by Alex Walters
Of course, for the foreseeable future, it would no longer need to.
Murrain shuffled awkwardly on the over-patterned carpet and glanced at Milton, who was staring blankly at the couple sitting on the sofa opposite. They looked shrunken themselves, as if physically oppressed by Murrain's substantial physique.
'I appreciate how difficult this must be for you—' Murrain began.
'Do you?' Alan Dunn said. 'Do you really?'
Two days before, Dunn had been taken to the mortuary at Stepping Hill hospital to confirm the identity of Ethan's tiny body. Not many people have to experience that kind of ordeal, but Murrain had been closer than most. Now, though, he said only: 'Of course not, Mr Dunn. But we'll do whatever we can to support you through this.'
'Except leave us alone,' Dunn said, belligerently.
'We won't trouble you any more than we can avoid,' Murrain said. 'But you'll understand we need all the information we can get. Anything that might help us track down the person responsible for this.'
'And as far as you're concerned, we're potential suspects too.'
It was a recurrent pattern that Murrain had noted in murder cases, especially those involving children. Those involved often seemed unduly keen to insert themselves into the frame, if only to demonstrate unequivocally why they shouldn't be there. It had been the same with Tanner earlier in the afternoon. 'We have to consider every possibility,' he said. 'Even if just to eliminate it. We have to be systematic.'
Dunn looked as if he were about to argue, but his wife placed a firm hand on his arm and he closed his mouth. Murrain suspected that, for all Dunn's bluster, he wasn't the dominant personality in this marriage.
'How can we help you?' Susan Dunn said. 'We've both already given statements to your colleagues.' She glanced across at Milton who had been responsible for taking the formal statements from the couple at the start of the investigation.
'We appreciate that, Mrs Dunn,' Milton said now. 'We always try to take statements from the key witnesses at the earliest opportunity, while events are still fresh in their minds. But we also sometimes find that people recall more—or at least different things—as time passes. As the investigation proceeds, we may also have different questions to ask.' And, he added silently to himself, we sometimes discover more when Chief Inspector Kenny Murrain is the one listening to the answers.
'Your statement was extremely helpful, Mrs Dunn,' Murrain said. She had described, in detail and with apparent precision, the sequence of events surrounding Ethan's disappearance. Murrain had read hers and Alan Dunn's statements over several times and had been left feeling slightly uneasy. He'd felt something. Some incongruity, something that sat awkwardly. But it had been no more than a passing fancy, and he'd felt no trace of the more intense sensations that might have suggested either had been directly involved in their son's disappearance. That wasn't necessarily definitive, as he well knew, but it suggested that, for the moment, the police might be better concentrating their attentions elsewhere. 'All I want you to do, if it's not too painful, is just to think again about the events of that afternoon. When you first became concerned, you went out to the main road?'
She nodded. She was dressed a little over-formally, Murrain thought, as if to receive visitors, and her face was carefully made-up in a style that, to his inexpert eye, seemed old-fashioned. He imagined that, like the house-cleaning, this was an attempt to maintain some normality in the face of these devastating events. She seemed remarkably calm but Murrain's years of experience had taught him that everyone mourns in their own way. 'I'd been trying to call the school. I thought perhaps the bus had broken down or delayed. It's happened once or twice before. Then I walked down to the road to see if the traffic looked particularly bad. They had roadworks down by the junction last year and everything gridlocked. So I went to have a look…' She trailed off.
Murrain could imagine the state she'd been in that afternoon, desperately hoping for some simple explanation for Ethan's non-appearance. He could remember his and Eloise's anxiety the day their own teenage son had failed to return home from school. Another story with no happy ending. 'Can you try to think back to what you saw? Was there anything unusual?' She would have reached the main road only a short time after Ethan had gone missing.
She closed her eyes as she tried to envisage what she'd seen that afternoon. Her husband looked as if he might be about to interrupt, but Murrain shot him a look and he remained silent. 'I don't think so,' she said, after a moment. 'From the corner you can see right down into the village. The traffic was running normally. Mostly cars on the school run, I suppose.' She stopped, as if to control her emotions. 'There weren't many people about. It was a dull day. Not raining, but threatening to.' She paused. 'I'm sorry. I don't think this is much help to you.'
Murrain shook his head. 'We don't know what might or might not be helpful at this stage. Just tell me anything that occurs to you. What about the vehicles on the main road? Passing by or parked. Any that struck you as unusual or out-of-place?'
She closed her eyes again. 'I don't think so. There were a few cars I recognised. Neighbours' cars that are usually there. But you get all sorts of cars in the village. Walkers, people visiting the cafes. So there are always unfamiliar cars out there.' She hesitated, her eyes still closed. 'There was a van.'
'Where?' Murrain exchanged a glance with Milton, who was silently making notes.
'Where the bus normally pulls in. It's not exactly a bus-stop, but there are double yellow lines on that stretch so it's normally clear. The bus usually pulls in there so it's not blocking the road while the children are getting off.'
