Aftermath (33 page)

‘Did any of them ever go back to their parents?’

‘No. Oliver and Geraldine Murray were charged with Kathleen’s murder and are still in jail, as far as I know. Michael Godwin committed suicide two days before the trial and his wife was declared unfit to stand trial. I believe she’s still in care. A mental institution, I mean.’

‘There’s no doubt about who did what, then?’

‘As I said, the police would know more about that than me, but . . . If ever I’ve come face to face with evil in my life, it was there, that morning.’

‘What happened?’

‘Nothing
happened
, it was just . . . I don’t know . . . the aura around the place.’

‘Did you go inside?’

‘No. The police wouldn’t let us. They said we’d only contaminate the scene. We had a van, a heated van, and they brought the children out to us.’

‘What about the Satanic angle? I understand it didn’t come up in court.’

‘Wasn’t necessary, the lawyers said. Would only confuse things.’

‘Was there any evidence?’

‘Oh, yes, but if you ask me it was nothing but a load of mumbo-jumbo to justify drinking, drug-taking and abusing the children. The police found cocaine and marijuana in both houses, you know, along with some LSD, Ketamine and Ecstasy.’

‘Is that case why you gave up social work?’

Elizabeth paused before answering. ‘Partly, yes. It was the straw that broke the camel’s back, if you like. But I was already close to burning out long before that. It takes it out of you, it does, dealing with ill-treated kids all the time. You lose sight of the humanity, the dignity of life. Do you know what I mean?’

‘I think so,’ said Jenny. ‘Spending too much time with criminals has a similar effect.’

‘But these were children. They had no
choice
.’

‘I see what you mean.’

‘You meet some proper losers down at the benefits office, believe me, but it’s not like childcare.’

‘What state was Lucy in?’

‘Same as the rest. Dirty, hungry, bruised.’

‘Sexually abused?’

Elizabeth nodded.

‘What was she like?’

‘Linda? Or I suppose I’d better start calling her Lucy from now on, hadn’t I? She was a sweet little thing. Shy and scared. Standing there with a blanket around her and that look on her face like a grubby little angel. She hardly said a word.’

‘
Could
she speak?’

‘Oh, yes. One of the children, Susan, I think, lost the use of her voice, but not Lucy. She’d been abused in just about every way imaginable, yet she was surprisingly resilient. She’d speak if she wanted to, but I never once saw her cry. In fact, she seemed to have assumed the role of care-giver to the younger ones, though she wasn’t in a position to offer much in the way of care. She was the eldest, at least, so maybe she could offer them
some
comfort. You’d know more about this than I do, but I guessed she was repressing the full horror of what she’d been through, holding it back. I often wondered what would become of her. I never suspected anything like this.’

‘The problem is, Elizabeth—’

‘Call me Liz, please. Everyone does.’

‘Okay. Liz. The problem is that we just don’t know what Lucy’s role in all this is. She claims amnesia and she was certainly abused by her husband. We’re trying to find out whether she knew anything about his other activities, or to what degree she might have been involved.’

‘You can’t be serious? Lucy involved in something like that? Surely her own experiences—’

‘I know it sounds crazy, Liz, but the abused often become the abusers. It’s all they know. Power, pain, withholding, tormenting. It’s a familiar cycle. Studies have shown that abused children as young as eight or ten have gone on to abuse their younger siblings or neighbours.’

‘But not Lucy, surely?’

‘We don’t know. That’s why I’m asking questions, trying to fit the psychology together, build a profile of her. Is there anything more you can tell me?’

‘Well, as I said, she was quiet, resilient, and the other children, the younger ones, seemed to defer to her.’

‘Were they afraid of her?’

‘I can’t say I got that impression.’

‘But they took notice of her?’

‘Yes. She was definitely the boss.’

‘What else can you tell me about Lucy’s personality then?’

‘Let me think . . . not much, really. She was a very private person. She’d only let you see what she wanted you to see. You have to realize that these children were probably as much, if not more, shaken up by the raid, by being taken from their parents so abruptly. That was all they knew, after all. It might have been hell, but it was a familiar hell. Lucy always seemed gentle, but like most children she could be cruel on occasion.’

‘Oh?’

