Cry of the Children

by J M Gregson

  ‘Not long now, love. Matt will be here soon. He rang to tell me that five minutes ago. He’s very thoughtful about these things, isn’t he?’ Lucy’s mother seemed to be reassuring herself, but Lucy wasn’t interested in that. Instead, she looked at the table and thought of when her dad had sat beside her and helped her with her food. She must have been very small then. She was a big girl now, as everyone kept telling her, and she must get used to a new situation. That was what her mum said. Mum seemed to say it almost every day now. Lucy wasn’t quite sure about Matt. She thought she liked him, as people said she should. But he wasn’t her dad, was he? Everyone said she must move on when she pointed that out. She wasn’t quite sure what ‘move on’ meant. She wasn’t going to forget her dad, whatever they said. But already she was finding it difficult to get a proper picture of him and how it had been between them. She wished she could see her dad more often.

  And then Matt was in the house, ruffling her hair and smiling at her and calling her ‘young ’un’. He went into the kitchen with Mum and shut the door firmly behind him, and they were quiet for what seemed to Lucy a long time. She heard her mum giggling a couple of times and whispering, so it must be all right.

  Then the door burst open and there was food and noise, and both Mum and Matt were fussing over her. ‘And what have you been up to this week, young lady?’ said Matt when they were all sitting at the table with Mum’s cottage pie and fresh green beans in front of them.

  Lucy wished they’d just let her eat. She was hungry and she hadn’t mastered this thing grown-ups seemed to do without any effort: talking whilst they were eating. When she tried to do it, she was told not to talk with her mouth full. The world seemed to get more confusing as you got bigger. It didn’t seem any easier when her mum said brightly, ‘Tell Matt about the fair,’ and then turned to him herself and said, ‘She’s been getting more and more excited about it. She hasn’t been old enough to appreciate a fair before.’

  Adults were like that. They suddenly spoke as if you weren’t there. They asked you to talk and then made some remark that somehow left you very little to say. Lucy said, ‘I can’t talk about the fair now. I mustn’t talk with my mouth full.’ Then she smiled down into the last of her cottage pie, feeling that she’d really said something quite clever.

  They had strawberries and ice cream for afters, because Matt liked that. ‘Make the most of this,’ her mum told them, ‘because these are probably the last British strawberries you’ll have this year.’

  ‘We’ll do that, won’t we, Lucy?’ said Matt. Then he smacked his lips extravagantly over his first mouthful, like some of the boys did over their puddings at school. Lucy thought he looked a little ridiculous, but she realized that he was trying to please her, so she gave him a weak smile as she conveyed her own strawberries carefully towards her mouth. They didn’t taste as good as the strawberries she remembered from the summer. But the ice cream was nice, so she ate it slowly, making her enjoyment last as long as possible.

  Matt insisted that she sat on his knee after they’d left the table. He hugged her tight and then ran his hand softly down her shin. Lucy supposed he meant well, but she couldn’t help thinking of her dad holding her like this and making her laugh whilst he bounced her up and down. Mum made her recite for Matt the four times table she’d learned this week. She managed to do all of it, with only one prompt from Matt, which she wouldn’t have needed if he’d given her just a second more time to think.

  He applauded very loudly, clapping his hands together very near her ears. He said he’d always known she was going to be clever and what a big girl she was becoming now. Then he bounced her very high on his knee, so that her bottom banged against him and her skirt climbed up above her pants, even though she tried to hold it down and almost lost her balance. ‘Too much!’ she shouted, and she dropped between his knees to the floor as soon as she could.

  ‘You mustn’t make her sick,’ warned Lucy’s mum. But she was laughing at how happy they seemed together.

  Matt offered to read her a story, but Lucy was relieved when her mum said she’d do it. It didn’t last long, and Lucy sensed that her mum was anxious to be away and back with the man downstairs. ‘He’s good fun, isn’t he, Matt?’ she asked her daughter, and Lucy, anxious to please, nodded vigorously. She didn’t trust herself to speak, because she might have mentioned her dad, and she knew her mum wouldn’t like that.

