Cry of the Children (5 page)

His face was drawn and grey when he came to her and spoke across the table and his untouched toast. ‘It's a missing child. A seven-year-old girl vanished last night. Disappeared from the fairground. She still hasn't been found. I'm going in straight away.'

Christine listened to his clipped phrases, nodded grimly and went with him to the door. They looked at each other but didn't wave as he reversed his big old Vauxhall in front of the bungalow, then turned swiftly through the gates and into the wide and dangerous world outside. Both of them were thinking of their two joyous, innocent grandsons, who had so enjoyed the fairground rides the previous day.

‘Why didn't I hear about this last night?'

The station sergeant looked at Lambert apprehensively. He could have said that he wasn't on duty then, but that would have been buck-passing. Something in the chief super's manner indicated that he wouldn't appreciate buck-passing. ‘It wasn't reported until five to ten, sir. It was midnight by the time a uniformed PC had brought in the first statement from the mother. There's no father around.'

‘What was a seven-year-old doing around the fairground at that time?'

‘I gather she disappeared much earlier, sir. Around half past seven, I believe. They spent the evening hoping she'd turn up, I think.'

Lambert didn't ask who ‘they' were. This was all second- or third-hand information and he wanted something more direct.

The station was unusually busy for a Sunday morning. A missing child brought in male and female officers in numbers no other emergency prompted. Lambert assembled the CID staff and made the initial moves. He directed Detective Sergeant Hook and Detective Sergeant David to go to the girl's home and divine whatever they could there. Bert Hook was experienced and sensitive, and Ruth David was intelligent and alert to all the possibilities in a situation. And it was always advisable to have a woman to speak to a mother in these appalling circumstances.

Detective Inspector Rushton would coordinate and computerize the vast array of information that would accrue unless the girl was found alive in the next few hours. Lambert would go immediately to the point where the seven-year-old had last been seen. He was a dinosaur among modern chief supers in demanding to be out and about in pursuit of a solution, rather than coordinating the investigation from behind a desk. But DI Rushton did that job very effectively and Lambert's methods worked. His chief constable was enough of a pragmatist to tolerate and encourage him.

Bert Hook and Ruth David did not speak to each other much as Bert drove the police Mondeo to Anthea Gibson's house. They were an unlikely pair, physically very different. Bert had the sturdy physique of the Minor Counties fast bowler he had been for fifteen years; he was just under six feet tall and broad of shoulder and beam. He subscribed to Fred Trueman's theory that you needed a powerful backside to bowl fast. He had a countryman's complexion and an air of sturdy reliability. One of his great advantages as John Lambert's bagman was that people assumed he was less intelligent than he was and underestimated him. Beneath his PC Plod exterior there lurked a shrewd brain. Hook had completed an Open University degree the previous year – a source of much police ribaldry but also considerable well-concealed respect.

No one would have assumed that Ruth David was unintelligent. She was seventeen years younger than Bert, possessed a Cambridge degree and had joined the service under the graduate recruitment scheme. She had the tall, willowy figure of an athlete, ash-blonde hair and dark green eyes. She was the source of many male sexual fantasies among the raging hormones at Oldford police station, but with a bearing too formidable for these to give her any problems.

These two very different physical specimens had great respect for each other. Bert had taken the decision several years earlier not to go for the detective inspector role that would undoubtedly have been his by now had he pursued it. But it was Bert Hook who had told Ruth a month ago that she should now be moving on and becoming an inspector. She had said that she didn't need the money and preferred for the moment to remain in John Lambert's team, because she thought she was learning more there than she would elsewhere.

They drew up outside Anthea Gibson's house and studied it for a moment before leaving the car. It was a small end-of-terrace. It looked far too unremarkable and far too much like its neighbours to contain the potential tragedy that was unfolding within it. The police pair stood looking at the unmown lawn and the weed-infested borders of the small front garden for a moment before steeling themselves to approach the green front door.

Anthea Gibson ignored the warrant cards and stared straight into each face in turn. ‘Is there any news?'

