Mrs Jeffries was protective and affectionate towards her children and cold and dismissive towards Mellor and me. She did not, however, seem to know quite what to make of Freda Lewis, a quietly spoken woman in her mid-fifties who had an ability to deal with the most emotive issues with simple logic and cool common sense. Freda had long, straight, rather straggly greying hair and part of her still existed in a kind of sixties’ time warp. Summer and Winter she wore full-length flowing floral skirts with lace shawls. She looked a bit like an overgrown schoolgirl and she had about her a natural warmth and childlike forthrightness to which children instinctively responded.
I had called in Freda to interview the Jeffries children along with Peter Mellor. It is normal procedure for a police officer to be joined by a social worker, and I knew that Peter was rather better with children than I was.
The first interview was to be with Stephen. Elizabeth Jeffries and her daughter were settled into the family room with its TV monitor and yet more toys, while I prepared to watch the proceedings on another monitor in the technical room where two note-taking DCs operated the cameras and a double recording machine.
Unlike Stephen’s teacher, Claudia Smith, Mellor and Freda Lewis were not allowed to ask the children leading questions. This had been found in the past to produce some highly suspect evidence. Children sometimes give answers for effect, or even merely the answers they think adults want to hear. And interviewing a Down’s Syndrome child is fraught with the greatest dangers of all.
Mellor and Freda spent almost a couple of hours with Stephen, watching him at play, gently probing into his day-to-day home life. Eventually the subject of bathtime did arise. For just a moment Stephen seemed uneasy. I thought he was reluctant to look either Freda or Peter Mellor in the eye, but I could not be sure that this was not just his natural shyness.
Ultimately ‘I like to bath with my daddy’ was the nearest we got to the story Claudia Smith had come up with. Stephen would take this no further, and certainly made no mention of secret games or his daddy’s ‘joystick’.
It was more or less lunchtime when Freda Lewis eventually escorted Stephen to join his mother and sister in the family room, so I despatched a DC to the McDonald’s drive-in just up the road for a bag of Big Macs, which the children attacked energetically while none of us adults seemed to have much appetite at all.
The afternoon interview with Anna Jeffries was even less productive. The little girl, although probably even more shy than her brother, gave no signs of any unease at all when Mellor and Freda Lewis probed as much as they dared into her relationship with her father. But the interview had to be brought to a premature close when after half an hour or so she began to whimper and ask for both her mummy and her daddy.
As soon as it was all over, Elizabeth Jeffries, still coldly uncommunicative, asked to be driven home.
‘Neither of my children could tell you anything to back up these extraordinary allegations because they quite simply have nothing to tell,’ she said.
I was beginning to think she might be speaking the truth, but we certainly couldn’t halt the investigation yet. I explained to Mrs Jeffries that it was standard procedure under the circumstances for the children to be medically examined by a police forensic doctor, and that in order to cause as little distress as possible, I would like this to be done on another occasion in the medical room at the Lockleaze victim suite. For a moment I thought she was going to refuse, but she didn’t.
‘I’ll make appointments and be in touch,’ I said. Then I led Freda and Peter into my broom cupboard for a case discussion.
As we squeezed into the tiny office, with Mellor perched on a corner of the scarred wooden desk as there was room for only two chairs, I first sought Freda’s opinion.
‘It’s so hard with a Down’s Syndrome child,’ she said. ‘It would be that much easier for an abuser to convince a boy like Stephen that whatever was going on was just normal behaviour.’
‘So what do you think?’ I asked. ‘What’s your gut reaction?’
Freda frowned and leaned back in her chair. ‘I’d somehow be surprised if the girl has ever been touched,’ she ventured. ‘I just don’t know about Stephen. He has a certain reserve, a certain secretiveness about him which I would not really expect from a boy of his age, let alone a Down’s Syndrome boy.’
‘So?’ I said again.
Freda shrugged. ‘Tough one,’ she said. ‘I know Richard Jeffries, of course, which makes it hard to believe these allegations. And Stephen has given us so little today. I don’t think you should back off it, Rose, not yet, anyway — but if there is something going on I don’t know how you’re ever going to prove it.’
I was already beginning to agree with that point of view.
The next day, as procedural regulations demanded, we held a formal strategy discussion and it was decided that a Joint Investigation under Section 47 of the 1989 Children’s Act should be conducted by the police and social services, and that Anna and Stephen Jeffries should be put on the official Children At Risk register which would give the social services unlimited access to them and to their home.
The medical examinations of the two Jeffries children proved inconclusive. That was no surprise. The notorious Cleveland investigations when so many children had been wrongly removed from their homes following Dr Marietta Higg’s discredited anal reflex tests had taught us there was no short cut to the truth. The next step was to have Richard Jeffries in for questioning, although I would like to have had more to go at him with. We arranged a formal taped interview which Mellor and I conducted. As expected, Jeffries hotly denied the allegations against him.
There was really only one card to play.
‘Your son tells us you get in the bath with him,’ I said.
‘Yes, I do,’ Richard Jeffries admitted quickly.
‘Isn’t that a little odd?’
‘Not to us, Detective Chief Inspector,’ he responded.
‘You think it’s normal behaviour for a father to bath with his nine-year-old son, do you Dr Jeffries?’ I asked.
Jeffries sighed heavily. ‘I have been bathing with my son since he was a baby,’ he said in a tired voice. ‘He’s Down’s Syndrome. He needs physical contact, he needs to have affection expressed, even more than most children do. I never saw any reason to stop bathing with him. I just can’t believe there are so many sick minds around.’
We formally interviewed Mrs Jeffries too. She was more openly hostile than her husband, but if Richard Jeffries was abusing Stephen then I somehow could not believe that she knew about it. And how could he hide it from her so effectively? That was another part of the riddle.
She did know that her husband bathed along with Stephen and admitted it freely.
‘It’s just people with sick minds who would read something into that with a boy like Stevie,’ said Elizabeth, echoing her husband.
‘But he doesn’t get into the bath with your daughter?’
‘Of course not,’ Elizabeth Jeffries responded. ‘Anna is a little girl. Neither Richard nor I would think that was right.’
The case proved to be every bit as much of a nightmare as I had feared. Fortunately a little light relief beckoned. My oldest and best friend, Julia Jones, a top London showbusiness journalist, announced that she was coming to stay for a couple of days — for the first time since Simon and I had parted. That was how it was between Julia and me. We didn’t wait for polite invitations. On the Friday evening that she was due to arrive I left Lockleaze a couple of hours earlier than usual and picked her up at Bristol Temple Meads.