Death Row

by Mark Pearson

  ‘He was with you about the time the child went missing?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘He’s yanking on our lariat, is all. He had nothing to say.’

  But Delaney remembered Garnier asking the time. Remembered looking at his watch at ten o’clock, about the time the boy had gone missing. Had he missed something? There was no way he could have predicted what time the boy would be abducted. Could he? Even if he did have an accomplice.

  ‘Why you?’ Duncton asked Delaney, snapping him out of his thoughts.

  ‘Why me, what?’

  ‘Why did he want to see you.’

  ‘He saw me in the woods this morning. Recognised me as the man who …’ Delaney realised he was about to say Gloria’s name but caught himself in time. Although he knew Duncton could track it down his close-mouthedness was a habit he wanted to stick to. The young woman had been through enough without her real identity being outed to the tender mercies of the press. ‘He recognised me from the photos in the papers of the time, holding the girl that he’d stashed in the boot of his car.’

  ‘So what did he want?’

  ‘I think he wanted to know what became of her.’

  ‘But you didn’t tell him.’

  Delaney shrugged again. ‘I don’t know, inspector. It was all a long time ago. I am sure that she more than anyone doesn’t want it raked up again.’

  ‘And he didn’t make any mention, however oblique, of what has happened here?’

  ‘If he did I didn’t pick up on it. I can’t see how he can be involved.’

  ‘You think it’s a copycat, then? Someone inspired by all this press coverage to emulate him?’

  ‘It wouldn’t be the first time. That’s a sad fact.’

  ‘How likely is it that he has got an accomplice from all those years ago starting up again?

  ‘He’s only had one visitor, a woman, since he has been in custody, sir, six months ago,’ said Sally. ‘Just one visit.’

  ‘Who is this woman?’

  ‘Her name is Maureen Gallagher. We’re trying to track her down. Uniform have been to the address we had for her but she had moved out quite a few years ago and we don’t know where to.’

  Duncton shook his head, frustrated. ‘Maybe it’s just a coincidence. It’s only been a couple of hours. If it wasn’t for Garnier’s little performance this morning we wouldn’t be going into overdrive like this. Maybe the boy’s at a friend’s house.’

  ‘It is possible, sure enough,’ said Delaney. ‘What exactly happened this morning?’

  ‘The mother left Archie, her child, here under the care of his grandfather at eight o’clock this morning. She had an appointment.’

  ‘What kind of appointment?’

  ‘She’s a hairdresser.’

  ‘That’s a bit early, isn’t it? said Sally.

  ‘She had to get to Abbots Langley.’

  Sally shrugged. ‘Even so, that’s, what, twenty minutes, thirty minutes tops from here. Who has their hair done at that time of day?’

  ‘Brides do, detective constable,’ Duncton replied. ‘She had a regular client getting married today.’

  ‘So she left the kid with the grandfather. What happened next?’

  ‘The old man wanted a cigarette and his daughter had taken his fags away with her when she left. The doctor’s told him he’s not allowed to smoke. So. He went out to get some.’

  ‘What, from the shops? He left the kid on his own at home?’ asked Delaney.

  Duncton shook his head. ‘He’s got an allotment. He’s got a shed there where he stashes some cigarettes. He uses it as a bolt-hole, apparently – doesn’t do a lot of gardening any more. He was inside having a smoke and the kid was outside playing, and when he came out to check on him the boy was gone. He swears it was like only sixty seconds, two minutes tops.’

  ‘What about the father?’

  ‘Barry Woods. He’s a lorry driver. In France. Due back today.’

  ‘Anybody spoken to him?’

  Duncton shook his head. ‘No response on his mobile.’

  ‘Possible he came back early?’

  ‘It’s possible. We’re looking into it.’

  At that moment Graham Harper came out of the lounge and looked at Delaney and Sally Cartwright. His face was white, drained of blood, his watery eyes squinting as he focused on them.

  ‘Have you found him? Have you found Archie?’ he asked in a tremulous voice.

