The pathologist reeled off a cruel litany of wounds. A broken wrist, a fractured femur. Cigarette burns to the front torso; cuts and scratches that appeared to have been deliberately inflicted with a Stanley blade across the back. Three broken toes. Staples – staples, for Christ’s sake – in the soft flesh of the forearm. Then the killing blow with a heavy, blunt instrument that had not just caved the boy’s head in but obliterated half of his face.
‘Depersonalisation,’ the DI had muttered and Matt had looked up. He had heard the term from the criminology lectures the detectives sometimes attended, and knew what the older detective meant – the killer, for some reason, had wanted to obliterate every trace of Jack’s identity. To make him nothing. It usually signified some deep-seated rage on the part of the killer, and was often an indication that the victim was known to the attacker.
For Matt however, it had been the staples that had nagged at him. It seemed an odd choice of weapon. It struck him as an almost juvenile thing to do; he remembered at his own school, an all boys’ academy in Birmingham of the decidedly rougher kind, a brutal game in which pupils would staple each other in the backs of their hands, seeing how much pain the other could take. When the stapler in question had been found, tossed further down the gorge, with a sticker on it confirming it was the property of a nearby private school, it was Matt who suggested that it was no coincidence; and that they weren’t looking for a member of staff, a caretaker, or even a recent visitor to the school; but for a pupil. A minor.
From that hunch the trail had led easily to Terry Prince. It turned out his own younger brother – who, it came out in court, he had no history of ever abusing, though he had never shown him any love either – attended the same nursery as Jack Randall. Terry would have come across the boy on the occasions he accompanied his mother to pick up his brother. For whatever reason, he had fixated on him or earmarked him out as a target. Although every child and criminal psychologist across the country had popped up in the media with their own pet theories as to why a fifteen-year-old boy would torture and kill a three-year-old child, Matt had his own, much simpler theory.
The boy was evil.
When he had arrested Prince, hauling him into the car while a uniformed officer tried to calm the hysterical mother, he had a moment where he wondered if there had been a mistake, in spite of the blood-stained clothes in Prince’s room that a search warrant had just uncovered, in spite of the guilt he had seen flash in the boy’s eyes. Simply because he seemed incapable of it. Prince was small for fourteen, and underdeveloped. He could easily have passed for an eleven-year-old. Not to mention the fact that he looked terrified. The dissonance between the boy he was arresting and the mental image he had had of Jack’s killer was jarring.
Only when he had none too gently put the boy into a cell, his head whirling, and that cold, contained rage that had embedded itself in him at the post mortem had started to ebb in the face of his sudden uncertainty, had Prince looked at him with the eyes of a killer. Sneered at him almost arrogantly, his eyes at once devoid of any emotion, neither fear nor remorse. Matt had narrowly escaped a disciplinary for throwing the boy up against the cell wall with enough force that Prince was lucky to escape without a fractured skull, and although Matt would always feel a trickle of shame that he had allowed his emotions to get the better of him on the job, another, hotter emotion always overshadowed it: regret that he hadn’t, indeed, smashed the boy’s skull in. That he couldn’t in effect deliver his head on a platter to Lucy Randall, who had sat waiting for him to bring her son home, and had been given only a cold corpse.
After she had finished sobbing Lucy had a shower, feeling an odd urge to stand under cold water; so cold she could only just bear it, and let it cascade over her body. The water bit at her skin, leaving her skin raised at the shock of the sudden change in temperature, but it was a sensation she almost enjoyed. Felt invigorated by, even.
After she had dressed and towel-dried her hair she picked up the phone to call Ricky. To tell him she loved him. The absence of any concrete memories, the knowledge that it had never even occurred to her back then to keep his things for remembrance, needled at her. What if it had been him who had been taken and destroyed? And she would have had nothing of those first precious few months, even if they had only now become precious with hindsight? Lucy felt optimistic she could build the bridges between her and Ricky; all mothers argued with their teenage sons.
