Killer Couples (12 page)

‘It’s only because I care so much,’ he’d tell her, after it had all blown over, stroking her thick brown hair and caressing the angular planes of her painfully thin face. ‘I’ve bought you an engagement ring, haven’t I? That must mean something, hey?’

And she’d forget about the bruises where he’d grabbed her arm so roughly, and the harsh words that rubbed away like sandpaper at the fragile surface of her self-esteem, and how he’d looked at her as if she were nothing to him. She’d forget the warnings of her family, and the sheepish glances from
neighbours who’d heard too much through the paper-thin walls. In those moments, it was just Maxine and Ian against the world – no one else mattered.

Who would have thought her loyalty would be put so brutally to the test, with such devastating results?

It was Ian, of course, who first suggested moving out of the area. His father, Kevin Huntley, was at this time working as a school caretaker in Littleport, Cambridgeshire. When the couple stayed with him for a while, Ian fell in love with the area, which boasted many airbases and appealed to his lifelong love of plane spotting. And when Kevin told his son about another junior caretaking vacancy at Soham Village College Secondary School in Soham, Cambridgeshire, Ian was convinced this was an opportunity not to be missed.

‘It’d be a great new start for both of us, Max,’ he had told her excitedly when he found out he’d got an interview. ‘It comes with a house and everything. We could save some money to get married, maybe start a family.’

But Maxine wasn’t so convinced: she’d be leaving her family, her friends. OK, she might not have seen so much of them recently, but it was enough to know they were there if she needed them. In Soham it would just be her and Ian. What if he went into one of his tempers and decided to break up with her? Who would she call? Where would she go?

But when Ian came back from the interview, he was so buoyed up by how well it had gone that she couldn’t help but
get swept away by his enthusiasm. ‘They asked me loads of stuff about how I’d deal with the children and make sure I kept an appropriate distance from them,’ he told her, his eyes shining in a way she hadn’t seen for ages. ‘They asked me what I’d do if one of the kids got a crush on me,’ here, he smirked a little, clearly relishing the idea of himself as a school Lothario. ‘I told them I’d report it to my manager straightaway. I know they were impressed – I really think this could be our chance.’

When Ian told her that the position came with a house next to the school for a peppercorn rent, Maxine’s resistance melted away. This could be really good for them. She had some private concerns about whether that other business with the rape accusation might count against Ian, but when the school rang to offer him the job she realised how silly her fears had been. Of course everyone else would have known as well as she did how ridiculous that charge was. She should never have had any doubts.

And for a while after they moved to Soham in November 2001, it really did seem like this would prove to be their lucky break. Ian was earning a steady £16,000 a year, and with the rent on 5 College Close fixed at just £25 a week, they had plenty of disposable income. For the first time, Maxine was able to start fixing up the little modern house the way she wanted it, without having to worry about moving again. Always obsessively tidy, she threw herself into housework, determined this was to be the place where her new stable life began; this was going to be a proper home.

The couple loved the little town, with its quiet residential areas, where children played in the street and people smiled at
you when you walked past. Ian puffed up with pride in his new position and insisted on using the title ‘Residential Site Officer’ rather than ‘caretaker’ which he felt carried less weight. For the first time he had status, he had authority. People respected him, despite the fact that he sometimes found dealing with other staff difficult and gained a reputation for getting
over-emotional
if he felt slighted at work.

‘I’ll put in a good word with you at the primary school, Max,’ he told his fiancée, knowing that St Andrew’s Primary, the other school that shared the same site as Soham Village College, was looking for a temporary classroom assistant.

Even though it was voluntary, Maxine felt a thrill of joy when she heard she’d got the post. It was a position of trust, working with children. They must think she was worth something. Life really did seem as if it was finally going their way.

Of course that didn’t mean it was all sunshine and roses. Ian could still fly into rages for no reason whatsoever, and as for helping around the house, he probably thought the toilets cleaned themselves! God job Maxine enjoyed housework. Well, ‘enjoyed’ probably wasn’t the word for it, she felt compelled to do it, not being able to relax until she knew there wasn’t a drawer even slightly open or a surface not dusted. But on the whole, life was pretty good.

