The Venables Jurisdiction

So, last month, I quit my job of nineteen years, and moved down to Spain.

I know I'm at the younger end of the spectrum, retirement-wise, but yes. Cleaning up crime scenes can be... challenging. Confronting, even. It probably goes without saying. Not that you need me to tell you that.

But then there's the Dormitory Forty-Four affair.

When the call came in from the station, I wouldn’t say it was entirely unexpected. Gossip had been spreading already, something to do with a tragedy at Ambrose Academy high school. Most people in that particular part of town just called it “The Boarding School” or something equally self-evident; I’d driven past it a few times, commuting along Stretford.

But now?  

It didn’t seem like much of a “School of Horrors” or “Hell School”; not from the street, at least. A normal old school, undeniably dated but clean, sat in a city’s block of something that might, very generously, be described as “gardens”. It seemed to be one of those classic “quad” buildings, the type with a courtyard in the middle, though as I would soon see the view from Dormitory Forty-Four looked out at the street.

Having been expected by the staff, I had no trouble accessing the required wing, the girls’ wing, and making my way up to the first floor. I’m sure the faculty were as keen to see that heinous room cleaned out as anyone else. Whatever the case, the hallway seemed perfectly respectable to me; again, the rather clinical, sickly blue of the walls screamed “institutional”, and the little nubs of the light switches harkened back to a simpler time. But it was well-kept. Normal. Just… fine.

The bland wooden door to the dormitory, bearing the now-infamous “44” in brass, was equally innocuous; I mean, aside from the fact it wouldn’t sit right in the frame. Someone had, out of sheer necessity, kicked it down from the outside, after all.   

I had no such problems letting myself in.

Now, I cannot state this enough, but the mundanity of what I saw seemed almost blasphemous, considering what I would later learn. My first instinct, having braced myself for  whatever unimaginable scene might be on the other side, was to think “oh… that’s anticlimactic”.

Not that I wanted to be scraping another body-stain off the floor or whatever, and I certainly didn’t like dealing with the death of a child. That part was never fun. It’s just that, really, the room didn’t seem to fit the mould of unthinkable acts. White drywall… parquet floors… an old metal locker, across from the bed… there was a peculiarly bland, impersonal bent to the room, the harmlessness and ineffable sense of almost grandparental-nostalgia bordering on off-putting.

But that wasn’t all.

No matter how drab the baseline was, someone had clearly made this room her home.

Here, there was everything a girl of this age could ever want or need, or so it seemed in that very first instant. She seemed cared for, even doted upon.

The dormitory was just about as messy as could be: ties, blazers, and skirts in Ambrose’s shades of grey and dark green were strewn across the floor with almost as much impunity as paper upon paper upon paper. Looking down, I noticed the toe of my boot just barely pressing down on some sort of maths worksheet, one which had yet to be filled out. That, internally, made me crack a smile; I knew my own daughter, who was the exact same age as the unfortunate victim here, would have absolutely zero gumption to do more homework than necessary either.

More personal were the other detritus everywhere. Across the thin metal headboard of the bed, a thick, brown cardigan had been draped, while a rolled-up picnic rug lay neatly by the radiator. A hair brush lay on the bedside table, its bristles still holding a thick mat of startlingly ginger hair.

What’s more, on the floor, I quickly spotted a paint palette lying face down, gunked to that thick matt of papers with what I would later learn to be dried-out watercolour pigments. Pages and pages of, appropriately enough, watercolour paintings were scattered this way and that, with a number of them being screwed up and tossed aside. At least a few showed Winnie the Pooh, hand in hand with one or another his animal friends. More still showed wildflowers and squirrels, lots of squirrels. All had a particularly old fashioned whimsy to them that was, to my untrained eye, very appealing.  

All that in the very first instant. I was surprised. She seemed absolutely fine, even happy, in the gawkily astray manner of so many of that age.  

And then, as I set to work, there were… signs. Hints. Tells, even.

Even before entering the room, I’d noticed the breakage of the door’s lock. This wasn’t from some horrible home-invasion; I knew that well enough. The school faculty had, according to reports, been forced to kick the door down. This, to my mind at least, raised the question: why would a girl die in a locked room? “How” didn’t matter here; that was sadly, unspeakably inevitable, given the manner in which the staff had found her. But, if things had gotten to such a horrific point, why on earth hadn’t she just left this place?

