Cry of the Children

by J M Gregson

  ‘No. I’ll stay here and wash up and tidy the house. You’ll be going after tea, like a big girl. You are a big girl now, aren’t you?’

  Not again, thought Lucy. When do you get old enough for people to stop telling you that? She nodded mutely, not trusting herself to speak, not wanting to say anything that might see her forbidden to go to the fairground. The fair had been withheld from her for so long now that it seemed the only thing that mattered in her life. Eventually, her mum said, ‘It will be a good chance for Matt and you to get to know each other better, won’t it? Well, I should say even better, because you already know each other quite well now, don’t you? It’s very important to me that you two get on with each other, you know.’ And then she suddenly bent forwards and hugged Lucy so hard that her daughter felt she couldn’t breathe. Grown-ups did things like that. As she smoothed her dress, Lucy felt that they should give you some sort of warning before a hug like that one.

  She put on her prettiest blue dress for the fair, with the pale blue beanie her mum had bought her in the summer. She wondered as she set off with Matt whether she should have put on her trousers, but it was too late to worry about that now. He’d said she looked very nice when she had stood waiting to go, and Lucy had managed to produce a small, tight smile for him by way of thanks. Mum said she should put on the coat she wore for school, but she said she’d be all right with the dark blue fleece, which went better with her dress.

  Matt held her hand tightly in his when they got to the common. When Lucy saw the number of people at the fair, she was suddenly glad of Matt. She didn’t like crowds, especially crowds of grown-ups. The rides, which had looked so attractive when they were being built, seemed very noisy now, with people clinging on for dear life and other people shouting and laughing at them from the wooden paths at the sides. Everyone except Lucy seemed very much at home here. She held on to Matt’s hand and leaned against his leg, feeling a reassuring warmth through his trousers.

  ‘We’ll be all right, won’t we, Lucy?’ said Matt. Before she could answer, he bent down suddenly and hoisted her high in his arms, holding her against his shoulder so that she could see over the heads around her. She pulled her dress down as low as it would go over her legs, but there still seemed to be a lot of them bare. It was cold now. It wasn’t quite dark yet, but the raw bright lights above the raucous noise of the fairground made it seem so here.

  Matt took her on a ride called the Caterpillar. The carriages went up and down and round and round, and it wasn’t really frightening, once you had got used to the noise. Then the canvas cover came up over the top of them and everyone screamed, and Matt put both arms round her and held her tight against him. She was glad he was there in the sudden darkness, which might have been very frightening with the cars still rattling forward on the bumpy track. But she wished he wouldn’t hold her quite so hard, or pull her legs against him with his big rough hand. She wished it was her dad who was there in the noisy darkness, but she knew it would have been rude and ungrateful to say that to Matt. Her mum had warned her about being rude and ungrateful.

  Matt wanted her to go on another of the rides, where motorbikes went up and down and round and round, but she was frightened of that. ‘I can’t ride a bike yet,’ said Lucy. ‘Not even an ordinary pedal bike.’

  ‘They’re not real bikes, Lucy,’ said Matt with one of his big, loud laughs. ‘They’re fastened to the floor and they just go round and round and up and down like the other things. You’ll be perfectly safe. I’ll come on with you and ride right behind you. I’ll make sure you don’t fall off.’

  The ride had stopped whilst he spoke and the people who had ridden were coming excitedly down the steps and shouting to each other. A big boy said there was ‘nothing to it’, and Lucy moved hastily out of his way as he jumped the last two steps and flung his arms up into the air. She saw one of the girls in her class away to her right with her mother, but before she could make any contact they had disappeared into the noisy darkness.

  And then, before she could speak or scream, Matt was swinging her high in the air and setting her down astride the motorbike. And then the ride was moving again, slowly at first, then much faster than Lucy wanted it to go. She clung hard to the handlebars in front of her, which were much too big for her small hands, and felt Matt’s body hard against her and his warm breath on the back of her neck. ‘You’ll be all right with me, little ’un!’ he shouted in her ear.

  Lucy bent low over the smooth wooden frame of the bike and clung to it with her arms and her knees and her feet as the speed increased and she heard excited screams around them. The man taking the money swung athletically about and took money from people for the ride. Lucy couldn’t understand how he did that without losing his balance and falling off and being crushed. She was afraid for him, until he disappeared from her sight and her mind, and she clung again to the bike and her own safety, whilst Matt pressed himself hard against the seat and her, like a protective shell on a tortoise.

  By the time the music slowed and the ride came to a halt, she had become accustomed enough to the movement to be excited as well as frightened. She didn’t nod her head at Matt, but she managed a sickly smile when he said, ‘That was good, wasn’t it? You’re a big girl, now that you’ve been on the motorbikes!’

  Lucy was a little breathless, but she was pleased that she had been on the motorbike and the big ride, now that it was over. Matt took her over to the shooting stall and said that he’d try to win a prize for her. She had to hold on to his trousers whilst he put both hands on the rifle and peered though the sight, then shot at the little moving targets ahead of him. He won her a little rag doll with a Chinese-looking round face and delivered it proudly into her two uplifted hands. Lucy would have liked the great big teddy bear in the middle of the prizes, but Matt said no one won that and it was only there to make people pay to try for it. He said the guns weren’t really very good and the sights on them weren’t true.