He didn’t pick up. Or rather, his phone rang three times and then went to voice mail, and when she tried to ring again she got voice mail function straight away. He was ignoring her.
Feeling a sharp sting of rejection, she rang Danielle, who wasn’t at home but at her local Age UK shop where she volunteered as a retail assistant a few hours a week.
‘Don’t you think you should have stayed at home with him?’ Lucy accused, instantly feeling like a hypocrite.
‘No I don’t,’ her mother sounded annoyed, ‘because he’s not a baby and doesn’t need to be mollycoddled. He seemed fine when I left this morning; he was listening to that god-awful music of his.’
‘Well, he’s not answering his phone to me. In fact, he seems to have turned it off deliberately.’
Danielle didn’t answer straight away, but even her silence sounded disapproving, so that Lucy rushed in, quick to defend herself.
‘You think I deserve it, I suppose? I am entitled to have a social life.’
‘I didn’t suggest otherwise,’ her mother answered her calmly. ‘And you’re entitled to see whoever you want. But I would have thought you would be a little bit more understanding of Ricky’s feelings right now.’
‘Mum, he got himself suspended. Stop treating him like a victim.’
‘He got himself suspended defending you, Lucy. You’re not the only one who’s been affected by all this.’
Lucy went quiet, acknowledging the truth of her mother’s words even though they hurt her. She sighed heavily down the phone.
‘Can you ring him at least? Let him know when you get through to him? I’ll be round tonight.’
‘I think you should wait for him to come to you, Lucy, but yes, I’ll check on him on my break, okay?’
Her mother rang off as a customer approached and Lucy replaced the phone. She stood there for a moment staring at the receiver, then walked into the lounge. She reached for the TV to turn it on, to check the news, then thought better of it. It would only upset her again. The sudden outburst of grief had been a scouring, somehow, leaving her feeling raw but alive, and she had no wish to sink back into her earlier lethargy, sitting staring at the screen, waiting for something to happen, for the boy to be found. Worrying about Matt, who she knew would be taking this hard. But then, it was his job wasn’t it? He chose to put himself in the middle of these tragedies; she and Benjamin Armstrong’s mother had had it thrust upon them.
Lucy thought about Ricky again, and knew what she had to do. What she should have done last night, instead of falling into his arms.
She left the message on his house phone, reasoning that if she was going to tell him she couldn’t see him again while he was right in the middle of a possible murder case, she could at least not drop it on him in the middle of investigating. But she felt it was important, vital even,that she do it now.
Her voice sounded uncannily calm to her ears. ‘I’m sorry Matt, but I think it’s better if we don’t continue to see each other. I don’t think it’s healthy for either of us, and I need to concentrate on Ricky.’ There was a pang of guilt as she said the last – how hard had she been concentrating on Ricky last night? –but as she finished the message there was a sense of relief; of having done what she had to.
Restless now she went upstairs to tidy Ricky’s room. She would make it nice for him; get in his favourite foods for tea, and then fetch him from her mother’s.
When the door knocked her first thought was that it would be Matt, and her heart leapt treacherously until she remembered the decision she had made. The ma
sculine shape outside her door, visible but distorted through the frosted glass was too tall and not broad enough to be Matt and she peered through the spyhole, hoping it wasn’t reporters.
Ethan. Again. She had seen more of him in the past week than she had in the past two years. Yet as she opened the door to him the disappointment that it wasn’t Matt rose up in her and she felt an inexplicable urge to throw herself into her ex-husbands’s arms.
***
Ben had had a great morning with his new friend. They had sweets, and played in the woods with a dirty old football they had found, and now they were back at the man’s house and they had played hide and seek. But then he had started to ask for Mummy, and the man had looked at him kind of funny, then changed the subject and asked if he wanted to play hide and seek again. Ben didn’t want to upset him and make him look sad again, so he agreed, but really he was getting a bit bored of hide and seek now, and he was starting to feel sick from all the sweets and wanted some proper dinner.
