting place of her daughter.

I’d wanted to go there. I passed the days thinking that if Thomas was buried up there, and no one could know if he was or not because there were more children unaccounted for than had been found, I would be nearer to him, to where he might be. It was my best bet, and more than once I had my coat and headscarf on ready to go, before I remembered that he could be anywhere, and I might be wasting my time.

I did go to Wardle Avenue, though. Colin never knew, and I never told anyone until now. I set off one day to get some cow heel for Colin’s tea, and before I knew it, I was outside the ‘house of horror,’ as the papers called it. I’d caught two buses to Hattersley and stared out of the window in case anyone asked me what I was doing.

I was a bit of a celebrity in Ashton, on the market, mother of a missing lad, and all the stares and whispers told me that I wasn’t alone in my thinking that our Thomas had been another victim. Here, though, I was just another woman is a Mac and a headscarf, going shopping for her husband’s tea.

I’d walked along the street, my feet heavy, wondering if Thomas had been brought here, hoping I could feel something, something small to tell me that I was right, that his young life had ended here.

I wasn’t thinking about the how; that would come if they ever found him, his body telling another story of how he died. It was more the ending to our story, to the mother and son story that, for me, was left to carry on, day after painful day, until I knew where he was.

I stood outside the house for a few minutes, willing myself to feel him, that love flooding back from when he was a toddler shouting ‘Mam!’ all over Ney Street. That pride when he passed his grammar exams. The tears when he gave me a homemade Mother’s Day card, to me proof of our love for each other. I wonder for a moment why we have to send cards, why we have to have material proof of how much we care.

I’d loved Thomas with all my heart, and with all my soul, and I thought he loved me, which was why I was so sure he would never leave of his own accord.

I felt nothing except anger. Standing outside the house, I wondered how a woman could have been part of these horrors. Ever since I’d been a young girl I’d been keen on having a baby. I’d wanted a job as well, but my parents had other ideas. I’d met Colin early and we’d had Thomas and got married. Until that day when I went into labour, it hadn’t really sunk in what my life would be like.

I still thought I’d be a pin-up, like Betty Grable and Jane Russell, I wasn’t bad looking and my dad said that’s all I had going for me. I was a good speaker and looked all right in makeup, I’d even applied for a job at the General Post Office as a telephonist before I caught with Thomas.

Until I actually saw him, I couldn’t have ever imagined what it would be like to have a baby. Something changed inside me, I got a sort of determination that nothing would ever stop me from caring about this little thing, nothing would ever come between us.

His tiny fingers were curled round mine and I realised then what I was here for. I was here to have children and to look after them. I forgot about the GPO and my wonky writing and just looked after him. I fed him myself, and he’d look into my eyes and make gooing noises. If I thought I’d been in love before, I was now.

She’d
never had that. And
she
snuffed it out for me. I felt sick and dizzy at the thought of another mother listening to her daughter dying, and my knees buckled.
They’d
tape recorded all of it, their screams and everything. It was no accident, something gone wrong. It was intentional;
they
knew what
they
were doing.

Now we all knew what
they
had done, here in this house. The mothers of the children knew, the fathers, and it became slightly diluted for those who didn’t have children involved. I didn’t know exactly how to feel, if the horror and anger I felt was right, but I knew one thing: I was in limbo. A mother without a child, with no idea where her child was. It wasn’t natural. Didn’t the world owe me that knowledge?

I knew that anyone who was part of it was equally responsible and that
they
should both go to prison; I never agreed with hanging, but now I wondered if an exception should be made for these two. It just seemed worse that a woman could do this.

Hadn’t
she
any maternal feelings? Had
she
been so taken by
him
that
she’d
do anything? None of it was normal. How could
she
stand by and watch
him
bury children? Take photographs?
She’d
denied it all, but just by knowing and being there
she
was guilty, wasn’t
she
?

And the sex. None of us ever spoke about sex. Not between adults and certainly not with kiddies. We all knew of someone who’d got an underage girl pregnant and she’d been whisked off and the baby adopted, or of a poor child who’d been messed about with.

We talked about it once, in hushed tones. This wasn’t the content for marketplace gossip. It was serious family business, often dealt with outside the law by uncles and cousins. But a woman? I’d never heard of that before. Someone who had the natural instincts, like we all have, for children. Even the women who I knew who didn’t have children had maternal instincts.

Why had
she
done it? I’d heard of women doing daft things for their lovers, their husbands, turning to drink and dancing till dawn, but this was unexplainable. I’d even heard of some funny bedroom goings on, what some women would do because their husbands liked it, to stop them straying, they said, but this wasn’t like that. The things that had happened.

They
were the Devil’s work, and no amount of love and romance could explain it. Infatuation my arse.
She
was a grown woman, not a besotted teenager. It didn’t wash with me.

It was disgusting. My mind fought with itself over why it was more disgusting for a woman than for a man. Wasn’t it equally disgusting because kiddies were involved? But somehow it seemed worse. There’d be a confession and a short trial, then jail. The rumours were that these two had tortured and sexually abused in this house flooded back and the bile rose in my throat. What the hell was I doing here?

I rushed up the street, ashamed of my lingering at a place where those children had died so recently, looking back as a couple stopped outside the house. I hadn’t even brought flowers. In my keenness to grasp at my own feelings for Thomas, my hopes that I would feel him there, I’d forgotten to mourn other people. Colin’s words rung in my ears.

‘You’re obsessed, woman.’

All the way home on the bus I worried that I was, and that it was getting worse.

Another six months went by, a Christmas and Mother’s Day. A set of carefully written cards stored in the top drawer of the sideboard.

I’d asked Colin to sign them, but he’d refused point blank. He was still out looking for Thomas, but we never talked about it. Instead, I scoured the newspapers for the object of my developing hate. I found pictures of
her
everywhere,
her
blonde beehive haircut and stern features reminding me of my Aunty Dot.

I cut out the pictures and burned them over the stove. I took the reports and glued them into a scrapbook that I would look at every night, searching for any clue that Thomas had been murdered by them.