Cry of the Children (28 page)

He was glad now that he had come out. But his head was teeming still with conflicting thoughts as he drove slowly back to the room and his bed. He would need to sort things out tomorrow, but he couldn't think about that now.

Dennis Robson had made his plans for the evening far more methodically than Dean Gibson.

He needed to leave the bungalow at twenty to eight, he had decided. He waited impatiently whilst the clock hands crept slowly towards that time. He had put a suit on for this meeting, but it scarcely mattered what you wore, as long as you paid your dues. A low profile was the order of the day, but Dennis wasn't quite sure how you dressed to secure that. He'd always worn a suit when he'd gone to the Masons, but it was a long time now since he'd ceased to do that.

He'd put the car in the garage, but the bonnet as he brushed past it was still quite warm from when he'd used it earlier. He wasn't going to think about his earlier journey in the Audi now; he wanted to give his full concentration to the evening ahead. There seemed to be more police about than usual as he drove through Oldford. Perhaps he was extra-sensitive since he'd been the subject of their enquiries. He checked his mirror repeatedly as he drove out of the town and turned south, but there was no sign of any vehicle pursuing him.

The car was warm and the roads quiet. He opened up the Audi's two-litre engine and tried hard to enjoy the drive. He felt the old stirrings of conscience, the conflicts within him, which he had felt a thousand times before. But he thrust them away and concentrated on the road, with a quiet, unconscious smile lifting the edges of his mouth. Tonight was about excitement, and for the moment eager anticipation thrust down all other feelings.

He turned off the A38 when he saw the sign for Thornbury, his elation rising with each passing mile. There was a car behind him now; he watched the headlights on his tail for four miles, whilst the seed of alarm germinated and grew in his head. Then, when he was within a couple of miles of his destination, it turned quietly left and disappeared into the darkness down a narrow lane. Dennis breathed more easily again, smiling mockingly at himself for creating fear out of a harmless coincidence. The clock on his dashboard told him that he would arrive at the very minute he had planned, and such exactitude restored his feeling of well-being.

There were no instructions about caution in parking and approach. He liked that. At the gatherings he had formerly attended in a Bristol suburb, they had been instructed to park at least two hundred yards away and walk to the venue, keeping a wary eye behind them for any evidence of unwelcome attention. He much preferred this venue and these companions, where you drove right to the house and parked openly. That was what a gathering of friends meeting for an evening of intelligent conversation might well do.

He had his story ready, as instructed. They were opera buffs, meeting to enjoy a recording of Renée Fleming's incomparable
La Traviata
at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. Dennis Robson had no difficulty with that explanation; it was an evening he might well have genuinely enjoyed, in a different place and with a different set of friends.

He had no difficulty finding the place; this was his third visit. It was a big, modern house, slightly elevated from its nearest neighbours, which were over a hundred yards away. It had a view of the Severn estuary and the motorway bridge in daylight, but none of that was visible now.
Valley View
, it said on the sign by the gate: each time he came, Dennis was amused by the uninventiveness of the name. A residence like this deserved a little more originality, he thought, though tonight they would all be glad of its dullness. It was better to be conventional, if you didn't want to excite attention.

There were three other cars parked here already, and the lights of a couple of others visible on the lane behind him. There was a convivial atmosphere inside the house. There was a judge here, and the leader of a town council, and at least two captains of industry, but anonymity was the order of the day. He passed through a well-lit hall and was offered white or red wine at the door to the big lounge. His £40 fee was pocketed without even being checked; it was rather as if you were attending one of the charitable functions he had often patronized in the past. There was a buzz of conversation, about politics, about sport, about music, about books, about the latest unwitting cabaret perpetrated by the London mayor. By tacit agreement, none of them talked about why they were here, even though there were most of the trimmings of a civilized gathering.

