“Will I?” asked the kid, still not looking up. No obvious fear in the voice. More resignation.
Charles Hayer gave the kid a paternal smile that the kid missed. “Sure you will,” he said. “But you’ve got to listen to me first. The fact is, Robert was my life. He was a good kid, he never hurt anyone, and he was everything a father would ever want in a child.
“Then one day when he was thirteen years and two months old, they came and took him.”
He paused. Waited. The kid said nothing. The kid knew.
Hayer continued. “There were three of them involved. The one driving the car was called Louis Belnay. He was forty-two and he had convictions going back to when he was in his mid teens. Bad convictions. The kind that get you segregated when they put you behind bars. He should have been locked up for life because everyone knew he was going to remain a constant danger to young boys, because he always had been, and even one of his psychiatrists said he was untreatable, but I suppose that’s not enough for some people. And Belnay was no fool. He knew how to pull the wool over people’s eyes. That’s why he’d only ever done time twice, just a couple of years on each count, which isn’t a lot considering he’d been a child molester for more than a quarter of a century.
“He didn’t look like a child molester, though, that was the thing. They often say they don’t. He just looked like a normal guy. One of his tricks if he didn’t have a kid he knew to hand, and he needed to get hold of one, was to impersonate a police officer, a plainclothes guy. Flash the badge, call them over, and bingo, he was away. That’s how he did it with my son. Robert was walking home from his friend’s place — and we’re talking about a walk of a hundred yards here — one night last summer. It was about a quarter past nine, and it wasn’t even fully dark. Somewhere on that hundred yards, Louis Belnay pulled up beside him, flashed that false badge of his, and called Robert over. Robert was a trusting kid. He had no reason not to be. His mother and me had warned him about talking to strangers plenty of times but this guy was a cop, so of course it should have been no problem. He did as he was told and approached the vehicle, and while Belnay spoke to Robert, his accomplice came round the other side of the car, had a quick check round to see that the coast was clear, then bundled him in the back, putting a cloth soaked in chloroform over his face to make sure he stayed nice and quiet. The accomplice’s name was Patrick Dean.”
Hayer couldn’t entirely suppress a shudder. Just repeating Dean’s name aloud could do that to him. Always would now.
“Now some people say that child molesters can’t help what they do, that they’re diseased rather than wicked, and I don’t know, maybe that’s true for some of them. But not Dean. Dean was — is — just pure fucking evil. He just liked to hurt people, kids especially. It was a power trip to him, a way of showing how strong he was to the world, that nothing was sacred to him. If he was here with you now, he’d hurt you bad. Do things to you that you cannot even begin to imagine. Sexual things, painful ones. And he’d enjoy every minute of it too, right up to the moment he put his hands round your neck and squeezed, or put the knife across your throat.”
The kid flinched. Hayer saw it. Like someone had threatened him with a slap. He still didn’t look up. Hayer felt bad. He didn’t like putting the kid through it, didn’t like putting himself through it. But there was no other way. He had to explain.
“Dean was strong. Big too. Six-three and fifteen stone. That’s why they used him for the physical stuff. That, and the fact that he didn’t scare easily. Ten years ago, while he was in Brixton prison, serving time for some assault and molestation charges, he made a formal complaint to the governor about the way he was being treated. The guards doing the mistreatment warned him if he didn’t drop the complaint, they’d stick him in with the general jail population and let him take his chances. He told them to go fuck themselves. They carried out their threat, he got the shit kicked out of him, but he still went through with the complaint. The guards ended up suspended, several of them lost their jobs, and he got released early even though he was what one detective called ‘a walking timebomb’.
“And on that night, the walking timebomb met my son and Robert never stood a chance. He must have seen Dean coming round the car but because he thought he was a cop he didn’t run. Maybe if he’d been a couple of years older he would have done, and I guess they counted on that. It was all over in seconds. One minute he was walking down the street minding his own business, looking forward to the holiday the three of us were going to be going to have in Spain the following week, the next he was unconscious in the back of a car, being driven away by two dangerous paedophiles who should never have been out on the streets in the first place. And no one saw a thing.
“I don’t know how long he lived after that. I don’t like to think about it, to tell you the truth. It’s too much. Either way, they took him back to the home of the third guy, Thomas Barnes, and that’s where they raped and killed him. Barnes said that the other two made him film it... everything... but the police never found the tape, so I don’t know if he was telling the truth or not. But then, why would you lie about something like that?”
Hayer sighed. His throat was dry. He felt awkward standing there, looking down at a silent boy who was only a few months older than Robert had been on the night they’d taken him. Hayer wanted to cry again, to let his emotions do their work, if only because it would show the kid that he wasn’t such a bad man — that he too felt pain — but no tears came out in the way they’d done on so many occasions before. It seemed like the well of sorrow and self-pity had finally run dry.
“After they’d finished with him, they cut up the body. Took off his legs, his arms, his head, and tried to burn the pieces separately. It didn’t work properly — apparently the body fat melts and it acts to stifle the flames — so they ended up having to put everything in separate bin bags and dumping them at different sites. The bag containing one of his partially burned legs and a section of his torso was found washed up on a riverbank a couple of months later by a man walking his dog. Other parts turned up after that beside a railway line, and at a landfill site. But they never found his head. We had to bury him in pieces.”
This time the kid did look up. His face was streaked with tears. “Listen, please. Why are you telling me all this? I don’t want to hear it.” His eyes were wide, imploring. Innocent.
Hayer’s inner voice told him to be strong. “You have to hear it,” he said firmly.
“But I don’t...”
“Just listen,” snapped Hayer.
The kid stopped speaking. His lower lip began to quiver and his face crinkled and sagged with emotion. Robert had pulled an expression like that once. It had been after he’d broken an expensive vase while he’d been fooling about in the family kitchen. The vase had been a birthday present from Hayer to his wife, and on discovering what Robert had done, Hayer had blown his top on the boy, shouting so loudly that he could have sworn his son’s hair was standing on end by the time he’d finished. But when Robert had pulled that powerless, defeated face, all the anger had fallen away to be replaced by guilt at his own unnecessary outburst. God knows, he hadn’t wanted to hurt him. His only child. His dead and gone son.