CHAPTER 84
Just the slightest of twitches in reaction to Mam’s deliberate stressing of the boy’s middle name, and of course I understood her purpose. My son turned his wide-eyed gaze to Mam.

“This is Aunty Annie and she lives in England by a church with aeroplanes and she plays a flute and she doesn’t speak Welsh but Aunty Steph Mrs Woodruff does!”

Pick the sense out of that lot, Mother dear. Mam smiled stepping forward to shake Annie’s hand.

“Hiya! I’m Dot, his Nana. My daughter was always talking about you, when you were working together. Roast chicken do you?”

Bless you indeed, Mam, for talking as if it had always been Annie, and never Adam. She looked around the room, taking in the bodies slumped in chairs and sofa.

“Well, it will take about two hours to get dinner ready, but all that time will NOT be spent standing in the kitchen, by neither of us!”

My larger man looked embarrassed at that, eyes flicking round the room before rising and bringing two dining chairs over, settling himself into one.

“This will do me, Dot. Need anything sorting?”

“You in any fit state, son? I hear it was a very good night. For several of you, Elaine”

I wanted to buy popcorn, settle into a chair and enjoy Mam’s gentle skinning of people I loved, but dinner needed some work, so I settled for taking a few mental notes for the future. My mother had class as well as skill, but it was all being done with love and a twinkle. It was all slightly derailed, of course, by the prattle of one little boy.

“Mam wants to go for the music with the tent, Aunty Annie! Are you going to be there? And Aunty Steph?”

Annie cocked her head, smiling down at him.

“I suspect I will, love. It is sort of our thing, me and Aunty Steph”

“Can we ride on the goblin train again?”

As the exchanges continued, I caught just the slightest of snorts from my mother.

“Mam? Time to get it all sorted and in the oven?”

Once back in the kitchen, she hugged me to her.

“You will no doubt have heard this too many times, love, but thank God you never made the mistake of asking her out! How did you ever miss what she was?”

I found myself looking down at my hands, but the words were there, just for once.

“Ease, Mam. It was so easy to talk to her, and… I wasn’t exactly overflowing with self-confidence back then, was I? With men?”

“Ah, no, love. That you weren’t. Not surprising, was it? I am just…”

She stopped speaking for a few seconds, before fixing her eyes on something outside the kitchen window, something I realised was actually years and miles away from where we stood.

“We ran away, Dad and me”

“You came back, though”

“Shush. We nearly lost hope, your Dad and me. Then you started talking about this boy at work, and we hoped, but he was gone to England, so we… Did you know we had other hopes?”

“What do you mean?”

“Bridget, love. We thought, well, if you were so hurt by men, then, well, would it be so bad if you found your love another way? I look at the Powells, aye? I see how strong they are together, and I see how it might have worked for you”

“I am not gay, Mam!”

She chuckled.

“You very nearly ended up that way, though! Sat in there cuddling our little boy, she is! And I give thanks to the Lord that you are not that way only because, if you had been, we, Dad and me, we would not have two men in our lives that we both love, and that is enough on that subject. Now: I need gossip, I need scandal. Tell me about last night…”

Dinner was a delight, Mam’s cookery skills putting my own to shame, and Annie surprising is all by offering and preparing a sliced-potato dish she called a ‘bastard tartiflette’ (I looked it up afterwards) that was, she assured us, something Ginny would kill her for.

Rhod, of course, had to ask why. I simply filed the recipe away for future use.

We spent the rest of the afternoon in comfortably replete conversation, and there was no question whatsoever that the foursome would stay another night. I am sure I saw moisture in Mam’s eyes as she left.

Blake and I had work the next day, and one small boy ha school, so I simply left the others with a spare key, trust not exactly being a worry. It felt like a loss when I returned to the empty house, but I consoled myself with thoughts about the Summer.

Things continued as they had before the stags night, and I found myself disappearing more than once into that zone of mine as I continued to excavate the history of one Benedict Nicol-Clements.

It stank. It reeked to high heaven, to be accurate, and Mam’s words came back to me more than once, but I found myself disagreeing with her. Too much of what I was reading wasn’t a case of honest coppers cutting corners to ensure a real villain was put away for long enough to protect the innocent, oh no. It did, indeed, stink. I knew that my favourite pair of colleagues could not possibly have been involved, but they had clearly been cloned and the resulting filth employed on Merseyside, for once confirming that age-old insult.

I found myself shuddering. It wasn’t just the victimisation of men for the non-crime of being gay, it was the simple equations of resources and time. How many pieces of shit like Charlie fucking Cooper, and the Parsons, and all those who had raped Ben, Deb, Stevie Elliott, how many of them had never been challenged, had been left to carry on with their obscenities, while Real Men in uniforms just like mine had been teaching poofters lessons in life? Whatever their reasons, I had my own focus, and the more I saw of the corners that had not just been cut but bulldozed, the more I dug, and the more I dug, the more that emerged from under a whole mountainside of rocks.

I put it all away at the end of the week, of course, for the whole family had an appointment at a registry office, and in ‘whole family’ I include my parents, who astonished me in their knowledge of who I knew, and how, and why.

It was a wedding, of course, but there were other dynamics. The number of coppers in the place was positively abnormal, even for a Wales home match, and while both ‘grooms’ had a best man, Darius had opted for a rather un-dragged Marlene, while Chris had called on Elaine. It was certainly a wedding, Jim, but not as we knew it.

It didn’t matter: women, and some men, cried. Toasts were made, after dreadfully non-cutting speeches by Marlene and Lainey. A bloody good, if rather unusual, meal was eaten, courtesy of a local pink support charity, whose chefs included both Fahmi and Debbie Mohammed, and whose desserts had a most definitely Gemma input.

