You Just Never Know People
While on holiday last month I received a couple of emails, totally independently of each other, (via Facebook, which I don’t really use these days) from some old friends alerting me to a piece of news that they’d stumbled across, that turned out to be quite disturbing.
The friends in question were a colleague and a couple of punters of a pub that I used to be Deputy Manager of about 10 years ago, and the news was about the manager of the pub who had been in charge before, during and after my two-year stint there.
Two of the friends had been discussing arranging a re-union for those of us that had remained in touch but were now scattered around the world and had done a Google search* for the manager (I have chosen not to mention him by name, but will refer to him instead as Bob) and had come across an article on a newspaper website in the area that he now lives.
I’m not sure exactly how my other friend had come across the news, but there were two separate news articles.
It turns out that Bob was sentenced by a judge for “internet child pornography” offences. He also had “previous convictions included indecent assaults on boys under 14 and earlier child porn offences”, had more than 50,000 indecent images on his computer and admitted making indecent photographs of children!
The bloke I had spent two years working for, was a paedophile! Not only that, but this was going on at the time I was living in the pub, under the same roof as this sick bastard!
When I look back at the time I worked there a couple of things suddenly don’t appear as they originally seemed. Bob would have the occasional kid working in the pub on a weekend morning, sweeping the garden, helping out in the kitchen, and at the time you think he’s just giving jobs to them so that they can earn a bit of money. Afterwards he would disappear upstairs with them and I remember one boy (a future X-Factor contestant who was at the local performing arts school) helping him out “on his computer” as Bob would put it.
But in hindsight you wonder if this as sinister as it now seems. At the time the thought would never cross your mind, which is why (if it did happen at the time) he would have got away with it!
Bob suffers from motor neuron disease so hopefully the sick bastard won’t be around for much longer. As for his wife (yes, he was married – although I did always suspect it was a sham marriage), did she know, or did she just ignore it? I doubt we’ll ever find out the full story of what went on.
It goes to show you what goes on around you that you’re not even aware of!