Escape From Evil - Cathy Wilson [134]
Seeing her succumb to Hodgkin’s lymphoma – a type of cancer – was heartbreaking, but at least I knew about her diagnosis almost as soon as she did, unlike the way Grandpa preferred to do things. Ever since Granny had been on her own, I’d always popped round once or twice a week and done her shopping. As time went by, she began to rely on me more and more. In her last three months, I was there every day. For the last month, it was a couple of times a day. By the time I managed to persuade the doctors that she needed to be hospitalized, I’d been virtually nursing her. She couldn’t stand, she couldn’t walk, she could barely eat. I knew the end was close, but until then I needed to be strong for her. Gran had supported me through so much. Now it was my turn to pay her back.
I think she was finally admitted to hospital on a Monday and by Friday it was over. She was cremated on 22 October 2006 and I thought I would never stop crying. Months of worry and grief and trying to show the good old British stiff upper lip that Grandpa and Granny would have expected finally took their toll. A short while later, Anne and I bought a memorial bench and placed it on Lady’s Mile on Southsea Common, where Granny used to love to walk with her dogs. A lovely plaque remembers her, Grandpa and my darling mum. After thirty years, I no longer feel the need to visit Mum’s crematorium on the anniversary of her death because I can just go and sit on that bench and remember my whole family.
Granny left a lot of interesting things, which Aunt Anne and I enjoyed sifting through. She had an original hairdryer from the 1950s, which I wanted to keep hold of, as well as more documents about my background. One of them made me catch my breath. It was a hand-drawn poem called ‘Nil Desperandum’. I had to look it up – it means ‘Don’t Give Up’. Mum had written it out for Granny during her last days at Telscombe Cliffs. She’d seen it on the wall in St Peter’s Church and copied it for her mother as her last act of contrition. I don’t know how she held her hand so steady. It was beautiful. I was so glad Granny had kept it and I still have it on my wall now.
While I was taking a tremendous amount of solace from the words ‘Don’t Give Up’, so were the police. By the time Angelika’s trial had concluded, I was already feeling overwhelmed by a relentless questioning process that had begun weeks earlier. Different police officers kept coming to my house and asking the same questions over and over. That was just about bearable – I understood how important this was. Then, a few months later, they started asking me to go to the station at Cosham because, as they explained, they had a tape-recording unit there. I went along, like a dutiful citizen, but I was puzzled.
They’ve already solved Angelika’s murder. What can I possibly tell them?
Then I discovered why they were so keen to keep speaking to me. A psychiatrist who analysed the Angelika case concluded that a murderer who’d disposed of a body so expertly was very unlikely to have started this behaviour in his sixties. This led to the formation of Operation Anagram – a nationwide search for other possible victims of Peter Tobin, based on unsolved missing persons files going back decades. It was hard enough coming to terms with the fact that Peter had done it once. But more? Whatever the experts said, that was impossible, surely?
Unfortunately, not only was it possible that Peter had committed other murders, I would soon discover he had done them while juggling his life with Daniel and me.
Operation Anagram’s first move was to search all Peter’s previous addresses and within two months it paid off.
In November 2007 police found another body, this time in the garden of Peter’s old house in Margate. The discovery of Angelika’s body had been bad enough, but this one was worse. It had been dismembered and buried in separate bin