Parry Lee

The auditorium darkened long enough for a collective intake of breath before the slide lit the screen. It was copied from a fuzzy, poorly lit Polaroid which had the same iconic significance as Myra Hindley’s prison photograph. At its centre was a girl of ten, Winifred Smythe. She was dressed in a school uniform and propped against a tree. Lighted candles flickered just beyond her outstretched fingertips. Her eyes were half open as if studying her Doc Martens.

She was dead.

Leaning over her, with the surprised look of a lover disturbed, was Daryl Stanley, his hand up the child’s skirt. He was tucking her folded handkerchief into the top of her knickers.

Carpe Dailey shivered, remembering her seven-year-old self, the child whose bare legs were cold and scratched. The child whose legs had downy hair, prickly with goose bumps; legs which trembled in sympathy with the girl who had a man’s hand up her skirt. She remembered the smell of death and decaying leaves and the hot breath of the candle at her first sight of that girl.

Looking at the Polaroid now through twenty-year-old eyes, she understood her mother’s outrage at Uncle James. She had been there and Uncle James had taken her.

Carpe shook her head, as if to clear the memory, to bring her back to the Royal Institution, to the speaker in the wine coloured dress, but she couldn’t concentrate. She could only remember that night and how it had all started so innocently in the Wells Tavern.