Chapter 29 Connor
Connor
Larges, it’s me again, Connor Chantree. Here are a few more things that I wasn’t sure whether or not to include, so I have. As follows:
A newspaper column.
A few pages of dialogue between members of the Lambert family.
Info about a comedian and some vodka. (This will make sense when you get there.)
As per when I popped up before, I’ll say the same again: These things are only of interest if there’s a chance that we’re looking at a murder.
I’ll be honest, Large: It’s not that I think the coroner got it wrong.
I actually think we could commission three more postmortems and they’d all conclude the same.
But deep down, and even though it makes no sense, I believe someone—maybe a Lambert, maybe a Gavey, maybe Corinne Sullivan—committed a murder so clever, they knew no autopsy would be able to prove it wasn’t a natural death.
And the thing is, Large, I reckon that’s the point of this whole book.
Whoever did it is advertising what they’ve done and boasting about it, but in a roundabout way.
You’ll see when you get to the end that we’re being asked to believe in a murderer who cannot possibly have done it.
That’s the real killer’s way of taunting us, I reckon.
Like: “We all know this isn’t what happened, but you might as well accept this silly story as the truth because it’s the only explanation you’re ever going to get. ”
So, anyway, here goes:
Below is a newspaper column by the Daily Telegraph’s Deborah Partrick.
I doubt you read it at the time. I didn’t.
It doesn’t prove anything at all, except that the opinion that the world would be a better place without Tess in it was a widely shared and almost acceptable one between mid-June and November last year.
Anyone tempted to murder Tess, therefore, might have felt encouraged to do so.
Have you heard of the Overton Window, Large?
It means: what’s considered by society to be the normal, acceptable range of beliefs at any given time.
I’d say it was widened in the second half of last year to include the belief that the world would be a better place without Tess Gavey in it.
Given that, it seems rather a coincidence, and certainly it defies logic, for her to have died from a supposed allergic reaction even though the postmortem report swears blind that the thing she was allergic to—fish—was nowhere in her system. Anyway, here’s the newspaper column:
Deborah Partrick, Daily Telegraph, 20 June 2024
Some of my older readers will remember a time, not all that long ago, when our justice system was a beacon to the world.
With wistful sighs (or perhaps uncontrolled sobbing, if they’re anything like me), they might recall the days when we could glory in the achievements of our top universities.
That golden age, alas, is no more. Nowadays young people are made to approach every work of art through a thicket of silly trigger warnings, almost all of which double up as quite unnecessary surprise-destroying plot spoilers (Macbeth: murder, suicide, infanticide, supernatural elements).
The modern university student is encouraged toward victimhood instead of resilience, fed great gulps of anti-scientific bilge from many directions, and taught almost no history.
The perilous ignorance that results from this approach is then duly celebrated by the misguided and the deluded, all in the name of progress.
Most tragically of all, youngsters these days are neither taught nor, if we’re being honest, permitted to think—not logically and certainly not for themselves.
Quite the reverse; they are brainwashed into rejecting concepts that have served us well for centuries.
Failure and dishonesty on such a monumental scale have grave consequences.
One of these is that I, who foolishly believed until recently that I had no further flabbers left that might be gasted and no more gobs available to be smacked, find myself both flabbergasted and gobsmacked by the sheer idiocy displayed by so many in relation to the Champ Lambert affair.
I don’t mind admitting to my own bias: I believe, though cannot prove, that Champ was with his “mum” (as we’re told she thinks of herself), Sally Lambert, walking along the lode path in Swaffham Tilney, Cambridgeshire, at 4:15 pm on 17 June, as his family say he was.
I am firmly #TeamChamp. I’ve done my homework—read every word available online about both the Lamberts and the Gaveys—and I know which family I believe is more likely to be lying through its teeth.
It’s interesting that no one from the Champ-Is-Guilty squad has come forward to defend Tess Gavey’s character.
Her online detractors report that she’s an envious, spiteful girl.
At least two octogenarian grandmothers have felt compelled to master the internet in order to contribute a Tess Gavey anecdote to the online furor, and those two accounts fit perfectly with all the others we’re seeing from parents who escaped to Hampstead, Hull, and several points in between in order to dodge persecution by Tess Gavey.
It can’t be a coincidence, surely, that the common feature shared by all the tales about Tess that have surfaced so far is a granddaughter or daughter leaving a school she previously loved in order to get as far away as possible from Tess’s peculiarly vicious brand of covert cruelty.
That’s who Tess Gavey is. Apparently it’s who she has always been.
Add to this a false accusation that might result in the lawful execution of a beloved furry family member, and I don’t blame the Lamberts one bit for planning and enacting a successful getaway, having first decided to ignore the official machinery of justice in favor of their own idea of what that word means.
I don’t doubt for a moment that Tess’s presence in my village would see me fleeing the contaminated area as soon as it was practical to do so.
But, wait—let’s say I’m wrong: wrong about Tess, and wrong to believe Champ didn’t bite her.
(I was lucky enough to attend an excellent grammar school in the 1970s, where I learned that we might, any of us, at any time, be mistaken and that people could even disagree with us most vehemently and that wouldn’t constitute a breach of our fundamental rights.
We could argue the toss, and win or lose based on who had the superior set of arguments at their disposal, and there was no need for anyone to accuse anybody else of an annihilatory lack of affirmation or similar nonsense.) My point, of course, is that I positively enjoy thought experiments in which I make myself wrong, so let’s do one now…
Let’s say Champ Lambert is guilty, and Tess Gavey is a blameless and honest victim of his terrier teeth, as well as of endless unwarranted online character assassination.
Even if we assume those circumstances apply, I’m afraid the vast majority of the pro-Tess contingent look no more sane or rational.
Champ Lambert happens to be a dog, yes, but he is not—crucially—an American Bully, or anything to do with the question of whether or not American Bullies are dangerous enough to warrant the outlawing of the breed.
Thematically, his story has no greater a connection with that particular debate than it does with, say, a Laurel and Hardy movie or the mutiny against Captain William Bligh on HMS Bounty in 1879.
Why is it, then, that so many who are gleefully drooling at the prospect of Champ being caught and put to sleep are also active members of the campaign to make American Bullies illegal?
And how are they able to be so certain that Champ did it?
Note: Most of these strangers who have never clapped eyes on a Lambert or a Gavey in their lives seem certain enough to assure us all that there is “simply no doubt.” Could it be that their ability to think sensibly about the specifics of a unique situation is impeded by their deeply ingrained habit of cheering on the position in any contretemps that is most palpably anti-dog, no matter the specific facts of the case?
I’d like to believe that even if I or a loved one had recently been mauled, mutilated, or maimed by mastiffs, I would nevertheless retain enough discernment to see that the Champ Lambert story isn’t about dangerous dogs if Champ is innocent, as the Lamberts claim, and has never bitten anyone in his life.
If that’s the case—and my gut tells me it is—then this story belongs to a quite different genre.
It’s a parable about wrongful accusation and its horrific consequences.
We ought all to be thinking not about American Bullies but about the tragic Dreyfus affair, or the grotesquely unjust chemical castration of scientific hero Alan Turing, or the hanging of poor Derek Bentley, whose special educational needs sadly cannot now be redefined to include the need not to be murdered by the state for a crime he neither committed nor properly understood.
Yet this obvious fact is ignored by hundreds of online warriors who need to pretend it’s all about dangerous dogs because that’s the topic they happen to be obsessed with.