Page 26 of Troubled Blood

1976: January 25th: attempted to abduct nightclub singer Melody Bower, 26.

January 31st: landlady Vi Hooper recognizes Creed from description and photofit.

February 2nd: Creed arrested.

Strike turned over the page and skim-read the introduction, which featured the only interview ever granted by Creed’s mother, Agnes Waite.

… She began by telling me that the date given on Creed’s birth certificate was false.

“It says he was born December 20th, doesn’t it?” she asked me. “That’s not right. It was the night of November 19th. He lied about it when he registered the birth, because we were outside the time you were supposed to do it.”

“‘He’ was Agnes’s stepfather, William Awdry, a man notorious in the local area for his violent temper…

“He took the baby out of my arms as soon as I’d had it and said he was going to kill it. Drown it in the outside toilet. I begged him not to. I pleaded with him to let the baby live. I hadn’t known till then whether I wanted it to live or die, but once you’ve seen them, held them… and he was strong, Dennis, he wanted to live, you could tell.

“It went on for weeks, the threats, Awdry threatening to kill him. But by then the neighbors had heard the baby crying and probably heard what [Awdry] was threatening, as well. He knew there was no hiding it; he’d waited too long. So he registered the birth, but lied about the date, so nobody would ask why he’d done it so late. There wasn’t nobody to say it had happened earlier, not anybody who’d count. They never got me a midwife or a nurse or anything…”

Creed often wrote me fuller answers than we’d had time for during face-to-face interviews. Months later he sent me the following, concerning his own suspicions about his paternity:

“I saw my supposed step-grandfather looking at me out of the mirror. The resemblance grew stronger as I got older. I had his eyes, the same shaped ears, his sallow complexion, his long neck. He was a bigger man than I was, a more masculine-looking man, and I think part of his great dislike of me came from the fact that he hated to see his own features in a weak and girlish form. He despised vulnerability…”

“Yeah, of course Dennis was his,” Agnes told me. “He [Awdry] started on me when I was thirteen. I was never allowed out, never had a boyfriend. When my mother realized I was expecting, Awdry told her I’d been sneaking out to meet someone. What else was he going to say? And Mum believed him. Or she pretended to.”

Agnes fled her stepfather’s overcrowded house shortly before Dennis’s second birthday, when she was sixteen-and-a-half.

“I wanted to take Dennis with me, but I left in the middle of the night and I couldn’t afford to make noise. I had nowhere to go, no job, no money. Just a boyfriend who said he’d look after me. So I went.”

She was to see her firstborn only twice more. When she found out William Awdry was serving nine months in jail for assault, she returned to her mother’s house in hopes of snatching Dennis away.

“I was going to tell Bert [her first husband] he was my nephew, because Bert didn’t know anything about that whole mess. But Dennis didn’t remember me, I don’t think. He wouldn’t let go of my mum, wouldn’t talk to me, and my mum told me it was too late now and I shouldn’t have left him if I wanted him so bad. So I went away without him.”

The last time Agnes saw her son in the flesh was when she made a trip to his primary school and called him over to the fence to speak to her. Though he was barely five, Creed claimed in our second interview to remember this final meeting.

“She was a thin, plain little woman, dressed like a tart,” he told me. “She didn’t look like the other boys’ mothers. You could tell she wasn’t a respectable person. I didn’t want the other children to see me talking to her. She said she was my mother and I told her it wasn’t true, but I knew it was, really. I ran away from her.”

“He didn’t want nothing to do with me,” said Agnes. “I gave up after that. I wasn’t going to go to the house if Awdry was there. Dennis was in school, at least. He looked clean…

“I used to wonder about him, how he was and that,” Agnes said. “Obviously, you do. Kids come out of you. Men don’t understand what that is. Yeah, I used to wonder, but I moved north with Bert when he got the job with the GPO and I never went back to London, not even when my mum died, because Awdry had put it about that if I turned up he’d kick off.”

When I told Agnes I’d met Dennis a mere week before visiting her in Romford, she had only one point of curiosity.

“They say he’s very clever, is he?”

I told her that he was, undoubtedly, very clever. It was the one point on which all his psychiatrists agreed. Warders told me he read extensively, especially books of psychology.

“I don’t know where he got that from. Not me…

“I read it all in the papers. I saw him on the news, heard everything he did. Terrible, just terrible. What would make a person do that?

“After the trial was over, I thought back to him, all naked and bloody on the lino where I’d had him, with my stepfather standing over us, threatening to drown him, and I swear to you now,” said Agnes Waite, “I wish I’d let it happen.”

Strike stubbed out his cigarette and reached for the can of Tennent’s sitting beside the ashtray. A light rain pattered against his windows as he flicked a little further on in the book, pausing midway through chapter two.

… grandmother, Ena, was unwilling or unable to protect the youngest member of the household from her husband’s increasingly sadistic punishments.

Awdry took a particular satisfaction in humiliating Dennis for his persistent bedwetting. His step-grandfather would pour a bucket of water over his bed, then force the boy to sleep in it. Creed recalled several occasions on which he was forced to walk to the corner shop without trousers, but still wearing sodden pajama bottoms, to buy Awdry cigarettes.

“One took refuge in fantasy,” Creed wrote to me later. “Inside my head I was entirely free and happy. But there were, even then, props in the material world that I enjoyed incorporating into my secret life. Items that attained a totemic power in my fantasies.”

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