  They went over to one of the smaller rides, which was quiet now that most of the younger children had left the fair and gone home to bed. It had an old-fashioned bus on it with a horn you could honk. She preferred it to Thomas the Tank Engine, because the bus was very like the one Lucy remembered from one of her favourite books when she had been small. She hadn’t gone on this ride earlier, because the bus had always stopped opposite other children rather than her and they’d been on to it and honking its horn before Lucy could get there.

  Now there weren’t as many children here. And this time when the ride was over and the roundabout slowed, the bus came to a halt right opposite Matt and Lucy. She looked up at him automatically and he smiled down at her. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘If you still want to go in that old bus, even after you’ve been on the big rides, you can do. But this will be your last ride. It’s getting late and we don’t want your mum to be worried, do we? We must go home after this.’

  Lucy was in the bright blue bus before he had finished speaking. Matt smiled and waved at her as she waited for the ride to fill up and the man to take the fares. He watched her face concentrate as the ride began to move slowly and she grabbed the wheel and gave her first vigorous honk on the horn.

  Matt took the time to think over his relationship with Lucy’s mother. He wasn’t sure how deep he wanted to get in with Anthea Gibson – everyone said don’t touch anyone with kids. But she liked him and she was good in bed; that was surely a good start and it made his life more pleasant having a few creature comforts to look forward to these days.

  And Lucy was a nice kid, when you got to know her. She had lovely bright eyes and a nice smile. And she had that smooth, perfect skin that you only really got with girls of her age. And that lovely soft … but he mustn’t think about things like that. That way disaster lay. He directed his thoughts to the rounded flesh of the child’s buxom mother: that should surely be enough for any man.

  Lucy relaxed a little as the ride made its third circuit, enough to remember that she was with Matt. She wave
d to him as her bus swung swiftly past him. He watched her go past, twisting the wheel hard to her left, then pressing the horn hard and continuously. She got a long ride because there weren’t as many small customers around as there had been earlier in the day. Lucy waved the arm of the little rag doll she’d decided to call Molly at Matt as she grew more confident. He’d take her straight home after this, so she’d better make the most of it.

  Matt waved to the joyous girl and smiled at her. He was thinking enthusiastically of the night ahead and his lovemaking with the eager Mrs Gibson.

  Then, after what seemed a long time, the ride was slowing and Lucy was giving him a hasty wave before her last sounding of the bus’s horn and her final twist of its wheel. The bus stopped on the other side of the circuit from Matt. Lucy must be exactly opposite him, he reckoned. He’d wait here for her. If he went round to the other side of the ride to meet her, she might go the opposite way and they’d miss each other. He didn’t want her to panic.

  But Lucy didn’t come. Matt peered into the darkness, wishing that there weren’t so many lights in his face to dazzle him and make things even ten yards away so indistinct in the gloom. He went round to the other side of the roundabout, then back to where he had stood whilst it was operating. All the other children on it had rejoined their parents and left now. He went back to the other side of the ride and yelled into the darkness. ‘Lucy, if you’re hiding, come out! This isn’t funny! This isn’t a joke!’

  But Lucy didn’t come. Nor was there any answering shout. Matt raced round the ride another three times, then roared off into the blackness beyond it and into the wood beside the common. He yelled Lucy’s name hopelessly into the night air.

  THREE

  Lambert couldn’t remember being quite so tired on a Saturday evening. Surely he must have been as exhausted as this many times before, when he’d worked long hours in the garden? But that was a different sort of fatigue; he loved unwinding in the garden after the rigours of his working week.

  That was the kind of fatigue he loved to feel in his ageing limbs, the sort he still occasionally eased away with a hot bath and a long soak, lying with closed eyes and shutting out the problems of the world. Soon it would be time for the autumn clear-up in the garden, when you threw out the annuals, divided the odd perennial, took in the dahlias and then lay in the bath planning your garden work for the spring. Perhaps he’d be able to begin that next weekend, after the clocks had been put back.

  It was wonderful to have grandchildren, to see the second generation beyond your own growing up and preparing to take over. But youngsters had boundless energy, and their swift growth reminded you constantly of your own accumulating years. On this pleasantly sunny autumn afternoon, he’d taken the boys to the common with his son-in-law and played football with them for a while. He’d become breathless far too quickly; he’d been secretly relieved when Richard had said it was time to pack up if they wanted to visit the fair at the other end of the common.

  The boys were seven and five now. John Lambert had been delighted when Harry, the five-year-old, had asked if Grandad would go on to the ride with him and sit in the engine with the cheerful face which looked so like Thomas the Tank Engine. John had folded his legs awkwardly within the cabin, whilst Harry had stood self-consciously on the footplate and pulled the cord which made the whistle sound each time they passed his father and George, standing and waving at the side of the ride.

