When I Wasn't Watching (22 page)

As horrible as the idea was, Matt felt eager to get going on what could be a new direction. He realised he was so desperate for it to not be Prince that anything else, even harm inflicted by the boy's own mother, was a preferable scenario.

But a further search and questioning turned up nothing.

The appeal from David Armstrong went out on the evening news, watched by households across the Midlands, but there was no new information or sightings of either the boy or the baseball cap-wearing companion. Benjamin Armstrong seemed to have disappeared into thin air, and as far as the discerning public was concerned, it was blatantly obvious who the killer was. The problem was finding him.

A problem that, according to another post on the Facebook page devoted to Jack Randall and the premature release of his murderer, may have just been solved.

Chapter Twelve
Wednesday Evening

Dailey drummed his fingers on the desk as Matt recounted his conversation with Lydia Armstrong.

‘I'm not sure any of this is relevant to the boy's disappearance.'

‘Me neither,' admitted Matt. ‘If anything, it's just confusing the picture.'

WPC Kaur had taken Lydia to the Armstrong house to gather some things to go and stay at her mother's, while her allegedly abusive husband had been appearing on the local and county news stations, pleading for his son to be brought home. A recording would also go out on the BBC evening news, and was being repeated every fifteen minutes on the digital news channel. Matt was doubtful that these measures ever had much significant success in uncovering information that could actually be deemed useful, but at this stage in an investigation they had to pull out all the stops. Benjamin had now been missing for over eight hours. A small crowd of protesters had again gathered in the City Centre, baying for blood, looking for someone to blame.

According to the information Dailey had just received from East Midlands CID, there was still a fair chance their suspicions were correct.

‘Terry Prince can't be ruled out; but there's no reason to bring him in, either. There will be a watch kept on him now, to monitor his movements, but there was no evidence at his house or nearby to connect him with the boy.'

‘Alibi?'

‘Says he was at the shops. There are no witnesses to back him up, but none to refute him either. The checkout staff at Asda can't recall seeing him this morning, but then they probably couldn't identify any of the hundreds of customers they see. We're waiting to see if their CCTV footage will show his image. He has a receipt from his local corner store from this morning, two hours after Benjamin was reported missing.'

‘So he could have had time – but not much. And where's the boy now? It doesn't look likely.'

Matt's worst-case scenario all day long had been that Prince had struck again, but the possibility of ruling him out left him with no other real suspects. Lydia Armstrong still niggled at him, but he didn't really think she had killed her own son. All in all this case was turning into a nightmare – one with few leads and even less evidence. The awful truth was that at this stage, if the boy's body turned up, however horrific that outcome was, at least it would give Matt and his team something to work with.

As soon as the macabre thought crossed his mind, Matt understood that he had stopped expecting there to be a chance that the boy might still be alive. He sat down, sinking into the chair, momentarily defeated. Then sat up bolt upright again as Dailey offered a titbit of information – one that may or may not mean anything.

‘Prince did admit that he has returned to Coventry over the last few days, though is apparently adamant that he was nowhere near the city this morning and has never clapped eyes on the Armstrongs; says he wanted to keep an eye on his mother. Maybe you should get over there and speak to her?'

Matt stood up, shifting his gears back into action mode. He remembered little of Mrs Prince – only that she had seemed surprisingly normal. Given what her son had turned into, Matt would have expected a rampant addict, or at least signs of neglect. That was one of the factors that had made the whole case so shocking. Both Jack Randall and his killer had been well brought up boys, living in the nicer areas of the city, with mothers who adored them. The same could be said of Benjamin Armstrong. And yet, Terry had grown up into a killer, and Benjamin's ‘normal' home life was apparently marred by the sort of domestic abuse you expected to see in very different households. No wonder the whole thing so inflamed the public; more than the case of child abuse he had mentioned to Scott earlier, more than the murdered prostitutes that had so far been the biggest case of his career. This was a stark reminder to the law-abiding general public that
it could happen to you
; no matter how white your picket fence or how expensive your education. No one was immune.

