Wednesday's Child, page 2
“Did you recognize either of them?” he asked. “Had you seen them around before?” Banks didn’t expect much to come from this—Eastvale was a fair-sized town—but it was worth a try.
She shook her head.
“Did they touch anything while they were here?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Did you offer them tea or anything?”
“No. Of course I didn’t.”
Banks was thinking of fingerprints. There was a slight chance that if they had drunk tea or coffee, Mrs Scupham might not have washed the cups yet. Certainly any prints on the door handles, if they hadn’t been too blurred in the first place, would have been obscured by now.
Banks asked for, and got, a fairly recent school photograph of Gemma Scupham. She was a pretty child, with the same long hair as her mother—her blonde colouring was natural, though—and a sad, pensive expression on her face that belied her seven years.
“Where could she be?” Brenda Scupham asked. “What have they done to her?”
“Don’t worry. We’ll find her.” Banks knew how empty the words sounded as soon as he had spoken them. “Is there anything else you can tell us?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“What was Gemma wearing?”
“Wearing? Oh, those yellow overall things, what do you call them?”
“Dungarees?”
“Yes, that’s right. Yellow dungarees over a white T-shirt. It had some cartoon animal on the front. Donald Duck, I think. She loved cartoons.”
“Did the visitors mention any name other than Brown or Peterson?”
“No.”
“Did you see their car?”
“No, I didn’t look. You don’t, do you? I just let them in and we talked, then they went off with Gemma. They were so nice, I … I just can’t believe it.” Her lower lip trembled and she started to cry, but it turned into another coughing fit.
Banks stood up and gestured for Susan to follow him out into the hall. “You’d better stay with her,” he whispered.
“But, sir—”
Banks held his hand up. “It’s procedure, Susan. And she might remember something else, something important. I’d also like you to get something with Gemma’s fingerprints on it. But first I want you to radio in and tell Sergeant Rowe to phone Superintendent Gristhorpe and let him know what’s going on. You’d better get someone to contact all the Yorkshire social services, too. You never know, someone might have made a cock-up of the paperwork and we’d look right wallies if we didn’t check. Ask Phil to organize a house-to-house of the neighbourhood.” He handed her the photograph. “And arrange to get some copies of this made.”
Susan went out to the unmarked police Rover, and Banks turned back into the living-room, where Brenda Scupham seemed lost in her own world of grief. He touched her lightly on the shoulder. “I have to go,” he said. “DC Gay will be back in a moment. She’ll stay with you. And don’t worry. We’re doing all we can.”
He walked down the short path to the patrol car and tapped on the window. “You told me you searched the place, right?” he said to the constable behind the wheel, pointing back up the path with his thumb.
“Yes, sir, first thing.”
“Well, do it again, just to be certain. And send someone to get Mrs Scupham a packet of fags, too. Silk Cut’ll do. I’m off to the pub.” He headed down the street leaving a puzzled young PC behind him.
II
Detective Superintendent Gristhorpe squatted by his dry-stone wall in the back garden of his house above the village of Lyndgarth and contemplated retirement. He would be sixty in November, and while retirement was not mandatory, surely after more than forty years on the job it was time to move aside and devote himself to his books and his garden, as the wise old Roman, Virgil, had recommended.
He placed a stone, then stood up, acutely aware of the creak in his knees and the ache in his lower back as he did so. He had been working at the wall for too long. Why he bothered, the Lord only knew. After all, it went nowhere and closed in nothing. His grandfather had been a master waller in the dale, but the skill had not been passed down the generations. He supposed he liked it for the same reason he liked fishing: mindless relaxation. In an age of technocratic utilitarianism, Gristhorpe thought, a man needs as much purposeless activity as he can find.
The sun had set a short while ago, and the sharp line of Aldington Edge cut high on the horizon to the north, underlining a dark mauve and purple sky. As Gristhorpe walked towards the back door, he felt the chill in the light breeze that ruffled his thatch of unruly grey hair. Mid-September, and autumn was coming to the dale.
