Ploughing Potter’s Field. Phil Lovesey

       8

      The tape rolled on, turning slowly in the black machine on the cigarette-burnt table. Outside, suburban birds tried their best to divorce me from the tinny voices, a natural melody of harmless song inadequately competing with Rattigan’s sickening confession. But there was no comfort to be had from their happy twittering. Birds go on, regardless. Birds sing before every execution.

      I began to see Allen’s purpose in sending me there a little more clearly. I had the benefit of a better insight, now. Rattigan had told me everything, and it chilled me to the bone. A significant part of me wanted nothing more to do with the Beast of East 16, leave him and his mind and motives be – as if I’d opened an abandoned manhole cover and found it clogged with all the shit from humanity.

      However, another equally significant part urged me on, directed me down into the stinking mess of the man with dark, whispered promises of what lay waiting there. Truth was, the more I knew about the man the less it all made sense; the more I felt there was to discover. About him. And perhaps myself into the bargain.

      I hated myself, but was honest enough to admit I was hooked. Addicted – as surely as I’d been to the booze.

      Here’s a condensed version of what I heard that morning, taken from my own notes written at the time.

      There are seven interviews in all, taken over a period of three days after Rattigan’s arrest. As each is terminated and another begins, new pieces fall into the puzzle as the investigation gathers momentum. A total of six officers and three psychiatrists take part at various times, each determined to make some sense of Helen Lewis’s apparently needless death.

      And always the repeated question: ‘Why?’

      And Rattigan’s ‘answer’: “Cause she was there. Pretty as a picture.’

      … Police at Bethnal Green (headed by DCI Moira) quickly establish the previous movements of Frank Rattigan prior to the attack. An address found on the suspect’s clothes links him to Welland Farm, Suffolk, where further enquiries reveal he was working (cash in hand) as a fruit-picker during the week before the murder.

      Two other pickers are tracked down and interviewed, when, in exchange for anonymity from the DHSS, they not only confirm Rattigan’s whereabouts, but go on to add that whilst picking plums, a green Jaguar XJS drew into the farmyard. The driver seemed anxious to speak to Rattigan in particular. The farmer, a Mr Bob Jenkins, verifies the incident, but cannot say whether the Jaguar’s driver sought out Rattigan specifically. It was Friday the 9th September, 1988.

      In response to this, Rattigan would only say that the driver was lost and needed directions. He had no idea who the man was, and only sought to offer what help he could in the circumstances. However, both pickers were under the impression that the driver knew Rattigan personally. The suspect and the driver spent several minutes in conversation among the farm’s outbuildings, before the driver left the scene.