Maxine loved her new job helping with the little kids in the classroom at St Andrews. She made herself so useful that when the first temporary placement came to an end, she was given another – this time helping in one of the Year Five classes with
the older kids in their penultimate year of primary school. Maxine got on well with all the children – at that age they tended to be friendly and helpful, eager to show how responsible they were. But two girls were to become particularly close to her – Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman.

Holly and Jessica were 10 years old, with shiny, neatly brushed hair and fresh, unguarded smiles. Their lives were typical of pre-pubescent girls all over the country – they hung out with their families, listened to music in their bedrooms with their friends, talked about animals, about boys in their class, about what they wanted to do when they grew up… And sometimes they talked about Maxine, their new classroom assistant. She was cool, they decided, with her fashionable clothes and her young, smiling fiancé and their lovely old dog. They’d asked if they could be bridesmaids at her wedding and had been thrilled when she told them they could.

There’s something so magical about girls this age – one minute they’re trying on make-up to make themselves older, the next squealing with delight over a new packet of sweets or a cute puppy glimpsed in the street. It’s something about the sheer potential in their bright, clear eyes, the undimmed innocence; the unquestioning belief that life will open up before them like a delicious box of chocolates just waiting to be tasted. No wonder Maxine, with her history of neuroses and disappointments, responded to Holly and Jessica’s smiling optimism. If life was such an adventure for them, why couldn’t it be so for her? Why shouldn’t this be the new start Ian had been promising?

But as the months wore on, the sheen started to come off the shiny new life Maxine had been hoping for. While Ian seemed to be getting on well at work, where he had won the confidence of his bosses by reporting a pupil who seemed to be getting over-close, at home he was still ordering her around and expecting her to clean up after him. Dishes he’d used remained piled up in the sink, the congealing food creating a rank fug that hung in the kitchen, until she came home to wash them up; dirty clothes were left on the floor for her to pick up. Something like her forgetting to stock up on muesli would send him into a bad mood that could last for hours.

In bed, there was little passion. Although they told everyone they were planning on starting a family, there was a distance between them that limited physical contact. Ian started chatting up one of the staff members at his school, Maxine tossed flirtatious glances at some of the customers at their favourite pub. It wasn’t enough to make Maxine worried, but it did take the edge off their brave new world.

Far more immediately upsetting was when she failed to get the full-time job that she had applied for at the primary school in the summer term on 2002. She’d been so happy there, so convinced she’d made a good impression with both the staff and the children, but it had been felt that she lacked boundaries when dealing with the kids, that she allowed herself to get too involved with them. The rejection was a crushing blow for an already fragile ego.

‘I worked really hard for them,’ she sobbed to Ian. ‘Those kids loved me!’

And Ian did his best to comfort her, revealing that often hidden side of him that made her feel they did have a future together after all, that they were in love with each other.

‘You’ll get another job, Max,’ he told her. ‘I’ll help sort you out – I know loads of people now.’

That was Ian all over – wanting to help but unable to resist taking control even over her misery, wanting to be the one to supply the solution, to fix things.

On the last day of term, Maxine was again in tears as she opened the cards the children had made for her, all thanking her for looking after them and telling her how much they were going to miss her. Typically, Jessica and Holly had laboured long and hard to make their cards perfect, their rounded childish writing spelling out their hopes that she’d come back and see them soon. ‘Miss u a lot. Hope to c u soon,’ Holly had written in different coloured pens. The letters spilled like petals across the page.

Then came the holidays. The summer of 2002 brought the usual mixture of lazy sun-dappled afternoons, where the normally quiet streets echoed with the shrieks of children playing and long damp days where the rain-clouds hung heavy over Soham like an unfulfilled promise.

At 5 College Close, Ian and Maxine relaxed into the slower pace of summer life, but still the petty arguments continued. Not long after the start of the holidays, Maxine decided to go home to Grimsby for the weekend to see her mother. Naturally, this plunged Ian into the blackest of humours. Not only would she be spending time with her family, which always made him
nervous, but also he’d be stuck at home on his own. A man of very few inner resources, Ian Huntley hated to be alone. Boredom made him frustrated and jumpy.

‘It’s only a few days,’ Maxine told him, uncharacteristically sticking to her guns. Ian could be so controlling sometimes, she needed to get away for a while to relax among people who accepted her for who she was, without picking her up on stuff all the time. ‘You can have a nice weekend just lounging about watching the football on the telly.’

