One Law For the Rest of Us Read online

  3

  Audrey Marshall

  I was born Audrey Patterson in October 1933. I had a sister, Joan, who was almost exactly five years older. My dad, Jack, was a clerk in an insurance company in the City. My mum, Dorothy, had been a secretary before she got married, and she made a bit of extra money by taking in typing and editing. So, although we weren’t exactly rich, we were pretty comfortably off. We lived in our own house in Stepney Way in the East End of London, and as far as I remember from so long ago, we were very happy together there. I remember going to the local primary school and playing in the street in front of our house with Joan; and I remember my seventh birthday party. Although the war had started by then, and some things we’d taken for granted before the war were in short supply, my mother somehow managed to bake me a cake and put seven white candles on it, and found balloons and ribbons to decorate the living room, and my friends from the street and school were all there. We played pass the parcel and hide-and-seek.

  One reason I remember that birthday party so well is that it’s the last real memory I have of my life in our house. The Blitz had been underway for about a month. The Luftwaffe was dropping its bombs on London by night and by day, inflicting as much damage as it could, and the East End bore the brunt of it because a lot of the bombing was aimed at crippling the docks. Then again, a lot of it was aimed simply at terrorising the city’s population; and a good deal of it was probably random – bombs ditched to lose weight before attempting the flight home with damage inflicted by our anti-aircraft guns; or when short of fuel; or when the navigator had lost his way.

  I was too young to understand the full extent of the danger. But at night, I remember hearing explosions and the wailing of sirens, and the rapid bursts of fire from anti-aircraft batteries; and, if I dared to peek out around the blackout curtains we had on the windows, seeing the red and orange glow of fires on the ground in the distance, and the white beams of searchlights in the sky. I remember my parents talking in whispered tones about people they knew who had been killed or lost their homes in the bombing, and about people sleeping on the platforms of the underground stations. For some reason, we never resorted to these obvious places of sanctuary from the nightly violence, even though Stepney Green and Whitechapel stations were close at hand. I’ve often wondered why. My parents never explained. Looking back on that time now with my adult understanding, I can only suppose that it was a case of denial. In common with many other Londoners, they couldn’t bring themselves to accept that the assumptions of peace and security on which they had built their lives had been swept away so comprehensively and so suddenly: that in just a month, a hostile air force could have reduced their city to a state of such terror that people would abandon their homes and everything they had worked for, that they would leave everything they had defenceless in the dead of night. Perhaps, also in common with many other Londoners, they were clinging desperately to the delusion that it would never happen to them.

  Whatever the truth, some sense of reality must have penetrated, because three days after my party, my parents packed suitcases for Joan and me. With no forewarning, they explained to us that we were being evacuated. That wasn’t how they put it: what they said was that we were going for a short holiday in the country until the war was over, which would be any day now, so we wouldn’t be away for long. What I’d seen, even through the eyes of a child, didn’t suggest to me that the war would be over any time soon; and my mother was crying as she and my father tied our name-tags around our necks with white ribbon, and bundled us out of the house in the bleak hours of the morning, just before dawn. They walked us quickly to the corner of the street, where we boarded a dark, cold bus with a handful of other children. Our consignment would grow to twenty: one or two we knew, but most of them strangers; a few, from Bow and Whitechapel and Stepney, already on board or boarding with Joan and me; others picked up on our way, as we meandered through unfamiliar streets towards the north-eastern outskirts of London. Our parents kissed us as we left, and promised that they would see us soon.

  I know they meant it. But on the third night after we left, the Luftwaffe scored a direct hit on our house, with my parents inside it.

  The drive from East London to the country seemed to take forever. But, to a child who had never been out of the city, it was fascinating to see the change of scenery as the bus left London behind and emerged into a dawning world of green fields and trees: a world in which you could travel for miles without seeing more than one or two houses; and in which I saw, for the first time in my life, sheep and cows, and horses roaming free instead of pulling carts through the streets of Whitechapel for some wizened old rag-and-bone man. I gazed out of the window with my nose pressed hard against the glass for miles on end, and Joan had to remind me to eat the sandwich and biscuits we’d been given as a packed meal, before some greedy child could snatch it away from me.

