This Body of Death

Chapter Fourteen

“’COURSE HE WAS HERE,” HAD BEEN CLIFF COWARD’S CONFIRMATION of Gordon Jossie’s alibi. “Where else’s he s’posed to be, eh?” A short cocky little bloke wearing crusty blue jeans and a sweat-stained headband, he’d been leaning against the bar at his regular watering hole in the village of Winstead, a pint in front of him and an empty crisp bag balled up next to his fist. He played with this as they spoke. He gave few details. They were working on a pub roof near Frith and he expected he’d know well enough if Gordon Jossie hadn’t been there six days ago as it was only the two of them and someone was up on that scaffold grabbing the bundles of reeds as he’d hoisted them up. “’Spect that was Gordon,” he’d said with a grin. “Why? What’s he s’posed to’ve done? Mugged some old lady in Ringwood market square?”

“It’s more a question of murder,” Barbara told him.

Cliff’s face altered, but his story did not. Gordon Jossie had been with him, he said, and Gordon Jossie was no murderer. “I think I’d bloody well know,” he noted. “Been working for him over a year. Who’s he s’posed to have done?”

“Jemima Hastings.”

“Jemima? Not a chance.”

They went from Winstead up to Itchen Abbas, bypassing Winchester on the motorway. On a small property between Itchen Abbas and the hamlet of Abbotstone, they found the master thatcher at whose side Gordon Jossie had worked years earlier to learn the trade. He was called Ringo Heath-“Don’t ask,” Heath said sourly. “It might have been John, Paul, or George and don’t I bloody well know it”-and when they arrived, he was seated on a battered bench, on the shady side of a brick house. He seemed to be whittling, as in one hand he had a wicked-looking knife with a sharp blade curving into a hook, and he was applying this to a thin switch, splitting it first and then sharpening both of its ends into arrow-tip points. At his feet lay a pile of switches yet to be seen to. In a wooden box next to him on the bench, he was placing those that had already been whittled. To Barbara, they looked like toothpicks for a giant, each of them perhaps a yard or more long. They also looked like potential weapons. As did the knife itself, which she learned was called a spar hook. And the toothpicks were the spars, which were used to make staples.

Heath held one up, extended between his two palms. He bent it nearly double and then released it. It sprang back to its original straight line. “Pliable,” he told them although they hadn’t asked. “Hazel wood. You c’n use willow at a pinch, but hazel’s best.” It would be twisted into a staple, he told them, and the staple would be used to hold the reed in place once it was in position on the rooftop. “Gets buried in the reeds and eventually rots away, but that’s no matter. Reeds’re all compressed by then and that’s what you want: compression. Best rooftop money can buy, thatch is. It’s not all about chocolate-box houses and front gardens done up with pansies, is it?”

“I expect not,” Barbara said cooperatively. “What d’you think, Winnie?”

“Looks good to me, roof like that,” Nkata said. “Bit of a problem with fire, I’d ’spect.”

“Bah, nonsense,” Heath said. “Old wives’ tale.”

Barbara doubted it. But they weren’t there to talk about the flammable nature of reeds on rooftops. She stated their purpose: Gordon Jossie and his apprenticeship with Ringo Heath. They’d phoned Heath in advance to track him down. He’d said, “Scotland Yard? What’re you lot doing out here?” but otherwise he’d been cooperative.

What could he tell them about Gordon Jossie? Barbara began. Did he remember him?

“Oh. Aye. No reason to forget Gordon.” Heath continued his work as he gave his history with Jossie. He’d come to work as an apprentice a bit older than usual. He’d been twenty-one. Usually an apprentice was sixteen “which’s better for training as they don’t know a thing about a thing, do they, and they’re still at the point when they even might believe they don’t know a thing about a thing, eh? But twenty-one’s a bit old ’cause you don’t want some bloke set in his ways. I was a bit reluctant to take him on.”

But take him on he did, and things turned out well. Hard worker, Jossie was. A bloke who talked very little and listened a lot and “didn’t go round wearing those sodding earphones with music blasting away like kids do now. Half the time you can’t even get their attention, eh? You’re up on the scaffold shouting at ’em and they’re down below listening to whoever and bobbing their heads to the beat.” He said this last word scornfully, a man who obviously did not share his namesake’s passion for music.

