Endangering Innocents (10 page)

“Why?”

“I don’t know. I’m not a professional. Not a trained psychologist or teacher. I’m just a classroom assistant. I help. I’m the mumsy one who buttons the coats or sticks an elastoplast on when they fall over in the playground.”

“But why did she shy away from you?”

“I’m only guessing. There were bruises, you know. I did tell the teacher,” she said defensively. “I mentioned it to you. At the christening.”

“Where were the bruises?”

“On her arms, her legs. I thought. I wondered. I thought maybe her dad was slapping her - or something. You’ve met him, Inspector. He’s a …”

Joanna nodded. She didn’t want to think about Huke. Not in connection with Madeline, the child who withdrew to her own world.

“I’d ask her if someone was hurting her. And she’d just stare at me as though I was a fool. As though I should
know
. But I didn’t. Not really. I was simply guessing. She could have just fallen over. I didn’t want to make a fuss. That’s why I asked you for your advice. Much good it did me.”

She picked up a tea towel and made a vague, emblematic attempt to wipe her hands with it before returning to the sink, her shoulders once again drooped. “Don’t make me feel guilty about this, Joanna. I picked up on a problem. I passed it on to the appropriate person. I even
broached the subject to you. What more
could
I have done? What more
should
I have done? I know how long Madeline’s been missing for. I’ve been aware of it every minute since Mrs Wiltshaw came tearing into the classroom.”

Joanna had no easy, mind-salving solution to offer. “Please, Gloria,” she said. “I need to know a bit more.”

Gloria half turned. “What more? What do you mean?”

“Tell me about that last afternoon. Good Friday. The children were excited.”

“Oh yes.” Gloria Parsons’ face changed. Some of her enthusiasm for the job became evident. “Oh yes. They had little baskets of chocolate Easter eggs and cut out chickens. Easter lambs. Although that didn’t seem quite right. But we didn’t want them to forget how sweet animals in the fields looked. And they will be back.”

It was the act of faith that echoed all around the Moorlands. She continued. “They’d coloured in some daffodils. All colours of yellow. And bright orange. They were so excited. We’d read them a story about Jesus on the Cross and explained about Easter.”

Joanna smiled. It brought back far-off memories of her own childhood.

Gloria’s eyes warmed too. “Easter
is
Christianity. Most of the children in the class love the story of Easter. Even the two little Muslims. And the twins from the Chinese takeaway.”

Joanna tried to steer the classroom assistant back to the missing child. “What about Madeline?”

“She was much quieter than the other children. She always was. But she loved colouring. She had a great big set of felt tipped pens in a clear plastic case. Every colour in the rainbow. Some of the other children borrowed them. Particularly the orange. But they did give them
back. She’d coloured in an Easter egg too. Very carefully. With some purple stars on. It was so pretty.”

“Stars?” It seemed an incongruous design for an Easter Egg.

It hadn’t occurred to the teacher. “Oh yes. She asked me to draw them in - using a plastic stencil. She said it was a magic Easter egg. That she could make it disappear. No,” Gloria remembered. “No. She said
he
could make it disappear.”

“He?”

“Yes. He.”

“Her father?”

“I’m sorry. I don’t know. I didn’t ask.”

There was a moment’s silence between them as they both toyed with the implications if she
had
asked. Joanna broke the silence. “And then?”

“The children were filing out towards the cloakroom. Lots of them wanted their coats buttoning up. Help. It was the usual happy pandemonium.”

“And Madeline?” Joanna felt that she needed to keep steering Gloria Parsons back towards the child. Like a child herself she was too easily distracted.

“I didn’t see Madeline again. I didn’t see her in the cloakroom.”

Yet her grey puffer jacket had not been hanging up when the police had arrived.

“Was she the sort of child who tended to run out when the cars gathered - maybe before her mother or stepfather had arrived?”

“No. Not really. If anything she seemed a bit reluctant to go out at all. She seemed to hang back. I think it made Mr Huke cross sometimes. I’d see him stamping across the playground - and sometimes …

“. . sometimes I’d push her through the door.”

“But not that day?”

“Not that day.”

“She’d gone.”

“But not met up with her parents.”

Gloria Parsons shook her head. “She liked playing hide and seek. “

“Hide and seek?” For the first fact the assistant had offered, it seemed a strange one.

“A few times - when she didn’t want to go out in the playground. If it was raining or very cold she’d hide.”

“Where?”

“Anywhere. In cupboards, under the tables, behind the bookshelves.”

“You should have told me earlier.”

But Gloria Parsons stood her ground. “It didn’t seem that that was what had happened,” she said with dignity.

Ha ha hee. You can’t find me.

