Acid Row (6 page)

“I was trying to protect Amy.”

It was an extreme phrase, he thought. "Is there some other abuse that you haven't told me about?"

“No.”

Tyler allowed a silence to develop while he referred to his notes again. It was a very decided negative and he wondered if she had prepared for the question. He would have expected a rather more shocked response, a rush to explain why the suggestion couldn't be true. It raised doubts in his mind, particularly as her husband had reacted very angrily to a similar question.

He traced his finger down the lines on the page. "According to your husband, Mr. Townsend's on holiday at the moment. He's gone to Majorca with a girlfriend." He looked up but Laura didn't react.

“Townsend's been a client of your husband's for over ten years,” he went on. "A property developer. He and his wife divorced two years ago. You and he began your affair shortly afterwards and you moved in with him last October. He lives in Southampton. Your husband agreed to your having custody of Amy while you were living with Townsend. His only proviso was that if the relationship failed, you would return Amy to his care until the issue of your own divorce was settled. He says you returned his maintenance cheques while you were with Townsend and weren't in a position to support Amy on your own. Is that correct?"

She lifted her hand in a small gesture of protest. "Martin was never as she sought for a word “reasonable as that.”

"You were sleeping with his friend. He was hardly going to be pleased."

“I didn't expect him to be,” was all she said.

“So what happened?”

“It didn't work out with Eddy so we came here.”

“Is there a reason why it didn't work out?”

She fingered the hair in front of her face. "It never had much of a chance. We wanted different things from the relationship."

“What did you want?”

“An escape,” she said simply.

“Why did you return the maintenance cheques?”

“It wouldn't have been an escape.”

“What did Eddy want?”

“Sex.”

“Is that what Gregory wants?”

“Yes.”

“You're a fast worker,” Tyler said mildly. "One minute you're with a developer in Southampton, the next you're with a bus driver in Portisfield. How did that work exactly?"

“We stayed in a hotel for five weeks.”

“Why?”

“It was anonymous.”

“Were you hiding from Martin?”

She shrugged.

“Because he'd have taken Amy back?”

“Yes.”

“Who paid?”

“I used my savings.” She paused. "I couldn't work because there was no one to leave her with, and we were running out of money. That's why I needed somewhere else."

He glanced about the kitchen. "Why another man? Why not put yourself on the housing list and find a child minder?"

She set to drawing circles again. "I couldn't risk Amy telling the housing officer about her father. They'd have taken her off me if they knew she had somewhere else to live." A tiny laugh fluttered from her mouth. "In any case, Martin's a snob. I knew he'd never come looking for us here. It wouldn't occur to him that I might be willing to live in a council house and work in a supermarket just to be free of him."

“How does Amy feel about it?”

"Even your daughter knows you're only sleeping with him to keep a roof over your head.. .“ ”I don't know. I've never asked her."

“Why not?”

“You've seen Martin's house.” She flicked him a quick, assessing glance. “Which would you choose if you were a ten-year-old girl?”

Rogerson had asked the same question after learning where Amy had been for the last two months. "Your husband's of course, but if that's what she wants then she should have been given the choice. She has the same rights as you, Laura, and to be a prisoner of war between her parents isn't one of them."

“If she were a prisoner,” she flashed back, 'she'd be locked safely in her room and you and I wouldn't be having this conversation."

“That's not what I meant, Laura.”

“I know what you meant,” she murmured, turning up the volume on the radio to shut him out. "But you're using Martin's words, so perhaps you should ask him what he means by them."

'.. . two hundred local people joined, police during the night to search the surrounding countryside .. ."

'.. . police believe Amy may be heading for her father's house in Bournemouth .. ."

'.. . home owners in the south are being asked to look in sheds garages, abandoned fridges, derelict houses .. . not given up hope that Amy may have fallen asleep .. ."

'.. . NSPCC spokesman said that, while it's an appalling tragedy when any child goes missing, the public should remember that two children a week die from cruelty and neglect in their own homes .. ."

