Fallen Angel (19 page)

The minute Collins left Peter Dawney's home, she pulled her mobile from her bag in order to call her mother. As the screen lit up, she saw that there were three missed calls, all from Penny Collins, and she immediately speed-dialled her mother.

‘It's me, Mum. What's happening? Have you found her?'

‘Yes, dear. Sophie's home safe and sound. She's all right.'

‘Where the hell was she?'

‘I don't know. I think she was out with some friends or something. But that's not important right now. Let's just be thankful that she's home and she's safe.'

‘Okay. I'm on my way'

It took Stacey forty-five minutes to reach her parents' flat. She paused only briefly in the hallway to greet them before rushing through to the spare room and gently opening the door.

Sophie was lying on her front, her head turned to one side, asleep. Even though the lights in the room were off, Stacey could tell that her daughter's skin was unusually pale and she immediately became suspicious about her condition.

Her eyes scanned the room. There were three empty glasses on the side of the bed and five chocolate wrappers
on the floor. Stacey gently peeled back the lid of one of her daughter's eyes. Her pupils were the size of saucers.

The excessive thirst, the snacking on sweets and the dilated pupils could mean only one thing: Sophie had been experimenting with Ecstasy. Her own trained eyes had picked up clues that her parents had easily mistaken.

‘Oh, Sophie,' Stacey whispered. ‘You stupid, stupid girl.'

Stacey wanted to shake her awake and demand answers, but she knew that much of the blame for what had happened would inevitably come to rest on her own shoulders. She worked too hard, she spent far too little time with her. Christ, she didn't even know the names of any of her friends. Tears began to well up in the corners of her eyes as the guilty feelings started to overwhelm her.

She collected herself before leaving Sophie to sleep off the remainder of the drug and went to see her parents, who were chatting in the kitchen.

‘Thank God she's home.' Her mother couldn't contain her relief and gave Stacey a warm embrace. Stacey held her mother tightly.

‘I'm sorry for last night, Mum.'

‘We all are. Even Sophie.'

They stepped back from their embrace.

‘What has she told you?'

‘She hasn't said anything,' said her father, ‘but she was brought home by an old friend of yours.'

Stacey turned to face him. ‘Who?'

‘Jack Stanley.'

DCI Chris Blackwell had been cynical, to say the least.

Although it was clearly relevant to the investigation that the two victims shared the same father, the notion that the killer of Daniel Eliot and the kidnapper of Michael Dawney was some old schoolfriend of Peter Dawney who had been hurt in an accident simply didn't add up.

‘Why would he wait so long to take his revenge?' asked Blackwell, when Collins explained what she had found. ‘How on earth would he have known about the affair? And why would he go after Dawney's children instead of just Dawney himself?'

‘I think he killed Daniel Eliot to prove to Dawney that he was serious, that he would go through with his threat to kill his other son if the full ransom wasn't paid.'

‘But Dawney didn't even know that Eliot was his child.'

‘The note from the kidnapper that was sent on the severed hand said it belonged to Dawney's son. We thought it was a sick joke, but now it seems the kidnapper was trying to tell him that he had another son.'

‘What do you want to do, Collins?'

‘With your permission, Woods and I would like to go to see Dawney's old schoolteacher this morning. I'm hoping she'll be able to throw some light on the subject.'

Blackwell sighed. He had been led up the garden path before by Collins, and, with only six hours to go until the
money-drop, he didn't want any distractions, especially from her. The idea of keeping her out of the way with a wild-goose chase was extremely appealing.

Although he wanted Michael to be found safe and sound, he also needed the drop-off to take place. The whisper campaign blaming his incompetence for the death of Daniel Eliot was still circulating through the Met and beyond. This time there would be no mistake. The full amount of the ransom would be delivered as per the kidnapper's instructions. If Michael Dawney was subsequently killed, it would be a tragedy for sure, but no one would be able to blame Blackwell himself. It would be the act of a ruthless killer and nothing to do with his failings as a detective.

‘Go ahead and see what she says. Just don't do anything that jeopardizes the money-drop.'

‘Thank you, sir. I'll let you know what we come up with.'

Lesley Riding had long since retired from the world of teaching and moved into a small pretty cottage in Limpsfield, a village on the southern Surrey and Kent border. She now enjoyed her retirement working as a part-time fundraiser for the NSPCC. She had never married, and now believed she'd left it too late and so shared her home with three cats and a lifetime of memories.