‘I don’t mean pulling the wings off flies or that sort of thing,’ said Elizabeth. ‘I assume that is the sort of thing you’re looking for, isn’t it?’

‘Such early patterns of behaviour can be a useful guide, but I’ve always thought they were overrated. To be honest, I once pulled the wings off a fly myself. No, I just want to know about her. How could she be cruel, for example?’

‘When we were arranging for foster parents, for example, you realize it was impossible to keep the siblings together, so they had to be split up. It was more important at the time that each child have a stable, possibly long-term, caring environment. Anyway, I remember Laura, in particular, Lucy’s younger sister was upset, but all Lucy said was she’d just have to get used to it. The poor girl just wouldn’t stop crying.’

‘Where did she end up?’

‘Laura? With a family in Hull, I believe. It’s a long time ago, so forgive me if I don’t remember all the details.’

‘Of course. Can you tell me what happened to any of the other children at all?’

‘I’m afraid I left there shortly after, so I never got to keep track of them. I often wish I had, but . . .’

‘Is there anything more you can tell me?’

Elizabeth stood up and went back to her ironing. ‘Not that I can think of.’

Jenny stood up, took her card from her purse and handed it over. ‘If you think of anything at all . . .’

Elizabeth peered at the card and set it on the edge of the ironing board. ‘Yes, of course. I’m only too glad to have been of help.’

But she didn’t look it, Jenny thought as she manoeuvred her car out of the tiny parking spot. Elizabeth Bell had looked like a woman forced to confront memories she would sooner forget. And Jenny didn’t blame her. She didn’t know if she’d learned anything much of value except confirmation that Satanic paraphernalia had been found in the cellar. Banks would certainly be interested in that. Tomorrow, she would go all the way to Alderthorpe and see if she could find anyone who knew the families before the investigation, and, as Elizabeth had suggested, to ‘get the feel of the place’.

Banks hadn’t had
a break all day, had even missed his lunch interviewing Lucy Payne, so with no real plan in mind, around three o’clock that afternoon, he found himself wandering down an alley off North Market Street towards the Old Ship Inn, heavy with the recent news that the second body discovered in the back garden of thirty-five The Hill was definitely
not
Leanne Wray’s.

Lucy Payne was being held in a cell in the basement of police headquarters and Julia Ford had booked herself in at the Burgundy, Eastvale’s best, most expensive hotel. The task force and forensics people were working as fast and as hard as they could, and Jenny Fuller was probing Lucy’s past – all looking for that one little chink in her armour, that one little piece of hard evidence that she was more involved with the killings than she let on. Banks knew that if they unearthed nothing more by noon tomorrow, he’d have to let her go. He had one more visit to make today: to talk to George Woodward, the detective inspector who had done most of the legwork on the Alderthorpe investigation, now retired and running a B & B in Withernsea. Banks glanced at his watch. It would take him about two hours: plenty of time to head out there after a drink and a bite to eat and still get back before too late.

The Old Ship was a shabby, undistinguished Victorian watering hole with a few benches scattered in the cobbled alley out front. Not much light got in, as the buildings all around were dark and high. Its claim to fame was that it was well hidden and known to be tolerant of under-age drinkers. Many an Eastvale lad, so Banks had heard, had sipped his first pint at the Old Ship well before his eighteenth birthday. The sign showed an old clipper ship, and the windows were of smoked, etched glass.

It wasn’t very busy at that time of day, between the lunch hour and the after-work crowd. Indeed, the Old Ship wasn’t busy very often at all, as few tourists liked the look of it, and most locals knew better places to drink. The interior was dim and the air stale and acrid with more than a hundred years’ accumulated smoke and beer spills. Which made it all the more surprising that the barmaid was a pretty young girl with short, dyed red hair and an oval face, a smooth complexion, a bright smile and a cheerful disposition.

Banks leaned against the bar. ‘I don’t suppose there’s any chance of a cheese and onion sandwich, is there?’

‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘We don’t serve food after two. Packet of chips – sorry, crisps – okay?’

‘Better than nothing,’ said Banks.

‘What flavour?’

‘Plain will do fine. And a pint of bitter shandy, too, please.’

As she was pouring the drink and Banks was dipping into a packet of rather soggy potato crisps, she kept glancing at him out of the corner of her eye and finally said, ‘Aren’t you the policeman who was here about that girl who disappeared a month or so ago?’