Even Rhod’s singing was moving towards a variety of tunefulness. It hadn’t quite arrived, but I had hopes. One real surprise was the presence of Elaine’s Uncle Arwel and Aunt Alice, which pleased me hugely. Chris had done so much, had put his life in jeopardy, out of love for others, and they were paying him more than just respect.

It was a bloody good day, and in a final twist, the two people it was all about left the reception in a tuk tuk for the Central Station, where they would catch the train to Rhoose and a flight to Barcelona.

A bloody good day indeed. It was only equalled, not surpassed, when Paul and Paula tied their own knot a month afterwards. So much of Bridget’s advice was not just being followed, but actually lived, by so many people around me. It got even better over the next two months, as other Forces started on a series of interviews relating to Ben’s convictions. If I say that those Forces around Merseyside were not backward in coming forward to assist us, I will be making a serious understatement. Cooper’s trial had certainly opened eyes, as well as reddened some faces, and damage limitation had turned into some very enthusiastic spring-cleaning. My initial reaction to reading Ben’s case files had turned into smug satisfaction as I read a number of transcripts that revealed a culture that matched everything Mam had described.

My own comment had been spot on: it had indeed been open season on gay men. Unfortunately, two of the Officers involved had passed away, but there was enough in the files to show how badly justice had been perverted. The final touch was almost a thank-you from the Cheshire Force, who asked me up to sit with one of their own people, Detective Inspector Lois Mulready, as she interviewed one Graham Linehan, a newsagent from Bootle, who had once been a fourteen-year-old boy.

Yes, I know all men were once fourteen, but that isn’t the point. This man had been Ben’s alleged victim. Lois was as smooth as Jon, and after the preliminaries, the dance began. It wasn’t a long one, because I gathered that Cheshire had been rather free with their publicity around the investigation. The solicitor was already well-prepared.

“Mr Linehan has a statement prepared in this matter. He asks that due consideration be given to his age and vulnerable situation at the time of the events we are discussing. May I read it out?”

Lois nodded.

“For the benefit of the tape, Mr Fowler will now read the prepared statement of Graeme Linehan, who is not at present under arrest. I must warn you, Graeme, that if evidence emerges of criminality in this matter, I will be obliged to caution you, and you must then consider whether you wish to continue with this reading”

Fowler nodded, and started on what looked like a reasonably thick sheaf of A4 paper. He got as far as a description of discussions with a certain DC O’Sullivan before Lois called a halt.

“Graham Matthew Linehan, I must caution you…”

She ran through the words smoothly, then asked if he wanted time to consult with his solicitor. Linehan shook his head, expression weary.

“No. I have been waiting too many years for this to happen. Waiting for that knock on the door. I know what happens next, and it’s arresting me. Could we do that bit later? I won’t say I am happy to stay and answer your questions, but I am willing to, and I would really like this put away. Before you put me away, like. Can you give me the statement, Mr Fowler? I think I’ll read it myself”

It wasn’t like Pritchard and Evans, with nothing but criminality lying behind their behaviour, but it felt much worse. As Linehan gave us his story, it became one of coppers who believed in what they were doing, really told themselves they were ‘protecting little boys, and they had done it with the help of bribery, coercion and blackmail. Linehan had been picked up for shoplifting, and as Ben had been such am obvious danger to little boys, well, you’ve got to look after kiddies, haven’t you?

Lois arrested him in the end, then sorted out Inspector’s bail after he had been booked into the system while ‘investigation continued before a decision on whether to charge’ was made. It all seemed too easy, and as the DI treated me to a surprisingly decent coffee from her own stocks, I made exactly that comment, and she laughed out loud.

“How long have you spent putting the case together, woman? How many man-hours? That was his second interview, and it was done after we handed over a shitload of stuff from your office. He wasn’t caving in quickly, he was just getting his contrition in as early as he could. We did our own digging, you know? Not too many cash machines back then, and our Financial team went through O’Sullivan’s cupboards. Stupid man had kept old cheque books going back decades, don’t know why. Cash withdrawals on exactly the dates Mr Nicol-Clements warned us about. They are both screwed nine ways from Sunday, and they know it”

She paused to take a sip from her cup, then grimaced.

“Not the best analogy, really, considering. I followed those cases, Diane, Cooper’s, including the other stuff in Bradford. Nicol-Clements was the child we should have been protecting, him and Deborah Wells, and we failed. That hurts. Now, how do you want to play this?”

“Pardon?”

“Are you after a big court case, dragging everything out again, which would not be nice for the real victim, or is there a less stressful way?”

I caught just a whiff of ‘canteen culture’, just as she caught my tells.

“No, Diane. Not a cover-up, but pragmatism. O’Sullivan’s running mates are no longer with us, he himself is in the early stages of dementia, so there is no real way to hurt him in any way that his own body isn’t doing. Linehan will get off with a ‘vulnerable kid’ plea, and I do not see that going anywhere in terms of prison time”

“You think he’ll get off?”

“Nope, not that one. He will pick up a conspiracy to pervert and a perversion, but the mitigation will be massive. I still want to see him in the dock, though”

“Why, if he’s likely to walk?”

“Why? Diane, why are you here? Why did you open this can of worms again? It was Nicol-Clements, wasn’t it? Getting his conviction quashed?”

“Guilty, if that’s not a bit of an inappropriate word right here. Yeah. I felt that when I first met him”

“Then if we get a couple of convictions, Linehan and O’Sullivan, everything gets easier. What is your friend like? He is a friend now, isn’t he?”

“Yes, I believe so”

“Then he is indeed a lucky man. Biccy?”