Cry of the Children

by J M Gregson

  ‘Which leaves the two men who were closest to Lucy Gibson,’ said Rushton. ‘The discarded husband and the man who replaced him. I saw Dean Gibson when he came in to see you yesterday. He looked at the end of his tether.’

  ‘I agree. But Gibson was pretty broken-up when he had to leave the marital home a few months ago. According to what everyone tells us, he’s been barely coping since then. And he lost a daughter he loved at the weekend. Even if he had nothing to do with her death, you’d expect him to look shattered. Which he does, as you say. He’s prematurely bald and he has this habit of blinking violently and repeatedly when he’s under any sort of emotional pressure. His appearance doesn’t do him any favours, but he hasn’t any previous history of violence, towards his child or his wife or anyone else. He’s in the frame because we know that he was around on Saturday and we haven’t been able to clear him. And, like the others, he has no one to alibi him for last night, when Raymond Barrington was snatched. One of our problems is that all five of our suspects are loners, in very different ways. Gerry Clancey has opted for the single man’s freedom, Matt Boyd and Dennis Robson are divorced, Dean Gibson and Big Julie Foster have had the solitary life forced upon them. That helps to account for the fact that none of them has a witness to prove he or she was elsewhere when Raymond was snatched last night.’

  It was a long speech for Lambert. It was also evidence of his uncertainty and of the agony this case was causing him. He was trying to rationalize his own thoughts by voicing them aloud and testing the logic of them. There was a pause before Hook said, ‘Could you see Dean Gibson killing his own daughter?’

  ‘No. But I also can’t rule him out. He lied to us about Saturday when we first saw him, pretending that he’d come to Oldford on his bike and missed seeing her altogether, when we now know that he’d come in a van and might well have been there at the moment she was snatched. I can’t see either Dean or Big Julie strangling a seven-year-old girl, but we’ve already agreed that a fit of panic might have overtaken any one of these five. I feel Dennis Robson is creepy enough to do anything under pressure, that Gerry Clancey is certainly violent enough and that we still don’t know enough about Matthew Boyd to rule him out. But I think we’ve still got to have all five in the frame at this moment.’

  Rushton said, ‘I’m glad you mentioned Matthew Boyd. I feel I should know most about him, in that I’ve talked to the woman who was sleeping with him; I went with Ruth David to give Anthea Gibson the news of her daughter’s death. Anthea spent the whole of that Saturday when Lucy died with Boyd. But I still feel he is the one of the five whom I know least well.’

  Hook glanced at the long, tortured face of his chief. ‘I think we might agree with that, even though we’ve twice spoken at length with Matthew Boyd. We know now that his teacher training course was ended abruptly ten years ago because of incidents with children. He denies there was anything improper, and there was no court case, so he hasn’t got form like Clancey and Robson. And Foster, I suppose, in a different way, though the psychological reports saved her from any real punishment when she took the baby.’

  Lambert was troubled. ‘You’re right; Boyd’s elusive. He spent Tuesday night with Anthea Gibson, three nights after her daughter was snatched and killed while in his care. That argues that she at least doesn’t believe Boyd killed Lucy.’

  Hook allowed himself a tiny, doubtful shake of his head. ‘But Anthea must be so shattered that she hardly knows her own mind at present. And Boyd’s kept his digs in Oldford. He’s living within four hundred yards of the spot where Raymond Barrington was snatched last night.’

  Rushton smiled. ‘Be fair, Chris. So are the others, apart from Dean Gibson.’

  ‘Yes. But Boyd has taken two days off work. Had he planned to snatch a child? He also had his car very thoroughly valeted this morning, conveniently removing any traces of a boy carried in it against his will last night.’

  Rushton nodded, glad as always to have a chance to display his efficiency. ‘We checked that. Matthew Boyd does have his car valeted regularly, at about monthly intervals. The last one was only three weeks ago, but it’s conceivable, as he claims, that he was taking advantage of the fact that he isn’t working for a couple of days to have the car cleaned. This is, however, an extremely convenient valeting for anyone who had an unwilling passenger in the car last night.’

