Justice?

The moral right of the author has been asserted. © "neonlyte"

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When I was younger, a teenager, I wandered these hills and valleys, emotion stirred, joy and trepidation. On the open moors a sense of freedom, everything before me. In the tight gorges and near overhanging cliffs, I trod with apprehension, fearful of rock fall, unnerved by dimming light and reflected sound and yet I trod those paths as often as opportunity allowed. In a sense, my emotional reaction to the landscape paralleled my irrational disposition to potholing, caving in other vernaculars, I yearned to be underground, see wonders carved in limestone rock yet feared the confinement of enclosed spaces. Claustrophobia: a fear of confinement in a closed space is the dictionary definition. It is not the way it worked with me, my dread of becoming stuck in a crawl hole, wedged in place unable to move backward or forward with one hundred metres of mountain above me gave me a rush, made me do it; the pure undiluted adrenaline saturated stench of fear gave me a buzz like nothing else.

I learnt to control my fears, not dismiss them but simply control their release, exuberantly celebrating escape whether from underground or some other flirtation with danger, it became my métier and I took more and greater risks with myself and others relishing their abandonment to their own fears, their subsiding into a sub-human babble of incoherence. It is intoxicating having control over others. I didn't have many friends.

I was too cavalier for the Caving Club, always ready to push further, breaching the strict safety procedures the club set. I could sense anxiety in others, eyes betraying emotion, smell their fear. I stretched them once too often wanting to push further into Gorbeck Cave to prove the water link to Malham Cove. We were in difficult unexplored territory. There were three of us, the minimum number in case someone got into difficulties, one to stay and one to go for help. We had traversed about one hundred metres through several sumps, water filled passageways for the uninitiated. The longest, twenty-five metres with a deep dive under a hanging boulder wriggling through silt to the air pocket on the other side. We had disturbed the silt to the extent that we had virtually no underwater vision, the first two back swims would be virtually blind. I wanted to push on, the team leader, a chicken-shit university type refused. I could see he was scared, the sweat beads on his forehead, speech stumbling as he ordered a return. On the back swim, I went in the middle with him behind me, I 'got stuck' under the hanging boulder wriggling and stirring silt until it became impossible to see. He went ape-shit, the passage was too narrow to turn round and it is not easy to swim backwards down a narrow tunnel when you are panicking to get out. After a few minutes I managed to 'free myself' and we eventually broke surface, him with tears streaming down his white face. He never caved again, and the Caving Club banned me from all UK caves.

The net result of the ban was that I never managed to prove the water link to Malham Cove, my driving ambition since my Uncle first explained the mystery of the underground streams and passageways. I considered bleeding one of my girls in the stream that flowed into Gorbeck Cave then head down to the bottom of the Cove and wait for the flow to turn red. It could never have happened, they were too terrified. By the time I'd driven them somewhere so they could perform for me they were scared witless, none of them could have made the walk across the moors to the cave. Toward the end of my reign, when they knew from newspapers what fate waited them, you could almost touch their fear, trapped in my car, crying, pleading, just like that prick in the sump hole, pissing their knickers with fright. I fed on their adrenaline more than the sex itself, goading them to a state where they would do anything for me as long as I didn't hurt them. Most became 'reasonable', once they had calmed down, once I told them what I wanted. The odd one or two I had to hit around a bit, to persuade them. You could hear them thinking, 'If I just suck him off, maybe he'll let me go.' I always let them go, after I'd fucked them. It was just that one girl, silly mare, I told her which way to go, but she knew better and headed out onto the moor. She was lucky the farmer found her, a few more hours in that cold would have done for her. Well they can't blame me for that. I was never a killer.

