Belinda Jones was obviously as methodical in her filing as she was meticulous about the tidiness of her office. The cuttings were all in date order, with the latest ones, relating to Brian Jennings’s sister’s efforts to clear his name, on top. Since that was the end of the story so far, and because Belinda’s interviews with her were a reiteration of what I already knew, I turned the whole pile of cuttings over and started working from back to front. Soon I was totally engrossed.
The reports of the fire had apparently been front page news, the banner headline ‘GIRLS ESCAPE BLAZE – LUCKY TO BE ALIVE’ appeared directly below the stylized title of the newspaper – the Stoke Compton Gazette. The story confirmed what Mum had told me, that the fire had taken hold in the early hours of the morning when the two girls who shared the flat above the electrical goods shop were asleep in bed. The alarm had been raised by a Paul Holder, who was on his way to start an early shift at the bakery further down the street, but by the time the fire brigade arrived the shop was an inferno. The two girls had been trapped in their upstairs flat, but, thankfully, the baker had found a ladder which was being used for repainting the windows at the rear of the bakery and rescued them. Though shocked and suffering from some smoke inhalation they were otherwise unharmed, though both had been taken to hospital and were still being kept in for observation.
The girls were named as Dawn Burridge and Lisa Curry, and there were photographs of both of them, clearly taken in happier times, before their ordeal. Dawn was an exceptionally pretty girl with dark shoulder-length hair that tumbled in waves and curls about a heart-shaped face. She was a leading light in the Stoke Compton Players, the report said, and there was an additional photograph, apparently reproduced from an earlier edition of the Gazette, showing her appearing as principal girl in their annual pantomime. She had been deputy head girl at her school, and worked for a local estate agent. All in all it was easy to see that she was just the kind of girl who would attract admirers without even trying.
Her friend and flatmate, Lisa Curry, was apparently a sous chef at Compton Grange, a rather expensive country hotel a few miles outside Stoke Compton. She was less striking than Dawn, with a round, rather plain face and hair that was either cropped short or pulled back into a ponytail, from the picture it was impossible to tell which. She was also several years older – twenty-three to Dawn’s twenty. She had been active in the local ATC as a teenager, but was no longer a member. The antisocial hours her job entailed had put an end to that, I surmised.
The first mention of Brian Jennings was in a cutting dated a few weeks later, though as yet no names were named. ‘Police have arrested a local man in connection with the suspected arson attack in the town High Street,’ the report read. It then went on to regurgitate much of what I had read before, adding that the two girls who had been victims of the blaze had made a good recovery, but that Dawn, shaken by what had happened, had decided to leave the town and return to her parents’ home in Dorset.
With hindsight it was easy to understand. She would have already known what was only to emerge publicly at a later stage – that the fire had been deliberately started by the weirdo who had been stalking her. She must have been totally spooked by his unwanted attention, and realizing he was capable of trying to burn her in her bed when she rejected him would have been the last straw.
I flipped back to the next cutting – a brief mention of Brian Jennings’ first appearance in court – not a lot to go on there – and then found the much meatier report, some nine months later, of the actual trial.
As Mum had said, the evidence against him was damning.
Without a doubt, he had been obsessed with Dawn. When police searched his flat they had found, amongst other things, a horde of photographs of her that he had clearly taken without her knowledge by means of a telescopic lens, programmes, posters and newspaper cuttings relating to her appearances with the Stoke Compton Players, a pair of her briefs, presumably stolen from her washing line, a cigarette butt stained with her lipstick which he had apparently taken from a pub ashtray, and a journal recording his sightings of her, together with disgustingly explicit descriptions of his fantasies concerning her. Dawn had given evidence of his persistence – how she could scarcely move but he was there, behind her, and that was backed up by a number of her friends.
There was evidence from a couple of witnesses that they had seen him hanging about in the High Street on the night of the fire, and, most damning of all, the police evidence of traces of petrol found in the pocket of his jacket.