Escape From Evil - Cathy Wilson [131]
Keeping Peter’s movements from Daniel was one thing, but I couldn’t hide them from his school. It was a tricky phone call, but I had to inform them that their pupil had an escaped convict for a father. He’d savaged two fourteen-year-olds already. The school needed to remain vigilant.
Once again, I was bombarded with questions from the police. They asked where I thought he might have gone. I couldn’t help them. In fact, I was annoyed at being bothered. I said, ‘You lot have seen him more than me in the last seven years. Look in your records – you’ve still got my address book from last time.’
Luckily, Peter was picked up shortly afterwards and the police confirmed that he’d been on his way to Portsmouth. For breaking the terms of his parole, he was put back in prison for, I assumed, the rest of his fourteen-year sentence. That turned out not to be the case.
I don’t think Daniel was ever aware how close his dad had got yet again. That made it easier to just knuckle down and concentrate on our lives. Tim and I developed well together and fresh housing projects made us a decent income. There wasn’t much to grumble about at all. By 2006 we were living in a nice house, had nice cars and, best of all, Daniel had grown into a confident, handsome young man. I had no complaints at all. But then Aunt Anne called and said, ‘I think you need to turn on the TV now.’
I couldn’t believe what I was seeing and hearing. Peter was being hunted for the murder of a young Polish girl called Angelika Kluk. Just as he’d done when he’d fled Havant in 1993, Peter had been working as a church handyman, this time in Glasgow. And, just like before, he’d changed his name – this time he was calling himself Pat McLaughlin, thank God, and not Wilson. Angelika was a student staying at St Patrick’s Church, where Peter worked. She was last seen in his company on 24 September 2006.
As far as the police can tell, Peter had become obsessed with the idea of sleeping with the beautiful twenty-three-year-old the moment he’d first laid eyes on her. His fantasies were fuelled by the fact that he knew she was having a sexual affair with a married businessman. There were even stories that, during her stay at the church the previous year, she had embarked on a physical relationship with the priest at St Patrick’s, Father Nugent. But what really appealed to him was the fact that she was so far from home.
With so few friends of her own, Angelika naturally enjoyed spending time with the charming odd-job man. If she wasn’t busy studying, she often helped him out on jobs, so much so that he called her his ‘little apprentice’.
One weekend she had been helping ‘Pat’ build a shed inside the garage attached to the presbytery. That was when he’d struck – literally. Police say Angelika was hit six times on the head by a wooden table leg. The force exposed her skull and sent blood all over the garage. Then Peter had bound her wrists, gagged her mouth and raped her unconscious body. At some point, though, Angelika regained consciousness and found the strength to fight back. That’s when Peter produced the knife. He stabbed her sixteen times in the chest, before dragging her body through the church and dumping her in a chamber beneath, of all places, the confessional box.
Then he’d showered, cleaned up the blood from the garage and turned up for work again the next day to finish the shed as though nothing had happened. How many times had I witnessed that detachment, that ability to just carry on as normal after doing the most unspeakable things? For the first time, I began to appreciate how close I must have come to sharing the same fate as this Polish stranger.
Angelika was killed on the Sunday and by Tuesday Pat McLaughlin had disappeared, having already been questioned, along with everyone at the church, by the police. It was days before her body was found and even longer before the police put two and two together and realized they weren’t chasing Pat McLaughlin at all but Peter Tobin.
As the horrific