Mark Pearson - Death Row

Samuel Ramirez was never seen alive again.

The shopkeeper next door, Patrick Nyland, a single man of forty-two with a slight stammer and sometimes painful eczema that was visible on his hands, claimed that he had never seen the boy come into his shop when he was questioned by his worried mother ten minutes later. The police were called and an hour after Laura Ramirez had sent her son for eggs, Ellie Peters, another single mother, who claimed never to have known who the father of her child was and who lived three houses up from the Ramirez home, woke up from a liquid lunch she had been sleeping off and realised that her daughter was also missing. Alice Peters was nine years and five months old. With blonde curly hair and eyes like chips of sapphire flashing in bright sunlight.

Patrick Nyland was questioned exhaustively at Harrow police station on the Northolt Road, and the search for the missing children intensified. Nyland was kept in custody for twenty-four hours and his story seemed to stand up to rigorous interrogation. His house was searched and no sign of the children was discovered nor any evidence linking him to them. No witnesses came forward to say that they had seen the children, let alone to say they had been seen entering his shop. He was released without charge but events had been set in motion and his private life became the object of scrutiny — and not just by the official forces investigating the children’s disappearance. His shopfront window was smashed and the store petrol-bombed when information that he had been charged with a sex offence some years before became public knowledge. The policeman who leaked the information was never charged or disciplined for it. The fact that Nyland’s offence was not related to children — he had been found guilty of indecent exposure to a mature woman on the fields south of the medieval church on the hill — made little difference to an increasingly angry and vigilante-minded local populace. Two schools were near those fields where he had been exposing himself: a Catholic primary school and, of course, the more famous Harrow School further up the hill. In fear for his life, Patrick Nyland went into hiding while his insurance company fought his case. The police initiated an enquiry into the perpetrators of the arson but their efforts were minimal. All eyes, ears, feet, hearts and minds of the force were focused on finding the missing boy and girl. Television appeals were made, newspapers ran daily updates — genuinely keen to help, perhaps, but profiting nonetheless from the increased sales that their lurid headlines engendered. The children’s faces appearing in those papers were poster models of innocence. Samuel’s hair was every bit as curly as Alice’s but his was jet black and his eyes were the warm brown of rich caramel, and the hearts of the entire nation went out to the parents. Almost the entire nation. Many dark-hearted people looked at the pictures of those children with feelings very far removed from pity or compassion. Men and women both. Society waking up to the chilling knowledge that one in every four of those sexual predators was a woman. And one forty-seven-year-old man in particular collected the pictures as they appeared in the papers. He would cut and paste them into a scrapbook with hands sculpted by the harsh weather and salt air into cruel things. His eyes would glitter as he pressed the cuttings hard into the pages of the book, his hands stroking the children’s faces as he smoothed them flat, fixing them. They glittered with a green cast, like an old bottle, like the ocean.

A month passed and still there was no sign of the abducted children, no witnesses came forward. No contact or ransom demand was made. Although it was clear from the outset this was no abduction for financial gain. It was as if the boy and girl had simply vanished off the face of the Earth in a moment, in a heartbeat. Only of course it hadn’t been a heartbeat and every waking minute since they’d disappeared represented an eternity of suffering for the boy’s mother Laura Ramirez. Nightly she would seek peace in her dreams but found heartbreaking tragedy instead. She would see her son walking into her room, climbing into bed with her, snuggling up to keep warm and she would smooth his hair, realising it had all just been a nightmare. And then she would wake up and the horror of it all would hit her again, turning her stomach muscles liquid, her mind reeling so that she gagged and dry-retched, her body shuddering with the inconsolable pain of it. Ghost-walking through the days, her nerves shredded, she would look at every boy out on the streets and for a desperate moment she would dare to hope. And at home she would sit and look at the front door as though mesmerised, and at every knock she’d say a prayer and close her eyes before she opened it. The hope ate away at her like cancer.

As for Alice’s mother, to the outside observer the loss of her child had seemingly little impact on her behaviour. She had been an alcoholic drug abuser before Alice had gone missing and the sad tragedy of her daughter’s disappearance had no seemingly redemptive effect on her. She sucked up the pity she was offered like she sucked up cheap wine, until she was tired of having to put on a brave face, and the charity of strangers that had at first fuelled her alcoholic emotional anaesthesia dwindled to frosty stares and muttered comments whenever her back was turned, comments loud enough for her to hear, whispered fingers of blame poking right at her. What kind of an addict falls unconscious and allows her angel of a nine-year-old daughter to roam the streets alone like that … Finally she had had enough. She changed her name and moved so that she could put it all behind her and forget she had ever lived in Carlton Row.

But human conscience is an organic and mutable thing. Wired differently in the individual mind so that two people could be almost from different species.

Two years after the summer evening in mid-August when Samuel Ramirez and Ellie Peters had disappeared into the ether, Laura Ramirez killed herself by stepping front of a high-speed train at a level crossing. Her existence wiped out in a thunderous moment.

Three weeks after that Peter Garnier was arrested.

It happened like this.

*

On a late Sunday afternoon Garnier had approached a small eight-year-old boy — who was seemingly on his own — in some wooded parkland bordering the Ruislip Lido. It was common land, like the Mad Bess Woods a mile or so away. The boy’s father, unobserved by Garnier, was in the trees attending to a call of nature. As he came out Peter Garnier moved swiftly away but when the father learned that the man had asked his son to help him look for a lost dog he swore loud enough to startle the boy and set off in furious pursuit. Garnier, seeing that he was being chased, took off at a fast run, but he was a slight man, never a sportsman, and was certainly no match for the enraged father, who was a plasterer from Northolt, a weekend footballer and a fan of the Sun newspaper. When he was finally pulled off him, Peter Garnier required hospital treatment for multiple injuries including internal bleeding, fractured ribs and a broken jaw. While being treated in hospital and unable to speak, his car remained on a road with no parking restrictions at the weekend but which came into force from eight a.m. the following Monday.

At ten past nine on that Monday morning Arthur Ellis, a fifty-nine-year-old traffic warden and chronic arthritis sufferer nearing retirement, was ticketing the car when he heard a soft whimpering sound like that of a small frightened puppy coming from inside the locked boot. Calling for assistance, he tried to open the boot himself. Becoming ever more frantic as the whimpering sound had faded away and now there was only a chilling silence. He tried to open the boot using a Swiss army knife that he carried but to no avail. He ran to the nearest door and banged on it but there was no reply. He ran to the next door along and had better luck. A puzzled middle-aged unemployed man in his dressing gown answered and let the traffic warden use his phone to call the police.