Escape From Evil (40 page)

It was 1999 and Peter had been inside for five years. A lot of people don’t bother with divorce because it means you have to see your estranged partner again. I didn’t have to worry about that. He was locked up. We would only be communicating through solicitors and I was confident it would be pretty straight forward. I was wrong.

‘You realize, of course, that your husband is entitled to fifty per cent of your plastic fabrication business and house equity, don’t you?’ my solicitor said, to which I replied, ‘You must be bloody joking!’

I was employing twenty staff and raking in decent money and I owned my own home. Why should that scumbag, who’d contributed nothing to my success, get a penny? The lunacy of the law got worse though.

As far as I was concerned, I already had sole custody of Daniel. For the purposes of a divorce, however, I needed to clarify why this should continue to be the case. I was laughing as I answered the question.

‘How about because he’s in prison and I’m not!’

It was utterly demeaning, but I had to write out in black and white exactly why I felt I should have sole custody of Daniel. So I mentioned the home, the private education, the swimming lessons twice a week, the martial arts, everything. Peter had given the boy nothing but nightmares. I’d even had to pay him, for God’s sake, to look after his own son.

Someone must have been smiling on me, though, because my solicitor advised me to write to Peter asking to be let off his legal claims to my wealth and he agreed. I didn’t do it personally, although Peter probably didn’t know that. I was grateful though. It was the first selfless thing he’d ever done and to this day I don’t know why he did it. He couldn’t have been harbouring delusions of winning me back.
Could he?

Divorce was something worth celebrating and that should have been yet another line in the sand. Somehow, though, I knew it wouldn’t be the final cut-off between Peter and me. I just didn’t expect him back in my life so soon.

I sold Hazlewood Avenue for another tidy profit, then bought a new place in St Ronan’s Road, Southsea. While I was living there, I met the man whom I would be with for the next ten years. His name was Tim and he was lovely. He’d closed his engineering business a year before and was dabbling with the idea of property developing with his spare cash. We decided to move in together, so I sold Southsea, again for a healthy markup, and we jointly bought another place in the area for £250,000 – which we did up and sold a year later for £525,000. The day that sale went through I looked at Tim and said, ‘I’m in the wrong business.’ I followed Tim’s lead and wrapped up my own business. Now I was a property developer too.

Suddenly we were enjoying lie-ins, cooked breakfasts and drawn-out lunches together and still finding time to do a few hours’ lucrative work each day. It was the perfect career for both of us and life was sweet. And then, in 2001, I received a call from a lady called Susan Blackwell.

‘I’m the probation officer for Peter Tobin,’ she announced, and at the very mention of his name my heart sank. Steeling myself to get the divorce had been hard enough, but at least I’d had a while to think about it. This call had come out of the blue and her very title gave away the bad news.

‘I have a note on Peter’s file that you should be kept up to date with his progress.’

‘Is he coming out soon?’

‘Yes, he’s behaved well and he’s won parole. He’ll be out in a few months.’

Her words were like a slap in the face. I’d built a very comfortable life for me and Daniel. Now, even though there was no way we wanted to see him, Peter could wreck it all.

‘Can you tell me where he is now?’ I asked.

‘Yes, he’s on the Isle of Wight.’

‘Christ, that’s close! I’ve actually been past there recently.’

He would soon be getting closer.

‘Can you stop him coming to Portsmouth?’

Susan was pleased to inform me that: ‘Yes, we can.’

‘Thank God.’

‘Yes,’ she continued, ‘we’re going to base him in Southampton.’

‘Oh, that’s much safer.’ I couldn’t hide the sarcasm. This was a man who could take my child for a walk in Portsmouth and end up in West Lothian. A few miles around the coast would provide no obstacle for him.

But I was grateful they’d told me. ‘Please keep me informed,’ I said, and she agreed.

I tried not to think about it, but by the time Peter was released on parole I was pretty nervous. They’d found him a starter job and a temporary home and he had to sign the sex offenders’ register once a week as a condition of his parole. After a tense seven days, I received the call I’d been waiting for.

