Cry of the Children (26 page)

The failure of that exploration hung like a ball and chain upon this one. The police officers and the few members of the public who searched outwards from the centre of Oldford for any trace of Raymond Barrington were weighed down by the knowledge that the first victim was dead. It was inconceivable that the person who had seized this eight-year-old boy was not the same individual who had taken and murdered the seven-year-old girl four nights earlier. The searchers worked diligently and urgently, but they could not thrust away the thought that the boy, like the girl, might have been killed within an hour or two of his abduction.

Inspector Cameron, the same uniformed man who had handled the unsuccessful hunt for Lucy Gibson, deployed his depleted army of searchers systematically around the area. He would not have thought there were so many garden sheds in such a small town, but land had been cheap when the older properties in Oldford had been erected and most of them had substantial plots. The scrutineers liberated two cats which had mysteriously got themselves locked in sheds; they also heard numerous rodents scrambling away from them as they opened the doors of the less-frequented sheds. The more experienced of the searchers tied string around the ankles of their trousers as a precaution against rodent intrusion. Mice fled to some very strange places when they were alarmed.

The searchers found no trace of a small boy.

They worked outwards from the spot where Raymond Barrington had been snatched. They found no trace of him in the outbuildings of Oldford. At four p.m., Cameron dispatched six of his more experienced officers to examine the banks of the Wye at the nearest points to the town, with instructions to search for any sign of recent access to the river. They knew exactly what they were looking for as they conducted their melancholy mission: any traces at the edge of the quietly flowing river that would indicate that a second child's body had been recently consigned to its waters.

They found none. That could not be considered conclusive. Unless they found some distinctive article dropped by the side of the river – a possession or an article of clothing, perhaps – they could not be certain that either Raymond or the person who had seized him had been here. Negative results were good in this case: they meant the boy might still be alive. But finding nothing, as they moved along the bank of the river with the light dying in the west, felt nonetheless like sad and unrewarding work.

There were still working barns with hay in them at a couple of the farms. There were also disused barns in various stages of decay. These seemed the likeliest sources of a find, and Cameron instructed his team in muted tones. ‘You need to search every nook and cranny of these places. Bear in mind that we don't know definitely what we're looking for. We all want a live and healthy boy, but we have to bear in mind that what we eventually discover might be a body. If that's the case, it's important that we find it, even if we can no longer help the boy. It's our job to get the mad sod who did this, whether male or female, before any other kids are put at risk. The body might be hidden, so make sure you search properly. I don't want anything turning up later in a building we're supposed to have searched.'

The majority of his team on this joyless day were professional police personnel. But it was a new experience for many of them. Young men and women, many of them with children of their own, found themselves beset by a variety of emotions as they moved apprehensively into the unknown. They all knew the rules; part of professionalism was to be as detached and unemotional as possible. But they were also human. When a child who had offended no one was in danger or dead, they couldn't proceed with the brisk efficiency of automatons.

They wanted to find things. There was even a small part of each of them that wanted them to be the one who discovered whatever there was to be found. There must be kudos in it, even if there must also be a huge amount of luck. But it couldn't do you any harm to discover key evidence in the most high-profile case that had come to Oldford in many years. But each man and each woman wanted it to be a positive finding, to find the boy Raymond Barrington alive and well and return him to the tearful Mrs Allen at Bartram House.

The British police service is not noticeably religious. The things officers see, the victims they find and the people they have to deal with militate against a belief in any beneficent higher agency. But as the light died on that Thursday in late October, many silent prayers were uttered by those not normally given to such supplications.

A search of this kind is a strange business. For much of the time, you are content to find nothing, consoled by the thought that at least you have discovered nothing dire and that the worst may still be avoided. Yet confirming that a series of huts and more substantial buildings are empty is a bleak experience. You want something more positive. Best of all, you want an excited, laughing boy falling into your arms and being carried back triumphantly to salvation.

Inspector Cameron called off the search for the day at seven thirty. The light was gone and the team was exhausted. They could have carried on with torches, but that wouldn't be either effective or sensible. He ticked off all the buildings they had investigated on his large-scale map of the area. They would recommence their search on the morrow – assuming always that there was not bad news from some source to make further investigation unnecessary.

Cameron paused at the bridge below Ross-on-Wye on his way home. He knew he would see nothing there, but some superstition made him stop and look at this long stretch of what many considered England's most beautiful river. The Wye flowed black and silent beneath him as he leant on the parapet of the bridge, its waters concealing who knew what. A crescent moon was already low in the sky, conspiring with the last glimmering of daylight to show him the silent eddies of the dark waters as they moved beneath him. It was a couple of miles south of here that the body of Lucy Gibson had been discovered. Cameron wondered what those dark, slow-moving waters concealed. Beauty became sinister when it was overlaid with human behaviour like this.

It was a little over twenty-four hours since Raymond Barrington had been snatched on his way home from cubs. No trace of him had been found. Every police officer knew what that suggested.

D
I Rushton thought he had never seen Detective Superintendent Lambert looking so old. Chris had just recorded on his computer the information that the search for Raymond Barrington had been abandoned for the day at seven thirty-three p.m. It was what they had expected, but a blow nevertheless to the three senior men at Oldford CID who were reviewing progress, or the lack of it.

Rushton looked at the faces of the two older men and voiced the thought that none of them wished to contemplate. ‘Do we think the lad's still alive?'

There was a long pause – this was the moment when Chris thought how grey, gaunt and tortured the long face of John Lambert looked. But it was the chief who said, ‘I think the boy's still alive, somewhere. I'm assuming for the moment that it's one of our five suspects who took him. We've seen them all; to my mind, none of them is behaving like someone who has just murdered a second child. I might be wrong, because I'm on ground I've never trodden before; we all are.'

