And so I put into motion the appropriate procedural mechanisms for the investigation into Arnold Brownlaw’s family background, whilst the two constables worked on the question of possible bank accounts. The staff in the incident room continued, patiently and sympathetically, to handle the public response calls. The CID followed up on the missing children’s list with personal interviews in police stations across the Midlands and the North. The amount invested in resources and energy to bring this tragic episode to a satisfactory conclusion was tremendous. And, still, we were left with frustration, as positive leads failed to materialise. I discovered, for instance, that Brownlaw’s father, himself an inheritor of substantial wealth, died of lung cancer when Arnold was only four years of age; his upbringing was left entirely to his mother, who never married again. That fact, coupled to what Margaret Simpson had told me of her unhealthy possessiveness with her son, gave me cause to wonder if perhaps Arnold had himself been a childhood victim of sexual abuse. Again, this would be consistent with the profile of the sadistic offender.
His father, in fact, did have a brother, but enquires revealed that he had lived in Australia for the last 30 years, and no contact had been maintained with his brother’s family. On the other hand, I ascertained that Mrs Brownlaw was herself an only child, leaving the trail as cold as it was when I began my enquires.
I also followed up the personal promise I had made to myself by looking into the circumstances associated with the ‘accidental’ death of Mrs Brownlaw. If I were suspecting a crime, as opposed to an accident, I would have to say the circumstances were definitely suspicious. The woman was, apparently, in the house alone; she was known (by the son!) to have something of a drink problem.
When Arnold returned home that night he is said to have found his mother unconscious at the foot of the stairs; he also claims she smelt strongly of alcohol. Arnold ‘immediately’ telephoned for an ambulance, which arrived some 20 minutes later. She was declared dead on arrival at the hospital. There were no other witnesses, and foul play was not suspected. “Why would a son want to murder his own mother?” I wondered to myself. An autopsy was carried out, and the cause of death was found to be a fracture of the second and third cervical vertebrae – or, simply, a broken neck. On the face of it, nothing really suspicious except no traces of alcohol was found in her bloodstream.
As I commented, however, there were two very good reasons for a motive to murder: one, he wanted revenge on a mother who, most of his life, had sexually abused him; and two, he stood to inherit a great deal of money. Proving it, though, was an entirely different matter, so I filed the case in my memory, classifying it ‘subject to further examination at a later date’.
On the matter of his bank accounts, there was good news and bad. The good news was that they found him; an account was registered in his name at the main branch of the Midland Bank. It was also in credit by a considerable sum. The bad news, however, was that this was 18 years ago, since when the balances had all been transferred offshore to a trust account in an unrelated name, in the Cayman Islands, and nothing further had been heard of him. So, another dead-end. Yet, somehow, even though I had never met the man, I couldn’t envisage him spending the rest of his life sunning around on some Caribbean island.
The follow-up with the missing children alas produced no additional information that might have tied the cases to the present one. The signals seemed to be clear that our man was likely to be involved, but to prove it we would have to establish material evidence; regrettably, that meant finding bodies, the very thought of which brought bile to my throat. In this respect, I had the horrible feeling that another ghoulish nightmare awaited us.
A few days later I received a call from Arthur Talbot – the sergeant I had taken to Ashworth House to check the security. In truth I had forgotten all about my conversation with him concerning his psychic aunt. She had cleared a space in her busy diary, he informed me, and she could see me that evening at her home in Stourbridge. I took a note of the address together with some directions, thanked Arthur for his help, and went back to the computer.
Stourbridge was a busy dormitory town some 15 miles or so from Birmingham. It had a population of around fifty thousand, many of who commuted into the city to work. It was fairly typical of many similar towns in the West Midlands, with good road access to the M42 and M5 motorways, and it wasn’t far from Birmingham Airport.
My appointment with Arthur’s aunt wasn’t until seven, so I had time to go home and change and get a bite to eat before setting off. The roads were quiet and with the help of Arthur’s instructions I completed the journey in less than half –an-hour.
Edna Morrison, as she was called, lived a short distance from the town centre of Stourbridge in a tree-shaded avenue of detached houses, causing me to think there must be a lot of money in clairvoyance – or perhaps I should stop being the policewoman! I was a little early, and as I presumed she would already have a client with her, I waited, down the street in the car, a little way from her house, until my appointed time. I just hoped Arthur had properly briefed his aunt and she wasn’t expecting me for a ‘psychic session’.
Mrs. Morrison, or Edith, as she insisted I call her, was a truly delightful lady. Despite her age – I would have guessed she was in her mid-seventies – she was sprightly and very alert, with what seemed to be a permanent twinkle in her eyes. She was also dressed quite elegantly in a beige tailored suit, and her greying auburn hair was nicely coiffure; I had the impression she was dressed for business.
