Cry of the Children (8 page)

‘About that, yes. We went straight from the shooting gallery to the small ride.'

‘But you weren't aware of anyone skulking around. He or she might have been some distance away, of course – we mustn't rule out women, at this stage.'

‘No, I wasn't. It's still my belief that whoever snatched her came out of the woods beside the common. But I don't think I'd have spotted anyone when I'd finished at the shooting gallery. I won a prize, you see. A small one, but I let Lucy choose what she wanted. All my attention must have been on her and the prizes at that moment.'

‘I see. What was it you won?'

‘A little doll. Just a simple rag one, with a big face and a stupid smile. But Lucy seemed to like it. She kept waving its arm at me as she went round and round in that blue bus on her ride.'

‘Just a minute.'

Lambert levered himself up without taking his eyes off Boyd and went out to the bags of exhibits that DI Rushton was beginning to catalogue in the murder room. He returned within his minute, during which Hook and Boyd had exchanged not a word. He held the polythene bag by its corner. ‘Would this be the doll you gave to Lucy?'

Matt Boyd's eyes widened in horror as he looked at the contents. ‘Yes. That's the doll. It didn't have that mud on it when I gave it to her, obviously. Where did you get it?'

‘It was found in the wood you mentioned. The one where you think the abductor took Lucy.'

The three men stared at the small, pathetic item. Matt was conscious that after a moment the two CID men had transferred their gaze to his face, but he could not move his own eyes from that piteous reminder of the girl who had waved at him from the roundabout. Lambert's voice seemed to come from a long way away as it said with quiet insistency, ‘We need your account of the rest of the evening, Mr Boyd.'

Matt took another huge breath. He needed to concentrate upon this above all. ‘There's nothing else to tell. I didn't see Lucy again.'

‘You need to look at this from our point of view, Mr Boyd. You are the last person known to have seen Lucy and there is very much more to tell. You said last night that Lucy vanished at around half past seven. Do you wish to revise that?'

‘No, not really. It was probably a little later than that, but not much. When I couldn't find Lucy, the last thing I was thinking about was what the time was.'

‘That at any rate is understandable. What is less so is how long you took to report her disappearance to us. Had we been informed immediately, we might have been able to help.'

‘Might have cordoned off the area,' agreed Matthew Boyd dully. ‘The uniformed man told me that last night.'

Lambert doubted privately whether they would have had the personnel available on a Saturday night to surround such a large area. It was far more likely that they'd have been reassuring the mother that children usually turned up by the end of the evening and trying to explore all the homes to which a small girl might have fled when she panicked. But he felt no inclination to take the pressure off this thickset, apprehensive figure in front of him. ‘According to Mrs Gibson, you didn't return to her house until around nine o'clock. Even allowing for the fact that you cannot be precise about the times, that still leaves us with a gap of at least eighty minutes. What were you doing during that time?'

He'd expected the question, but it came across the table from Lambert more like an accusation. ‘I thought I'd find her. I couldn't believe she was gone, at first. Then I thought she must be playing a trick on me – that she'd hidden herself away and was going to come out and laugh at me.'

‘Is Lucy a frisky little girl? Would she enjoy playing hide and seek with you like that?'

Frisky. Matt wanted to say that she was; it would help to explain his conduct, surely. But he wasn't sure what Anthea would have told them and he couldn't afford to contradict the girl's mother, could he? ‘No, not really, I suppose. But I didn't know her all that well, did I? You pointed out yourself that it was the first time we'd been out alone together. I suppose I
wanted
to think she was hiding. I couldn't get my head round the idea that she'd simply disappeared.'

‘But it didn't take you eighty minutes to decide that a seven-year-old wasn't playing hide and seek with you.'