The driver had mentioned the pull-in being blocked but had been unable to recall any details of the vehicle in question. 'I was too busy trying to manoeuvre a bloody bus full of screaming kids up that narrow road and swearing at the bugger who'd blocked the stop,' he'd explained colourfully.
'You're sure it was a van?'
She opened her eyes. 'Fairly sure. It wasn't a large van, just one of those small ones. Like it might have belonged to someone doing work at one of the houses or shops on the main road.'
'Can you remember the colour?'
She frowned. 'Dark, I think. Blue, maybe? I'm not sure.'
'Any name or logo on it?'
'Not that I can recall. I was looking down the road at it, so I couldn't really see the sides. But my impression was that it was just plain.'
Murrain had felt the slight electrical jolt when she'd first mentioned the van. The sense that it was somehow significant. But perhaps he'd imagined that, just linked what he'd read in the bus-driver's statement. He'd felt something then, too, but very faint, the echo of an echo.
'Is it unusual for vehicles to be parked there?' Milton asked.
'None of the locals park there at that time of day because we all know the bus uses it. But the parking spaces further down get filled so people sometimes park there if they're calling at one of the shops or something.'
'It may be nothing,' Milton observed. 'But it's worth following up. We can check CCTV footage from the surrounding area, see if we can get a match and the registration.'
They were already doing that, of course, trying to identify all the vehicles parked in the area, along with any that had passed through the village at the relevant times. It wasn't easy. They'd obtained some information from their house-to-house interviews with the street's shop-owners and residents. There was some private CCTV coverage in the village itself and they were persuading the various retailers to give them access to the data. Down on the main road there were more cameras and there was a number-plate recognition camera on the route to the M60. But once past the village, heading into the hills, there was nothing.
But Murrain had felt something, and now he had more reason to focus attention on the van. Who did it belong to, and why was it parked just there? If the driver was involved, there would have been a risk in parking conspicuously. But the registration might be faked and, in any case, people tended to be
unobservant. If the driver had stopped with the intention of snatching Ethan or another child, the vehicle would need to have been parked close at hand. And perhaps the driver had deliberately intended to cause the bus to park further up the road, out of sight of Susan Dunn's usually watchful eyes. Which, he added silently to himself, would suggest some premeditation. And also, perhaps, some knowledge of Susan Dunn's routine.
'I don't understand why he'd have gone off with anyone,' Susan Dunn said, her voice low as if speaking to herself. 'We'd warned him often enough about stranger danger.'
Murrain nodded sympathetically, though he'd often wondered whether warnings to children about going off with strangers missed the point. Children were generally much more at risk from those they knew than from a random stranger. 'It's all too easy to distract a child if you're sufficiently manipulative,' he said. 'And there's always the possibility that this wasn't a stranger.'
'So you're back to us again,' Alan Dunn said.
'There may be lots of people around the village who could have seemed familiar to Ethan. Friends, acquaintances, neighbours, people who work in the shops, parents of his school friends, or other people associated with the school. Anyone he might have come across. People who might have been able to persuade him they weren't really a stranger. We're doing door-to-door interviews through the village, and we're talking to the staff and the pupils at the school. If there's anyone else you can think of that we might have missed, maybe you could provide us with details?'
'I can't go accusing people,' Susan Dunn protested. 'Not about this.' She sounded as if her primary concern was a breach of neighbourly etiquette.
'That's not what I'm suggesting,' Murrain said. 'But people know other people. There may be shops you visit regularly, or people you see. Contacts that might not be obvious to us, but which are worth pursuing.'
Her husband had risen to his feet and was pacing up and down the small living room. 'You haven't a clue, have you? That's what this amounts to.'
It wasn't far off the truth, Murrain thought. As Alan Dunn had implied, the first rule in a case like this was to suspect the parents, but they'd searched the house and garden thoroughly—on the pretext of gathering whatever information they could about Ethan—and had so far uncovered nothing suspicious. The second line of investigation was anyone else close to the family—relatives, close friends, regular visitors. But so far they'd identified no obvious candidates. All they could do was continue to expand their circle of interest, gathering information as systematically as they could. The worst possibility, in terms of their likely success, was that this was genuinely a stranger, just someone passing through, with Ethan no more than a random victim of the fates. Those killers, like the notorious Robert Black who'd evaded the police for decades, were the ones who might never be caught.
'We don't jump to conclusions. We gather and analyse as much information as we can. It's only a matter of time.' Murrain sounded, he hoped, much more confident than he currently felt.
'I hope you're right,' Alan Dunn said. 'I want this bastard caught. Before anyone else suffers.' He suddenly sounded the way he looked—no longer aggressive, but reduced, vulnerable, at a loss. As if he'd been struggling to keep the reality at bay and now it had overwhelmed him.
Murrain remembered how he'd felt when faced with a similar reality. 'That's what we all want, Mr Dunn. I promise you we'll do our best to make it happen.' As he spoke, he momentarily felt that familiar tremor beneath his skin, but he couldn't begin to interpret what it might mean. All he knew was that twice already today he'd made the same promise. A promise he didn't know whether he really could keep.
