So He Takes the Dog. Jonathan Buckley
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front of the TV, pissed out of their heads. Three or four times a week they’d do it, for the next couple of months, always in Ryan’s bedroom. Often his parents were at home, and usually they had no idea that Ryan and Jessie were there too.
At around 7.30 p.m. on 17 June 1987, Ryan Tate helped himself to a couple of beers from his parents’ supply, then helped himself to a car that some idiot had left unlocked in a backstreet. He drove past Jessie’s place and, as luck would have it, she was at home. With money from her mother’s purse they bought some more drink. At about eight o’clock they saw a friend of Ryan’s, Trevor Driscoll, walking down the street. He got into the car and they returned to the off-licence, where Trevor contributed a six-pack of lager to the evening’s intake. For an hour they drove around town, with Ryan swigging his lager as he cruised the high street in the stolen car. They dropped in on another off-licence, so Jessie could buy some more cans while Ryan nicked a half-bottle of whisky. Then, shortly before 9.30, they passed the Atalays’ shop and there was Abby, talking to a friend. Since the party Ryan had seen Abby a few times on the street. In Abby’s mind perhaps their relationship had a future. Perhaps she thought that there were some issues to resolve and that now might be the time to resolve them. And perhaps she thought that Trevor Driscoll was Jessie’s boyfriend. She said goodbye to her friend and climbed into the car. Ten minutes later Trevor Driscoll got out of the car outside his brother’s house, and Ryan Tate, Jessie Kingham and Abby Atalay drove up on to Dartmoor.
From here on there are two different versions of events. Ryan Tate claimed that Jessie had known from the start about Abby Atalay, and that there was nothing going on between himself and Abby any longer, but that Jessie – who was drunk by the time they reached the hills – turned on Abby when Abby tried to kiss him. It was a warm night. They’d parked the car and walked a distance, taking the whisky and some beers with them, but as soon as they sat down Abby flung herself at him and the girls had a fight, which ended when Abby got hurt, though why he found himself incapable of keeping the girls apart was something he could never adequately explain. When he saw the blood, and understood what had happened, he panicked. He admitted that. He panicked and he helped Jessie do what she did. Jessie, for her part, said she knew nothing about Abby and Abby knew nothing about her, until they were in the car together, after they’d dropped Trevor Driscoll. The three of them had a huge argument. Ryan stopped in a lay-by and got out of the car, to get away from them, but they both followed him. They were both yelling at him, but Abby was drunk on the whisky and went bananas, so Ryan hit her. Then Jessie just sort of froze. Which is why she did nothing to stop what Ryan then did to Abby.
So one of them, for some reason that we’re unlikely ever to know, hit Abby Atalay very hard with a small rock, hard enough to knock her senseless. Not long afterwards they returned to the car and drove until they came to a petrol station. There they are on CCTV: Jessie in the passenger seat, slurping a beer, laughing at something Ryan says to her as he steadies himself against the pump while he fills the petrol can; and Ryan joking with the cashier, unaware that there’s a streak of blood on the underside of his arm. Abby, meanwhile, had regained some degree of consciousness and begun to crawl away, but she’d covered only a very short distance by the time Ryan and Jessie got back, so they found her easily enough and cracked her with a rock once more. They then doused her with petrol and set fire to her. In the opinion of the pathologist, Abby was not quite dead at this moment, but a few seconds later she would have been: a lifetime’s allowance of pain packed into half a minute. Ryan or Jessie emptied the can over Abby and went back to the car to wait for the fire to die down. Satisfied with their work, they drove the car a couple of miles, rolled it into a ditch and torched it. They then set off on the twelve-mile hike back home.
By midnight Abby’s parents had reported her missing. At two o’clock Jessie’s mother had phoned the police to say that her daughter had disappeared. Smoke-stained and spattered with Abby’s blood, Jessie and Ryan reeled home in the middle of the morning. Within a few hours they were both charged. It took the jury less than an hour to find them guilty, and they only took that long so as not to appear to have rushed the verdict.
