The Silent Children

by Carol Wyer

  Eleven

  THEN

  * * *

  His sister is whimpering in her room. His father had been in a filthy mood this evening. His dinner had dried out in the oven while he’d been at the pub, and when he’d finally turned up to eat it, he was displeased. The boy had been watching the television when he heard the familiar sounds of raised voices and scraping chairs as his father laid into their mother. His sister had thrown him a look and they’d been about to melt away when they heard a sickening crash followed by silence. The boy had raced to the kitchen and found his mother on the floor, blood pouring from her face. His father was glowering at her.

  ‘She’s fine,’ he’d growled as the boy threw himself onto the floor. ‘Leave her.’

  His sister, standing in the doorway, had started to cry.

  ‘Mum.’

  ‘I said leave her.’

  His mother had struggled to sit up, a crimson ribbon of blood falling from her nose. She had pinched the bridge of her nose and winced. Her voice was thick. ‘It’s okay. Go,’ she said.

  He’d not wanted to leave. He’d wanted to help her. His father had ignored them all, pulled out a chair and began eating his dried dinner, stabbing at it angrily. He’d waved his fork at them. ‘Shove off,’ he’d said, mouth full of potato.

  He’d taken his sister upstairs and cuddled her while she cried herself to sleep.

  Now she’s whimpering again. It happens frequently. He slips into her bedroom and sits on the bed.

  ‘It’s okay,’ he says, stroking her hair. She’s not asleep.

  ‘He’s going to kill her,’ she says through gulps of air.

  ‘No, he won’t,’ the boy replies, but his insides turn upside down at the thought. His mother accepts the blows and the shouting, too afraid to speak out about the man who beats her and her children.

  They all live in perpetual fear in this silent house, and nobody outside it knows what goes on behind its walls.

  Twelve

  DAY THREE – THURSDAY, 16 FEBRUARY

  * * *

  Tom Shearer was lounging at his desk, shirt sleeves rolled up to his elbow. He exuded confidence but his face had darkened when he’d read the message that had been sent through for him, and Robyn could almost see his thought processes as his face twitched uncomfortably. His cocky attitude and supreme confidence only served to disguise how he truly felt about his job. He’d divulged as much one rare night when, after attending the funeral of an old school friend, he’d let his guard down and confessed he was a results man who hated the atrocities he faced.

  He cleared his throat. ‘Right. Listen up. An assault has taken place in Hurst Lane. There are two victims believed to be from the same family and both female. One is aged twenty-nine, the other in her sixties. Police are in situ but the attacker’s taken a hostage and is holed up inside the house. Get to the incident room for a full briefing.’

  Shearer, like Robyn, had a team of four working with him. The room was filled with the immediate scraping of chairs as they gathered up their necessary kit and hurtled out of the office, the drumming of boots on the floor like cattle running. Shearer followed swiftly behind, his face grim.

  Robyn had been reading through Mitz’s notes on Henry Gregson. She shifted from side to side in her chair. There wasn’t anything in the notes that pointed to why Gregson had been killed. His bank accounts held no answers.

  Her mind wouldn’t settle. This wasn’t like her. Ordinarily, she’d have leads and ideas and direction. At the moment, she felt stumped and she didn’t like that feeling. She surveyed the mess of files and boxes at the far side of the room. She preferred order in her life, and having several more bodies cluttering the office was affecting her concentration and adding to her frustration. Or was she still half-thinking about Davies? She needed to get out of the office.

  The door opened and Anna marched in, waving a file.

  ‘Gregson’s mobile,’ she said, placing the file on Robyn’s desk with a small smile of satisfaction. ‘Both mobile and computer are clean – no current social media accounts, dating websites, porn, gambling sites, nothing.’

  ‘You’re kidding,’ said David, looking up from his own computer. ‘That’s not possible. Surely there must be something – he’s thirty-three. He must be on social media. I’m ten years older than him and I’m on it.’

  ‘He had a Facebook account but he hasn’t bothered with it for well over a year. There’s not much of interest on his wall, mostly comments about football games, some sports clips taken off the web. He rarely posted on it. He had four friends. I contacted them and one has closed his account altogether, one knew him through football and two attended the same school as him. Nobody has heard from him in ages.’

