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Tuesday 8th September 1964
On Tuesday 8th September 1964, the State hanged John Bastin for the brutal murder of five women.
While his wife and child stood outside the prison gates waiting for the execution bell to toll, a distraught young woman took a coal shovel and beat a man to death. She brought it down again and again, slicing through cloth and flesh and hitting bone as her victim squirmed and cowered under the torrent of blows. Finally his movements ceased and all that remained was the battered pulp of his body and a glistening ooze of blood. The woman felt no sense of regret, even though she paused to feel for it. All she could locate was the heightened pulse of her adrenaline-fuelled heart and the sound of quiet sobbing from the woman beside her.
‘Oh Jesus! What have you done?’ the other woman cried. Her words were loaded with fear and whistled out through her misery like the thin strain of a battered bugle.
The woman looked at the blood-gored shovel and noticed that her heart rate had started to slow into a dull, regular thump. She glanced at the body and prodded it with the toe of her shoe, bristling at the realisation that some of his filthy blood had stained the leather. ‘The right thing, that’s what.’ She could feel nothing but relief now that the nightmare was over.
She turned to the woman she had believed was her friend and said the words exactly as she meant them. ‘You owe me for this.’
There was no such thing as a favour that didn’t have to be repaid and she had a clear price. The other woman glanced down at the dead man, and then at her own ruined body. She paid her debt four months later.
August 2010
At first glance Coronation Square didn’t seem to have changed much in over thirty years; it still had its postage stamp patch of green in the middle and still boasted its tall Victorian houses on all four sides. It still looked blowsy and overdone, and it still had a baleful air that marked it out as somewhere to be wary of. On closer inspection, Edie