Listening to the story of the murder of Abby Atalay, Alice cried. On the kitchen table lay pictures of the killer teens: pea-brained, psychotic Ryan Tate, whose face says he knows that everyone knows he’s lying and he could not give a flying fuck what anyone thinks; and pea-brained, confused Jessie Kingham, who looks terrified by what’s happening to her and yet, at the same time, not unpleasantly surprised at finding herself notorious. ‘They feel no remorse?’ asked Alice, peering at their faces, incredulous at their depravity. All that could be said for a fact was that each was claiming that the other was responsible and that neither had expressed the slightest remorse so far. Jessie perhaps was beginning to feel it, however. Soon she’d go berserk with it and take a jump from a second-storey landing, which would break her neck and leave her in a wheelchair for the rest of her life, an outcome that she seemed to accept with equanimity, as a concluding retribution. But with Ryan Tate it was different. You looked at that face and you knew that for him the death of Abby Atalay was no more important than a dog getting run over in the street. That’s how it seemed at the time and that’s how it’s seemed ever since. Jessie Kingham was the one who killed Abby Atalay, he’ll tell you, and it’s as if he’s telling you that Elvis shot JFK and defying you to tell him that he doesn’t believe a word of what he’s saying. ‘There’s no one there,’ Alice concluded, staring at his face, meeting the challenge of his empty gaze. Ryan Tate was never mentioned at home again. It was soon afterwards that Alice became a churchgoer.
As with violence among the Tates, godliness among the Pierces was something of a tradition, albeit – unlike the volcanic idiocy of the Tate dynasty – a tradition that recently had fallen into abeyance. Great-grandfather Joseph Pierce, the fountainhead of the river of piety, was a much-honoured man of the cloth, for whose son, Julian, the discovery of the same religious vocation would appear to have been as natural a process as the discovery of the desire to walk or speak. With the career of Elisabeth, the first Pierce daughter in three generations, the transmission of the holy gene suffered something of a setback, or so it appeared for a time. Obediently, even willingly devout as a girl, Elisabeth was diverted from the path of righteousness by the experience of university, the study of medicine and betrothal to the unswervingly secular Mr Jameson, a man for whom the Financial Times share index was the truest mirror of the real world, just as Gray’s Anatomy became the touchstone for Dr Elisabeth. Yet the agonised death of her husband, killed by cancer within two years of the birth of their only child, seems to have been the catalyst for an outbreak of faith in the soul of Dr Elisabeth. This faith sustained her for the rest of her life. To her great credit, though, she never preached to her daughter. She never so much as invited her to accompany her to church, and Alice’s belief remained dormant for years, until Dr Elisabeth’s final illness, when something began to change in Alice, as she would later say, in the light of her mother’s selfless preparation for her own death, from cancer also, and several years short of the average span.
On the day of the funeral she went back into the church after the business at the graveside was done. There was motherless Alice alone in the empty church, smaller than life-size under the high stone ceiling. A pillar of sunlight smacked the paving to the side of her, as if the finger of the Lord had fired a shot of revelation in her direction and missed by a couple of yards. Dry-eyed, Alice was looking at the brass eagle on the lectern, at the place where the coffin had rested on its trestle throughout the service, at all the vacant pews, as if imagining the faces of everyone who had been there. She turned and smiled, and there was a sort of shadowing in her gaze, a dimming that never leaves the eyes of some people after bereavement, and never left Alice. But still whatever it was she believed remained covert and undefined for a while longer. The subterranean stream that flowed down from the heights of Joseph Pierce broke into the open only when those two ambassadors of the devil, Ryan Tate and Jessie Kingham, did their worst. There was no discussion, only a quiet announcement of intention: ‘I’m going to church tomorrow.’ She was happy to go alone, Alice said, as her mother had said to her, and at first she went alone, gradually becoming someone different. A photo of grandfather Pierce, the blessed Julian, occupies the centre of the very first page of one of the family albums, a veritable lighthouse of virtue, radiating probity through rimless glasses, with a dog collar as bright and stiff as a band of ivory and a haircut like the helmet of God’s