  Her mum went out, then came back only a moment later, whilst Lucy was still staring at the ceiling. ‘Matt says he’ll take you to the fair tomorrow if you’re good in the morning. Aren’t you my lucky little girl?’

  It was the first time Lucy had been allowed to be little for ages.

  TWO

  Detective Chief Superintendent Lambert was deeply depressed. He found any sort of police corruption disturbing, and to him this was one of the worst instances. The fact that it was petty compared with the major crimes of violence that made the headlines excused nothing. It was the stupid crimes that were somehow the most depressing.

  John Lambert didn’t think he was much good at bollockings, though there were some junior members of Oldford CID who would have disagreed with that view. But on this occasion he would have no difficulty. These men were not only fools but fools who should have known better. He’d arranged to see them on Saturday morning because the station was quiet then, which meant that their humiliation would be less public. Now he wasn’t sure whether he should have afforded them even that consideration.

  They were sitting outside his office when he got there. They sprang to attention as he approached, as though they were army infantrymen or trainee policemen. But their trainee days were long behind them. Lambert left them standing stiffly upright for a moment, whilst he looked them up and down without disguising his distaste.

  ‘At least you’re here on time!’ he said sourly. Then he was annoyed with himself for lapsing into something so banal and for suggesting that he might be lenient.

  There was a little pause whilst the men wondered how to respond. Then the taller of the two said, ‘Do you want to see us separately or together, sir?’

  ‘You might as well come in together. You’ve been equally stupid, as far as I can make out. I don’t want the same feeble excuses trotted out twice over.’

  Lambert took his time over moving the papers to one side of his desk and sitting himself down in the swivel chair behind it, letting them stand awkwardly and feel too tall in the low-ceilinged room whilst he scanned the three envelopes that were his morning post. It was a good thirty seconds before he looked at the men again and snapped, ‘You’d better sit yourselves down, I suppose. I can’t speak to you whilst you’re standing there like prisoners.’

  They hurriedly pulled out steel and canvas chairs from the corner of the room, sensing that the two small armchairs were not the right seats for them. Neither of them had been in this room before, though they both knew all about John Lambert, who was the sort of policeman around whom legends were created. He was such a successful taker of villains that the Home Office had accorded him an exceptional three-year extension to his service, at the chief constable’s request. To them he looked very severe, very old and very unyielding.

  And now they were here as villains themselves, sitting still and awaiting his wrath. They sat as upright as guilty schoolboys before the headmaster, not daring to look at each other, not daring to look anywhere save at the long, lined face on the other side of the big desk. The head of Oldford CID looked at them without speaking for a moment, allowing his distaste to manifest itself in a tightening of the lips beneath the long nose and the merciless grey eyes. It seemed a long time before he spoke. ‘You’ve been stupid buggers. But you know that. Every stupid bugger realizes he’s been stupid, when it’s too late.’

  The smaller of the two glanced sideways at his companion before he said, ‘Yes, sir. We acknowledge that, but there are certain extenuating—’

  ‘I’m not interested in your extenuating circumstances. The
y don’t apply for policemen. Still less for experienced CID officers. Still less for an experienced Detective Sergeant. You should have learned that a long time ago. How old are you, DS Padgett?’

  ‘Twenty-seven, sir.’

  ‘And you, DC Kennedy?’

  ‘Twenty-four, sir.’

  ‘Quite old enough to know better. I wouldn’t try offering callow youth as your defence when this comes to court. Because it’s going to come to court, you know. The Crown Prosecution Service told me that yesterday. And so it should. No one should get away with this, and least of all experienced CID officers.’

  He let the rebuke drop like lead into the silence, which extended until DS Padgett felt an overwhelming need to break it. ‘We were provoked, sir.’

