Evidently, at some point while in Stanley Wallingford’s, Alan Dresser promised John the treat of a McDonald’s lunch. This seems to have been at least partially an attempt to settle the child, a fact which the shop assistant later verified to the police, for John was restless, unhappy in his pushchair, and difficult to keep occupied while his father chose the paint samples and made purchases relevant to the bathroom renovation. By the time Dresser got his son to McDonald’s, John was irritable and hungry and Dresser himself was annoyed. Parenting did not come naturally to him, and he was not averse to “swatting a bum” when his son did not behave appropriately in public. The fact that he was indeed seen just outside McDonald’s giving John a sharp smack on his bottom ultimately caused a delay in the investigation once John disappeared although it’s unlikely that even an immediate search for the boy would have altered the outcome of the day.
While Ian Barker’s interview has him claiming that he didn’t care about being excluded from the imaginary playing of video games, Michael Spargo evidently assumed that this exclusion prompted Ian to “grass me and Reg to the security guard,” an accusation that Ian hotly denied. However they came to the guard’s attention, though, they escaped his further attention when they next went into the Items-for-a-Pound shop.
Even today, this establishment is chock-a-block with goods, offering everything from clothing to tea. Its aisles are narrow, its shelves are tall, its bins are a jumble of socks, scarves, gloves, and knickers. It sells overruns, knockoffs, seconds, mislabeled items, and Chinese imports, and it’s impossible to see how stock control is managed although the shop’s proprietor seems to have perfected a mental system that takes all items into account.
Michael, Ian, and Reggie entered the shop with the intent of stealing, arguably as an outlet for the displeasure they felt at having been told to leave the video arcade. While the shop had two CCTV cameras, on this day they were not operational and had not been for at least two years. This was widely known to the neighbourhood children, who evidently made Items-for-a-Pound a frequent haunt. Ian Barker was among the most regular visitors to the shop, as its owner was able to name him although he was unfamiliar with Ian’s surname.
While in the shop, the boys managed to steal a hairbrush, a bag of Christmas poppers, and a package of felt-tip marking pens, but the ease of this activity either did not satisfy their need for antisocial behaviour or lacked a suitable frisson of excitement, so upon leaving they went next to a snack kiosk in the arcade’s centre, where Reggie Arnold was quite well known to the proprietor, a fifty-seven-year-old Sikh called Wallace Gupta. Mr. Gupta’s interview-taken two days after the fact and consequently at least somewhat suspect-indicates that he told the boys to clear off at once, threatening them with the security guard and being labeled in turn “Paki,” “wanker,” “bumboy,” “fucker,” and “towelhead.” When the boys did not move away from the kiosk with the alacrity he desired, Mr. Gupta pulled from beneath the till a spray bottle in which he kept bleach, the only weapon he had with which to defend himself or to urge their cooperation. The boys’ reaction, reported by Ian Barker with a fair degree of pride, was laughter, followed by the appropriation of five bags of crisps (one of which was later found at the Dawkins building site), which prompted Mr. Gupta to make good on his threat. He sprayed them with the bleach, hitting Ian Barker on the cheek and in the eye, Reggie Arnold on the trousers, and Michael Spargo on both trousers and anorak.
While both Michael and Reggie understood quickly that their school trousers were as good as ruined, their reaction to Mr. Gupta’s attack upon them was not as fierce as Ian’s reportedly was. “He wanted to get that Paki,” Reggie Arnold declared when questioned by the police. “He went mental. He wanted to rubbish the kiosk, but I stopped him, I did,” an assertion unsupported by any facts that followed.
It’s likely, however, that Ian was in pain and, lacking any socially acceptable response to pain (it appears unlikely that the boys sought out a public lavatory in which to wash the bleach from Ian’s face), Ian reacted by blaming both Reggie and Michael for his situation.
Perhaps as a means of deflecting Ian’s anger and avoiding a thrashing, Reggie pointed out Jones-Carver Pets and Supplies, in the window of which three Persian kittens played on a carpet-covered set of platforms. Reggie becomes vague at this point, when asked by the police what attracted him to the kittens, but he later accuses Ian of suggesting they steal one of the animals “for a bit of fun.” Ian denied this during his questioning, but Michael Spargo has the other boy saying that they could cut off the cat’s tail or “nail it to a board like Jesus” and “he thought that’d be wicked, that’s what he said.” Naturally, it’s difficult to know who was suggesting what at this point, for as the boys’ stories take them closer and closer to John Dresser, they become less and less forthright.
What is known is this: The kittens in question were not readily available to anyone, being locked inside the window-display cage because of their value. But standing in front of the cage was Tenille Cooper, four years old, who was watching the kittens as her mother made a purchase of dog food some six yards away. Both Reggie and Michael-interviewed independently and in the presence of a parent and a social worker-agree that Ian Barker grabbed little Tenille by the hand and announced, “This is better than a cat, innit,” with the clear intention of walking off with her. In this he was thwarted by the child’s mother, Adrienne, who stopped the boys and, in some outrage, began to question them, to demand why they weren’t at school, and to threaten them with not only the security guard but also with the truant officer and the police. She was, of course, crucial in identifying them later, managing to pick photographs of all three of them from sixty pictures that were presented to her at the police station.
It must be said that had Adrienne Cooper gone for the security guard at once, John Dresser might never have come to the attention of the boys. But her failure-if it can even be called a failure, because how, indeed, was she even to imagine the horrors to follow-is minor compared to the failure of those individuals who later saw a progressively more and more distressed John Dresser in the company of the three boys and yet made no move either to alert the police or to take him from them.
Chapter Two
“YOU’RE UP TO SPEED ABOUT WHAT HAPPENED TO DI Lynley, I take it?” Hillier asked, and Isabelle Ardery considered the man as well as the question before she replied. They were in his office at New Scotland Yard, where banks of windows looked out on the rooftops of Westminster and some of the costliest real estate in the country. Sir David Hillier was standing behind his oceanic desk, looking crisp and clean and remarkably fit for a man his age. He had to be somewhere in his middle sixties, she decided.
At his insistence, she herself was seated, which she thought quite clever of him. He wanted her to feel his dominance on the chance that she might think herself his superior. This would be physically, of course. She was unlikely to conclude that she had some other sort of ascendancy over the assistant commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. She was taller than he by a full three inches-even more if she wore higher heels-however, there her advantage ended.