Past Mortem (27 page)

‘No. No, you’re right. There isn’t a problem…Still, not pleasant, eh?’

‘No, definitely not pleasant.’

‘Shit!’ said Newson. ‘Shit, shit, shit. This is so unfair. So unfair. I have sex with just two women in about a trillion years…’

‘And they turn out to be the victim and chief suspect in the case you’re investigating. Good work, my son.’

Newson was in for one more massive embarrassment that day in front of Natasha, and, as always, he was the architect of his own misfortune.

They had returned together to the office they shared at New Scotland Yard.

‘The answer to all this lies on the Friends Reunited site,’ Newson said. ‘Let’s take another look, shall we?’

Natasha sat down at her computer and logged on while Newson went off to fill the kettle for tea.

‘I presume you used your home email address,’ Natasha said when he returned.

‘Yes, of course.’

‘What’s your password?’

Newson froze. The private password he had chosen with which to gain entry to Friends Reunited was ‘Natasha’.

It had not seemed foolish at the time. On the night on which he had joined Friends Reunited in pursuit of Christine Copperfield he had felt a moment of weird infidelity. His love for Natasha was so real to him that he had almost felt that in lusting after his old school flame he was being unfaithful to her. Stupidly, drunkenly, in order to assure himself that his fantasy relationship with Natasha was indeed real, he had entered her name into the little box marked ‘password’. Now he was paying the price.

‘My password?’

‘Yes. What is it?’

‘Maybe you should be the one to log on. You’re a member, aren’t you?’

‘I don’t know. I haven’t done it for so long I presumed it had lapsed. Anyway, I’ve put your address in now.’

‘I don’t think their memberships lapse.’

‘What difference does it make?’

‘I don’t know…You know, the fact that I’m connected to the last victim…Maybe I shouldn’t be accessing the site.’

‘That’s ridiculous. You’ve accessed it loads of times.’

‘I just think we should try and use your membership.’

Natasha was an astute woman. Her expression showed that she knew Newson was hesitating because he was embarrassed about his access code. What was more, she had clearly decided not to let him off the hook.

‘No, it’s your theory and your investigation. I don’t have to let you use my personal membership.’

‘I could order you.’

‘No, you couldn’t, any more than you could order me to lend you my kettle.’

‘So you’re not going to let me access the site via your membership?’

‘No. What’s your password, Ed?’

The game was up. He needed to get on to the site and quickly. The bullet had to be bitten. ‘Natasha.’

‘Yes?’

‘No. Natasha, that’s it, that’s my password.’

‘My name?’

‘Yes, I don’t know why I used it. It was just the first name that came into my head, that’s all.’

‘Bit weird, Ed.’

‘I don’t think so. I just needed a word, any word that I’d remember.’

‘And you chose my name?’

‘Yes.’

Natasha said nothing.

‘Right,’ said Newson, putting her tea down on the desk and attempting an airy tone, ‘better get on with it then, shall we? Bang it in, Natasha. Do you need me to spell it?’

Still she said nothing as she typed in her name and the seven little black blobs appeared one after another in the box. Newson could not remember the last time he had felt such an idiot.

TWENTY-FIVE

N
ewson began by informing the site that he wished to pursue his investigation by the name of a school.

When the box appeared he typed ‘Brockley Rise Junior’, the school attended by Adam Bishop and William Connolly from 1955 to 1960.

‘Connolly said he’d never spoken or written about what happened to him at the hands of Adam Bishop, but perhaps somebody else did.’

There were twelve names entered for the year that moved on in 1960, but neither Bishop nor Connolly was amongst them. Six of the class members had left information about themselves.

Marjorie Bartlett wrote:

Like lots of us from Brockley I went on to Lewisham Secondary Modem as was! I believe it’s a sixth-form college now. After that I worked in Woolies on Catford High Street where I met John and married him within a month! We are still together after thirty-three years and have two lovely grown-up girls. I would love to hear from any of the old gang if anyone remembers me.

‘They all want to be remembered,’ Newson remarked.

Lucy Seman wanted to be remembered, as did Donald Cornell and Patricia Powers.

I ended up joining the Navy! That was in the days when we were still Wrens. No ship board duty for us, more’s the pity! I would have loved to have gone to sea like the girls do now. I wonder if anyone remembers me? If they do I’d love to hear from them.

Jason Hart’s name had the word ‘NEW’ next to it.

