by J M Gregson
‘No. I’d paid the money before it began to move, and I think most of the other adults had done the same. I didn’t see anyone collecting fares or swinging around the carriages once it started.’
‘Carry on, please.’
‘Lucy waved to me, the first three or four times she passed me. Then she got more confident. She tooted the bus’s horn and twisted the steering wheel and got really involved. She looked very happy.’ He threatened to break down again, but he filled his big chest with a huge breath and regained control. ‘They got a good long ride, as I’d said they would. Most of the younger children had been taken home by this time, so there weren’t many waiting to get on.’
‘But you didn’t see Lucy again after she left that little bus on the roundabout.’
‘No. I waited for the ride to stop and Lucy to climb out and run to me, all excited. But when it stopped, the bus was exactly opposite me on the other side and I couldn’t see across the other cabins to where she would have got off. I waited for a moment for her to come round to me. I was afraid that if I went to collect her, she might choose the other side of the ride from me and panic if I wasn’t where she’d left me.’
‘So you stood quite still for a moment and watched for Lucy coming back to you. How long would that be?’
‘I’m not sure. It seemed a long time, as I gradually realized that she wasn’t coming. I was worried, but I didn’t really panic at that stage. I thought Lucy would be standing still on the other side of the ride, waiting for me to collect her. She’s a sensible girl. I suppose I stood waiting for about thirty seconds before I moved – certainly not longer than a minute.’
‘You’re probably about right in that guestimate. A minute is a long time when you’re standing quite still and waiting for something to happen.’ Lambert was thinking of how long a minute seemed when there was no noise and no movement at eleven o’clock on Armistice Day. He dismissed that death-laden image furiously from his mind. ‘This is very important, Mr Boyd. When you stood watching and waiting for Lucy, you must have been acutely aware of other adults around you. Did you see any movement towards the spot where Lucy must have been when the ride stopped and she left her bus?’
Matt shook his head unhappily. ‘I’ve been over that moment a dozen times. I’ve told myself that I must surely have seen something – someone – who had a hand in her removal. I can see the ride and its lights and the other children getting off it and running back to their parents quite clearly in my mind, as if it were a film loop being run over and over again past my eyes. I can even hear some of the things the other kids said to their adults, but I can’t see or hear any sign of Lucy, or any shadow of a movement towards where she must have been.’
He waited for an agonizing moment as Hook completed his note on this. Then the DS looked up at him and said, ‘So how do you think you missed her, Matt? Do you think she lost her bearings and wandered off in the wrong direction, or do you think some person or persons unknown abducted her?’
Matt noted the first use of his forename. The man seemed friendly, but was that merely a tactic to soften him up? ‘Someone took her, didn’t they?’
‘It certainly looks like it. But if she wandered off and fell into the wrong hands, it could have been later in the evening rather than by that roundabout.’
Matt thought about it. It was a possibility he hadn’t considered. He tried desperately to work out how his answer might affect his own position, but he couldn’t think it through. He shook his head vigorously, as though trying to rid his face of a troublesome fly. ‘No. I think someone grabbed her as she came off the ride. Probably someone who came out of the wood. It comes right up to the edge of the common at that point. The trees can’t be more than a few yards from that ride and the point where Lucy climbed off it.’
Lambert nodded. ‘Eleven yards.’ He’d paced it out less than an hour ago when he’d talked to the SOCO team. ‘Mr Boyd, your evidence is vital. At this moment, you are the last person known to have seen Lucy Gibson.’ He bit his lip. Familiarity with dozens of homicides had almost led him to say ‘the last person known to have seen Lucy Gibson alive’. He must not allow the increasing foreboding that was weighing upon him to enter his speech. ‘You will be asked to sign a statement in due course, Mr Boyd. Is there anything you feel you have missed out in your account of what happened last night?’