Inside the house, he brewed a pot of strong black tea, threw together a Wensleydale cheese-and-pickle sandwich, then went into his living-room. The eighteenth-century farmhouse was stur-dily built, with walls thick enough to withstand the worst a Yorkshire winter could throw at them, and since his wife’s death Gristhorpe had transformed the living-room into a library. He had placed his favourite armchair close to the stone hearth and spent so many an off-duty hour reading there that the heat from the fire had cracked the leather upholstery on one side.
Gristhorpe had given the television his wife had enjoyed so much to Mrs Hawkins, the lady who “did” for him, but he kept the old walnut-cabinet wireless so he could listen to the news, “My Word,” cricket and the plays that sometimes came on in the evenings. Two walls were lined with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, and a series of framed prints from Hogarth’s “The Rake’s Progress” hung over the fireplace.
Gristhorpe set his tea and sandwich beside the books on the small round table, within easy reach, and settled back with a sigh into his chair. The only sounds that broke the silence were the wind soughing through the elms and the ticking of the grandfather clock in the hall.
To retire or not to retire, that was the question that kept him from immediately picking up The Way of All Flesh. Over the past few years he had delegated most of the investigative work to his team and spent his time on administrative and co-ordinating duties. He had absolute trust in Alan Banks, his protégé, and both DS Richmond and the recently appointed DC Gay were coming along well. Should he move aside and clear the space for Banks’s promotion? Certainly Alan showed an enthusiasm for work and learning that reminded Gristhorpe of himself as a young lad. Both lacked formal education beyond the local grammar school, but neither let it hold him back. Banks was a good detective, despite his anti-authoritarian tendencies, occasional rashness and a loathing for the politics that were now becoming so much a part of the job. But Gristhorpe admired him for that. He, himself, hated police politics. Banks, though twenty years younger, was a real copper, a man who had come from the street. He also had imagination and curiosity, two qualities that Gristhorpe thought essential.
And what would he do with his time if he did retire? There was the dry-stone wall, of course, but that was hardly a full-time occupation. Nor was reading, especially with the way his eyesight had been declining of late. He was at an age when every odd ache or pain brought a little more fear than it had before, when colds lingered and settled on the chest. But he was no hypochondriac. The Gristhorpes were robust, always had been.
He would like to travel, he decided, to revisit Venice, Florence, Paris, Madrid, and go somewhere he had never been before—the Far East, perhaps, or Russia. But travel cost money, and a policeman’s pension wouldn’t stretch that far. Gristhorpe sighed and picked up Samuel Butler. He didn’t have to make his decision tonight; best wait for a while.
He had hardly got through the first paragraph when the phone rang. Marking the page with a leather strip and putting the book aside, he got up and walked into the hall. It was Sergeant Rowe from the station. He had received a message from Susan Gay about a child gone missing from the East Side Estate. Could the superintendent come in as soon as possible? Gristhorpe could get few more details over the phone, except that the child had been taken by a man and a woman pretending to be social workers and that she had been gone over a day. As he listened to Sergeant Rowe deliver the message in his flat, emotionless voice, Gristhorpe felt a shiver go up his spine.
Grimly, he put on his tweed jacket and went outside to the car. It was completely dark now, and the lights of Lyndgarth twinkled below on the daleside. Gristhorpe drove through the village, past the squat St Mary’s, and onto the main Eastvale road. It was a journey he had made hundreds of times, and he drove automatically, without even having to think about the dips and turns. Normally, even in the dark, he would glance at certain landmarks— the lights of the old Lister house way up on the opposite slopes of the valley; the six trees bent over by the wind on the drumlin to the west—but this time he was too distracted to notice the landscape.
