Page 8 of The Tapes
JANINE
Extract fromThe Earring Killerby Vivian Mallory, © 2015.
The wooden deck is soft from rain, like treading across the surface of a trampoline. I half walk, half bounce across to the bench as a man stands to shake my hand. The lush emerald of the field stretches towards the distant fence, where a woman wrapped in an ankle-length coat is being dragged by a pair of scruffy grey collies.
The man and I sit on the bench watching the dog walker as the gentle sound of rain tickles the roof above.
‘It’s a lot different in summer,’ he tells me. ‘We have families who come down and watch. It’s not really about the cricket, it’s more a community place. Kids play on the boundary and the mums might have a book to read. The dads have a pint of cider, something like that. There’s nowhere like it.’
I ask him how long he’s been coming and the man stares momentarily towards the horizon, where a newish housing estate sits: all red-brick and skylights.
‘Since I was ten or so,’ he says. ‘I met Janine when we were both about eighteen. She got a job working behind the bar…’
He tails off and it’s hard to blame him. The bar is in the clubhouse behind us.
‘Nothing felt rushed,’ he says. ‘After Janine’s first shift, I helped her clean the clubhouse and we ended up talking until about two a.m. I walked her home and, after that, we sort of ended up doing things together. We’d go to the cinema, or bowling. Sometimes we’d just sit here, on this deck, and we’d talk. We’d listen to the rain. I never asked her out, or anything like that. We were boyfriend-girlfriend and that was that.’
Harry Bailey and Janine were living together within a year; married within three. They were talking about saving for a week or two in Cyprus and then, ultimately, children. It was a small-town love story, even as Janine moved on from working behind the bar at a cricket club.
‘That was just a summer thing for her,’ Harry remembers. ‘She was still at college, doing business studies, and then got a job with a recruitment agency. She did that for a bit, which is when we ended up moving into our flat and then getting married. We always came to the cricket on a Saturday, partly through habit, I suppose. I’d play sometimes but, others, we’d put down a blanket on the grass and lie in the sun.’
There’s no sun in Sedingham now. The grey wash stretches deep into the distance and the rain starts to clatter harder on the roof above. The dog walker is long gone, with pools of water starting to form on the far side of the field.
Harry fidgets on the bench, standing and readjusting his jeans, before sitting and scratching his head. He’s six foot and a bit, a gentle giant sort with big hands and a deftness when he speaks. The sort that doesn’t have a lot to say but, when he does, it’s probably worth listening to.
‘It had been so busy because we got married three or four months before,’ Harry says. ‘Janine had just got a new job and it felt like a lot was happening at the same time.’
I ask about the new job and Harry smiles with his lips closed. There’s a sigh that’s impossible to miss. ‘It was essentially the same job in recruitment but she was making a bit more. She didn’t really want to move but her old place never gave pay rises, so she didn’t think she had much choice. She was trying to work her way up. She’d got through her first week and was enjoying it in the way you do when there are new people. I think it was probably Thursday night when she said some of the girls were going out after work on the Friday. She asked if I minded her going along, and of course I didn’t. We weren’t clingy like that. I would go out with my friends; and Janine did the same with hers. I do think about that sometimes.’
The Friday morning was the last time Harry ever saw his wife. This was before the days of text messages but Janine sent him an email from her work computer at three minutes to five, saying she’d see him later. She logged off and headed the short five minutes into town with her workmates. They hopped around a few pubs, danced in a place named Reflex, and then headed out to get taxis at around eleven o’clock.
It is there where that part of the story ends. One new friend got into a taxi on the corner opposite the town post office, leaving Janine to walk the short two-minute trip to the actual taxi office.
Except Janine never made it.
It was Harry who identified her body four days later, after she’d been dragged out of the canal.
‘It was her but it wasn’t,’ Harry says, as his voice cracks. ‘Before I went into the room, one of the officers said that I should brace myself, that it wouldn’t be what I thought. I remember thinking it was such an odd thing to say, because my wife had been missing for four days, and I was now in a morgue ready to identify her body. I obviously wasn’t going to be ready for it. I’d never seen a dead body before, for one. I was almost angry athim. But then I went into the room and I knew what he meant. It was Janine but it wasn’t. Her skin was this sort of grey colour and parts of her hair weren’t there. The guy asked me if it was her and I had to turn away. I can’t even remember saying yes.’
It was outside the room, away from Janine, that the officer asked the question that would come to define Harry’s life.
‘They wanted to talk about Janine’s earrings,’ Harry says. ‘It was such a strange thing given everything I’d just seen – and the four days before. I was a mess and couldn’t understand at first. They wanted to know if Janine usually went out with only one earring. All I could say was that I didn’t think so but that I didn’t know. I didn’t get what it all meant at the time.’
It wasn’t long before it became very clear why the police were interested. Four months before Janine was murdered, another dead body had turned up. Police had struggled to find a motive for that killing, let alone the killer, but they had been taken by a peculiar detail in that the victim was only wearing a single earring.
‘They told me later that they thought whoever killed Janine had taken one of her earrings,’ Harry says. ‘Some sort of trinket or trophy. He’d done it before and they were worried it was linked. With that first killing, it might have been an accident that she only had one earring but, because there were two, suddenly there was this pattern.’
A ‘pattern’ is one way of putting it. From one victim killed in mysterious, unsolved circumstances, there were suddenly two. Not only that, there was a calling card in the form of those missing earrings.
‘The first time anyone mentioned “serial killer” to me was a day or two after I identified Janine’s body,’ Harry says. He’s shrunken into himself while we’ve been talking, knees to chest, his large feet perched on the tip of the bench. I have to leancloser to catch what he’s saying, with the thunderous patter of the rain almost drowning out the placidity of his voice.
‘The thing is, as soon as someone said “Earring Killer”, that was it. Janine was no longer her own person, she was “victim number two”. I tried not to read too much, or listen to any of it, but it was impossible to ignore. People wouldn’t use her name, or talk about who she was. She was just “the second victim”, or “number two in a series…” It felt like it was this big competition, like how many could he kill. They became numbers, not names, and I found it so hard to deal with. Even now, you get the odd thing and they’ll put up the victims like it’s a league table.’
Harry says he was unsure of talking to me for this reason – and it’s hard to blame him. As with seemingly any serial killer, a borderline glorification grows. Society’s obsession is as gleeful as it is morbid. It would be wrong to pretend to be above any such things, given the existence of this book. I admit as much to Harry, while insisting that I do want to tell the story of the victims. He’s right that they’ve largely been forgotten in all this. They do have names, and Janine Bailey deserves to be remembered.
‘It’s not that I was desperate to move on,’ Harry says quietly. ‘But I’m defined by this as well. I’m not trying to be a victim in any of this but it’s true. I went on a date about four or five years after what happened and I thought I should be honest. I told her that my late wife was a victim of the Earring Killer and she just stared. We didn’t go out again after that, and I don’t really blame her. It’s been years and I’ll always be the person whose wife was murdered. I do want people to know Janine’s name, and to remember her – but this is so much bigger than that. All the people over all these years. I’m one of the lucky ones in that I’m still here – but it’s a part of everything I am and everything I’ll ever be. I still talk to Janine’s mum and dad and they’ve never had answers. There’s all these people left with this big gaping question, because none of us know what happened, or why.’
Harry lowers his feet and rubs his forehead. We sit quietly together for a moment, before he nods behind and asks if I want a coffee. He has a key for the clubhouse, and so we head inside. There’s a pastoral, slightly rundown feel to the space, but charm as well. Photos line the walls of cricket teams from years and decades past. Young men – and, in one instance, young women – with lives ahead of them.
