A Cry in the Night (3 page)

‘Good, yes, right. So, pop up, stay for a bit, there’s a local hotel that isn’t too dear so we won’t have the taxpayers muttering. See what you can find out. Never good when the little ones vanish, is it?’

‘No, sir.’

‘No. Few too many recently.’

Chief Superintendent Frey left his last comment hanging in the air. Sam had a good idea as to what he was talking
about, but waited for his boss to continue. He watched the white-haired man play with the glass paperweight, the light throwing spectrums onto his desk.

‘How are your girls?’ was all his boss ventured after the silence had dragged on too long.

‘They’re doing well, thank you, sir. Stronger by the day.’

‘Well, that’s women for you,’ Mr Frey replied. Then he reached behind him and dumped a large stack of thick manila envelopes onto the desk.

‘Look at these, will you?’

‘Sir.’

‘I don’t know if they’re relevant to your case or not. Impossible to tell at this stage, but you should be as well informed as possible.’

‘Yes, sir. Of course.’

‘Good. And I’d be careful about how much you tell your young detective constable. What’s her name?’

‘Zoe Barnes, sir.’

‘Barnes. Yes. She’s very popular.’

‘She’s very good at her job.’

‘Pretty little thing too. Just be wary of how much you divulge.’

The envelopes sat between them. The topmost was threatening to slip off and ruin the perfect order of the desk. Sam didn’t move to take them, wary of the privilege of secrets.

‘Keep me informed, yes?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Straight to me. Right?’

The meeting over, Sam stood, reluctantly scooped up the files, and thanked his boss again. Later he dumped them in the back of his car.

They were sliding around in the boot right now, as Zoe drove them into the village. They passed the medieval church and turned left before the pub, following the hand-painted sign to the patrons’ car park. The Black Bull was a white, picturesque building with a pretty thatched roof. Around it were old, identical houses with black doors and window frames. The conformity gave the village a toy-town feel. A few doors down was a shop, then nothing – just a country lane with neighbouring fields filled with sheep. There were thirty houses in all – each one dainty and proper. The word ‘sleepy’ was irresistible. Once parked, they got their things out of the boot, Zoe waiting for Sam as he stuffed the files into a backpack. He saw that she looked at them with interest, but didn’t ask him what was inside.

He felt guilty. He knew what they were, even without reading them. Everyone knew about them. They’d caused a frenzy of debate across the country; terrible tales about monstrous women. And he knew what Mr Frey had implied by advising him to exclude Zoe. That he should only trust men. It made Sam hate him all the more.

‘Shithole,’ muttered his partner.

‘Fifteen minutes to check in and dump our stuff. Then let’s go and meet the parents.’

‘So, boss, how long do you think you’d last in a place like this? I’d go crazy after six months.’

He looked around at the quiet pavements, the pretty cottages and hedgerows. The fells rose up behind them, the darkening sky turning their browns and greens to purples and blacks. Even the leafless winter trees seemed pretty and bucolic.

‘I’d last a week,’ he said with a grin. Zoe’s hard laugh seemed too loud for this sweet place. They grabbed their things and marched towards the pub.

Tim Downing hung up the phone and turned to look at his wife. Sarah was sitting at the large wooden kitchen table, staring at a mug of tea. It was all either of them seemed to do. Make tea or drink booze, and stare at the table.

Sarah was beautiful. Even now, crumpled by grief, her eyes puffy and her face sagging without expression, she still looked incredible. He watched her thin fingers clutch the mug and felt like crying all over again. He fiddled with the shirt he’d ironed this morning and didn’t know what else to do. He had always considered himself successful and the money he’d earned had seemed to prove this true, but all it had done was make him feel bigger and stronger than he really was. Arthur and Lily’s disappearance had exposed the lie brutally.

‘The cops are here. New ones,’ he said.

She didn’t reply. Her hands wrung the mug, slowly strangling it.

‘Staying at the Black Bull.’

Still nothing from her. Not even the barest acknowledgement. Tim stared at his own mug on the black marble worktop. The coffee was untouched, stone-cold. He exhaled a weak, shivery breath and dug his hands into his pockets.

The thick curtains had been closed for days. The stagnant climate within seemed all the worse for it.

