Page 61 of Dying Truth

‘Initiation rites to gain entry. It goes right back. Stuart Pierson in Igos, Cincinnati, was taken into the forest and was found hit by a train. No one was ever charged. A kid named Michael Davis in 1994 was beaten, kicked and punched repeatedly, taken back to his student apartment and died from massive internal injuries. A kid named Jack Ivey was involved in a drinking contest, stripped to his underwear, tied to the back of a truck, driven around and left for dead. The perpetrators got bloody community service,’ he snarled.

‘But what…’

‘There are hundreds of ’em, Stace. Hundreds of pointless deaths because of these exclusive clubs that people are desperate to join, and most of the time no one gets punished. It seems that what happens at school stays at school,’ he said with disgust. ‘There’s a code of silence that fucks me right off.’

‘And this involved Sadie Winters how?’ she asked, bringing him back, subtly, to the case at hand.

‘I don’t even know that it does,’ he said, honestly. ‘But there’s something going on at that school, and I want to know what it is.’

Stacey sighed. ‘When you’re like this, Kev, there’s no reasoning with you, and this is as good a chance as you’re gonna get.’

‘Meaning?’

‘The boss told you to follow your nose for today, so it had better lead you somewhere good,’ she said, pulling the keyboard towards her, signalling the end of the conversation.

Stacey had a point and he already knew where he wanted to go.

Over the course of the last two years there were three student names not repeated on the term list. Meaning they had left the school, quickly, mid-term.

And he wanted to know why.

Forty-One

Ted placed the mugs of coffee on the table that separated the two wooden seats of the companion set that overlooked the fish pond. Ted had insisted that such a conversation required caffeine.

‘Moby died,’ she observed, as he slowly took his seat beside her. She noted that his joints appeared to be giving him trouble and pushed away the pang of sadness.

‘Yes, my dear. Just a couple of weeks ago.’

She said nothing but felt the loss of the gold carp she’d named many years earlier.

‘So, you think a child could be responsible for a murder you’re investigating?’

‘I don’t know,’ she answered honestly. ‘But I can’t rule it out. Someone has to consider it.’

‘Your colleagues are less open to the possibility?’

She nodded. ‘And yet somehow it seems easier for me. Why is that, Ted?’ she asked, quietly.

Her dark mind always seemed able to explore a depth of depravity that was deeper than most normal people could go; her brain more able to accept the heinous level that humanity could produce.

‘Because the very idea of a child being able to kill, especiallyanotherchild, challenges our belief in innate innocence, which is not something you have extensive experience of, my dear.’

He sipped his coffee and continued. ‘Your eyes were opened to the evil that exists around us at a very early age. You never had that blissful ignorance of the horrors that should be a God-given right. There is no preconceived notion that needs to be destroyed before you can consider the possibilities, all possibilities, however dark or misguided they may be.’

‘And are they, misguided?’ she asked, hoping he would quote some kind of statistic that would assure her that they couldn’t possibly be.

‘Not necessarily, I’m afraid,’ he said, flexing fingers that were showing signs of arthritis. ‘Children do kill, and they do kill other children. Experts have categorised them into three types. You have the ones that kill for the thrill. They enjoy the hands-on kill, torture beforehand and sometimes mutilation afterwards. Our very own Jon Venables and Robert Thompson fell into that category when they abducted two-year-old Jamie Bulger from that shopping centre.’

He shook his head and closed his eyes. ‘Those boys did unspeakable things to that child. There were forty-two injuries.’

Kim held up her hand to stop him from continuing, she’d read the accounts of the torture and had been unable to remove the images from her mind for months.

‘Although before your time, I’m sure you’ve heard of Mary Bell. In 1968 she killed a four-year-old and a three-year-old when she was only eleven herself. Her own mother had tried to kill her on numerous occasions and forced her to perform sexual acts from the age of four.’

‘I know the case,’ Kim said. She’d researched it after the woman’s lifelong anonymity and that of her daughter had been threatened by the release of a new book.

Ted continued. ‘There was a thirteen-year-old kid named Eric Smith who abducted a four-year-old boy. He strangled him, dropped rocks on his head and then used a tree branch to—’