  Lambert looked at him for a moment, which stretched out long after Padgett had begun to regret the phrase. ‘Do you know how much you sound like those young thugs we arrest in Gloucester every Saturday night? You’ll need to come up with something much better than that in court. Otherwise, you’d better keep your mouth shut and leave it to your brief.’

  Kennedy felt an unwise impulse to support his colleague in the face of the chief superintendent’s contempt. ‘We were off duty at the time, sir. It all blew up out of nothing. It happened very quickly.’

  ‘I’m sure it bloody did. Brawls usually blow up out of nothing. And they invariably happen very quickly. All of which you know very well by now. That’s why they warn you in the first weeks of police training that you have to keep cool and keep control of yourselves. Both of which you signally failed to do.’

  Lambert tried not to think of himself in his twenties, tried to shut out any thought of the impulsive things he might have done then, when there were fewer checks on coppers and fewer people anxious to provoke them. He looked at the cut above Kennedy’s eye and the blue-green bruising that coloured Padgett’s left cheek. ‘You didn’t even have the sense to choose the right side, by the looks of it.’

  It was the first semblance of humour he had accorded them. Padgett was encouraged to say, ‘We didn’t have time to choose sides, sir. It all happened so quickly. That’s the way with football violence.’

  ‘Don’t talk to me about football violence, DS Padgett. We were handling football violence in the bad old days, before all-seater stadiums and segregated crowds and all-ticket entrance. Before you two were even in nappies.’ He looked at the two pale faces, which looked so out of place on these young, powerful men. They were gazing at their feet like chastened schoolboys. He was suddenly even more annoyed that grown men should have reacted like this. ‘You got yourself involved in a bar-room brawl; you behaved like particularly ignorant sixteen-year-old schoolboys. Every police instinct should have told you to back off, but you let your fists take over. Wanted to bully someone, did you?’

  DC Kennedy felt it was his turn to speak. He had an odd feeling that they should alternate in confronting the Lambert wrath. ‘We were trying to keep order, sir, not disrupt it.’

  Lambert stared at him for so long that DC Kennedy eventually felt compelled to lift his eyes and look at the man on the other side of the desk. He immediately wished he hadn’t done that and dropped his gaze again to the shoes he had polished so assiduously before coming in to confront the chief.

  John Lambert wished he hadn’t mentioned bullying. It made him feel he was using rank now to do a little bullying himself. But he was genuinely fiercely annoyed with these men and he hadn’t yet reached the real reason for that. He said, ‘You were a couple of fools to get involved and you know that, whatever you try to trot out in the way of mitigating circumstances. I expect you’ll be happy to let your brief use all the arguments you find so contemptible when they’re used on behalf of common criminals. But that’s not the worst of it. That isn’t what will lose the two of you your jobs, is it?’

  ‘No, sir.’ DS Padgett knew better now than to try to defend himself or Kennedy. He had caught the genuine anger that was driving Lambert’s tirade.

  ‘No. You tried to cover up your role in this brawl. You put pressure on a witness to retract his evidence. The two of you sought out one of the men you had hit and used a combination of bribery and threats to try to get him to change the statement he had made in this station.’

  Kennedy said desperately, ‘We didn’t offer any direct bribe, sir. We simply suggested that—’

  ‘I’m not interested in what you simply suggested, DC Kennedy. You know as well as I do that the CPS wouldn’t have charged you unless they thought they had a strong case. Contrary to what you might think, they don’t like bringing cases against the police. It’s tiresome, time-consuming and a waste of resources that should be applied to other things. I suggest you now get together with your brief and either refute the charge or produce the best “mitigating circumstances” plea the bugger’s ever heard.’

  ‘Yes, sir. I think we can show that we—’

  ‘I’m not interested in hearing what you think you can show or what you intend to cobble up. Consult your bloody brief about that, not me. I’ll take the verdict of the court on this, in due course. You’ve brought disgrace on the police service as well as yourselves with this. It’s that service that is my concern, not your miserable skins. Don’t expect any sympathy from me if and when the Crown Court finds you guilty! Now get out of here!’