  ‘No, sir, we haven’t. Not yet. I’m sorry,’ said Delaney and turned to Duncton. ‘Have you got people down at the allotment?’

  ‘Of course we have.’

  Delaney turned to Graham Harper. ‘Maybe you could show me the way, sir, walk me through what happened.’

  The elderly man nodded and went to pick up his overcoat hanging on the newel post at the bottom of the stairs.

  Duncton grabbed Delaney’s arm. ‘Like I said, this is my watch, Delaney.’

  ‘Of course it is,’ he agreed affably. ‘But Garnier has dealt me into this game and we need to find out why, don’t we?’

  Duncton sighed and nodded finally. ‘We go together. And you don’t do anything on this without clearing it with me first. We clear on that?’

  ‘Clear as a glass of water from a mountain lake in the Ring of Kerry,’ said Delaney, slipping into a soft brogue.

  *

  The allotment was a scant six hundred yards or so from Graham Harper’s house. It took them just a few minutes to walk there. At the bottom of Carlton Row they turned left into Rowland Avenue at the bottom of which a public footpath led up to a cast-iron bridge built in the early part of the last century. Painted battleship grey, it had rivets like half-marbles studded across it. Wire meshing stretched either side of the bridge, making it into a cage to prevent disaffected youths from dropping rocks onto the passing Underground and overland trains below as they thundered east towards the city.

  Delaney paused for a moment, flashing back to a time in his youth when he’d stood on a bridge at Balleydehob. The river below him snaking out to sea, the dazzling light bouncing off it like a million shattered crystals. He remembered picking up a pebble and lobbing it to send a crow flapping away. He remembered his cousin Mary, whom he had left just a short while back, telling him that it was a raven he had disturbed and that it would bring bad luck down upon him. He looked at where he was today, looking down through meshed wire onto a railway line that carved through an unbroken run of development that stretched from Harrow to Stratford and beyond. He looked at the garbage that littered the sides of the railway, he looked at the grey sky overhead and wondered if his cousin had been right all along. He didn’t know what it was that had brought him here, but if it was luck it certainly wasn’t of the good kind.

  He carried on over the bridge, taking the arm of Graham Harper and helping him down the iron steps on the other side. There was more wire fencing at the base of the steps enclosing what looked like some kind of Second World War memorial. Whatever it was was rusted and overgrown with weeds and tangled growth. The allotments were to the left. A small muddy path ran alongside them, with another wire fence between them and the railway line beyond. In all there were probably about thirty allotments that ran alongside each other for a couple of hundred yards or so before ending in a wooded scrubland. A road bridge above the railway loomed high over the undergrowth. In the wooded area Delaney could see a couple of uniformed officers finger-searching the ground.

  Graham Harper led the way along to an allotment near the end of the run. It had two areas for cultivation bisected by a simple narrow shingle path that led up to a wooden shed. A door, with one window to the right, a small porch or step in front, plain wood, the varnish on it peeling, all of it bleached by the sun that was now no more than a distant fond memory. It looked to be about twenty or thirty years old, Delaney reckoned, and like its owner not in its prime, to say the least. Judging by the hacking cough he was listening to it was a toss-up which would stay standing the l
ongest. He walked into the shed with Duncton while Sally stayed outside with the elderly man.

  Delaney wasn’t sure what he expected to find inside but what he did find didn’t surprise him. The weak sunlight barely filtered through the grime- and dust-encrusted window. Delaney placed his feet carefully, mindful that the floor had rotted in places. It was a bare floor with boxes scattered here and there. Vegetable-seed packets, twine, gardening gloves. Against one wall stood a hoe, spade, and assorted plastic plant pots. In the corner was an old-fashioned wing-backed upholstered armchair. A table beside it with an ashtray brimful of fag ends. The air reeked with the smell of creosote and stale cigarette smoke and for once Delaney didn’t feel like reaching into his pocket for his own packet.

  To the right of the chair, as Delaney looked at it, was a shelf filled with all sorts of knick-knacks and oddments, mostly gardening-related. But there was an old fishing reel as well, along with a clasp knife, some empty jars, a can of rat poison, a few tobacco tins. Beneath the shelf was a box of magazines. Old issues of Gardener’s World, Coarse Fishing Monthly.