Collins and Woods arrived outside her house just before eight. She rang the bell and after a few moments the yellow door was opened by a large woman with a tidy mop of bright-white hair and a warm smile.

‘Lesley Riding?' asked Collins.

The woman nodded, confusion crossing her face as she looked first to Collins, then to Woods, and back again to Collins. ‘That's right. How can I help you?'

Collins stood forward slightly and lifted her warrant card up to the woman's face. ‘My name is Detective Inspector Stacey Collins. This is my colleague Detective Sergeant Tony Woods. We're investigating the murder and kidnap of a child, and we have reason to believe that you might be able to help us with some background information about a possible suspect.'

The old woman's jaw fell open with shock and surprise. ‘Please come in,' she said, after taking a moment to compose herself. She led the two officers into her small living room, with Woods having to duck down in order to avoid hitting the low wooden beams above. Lesley gestured for the two officers to sit down. ‘The kidnap and murder of a child! You must mean Peter Dawney's son, Michael, and the other boy, Daniel Eliot. I've been following the case. I used to teach Peter, you know. It's so awful.'

Collins nodded. ‘Yes. I saw Peter last night, and he mentioned that there was an accident in your class involving another pupil. Do you remember it?'

It was as if Lesley Riding's body had been full of hot air and had suddenly developed a leak. She seemed to collapse under her own weight at the memory. Her knees began to wobble, her hand went up to her face, and she fell on to the floor, hitting the ground before Collins or Woods had a chance to move forward and catch her.

When Lesley came round, she found she had been
placed in a large armchair, and Collins offered her a glass of water that she had fetched from the kitchen.

‘Are you okay?' Collins asked gently.

‘I think so. I'm sorry. It's just that I haven't really thought about the accident for years, and yet at the same time I've always feared that one day it would come back to haunt me. You see, I've never forgiven myself for what happened to Duncan. I couldn't go back to teaching after that. I couldn't face it.'

Collins placed the glass of water on the coffee table behind her. ‘I know this is going to be difficult, Lesley,' said Collins. ‘But this is what we have come to ask you about. We're totally in the dark. We need to know what happened to Duncan. We need to know absolutely everything.'

Lesley nodded. ‘I understand. I think perhaps you'd both better sit back down. This could take a while.'

White paint.

That was what it had looked like, and that was what Lesley Riding had assumed it was when she had put away the unmarked bottle in the cupboard that morning before the children arrived. Many of the bottles they used were unmarked. It meant the only way of knowing the paint's colour was by the lid. But this time the plastic bottle contained a thick caustic-soda solution that one of the cleaners had been using to clear a small blockage in the class sink.

She had been teaching ever since she had graduated from university some twenty years before. She had dreamed of teaching primary-school children ever since she herself had been a child, and discovered that, with the right guidance and support, those early years at school can be a wonderful and magical time. She wanted to find a way to show children that books were better than cartoons, that competitive sports were better than games that had no clear winner or loser, that studying hard was something to be proud of.

She had spent fifteen years working at a private prep school in London and was looking forward to the challenge of teaching Year 4 children at a state school in Dulwich. The first moment she had stepped into the
classroom of the South London school and seen twenty-five eager faces staring up at her in anticipation, she knew she had made the right choice.

She loved them all, of course, but it didn't take long for the individual personalities of the children to emerge and for her to have her secret favourites.

Susan Flemming was delightful in every way. At seven she was one of the youngest in the class and had only just lost her two front baby teeth. With a head full of bright blonde curls and sparkling blue eyes, Susan was already the kind of girl who lit up a room when she walked into it. Whenever she was in the class, the mood of all the other children seemed to lift. As bright as she was beautiful, Susan was a delight to teach and just the sort of girl that Lesley hoped to have when she eventually got around to having children of her own.

Mary Harris was equally chirpy, though she had a tendency to be as loud as some of the boys. And the boys were a handful in themselves. Max Carter's father was a manual labourer from a rough working-class background and had already instilled in his son an unwillingness to take orders from women.

Every class has its clown, and this one was no exception. Little Duncan Jenkins didn't just make her laugh, he made everybody laugh. His infectious smile and playful manner made him popular wherever he went. He was one of those children who had developed the knack of saying the sweetest possible thing at just the right time to make everyone fall in love with him.

In truth, Duncan was of way-above-average intelligence. He loved to learn. At the age of eight his reading
skills were already on a par with those of a twelve-year-old, and his mathematical abilities were not far behind.