  Lambert nodded. ‘We’ve had Boyd’s ex-wife interviewed. She says that she never really felt she knew him and that she always felt that he lived some other sort of secret life away from her.’

  ‘Which sounds exactly the right background for someone perpetrating crimes like these,’ Rushton pointed out. He’d been waiting to say that ever since he had filed DS Ruth David’s report on her interviewing of Hannah Boyd, the woman who had divorced their suspect.

  ‘Agreed,’ said Lambert promptly. ‘But we have to remember that ex-spouses have their own agendas. It’s not often that they want to see the best in their former partners. Nevertheless, it reinforces our own thoughts about Boyd, that he’s a difficult man to fathom. He was pretty vague about his present relationship with Anthea Gibson and how she’s reacted to someone stealing and murdering her daughter when she was in his care.’

  Hook smiled ruefully at the memory of Matt Boyd’s troubled face. ‘That may be because neither of them is sure yet of exactly how they feel about the other. What happened to Lucy must be traumatic for both of them. I imagine Anthea in particular isn’t sure what she wants or needs at the moment. I expect her feelings change hour by hour. I know mine would.’

  The three were silent for a moment, pondering once again the uniqueness of these happenings for them. Even with their vast combined experience of crime, they were feeling their way into unfamiliar areas.

  It was Lambert who wrenched them back to the practicalities of the investigation. ‘We’ve given it twenty-four hours. I think we need to set up surveillance of all five of these people. If we put a tail on each of them, we’ll soon know if that boy is still alive. I’d have done it today, but as you know I was afraid of scaring an unbalanced kidnapper into violent action. But we can’t leave it any longer. I’ll discuss who we’re going to use with you in the morning, Chris.’

  ‘It’ll be expensive,’ said Chris Rushton. He was a natural bureaucrat and this was the standard bureaucratic reaction.

  ‘Expensive but warranted,’ said Lambert grimly. ‘Refer any queries from the chief constable about the overtime budget to me. I want good people on this – perhaps as many as fifteen, if we want twenty-four hour surveillance. Each of them needs to be aware that a child’s life might depend on his or her actions. We’ll assign them first thing tomorrow, Chris, unless we have any further news by then.’

  It was nine o’clock and each of them was exhausted. They left the station at Oldford sadly, mindful of the fact that the further news Lambert mentioned in his last phrase was likely to be of the death of a second child.

  NINETEEN

  The five people the detective trio had discussed were pushing ahead with their own lives, unconscious of the intense examination of their characters that was being conducted in the CID section at Oldford.

  Dean Gibson was both exhausted and confused, as they had surmised. He had spent a long morning without any break plastering the wall of the new extension they were building near Hereford, which had taken all his skill and concentration. His afternoon had seen the very different pressures of a grilling by Lambert and Hook in the interview room at the police station. It would have taxed most men, he supposed, and he had been in a fragile condition even at the beginning of his day.

  He couldn’t remember when he had last slept for any decent length of time. He was so tired that he was not thinking straight. It seemed scarcely possible that it was only five days since Lucy had been seized and killed. His mind had not been clear since then; his brain, his stomach and his whole body were beset by a mass of conflicting emotions. He scarcely felt the same from one minute to the next, let alone from
day to day. He sat in the dismal room in his Ledbury digs and wondered what he was to do and what was to become of him.

  He wasn’t even sure whether he was hungry or not. He ought to eat something, he supposed. There would be more plastering for him tomorrow, more long hours without a break whilst he covered another raw wall of the newly completed extension at Breinton. He didn’t want to collapse whilst he was working. That would draw the kind of attention he didn’t want. It might lose him the steady work he had toiled so hard to secure. But that didn’t seem anything like as important as it had a week ago. He kept telling himself that he needed the work, that he might even get back with Anthea some time in the next few months. But Dean didn’t really believe that was going to happen any more. He wondered if he had the energy to work, or even the energy to think, beyond the next few minutes.