  Delaney nudged the box with his foot. ‘Anyone been through it?’

  Duncton nodded. ‘Just what it looks like.’

  Delaney looked around the shed. ‘You got any theories?’

  ‘I read him as genuine. He came in here for a smoke, like he said.’ Duncton shrugged. ‘Someone took the boy, maybe.’

  ‘Maybe?’

  ‘His mother said he was really keen to be with his mate Johnny. Maybe he ran off. Maybe he’ll turn up there.’

  ‘I take it you’ve got uniform out there looking?’

  ‘As much as we can. Could be he got lost.’

  ‘You don’t think so, though?’

  ‘Do you?’

  Delaney shook his head. ‘No. Peter Garnier is in this somehow. He has to be.’

  ‘How though?’

  ‘I don’t know, detective. I wish I did.’

  ‘Why did he really want to see you? He was talking to you about the same time this kid was abducted. Is he telling us something?’

  ‘If he is, I’m sure as hell not hearing it.’

  ‘He lied about taking us to the burial site of his victims.’

  ‘He claims he couldn’t remember exactly, that the shot at him put an end to the trip. He might well have led us to them.’

  ‘You think he was telling the truth.’

  ‘I don’t think he knows what the truth is any more. The man has maggots in his brain.’

  ‘So he had an accomplice back then. Why now? Why start again now?’

  ‘His illness – maybe it all ties in with that.’

  ‘And where do you tie in?’

  ‘I don’t. I’m simply a man with a badge, just like you, detective.’

  Duncton looked at Delaney and shook his head. ‘You’re not like me at all, Delaney. You’re in this somehow.’

  Delaney shrugged. ‘You know what I know, which is that a young boy has been abducted. Garnier is in the mix and we are running out of time fast. So what say we put aside your fucking petty politics and concentrate on getting him back alive?’

  Duncton would have responded but Sally stuck her head through the open door. ‘You better get out here, sir,’ she said.

  Delaney and Duncton hurried outside. Graham Harper was sitting on the steps of his shed, his body humped and racked with sobs.

  A uniformed police constable was holding an evidence bag in her hand, showing it to the elderly man.

  ‘Please look, sir.’

  Graham Harper dashed the back of his hand against his eyes and looked up. ‘My God, what have I done?’ he said, trying to sniffle back the tears and failing.

  In the evidence bag was a single black and white trainer. Small – a child’s size.

  ‘Is this your grandson’s trainer, sir?’ asked the constable.

  Harper nodded his head, his voice a croaked whisper. ‘Yes. God help me.’

  Sally looked over at Delaney. His expression was unreadable. ‘Show us where you found it.’

  The constable led them to the end of the allotments where a gap in the trees revealed a path through the tangled undergrowth to the base of a small slope that led up to the road bridge and pavement above. At the top of the slope the wire fence had been pulled loose from a concrete post, creating a gap. A large enough gap for an adult to have hunched down, squeezed through and pulled a young boy with him.

  The female constable pointed to the side of the slope that ran down to the flat ground running alongside the railway track. The ground had been dug over by the looks of it: pieces of broken glass and pottery shards lay scattered around.

  ‘It was down here, sir.’

  Delaney looked up at the fence and scrambled up the slope, his feet slipping in the wet mud, but he managed to make it and hold onto a post beside the wall.

  ‘Careful, sir!’ Sally called out. Delaney pulled out an evidence bag and used it to pick up a small thread that had snagged on the pulled-back wire. He folded the bag over itself and put it in his pocket. He looked at the wire fence where it had been pulled loose from the retaining post: it was rusted but by his reckoning it would still have taken a bit of strength to rip it free. He put back the fencing and slid back down the slope.

  ‘I think we can safely say he didn’t go to Johnny’s,’ he said, taking the evidence bag out of his pocket and handing it over to Duncton.

  ‘The ground here, sir …’ said Sally Cartwright, pointing to the slope down to the railway tracks.

