When I Wasn't Watching (19 page)

‘He goes to a childminder's two mornings a week while the mother goes to the spa, apparently. WPC Kaur has just gone over there.'

Dailey regarded Matt for a long moment.

‘You're doing everything as I would expect you to, Matt. Don't beat yourself up about this.'

‘Sir?'

‘Don't make it personal.' Matt didn't need the superintendent to clarify his meaning.

‘I'm trying not to. But what if the obvious assumption turns out to be right? If it is Prince?'

‘Then we'll arrest him. And hopefully this time, he'll be locked up until he takes his last breath.'

‘Amen to that,' Matt said quietly. Then he left to start preparing for the inevitable press conference, and the questions that he wouldn't be able to answer. Halfway out of the door he paused and said over his shoulder,

‘Sir? If the Search team don't uncover anything around the immediate area I think we should widen the search parameters and consider searching Baginton Woods. Just a suggestion.'

Dailey looked grim, but nodded, and Matt knew the thought had occurred to him too. Unbidden, the memories of that first search in the woods smashed into his consciousness.

‘Sir! There's something over here!' Then Detective Sergeant Matt Winston had swung round, nearly blinding the young Detective Constable with his torch, and hurried over to the shallow gorge he was pointing at excitedly. On the other side of it one of the Search and Rescue dogs was whining and clawing at the ground frantically. The officer handling him looked up at Matt, his face eerie in the half light.

‘Looks like a young boy, sarge,' he said, and a wild hope flared up in Matt then; that the little boy they were searching for was still alive. Wandered off and had an accident perhaps, but still alive.

When he knelt down and shone his torch on the pitiful, broken body of Jack Randall all hope died along with the rolling of his stomach. He swallowed down his nausea as he leaned in for a closer look. As he moved the light of the torch to illuminate the boy's face, the young constable turned and vomited unceremoniously into the bushes. The Search Officer grimaced. ‘They're always the worst; kids. It seems unnatural, like.'

Matt said nothing, fighting tears he was too proud to shed. In public anyway. He wanted to reach down and touch the boy's cheek, the side of his face that remained unmarked, and stroke the blood-streaked hair. Instead he coughed and stood up, reaching for his radio to call in the DI. It was a crime scene now; the boy's body a piece of evidence. The area needed to be cordoned off so forensics could do their work; so the pathologists could take the body and ready it for post mortem, so they could find out exactly what had happened to Jack Randall.

‘Maybe he just fell and banged his head?' the constable said beside him, his voice shaky and sounding as if he was about to throw up again any second. Clutching at straws. Not wanting to believe that any part of humanity could inflict such a brutal death on another part, especially not one so young. So innocent.

No, they were looking for a murderer. The question of course was who? Who was sick enough to do this to a child?

Of course at that point no one on the investigation team could have dreamed they were looking for a murderer who was barely more than a child himself. Later on, when the body – he couldn't think of it as ‘Jack' – had been removed from the crime scene and taken in for the post mortem, Matt had felt something inside him, a lingering faith in the goodness of human nature perhaps, shrivel up and wither away.

The corpse of Jack Randall lay on the pathologist's slab like a broken doll, a macabre sculpture that made a mockery of everything innocent. It was impossible to reconcile the dead flesh in front of him with the pictures he had seen of the boy alive; a cherub-cheeked, happy-looking child who, according to the mother, ‘never cried'.

Had he cried when his head was being caved in; screamed for a mother he would never see again? A cold rage had crept into the recesses of Matt's soul that he knew would never quite leave him. Watching the pathologist open the boy up, listen to him catalogue his wounds, solidified that rage into something he could work with – a burning desire to find the culprit.

Post mortems were never anyone's idea of a good day out and there was often some teasing among the officers present as to who would vomit or have to leave the room. Not out of any disrespect for the dead but more as a coping mechanism, a bit of camaraderie that served to bond the team together. It was an unspoken rule however that such teasing never went on when it was a child lying on the slab. When the young DC turned and vomited into a pristine basin, neither Matt nor the DI in charge batted an eyelid or even acknowledged his weakness.