Vicky Salisbury, in contrast to her assistant’s middle-class abode, lived in a flat in Leek, by herself. And this time Joanna took Mike along with her. Instinctively she knew that Vicky Salisbury would respond to the burly police officer. The teacher opened the door immediately and gave Joanna and Mike one of her hesitant, shy smiles. “Have you found her?”

Joanna shook her head. “I’m sorry,” she said.

She asked the questions in the same way and quickly realised that Vicky had a similar perspective to Gloria Parsons. She looked thoughtful when Joanna asked her to describe the little girl.

“I found her - strange,” she said eventually. “A challenge. She didn’t mix with the others but stayed on her
own. We learn a lot about children in teaching practice but nothing prepared me for Madeline. I couldn’t seem to reach her. She deliberately shut me out. If I praised her she froze. If I touched her she flinched. Five-year olds are quite a handful. She wasn’t. And yet I wished she was.” She tried a smile out on Joanna. “I daresay you know what five-year-olds are like.”

“No.”

“Oh.” Victoria Salisbury flushed at the abruptness of Joanna’s reply.

“Well they are,” she finished lamely. “By the time I get home I’m shattered.”

“Mrs Parson mentioned that Madeline had some bruising. On her arms and legs.”

“I never saw any.”

“Did you pass her observation on?”

“Oh yes. It’s part of the agreed procedure.”

Joanna bit back the tight retort that that was all right then. “And was any action taken?”

“Not that I know of. I mean - I promised to keep an eye on Madeline and let the correct channels know if there was any cause for concern.”

Her face was young, unlined. She had little experience of life. “But her disappearance was nothing to do with her stepfather, was it?”

“It doesn’t look like it.”

“So it was nothing to do with anything I did or didn’t do?”

“And when did you last see Madeline?”

“Oh - I don’t know. The class was milling about. The kids were playing up. Last day before the Easter holidays. And that bloody Sam doing his aeroplane impersonations. Enough to … I didn’t see her in the classroom during all the disturbance.”

Mike asked the next question with all the gentility and tact of a parent. “Did you actually see her with her coat on leaving the school?”

Vicky Salisbury gave Mike a warm, wide, welcoming smile. “No, Sergeant. I did not.”

Joanna was watching the teacher carefully. She was holding something back. There was an air of embarrassment around her. “Is there anything else, Vicky?”

The girl nodded and the two detectives waited.

In her own time.

“I only remembered it later,” she said. “Good Friday, the children were colouring in some pictures. I asked her who she was going to give it to and she said, the magic man.”

Her eyes were filling with tears. “I - she looked so confident, so sure. I didn’t know who she meant.”

Mike and Joanna exchanged glances.

They knew.

Sunday afternoon.

They took four officers with them to search the school again, this time Joanna and Mike briefing them very precisely as a result of talking to Gloria Parsons.

“No one saw the little girl actually leave the school,” Joanna said. “It’s possible that she never did.”

Mike objected. “She can’t have been there when we were…”

She turned on him then. “I know it’s an awful thought. I don’t particularly want to face it myself, Mike. But if she was still there - hiding, then I want us to know. I only want her found. Her mother told us she hid under the bed. What we should have asked was why? What was she hiding from? We see her now not as an average five-year-old girl but as a little girl who was very anxious not to be noticed. Who hid. Who didn’t want to be seen. That changes things, Mike. One would assume a little girl who was lost would want to be found. But what if she didn’t? That’s why I want Horton School to be searched from top to bottom for any sign of Madeline Wiltshaw.”

Mike’s face turned dull red. “We already did that, Joanna.”

“We took a cursory look. OK. I agree. But we have new facts now. We called. Within half an hour of her last being seen we were shouting through the school. We assumed that if she was able she would have called back. But there’s something strange about this little girl. She is not like other children of the same age.”

Mike opened his mouth to speak then shut it again
with a great sigh. “I know she isn’t there,” he said, obstinacy making his eyes gleam.

“I don’t know whether I hope she is or not,” Joanna said. “But we have to find her. And I guess I’d better find out how Baldwin is.”

Korpanski grunted.

She rang the hospital using her mobile phone and got the news that Baldwin was a lot better. It was good news and bad news. He was safe in hospital on two counts. One, she knew just where he was and two, she didn’t think even Huke and his band of trusty mates would go for Baldwin while he was in hospital.

Once he was out anything might happen.

The school was quiet now, the main centre of activity the makeshift Incident Room which was gleaming with computer screens.