‘Leanne Wray,’ said Banks. ‘Yes.’

‘I thought so. I saw you here. You weren’t the policeman I talked to, but you were here. Have you found her yet?’

‘It’s Shannon, isn’t it?’

She smiled. ‘You remember my name and you never even talked to me. I’m impressed.’

Shannon, Banks remembered from the statement taken by DC Winsome Jackman, was an American student taking a year off from her studies. She had already travelled around most of Europe and through relatives and, Banks suspected, a boyfriend, she had ended up spending a few months in Yorkshire, which she seemed to like. Banks guessed that she was working at the Old Ship, perhaps, because the manager wasn’t concerned about visas and permits, and paid cash in hand. Probably not much of it, either.

Banks lit a cigarette and glanced around. A couple of old men sat smoking pipes by the window, not speaking, not making eye contact with each other. They seemed as if they might have been there since the place first opened in the nineteenth century. The floor was worn stone and the tables scored and wobbly. A watercolour of a huge sailing ship hung crookedly on one wall, and on the opposite one a series of framed charcoal sketches of sea-going scenes, quite good to Banks’s untrained eye.

‘I wasn’t trying to be nosy,’ Shannon said. ‘I was only asking because I haven’t seen you since and I’ve been reading about those girls in Leeds.’ She gave a little shudder. ‘It’s horrible. I remember being in Milwaukee – that’s where I’m from, Milwaukee, Wisconsin – when all the Jeffrey Dahmer stuff was going on. I was only a kid but I knew what it was all about and we were all scared and confused. I don’t know how people can do things like that, do you?’

Banks looked at her, saw the innocence, the hope and the faith that her life would turn out to be worth living and that the world wasn’t an entirely evil place, no matter what bad things happened in it. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I don’t.’

‘So you haven’t found her, then? Leanne?’

‘No.’

‘It’s not that I knew her or anything. I only saw her once. But, you know, when something like that happens, like you think you might be the last person to have seen someone, well . . .’ She rested her hand on her chest. ‘It sort of sticks with you, if you know what I mean. I can’t get the picture out of my mind. Her sitting over there by the fireplace.’

Banks thought of Claire Toth, whipping herself over Kimberley Myers’s murder, and he knew that anyone remotely connected with what Payne had done felt tainted by it. ‘I know what you mean,’ he said.

One of the old men came up to the bar and plonked his half-pint glass down. Shannon filled it for him, he paid and went back to his chair. She wrinkled her nose. ‘They’re in here every day. You can set your watch by them. If one of them didn’t turn up I’d have to call an ambulance.’

‘When you say you can’t get Leanne’s image out of your mind, does that mean you’ve given any more thought to that evening?’

‘Not really,’ said Shannon. ‘I mean, I thought . . . you know, that she’d been taken, like the others. That’s what everyone thought.’

‘I’m starting to believe that might not be the case,’ said Banks, putting his fear into words for the first time. ‘In fact, I’m beginning to think we might have been barking up the wrong tree on that one.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Anyway,’ Banks went on. ‘I just thought I’d drop by, see if you remembered anything you forgot to mention before, that sort of thing. It’s been a while.’ And that, he knew, meant that any trail Leanne may have left would have gone cold. If they had screwed up in assuming too quickly that Leanne Wray had been abducted by the same person, or persons, as Kelly Matthews and Samantha Foster, then any clues as to what had
really
happened could well have vanished for ever by now.

‘I don’t know how I can help,’ said Shannon.

‘Tell me,’ said Banks, ‘you say they were sitting over there, right?’ He pointed to the table by the empty, tiled fireplace.

‘Yes. Four of them. At that table.’

‘Did they drink much?’

‘No. I told the policewoman before. They only had a drink or two each. I didn’t think she was old enough but the landlord tells us not to bother too much, unless it’s
really
obvious.’ She put her hand over her mouth. ‘Shoot, I probably shouldn’t have said that, should I?’

‘Don’t worry about it. We know all about Mr Parkinson’s practices. And don’t worry about what you told us before, Shannon. I know I could go and look it all up in the files if I wanted, but I want you to start again, as if it had never happened before.’