Jossie, on the other hand, hadn’t been like the typical apprentice. And he’d been willing to do anything he’d been assigned to do, without claiming something was “beneath him or rubbish like that.” Once he was given actual thatching jobs to do-which, by the way, did not happen for the first nine months of his apprenticeship-he wasn’t ever above asking a question. And it would be a good question and never once did it have to do with “How much money c’n I expect to make, Ringo?” like he was thinking he’d be going out to buy some Maserati on what a thatcher makes. “It’s a good living, I tell him, but it’s not that good, so if you’re ’specting to impress the ladies with golden cuff links or whatever, you’re barking up a tree with no leaves, if you know what I mean. What I tell him is that there’s always need for a thatcher ’cause we’re talking ’bout listed buildings, eh? And they’re all round the south and up into Gloucestershire and beyond and they got to stay thatched. There’s no replacing ’em with tiles or anything else. So if you’re good-and he meant to be good, let me tell you-you work all year and you’ve gen’rally got more bookings than you c’n handle.”

Gordon Jossie had apparently been a model apprentice: With no complaint he’d started out doing nothing more than fetching, carrying, hoisting, cleaning up, burning rubbish-and according to Heath he “did it all right, mind you. No cutting corners. I could tell he was going to be good when I got him on the scaffold. This is detail work, this is. Oh, it looks like slapping reeds onto the rafters and that’s that, doesn’t it, but it’s step-by-step and a decent roof-a big one, say-takes months to put on ’cause it’s not like laying tiles or pounding shingles, is it? It’s working with a natural product, it is, so there’s no two reeds the same diameter and the length of them’s not exact. This is something takes patience and skill and it takes years to get it down so you can do a roof properly.”

Gordon Jossie worked for him as an apprentice for nearly four years, and by that time he’d gone far beyond the apprentice stage and was more like a partner. In fact, Ringo Heath had wanted to bring him on as a bona fide partner, but Gordon wanted to have his own business. So he’d left with Heath’s blessing, and had begun the way they all began: subcontracted to someone with a larger concern till he was able to break out on his own.

“Ever since, I end up with one after ’nother lazy sods to work as apprentices,” Heath concluded, “and believe me, I’d take ’nother older bloke like Gordon Jossie in the blink of an eye, if one came round.”

He’d filled the wooden box with completed spars as they were speaking, and he heaved it up and took it over to an open-back lorry, where he slung it alongside various crates that sat among a collection of curious implements, which Heath was happy to identify for them without being asked to do so. He was building up a real head of steam on his topic. They had shearing hooks for carving into the thatch-

“Takes about a millimeter off, it does, sharp as anything, and you got to use it with care lest you slice into your hand.”

– leggetts which were used to dress the thatch and which, to Barbara, looked like nothing more than an aluminium grill with a handle, something one might use on the cooker to fry up bacon; the Dutchman, which was used in place of the leggett to dress the thatch when the roof was curved…

Barbara nodded sagely and Nkata jotted everything in his notebook, as if expecting he’d be tested on it later. She was having trouble keeping it all straight and determining how she would bring the thatcher away from his lengthy exposition on the process of thatching a roof and back to the subject of Gordon Jossie, when Heath mentioned “and ever’one of them’s different,” which brought her round to pay closer attention to what he was saying.

“…bits an’ bobs that the blacksmith provides, like the crooks an’ the pins.” The crooks were curved at one end-hence the name, as they resembled a shepherd’s crook in miniature-and these were hooked round the reeds and driven into the rafters to hold them in place. The pins, which resembled long spikes with an eye at one end and a sharp point at the other, held the reeds in place while the thatcher was working. These came from the blacksmith, and the interesting bit was that every blacksmith made them according to however he wanted to make them, especially as far as the point was concerned.

“Forged on four sides, forged on two sides, cut to give it a slash tip, spun on a grinding wheel…Whatever the blacksmith fancies. I like the Dutch ones best. I like a proper forging, I do.” He said this last as if one could not expect such a thing as proper forging to go on in England any longer.

