Death Row - Mark Pearson [14]
Peter Garnier.
*
In the summer of 1995 Delaney was just a few years out of Hendon, a foot soldier in uniform working at the Wealdstone police station near Harrow on the Hill. Practically every other lamp-post that he passed as he walked had on it a picture of the two children who had gone missing.
Samuel Ramirez was just ten days away from his tenth birthday. He lived next door to a corner shop in Carlton Row, a little side street a mile or so away from the main shopping centre of Harrow. It was within walking distance of a large bingo hall that had once been a cinema that his mother went to every Friday night. And every Friday night, she brought him back fish and chips from the shop next door to it.
But at six-forty-five on this particular Friday night in mid-August his mother Laura Ramirez, a young widow and a nurse of English/Spanish descent, had sent him out to buy a fresh box of eggs, since she was making him pancakes for his tea. His favourite sort, with maple syrup, lemon juice and ice cream. He had passed his cycling proficiency test that day and his proud mother declared that he deserved a special treat because of it. Samuel Ramirez was wearing white shorts, a blue-and-white-striped T-shirt, a lime-green cardigan and a Mickey Mouse watch on his wrist. It was a thing he treasured because it was the last present that his father had given him before dying six months earlier from a brain embolism. He’d sit and watch the gloved hands telling him the time and he liked to think it was Mickey waving directly at him. Sometimes he’d even wave back.
Samuel Ramirez was never seen alive again.
The shopkeeper next door, Patrick Nyland, a single man of forty-two with a slight stammer and sometimes painful eczema that was visible on his hands, claimed that he had never seen the boy come into his shop when he was questioned by his worried mother ten minutes later. The police were called and an hour after Laura Ramirez had sent her son for eggs, Ellie Peters, another single mother, who claimed never to have known who the father of her child was and who lived three houses up from the Ramirez home, woke up from a liquid lunch she had been sleeping off and realised that her daughter was also missing. Alice Peters was nine years and five months old. With blonde curly hair and eyes like chips of sapphire flashing in bright sunlight.
Patrick Nyland was questioned exhaustively at Harrow police station on the Northolt Road, and the search for the missing children intensified. Nyland was kept in custody for twenty-four hours and his story seemed to stand up to rigorous interrogation. His house was searched and no sign of the children was discovered nor any evidence linking him to them. No witnesses came forward to say that they had seen the children, let alone to say they had been seen entering his shop. He was released without charge but events had been set in motion and his private life became the object of scrutiny – and not just by the official forces investigating the children’s disappearance. His shopfront window was smashed and the store petrol-bombed when information that he had been charged with a sex offence some years before became public knowledge. The policeman who leaked the information was never charged or disciplined for it. The fact that Nyland’s offence was not related to children – he had been found guilty of indecent exposure to a mature woman on the fields south of the medieval church on the hill – made little difference to an increasingly angry and vigilante-minded local populace. Two schools were near those fields where he had been exposing himself: a Catholic primary school and, of course, the more famous Harrow School further up the hill. In fear for his life, Patrick Nyland went into hiding while his insurance company fought his case. The police initiated an enquiry into the perpetrators of the arson but their efforts were minimal. All eyes, ears, feet, hearts and minds of the force were focused on finding the missing boy and girl. Television