MURDERED-BY JACK WHITEHEAD, CRIME REPORTER OF THE YEAR.
I picked it up.
The naked body of nine-year-old Clare Kemplay was found early yesterday morning by workmen in Devil’s Ditch, Wakefield.
An initial medical examination failed to determine the exact cause of death, however, Detective Chief Superintendent George Oldman, the man who had been leading the search for Clare, immediately launched a murder investigation.
It was expected that Dr Alan Coutts, the Home Office Pathologist, would conduct a post-mortem late Saturday evening.
Clare had not been seen since Thursday teatime when she went missing on her way home from Morley Grange Junior and Infants. Her disappearance sparked one of the biggest police searches seen in the county with hundreds of local people joining police in searches of Morley and nearby open land.
Initial police enquiries are concentrating on anyone who may have been in the vicinity of Devil’s Ditch between midnight Friday and six AM Saturday morning. Police would particularly like to speak to anyone who may have noticed any vehicles parked near Devil’s Ditch between those hours. Anyone with information should contact their nearest police station or the Murder Room direct on Wakefield 3838.
Mr and Mrs Kemplay and their son are being comforted by relatives and neighbours.
If it bleeds, it leads.
“How’d it go with Hadden?” Kathryn was standing over my desk.
“How do you fucking think.” I spat, rubbing my eyes, looking for someone easy.
Kathryn fought back tears. “Barry says to tell you he’ll pick you up at ten tomorrow. At your mother’s.”
“Tomorrow’s bloody Sunday.”
“Well why don’t you go and ask Barry. I’m not your bloody secretary. I’m a fucking journalist too.”
I stood up and left the office, afraid someone would come in.
In the front room, my father’s Beethoven as loud as I dared.
My mother in the back room, the TV louder stilclass="underline" ballroom dancing and show jumping.
Fucking horses.
Next door’s barking through the Fifth.
Fucking dogs.
I poured the rest of the Scotch into the glass and remembered the time when I’d actually wanted to be a fucking policeman, but was too scared shitless to even try.
Fucking pigs.
I drank half the glass and remembered all the novels I wanted to write, but was too scared shitless to even try.
Fucking bookworm.
I flicked a cat hair off my trousers, trousers my father had made, trousers that would outlast us all. I picked off another hair.
Fucking cats.
I swallowed the last of the Scotch from my glass, unlaced my shoes and stood up. I took off my trousers and then my shirt. I screwed the clothes up into a ball and threw them across the room at fucking Ludwig.
I sat back down in my white underpants and vest and closed my eyes, too scared shitless to face Jack fucking Whitehead.
Too scared shitless to fight for my own story.
Too scared shitless to even try.
Fucking chicken.
I didn’t hear my mother come in.
“There’s someone on the phone for you love,” she said, drawing the front room curtains.
“Edward Dunford speaking,” I said into the hall phone, doing up my trousers and looking at my father’s watch:
11.35p.m.
A man: “Saturday night all right for fighting?”
“Who’s this?”
Silence.
“Who is it?”
A stifled laugh and then, “You don’t need to know.”
“What do you want?”
“You interested in the Romany Way?”
“What?”
“White vans and gyppos?”
“Where?”
“Hunslet Beeston exit of the M1.”
“When?”
“You’re late.”
The line went dead.
Chapter 3
Just gone midnight, Sunday 15 December 1974.
The Hunslet and Beeston exit of the M1.
It came out of the dark at me like I’d been asleep my whole life:
Tall yellows and strange oranges, burning blues and real reds, lighting up the black night to the left of the motorway.
Hunslet Carr ablaze.
I pulled up fast on the hard shoulder, hazard lights on, thinking the whole of fucking Leeds must be able to see this.
I grabbed my notebook and bolted out of the car, scrambling up the embankment at the side of the motorway, crawling through the mud and bushes towards the fire and the noise; the noise, revving engines and the thunderous, continuous, monot onous banging of time itself being beaten out.
At the top of the motorway embankment I pulled myself up on my elbows and lay on my belly staring down into hell. There below me in the basin of Hunslet Carr, just 500 yards beneath me, was my England on the morning of Sunday 15 December, in the year of Our Lord 1974, looking a thousand years younger and none the better.
A gypsy camp on fire, each of the twenty or so caravans and trailers ablaze, each beyond relief; the Hunslet gypsy camp I’d seen out of the corner of my eye every single time I’d driven into work, now one big fat bowl of fire and hate.
Hate, for ringing the burning gypsy camp was a raging metal river of ten blue vans churning seventy miles an hour in one continuous circle, straight out of speedway night at Belle fucking Vue, trapping within the roaring wheels fifty men, women and children in one extended family hanging on to each other for dear life, the intense flames scolding and illuminating the sheer stark fucking terror upon their faces, the children’s cries and mothers’ howls piercing through the sheets and sheets of noise and heat.
Cowboys and fucking Indians, 1974.
I watched as fathers and sons, brothers and uncles, broke from their families and tried to charge between the vans, to punch, to kick, to beat on the metal river, screaming up at the night as they fell back into the mud and the tyres.
And then, as the flames rose higher still, I saw who the gypsy men were so desperately trying to reach, whose hearts they had their own so set upon.
Around the entire camp, in the shadows down below me, lay another outer circle beyond the vans, two men deep, beating out time with their truncheons upon their shields:
The new West Yorkshire Metropolitan Police putting in a spot of overtime.
And then the vans stopped.
The gypsy men froze in the firelight, slowly edging back towards their families in the middle, dragging the injured back through the dirt with them.
The banging of the shields intensified and the outer ring of police began to advance, one big fat black snake sliding in single file between the vans, until the outer circle became the inner, the snake facing the families and the flames.
Zulu, Yorkshire style.
And then the banging stopped.
The only sounds were the fire cracking and the children crying.
Nothing moved, ‘cept my heart at my ribs.
Then, out of the night and away to the left, I could see a van’s headlights approaching, bumping across the wasteground towards the camp. The van, maybe white, suddenly braked hard and three of four men tumbled out. There was some shouting and some police broke off from the circle.
The men tried to get back into the van and the van, definitely white, began to reverse.
The nearest police van jerked into life, churned mud and hit the van full on in the side, nought to seventy in half the metres.
The van stopped dead and the police descended on it, drag ging men out through broken windows, exposing flanks of white flesh.
Sticks and stones set about their bones.
Within the circle a man stepped forward, barechested. The man lowered his head and charged, screaming.
Instantaneously the police snake sprang, moving in and swal lowing up the families in a sea of black and sticks.