Delaney nodded. ‘And you look up the words “degenerate scum” and that dead man walking is right there too.’ He gestured with his cigarette. ‘Just the sight of him makes my skin crawl.’
Sally looked across to a clearing where a small army of police – uniformed, detectives, armed officers – stood by watching as Diane Campbell led a slight manacled man, with grey hair and thin stooped shoulders, across the wet ground. He was dressed in prison uniform and had wire-framed spectacles that made his pale blue eyes look larger than they were, like fish eyes. He glanced across at Delaney as if he had heard what he’d said, looking at him for a long unblinking moment. A shaft of sunlight breaking through the clouds made his spectacles shine and then with a quick reptilian flick of his head he looked down at the ground again. Scanning it. Remembering. Stirring the leaves with the toe of his shoe as though stirring his memories. His thin lips curving into something resembling a smile as his foot moved back and forth and the leaves rustled.
Peter Garnier.
*
In the summer of 1995 Delaney was just a few years out of Hendon, a foot soldier in uniform working at the Wealdstone police station near Harrow on the Hill. Practically every other lamp-post that he passed as he walked had on it a picture of the two children who had gone missing.
Samuel Ramirez was just ten days away from his tenth birthday. He lived next door to a corner shop in Carlton Row, a little side street a mile or so away from the main shopping centre of Harrow. It was within walking distance of a large bingo hall that had once been a cinema that his mother went to every Friday night. And every Friday night, she brought him back fish and chips from the shop next door to it.
But at six-forty-five on this particular Friday night in mid-August his mother Laura Ramirez, a young widow and a nurse of English/Spanish descent, had sent him out to buy a fresh box of eggs, since she was making him pancakes for his tea. His favourite sort, with maple syrup, lemon juice and ice cream. He had passed his cycling proficiency test that day and his proud mother declared that he deserved a special treat because of it. Samuel Ramirez was wearing white shorts, a blue-and-white-striped T-shirt, a lime-green cardigan and a Mickey Mouse watch on his wrist. It was a thing he treasured because it was the last present that his father had given him before dying six months earlier from a brain embolism. He’d sit and watch the gloved hands telling him the time and he liked to think it was Mickey waving directly at him. Sometimes he’d even wave back.
Samuel Ramirez was never seen alive again.
The shopkeeper next door, Patrick Nyland, a single man of forty-two with a slight stammer and sometimes painful eczema that was visible on his hands, claimed that he had never seen the boy come into his shop when he was questioned by his worried mother ten minutes later. The police were called and an hour after Laura Ramirez had sent her son for eggs, Ellie Peters, another single mother, who claimed never to have known who the father of her child was and who lived three houses up from the Ramirez home, woke up from a liquid lunch she had been sleeping off and realised that her daughter was also missing. Alice Peters was nine years and five months old. With blonde curly hair and eyes like chips of sapphire flashing in bright sunlight.
Patrick Nyland was questioned exhaustively at Harrow police station on the Northolt Road, and the search for the missing children intensified. Nyland was kept in custody for twenty-four hours and his story seemed to stand up to rigorous interrogation. His house was searched and no sign of the children was discovered nor any evidence linking him to them. No witnesses came forward to say that they had seen the children, let alone to say they had been seen entering his shop. He was released without charge but events had been set in motion and his private life became the object of scrutiny – and not just by the official forces investigating the children’s disappearance. His shopfront window was smashed and the store petrol-bombed when information that he had been charged with a sex offence some years before became public knowledge. The policeman who leaked the information was never charged or disciplined for it. The fact that Nyland’s offence was not related to children – he had been found guilty of indecent exposure to a mature woman on the fields south of the medieval church on the hill – made little difference to an increasingly angry and vigilante-minded local populace. Two schools were near those fields where he had been exposing himself: a Catholic primary school and, of course, the more famous Harrow School further up the hill. In fear for his life, Patrick Nyland went into hiding while his insurance company fought his case. The police initiated an enquiry into the perpetrators of the arson but their efforts were minimal. All eyes, ears, feet, hearts and minds of the force were focused on finding the missing boy and girl. Television appeals were made, newspapers ran daily updates – genuinely keen to help, perhaps, but profiting nonetheless from the increased sales that their lurid headlines engendered. The children’s faces appearing in those papers were poster models of innocence. Samuel’s hair was every bit as curly as Alice’s but his was jet black and his eyes were the warm brown of rich caramel, and the hearts of the entire nation went out to the parents.
A month passed and still there was no sign of the abducted children, no witnesses came forward. No contact or ransom demand was made. Although it was clear from the outset this was no abduction for financial gain. It was as if the boy and girl had simply vanished off the face of the Earth in a moment, in a heartbeat. Only of course it hadn’t been a heartbeat and every waking minute since they’d disappeared represented an eternity of suffering for the boy’s mother Laura Ramirez. Nightly she would seek peace in her dreams but found heartbreaking tragedy instead. She would see her son walking into her room, climbing into bed with her, snuggling up to keep warm and she would smooth his hair, realising it had all just been a nightmare. And then she would wake up and the horror of it all would hit her again, turning her stomach muscles liquid, her mind reeling so that she gagged and dry-retched, her body shuddering with the inconsolable pain of it. Ghost-walking through the days, her nerves shredded, she would look at every boy out on the streets and for a desperate moment she would dare to hope. And at home she would sit and look at the front door as though mesmerised, and at every knock she’d say a prayer and close her eyes before she opened it. The hope ate away at her like cancer.
As for Alice’s mother, to the outside observer the loss of her child had seemingly little impact on her behaviour. She had been an alcoholic drug abuser before Alice had gone missing and the sad tragedy of her daughter’s disappearance had no seemingly redemptive effect on her. She sucked up the pity she was offered like she sucked up cheap wine, until she was tired of having to put on a brave face, and the charity of strangers that had at first fuelled her alcoholic emotional anaesthesia dwindled to frosty stares and muttered comments whenever her back was turned, comments loud enough for her to hear, whispered fingers of blame poking right at her.
But human conscience is an organic and mutable thing. Wired differently in the individual mind so that two people could be almost from different species.
Two years after the summer evening in mid-August when Samuel Ramirez and Ellie Peters had disappeared into the ether, Laura Ramirez killed herself by stepping front of a high-speed train at a level crossing. Her existence