As he drove towards the lights of Eastvale, he remembered that long Saturday in October, 1965, when he and dozens of other young policemen had stood in the drizzle and the biting wind 1,600 feet up the Pennines listening to their orders. There they all stood, in anoraks and wellington boots, shivering in the late autumn cold on the top of Saddleworth Moor, complaining about the Saturday afternoon football they were missing. It was eerie enough just being up there in the banshee wind, the rain and inky light, with those outcrops of rocks like decayed teeth on the skyline. All day they had searched, dragging their feet through the mud and peat, from 9:30 a.m. until well after three o’clock. The rain had stopped by then, and the weather was a little warmer, the moor shrouded in a slight mist.
Suddenly Gristhorpe had heard the shout from a searcher in the distance: a young lad, he remembered, just out of training college, who had taken a break to answer a call of nature. Those nearby, Gristhorpe included, hurried towards him, and watched in horror as Detective Sergeant Eckersley came and scraped away the clinging peat from a child’s arm bone. A little more digging revealed a head. Eckersley stopped at that. He sent for the scene-of-crime officers, and soon they all arrived, out of nowhere, the Assistant Chief Constable, police surgeons, photographers, Joe Mounsey, the lot.
They put up canvas screens and everyone but the brass and the SOCOs had to stand back. As the doctor scraped off the dirt and the flash camera popped, the whole gruesome discovery finally lay revealed. Gristhorpe caught only a glimpse of the body through a gap in the canvas, but it was enough.
They had been looking for a boy called John Kilbride, but what they had found was the near-skeletal body of a girl lying on her side with her right arm raised above her head. Close to her feet, her clothes lay bundled—a blue coat, a pink cardigan, a red-and-green tartan skirt. Instead of John Kilbride, they had found the body of Lesley Ann Downey, aged ten, another victim of the couple who came to be called the “Moors Murderers,” Ian Brady and Myra Hindley.
Somehow, that day stood engraved in Gristhorpe’s memory more than any other day in his life. Months, even years, might go by and he wouldn’t even think of that October day in 1965, but when something like this happened, there it was, every bit as real and as horrifying as if he were back there on the moor seeing that arm sticking up through the quagmire as if it were waving or pointing.
He had thought of it only once in the past few years, and that was when a sixteen-year-old girl had gone missing from one of the Swainsdale villages. And now two people, a man and a woman— just as Brady and Hindley had been—had walked bold as brass into a house on the East Side Estate and abducted a seven-year-old girl.
As Gristhorpe drove down narrow North Market Street past the Town Hall, the lit window displays of the tourist shops and the community centre, he gripped the wheel so hard his knuckles turned white as he once again heard the girl’s voice in his head from the tape Brady and Hindley recorded before they murdered her: Lesley Ann whimpering and begging for her mummy and daddy to help her; Brady telling her to put something in her mouth and saying he wants to photograph her. And that damn music, that damn music, “The Little Drummer Boy.” Gristhorpe had never been able to listen comfortably to any music since then without hearing the girl screaming and begging for mercy in his head, and he let everyone believe he was tone deaf to avoid awkward explanations.
He turned his car into the parking area at the back of the station, an old Tudor-fronted building, the front of which faced Eastvale’s market square, and sat for a few moments to calm himself down and rid himself of the memory. And before he went inside, he delivered a silent prayer—not without some embarrassment, for he wasn’t a religious man—that there should be nothing, nothing to compare between this affair and the Moors Murders. No time for thoughts of retirement now.
III
As Banks walked down the street towards The Barleycorn, he glanced at the rows of identical red brick houses. There was no doubt about it, the East Side Estate was a disaster. True, some tenants had bought the houses when the Thatcher government sold them off, and many had added a white fence here, a lick of paint there, or even a dormer window. But it was a shabby area, with junk-littered lawns, children’s tricycles left in the street, and mangy dogs running free, fouling the pavements, barking and snapping at passers-by.
And The Barleycorn was a typical estate pub, right from its unimaginative name and its squat flat-roofed exterior to its jukebox, video games and poorly kept keg beer.
