Cry of the Children

by J M Gregson

  But it sounded feeble, even to him, and he couldn’t think of anything to add that would make it even faintly convincing. Lambert turned the stiletto in the wound. ‘There have been very few details in the bulletins we have released to the media, as is normal in cases like this one. It would be difficult for anyone who did not already know Lucy to identify her from what has been broadcast or printed.’

  ‘Yes. I heard her age in the radio bulletin. I remembered seeing a girl of about that age riding on her own on one of the smaller roundabouts. I got it into my head that she must have been the poor kid who was snatched. I’m probably quite wrong. I expect the girl I’m thinking of is alive and well and at home with her parents at this moment. I certainly hope so! I’ve always had too vivid an imagination. The teachers used to think it a good thing when I was at school, all those years ago, but Edith used to say I let it run away with me. That’s probably what happened in this case.’

  He was talking too much now. They let him run on, watching him entangle himself in the strings of his own verbiage. He looked at Lambert’s long, lined, intensely observant face and stopped speaking. But it was Bert Hook who now said, ‘Your name was one of the ones we immediately thought of, Mr Robson. That can scarcely be a surprise to you.’

  ‘That’s the trouble with you boys, isn’t it? Once one has had any trouble with the police, one is damned for ever. When any sort of crime turns up, you don’t look any further than people like me.’

  Genial Bert Hook could use a stiletto as expertly as his chief when he thought it appropriate. ‘Three things, Mr Robson. First, this is not just “any sort of crime”. Child murder is the most horrid of all crimes. Second, you are merely one of several people being followed up and questioned. And third, we take note of people who have a history of this sort of thing for one very good reason: they tend to re-offend. It is no more than common sense to speak to them first.’

  ‘Recidivists.’

  ‘That’s what they’re called, yes. A lot of criminals break the law again. It’s something various governments have been trying to correct for the last hundred years, without much success. Consequently, it makes sense for those of us who have to make arrests to look first amongst those who have previously offended.’

  ‘Impeccable logic, DS Hook. I congratulate you upon a well-argued case. But, then, I’d expect no less from a policeman who has recently become a graduate of the Open University. May I offer you my belated congratulations upon that?’

  Bert was shaken. He told himself that he should have expected something like this from this oily, intelligent man. But it was the first time any member of the public he had been questioning had come back at him with his degree, and it shook him that the man should have such knowledge. It made him no more than a diligent reader of the local press, where Bert’s achievement had been gleefully reported by a police press officer eager for positive publicity. But it took Hook by surprise. He dragged himself back resolutely to the matter in hand and the need to investigate this man who was trying to divert them away from the mistake he had made. ‘You’re confident that it was Lucy Gibson whose movements you were following at the fairground, aren’t you, Mr Robson?’

  Dennis forced himself to take his time. He had made a mistake in telling them he knew Lucy Gibson. Apart from that, he was holding his own in this strange game of hint and counter-hint. He had been almost enjoying it until he’d made that mistake about the girl. He recognized now that he mustn’t enjoy the game. His position was too perilous for that. He made a play of refilling the cups, of raising his eyebrows in surprise when Lambert put his hand over his. ‘I thought it was Lucy until you raised your query. I now realize that I might have been noticing a quite different child.’

  Lambert had been watching the two men carefully. He knew Hook’s weaknesses as well as his strengths. Bert was much better at handling hostility than flattery. Being buttered up embarrassed and irritated him, even when it was sincere. And Dennis Robson’s admiration for Hook might be elegantly couched, but it was anything but sincere. Lambert said brusquely, ‘I think you knew Lucy Gibson’s appearance quite well, Mr Robson. Were you not the subject of a complaint from the headmistress of her school earlier this year?’

