Cry of the Children (10 page)

‘You'll need to do better than that, Mr Burns. A lot better. You saw Lucy on your ride a quarter of an hour before she was snatched. She rode on one of the motorbikes, with her adult guardian behind her. You took the fares from him and you spotted Lucy. When she rode on her own on the small ride next to your big one, you saw your chance. What did you do after you'd rushed her away through the woods?'

The brown eyes shut completely, as if the world's threat could be banished when it could not be seen. But all three of the men in that narrow, sweaty hut knew that they would have to open again very quickly. Burns was now a strange combination of physical strength and mental fragility. ‘I didn't touch your damn girl! I finished my stint after she'd ridden on that feckin' motorbike with her man. You can check with Gary Ruddock who relieved me. I had a date on Saturday night and I wanted to get away. I'd been on the rides since ten in the morning.'

His words came in a rush, tumbling one upon another as if speed itself could convince them of his innocence. Lambert said calmly, ‘We'd better have the name of the girl. If she can confirm a time for us, she could be your alibi.'

Now there was a pause, so quiet that his noisy, uneven breathing sounded as it bounced off the wooden slats like that of an older man. ‘Dora,' he said. ‘I don't know her second name. I might have got it from her on Saturday if she'd turned up.'

‘You're telling us you had a date with a girl whose full name you don't know, who chose not to turn up and meet you. Not very convincing, is it? Can you suggest how we might contact this girl?'

‘No. She's no bloody use to me anyway, now she didn't turn up. Youse lot just don't want to believe me.'

Lambert had a shrewd suspicion that this squalid man had arranged to meet an underage girl who, not surprisingly, had made the arrangement to get away from him and had never intended to keep it. But he couldn't pursue that idea whilst the mystery of Lucy Gibson remained to be solved. He didn't like this man and he didn't like himself for the way he was conducting this interview. It was too rambling and indeterminate. He said harshly, ‘You dragged Lucy away through that wood.' He twitched his head towards the invisible trees beyond the thin wooden panels of the shed. ‘What did you do to her? Where is she now?'

‘I didn't take her. I haven't a fucking clue who did take her.'

‘You'll need to prove that, Burns. You haven't a scrap of evidence in your favour.'

It was a mistake. Rory Burns wasn't an intelligent man. But he'd dealt with a lot of police questioning in his twenty-nine years and he knew enough to spot a weakness. ‘I don't need any scraps of evidence, copper. Innocent until proved guilty, in this country. The country some of us fought to defend against the IRA scum. You prove I snatched that kid on Saturday, or you fuck off and leave me alone. That's the way it works, and youse lot can't do a feckin' thing to change it!'

He shifted on his seat, made himself a little more comfortable, looked even more squat, powerful and unpleasant. There was no way of challenging his stance until they had some more powerful evidence to fling against him. Bert Hook said quietly, ‘We'll get what we need to make an arrest if you did this, Rory. Even people who won't normally help us come forward when it's a child that's disappeared. With your record, people are going to want to believe the worst of you, aren't they? If you didn't do this and you have any idea who might have done it, this is the moment to speak. It's the only way you can help yourself.'

‘I didn't do this and I don't have to prove I didn't!' He looked from Lambert's long, grim face to Hook's more fatherly countenance and softened a little. ‘You talk as if I approve of seven-year-old kids being killed. I might fancy young 'uns and I might like a quick grope, but I don't like kids being killed – that's something different. I'll keep my ears open around here. If I hear anything that might help you, I'll pass it on. I'm like the other people you spoke of. I don't like kids being raped and killed, either.'

Bert gave him a tiny nod of acceptance. ‘You're assuming she's dead.'

‘Well, aren't you? Thirty-six hours now, she's been gone. I'd take a bet the poor little sod's dead and gone, wouldn't you?'

Lambert studied him for a moment longer, not troubling to disguise his distaste and distrust. ‘You can go now. What are your plans for the next few days?'