  ‘And what guy doesn’t have some porn on his computer?’ David muttered.

  Anna shook her head. ‘He’s squeaky clean. Mainly visits sports and news websites, technology sites, forums about sport. I went through his deleted history too – nothing.’

  Robyn found it difficult to believe. Henry had had a life before Lauren. He hadn’t lived like a monk. And surely there’d been friends, acquaintances and other women in his life? He wouldn’t have shut himself away and only watched sport. It didn’t add up. Maybe he’d deliberately kept off such websites in case Lauren found out, and instead accessed them from a different computer. He was a man who kept secrets and who told lies; he’d be able to cover his trail if he had been accessing sites he didn’t want his wife to know about. No, Henry Gregson wasn’t as morally pure as he made out, she was sure of it.

  Anna continued. ‘He used WhatsApp messaging from his mobile. The details are in the file along with all the calls he made and received. That’s Liam Carrington’s number.’ She indicated another number, highlighted in green. ‘That’s Carrington’s partner’s number – Ella. He rings or messages them regularly. He’s godfather to their child, isn’t he?’

  ‘Yes. Liam Carrington said Gregson took that duty seriously and even looked after Astra on weekends. I expect that’s why he phoned them so frequently,’ said Robyn, running her finger down the list. ‘Have you identified all these numbers?’

  ‘All but that one,’ said Anna, indicating the number. ‘The tech department say it’s a pay-as-you-go phone and it isn’t operating any more.’

  Robyn tapped the number with one finger. ‘Gregson rang this number the morning of the fourteenth at ten past ten. And it appears to have rung him several times during the last fortnight.’

  ‘Six times in total, and we can’t throw any light on who owns the mobile, guv.’

  Robyn tutted. ‘This is ringing alarm bells. Pay-as-you-go numbers that are suddenly no longer in use seem highly suspicious to me.’

  David spoke up. ‘Might be a girlfriend’s phone.’

  Robyn’s face pulled into a grimace. ‘You could be right. Maybe his whole goody-goody image is a front. No prints on that mobile?’

  ‘Only his.’

  Anna interjected with a slight cough. ‘Lauren Gregson is a big Snapchat user. She’s got a Facebook account but she only uses it these days to play games. Looks like she used it far more before she met Henry. Posts trail off about eighteen months ago.’

  ‘Glean much from her account?’ Robyn asked.

  ‘Only that she had several boyfriends before Henry – six of them in the three years she was using Facebook. She has loads of friends on Snapchat.’

  ‘Stick with it. See what else you can learn. Mitz?’

  ‘I’ve just got off the phone with a chap from the Forestry Commission. There’s been no deer culling anywhere on Cannock Chase recently. He says that’s not part of the Chase they tend to shoot in, especially given the Gruffalo Trail is in the vicinity. And it’s unlikely a hunter would be in that area. The official was quite clear on rules and regulations on the Chase. Moreover, they definitely don’t use .455 cartridges.’

  Robyn’s nostrils flared as she breathed out noisily. ‘I think we can unequivocally say Gregson was murd
ered.’ She rose and stood in front of the whiteboard, rubbed out ‘accidental death’.

  ‘Keep digging?’ asked David.

  She waved a finger at him. ‘You got it. Anyone know where Matt is?’

  ‘Yoxall. He’s verifying Liam Carrington’s story. Think he also planned on buying some juicy steaks at the butcher’s while he was there. I put in my order too. You want anything bringing back, guv?’ David grinned.

  Robyn smiled back. Sometimes a little light-heartedness did them all good. ‘Only evidence pointing to our killer,’ she replied.

  ‘I’ve got something interesting on Libby Gregson too,’ said Anna. ‘Unlike her brother, she’s very active on Facebook. She’s got over two hundred friends, most of whom live in or around Stoke, and several who were work colleagues. She’s big on selfies. She must post pictures of herself at least twice a day. She never mentions her mother in any of her status updates. They’re usually about television programmes, celebs, magazines or funnies from the Internet. She discusses various shows and has a laugh with her girlfriends. She’s also into tattoos. Recently – the last six months – she’s been posting pictures of the tattoos she’s had done all over her body. Some of the pictures were taken down from the site due to complaints, and she fired off angrily at the so-called friends who reported them as pornographic.’ Anna handed over a printout taken from Facebook. ‘That’s the latest one.’

