Cry of the Children (20 page)

It brought cushions from somewhere else, whilst Raymond kept his eyes resolutely shut, fearing that any sort of movement on his part might lead to sudden violence from above. But there was no violence. The monster rolled him over, slid the cushions beneath him, then rolled him roughly back again. Raymond stared up at it between eyelids that were almost closed; he was still afraid that any sort of reaction might provoke this strange and unpredictable presence.

There was a gruff command that he should not move, an assurance that the monster would be back. Was he supposed to find that reassuring? Then the thing was gone. The light went off in the hall and the front door closed softly in the distance. Raymond was left in a darkness so profound that it seemed to press down upon his small and helpless limbs.

He didn't dare to move for quite a long time. Then, as his body relaxed, he shed his first tears. They came as a relief after the tensions he had endured in the previous half-hour, when he had felt that he might be killed at any time. Tears also brought a heavy, releasing lassitude. The boy who had thought he would never relax again fell into a deep and dreamless sleep.

It was after ten now, but the CID section was crowded and busy. The house-to-house reports were already coming in and being logged by Chris Rushton, but nothing significant had been discovered yet. There had been no random sightings of a boy with an unauthorized adult.

Lambert exchanged views sporadically with DI Rushton, watching the flickering additions to the DI's computer screen. He was there when the young man in uniform came in to say that Big Julie Foster had returned home. The officer had followed instructions. He had watched Julie park her old car behind the house where she had her flat, then enter by the front door. As his orders dictated, he had not made any contact or revealed himself to the woman. He'd shone his torch through the window of the locked car but not attempted to enter it. He had seen nothing there to indicate the presence of an abducted minor.

John Lambert glanced at his watch, nodded at Rushton and took a quick decision. ‘I'm going out there right now to see her. I know it's late, but a kid's life's in danger here.'

As if by some private understanding, Bert Hook appeared soundlessly at his side. Lambert had told him ten minutes ago to go home; neither of them was surprised to find him still here. Lambert parked his old Vauxhall at the end of the road rather than right outside Julie Foster's house. The woman would receive enough unwelcome attention on the morrow when news of the second child abduction was made public. There was no need to create difficulties for her now. It was still possible that she had no connection with this latest outrage.

Lambert had thought that Julie might be on her way to bed, but she was still in corduroy trousers and heavy, flat-heeled shoes when she opened the door to them. He expected her to be shocked, even resentful, when he said they must speak to her at this hour of the night, but she evinced no surprise. She merely turned and led them down the dimly lit passage and into the bedsitter where they had spoken to her two days earlier.

This time the curtain at the far end of the room had been drawn to one side, exposing the bed that lay behind it. The portable television on top of the chest of drawers was blaring noisily, the sound of the ITV adverts as usual louder than the programmes they divided. Lambert asked her to switch it off and inspected the soles of her shoes as she moved to the set. The place was tidy, but even more depressing than it had been in daylight. He and Hook sat as they had on Monday on the battered sofa, leaving the big armchair with the green buttoned back for the woman who normally occupied it.

‘You were out earlier this evening, Miss Foster,' he said.

It sounded like an accusation, so that Julie wondered if they were going to take her in at the end of this. She'd spent nights in the cells before, and in much worse places too. That didn't really worry her. She was more disturbed by the tall man coming back here and calling her ‘Miss Foster' again. No one called her that. ‘Miss Foster' was a written thing, confined to the odd letter she received from the council, which Karen the social worker usually helped her to read.

She said, ‘I was out tonight, yes.' She wondered if she should snap out, ‘There's no law against that!' or ‘Why the hell shouldn't I be?' as some of the lads at work would have done. But Julie Foster didn't do that. She didn't want any trouble, and these people were much cleverer with words than she would ever be. It would be much better to stick to something straightforward.

Julie said carefully, ‘I went to Tewkesbury.'

‘Did you take anyone with you?'

They watched her carefully, studying her face even more keenly than they listened to her words. Would she give them any sign that she had carried a small, terrified boy in the old car?

‘I was on my own. I don't have friends.'

It was a flat statement of fact, not asking them for sympathy, leaving them to make of it what they would. It was Hook who now said to her gently, ‘That's not true, is it, Julie? You've got friends at work, at the supermarket.'

‘They're not real friends. We're friends at Tesco's, not anywhere else. They talk to me at work. Some of them are quite good to me. But they don't want me anywhere else.'

She wasn't looking for consolation. She would have resented attempts to tell her it was not so. She was talking about the life she lived, the life she was compelled to live, and no one knew about that except her. Hook said softly, ‘But you like children, Julie, and they like you. We were talking about that when we were here on Monday, if you remember.'

‘I remember. But all I said was that I chat to some of them at the store, if they come to me. It's only there, when I'm at work, that I talk to the kids. The parents don't like me to do it anywhere else.'

They were getting a troubling insight into her bleak life again. She was content that it should be so. Better to keep life simple, as she was trying to do now. It was safer just to recite simple facts for as long as you could. She folded her hands in her lap, the only movement she had made since she sat down in the big green chair. She was happier here than on the sofa. It was the chair she always sat in, during the long hours she spent in this place alone.

Hook looked at those hands; her movement had drawn attention to them. They were the nearest parts of Big Julie Foster to him, scarcely four feet away. Strong hands, which would have been perfectly capable of taking an eight-year-old by the scruff of his neck and flinging him into that car now parked thirty yards from where they were sitting. She was a big, powerful woman, filling the wide green armchair in which she sat. Bert had not realized that her shoulders were so broad. He wondered why her very strength and potential, her lack of femininity, should compel this odd sympathy to well within him.

He strove to keep emotion out of his voice as he said, ‘Do you know a boy called Raymond Barrington? Perhaps you've chatted to him.'

