“Shall we have some television?” she said, trying to keep the weariness out of her voice. “There’s quite good film on, I believe.”
Too much homework,” John said, “and I can’t do the maths till my father comes. Did you say he’d be back at ten?”
“He said about ten.”
“I think I’ll go into my room, then.”
Grace and Pat sat on the sofa and watched the film. It was all about the domestic lives of policemen and bore little relation to reality.
Burden drove to Stowerton, through the new part and into the old High Street. Fontaine Road was parallel with Wincanton Road, and there, years and years ago when they were first married, he and Jean bud for six months rented a flat. Wherever he went in Kingsmarkham and its environs he kept coming on places that he and Jean had been to or visited on some special occasion. He couldn’t avoid them, but the sight of them brought fresh hurt every time and the pain did not diminish. Since her death he had avoided Wincanton Road, for there they had been especially happy, young lovers learning what love was. Today had been a bad day, bad in that for some reason he was ultra-sensitive and prickly, and he felt that the sight of the house where their flat had been would be the last straw. Control might go utterly and he would stand at the gate and weep.
He didn’t even look at the street name as he passed it but kept his eyes fixed straight ahead. He turned left into Fontaine Road and stopped outside number 61.
It was a very ugly house, built about eighty years ago, and surrounded by a wild untended garden full of old fruit trees whose leaves lay in drifts on the grass. The house itself was built of khaki-coloured bricks with a shallow, almost flat, slate roof. Its windows were the sash kind and very small, but the front door was enormous, quite out of proportion, a great heavy thing with inset panels of red and blue stained glass. It was slightly ajar.
Burden didn’t go into the house at once. Wexford’s car, among other police cars, was parked against the fence which divided the end of the street from the field Stowerton Council had turned into a children’s playground. Beyond this came more fields, woods, the rolling countryside.
Wexford was sitting in his car, studying an ordinance survey map. He looked up as Burden approached and said:
“Good of you to get here so fast. I’ve only just arrived myself. Will you talk to the mother or shall I?”
“I will,” said Burden.
There was a heavy knocker on the front door of number 61, shaped like a lion’s head with a ring in its mouth. Burden touched it lightly and then he pushed open the door.
Chapter 2
A young woman was standing in the hall, holding her hands clasped in front of her. The first thing Burden noticed about her was her hair which was the same colour as the dead apple leaves that had blown in on to the tiled passage floor. It was fiery copper hair, neither straight nor curly but massy and glittering like fine wire or thread spun on a distaff, and it stood out from her small white face and fell to the middle of her back.
“Mrs. Lawrence?”
She nodded.
“My name is Burden, Inspector Burden, C.I.D. Before we talk about this I’d like a photograph of your son and some article of clothing he’s recently worn.”
She looked at him, wide-eyed, as if he were a clairvoyant who could sense the missing boy’s whereabouts from handling his garments.
“For the dogs,” he said gently.
She went upstairs and he heard her banging about feverishly, opening drawers. Yes, he thought, it would be an untidy house with nothing in its place, nothing to hand. She came back, running, with a dark green school blazer and an enlarged snapshot. Burden looked at the photograph as he hurried up the road. It was of a big sturdy child, neither very clean nor very tidy, but undeniably beautiful, with thick light hair and large dark eyes.
The men who had come to search for him stood about in groups, some in the swings field, some clustered around the police cars. There were sixty or seventy of them, neighbours, friends and relatives of neighbours, and others who had arrived on bicycles from further afield. The speed with which news of this kind travels always amazed Burden. It was scarcely six o’clock. The police themselves had only been alerted half an hour before.
He approached Sergeant Martin, who seemed to be involved in some kind of altercation with one of the men, and handed him the photograph.
“What was all that about?” said Wexford.
“Chap told me to mind my own business because I advised him he’d need thicker shoes. That’s the trouble with getting the public in, sir. They always think they know best.”
“We can’t do without them, Sergeant,” Wexford snapped. “We need every available man at a time like this, police and public.”
The two most efficient and experienced searchers belonged, properly speaking, in neither category. They sat a little apart from the men and viewed them with wary scorn. The labrador bitch’s coat gleamed like satin in the last of the sun, but the alsatian’s thick pelt was dull and rough and wolflike. With a quick word to the man Sergeant Martin had admonished not to go near the dogs - he appeared to be about to caress the Alsatian - Wexford passed the blazer over to the labrador’s handler.
While the dogs explored the blazer with expert noses, Martin formed the men into parties, a dozen or so in each and each with its leader. There were too few torches to go round and Wexford cursed the season with its deceptive daytime heat and its cold nights that rushed in early. Already dark fingers of cloud were creeping across the redness of the sky and a sharp bite of frost threatened. It would be dark before the search parties reached the wood that crouched like a black and furry bear over the edges of the fields.
Burden watched the small armies enter the wide swings field and begin the long hunt that would take them to Forby and beyond. A frosty oval moon, just beginning to wane from the full, showed above the woods. If only it would shine bright, unobscured by that blue-black floating cloud, it would be a greater asset than all their torches.
The women of Fontaine Road who had hung over their gates to see the men go now strayed lingeringly back into their houses. Each one of them would have to be questioned. Had she seen anything? Anyone? Had anything at all out of the way happened that day? On Wexford’s orders, Loring and Gates were beginning a house-to-house investigation. Burden went back to Mrs. Lawrence and followed her into the front room, a big room full of ugly Victorian furniture to match the house. Toys and books and magazines were scattered everywhere and there were clothes about, shawls and scarves draped over the furniture. A long patchwork dress on a hanger hung from a picture rail.
The place looked even dirtier and mustier when she switched on the standard lamp, and she looked stranger. She wore jeans, a satin shirt and strings of tarnished chains around her neck. He didn’t need to admire her, but he would have liked to be able to feel sympathy. This woman with her wild hair and her strange clothes made him immediately feel that she was no fit person to be in charge of a child and even that her appearance and all he associated with it had perhaps contributed to that child’s disappearance. He told himself not to jump to conclusions, not yet.