Miss Riding could have done with more pupils like Duncan and fewer like Peter Dawney. Right away she could tell he was the boy who would be most likely to end up behind bars in later life. When he acted up, as he often did, he claimed that it was because he was bored and needed to find a way to liven things up. Whenever the fire alarms were tripped, Peter Dawney was the first person the head teacher looked to. Whenever the toilets backed up because they had been stuffed with unflushable objects, Peter Dawney's name rang out through the corridors. Whenever money went missing from the cloakroom, Peter Dawney was the one who got the blame, even though he insisted he was innocent. If ever a boy seemed destined to have a criminal record by the time he was sixteen, Peter Dawney was that boy.

Duncan Jenkins and Peter Dawney were like chalk and cheese. They were living proof of the old saying that opposites attract. They were the very best of friends.

That morning had been set aside for arts and crafts. Lesley encouraged the children to get the paints out for themselves. Knowing how to put things away and how to get ready for each class was a valuable lesson. They often forgot to tidy up after themselves, but that was all part of the learning journey.

Two days earlier, during the last art class, Duncan had accidentally knocked over a paint pot that was sitting on Peter's desk. Red paint had spilled all over the picture of a house Peter had spent ages working on. Peter and Duncan soon began to flick paint at each other.

Halfway through that morning's art class, Peter saw that Duncan was working on a picture using a red piece of paper. Peter decided it would be funny to ‘accidentally' spill a pot of white paint on top of it. With a half-smirk on his face, he glanced round to make sure Miss Riding wasn't watching. He took the white paint from the cupboard, flicked open the lid and began to make his way back to his own desk on the other side of the classroom. As he passed his best friend's desk, he turned and squeezed the contents in the direction of the picture.

Duncan had been concentrating hard on drawing swirls of smoke coming from the funnel of a steam train. Instinct took over. Eager to stop his picture being ruined, he reached across with his hand and brushed the liquid away. It was warm to the touch and slippery, like soap. It began to spill over the edge of his desk and on to his lap. As he stood up, his clothes began to dissolve and the sensation of warmth was quickly replaced by one of intense burning.

The sound of his agonized squeals made Lesley instantly look over: what she saw would haunt her for the rest of her life. Duncan had turned to face her, his young features distorted by pain and fear. His left hand was held high in the air, a mass of charred black flesh dripping down on to his neck and the floor. Everything from the top of his bellybutton down to his ankles had been replaced by a bubbling, steaming mixture of what looked like melted candle wax, slowly dripping down.

Within a split second everyone in the class was screaming, backing away from the vision of horror that was now staggering towards the teacher. Finally the pain became
too much for Duncan to bear, and he collapsed, twitching slowly on the classroom floor.

Duncan Jenkins spent the next eight months in hospital. He had received third-degree burns to more than thirty per cent of his body, and the doctors told his agonized parents that he would never fully recover.

There were nineteen operations in all, using grafts of skin from the unaffected parts of his body to cover up the gaping holes that had been left by the caustic soda. Soon Duncan's lower body began to resemble a patchwork quilt of ragged scar tissue. There was nothing cosmetic about the work – it was merely an attempt to prevent the wounds from constantly getting infected.

But there was a limit to what the grafts could do. Three fingers of his left hand had been permanently fused together. It would, the doctors decided, be better not to attempt to separate them. His genitals had been damaged beyond recognition. Yet his face remained untouched.

His parents were at his bedside night and day. They had been devout Catholics all their lives and prayed constantly for their son to make a full recovery. Lesley Riding came to visit him regularly, but she was so overcome by grief and guilt that she was unable to look the little boy or his parents in the eye. She left teaching shortly afterwards, abandoning her dream for fear that her incompetence might one day ruin the life of another child.

During the first few months in hospital Duncan was on such high doses of painkillers that he was unaware of what was going on around him, but the doctors gradually began to wean him off the drugs, concerned that he would be addicted for life.

‘But surely he's still in great pain,' said his mother, Grace.

‘Yes, but the risk of addiction is too great,' came the reply. ‘I'm
afraid that he's just going to have to learn to live with the pain.'

‘But he's only a little boy,' said his father. ‘Why should he have to bear such a burden?'

‘I'm sorry, Mr Jenkins, but the fact of the matter is that Duncan is going to be in pain, day in, day out, for the next few years of his life.'

While Duncan was in hospital he suffered another terrible blow. He had always been incredibly close to his father. They spent a lot of time together, just the two of them, playing in the garden, going fishing and watching the local football team on Saturday mornings. Best of all they spent hours together wargaming: re-creating famous battles using miniature soldiers that they lovingly painted. But ever since the accident Duncan could sense that his father was suffering too. It saddened him greatly to see his little boy in such pain.