  Dennis turned his attention back to the man in charge with an air of relief. ‘Why do you bother to ask me questions to which you obviously know the answers, Mr Lambert? Do you need confirmation that you are in the right house, that I am not some recidivist impostor? Very well, I shall confirm for you that the head teacher spoke to me. I shall also point out that the unpleasantness in March was due to the head’s overreaction to a hysterical complaint from one of the parents. When your officers came to see me, they found that it was no more than a storm in a teacup. I apologize for the cliché, but it is provoked by an incident which itself represented no more than a clichéd reaction. Modern parents believe that every elderly man they see alone is a menace to their children.’

  ‘The head teacher is an experienced professional. She would have been at fault if she had not reported the complaint to us.’

  ‘And when she did, your equally experienced officers decided that there was no need to pursue the matter further.’

  ‘The family liaison officer and the sergeant who interviewed you decided, Mr Robson, that there was insufficient evidence for a prosecution. They issued you with a warning about your future conduct, did they not?’

  ‘You have done your homework and are well informed, Chief Superintendent. I would expect no less from a man with your reputation. And that homework reveals that no charges were even considered, so that there is no way that this silly business should be thrown at me now.’

  ‘What reason did you have to hang around the school gates and to observe the children on their playing field, Mr Robson?’

  Dennis drew in a long, slow breath, then expelled it with equal control. ‘I like children, Mr Lambert. I said it earlier, and it’s true. I enjoy their innocence. I enjoy watching them at play. There was a time when one would not have needed to account for such feelings. A time when they might even have been considered praiseworthy, in a responsible adult.’

  ‘Even in that time you postulate, the persistent presence of a man with a history of unhealthy interest in children near school gates and school playing fields would have been a source of police concern and action. As you’ve already acknowledged yourself, you cannot escape your past, Mr Robson. And now one of the children you were observing in March has been snatched and murdered from a fairground, at a time when we know you were present. You must have expected us to come here.’

  ‘I did. I know the way things work. The innocent suffer, especially if they have any previous sort of record.’

  ‘You certainly have previous, Mr Robson. What we have to decide is whether you are innocent in this particular case. The circumstantial evidence is heavy against you. You admit that.’

  ‘I see no point in denying the obvious to people who have a talent for the obvious. I am now telling you formally that I had nothing to do with this crime. Perhaps I should point out something that should also be obvious, but which you seem at present to be choosing to ignore. That is that I have no previous history of violence towards children.’

  ‘I accept that. But it seems probable that whoever snatched Lucy Gibson did not intend to kill her but panicked under pressure. Perhaps he or she was desperate to stop the child from screaming.’

  ‘I like that “he or she”. It shows a proper detachment at this stage, even if your criminal turns out to be male. For the record, I’m not given to panic.’ Dennis Robson looked at them steadily, challenging them to deny him.

  Lambert said softly, ‘There are many cases of paedophiles without previous histories of violence who have committed vicious and uncharacteristic acts when they felt under pressure.’

  ‘That’s the first time either of you has used that word. I congratulate you on your moderation. Our use of language is curious, is it not? An Anglophile loves England. A bibliophi
le loves books. I would claim to be both of those. A paedophile is a lover of children, which I would freely admit to being. But the use of the word has now been perverted to something much more ugly, so that I’m not allowed to be a paedophile.’

  Lambert chose not to respond to this. He said formally, ‘If we assume for a moment that you have no connection with this crime, I must remind you that it is your duty to pass on to us any thoughts that might have a bearing on this case. Good afternoon to you, Mr Robson.’

  As they moved to the door, Bert Hook stopped beside the computer on a small table beneath the window, the newest item in this conventionally furnished room. ‘Is there any material on here that you wouldn’t wish us to see?’

  Dennis Robson smiled, recognizing the question as evidence of frustration. ‘Of course not, DS Hook. How could you even entertain such an idea? And you wouldn’t be able to investigate without a search warrant, would you?’

  He stood in the doorway and saw them away with that contented, superior smile he had striven to maintain through most of their exchanges. He was glad to see they’d come in Lambert’s old Vauxhall. One of those garish police vehicles might bring unwelcome attention from a boorish public when you had the background he had.

