garden.
Fir trees covered the rear of the property, but he would break cover the moment he pushed between two leaning fence panels, rotted away from a concrete post. There was nowhere
to hide in the garden. Even without ambient light, if anyone was to look from the rear windows at the back of the three terraced houses confronting him, they would see him.
He’d need to move slowly because the back yard was an obstacle course designed by those who cared nothing for a rear outlook. The smell of desiccated grass by the broken fence clouded his
thoughts and hampered a strategy that became even less clear in his mind, less convincing, until his plan entirely fell away. He was tired, had slept badly for months, was thinking too much but
resolving nothing. His head was not right for today’s work. But would it ever be right again?
Elderly private owners occupied the house on the right. Their garden featured an orderly array of crops around bleached stone paths. Two families shared the house on the left. He’d counted
five children earlier that week and wondered if the parents knew who was living next door. He thought of the children playing outside their neighbour’s shabby house, and the father shivered
with a sudden, mad desire to do the move fast, and at gunpoint, eschewing nerve gas or the police immobilizer.
According to Scarlett, Murray Bowles had already served a three-year sentence in the early forties for the physical and sexual abuse of children, before appearing in court in 2046 on twelve new
charges of indecent assault and the rape of minors. The latter abuse was sadistic in nature, though he served no more than three years. He was out in 2049 and housed at the seaside in Margate. In
2050 he moved west, to Torbay.
In the late thirties Murray Bowles was a suspected affiliate of Ken ‘Santa’ Barret, a reviled paedophile and one of the last child killers to get the nation bristling for the death
penalty, before such things were swept away by record rainfalls, European hurricanes, floods and rising sea levels. In Nottingham ‘Santa’ Barret’s group had killed two brothers in
care during a sadomasochistic ritual. Rumours suggested more children had been killed by the ring. Five of the twenty boys and girls that Santa’s secretive group had abused were never
found.
‘Santa’ Barret was killed by other inmates in prison in 2043. Besides Murray Bowles, none of Barret’s associates had ever been traced, and Bowles’s connection to the
‘Santa’ murders never stuck due to lack of evidence.
The father knew why Scarlett Johansson had made Murray Bowles available to him: he’d mainly groomed from care homes in the East Midlands, like his master, and they’d often moved the
victims into rented flats. Two children were imprisoned for over a year, and Murray Bowles had arrived in Torquay the year before his daughter was taken.
Bowles couldn’t drive, but may have been part of a group. Parole officers had kept an eye on the man once a month for thirty minutes since his release from prison, but he hadn’t been
a suspect for anything since 2049. According to statistics and case histories, that didn’t mean much during the quiet periods of predators like Bowles, and all of the offenders were mostly
off radar now; there were far greater priorities to occupy the police and social services.
He should have been told about Bowles before. That bugged him. A notion that the four men he had made moves upon thus far had been mere practice, and that he had been surreptitiously tested and
trained in advance of this hot morning at another stranger’s house, nagged him. As his wife suspected, maybe tendrils of the Home Guard scandal, created by factions in authority and their
associations with paramilitaries, were now coiled about his neck. God knew he had reason to be here, but he didn’t want to be used for general organized harassment, or another paedophile
cull. He did not want to engage in anything
Fir trees covered the rear of the property, but he would break cover the moment he pushed between two leaning fence panels, rotted away from a concrete post. There was nowhere
to hide in the garden. Even without ambient light, if anyone was to look from the rear windows at the back of the three terraced houses confronting him, they would see him.
He’d need to move slowly because the back yard was an obstacle course designed by those who cared nothing for a rear outlook. The smell of desiccated grass by the broken fence clouded his
thoughts and hampered a strategy that became even less clear in his mind, less convincing, until his plan entirely fell away. He was tired, had slept badly for months, was thinking too much but
resolving nothing. His head was not right for today’s work. But would it ever be right again?
Elderly private owners occupied the house on the right. Their garden featured an orderly array of crops around bleached stone paths. Two families shared the house on the left. He’d counted
five children earlier that week and wondered if the parents knew who was living next door. He thought of the children playing outside their neighbour’s shabby house, and the father shivered
with a sudden, mad desire to do the move fast, and at gunpoint, eschewing nerve gas or the police immobilizer.
According to Scarlett, Murray Bowles had already served a three-year sentence in the early forties for the physical and sexual abuse of children, before appearing in court in 2046 on twelve new
charges of indecent assault and the rape of minors. The latter abuse was sadistic in nature, though he served no more than three years. He was out in 2049 and housed at the seaside in Margate. In
2050 he moved west, to Torbay.
In the late thirties Murray Bowles was a suspected affiliate of Ken ‘Santa’ Barret, a reviled paedophile and one of the last child killers to get the nation bristling for the death
penalty, before such things were swept away by record rainfalls, European hurricanes, floods and rising sea levels. In Nottingham ‘Santa’ Barret’s group had killed two brothers in
care during a sadomasochistic ritual. Rumours suggested more children had been killed by the ring. Five of the twenty boys and girls that Santa’s secretive group had abused were never
found.
‘Santa’ Barret was killed by other inmates in prison in 2043. Besides Murray Bowles, none of Barret’s associates had ever been traced, and Bowles’s connection to the
‘Santa’ murders never stuck due to lack of evidence.
The father knew why Scarlett Johansson had made Murray Bowles available to him: he’d mainly groomed from care homes in the East Midlands, like his master, and they’d often moved the
victims into rented flats. Two children were imprisoned for over a year, and Murray Bowles had arrived in Torquay the year before his daughter was taken.
Bowles couldn’t drive, but may have been part of a group. Parole officers had kept an eye on the man once a month for thirty minutes since his release from prison, but he hadn’t been
a suspect for anything since 2049. According to statistics and case histories, that didn’t mean much during the quiet periods of predators like Bowles, and all of the offenders were mostly
off radar now; there were far greater priorities to occupy the police and social services.
He should have been told about Bowles before. That bugged him. A notion that the four men he had made moves upon thus far had been mere practice, and that he had been surreptitiously tested and
trained in advance of this hot morning at another stranger’s house, nagged him. As his wife suspected, maybe tendrils of the Home Guard scandal, created by factions in authority and their
associations with paramilitaries, were now coiled about his neck. God knew he had reason to be here, but he didn’t want to be used for general organized harassment, or another paedophile
cull. He did not want to engage in anything
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