Cry of the Children (27 page)

Hook nodded dolefully. ‘All right. I can't deny that possibility. But any of them might have panicked, faced with a terrified, screaming kid and the prospect of being discovered. I'd prefer to bet on Dennis Robson if we think that's what happened.'

Rushton said, ‘You said you wanted my view from the outside, so to speak. Well, I've never even seen Robson, let alone spoken to him, but from what I've filed on him he seems to me the least likely killer of the lot. He's a man of seventy without any history of previous violence. OK, he's another nasty piece of work: a known paedophile, whose wife divorced him because he continued to offend. I can see him doing all sorts of unspeakable things with children and I wouldn't want him within a hundred yards of my kid. But although I can see him taking Lucy, I can't see him killing her.'

Lambert nodded slowly. ‘That sounds convincing as you say it. But we should bear in mind that Robson had studied these kids on their school playing field. He may actually have targeted Lucy weeks beforehand, for all we know. And then followed up four days later with another kid he already knew, from the same school.'

Hook said, ‘Robson doesn't know children. He never had any of his own, which we might now consider a blessing. But that inexperience might be crucial here. Lucy would scream when he took her and even more if he attempted to abuse her. He would have had no idea how to shut her up. He's more likely to have panicked than any of them.'

Lambert said quietly, revolving the thought that Hook had just prompted, ‘The forensic psychologist thought that the person involved almost certainly had some sort of personality disorder. Robson, like many paedophiles, has that. As far as most of his neighbours are concerned, he's a cultivated and highly respectable elderly man who lives alone and causes trouble for no one. His perversions are part of a completely different life, which no doubt fills him with excitement. Apart from the pressures Bert accurately describes, Dennis Robson might exhibit a different personality when he becomes an active paedophile.'

‘Which leaves the two men who were closest to Lucy Gibson,' said Rushton. ‘The discarded husband and the man who replaced him. I saw Dean Gibson when he came in to see you yesterday. He looked at the end of his tether.'

‘I agree. But Gibson was pretty broken-up when he had to leave the marital home a few months ago. According to what everyone tells us, he's been barely coping since then. And he lost a daughter he loved at the weekend. Even if he had nothing to do with her death, you'd expect him to look shattered. Which he does, as you say. He's prematurely bald and he has this habit of blinking violently and repeatedly when he's under any sort of emotional pressure. His appearance doesn't do him any favours, but he hasn't any previous history of violence, towards his child or his wife or anyone else. He's in the frame because we know that he was around on Saturday and we haven't been able to clear him. And, like the others, he has no one to alibi him for last night, when Raymond Barrington was snatched. One of our problems is that all five of our suspects are loners, in very different ways. Gerry Clancey has opted for the single man's freedom, Matt Boyd and Dennis Robson are divorced, Dean Gibson and Big Julie Foster have had the solitary life forced upon them. That helps to account for the fact that none of them has a witness to prove he or she was elsewhere when Raymond was snatched last night.'

It was a long speech for Lambert. It was also evidence of his uncertainty and of the agony this case was causing him. He was trying to rationalize his own thoughts by voicing them aloud and testing the logic of them. There was a pause before Hook said, ‘Could you see Dean Gibson killing his own daughter?'

‘No. But I also can't rule him out. He lied to us about Saturday when we first saw him, pretending that he'd come to Oldford on his bike and missed seeing her altogether, when we now know that he'd come in a van and might well have been there at the moment she was snatched. I can't see either Dean or Big Julie strangling a seven-year-old girl, but we've already agreed that a fit of panic might have overtaken any one of these five. I feel Dennis Robson is creepy enough to do anything under pressure, that Gerry Clancey is certainly violent enough and that we still don't know enough about Matthew Boyd to rule him out. But I think we've still got to have all five in the frame at this moment.'

Rushton said, ‘I'm glad you mentioned Matthew Boyd. I feel I should know most about him, in that I've talked to the woman who was sleeping with him; I went with Ruth David to give Anthea Gibson the news of her daughter's death. Anthea spent the whole of that Saturday when Lucy died with Boyd. But I still feel he is the one of the five whom I know least well.'