  Eventually we arrived at a huge mansion, which seemed to spring at us from nowhere as we were driving along a narrow country lane bordered by tall trees and hedges. It hasn’t changed at all over the years. Today Lancelot Andrewes House looks exactly the same as it did when I first set eyes on it: an imposing six-storey construction of red brick, with austere bay windows formed of thin black panes and old wavy glass, set back from the road a hundred yards or so, with extensive grounds at the rear. It is a place I have come to know intimately, and which has played a huge role in my life, for good and for ill: and even now that I’m forty years of age and have seen it so often as an adult, I still remember how it looked for the first time through the eyes of a child; I still remember the sense of being overawed by its size and its unexpected presence, its ability somehow to spring at you suddenly from its hiding place behind the trees and hedgerows, the sense of its being unconnected to the world, certainly the world of my seven-year-old experience.

  Lancelot Andrewes House is a Church of England boarding school situated in the Cambridgeshire countryside, about five miles from Ely. It is actually two separate schools, one for boys and one for girls; but the two are accommodated in the same building, with strict separation, girls on the left, boys on the right, as you see the building from the road. As a contribution to the war effort, the school had offered to take a limited number of children evacuated from the East End, and had agreed to waive its usual fees. The offer was a generous one, although it was meant to last only until it became safe for us to return to London; and most of the children who had arrived on the bus with me left to go home to Bow and Whitechapel and Stepney and Bethnal Green once our Spitfires had all but banished the Luftwaffe’s bombers from our skies. But Joan and I were orphaned within three days of arriving, and out of sympathy, were immediately told that we could stay and complete our education at Lancelot Andrewes, come what may; and despite everything that happened subsequently, I am still deeply touched by that act of extraordinary kindness.

  That same sympathy probably saved Joan and me from the worst of the nastiness many of the East End evacuees experienced at the hands of snobbish school mates, girls who came from richer homes and whose parents could afford the fees. Joan and I seemed to get off relatively lightly. But the richer girls found it fun to laugh at our lack of sophistication, at our Cockney accents and poor diction, at our ignorance of life outside the East End, and at our more shabby clothes: until Matron – a lovely, plump, forty-something, caring but no-nonsense woman called Molly – supplied us with second-hand school uniforms, red blazers and grey skirts, grey stockings and black shoes that looked exactly the same as everyone else’s. That wasn’t Matron’s only kindness, by any means. Somehow – looking back on it, I’m pretty sure she must have had a whip-round among the staff – she found us some weekly pocket money: not as much as the richer girls had, of course, but enough to allow us to patronise the school tuck shop; and to hold our own when we were allowed to go for tea and cakes in the High Street after our monthly school service in Ely cathedral. As we all got used to each other, and
as most of the London children returned home, the worst of the childish prejudices faded away. Joan and I made friends, some of whom I’m still in contact with today, and we were sometimes even invited to their homes for school holidays.

  I’m grateful, too, despite everything, for the education I received at Lancelot Andrewes. I settled without too much restlessness into the daily routine of prayers, classes and games, and the discipline did me good. I think it did Joan good, too. It structured our grieving for our parents, and it gave form to our new life without them, without the only home we had ever known; it enabled us to avoid the temptation of clinging exclusively to each other, of erecting barriers against the rest of the world to defend ourselves from the pain. The staff were dedicated teachers, who, unusually for the time, expected the same high academic standards of the girls as they did of the boys, with the result that the school was continually breaking national records for the number of girls gaining university places.

  Joan left Lancelot Andrewes at the age of eighteen to study History at Edinburgh, and I followed in her footsteps five years later, to read English. After graduation, as a twenty-one-year-old woman with no other plans for her life, I decided to stay with Joan in Edinburgh. By then, she already held a responsible administrative position with the Royal Bank of Scotland, where she was highly thought of; so much so that at her request, her manager offered me a job too, on a similar career path. We shared an upstairs flat in a lovely old Georgian town house in the New Town district.