'.. . police spokesman confirmed that all registered paedophiles in Hampshire were visited within eight hours of Amy's disappearance ..

."

'.. . no leads .. ."

Saturday 28 July 2001 10.00-19.00  

Saturday 28 July 2001 Glebe Road, Bassindale Estate

MELANIE PATTERSON SHARED a cigarette with her mother on a bench seat outside the Co-op in Glebe Road. It was an unvarying Saturday morning ritual during which they caught up on news before doing their shopping together. It was like the old days, when they still lived together.

Gaynor would stretch out on the settee with Melanie curled against her and they'd drink a beer and split a fag and set the world to rights.

They'd always been close and never understood the hassle the Social gave them about their ever increasing family.

Gaynor was an older version of her daughter, not so tall, but with the same lush blonde hair and sparkling blue eyes. Her fifth child, a little boy, was born six months after his niece, Rosie, but none of the Pattersons found this particularly odd. There was no logic to any of the generations. Melanie's great-grandmother, herself the mother of ten, wasn't born until five years after her eldest brother's death in the First World War, yet she kept his photograph beside her bed and spoke as if she were closer to him than any of her surviving brothers.

And maybe she was, because Patterson men were renowned for their feuding“ It the Irish in them,” Great-Grammer always said, making a tenuous link to some distant ancestor who had crossed the sea to Liverpool during the nineteenth century. "They'd rather be fighting than home in their beds.. ." and Patterson women for taking lovers out of boredom '.. . the good Lord wouldn't have given us wombs if he hadn't meant us to fill them."

It was a view shared by Melanie and her mother. Bossy health visitors could say what they liked about contraception, but child-bearing answered a basic need in both of them. As indeed it had for the long line of women before them. There had never been a perception among Patterson women that personal fulfilment lay in taking a regular job and making money. A woman's role was to make babies, particularly when someone else was prepared to pay for them. Indeed, Gaynor's most perfect achievement was this, her eldest daughter, who adored and was adored in equal measure. Men came and went in both their lives but their constancy to each other was unshakeable. They agreed on everything. Loves, hates, beliefs, prejudices, friends and enemies.

On hearing from Melanie the previous Saturday that paedophiles had been housed just one door away from her grandchildren, Gaynor had reacted with predictable anger.

“It makes you sick,” she'd said. "The Social's got no business sticking psychos in your road and expecting you to guard your kiddies twenty-four hours a day. That says the nonces are more important than you, Rosie and Ben put together .. . and that's not right, darling'.

Men like that should be locked up for life .. . simple as that." She took a drag and passed the cigarette to her daughter. "I don't want you and the babes in danger,“ she said with sudden decision. ”You'll have to come home. You and the wee ones can take Colin's room, and he can move in with Bry and little Johnnie."

But Melanie had shaken her head. "Jimmy's due out in a couple of days.

He'll take care of us. Anyways, I reckon it's the nonces should move not us ... which is what I told the cow at Housing the Social's got a fucking nerve, I said, giving us lectures about' she drew quotation marks in the air' "parenting then dumping sodding paedophiles on the street without telling anyone. So she tells me to stop swearing or she'll hang up."

“She never!”

"She fucking did, and I said, if she thought swearing was worse than murdering little kids then she ought to be in therapy. I bet she wouldn't like it, I said, if the council stuck perverts next to her. So then I get the usual wall-to-wall bull .. . she didn't know what I was talking about ... it wasn't her responsibility .. . the person to ask was my social worker. I was well pissed off and said if she didn't fucking move them out herself, then us as lives in the street'd fucking do it for her. I mean, they can't rate our kids very high if they reckon it's OK for dirty old men to shaft them whenever they get a sodding itch .. . and that's when she hung up .. ."

Seven days later, fuelled by radio and television reports that a child had gone missing in Portisfield, the swell of opinion against the paedophiles had reached fever pitch. It was known, courtesy of a postman who had shown a redirected letter to a neighbour, that the men's previous address had been Callum Road, Portisfield, so late on the Friday night the same neighbour phoned the former occupant of number 23, Mary Fallen, to find out what she knew.

