For Death Comes Softly (6 page)

I was in any case aware that was really nonsense and that I had the kind of track record which made Titmuss's patronising approach to me quite unforgivable, but the bloody man had the knack of getting under my skin and I had to force myself to concentrate on the job in hand. Child abuse is something police officers, like the vast majority of people, find especially abhorrent, and I knew better than to allow Titmuss to get in the way of the remains of my brain.

I picked up the file and glanced at it. The child believed to have been the victim of abuse was a nine-year-old Down's Syndrome boy. I looked at Peter Mellor. All the banter had gone from him now.

‘The woman who reported her suspicions is a teacher at the special school this boy attends,' said Titmuss. ‘Apparently he made some remarks which might incriminate the father, usual thing . . .' Titmuss paused and coughed almost nervously. ‘The boy's name is Stephen Jeffries – his father is Richard Jeffries.'

I studied Mellor again. He looked as blank as I did.

Titmuss noticed our lack of reaction.

‘Name doesn't mean anything to you? Good, that's what I was hoping for, and why I want you, Rose, to handle the investigation personally along with Peter. Keep things straightforward. If the pair of you had been in CPT longer you'd be bound to know him. Richard Jeffries is a doctor, a respected Bristol GP. He is also a qualified paediatrician who many times over the years has taken part in strategy discussions.'

Mellor gave a long low whistle. I remained silent. Waiting.

Strategy discussions are a formal part of the child abuse investigation procedure when representatives from Police, Health, Housing and Social Services decide what further action should be taken in a case. Any allegation of child abuse against a doctor would be a particularly tricky one to deal with, but this was even worse – a suspect who was a paediatrician actually involved in child protection work. So that's why we've had all this build up, I thought. No bloody wonder.

After a brief pause Titmuss continued. ‘This one could be very messy,' he said, and for once I agreed with his every word. ‘Let's try to be a jump ahead, shall we? Top priority, eh? Now get on with it.'

I left his office with a sinking heart, in little doubt that I was in a no win situation. In addition I was bogged down with paperwork as usual and the Jeffries case was far from all I had to deal with. The Avon and Somerset CPT investigates 800 cases of suspected child abuse every year, and around a quarter of these are in the Bristol and South Gloucestershire area. I had difficulty enough keeping a jump ahead of Titmuss, let alone anything else.

However we had been told to give top priority to the Jeffries investigation – not without justification I had to admit – and top priority it would get. There was one up side to it all. As I was now heading a specific enquiry it made sense for me to move over at once to Lockleaze, which houses its own customised computer system, the filed records of previous child abuse cases going back a minimum of seven years, and a victim suite, designed to look like a sitting room in an ordinary house so as not to cause unnecessary distress to children we needed to question during an investigation. Only at Lockleaze could I ensure that I would always be at the hub of the action. So I installed myself there that afternoon in a temporary new office which had been hastily cleared for me. It was little more than a broom cupboard – after all the old police station was already so overcrowded that there were not even enough desks to go round should all the detective constables based there ever have turned up for duty at the same time – but it put me at a welcome distance from Titmuss the Terrible. And I found, as I began to set up the investigation and organise a team to check out Dr Jeffries as discreetly as possible, that I did not miss the comparative luxury and space of Portishead at all.

The next day Mellor and I drove across the city to Stephen Jeffries' school, Balfour House, which specialised in tutoring handicapped children, to see the teacher who had reported her suspicions.

Claudia Smith was a pretty young woman in her late twenties who seemed to me to be perhaps overly confident, but she had been trained to understand children like Stephen Jeffries and to spot any problems they might have, and there was no doubting the sincerity of her concern.

‘I've been teaching Stephen for two years and in the last few months I have noticed some disturbing aspects to his behaviour,' she explained, brushing aside locks of the rather lank almost black hair which seemed to habitually fall across her face. ‘He seems to have become rather hyperactive and he has started to touch the other children, particularly the girls, in a way that if not always overtly sexual is certainly over familiar. Once he actually appeared to me to be simulating sexual intercourse with one of our little girls.