But Barbara was taken by the very idea of blacksmithing and how it might relate to making a weapon. The thatching tools themselves were weaponlike, if it came to that, no matter Heath’s referring to them dismissively as the bits and bobs of his job. Barbara picked one up-she chose a pin-and found its tip was nice and sharp and suitable for murder. She handed it to Nkata and saw by his expression that they were of the same mind on the matter.

She said, “Why was he twenty-one years old when he came to you, Mr. Heath? Do you know?”

Heath took a moment, apparently to adjust to the abrupt change in topic as he’d been nattering on about why the Dutch took more pride in their work than the English and this seemed to have to do with the EU and the mass migration of Albanians and other Eastern Europeans into the UK. He blinked and said, “Eh? Who?”

“Twenty-one was old for an apprentice, you said. What had Gordon Jossie been doing before he came to you?”

College, Ringo Heath told them. He’d been a student in some college in Winchester, studying one trade or another although Heath couldn’t recall which it was. He’d brought two letters with him, though. Recommendations these were, from someone or other who’d taught him. It wasn’t the typical way an apprentice presented himself for potential employment, so he’d been quite impressed with that. Did they want to see the letters? He thought he still had them.

When Barbara told him that they did indeed want to see them, Heath turned towards his house and bellowed, “Kitten! You’re needed.” To this a most unkittenlike woman emerged. She carried a rolling pin under her arm and she looked the type who’d be happy to use it: big, brawling, and muscular.

Kitten said, “Really, pet, why’ve you got to yell? I’m only just inside, in the kitchen,” in a surprisingly genteel voice, completely at odds with her appearance. She sounded like an upstairs someone from a costume drama, but she looked like someone who’d be washing the cook pots in a decidedly downstairs scullery.

Heath simpered at her, saying, “Darling girl. Don’t know the strength of my own voice, do I. Sorry. Have we still got them letters that Gordon Jossie handed over when he first wanted a job? You know which ones I mean, don’t you? The ones from his college? You remember them?” And to Barbara and Winston, “She keeps the books and such, does my Kitten. And the girl’s got a mind for facts and figures that’d make you dizzy. I keep telling her to go on telly. One of those quiz programmes or summat, if you know what I mean. I say we could be millionaires, we could, if she got herself on a quiz show.”

“Oh, you do go on, Ringo,” Kitten said. “I made that chicken and leek pie you love, by the by.”

“Precious girl.”

“Silly boy.”

“I’ll see you when I see you.”

“Oh, you do talk, Ring.”

“Uh…About those letters?” Barbara cut in. She glanced at Winston, who was watching the exchange between man and wife like a bloke at an amorous Ping-Pong match.

Kitten said that she would fetch them, as she reckoned they were in Ringo’s business files. She wouldn’t be a moment, she said, because she liked to stay organised since “leave things to Ringo, we’d be living under mounds of paperwork, let me tell you.”

“True enough,” Ringo said, “darling girl.”

“Handsome-”

“Thank you, Mrs. Heath,” Barbara said pointedly.

Kitten made kissy noises at her husband, who made a gesture that seemed to indicate he’d love to swat her on the bum, at which she giggled and disappeared inside the house. Within two minutes, she was back with them, and she carried a manila folder from which she extricated the aforementioned letters for their inspection.

These were, Barbara saw, recommendations attesting to Gordon Jossie’s character, his work ethic, his pleasant demeanour, his willingness to take instruction, and all the et ceteras. They were written on the letterhead of Winchester Technical College II, and one of them came from a Jonas Bligh while the other had been written by a Keating Crawford. They’d both indicated knowledge of Gordon Jossie from within the classroom and from outside the classroom. Fine young man, they declared, trustworthy and good-hearted and well deserving of an opportunity to learn a trade like thatching. One would not go wrong in hiring him. He was bound to succeed.

Barbara asked could she keep the letters. She’d return them to the Heaths, of course, but for the time being, if they didn’t mind…

They didn’t mind. At this point, however, Ringo Heath asked what Scotland Yard wanted with Gordon Jossie anyway. “What’s he s’posed to’ve done?” he asked them.

