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While we were waiting for Inspector Murdishaw, Richard got hold of the Electoral Roll and hunted through it for a household in the road where Anthony had told him that the mysterious Colin lived. Eventually he found the house: its residents were a Mr Colin Antrobus and a Mrs Enid Antrobus. As I watched him painstakingly sifting through the list of names and addresses, I realised for the first time the value of mundane and rather ordinary routine tasks in the work of CID. It wasn’t all comparing fingerprints and interrogating suspects!
What followed was, at the same time, very exciting, and painfully predictable. The house was searched and eventually a boy’s body was found crammed inside an old-fashioned wooden trunk in the loft. A tearful Jenny identified it as her middle son. The post mortem gave the cause of death as a broken neck and head injuries, probably caused by a fall. There were no signs of sexual assault, but there were bruises on his arms that could have been the result of some sort of struggle.
Colin Antrobus – a small, rather scrawny man in his early twenties – was arrested and questioned under caution. He was none-too-bright and, probably as a result, unemployed. While his mother was out at work, as a “clippy” on the buses, he either wandered the streets or played games in his room. Ian had been about the first person who had ever seemed to enjoy his company and he had taken ot inviting him home after school each day.
He broke down and admitted that he had hidden the body, but he claimed that the death had been an accident. According to him, Ian and he had been fooling about at the top of the stairs and Ian had tripped and fallen headlong. When Colin realised that his friend was dead, he panicked and dragged the bottom up into the loft and hid it in the trunk. He said again and again how sorry he was and repeated over and over again his claim that he had never done any of the boys any harm – or wished any on them.
Personally, I would have been willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, but the jury thought otherwise. The prosecuting counsel painted a picture of a loner, who preyed on young boys and who had killed Ian, either out of frustration when the boy refused his advances (unspecified but assumed to be of the fate-worse-than-death kind) or to prevent him from telling anyone about them. Colin was found guilty of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment. I’ve often wondered what became of him, but never made the effort to find out – which is probably the story of Colin’s life. His mother disowned him and went to live with her sister down in Weston Supermare to get away from the notoriety; so I doubt if he ever had any visitors or anyone who could be bothered to take the time to get to know him. All very sad, really.