“I am not,” I say.
“You are,” half a dozen shooters say in unison.
Graham says it’s great to see me so invigorated, and adds that if I want even more excitement, I should try shooting pheasants. “Pheasants have minds of their own,” he says, “so that’s rewarding. The best time to shoot them is at the end of October, a few weeks into the season, because they’ve already been shot at and survived. So they’re wise then, you see?”
And then it starts raining again, so we rush back indoors and pass the time window-shopping the guns for sale. The conversation returns to Foster. Graham says he was a really impressive sight, turning up in his Porsche every Tuesday night. He says everyone knew he was loaded, “but around here people aren’t prejudiced against that sort of thing. Fossie was a good guy. A good shot. He called me El Supremo.” Graham pauses sadly. “He loved guns,” he says. “He had hundreds of thousands of pounds’ worth of them. He was a real collector.”
On my way home, I drive once more through posh little Maesbrook. All the talk on the radio is of the credit crunch. They’re interviewing Oliver Letwin and Harriet Harman. Both admit, quite sheepishly, that they have no savings, only overdrafts.
“I wish it weren’t so,” Letwin says, “and incidentally I wish people in Britain were all saving more. I know I ought to, but my wife and I are too extravagant and we should cut back.”
The police followed me out of the village last time I was here, in part because I seemed too scruffy for these exclusive, nouveau-riche surroundings; but it dawns on me that perhaps—like Letwin—the people of Maesbrook actually have nothing but overdrafts and all these fancy cars and mansions are just an illusion. Maybe, with my meager savings, I’m the richest man in town.
• • •
LESS THAN A MONTH after the murders at Maesbrook, yet another father wiped out his family, this time in Southampton. His name was David Cass. He smothered his two daughters, telephoned his estranged partner, Kerrie Hughes, told her that the children had “gone to sleep forever,” hung up, and hanged himself. They were apparently going through a messy breakup. In the U.S., according to the Department of Justice, a parent—usually a man—wipes out his family, and then himself, about once every week.
It’s startling to hear Foster’s friends talk about how they empathize with his actions. I wouldn’t have guessed how on the edge people in this Shropshire enclave can be, and how easy it is for the whole thing just to unravel.
PART FOUR
STEPPING OVER THE LINE
“I know it’s bitter. Just keep drinking. Put your finger over your nose and chugalug it all down.”
—George Exoo
Blood Sacrifice
On a Friday afternoon in January 2002, Susan Ellis sneaks past the security staff at Guy’s Hospital, London. She’s pretending to be a patient, although nobody asks. She catches the lift to the fourth floor, finds the kidney-dialysis waiting room, and whispers to me, “It’s perfect.”
And, for her purposes, it is. It’s easily accessible from the corridor and security is not tight. It’s almost empty of patients and staff. Most crucially, there’s a table full of magazines. Susan pretends to read them. Nobody notices as she slips business cards inside the pages. She hopes patients will leaf through the magazines and see her card, which reads: “Need a kidney transplant? I can donate a kidney to you for free. Contact me at: kidney_for_free_from_me@yahoo.co.uk. This is a genuine free offer.”
Donating kidneys to strangers is illegal in the UK. When I called the Department of Health to ask why, they said, “You mean, strangers selling kidneys?”
“No. Just giving them away.”
There was a silence: “Giving them away?”
“Yes.”
“You mean, when the donor is dead?”
“No, alive.”
“We’ll get back to you,” they said. They did, with a prepared statement: “ULTRA [the Unrelated Live Transplant Regulatory Authority] insists on confirmation of an emotional relationship between a donor and a recipient.”
The DH’s view, they explained over the phone, is that anyone who wants to donate a kidney to a stranger must be in it for money. If they’re not, they must have psychiatric problems, and so they need to be protected from themselves. No one would go through such a traumatic, invasive operation for sane, altruistic reasons. When I met ULTRA’s chairman, Sir Roddy MacSween, he said he was sympathetic to altruistic donors in general, but added that the law’s the law, and any infringement would result in three months in prison and a £2,000 fine.
Susan already knows about the illegality of strangers donating to strangers, so her plan is this: Once a recipient contacts her, they will together concoct a story about how they’ve been best friends for years. They will prove this long-standing friendship with faked photographs. Some of Susan’s wedding photos, she says, could easily be doctored—a recipient’s head superimposed onto a bridesmaid’s body, etc. If this plan fails, Susan will try to donate abroad.
Susan is a Jesus Christian. She has long forsaken her possessions to live in a camper van currently parked next to a jogging track in Catford, South East London. Even though the Jesus Christians have been widely labeled as a sinister cult by the media and anticult groups, there is nothing externally odd about them—no unusual rituals or anything like that. They simply spend their days keeping fit, discussing theological matters, and hanging around shopping precincts, handing out cartoon books that look like Simpsons comics but, in fact, depict, among other parables, the persecution of the Jesus Christians by the courts, the media, and the anticult groups.
The lifestyle is the thing. The Jesus Christians alone, they believe, are obedient to the teachings of Jesus, particularly Luke 14:33: “Whosoever he be of you that forsaketh not all that he hath, he cannot be my disciple.” They have forsaken everything: families, possessions, jobs, homes, their place in the outside world, and are now in the process of giving up their spare kidneys, too, en masse.
A year ago, their leader, Dave McKay, was flying home to Australia after visiting his followers in the UK, India, and the U.S. The in-flight entertainment was A Gift of Love: The Daniel Huffman Story, a TV movie about a boy who donates his kidney to his grandmother. Dave was profoundly moved, and that’s when he had the idea. In a round-robin to his followers (there are around two dozen Jesus Christians worldwide; Dave’s strict lifestyle criteria tend to keep the numbers down), he e-mailed his own intention to donate a kidney to a stranger. He also wrote, “If anyone else is interested in doing the same, let me know.” The majority took him up on the offer.
Dave imagines that when the world learns of his mass kidney-donating plan, we’ll regard it in one of two ways—either as a really lovely thing for the Jesus Christians to do, or as the self-destructive act of a religious cult acting under the spell of a notorious leader. I am surprised to learn later that he is not only expecting the latter response, he is hoping for it.
Susan has been researching and strategizing. As well as the business cards, she’s been posting messages in chat rooms where people with failing kidneys support one another emotionally while they queue, often in vain, for a transplant. At an Internet café in Sutton, she checks her account to see if anyone has responded to her latest messages. There are scores of e-mails for her. The first is from the chat-room host: “I do not wish to be associated with anything that could be construed as illicit as this would risk the group being shut down. I will discuss this matter with my son who’s a police chief inspector and get back to you.”