Matt was just on his way to question Mrs Prince when Scott came in, looking excited.

‘We've got the guy who tweeted the sighting of Benjamin,' he grinned.

‘Already? I thought IT would struggle to trace it.'

‘No need for the techy stuff,' Scott said. ‘Guy just walked straight in and asked to speak to you. He's in an interview room now.'

Matt hung his jacket back up and followed Scott to the interview room, praying for some new information that could give them a breakthrough. If he could give them a detailed description of the man he had seen with Ben, it might be enough to either rule out Prince or hold him for questioning.

Hagard straightened his tie, smoothed over the few strands of hair still lingering over his crown, and prepared to face the crowd outside. Again. Just as he thought the malingerers had got bored and found something else to moan about, the Armstrong boy had been kidnapped, and it had all flared up again, like a spot that just wouldn't stop oozing. All day he had been forced to listen to the hum of their protests through the heavily glazed windows of Coventry's historic Town Hall, to fend off phone calls and even face the accusatory glares of his own staff. As if he had kidnapped the boy. It was playing havoc with his nerves, not to mention his blood pressure. His diet had gone to the dogs days ago.

The worst of this, he mused, peering out of the stained-glass window adorned with the city's motto and elephant logo – why an elephant? He had never figured that out – was the inflammatory nature of it all. The good citizens of Coventry that were currently gathered outside the City Hall were taking the whole débâcle personally, as though it were their child, their problem. He saw banners that had been waved in his face a week ago, now hastily changed to ‘Justice for Benjamin' with only an underlying smudge to show where another name had been. People were so quick to jump on a cause. It was laughable, really.

In spite of the fact it was spring, and the weather gradually getting warmer, the temperature had dropped today, a fog settling over the city like an omen. He wouldn't be voted in again after this, even though the matter was out of his hands. It was human nature to find a figurehead to blame.

As he emerged from the doors, pulling his greatcoat around him, he saw the camera flash and the inevitable Dictaphone and sighed. He was only half relieved when a striking dark-haired girl materialised through the fog in front of him.

‘I have nothing to say,' he said brusquely, going to step past the woman, but she had placed herself in front of him, at the very top of the steps that led down to the pavement, in such a way that if he tried to get past her he might well send her slight frame flying. The only other way to go was back inside the Hall, a sure sign of retreat. So he stopped, and instantly there was a microphone in his face.

‘How do you feel about recent developments, Councillor? The citizens of Coventry say they are too scared to let their children out of their sight. Can you reassure us that enough is being done?'

Then why aren't they at home with their children
, Hagard thought but didn't say. Instead he plastered on his public smile, the same one he used for the openings of galas and museums.

‘It's really a matter for the police, but you can rest assured that we are doing all we can to aid them in their search. Every citizen deserves to feel safe in their own homes.'

Rather proud of his little speech, Hagard smiled in the direction of the news cameras and then made his way to his car, the reporter finally stepping to the side to let him pass. As he walked quickly to his vehicle he heard catcalls, and a shrill voice shouting abuse he was glad he couldn't quite hear the specifics of.

As he sat behind the wheel of his classic Jag he looked out at the angry faces. Not as many as last week, just a few die-hard fanatics. Nevertheless the hatred and fear was tangible. Hagard wondered where it would all end.

Sooner or later, someone would always be made to pay, even if they weren't to blame.

As Hagard drove off Carla turned on her heel to ask an angry young woman brandishing a hastily made banner a question that unwittingly echoed the Councillor's thoughts.

‘Assuming it is Terry Prince who has taken Benjamin Armstrong, who do you think is to blame?'

