But there are dangers. He must be of good behaviour or he will be recalled to prison. His crime was a horrid one – a sexual assault and the slashing to death of a ten year old girl. The tabloids have not forgiven and are sniffing after him. Someone has posted a reward for information about his whereabouts on the Internet. He must be careful – one slip could lead to discovery and disaster, something he is only too aware of after another man is mistaken for him and badly beaten up. These events are clearly based on the experiences of Mary Bell and the Bulger killers.

Trigell attempts to cover much ground here : the causes of serious child crime; the treatment of young offenders; the difficulties of rehabilitation after years of institutional life; male emotional pain and flawed relationships; the need to feel powerful. He is also an evangelist with a cause. It’s a lot to cram into 248 pages.

The narrative is not linear – the entire story is told in scenes, each one a snapshot of Jack’s life, or of the lives of other characters, which enables Trigell to move easily and fluidly from present to past and back to present again. Harrowing scenes of mobs baying for children’s blood outside the court room, or the horrors of prison life, might be juxtaposed with a hilarious scene such as Jack’s first encounter with a washing machine, or a poignant one such as Jack’s study of a sex manual when the prospect of sex with his new girlfriend arises.

This structure allows Trigell to orchestrate a sympathetic context for Jack, but in the end, the selection of snapshots is highly manipulative, designed to ‘normalise’ Jack and the Stanley knife. We are treated to a glimpse of Jack’s father (who abandoned Jack after the trial and went abroad) in a Thai sex club, surveying with distaste the antics of performers and viewers alike, in an attempt to show that Jack’s nasty impulses are just like everyone else’s; we see Jack’s psychiatrist’s son tormenting insects and solemnly blaming his mother :‘You didn’t stop me, Mummy’ (a main cause of child crime is inadequate parenting); Terry, his mentor, admits to a desire to rape his wife when she had an affair , just to ‘take the smirk off her face’; Boy B’s brother sexually abuses him. In short, all males are bastards; some are unlucky enough to be caught.

In contrast, Jack’s scenes are largely sympathetic: he is emotionally neglected by his father; he is bullied at school; his quiet nature compares favourably with the violent men he shares a prison with; he saves the life of a car crash victim and also comes to the rescue of a friend under attack. The manipulation is obvious and facile.

In his efforts to engage sympathy for Jack, Trigell comes dangerously close to saying that the murder was just bad luck. He seems to fear that any sympathy for the victim will detract from Jack’s and so he objects in equal measure to the demonisation of Jack and the beatification of the murdered Angela. He dislikes the tabloid habit of calling murdered girls ‘angels’, and in fact can’t leave it alone, as if in some way pity for Jack cannot be maintained if this idea of a little girl’s innocence is not destroyed.

Terry, Jack’s mentor, has some thoughts on the crime, demonstrating the kind of logic which will de-demonise the crime and un-beatify Angela:

‘She was only ten, but had looked twelve, would soon have been sixteen, though no one said it.’

Make of that what you will.

Another specious logic:

‘…the innocent people in Chile, Argentina,… political mass murders…not seen to be as bad as someone who acts from some nameless sickness, shameless sudden impulse.’ [sic]

(Warning - there is some gruesome syntax in this book.)

Isn’t political murder regarded in a bad light? The problem is that it is outwith the jurisdiction of British courts, whereas domestic murder is not. All the same, this remains a popular rationalisation among criminals. That a worker familiar with offenders should think like that stretches credulity to its limits.

The path to murder is flawed by Trigell’s failure to come to grips with the reality of the murderous levels of rage in the disturbed child. Jack is a somewhat bland character who somehow or other drifts into mutilation and murder, always a victim, never an aggressor.

Several factors combine to provoke the slaughter: school bullying (the teacher doesn’t help him because he has the same blue eyes as her nasty ex-husband); an emotionally distant father; a friendship with Boy B, the sociopath; and finally, an undignified expulsion from a sweetshop on the day of the murder .

Trigell has a fondness for portentous and irritating asides to the reader : After the expulsion, he says: ‘If they (the shop staff) had an understanding of consequence they might have left them alone.’

He’s serious.

Trigell has altered the classic pattern of the child killer: they generally pick on the very young. A and B choose a girl near their own age. Perhaps it is hard to remove the ‘angel’ label from younger children.

The boys see Angela, perfectly beautiful, 10 years old, looking like 12, and soon to be 16, walking with a boy of about 12. They resent this boy and his private school and witness Angela kissing him - she’s no angel, as the judge once said to the jury. The boy sexually assaults her and then leaves her crying. A and B are entranced and demand from her what the other boy got. This newly molested and distressed little girl, now threatened with a Stanley knife, becomes imperious, promising them that they will ‘regret this’ and that she will make sure ‘everyone knows what animals you are. You’re going to wish you’d never been born.’

Do ten year olds talk like that? I ask because the dialogue in the book is elsewhere lively and convincing. But perhaps frightened whimpers or a show of fear would have made Jack a less sympathetic character. Perhaps Trigell needed her to sign her own death warrant. Anyway, Jack feels a ‘numb horror’ that she can do what she says, and so participates in this brutal crime.

More manipulation – the boy from the private school got away with a sexual assault; the kids from the wrong end of town didn’t. It’s not the first time class is brought into this book.

Jack comes to a sad end engineered by Terry’s horrid son, another victim of an emotionally distant father.

The final scenes are moving, as were the scenes where Jack desperately tries to get his life on track. There was never any need for Trigell to ‘normalise’ Jack’s crime, nor any need to be snide about the victim – the plight of people like Jack, reformed and genuinely trying to live a decent life, was all the material he needed for a powerful and more honest novel.

Marion Arnott lives in Paisley, Scotland. She was winner of the Phillip Good Memorial Prize For Women's Fiction 1998, CWA Short Dagger 2001 and shortlisted for CWA Short Dagger 2002. Work has appeared in Scottish Child, West Coast, Solander Magazine, Peninsula , QWF, Hayakawa Mystery Magazine (Japan), Books Ireland, Northwords, Chapman, Crimewave, and Datlow and Winding's Year's Best Fantasy and Horror volume 15. Her short story collection 'Sleepwalkers,' was published in August, 2003 by Elastic Press. To visit Marion's Showcase on this website, click here

© 2004 Laura Hird All rights reserved.