Killer Couples (13 page)

One by now, he carries the bodies down the narrow stairs, their arms hanging limply, hair trailing. Despite being wrapped in a bin bag, Holly’s wet clothes leave damp patches on his shirt. It’s like being trapped in a bad dream, one you can never wake up from.

He has to bend the girls’ knees to get them to fit into the boot of his red Ford Fiesta. Somehow it feels wrong to be shutting them in the dark, even though they’re dead. He drives to Thetford Forest Park, Suffolk, near Lakenham air base, seventeen miles away – He’s been here before, watching the planes landing and taking off, and he envies them the freedom to come and go as they please. In a ditch nearby, he unloads the girls’ bodies, not looking at their faces, not wanting to make it real. He has brought scissors to cut off their clothes – shirts, tracksuit trousers, knickers, Holly’s first bra, worn with such shy pride – all torn now, reduced to so many
rags, which he stuffs into a bin bag. Then he fetches a petrol can from the car, sprinkles liquid into the ditch without looking too closely. It’s funny the way your mind sometimes allows you to see, without really recognising what you’re seeing. Huntley wears gloves – he doesn’t want to leave fingerprints, doesn’t want to burn his fingers. He tosses in a match and turns away, not wishing to watch the flames grow higher.

He returns home and he tells himself it hasn’t happened. When villagers out searching for two missing girls ask if he has seen them, he says ‘no’. Later, when he uses his keys to help a police officer look round the school grounds, he also keeps quiet about seeing the girls. It’s only after the police officer leaves and two more searchers arrive, that he ‘remembers’ that he did see the girls after all, that they came past while he was outside washing the dog, that they asked about Maxine and that they went on their way still laughing, their high-pitched giggles hanging in the air even after they’d gone.

Of course it didn’t happen the way Huntley says it did. Fit, healthy girls don’t drown in a foot of bathwater or suffocate from a hand pressed to the mouth. People don’t kill other people and then take extreme pains to dispose of the bodies except to cover something up, something they don’t want anyone to know they’ve done. But in the absence of truth, the kinder lie prevails – Holly floating painlessly in the water, Jessica breathing one moment and not the next: a freak accident and an act of panic.

By the time Maxine returned to College Close on Tuesday, 6
August, everything in the house was back to normal, although she was surprised to find the duvet and its cover both sopping wet in the washing machine.

‘It needed a clean,’ Ian told her, not meeting her eyes.

From her phone conversations with Ian the night before, Maxine already knew that the girls had been in the house while she wasn’t there, knew that one of them had been in the bedroom, and yet she didn’t think, or refused to think, the worst. True, her mind skated briefly across the surface of the word ‘sex’ – although never in relation to the children. Had Ian had another woman in her house? Instantly she steered her thoughts away again. Ian needed her help, just as he had done before when he had been falsely accused of rape. She would not doubt him.

Outside the house, the world was anything but normal. Soham, once an active, bustling place, hung suspended in time. Its heart stopped at 6.28pm on Sunday, 4 August, when Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman disappeared off the footage of the town’s CCTV cameras. Police in reflective jackets stopped cars and knocked on doors, showing the already familiar photo of two little girls in red football shirts, hoping to jog someone’s memory, to dredge up a clue.

Two sets of parents, whose daughters had wandered off from a family barbecue and never came home again, waited by telephones that rang constantly but never with the voices they most wanted to hear. Where children had once played in the nondescript residential streets, now journalists and TV crews
roamed around, looking for a new spin on a story that gripped the nation.

‘I could have been the last friendly face those girls ever saw, Max,’ Ian Huntley told his fiancée, after he got her to agree to say that she was home all along. It was a line he was to repeat to the newsmen and press reporters who called on the helpful, if slightly jobsworthy school caretaker, asking him again and again to describe how the girls had looked as they walked away laughing.

Three days after the girls went missing, at a press conference in Soham Village College, Ian Huntley spotted a tall figure, his bald head making him instantly familiar, although there were new black shadows around the eyes and his broad shoulders seemed to sag under an invisible weight. It was Kevin Wells, Holly’s father. Huntley hovered uncertainly by the other man’s shoulder until he gained his attention.