Their footsteps echoed along the wooden floor of the corridor. Ghosts of the children reached out to them through their pictures.
Daniel Pascoe, Sheelagh Bradshaw, Lorna Fankers, Cathy Platt, Sam Owen, Madeline Wiltshaw
. The names already beginning to grow familiar

Joanna stopped in front of Madeline’s Easter egg. It was, as the teacher had said, a mass of purple, red and orange stars carefully coloured-in in felt-tip pen. Looking closely Joanna could see that the teacher had pencilled in Madeline’s name for the child to imitate on top. The heavier line was wavy and at times not precisely over the pencilled in letters. And Madeline had added little touches of her own - freehand - without the teacher’s guidelines. Something that looked very like a magician’s wand tapped the top of the egg. And a few of the purple stars span from its top, their shapes obviously drawn freehand. Joanna had drawn
inspiration before from pictures and pieces of music, from photographs and pottery figures. And this picture, in its simple crudity, had a message all of its own. The trouble was it was one she did not have the insight to read.

They passed on.

Sunshine slanted in through the dusty windows to dance around empty desks, play with tiny chairs, books, playmats, pictures.

“We’ll start with Madeline’s classroom.”

It was small and square, crowded with furniture. Formica topped tables instead of single desks.

A plastic slide stood in the corner, two large buckets of huge Lego either side. There were pictures of a man riding a camel, a sunglassed woman sitting in a Porsche, some climbers on a craggy, Alpine mountain, a still from the Tour de France all underneath the general heading, Travel.

There was nowhere to hide in the classroom except behind a movable bookshelf. Two seconds and they knew for sure Madeline was not here.

They moved to the next classroom, a similar one except the times tables were pinned up on the walls. Older children. And here again there was nowhere to hide except in one large cupboard with a bolt very high up on the wall. And there was nothing here either except some rolled up wall charts and boxes of paper. A few text books and some pencils. It was a shallow cupboard, no more than a couple of feet deep and shelved from top to bottom. No child, not even one as small as Madeline could have hidden here.

The next classroom was locked but luckily Sally Thompson had left them a bunch of keys. And when
they opened the door they saw why this classroom was kept locked. Inside were computers.

They searched the two remaining classrooms quite quickly and realised Madeline could not be here. The school was single storey. The headmistress’s office and staff room yielded nothing else. And neither did the kitchens, the cloakrooms or the toilets. Madeline was not here. They walked back along the long corridor, Joanna sensing Mike’s jubilance. He had been right, she had been wrong.

But halfway along the corridor the tables turned.

The window-sills were wide. Wide enough for a small foot to fit front to back. Maybe it was the way the sunshine played around the dust and the absence of dust in a footshape.

“Oh, Mike,” Joanna said softly. “Mike.”

He looked at her. Then stood behind her so he caught the same shape picked out by sunshine, the paintwork more shiny where it lacked dust. “That wasn’t there,” he said. “It wasn’t. We searched the entire building. Do you really think a gang of officers hunting for a little girl would have missed something as obvious as a footprint?”

Joanna chewed her lip. He was right. She wasn’t particularly sharp-eyed. It wasn’t difficult to spot. While the sun shone. But Friday afternoon …

“Somehow we’ve made a mess of this,” she said.

And for once Korpanski had no words to cheer her.

In the same moment they both looked up. There was a small trapdoor into the roof-space. Too tiny for official access. Knowing the footprint must be preserved for the SOCOs to lift it they spent valuable minutes locating a ladder and a flashlight. Joanna ascended first. And as she climbed the rungs she acknowledged that she was
frightened of what she would find. Ifs skidded through her brain and collided with her reason. If Madeline was here, had been here all along her head would roll - her career tumble - and rightly too - for incompetence.

If the child was up here she faced humiliation. She flashed the light around. And saw nothing but rafters. The attic was boarded for the short space between purlings and roof supports. But it was quickly apparent that no one was here. She climbed right into the roof-space, flicked on an electric switch. And knew. Madeline had been here.

Hee hee hee You can’t catch me. You can’t find me - ever.

And then she was relieved that they had taken Baldwin straight into custody. That then he had been watched and that the child couldn’t have run to him.

Most of the time. Not quite all of the time. Huke had got to him.

These days most SOCOs were civilians - not police officers. But Barraclough had been a SOCO when most of the young PCs had been sucking lollipops. Joanna would have no other particularly on such a sensitive and potentially destructive case. If there was a hair of Madeline Wiltshaw’s head in this attic Barraclough would find it. And preserve it as legal evidence.

She didn’t want some cost-conscious civvy up here. She wanted “Barra”, whose talent at finding trace evidence was unsurpassed.

He took some locating. It was a Sunday afternoon but once he had absorbed Joanna’s terse request you could almost hear him crank back into gear.

He lifted the footprint with the care of a surgeon carving away the years for a facelift. He found some fingerprints on the upper window frame - and part of a second
small footprint on the bar of the skylight. Within an hour his head was sticking out of the trapdoor, plastic specimen bags dangling from his fingers.

Containing hair for the comparison microscope. “Didn’t you say your little girly had very dark, straight hair to her chin?”