He had expected a straight denial, but she suddenly had that air of sly cunning that the unintelligent sometimes unexpectedly adopt. ‘Not at Tesco's, I haven't. He doesn't go there.'

‘But you know him.'

‘Might do.' She folded her massive, powerful arms, but she was not being truculent. She was merely inviting them to talk on, because she had knowledge they had not thought she would have. Make them work for it, make them ask the questions. She wasn't often in this position, with educated men like this.

Hook didn't react as he would have done to one of the aggressive, anti-fuzz young thugs they encountered more frequently each year. This was a woman of thirty-eight, finding herself in possession of more knowledge than they had expected. Treating her kindly, encouraging her to talk, might be the best way to discover the whereabouts of this boy she had known and perhaps kidnapped. He said quietly, ‘You need to tell us all about this, Julie.'

‘Is he in the care home? Is he in Bartram House?'

‘That's where he lives, yes. Have you talked to him there?'

She nodded vigorously, as if the vehemence of her reaction was important to her as well as to them. ‘Karen got me to go there. I was there myself at one time. But that was a long time ago. There's no one there now who was there when I was there.'

This wasn't unusual. Social workers often got former residents of care homes to go in and talk with the present occupants, on the grounds that they might bring a steadying influence and give good long-term advice. He wondered whether that was a good idea in Big Julie's case. Would the younger children in particular get anything useful from her? Wouldn't the older, more streetwise ones find her a figure of fun rather than a role model? He found himself hoping irrelevantly that she had not been bruised by the experience; Julie Foster seemed to collect a lot of bruises from life. He just hoped she hadn't decided that she needed to hit back.

‘So you've talked with the children there. Do you remember Raymond Barrington?'

‘I think so. Is his house-mother Amy Allen?'

‘Yes.'

‘And is Raymond a fair-haired boy? Thin and spindly?'

The description they had from Mrs Allen hadn't used either of those words. But someone as heavily built as Big Julie would no doubt think of any healthy growing boy who was less than burly as being spindly. He wondered if the adjectives derived from her handling of Raymond Barrington earlier in the evening. ‘That would be him, yes.'

‘He asked me about my mother. He wanted to know how I came to be in the home. I think his mother was a junkie. She didn't look after him properly. People shouldn't have children if they're not going to look after them.' She looked sadly past him at the silent television and the wall beyond it. He knew more clearly than if she had stated it how much she wanted the babies she would never have.

‘Did you see Raymond earlier tonight, Julie?'

‘No.' The monosyllable came dully. Then, as she realized the implications of his question, she said more loudly, ‘No, I didn't. Has something happened to him?'

‘Did you pick him up in Church Lane? Did you take him for a ride in your car?'

‘No I didn't!' She was shouting now. ‘I was on my own. I went up the M50 and then down into Tewkesbury. I like the motorway at night, when it's quiet.'

‘Is there anyone who can give us confirmation of that?'

He spoke quietly, trying to calm her down, to preserve the embryonic relationship he had built with her. But he had used the familiar police term and Julie did not understand it. ‘Confirmation' was something they'd talked to her about long ago in school, something that was supposed to follow on after baptism. She looked at him suspiciously and repeated the syllables carefully. ‘Confirmation?'

‘Is there anyone who saw you in Tewkesbury? Did you go into any shops there? If you spoke to people, they might remember seeing you.'

The big, open face frowned a little as she gave the matter her full concentration. ‘No. I didn't speak to anyone. I'm used to being on my own. People don't like you speaking to them, unless you already know them.' She spoke as if giving him guidance on how he might behave in company, and in doing so offered him another glimpse into her loveless life. ‘I walked up and down for a while, looking into the shop windows. I thought I might go to the pictures, but when I got to the Roses Theatre there was a play on, not a film. I don't like plays – they're hard to understand. And it costs more than the pictures.'

‘Do you think anyone will remember you from when you were walking up and down?' Bert wanted desperately to throw her a lifeline, but he was pretty sure that no lifeline existed.

‘No. There weren't many people about. It started to rain and most of them were hurrying along. I went to look at the abbey. It's nice at night, when they have the floodlights on. It looks like something out of fairyland.'

‘And you weren't in Church Lane tonight? And you haven't set eyes on Raymond Barrington?'

‘No. I wouldn't recognize him in the dark if I did. I don't know him that well. I just remember him talking to me about my mum and my house and thinking that he must have had a rotten time before he was taken into care.' Then her voice rose again. ‘Something's happened to him, hasn't it? Someone's taken him. Have they killed him, like they killed Lucy?'

‘We think that someone has taken him, yes. We very much hope that he's still alive. But if you can help us at all, if you know anything about this, you must tell us now, Julie. We need information very quickly if we're to help Raymond.'

‘I didn't take him!' Her voice rose towards a scream.

Was this panic because she was innocent but feared they would not believe her? Or was it panic because the enormity of what she had done was pressing upon her? Both Hook and Lambert felt a searing sympathy for her, but an even greater and more fierce desire to find and rescue that lonely boy who might be trapped and terrified as a result of her actions.

Just when she had become used to DS Hook's friendly and understanding manner, it was the older man who now took over. John Lambert's long, lined face seemed a huge threat to Julie as he said, ‘You really must tell us everything you know, Miss Foster. If it's you who has taken Raymond, you must tell us now. We'll do everything we can to help you, But you must help us before we can help you. Where is Raymond?'

‘I don't know! I've told you I don't know! Why won't you believe me?'

‘A lot of people tell us lies. When one child has been murdered and another one goes missing, we can't afford to believe anyone. That's why DS Hook was asking if you'd seen anyone who could support your story about where you've been in your car tonight.'

‘I was in Tewkesbury. I walked up and down the main street and I looked at the abbey in the lights.' She spoke as if she no longer expected to be believed.