  We lived and worked together, happily as far as I could tell, for almost four years: until one Saturday afternoon, when I got back from the shops and the library, I found her lifeless body hanging from the staircase on the attic floor above our flat. I’d had no idea, not the slightest indication, that she’d had any thoughts about taking her own life. She was always quiet, and could be rather reserved, even with me. But she was doing well at work and there was a young man she seemed to like who was paying attention to her. I hadn’t detected any change in her mood. But there she was, hanging there. Dead.

  She’d left me a note. It said: ‘I’m sorry, Audrey. I wanted to stop it, but I couldn’t.’ At the time, I didn’t understand what she meant. If I had, I might perhaps have saved her: and, in a sense, and to some extent, myself.

  4

  ‘I suppose the first question I have,’ Ginny said, after Julia had introduced Audrey and Ken Marshall, and they were comfortably settled around the table with cups of tea, ‘is why you haven’t been to the police? What you’re saying is that this Father Gerrard has been enabling a network of paedophiles to molest young girls at Lancelot Andrewes School for two generations, and that you and Emily are both victims. Why haven’t you been to the police? For that matter, why hasn’t anyone been to the police before now?’

  Audrey nodded. ‘We’ve been trying to decide what to do ever since Emily told us what happened to her, and my memory came back. I know it’s the right thing to do, to tell the police. But… well, we’re not sure we’d be taken seriously if we reported it in Ely.’

  ‘The school has a lot of influence locally, Miss Castle,’ Ken added. ‘You’d be surprised. And with Audrey having worked for the diocese of Ely for so long, we just don’t feel confident about going to the police at home.’

  ‘Is the school under the control of the diocese?’ Ben asked.

  ‘Not now,’ Audrey replied. ‘It was originally, but the Church suddenly cut all ties to the school in the early 1950s. No one seems to know exactly why, but it was quite abrupt. Since then, Lancelot Andrewes has been an independent school with its own charitable status. It still describes itself as a Church of England school, and the headmaster’s a priest, but there’s no formal connection with the Church. Obviously, with the school being so close, there are still contacts with the diocese; they still hold regular services in the cathedral, and so on.’

  ‘Why should that affect the police?’ Ben asked.

  ‘Because of Father Gerrard,’ Ken replied.

  ‘Desmond Gerrard has a national reputation, Mr Schroeder,’ Audrey added. ‘Lancelot Andrewes is one of the most respected schools in the country. He’s been headmaster since before my time – and I started there in 1940. The Queen gave him the CBE for services to education. The Church gave him a special title, the Most Reverend Father Desmond Gerrard. Desmond Gerrard is a legend in Ely. He’s untouchable.’

  ‘Nobody’s untouchable,’ Ginny said.

  ‘No, I know,’ Audrey said. ‘But… I’m the deputy administrator for the diocese. I’ve been in my job for the best part of fifteen years, so I’ve had ample time to see how these things work…’

  ‘Go on,’ Ginny said encouragingly.

  ‘The diocese is represented by the same solicitor as Lancelot Andrewes, a man called John Singer. Singer is ruthless when it comes to protecting the Church. I report to the administrator, and he reports to John Singer. Believe me, I know.’

  ‘That’s why we asked Julia for advice,’ Ken added. ‘We needed an outsider, someone with some contacts, someone who won’t be intimidated by the Ely mafia.’

  Ginny laughed. ‘Julia’s taken on more sinister characters than the Ely mafia in her time, Audrey. She won’t be intimidated, I can promise you that.’

  ‘Amen to that,’ Julia smiled.

  ‘I know John Singer,’ Ben said, ‘or, at least, I worked with him for some time on a case, not long after I’d started out in practice.’

  ‘What? In Ely?’ Ken asked.