It was a statement, not a question. That was another signal that he was on trial here, or at least meant to feel that he was. What he had meant to deliver as bold and convincing statements were being made to sound like a weak and desperate defence. ‘I looked for her. I went all round the fairground. I asked one or two of the stallholders whether they'd seen a little girl on her own, but none of them had. As one of them said, looking for a kid in a fairground is like searching for a needle in a haystack. I searched the wood beside the fairground – well, searched it as well as I could. I needed a torch really, but I hadn't got one and I hadn't even got my mobile phone: I'd left it behind at Anthea's house'

Lambert spoke more gently this time. ‘Eighty minutes is a long time, Mr Boyd.'

‘I know it is. I suppose part of the reason I took so long is that I didn't want to face Anthea and tell her that I'd lost her little girl, when she'd trusted me with her. I even came back and got my car to search a wider area.'

Lambert nodded whilst Hook made a note of that. ‘So you returned to the house and gave Anthea the bad news at around nine o'clock. The call reporting that Lucy was missing was logged at this station at nine fifty-four. Why this additional delay?'

‘I had to calm Anthea down. Or try to – she was hysterical.'

‘Then surely she would have been anxious to let us know what had happened as quickly as possible.'

Again the statement. Again the ringing logic that made his story sound like a pack of lies. Matt said in a low, defeated voice, ‘That was me. I thought we should ring all her friends' houses, all the places where she might possibly have gone, before we rang the police. I said that was the first thing they would ask us to do anyway.'

‘You may well be right about that. But we could also have been taking other steps, setting a search in motion. Mr Boyd, have you any further thoughts to offer?'

Matt shook his head hopelessly. ‘No. I think now that someone snatched her and was away through the woods with her before I or anyone else realized anything was wrong. It seems the only possible solution.'

There were others, but Lambert wasn't about to offer them. He said merely, ‘Please don't leave the area without furnishing us with an address, Mr Boyd.'

E
leanor Hook saw how drawn and tired Bert looked as soon as he entered the house. That wasn't usual for Bert, who generally enjoyed his work, despite his routine protests on occasions at the dullness of it. Tonight he came into their home wishing heartily for a little of that dullness.

‘Supper won't be long,' she said.

He looked at her for a moment as if he had not understood, then nodded and slumped into an armchair.

Eleanor got herself a gin and tonic and set a glass and a can of beer on the small table by Hook's elbow. ‘Thanks,' he said quietly. He summoned up a small, grateful smile for her, then stared into space. After a moment, he tilted the glass and poured the contents of the can into it with elaborate care, as if he could shut out the rest of his day by this simple act of concentration.

Eleanor sat down opposite him but didn't speak. They had married relatively late by police standards, when both of them were in their late twenties and recovering from broken engagements. It was a relaxed and happy union; they often didn't need words. It wasn't until Bert gave a long sigh and said, ‘We haven't found her,' that Eleanor chose to speak.

‘You saw the mother?' Eleanor listened to the movements of her boys in the room above her and tried to imagine what it must be like to lose a child as this woman had: snatched off the face of the earth when the little girl had been enjoying a treat. It wasn't even like an illness, where at least you had a little time to prepare yourself for what might happen. The Hooks had almost lost their younger son, Luke, to meningitis a year or so ago. The hours when he had wavered between life and death had been the worst three days of her life.

This must be much, much worse – this sudden removal of your child without any notice of catastrophe. And with it the thought that your little girl must surely be in the hands of someone evil. When you were a police wife, you retained what some people now thought of as the old-fashioned idea of evil.

Hook signalled his return to the world around him with a huge sigh and a belated reply to his wife's question. ‘Yes, I saw the mother. I'm sure in my own mind that she had nothing to do with this.'

Eleanor gasped. She'd heard the radio appeals at lunchtime and felt a quite crushing sympathy for anyone close to the girl. She hadn't even entertained the idea that Lucy Gibson's mother might be involved in some sort of unnatural intrigue to dispose of her daughter, but she knew there had been some bizarre happenings in the last few years. The macabre Fred West and his wife had operated less than twenty miles from here. No doubt these things had to be checked out; no wonder Bert was distressed. She said dully, ‘Is there a man around?'