It was DS Hook who voiced the second appalling thought that lay darkly behind everything they were doing. ‘What are the possibilities that these crimes are the work of someone else entirely? Perhaps someone who might be among the fifty-odd people seen by the team, but not thought worth further follow-up? Is there perhaps someone who presented an alibi for the Lucy Gibson snatch, which was accepted at face value when it shouldn't have been?'

‘Thanks, Bert!' Lambert's weary face produced a mirthless grin. ‘You're quite right to raise the question. We can't afford to neglect any possibility in this situation. What do you think, Chris?'

Rushton frowned. Hook had raised the query he'd been putting to himself all day. Every CID man is wracked by the knowledge that in some previous high-profile investigations, such as the one conducted into the multiple murders of the Yorkshire Ripper, Peter Sutcliffe, crass mistakes had been made. Obvious lines of enquiry had been ignored. Sutcliffe himself had been missed when he should have been picked up, with the result that his later victims had been needlessly killed. Chris said, ‘I've been over things today. I couldn't find other possibilities. In some cases, we're dependent upon the perceptiveness of the men and women doing the questioning, but there have been at least two officers involved with every person we have cleared from further questioning.'

Lambert nodded. He and Hook sometimes made fun of Chris Rushton's earnestness and ambition, but the DI was at his best with issues like this. He was confident that Rushton wouldn't have overlooked anything that should have been investigated further, that the officers answering to him wouldn't believe for a moment that they could get away with anything slipshod. He said, ‘We're all on unknown ground with a case like this. For what it's worth, it's still my belief that one of our five killed Lucy Gibson and has taken Raymond Barrington. What I find most difficult is establishing which one might have killed Lucy. Even if we allow that snatching her is the action of someone unbalanced, for a variety of different reasons none of the five seems to me a likely killer. Yet if we're right, one of them surely must be.'

Hook nodded. ‘We've seen them, Chris, and we're baffled. Sometimes experience actually gets in the way of objectivity. When you meet people face to face and probe their personalities, your own prejudices play a part, however much you try to guard against it. In that sense, you're standing outside this. You're logging everything that comes in from all sorts of sources, but you haven't confronted, face to face, the five people we regard as our leading candidates for this. From everything you've recorded, which one would you say is likeliest to be a killer?'

Rushton smiled grimly. ‘If I saw any of these as obvious, it would be my duty to say so and I would have done that by now. If you want my thoughts, I tend to follow the old copper's instincts. I believe in recidivism; those who have offended before are the ones most likely to do it again. I know you don't always like that, Bert, but the statistics support me.'

Hook bridled a little. ‘We're not daft, Chris. We don't ignore previous records. We very often throw them at people when we're questioning them. It's just that we don't wish to close our minds to other possibilities.'

Chris Rushton grinned. It always amused him to find the staid and homely-looking Bert Hook such a dangerous liberal – in police terms, anyway. ‘In my view, your outstanding candidate has to be Gerry Clancey – Rory Burns. Operating under this alias because of a previous conviction for child molestation six years ago in Cork and with a later conviction for violent assault. He's handy with his fists and certainly not averse to violence as a means of resolving his problems. We know he'd already been touching up an eleven-year-old girl on the fair rides on the same day that Lucy Gibson disappeared. He lives by his wits and by his fists, and the fists are sharper than the wits.'

Lambert sighed. ‘It's a fair summary and you make out a persuasive case. We haven't a lot of evidence beyond what you say, but Clancey is probably the one among our five who would cover his tracks most effectively. Let me put the other side of the case. Clancey is a nasty piece of work with a previous record, but perhaps the most sane and clear-sighted about the implications of murder for himself. He knows that killing a child would land him inside for a very long time, and that he'd almost certainly suffer whilst there from other criminals, who dislike child murderers as much as do more law-abiding citizens. Do you see Gerry Clancey volunteering himself for a life sentence?'

Chris pursed his lips. ‘Not volunteering, no. But perhaps he didn't mean to kill Lucy. Perhaps he had a moment of panic and did what he never intended.'

‘That's perfectly possible. It's also possible, perhaps even likely, for the rest of our candidates. It would be much easier for us if one of them was the homicidal maniac who features in lurid fiction and in the more sensational efforts of our popular press. But there's no sign of that. These are emotional crimes for all of us, and we'd probably all prefer Clancey to be our man: he's an aggresive lout and a dangerous individual. But I scarcely need to remind you two that that is a dangerous line of thought unless we have facts to support it.'

It was Chris Rushton's turn to sigh. ‘Point taken. My second favourite for this would be Big Julie Foster.' He glanced at Hook, anticipating some sort of reaction, but there was none. ‘Again, she's got previous. She took a baby seven years ago.'

Now Hook did speak. ‘A little girl, which she looked after perfectly. A baby who, by all accounts, was returned to the negligent parents in better condition than when she left them.'

‘Nevertheless, Julie is of limited intellect and attracted to children. She's a powerfully built woman who might well have taken Lucy and panicked when the girl struck her or tried to get away. Moreover, she's been into Bartram House and talked to the children there. Because she'd been brought up in care herself, the authorities thought that was a good idea. Maybe it wasn't, because when Big Julie decided to take another kid, the home was a natural place for her to turn to.'

Hook shook his head. ‘Big Julie's got limited intelligence, but she likes kids. I can just about see her taking Lucy Gibson, but not harming her.'

Lambert grimaced. ‘We can't presume that, Bert. If we could, Big Julie wouldn't still be in the frame for this. I can't see Julie taking either child with the intention of harming them, but I can see her panicking under pressure. If she did that, who can say what might happen? She's a powerful woman, as Chris says – possibly more powerful than she realizes.'