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‘I finally retired. It was our time. They were someone else’s problem, and I could leave with a clear conscience. Literally one week later, Lizzie was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. Palliative care only. She lasted six weeks, and she struggled through every one of them.’
Kim heard the catch in his voice and waited a short minute for him to recover.
‘I’m so sorry for your loss, Mr Baldwin.’
‘Thank you. But I’m sure you can understand why I don’t wish to give Welton any more of my energy.’
‘I get it, but you literally are the only person we can ask. Perhaps just a few questions and then we’ll leave you in peace.’
His face tightened, but he nodded.
‘We understand that Eric Gould and Paul Brooks were at Welton at the same time. Would their paths have crossed?’
She deliberately left out the names offered to her by Ryan West, to see if she got the same story from this man.
He spluttered. ‘Paths crossed? Are you kidding? They were best friends. Thick as thieves. They shared a room and were always together. I mean, it wasn’t just them. There was a core group, six of them if I remember correctly.’ He tapped his head. ‘Of course. They used to call themselves the Superior Six. It was their little gang name. We had a nickname for them as well, but it wasn’t quite that pleasant.’
‘What was it?’
‘The Psycho Six.’
‘And why was that?’ Kim asked.
‘Because they were a bunch of nasty little bastards.’
FIFTY-ONE
‘To be fair, neither of these two seem to be geniuses,’ Stacey said, prompting both Penn and Alison to look up.
‘Which two?’ Alison asked.
‘Elliot Reed and Gordon Banks from the Black Country Angels. Elliot is the son of a surgeon and has spent most of his thirty-two years being completely average. His father is revered for his skills in orthopaedics, and yet junior was a C-plus-average student right up until his last two years when a private tutor was engaged to get his grades up for college, which he dropped out of halfway through his first year. He’s worked as a barista, a car wash attendant, a hotel porter in Birmingham and he still lives at home with mummy and daddy. I’m surprised he feels passionate about anything. Strikes me as a bit lazy to be honest.’
‘Or dyslexic,’ Alison offered. ‘He works low-skill jobs that don’t require much mastery of the written word. Many people have been mislabelled as lazy or stupid but really do have a prohibitive learning difficulty.’
‘Fair point,’ Stacey admitted. Perhaps she had assumed that because he was from a wealthy family, he was an entitled good-for-nothing layabout. Not the same for Gordon Banks, who appeared to have fought his way through school with his fists and disappeared from the education system in his mid-teens. Now in his late twenties, his socials consisted of lewd jokes and funny videos. Both seemed to lack passion, vocation and direction.
‘I can’t quite work out what possessed them to volunteer with the Black Country Angels. Neither of them appear to be political activists or vocal about social injustice.’
‘Maybe they’ve been victims of crime,’ Alison offered. ‘Our first reaction to crime isn’t fear, it’s anger. Anger often requires action to neutralise it.’
‘But to join a group of interfering, obstructive—’
‘Hey, some people appreciate the work of vigilantes,’ Alison argued. ‘In 1981 in Missouri, a resident of Skidmore shot and killed the town bully in broad daylight after years of crimes without any punishment. He’d basically raped, looted and pillaged his way around town for years. Forty-five people witnessed the shooting and not one would identify the shooter.’
‘But that’s still murder,’ Penn protested.
‘Forty-five people say otherwise. As did the two hundred women in Kasturba Nagar, India, who lynched a man who’d raped them repeatedly for more than a decade. They cut off his penis, and he died from seventy stab wounds. It’s not just the recent trend of paedophile hunting and entrapment. Vigilante groups have been around for decades. There’s a group in El Salvador called the Sombra Negra or Black Shadow, and they’re mostly retired police officers and military personnel whose sole duty is to cleanse the country of impure social elements by killing criminals and gang members.’
‘Not on the level of El Salvador, but wasn’t there a guy in Hampshire some years back that went around slashing tyres because he’d seen the drivers using mobiles?’ Stacey asked.
‘Yeah, I remember that. He clearly felt strongly about folks and their phones,’ Penn added.
‘But people do feel strongly, Penn,’ Alison said. ‘And as I said before, it tends to come from anger at some kind of injustice. I read somewhere that in some US cities, people have created real-life superhero personas, donning masks and costumes to patrol their neighbourhoods.’
‘So are these people doing it for the feeling of power?’ Stacey asked.
‘Some are, yes, but there are also groups with a genuine wish to protect. The Gulabi Gang in Uttar Pradesh is a female vigilante group dedicated to protecting women of all castes from domestic abuse, sexual violence and oppression.’