  Robyn looked at the pictures of a semi-naked Libby, back to the camera and wearing only a thong. Her back was a collage of red, black and blue stars and swirls that started at the base of her shoulder blade and travelled over her hips and buttocks and down the back of her legs. There was a large tattoo of a skull with angel wings across her spine, and under it the word ‘Mother’. Anna pointed to a photograph, showing the underside of Libby’s left forearm, and the fresh tattoo of a handgun shooting flowers.

  Robyn looked up at Anna, who nodded. ‘Might be something. Might be nothing.’ Robyn had hauled in a suspect during the investigation into missing girls earlier that year because the man had hunting tattoos on his body and she was searching for a man calling himself Hunter. It had been the wrong call to make, and she wasn’t keen to repeat the mistake. The tattoos might have no relevance. However, they proved Libby had another side to her personality and was not the put-upon and obedient daughter she painted herself to be. She’d posted this photograph late Monday afternoon, before Henry was shot.

  ‘Either way, we’ll need to talk to her again. Anything on Tarik?’

  Anna nodded. ‘I think so. There’s a Tarik Akar who’s one of her friends on Facebook. He’s a car mechanic in the centre of Hanley – works for Mike’s Motors. Attended the same secondary school as Libby and Henry. Married. Got a younger brother and a younger sister, both of whom went to the same school.’

  ‘Look into their backgrounds before we go dashing off to Stoke-on-Trent to interview them both.’

  She turned her attention back to the list of numbers and began studying the dates and times of the calls. The buzzing of her mobile broke her concentration.

  ‘Carter,’ she said, writing as she spoke.

  ‘It’s Emma Moore, Aiden’s mum.’ Her voice was quiet. ‘Can you come over? Aiden told me why he thought the Gruffalo was hiding in the bushes. He said it was frightened of the man in the car. He also said the Gruffalo was wearing shoes and trousers. DI Carter, I think he might have seen the person who killed that man.’

  Thirteen

  DAY THREE – THURSDAY, 16 FEBRUARY, LATE MORNING

  * * *

  Aiden was colouring in a picture of a house, lost in his own world, when Robyn turned up. Emma acknowledged Robyn and David but stayed seated on the edge of her chair, watching her son protectively.

  ‘Hi, Aiden,’ said Robyn.

  The boy looked up for a second, gave a brief smile, then returned to the picture, his small hand clutching a red crayon and scooting it over the shape in front of him in untidy lines.

  ‘You remember me and Robyn, don’t you?’ said David, dropping down onto the floor beside Aiden. ‘We came yesterday.’

  ‘Yes.’

  David gave Robyn a small nod to encourage her to speak.

  ‘Do you want to play a game?’ Robyn said.

  Aiden looked quizzically at her.

  ‘It’s a memory game. Are you good at remembering things? I bet you are.’

  Aiden held on to his crayon but stopped colouring.

  ‘Yesterday you told me you saw the Gruffalo. I’ve never seen him and I’d really like to know what he looks like. I’ve only seen pictures. He’s very big, isn’t he? Is he as big as a tree?’

  Aiden gave a serious shake of the head.

  ‘But he’s big, isn’t he? Is he taller than me?’

  Aiden looked at her and nodded.

  ‘That’s really big. Oh, and he’s got big claws. Did you see his claws?’

  ‘No. He was wearing shoes.’

  ‘I expect that was because it was raining and he didn’t want to get his feet dirty. Did he have big slippers like those?’ Robyn smiled warmly at the child.

  He studied his red slippers for a moment. ‘No, these aren’t for outside. I have shoes for outside.’

  ‘Are they like my shoes?’ asked Robyn.

  Aiden looked at her black, flat-heeled shoes and shook his head. ‘I have trainers. The Gruffalo has trainers too.’

  Robyn leant forward and spoke in awe. ‘You saw the Gruffalo’s trainers?’

  He nodded again and smiled. ‘But they weren’t the same colour as mine.’

