Wednesday's Child ib-6

by Peter Robinson

  She glanced over the titles. They were mostly works of criminology and law—the essential Archbold’s Criminal Pleading, Evidence & Practice and Glaister’s Medical Jurisprudence and Toxicology in addition to several other technical and forensic texts—but there were also books on history, fishing, cricket, a few novels and Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch’s edition of The Oxford Book of English Verse. What surprised Jenny most was the number of mystery paperbacks: about four feet of them, mostly Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh, Edmund Crispin and Michael Innés.

  “That’s just the overflow,” a voice said behind her, making her jump. “The rest are at home.”

  “I didn’t hear you come in,” Jenny said, putting her hand to her chest. “You startled me.”

  “We coppers are a light-footed lot,” Gristhorpe said, with a twinkle in his baby-blue eyes. “Have to be to catch the villains. Sit down.”

  Jenny sat. “This murder, I couldn’t help thinking … It’s not… ?”

  “No, it’s not, thank God. It’s bad enough, though. We don’t know who the victim is yet. I left Alan at the scene. I decided to stick with the Gemma Scupham case and let him handle the murder.”

  Jenny had never felt entirely at ease with Superintendent Gristhorpe, but she didn’t know why. He seemed very much his own man—self-contained, strong, determined—and he projected a solid, comforting presence. But something made her feel awkward. Perhaps, she speculated, it was the underlying sense of isolation she sensed, the fortress he seemed to have built around his feelings. She knew about his wife’s death from cancer several years ago, and guessed that perhaps a part of him had died with her. Susan Gay, she remembered, had said that she also felt uncomfortable with him, yet he had a reputation as a kind and compassionate man.

  His physical presence was difficult to ignore, too. He was a big man—bulky, but not fat—with bushy eyebrows and an unruly thatch of grey hair. With his reddish, pock-marked complexion and the slightly hooked nose, he was very much the dalesman, she thought, if indeed there was such a creature, weathered and moulded by the landscape.

  “I did a bit of preliminary research last night,” Jenny began. “I can probably give you a capsule version of the paedophile types.”

  Gristhorpe nodded. As she spoke, Jenny somehow felt that he probably knew more than she did about the subject. After all, some of his books dealt with criminal psychology and forensic psychiatry, and he was reputed to be well read. But she didn’t feel he was simply being polite when he let her speak. No, he was listening all right, listening for something he might not have come across or thought of himself. Watching her carefully with those deceptively innocent eyes.

  She balanced her black-rimmed reading-glasses on her nose and took her notes out of her briefcase. “Basically, there are four types of paedophile,” she began. “And so far it doesn’t seem like your couple fits any. The first kind is someone who hasn’t really been able to establish satisfactory relationships with his peers. It’s the most common type, and he only feels sexually comfortable with children. He usually knows his victim, maybe a family friend, or even a relation.”

  Gristhorpe nodded. “What about age, roughly?”

  “Average age is about forty.”

  “Hmm. Go on.”

  “The second type is someone who seems to develop normally but finds it increasingly difficult to adjust to adult life—work, marriage, et cetera. Feels inadequate, often turns to drink. Usually the marriage, if there is one, breaks down. With this type, something sets things in motion. He reaches a kind of breaking-point. Maybe his wife or girlfriend is having an affair, intensifying his feelings of inadequacy. This kind doesn’t usually know his victim. It may be someone he sees passing by in a car or something. Again, not much like the situation you described at Brenda Scupham’s.”

  “No,” agreed Gristhorpe. “But we’ve got to keep an open mind at this point.”

  “And I think we can dismiss the third type, too,” Jenny went on. “This is someone who generally had his formative sexual experiences with young boys in an institution of some kind.”

  “Ah,” said Gristhorpe. “Public school?”

  Jenny looked up at him and smiled. “I suppose that would qualify.” She turned back to her notes. “Anyway, this type is generally a homosexual paedophile, the type that cruises the streets for victims or uses male prostitutes.”

