Cry of the Children (11 page)

Dean Gibson must have heard the voices downstairs. Probably he had heard what his landlady had said to them. The door opened virtually as Lambert knocked, so that detective and quarry almost collided with each other and were left with their faces scarcely a foot apart. It was like a clumsily mistimed move in amateur dramatics, which makes the audience titter when there should be a significant silence.

The room was small and scarcely adequate for three adults, but it did not smell stale. Gibson had opened the single small window, so that the grubby curtain wafted gently and they could hear the noises from the supermarket car park below them. Hook said, ‘I'm sure Mrs Jackson would let us use her living room downstairs for this, if we ask her nicely and—'

‘I'd rather do it here. More private, like, if you don't mind sitting on the bed.' Gibson wasn't a native of these parts; he had a Birmingham accent, though not a strong one. He took the only chair in the room and gestured towards the single bed. The two big men sat down cautiously on the edge of it. It wasn't comfortable, but they'd questioned people in places much worse than this.

They knew from the file Chris Rushton had already opened on this man that Dean Gibson was thirty-three. He looked much older. His hair was greasy and already thinning drastically; he had a three-day growth of stubble on his chin and cheeks. He was thin and narrow-shouldered, and he had three sticking plasters on his fingers. His sweater had a stain on the front and a hole in one elbow. It was easy to see how his wife might have abandoned him for the far more presentable Matthew Boyd.

Lambert said, ‘We had some difficulty finding you, Mr Gibson. Your last address was in Malvern. You seem to have moved around a lot since you left your wife.'

‘I take work where I can get it. I don't have a car now. I try to live as near as possible to the place where I work.' He stared at his questioner steadily, but his eyes blinked far more frequently than they should have.

Lambert looked back at him hard, then said tersely, ‘You know why we're here.'

‘Yes. Have you found her?'

They would have had to tell him, and quickly. Now he had given them the opening. ‘I think so. I was notified on my way here that the body of a small girl has been found. I am afraid we are almost certain that it is Lucy.'

Gibson clutched suddenly at his torso with both arms. For a long, agonizing moment he did not speak. When he spoke, it was in a voice quite different from the little they had heard from him previously. ‘I knew it. I knew she was gone. If they don't turn up within the first day, they're gone, aren't they?'

‘I'm afraid they very often are, yes. I'm very sorry, Mr Gibson. We both are. I know it can't be much consolation to you, but we'll get whoever did this.'

‘I expect you will, yes. With all the men and women you can use, you'll get whoever did this. And, as you say, it won't be much consolation to me.'

He spoke dully, but he had acquired a strange dignity with his reception of the news. Beyond that, they couldn't analyze his reaction. Lambert said, ‘If you do not wish to speak to us at this time, that would be entirely understandable. We can do this later, either here or at the station. I have to say that the sooner we have your statement, the better it will be, from our point of view. We have as yet no idea who did this and there are other people as well as you to whom we need to speak.'

It was stilted and formal, but formal was probably best in these appalling circumstances. Gibson stared straight ahead of him, his grey eyes blinking steadily but producing no tears. All other movement seemed frozen within him. Eventually, he produced a voice that seemed to come from a distance and belong to someone else. ‘Poor little Lucy. Poor, poor little Lucy. She was so small and so innocent.' After a moment, he came back to them, seeming surprised to find them here. ‘You'll get whoever did this. I believe that. I want you to do whatever you have to do right now and right here.'

Lambert said quietly, ‘Thank you. I think that is the right decision. How long is it since you saw Lucy, Mr Gibson?'

He frowned a little, as if finding it difficult to concentrate on the question. ‘Two weeks ago. Two weeks last Saturday. Two weeks before … before this happened. Anthea dropped her off in Malvern. I was still in my digs there, then. We had a good walk together, Lucy and me. I carried her on my shoulders when she got tired. Just for a little while. I used to do that when she was small, you see. When all three of us lived together in Oldford.'