I had to join this site now. I just had to tell someone and you of course are the only people who would understand. Has anybody heard? Adam Bishop got murdered! Yes! Ding dong, the bastard’s dead. It was in this evening’s Standard. He’s dead! And I for one can find nothing in my soul but delight. That bully damn near ruined our schooldays. He did ruin poor old Bill Connolly’s and I hope he rots. Vanessa, if you’re reading this, well done for what you wrote on the notice board. I suppose it’s only us that will ever read it or care. But at least somewhere there is an account of his cruelty. A cruelty I stood by and watched happen for which I’ll always be ashamed.

Rebecca Wilkinson was also new.

Thank you for joining us, Jason, and for saying something that I have not had the courage ever to say. I stood by too. I watched Adam Bishop hold little Billy down and stick that compass into him. Seventeen times, it was. I remember the number. He was always sticking it in him, wasn’t he?

But not like he did that day. I’ve always said that because I was a girl there was nothing I could have done. But that’s not true. I could have spoken out. But I didn’t and like you Jason I’ve always been ashamed.

‘Jesus,’ Natasha said. ‘So much pain in the world. Little slabs of it hanging about in the air, unnoticed and ignored.’

‘Not ignored this time,’ Newson said. ‘Somebody else was reading this website.’

‘Helen Smart, do you think?’

‘No, I don’t think. This all started some time ago, maybe with Warrant Officer Spencer. Who knows? Maybe even before that. Let’s see what Vanessa wrote on the school notice board, shall we?’

Vanessa Cuthbert had left no information about herself, but had made a contribution to the Brockley Rise junior school notice board.

Ours was a good school, but even good schools are not immune from the cancer of bullying. I’ve decided to say something here that I have waited forty-five years to say. When I was ten years old I witnessed an incident of violent bullying that has lived with me ever since. Anyone from my class will remember what happened because it resulted in a boy being hospitalized and nearly dying. Yet we did nothing about it at the time and nothing was done subsequently. Adam Bishop was a big cruel, violent boy from a cruel, violent family. Everybody knew the Bishops and everyone was scared of them. Adam made the lives of all of the kids in his class a misery, including mine. He used to touch the girls even though we were all only ten and he would hit the boys. One boy above the rest was the main victim of this vicious bully. William Connolly suffered at his hands from the age of five, and slowly but surely the bullying got worse. Adam Bishop got into the habit of stabbing William with his compass, just little scratches and pricks at first, but one day it got out of hand. I will never know what it was that sparked Bishop’s fury that day and I doubt that William will either. I’m sure he did not know at the time. Just something in Bishop’s psychopathic nature flipped and one break-time he literally threw William to the floor behind his desk. Then Bishop fell upon him and began to stab him with the compass, mainly in the arms but at the end he pulled up his shirt and gave him several in the stomach. Bishop was cunning as well as cruel, and he only let the thing go in at most half an inch. I can still remember him holding the spike between his finger and thumb about two thirds up it so that it would not go too far in. It was over in five minutes and then Bishop made William clean up the blood on the floor. He sent a little girl to get toilet paper. I was that girl and I did what I was told. After I handed the paper to Bishop he stuffed it into William’s mouth. Then he told him to clear out of school for the rest of the day and never say what happened. William ran out of the room and that evening he was taken into hospital with severe blood poisoning. There were about fifteen kids in the room when this attack took place and not one of us lifted a finger to help William. What’s more, when we were questioned later by the school and by a police constable not one of us was prepared to say a word. None of us wanted to become Bishop’s next victim and we should all be ashamed. Well, I’ve told the story now. It’s probably just between me and cyberspace and perhaps one or two of the old gang who like me look back in shame. Perhaps Adam Bishop himself will read it. If you do read this, Adam Bishop, then know this.

You are hated. You were hated then, you are hated now and you will always be hated. What you did scarred us all.

Vanessa Cuthbert’s public soul-searching was dated two months earlier and had preceded all the other mentions of Adam Bishop on the Brockley Rise pages. She had been the first to break the silence.

‘Just a few weeks before Adam Bishop was killed,’ Natasha noted. ‘Why do you think she spoke up when she did?’

‘Who knows? This whole Friends Reunited thing is only three or four years old. I suppose there are going to be a lot of worms slowly crawling out of the woodwork.

‘So the killer read what she wrote and decided to act upon it?’

‘I can’t see any other explanation,’ said Newson. ‘We now have both the Bishop and the Copperfield murder described in detail on the internet before they even occurred. What we need to do now is take a look at the schooldays of Warrant Officer Spencer, Angie Tatum, Neil Bradshaw and Farrah Porter.’

‘It’s Sunday evening, Ed. How do we find out where they went to school?’

‘Farrah Porter won’t be difficult, it’ll be listed in her
Who’s Who
entry, and I’m sure there’s any number of internet hits to be found on Angie Tatum.’

