Cry of the Children

by J M Gregson

  ‘And a dog enables you to stalk and approach children. I seem to remember that you were accused of using your own dog for that purpose when you were questioned at length by police officers eleven years ago.’

  ‘I denied that I used my dog for that purpose and it was never proved. I presume that always wanting to think the worst of people is part of the equipment considered necessary for CID officers.’

  Hook said, ‘You’ll need to give us the address of tonight’s dog.’ Bert contrived, thought Lambert, to brandish his notebook aggressively, a feat he would have thought impossible.

  ‘Fourteen, Gleeson Terrace. The dog’s name is Hector and he’s an Airedale. But it’s no use your trying to check that. Neither he nor his owners were at home. That was no great surprise to me. There was no prior arrangement on this occasion. It was just an impulse of mine to get a little exercise because I’d been stuck in here all day and I thought Hector might like a run.’

  Hook noted the address nonetheless, then said, ‘So you now admit being out of the house this evening, but with no one to confirm exactly where you were. I note that the coat hanging in your utility room is also wet. I believe it began to rain at around eight o’clock this evening.’

  ‘I’m sure you’re right about that – if you want to confirm the time, ask a policeman.’ Dennis Robson smiled at his own witticism. Skilled in subterfuge, he was fighting to recover his self-control. ‘A light drizzle. Nothing at first, even quite refreshing, but very wetting if you stayed out in it for a lengthy period. I didn’t do that, but I obviously got wet enough for a diligent and highly intrusive DS to note the condition of my footwear and topcoat.’

  Lambert believed in letting suspects talk. They often revealed far more of themselves than they realized. The most difficult ones to crack were usually those who said least. But he’d had enough of the elaborate verbosity of Dennis Robson, who combined fluency with insolence so effectively. He snapped, ‘Where were you at eight o’clock this evening?’

  ‘On the common. Breathing in my allowance of fresh air and getting my exercise without a dog. Feeling rather foolish as it began to rain.’

  ‘Were you in Church Lane, Oldford, at any time this evening?’

  ‘No.’ For once, he was reduced to a monosyllable, as if recognizing the gravity of the issue. Robson and Lambert stared hard at each other for a moment. Then he said, ‘And now I’d like you both to leave my house, please.’

  He’d included Hook in his injunction without even glancing at him. Hook had still scarcely moved from the doorway into the big, rectangular room. It was from there that he said, ‘You took your car with you when you went out. The bonnet is still warm. You didn’t tell us that.’

  ‘You didn’t ask me.’ But he’d been caught out again and he knew it. ‘I went round to my friend’s house in the car in the hope of collecting his dog. When that wasn’t possible, I drove to the edge of the common and parked there. I’m glad I took the car. I’d have got much wetter if I’d had to walk back here without it.’

  ‘Did anyone speak with you whilst you were parking or walking?’

  ‘No. I like my own company.’

  Hook didn’t voice the thought that not many other people would wish to share it. He told the man brusquely not to leave the area without informing them of his destination. Then they left him in a sour silence.

  Bert Hook sat beside Lambert in the big car, reflecting that they had tried unsuccessfully to speak with their least articulate suspect, Big Julie Foster, before moving to the other extreme with this great balloon of words. There was no doubt which of the two Hook preferred as his prime suspect.

  THIRTEEN

  Raymond Barrington was better fitted for survival than many eight-year-olds. He had spent many nights on his own before he had been taken into care two years ago. It shouldn’t have been so, but that is what had happened. He was used to dark and to loneliness. He had also grown used to fear in those days, and to coping with fear.

  But this was a different and greater fear than anything Raymond had known before. He was frightened, very frightened. He had no idea where he was and that made things much worse. But he was still alive. He had thought when he was first seized that he would be dead by now. That girl Lucy Gibson, who was in the class below him at school, had been killed. She’d been strangled. It said so in the paper.

  Mrs Allen had tried to stop him reading the print beside the photograph on the front page of the paper. She’d said it wasn’t good for him. Well, what was happening now wasn’t good for him, was it? This wasn’t good for him at all. This is what Mrs Allen should have protected him from, not some silly old newspaper.

  He wished he hadn’t thought of Mrs Allen. The thought of her kindly bosom and her arms around him would surely make him cry. Yet, miraculously, it didn’t. For a minute or two, Raymond couldn’t move at all. Then he shook his head hard, as though he was jolting tears angrily away.

  But there were no tears. Raymond was surprised by that. He clenched his fists and told himself he’d been through much worse things than this with some of the men his mother had brought home. They’d hit him when he spoke out of turn – or if he spoke at all, some of them. This man hadn’t hit him yet. If it was a man. It might be a big woman. Raymond still wasn’t sure, with that scarf wrapped round so much of the face. He wondered if he’d ever heard that voice before. But that only helped to make the thing more scary.

  He decided that he would think of his captor just as the monster. That would be best. Or at any rate it might be better than wondering if this was someone who knew him. A monster was definite, not vague. The vaguer things were, the more he feared for his future.