Banks pushed open the door and glanced around. Little Richard’s “Good Golly Miss Molly” was playing too loudly on the jukebox. The cash register rang up another sale. Most of the tables were empty, and only a few diehard drinkers stood at the bar.
As the door shut behind him, Banks noticed the people look in his direction, and suddenly one man took off towards the back. Banks dashed after him, bumping his knee on a chair and knocking it over as he went. He caught the man by the shoulder just before he had reached the exit. The man tried to pull free, but Banks kept his grip, spun him around and hit him hard, just once, in the solar plexus. The man groaned and doubled up. Banks took him by the elbow and helped him to a table the way one escorts an elderly relative.
As soon as they had sat down, the barman rushed over.
“Look, mister, I don’t want no trouble,” he said.
“Good,” Banks answered. “Neither do I. But I’d like a small brandy for my friend here, just to settle his stomach.”
“What do you think I am, a bloody waitress?”
Banks looked at the man. He was about six feet tall and gone to fat. His nose looked as if it had been broken a few times, and old scar tissue hooded his left eye.
“Just bring the drink,” Banks said. “I won’t have anything myself. Not while I’m on duty.”
The barman stared at Banks, then his jaw dropped. He shrugged and turned back to the bar. In a few seconds he came back with the brandy. “It’s on the house,” he mumbled.
Banks thanked him and passed the glass over to his companion, who sat rubbing his stomach and gasping for breath. “Here’s to your health, Les.”
The man glared at him through teary eyes, knocked back the brandy in one and banged the glass down hard on the table. “You didn’t need to have done that,” he said. “I was only off for a piss.”
“Bollocks, Les,” said Banks. “The only time I’ve seen anyone run as fast as that to the bog they had dysentery. Why were you running?”
“I told you.”
“I know, but I want you to tell me the truth.”
Les Poole was well known to the Eastvale police and had been a frequent guest at the station. He had congenitally sticky fingers and couldn’t stand the idea of anything belonging to anyone else but him. Consequently, he had been in and out of jail since Borstal, mostly for burglary. No doubt, Banks thought, had he the intelligence, he might also have risen to the dizzy heights of fraud and blackmail. Les had never held a job, though rumour had it that he had, in fact, once worked as a dustbin man for six weeks but got the sack for wasting too much time rummaging through people’s rubbish looking for things he could keep or sell. In short, Banks thought, Les Poole was little more than a doodle in the margin of life. At least until now.
Les was an odd-looking character, too, like someone who had fallen through a time warp from the 1950s. He had greased-back hair, complete with quiff, sideboards and duck’s arse, a triangular face with a Kirk Douglas dimple on his chin, a long, thin nose, and eyes as flat and grey as slate. About Banks’s height, he was wearing a black leather jacket, red T-shirt and jeans. His beer-belly bulged over the belt. He looked as if he should be playing stand-up bass in a rockabilly band. Why he had always been so attractive to women, Banks couldn’t fathom. Maybe it was his long dark eyelashes.
“Well?” prompted Banks.
“Well what?”
Banks sighed. “Let’s start this again, Les. What we’ll do is we’ll back up and lead nice and slowly to the question. Maybe that way you’ll be able to understand it, all right?”
Les Poole just glared at him.
Banks lit a cigarette and went on. “I came down here to ask if you know anything about young Gemma’s disappearance. Do you?” “She was taken away, that’s all I know. Brenda told me.” “Where were you when it happened?”
“Eh?”
“Where were you yesterday afternoon?”
“Out and about.”
“Doing what?”
“Oh, this and that.”
“Right. So while you were out and about doing this and that, a man and a woman, both well-dressed and official-looking, called at your house, said they were child-care workers, talked their way inside and persuaded Brenda to hand over her daughter for tests and further examination. Now what I want to know, Les, is do you know anything about that?”
Les shrugged. “It’s not my kid, is it? I can’t help it if she’s so fucking daft she’ll give her kid away.”
The barman appeared at Banks’s shoulder and asked if they wanted anything else.
