I tell Jonesy I’ll see her back at the cottage and head for the Homes library. One of the things the founder believed in – apart from the sanctity of the word of the Lord, which would bring salvation to us children of sin – was that education would be another saviour. So the library is huge.
I love the library. I’m not a big one for stories, but I love facts, and books have lots of facts. I can read the encyclopaedias from cover to cover. I’ll read anything that I can learn from. They also have old newspapers. Other children have used the newspapers to find out why someone’s dad is really in prison. Today I want to read about the Peter Montrose murders. They scare me, but I need to know all the details.
I ask the librarian where the papers from ten years ago are. She asks what I am looking for and I say I am looking up articles from around the time my little brother was born. From then it is just a case of forwards and backwards with the papers. There was nothing at the end of the year, but at the start they mention Peter Montrose had been caught. In the middle of the year they hanged him, but I want the reports from the trial so I can find out what exactly he did.
He murdered eight people. It’s a relief to find out that it wasn’t just young girls he murdered; he murdered older women too. Reading the transcripts from the court it seems pretty certain that they got the right man. The doctors said he was a psychopath, he had no compassion, and if he hadn’t been caught he would have killed again.
*
I go back to the cottage. Jonesy is upset that I didn’t tell her where I was going. I only went without her because she would have got too excited in the library and would have been unable to keep her mouth shut. Libraries are supposed to be quiet and she wouldn’t have been able to cope.
She seems disappointed that it really couldn’t be Peter Montrose killing Homes girls. I love Jonesy so, but sometimes she’s a bit too crazy to keep up with.
We do our chores and then go to our room. Jonesy gets out an exercise book and shows it to me. She’s already started to put together a list of suspects. She points at Suspect 1.
‘It’s the da of Glenda McAdam.’
‘Away,’ I say.
‘No, true. You look at it, Lesley, look at it. You add the bits together and it comes back to him. You’ve seen him, aye?’
‘Aye.’
‘He’s an evil-looking man.’
He is an evil-looking man. He’s been in Barlinnie countless times. When he turns up at Cottage 13, you know about it. He has four kids in the Homes. Their mam is rumoured to be a drunk or a whore or both, but no one ever dares say it to them. Maybe that’s why Glenda and the brothers are like they are. It can’t be nice having parents like that.
‘Well guess whit, Les, I heard the big girls talking yesterday and Jane Denton had a run-in with Glenda McAdam two months ago. Lots of kids at school are saying that Jane and Sally were friends, though no close like you and me, more like me and Brenda, so mibbie Glenda hated Sally too. And more, Sally Ward went out with one of the brothers, but then just split up with him, and then like two days later she’s deid.’
‘So why would it be the dad? Why wouldn’t it be the brother?’
‘Aye, right enough, Les, but anyway the brother doesn’t look evil enough. The da would, though, he’d strangle a puppy for eating a sausage.’
‘Away, Jonesy.’
‘It’s true, Lesley, and you could be next. You duffed Glenda, it could be you that’s going to get done now.’
‘Dinnae say that, Jonesy.’
I feel sick. It could be Mr McAdam. He is a bad man. He has a reason, even if it is not a good one. The bad parents, the really rotten ones, are not supposed to come to the Homes, they are banned. But no one can stop him from turning up when he wants to see his kids. There aren’t any adults strong enough to kick him out and usually one of the houseparents has to call the police, but by the time they arrive he is already gone.
Some people hate the police, but imagine if that is your job, you turn up and you’ve got to get rid of someone like him. I wouldn’t want to do it.
Even though I doubt it is him, he is someone to keep an eye on. After all, Jonesy has a point – he is capable of it.