Dennis had been in the house for twenty minutes when the host tapped the table gently and introduced their ‘speaker for the evening', without troubling to name him. Dennis hadn't even known there was to be anything so formal. A man who reminded him of Mephistopheles in
Faust
stepped forward
and began to talk about the bond that united them and had brought them together tonight. He had a well-trimmed moustache which curled up sharply at the ends, plentiful slicked-back hair, and dark eyes which flashed with humour; he was entirely confident and gave every evidence of being beguiled by his own intelligence.

The man's theme was that although they had necessarily to recognize that their tastes and activities were at present against the law, and had thus to be indulged in secret, they should privately feel no shame. They were merely a little in advance of their time. Enlightenment among the leaden public must surely follow eventually. Homosexuality had been against the law fifty years earlier; those with a taste for it had needed to be as secret as they were being tonight. But now homosexuals were not persecuted; indeed, it sometimes seemed to him that they were positively encouraged. He paused for laughter and the nodding of heads.

And so it would be with people who loved children, in due course. For they should remember that the word paedophilia meant, in fact, the love of children, just as Anglophilia was the love of England and Francophilia indicated a love of France. (Dennis smiled a little patronizingly as he recognized the argument he had put to those police plodders three days ago.) A recent court case had proved that sadomasochism was nowadays recognized as a private matter, a sexual preference, which should be tolerated, not persecuted. In fifty years, perhaps sooner, their own sexual preferences would be recognized as just one more aspect of the infinite variety of human instincts.

Mephistopheles received the applause he expected and demanded, which he acknowledged with a practised smile. It was a little like a politician addressing a party conference, Dennis Robson thought ungenerously. When you were speaking to those of a like mind, you had no need to convert. He put his hands together politely with the others, though a small, persistent voice within him said that children were not capable as adults were of deciding what they thought about sex with grown men and women, or any of the other things that he and the men around him found desirable in them.

Despite his theme, Dennis decided he didn't like Mephistopheles, and he took care to keep his distance when others were fraternizing with him after his address. Perhaps, he thought, it was the very fact that his perversion was illegal, as well as outrageous to the majority of people around him from day to day, that gave it an edge. Dennis had never really rejected that word ‘perversion'; he prided himself on seeing other people's point of view, even when it ran so counter to his own.

Soon they were setting down their glasses and moving downstairs, into the cinema room that occupied the whole of this basement floor. Dennis sat alongside but a little way from his nearest companions, leaving a vacant seat between them, as if intimacy was dangerous, even with these men who had the same sexual preferences as he had.

They were all men. Mephistopheles had stressed in his talk how many women were now involved in paedophilia, how some females were more excited and extreme than their male counterparts, as if that brought a sort of legitimacy to what they practised. Dennis hoped this would not become a mixed group; he thought he would have to withdraw from it if it did.

He could feel the excitement rising around him as the images flashed up on the big screen, as the children removed their clothes and the shots became more brazen and the angles more daring. He was sure that the breathing of the others in the room became more uneven, as his did. Why were they abnormal? Why didn't everyone react like this to pictures of naked children? It was easy to think in a gathering like this that your tastes were conventional, that it was the wider world around you that was out of step.

There was a hush when the show finished and the lights were put on. The host stood briefly before them and gave them the details of the websites they were to access on their computers for the illegal materials they wanted. Each man in the room made careful notes, as if they were gardeners recording where they could locate favourite plants and specialist growers. And now everyone was suddenly anxious to be away. The show was over, the information recorded, and there was no need to preserve the rituals and illusions of a normal social gathering.

Dennis Robson threaded his way carefully along the minor roads in the darkness. It wouldn't do to end up in a ditch and have the police asking what had been the purpose of his journey tonight. Especially not in view of the things that were presently going on in and around Oldford. Mephistopheles was immediately behind him in his Jaguar; Dennis imagined him cursing the excessive caution of the man in the Audi in front of him and drove even more carefully. He was glad to see the Jaguar swinging south towards Bristol as he turned north up the A38.