“We’re investigating a murder up in London,” Barbara told them. “A girl called Jemima Hastings. D’you know her?”

They didn’t. But what they did know and were willing to assert was that Gordon Jossie was definitely no killer. Kitten, however, added an intriguing detail to the Jossie résumé as they were about to leave.

He couldn’t read, she told them, which always made her wonder at the fact that he somehow completed courses in college. While obviously there were classes one took that might not require reading, she had always found it a bit odd that he’d managed such success at the Winchester college. She said to her husband, “You know, darling boy, that does suggest something not quite right about Gordon, doesn’t it? I mean, if he could actually manage to get through his course work and still hide the fact that he couldn’t read…It does rather imply an ability to hide other things, wouldn’t you say?”

“What d’you mean he couldn’t read?” Ringo demanded. “That’s rubbish, that is. Bah.”

“No, precious. It’s the truth. I saw it. He absolutely could not read.”

“D’you mean he had trouble with reading?” Nkata asked. “Or he couldn’t read.”

He couldn’t read, she said. In fact, while he knew the alphabet, he had to print it out in order to know it for certain. It was the most peculiar thing she’d ever seen. Because of this, she’d wondered more than once about how he’d gone through school. “Reckoned he’d been performing for the instructors in ways not entirely academic,” she concluded, “if you know what I mean.”

THROUGHOUT THE REST of the day, Meredith Powell felt a dull fire burning within her. It was accompanied by pounding in her head, one that wasn’t connected to pain but rather to the words she’s dead. The simple fact of Jemima’s death was bad: It put Meredith into a state of disbelief and sorrow, and the sorrow was more profound than she would ever have expected to feel for someone who was not a member of her immediate family. Beyond the fact of her death, though, was the additional fact that Jemima had been taken away before Meredith had been able to put things right between them, and this gnawed at her conscience and her heart. She could no longer remember what it even was that had actually so damaged their long friendship. Had it been a slow chipping away of their affection for each other, or had it suffered one deadly blow? She couldn’t recall, which told her how unimportant it must have been.

“I’m not like you, Meredith,” Jemima had said so many times. “Why can’t you just accept that?”

Because having a man’s not going to make you stop being afraid had been the answer. But it had been a reply that Jemima had pooh-poohed as an indication of Meredith’s jealousy. Except she hadn’t been jealous, not really. She’d merely been concerned. She’d watched Jemima flit from boy to boy to man to man for years in a restless search for something not a single one of them would ever be able to give her. And that had been what she’d wished her friend to understand and what she’d tried again and again to get across to her until finally she’d thrown up her hands-or Jemima had done, because she couldn’t remember now-and that had been that as far as friendship went between them.

But there had been a bigger issue that Meredith had failed to see till now: Why had it been so incredibly important to her that Jemima Hastings see things Meredith Powell’s way? And for that question, Meredith had no answer. But she was determined to find one.

She phoned Gordon Jossie’s house before leaving work at the end of the day. Gina Dickens answered, and this was good, as it was Gina Dickens whom Meredith wished to see. She said, “I need to talk to you. Will you meet me? I’m in Ringwood just now, but I can meet you anywhere, wherever you like. Just not at…not at Gordon’s please.” She didn’t want to see the house again. She didn’t think she could face it just now, not with another woman there, happily going about a life with Gordon Jossie while Jemima lay dead, cold, and murdered up in London.

Gina said, “The police have been here. They said that Jemima-”

Meredith squeezed her eyes shut, and the telephone felt cold and slick in her hand. She said, “I need to speak with you.”

“Why?”

“I’ll meet you. You name the place.”

“Why? You’re making me nervous, Meredith.”

“I don’t mean to. Please. I’ll meet you anywhere. Just not at Gordon’s.”

There was a pause. Then Gina named Hinchelsea Wood. Meredith didn’t want to risk a wood, with all its solitude and everything that solitude suggested about danger, no matter what Gina Dickens said about being nervous of her and all that this was supposed to imply about Gina Dickens’ apparent innocence. Meredith suggested a heath instead. What about Longslade Heath? There was a car park and they could-

“Not a heath,” Gina said at once.