‘Now Stephen has always been exceptionally affectionate, as Down's Syndrome children usually are, but that was when I seriously began to suspect that something was very wrong. I began to talk to him, in a general way, about his life at home. To try to lead him out.'

Claudia Smith paused. Neither Mellor nor I spoke. She studied us for a moment, an appraising look in her speckled greenish-brown eyes.

‘I do know who Stephen's father is,' she said after a few seconds. ‘I should imagine he's about the last man in the world you'd want to be investigating in a case like this.'

She was a bright lady, Claudia Smith, and she was dead right, of course. However I answered her formally.

‘I can assure you Miss Smith that Dr Jeffries will be investigated as thoroughly as any other father would be under these kind of circumstances,' I said. ‘So please continue.'

She nodded, possibly a little apologetically, I thought.

‘I asked Stephen about bathtime,' she went on. ‘In my experience that's a classic opportunity. He told me his father nearly always bathed him, and, it took a while, but eventually he told me that his father would undress and get in the bath with him. Then they played a game . . .'

This time when she paused I knew it was simply because she was finding it hard to find the right words. I sympathised totally. There are no right words, really. I had already heard enough descriptions of these kind of games, often directly from the children involved, to last me a lifetime.

‘Stephen told me that his father liked him to play with his “joystick”,' Claudia Smith continued, and she did not sound quite so coolly confident now.

It would have been funny if it weren't so sick. Baby words and pet names are a common part of the child abuser's repertoire. Everything Claudia Smith described to us indicated a classic case of paternal abuse. Proving it, however, would be something else. Less than five per cent of police investigations into child abuse result in a prosecution. Trying to get to the truth in these cases is always a minefield, and this time we were up against an expert in the field.

The team investigating Richard Jeffries came up with nothing at all suspicious in his past. If there was anything then it was certainly going to take more than two or three days to unearth. In fact the doctor's record and his character appeared to be exemplary. His father had been a doctor before him and after gaining his medical degree Dr Jeffries had taken a paediatrician speciality at a London teaching hospital before returning to his home town of Bristol where he had become a popular and respected GP and a pillar of local society. His marriage of fifteen years seemed solid enough and he and his wife Elizabeth were generally regarded as having coped admirably with the birth of their Down's Syndrome son which had come as a complete surprise as Elizabeth Jeffries had been well below the danger age. There was a second unaffected child, five-year-old Anna.

For us the next stage was to pay the Jeffries family a visit and arrange for their children to be interviewed on video at Lockleaze. We always try to do this by agreement with parents, and we normally do get co-operation. Parents, innocent or guilty, generally realise that not allowing their children to be interviewed will almost certainly just make matters worse.

In accordance with Titmuss's instructions I continued to take an active role personally in the Jeffries case and it was Mellor and I who, a couple of days after talking to Claudia Smith, went around to the Jeffries' home in the Clifton area of Bristol. The house was an imposing Victorian villa with views across the city.

It was just before six thirty on a typically cold and wet November evening and already dark when Elizabeth Jeffries answered the door. We had chosen the time of our visit carefully – late enough to stand a good chance of catching both parents at home on a day when Dr Jeffries had no evening surgery and his wife was not at the hospital where she worked occasional shifts as a night nurse, and not so late as to be provocative – and we had got it right. Hearing strange voices, no doubt, Richard Jeffries quickly appeared in the hallway behind his wife, and as the couple stood at the door, almost silhouetted in the bright light from within the house, both seemed ill at ease – although perhaps not more than anyone would be when confronted unexpectedly with a brace of police officers.

