Who Needs Flowers When They're Dead Read online

  About the author

  George spent many years investigating real cases of child abuse in the Metropolitan Police Service. In between writing and walking his beloved dog, he continues to work helping young people in Surrey.

  Who Needs Flowers When They're Dead?

  George Lincoln

  Who Needs Flowers When They're Dead?

  Vanguard Press

  VANGUARD EBOOK

  © Copyright 2019

  George Lincoln

  The right of George Lincoln to be identified as author of

  this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the

  Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All Rights Reserved

  No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication

  may be made without written permission.

  No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced,

  copied or transmitted save with the written permission of the publisher, or in accordance with the provisions

  of the Copyright Act 1956 (as amended).

  Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to

  this publication may be liable to criminal

  prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is

  available from the British Library.

  ISBN (PAPERBACK) 97 8 1784656 08 9

  Vanguard Press is an imprint of

  Pegasus Elliot MacKenzie Publishers Ltd.

  www.pegasuspublishers.com

  First Published in 2019

  Vanguard Press

  Sheraton House Castle Park

  Cambridge England

  Printed & Bound in Great Britain

  For Atinus

  CHAPTER 1

  It made no sense whatsoever. A miserable fucking bus depot in the middle of nowhere on a cold, wet winter afternoon. He trudged in there like a naughty boy sent to see the headmaster, full of fear and trepidation.

  ‘No, I am not lost,’ he said in response to the rather bemused-looking receptionist’s polite enquiry.

  He hated the way adults always patronised him, as if all he needed to succeed in life was a fucking compass.

  ‘We don’t get many boys in here your age, you know,’ said the receptionist.

  By now the naive confusion of a pale, skinny fourteen-year-old was growing by the second into the full-blown humiliation of not really understanding why the fuck he was standing there in the first place.

  ‘I came to collect something for my dad.’ He just-about managed to stutter the line repeatedly drilled into his ear for the past half an hour in the car on the way there.

  ‘Oh really? Most of our drivers come here to collect their own belongings, you know.’

  Of course they fucking do. As if he needed to be told this. But this perfectly reasonable, predictable line of enquiry would never enter his dad’s head, mostly because it got in the way of what he wanted at that particular time. Which is all that ever mattered.

  ‘I came to collect his pay.’ The words somehow eventually tumbled out of the boy’s mouth. ‘His severance pay,’ he managed to add, almost forgetting his line.

  ‘And your dad couldn’t come to collect this himself, no?’

  ‘No, he is very unwell today.’

  The boy remembered his line this time.

  Ten minutes later the boy was sitting in the car as his dad ripped open the brown envelope as though it contained the winning lottery ticket. For a brief moment the boy glowed in the warm feeling that he had done something that made his dad happy. But this feeling was short-lived as his dad glared with what seemed like genuine astonishment at a cheque for just £8.72. Of course this was the boy’s fault. He hadn’t explained things properly to the kind lady at reception. He should probably go back inside and ask if the one thousand five hundred pounds deduction from final pay for bus driver training in lieu was a mistake. Far better if this came from the boy than from the spineless fucking coward waiting in the car park who quit the job after just three months.

  Rage infused every fibre of his father’s being at this apparent injustice, the way the boy had seen so many times before. By now the boy wasn’t listening any more, just gazing up towards the window of the office he’d been in a few moments ago. He noticed how a line of people had gathered to see the envelope-opening ceremony in full for themselves.

  He’d heard all of this before.

  There wouldn’t be enough money for him to have anything nice this month. It wasn’t because his dad hadn’t quite negotiated the basic requirements of his new job properly by driving a big yellow bus around the Peak District without getting lost like a fucking moron. It wasn’t because his dad didn’t feel he needed to attend extra training sessions and perhaps spend more time learning his bus routes.

  It was because he had a son who hadn’t quite developed into the accomplished liar his dad was just yet.

  CHAPTER 2

  David was fascinated by what drove people to commit the most sordid, evil crimes and by some amazing good fortune he had the perfect job to indulge his interest – a detective in the Metropolitan Police Service. The boys in blue. The thin blue line. Or the fucking filth, depending on your own perspective.

  David can’t remember which way round events unfolded, so much of his childhood a blurred memory. Did he seek out the specific role that would grant him unlimited access to these crime scenes, the unadulterated sorrow of the family members left behind by the tragedy in question? Or was there something dark that he found himself subconsciously drawn towards, long before he began to realise he enjoyed it? Such questions for a future inquest perhaps. All David knew for sure was that he loved his job but it was for all the wrong reasons. Trapped in a paradigm of false expectations and secret desires, trying to ‘fit in’ as much as he possibly could without ever raising too much alarm. It was tricky.

  It’s not that David wanted anybody to suffer, least of all complete strangers he had never met. But once he realised that suffering was such an integral part of the human condition, David began to view the suffering of others as some warped idea of free entertainment. He didn’t create or wish for the suffering to occur, he merely extracted what he needed for his own gratification at no cost to any other being, living or not so.