  He wondered where on earth he might be now. A long way from Oldford and the care home and Mrs Allen, he thought. He’d been flung into the passenger seat of some sort of vehicle and told to stay still whilst the belt was buckled tight across him. Then he had cowered in the dark with his eyes tight shut as they had bounced and skidded over narrow roads, made slippery by the falling rain. He had thought he was going to be killed when they stopped, and because of that he had wanted that bucking ride to go on for ever. He tried to think now how long it might have taken, but he had really no idea. You were too terrified to think of time when you were wondering how you were going to die.

  But now they were stopping. They jolted to a halt outside a house which rose all on its own against the night sky. The monster undid his belt, then took his arm and pulled him towards the darkness of the door. Then he was dragged into a room and told to be quiet, for the fifth or sixth time. That was all the monster ever seemed to say to him through the scarf: be quiet. This room must be on the ground floor; they hadn’t gone up or down any stairs. The monster switched on a light in the hall, but not in the room where they were. Raymond crouched fearfully on the floor and looked up at the monster, who was breathing heavily from what seemed many feet above him. But there was only the dim light from the hall behind his captor. Everything seemed to be just a collection of dark, threatening shadows.

  Both of them gasped for breath and Raymond wondered what was going to happen to him. In that moment, when nothing moved, he wondered whether perhaps the monster was wondering about that too.

  The monster stood very close to its victim for a moment. Raymond was very conscious of heavy shoes and trousers with splatterings of mud upon them. Then it turned and stood in the doorway, looking down the hall and towards the front door through which they had come. Raymond wondered whether he might gather his strength and escape. He would crouch on the floor like a coiled spring, then catch the monster off guard and make a run for it.

  Boys did that in stories. But stories were different from real life. Raymond Barrington’s real life had taught him that years ago. And where would he run to if he managed to slip past the monster and get to the front door? He would have no idea which way to turn in the darkness outside, so that the monster would easily catch him and kill him.

  Perhaps the thing could read his
thoughts. Anything seemed possible on this strange and horrific night. The monster reached up to the back of the door, pulled something from there and tied it round Raymond’s leg. Then it tied the other end of it to something heavy, a few feet away to their left in the darkness. It was the leg of a big, heavy bed. The monster knew his way around in this house. That was one more thing that added to Raymond’s fear and helplessness.

  Then the monster was suddenly standing above him and Raymond cringed against the carpet, breathing in the dust and praying pitifully for the creature not to hurt him. When he dared to open his eyes, he saw the dark outline of a pillow above his head. He thought in that moment that the monster was going to bring it down upon his face and smother him, whilst he pleaded hopelessly for his life into the softness that would not let him breathe. But the monster placed the pillow almost tenderly beneath his head as he flinched, turning him upon his side, trying ridiculously to make him relax.

  It brought cushions from somewhere else, whilst Raymond kept his eyes resolutely shut, fearing that any sort of movement on his part might lead to sudden violence from above. But there was no violence. The monster rolled him over, slid the cushions beneath him, then rolled him roughly back again. Raymond stared up at it between eyelids that were almost closed; he was still afraid that any sort of reaction might provoke this strange and unpredictable presence.

  There was a gruff command that he should not move, an assurance that the monster would be back. Was he supposed to find that reassuring? Then the thing was gone. The light went off in the hall and the front door closed softly in the distance. Raymond was left in a darkness so profound that it seemed to press down upon his small and helpless limbs.

  He didn’t dare to move for quite a long time. Then, as his body relaxed, he shed his first tears. They came as a relief after the tensions he had endured in the previous half-hour, when he had felt that he might be killed at any time. Tears also brought a heavy, releasing lassitude. The boy who had thought he would never relax again fell into a deep and dreamless sleep.

  It was after ten now, but the CID section was crowded and busy. The house-to-house reports were already coming in and being logged by Chris Rushton, but nothing significant had been discovered yet. There had been no random sightings of a boy with an unauthorized adult.

  Lambert exchanged views sporadically with DI Rushton, watching the flickering additions to the DI’s computer screen. He was there when the young man in uniform came in to say that Big Julie Foster had returned home. The officer had followed instructions. He had watched Julie park her old car behind the house where she had her flat, then enter by the front door. As his orders dictated, he had not made any contact or revealed himself to the woman. He’d shone his torch through the window of the locked car but not attempted to enter it. He had seen nothing there to indicate the presence of an abducted minor.

  John Lambert glanced at his watch, nodded at Rushton and took a quick decision. ‘I’m going out there right now to see her. I know it’s late, but a kid’s life’s in danger here.’

  As if by some private understanding, Bert Hook appeared soundlessly at his side. Lambert had told him ten minutes ago to go home; neither of them was surprised to find him still here. Lambert parked his old Vauxhall at the end of the road rather than right outside Julie Foster’s house. The woman would receive enough unwelcome attention on the morrow when news of the second child abduction was made public. There was no need to create difficulties for her now. It was still possible that she had no connection with this latest outrage.

  Lambert had thought that Julie might be on her way to bed, but she was still in corduroy trousers and heavy, flat-heeled shoes when she opened the door to them. He expected her to be shocked, even resentful, when he said they must speak to her at this hour of the night, but she evinced no surprise. She merely turned and led them down the dimly lit passage and into the bedsitter where they had spoken to her two days earlier.