The pathologist reeled off a cruel litany of wounds. A broken wrist, a fractured femur. Cigarette burns to the front torso; cuts and scratches that appeared to have been deliberately inflicted with a Stanley blade across the back. Three broken toes. Staples – staples, for Christ's sake – in the soft flesh of the forearm. Then the killing blow with a heavy, blunt instrument that had not just caved the boy's head in but obliterated half of his face.

‘Depersonalisation,' the DI had muttered and Matt had looked up. He had heard the term from the criminology lectures the detectives sometimes attended, and knew what the older detective meant – the killer, for some reason, had wanted to obliterate every trace of Jack's identity. To make him nothing. It usually signified some deep-seated rage on the part of the killer, and was often an indication that the victim was known to the attacker.

For Matt however, it had been the staples that had nagged at him. It seemed an odd choice of weapon. It struck him as an almost juvenile thing to do; he remembered at his own school, an all boys' academy in Birmingham of the decidedly rougher kind, a brutal game in which pupils would staple each other in the backs of their hands, seeing how much pain the other could take. When the stapler in question had been found, tossed further down the gorge, with a sticker on it confirming it was the property of a nearby private school, it was Matt who suggested that it was no coincidence; and that they weren't looking for a member of staff, a caretaker, or even a recent visitor to the school; but for a pupil. A minor.

From that hunch the trail had led easily to Terry Prince. It turned out his own younger brother – who, it came out in court, he had no history of ever abusing, though he had never shown him any love either – attended the same nursery as Jack Randall. Terry would have come across the boy on the occasions he accompanied his mother to pick up his brother. For whatever reason, he had fixated on him or earmarked him out as a target. Although every child and criminal psychologist across the country had popped up in the media with their own pet theories as to why a fifteen-year-old boy would torture and kill a three-year-old child, Matt had his own, much simpler theory.

The boy was evil.

When he had arrested Prince, hauling him into the car while a uniformed officer tried to calm the hysterical mother, he had a moment where he wondered if there had been a mistake, in spite of the blood-stained clothes in Prince's room that a search warrant had just uncovered, in spite of the guilt he had seen flash in the boy's eyes. Simply because he seemed incapable of it. Prince was small for fourteen, and underdeveloped. He could easily have passed for an eleven-year-old. Not to mention the fact that he looked terrified. The dissonance between the boy he was arresting and the mental image he had had of Jack's killer was jarring.

Only when he had none too gently put the boy into a cell, his head whirling, and that cold, contained rage that had embedded itself in him at the post mortem had started to ebb in the face of his sudden uncertainty, had Prince looked at him with the eyes of a killer. Sneered at him almost arrogantly, his eyes at once devoid of any emotion, neither fear nor remorse. Matt had narrowly escaped a disciplinary for throwing the boy up against the cell wall with enough force that Prince was lucky to escape without a fractured skull, and although Matt would always feel a trickle of shame that he had allowed his emotions to get the better of him on the job, another, hotter emotion always overshadowed it: regret that he hadn't, indeed, smashed the boy's skull in. That he couldn't in effect deliver his head on a platter to Lucy Randall, who had sat waiting for him to bring her son home, and had been given only a cold corpse.

After she had finished sobbing Lucy had a shower, feeling an odd urge to stand under cold water; so cold she could only just bear it, and let it cascade over her body. The water bit at her skin, leaving her skin raised at the shock of the sudden change in temperature, but it was a sensation she almost enjoyed. Felt invigorated by, even.

After she had dressed and towel-dried her hair she picked up the phone to call Ricky. To tell him she loved him. The absence of any concrete memories, the knowledge that it had never even occurred to her back then to keep his things for remembrance, needled at her. What if it had been him who had been taken and destroyed? And she would have had nothing of those first precious few months, even if they had only now become precious with hindsight? Lucy felt optimistic she could build the bridges between her and Ricky; all mothers argued with their teenage sons.

He didn't pick up. Or rather, his phone rang three times and then went to voice mail, and when she tried to ring again she got voice mail function straight away. He was ignoring her.