Boyd’s forehead twisted into a frown above the broad features. ‘There’s one thing. When we were on our way from the big rides to the edge of the fair where the smaller ones were, we passed a shooting gallery. I stopped and had a go to try to win a prize for Lucy or her mum. She didn’t leave me, even when I was shooting. I can remember her clinging on to the leg of my trousers when I had both hands on the rifle. But my attention was obviously on the target I was shooting at, for perhaps two minutes. I suppose someone might have been watching us, sizing up his chances of snatching Lucy.’
‘Indeed someone might. I take it this would be only about ten minutes before she vanished?’
‘About that, yes. We went straight from the shooting gallery to the small ride.’
‘But you weren’t aware of anyone skulking around. He or she might have been some distance away, of course – we mustn’t rule out women, at this stage.’
‘No, I wasn’t. It’s still my belief that whoever snatched her came out of the woods beside the common. But I don’t think I’d have spotted anyone when I’d finished at the shooting gallery. I won a prize, you see. A small one, but I let Lucy choose what she wanted. All my attention must have been on her and the prizes at that moment.’
‘I see. What was it you won?’
‘A little doll. Just a simple rag one, with a big face and a stupid smile. But Lucy seemed to like it. She kept waving its arm at me as she went round and round in that blue bus on her ride.’
‘Just a minute.’
Lambert levered himself up without taking his eyes off Boyd and went out to the bags of exhibits that DI Rushton was beginning to catalogue in the murder room. He returned within his minute, during which Hook and Boyd had exchanged not a word. He held the polythene bag by its corner. ‘Would this be the doll you gave to Lucy?’
Matt Boyd’s eyes widened in horror as he looked at the contents. ‘Yes. That’s the doll. It didn’t have that mud on it when I gave it to her, obviously. Where did you get it?’
‘It was found in the wood you mentioned. The one where you think the abductor took Lucy.’
The three men stared at the small, pathetic item. Matt was conscious that after a moment the two CID men had transferred their gaze to his face, but he could not move his own eyes from that piteous reminder of the girl who had waved at him from the roundabout. Lambert’s voice seemed to come from a long way away as it said with quiet insistency, ‘We need your account of the rest of the evening, Mr Boyd.’
Matt took another huge breath. He needed to concentrate upon this above all. ‘There’s nothing else to tell. I didn’t see Lucy again.’
‘You need to look at this from our point of view, Mr Boyd. You are the last person known to have seen Lucy and there is very much more to tell. You said last night that Lucy vanished at around half past seven. Do you wish to revise that?’
‘No, not really. It was probably a little later than that, but not much. When I couldn’t find Lucy, the last thing I was thinking about was what the time was.’
‘That at any rate is understandable. What is less so is how long you took to report her disappearance to us. Had we been informed immediately, we might have been able to help.’
‘Might have cordoned off the area,’ agreed Matthew Boyd dully. ‘The uniformed man told me that last night.’
Lambert doubted privately whether they would have had the personnel available on a Saturday night to surround such a large area. It was far more likely that they’d have been reassuring the mother that children usually turned up by the end of the evening and trying to explore all the homes to which a small girl might have fled when she
panicked. But he felt no inclination to take the pressure off this thickset, apprehensive figure in front of him. ‘According to Mrs Gibson, you didn’t return to her house until around nine o’clock. Even allowing for the fact that you cannot be precise about the times, that still leaves us with a gap of at least eighty minutes. What were you doing during that time?’
He’d expected the question, but it came across the table from Lambert more like an accusation. ‘I thought I’d find her. I couldn’t believe she was gone, at first. Then I thought she must be playing a trick on me – that she’d hidden herself away and was going to come out and laugh at me.’
‘Is Lucy a frisky little girl? Would she enjoy playing hide and seek with you like that?’
Frisky. Matt wanted to say that she was; it would help to explain his conduct, surely. But he wasn’t sure what Anthea would have told them and he couldn’t afford to contradict the girl’s mother, could he? ‘No, not really, I suppose. But I didn’t know her all that well, did I? You pointed out yourself that it was the first time we’d been out alone together. I suppose I wanted to think she was hiding. I couldn’t get my head round the idea that she’d simply disappeared.’
