Free Cry of the Children by J.M. Gregson Page B

listened to the movements of her boys in the room above her and tried to imagine what it must be like to lose a child as this woman had: snatched off the face of the earth when the little girl had been enjoying a treat. It wasn’t even like an illness, where at least you had a little time to prepare yourself for what might happen. The Hooks had almost lost their younger son, Luke, to meningitis a year or so ago. The hours when he had wavered between life and death had been the worst three days of her life.
    This must be much, much worse – this sudden removal of your child without any notice of catastrophe. And with it the thought that your little girl must surely be in the hands of someone evil. When you were a police wife, you retained what some people now thought of as the old-fashioned idea of evil.
    Hook signalled his return to the world around him with a huge sigh and a belated reply to his wife’s question. ‘Yes, I saw the mother. I’m sure in my own mind that she had nothing to do with this.’
    Eleanor gasped. She’d heard the radio appeals at lunchtime and felt a quite crushing sympathy for anyone close to the girl. She hadn’t even entertained the idea that Lucy Gibson’s mother might be involved in some sort of unnatural intrigue to dispose of her daughter, but she knew there had been some bizarre happenings in the last few years. The macabre Fred West and his wife had operated less than twenty miles from here. No doubt these things had to be checked out; no wonder Bert was distressed. She said dully, ‘Is there a man around?’
    She tried to keep her voice as neutral as she could, but you couldn’t escape two facts. First, the overwhelming probability was that it was a man who had done this, however the seven-year-old girl had been spirited away. Second, there was a higher incidence of crime in homes where only one parent remained. Eleanor had huge respect for the many single mothers who were struggling to give their children the best chances they could, but the statistics said that single-parent children had more chance of being harmed and more chance of becoming criminals themselves than those in two-parent households.
    Hook said evenly, ‘There’s a dad. He’s been gone for a few months. We haven’t caught up with him yet, but we will. There’s also a new man, a man who’s been regularly staying overnight with Anthea Gibson. He hasn’t moved in yet, but I think Anthea was hoping that he would. God knows how this will affect the two of them. The girl was on her own with him when she disappeared. Lucy, she’s called.’ He felt the same need to assert the girl’s identity and continued existence as John Lambert had done earlier in the day.
    â€˜You’ll have seen this man.’
    She didn’t voice her queries about him, but Bert understood and answered. ‘John Lambert gave him quite a grilling this afternoon. You’ve got to in cases like this. You’ve no time to spare.’ He smiled grimly. When there was a body, however brutal the death, there was not quite the same urgency. When a child went missing, you were trying to anticipate and prevent death. As well as other things, which, for a terrified little girl, might be worse than death. ‘The man’s called Matthew Boyd. I’m sure the papers will have got hold of the name by tomorrow morning, though not from us. He answered all our questions satisfactorily enough, as far as we could tell. But to my mind there’s something not quite right about him. That doesn’t necessarily mean he had anything to do with this crime, though.’ Hook asserted the caveat of the fair-minded man, even when speaking to his wife.
    Bert smiled grimly as he heard the noise of his sons’ voices raised in argument upstairs. He was thinking of Jack, his elder son, who always teased him by asking in an American drawl if he was ‘playing a hunch’. A