  They shuffled to their feet and departed as rapidly as his fierceness indicated they should. John Lambert stared at the blank wall opposite his desk for a long five minutes. Police corruption always appalled and depressed him. Yet, despite what he’d said, he knew he’d end up doing his best for Padgett and Kennedy in due course. He’d be telling whoever would listen in the hierarchy that they were foolish rather than vicious young men, who would surely learn from this experience and give good service in the future.

  And yet … and yet. If they were found guilty of trying to pervert the court of justice, they would deserve no sympathy, so that he hoped his routine pleas would be ignored. It was a ridiculous contradiction. He slammed the door behind him and went home very depressed. He thought as he drove, ‘God give me some real crime and let me dispense with this sort of rubbish!’

  By the end of the weekend, he would be heartily wishing he had entertained no such thought.

  Lucy Gibson went to the fair that Saturday. She waited all day to go whilst she did other things that were boring.

  She was forced to go into Hereford with Matt and her mum. There she had to walk round shops, when she wanted to go to the cathedral or the castle. She wouldn’t even have minded a walk by the river, where there were lots of things to see and people to watch, but she had to trail round shops with her mother, holding on to her hand, whilst the adults tried to buy things that were of no interest to her.

  She had to sit and watch her mother try on winter coats and parade up and down for Matt to decide which one was best. Her mum was like a silly girl with Matt, prancing up and down and giggling at his comments. Lucy would never have thought of that, but she heard one of the mums at the school gates saying it about another woman who’d got herself a new man. So that’s what her mum was being, in this shop and in front of other people – a silly girl. Lucy tutted silently to herself with all the righteous puritanism of a seven-year-old.

  Then she had to watch the terminally boring business of Matt buying himself a new electric shaver, whilst her mum giggled and asked questions that Lucy did not understand but which the salesman’s reactions told her were silly. Matt made a great show of trying out different models and discussing with the man behind the counter what you got for the extra money with the dearer ones. Then he bought the cheapest of them, which Lucy felt she had known from the start he would do.

  They had their lunch in a café in the middle of the town. Lucy was told it was a treat for her and she would normally have enjoyed it. But the place was crowded and it took them a long time to get served. Lucy couldn’t help thinking of the summer and her visit here with just her mum, when they walked round the grounds
of the old castle and then had tea in a much nicer café beside the river. Matt bought her a milkshake at the end of the meal as a special treat, then asked her when she’d finished whether she’d enjoyed it. ‘Too sweet!’ Lucy said decisively. Her mum told her that was rude and ungrateful. Probably it was, Lucy thought to herself. She couldn’t remember ever saying anything was too sweet for her before.

  It seemed ages before they finally reached home. Then her mum insisted on parading up and down in her new coat, to make sure she’d made the right choice. Lucy asked again about the fair, even though she’d been forbidden to mention it again. She was told she must be tired and needed a rest before she went out and got excited. She was sent to her room to read her book and calm down. She talked to Donna, her favourite doll, and told her how stupid and annoying grown-ups could be.

  When she went down again, Matt was sitting with his arm round her mum on the sofa. Mum had her head on his shoulder; her eyes were closed and she was nearly asleep. She had what Lucy thought was a stupid smile on her face. She scrambled up when she heard her daughter and said she would make them tea and cake. Lucy followed her into the kitchen, not daring to ask the question that shone out from every feature in her small, anxious face.

  ‘Matt’s going to take you to the fair,’ said her mum. ‘That’s good of him, isn’t it? And you must promise to be a very good girl for him.’

  Lucy clenched her lips and nodded firmly three times. She didn’t want to go with Matt, not on his own. But she wouldn’t risk being told she was a naughty, ungrateful girl and wouldn’t be allowed to go, as had happened two weeks ago when she’d been hoping to go to the cinema. ‘Won’t you be coming?’ she said.