She nodded, her eyes fixed on the contents of the bag. It wasn’t much in the way of trace evidence. But then Barraclough produced the second bag. And Joanna knew. Because it contained one felt-tip colouring pen. Bright green.

“Well, someone’s been here, Jo.”

“When?”

He started descending the ladder. “Come on, Jo,” he said. “You know I can’t even guess at that. We don’t even know that she’s been here. Not until we’ve got a match on the hair or lifted a fingerprint from the pen. And we certainly don’t know that Madeline’s been here since she’s been reported missing.”

“The footprint,” she said.

“Be careful,” he warned. “Be very careful. This is a big find. Although didn’t you say the teachers reported she was reluctant to go outside in cold weather? This might have been her hidey-hole. After all - it’s just out of view of both classrooms, isn’t it? And I bet a little imp like that would easily get up there, using the windowsill and then the pelmet to yank herself up. So even if we do get a match it’s probable that she was here before Friday.”

“Let’s hope so,” she said. “Otherwise my head is lying beneath Madame Guillotine.”

She and Mike walked back along the corridor to study the children’s pictures again. Plenty of red, orange and purple, but no green at all.

It wasn’t exactly evidence but it gave her the tiniest fragment of hope.

She was beginning to understand the child, to know her. And knowing her meant she could anticipate her actions. Madeline was a little girl who loved to hide. Who loved secrets. Who
kept
secrets.

She took a deep breath in and held it. “I think I’d better have a word with Colclough.

It was Easter Sunday afternoon. And, as befitted his senior rank, Chief Superintendent Arthur Colclough was to be found at home - letting his dinner go down. As Mrs Colclough went to fetch him she could picture the aged bulldog, whiskers trembling, as she related her story.

There was a moment’s awful silence down the phone. Then a shocked expletive followed by a swift apology. “Piercy,” he barked. “Where is the little girl now?”

“I don’t know, Sir. Except that this isn’t a normal case of a little girl being abducted. She was hiding, Sir.”

“Well find her.”

“Yes, Sir.”

“And report to me first thing Tuesday morning.”

“Yes, Sir.”

A quick harrumph then. “And I’ll be on the end of the telephone all weekend.”

“Yes, Sir.”

Korpanski’s brows met in the middle. “It’s all right for him telling us to find her. Where do we start looking?”

“I don’t know. I mean - the whole thing’s turned on its head, isn’t it? She could be wandering anywhere.”

“And the damned farmers aren’t going to let us roam all over their land.”

She felt vicious then. “They’re just going to have to let us. They’ve no choice.”

They had a few more hours of daylight and Joanna gathered up the entire investigating force and told them their findings. Explained to them that Madeline Wiltshaw had been a child who would hide. From them. That there was even a possibility that she had remained in the school after the other children had gone and after she had been reported missing. She watched them all sag as they realised that there was a chance they could have found her alive. The major investigation then would have been minor - a simple problem of a child who didn’t want to go home. Work for the Social Services - not the police force. And they would have been able to spend Easter with their families. She understood all their emotions, their puzzlement, their frustration, their disappointment - and lastly their determination.

It felt as though they were being outwitted by a five-year-old child.

Even more than before Joanna was searingly aware of the personality of the little girl they were all so intent on finding. She had hidden. Why?

Because she hadn’t wanted to go home with her stepfather.

Why? Easy to answer - because he was a violent bully and she was scared of him.

But the question that was not so easy to answer was where was Madeline now?

What had she intended to do on Friday?

Had she had a definite plan or had she thought she might simply wander?

The answer came back as certain as before. A definite plan?
To meet someone.

And strong in that line fell Mr Baldwin, children’s
magician. Parties a speciality. Magic a talent. He could make eggs vanish, people disappear. Produce flowers from inside your ear, crayons and stars. He was a clown, a wizard, a person who could change things. She had coloured in her picture to give to him.

Joanna stood very still, an icy wind stroking the back of her neck. It was not possible. A breathy voice that seemed to come from inside her whispered. So soft she could have imagined it.

He can make me invisible. And then no one can see me. No one can hurt me. I am here. I am there. But nobody knows.

She felt her jaw ache with tension.

How had Baldwin done it?

As though the surround was an orange she divided the area immediately around Horton into pointed segments, teams of officers detailed to scour these segments, to leave no square millimetre of ground unexplored. No blade of grass undisturbed.

“You’ll have to take precautions against foot and mouth,” she warned. “Wear disposable suits when you enter any farmland. Take full advantage of the buckets of disinfectant and let the farmers
see
you douse your boots.
Don’t
take vehicles on and off farmland. And if you do, get the farmers to spray your wheelarches with disinfectant. Drive slowly over the straw mats. If you enter farm buildings do so with the attendant farmers. Any problems use your phones. The last thing we want is for one of you to be blasted with lead shot by some farmer overprotective of his animals.”