I'd better tell you where all this happened, where I took the girls that I picked off the streets of Leeds or Bradford. It was some distance to drive out onto the moors, but I enjoyed driving, I was a good driver, always stayed within the speed limit, never gave the law cause for concern. Knew all the back-ways, cross country roads, best that way, even at night there could be a chance of headlights picking out the girl screaming in the passenger seat. I told them first off that I would kill them if they didn't stop bawling. That usually worked. Most of them sat there snivelling, eyes averted, surreptitiously trying the door handle, but I'd fixed that, no way out until I'd had my fill. Then the begging began, it usually entertained me for most of the journey, wheedling and pleading. One girl told me if I let her out she would meet me the next night with her sister and I could fuck both of them. She took me for stupid until I hit her across the mouth for suggesting such a thing. I don't need anyone to pimp for me. I certainly don't want someone giving it up freely, where's the fun in that? I want them terrified, crying when they go down on me not some prissy mouth whore batting her eyelashes and licking her lips before she sups.

I was telling you about where we went. Sometimes I drove them out beyond Bolton Abbey to Barden Towers, a ghostly ruin in granite bleak as the moor itself, desolate, miles from anywhere; in the dead still of the night, owls hooted or foxes barked, the strange sounds adding to the unease of a town girl. Stump Cross was another favourite spot of mine; quite nice show caves though the real business starts after the tourist trail stops, good caving. We would hold up there in the car park, hidden from the road by a berm, while I quietly explained to them, through their tears, what I was going to do with them. I thought it best to explain things, that way they knew what was expected of them, though half the time I don't think they listened, not fully. It surprised me how quickly they got undressed, most of them, as if sat there with no knickers would be good enough for me. No, that wasn't going to do it, I wanted much more than just to look. My first girl gouged me as I tried to get her trousers off, after that, I told them to undress themselves, if they knew what was good for them.

My favourite place, since childhood really, was Malham. The village snuggles into a fold in the Yorkshire Moors and receives hundreds of thousands of visitors each year to admire the geological fault that created Malham Cove, Gordale Scar, and Janet Foss, the lower falls. In summer, you can climb the cliff alongside the falls that plunge through Gordale Scar and wander the fractured limestone sheets that abruptly end in a one hundred metres plunge into Malham Cove. In millennia past a great river flowed over the cliff, the Ice Age ended all that, the limestone pavement atop the cove fractured and the water found a way down through the bedrock. See here is where it gets mystical, where nothing is quite what it seems.

Set back about three kilometres north from the lip of the cove is a lake, Malham Tarn, beautiful peaceful spot, Charles Kingsley stayed in the house at the head of the lake, it is where he wrote The Water Babies, what could be more romantic. A stream flows out of the bottom end of the tarn in the direction of Malham Cove rapidly disappearing underground into what the locals call a 'swallow hole'. A stream emerges at the foot of Malham Cove and everybody thought that was the stream from the tarn; wrong. The stream from the tarn bypasses Malham and emerges at Airedale springs some two thousand metres down stream. So where the fuck does the water at Malham Cove come from? That is what I was trying to find out when those bastards from the Caving Club banned me. We know some of it comes from the limestone pavement atop the cove, rainwater seepage mostly; some comes from old mine working sinkholes, they act as gravitational points for underground streams and one group connects to the cove. I've always favoured Gorbeck Cave as the primary source, dye tests on occasion have established a link but so much depends on the level of the water table. I'd have been famous in caving legend if they had let me push on and find that link. It would have made my life. Too late for that now, I'm too fat to go crawling down passageways, too old for exploration. Still, I made a name for myself. I won't be forgotten in a hurry.

I knew they would catch me eventually. The shrink the police brought in surmised that the risks I took pointed to my wanting to be caught; didn't say it like that, his words wrapped in psycho-babble, but it came to the same thing. How do I know? I was there, part of the investigating team. That's how I kept getting away with it, I knew which places were being watched, where the check-points were. The newspapers were having a great run categorising every attack, printing maps showing the distribution of my assaults and laying into the police for failing to do their job, but they can't have it both ways; my activities could have been stopped with extra funding for the police, putting more policemen out on the beat. No one wants to pay for it, the public wants low taxes so to my thinking they brought it on themselves; and the girls, well they should have known better, with all the stuff in the papers and on TV they were still willing to get into a car with a complete stranger, especially one masquerading as a mini-cab. When the end came, it wasn't at all what I expected, but then nothing is ever quite what it seems.