  Each boy had ridden on three of the smaller rides at the side of the fair. Then Grandad and Dad had taken them for their last ride, a special treat on the least frightening of the big roundabouts, the Caterpillar. The boys had clung wide-eyed to the adults as the cars had accelerated and moved more swiftly round the undulating track, then screamed with delight and excitement like everyone else when the canvas hood came suddenly over them and left them in noisy darkness. The sound of the wheels rattling beneath them over the rails was suddenly much louder, and even George, who had spent much of the afternoon asserting his senior status, clung hard to his grandad’s arm through this new experience.

  Then it was home to the meal Christine had prepared for her family, and amusement at the boys’ tales of the football and the fair and Grandad’s pretended fear of the Caterpillar. John had stood at the door with Christine to see their daughter Caroline and Richard and their grandchildren drive away, the boys waving furiously at them through the windows as the car disappeared into the gathering darkness.

  As the grandparents dropped happily into armchairs and sipped the glasses of port Christine had set beside them, Lambert found himself fighting to stay awake. ‘I didn’t used to be like this,’ he announced resentfully to the ceiling.

  ‘None of us used to be like this,’ said Christine firmly. ‘Get real, John. You’re getting older like everyone else. Chief superintendents don’t have a divine dispensation to keep their energy whilst the rest of the world ages around them.’

  ‘I had a depressing morning.’ He preferred to blame that rather than his happy efforts with George and Harry for the exhaustion he now felt.

  ‘You weren’t at the station long. What was it that left you so depressed?’ Christine gazed at him steadily over the top of her glass. Her question came softly, but it was a challenge nevertheless. For years during the early part of his career, when her children had been small and she’d felt isolated with them in her home, John had shut her out of his working life completely. He’d worked long hours as a detective sergeant and then as a detective inspector without even being prepared to reveal the cases he had been assigned to. Often she’d picked up more from the press than she had from her husband about his successes and failures. He’d been away so much and cut himself off from her so completely that their marriage had almost failed. The union that now looked so solid and unshakeable to his juniors at Oldford CID had almost foundered on the rocks of his passion for results.

  He had realized later, much later, that he had been driven above all in those days by a fear of failure. He had confessed as much to Christine now, but that hadn’t prevented them from sailing very near to the rocks of divorce in those early years. Christine still wondered what might have happened if she had not resumed the teaching she loved when the children reached school age. Now they were so solid and had been through so much together that it seemed as though she was studying two other people, ignorant and vulnerable, when she looked back to those years. Yet her instinctive reaction when he mentioned his work was still to encourage him to talk to her about it.

  John gave her a small, tight smile, as if he wished to convey to her that he understood all of this and was sorry for the past. ‘You’ll read about it, in due course. Two CID men in their twenties have got themselves into trouble. They used their fists in a brawl outside a pub before a Bristol City football match. They were off duty at the time and no doubt didn’t announce themselves as coppers.’

  ‘It’s daft, but it’s the kind of thing young men get themselves involved in before they realize it’s happening.’

  John Lambert smiled sadly. ‘That’s more or less what they said. If that was all they’d done, I’d have given them an earful and sent them on their way – possibly even left that to someone further down the line. But they’ve now done much worse. They tried to pressurize a witness into withdrawing his statement. They’ll end up in the Crown Court in a couple of months’ time.’

  Christine knew that he was only speaking about what would become public knowledge in due course. He still never mentioned anything that should remain confidential; she understood that and respected him for it. But at one time he would never have mentioned anything that went on in the Oldford CID section, however trivial. He had shut the doors on her when it came to that dominant section of his life. She said gently, ‘I know how it upsets you, any sort of police corruption.’

  ‘It affects us all, the publicity these idiots will get. The public tar us all with the same brush. We’re all corrupt and all on the take.’

  ‘That’s the way
life is, John. Some people always want to believe the worst. It’s not confined to the police.’

  He shook his head sadly, then grinned at her, suddenly and unexpectedly. ‘You’re right about me getting old. Perhaps we should discuss what we’re going to do when I retire.’

  Christine Lambert was a wise woman. She knew that, with husbands, you sometimes had to give up whilst you were winning. She said, ‘Let’s leave that until the time comes. You’ve got a few more years in you yet, super-sleuth.’

  She used the term one of the tabloids had created for him a year earlier, which she knew he hated. It was part of a private code between them, and he grinned his recognition of that, then switched to happier themes and talked for a pleasant ten minutes about how quickly and attractively George and Harry were developing. He was fully alert again for the BBC’s Match of the Day and managed to shout at the screen three times after Christine had retired to bed. Not too bad a day after all, he decided.

  It rained overnight, but only a little light drizzle. A weak early-morning sun was beginning to pierce the autumn mist as Lambert drew the curtains back. He’d be able to get out into the garden by late morning. Dig over the vegetable plot and leave it ready for the first frosts.

  The phone rang early. That was never a good sign at the weekend. Christine answered it, then passed it across with a sigh of resignation to her husband. She went back into the kitchen and left John speaking in low tones into the mouthpiece. Most of the talk came from the other end of the line; his contribution was a series of terse questions about time and place.

  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.’