Page 29

TWENTY-EIGHT

He’d been thinking about his parents, on and off, all day.

Three years gone now, both of them, and it hadn’t got any easier, and the most terrible thing of all was that, when he tried to picture them, he could only see them as they’d been in those first few days of the trial.

His mum in her best blue dress and his dad in a suit and tie, because they thought that was important.

Because you dressed up if you were going to court and they understood those things.

‘It isn’t like we haven’t had to do it before,’ his mum had said.

He’d dressed up, too, worn a jacket his mum had picked out for him.

Not that he’d lasted very long in that courtroom.

They were pinched and pale, the faces he remembered.

Unsmiling, for obvious reasons, and it was so unfair because both of them had smiled a lot before that.

He doubted very much that either of them had ever smiled or laughed again.

Just hard stares and harder silences for the three poxy months they had left after that verdict came in.

Picking their way quietly through the wreckage of it.

Martin and Diane, fading away together in a few small rooms, with her dress and his suit both dry-cleaned and hanging up in the wardrobe.

Forty years married, then gone within a fortnight of each other.

They’d stayed all the way through the trial, his mum and dad, even when it had become fairly bloody obvious which way things were going.

They wanted to be there, because it was the right thing to do, they’d told him, the loving thing.

So, day after day, they’d sat there, helpless, and listened to all the lies.

They’d watched, saying nothing while one bullshit witness after another had sworn a sacred oath then cheerfully perjured themselves; scientific experts and copper after filthy copper, all of them conspiring to destroy his parents’ world while they sat holding hands in the gallery.

He hadn’t been able to keep quiet or behave himself like they had.

He’d had plenty to say, right from the off, which was why he’d only just managed to dodge a contempt charge and ended up making his protests on the street outside.

He’d known that badgering journalists and shouting at passers-by about justice wasn’t going to make any difference to what was happening in that courtroom, but he had to tell people the truth.

Someone needed to do it, didn’t they? To let everyone know what was being done in their name, in the crown’s name, whatever, the complete and utter disgrace of what those bastards were doing.

But a placard and a loudhailer were never going to measure up against barristers in their stupid wigs and the so-called indisputable forensic evidence.

So, in the end, after he’d watched his parents wither and die, he’d gone searching for some evidence of his own and found a different way to do things, in a different place.

To protest and then, eventually, to punish.

He wasn’t what you’d call squeaky clean before then, never really had been. He’d hung around with bad lads and occasionally he’d been one himself. Rape , though . . . that was something else entirely.

Rape was ridiculous.

Rape was worse than murder.

Rape was disgusting and the people that did it were animals.

Obviously, he had a very particular reason for feeling quite so strongly about it, so driven to mete out his own version of justice.

He understood that his take on it was what some people would call extreme, especially where rapists in uniform were concerned, but he didn’t much care because it was the only way to make things fair again.

To dull the pain caused by everything they’d done to him, and to Martin and Diane, and worst of all to the only person left in the world he cared about.

Peter . . .

He could feel the rage starting to bubble, the acid in his stomach, so he sat down at his computer and logged on.

It was strange, but an hour or so browsing through the posts on FUCK THE FILTH or ROASTING THE PORK almost always calmed him down.

He could happily lose himself in other people’s disgust for a while, take some comfort from it, and, when he logged off, he would not be feeling quite so alone.

The fact that he did feel so strongly was why he’d reached out to ButterflyGrrrl to begin with.

He hadn’t done so straight away, but he’d known he was going to as soon as he’d seen her first message.

How could he ignore it? They’d been coming at things from very different angles, obviously, but they shared the same hatred.

It was why he’d offered to help, even if she’d pretended not to understand exactly what that help would entail and wasn’t as immediately grateful as she might have been. As she should have been.

It sounded like she was coming round, though.