Hag Fold. Paul Finch

series. By 1985, investigators were daring to hope it had come to an end, the perpetrator either having died or been imprisoned for some other offence. By 1986, the taskforce created to find the ‘Giro City Strangler’ – as he was dubbed by the Greater Manchester Serious Crime Squad – had been scaled down considerably. Police overtime rosters returned to normal. Local women no longer feared to walk the streets at night.

      Timmy continued to peep through the care home’s back gate until long after the age when such an activity was permissible. The older girl, who he’d nicknamed ‘Billie’ after a female character he fancied on Here Come the Double Deckers, wasn’t always out there. In fact, the older she grew the less often she appeared with the rest of the children, but that didn’t stop Timmy peeping through the planks at every opportunity.

       One day, he found something else to attract his attention, though it wasn’t entirely divorced from his interests next door. His mother had a collection of books about the lives of the saints, and though he’d initially flipped through them because all the saint stories he’d heard had gory endings and he’d wondered if there were any pictures, he found himself returning again and again to one volume in particular, and one chapter in that volume, the one dealing with Joan of Arc.

       At first he didn’t even know who Joan of Arc was, or care, but he was fascinated by a painting of her kneeling at a church altar in a suit of armour. With her short, dark hair, lovely eyes and handsome, noble profile, she looked remarkably like ‘Billie’ – so much that the warm feeling he usually got in his tummy when he saw the real girl could soon be replicated just by looking in this particular book. He became so fascinated that he actually read the chapter on Joan of Arc, even though his reading at that time wasn’t good. He was well-rewarded for his efforts. The passages where Joan wept tears of fright when the English showed her their torture chamber, and where she gave out a piteous cry when the first flames began to lick at her on the stake, sent shivers of excitement through him.

       One day, his mother asked him why he was always poring over the book.

       “Are you thinking of becoming a priest, or something?” she asked, for once affectionately. She knew that his schoolwork was poor, and was always voicing a worry that he might “end up on the dust-carts”.

       Timmy looked down at the page in front of him. According to the text, many of the men who had interrogated Joan, binding her and beating her, and calling her “an apostate whore”, had been bishops and priests.

       “Maybe,” he said.

      *

      It’s an odd characteristic of modern humans that we seem to care more about animals than we do our fellow men. A succession of celluloid celebs have ensured their own immortality in a way their paltry movie efforts never could by appearing on news photos with baby seals or fox cubs. Pop stars have embarrassed audiences at award ceremonies by unexpectedly using them as platforms to speak out against hare coursing, whaling, even the use of animals in circuses. I remember a famous TV writer – a faded hippy, by the looks of her – almost weeping on a television news programme over the fate of calves facing transportation in veal crates. On the same bulletin, we’d seen tiny children, wounded and emaciated, fleeing war-ravaged towns somewhere in the Third World, yet no-one made a special guest appearance to cry over that.

      Yet, I feel that way too. I care more about animals than people.

      Once, I was sent to a Bethnal Green council house, the OAP occupant of which owed several weeks’ fines on a library book he hadn’t returned. When I got there, the place was in silence, all the curtains drawn on its windows. No-one replied to my repeated knocks, so I spoke to the man in the next house, a painfully thin specimen with long hair and stubble, who answered the front door dressed only in tatty jeans and showed arms pitted with needle-tracks. He shrugged when I asked him if he’d seen the old guy or if there were any relatives I could contact.

      Eventually I forced entry, expecting the worst.

      What I found was worse than the worst.

      I gained access by smashing a ground-floor window, but the stench hit me like a sledgehammer as I climbed over the sill. It wasn’t just putrefaction – it was shit as well, vomit, flyblown offal. I’d been in the job several years by this time and had learned to prepare for all eventualities, so I stuffed pieces of cotton wool into my nostrils from the wad I always carried, and was able to continue.

      I’d expected a shrunken, mummified thing slumped in an armchair or curled up in some downstairs bed. That was the way you usually found them. Not this time. The lounge looked like a bomb had hit it. Smashed crockery, torn newspapers and shredded upholstery strewed the dirt-clogged carpet. Every item of furniture was overturned, and in the middle of it all lay the old fella, or what was left of him.

      He’d been laid bare to the bones. A few scraps of skin and chunks of gristle remained, but virtually all the soft tissue had gone, apart from a couple of lumpy black objects, which I later found out were diseased organs. Even the skull had been cracked open and the brain dug out. Stiff, brown bloodstains caked everything.

      At first I thought I was looking at the scene of some bizarre ritual killing, and for a second I wanted to go and beat fifty colours out of the junkie next door. Then I heard the snarling – and it all became clear.

      A dog – the old man’s lab – foaming and slavering at the chops, eyes crimson-rimmed, lay on its belly under the overturned armchair. No amount of coaxing would tempt it out. It slashed and snapped if you went within a yard of it. The wretched thing had gone off its rocker, and eventually had to be shot.

      Later on, they discovered some undigested hunks of newspaper in what remained of the old man’s stomach and gullet. Crippled with arthritis and abandoned by society, desperate hunger had finally driven him to eat whatever he could get past the brown stubs of his decayed teeth. The coroner reckoned he’d choked to death about two months before I found him.

      Sad tale, eh? Still, at least his dog hadn’t starved.