Five months after the accident Matthew Jenkins died of a massive heart attack. His mother believed her husband had never recovered from the shock of their son's suffering. Duncan cried non-stop the day he was buried, as he was unable to leave the hospital to attend the funeral.

Having lost her husband and seen her son horribly mutilated, Grace increasingly relied on the Church for comfort. She spent most afternoons with her son in hospital, and one Sunday after church she produced a Bible from her bag and began to read from it. ‘For whatsoever man he be that hath a blemish … or he that hath anything maimed … shall not come nigh to offer the offerings of the Lord.

‘Sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned.'

‘What does that mean, Mum?' asked Duncan.

‘It means anyone who sins will be punished.'

‘I don't understand.'

She placed the Bible on Duncan's bed and rose to leave. ‘It means our family has been punished for something you've done.'

Duncan looked at his mother in disbelief. ‘But I haven't done anything wrong.'

She leaned over and kissed him gently on the forehead. ‘You must have, son,' she said, as she turned and left.

The January after he was finally discharged from hospital Duncan returned to school, the same school where the accident had taken place, for the start of the spring term. It was a miserable experience. Before the accident he had been one of the most popular boys at the school. Afterwards everyone shunned him. His most visible disability was his left hand, which he kept permanently covered in a long leather gauntlet, and a roll-neck top hid the scars down his neck, but rumours about the full extent of his injuries persisted throughout the playground. He was now considered a freak.

No one except his mother knew the truth for sure – Duncan had been excused PE because of the pain it would cause. But it was clear to everyone that something was very, very wrong.

As the doctors had previously warned, he was in constant pain. After a while he managed to all but ignore it as a dull ache in his lower body, but every now and then there would be a sharp, stabbing sensation in one of his legs or stomach, and it took every ounce of will power and strength not to cry out loud.

The boy who had once sat at the front of the class and put his hand up to answer every question now languished at the back. During break time he usually sat on a bench by himself, lost in his own thoughts and being sniggered at by those who were once his friends.

By this time his mother's life revolved around the church of St Andrew in Peckham. She attended Mass several times each week, sang in the choir and taught Sunday School. It gave her much
comfort, and she also believed it helped to repay the sins that had been committed by her son.

By contrast the accident turned out to be the best thing that could have ever happened to Peter Dawney. He was expelled from the school where the accident had taken place, and his parents struggled to find anywhere willing to take him. In the end the last remaining option was the local prep school. Knowing of the boy's reputation, the headmaster dismissively told the parents that if Peter passed the entrance exam, he would be able to attend.

To everyone's astonishment, Peter not only passed the entrance exam but achieved the highest pass rate in the school's history. Once installed at the new school, Peter's behaviour changed to the extent that he became virtually unrecognizable. His past complaints of ‘boredom' turned out to be just that. Highly intelligent, he had been acting up because none of the schoolwork he had been assigned was challenging enough for him. In this new, high-pressure environment he thrived.

‘If your son doesn't make head boy, I'll eat my hat,' the headmaster told Peter's bemused parents.

The winter was the hardest time. The icy winds made Duncan's scars and grafts burn like fire. Most of the time he would remain inside during playtime, but every now and then the teachers would insist that he get some fresh air, wrap him up warm and send him out to sit on a bench at the edge of the playing fields.

The years that followed for Duncan were hard. There was no let-up at school, and his weekends consisted of following his mother to church twice a day. He missed his father greatly and began to spend time alone in his room painting toy soldiers.

At the age of fifteen Duncan made his first real friend since the accident. Having transferred to his school in the middle of the year,
Karen Sterling was something of an outsider. With no preconceived ideas about Duncan's past, she was happy to enjoy his company.

Their relationship grew from strength to strength. Duncan confessed his fears, his dreams and told Karen of his pain. She told him of her own plans for an idyllic life in the country with a family of her own.

They began to eat lunch together, talking during break time and even walking to and from school together. Before too long Duncan confessed everything about the accident that had maimed him, and Karen was wonderfully sympathetic.

As time went by, he began to trust her more and more, and came to believe that their friendship would be the kind that would last for ever. Of course, Duncan wanted far more than friendship. Although his young mind could not fully understand the feelings rushing through it, he knew that he wanted Karen to be a big part of his life in the future. When he heard people jokingly talk about getting married and having children, he knew that he wanted Karen to be that woman for him.