wiped out in a thunderous moment.
Three weeks after that Peter Garnier was arrested.
It happened like this.
*
On a late Sunday afternoon Garnier had approached a small eight-year-old boy – who was seemingly on his own – in some wooded parkland bordering the Ruislip Lido. It was common land, like the Mad Bess Woods a mile or so away. The boy’s father, unobserved by Garnier, was in the trees attending to a call of nature. As he came out Peter Garnier moved swiftly away but when the father learned that the man had asked his son to help him look for a lost dog he swore loud enough to startle the boy and set off in furious pursuit. Garnier, seeing that he was being chased, took off at a fast run, but he was a slight man, never a sportsman, and was certainly no match for the enraged father, who was a plasterer from Northolt, a weekend footballer and a fan of the
At ten past nine on that Monday morning Arthur Ellis, a fifty-nine-year-old traffic warden and chronic arthritis sufferer nearing retirement, was ticketing the car when he heard a soft whimpering sound like that of a small frightened puppy coming from inside the locked boot. Calling for assistance, he tried to open the boot himself. Becoming ever more frantic as the whimpering sound had faded away and now there was only a chilling silence. He tried to open the boot using a Swiss army knife that he carried but to no avail. He ran to the nearest door and banged on it but there was no reply. He ran to the next door along and had better luck. A puzzled middle-aged unemployed man in his dressing gown answered and let the traffic warden use his phone to call the police.
Ten minutes later and PC Jack Delaney, who had been on patrol with his sergeant Rosemary Dawlish, arrived. They prised open the boot with a metal bar, which they had confiscated fifteen minutes earlier from a bald-headed tattooed man who had been using it to smash up his lover’s car. The woman had been unfaithful to him with a number of people from his football team while he’d been in prison. The man was even then scowling at them through the barred windows of their patrol car, clearly eager to return to secure accommodation.
Inside the boot there was no puppy, but an olive-skinned seven-year-old girl with brown hair and almond- shaped hazel eyes was huddled against the back, looking up at the young constable. Her tired eyes were wide with fear and her tiny hands were clutching a large teddy bear as though it were a powerful talisman that could protect her from all the evils of the world.
Delaney smiled at her reassuringly and stepped aside to let his female sergeant bring her out. But when the woman reached in with arms outstretched the little girl screamed, almost soundlessly, and backed deeper into the boot. She looked at Delaney, almost pleading for his help. The sergeant shrugged and stepped back.
‘Why don’t you give it a try, constable?’ she said.
Delaney stepped up, smiling reassuringly again. The girl scampered forward and climbed into his arms, hugging him around his neck. As Delaney stood up and brought her out a bright light flashed in front of them. The homeowner, still in his dressing gown, fired off another shot before a glare from Delaney made him lower his camera. The first picture, however, was on the front page of almost every paper the following day and the man in the dressing gown, whose breakfast had been so rudely interrupted, made more from the sales of it than he had all year.
The picture of Delaney holding ‘the girl in the boot’, as she became known, was wired around the world and earned him no small amount of ribbing from his colleagues. But Delaney didn’t care: that moment, holding the small, vulnerable, terrified girl, now safe in his arms, was exactly why he had joined the police force in the first place.
Later that day, the real horror of what might have been struck home to him as he stood guard watching as a SOCO team led by CID went through Garnier’s house. In the basement they found three boxes of photographs. All children. They found videos and Super-8 films. Home-made. In a locked cupboard they found several items of clothing. Children’s clothing. And they found a cardigan that had once belonged to Samuel Ramirez, the cardigan he had been wearing two years previously on the day he was abducted from Carlton Row.
Later they would find the bodies of six children aged between six and ten buried in the ground underneath his garden shed. None of them would prove to be either Samuel Ramirez or Alice Peters.
When Garnier awoke in prison the next day after being assaulted on the common he was arrested and moved to a secure unit. He would never enjoy life as a free man again.
The same day that Peter Garnier was arrested Police Constable Jack Delaney put in his application to join CID.
In the thirteen years since his arrest Peter Garnier had refused ever to disclose where the missing children were or where the girl in the boot had come from.
Five months ago he had converted to Catholicism.
Three months ago he had been diagnosed with progressive supernuclear palsy. A disease which over time could rob a person of the ability to walk, talk, feed themselves or communicate with the world around them. And yet their brain would remain alert.
Fourteen days ago he had agreed to tell the police where the children’s bodies were buried.
*
Delaney scratched another match to light a cigarette and watched as a team of forensic anthropologists excavated the ground that Garnier, after twenty minutes of deliberation, had indicated to be the place where the bodies of the murdered children were buried. Garnier himself was sitting on a fallen tree trunk some twenty yards away. His fishlike eyes watching dispassionately, glancing across occasionally at Delaney and Sally Cartwright. But no emotion showed on his face.
‘Does he know who you are?’
Delaney shrugged. ‘I doubt it.’
‘What happened to the girl you found alive?’
Delaney took a long drag on his cigarette. ‘We never found her mother or father. No relatives at all ever came forward and that degenerate slime refused to say where he had taken her from.’