  Robson would have been surprised to hear that John Lambert had voiced just that thought an hour earlier when opting to come here in his own car. As they now drove slowly back towards the station at Oldford, he said heavily, ‘We didn’t make a lot of progress there, did we, Bert?’

  ‘I shouldn’t have made that remark about his computer as we came out. Gives him the chance to get rid of anything incriminating, doesn’t it?’

  ‘It might have been better to keep your powder dry. But I suspect it hardly matters in this case. I’ve no doubt Dennis Robson is an expert in covering his tracks.’

  ‘I didn’t like the bugger at all. There’s something creepy about him. Something that makes me shudder. I’m usually pretty good at shutting the job out once I get home, but I’ll be able to picture that sod clearly when I’m trying to get to sleep tonight.’

  NINE

  The post mortem-examination of the small, almost unmarked body of Lucy Gibson revealed very little new information.

  CID officers investigating murder are interested in how, when and where death occurred. Only on the first of these did Lambert, Hook and Rushton gain positive information. Rushton, who had attended the post-mortem, handed copies of the PM findings to the two older men. ‘She didn’t die in the river. She was dumped there after death.’

  Lambert said dully, ‘How was she killed, Chris?’

  ‘Manual strangulation. The marks are on her throat and there are petechial haemorrhages in the whites of her eyes. They’re not strong, not even very evident at first sight. It doesn’t take much strength to kill a seven-year-old.’ Rushton was divorced, but he had one child, Kirsty, of whom he was very fond. She was only marginally younger than the girl whose corpse he had just seen scientifically cut, and all three of them were acutely conscious of that fact at this moment.

  The detective inspector coughed and tried to steady his voice as he said, ‘The pathologist thinks Lucy was probably strangled from behind, though the marks on her throat had faded a little with the exposure to water. She had been in the Wye for around thirty-six hours by the time her body was found.’

  Lambert spoke as much to relieve Rushton as because he thought it was necessary. ‘It could be significant that she was strangled from behind. It could indicate that the killer knew Lucy and was known to her. That he didn’t want to look into her eyes as he saw her die.’

  Even these men with much experience of death were silenced for a moment by that image. It was a few seconds before Hook said, ‘But we can’t assume that. Who would want to look into a little girl’s eyes as he killed her, even if he was seeing her for the first time in his life?’

  There was silence again. Normally, they could imagine the emotions of a killer, but child murder once again was different. It was left to Hook to voice the one item that brought them relief as they read quickly through the sparse information of the report. ‘It says here that there was no evidence of sexual assault.’

  ‘No. But that means exactly what it says: no evidence. Lucy certainly wasn’t raped, and there is no bruising on thighs or groin from any attack or any resistance. And there was nothing under Lucy’s nails, but the pathologist made two points about that: first, in a victim of such limited strength, skin or hair under the nails is unlikely, and second, the hours in the Wye might well have washed away any minimal evidence there was from the nails. There is no bruising around genitalia, stomach or buttocks that would suggest any manual attack, but, as the report says, the fact that there is no evidence of indecent assault does not mean in this case that we can discount the possibility.’

  Lambert nodded sadly and moved them on. ‘Time of death? Can you add anything to the cautious findings here, Chris?’

  ‘He says that he thinks she died within an hour of being snatched at the fairground. He isn’t as precise as that in writing, because he’s aware that he could be made to look silly in court when questioned about a corpse that has been in water for a day and a half. But he thinks from the stomach contents that she died very shortly after she disappeared. That finding is based on the mother’s information about what Lucy ate and at what time, but we’ve no reason to doubt Anthea Gibson, have we?’

  ‘None at all. Where did Lucy die, Chris?’

  ‘I can’t add anything to what’s stated here. She didn’t drown in the River Wye. She was dead before she was put in the water. So presumably the killer saw the river as a convenient means of disposing of the body and getting away from the scene himself.’

