She had been relocated somewhere far from where she was brought up. She had been let out on license, which meant that she could be called back to prison at any time. She had served six years for murder (the judge had called it manslaughter but that was just a nice word). Jennifer Jones had finally been released. In the weeks leading up to the ninth of June, Alice Tully’s seventeenth birthday, the stories started again. In the past six months, though, she had read as much as she could get her hands on, and the question that lay under every word that had ever been printed was the same: How could a ten-year-old girl kill another child? Alice Tully hadn’t seen any of these at the time. Some of the tabloids focused on the seedier side: the attempts to cover up the crime the details of the body the lies told by the children. The events on that terrible day at Berwick Waters. The trial had thrown up dozens of articles from all angles. When the killing first happened, the news was in every paper for months. Sometimes they were tiny, a column on an inside page, a nugget of gossip floating on the edge of the news, hardly causing a ripple of interest. Sometimes they roared from the front page, the headlines bold and demanding.
In any case, the stories about Jennifer Jones weren’t around all the time. She was a social worker and had a lot of clients to see. It meant waiting until Rosie, the woman she lived with, was out at work. She much preferred to read the articles about Jennifer Jones when she was on her own. Frankie was a giant beside her, and he liked to pick her up and carry her around, especially if they were having an argument.
Alice was small and thin and often bought her clothes cheaply in the children’s section of clothes shops. He was bigger and taller than she, but that wasn’t difficult. Alice tried to push him away, but he wouldn’t take no for an answer and in the end the newspaper crumpled and slipped onto the ground.Īlice couldn’t resist Frankie. He put his arm around her shoulder and dipped his mouth into her neck while she was reading. He couldn’t understand why she was so fascinated. Some of the weekend papers even resurrected the old headline: a life for a life!Īlice Tully read every article she could find. The public had a right to know where she was. She posed a threat to children and should be kept behind bars.
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