There were indeed. Like anyone who has been in the public eye, Angie Tatum had her obsessives, people who had set up sites in tribute to the girl whose breasts had caught the public imagination twenty years before. Since her death these sites had proliferated. There was even a goth rock group called Angie Tatum’s Dead.

The first site they opened revealed that Angie Tatum had attended a large comprehensive school in Essex.

Sergeant Wilkie entered the name of the school on to the Friends Reunited site. ‘I presume we’re looking at 1984 because of the compilation tape they found in her machine.’

‘Yes.’

‘The same as for Christine Copperfield.’

‘My guess is that’s a coincidence. I think it’s possible that the eighties generation is the one that figures most highly on the Friends site.’

‘Old enough to be feeling discontented with the way your life’s going but young enough to still think you might want to shag the people you were at school with?’

‘Something like that, yes.’

‘It’d be interesting to do the research.’

Angie Tatum had joined Friends Reunited and despite the fact that she was dead her entry remained on the list. The message of a dead girl who had posted it in the hope of being remembered made uncomfortable reading.

‘You’d think they’d have removed it,’ Newson said. ‘Nobody’s asked them to take it off, I suppose.’

Remember me? Of course you do. Everybody does, don’t they? I was ‘it’ for a few years back then wasn’t I? So there’s no point me writing what I’ve been up to since I left like the rest of you have all done because you know all about me. Let’s face it I was already modelling and getting in the papers in my last year wasn’t I? I remember some of you girls calling me a slag and a slapper because you were jealous and had fried eggs for knockers. But some of you were really supportive about my dream which I will never forget. And of course the boys didn’t mind did they? I didn’t get any 0 levels of course but who cares I had a couple of excellent Double D’s so I didn’t need any exams did I? Anyway just to say contrary to what has been said in the press I’m not thick and what’s more I’m really proud of what I did and the fact that I used what I had to follow my dream and make a success of myself. I am strong, in control, and I have no regrets.

‘Written late and pissed, if you ask me,’ said Natasha.

After reading a number of innocent messages from other people who had been in Angie Tatum’s class, Natasha and Newson found what they were looking for.

Hello. My name is Katie Saunders. I wonder If any of you remember me? I expect some of you do. Well actually I doubt that you remember ME as in a person. I doubt that you remember somebody who, like you, had a heart and a soul. Somebody who needed friendship and felt the pain of isolation. No, I doubt anybody remembers that. Perhaps you don’t even remember my name. You certainly never used it, not to me in my memory anyway. ‘What some of you will remember is that somewhere lurking on the edge of your school days there was a small, skinny, ungainly, ugly girl with a harelip.

‘Oh my God,’ said Natasha.

‘Bingo,’ said Newson.

Yes. I was born pretty much without a thing going for me physically. They tried to correct my lip a couple of times but made a mess of it. I looked awful and I sounded worse. I had the classic harelip speech impediment. Not that you’d have heard it much since I scarcely ever said a word at school unless I absolutely had to. What you may remember hearing quite a lot was Angie Tatum’s impression of me. Funny isn’t it that our class contained both the least and the most fancied girl in the school? Maybe it was that which made you do what you did to me, Angie. You were so cute, weren’t you, such a sweet face, even before you grew those extraordinary breasts. You were the classroom star with that pretty face. And then there was me with my harelip, lost alone in almost complete isolation except for you Angie. I wasn’t isolated from you, was I? Because for five long years you never let one day go by without doing your famous impression of me. The mong. The spaz. The saddo. You were so vain, Angie, so incredibly proud of your teenage beauty, that I think you used me as a way of constantly drawing attention to it. By always being near me and doing your little impressions you were able to keep the focus of the entire class on you, weren’t you? Well we all moved on in the end and you managed to make yourself into a focus of attention for the whole country. I never managed to move on fully from the problem of my face. They never did get it fixed up. Things improved of course. Adults are perhaps not as cruel as kids, or at least they don’t have the same opportunities to practise cruelty that the classroom presents. I’ve made friends, and believe it or not I’ve even had boyfriends, despite the fact that you assured me many times that that could never happen. But I’ve never been able to form a long-term relationship. Something in me pulls away. I don’t feel worthy of it; and I don’t want to be hurt. I have to say that I don’t think I’m overstating the case when I say that your cruelty, and the way that for five years you crushed any spark of hope or confidence that might have grown in me, has burdened me throughout my life and will do so until the day I die.

Katie Saunders’ entry had been made five months earlier.

‘Two weeks before Tatum died,’ Natasha observed.

Newson took up a pen and paper and created two columns, one headed ‘Victim’, the other ‘Victim’s victim’. In the first column he wrote the names of all those who had been killed, and opposite these he wrote the names of the victims’ victims that they had so far discovered.