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘Looks like it’s been freshly dug over.’

  ‘We’ll have the place sealed.’ Duncton reached into his jacket to pull out his mobile phone. ‘Everybody step back. Let’s keep the scene preserved for SOCO.’

  He looked across critically at Delaney, who was toeing the grass to clean his shoe.

  Delaney ignored him and looked back instead at Graham Harper, his head held in his hands between his knees as he sat on the small porch of his shed, his back rounded, his posture almost foetal as he rocked back and forward, his ragged breath still audible across the distance as he dry-sobbed and choked back tears.

  Guilt.

  Jack Delaney knew all about that.

  *

  Archie Woods kept his back tight against the wall of the cold room. As tight as he could, given that his hands were tied behind his back. Not cruelly constricting, not so that the rope cut into his flesh, but taut enough so that he could not free himself. The other end of the rope had been tied to an old-fashioned metal radiator beside him. There was no heat coming from the radiator but he had his warm coat on and his jumper with the picture of a giraffe on it underneath and although he was cold he wasn’t shivering because of that.

  He was shivering with fear.

  The man sitting in the chair across the room and watching him had flat black lifeless eyes. A small amount of saliva trickled from the corner of his mouth and he slowly raised a hand to wipe it away, the thick veins standing proud from the liver-spotted skin like worms.

  The boy would have screamed had he been able to, but a silk scarf had been tied around his head and mouth, forcing his lips and teeth apart and rendering him mute.

  He looked down at his feet, one of them still clad in a black and white trainer, the other in a sock that had once been bright red but was now damp with rainwater and spattered with mud. He made a small whimpering sound and closed his eyes as if to dream what was happening away.

  The man watched him for a moment longer and then the corners of his mouth moved upwards slightly. It might have been a smile.

  The small boy kept his eyes shut, humming in his head to drown out the sound of approaching footsteps.

  ‘The wheels on the bus go round and round, round and round, round and round. The wheels on the bus go round and round. All day long.’

  *

  Delaney stood by the doorway, watching as DI Duncton held up the plastic evidence bag with the single trainer in it.
Rosemary Woods already had very pale skin but what colour she had leached from her face as she looked at the bag, her green eyes widening with the horror of what it signified.

  ‘Is it his, Mrs Woods?’ asked Detective Inspector Duncton.

  The woman swallowed and nodded, barely able to speak.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Oh my God.’

  She teetered on her heels and Sally Cartwright quickly crossed to take the tall woman’s arm.

  ‘Oh my God,’ she said again, stumbling backwards to sit back on the sofa.

  Her father came in and stood beside Delaney, turning the flat cap in his hands like a guilty schoolboy, his eyes downcast.

  His daughter looked up at him, spots of colour returning to her cheeks now. ‘What the hell have you done, Dad?’

  Graham Harper looked at her for a moment or two, his eyes wet with grief. He mumbled something inaudible and left the room.

  Rosemary Woods looked over at Delaney. ‘He’s dead, isn’t he?’

  Delaney shook his head. ‘It’s still very early yet. We’re only talking a matter of hours.’

  ‘He was on the television this morning.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’ Delaney asked, puzzled.

  ‘Peter Garnier.’ She pointed to the television set in the corner. ‘He was on there this morning. I made him change channels. Archie wanted the cartoons and I couldn’t bear to look at that man’s face.’

  Delaney nodded sympathetically.

  ‘He’s taken my son, hasn’t he? That man has got my son.’

  ‘Peter Garnier is locked up safe and secure in prison,’ said Detective Inspector Duncton.

  The woman ignored him. Her stare was fixed on Delaney. ‘Why is he doing this? Why now? Why my boy?’

  Delaney shook his head. ‘We don’t know what has happened yet, Mrs Woods. I know you are concerned and you have every right to be feeling the way you do right now. But we have every available person out there looking for your boy. And we will find him. I can promise you that.’

  Duncton glared reprovingly at him as Delaney walked out the room, but it had as much effect as throwing a ping-pong ball would have had stopping a determined rhinoceros.