‘I’m so sorry, Kev. I didn’t know it was your daughter,’ he said.

Kevin Wells, fielding questions from police, from
well-wishers
, from the world’s press, didn’t stop to consider what the nervous-looking caretaker meant by this.

‘Thanks,’ he told him wearily. ‘It beggars belief, doesn’t it?’

Maxine too found herself the focus of media attention. She’d known the girls personally; her fiancé had spoken to them just before they disappeared. Her demeanour when she was interviewed was concerned, but ever-so-slightly self-important, as if a part of her was almost enjoying the attention.

‘I was inside, in the bath,’ she repeated so many times she almost came to believe it herself. ‘Now, of course I wish I’d been
downstairs. I could have talked to them, found out where they were going, stopped them… Ian didn’t know them well enough. He blames himself.’

What conversations did the couple have at night after the news reporters filed their copy and the cameramen had packed their lights and their sound equipment back into their car boots? Did they talk about the journalists, about the search? Perhaps they speculated on what had happened to the girls, on the ever-diminishing chances of them being found alive. Did Ian Huntley keep up the pretence, even behind closed doors, of being the last friendly face the girls saw, the helpful caretaker wracked with self-reproach at not having done more to stop them going off into whatever dark fate awaited them?

There are those who will always believe that Maxine Carr knew exactly what her fiancé had done in their spotlessly clean home. That she continued taking baths in the bath where she knew Holly had drowned, that she piled shopping bags into the same car boot she knew had been used to transport the girls’ bodies. There are those who go further and claim that she orchestrated the disposal of the bodies, the cleaning of the house. But most people believe what the jury believed, that Maxine Carr was a woman used to deferring to her man, that she was easy to manipulate and that she believed him utterly when he said he’d waved the girls off, laughing as they went.

‘They’ll fit me up for this, if they can,’ he’d told her, right at the start. And she believed he was right. After all, hadn’t they tried
to pin that other rape charge on him? But she knew Ian: she knew he wasn’t capable of lying about something like this. He’d go straight to pieces. She couldn’t wait for them to find out what had really happened to those girls so they could all get on with their lives.

But slowly, very slowly, evidence was coming in that would shred Maxine’s certainties one by one until they floated away like dust on the Soham summer breeze. A television interview with the concerned caretaker who’d provided the last-known sighting of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman prompted a phone call to police. It was from a woman in Grimsby whose daughter was one of those who claimed to have been sexually assaulted by Ian Huntley. Did police know the man on the TV who was talking about the disappearance of those two little girls had been investigated for rape?

Suddenly Ian Huntley was no longer a witness, but a number one suspect.

On Friday, 16 August, Ian and Maxine were questioned again at length. Again Ian told his happy-ending fairy story – the girls came skipping past when he was outside with the dog, they asked about Maxine. Then they went off ‘happy as Larry’. He’d told the tale enough times he’d almost started to believe it.

Later that night, nearly two weeks after the girls disappeared, a police officer searched a storage hanger belonging to Soham Village College. It was full of stuff and he held out little hope of finding anything of interest, but he started anyway, picking his way through the contents of several large plastic bins. The third
bin was lined with a black bin liner. After removing it, the policeman leaned in to look at the contents and his heart gave a sudden lurch. At the bottom was a pile of what looked to be rags. One of them was red, with black letters and part of a number visible. It was a Manchester United football shirt. The material smelled scorched, as if it had been partially burned. Holly and Jessica’s clothes had been found.

Earlier that night, while Maxine went to a hotel room provided by police, Ian Huntley had gone to stay with his parents.

‘I really need to talk to you about something,’ he’d told his mum, Lynda Nixon, on the phone, his voice strange and strained, like an over-tightened violin string.

‘No wonder he sounds so stressed,’ his parents told each other. ‘After all he’s been through, all the questions and the interviews. You’re bound to blame yourself, aren’t you, if you’re the last person they spoke to, you’re bound to wonder if you could have done more?’

