Wallace sighed as he pushed the plate away and settled back in his chair. He patted his stomach with both hands. ‘Well, that hit the spot,’ he said. He had devoured a canteen cheeseburger and chips and drunk most of the Coke they had given him. DI Friar and Lulu hadn’t spoken while Wallace had been eating, but the tape had continued to run.
‘You know, people complain about the food in prison, but I never found it that bad. The last place I was in, we had burgers and chips every Saturday. Not quite as good as the burger you’ve just given me, but good enough.’
‘So tell us about Jackie Butler,’ said Lulu. ‘How did he die?’
‘He was stabbed. In his cab.’
‘By you?’
Wallace shook his head. ‘I was in the back seat. Eddie was in the front.’
‘It was planned?’
‘We didn’t want to do it, but Jackie was off his head. He’d stopped caring. The plan was for him to stay away from the fourth one but he kept insisting that he be there. He was starting to get pleasure from it, you know?’
‘Well, you all wanted them to suffer, didn’t you? That’s why you used the rope.’
‘We wanted revenge,’ said Wallace. ‘We wanted them to feel how we felt. But Jackie, he began talking about it all the time. And he was careless. We had to keep telling him to wear gloves and shoe covers, and he wouldn’t help us clean the van.’
‘You used your van to dispose of the bodies?’ asked DI Friar.
Wallace nodded. ‘No one looks twice at a courier van,’ he said. ‘But we always gave it a good clean afterwards. With bleach and everything.’
‘But you didn’t use the van to dispose of Jackie Butler’s body. You left him in his car?’
‘We figured people would think it was a mugging,’ said Wallace. ‘We took his watch and his wallet and both his phones.’
‘Both phones?’ repeated DI Friar.
‘His regular phone and his burner phone,’ said Wallace. ‘That’s how we stayed in touch. WhatsApp messages on pay-as-you-go burner phones. We knew that the longer it went on, the more likely it would be that the cops would look at us. So we used burner phones to stay in contact. And after the first one, after Pettigrew, we made a point of only two of us doing the job. That way the third one would have an alibi.’
‘But with Jackie Butler dead, and you behind bars, Eddie had to kill John Dunne alone?’
‘Which he did. But me being banged up really put an end to it all. We knew that Sawyer and Robbo had gone to Manchester, and Pettigrew had said that Sawyer was still a cop, so the plan was always to go up north and find them. But there was no way that Eddie could do that on his own. My accident changed everything.’
‘Tell me about the accident,’ said DI Friar.
Wallace said, ‘I was running late with my deliveries. I’d taken some whizz so I guess I wasn’t thinking straight.’
‘Whizz?’ repeated Lulu.
‘Speed. Amphetamines. I’d been working twelve hours flat out and I needed something to keep me going. I was on the M25 and I was checking my phone and I hit another car. Killed a mother and two kids.’ He grimaced. ‘Not a day goes by that I don’t regret what happened. If I could turn back time, I would.’
‘You fled the scene?’ said Lulu.
‘I had to. I had my burner phone on me. If the cops had found it, they’d have linked me to Eddie and Jackie. So I did a runner and dumped the phone. I was actually on the way to turn myself in when the cops pulled me over.’
‘And you got nine years for that?’
Wallace nodded. ‘And I deserved it. No question. I made a bad decision and innocent people died. But I only did five years in the end and, if you ask me, five years wasn’t enough.’
‘And while you were in prison, after he’d killed Dunne, Eddie Parker went to live in Spain?’
‘He’s got family there.’
‘And when you were released, he came back? To finish what you’d started.’
‘He felt the same as I did. We needed to do to them what they did to us.’
‘So after you got out of prison, you tracked them down?’
‘It wasn’t hard, what with social media and all. Found Sawyer first and reached out to Parker in Spain.’
‘Didn’t he visit you in prison?’
‘No, because there would have been a record. There was no contact at all until I was released. We had unfinished business, but he couldn’t do both of them alone. Then as soon as I was out, he came back to the UK and we came up to Manchester together.’
‘Did Sawyer say why he’d moved to Manchester?’ asked Lulu.
‘When they closed the home, Sawyer was worried that there might be an investigation. So he decided to leave London before the shit hit the fan. He knew that Robbo was from Manchester so maybe that gave him the idea. He got married not long after he moved. Like he wanted to start a new life, pretend that he wasn’t a monster.’
‘They weren’t friends in Manchester?’
Wallace shook his head. ‘Sawyer said he’d tried to contact Robbo but Robbo wanted nothing to do with him. He said he wasn’t sure where he lived but knew he was working as a hairdresser and was a regular in Canal Street.’
‘You went looking for him?’
‘Found him easy enough. Followed him home. Picked him up a few days later. Did what had to be done.’