He should ask the man, but something stopped him. He didn’t want to upset him. Because although the man was nice to him and played with him, it seemed as if he could get sad again at any minute. Like the way Mummy got sad but at the same time angry when she had to tell him off for doing something silly, like the time he had used his felt tips to draw on Daddy's white shirts. He didn’t know what the man would want to tell him off for, because he had been good, but sometimes grown-ups got sad or cross for reasons Ben didn’t understand.
In fact, Ben was starting to worry that there was something very wrong with the man. That perhaps he wasn’t his friend after all.
Chapter Eleven
Wednesday Afternoon
Matt straightened his tie and took his seat behind the table next to Dailey and WPC Kaur. The FLO winked at Matt as he sat next to her, rolling her eyes and prompting a smile from him. Dailey cleared his throat, ready to begin, and as he read a brief statement Matt blinked against the flashes of cameras, spotting Carla at the back of the room, glaring directly at him, notebook gripped in her expensively manicured nails like a weapon. She looked good, he noted, with a new and obviously also expensive haircut. Life with Jacob must be agreeing with her.
Dailey finished his spiel and sat back, having done his part and directing questions towards Matt as the investigating officer. Throwing him to the wolves. A red-haired tabloid reporter was the first to pounce.
‘Are there any new leads on the whereabouts of Benjamin Armstrong?’
‘There has been a suspected sighting of Benjamin at around nine-thirty this morning, hand in hand with a white male, aged early to late twenties, wearing a baseball cap. The information was given anonymously and we’re calling for the witness to come forward, and for anyone else who thinks they may have seen Benjamin with this unidentified person to come forward with the information. However sparse, any sighting at this stage could be crucial to the investigation.’
There was an excited murmur at that, the noise of frantic scribbling, more camera flashes. Matt felt a headache coming on.
‘Any more information on this mysterious companion? Do we know for certain it was Benjamin Armstrong he was with?’ The redhead again, an eager light in her eyes. Matt shook his head, feeling as though he was admitting to a failure. A morning of searching, interviewing and reading through statements and this was all they had to offer – a young man in a baseball cap?
‘At this time that’s the only information we have. Again, I must stress the importance of this anonymous witness – and anyone else with information – coming forward. However trivial it may seem.’
Another reporter, a young blond lad who looked as though he should be in school, went to speak but was interrupted by the redhead. She would have been attractive, Matt thought, if it wasn’t for the almost fanatical gleam in her eyes.
‘I’ll ask you what we’re all thinking, inspector. Is there any chance the man in question could be Terry Prince?’
Matt glared at her, only for three different camera flashes to snap in his direction. Still, he had known the question was coming.
‘There is nothing at this stage in the investigation to connect Benjamin Armstrong with Terry Prince, or any other previous cases of child abduction.’
‘So we’re talking about an abduction?’ a voice from across the room jumped on his comment. Matt smiled tightly.
‘We’re talking about a missing boy. No possibility will be ruled out, including abduction.’
‘Are you looking for a body?’ The redhead again. He wondered how any other representative from the various media outlets ever managed to get a word in edgeways with this woman around. She was like a pitbull in a dress.
‘We’re looking for Benjamin Armstrong. It is too early to speculate. The important thing, as I have stressed, is that anyone with possibly relevant information comes forwards. Every moment is crucial.’
There was a brief pause after his words, even the eager redhead grasping the seriousness of the situation. The clock was ticking for Benjamin Armstrong.
It didn’t make her pause for long. Obviously sensing Matt’s unwillingness to get led into the subject of Prince, she went in for the kill.
‘But don’t you think it’s a coincidence, inspector? That a known child killer gets released and a week later a child goes missing in exactly the same circumstances? Just a few miles away? And now we have a sighting of a possible suspect who could fit Terry Prince’s description.’
Matt raised an eyebrow at her, waited a beat before answering. Let her look over-eager, as if she was trying to sensationalise the case. The other journos were staring at Matt, waiting for his answer, a collective hush settling over the room. Although he didn’t look in her direction he was particularly aware of Carla’s eyes on him.