‘Are you going to get dressed for them?’

It came out as an accusation, but it was just concern. She sat barefoot in a thin nightie and dressing gown, her long, lithe legs exposed to the thigh.

‘What do they care?’ she replied. Her eyes never moved from the mug.

That was all he’d get out of her. He went over and put his hand on her shoulder, leaned in and kissed her cheek. Her hand went to his, held it there, pressed hard to keep him close. He was so grateful for the contact, so desperate to feel needed.

The tears rose again.

It was September 15th of the previous year, and Constable Eddy Pearson had only been in the job for five weeks. He was barely nineteen and as eager as a puppy. He was partnered with Alan Troughton, who was known by one and all as a miserable bastard. The hope was that he’d knock a little bit of the keenness out of Eddy before he did something silly.

Eddy and Alan had been called to a disturbance in Mapleside Avenue, a well-to-do leafy road in a posher part of Manchester. An elderly lady had been complaining about the noise from next door. She’d been grumbling for some weeks and this was one of many calls. Troughton thought this would be an excellent opportunity for young Eddy to try his diplomatic skills on the utterly uncharmable old woman.

They never got to see her. As Troughton rang on her doorbell, Eddy had wandered over to the neighbouring house, and was about to comment on the fact that there
was no noise whatsoever when he saw a young girl throw herself at the first-floor window. She was soaking wet, but fully clothed. The glass cracked but did not break. Eddy and the girl’s eyes met and he saw terror there. And then an arm appeared from behind her and dragged her out of sight.

Troughton saw none of this but he did see the cracked glass and paid attention to the yapping of his new colleague. Moving towards the house, he radioed in his concerns, banging loudly on the door. Eddy was frantic by now. As Troughton rang again and peered in through the large windows at the front of the house, Eddy ran to the back. He yanked hard on the back door. To his frustration, it was also locked. He could hear Troughton ringing repeatedly on the doorbell, clearly getting nowhere. He thought of the little girl again, her wet hair matted against her forehead.

He got inside without remembering exactly how. Evidence suggested that he had barged the door open. He ran through the rooms, calling out, until he saw a woman staring at him from the top of the stairs. She was about his age, with long dark hair that fell to her shoulders. It was the way she gazed at him that was most disquieting: the tilt of her head, the slackness of her mouth, the hint of a smile. Then he noticed that the sleeves of her jumper were dripping with water.

He ran at her and expected her to claw at him and fight, but instead she just collapsed as he shoved her and lay still where she fell, inanimate on the landing. Eddy ran past her,
the doorbell ringing continually, the woman making no attempt to get up.

He found the girl in the bath. Her hair swam before her face like weed in a lake. Her eyes were open, no longer scared. A tiny bubble of air slipped from her lips. Her skin seemed so white. She was naked now and although she was dead, Eddy was embarrassed to look at her. The little drowned girl stared up at the ceiling, alone under the water.

Troughton found Eddy about five minutes later. The woman was still lying on the floor where his colleague had barged past her. Her cold, detached gaze echoed that of the girl in the water. Eddy was lying on the bathroom floor, the girl now in his arms after he’d failed to resuscitate her. His hand stroked her wet hair.

The woman was the nanny of a wealthy couple, Matt and Diane Parlour. The girl was their only daughter, Melinda. The evidence against the nanny was undeniable. The only troubling aspect was a lack of motive. As arresting officers, Eddy and Troughton were the first to interview her, although the case was soon passed on to CID. Eddie sat opposite her, unable to speak. Troughton asked the questions, but the nanny didn’t respond. She just gazed at Eddy with that same curious, vague, unknowable expression. It was soon decided that she was unfit to stand trial and needed psychiatric evaluation.

Eddy was interviewed himself some days later. It was
partly a debrief, partly an examination into his own state of mind, and partly another box that Human Resources required ticked. He knew the answers he was meant to give – the reasons needed to justify forcibly entering a premises. He said exactly what he was meant to say and was commended for it. But when asked about the nanny and why he believed she had drowned poor little Melinda, his professionalism was derailed. He tried to sidestep the questions with a shrug, but this was not acceptable. He had faced something cruel and cold, without any comprehensible sense or reason. He had seen terror in the eyes of a little girl and he had seen her look to him for help. And he had failed her. He had watched that woman stare at him across the table in a police interview room without any sense of remorse or shame or any emotion that would make sense to him. And so, when pressed to answer the question, young Eddy Pearson floundered.