‘Not yet, I'm afraid,' said Ruth David. ‘It's early days. We'll have a better chance of finding her in the daylight.' She was ashamed of herself for the clichés, but she had nothing better to offer. ‘Mrs Gibson, I know you spoke briefly with a uniformed officer last night, but we're CID. We need a few more details from you to help our search. May we come in?'

‘Yes. Yes, I'm sorry, of course you must.' She glanced past them and looked up and down the road, as if she hoped to see Lucy's small face peeping round a hedge and banishing her nightmare.

‘And who is this?' said Bert Hook, as affably as he could, drawing into the conversation the heavy, white-faced man who stood in a doorway behind her.

Mrs Gibson looked startled, as if she had thought that she was alone in the house. Then she said, ‘Yes. Oh, yes. This is Matt Boyd. He's not my husband. He's – he's a friend. A close friend.'

Bert thought he knew what that meant. ‘We'll need to speak to you both, but separately, I think. We find people remember things better when they speak to us alone. Is that all right?'

The pair nodded without looking at each other. Ruth David said, ‘I think we should speak to you first, Mrs Gibson – get a few more details about Lucy to help us with the search.'

‘I'll wait in the kitchen,' said Matt Boyd. ‘I'll come with you to the station afterwards, if that's all right.'

‘That will be fine,' said Bert immediately. He wondered why the man didn't want to be interviewed with the girl's mother around. Very few people opted to go to the police station to be interviewed; it was generally something the CID offered as a threat when people were being uncooperative. Probably this man would be trying to hear what they said to Mrs Gibson, but he couldn't blame him for that. Bert shut the door of the living room carefully behind him and went to sit at the other end of the sofa from Ruth David. His colleague was already contemplating the tense face of the woman sitting in the armchair opposite her.

Ruth waited until the room was still and silent, smiling gently at the young woman who was suffering this rare but excruciating torment. ‘How old is Lucy?'

She said it easily enough, as though it was nothing other than a gentle opening question, but she was already treading carefully. It was so easy to say ‘was' rather than ‘is', and there was no retrieving an error like that once you'd made it.

Speech was a small relief for Anthea Gibson. She said promptly, ‘Seven and three-quarters last Thursday.' Then she almost burst into tears, as Lucy's voice sounded in her ears. ‘I know because she kept telling me that all last week.' The woman's small, involuntary giggle showed how near she was to hysteria.

‘Doing well at school, is she?'

It seemed irrelevant, no more than a polite enquiry. But they needed to know that the girl was normal, whatever that blanket term meant. Children with mental limitations were much more likely to be abused or abducted, because vicious people recognized weakness of any kind and exploited it. Less intelligent children were less aware, less ready to defend themselves against initial advances, more liable to disappear in the way that Lucy had. The statistics showed it, and at this stage, when you had so little else to aid you, you fastened upon statistics.

Anthea Gibson knew none of this. She said with a tiny smile and a flash of pride, ‘Yes. She's a good reader and Mrs Copthall said her writing is coming on well. She's doing pretty well in maths. Not quite as well as in her language work, but that's girls for you, isn't it?'

Ruth didn't respond to this disavowal of her sex, except with a small smile of encouragement. ‘She hasn't had any problems at school that you know of?'

‘No. She's always been a good mixer, the teachers say. She likes going to school.'

‘And you're not aware of any change in that recently?'

‘No. She chats to me about her friends and what's been happening.' Anthea's tense face clouded with a sudden thought. ‘I've not been meeting her at the school gates lately. Daisy, a bigger girl who lives next door but one, brought her home from school each day last week. You don't think that has anything to do with this, do you?'

Ruth watched Bert Hook making a note, then said, ‘Almost certainly not, Mrs Gibson. But if Lucy doesn't turn up quickly, we'll be talking to people at the school to find out whether they have any thoughts on this.'

‘It's not dangerous, you see, the way she comes home. There are no busy roads to cross and we're only two or three hundred yards from the school. And Daisy's a sensible girl, even though she's only nine. I thought it would be another stage in Lucy's growing up.' She suddenly found herself weeping, without any warning. She dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief that was already sodden.