  This was how it began.

  Politicians and senior police officers came and went, each promising to be tough on crime, to stamp out crime, to eradicate all human error, to shape all human thought along a more ‘acceptable’ trajectory for future generations. And the general public would buy into this constant war footing, this notion that in order to survive and protect what we have, there must be some ‘other’ to all rally against.

  It’s not that David disagreed with any of this. He just felt that the general public were missing out on the essence of what human suffering has to offer. Only through experiencing directly the true suffering of others can we possibly hope to value what is ours and by definition, the suffering that we do not have to endure ourselves.

  But none of this made David a popular choice at social events and team-building exercises. When faced with the darkness or the everlasting light, most people don’t like having to use their torch if they don’t have to. David wanted to shine a light on all things, no matter how well the darkness hid them. In his uniform patrol days, after seeing the aftermath of a horrific car accident with untold misery and devastation splattered all over the windscreen, David would volunteer to seek out the family members just so he could deliver the news and bask in the immediate abject crushing misery that unfolded for free in front of his very own eyes. He wanted to dwell as deeply as possible in the misery and devastation.
It’s not a job people usually volunteer for and even the most sadistic supervising officer would be loath to order somebody to do this. Which is not to say David felt they were wrong to feel this way, he just felt it was a shame they were missing out on all the best bits.

  David got used to being side-lined in the workplace due to his ‘interests’. But he worked this to his advantage, allowing him more time to delve deep into the rabbit hole of human suffering unhindered by the emotional boundaries other people seemed to possess. When colleagues tried to use jokes and banter to make light of something horrific, David felt sad for them. Sad for their inability to breathe in the misery, to be a sponge of desolation and despair the way he was.

  Rape. Incest. Sexual slavery. Torture. Human trafficking. Child abuse. These were the big-hitters, the heavyweights. People get over losing a bar fight or crashing their car or having their handbag stolen. They never forget the humiliation of being raped. The suffering of being forced to submit to something so degrading stays with the victim forever.

  Having worked his way through the organisation, by 2012 David was a detective in the Sexual Offences & Child Abuse Investigation Command. An Olympic year. Every single day a goldmine of untapped misery just waiting to be laid bare. Thanks to the post-2008 financial meltdown and the swingeing cuts to police budgets that soon followed, they couldn’t wait to deliver David with a smorgasbord of suffering from the day he arrived. Historic rape of a child by a teacher? Yes, please. Anal rape of a broken woman by her uncle? Lovely. Suicide by ramming a CD case so far up her own cunt that she bled out in the mental hospital where staff had been raping her for years? Manna from heaven.

  And this is where it really began for David. Everything in his life leading up to that point had been preparation for the tidal wave of sorrow that was about to wash over him.

  CHAPTER 3

  ‘I’d rather have a dead son than one who is fucking queer.’

  His dad’s words hit him like a bullet to the brain. The boy had recently discovered bands like The Cure and Black Sabbath, bands not known for the traditional notion that only women wore make-up. He immersed himself in the whole new world these and many other bands had to offer boys his age in the early 1990s. Boys in make-up seemed so other-worldly, so out-there to him. There was even a special episode on Trisha one day.

  Of course, in his dad’s eyes, this made him a homosexual. He had grown up surrounded by photos of relatives standing proudly outside the many steelworks and coal mines once so abundant in the area. It seemed like they all had dark circles around their eyes and black fingernails. He’d just be carrying on the family tradition, he thought. His dad did not see it that way.

  His dad was more into ‘proper’ music like David Bowie.

  The boy was the older of two brothers born three years apart. Both had taken their parents’ divorce hard, shattering any sense of stability and normality they had clung to even through the years of endless tension. The boys were no strangers to anger, having grown up around it for most of their lives. The younger of the two boys had taken the break-up particularly badly and tried to find solace in recreational drugs. Speed. Ecstasy. Amphetamines. He even sniffed glue when all else failed. Several visits to the hospital to collect what was left of their younger son from the emergency room didn’t bring his parents any closer together.

  The boy didn’t wear his make-up at home again.

  CHAPTER 4

  Sally had been in and out of various psychiatric institutions for most of her tragically short teenage years. Born to heroin-addicted parents, her time with them had been thankfully brief before social services intervened. The depths of self-delusion that crack addicts often possess never ceased to amaze David. He was in no position to condemn others for an unhealthy addiction. He understood that all too well. But his addiction bore no consequence for the lives of others, unlike a baby born addicted to smack.

  Sally had shown early signs of promise, spending most of her pre-teenage years with one long-term adoptive carer, Susan. The thing they don’t really prepare you for as an adoptive parent is the resentment and anger your child will always feel towards the world and, by extension, towards you. You weren’t there in the beginning. You aren’t my real mum. The second that child reaches puberty and all those hormones come flooding forward, you’re at the top of the shit-list.