She tried to keep her voice as neutral as she could, but you couldn't escape two facts. First, the overwhelming probability was that it was a man who had done this, however the seven-year-old girl had been spirited away. Second, there was a higher incidence of crime in homes where only one parent remained. Eleanor had huge respect for the many single mothers who were struggling to give their children the best chances they could, but the statistics said that single-parent children had more chance of being harmed and more chance of becoming criminals themselves than those in two-parent households.

Hook said evenly, ‘There's a dad. He's been gone for a few months. We haven't caught up with him yet, but we will. There's also a new man, a man who's been regularly staying overnight with Anthea Gibson. He hasn't moved in yet, but I think Anthea was hoping that he would. God knows how this will affect the two of them. The girl was on her own with him when she disappeared. Lucy, she's called.' He felt the same need to assert the girl's identity and continued existence as John Lambert had done earlier in the day.

‘You'll have seen this man.'

She didn't voice her queries about him, but Bert understood and answered. ‘John Lambert gave him quite a grilling this afternoon. You've got to in cases like this. You've no time to spare.' He smiled grimly. When there was a body, however brutal the death, there was not quite the same urgency. When a child went missing, you were trying to anticipate and prevent death. As well as other things, which, for a terrified little girl, might be worse than death. ‘The man's called Matthew Boyd. I'm sure the papers will have got hold of the name by tomorrow morning, though not from us. He answered all our questions satisfactorily enough, as far as we could tell. But to my mind there's something not quite right about him. That doesn't necessarily mean he had anything to do with this crime, though.' Hook asserted the caveat of the fair-minded man, even when speaking to his wife.

Bert smiled grimly as he heard the noise of his sons' voices raised in argument upstairs. He was thinking of Jack, his elder son, who always teased him by asking in an American drawl if he was ‘playing a hunch'. A hunch is what he'd just voiced, he supposed, when he'd said he sensed something not quite right about Matthew Boyd.

But when the boys came down with appetites honed for the evening meal, there was no teasing from Jack. He said without preamble to his father, ‘This kid who's disappeared – was it from the fairground yesterday? That's what they seemed to be saying when we saw the bit on the telly about it.'

Hook nodded. ‘At around half past seven or a little later yesterday evening. It was a seven-year-old girl called Lucy Gibson.' At that moment Bert was very glad that Jack and Luke were male and aged fourteen and twelve. ‘Why do you ask?'

Jack was at that annoying age when he was still a child but very much wanting to seem an adult. That meant that he said nothing now. Instead, he nodded sagely, produced his mobile phone and tapped the buttons that brought up his best friend from school. He then sank his head towards his chest, covered the mouthpiece and conversed in low tones. His own side of the conversation seemed to be mostly a series of questions.

Then he turned back to his brother and his parents, who were waiting to begin their meal. His face was grave and urgent with his news. ‘That was Darren. He told me this at football this morning, but I didn't know then that a kid had disappeared. Darren's kid sister is eleven. One of the guys taking the fares and operating the rides at the fairground tried to molest her yesterday. He stroked her leg and touched her up. She was scared stiff. She ran away as fast as she could, Darren says.'

There is no shortage of civilian volunteers when a child disappears, especially in small rural communities. The problem for the police is usually how to marshal these men and women most effectively. There was little difficulty in doing that after Lucy Gibson had vanished.

The rag doll that she had been clutching when last seen on the roundabout had been discovered in the woods to the west of the common. That suggested that she had been led, carried or dragged away from the fairground on that route. It wasn't a large area, and uniformed police officers and the civilians from the SOCO team searched it diligently in the middle hours of Sunday. Little else of note was found, though much was collected and documented in case it might be of use. A stray glove, a worn and filthy cap, several cigarette ends and various other more disgusting items had been lifted between finger and thumb and bagged, against the unlikely possibility that one or more of them might provide a match with an eventual suspect. The overwhelming probability was that all of this detritus would be irrelevant to the case, but if there was even a faint possibility that one or more of them might become labelled exhibits in a serious crime case in the Crown Court, they had to be kept.