He didn't need to drive right into Gloucester. He turned west as he approached the ancient city and was within ten miles of home when he twisted suddenly into a lay-by, switched off his engine and put his head in his hands. Dennis hadn't known he was going to do this. He had been beset by one of the sudden, overpowering bursts of remorse that overtook him from time to time. He supposed it was guilt, but he wasn't really sure what it was, except that it made him despise himself more completely than he would have thought possible.

It was at moments like this that he ached to be normal, to have those conventional reactions to events and to people that he affected to deride. For a few minutes of searing clarity, he saw himself as the creature that others reviled and he loathed what he saw. The frame within the elegant suit was wracked by a series of violent sobs. Then he lifted his head and stared ahead into the darkness, ignoring the headlights from the other direction as they approached and passed him. Grief was an indulgence. He wasn't going to change at seventy, was he? He drove home and parked expertly within two inches of the back wall of his garage, as if such precision could make him a part of the normal world.

Then Dennis Robson went indoors to the welcoming warmth of his bungalow, where he busied himself with a series of small domestic tasks. He didn't wish to settle into his favourite armchair; that would allow him time for reflection. He took his hot drink to bed with him, tried unsuccessfully to read, downed the pill that he nowadays needed to get to sleep.

As he slipped into unconsciousness, he thought of the small, perfect limbs of Lucy Gibson and of what the morrow might hold in store for himself and for Raymond Barrington.

Big Julie Foster would have been outraged by Dennis Robson's activities on this Thursday evening. Her own evening could scarcely have been more different.

She had come back to work to do two hours' overtime, from eight until ten. Her male supervisor said, ‘You look tired, Julie. It's only two hours since you left here. Are you sure you're fit to do this?'

Julie wasn't used to such consideration. She immediately suspected that she was going to be denied the overtime if she gave the man an excuse to do that. And she wanted this little slot. It would buy her twenty litres of petrol for the Fiesta, which she needed. She liked overtime. The work was no harder – sometimes easier, with fewer people around to bother you. She didn't really understand why you got more money for it, but she was very glad you did. She didn't really know what unsocial hours meant, either, but that was fine by her if they meant more money.

There was often overtime on a Thursday. The manager at her branch of Tesco's liked to have everything ready for the weekend. Friday and Saturday were the two busiest days of the week; that was when the store took most at the tills. The supervisor quite liked having Julie in for a stint like this. She never complained, even when she was tired, and she would turn her hand to anything he asked her to do. And she was as strong as any man when it came to carrying cartons and stacking shelves.

Julie worked steadily, anxious to disprove the supervisor's view that she looked tired. Tonight's work was mostly replenishing shelves, so that they were fully stocked for the Friday and Saturday rush. Julie was amazed by how many tins of baked beans had disappeared since she had left the store at six. There was a special offer on – four tins for a pound – so they were flying off the shelves. She liked that expression – ‘flying off the shelves'. It took her back to her childhood and her love of cartoons, where anything could happen and tins might indeed fly off shelves.

Big Julie stacked her trolley repeatedly with boxes of tins and filled the shelves quite expertly. She knew now exactly how many tins of different sizes each shelf division was meant to hold. She worked steadily, dropping into the rhythm of the task she had done so often before, happy to show Mr Burton that she wasn't as tired as he'd thought she was. Swiftly and efficiently, she cleared the place in an aisle where a child had dropped and smashed a jar of jam. She made sure that not the tiniest shard of glass remained, then brought her mop and bucket to perform the final thorough cleansing.

Jason Burton watched her surreptitiously through the half-open door of his office and was smitten with a sudden shaft of sympathy for the willing, ungainly woman who so wanted to please. He waited until she finished her cleaning, then brought the sign with large letters ‘PLEASE TAKE CARE – FLOOR DAMP', which he set at the end of the aisle. As Julie passed him with her mop and bucket, he said, ‘It's quiet now. I'm brewing a cup of tea in my office. Why don't you come in and have one with me?'