Cry of the Children Page 8

  ‘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.

  SEVEN

  Lambert 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.

  Dean Gibson must have heard the voices downstairs. Probably he had heard what his landlady had said to them. The door opened virtually as Lambert knocked, so that detective and quarry almost collided with each other and were left with their faces scarcely a foot apart. It was like a clumsily mistimed move in amateur dramatics, which makes the audience titter when there should be a significant silence.

  The room was small and scarcely adequate for three adults, but it did not smell stale. Gibson had opened the single small window, so that the grubby curtain wafted gently and they could hear the noises from the supermarket car park below them. Hook said, ‘I’m sure Mrs Jackson would let us use her living room downstairs for this, if we ask her nicely and—’

  ‘I’d rather do it here. More private, like, if you don’t mind sitting on the bed.’ Gibson wasn’t a native of these parts; he had a Birmingham accent, though not a strong one. He took the only chair in the room and gestured towards the single bed. The two big men sat down cautiously on the edge of it. It wasn’t comfortable, but they’d questioned people in places much worse than this.

  They knew from the file Chris Rushton had already opened on this man that Dean Gibson was thirty-three. He looked much older. His hair was greasy and already thinning drastically; he had a three-day growth of stubble on his chin and cheeks. He was thin and narrow-shouldered, and he had three sticking plasters on his fingers. His sweater had a stain on the front and a hole in one elbow. It was easy to see how his wife might have abandoned him for the far more presentable Matthew Boyd.

  Lambert said, ‘We had some difficulty finding you, Mr Gibson. Your last address was in Malvern. You seem to have moved around a lot since you left your wife.’

  ‘I take work where I can get it. I don’t have a car now. I try to live as near as possible to the place where I work.’ He stared at his questioner steadily, but his eyes blinked far more frequently than they should have.

  Lambert looked back at him hard, then said tersely, ‘You know why we’re here.’

  ‘Yes. Have you found her?’

  They would have had to tell him, and quickly. Now he had given them the opening. ‘I think so. I was notified on my way here that the body of a small girl has been found. I am afraid we are almost certain that it is Lucy.’

  Gibson clutched suddenly at his torso with both arms. For a long, agonizing moment he did not speak. When he spoke, it was in a voice quite different from the little they had heard from him previously. ‘I knew it. I knew she was gone. If they don’t turn up within the first day, they’re gone, aren’t they?’

  ‘I’m afraid they very often are, yes. I’m very sorry, Mr Gibson. We both are. I know it can’t be much consolation to you, but we’ll get whoever did this.’

  ‘I expect you will, yes. With all the men and women you can use, you’ll get whoever did this. And, as you say, it won’t be much consolation to me.’

  He spoke dully, but he had acquired a strange dignity with his reception of the news. Beyond that, they couldn’t analyze his reaction. Lambert said, ‘If you do not wish to speak to us at this time, that would be entirely understandable. We can do this later, either here or at the station. I have to say that the sooner we have your statement, the better it will be, from our point of view. We have as yet no idea who did this and there are other people as well as you to whom we need to speak.’

  It was stilted and formal, but formal was probably best in these appalling circumstances. Gibson stared straight ahead of him, his grey eyes blinking steadily but producing no tears. All other movement seemed frozen within him. Eventually, he produced a voice that seemed to come from a distance and belong to someone else. ‘Poor little Lucy. Poor, poor little Lucy. She was so small and so innocent.’ After a moment, he came back to them, seeming surprised to find them here. ‘You’ll get whoever did this. I believe that. I want you to do whatever you have to do right now and right here.’

  Lambert said quietly, ‘Thank you. I think that is the right decision. How long is it since you saw Lucy, Mr Gibson?’

  He frowned a little, as if finding it difficult to concentrate on the question. ‘Two weeks ago. Two weeks last Saturday. Two weeks before … before this happened. Anthea dropped her off in Malvern. I was still in my digs there, then. We had a good walk together, Lucy and me. I carried her on my shoulders when she got tired. Just for a little while. I used to do that when she was small, you see. When all three of us lived together in Oldford.’

  They had a brief glimpse with that picture of the bleakness of his life now, of the cruelty of it, for a man with few personal resources who had been cast out into an alien world – a world that demanded more then he had to give it. Everyone spoke of how hard marital break-ups could be for the children, but few saw what they did to inadequates like this. Lambert said, ‘How would you describe your present relationship with your wife, Mr Gibson?’

  ‘With Anthea? We get on all right, I suppose. As well as people who’ve split up normally do, I expect. We said we’d separate for a while to see how it went.’

  ‘A trial separation?’

  ‘That’s it. That’s what they call it, isn’t it? That’s the phrase Anthea used. Picked it up from the mums at the school gates, I expect. She did a lot of talking with them, before we split.’

  It wasn’t bitter; it was dull and resigned. There was a silence, as though all of them were pausing to pin down this situation in their minds. Then Bert Hook said, ‘Were you hoping that you’d get back together, Dean?’

  Gibson glanced at him sharply, as if he had not expected him to speak. When he replied, it seemed that his words were almost a surprise to him. ‘Ye–es. Yes, I suppose I was. Lucy wanted it – she told me that, when we were together. And I must have wanted it, because I haven’t settled to anything since I left.’ He looked round the tight and shabby
little bedroom, as if citing the evidence of that.

  ‘But it hasn’t happened. There’s been no sign of you going back to the house in Oldford. Not so far.’

  ‘No, and it isn’t going to happen. Not with him around, it isn’t.’

  ‘You mean Matthew Boyd?’

  ‘Yeah, I mean Matt bloody Boyd. Smooth talker, steady job, worming his way in. Even trying to take over with Lucy. She told me that. Well, he won’t be able to do that now, will he?’

  He had raised his voice as he spoke, so that his question echoed back off the walls of the cramped room. He must have realized how awful it sounded, for he said in a lower tone, as if by way of explanation, ‘He’s a salesman, Matt Boyd. He moves around the area. I expect he finds it easy to pick up women. I expect he’s had lots of practice.’

  ‘And you don’t like to think of him with Anthea, do you, Dean?’ Hook probed as gently as a therapist.

  Gibson stared at the wall and slowed his blinking. ‘I don’t like to think of them in bed together. I don’t like to think of what they do. That’s only natural, isn’t it?’

  ‘Indeed it is, Dean. And you didn’t like to think of him with Lucy, your little girl. That was natural, too.’

  ‘Only natural, it was, yes.’ He didn’t seem to notice the repetition of the word. ‘I didn’t like to think of him with my Lucy.’

  ‘And it hasn’t been easy for you to get work, since you moved out of your house and away from Oldford.’