‘But it didn’t take you eighty minutes to decide that a seven-year-old wasn’t playing hide and seek with you.’
It was a statement, not a question. That was another signal that he was on trial here, or at least meant to feel that he was. What he had meant to deliver as bold and convincing statements were being made to sound like a weak and desperate defence. ‘I looked for her. I went all round the fairground. I asked one or two of the stallholders whether they’d seen a little girl on her own, but none of them had. As one of them said, looking for a kid in a fairground is like searching for a needle in a haystack. I searched the wood beside the fairground – well, searched it as well as I could. I needed a torch really, but I hadn’t got one and I hadn’t even got my mobile phone: I’d left it behind at Anthea’s house’
Lambert spoke more gently this time. ‘Eighty minutes is a long time, Mr Boyd.’
‘I know it is. I suppose part of the reason I took so long is that I didn’t want to face Anthea and tell her that I’d lost her little girl, when she’d trusted me with her. I even came back and got my car to search a wider area.’
Lambert nodded whilst Hook made a note of that. ‘So you returned to the house and gave Anthea the bad news at around nine o’clock. The call reporting that Lucy was missing was logged at this station at nine fifty-four. Why this additional delay?’
‘I had to calm Anthea down. Or try to – she was hysterical.’
‘Then surely she would have been anxious to let us know what had happened as quickly as possible.’
Again the statement. Again the ringing logic that made his story sound like a pack of lies. Matt said in a low, defeated voice, ‘That was me. I thought we should ring all her friends’ houses, all the places where she might possibly have gone, before we rang the police. I said that was the first thing they would ask us to do anyway.’
‘You may well be right about that. But we could also have been taking other steps, setting a search in motion. Mr Boyd, have you any further thoughts to offer?’
Matt shook his head hopelessly. ‘No. I think now that someone snatched her and was away through the woods with her before I or anyone else realized anything was wrong. It seems the only possible solution.’
There were others, but Lambert wasn’t about to offer them. He said merely, ‘Please don’t leave the area without furnishing us with an address, Mr Boyd.’
FIVE
Eleanor Hook saw how drawn and tired Bert looked as soon as he entered the house. That wasn’t usual for Bert, who generally enjoyed his work, despite his routine protests on occasions at the dullness of it. Tonight he came into their home wishing heartily for a little of that dullness.
‘Supper won’t be long,’ she said.
He looked at her for a moment as if he had not understood, then nodded and slumped into an armchair.
Eleanor got herself a gin and tonic and set a glass and a can of beer on the small table by Hook’s elbow. ‘Thanks,’ he said quietly. He summoned up a small, grateful smile for her, then stared into space. After a moment, he tilted the glass and poured the contents of the can into it with elaborate care, as if he could shut out the rest of his day by this simple act of concentration.
Eleanor sat down opposite him but didn’t speak. They had married relatively late by police standards, when both of them were in their late twenties and recovering from broken engagements. It was a relaxed and happy union; they often didn’t need words. It wasn’t until Bert gave a long sigh and said, ‘We haven’t found her,’ that Eleanor chose to speak.
‘You saw the mother?’ Eleanor listened to the movements of her boys in the room above her and tried to imagine what it must be like to lose a child as this woman had: snatched off the face of the earth when the little girl had been enjoying a treat. It wasn’t even like an illness, where at least you had a little time to prepare yourself for what might happen. The Hooks had almost lost their younger son, Luke, to meningitis a year or so ago. The hours when he had wavered between life and death had been the worst three days of her life.
This must be much, much worse – this sudden removal of your child without any notice of catastrophe. And with it the thought that your little girl must surely be in the hands of someone evil. When you were a police wife, you retained what some people now thought of as the old-fashioned idea of evil.
Hook signalled his return to the world around him with a huge sigh and a belated reply to his wife’s question. ‘Yes, I saw the mother. I’m sure in my own mind that she had nothing to do with this.’