“Why not?”

“Snakes.”

“What snakes?”

“Adders. There’re adders on the heath. You must know that. I read that somewhere, and I don’t want to-”

“Hatchet Pond, then,” Meredith cut in. “It’s outside Beaulieu.” They agreed on this.

There were other people at Hatchet Pond when Meredith arrived. There were ponies and foals as well. The people strolled along the edge of the water, they walked their dogs, they sat in cars reading, they fished, they chatted to each other on benches. The ponies lapped water and grazed.

The pond itself stretched out a good distance, with a finger of land on the far side that reached into the water and was topped with beech and chestnut trees and a single, graceful willow. It was a good trysting place for young people at night, tucked off the road so that parked cars could not be seen, but still conveniently located at the intersection of several routes: with Beaulieu immediately to its east, East Boldre to the south, and Brockenhurst to the west. All sorts of trouble between hot-blooded adolescents could be got into here. Meredith knew that from Jemima.

She waited some twenty minutes for Gina to arrive. She herself had barreled the distance from Ringwood, driven by determination. It was one thing to be deeply suspicious about Gordon Jossie, Gina Dickens, and the fact that most of Jemima’s belongings were packed away in Gordon’s house. It was another thing to learn that Jemima had been murdered. All the way from Ringwood, Meredith had engaged in a mental conversation with Gina about these and other matters. When Gina finally arrived in her little red convertible with her enormous film star dark glasses covering half her face and a scarf keeping her hair in place-as if she were Audrey flipping Hepburn or something-Meredith was quite ready for her.

Gina got out of the car. She cast a look at one of the ponies nearby, as Meredith crossed the car park to her. Meredith said, “Let’s walk,” and when Gina hesitated, saying, “I’m a bit leery of the horses,” Meredith countered with, “Oh for God’s sake. They won’t hurt you. They’re just ponies. Don’t be stupid.” She took Gina’s arm.

Gina pulled away. “I can walk on my own,” she said stiffly. “But not near the horses.”

“Fine.” Meredith headed along a path that skirted the water. She cooperatively chose a direction away from the ponies, towards a lone fisherman who was casting his line not far from a heron, motionless as it waited to scoop up an unsuspecting eel.

“What’s this about?” Gina demanded.

“What do you think this is about? Gordon has her car. He has her clothes. Now she’s dead in London.”

Gina stopped walking, and Meredith turned to her. Gina said, “If you’re suggesting or even trying to get me to believe that Gordon-”

“Wouldn’t she have sent for her clothes? Eventually?”

“She wouldn’t need her country clothing in London,” Gina said. “What was she going to do with it there? The same goes for her car. She didn’t need a car. Where would she keep it? Why would she drive it?”

Meredith tore at the skin round her fingernails. There was truth here somewhere. She meant to have it. She said, “I know all about you, Gina. There’s no programme anywhere round here for young girls at risk. Not at the college in Brockenhurst, and not at the comprehensive. Social services haven’t even heard of a programme and social services haven’t even heard of you. I know because I checked, all right? So why don’t you tell me what you’re doing here, really. Why don’t you tell me the truth about you and Gordon? About when you really met and how you met and what that meant to him and Jemima.”

Gina’s lips parted then pursed. She said, “Honestly. You’ve been checking on me? What’s wrong with you, Meredith? Why are you so-”

“Don’t you dare turn this on me. That’s clever of you, but I’m not about to be dragged in that direction.”

“Oh, don’t be ridiculous. No one’s dragging you anywhere.” She pushed past Meredith on the narrow path along the water. “If we’re going to walk, let’s bloody well walk.”