Before she would discuss anything with me she insisted on my having coffee with her, which she served in a silver pot and a china coffee service. I wondered if this were standard procedure for her clients, who, no doubt, would be somewhat apprehensive about meeting the ‘great lady’. But instead of sitting me at the round table at one end of the room, she beckoned me over to the comfortable sofa; Edith took a seat opposite me in a large armchair. I had looked a round the room whilst she was getting the coffee and, contrary to my expectations, it was furnished very simply with the settee at one end by the fireplace, and the visiting table at the other. I assumed from the size of the house that this room was set-aside purely for her psychic work. The colours throughout the room were also friendly with long green drape curtains and a fitted carpet of gold and burgundy.
“Now, my dear. Arthur said you wanted me to help you …” she held up a hand and smilingly said, “No, you don’t have to worry, Angie, Arthur has told me you are seeking information rather than deceased ones.” She gave a little titter at her attempted joke. “So, where do you want to start?”
“Well, I’m grateful for you agreeing to see me at such short notice – one of the things Arthur told me was how busy you are. Actually, Edith, I’m after information. You see I have this young psychic friend and I would like to know more about how her gift works …”
“But surely, you could find that in any of the many books on the subject?”
“Yes, but Connie, that’s my young friend, doesn’t fall into what you might describe as the usual category of clairvoyants. Maybe if I tell you the story it might help you understand.”
Edith nodded and treated me to another of her warm smiles. I noticed the lines on her face crinkled when she smiled – laughter lines I would call them. So I went over the background of my relationship with Connie, condensing it as much as I could. I began with the discovery of the bodies in the woods four years ago, and how it was Connie who reluctantly guided us to the burial site and the terrible psychological effect it had on her. I then covered her long period in Forrest Hills psychiatric hospital, including the vision she had of her mother’s death, followed by the ‘preternatural’ image she had received a few days ago of the little girl from Solihull who was abducted from outside her school. And finally up to the present, where Connie is staying in Ashworth House, the halfway house, and when, last weekend when we were on our day’s excursion, she had what appeared to be her first prophetic vision of a child who may or may not be snatched from a playground in an unknown park. I ended with Connie’s repeated expressions of terror that this man knew she was watching him and was trying to trace her to do her physical harm.
When I’d finished I leaned back in my seat on the settee and rubbed my eyes. I had never found it easy talking about psychic phenomena.
“You seem to be as worried as your young friend is,” Edith observed. “Are you?”
“Yes. I’m concerned because I’ve seen the terrible things this man’s capable of doing to children … I’ve seen the bodies, Edith. And, although I don’t profess to understand Connie’s gift, or how it works, I do believe it’s completely genuine; if Connie tells me that the killer is hunting her, I believe her. I just thought that by talking to someone who’s an expert in the subject I might be able to help her … And it might help us catch this monster. So, I’d appreciate anything you can do to enlighten me on psychic phenomena … anything you think might help me protect Connie.”
The psychic pursed her lips thoughtfully before saying anything. It was as though she was trying to communicate somehow with Connie – at least that was the impression she gave me. Finally she said, in a slow measured voice, “ You do understand, do you, that there is no commonality amongst psychics? What I mean by that is that we do not fall into one little box with identical labels on it.” She paused as if gathering her thoughts again. “You see, my dear, there are different characteristics that define our gifts. For instance, I communicate with the departed ones – the deceased. Others see ghosts, whilst some have visions, either prophetic or in real time. I agree from what you’re telling me that your friend’s gift doesn’t fall into any one of these categories, but that doesn’t necessarily mean anything. It could well be Connie’s abilities sub-divide – I mean, sometimes her visions are in real time, while others are prophetic. But it seems to me from the way you describe her experiences, that the real problem’s the fact that she doesn’t understand her gift herself… She’s not familiar with it…”
“I’m sorry. I don’t understand.”
“No. Of course you don’t, my dear. Let me explain … Psychic gifts don’t arrive gift- wrapped and ready to use. We don’t, any of us, wake up one morning to discover we have the psychic gift presented to us, ready to use, if you like. It is an evolving blessing that takes many years to reach … shall we call it maturity? I remember when I had my first experience … I’d have been eleven at the time … I had a terrible vision of Sandy, our Labrador, being run over. It broke my heart, even though the dog was lying in front of the fire at the time. When my mother asked me what the problem was I daren’t tell her in case she thought I was losing my mind. Three days later, Sandy chased after a car in the road and was knocked down and killed …” she paused as though the telling of the story brought back unhappy memories for her. “I remember I was very angry at the time – I hadn’t asked for this vision, nor could I control it. But that became the pattern of my life for years afterwards. It wasn’t until after my grandmother died that I realised my true vocation was communicating with the dead – it was she who visited me and told me I was to help people in their grief.
“It was the scariest period of my life, made worse because I had no one to talk to about it.”