They had a brief glimpse with that picture of the bleakness of his life now, of the cruelty of it, for a man with few personal resources who had been cast out into an alien world – a world that demanded more then he had to give it. Everyone spoke of how hard marital break-ups could be for the children, but few saw what they did to inadequates like this. Lambert said, ‘How would you describe your present relationship with your wife, Mr Gibson?'

‘With Anthea? We get on all right, I suppose. As well as people who've split up normally do, I expect. We said we'd separate for a while to see how it went.'

‘A trial separation?'

‘That's it. That's what they call it, isn't it? That's the phrase Anthea used. Picked it up from the mums at the school gates, I expect. She did a lot of talking with them, before we split.'

It wasn't bitter; it was dull and resigned. There was a silence, as though all of them were pausing to pin down this situation in their minds. Then Bert Hook said, ‘Were you hoping that you'd get back together, Dean?'

Gibson glanced at him sharply, as if he had not expected him to speak. When he replied, it seemed that his words were almost a surprise to him. ‘Ye–es. Yes, I suppose I was. Lucy wanted it – she told me that, when we were together. And I must have wanted it, because I haven't settled to anything since I left.' He looked round the tight and shabby little bedroom, as if citing the evidence of that.

‘But it hasn't happened. There's been no sign of you going back to the house in Oldford. Not so far.'

‘No, and it isn't going to happen. Not with him around, it isn't.'

‘You mean Matthew Boyd?'

‘Yeah, I mean Matt bloody Boyd. Smooth talker, steady job, worming his way in. Even trying to take over with Lucy. She told me that. Well, he won't be able to do that now, will he?'

He had raised his voice as he spoke, so that his question echoed back off the walls of the cramped room. He must have realized how awful it sounded, for he said in a lower tone, as if by way of explanation, ‘He's a salesman, Matt Boyd. He moves around the area. I expect he finds it easy to pick up women. I expect he's had lots of practice.'

‘And you don't like to think of him with Anthea, do you, Dean?' Hook probed as gently as a therapist.

Gibson stared at the wall and slowed his blinking. ‘I don't like to think of them in bed together. I don't like to think of what they do. That's only natural, isn't it?'

‘Indeed it is, Dean. And you didn't like to think of him with Lucy, your little girl. That was natural, too.'

‘Only natural, it was, yes.' He didn't seem to notice the repetition of the word. ‘I didn't like to think of him with my Lucy.'

‘And it hasn't been easy for you to get work, since you moved out of your house and away from Oldford.'

‘I 'ad regular work with a builder when I was in Oldford. I can do roofing and lots of other things. Even plastering – there's not many as can do that. But work drops off in the winter. No one wants casuals.'

‘And you don't have transport. That must be a handicap for you.'

Gibson hesitated for a moment. ‘I got a bike. I get around on that, when I need to. But they don't want casuals in the winter. Not in a recession.' He produced the last phrase with a bitter familiarity; it had obviously been proffered to him many times as he was turned away.

Lambert had been content to observe closely whilst Hook elicited more than the man realized he was revealing. Now he leant forward and said, ‘We're almost finished, Mr Gibson. But we need to know where you were on Saturday night.'

‘When Lucy was taken, you mean?' He gave a bitter grin at seeing through the question so quickly. ‘Well, I wasn't here, as that cow downstairs was so pleased to tell you.' He had been listening to the exchanges in the hall, as they'd suspected. ‘I was in the pub up the road, the Rose and Crown.'

‘I see. I suppose you were drinking with someone who can confirm this for us?'

‘No. I was on my own. I can't buy rounds. I have to make halves of bitter last a long time.'

‘But I expect the landlord will remember you. Are you a regular in there?'

‘No, he won't remember me. Well, I doubt it. It's busy on a Saturday night.'

‘Even early on a Saturday night, Mr Gibson?'

There was so little room in the shabby bedroom that they were almost touching each other. Bert Hook leant forward and rolled up the frayed cuff of Gibson's sweater. There were significant marks on the inside of the man's forearm. Heroin. Bert looked into Gibson's moist grey eyes from no more than a foot away. The man looked down at his exposed flesh. ‘They're old marks, those. It's four years since I injected.'