Gina stalked off. After a moment, she began to speak over her shoulder, saying sharply, “Just think, if you’re capable of it. I told you I was establishing a programme. I didn’t tell you it existed. And the first step in establishing a programme is assessing need, for heaven’s sake. That’s what I’m doing. That’s what I was doing when I met Gordon. And yes, all right, I admit. I haven’t been as diligent as I could have been about it, I haven’t been as…as dedicated as I was when I first came to the New Forest. And yes, all right, the reason for that is that I got involved with Gordon. And yes, I’ve rather liked being Gordon’s partner and having Gordon provide for me. But as far as I know, none of that is a crime, Meredith. So what I want to know-if you don’t mind-is why you dislike Gordon so much? Why can’t you stand the thought of me-or anyone else I daresay-being with him? Because this really isn’t about me, is it? This is about Gordon.”

“How did you meet him? How did you really meet him?”

“I told you! I’ve told you the absolute truth from the first. I met him last month, in Boldre Gardens. I saw him later that day and we went for a drink. He asked me for a drink and he looked harmless enough and it was a public place and…Oh, why am I bothering with all this? Why don’t you just come out with it? Why don’t you tell me what you suspect me of? Murdering Jemima? Encouraging the man I love to murder her? Or is it loving him at all that bothers you and why would that be?”

“This isn’t about loving anyone.”

“Oh, isn’t it? Then perhaps you’re accusing me of sending Gordon off to murder Jemima for some reason. Perhaps you see me standing on the front step and waving a handkerchief as he drives off to do whatever he was supposed to do. But why would I do that? She was gone from his life.”

“Perhaps she got in touch with him. Perhaps she wanted to come back. Perhaps they met somewhere and she said she wanted him and you couldn’t have that because then you’d have to-”

“So I killed her? Not Gordon at all, but me this time? Do you know how ridiculous you sound? And do you want to be meeting out here in the wilds of Hatchet Pond with a killer?” She put her hands on her hips as if thinking about the answer to her question. She smiled and said bitterly, “Ah. Yes. I see why you didn’t want Hinchelsea Wood. How foolish of me. I might have killed you there. I’ve no idea how I would have done it, but that’s what you think. That I’m a killer. Or that Gordon is. Or that we both are, somehow in cahoots to eliminate Jemima for reasons that are so bloody obscure…” She turned away. There was a weather-beaten bench nearby and she made for this and dropped upon it. She whipped off her scarf and shook back her hair. She removed her dark glasses, folded them up, and held them tightly in her hand.

Meredith stood before her, arms crossed against her chest. She was suddenly and acutely aware of how different they were: Gina tanned and voluptuous and obviously appealing to any man and herself a miserable, freckled beanpole of a thing, alone and likely to stay that way. Only that wasn’t the issue here.

Yet as if Gina had read her mind, she said in a tone no longer bitter at all but instead resigned, “I’m wondering if this is just what you do to any woman who has a nice relationship with a man. I know you didn’t approve of Gordon and Jemima. He said you didn’t want him to be with her. But I couldn’t sort out why, what it was to you if she and Gordon were partners. Was it because you yourself have no one? Because, perhaps, you keep trying and failing while all round you women and men get attached with no trouble at all? I mean, I know what happened to you. Gordon told me. Jemima told him. Because, of course, he was trying to sort out why you disliked him so much and she said it had to do with London, with when you lived there and got involved with the married man, the one you didn’t know was married, and there you were pregnant…”

Meredith felt her throat close. She wanted to stop the flow of words but she couldn’t: the catalogue of her personal failures. She felt weak and dizzy as Gina kept talking…about betrayal and then desertion and then bloody little fool, don’t claim you didn’t know I was married because you are simply not that stupid and I never lied, I never once lied, and why the hell weren’t you taking precautions unless it was that you wanted to trap me is that what it was did you want to trap me well I won’t be trapped not by the likes of you or by anyone else if it comes down to it and yes, yes, you can damn well sort out exactly what that means my dear.

“Oh, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Here. Please sit.” Gina rose and urged Meredith onto the bench next to her. She said nothing more for several minutes as across the surface of the placid water dragonflies flitted, their fragile wings flashing purple and green in the light.

“Listen,” Gina said quietly, “can you and I possibly be friends? Or if not friends, perhaps nodding acquaintances? Or maybe nodding acquaintances at first and then afterwards friends?”

“I don’t know,” Meredith said dully, and she wondered how widely her shame was known. She reckoned it was known everywhere. It was, she thought, as much as she deserved. For stupid is as stupid does, and she’d been unforgivably stupid.