  He heard Mrs Jackson moving about in her kitchen downstairs, and the thought of another confrontation with that mean-spirited woman gave him his first strong feeling in several hours. He didn’t want to speak to her, wanted with a passion he could scarcely understand to be away from her. He crept down the stairs as quietly as he could, treading at the sides of the two he knew creaked particularly loudly. Ma Jackson came out of the kitchen as he pulled the front door softly shut behind him. He heard her heavy, proprietorial steps in the hall. But she did not open her front door to call after him, and Dean, whose head was reeling a little, told himself that was an omen of better things to come for him.

  He sat for a moment in the van he had cleaned out hastily before the police examined it. They had left it, if anything, even tidier than it had been when they had taken his keys. Without its usual jumble of tools and materials and discarded food wrappers, it felt at this moment like a different van altogether. And for another very long moment, Dean wished that it was and that he was starting anew.

  He set out to put distance between himself and Barbara Jackson and the small, miserable room where he spent too much of his life. He drove slowly through the small town and towards Ross-on-Wye. A roadside pub said that you could have two courses for £8.95 on weekday evenings. He eased the van into the car park, sat for a couple of minutes to compose himself, then went inside and collected the set menu from which he was to select his two courses.

  It was quiet in the pub. Even at these prices, people who were hit by the recession weren’t eating out as often as they had a couple of years earlier. Dean sat at the smallest and most obscure table he could see. There was a party of eight men at the other side of the room on a lads’ night out, and two couples who had arranged a convivial meal together. Otherwise, a room that held fifty when packed was empty. The noise rose from the other two tables, particularly the all-male one, but no one took any notice of the white-faced, balding man in the shabby sweater who munched steadily through his meal at the side of the dining area.

  That was the way he wanted it, Dean told himself. He didn’t want company and wanted least of all to make conversation. And yet he felt very alone. He wanted someone, not to speak to him, but to wrap warm arms around him and tell him that all would be well. He didn’t think that would ever happen again. It couldn’t now, could it? Not without Lucy.

  He refused to order a drink, because he knew how tired he was and he was trying to keep his thinking straight. He had gammon ham and pineapple, with chips and broccoli, and he found that once he started to eat he was surprisingly hungry. He ate it all; he managed to answer the waitress’s cheerful query with a routine assurance that he had enjoyed his meal, then a request for a sticky toffee pudding for his second course. No coffee; he would use the old kettle in his room to make that when he had crept past La Jackson and up the stairs.

  He was glad now that he had come out. But his head was teeming still with conflicting thoughts as he drove slowly back to the room and his bed. He would need to sort things out tomorrow, but he couldn’t think about that now.

  Dennis Robson had made his plans for the evening far more methodically than Dean Gibson.

  He needed to leave the bungalow at twenty to eight, he had decided. He waited impatiently whilst the clock hands crept slowly towards that time. He had put a suit on for this meeting, but it scarcely mattered what you wore, as long as you paid your dues. A low profile was the order of the day, but Dennis wasn’t quite sure how you dressed to secure that. He’d always worn a suit when he’d gone to the Masons, but it was a long time now since he’d ceased to do that.

  He’d put the car in the garage, but the bonnet as he brushed past it was still quite warm from when he’d used it earlier. He wasn’t going to think about his earlier journey in the Audi now; he wanted to give his full concentration to the evening ahead. There seemed to be more police about than usual as he drove through Oldford. Perhaps he was extra-sensitive since he’d been the subject of their enquiries. He checked his mirror repeatedly as he drove out of the town and turned south, but there was no sign of any vehicle pursuing him.

  The car was warm and the roads quiet. He opened up the Audi’s two-litre engine and tried hard to enjoy the drive. He felt the old stirrings of conscience, the conflicts within him, which he had felt a thousand times before. But he thrust them away and concentrated on the road, with a quiet, unconscious smile lifting the edges of his mouth. Tonight was about excitement, and for the moment eager anticipation thrust down all other feelings.