Feeling a sharp sting of rejection, she rang Danielle, who wasn't at home but at her local Age UK shop where she volunteered as a retail assistant a few hours a week.

‘Don't you think you should have stayed at home with him?' Lucy accused, instantly feeling like a hypocrite.

‘No I don't,' her mother sounded annoyed, ‘because he's not a baby and doesn't need to be mollycoddled. He seemed fine when I left this morning; he was listening to that god-awful music of his.'

‘Well, he's not answering his phone to me. In fact, he seems to have turned it off deliberately.'

Danielle didn't answer straight away, but even her silence sounded disapproving, so that Lucy rushed in, quick to defend herself.

‘You think I deserve it, I suppose? I am entitled to have a social life.'

‘I didn't suggest otherwise,' her mother answered her calmly. ‘And you're entitled to see whoever you want. But I would have thought you would be a little bit more understanding of Ricky's feelings right now.'

‘Mum, he got himself suspended. Stop treating him like a victim.'

‘He got himself suspended defending
you
, Lucy. You're not the only one who's been affected by all this.'

Lucy went quiet, acknowledging the truth of her mother's words even though they hurt her. She sighed heavily down the phone.

‘Can you ring him at least? Let him know when you get through to him? I'll be round tonight.'

‘I think you should wait for him to come to you, Lucy, but yes, I'll check on him on my break, okay?'

Her mother rang off as a customer approached and Lucy replaced the phone. She stood there for a moment staring at the receiver, then walked into the lounge. She reached for the TV to turn it on, to check the news, then thought better of it. It would only upset her again. The sudden outburst of grief had been a scouring, somehow, leaving her feeling raw but alive, and she had no wish to sink back into her earlier lethargy, sitting staring at the screen, waiting for something to happen, for the boy to be found. Worrying about Matt, who she knew would be taking this hard. But then, it was his job wasn't it? He chose to put himself in the middle of these tragedies; she and Benjamin Armstrong's mother had had it thrust upon them.

Lucy thought about Ricky again, and knew what she had to do. What she should have done last night, instead of falling into his arms.

She left the message on his house phone, reasoning that if she was going to tell him she couldn't see him again while he was right in the middle of a possible murder case, she could at least not drop it on him in the middle of investigating. But she felt it was important, vital even,that she do it now.

Her voice sounded uncannily calm to her ears. ‘I'm sorry Matt, but I think it's better if we don't continue to see each other. I don't think it's healthy for either of us, and I need to concentrate on Ricky.' There was a pang of guilt as she said the last – how hard had she been concentrating on Ricky last night? –but as she finished the message there was a sense of relief; of having done what she had to.

Restless now she went upstairs to tidy Ricky's room. She would make it nice for him; get in his favourite foods for tea, and then fetch him from her mother's.

When the door knocked her first thought was that it would be Matt, and her heart leapt treacherously until she remembered the decision she had made. The masculine shape outside her door, visible but distorted through the frosted glass was too tall and not broad enough to be Matt and she peered through the spyhole, hoping it wasn't reporters.

Ethan. Again. She had seen more of him in the past week than she had in the past two years. Yet as she opened the door to him the disappointment that it wasn't Matt rose up in her and she felt an inexplicable urge to throw herself into her ex-husbands's arms.

***

Ben had had a great morning with his new friend. They had sweets, and played in the woods with a dirty old football they had found, and now they were back at the man's house and they had played hide and seek. But then he had started to ask for Mummy, and the man had looked at him kind of funny, then changed the subject and asked if he wanted to play hide and seek again. Ben didn't want to upset him and make him look sad again, so he agreed, but really he was getting a bit bored of hide and seek now, and he was starting to feel sick from all the sweets and wanted some proper dinner.

He should ask the man, but something stopped him. He didn't want to upset him. Because although the man was nice to him and played with him, it seemed as if he could get sad again at any minute. Like the way Mummy got sad but at the same time angry when she had to tell him off for doing something silly, like the time he had used his felt tips to draw on Daddy's white shirts. He didn't know what the man would want to tell him off for, because he had been good, but sometimes grown-ups got sad or cross for reasons Ben didn't understand.