Hook glanced at the long, tortured face of his chief. ‘I think we might agree with that, even though we've twice spoken at length with Matthew Boyd. We know now that his teacher training course was ended abruptly ten years ago because of incidents with children. He denies there was anything improper, and there was no court case, so he hasn't got form like Clancey and Robson. And Foster, I suppose, in a different way, though the psychological reports saved her from any real punishment when she took the baby.'

Lambert was troubled. ‘You're right; Boyd's elusive. He spent Tuesday night with Anthea Gibson, three nights after her daughter was snatched and killed while in his care. That argues that she at least doesn't believe Boyd killed Lucy.'

Hook allowed himself a tiny, doubtful shake of his head. ‘But Anthea must be so shattered that she hardly knows her own mind at present. And Boyd's kept his digs in Oldford. He's living within four hundred yards of the spot where Raymond Barrington was snatched last night.'

Rushton smiled. ‘Be fair, Chris. So are the others, apart from Dean Gibson.'

‘Yes. But Boyd has taken two days off work. Had he planned to snatch a child? He also had his car very thoroughly valeted this morning, conveniently removing any traces of a boy carried in it against his will last night.'

Rushton nodded, glad as always to have a chance to display his efficiency. ‘We checked that. Matthew Boyd does have his car valeted regularly, at about monthly intervals. The last one was only three weeks ago, but it's conceivable, as he claims, that he was taking advantage of the fact that he isn't working for a couple of days to have the car cleaned. This is, however, an extremely convenient valeting for anyone who had an unwilling passenger in the car last night.'

Lambert nodded. ‘We've had Boyd's ex-wife interviewed. She says that she never really felt she knew him and that she always felt that he lived some other sort of secret life away from her.'

‘Which sounds exactly the right background for someone perpetrating crimes like these,' Rushton pointed out. He'd been waiting to say that ever since he had filed DS Ruth David's report on her interviewing of Hannah Boyd, the woman who had divorced their suspect.

‘Agreed,' said Lambert promptly. ‘But we have to remember that ex-spouses have their own agendas. It's not often that they want to see the best in their former partners. Nevertheless, it reinforces our own thoughts about Boyd, that he's a difficult man to fathom. He was pretty vague about his present relationship with Anthea Gibson and how she's reacted to someone stealing and murdering her daughter when she was in his care.'

Hook smiled ruefully at the memory of Matt Boyd's troubled face. ‘That may be because neither of them is sure yet of exactly how they feel about the other. What happened to Lucy must be traumatic for both of them. I imagine Anthea in particular isn't sure what she wants or needs at the moment. I expect her feelings change hour by hour. I know mine would.'

The three were silent for a moment, pondering once again the uniqueness of these happenings for them. Even with their vast combined experience of crime, they were feeling their way into unfamiliar areas.

It was Lambert who wrenched them back to the practicalities of the investigation. ‘We've given it twenty-four hours. I think we need to set up surveillance of all five of these people. If we put a tail on each of them, we'll soon know if that boy is still alive. I'd have done it today, but as you know I was afraid of scaring an unbalanced kidnapper into violent action. But we can't leave it any longer. I'll discuss who we're going to use with you in the morning, Chris.'

‘It'll be expensive,' said Chris Rushton. He was a natural bureaucrat and this was the standard bureaucratic reaction.

‘Expensive but warranted,' said Lambert grimly. ‘Refer any queries from the chief constable about the overtime budget to me. I want good people on this – perhaps as many as fifteen, if we want twenty-four hour surveillance. Each of them needs to be aware that a child's life might depend on his or her actions. We'll assign them first thing tomorrow, Chris, unless we have any further news by then.'

It was nine o'clock and each of them was exhausted. They left the station at Oldford sadly, mindful of the fact that the further news Lambert mentioned in his last phrase was likely to be of the death of a second child.