They led us into an immaculate sitting room which was tastefully if unimaginatively decorated in cream and white and formally furnished with a smattering of what I guessed to be genuine antiques. The curtains were not drawn and through the French windows I could see an attractively lit landscaped garden which even in the late Autumn, when gardens invariably look at their worst, contrived to give the impression of being well-cared for.

Richard Jeffries was a pleasant-faced man with thinning sandy hair, gentle grey eyes, and an obvious tendency towards plumpness that appeared to be only just under control. He was about five feet nine inches tall, dressed in dark blue slacks and a comfortable-looking paler-blue pullover with a string of multi-coloured elephants striding around it. As he stood in the middle of his thick-pile fitted carpet gesturing to Mellor and I to sit, I thought that he looked the picture of middle-class niceness. I knew him to be aged forty-three, and that his wife was five years younger. Elizabeth Jeffries was about the same height as her husband but slimmer and darker. Her brown eyes were bright and intelligent and I somehow suspected at once that she might prove more difficult to deal with than the man we were investigating.

I told them both in matter-of-fact language that there was concern at Balfour House about their son's welfare, that one of the teachers felt the boy was showing telltale signs of sexual abuse.

‘Have you any idea what may have happened to lead to this, Dr Jeffries?' I asked quietly.

At first Richard Jeffries just seemed stunned. He shook his head and glanced anxiously at his wife who sat in shocked silence. Or maybe she merely wasn't ready to speak. I wasn't sure of Elizabeth Jeffries yet.

‘There's nobody, I can't believe it,' Dr Jeffries began falteringly, then his voice hardened. ‘I'd kill anyone who hurt that child,' he said.

‘You should know that Stephen has related some rather disturbing incidents to his teachers,' said Mellor in an expressionless voice.

Richard Jeffries seemed merely mildly perplexed. ‘But he's never said anything to us, has he, Liz?'

His wife murmured her agreement, and continued to sit quite still staring straight ahead. However, I reckoned I could see the beginning of hostility in those intelligent brown eyes. She was ahead of her husband, I was quite sure of it.

Ultimately a flush began to spread across Richard Jeffries' benign features as realisation dawned.

‘You're accusing me, aren't you?' he said suddenly.

‘No, Dr Jeffries, we don't go around making accusations of this kind of gravity,' I told him levelly. ‘We need to talk to everyone who would have had even the opportunity to abuse Stephen. And as his father you obviously have the maximum opportunity.'

Richard Jeffries glanced at his wife again. For just a few seconds he looked quite frightened. Then his anger erupted.

‘What the hell is going on?' he asked suddenly. ‘This is a disgrace, Detective Chief Inspector. Look at my children, come on, see for yourself if they look abused.'

One side of the sitting room took the form of big sliding doors. He flung them open to reveal his two children playing contentedly in a playroom which seemed to contain everything conceivable for their entertainment ranging from a Victorian rocking horse to a state-of-the-art computer.

Stephen and Anna were sitting on the floor in the middle of a toy railway track. The boy was wearing jeans, trainers and a bright red Thomas The Tank Engine tee shirt while his younger sister was dressed ready for bed in snug-looking pink pyjamas. They both looked up and beamed at their father who introduced me and Mellor without mentioning that we were police officers.

‘Come and say hello,' said Richard Jeffries.

Both children obediently got up from the floor and came towards us. I studied Stephen Jeffries carefully. He had the typical features of Down's Syndrome children and, it appeared, just as Claudia Smith had told us, the typical affectionate nature.

The boy stared at Mellor and I nervously and after taking a few uncertain steps towards us went straight to his father, took his hand, and, his shyness now overcoming him, half hid behind Dr Jeffries who spoke to him soothingly and ruffled his spiky fair hair. The little girl, as if unwilling to let her brother have all the attention, also then went to her father and grasped him by the leg.

Jeffries, his face still pink from shock and anger, looked down at them both with fondness, and in turn the children looked up at him with what appeared to be complete adoration. Certainly it seemed to me that neither child showed any sign of awkwardness or unease with their father.