‘It's addictive – horse.'

‘I was never an addict. I might have become one, at one time. Lucy stopped that. I looked at her and thought her dad couldn't be an addict.'

‘But you're still a user.'

He looked for a moment as if he would deny it, then shrugged the scrawny shoulders and pulled down the sleeve of his sweater. ‘I take the odd pill or a bit of coke, when I can get it. Since I broke up with Anthea. You get bloody miserable, living in places like this.'

‘I know you do, Dean. But don't become a user again. It will destroy you. And if the hash and the shit and the white powder don't, the people who run the industry will.' Any policeman, and particularly any CID man, knows the pattern. People like Gibson don't have the money to indulge the habit. They either steal to continue it or more usually become small-time dealers, taking the risks for the bigger men who supply them. Once you're hooked, you sell to indulge the habit, being paid in drugs, just enough to keep you hooked whilst you sell to new users in pub car parks, in the back streets around cinemas, even outside the gates of secondary schools.

Hook was still staring into the man's face after he had given his advice. He said softly, ‘You weren't in the Rose and Crown on Saturday evening, were you, Dean? You were away on your bike to Oldford, weren't you?'

He spoke with such conviction that the jaded Gibson was convinced this was knowledge, not speculation. He was blinking furiously as he said, ‘I wanted to see Lucy. It should have been my day to see her, Saturday. But Anthea put me off because of that bugger Boyd. I knew the fair was on. I thought I might see Lucy there. I'd been planning to take her there, before bloody Boyd turned up.'

‘And did you see her?'

‘No. I must have been too late. I didn't get there until about quarter to eight.'

‘How do you know when Lucy disappeared, Dean? We haven't given a time in any of our information bulletins.'

The grey eyes blinked furiously, but they didn't drop away from his, as Bert had expected. ‘I don't know, do I? I just know that I didn't manage to see her when I got to the fair.'

Hook looked at him steadily for three long seconds before he said, ‘You know Lucy and her background better than anyone except her mother, Dean. Have you any idea who might have done this awful thing?'

‘No. I've been asking myself that ever since I heard.'

‘You don't know of any odd people who hung around the school gates, for instance?'

‘No. You should ask the school about that.'

Hook nodded. ‘Members of our team have been doing that this morning. Chief Superintendent Lambert has told you that we only got the news of Lucy's death on the way over here, so we don't have many details as yet. Is there anything you wish to ask us?'

Only now, when prompted, did he ask the question that usually sprang first to the lips of parents involved in this agony. ‘Was she … did he tamper with her, before he killed her?'

Lambert said as calmly as he could. ‘There will have to be a post-mortem. But a preliminary examination by a pathologist has revealed no evidence of sexual molestation.'

They stood up from the hard single bed, straightened the blankets and left him sitting on the single chair, looking up at the small, open window, listening to the innocent sounds of small children with their mothers in the supermarket car park.

By three o'clock in the afternoon, the sun had disappeared, as if it recognized a need to cloak the dismal events in this small corner of the spinning world. The lights were already on in the CID section and in Lambert's office, where four of the senior ranks involved in the Lucy Gibson case were discussing what they should do next on this melancholy day.

‘How did the mother take it?'

All of them knew that Lambert's routine opening query involved more than the compassion they all felt for Anthea Gibson. Had there been any tiny signal in her reception of the news of Lucy's death that she might have been involved, or that she knew more about it than she was revealing to them? One of the worst aspects of this sort of crime was that you had to think the unthinkable. Fred West's despicable wife was still in her closely guarded cell to remind them of that.

Ruth David said, ‘Anthea Gibson was as stricken as you'd expect her to be. I've no comparisons, because I've never had to do this before. She was devastated by Lucy's death, as you'd imagine, even though she seemed to be half expecting it. Chris went with me; I thought the situation warranted a DI. It was quite bizarre, but I think I was right. I think the lady appreciated that we'd allotted her little girl a senior rank to deliver the final news. Chris was very good with her.'