T
he five people the detective trio had discussed were pushing ahead with their own lives, unconscious of the intense examination of their characters that was being conducted in the CID section at Oldford.

Dean Gibson was both exhausted and confused, as they had surmised. He had spent a long morning without any break plastering the wall of the new extension they were building near Hereford, which had taken all his skill and concentration. His afternoon had seen the very different pressures of a grilling by Lambert and Hook in the interview room at the police station. It would have taxed most men, he supposed, and he had been in a fragile condition even at the beginning of his day.

He couldn't remember when he had last slept for any decent length of time. He was so tired that he was not thinking straight. It seemed scarcely possible that it was only five days since Lucy had been seized and killed. His mind had not been clear since then; his brain, his stomach and his whole body were beset by a mass of conflicting emotions. He scarcely felt the same from one minute to the next, let alone from day to day. He sat in the dismal room in his Ledbury digs and wondered what he was to do and what was to become of him.

He wasn't even sure whether he was hungry or not. He ought to eat something, he supposed. There would be more plastering for him tomorrow, more long hours without a break whilst he covered another raw wall of the newly completed extension at Breinton. He didn't want to collapse whilst he was working. That would draw the kind of attention he didn't want. It might lose him the steady work he had toiled so hard to secure. But that didn't seem anything like as important as it had a week ago. He kept telling himself that he needed the work, that he might even get back with Anthea some time in the next few months. But Dean didn't really believe that was going to happen any more. He wondered if he had the energy to work, or even the energy to think, beyond the next few minutes.

He heard Mrs Jackson moving about in her kitchen downstairs, and the thought of another confrontation with that mean-spirited woman gave him his first strong feeling in several hours. He didn't want to speak to her, wanted with a passion he could scarcely understand to be away from her. He crept down the stairs as quietly as he could, treading at the sides of the two he knew creaked particularly loudly. Ma Jackson came out of the kitchen as he pulled the front door softly shut behind him. He heard her heavy, proprietorial steps in the hall. But she did not open her front door to call after him, and Dean, whose head was reeling a little, told himself that was an omen of better things to come for him.

He sat for a moment in the van he had cleaned out hastily before the police examined it. They had left it, if anything, even tidier than it had been when they had taken his keys. Without its usual jumble of tools and materials and discarded food wrappers, it felt at this moment like a different van altogether. And for another very long moment, Dean wished that it was and that he was starting anew.

He set out to put distance between himself and Barbara Jackson and the small, miserable room where he spent too much of his life. He drove slowly through the small town and towards Ross-on-Wye. A roadside pub said that you could have two courses for £8.95 on weekday evenings. He eased the van into the car park, sat for a couple of minutes to compose himself, then went inside and collected the set menu from which he was to select his two courses.

It was quiet in the pub. Even at these prices, people who were hit by the recession weren't eating out as often as they had a couple of years earlier. Dean sat at the smallest and most obscure table he could see. There was a party of eight men at the other side of the room on a lads' night out, and two couples who had arranged a convivial meal together. Otherwise, a room that held fifty when packed was empty. The noise rose from the other two tables, particularly the all-male one, but no one took any notice of the white-faced, balding man in the shabby sweater who munched steadily through his meal at the side of the dining area.

That was the way he wanted it, Dean told himself. He didn't want company and wanted least of all to make conversation. And yet he felt very alone. He wanted someone, not to speak to him, but to wrap warm arms around him and tell him that all would be well. He didn't think that would ever happen again. It couldn't now, could it? Not without Lucy.

He refused to order a drink, because he knew how tired he was and he was trying to keep his thinking straight. He had gammon ham and pineapple, with chips and broccoli, and he found that once he started to eat he was surprisingly hungry. He ate it all; he managed to answer the waitress's cheerful query with a routine assurance that he had enjoyed his meal, then a request for a sticky toffee pudding for his second course. No coffee; he would use the old kettle in his room to make that when he had crept past La Jackson and up the stairs.