Ruth nodded, moving without any visible change of gear into the more contentious section of her questioning. ‘I know you've answered this question before, but could you tell us exactly when Lucy disappeared last night?'

Anthea glanced automatically at the room's closed door, perhaps wondering, as Ruth did, whether the man they had excluded had his ear against the other side of it. ‘We think about half past seven. She was at the fair on the common with Matt.'

‘I see. But according to our records at the station, her disappearance wasn't noted until almost ten o'clock.' The two detective sergeants in the room had read the statement made to the uniformed officers on the previous night and knew all of this, but Ruth David was probing, looking for any sign of nervousness. Even mothers had to be investigated in situations like this. She'd already noted that there were no signs of drugs in the house and that Anthea Gibson didn't look like a user.

Now the girl's mother looked hard at her own feet. ‘Matt was looking for her. He couldn't believe she'd gone, at first. He thought she was playing tricks and hiding away from him as a joke.'

‘Is that the sort of thing Lucy does? Is she a mischievous little girl?'

‘No. She's a good girl. I don't think she'd do that. I said so to Matt.' She dabbed furiously at her eyes again, then looked up to check their reactions to what she'd said. This woman sergeant was pretty. Too pretty, Anthea thought. She asked abruptly, ‘Do you have children yourself?'

Ruth summoned her gentlest, most understanding smile. ‘No. I've just got engaged. I hope I shall have them, in a year or two.'

Mrs Gibson nodded and sat very upright. Her bearing reflected her view that a childless woman couldn't possibly understand what she was feeling.

Bert Hook had been wondering how to enter the exchanges. He had agreed with Ruth beforehand that she would do the mother-and-child questions and he would come in when they reached the men in Anthea Gibson's life. He now said softly, ‘I have children, Anthea. Two boys. They're older than Lucy, but we still worry about them when they're out on their own.'

The woman in the armchair nodded fiercely, as if establishing common ground with this experienced, unthreatening man. Bert said softly, ‘I gather your husband isn't around any more.'

Anthea wondered fleetingly where he had gathered it from, but all she did was nod. She was too near to tears to trust herself to do more.

Hook produced an immaculate white handkerchief and stretched his arm stiffly across the gap between them. ‘Take it, please, and use it. I shan't want it back.'

‘Thank you. I've got some tissues somewhere.' Ruth David passed the box to her from the unit behind her and Anthea blew her nose noisily, as if she needed this vigorous gesture to regain control. ‘No. We're not divorced. But I expect we will be. Dean's not around anymore.'

‘But he's Lucy's father.'

‘Yes.'

‘Does he live far away?'

‘Not far. Somewhere in Malvern, I think.' She watched Ruth David's perfect fingers as she scribbled furiously, having taken over the note-taking from Hook. You had to be single to have hands and nails like that, Anthea thought inconsequentially. ‘I don't have an address. He's moved around a bit since he left here.'

Hook nodded. Malvern wasn't a huge place. They'd need to speak to the father, but they'd find him quickly enough if he was still there. Bert noticed that he was already assuming that the girl wasn't going to turn up today and give them a happy ending. ‘Does your husband still see Lucy?'

‘At least once a month. More like once a fortnight, most of the time.'

‘Could you describe his relationship with Lucy for us, in just a few words?'

She should have expected this, she thought. But she hadn't planned for it. But then she hadn't planned any of this. ‘Dean likes Lucy. She likes him. We didn't split up over her.'

‘And he enjoys seeing Lucy?'

‘Yes. I feel guilty about it. Not about splitting up, but about Lucy and her dad. They got on well together.'

Did this mean that Lucy didn't get on with the man now in the kitchen? The man who had been the last person known to have been with the seven-year-old before she vanished? Hook was at his kindest and most avuncular as he said, ‘Please think about this before you answer me, Mrs Gibson. Do you think your husband might be involved in this in any way?'