Death Row - Mark Pearson [16]
At ten past nine on that Monday morning Arthur Ellis, a fifty-nine-year-old traffic warden and chronic arthritis sufferer nearing retirement, was ticketing the car when he heard a soft whimpering sound like that of a small frightened puppy coming from inside the locked boot. Calling for assistance, he tried to open the boot himself. Becoming ever more frantic as the whimpering sound had faded away and now there was only a chilling silence. He tried to open the boot using a Swiss army knife that he carried but to no avail. He ran to the nearest door and banged on it but there was no reply. He ran to the next door along and had better luck. A puzzled middle-aged unemployed man in his dressing gown answered and let the traffic warden use his phone to call the police.
Ten minutes later and PC Jack Delaney, who had been on patrol with his sergeant Rosemary Dawlish, arrived. They prised open the boot with a metal bar, which they had confiscated fifteen minutes earlier from a bald-headed tattooed man who had been using it to smash up his lover’s car. The woman had been unfaithful to him with a number of people from his football team while he’d been in prison. The man was even then scowling at them through the barred windows of their patrol car, clearly eager to return to secure accommodation.
Inside the boot there was no puppy, but an olive-skinned seven-year-old girl with brown hair and almond-shaped hazel eyes was huddled against the back, looking up at the young constable. Her tired eyes were wide with fear and her tiny hands were clutching a large teddy bear as though it were a powerful talisman that could protect her from all the evils of the world.
Delaney smiled at her reassuringly and stepped aside to let his female sergeant bring her out. But when the woman reached in with arms outstretched the little girl screamed, almost soundlessly, and backed deeper into the boot. She looked at Delaney, almost pleading for his help. The sergeant shrugged and stepped back.
‘Why don’t you give it a try, constable?’ she said.
Delaney stepped up, smiling reassuringly again. The girl scampered forward and climbed into his arms, hugging him around his neck. As Delaney stood up and brought her out a bright light flashed in front of them. The homeowner, still in his dressing gown, fired off another shot before a glare from Delaney made him lower his camera. The first picture, however, was on the front page of almost every paper the following day and the man in the dressing gown, whose breakfast had been so rudely interrupted, made more from the sales of it than he had all year.
The picture of Delaney holding ‘the girl in the boot’, as she became known, was wired around the world and earned him no small amount of ribbing from his colleagues. But Delaney didn’t care: that moment, holding the small, vulnerable, terrified girl, now safe in his arms, was exactly why he had joined the police force in the first place.
Later that day, the real horror of what might have been struck home to him as he stood guard watching as a SOCO team led by CID went through Garnier’s house. In the basement they found three boxes of photographs. All children. They