Irvine Welsh - Crime

The other name that came back to you was George Marsden, part of the Hertfordshire team who had put Robert Ellis away for the kidnap and murder of twelve-year-old Nula. The prosecution had established that Ellis was prone to hanging around the local park where the girl had last been seen, by a tree-lined path that she was traversing en route to her aunt’s.

Only George believed that they’d got the wrong man. There were similarities with the case of Stacey Earnshaw, whose body had been found dumped in woods in the Lake District two years previously. When Hertfordshire Police hauled in Ellis, they discovered he’d had a girlfriend in Preston whom he’d visited regularly around the time of Stacey’s murder. The girl, Maria Rossiter, disclosed some fairly mundane details of their relationship to a tabloid, which were luridly recast and spiced with innuendo. Alongside a disturbing tape Ellis involuntarily made, this helped establish his guilt. George Marsden was sure it was same person who snatched Nula Andrews who had got Stacey Earnshaw in Manchester. Only he was absolutely convinced that it wasn’t Ellis. In Welwyn Garden City, a white van had been reported leaving the side street adjacent to the wooded parkland near the time of Nula’s disappearance. Now Ellis was inside and White Van Man was back.

You’d felt a disturbing weight settle around your limbs as you’d looked up at the wall clock at around 9 a.m. It was now over twenty-four hours since Britney had gone. You opted to give those stinging eyes a rest, head to the Stockbridge Deli and get another black coffee and call up George Marsden. You were on friendly terms, having got drunk together after a DNA-testing training course in Harrogate several years back.

—White van, was it? George casually asked after you’d explained the crime in broad brushstrokes. Refusing to confirm or deny this detail as a smile pulled at your features, you hoped your silence didn’t speak too many volumes.

You seemed to get immediate pay-off from the break when you returned to the footage. Once again Britney stepped out of her stair, turned, but this time you noticed that she seemed to give a half-wave; a furtive acknowledgement to someone approaching from her right. An enhancement of the image confirmed this impression. The person was out of shot but would be heading into the stair. You looked at the list of names of the neighbours. Then you loaded up the sex offenders register and the image of Tommy Loughran leapt out at you.

When you got down to the Hamil family’s house with Notman, it was discovered that Loughran was the man just beyond camera range. He’d been walking his dog yesterday morning. And he was the people’s choice, with votes cast in brick through his shattered window, and campaign graffiti dubbed on his wall:

NONCES DIE

The security guard, an old flasher, was an ex-alco turned Christian teetotaller. He carried the air of the sinner who had repented with gusto but still expected more retribution before the slate could hope to be wiped clean. Such was Loughran’s masochistic self-loathing, you figured that he could easily have been induced to admit that he’d committed the crime. The only problem was that after taking his dog home and seeing Britney leave for school, he boarded a crowded bus to a cinema, where local students had started a morning movie club. The transaction on his Bank of Scotland card and the film theatre’s records indicated that Loughran was watching the Werner Herzog documentary Grizzly Man . You recalled how the movie – about a self-righteous, liberal environmentalist, eaten by the creature he was trying protect – was a hit in the police canteen. Remembered Herzog dismissing the subject’s claims of the spiritual superiority of the bear. In the face of the beast, the German film-maker saw only ‘the cruel indifference of nature’. — What do you think the message of that film was, you’d asked the bemused Loughran.

Billy Lumsden, a janitor at Britney’s school who regularly talked to the girl (although he talked to most of the kids), was late for work on the day of the disappearance and was taken in to assist the inquiry. You learned that his marriage had broken up the previous year, when he’d left his wife and their three kids. Lumsden had already been suspended for being intoxicated on duty, and he confessed to you his feelings of loneliness and despair. The compassion you experienced for this man shocked you in its intensity. What if Lumsden was the beast? But he seemed so broken, so quietly desperate. Then it was established that his mother had suffered a bad fall at her home. Neighbours and a local shopkeeper verified his presence four miles away at the time of Britney’s vanishing.

The case continued to seep under your skin. The clock was ticking. The disappearance of a child was harrowing enough. But it was also showing you how the vulnerable were lining up to be devoured by the criminal justice system. The potential for miscarriage was so strong everywhere. It sowed a sickening moral relativism into your psyche, spreading a rash of doubt and uncertainty. You steeled yourself with the thought that somebody had taken Britney. She couldn’t have just vaporised into the misty air in those three minutes she turned the corner into Carr Road out of sight of Stella and Andrea. Somebody was evil. And you vowed that you were going to get them.

The starting point had been checking out the men who came into contact with the girl, at school, home and work, and slowly eliminating them from the investigation. Britney’s biological father was off the list; long estranged from the family, he was on an oil platform in the North Sea. One man remained unaccounted for and, chillingly, he’d vanished around the same time as the child. They couldn’t find her grandfather, Ronnie Hamil, at his flat in Dalry. Neighbours informed you that this was nothing new; Ronnie could vanish for days at a time when his giro arrived. It had been Gillman who had cottoned on to the grandfather connection first. — That cunt’s up tae something, he’d sneered over a photograph of Ronnie with Angela and the girls. — Auld Gary Glitter.

You put everyone in the team on a full-time search for Ronnie Hamil. All squad cars were instructed to be on the lookout for him. His tenement flat was staked out around the clock. The team spent hours visiting his haunts: the bookies, the off-licences and the bars of Dalry and Gorgie Roads. But you declined to join the hunt. Try as you might, you couldn’t stop yourself pursuing another avenue. — I’m heading off to do some snooping around, you’d informed Bob Toal.

Toal had given you his trademark lemon-sucking look. He knew you were up to something. Somehow you’d suspected this wasn’t going to be a typical child sex case; a bubbling in your innards told you that the trail wouldn’t lead to a traditional British nonce. You’d studied the mugshots of every paedophile on the register: the priests, schoolteachers and scoutmasters; the pervert uncles, opportunistic stepfathers and twisted blood-fathers with their arrogant and chilling rationalisations. Nobody fitted the bill. It seemed an American-style crime, or rather the kind of crime of US fiction, as you supposed that real American crimes were like British ones. But it was culturally American: a lone drifter, a predator, not driving across long and lonely interstate freeways over a vast continent, but shuffling along in a white van through crowded, nosy Britain.

What you did was drive to the airport, surreptitiously boarding a lunchtime flight to Gatwick, then jumping on a train down to Eastbourne, where George Marsden now lived. He’d resigned after the Nula Andrews case and now installed security systems and offered advice to nervous retirees. George had never struck you as a maverick. Ex-forces, Royal Marines; had fought in the first Gulf War. A straight-backed divorcee with a rugby player’s build, a floppy head of thick grey hair and sportive smile that suggested he wouldn’t spend too many lonely nights. With his pressed trousers and freshly laundered shirts, everything about him suggested steadfast adherence to procedure. Except that when he’d seen the evidence and it didn’t add up, he’d lost faith.