But it wasn’t George who began to emerge. Not unless he had taken to wearing black stockings and stilettos. A swagger of camel cashmere covering a tailored charcoal suit followed the legs. A flourish of shoulder-length hair whose fifty shades of dark blonde bore testament to an expensive hairdresser’s talents. A skilful make-up job that banished the years as surely as Vanessa Hill’s. A juddering moment of recognition pitched Carol into the physical and emotional reaction she now recognised as PTSD. For years, this woman had been her adversary. But the last time she’d seen her had been at Tony’s trial, the defence solicitor constantly on the shoulder of his barrister.
Now Bronwen Scott had come calling. And Carol’s heart raced when she considered why that might be.
12
It’s the job of police officers to investigate the backgrounds of suspects. They have access to all sorts of information that’s not readily available to anyone else. The product of those inquiries is the invaluable raw material for any psychologist who is advising them on angles of approach in an interview.
From Reading Crimes by DR TONY HILL
One of the secrets of Paula’s success as an interviewer was to suck up as much background information about her subject as possible. So much so that Stacey had once referred to them as Paula’s ‘victims’. She’d said it was a slip of the tongue, but none of the others in the squad had pulled her up on it. So while Stacey was data-mining for individuals they could pursue, Paula set about a different kind of digging. Stacey might be all over the dark side of the information highway, but Paula knew how to google.
When the Blessed Pearl had closed down five years before, it hadn’t made much of a stir online. The closure of a convent and its associated children’s home wasn’t of much interest, not even in nearby Bradfield. There were no allegations of sexual abuse against the nuns and priests of the Blessed Pearl, and if anybody had been complaining about any other kind of abuse, it hadn’t grabbed the interest of the mainstream media or the citizen journalists of cyberspace.
So the Bradfield Evening Sentinel Times had contented itself with a short news feature about the closure of an institution that had existed almost unnoticed on the edge of the satellite village of Bradesden for more than seventy years. They had a quote from the Mother Superior, a woman weirdly called Sister Mary Patrick: ‘It’s very sad to see the end of a community that has educated and raised hundreds of children and led them to productive lives in society. But there are fewer women entering the Order of the Blessed Pearl and we can no longer sustain the level of involvement and training required to care for girls who are often very disturbed and have complex emotional needs. St Margaret Clitherow Refuge and School has been an anchor for those children but now it’s time to pass the baton to others.’
The archdiocese had chipped in too. ‘The sisters of the Order of the Blessed Pearl have given remarkable service to generations of young people. We salute their hard work and sacrifice. Young people will always find a home in the Catholic Church, but in less formal arrangements than before.’
Interestingly, in the light of what the bulldozers had uncovered, there were no quotes from any of the former residents of the St Margaret Clitherow Refuge and School. Paula knew journalists could be lazy, letting themselves be spoon-fed easy answers. But not to have sought out any of the children who’d been raised by the sisters seemed wilfully negligent, given the level of allegations of sexual abuse that had risen like a polluted tide around the Catholic Church in recent years.
Perhaps the answer was even more mundane than overworked or under-curious hacks. Perhaps the answer was that the dead of St Margaret Clitherow were the victims of a different kind of abuse. It was certainly worth considering.
Towards the end of the article, the fate of the nuns from Bradesden was reported. According to the Mother Superior, they were to be redistributed among the other establishments run by the order. Paula wondered if that was the whole story. If she was running an order of nuns and it looked like at least some of them had been engaged in questionable behaviour, she’d want to farm them out to another sisterhood altogether. Somewhere nobody would come looking. The Little Sisters of Perpetual Hypocrisy, or something.
Paula carried on googling, looking for any hints of impropriety surrounding the wider Order of the Blessed Pearl. It was named for St Margaret Clitherow, a Catholic martyr in Elizabethan England, she discovered. She’d been known locally as the Blessed Pearl of York. The order honouring her had been established in 1930, a year after Margaret had been beatified by Pope Pius XI. Paula read about Margaret’s sixteenth-century martyrdom with the same sickening disgust that years of working serial homicide had provoked. Her executioners had stripped her naked and laid her flat on the ground, a sharp stone pressing into her spine. Then they’d laid a heavy door on top of her and piled it with rocks till her spine was broken and her chest crushed so she could no longer breathe. Her crime? Hiding Catholic priests from the post-Reformation Protestant zealots. Paula wondered what Tony would make of them, and the Virgin Queen who had been head of their church. Though it turned out Elizabeth had written to the populace of York expressing her unhappiness at the execution. Not at the method, but the fact that
