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Deep within us, there is a dormant, dark, embryo. An embryo containing another us - another you. Mostly, due to good parenting, a stoic education, peer assertiveness, and of course, in part for some, religious guilt, these dormant seeds never surface - and we lead good, normal healthy lives - that is, most of us do.
Between 1969 and 1999 there was a man who took it upon himself to hand out retribution to those individuals who had escaped justice for heinous acts of abuse, rape, and even murder. The condemned men in question were ‘low life’, with little self-esteem, unemployed or in low-paid employment, usually centered around, or in close proximity to children. One of them, however, was in a different level of employment and trust - he was a Priest. Father Peter Dunfold was spared the indignity of his pursuer’s usual reckoning - hanging by a rope and deprived of his genitalia - as he was arrested and sent to trial, receiving a life sentence based on video evidence. During the investigation in the mid-1990s, it was thought Dunfold and others were part of a wider circle of child abusers, but no other names were revealed by Dunfold during his interrogation. The only important evidence was a coded notebook found at Dunfold’s house and sent to the investigating officer, DI Christine Ling. The ‘evidence’ mysteriously disappeared when Chief Superintendent James Jarvis claimed he knew someone who could decipher it. The one entry in the notebook DI Ling remembered before it disappeared was 'Seek vital demon'. The only two people outside the case to know this, was a crossword compiler, Graham King, who was asked to decipher it, and Mandy Silver, to whom he eventually gave the answer. Both have since died - he from a heart attack, and she in a hit and run car incident.
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The lights of the city were too bright so she closed the curtains; darkness was more conducive to her mood. She slipped off her coat letting it fall and fell backwards onto the bed. She lay staring at the white ceiling, her memory playing movies of the fun times she and Mandy had had over the years - ice skating at Whitley Bay Ice Rink – Mandy telling her off for being late, again, at the wine bar – feeding the penguins at the zoo – their last Easter weekend away at Edinburgh – getting tipsy at a friend’s wedding and having to leave early because they could not stop laughing . . . Christine turned over and buried her head in the pillow, and let everything she had been bottling up come out. Sleep eventually came to her in the early hours of the morning, but she was in no hurry to wake up.
Loud knocking on the bedroom door eventually roused her. It was the maid, who she sent away, and ordered breakfast in her room. Having showered and devoured some tea and toast she plugged in her mobile, which had been left on all night so the battery was now flat. Checking it, she had three missed calls from Clive, her husband. “Hi, love. Sorry, but I was clean exhausted by the time I got back from the wake. How are the girls.?”
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