  “And the last?”

  “The wild card,” Jenny said. “The psychopathic paedophile. It’s hard to pin this type down. He’s in search of new sexual thrills, and pain and fear are generally involved. He’ll hurt his victims, introduce sharp objects into the sexual organs, that kind of thing. The more aggressive he gets, the more excited he becomes. A person like this usually has a history of anti-social behaviour.”

  Gristhorpe held the bridge of his nose and grunted.

  “I’m sorry I can’t really be of any more help yet,” Jenny said, “but I’m working on it. The really odd thing, as I told Alan, is that there were two of them, a man and a woman. I want to look a bit further into that aspect.”

  Gristhorpe nodded. “Go ahead. And please don’t underestimate your usefulness.”

  Jenny smiled at him and shuffled her notes back into the briefcase.

  “This stuff the newspapers were on about,” Gristhorpe went on, “organized gangs of paedophiles, what do you think of that?”

  Jenny shook her head. “It doesn’t figure. Paedophiles are like other sexual deviants, essentially loners, solo operators. And most of the allegations of ritual abuse turned out to be social workers’ fantasies. Of course, when you get abuse in families, people close ranks. They might look like organized gangs, but they’re not really. Paedophiles simply aren’t the types to form clubs, except

  “Except what?”

  “I was thinking of kiddie porn, child prostitution and the like. It’s around, it happens, there’s no denying it, and that takes a bit of organization.”

  “Videos, magazines?”

  “Yes. Even snuff films.”

  “We’re doing our best,” Gristhorpe said. “I’ve been in

  touch with the paedophile squad. Those rings are hard to penetrate, but if anything concerning Gemma turns up, believe me, we’ll know about it.”

  Jenny stood up. “I’ll do a bit more research.” “Thanks.” Gristhorpe walked over to open the door for her.

  Jenny dashed back to her car, got in and turned her key in the ignition. Suddenly, she paused. She couldn’t remember where she was supposed to go or why she was in such a hurry. She checked her appointment book and then racked her brains to see if she had forgotten anything. No. The truth was, she had nowhere to go and no reason at all to hurry.

  IV

  Banks breathed deeply, grateful for the fresh air outside

  the flue. Claustrophobia was bad enough, but what he

  had just seen made it even worse.

  After Gristhorpe had gone to meet Jenny, the SOCOs had slowly and carefully removed all the stones from the body of a man in his mid-to late-twenties. When they had finished, Dr Glendenning bent forward to see what he could find out. First, he opened the bomber-jacket and cursed when he had to stop the tangle of greyish intestines from spilling out of the man’s shirt. A couple more flies finally gave up the ghost and crawled out from under the tubing and took off indignantly. The wind moaned down the flue. Quickly, Banks had searched the dead man’s pockets: all empty.

  Banks lit a cigarette; fresh air wasn’t enough to get the taste of the flue and of death out of his mouth. The smell was difficult to pin down. Sickly, sweet, with a slight metallic edge, it always seemed to linger around him like

  an aura for days after attending the scene of a murder.

  Glendenning had been crouched in the flue alone for over half an hour now, and the SOCOs were still going over the ground inside the taped-off area: every blade of glass, every stone.

  Banks wandered into the smelting mill and looked at the ruins of the furnace and the ore hearth while he
waited, trying to put the first shocking glimpse of those spilled intestines out of his mind. He had seen the same thing once before, back in London, and it wasn’t something even the most hardened policeman forgot easily. He stared at the dullish brown patch in the corner, marked off by the SOCOs as blood. The murder, they said, had probably taken place in the mill.

  At last, Glendenning emerged from the flue, red in the face. He stood upright and dusted his jacket where it had come into contact with the stones. A cigarette dangled from his rnouth.

  “I suppose you want to know it all right away, don’t you?” he said to Banks, sitting on a boulder outside the smelting mill. “Time of death, cause of death, what he had for breakfast?”

