It is quiet in the graveyard. Away to the west, all Birmingham is on its way to work, the motorways are humming, the pavements are already choked with shoppers and on the radio they are wondering about the weather, but when the big, dark hearse rolls in through the heavy iron gates of Sutton Coldfield cemetery, there is silence.
In the early hours of Monday morning, January 3, five small boys from Leeds were taken into care. They were brothers, aged between six months and six years, their mother was only 22, and they lived together in a council house which was said to be so dirty, so littered with dog mess, that police were physically sick at the smell and senior social workers compared it to a toilet.
When John Cunliffe sat down in the back bedroom of his home in the Lake District 15 years ago and started to write a story about a postman called Pat, something very strange began to happen. Cunliffe was not aware of it at the time. He was writing, as he always did, for the fun of it, for the change it gave him from teaching at the local primary school, and it was only years later that he could look back and begin to see the outline of what was really going on.
It didn’t take long for Jeremy Whaley to realise something was wrong. It was four in the morning, he was alone in his cottage near Petworth in the shadows of the West Sussex Downs, his dogs were asleep and all was quiet. First the phone rang, and then stopped. He was used to that happening and he might simply have turned over and gone back to sleep if his senses had not been sharpened by his years of bitter experience. There was something moving outside.
Truth was the first casualty on Ward Four after Grantham Hospital finally called in Lincolnshire police to investigate the mysterious deaths and collapses on their childrens’ ward in the Spring of 1991. Yesterday’s report by Sir Cecil Clothier has only partially healed the damage.