When Ian arrived at his father Kevin’s house, he was in no fit state to talk about anything – exhausted, over-emotional. ‘I just needed a break from everything,’ he told his family, but there was no need to explain. Everyone in the country could see how things in Soham stood – the pain etched deep on a whole town’s collective face.

Meanwhile, on the news, the police were digging up the garden of No. 5 College Close and questioning a couple. The Huntleys looked at one another: something was very wrong. But Ian’s parents never got a chance to ask their son what was
on his mind. The sky through the gap in the curtains was still black and steeped in inky night when there was an almighty crash at the front door. Before they had a chance to work out what was happening, police had stormed the house and dragged Ian from his bed.

‘What’s going on?’ his parents repeatedly asked, their minds still wrapped in an insulating layer of sleep. ‘What’s happening?’

Saturday, 17 August was the day the police announced that Ian Huntley and Maxine Carr had been arrested in connection with the disappearance of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman. Within a few hours, the word ‘disappearance’ had been changed to ‘murder’.

It was a couple of farm workers who stumbled across the kind of discovery no one ever wants to make. The two were walking along a deserted track near a medieval church on Common Drove in Wangford Fen nature reserve just after midday on a Saturday in mid-August. Though the clouds above seemed pregnant with unshed rain, it was still the kind of day that makes walking in the English countryside a privilege. But then came the glimpse of something odd in a ditch followed by the moment of frozen disbelief, the mind’s refusal to believe what the eyes are seeing: innocence lying dead and rotting among the rushes. Two small bodies, lying side by side, legs slightly bent. The arm of one slightly under that of the other, linked in death as in life.

At the police station, Maxine Carr still clung to her conviction that everything would work out in the end. ‘I don’t need a solicitor,’ she told police. ‘I haven’t got anything to hide
really. Nothing.’ She did admit, straightaway, to having lied about being in Soham on the night the girls disappeared, however. ‘Sorry if I wasted time and all that,’ she said, as if apologising for turning up a couple of minutes late to a meeting. She’d only done it to protect Ian, she explained. He couldn’t go through another false accusation, it wasn’t fair. If people knew he’d been on his own, if people knew the girls had actually come into the house, they’d jump to all the wrong conclusions. They didn’t know him as she did.

But in the end it was Maxine who didn’t know her man. She wasn’t aware of the string of allegations of sexual assault, she didn’t know about the history of inappropriate relationships with very young girls or that Jessica and Holly hadn’t skipped happily away from No. 5 College Close, as Ian had always maintained. When police told her that the girls’ bodies had been found near Lakenheath air base, where Huntley used to go, and that their clothes had been found in a hangar at Ian’s school and his fingerprints were on the bag the clothes were in, she still refused to accept it.

‘I know Ian,’ she sobbed. ‘I know Ian better than you or anybody here or anybody else or even his mum! He is not a malicious person; he is not a violent person… I haven’t done anything and I know Ian hasn’t done anything!’

But the jury didn’t agree.

At their trial in November 2003, Ian Huntley was found guilty of two charges of murder and Maxine Carr of conspiring to
pervert the cause of justice. During the trial, it became obvious that Maxine had had a complete about-turn in her feelings for her former fiancé.

‘I won’t be held responsible for what that thing in the dock has done!’ she sobbed at one stage, gesticulating at the man who’d once meant so much to her that she’d agreed to lie to the police just to save him from distress.

Ian Huntley was sentenced to life imprisonment. He remains in prison in Wakefield, where he has made several attempts on his life: in June 2003, he saved up 29 antidepressant tablets in a box of tea bags, and was found in his cell having a seizure. In September 2006 he took another drug overdose, and again in October 2007. Huntley is now rumoured to be in desperate need of a liver transplant following his overdoses. He has repeatedly expressed a wish to die rather than live out his days in prison.

Maxine Carr was released in May 2004 after serving
twenty-one
months of a three-and-a half-year sentence. Living under a new identity, she claims to be serving a life sentence of her own, reviled by the nation for doing nothing more than standing by her man, always having to look over her shoulder for the baying mob, the vigilantes.