Blood is Thicker Than Water Read Online Free PDF Page B

lads when they were playing football or British bulldog, but there was a line.”
    “And Charles Michaelson crossed that line?”
    “Yes, in my opinion.”
    “How?”
    “It was little things. He was quite good at unarmed combat from his army days and he used to teach the kids self-defence. I encouraged it at first, but he was a bit too involved. He’d have kids in headlocks or judo holds. I had a word but he insisted it was just clean fun.
    “He also used to play rugby and again, he’d be getting in the scrum with the boys and demonstrating tackles. Again, nothing concrete, but it got my radar twitching, you know?”
    Warren knew what the man meant. That instinct that told you regardless of what people said or what they did, something wasn’t quite right.
    “So what happened?”
    “He’d been with us about a year, when we went away for the weekend. Again nothing I could ever prove, but on the last morning the boys had gone off to use the shower block.” He smiled slightly. “We always tried to send them back to their parents reasonably clean—anyway Charlie was supposed to be off extinguishing the cooking fires. I was walking towards the car park to move the van up to start loading, when I saw him coming out of the shower block. He was all red-faced and embarrassed when I saw him and claimed he’d gone to use the toilet.”
    “So what did you do?”
    “There wasn’t much I could do. I hadn’t seen anything and nobody had said anything, so I had to bide my time. Anyway, eventually, he applied to become invested as a leader. I phoned the district commissioner and told him my concerns.”
    “What happened?”
    “Like I said, we might not have had CRB checks and all that, but we weren’t daft and the commissioner knew me well enough to trust my instincts. So he wrote to Charlie thanking him, but said that there weren’t any suitable vacancies.”
    “How did Michaelson react?”
    “Not well. It was clearly bullshit. We were desperate for leaders and he wasn’t stupid. He threatened to sue me, claimed I had defamed him and all that, but in the end I called his bluff. I knew that he’d never make anything of it. He’d be too scared that we might start digging a little deeper and asking questions. So he got the hump and stormed out and never came back.”
    “And was that the last time you saw him?”
    Truss shook his head.
    “About twelve months later, we were doing the St George’s Day parade, alongside the Guides and several other youth organisations. And who do I see marching alongside the local Boys’ Brigade? Charlie Michaelson.”
    “So he’d joined them?”
    “Yes, and the really interesting thing is that the Boys’ Brigade is a Christian organisation, but in all the time I knew Charlie, he was a vehement atheist.”
    * * *
    The evening briefing was a sparse affair, with several members of the team out conducting inquiries. Nevertheless, Warren had everyone’s attention.
    “It looks as though Charles Michaelson may have liked young children.”
    Mutters went around the room as Warren outlined his conversations with Albert Truss and Gladys Blenkinsop.
    “I just got off the phone with a leader from the Boys’ Brigade who remembers Michaelson. He turned up unexpectedly in 2001 as a volunteer. They were desperate for help and Michaelson could drive a minibus so they took him on.”
    “Do we have anything in the computer about him?” asked Sutton.
    “No, he’s never come to our attention and as far as both the Scouts and the Brigade are concerned there were never any complaints from the kids.”
    “So what were their worries?”
    “Nothing concrete. Mostly gut feelings. Albert Truss contacted the Boys’ Brigade after seeing him at the parade and they had a chat. Apparently, Michaelson claimed to be a born-again Christian, although he didn’t strike them as especially religious. They agreed to keep an eye on him, but within a few weeks of joining he had his stroke. Michaelson was far