‘I've four more nights' bed and board booked at my lodgings. Two, Harvey Court. We work through every weekend; this is my time off. Then we move on to Stroud. I won't bloody disappear.'

‘Don't even think of it. We shall take it as an admission of guilt if you do. And if you did this, we'll get you, however long it takes. Far better for you to tell us now, if you're guilty, and take whatever help you can get.'

Burns looked as if he might spit in his enemy's face, but he contained himself until he had flung open the door of the shed and lurched outside it. He went back towards his demolition work without a backward glance.

Lambert said to Hook, ‘He's got form, that bugger. We bluffed him into thinking we knew all about him when we didn't, but we'd better get Chris Rushton busy on his computer. We need to check up on exactly what Rory Burns has done with youngsters in the past.'

The news the police had dreaded, but increasingly expected, came in at eleven twenty on that cool, clear Monday morning.

Bad news came in a most unlikely shape. Emily Patten was a grandmother, sixty-four years old, recently retired from her work as a part-time librarian and enjoying a brisk walk with her Labrador, Ben, on the picturesque path that runs alongside the River Wye below the old town of Ross-on-Wye. She was exulting in the crispness of the late-October morning, with the sun still quite low in an almost cloudless blue sky. She met few people here at this time, save for the occasional person who was retired like herself.

Most of the people she met were walking in the opposite direction, back towards Ross, and most of them were men. Some of them were considerably older than she was. They found this slim woman with the pretty, small-featured face and the vigorous carriage very attractive, and Emily enjoyed that, even as she told herself how little it meant. Most of them were dog-walkers like herself, and dog-walkers in Emily's experience were invariably not only harmless but interesting. So she accepted friendly greetings, a little banter and a few shameless compliments.

There was no harm in it and not a little pleasure. And if there had been any menace, Ben would surely have come to her rescue. In truth, Emily was not entirely sure of that, since the dog seemed universally friendly to all human approaches. Even in canine interchanges, Ben acted as a fully paid-up coward; his policy was to steer clear of all conflict. He was enthusiastic and indiscriminate in his amorous advances to other dogs, which occasionally embarrassed his owner. But he drew the line at snarls, growls and fights and extricated himself swiftly from all situations that involved them.

Emily carried a tennis ball. She had become more expert in throwing it, now that Ben had left his puppy days behind him. It needed a good long throw to give the Labrador the exercise he needed. She flung it now along the deserted bank of the river, where the grass was short and the ball bounced and ran, so that Ben could race enthusiastically to retrieve it. No wonder he was so energetic, she thought wryly. When they returned home and she resumed the household chores, Ben would stretch himself flat with a contented sigh and doze happily whilst she worked. A dog's life was a pretty good life, in her household.

This was the wrong place to throw his tennis ball, and she knew it. Ben brought the ball back to her with diminishing enthusiasm after her first two throws. After the third, he abandoned it shamelessly. When there was water at hand, it dominated the dog's thoughts and actions.

Whenever opportunity in the form of an easy entry to the water offered, the dog was down the bank and into the Wye. He swam enthusiastically, returning to the shore a little further down the river each time as the current carried him gently southwards and away from Ross. He now emerged to frisk around a septuagenarian whom he recognized immediately as a friend. His mistress yelled a desperate warning, which she saw was too late. She knew what was about to happen, but she was powerless to prevent it.

Ben convulsed himself into forty pounds of boneless muscle and shook himself with a convulsive energy that extended from nose to extremely mobile tail. Hearing the man's good-natured shouts of alarm, he accepted them as a compliment and redoubled his efforts. Thirty seconds of intense activity left the dog transformed from sopping to merely damp and his new friend liberally showered in the waters of the silver Wye.

‘I'm terribly sorry!' gasped Emily Patten, arriving precipitately just after the event.