“So how did you learn to cope?”
She shook her head, as if to say I had asked the wrong question. “I don’t believe you ever learn to cope with this special kind of gift. What happens is that you learn come to terms with it, and from there you nurture it as you would a child, allow it to develop and mature over time. And you accept that it will never be something you can control, no matter how much you want to or how hard you try.” Edith shrugged at the memory of her learning curve. “It can be both a blessing and a curse, my dear – and I don’t really know how I can help your young friend, except to say she has to be patient. And above all she mustn’t be afraid of her visions … they can’t harm her – and they don’t mean to. It’s simply that part of her psyche lives on a different plane to other people; she experiences happenings that fall outside the realms of normal laws, and she’ll involuntarily shift into that dimension when something - or someone - wants to make contact or convey a message either verbally or visually.”
“What about this paedophile killer she’s afraid of, Edith. Is he going to be able to find her?”
“Not by any supernatural means, no. Any more than … Connie? …can find him. They undoubtedly share a common prescience, but you can be certain it’s frightening him just as much as her. But that’s not to say he won’t find her. He obviously knows she exists somewhere in the ether, and his constant fear now is that she’ll find him. That, I suspect is his overriding concern at present – that she’ll find him before he finds her. So he’ll have to hunt her down to stop her. So you see, Angie, they share the same fear for the same reason. “I’m sorry if that scares you,” she added, after seeing my reaction to this news. “I know it isn’t easy to digest, and I certainly wouldn’t pass it on to your friend. But I do believe you should be aware of its possibility.”
I couldn’t help but smile at the seriousness of her comments. “You sound more like a policewoman than I do,” I told her. “But I am very grateful for your help and advice, Edith, and I’ll try to keep a closer watch on Connie’s safety. And thanks for finding the time to talk to me.”
We talked for about an hour on the subject of the supernatural; it was hard for me to get my head round some of the things Edith told me, and I suspected that at the end of our discussion I was very little the wiser about the preternatural talents of psychics - principally the origin of their gift and its application. I suppose what really threw me was the almost casual way she treated the kinds of phenomena she had experienced in her life. But then, isn’t that precisely what she had advocated Connie would have to learn to do? Come to terms with her gift and accept it for what it was to a psychic – the most natural thing in the world.
As we said goodbye and I made my way back to the car it occurred to me that I hadn’t made very much progress. It was true I was a lot more knowledgeable about the mysteries of psychics and the strange world they spent part of their lives in, but it wasn’t something I could pass on to Connie. I mean, I can imagine her face if I were to tell her she will have to learn to come to terms with her gift and nurture it over time. She would probably think it was me who had gone round the bend. But at least I had gone someway to satisfying my curiosity about the phenomena as well as fulfilling my promise to myself to learn more about it..
I was still shaking my head though as I made my way back to Birmingham.
The public response to our requests for information slowly began to abate, and to a large extent it was becoming repetitive as well. Unfortunately, there was no fresh information that might be helpful to the police, and we were now dealing with the tail end of the calls. We did discuss the question of issuing a further appeal, but, on reflection, decided against it, at least for the time being.
The publicity the case had attracted began to subside, as these things do with the passage of time, until eventually it was relegated to the ‘lower case’, and finally it fell off the front pages.
As the days and then weeks went by our investigation lost none of its importance, as far as the police were concerned, but other cases started to command our attention … a fatal shooting in Birmingham’s club area, suspected to be linked to a gangland killing … an armed robbery of a building society involving the shooting of a cashier … a serial rapist attacking elderly women in daylight hours around the suburbs of the city-centre. As they say: life goes on: it was as if we had been shunted into a cul-de-sac with the missing child case and there was nowhere else we could go. So, we got on with our lives.
I saw Connie regularly, and once a month I had her stay with me for the weekend, which we both thoroughly enjoyed. By now, she and constable Harrison had become something of an item, and, although she was still very young, I did nothing either to lecture her or to discourage her from her first romance. Tongue in cheek, I did suggest she would be well advised to take precautions!
Jim and I remained close, although I was rather glad I hadn’t agreed to move in with him; I didn’t feel yet that we were close enough for that kind of commitment. I still had no idea where the relationship was headed. I loved the sex but I also knew I appreciated the freedom that living alone gave me, and I was very reluctant to surrender that.
Weeks went by with no further developments in the case, but we insisted on trying to maintain a high profile as far as public awareness was concerned. The posters and photofit pictures remained on display as an ongoing warning that this evil predator was still at large. I did notice, though, in passing a kiddies’ park one afternoon that the poster on display looked rather sad and worn.
I sat my inspector’s exam, and was relieved to pass with flying colours. Gradually life reverted to something like normality, and I concentrated more and more on trying to advance my career. Secretly I harboured ambitions to one day making it as high as Jim – if not all the way up to Superintendent.