But Ian Huntley soon grew bored of watching the TV after Maxine left on Saturday, 3 August. And he wasn’t the kind of man who made friends easily, so he didn’t have anyone to call up. Instead, he stayed in the house brooding on Maxine’s ‘desertion’ and imagining all the things she’d be getting up to without him there to keep an eye on her. By the Sunday afternoon, he was in a terrible mood, his deep-seated jealousy and insecurities compounded by the uncustomary solitude and the patchy grey drizzle.

Around 6.25pm, he dialled Maxine’s mobile number.

‘I can’t talk long, I’m off out with my mum later,’ she told him, the physical distance between them making her unusually assertive.

‘But you went out last night!’

Ian wasn’t happy at all. He knew that whenever Maxine went out with her mother, she always had a few drinks and got silly. And he knew the kind of places they went to – full of men on the hunt for tipsy women who just might have checked their
inhibitions in with their coats, just as he himself had been on many occasions in the past.

‘I don’t want you going out again,’ he raged at her. ‘You’re just going out on the pull!’

For once Maxine held firm. Who did he think he was, trying to tell her what she could and couldn’t do with her own mother? She knew there’d be a scene when she got back to Soham, but just at that moment she didn’t care. She was on holiday for a few days, and she was determined to enjoy it.

It was 6.28pm when Ian Huntley came off the phone from his fiancée. He was fuming, his fingers digging painfully into the palms of his hands, his jaw clenched tightly shut… He was still seething when the phone beeped three minutes later, indicating a text. ‘Don’t make me feel bad that I’m with my family,’ Maxine had written.

And then he saw them. Two little girls in matching Manchester United shirts, arms linked in giggling friendship, walking up the rain-darkened road towards his house, a blaze of red in the grey afternoon like wild poppies growing on a motorway embankment.

How must they have looked to Ian Huntley, the bully, who already had a long history of sexual attacks on young girls? Ian Huntley, the control freak, who had just had a row with the girlfriend he thought was behaving disrespectfully, who now needed to reassert his authority over someone else? The emotionally unstable Ian Huntley, whose unstoppable anger shot to the surface, who confused love with control and sex with power.

Did Jessica and Holly see Ian Huntley on his doorstep, washing his dog, as he claims? Did they stop to pet their pretty young teaching assistant’s Alsatian and shyly ask her fiancé where she was? Did he tell them she was inside taking a bath, perhaps invite them in to wait for her? Might he have done something to one or both of them that savagely ripped the freshly scrubbed smiles from their young faces? Did he see a mist as red as their shirts descend? Perhaps he panicked, hitting out against pretty mouths now contorted in fear. Did he press his hand hard against a scream that seemed to echo the one rising up somewhere in his own gullet? Did dawning horror and reality spew up inside him so much that he threw up on the floor, where just moments before children’s feet had trodden, lightly, tentatively in rubber-soled trainers?

No one knows exactly what happened to Jessica Chapman and Holly Wells once they walked through the door of 5 College Close. All we know is that when they came out again, they were being carried, slumped, lifeless. Somewhere in that house the giggling abruptly stopped and two heads, one brown, one blonde, flopped brokenly forward like puppets on cut strings.

This is the truth according to Ian Huntley, a known fantasist who lied about his RAF training, about winning the Lottery, about being a professional bodybuilder: Holly had a nosebleed, he recalled. He offers to help, leads the girls into the house and up to the bathroom. Jessica needs to use the loo, so he and Holly wait in the bedroom. A drop of blood falls from Holly’s nose onto the duvet cover, red to match her shirt. She is embarrassed,
fumblingly apologetic. He says it doesn’t matter. Then Holly sits on the edge of a bath filled with water. He slips and she falls, bangs her head and floats under the surface, hair spreading out like a golden cloud. He needs to do something, but now Jessica is screaming, ‘You pushed her, you pushed her!’ Huntley can’t think for the screaming, he needs to make her shut up. He presses his hand to her mouth, waiting for her to stop, knowing there’s something he ought to be doing, unable to work out what. There are two girls in matching red shirts, one under the water, one on the floor. Neither is moving. He crawls onto the landing, throws up, rocks himself to and fro to the rhythm of the thought in his head that says ‘No, no, no, no!’