‘It's quite all right,' said the white-haired victim, feeling foolish rather than wounded. ‘I saw it coming – I'd have got out of the way twenty years ago. But now …' He lifted his arms hopelessly and humorously, a willingly abject figure of fun. Ben certainly found it amusing. He gave himself a second, subsidiary shake, watched his two human companions leap ineffectively away from him, and then came forward for the stroking he felt was due to him from his dripping victim.

‘I used to have a Labrador myself,' the man said. And Emily understood in that moment that everything was accepted and everything was forgiven. They exchanged indulgent thoughts about the Labrador breed and its production line of likeable rogues like Ben, then moved affably on their different ways.

Emily decided that she would walk as far as the next big curve in the river. That would give her a brisk round trip of four miles, though Ben's energy and curiosity had carried him at least twice as far as that already. After another two hundred yards, she would turn back and follow the path gently up-river with the autumn sun on her back. Meantime, she mused with a pleasant melancholy upon life, and her own life in particular. In another ten or fifteen years, she would be as old as that pleasant and tolerant man who had just accepted his dousing from Ben. Those years would pass very quickly, she knew. She wished that she could pin herself exactly where she was and enjoy the years she had left with all the faculties and all the knowledge she had at present. She thought she was probably happier now than she had been at any stage in her life.

These reflections were interrupted by Ben's abrupt disappearance again towards the river, at a point where there had been a little subsidence and the bank dropped away steeply towards the quietly moving waters beneath it. Emily called him repeatedly, skirting the point where he had disappeared cautiously in the belief that he would emerge at any moment and re-enact his galvanic plunging and localized shower-bath.

The dog did not respond to his name. His mistress peered cautiously down on his activity at the edge of the river. Ben was not swimming and being carried downstream, as she had expected. He was investigating something at the edge of the water. He grasped what looked to her like cotton in his strong jaws as she watched. Then, digging his paws into the wet earth behind him, he dragged his trophy first to the edge of the water and then on to the muddy lower section of the bank. His tail wagged vigorously with his excitement.

Blue clothing. Long, wet strands of childish hair. Emily Patten knew what Ben had found seconds before she gazed in horror at the pale, dead face of Lucy Gibson.

L
ambert received the news that the girl was dead as he was driving to see her father. He listened to the first sombre details and was assured that the post-mortem examination would be done immediately. Child murder leapt ahead of the varied multitude of deaths in other minds as well as his.

Neither he nor Hook spoke for several miles as they drove up the A449. They had worked together for many years. Each knew that the other was thinking of his own children, and, in Lambert's case, grandchildren. It wasn't long before they ran into the small town. Both of them could have used a little more time to compose themselves for the things they had to do and the news they had to give.

Dean Gibson had been discovered by the police machine. He was living not in Malvern but in the ancient town of Ledbury, some eight miles nearer to their base at Oldford. He was lodged in a mean little terrace of houses that ran away from the main street and down towards the modern wasteland of a supermarket car park. What had once been a quiet street was now a noisy and unpleasant spot, though handy for the centre of the town and its amenities.

The door needed a coat of paint. The woman who opened it would also have benefited from a little restoration. She was overweight, though not drastically so; her waist had almost disappeared, but she was shapeless rather than obese. Her hair was lank and grey and escaping from the single slide that was her only attempt at control. There was a greyness also about her complexion, which suggested that her sour face saw little of the clean country air around Ledbury.

She looked at them curiously when they announced themselves and presented their warrant cards. She didn't like policemen and wouldn't normally have welcomed them into her house, but murder had a grisly and universal glamour which no other crime possessed. She wanted to be able to relate accurate details about the CID interest in her lodger to her neighbours and her daughter. For a few days it would give her an importance that she had never felt before.

‘His room's on the landing. Second door on the right.' She clutched Hook's arm as her visitors moved past her. ‘He wasn't here on Saturday night. I don't know where he was, mind, but he wasn't here.' She invested her words with all the heavy import she could give them. Bert sensed that the man behind the second door on the right of the landing couldn't expect much support here. For no reason he could analyze, Bert hoped he wouldn't need it.