‘I don’t deal in coincidences, madam, I deal in facts. As I said, at this stage there is nothing to connect Benjamin Armstrong to Terry Prince, and speculation for the sake of a good news story could jeopardise our current investigation. Finding Benjamin is paramount.’
The reporter dipped her head, acknowledging the jibe, but didn’t let go of her thread of questioning. Matt decided his pitbull comparison had been spot on.
‘But surely you can’t afford to rule it out either?’
‘Nothing relevant will be ruled out.’
‘Then you admit it’s a possibility? Has Terry Prince been questioned? Do you know his whereabouts? Surely the public have a right to know, inspector, if a dangerous criminal has been released only to strike again?’
Next to him Matt felt Dailey stiffen. Again there was an expectant hush, pens and voice recorders poised to record Matt’s answer. Matt linked his fingers together on the desk in front of him, leaning forward slightly towards the eager faces in the room.
‘As of yet, no one has been taken in for questioning by West Midlands police, and as I have already stated, there is no reason to connect the murder of Jack Randall to the disappearance of Benjamin Armstrong. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves here.’
Another voice piped up then, cold and shrill, cutting across the buzz of the others.
‘Perhaps this subject is a little close to home for you, inspector?’
Carla. Making digs about Lucy, no doubt. Was she really going to go there, right now?
‘Carla. How are you?’ he asked. Acknowledging the relationship between them and either reminding those in the room who knew, or implying it for those who didn’t. To make jibes about himself and Lucy could only look like sour grapes on her part. She flushed and looked annoyed. The males in the room were staring at her with rapt attention.
‘Inspector,’ she said with just a tinge of sarcasm, ‘I’m very well, thank you. But it concerns me that you seem so quick to dismiss any suspicion that Terry Prince could be involved, and yet isn’t it true that you have just assigned a Search and Rescue team to search Baginton Woods – the very place where the body of Jack Randall was discovered?’
How the hell did she know that? Really, Ca
rla was wasted on a local paper.
She allowed herself a triumphant smirk in Matt’s direction at the buzz that went through the room. Matt rubbed his chin, then dropped his hand quickly at the admission – a move that only Carla would recognise, and no doubt derive some satisfaction from – that her comment had unsettled him.
‘We’re leaving no stone unturned when it comes to finding Benjamin; it’s our top priority right now. Again, I must stress the importance that any potential witnesses come forward.’
Having deftly sidestepped Carla’s revelation, Dailey called time on the press conference. Nevertheless, the damage was done. That juicy bit of information would be all over the evening papers.
It had become a habit with Lucy now to gloss over her time with Ethan and make flippant comments about his infidelity, and to dismiss her love for him as the youthful passion of a young woman, both naïve and grateful that a man like Ethan would want a girl like her. Yet if she looked back, before Jack, before she realised that she was never going to measure up to the image of the perfect wife that Ethan wanted her to be, then it was true that, without the bitterness of hindsight to spoil their memories, like a tea stain over a photograph, they had been in love. Madly, deeply in love.
Enough in love that Ethan had proposed to her against his overbearing mother’s wishes, even under the threat of having the funds to finish his medical degree revoked. In love enough that they had managed to fool themselves that such an uneven pairing could actually work. The day of their wedding, which, for appearances’ sake had been big and white and traditional, with flowers and table decorations chosen carefully by the unhappy mother-in-law, had been something out of a fairytale, or a chick-flick, the sort that always end with a starry-eyed bride and her handsome Mr Right. For a while, Ethan had fitted her image of Mr Right so perfectly that it had been unthinkable that things could ever go wrong.
It had taken five dates before she had admitted to him that she was a single parent, that the reason she still wouldn’t stay the night wasn’t out of any reluctance to give herself to him sexually but because she had a baby at home, and she had to get back before the time crept past her teenage babysitter’s curfew. Lucy had imparted that bit of information with her eyes down and her body coiled tightly, to ward off the impact of his putting an end to their budding romance.
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