‘Peter has signed the register. All is well.’

Great,
I thought.
He’s going to keep his nose clean. I can get on with my life.

The following week, they called again. ‘Bad news, Cathy. Peter didn’t sign the register today. He’s on the run – and we think he’s coming to you.’

You cannot imagine the fear that coursed through my veins. I’d had a comfortable few years, put on a pound or two through good living and generally learnt to enjoy the finer things in life now I could afford them. All of that meant nothing now I knew this madman was on the loose.

I swung into action. I told Tim I needed a spy-hole drilled in the front door immediately.

‘I think you’re overreacting,’ he said. He was trying to comfort me, but it just wound me up. He had no clue what I’d already been through – my fault for having kept most of it back.

‘Look,’ I said, ‘that man wants to hurt me. He’s still sore that I left him.’

But there was another reason I was scared. As far as Peter was concerned, I had robbed him of his son. I’d done it once when I’d fled from Bathgate. Now, as far as he knew, I’d prevented Daniel from visiting him in prison. I’d even forbidden him from having a photograph!

If there’s a chance he could use Daniel to hurt me,
I thought,
he’ll take it
.
And I’ve got to be ready.

My next stop was Havant police. They were more receptive to my fears than Tim had been. Within the hour, I had a crew round at Southsea, fitting panic buttons. They also arranged for a CID officer to be stationed at Daniel’s school. I would still take him and pick him up, but the policeman was there for the rest of the day – on the understanding that Daniel never found out. It was crucial to me that he didn’t worry and that his friends didn’t discover his past.

Looking back now, the idea of Daniel worrying about anything makes me laugh. He takes laid-backness to new levels. I’d like to take some credit for that, but he’s the one who’s done it all. He seems to have taken everything that happened before his sixth birthday and just dealt with it. Some kids might have become wallflowers or gone off the rails without a full-time dad around – look how it had affected me. Not Daniel. He was bright and intelligent and was always the first to sign up for new experiences. Junior RAF, the Marines, drums, guitar, camping – you name it, he wanted to try it. When he was sixteen, he would even climb Kilimanjaro with his Uncle Geoff.

But in 2001 this was the last thing on my mind. Back then, I was just desperate that Daniel stayed safe.

Keeping Peter’s movements from Daniel was one thing, but I couldn’t hide them from his school. It was a tricky phone call, but I had to inform them that their pupil had an escaped convict for a father. He’d savaged two fourteen-year-olds already. The school needed to remain vigilant.

Once again, I was bombarded with questions from the police. They asked where I thought he might have gone. I couldn’t help them. In fact, I was annoyed at being bothered. I said, ‘You lot have seen him more than me in the last seven years. Look in your records – you’ve still got my address book from last time.’

Luckily, Peter was picked up shortly afterwards and the police confirmed that he’d been on his way to Portsmouth. For breaking the terms of his parole, he was put back in prison for, I assumed, the rest of his fourteen-year sentence. That turned out not to be the case.

I don’t think Daniel was ever aware how close his dad had got yet again. That made it easier to just knuckle down and concentrate on our lives. Tim and I developed well together and fresh housing projects made us a decent income. There wasn’t much to grumble about at all. By 2006 we were living in a nice house, had nice cars and, best of all, Daniel had grown into a confident, handsome young man. I had no complaints at all. But then Aunt Anne called and said, ‘I think you need to turn on the TV now.’

I couldn’t believe what I was seeing and hearing. Peter was being hunted for the murder of a young Polish girl called Angelika Kluk. Just as he’d done when he’d fled Havant in 1993, Peter had been working as a church handyman, this time in Glasgow. And, just like before, he’d changed his name – this time he was calling himself Pat McLaughlin, thank God, and not Wilson. Angelika was a student staying at St Patrick’s Church, where Peter worked. She was last seen in his company on 24 September 2006.