The urge to escape harm, judging from the scenes I’ve dealt with, is a powerful instinct indeed. So, much as I attempted to maintain a certain level of detachment, I couldn’t help but think to myself, “someone had her right where they wanted her”.

If she’d had no way of leaving… and I must admit the realisation made me shudder… if that were the case, then others had clearly made Dorm Forty-Four their own, coming and going with impunity, it seemed.

Entering the room, something in the air shifted. A heaviness… a bated breath, if you will…

I laid out my kit. Bin-bags. Brushes. Disinfectant. Gloves.  

Time to get to work.

The papers, as I began to gather them up for bagging, were the next thing that started to creep their way under my skin. Each and every homework sheet, week after week, was completely bare. This wasn’t just the whim of some fed-up teenager; there was a real pattern here. Hadn’t the school noticed that one of their students was either very, very lax, or very, very sick? Had the pattern been too common, too stubborn, to be anything more than an inconvenience?  

The state of those watercolours, the longer I looked at them, did little to assuage my concerns. Yes, they were remarkably executed, clearly made with hours of care and attention judging by the cleanness of the colours within the lines. But even these genuinely impressive efforts had been crumpled up and chucked around randomly. Judging from everything else I’d seen so far, this girl had been no perfectionist in her organisation… but still. Even I could tell this wasn’t her handiwork, but something very different.

I bagged the paintings up, along with all the other papers. The task wasn’t a lengthy one, especially compared to some of the scenes I’ve had to clean, but it more than sewed the seeds of doubt.

As for all those crumpled, discarded clothes, when I began to tidy them away, I found myself even more confused. Now, the Ambrose Academy wasn’t Eaton or Harrow or anything; far from it. But it was hardly a disreputable school. The girl’s parents had clearly been able to provide all the necessary uniforms for her. So, why did they all reek and bear the stiff, glazed stains of thick, laboured sweat? How had mould begun to set in?

I technically wasn’t supposed to form any firm opinions, especially as a mere cleaner, but I always tried my best to humanise what I encountered, in my line of work. And it certainly occurred to me that it would be impossible for the poor girl to clean her clothes if she couldn’t even leave her room. Even a sink-washing would be impossible; the bathrooms were shared, and located just down the hall… hadn’t anyone picked that this girl was, at the very least, neglecting herself? Then again, that was the problem. For anyone to pick it, they’d have had to actually be in her presence…

And then, as I prised a tiny, floral sock off the old metal radiator, I noticed the bending of those dusty old columns. From top down, and even along their sides to a lesser degree, all of them were subtly yet undeniably warped by some greatly blunted force.

I could even trace a pattern from the radiator all along the drywall. The same dents, at most a fist’s width apart, but the vast majority of them at head rather than punching height. Even the metal locker, squatting forlornly in the corner, bore more than its fare share of similar damage, as if the whole room had been little more than a punching bag.

I simply couldn’t reconcile the girl who’d painted those watercolours as the force behind such needless destruction.

Whatever the case, I dashed in my notebook: “radiator to be replaced”. Even if I cleaned those reddish, brownish spatters off the metal, it would still be completely unusable. To create such damage, in all its unspeakable implications, would have been a very loud business. So, hadn’t the neighbours heard anything? Hadn’t anyone complained?

Not if they’d been expecting it...

Wait. I’d gotten ahead of myself, hadn’t I? I shook my head clear of unspeakable things; that lovely cardigan, the one on the headboard, still needed bagging.

As I lifted it away, I’m not quite sure what I noticed first. Was it the thickly layered stains of metallic, coppery brown, or the twinned school ties wrapped tight around the headboard’s frame, each an arm’s width apart?

I really, really tried not to think about it as I tugged at those knots. They really were remarkably tough to undo, weren’t they? The anaemic white paint around them had started to flake off, so tightly were they wound.

Presuming with almost complete certainty that the girl herself hadn’t put them there, because why would she, all I could wonder was “who, then?”. This was the girl who’d created so many paintings of precious friendship; didn’t she have friends to defend her from whatever this was?

Not, I theorised, if these had been her “friends”.

Teenagers…

Having a daughter of that very same age myself, albeit one far less inclined to whimsy,  I knew full well that such people really were the absolute best and absolute worst of humanity all in one.

Well, now I was here by the bed, I figured I might as well start stripping it. The ineffable thickness and taste in the air was undeniably stronger here, but I still grabbed the duvet without overmuch suspicion. I was already behind schedule, what with all my thinking…

I yanked it away.