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In February, when everything else may lay dormant, insects have an instinct for finding sources of nourishment. Quite how they found their way into the sealed environment of the car is speculation. After three days and nine hours, and despite the bitter cold, O'Brien had begun a slow decomposition, his rotting organs generating sufficient heat to keep active the tiny flies that swarmed around his groin. In a few more hours, his flesh, already purple and blackened from the severity of his wounds, would begin to creep as maggots burrowed into tissue.

Mrs Charlton found O'Brien. She beat the combined police forces of the United Kingdom who had been actively seeking the suspected rapist for eight months after a pattern emerged to a series of attacks across the Midlands and North of England. To be more precise, she spotted a car that should not have been where it was and called the local constabulary. Police Constable Roy Street, dispatched from the Settle police station to investigate, rather wished some one else were sent after depositing his greasy canteen breakfast next to the parked car, steam rose from his breakfast for the second time that morning as he used the radio to summon help. As is often the way, no amount of serious police investigation can match a lucky break by an observant member of the public.

Mrs Charlton habitually walked her two retrievers setting out at precisely 11.00am from her Malham home and taking one of several walks from the village out into the glorious Yorkshire countryside. Three days earlier she had noticed the parked car, a mini-cab, and thought nothing of it, February was extremely early in the year for visitors but her natural assumption was the occupants had parked and gone to view the falls. Possibly a tourist with a driver for the day she thought, or a cab owner on a day out who had forgotten to remove his sign. She was heading in the direction of Gordale Scar and thought she might meet the visitors along the path. She felt a motherly concern that they should be wearing the correct footwear; the path would be treacherous in places, the deep gorge retaining frost and ice through the day at this time of the year.

She saw walked as far as the entrance to the gorge where the overhang of the limestone cliffs darkened day into twilight and stood listening to the roar of the water echoing from the walls, the fall itself hidden by a twist in the chasm. It would be dangerous to advance further along the footpath, ice and frost evident in the deep shade despite the relative warmth of recent days. Calling to her dogs she retraced her path and guessed the visitors had taken the other track from the car park leading to Janet Foss, and thought no more on the matter until she took a similar route three days later. She noted the car, conspicuous with its mini-cab sign on the roof, in the same place, though now covered with frost and ice, the promised cold spell having arrived with vengeance three evenings before. Curious, but not nosy by habit, she investigated but could see nothing through the ice covered windows. She called out a couple of times and walked a little way in the direction of Janet Foss, the cascade of the water fall punching the still morning air, and deemed the path and steps down to the falls too dangerous for her footwear. Concerned there may have been an accident she returned home and called the constabulary.

There was some delay before the police released details of the death. Eventually they confirmed they had finally found the man labelled by the newspapers as The Beauty Spot Rapist, after the locations of his attacks; that O'Brien was 'one of their own', actually part of the investigating team, added to the confusion. DNA evidence would prove conclusively the rape case closed but the initial forty-eight hours brought claim and denial tumbling one on top of another as the Commissioner of Police tried to head off a public relations nightmare. The police initially tried to conceal the nature of the injury that caused O'Brien's death, but the newspapers have their sources and the involvement of a police officer in the attacks ensured the public would know every detail.

Glaring headlines, almost vitriolic, proclaimed"Rapist's Penis Shredded" and"Revenge on Beauty Spot Rapist". The broadsheet papers gave a slightly more balanced account though none of the newspapers reserved any measure of sympathy for his fate. The morning radio and TV stations wheeled out the usual 'medical experts' and ran through various scenarios with different degrees of graphic support depending upon the current state of the ratings war. One producer of a struggling network would have been heard to argue, 'When are we going to get another chance to show a prick at breakfast time?' To which the obvious answer was to turn the camera upon himself!

