It would take another six weeks from the receipt of Strachan’s hard drive for detectives to cut through Rennie’s electronic subterfuge. On a Sunday morning, December 16, 2007, they arrested him at his flat near Meadowbank stadium in Edinburgh. In his kitchen they found a photo of a boy stuck to the fridge, the kind of picture a child might send his favourite uncle as a thank-you. It was Billy. Within hours, family life for the Reillys would collapse.
“It was Sunday night and we were sitting watching Sports Personality of the Year on the telly and the door bell rang,” remembers John. “One of these men was showing me a badge. He said, ‘Mr Reilly? Leith CID. We need to talk to you about something.’” John nervously assumed he had forgotten to pay a parking ticket, until one of the men asked if his wife was home. “I wasn’t sure what the right answer was,” he says. “I thought, ‘What’s going to come out?’”
As soon as they were ensconced in the Reillys’ comfortable living room, one of the policemen asked if the couple knew Rennie. “At first,” says Maggie, “there was slight relief, because you think, ‘At least we haven’t done something.’” The police explained that they were calling as part of an ongoing investigation, Operation Algebra, and that they were investigating Rennie for possession of indecent images of children. And then the heart-stopping words were uttered: “We believe it involves your son.”
The following week was a foretaste of the chaos ahead. Every kind of normality was ripped away from the Reillys’ lives. A stream of child protection consultations was punctuated by conversations with the police. The phone never stopped ringing. The couple found themselves having to invent reasons to explain away the strange things that were happening to their son. Why was Billy suddenly being picked up in cars and taken to such strange places to meet policemen and doctors? Who were “Mummy’s new friends”? Why did he have to play with their toys?
“It felt like: ‘What lies do we have to tell him now?’” remembers Maggie.
The events of the next six months are as vivid as the foulest nightmare: those moments in February when a policeman showed them images of Billy being abused; their struggles to identify their child in a grainy video recorded on Rennie’s camera phone; the growing realisation that the distinctive jersey the child was wearing had been given to him by an elderly friend of his granny.
Then, in June, came their first acquaintance with the indictment, a series of 54 charges against Rennie and his accomplices that recorded their grotesque crimes in detail so chillingly exact it turned the stomachs of the officials who drew it up. The impact on the Reillys was even more gut-wrenching.
“When someone says your child has been abused, you have no concept of what that means,” says Maggie in a small voice.
“It is hard to take in,” John confirms. He had dragged himself back from his work to make that first identification from photographs, viewed on a policeman’s laptop.
“I remember there were four photographs and they were quite clearly Billy. You look at an image for a few seconds and you think, ‘That’s him,’ and then immediately, ‘Christ Almighty.’ Because it’s not what you expect to see. It takes time to assimilate what you’re looking at. You’re saying, ‘Where is that? What’s that in the picture? That’s not a finger, or a child’s arm…’”
Maggie puts in: “And then you see the context. ‘My God, that’s our bathroom. My God, that’s my house.’”
As horror followed horror, the couple attempted to impose order on their lives. Since John worked on the other side of the city it made sense that Maggie would become the main point of contact with the police, but the strain for both became unbearable. They brought their closest friends and family members into their confidence, to share their burden, but inevitably there were moments when they felt utterly alone.
Maggie came to fear every mobile phone call that announced “number withheld”, because inevitably she was greeted by a policeman’s voice. The process reached a dark and surreal summit on a spring morning in 2008 when Maggie was on a bus with another mum, and her phone rang. It was the senior investigating officer.
“He asked how I was getting on. But as usual there was something else: ‘We’re thinking that Billy might have to have an HIV test,’ he said. I’m on the bus. I’m saying, ‘OK. All right. We’ll sort that out then.’ I had a conversation, it finished, and I’m back on a bus heading into town, sitting next to another mum again. It was another world.”
The memory of the days that followed the call is almost unbearable. “We had to sit that out, on top of all the other s*** that was happening,” seethes John. Mercifully, Billy – still then at nursery school – had no sexually transmitted diseases.
And all the while, the Reillys punished themselves with the question: should we have known? The answer, delivered by family, friends and advisers, was, quite simply, “No.”
The friendship with Rennie had been built on implicit trust, no questions asked. It was founded before Billy was born. In those early days, Rennie was a man with a view on politics or music, a great guy for the pub or a party, and they enjoyed his company. Jamie seemed “fragile” when they first knew him, but they had such great laughs.