The woman looked at her out of slightly unfocused, bloodshot eyes, and Carla wondered if the woman was tired from her afternoon's tirade or if she had been smoking weed. Either way she was hardly the picture of a concerned citizen that Carla wanted. She pulled her coat around herself while giving the photographer a barely perceptible shake of her head, and wondered why she was standing out in the cold, going over the same angle that every other paper had covered and would be covering. She should never have shouted out that the police were planning to search Baginton Woods at the press conference; she had done it to rile Matt. Although she was in many ways glad to be rid of him, his easy dismissal of their relationship still rankled.

It hadn't been through any of her contacts that she had gleaned the information either, it had been an out and out guess. An informed guess though, based on the fact that she had paid more attention to Matt's feelings about his job and the Randall case in particular than he thought. She was a journalist, after all.

A journalist in need of a story, or rather, a fresh take on this particular story. Such a high-profile topic could get her noticed, get her career moving in the direction she had wanted it to go. For the moment though there was no new information to be had. No more sightings, no body, no new information on Prince.

Carla half wished something would happen, however dire. Tragedy made fantastic copy.

‘Mum.' Lucy breathed a sigh of relief as Danielle finally answered the phone. ‘Can you please put Ricky on? He still won't pick up my calls.' The need to speak to her son, to tell him she loved him, had become overwhelming. On the other end of the line was a confused and ominous silence, one that made Lucy catch her breath, anticipating what was happening even before her mother spoke.

‘I thought he was with you? He told me he was on his way to see you over an hour ago. I thought best to leave you two to talk.'

An hour ago. It was a twenty-minute walk from her house to her mother's. A flutter of panic, like a trapped butterfly, started behind Lucy's ribcage. It got faster, her pulse jumping as her mother continued.

‘Perhaps he didn't leave when he said he was going to. We spoke on the phone, I haven't actually seen him.'

‘So the last time you saw him was when you left this morning?'

‘Yes, well he was in his room listening to music, I didn't actually go in.'

Alarm bells were ringing inside Lucy's head.

‘There's something wrong with him,' she said, an urgent whisper. Danielle laughed lightly, but there was a discordant note to it, as though she were picking up on Lucy's panic.

‘He's probably just gone to a friend's on the way. Give him half an hour or so.'

Lucy replaced the handset without answering. A call to Tyler's – he rarely seemed to have any other friends these days – confirmed he wasn't with him, and hadn't been seen in fact for two days. What about the girlfriend? But according to Tyler, who took the phone from his father and spoke to her in slightly slurred words, as if he had been drinking, she was there too. And no, she hadn't seen Ricky either. So where was he?As she walked upstairs into Ricky's room, she felt as though she were moving through fog. Like those dreams she sometimes had when she had to get somewhere quickly, or run away from something, but her limbs turned to lead and she couldn't see where she was going. Couldn't scream either, as if the fog invaded her mouth as soon as she opened it.

Lucy went straight to Ricky's computer and turned it on. She wasn't entirely sure what she was looking for – a message perhaps, something to reassure her that her son was with a friend as Danielle had suggested, safe and sound and on his way home. A quick search through his browsing history pulled up a Facebook page that brought sudden tears to her eyes as an old picture of Jack, the one that had been used in the media at the time of his disappearance, flashed up in front of her.

Feeling nauseous, she scrolled down and saw at once what it was – a community page set up recently, after the release of Terry Prince. Next to the picture of Jack was one of Benjamin Armstrong, and Lucy's stomach twisted further as she read down the recent posts. She wasn't the only person to assume the same person was behind the disappearance of both boys. What caught her attention however was a recent post that had her sinking into a chair, her whole body trembling as she stared at the screen. Hands shaking, Lucy buried her head in them.

Matt smiled at the man hovering nervously in the interview room and waved him into a chair.

‘Thanks for coming in, Mr Tate, it's very helpful of you.' Though it would have been a damn sight more helpful if he had come in sooner. Still, Matt tried to be as welcoming as possible to assuage the man's obvious nerves. If he could give them a fuller description of the man seen with Benjamin – if the boy he had spotted even was Benjamin – then they could finally have something concrete to go on.