  This time the curtain at the far end of the room had been drawn to one side, exposing the bed that lay behind it. The portable television on top of the chest of drawers was blaring noisily, the sound of the ITV adverts as usual louder than the programmes they divided. Lambert asked her to switch it off and inspected the soles of her shoes as she moved to the set. The place was tidy, but even more depressing than it had been in daylight. He and Hook sat as they had on Monday on the battered sofa, leaving the big armchair with the green buttoned back for the woman who normally occupied it.

  ‘You were out earlier this evening, Miss Foster,’ he said.

  It sounded like an accusation, so that Julie wondered if they were going to take her in at the end of this. She’d spent nights in the cells before, and in much worse places too. That didn’t really worry her. She was more disturbed by the tall man coming back here and calling her ‘Miss Foster’ again. No one called her that. ‘Miss Foster’ was a written thing, confined to the odd letter she received from the council, which Karen the social worker usually helped her to read.

  She said, ‘I was out tonight, yes.’ She wondered if she should snap out, ‘There’s no law against that!’ or ‘Why the hell shouldn’t I be?’ as some of the lads at work would have done. But Julie Foster didn’t do that. She didn’t want any trouble, and these people were much cleverer with words than she would ever be. It would be much better to stick to something straightforward.

  Julie said carefully, ‘I went to Tewkesbury.’

  ‘Did you take anyone with you?’

  They watched her carefully, studying her face even more keenly than they listened to her words. Would she give them any sign that she had carried a small, terrified boy in the old car?

  ‘I was on my own. I don’t have friends.’

  It was a flat statement of fact, not asking them for sympathy, leaving them to make of it what they would. It was Hook who now said to her gently, ‘That’s not true, is it, Julie? You’ve got friends at work, at the supermarket.’

  ‘They’re not real friends. We’re friends at Tesco’s, not anywhere else. They talk to me at work. Some of them are quite good to me. But they don’t want me anywhere else.’

  She wasn’t looking for consolation. She would have resented attempts to tell her it was not so. She was talking about the life she lived, the life she was compelled to live, and no one knew about that except her. Hook said softly, ‘But you like children, Julie, and they like you. We were talking about that when we were here on Monday, if you remember.’

  ‘I remember. But all I said was that I chat to some of them at the store, if they come to me. It’s only there, when I’m at work, that I talk to the kids. The parents don’t like me to do it anywhere else.’

  They were getting a troubling insight into her bleak life again. She was content that it should be so. Better to keep life simple, as she was trying to do now. It was safer just to recite simple facts for as long as you could. She folded her hands in her lap, the only movement she had made since she sat down in the big green chair. She was happier here than on the sofa. It was the chair she always sat in, during the long hours she spent in this place alone.

  Hook looked at those hands; her movement had drawn attention to them. They were the nearest parts of Big Julie Foster to him, scarcely four feet away. Strong hands, which would have been perfectly capable of taking an eight-year-old by the scruff of his neck and flinging him into that car now parked thirty yards from where they were sitting. She was a big, powerful woman, filling the wide green armchair in which she sat. Bert had not realized that her shoulders were so broad. He wondered why her very strength and potential, her lack of femininity, should compel this odd sympathy to well within him.

  He strove to keep emotion out of his voice as he said, ‘Do you know a boy called Raymond Barrington? Perhaps you’ve chatted to him.’

  He had expected a straight denial, but she suddenly had that air of sly cunning that the unintelligent sometimes unexpectedly adopt. ‘Not at Tesco’s, I haven’t. He doesn’t go there.’
>
  ‘But you know him.’

  ‘Might do.’ She folded her massive, powerful arms, but she was not being truculent. She was merely inviting them to talk on, because she had knowledge they had not thought she would have. Make them work for it, make them ask the questions. She wasn’t often in this position, with educated men like this.

  Hook didn’t react as he would have done to one of the aggressive, anti-fuzz young thugs they encountered more frequently each year. This was a woman of thirty-eight, finding herself in possession of more knowledge than they had expected. Treating her kindly, encouraging her to talk, might be the best way to discover the whereabouts of this boy she had known and perhaps kidnapped. He said quietly, ‘You need to tell us all about this, Julie.’

  ‘Is he in the care home? Is he in Bartram House?’

  ‘That’s where he lives, yes. Have you talked to him there?’

  She nodded vigorously, as if the vehemence of her reaction was important to her as well as to them. ‘Karen got me to go there. I was there myself at one time. But that was a long time ago. There’s no one there now who was there when I was there.’

  This wasn’t unusual. Social workers often got former residents of care homes to go in and talk with the present occupants, on the grounds that they might bring a steadying influence and give good long-term advice. He wondered whether that was a good idea in Big Julie’s case. Would the younger children in particular get anything useful from her? Wouldn’t the older, more streetwise ones find her a figure of fun rather than a role model? He found himself hoping irrelevantly that she had not been bruised by the experience; Julie Foster seemed to collect a lot of bruises from life. He just hoped she hadn’t decided that she needed to hit back.

  ‘So you’ve talked with the children there. Do you remember Raymond Barrington?’