Free Endangering Innocents by Priscilla Masters Page A

leisure time entertaining children in a clown’s guise. While this could be an innocent and lucrative hobby, it could also be clever manipulation to gain access to children. Parents over-protected their children - or most of them did. Others needed their children protecting from them. Baldwin had hinted that Madeline fell into this category. Maybe this was something she should not ignore. Baldwin had openly confessed to having a particular interest in - a sympathy with - Madeline. And it was Madeline who had vanished. It was not exactly a giant leap to string all these pieces of circumstantial evidence together.
    The trouble was, as she had said to Mike, the evidence she had was purely circumstantial. She had nothing concrete. No piece of evidence. She needed something. But Colclough’s warning was ringing in her ears. “Just because you have a hot suspect …”
    Baldwin might be a hot suspect but if she was wrong and he was innocent her face was turned away from the truth.
    One should not ignore gut reactions. But what was her gut reaction? She didn’t even recognise it herself.
     
    She replanned her mode of questioning.
    It was time to play the friendly detective. Give Baldwin some “best friend” advice.
    “Joshua,” she said, looking him full in the face and treating him to her widest, warmest smile, “you said something about Madeline’s home circumstances. Tell me a bit about them. Tell me what she told you.” Anotherconspiratorial smile. “I shall have to call round and talk to her parents later on. It’ll help me know how to interview them. Give me an angle?”
    “Not both her parents. No father. It all stems,” Baldwin said slowly, “from the man her mother is with. You see - like many women - she’s weak.”
    “Physically?”
    “Both physically and in her character.” Baldwin said. “She wasn’t sticking up for her daughter. Not looking after her. Not properly. Women don’t, you know. They want another man so bad they sacrifice their children.”
    It was an unfortunate word, sacrifice. It had connotations. The Aztecs had sacrificed crying children. Primitive cultures sacrificed victims to appease a hostile force. And she had the impression he had chosen the word deliberately. He wasn’t talking only about Madeline. But about someone else. Real pain - and pity, fury and frustration - had flashed, unbidden, across his face.
    Maybe if she could winkle out these emotions … “You have personal experience of this?”
    Baldwin’s hands started fidgetting. It was a very different action from the steady control when he was shuffling his playing cards. “I don’t see it’s any of your business.”
    Another smile. “I’m only trying to understand, Mr Baldwin.”
    He looked up, frowned suspiciously. Not ready to trust her yet.
    “How did you know that Madeline had problems at home?”
    “I could see,” he said. “I’ve got eyes. I saw the way they’d drag her along the pavement like a misbehavin’ puppy.”
    “Her mother?”
    “She wasn’t so bad,” Baldwin admitted. “But that big guy with the tattoo who always wore vests. Made me cringe, it did, the way he was with her. He should have been shot.”
    Joanna was thinking fast
.
Darren Huke wouldn’t have been the first stepfather to be responsible for the harm done to his stepdaughter. Maybe Baldwin was innocent.
    Was it possible that Joshua Baldwin was some kind of a guardian angel rather than the pervert they had all labelled him? What if …? She began to toy with a new idea. What if Madeline Wiltshaw had run out of school straight into the arms of …?
    No. She rejected the idea instantly. Carly Wiltshaw had reported her daughter missing straight away. Joanna was silent for a moment. Frustrated that
no one
had seen the child leave school. She needed to read through the statements of all the parents who had waited outside Horton Primary at 3.15 pm on Friday the thirteenth of April. But, as she eyed Baldwin across the interview