Eleanor gasped. She’d heard the radio appeals at lunchtime and felt a quite crushing sympathy for anyone close to the girl. She hadn’t even entertained the idea that Lucy Gibson’s mother might be involved in some sort of unnatural intrigue to dispose of her daughter, but she knew there had been some bizarre happenings in the last few years. The macabre Fred West and his wife had operated less than twenty miles from here. No doubt these things had to be checked out; no wonder Bert was distressed. She said dully, ‘Is there a man around?’
She tried to keep her voice as neutral as she could, but you couldn’t escape two facts. First, the overwhelming probability was that it was a man who had done this, however the seven-year-old girl had been spirited away. Second, there was a higher incidence of crime in homes where only one parent remained. Eleanor had huge respect for the many single mothers who were struggling to give their children the best chances they could, but the statistics said that single-parent children had more chance of being harmed and more chance of becoming criminals themselves than those in two-parent households.
Hook said evenly, ‘There’s a dad. He’s been gone for a few months. We haven’t caught up with him yet, but we will. There’s also a new man, a man who’s been regularly staying overnight with Anthea Gibson. He hasn’t moved in yet, but I think Anthea was hoping that he would. God knows how this will affect the two of them. The girl was on her own with him when she disappeared. Lucy, she’s called.’ He felt the same need to assert the girl’s identity and continued existence as John Lambert had done earlier in the day.
‘You’ll have seen this man.’
She didn’t voice her queries about him, but Bert understood and answered. ‘John Lambert gave him quite a grilling this afternoon. You’ve got to in cases like this. You’ve no time to spare.’ He smiled grimly. When there was a body, however brutal the death, there was not quite the same urgency. When a child went missing, you were trying to anticipate and prevent death. As well as other things, which, for a terrified little girl, might be worse than death. ‘The man’s called Matthew Boyd. I’m sure the papers will have got hold of the name by tomorrow morning, though not from us. He answered all our questions satisfactorily enough, as far as we could tell. But to my mind there’s something not quite right about him. That doesn’t
necessarily mean he had anything to do with this crime, though.’ Hook asserted the caveat of the fair-minded man, even when speaking to his wife.
Bert smiled grimly as he heard the noise of his sons’ voices raised in argument upstairs. He was thinking of Jack, his elder son, who always teased him by asking in an American drawl if he was ‘playing a hunch’. A hunch is what he’d just voiced, he supposed, when he’d said he sensed something not quite right about Matthew Boyd.
But when the boys came down with appetites honed for the evening meal, there was no teasing from Jack. He said without preamble to his father, ‘This kid who’s disappeared – was it from the fairground yesterday? That’s what they seemed to be saying when we saw the bit on the telly about it.’
Hook nodded. ‘At around half past seven or a little later yesterday evening. It was a seven-year-old girl called Lucy Gibson.’ At that moment Bert was very glad that Jack and Luke were male and aged fourteen and twelve. ‘Why do you ask?’
Jack was at that annoying age when he was still a child but very much wanting to seem an adult. That meant that he said nothing now. Instead, he nodded sagely, produced his mobile phone and tapped the buttons that brought up his best friend from school. He then sank his head towards his chest, covered the mouthpiece and conversed in low tones. His own side of the conversation seemed to be mostly a series of questions.
Then he turned back to his brother and his parents, who were waiting to begin their meal. His face was grave and urgent with his news. ‘That was Darren. He told me this at football this morning, but I didn’t know then that a kid had disappeared. Darren’s kid sister is eleven. One of the guys taking the fares and operating the rides at the fairground tried to molest her yesterday. He stroked her leg and touched her up. She was scared stiff. She ran away as fast as she could, Darren says.’
There is no shortage of civilian volunteers when a child disappears, especially in small rural communities. The problem for the police is usually how to marshal these men and women most effectively. There was little difficulty in doing that after Lucy Gibson had vanished.