‘She was just fucking evil. A fucking witch,’ he stammered.

Witch. It was the first time the word had been used like this for years. The word would stick.

*

Sam snapped the case file shut. He had imagined the details too vividly. There were copies of photographs, but he chose not to look at them.

There was a bang on the door. It was Zoe.

‘Come on then, we’re five minutes behind already,’ she said as she breezed in, checking out his hotel room. ‘I take it
all back. By the way, they’ve got wi-fi.’ And then she noticed that nothing was unpacked, his bags lay on the bed, that he was still wearing his coat, with the closed file in his hand.

‘What’s that?’ she asked.

‘Nothing.’ There was an awkward pause and he saw her eyes narrow, taking this in. She was a good cop, he reminded himself. ‘Sorry for being late. Got distracted.’

‘Yeah?’

‘I’ll tell you about it another time.’

That was good enough for her and her face brightened. ‘They do loads of beers in the pub. Got proper pork scratching in bowls on the bar. Free pork scratchings! And there’s this feisty barmaid called Bernie and she said tomorrow they’d have mini-Yorkshire puddings. None of that peanut bollocks. How cool is that?’

‘Yeah. Missing kid.’

‘All right. But come on, mini-Yorkshire puds! Sam!’

‘Yes. Great. Now, stop smiling, you’re on duty.’

He grabbed his coat and led her along the uneven corridor (‘See, it’s so olde-worlde!’), down the dark wooden stairs and out into the cold. They pulled their coats tighter around them; there was a real bite to the air now. Sam pointed to the small lane that ran away from the pub.

‘Five minutes’ walk,’ he said, and set off. She was at his side immediately.

It was darker now and would be pitch-black in an hour
or so. The fells rose away from them and Sam thought he could see movement on the ridges, but the more he stared, the less sure he was. A cloud billowed above, and he noticed the branches shake in the bitter wind.

The village was dead quiet as they walked. Further ahead was a small gathering of buildings – a post office-cum-corner shop, next to a bakery and a grocer’s. Sitting on three black benches in front of the shops was a gang of kids, hoods up, wrapped up against the cold. Two were mucking about on skateboards, doing noisy tricks to which the others paid little attention. Most were on their phones or gossiping, or both. They were a surprising shot of modernity in these pastoral surroundings. They looked up at Sam and Zoe as they approached.

‘Five-Oh!’ someone shouted and the kids looked up with hostile faces.

‘Hey, kids!’ Zoe said happily, as though she were the friendliest woman in the world. There was, unsurprisingly, no response to this.

Sam ran his eyes over each of them, checking for the tell-tale signs of guilt, drugs, abuse and shame. They seemed just like the kids he dealt with back in the city. Identikit youth with their everyday issues. He looked away, a little bored by their obviousness. As he did so, he spotted a girl, eighteen, maybe nineteen, a little taller and older than the others, watching him from further back. She was leaning
against a wall between two of the buildings, sheltering from the cold, he guessed. She wore a white bobble hat, a short white puffa jacket and white jeans. Her hair, as far as he could tell, was blonde. She watched him with a sneer. But when he looked at her, she didn’t shirk his gaze like the others. Her stare was a challenge and it was Sam who broke contact first. They walked on, towards the Downings’ house a few minutes further along the road. He didn’t look back, but he imagined that the girl in white was still watching him with that aggressive gaze.

‘We could pop back after and pull them all in for drugs,’ Zoe said cheerfully. ‘Give us something to do.’

Sam gave her a jokey cuff across her head. She replied with a sharp punch to his stomach. He was expecting it, though and slapped her hand away. It felt wrong to be this jokey so close to the house, and he glanced around, worried that they’d been seen. But the road was empty. So were the fields that stretched down to the lake. His eyes ran across them, reaching the water. He looked back down the lane where the kids had been but he couldn’t see them now. He scuffed his boots against the floor, just to hear a noise that felt normal. Then he nodded at Zoe and they marched on.