But as the shades were lifted from their eyes, some of Billy’s behaviour began to make sense. “Obviously the images gave an idea of what had gone on,” says Maggie. “Suddenly you think, ‘Oh my God, that’s why he’s been doing this, that’s why he has been masturbating.’ It never dawned on us what abuse meant until we actually saw the images and saw what had happened.
“And then you begin to put all these jigsaw pieces together about what has been going on since he was 18 months old. You’d speak to people in the past: ‘He masturbates a lot,’ and they’d say, ‘Oh it’s just boys.’ All these little things start to drop… and then of course you end up doing more stuff, statements and psychologists. You can’t imagine…”
Rennie himself had seemed more self-obsessed in his last years of liberty, distancing himself from John and Maggie. “He became self-important, increasingly boastful about his contacts and situations he’d been in,” recalls John.
“Health board this, council the other. He’d been invited to the garden party at Holyroodhouse, but he might not go, because he was just too busy. He was invited to Downing Street, but he didn’t know if he would find the time – all the way to London, just to visit Downing Street! He seemed to enjoy all that one-upmanship.”
Finally, in March last year, the couple had to endure the intensity of the trial. Nothing, says Maggie, could have prepared her for the strain of the witness box, and her first sight of Rennie for 18 months. She vividly recalls walking nervously into court, and through the sea of people, catching sight of her former friend in the dock. He had his head down, sobbing. “I remember watching him and seeing the jury and the defence teams looking at him, and I thought, ‘It is not looking good for you, Jamie, because you look as guilty as sin.’”
Maggie herself was on the point of collapse as she took the stand. “I felt like crying because I’m thinking, ‘How sad is this? I am about to give evidence against the man who has abused my child, whom I have known for all this time, and who has been such a close family friend at really pivotal points in our lives.’ It was not even anger. It just felt overwhelming, incredibly sad. I thought, ‘No I can’t let this happen. I must pull myself together, I must be strong enough to give evidence.’”
When the turn came to make his impact statement, John felt no such sadness, nor even anger – just determination to tell the truth. “I thought, ‘Right, you bastard, I am going to do the business here. I’m here because I’m a good guy. I’m here because I’ve done nothing wrong. I have the opportunity to make my own contribution, and to drop the ball or screw it up.’?” When it was over, he felt a novel, albeit brief, sensation: elation.
In October, Rennie was sentenced to lifetime’s supervision, with the recommendation that he serves a minimum of 13 years in prison. Even if he is released, he will never have the freedom to repeat the terrible crimes he has committed against Billy. In the aftermath of the sentencing, Maggie welcomed the judgment and told reporters at Edinburgh’s High Court: “My focus is about my son, about how to support him and loving him for who he is. And who he is now has been shaped and moulded by what’s gone on.”
Today, just weeks after Rennie was sent away to prison, there is no sense of closure for the Reillys as they struggle to rebuild their lives. They cannot pretend they did not know a man who shared many of the most personal moments of their lives. Too often they have had to answer the question, “Where has Uncle Jamie gone?” And occasionally, they are moved to ask themselves, why us?
“I don’t think I deserve this, but who does?” says John. “Life isn’t fair. You have to deal with it.” As for Rennie, a former friend, he has been dismissed as someone John had never really known at all.
“That person is someone I once spent a lot of time with, a face I know and recognise because we shared experiences together,” he says slowly and carefully. “He was actually an outrageous and disgusting monster. He had a job and a suit and went to work and bought Ikea sofas and shopped in Sainsbury’s, all the usual stuff. But it was just a façade.
“I never saw this as a betrayal. I think, ‘You weren’t my friend at all. You just pretended to be to suit your own ends.’ He was just a skin and a shell. Underneath, that person was not in any shape or form a person I knew. He is an inhuman and amoral monster.”
Tonight, on another dark evening, the Reillys sit in their comfortable lounge, in their modern house. Their boy is fit and well, and sleeping in the room above.
“It’s something which has affected our lives, but it mustn’t be something that dominates it, something which affects everything we do and think and say,” says John. “We have to enjoy and sustain the relationships we have with friends and family. And take pleasure in those relationships and in each other. It is something you learn to live with…”
“…That we’re learning to live with,” says Maggie, correcting him. “We’re learning to live with it. That’s the best phrase. We are seeking a degree of normality.”
SOURCE: http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/families/article7001548.ece?token=null&offset=36&page=4
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