‘He’d been married, too,’ said Lulu.
‘He didn’t know what he was,’ said Wallace. ‘I think he knew he was gay when he was younger. Then Pettigrew got hold of him and twisted his mind. He knew what he was doing was wrong, which is why he went back to Manchester. Probably got married to put it all behind him, same as Sawyer. Tried to become something he wasn’t. But he couldn’t stop cruising Canal Street.’
‘Did Pettigrew push him into doing what he did?’ asked Lulu.
‘Encouraged him, maybe. But he didn’t force him, if that’s what you mean.’ He leaned forward over the table. ‘He deserved what he got, don’t think that he didn’t.’
‘And what else did you have planned?’ asked DI Friar.
‘What do you mean?’
‘You, Butler and Parker killed – or planned to kill – Pettigrew, Hurst, Eccles, Dunne, Sawyer and Robinson. Were there any more names on your list?’
‘About a dozen, but faces rather than names,’ said Wallace quietly. ‘Our abusers came and went. Pettigrew gave us some of their names, but even he didn’t know where to find them. He pimped us out. Men would pay money to come to the home and abuse us. I’m guessing most of them used false names.’ He gestured vaguely. ‘So yeah, we’d pretty much reached the end of the line, revenge-wise.’
‘Where is Eddie Parker, Gordon?’ asked DI Friar.
Wallace shrugged but didn’t reply.
‘We know he was in your motorhome,’ said DI Friar. ‘There were two mugs and two plates and two sets of cutlery in your sink.’
‘I’m no grass,’ said Wallace.
‘We have information that suggests he’s gone back to Spain. Is that correct?’
Wallace folded his arms. ‘No comment.’
‘Do you feel any better, having done what you’ve done?’ asked Lulu.
Wallace looked at her for a few seconds, then flashed her a tight smile. ‘I do, yes. It doesn’t make my pain any less, but at least now I know they didn’t get away with it.’
‘Can I ask you something? The knot. Pettigrew used the same knot when he tied up you and the others, didn’t he?’
‘He had a boat. Moored down at Southampton. He used to take us down there, if we were good. He’d take us out on it, show us how to sail. He liked showing us how to tie knots. He liked making us tie each other up. It gave him a hard-on.’
Lulu nodded. ‘It must have been . . . awful.’
‘Awful? Yes. The only thing that stopped me topping myself was the thought that one day I could make the bastards suffer the way they’d made me suffer.’
He picked up his cup and drank the last of his Coke. ‘So what happens now?’ he asked.
‘You’ll be formally charged with the murders of Pettigrew, Hurst, Eccles, Sawyer and Robinson, conspiracy to murder Dunne and accessory to the murder of Jackie Butler, I suspect. You’ll need a lawyer.’
Wallace shook his head. ‘No need. I did it, and I’m glad I did it. Whatever price there is to pay, I’ll pay it.’
‘You should still get yourself a lawyer, Mr Wallace,’ said Lulu. ‘A good one.’
‘I’m going down, everybody knows I’m going down,’ he said, folding his arms. ‘I’ll plead guilty with pride. I killed them and if I had to do it again, I would. With pleasure. Except Jackie, of course. That I am sorry about. But it had to be done. It was him or us.’
‘You need a lawyer to give your side of the story,’ said Lulu. ‘It’s a story that needs to be told.’
‘I’ve been in prison,’ said Wallace. ‘It’s no hardship for me.’
‘You’re not even thirty years old,’ said Lulu. ‘You still have most of your life ahead of you. Do you want to spend all those years behind bars?’
‘I don’t see that I have a choice, do you? Don’t you worry about me – I’m at peace with what I did and what will happen to me. Hand on heart, I’ll be happier in prison with them all dead than if I was free and they were alive. It’s a fair price. What do you think, that I can claim it was manslaughter? I wanted them dead. We all did. We set out to kill them and that’s what we did. End of.’
‘I understand that, but the price you have to pay is negotiable,’ said Lulu. ‘And a good lawyer can help with that negotiation. You were abused as a child, abused in ways that most people could barely imagine. If it wasn’t for that abuse, you’d never have done what you did.’
Wallace pulled a face. ‘What’s done is done. There’s no turning back the clock.’
‘No, there isn’t. But even if you plead guilty, there’s every chance you’ll spend the rest of your life behind bars. Unless you tell your side of the story. If a good lawyer explains what you went through as a child, maybe your time served comes down to twenty years. Maybe fifteen. You could be out before you’re forty-five, with enough time left to live a decent life.’
Wallace nodded slowly. ‘Let me think about that.’
‘Please do,’ said Lulu. She looked over at DI Friar. ‘Are we done?’
DI Friar leaned over to the tape machine and switched it off. ‘For the moment.’