As far as the police can tell, Peter had become obsessed with the idea of sleeping with the beautiful twenty-three-year-old the moment he’d first laid eyes on her. His fantasies were fuelled by the fact that he knew she was having a sexual affair with a married businessman. There were even stories that, during her stay at the church the previous year, she had embarked on a physical relationship with the priest at St Patrick’s, Father Nugent. But what really appealed to him was the fact that she was so far from home.

With so few friends of her own, Angelika naturally enjoyed spending time with the charming odd-job man. If she wasn’t busy studying, she often helped him out on jobs, so much so that he called her his ‘little apprentice’.

One weekend she had been helping ‘Pat’ build a shed inside the garage attached to the presbytery. That was when he’d struck – literally. Police say Angelika was hit six times on the head by a wooden table leg. The force exposed her skull and sent blood all over the garage. Then Peter had bound her wrists, gagged her mouth and raped her unconscious body. At some point, though, Angelika regained consciousness and found the strength to fight back. That’s when Peter produced the knife. He stabbed her sixteen times in the chest, before dragging her body through the church and dumping her in a chamber beneath, of all places, the confessional box.

Then he’d showered, cleaned up the blood from the garage and turned up for work again the next day to finish the shed as though nothing had happened. How many times had I witnessed that detachment, that ability to just carry on as normal after doing the most unspeakable things? For the first time, I began to appreciate how close I must have come to sharing the same fate as this Polish stranger.

Angelika was killed on the Sunday and by Tuesday Pat McLaughlin had disappeared, having already been questioned, along with everyone at the church, by the police. It was days before her body was found and even longer before the police put two and two together and realized they weren’t chasing Pat McLaughlin at all but Peter Tobin.

As the horrific news unfolded before my eyes, my heart went out to the poor, distraught family of Angelika Kluk. Then it hit me. How had Peter committed this murder? As far as I knew, he’d be in prison until 2008. Yet the news was saying it had just taken place and they were trying to catch him. I said to Tim, ‘I don’t understand it. He should be inside.’

But the simple explanation was that he wasn’t inside. He hadn’t been since 2004. I’d naturally assumed that when Peter had broken his parole, he’d be incarcerated until the end of his original term. But no, he’d served a further three years only. He’d been let out and had immediately fled to Paisley in Scot land, an area he was obviously comfortable with for some reason. The following year a warrant had been issued for his arrest after a knife attack on Cheryl McLachlan, but he’d absconded again. Only now, a year later, had he popped up, this time under the pseudonym Pat McLaughlin. This time as a fully fledged killer.

For years I’d been convinced I was the only one who knew what Peter was capable of. Now the whole world knew – and that just made him all the more terrifying.

‘Tim,’ I said, ‘the police have no idea where he is. But I promise you now: he’s heading here.’

Seeing it on the news, Tim finally grasped the magnitude of the shadows of my life.

‘I’d better get that spy-hole put in.’

The first time Peter had gone on the run in 1993, the police couldn’t have been more supportive. Then, I suppose, it was in their interests to look after me because I might lead them to him. Thirteen years later and they obviously didn’t think I warranted so much attention this time. I couldn’t understand it, but I didn’t let that stop me. When I marched into Havant police station, I noticed there was a copy of the local paper on the desk. Guess whose picture was plastered across the front page?

‘Can I help you?’ the desk sergeant asked.

‘Yes,’ I said, pointing at the paper, ‘I’ve come to talk about him.’

Thirteen years earlier that would have been enough to guarantee, at the very least, a cup of tea with the chief constable. Times had changed, the old personnel had moved on. This time I really had to fight for a panic button. I wished I hadn’t had to give the last one back, but there were only two or three in any county. Eventually I got one, but I also wanted answers. Why hadn’t anyone told me Peter had been released? This was 2006 – he’d been out for two years. Daniel had been walking to school, I’d been working all over the place. We’d been sitting ducks had Peter come this way.