  He turned off the A38 when he saw the sign for Thornbury, his elation rising with each passing mile. There was a car behind him now; he watched the headlights on his tail for four miles, whilst the seed of alarm germinated and grew in his head. Then, when he was within a couple of miles of his destination, it turned quietly left and disappeared into the darkness down a narrow lane. Dennis breathed more easily again, smiling mockingly at himself for creating fear out of a harmless coincidence. The clock on his dashboard told him that he would arrive at the very minute he had planned, and such exactitude restored his feeling of well-being.

  There were no instructions about caution in parking and approach. He liked that. At the gatherings he had formerly attended in a Bristol suburb, they had been instructed to park at least two hundred yards away and walk to the venue, keeping a wary eye behind them for any evidence of unwelcome attention. He much preferred this venue and these companions, where you drove right to the house and parked openly. That was what a gathering of friends meeting for an evening of intelligent conversation might well do.

  He had his story ready, as instructed. They were opera buffs, meeting to enjoy a recording of Renée Fleming’s incomparable La Traviata at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. Dennis Robson had no difficulty with that explanation; it was an evening he might well have genuinely enjoyed, in a different place and with a different set of friends.

  He had no difficulty finding the place; this was his third visit. It was a big, modern house, slightly elevated from its nearest neighbours, which were over a hundred yards away. It had a view of the Severn estuary and the motorway bridge in daylight, but none of that was visible now. Valley View, it said on the sign by the gate: each time he came, Dennis was amused by the uninventiveness of the name. A residence like this deserved a little more originality, he thought, though tonight they would all be glad of its dullness. It was better to be conventional, if you didn’t want to excite attention.

  There were three other cars parked here already, and the lights of a couple of others visible on the lane behind him. There was a convivial atmosphere inside the house. There was a judge here, and the leader of a town council, and at least two captains of industry, but anonymity was the order of the day. He passed through a well-lit hall and was offered white or red wine at the door to the big lounge. His £40 fee was pocketed without even being checked; it was rather as if you were attending one of the charitable functions he had often patronized in the past. There was a buzz of conversation, about politics, about sport, about music, about books, about the latest unwitting cabaret perpetrated by the London mayor. By tacit agreement, none of them talked about
why they were here, even though there were most of the trimmings of a civilized gathering.

  Dennis had been in the house for twenty minutes when the host tapped the table gently and introduced their ‘speaker for the evening’, without troubling to name him. Dennis hadn’t even known there was to be anything so formal. A man who reminded him of Mephistopheles in Faust stepped forward and began to talk about the bond that united them and had brought them together tonight. He had a well-trimmed moustache which curled up sharply at the ends, plentiful slicked-back hair, and dark eyes which flashed with humour; he was entirely confident and gave every evidence of being beguiled by his own intelligence.

  The man’s theme was that although they had necessarily to recognize that their tastes and activities were at present against the law, and had thus to be indulged in secret, they should privately feel no shame. They were merely a little in advance of their time. Enlightenment among the leaden public must surely follow eventually. Homosexuality had been against the law fifty years earlier; those with a taste for it had needed to be as secret as they were being tonight. But now homosexuals were not persecuted; indeed, it sometimes seemed to him that they were positively encouraged. He paused for laughter and the nodding of heads.

  And so it would be with people who loved children, in due course. For they should remember that the word paedophilia meant, in fact, the love of children, just as Anglophilia was the love of England and Francophilia indicated a love of France. (Dennis smiled a little patronizingly as he recognized the argument he had put to those police plodders three days ago.) A recent court case had proved that sadomasochism was nowadays recognized as a private matter, a sexual preference, which should be tolerated, not persecuted. In fifty years, perhaps sooner, their own sexual preferences would be recognized as just one more aspect of the infinite variety of human instincts.