The bed itself, it seemed, let out a fetid breath that had me spluttering against the urge to retch.

If the upper third of the mattress was completely saturated with great spatters of unmistakable sanguine brown, the metallic tang so thick that I could easily taste it even when long since dried, then the marks and scents of the lower two thirds almost defied explanation. Almost. I wish I could’ve looked at those great concentric rings of curdled yellow, many aged to the cusp of green, or the unspeakable smears of milky brown, and just filed it away as “mystery substances” for forensics to deal with.

How long had this girl been locked in here? Who the hell would even think to do such…

The unmistakable roots of a human tooth embedded in the pillow slapped me out of my reverie.

Without a word, trying my respectful best not to hurl it away like the plague, I replaced the duvet. I thanked God for the invention of disposable gloves.

In the notebook, I wrote: “bedding and mattress require specialist removal and decontamination”. Hopefully someone would burn those accursed things.   

Ok.

I breathed. I breathed deeply. The air only tasted mildly of those unspeakable stains, on the other side of the room.

I decided to focus on something more easily manageable and, hopefully, less heinous than whatever the hell I’d just encountered. The locker… that’s where I figured I ought to look; surely there were things in there in need of disposing, or at the very least things salvageable for the victim’s family.  

Two things struck me immediately, upon opening that dented little door. Firstly, many of the girl’s clothes were hanging there, eerily and completely untouched. Why had she avoided wearing them? That might have had something to do with the second, much more alarming sight that greeted me.

All over the inner part of the door, crudely wrought in thick, black sharpie, were images and words.

Several different handwritings had contributed to phrases of such viscerally ugly implications that the sinking of my stomach felt inevitable.

“Back For More?”

“Pain Pig.”

“Property of Emily Thorpe.”

“Pain Pig.”

“Having Fun?”

“Dollie Bramble Is A Masochist.”

“Eat Up!”

“Emily’s Pain Pig.”

The drawings, or doodles to be more accurate, were much, much worse.

They weren’t quite stick-figures; some attempts at detail had been made, to distinguish one figure from another. But the primitive conciseness and crudeness of them reminded me, for some reason, of ancient cave paintings.

The instinct for cruelty, after all, was an ancient one indeed.  

All across that rudimentary mural were scenes I can only describe as blasphemous.

A figure tied to a bed, blindfolded and gagged, as other figures were shown either pointing and jeering or winding up for mighty blows… a figure eating something off the floor, her head held in place by a firm boot, when the coroners would find no contents in that stomach… a figure squatting on all fours with a blank-faced girl on her back, a parody of a fairground donkey, while other figures watched and laughed…

It was always the same figure, a female with bangs and wavy hair ending just above the shoulder, shown to be suffering. Her identity was hardly a mystery, not even to me.

No wonder the poor girl had never once tried to open her locker. I’d shut such memories away too, in her place.  

And yet, on the little desk across from the bed, there sat a small, framed photo. It showed six people, clearly some kind of group of teenaged… no. Not “friends”. Only one of them was smiling, a beaming, braces-clad girl with brilliant ginger hair in bangs and waves. Her cardigan was disconcertingly familiar.

Around her stood figures I didn’t recognise at the time, but whose faces the whole country would know soon enough. The scrawny girl to the ginger one’s right, her hair cut tomboy-short, draping an arm almost guilty over her shoulder… a boy with glasses and a Weezer t-shirt standing off to the side, the camera capturing him mid eye-roll… a pair of girls; a blond, keychain-trailing one dressed in not much more than the smoke from her vape, and the other hugging herself, with purple hair slicing free from the confines of an oversized hoodie…

And there, on the ginger girl’s left, was a young woman whose long, pale, patrician features bore an expression astonishing, paradoxically, for its total lack of just that; she had no expression at all. She watched. She calculated. But with those flatly staring eyes and straight-line mouth, she gave absolutely nothing away, as one would expect of someone with the power to make even the most degraded of victims come back again and again. In her left hand, just barely in frame, I could see the top of some kind of vodka bottle, but her eyes were compellingly steady and clear.

The photo was captioned by hand.

In flowing, looping little letters, the forlornly hopeful legend read: “New Friendos!”.  

I got the room cleaned up as best I could.

