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THIRTY-TWO
‘Okay, sorry about the wait,’ Kim said as the second man took a seat across the table in the meeting room. Interview room one was still busy with the sexual assault victim, and Philip Drury was waiting nervously for Vik in interview room two.
‘No probs. I’m sure you’re pretty busy. Let me introduce myself: Ryan West, English teacher.’
‘My colleague at the front desk said you know both of our victims?’
Damn the Sentinel for revealing their second victim’s name so soon.
He nodded, and she took a good look at him. He was around five feet eleven with muscles that didn’t strain at his shirt but hinted at their presence. His dark brown hair was cut shorter on the sides but with more volume on the top. He sported a full beard, and a couple of faint lines visible at the corners of his eyes when he smiled put him in his mid-thirties. He was good-looking and well presented and wasn’t showing any signs of being a typical crackpot. For now she’d give him the benefit of the doubt, while watching closely to see if he was here to take the piss and try to send her on a wild goose chase.
‘Ah, well, know is a bit of a stretch and use of the present tense is not totally accurate either.’
‘Okay,’ she said, feeling the benefit of her doubt starting to slip away.
‘Sorry. I’ll try and explain. I know what they have in common.’
‘Go on,’ Kim said, feeling the doubt grow stronger. She couldn’t imagine any situation where these two men had anything in common. Eric was employed, fit, engaged, health conscious and organised. Paul was none of those things.
‘I thought I recognised the name of the first victim, but I couldn’t place it initially. Seeing the second name on social media today blew away the cobwebs and I came straight here.’
Kim waited.
‘I knew them both at Welton. They were part of a bigger group.’
‘Ahh,’ Kim said, needing no further explanation.
To use its full name, Welton Hall was a young offenders institution situated on the outskirts of Wednesbury.
It had once been a borstal, if she remembered correctly, and had been a threat levelled at her many times during her years in care. ‘Do that again and you’ll be sent to Welton’ were words heard by every kid that had spent time at Fairview Children’s Home. The words alone had incited a fear so strong that many of the kids wet the bed for days afterwards.
It was only much later that Kim had understood the emptiness of the threat. Welton had been for kids aged fifteen upwards who’d committed crimes. Teens who weren’t old enough for prison but too old for secure training centres.
‘And you were there as…?’
‘A teacher. First job out of university. Idealistic, wanting to break the cycle, at the very least help these kids to understand that the terms would of, could of, should of don’t actually exist.’
Kim couldn’t help the smile that formed. Oh yes, he was an English teacher all right.
‘So you planned to save them with superior sentence structure?’
‘Very clever, Inspector. I saw what you did there. Nice bit of alliteration, and yes, kind of. I suppose it’s all about the basics, isn’t it? There are few jobs that don’t need people to read and write at a basic level. Did you know fifty per cent of fifteen- to seventeen-year-olds have numeracy and literacy levels of seven- to eleven-year-olds? I wanted to change those numbers.’
‘Very altruistic of you, but I’m seeing regret in your face, so I’m guessing your sensibilities were tested.’
‘If you’re asking how long until I lost my nerve, I can admit that it wasn’t very long at all.’
‘Wanna give me a rough number?’
‘Seven months, two weeks and three days.’
‘You know I’m going to ask why now.’
‘Happy to share. There’s a lot of lip service paid to the regime in a place like that. They stress the priority of time spent on education or in programmes to help offenders get a job or return to further education. The words look great on the literature or the website but are less impressive in practice. I know where the problem lies. The staff aren’t really interested and neither are the offenders. To make a change, at least one of them has to give a shit. I couldn’t handle the despondency. I went there full of energy and enthusiasm, but as the days and weeks passed, I could feel it ebbing away. I was twenty-two years old and didn’t want to face my twenty-third birthday devoid of hope.’
‘And was that the problem with all the kids? Were they all disengaged?’ she asked, uncomfortable with the generalisation. She’d fought the stigma of being a ‘care kid’ all her life, and as was the case with any set of people, there were good and bad.
‘Not all of them. There was the odd one who wanted to take advantage of every educational opportunity.’