  Banks grinned. “As much as you can tell me.”

  “Aye, well, that might be a bit more than usual in this case. Given the temperature, I’d say rigor mortis went basically according to the norm. It was just after two o’clock when I got the chance to have a really good look at him. Allowing, say, two to three hours for rigor to start, then about ten or twelve to spread, I’d say he was killed sometime after dark last night, but not much later than ten o’clock. His body temperature confirms it, too. Is that good enough for you?”

  Banks said it was, thank you very much, doctor, and mentioned the blood in the smelting mill.

  “You’re probably right about that,” Glendenning said.

  “I’ll check postmortem lividity later when I get him on the table, but as far as I could tell there was no blood around the body, and there would be, given a wound like that.”

  “What about cause of death?”

  “That’s not difficult. Looks like he was gutted. You saw that for yourself.” Glendenning lit a new cigarette from the stub of his old one. “It’s an especially vicious crime,” he went on. “In the first place, to do something like that you have to get very close.”

  “Would it take a lot of strength?”

  “Aye, a fair bit to drag the knife up when it’s stuck so deeply in. But not a superman. Given a sharp enough knife. What are you getting at? Man or woman?”

  “Something like that.”

  “You know how I hate guesswork, laddie, but I’d go for a moderately strong man or an exceptionally strong woman.”

  “Thanks. First we’ll check all the female bodybuilders in Yorkshire. Left-handed or right?”

  “I should be able to tell you later when I get a good look at the entry point and the direction of the slit.”

  “What about the weapon?”

  “Again, you’ll have to wait. All I can say now is it looks like a typical upthrust knife wound. Have you made arrangements for the removal?”

  Banks nodded.

  “Good. I’ll get to it as soon as I can.” Glendenning stood up and headed down the track to his car. Banks looked at his watch: almost three o’clock and he hadn’t had lunch yet. Maybe an hour or so more up here and he’d be able to leave the scene for a local constable to guard. He called Vic Manson over.

  “Any sign of the murder weapon?”

  “Not so far. I don’t think it’s around here. The lads

  have almost finished the third grid search, and they’d have found it by now.”

  Banks walked back over to the smelting mill and leaned against the wall watching the men examine the scree outside the flue entrance. “A particularly vicious crime,” Dr Glendenning had said. Indeed it was. It was hard to believe, thought Banks, that in such beautiful countryside on such a fine autumn evening, one human being had got so close to another that he could watch, and perhaps even savour, the look in his victim’s eyes as he thrust a sharp knife in his groin and slowly dragged it up through the stomach to the chest.

  Brenda Scupham lay alone in bed that night. Les was out

  at the pub. Not that she really cared. These days he was

  practically worse than useless. He mostly kept out of her

  way, and that suited her fine. The only thing was, she

  didn’t really want to be alone tonight. A nice warm body

  to love her and hold her would help take her mind off the

  bad things she couldn’t seem to stop herself from feeling.

  She hadn’t wanted Gemma, it was true. But things like that happened. She had done her best. At first, there always seemed to be so much to do: changing nappies, feeding, scraping and saving for new clothes. And the sleepless nights she had listened to Gemma cry from her cot, leaving her till she cried herself to sleep because her own mother had said you shouldn’t make a habit of being at a baby’s beck and call. Well, she should know all about that, Brenda thought.

  Even as she got older, Gemma had got in the way, too. Every time Brenda had a man over, she had to explain the child. Nobody stayed with her when they found out

  she had a kid. One night was the best she could expect from most, then a hasty exit, usually well before dawn, and Gemma there wailing away.

  Brenda understood women who had beaten or killed their children. It happened all the time. They could drive you to that. One night, she remembered with shame, she had wrapped three-month-old Gemma in blankets and left her on the steps of the Catholic church. She hadn’t been home five minutes before guilt sent her racing back to reclaim the bundle. Luckily, nobody else had got there first.

