Elizabeth George: This Body of Death

He said his intention was to go directly to school, and in his first interview with the police he claims he did go there. This was a story he did not change until he was read the statement made by his teacher attesting to his truancy that day, at which point he changed his story to confess that he went into the allotments, which were a feature of the Buchanan Estate and which were positioned behind the terrace where the Spargos lived. There, he “might’ve give a bit of aggro to an old bugger working in a patch of veg” and he “might’ve bashed in some shed door or something” where he “could’ve nicked some secateurs maybe only I didn’t keep them, I never kept them.” The “old bugger” in question does verify Michael’s presence in the allotment at eight in the morning, although it’s doubtful that the small enclosures of raised beds held much attraction for the boy, who seems to have spent some fifteen minutes “tramping them about” according to the pensioner, until “I gave him a right proper talking to. He swore like a little thug and scarpered.”

It seems at this point that Michael headed in the general direction of his school, some half mile from the Buchanan Estate. It was somewhere on this route, however, that he encountered Reggie Arnold.

Reggie Arnold was quite a contrast to Michael Spargo. Where Michael was tall for his age and rake thin, Reggie was squat and had carried baby fat well beyond babyhood. His head was regularly shaved to the skull, which made him the subject of considerable teasing at school (he was generally referred to as “that slap-head wanker”) but, unlike Michael’s, his clothing was usually neat and clean. His teachers report that Reggie was a “good boy but with a short fuse” and when pressed they tend to identify the cause of this short fuse as “Dad and Mum’s troubles and then there’s the trouble with his sis and brother.” From this, it is probably safe to assume that the unusual nature of the Arnold marriage, in addition to the disability of an older brother and the mental incapacity of a younger sister, put Reggie in a position of getting lost in the shuffle of daily life.

Rudy and Laura Arnold, it must be said, had been dealt a difficult hand of cards. Their older son was permanently wheelchair bound from severe cerebral palsy and their daughter had been deemed unfit for a normal classroom education. These two elements of the Arnolds’ life had the effect of simultaneously focusing nearly all parental attention on the two problematic children and burdening what was already a rather fragile marriage in which Rudy and Laura Arnold had separated time and again, putting Laura in the position of coping on her own.

Caught up in the middle of trying familial circumstances, Reggie was unlikely to receive much attention. Laura readily confesses that she “didn’t do right by the boy,” but his father claims that he “had him over the flat five or six times,” in apparent reference to meeting his paternal obligations during those periods when he and his wife were living apart. As can be imagined, Reggie’s unmet need for nurturing metamorphosed into common attempts at gaining adult attention. In the streets, he evidenced this through petty thievery and the occasional bullying of younger children; in the classroom, he acted up. This acting up was seen by his teachers, unfortunately, as the aforementioned “short fuse” and not as the cry for help it actually was. When thwarted, he was given to throwing his desk, beating his head upon it and upon the walls, and falling to the floor in a tantrum.

On the day of the crime, accounts have it-and CCTV films confirm-that Michael Spargo and Reggie Arnold encountered each other at the corner shop nearest the Arnold home and on Michael’s route to school. The boys were acquainted and had evidently played together in the past but were as yet unknown to each other’s parents. Laura Arnold reports that she’d sent Reggie to the shops for milk, and the shopkeeper confirms that Reggie purchased a half liter of semi-skimmed. He also apparently stole two Mars bars “for a bit of a laugh,” according to Michael.

Michael attached himself to Reggie. Along the route back to the Arnold house, the boys extended their enjoyment of Reggie’s errand by opening the milk and dumping its contents into the petrol tank of a Harley-Davidson motorcycle, an act of mischief witnessed by the motorcycle’s owner, who chased them unsuccessfully afterwards. He was later to remember the mustard-coloured anorak that Michael Spargo was wearing, and although he was not able to identify either boy by name, he recognised a photo of Reggie Arnold when the police presented it to him, along with other faces.

Reaching home without the milk he’d been sent out to fetch, Reggie reported to his mother-with Michael Spargo as putative witness-that he’d been bullied by two boys who took the money intended for the milk. “He cried and was getting himself into one of his states,” Laura Arnold reports. “And I believed him. What else was there to do?” This is indeed a relevant question, for without her husband in the home and considering that she was attempting alone to care for two disabled children, a missing carton of milk, no matter how needed it might have been that morning, would have seemed a very small matter to her. She did, however, want to know who Michael Spargo was, and she asked her son that question. Reggie identified him as a “mate from school,” and he took Michael along to do his mother’s next bidding, which was evidently to get his sister out of bed. By now, it was in the vicinity of eight forty-five and, if the boys planned to go to school that day, they were going to be late. Doubtless, they knew this, as Michael’s interview details an argument that Reggie had with his mother following her instructions to him: “Reggie started whingeing about how it would make him late, but she didn’t care. She told him to get his bum upstairs and fetch his sister. She said he was to pray to God and say thanks that he wasn’t like the other two,” by which she likely was referring to the disabilities of his brother and sister. This last remark from Laura Arnold appears to have been a common refrain.

Despite the command, Reggie did not fetch his sister. Rather, he told his mother to “do the bad thing to herself” (these are Michael’s words, as Reggie seems to have been more direct) and the boys left the house. Back in the street, however, they saw Rudy Arnold who, during the time they’d spent in the kitchen with Laura, had arrived by car and was “hanging ’bout outside, like he was afraid to come in.” He and Reggie exchanged a few words, which seem to have been largely unpleasant, at least on Reggie’s part. Michael claims he asked who the man was, assuming it was “his mum’s boyfriend or something,” and Reggie told him “the stupid git” was his father and followed this declaration with a minor act of vandalism: He took a milk basket from a neighbour’s front step and threw it into the street, where he jumped on it and crushed it.

According to Michael, he took no part in this. His statement asserts that at this point he had every intention of going to school, but that Reggie announced he was “doing a bunk” and “having some bloody fun for once.” It was Reggie, Michael says, and not Michael himself who came up with the idea of including Ian Barker in what was to follow.

At eleven years of age, Ian Barker had already been labeled as damaged, difficult, troubled, dangerous, borderline, angry, and psychopathic, depending upon whose report is read. He was, at this time, the only child of a twenty-four-year-old mother (his paternity remains unknown to this day), but he’d been brought up to believe that this young woman was his older sister. He seems to have been quite fond of his grandmother, who he naturally assumed was his mother, but he apparently loathed the girl he’d been taught to believe was his sister. At the age of nine, he was considered old enough to learn the truth. However, it was a truth he did not take well to hearing, especially as it came hard on the heels of Tricia Barker’s being asked to leave her mother’s house and being told to take her son with her. In this, Ian’s grandmother now says she was doing her best to “practise the tough love. I was willing to keep both of them-the lad and Tricia, too-as long as the girl worked, but she wouldn’t hold on to a job and she wanted parties and friends and staying out all hours and I reckoned if she had to bring up the boy on her own, she’d change her ways.”