CHAPTER FIVE
Two Years Earlier
Tell him to buy me an acre of land.
He'd been humming gently to himself when she entered the meeting room, and she recognised the old Simon and Garfunkel song.
'Not long now,' she said. 'How are you feeling?'
He looked up. 'I don’t know. Blank, mainly. Emotionless. It doesn’t feel real.'
She could understand that. Despite all the attempts to prepare him—the days out on licence, periods in the probation hostel, the endless discussions with probation and other advisors—he probably still couldn’t begin to envisage what the future would be like.
'Do you feel scared?'
'Sometimes. Sometimes I wake in the night, and there’s a cold hand clutching my insides. I lie there till the panic goes away. But mostly it’s not like that. That only happens when the fear takes me by surprise. When I’m half-asleep and not really prepared.'
'You think you’re suppressing that fear most of the time? Finding ways of coping with it?'
'Not consciously. But, yes, I must be finding ways of dealing with it. Is that a bad thing?'
In truth, she had no idea. 'It’s natural you’re feeling scared,' she offered, after a pause.
'Don't psychologists think repression is a bad thing?'
'Christ knows what psychologists think,' she said. 'I just think it’s human. It can be good or bad, depending on the circumstances.' As so often in her conversations with Carl, she found herself circling the real issues, looking for a way of engaging in something beyond banter.
'You lot have spent the last ten years trying to get me to unrepress things.'
'But our motives aren’t entirely altruistic. Or, more accurately, we aren’t concerned only with you or your well-being.'
'You also have a duty to the victim?' he intoned. 'Or the victim’s family. For what it’s worth, that’s always mattered to me too. It’s just that there’s not been much I could do about it.'
'Is that right, Carl?' she said. 'There was nothing you could do to help the family?'
He appeared genuinely pained by the question. 'I don’t expect anyone to feel sympathy for me. But I’ve had to live with this without even knowing what I was living with.'
'You know what you did, Carl. You know what happened.'
'I know what they told me happened.'
'So what do you know?'
He stared back at her as if the question was unexpected, though she had asked variants of it at almost every session. 'Oh, God, Kate,' he said now. 'I know everything except the one thing I really need to know.'
'Tell me about it,' she said. 'The holiday.' They'd discussed this before, but his responses had never been more than superficial.
'Tell you what?'
'Anything. Something you haven’t told me before.'
His smile had returned, and she could sense he was taking up the challenge. 'Oh, Christ, I don’t know. It was a crap holiday, I’ve told you that already, haven’t I? I didn’t want to go. My mother had died. My old man was in a state, had been knocking back the booze like there was no tomorrow. Which in his head there probably wasn't. I just felt like—I don’t know, as if the ground had been whipped from under me. As if everything I’d relied on had melted away.'
'And the holiday?' He’d never talked as openly as this before, not about anything this close to what mattered.
'Those months after my mum died were awful. My dad really lost it. At first, he was all right. He knew he had to keep things going. It was just about okay while he still had things to deal with. Organising the funeral. Sorting out the will. While he was caught up in that, he had a purpose. Then he didn’t any more.'
'He had you.'
'That was probably what stopped him going off the rails entirely. Things become tough, but he never neglected me. He always made sure I was fed. That I was taken care of.'
'You say he was drinking?'
'Probably more than I realised. And maybe there was something of a nervous breakdown, or depression, or whatever the right word is. He was taking time off work, and in the end they gave him compassionate leave. He couldn’t get out of bed half the time.'
'But he didn’t neglect you?'
'Not really. It was a shitty time. But it was only a few months. He realised what was happening. He told me later he spoke to the GP, got some help with the
depression. He got himself together. Cut back on the drinking. Went back to work. Got his life in order, more or less. Found a way to cope.'
'What sort of way?'
Carl looked up at her, as if he’d only just realised that, in his eagerness to talk, he’d wandered outside his comfort zone. 'Partly religion. He’d always been a devout Catholic.' He spoke the last two words as if they were encircled with ironic quotation marks. 'They both were, my mum and dad. And I suppose I was, by upbringing. But he started to take it a lot more seriously. We’d missed Mass most weeks after the funeral, but he started dragging me along again. He got involved in various church activities.' He stopped and laughed. 'I think he was just trying to meet another good Catholic wife to replace mum.'
'Did he succeed?'
'Not that I was aware of. There were women in and out of his life later but no-one who stayed. I don’t remember anyone at this time. I suppose he must have been lonely.'
'He had you.'
'Lonely for adult company. He was never much of a mixer. Not one of the lads. I suppose he must have had friends, but I don’t know who they were. Once mum died, he was on his own.'
'And the holiday? Tell me about the holiday.'
'Crappiest holiday ever,' he said. 'At least that’s what I thought then.'
'What was wrong with it?'
'Oh, nothing really, looking back. But you know what it’s like when you’re that age. I was just bored. I was the wrong age. You spend your time just mooching around, fed up with everything.'
'What sort of place was it?' She’d read the accounts in the file but wanted to hear what he thought, what impressions he might have of the place now. Any clues that might be lodging in his memory.