  But no matter what those policemen tried to say, she had never abused Gemma. Some mothers sat their children on the elements of electric cookers, poured boiling water on them, locked them in the cellar without food or drink until they died of dehydration. Brerida would never have done anything like that. She put up with Gemma and took her pleasure when she could. True, she had left the child alone for visits to the pub. But nothing had ever happened to her. Also true, she never had much time to spend with her, what with the odd bit of waitressing she did on the sly to eke out her social. Meals had occasionally been forgotten, old clothes left unwashed too long. Gemma herself, like most kids, was not overfond of bath-time, and she had never complained about going without a bath for a couple of weeks.

  What upset Brenda most as she lay there alone in the dark was accepting that she had never really liked her child. Oh, she had got used to her, all right, but there was something secretive and isolated about Gemma, something alien that Brenda felt she could never reach. And there was something creepy about the way she skulked around the place. Many a time Brenda had felt Gemma’s accusing, woebegone eyes on her. Even now, alone in the dark, she could feel Gemma’s eyes looking at her in that

  way. Still, you didn’t choose your child, no more than she chose to be born. She wasn’t made to order.

  But now Gemma was gone, Brenda felt guilty for feeling relieved when Miss Peterson and Mr Brown took her away. Why did it have to be so complicated? Why couldn’t they have been real social workers like they said they were? Then she wouldn’t have to feel so guilty for being relieved. Now she couldn’t even bear to think about what they might have done to Gemma. She shivered. Gemma must be dead. Brenda only hoped it had happened quickly and painlessly and that soon the police would find out everything and leave her alone to get her grieving done.

  Again she replayed what she could remember of the social workers’ visit. Maybe she had been a fool for believing them, but they had looked so real, and they had been so convincing. She knew she had neglected Gemma and that she was wrong to do so, however much she couldn’t help herself. She knew she was guilty, especially after what happened the week before. But they surely couldn’t have known about that? No, they were right. She had to let them take the child. She found herself hoping, after the door closed, that they would decide to keep her or find her a good home. It would be best for everyone that way.

  And then there was Les. She remembered defending him to the police that morning, saying he wasn’t much but he was better than nothing. She wasn’t even sure that was true any longer. Mostly, she’d been thinking of sex. He used to do it three, four times a night, if he hadn’t had a skinful of ale, and she couldn’t get enough of him. He ha
d made her laugh, too. But lately all the passion had gone. It happened, she knew, and you became nothing more than a maid, your home no more than a hotel room.

  She turned on her side and put her hand between her

  legs, then began gently stroking herself with her fingers. It would help her forget, she thought, rubbing harder. Forget her foolishness, forget her guilt, forget Gemma. Gemma, precious stone, name stolen from an old schoolfriend whose serene beauty she had always envied.

  Just before the climax flooded her, an image of Gemma going out of the door with Mr Brown and Miss Peterson appeared in her mind’s eye. As she came, it receded, like someone waving goodbye from a train window.

  I

  At ten past eleven on Saturday morning, Banks stood at

  his office window, coffee in hand, and looked down on

  the market square. It was another beautiful day—the fifth

  in a row—with a pale blue sky and high wispy clouds. It

  was also four days since Gemma Scupham’s abduction.

  Down in the cobbled square, the market was in full swing. Tourists and locals browsed the stalls, where vendors dealt in everything from clothes and used books to car accessories and small electrical gadgets. As Banks watched them unload new stock from the vans, he speculated how much of the goods were stolen, fallen off the back of a lorry. Most of the things for sale were legitimate, of course—over-production or sub-standard stuff rejected by a company’s quality control and sold at slightly above cost—but a busy market was an ideal place for getting rid of hot property.

  There would be nothing from the Fletcher’s warehouse job, though; televisions and stereos attracted too much attention at outdoor markets. Mostly, they would be sold by word of mouth, through pubs and video retailers.

  Banks thought again about how smooth the operation