The thing that baffled everyone, professionals and pundits alike, was just how had the wound been inflicted. His penis looked as if it exploded from the inside, it lay in strips in congealed blackened blood as if passed through a chip-making machine. O'Brien was not a small man, he had been powerful and strong, as many of his victims testified. What ever happened to him happened instantly, pathologists deduced he had been alive and with an erection at the time of the attack, the blood spray conclusive as to the last part, and that he remained alive for a considerable time after the attack, eventually losing consciousness from loss of blood before slipping into death. His face, adorned with fake facial hair and wrap around shades, conveyed an expression of shock, as one might have imagined. His phone was within reach; he could have called for assistance, but may have been 'paralyzed' in a state of shock. Regardless of the crimes with which he had been associated, he had died in a truly terrifying and horrific manner.

A forensic team spent many hours combing the car, difficult work given the extraordinary quantities of blood virtually coating the front seating area. Once they had taken the car the laboratory, they found sufficient traces of victims of O'Brien's heinous attacks to gather enough circumstantial evidence to prove the case against him. There were traces of others, possibly victims who had never reported an attack, as sadly happens, possibly who ever was with him on the night of his death, possibly some other persons all together.

The pathologists determined the cause of death as loss of blood, that much was self evident from the volume of blood found in the vehicle and soaking O'Brien's clothes. They were at a loss to explain the injury or how it became to be inflicted, nothing found in or around the vehicle to suggest it may have caused the injury. The pathologist report confirmed what an observer of the scene would have immediately known; whoever inflicted the wound would have been soaked in blood.

The lack of evidence around the vehicle was puzzling. A bitterly cold spell set in and lasted for around ten days after the estimated time of O'Brien's death. The tracks leading to O'Brien's car were clearly marked frozen in the surface mud; there were no other vehicle tracks. They accounted for all footprints around the car, and yet it was certain there had to have been another person in the vehicle at or around the time of the injury that led to his death.

They now had a murder enquiry to prosecute and little to no evidence to go by. Pains-taking investigation of the parking area kept the beauty spot closed, the police relenting and re-opening the car park just before the important Easter visitor season commenced.

The visitor season runs from Easter until October; for the rest of the year, the village is as quiet as a ghost. The police began to suspect that a ghost was their only possible explanation for the death of O'Brien. Malham is 20km or more from the nearest town of any size where it would be possible to find public transport. No taxi reported collecting anyone from Malham, no blood soaked people seen in the village; no one called for help or called the police even though there was a working mobile telephone in the car. Telephone company records confirmed no calls made and yet O'Brien had sat there, according to the pathologists, and bled to death.

The only possible explanation, only a theory yet nothing else made sense, was that O'Brien was followed to the location by someone known to his intended victim and in that vehicle she fled the scene, or, that he arranged to meet someone at that spot, they parked on the roadway, perpetrated the crime and drove away. Either was a possible, except for the lack of footprints or any other evidence.

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Twenty-four years earlier a young woman performed a ceremony at a location reputed to be able to grant wishes, her heart set on a young man and she would risk everything to be by his side. Mother Shipton's Well, known in Roman times, was a spring that fell over a boulder into a pool. Mother Shipton resided in a cave alongside the well some five hundred years ago, toward the end of the reign of Henry VIII. A soothsayer of repute though interpreters of her writings find many ways to divine meaning. The remarkable thing about the 'Well' was its ability to transform objects into stone; anything suspended in the stream of water flowing over a rock into the 'Well' becomes petrified in the space of a few short weeks. We now know it is dissolved limestone in the water that performs this 'miracle' but in medieval times it was pure magic and like all such freaks of nature, the 'Well' became symbolic with mystical powers and legends. There are two legends of particular note to young ladies; one enables the woman to see the image of her future husband, the other, binds him to the woman. The girl in this story performed the latter ceremony.