‘They raped us,’ Robbie said and looked up with a dead expression. ‘They took us into the woods and they raped us.’

Barrett nodded slowly. There it was. The motive.

‘Jack and I both knew what happened to one another, but we tried not to speak about it again. He never recovered.

‘We kept going to scouts, and most of the time it was difficult for Dennis to get Jack on his own, but he managed it. I never saw Eddie again. It only ever happened to me once. But Jack, for him it carried on. After a while my mum let me leave the scouts. I never told her what had happened to Jack or me.

‘Jack was so broken he even lost the ability to fight it. He went to scouts week-in and week-out without saying a word. Then, one day two years after it began, when he couldn’t take it any more, he killed himself.’ Robbie put his hands up around his own neck. ‘He hung himself until his last breath left his body and he was finally free from that monster.’

The inspectors sat in silence. What was there to say? The law said an eye for an eye was wrong, but for a moment both men imagined themselves as young boys. They pictured the fear and pain Robbie and Jack had been subjected too and, for a split second, they could identify with the killer.

‘Why Wendy?’ Palmer asked suddenly, wanting to understand what she’d been punished for. ‘Why did you have to kill her?’

‘She saw us,’ Robbie said. ‘That night when they walked us back to the tents, she was awake. She saw us. I looked at her. She could see we’d been crying, and she watched through a gap in her tent as our abusers tucked us into our sleeping bags. She knew, and she never said a word.’ A long silence prevailed.

‘Why now? Why wait until now?’ Barrett asked finally.

‘I’d left. I’d got away from it all. It was in the past, but then my mum died and I had to come home. It was all here waiting for me when I got back, and I knew the only way to lay Jack’s ghost to rest was to do this. He’s been with me. He’s always been with me, following me from country to country. He speaks to me and haunts my dreams.’ Robbie looked distant, unhinged. ‘I had to put it right. They had to pay for what they did to us.

‘I knew Dennis wouldn’t remember me. Jack was his special boy. I came up with fake name and got a part-time job in the shop. The rest was simple.’ He looked down at the palms of his hands. ‘Jack can rest now, can’t you Jack.’ He turned, smiling, and spoke into the thin air.

Chapter 28

12.00pm Tuesday 25th December