Mary was full of it. Portisfield was crawling with policemen, knocking on doors, showing the kid's photograph, and asking if anyone had seen her or knew where she'd spent the last two weeks. They were talking about a 'friend' that her family didn't know about, but even a moron could work out that 'friend' was a euphemism for a predatory paedophile. There were two evicted from Portisfield near on a month ago after one of them was recognized from a photograph, and Mary wasn't the only person who'd told the police to track them down. The kid had been living cheek by jowl with them for God knows how long, and paedophiles being what they are on the lookout for lonely and vulnerable children you could bet they'd picked her out for attention.

It didn't make sense to assume she'd gone to ground in her own neighbourhood, when the chances were she'd been collected and driven somewhere else every day.

Mary was speechless for all of five seconds when her friend told her the Portisfield paedophiles were living in her old house. She couldn't believe it. Her house! Home to bloody nonces! What kind of idiot had decided to move them into the Row? The place had more children than adults. It was like putting a junkie in charge of a drug store. How had they been sussed? Had they tried it on with a kid? Did they have a car? Did they leave the house every day? Had anyone seen a skinny little girl with dark hair there?

The answers to her questions were largely negative but there was always room for doubt. The men's arrival had been so secret that it stood to reason they could come and go at will. The younger one did the shopping occasionally, scuttling along and never meeting anyone's eyes but who was to say where he went when he turned the corner out of Bassindale Row or if he had a car parked secretly away from the estate?

The older one, white-faced and black-haired, had been spotted through the window from time to time, standing in the shadows and scowling at passers-by, but who knew where he went at night when decent people were asleep? As for a little girl .. . well, they wouldn't bring her back to the house in daylight, would they?

Plans had been made at the beginning of the week to converge on Humbert Street that Saturday afternoon and force the police to move the perverts out, though there was considerable irritation that Portisfield hadn't had to do anything so dramatic ... or energetic. It highlighted the difference between the way the two estates were perceived the one modern and upwardly mobile, the other a dilapidated ghetto for the underclass. The upwardly mobile complained. The underclass marched.

Naturally no one in Bassindale bothered to inform the police of their plan. The idea was to shock the pigs into removing the nonces, not give them a chance to order the march banned and arrest anyone who tried to go through with it. In any case, so many of the Acid Row youngsters were serving weekend community sentences that, if the rozzers got a sniff of trouble, half the foot soldiers would be lost because they'd be banged up in secure detention till the trouble passed. It was a protest of numbers. The more there were, the more powerful the message .. . and the less likely it was to be ignored.

With some justification, Gaynor and Melanie prided themselves on being the leaders. It was they who had brought the perverts to the community's attention. Their resolution that had fired a reciprocal commitment from their neighbours. Their efforts that had translated ideas into action. Also their motivation was entirely unselfish. They believed the council was endangering children by introducing paedophiles into the estate. It was an open-and-shut case. Force the authorities to get rid of the perverts and the kids would be safe.

What they lacked was imagination, for it never occurred to them that their leadership would be secretly hijacked nor that a protest march could lead to war. Certainly not in broad daylight on one of the hottest days of the year.

But, as the police could have told them, riots only happen when heat frays tempers.

This Saturday, on the bench outside the Co-op, Melanie was bringing her mother up to speed on where and when the protesters were meeting that afternoon. “It's mostly women and kids,” she said, 'but I reckon there's going to be about a hundred and that's enough to make the rozzers sit up and think. Jimmy'll be there too, and, as long as you and me get there first to keep a bit of order, it ought to work well."

She could see that Gaynor was listening with only half an ear. "This is important, Mum,“ she said severely. ”If you and me aren't outside the school in time to organize the sodding thing, then it'll fizzle out. You know what they're like round here. They'll vanish off to the pub if there's no one to tell 'em what to do."