  ‘What colour were they?’ asked Robyn. ‘Pink?’

  Aiden gave a sudden giggle. ‘No. That’s silly. Not pink. Black. Big black ones.’

  ‘Of course. The Gruffalo wouldn’t wear pink shoes. How silly of me,’ said Robyn, slapping her forehead with the palm of her hand. ‘So, you saw his big black trainers, and was he wearing trousers, or did he have hairy legs and hairy brown knees?’

  Aiden put his crayon down, shuffled forwards on the floor and giggled again. ‘He had dark trousers like Daddy wears when he goes running. They have elastic at the bottom.’

  ‘So, you saw his big, hairy ankles?’

  ‘No,’ he spluttered with a smile. ‘He had socks.’

  ‘Wow, what a good memory you have. Can you remember what colour socks he had?’

  His brow furrowed a little. ‘I don’t know. I think they were stripy ones.’

  ‘Well done. I’d never have remembered that. So, when you saw the Gruffalo, he wasn’t hiding behind a tree, was he? I expect he’s too big to hide properly behind a tree, isn’t he? His big, hairy tummy will stick out.’

  A smile and another shake of the head, then in a tiny voice he whispered, ‘He was in the bush.’

  ‘Did he speak to you?’

  ‘No.’ He shifted on his bottom uncomfortably and picked up his crayon again.

  ‘Aiden, was this before you saw the red car?’

  Aiden hesitated and looked towards his mother, who spoke. ‘It’s okay, matey. Tell Robyn exactly what you saw. Can you do that? Tell her what happened after you lost Kyle. He ran on without you, didn’t he?’

  His lips pouted as he considered the request. He spoke, deliberately and slowly. ‘I saw a big footprint by the path. It was the Gruffalo’s footprint. I wanted Kyle to see it and I called him, but he had gone away. I thought I heard the Gruffalo and I went to find him in the woods. I saw his feet under a bush, and then I got scared in case he jumped out at me, like Kyle does sometimes. I don’t like it when he does that. I said hello but he didn’t speak. I couldn’t see Kyle. Or Granny. And I got frightened of the Gruffalo because he didn’t say anything. I saw Mummy’s car and I ran to it. But it wasn’t Mummy’s car.’

  David spoke words of encouragement. ‘You’re a very brave boy. I bet the Gruffalo thought you were brave too. Did he stay under the bush or did he run away?’

  ‘I think he ran away. He was scared of the man in the car. He disappeared ba
ck into his woods.’

  Robyn observed David as he continued talking and engaging the boy. Now they knew for certain somebody else had been in the vicinity of Gregson’s car. It might have been the jogger the family had seen. If so, why had that person hidden in the undergrowth? She had to locate whoever it was. They were either a valuable witness or guilty of murdering Henry Gregson.

  * * *

  Robyn clattered up the corridor with determination. Matt was standing by his desk, paper cup of tea in his hand.

  ‘The butcher remembers Liam Carrington and his daughter Astra in his shop, but he has no idea what time that was. He’d been busy sorting out the freezer and lost track of time. One eyewitness spotted Carrington in the park, pushing his daughter on a swing, but again he wasn’t sure when, and said it could have been about twelve. Can’t find anyone else in Yoxall who saw him,’ Matt said. ‘His partner, Ella Fox, returned earlier than she expected, and claims Carrington was in the house at 2 p.m. If Jane Dean heard a shot at one forty-five, there’s no way Carrington could have committed the crime and returned from Cannock Chase by then.’

  Robyn linked her hands behind her neck and groaned. ‘Not Carrington. Who could want Gregson dead? Lauren has an airtight alibi but she might have asked somebody else to shoot him – a boyfriend, or even hired somebody. We might also have to look more closely at Libby Gregson and her friend Tarik Akar. I can’t discount the possibility they were somehow in this together, although I’m thin on evidence at the moment. Anna, any more on either of them?’

  ‘Still working on it.’

  ‘Okay, David, try Gregson’s work colleagues and anyone he plays cricket with, and his neighbours. Until we find out who might have a motive, we’ll have to talk to everyone, no matter how unlikely a suspect they seem.’