Now, I don’t mind telling you, when I got back home that night, I held onto my daughter. I… I absolutely clung to her. Yes, she was distinctly irritated by the whole thing after a minute or two, asking rather pointedly if she could get back to Just Dance already. Normally, I would have laughed at her, or made some joke about raising her wrong. But that night? I didn’t say a word. I couldn’t. Anything else felt heinous.

Anyway. Soon enough, alongside pretty much everyone else in the country with access to the news, I learned the sordid detailed of what they started to call “The Manchester Five”, or “Ambrose Five”.

Five teenagers: four girls and a boy…

Emily Thorpe, Jeff Geoffries, Jessica Snodgrass, Chloe Colbeck, Zuzana Grosicki…

A newcomer entering their dormitory block, bubbly and offbeat and stubbornly determined to make friends…

The quickness with which rolled eyes and adolescent apathy turned to “challenges of trust”, then games of cruelty, then something little better than bloodsport…

The beatings and deprivations and degradation dealt out for little more than idle amusement…  

All this, and for what? The unthinkable, unnecessary death of Dollie Bramble. That’s what.

Had she ended the torment, permanently and tragically? Yes. But, as the court found, the likelihood of her survival beyond that point was slim, at any rate. Repeated blunt-force trauma… advanced malnutrition... dehydration… infected sores… a film of grime and filth… all these horrors had already taken a firm hold.

In hindsight, three years on from the trial, there’s a much more personal question related to my own small involvement with that particular case.

Why, after however many years I’ve spent cleaning up so many crime scenes, was this the one that lead to me leaving the country? Why now?

Well, let’s just say, I wasn’t planning on living the expat retiree cliche some thirty years too early. No. If I didn’t have to live somewhere like Malaga for my own peace of mind, I wouldn’t; there’s a much simpler answer to it than all that.

It’s called the Venables Jurisdiction.

Yes. Apparently, in this country, if a juvenile sentence is fully served or the behavioural of the convicted seems promising, the offenders don’t just get a second chance. They get a completely fresh start. New identities. Injunctions protecting every aspect of their privacy, “for their own safety”.  

Back last month, when I saw the headlines screaming “Jeff, Jessica, and Chloe: Manchester Five Members To Be Released”, I knew I had to get my family out of here.

I hardly paid any attention to articles claiming therapeutic goals had been met, analysts consulted, and rehabilitation deemed “highly probable”. I didn’t even listen to the outcry, justified though it was.

Some might say the fact those teenagers served a full three years, in this current legal climate, was at least some semblance of justice. The lack of prison time for Zuzana, Dollie’s roommate turned friend turned traitor-through-silence, strikes most as reasonable, given evidence of Dollie’s fate, both in life and in death, almost repeating itself. And the continued detention of Emily gets clung to by so many as “a small mercy”.

These are all fine points, yes. But let me tell you, once again; my daughter is the exact same age as the Ambrose Five.

Look at it this way. Every hangout I drive her to… every trip to the mall she takes with her friends… if I take her to the salon, to touchup her underdye... there’s a chance, no matter how slim, that my child could be walking past, meeting the glances of, or even talking to those capable of the deepest, most heinous things. And that, to my mind, feels like a violation.

Think about it.

Jeff beat and kicked Dollie within inches of her life. The broken ribs and fractured skull, all unhealed… the dents and cracks all over the walls… the teeth barely held in place by swollen lips and gums… all that anger, that need to impress "his queen" Emily, that man-child mix of self-righteousness and self-pity; that was him.

Jessica followed her leader to the darkest, most inconceivable of places. Slapping and spitting… binding and berating… the food on the floor kicked out of leashed-reach… she experimented, a vacuous excuse for a human being, going as far as she could to get a reaction not from her victim, but from her cronies.  

Chloe could twist the knife with nothing more than her words. She too experimented on Dollie, but hers wasn’t blunt-force cruelty. No. It would take a far more surgical kind of torture to fill her bitter void. The jury heard that Dollie wept so wretchedly at what Chloe said that, when found, her eyes had suffered permanent damage.  

The only contrition these beasts could offer the court was “well, if she’d asked us to, we'd have stopped”.

Not one of them disowned Emily.

Let me ask you this: do these seem like children capable of “change”?

Whatever the answer may be, it doesn't matter. They’re out there. Somewhere on my old home turf, as I speak, there are beasts on the streets.

They’re not just trusted; they’re actively helped. Their release feeds the egos of a system convinced it can “cure” all ills. It’s actively encouraged, even lauded by some.

Somewhere out there, they hide in plain sight.