  ‘As you’d expect, there’s nothing here about where or how she was put into the river. We haven’t yet identified that spot?’

  ‘We haven’t. Maybe we never will. The weather has been unusually dry through most of October. If whoever did this chose his spot carefully, he may have left little or no trace of himself behind. I’ve got six of our team examining likely places, beginning with the points where the river is nearest to Oldford and the fairground.’

  All three of them knew the Wye and the paths that ran beside it well. They had trodden them with their own children, enjoying the tranquil beauty of one of the nation’s loveliest rivers. Now they were picturing the places where it would have been easy for the killer to dump his small, innocent burden into the dark waters by night. It was important, because a terrified criminal might well have left some trace of himself, one of those ‘exchanges’ that detectives always hope to find at the scene of a crime. He might have dropped something significant, left fibres of a garment on hawthorn or barbed wire, even left a footprint in the ground at the edge of the water.

  Rushton said dolefully, ‘It’s a needle-in-a-haystack situation. Lucy could have been dumped anywhere between the nearest point to Oldford and the spot where the body was eventually retrieved. That’s a distance of approximately eleven miles.’

  ‘Could she have been thrown into the Wye near where she was found?’

  ‘It’s possible, but we think unlikely. It’s more probable that she was dumped somewhere near Oldford on Saturday night. The body wasn’t weighted. It’s likely it drifted slowly downstream, being held on the way by various obstructions for periods which we cannot possibly determine.’

  Hook was staring unseeingly at his copy of the report, having already scanned it twice. ‘The killer must have had transport. Even the nearest point of the Wye must be a good two miles from the fairground. He’d need a van or a car.’

  Lambert gave his DS a grim little smile. He knew that Hook was thinking of the girl’s father, hoping that the fact that he didn’t have a car or a van was now going to let the man off the hook. ‘Lucy was a small burden, Bert, and desperation lends strength. If he’d slung the body over his shoulder, he could have carried her there.’

  Rushton nodded. He liked the fact that the others di
d most of the interviewing, whilst he correlated all the information as it came in. In his view, that gave him a certain objectivity about suspects. He said almost eagerly, ‘Or Dean Gibson could have strung her across the carrier at the front of his bike. No one would have spotted what it was he was carrying, on unlit lanes at night.’

  Hook said stubbornly, ‘Matt Boyd had his car. He claims that he came home from the fairground to get it, so that he could search a wider area. And Dennis Robson might well have had his car waiting near the wood, for all we know.’

  Lambert was still perusing the report. ‘We still have no idea about exactly where Lucy died. She could have been killed within minutes of being snatched, or she could have been killed by the river up to an hour later.’

  Rushton nodded. ‘We’ve searched that wood by the fairground and bagged up everything we’ve found. But it’s much too near to the common. All kinds of people use it for all sorts of activities.’ He spoke with some distaste, thinking of the unsavoury items he’d seen bagged in the CID section. ‘It’s my belief we’ve got nothing crucial from there. But that doesn’t mean that Lucy didn’t die there. Strangulation of a child needn’t leave much evidence.’

  Bert said, ‘Lucy Gibson disappeared as if she’d suddenly been removed from the face of the earth. There wasn’t a sound from her if we’re to believe what people tell us. Could that mean that she knew the person who took her and didn’t feel threatened – not at first, anyway?’

  Rushton looked at Lambert, who said, ‘We can’t assume that. There’s a lot of noise around a fairground. Blaring and distorted music on most of the bigger rides, for a start. It’s entirely possible that a child’s scream wouldn’t be heard, especially if her abductor threw his hand over her mouth to stifle it.’

  There was silence in the room. None of them cared for the succession of images they had created. DI Rushton dragged them back to the realities of policing. ‘We need a result. The press are hounding us for information. They’ll be baying for police blood if we can’t give them anything in the next day or two.’