‘And what happened if you broke the rules?’ Paula probed gently.
‘You were punished.’ Louise rubbed her eyes with her fingertips, shedding mascara on her cheeks.
‘Punished how?’
‘Depends what you’d done. They had . . . I suppose you’d have to call them punishment cells. Just a tiny bare room with nothing except a bucket to piss and shit in. No mattress, no blanket, no nothing. You’d get locked in there overnight. Or sometimes for two or three nights. No food, just a cup of water twice a day. It was freezing in the winter and roasting in the summer. You wouldn’t treat a dog like that, not legally.’
Now Paula could feel the slow burn of anger in her belly. ‘You definitely shouldn’t treat a child like that. Did that ever happen to you?’
Louise blinked hard. A tiny tear escaped from the corner of one eye. ‘Just the once. I refused to eat my dinner. It was liver and onions.’ She shuddered. ‘I’ve always hated liver. It’s the texture as much as the taste. Yuck. And they cooked it till it was like shoe leather. One of the nuns dragged me away from the table by the hair. Then they grabbed my arms so tight I had bruises and took me to the punishment cell. I was bloody terrified. I thought I was going mad. I tell you, I never refused liver again. But even the smell of it makes me gag to this day.’
‘I can imagine. Were there other punishments handed out by the nuns?’
Louise sighed. ‘You bet. They stuck to the bible. You know that bit where it says, “spare the rod and spoil the child”? They made bloody sure we weren’t going to be spoilt. The lowest level of physical punishment was the ruler. You remember those thin rulers we had in school? Wooden or plastic, about thirty centimetres long? Well, they’d set those against the back of your legs or your hands, bend them back and then let them go. You wouldn’t think something so little could cause so much pain, but it was bloody excruciating. Especially on the backs of your hands. There’s no flesh there to protect you.’ She grimaced and rubbed the backs of her hands as if she were washing them.
‘I bet that stung. One of the boys in my class once did that on the back of my thigh, I was wearing trousers, but I can still remember how it burned.’
‘That wasn’t enough for Sister Mary Patrick. The Mother Superior. She had a leather belt, a proper heavy-duty one. Girls would get a beating with the belt for what she reckoned were serious crimes. Like being cheeky to a nun or being late for Mass. There was a story went the rounds that sometimes she’d use the buckle end of the belt.’
The thought of what that could do to the fragile body of a growing girl made Paula feel physically sick.
Louise studied Paula’s face, as if weighing something in the balance. Her lips tightened, then she said, ‘Maybe it was just the older girls trying to frighten the little kids. But there were stories that Sister Mary Patrick didn’t always know when to stop.’
25
One of the first serial offenders I profiled was a sadistic rapist who specialised in dumping his victims at sites where other women had previously been murdered. He told his victims the gruesome history of the places as part of his strategy to force their silence. Not so much revisiting the scene of the crime as annexing the horror of someone else’s.
From Reading Crimes by DR TONY HILL
It was only a slight detour for Alvin to visit the crime scene on his way to the office. He wanted to see the place for himself, to fix it in his mind’s eye so that as evidence began to trickle in, he could place it within his own mental map. He was luckier than Sophie; there was space in the car park by the time he arrived.
As he walked towards the mobile incident room, he took in the extent of the convent and its grounds. With the right people in charge, this could have been an amazing place to grow up. Space to run around. Trees to climb, countryside to go for walks. What had happened instead felt like a double whammy.
He checked in at the mobile incident room then headed for the blue tent. He found an extra-large protective suit in the pile by the door and was soon almost anonymous within its folds. Bootees over his shoes, gloves on his hands and a face mask completed his camouflage. It wasn’t that he was hiding; he just didn’t want to draw attention to himself. He had a feeling the new boss wouldn’t be happy at his officers going off piste. Rutherford would find out soon enough that was how ReMIT functioned. But Alvin didn’t feel the need to be first out of the gate.
He spotted the diminutive figure of DCI Fielding and headed in the opposite direction. The very protective gear that disguised him made it hard to identify someone he could count on to fill him in on the details of the investigation. Frustrated, he headed out of the far side of the tent to where the excavation work was being carried out. It looked like a deep gash had been ploughed in the earth a couple of metres wide and about fifty metres long, and teams of white-suited figures were working their way along it, trowels and brushes in hand. Cameras on tripods had been set up alongside, flashguns firing at intervals. They would, he knew, provide a record
