Chapter 6
The high pressure moved around a bit, bringing breezes from the north.
The nights were clear and cold and early-morning mists rolled off the hills, causing havoc on the roads. Two people were killed in a fifteen-vehicle pile-up on the M62 and a golfer was struck by lightning in Brighouse. We made ten more contacts, some by telephone. It's all right having carte blanche with expenses, but driving a hundred miles for an interview takes a big chunk out of the working day. And although Nigel was running the big show there were some jobs I had to attend to myself and some I wanted to. Arresting Peter Mark Handley was one of the latter.
Handley was forty-four years old and taught physical development at Heckley High School, the local comprehensive. When I was a pupil there it was called the Grammar School and we learned PT. Because of financial constraints there was no games mistress as such for the girls, just a reluctant succession of uninterested teachers seconded to take a lesson when they could. The net ball and hockey teams suffered, as did a group of girls who showed promise as swimmers. To prevent a further slide in the school's fortunes Handley had volunteered to take over as their coach, too.
We'd heard via an older girl who spent a week with us on a job awareness programme that he subscribed to the touchy-feely training method. We held off while the school was in session to avoid rumours spreading, but as soon as the summer holiday came we put him under observation and started interviewing specially selected pupils. Another girl, called Grace and wise beyond her years, said he would give them group talks before a match, extolling the virtues of the East German training methods. He showed them videos of the 1936 Berlin Olympics and modern ones of powerful Teutonic maidens out-sprinting, out-throwing and out-swimming their mortal competitors. Winning was all, he exhorted. Any means of achieving victory was acceptable, and 'Simply the Best' became the unofficial team song.
Later, after the game, when senses were heightened and bodies pleasantly tired, he would offer a lift home to his current favourite.
Let's have a McDonald's he'd insist. In the restaurant he'd tell her more about East German training methods. They had relied heavily on the administration of huge amounts of the male hormone testosterone. It was a wonder drug for female athletes, and drastically cut down on the amount of training required to achieve international status. There could be problems, of course, if the dosage wasn't carefully controlled. He' dlaugh, and suggest that some of the women shot-putters who'd taken massive doses now left the seat upright when they came out of the toilet. What it did for their sex lives he couldn't imagine, he said, studying the girl's reaction as he broached the subject.
In the car, near the end of her street, he'd park while talking about the game to hold her attention. His arm would reach across the back of the seat and his fingers caress her hair. There were other methods, he'd say. She was special. She could make it, right to the top. The coach-and-athlete relationship was like no other. The other way, his way, was the loving way. There were no tests for it, and anyway, it wasn't against the rules. His way of administering the male hormone brought only happiness and contentment, plus improved performance. And there were no unwelcome side effects. He didn't mention pregnancy.
Grace told him to go play with himself and slammed the car door so hard the mirror fell off. He never spoke to her again but she thought the next girl he approached fell for it. Two others gave us the same story but different names of girls they thought had had affairs with him.
Three refusals, three successes, not a bad score line A female DC had a quiet word with the girls we'd been told about and two of them admitted it. The other one told her to mind her own business.
Trouble was, they were over sixteen. A schoolteacher is in loco parentis, and is not expected to seduce his charges, but it ain't illegal. We could get him sacked, but that looked like all we could do. Then one of the girls mentioned the magazines he'd shown her and that was all we needed.
The good news was that his wife had left him about a month earlier.
Whether it was related we didn't know, but she'd packed two suitcases and decamped to her mother's in Wombwell, near Barnsley. We have to tread delicately in cases like this, but with her out of the way we had a free hand to go round and put the shits up him. Thursday morning, nine a.m.' me, Maggie Madison, Sparky and Annette Brown swung into the street of mock-Georgian link-detached dwellings and knocked on his door. The neighbour's sprinkler was drenching the shared lawn and a sun bed was deployed, all ready for duty. The forecast said thunder and a few big cumulus clouds were sailing overhead, but it looked unlikely.
Mrs. Handley opened the door, which wasn't in the script. I stumbled through the introductions and suggested she let us in. Her husband was in the back garden, tinkering with a lawnmower.
'Peter Mark Handley?' I asked.
'Yes. Why?' He placed a screwdriver back in its toolbox and rose to his feet. He didn't look like a PT instructor. He didn't look much like anything right then, except a man whose past has caught up with him. Mrs. Handley looked at us in disbelief and didn't even ask if we'd like a cup of tea.
'We have a warrant to search your house,' I said, holding the printed side towards him.
There was a green plastic picnic table nearby, with four matching chairs around it. He reached out like a blind man, feeling for a chair. When he located one he fumbled with it and lowered himself down. 'Search the house?' he repeated.
'Yes.' I turned to his wife. 'Would you like to accompany my officers while they conduct the search?' I said.
She ignored my question. 'What are you looking for?'
'We're acting on information suggesting that your husband may be in possession of pornographic material.' I nodded to the other three to get on with it and invited her to accompany them again.
'What's all this about, Peter?' she asked.
'I… I don't know, love.'
'I'm not leaving you alone with my husband,' she said. 'I want to know what this is about.' We sat down. Pornography is a vague definition.
The tabloids and most women's magazines overstep the boundaries that our parents would have laid down. I'd wanted to have a chat with him, perhaps suggest he quietly hand in his resignation and take up welding or tyre- fitting. Something that wouldn't surround him with nubile young ladies. I couldn't have done his job. I wouldn't have fallen to temptation, like him, but I'd have slowly gone blind and mad.
'We didn't expect you to be here, Mrs. Handley,' I said.
'I came back last night.'
'Why did you leave?'
'Is that relevant?'
'I don't know. Is it?'
'You tell me. My mother suffers from Alzheimer's, with other complications. The doctor wanted to put her in a nursing home. One for geriatrics. She has four daughters, so we decided we could look after her ourselves, staying with her for a few weeks at a time. I've just done my first stint. At a guess I'll have one more to do. I can't see her lasting much longer than that.'
'I'm very sorry,' I said. It wasn't much to offer, but I meant it.
'Boss.' I looked round and saw Maggie standing in the doorway. I walked over to her and she whispered: 'Upstairs.'
'Go sit with them,' I told her, and went inside.
The loft ladder was down, with Dave leaning on a rung and Annette standing nearby. 'Up there,' she said. It was his den. His private world, his space, his fantasy land that nobody else was allowed to enter. I couldn't stand upright, even in the middle, but there was room for a cheap desk and chair, with a TV and VCR.
Mr. Handley liked pictures of young girls. Without their clothes on.
He liked to see them posing. He liked to see them struggling. But most of all he liked to see them suffering. At a guess he downloaded stuff from the Internet and dealt in imported magazines. I looked at just enough to satisfy myself it was illegal and went outside, to the real world, where the sun still shone. President Truman was