  Which is exactly the position Susan found herself in.

  Sally had always been very creative in both art and literature, showing great potential as a writer. She wrote pages and pages of rather graphic stories about a girl her age repeatedly raped and abused. Always in the third person.

  People began to notice.

  Sally slowly ostracised herself from any recognisable peer group, consumed by her writing. Teachers would enquire, refer and forget. Social workers went through the same process. Nobody seemed able to get through to Sally; she was lost in her stories.

  With no visible signs of injury or abuse, bureaucratic hands were tied. Susan watched her adopted daughter disappear into substance abuse. Sally stopped going to school, preferring instead to write. She now began to add drawings and sketches to her stories. Little teenage doodles of a young girl tied to a ceiling light, clothes ripped open. Vaginal tears. Location unknown.

  Substance abuse inevitably led to psychiatric referral when Sally became violent. Institutionalised by the age of fourteen. Then the line between what was real and what she imagined became forever blurred for Sally.

  David read the file with such fervour he quickly forgot about any other cases he had. This was the one. Sally’s stories, complete with drawings, had been lovingly bound as one long book of police exhibit misery. Exhibits were supposed to be stored securely at all times, with a clear chain of evidence linking any removal from storage for any reason. Without this there could never be any trial, too easy for a defence barrister to pull the case apart. David pored over each and every word, absorbing each little pocket of despair. Ostensibly, he was taking the case very seriously. Nobody could ever accuse him of not being thorough. He needed to get closer. He needed to soak up every last drop of Sally that he could.

  ‘Thank you so much for allowing me into your home.’

  David politely wiped his feet at the door. The small meaningless gestures we make, he wondered to himself. Not much mud in this part of London.

  ‘Have you travelled far?’

  The meaningless patter continued, Susan knowing exactly where he had travelled from. People seem to find comfort in such predictable words and gestures. Like leaving flowers on a grave long after that person has died. Who are those flowers really for?

  Sally’s bedroom had been left the way she always preferred it. The air was stale as if the windows had been closed for quite some time. Susan said she could never bring herself to change anything, even after Sally left. Apparently, this included the air in the room. Air with sentimental value. Immaculately presented in white, as an estate agent might say.

  No posters, David noticed. As though Sally didn’t want any other pairs of eyes to see her, living or otherwise. Intensely private, like a womb of teenage dreams. His eyes darted around the room for any nuance that might unlock some darker secret. There was nothing.

  Small cracks beginning to appear in the coving. The tell-tale signs of wall filler over an old picture hanger opposite the window. The slightly dated feel suggested a teenager raised by somebody significantly older, from a different generation. You could imagine those creepy old Victorian dolls, lace doilies and net curtains if Sally had never lived there. Sally saving Susan from her own taste.

  He sat on the crisp white bed linen. An array of cute teddy bears along the fold below the pillow. He breathed in deeply, the faint aroma of sickly-sweet teenage perfume seemed to have been released into the air by him sitting on the bed. He was probably the first person to do so for a long time. Susan tried to busy herself, tidying what was already tidy, shuffling around uncomfortably. David was reminded how normal parents often behaved around stran
gers, terrified of any negative judgement being directed towards them.

  Just days earlier, Sally lay in pools of her own blood, undiscovered for several hours at the secure unit she had been detained at. The latest Jewel CD rammed so far inside her uterus the medical team later said they wouldn’t have been able to retrieve it if she had survived, the blood loss would have been so heavy.

  ‘Can I offer you anything to drink, Officer?’

  Another polite gesture.

  ‘I’m okay, thank you,’ David replied, mildly irritated at the interruption to his thoughts.

  Though not technically part of any crime scene, he had hoped the bedroom would offer him more of Sally. It seemed she had taken anything really personal with her, leaving just the pretty picture she wanted the world to think of her behind.

  ‘Sally would never have committed suicide,’ Susan tentatively suggested.

  ‘Why do you think this?’

  David humoured her. A locked room in a secure psychiatric unit with twenty-four-hour CCTV coverage showing all access to her room. Showing her entering her room shortly before midnight. Showing no hourly checks whatsoever until her body was discovered by the morning team shortly after six a.m. Sally was supposed to be checked hourly due to her being deemed a high suicide risk following the death of her friend a few weeks earlier. They had been standing on the platform at Denmark Hill station together, a suicide pact about to unfold in front of a thousand commuters. Her friend jumped first.

  Sally hesitated.

  She would later tell her grief counsellor that she didn’t think her friend was being serious. She blamed herself for her friend’s death, as teenage girls so often do. Then she went on to make allegations of repeated sexual abuse at the hands of every male staff member and even her own brother, a serving police officer. All in rooms covered by CCTV at all times, which was the reason David was at Sally’s house that day.