  ‘No. St Ives. The defendant was a vicar there. He had a very unusual name, Ignatius something. This would be ten years ago, 1964.’

  ‘Ignatius Little,’ Audrey said immediately.

  ‘That’s the man.’

  Audrey scoffed. ‘I remember Ignatius Little. Don’t I just? He was bad news from the day we ordained him: couldn’t keep his hands off his choir boys. But he wasn’t one of the obvious ones – he looked the part, you know. He was a real blighter to pin down. Finally, he was arrested and charged.’ She smiled ruefully. ‘But then you went and got him off, didn’t you?’

  Ben nodded. ‘Sorry. I’m afraid I did. We went for trial at Quarter Sessions in Huntingdon, and we got the right jury. And he had a really nice fiancée, who made a good witness. But some time later…’

  ‘Some time later, we shipped him off to the diocese of Chester,’ Audrey interrupted, ‘where he distinguished himself by getting himself arrested for importuning in a public place; following which he hanged himself in a police cell. But that was typical Singer: anything to protect the diocese. We should never have sent Ignatius to Chester – not without telling them what we knew about him. I argued against it, but I was overruled. By the time it all finally came out, it was Chester’s problem, not ours. Singer was happy with that, needless to say. I wasn’t happy, and neither was my boss. But we had no say in it.’

  ‘It sounds to me,’ Julia suggested, ‘that you may have been right not to go the police in Ely – not as a first step, anyway.’

  ‘But she must go to the police, Julia,’ Ginny insisted. ‘There’s been a long history of child sexual abuse at Lancelot Andrewes, and it has to be investigated.’

  ‘There’s something else, too,’ Audrey said after a silence.

  ‘Go on,’ Ginny said. ‘Don’t be afraid. We’re on your side.’

  ‘She’s worried no one will believe her,’ Ken said quietly.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I sent Emily to Lancelot Andrewes after I’d been molested there myself, didn’t I? The school still gives employees of the diocese a special rate on the fees. When she reached the age to start school, I’d been working for the diocese long enough to qualify, and it was a huge, huge reduction. To be honest, we couldn’t have afforded it otherwise. At the time, it was too good to turn down. But now I’m afraid they will use it against me.’

  ‘You had no memory of being molested then,’ Ginny poin
ted out. ‘You had no way of knowing.’

  ‘No, but…’

  ‘And they can’t hold that against Emily. There’s no question of recovered memory in her case. Her memory is as fresh as a daisy.’

  ‘Yes, Ginny,’ Ben agreed. ‘But she’s a child, claiming to be the victim of sexual assault. Any evidence she gives would need corroboration from an independent source.’

  ‘So they could say that Audrey’s trying to provide Emily with corroboration,’ Julia asked, ‘by pretending to have memories of being molested herself?’

  ‘Exactly,’ Ben replied.

  ‘That’s what scares me,’ Audrey said quietly.

  ‘Other witnesses will come forward,’ Ginny insisted. ‘They’re bound to, once word of this gets out. Emily will have all the corroboration she needs. So will you, Audrey.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ Ben said, ‘but it’s a problem we can’t just ignore. There’s no reason why you shouldn’t be believed, Audrey, and it’s no reason not to go forward. But the first step is to find a way to report to the police, in such a way that John Singer can’t obstruct us.’

  ‘The question is: how to do it?’ Julia mused.

  ‘I dealt with a capital murder committed in St Ives,’ Ben said, ‘at about the same time as Ignatius Little’s case. There were two senior officers from Cambridge dealing with it, a Detective Superintendent Arnold and a Detective Inspector Phillips.’

  ‘I know Ted Phillips from Rotary Club,’ Ken said. ‘Arnold has retired, and there’s a Detective Superintendent Walker who’s taken over now. Ted’s still there, though. I’ve always thought of him as somebody you could trust.’

  Ben nodded. ‘He struck me as a good man. We have to start with the Cambridgeshire police. There’s no way around that. It’s their jurisdiction.’