By the time John Dresser’s body was found two days after his disappearance, he was national news. What was known to the public at that point was what was seen in the CCTV films from the Barriers, in which a toddler seems to walk off happily hand in hand with three little boys. The still photos released by the police thus offered images that could be interpreted in one of two ways: as children having found the toddler wandering and setting out to take him to an adult who ultimately did him harm or as children intent upon the abduction and possible terrorising of another child. These images played across the front page of every national tabloid, of every broadsheet, of the local newspaper, and on the television.

With Michael Spargo wearing that unmistakable, overlarge mustard anorak, his identity was quickly established by his own mother. Sue Spargo took her son straight to the police station. That he’d been beaten beforehand was evident by the heavy bruising on his face, although there is no record of anyone’s having questioned Sue Spargo about this beating.

Following the rules of law, Michael Spargo was interrogated in the presence of a social worker and his mother. The detective in charge of this questioning was a twenty-nine-year veteran of the police force, DI Ryan Farrier, a man with three children and two grandchildren of his own. Farrier had been working criminal investigations for nineteen years of his twenty-nine-year career, but he had never come across a killing that affected him as did the murder of John Dresser. Indeed, so deeply was he harrowed by what he saw and heard during the investigation that he has since retired from the police and has remained under the care of a psychiatrist. It’s worth noting, as well, that the police department made both psychological and psychiatric services available to all the individuals who worked upon the crime once John Dresser’s body was found.

As might be expected, Michael Spargo denied everything at first, claiming that he was in school that day and maintaining that claim until presented not only with the CCTV film but also with evidence from his teacher as to his truancy. “All right, I was with Reg and Ian,” is all that he says on tape at this point. When asked for their surnames, he tells the police, “It was their idea, wasn’t it. I didn’t never want to nick that kid.”

This enrages Sue Spargo, whose eruption into verbal abuse and whose attempts at physical abuse are immediately halted by the other adults in the room. Her screams of, “You tell them the bloody truth or I’ll fucking kill you, I will,” are the last words she will speak to Michael during the course of the investigation and up until the moments she shares with him following his sentencing. This abandonment of her son at a crucial moment in his life is characteristic of her parenting style and perhaps speaks more loudly than anything else as to the source of Michael’s psychological disturbance.

Arrests of Reggie Arnold and Ian Barker quickly followed Michael Spargo’s mentioning of their names, and what was known at the time of their arrests was only that John Dresser had been seen with them and had disappeared. When they were brought to the police station (each boy was taken to a different station, and they did not see each other until their trial began), Reggie was accompanied by his mother Laura and later joined by his father Rudy, and Ian was alone although his grandmother arrived prior to his being interviewed. The whereabouts of Ian’s mother Tricia at the time of his arrest are never made clear in the documentation, and she did not attend his trial.

At first no one suspected that John Dresser was dead. Transcripts and tapes of early questioning by the police indicate that their initial belief was that the boys took John in an act of mischief, grew tired of his company, and left him somewhere to fend for himself. Although each of the boys was already known to the police, they were none of them known for anything more than truancy, acts of petty vandalism, and minor thefts. (One does wonder how Ian Barker, with a history of small animal torture, managed to go unnoticed for so long, however.) It was only when repeated witnesses began to step forward in the first thirty-six hours following John’s disappearance-communicating the level of the toddler’s distress-that the police seem to have developed a sense that something more ominous than a prank had occurred.

A search for the little boy had already begun, and as the area surrounding the Barriers was picked through by police and by concerned citizens in an organised and ever-widening circumference, it was not overlong before the Dawkins building site came under scrutiny.

Constable Martin Neild, twenty-four years old at the time and a brand-new father, was the individual who found the body of John Dresser, alerted to the possibility of its proximity by the sight of John’s blue snowsuit crumpled and bloodied on the ground near a disused Port-A-Loo. Inside this loo, Neild found the baby’s body, stuffed callously into the chemical toilet. Nield reports that he “wanted to think it was a doll or something,” but he knew otherwise.