“Now, what is the boy’s name and how old is her’
“John. He’s five.”
“Not at school today?”
“It’s half-term for the primary schools,” she said. “‘I’ll tell you about this afternoon, shall I?”
“Please.”
“Well, we had our lunch, John and I, and after lunch at about two his friend from next door came to call for him. He’s called Gary Dean and he’s five too.” She was very composed, but now she swallowed and cleared her throat. “They were going to play in the street on their tricycles. It’s quite safe. They know they have to stay on the pavement.”
“When John goes out to play I look out of the window every half-hour or so to see he’s all right and I did that today. You can see all the street and the field where the swings are from my landing window. Well, for a bit they played on the pavement with the other boys, all boys from around here, but when I looked out at half past three they’d gone into the swings field.”
“You could make out your son from this distance?”
“He’s wearing a dark blue sweater and he’s got fair hair.”
“Go on, Mrs. Lawrence.”
She took a deep breath and clasped the fingers of one hand tightly in the other.
“They’d left their tricycles in a sort of huddle on the pavement. The next time I looked they were all on the swings and I could pick out John by his hair and his sweater. Or - or I thought I could. There were six boys there, you see. Anyway, when I looked out again they’d all gone and I went down to open the front door for John. I thought he must be coining in for his tea.”
“But he wasn’t?”
“No, his tricycle was on the pavement by itself.” She bit her lip, her face very white now. “There weren’t any children in the street. I thought John must have gone into someone else’s house - he does that sometimes although he’s not supposed to without telling me so I waited - oh, five minutes, not more - and then I went into the Deans to see if he was there. It gave me a shock,” she said, half-whispering. “That was when I first started getting frightened. Gary was there, having his tea, and there was a boy with him in a blue sweater and with fair hair, but it wasn’t John. It was his cousin who’d come over for the after noon. You see, I realised then that the boy I’d been thinking was John ever since half past three was this cousin.”
“What did you do next?”
“I asked Gary where John was and he said he didn’t know. He’d gone some hours ago, he said - that was how he put it, hours ago - and they thought he was with me. Well, I went to another boy’s house then, a boy called Julian Crantock at 59, and Mrs. Crantock and I, we got it out of Julian, He said Gary and the cousin had started on John, just silly children’s teasing, but you know what they’re like, how they hurt each other and get hurt. They picked on John about his sweater, said it was a girl’s because of the way the buttons do up at the neck, and John - well, Julian said he sat on the roundabout by himself for a bit and then he just walked off towards the road.”
“This road? Fontaine Road?”
“No. The lane that runs between the swings field und the farm fields. It goes from Stowerton to Forby.”
“I know it,” Burden said, “Mill Lane. There’s a drop into it from those fields, down a bank, and there are trees all along the top of the bank.”
She nodded. “But why would he go there? Why? He’s been told again and again he’s never to leave the street or the swings field”
“Little boys don’t always do as they are told, Mrs Lawrence. Was it after this that you phoned us?”
“Not at once,” she said She lifted her eyes and met Burden’s. They were greenish-grey eyes and” they held a terrified bewilderment, but she kept her voice low and even. “I went to the houses of all the boys. Mrs Crantock came with me and when they all said the same, about the quarrel and John going off, Mrs Crantock got out her car and we drove along Mill Lane all the way to Forby and back, looking for John. We met a man with cows and we asked him, and a postman and someone delivering vegetables, but nobody had seen him. And then I phoned you.”
“So John has been missing since about three thirty?”
She nodded. “But why would he go there? Why? He’s afraid of the dark.”
Her composure remained and yet Burden felt that the wrong word or gesture from him, perhaps even a sudden sound, would puncture it and release a scream of terror. He didn’t quite know what to make of her. She looked peculiar, the kind of woman who belonged to a world he knew of only through newspapers. He had seen pictures of her, or of women who closely resembled her, leaving London courts after being found guilty of possessing cannabis. Such as she were found dead in furnished rooms after an overdose of barbiturates and drink. Such as she? The face was the same, pinched and pale, and the wild hair and the repellent clothes. It was her control which puzzled him and the sweet soft voice which didn’t fit the image he had made of her of eccentric conduct and an unsound life.
“Mrs. Lawrence,” he began, “we get dozens of cases of missing children in the course of our work and more than ninety percent of them are found safe and sound.” He wasn’t going to mention the girl who hadn’t been found at all. Someone else probably would, some interfering neighbour, but perhaps by then the boy would be back with his mother. “Do you know what happens to most of them? They wander away out of pique or bravado and get lost and exhausted, So they lie down in some, warm hole and - sleep.”
Her eyes dismayed him. They were so large and staring and she hardly seemed to blink at all. Now he saw in them a faint gleam of hope. “You are very kind to me,” she said gravely. “I trust you.”
Burden said awkwardly, “That’s good. You trust us and let us do the worrying, eh? Now what time does your husband get home?”
“I’m divorced. I live alone.”
“Yes, well, my chief will want to know about that, see your - er, ex-husband and so on.” She would be divorced, he thought. She couldn’t be more than twenty-eight and by the time she was thirty-eight she would probably have been married and divorced twice more. God knew what combination of circumstances had brought her to the depths of Sussex from London where she rightly belonged, to live in squalour and cause untold trouble to the police by her negligence.
Her quiet voice, grown rather shaky, broke into his harsh and perhaps unjust reverie. “John’s all I’ve got. I’ve no one in the world but John.”
And whose fault was that? “We’ll find him,” said Burden firmly. “I’ll find a woman to be with you, Perhaps this Mrs. Crantock?”
“Would you? She’s very nice. Most of the people around here are nice, although they’re not . . .” She paused and considered. “They’re not quite like any people I’ve known before.”
I’ll bet they’re not, thought Burden. He glanced at the patchwork dress. For what respectable social occasion would any woman choose to wear a thing like that?
She didn’t come to the door with him. He left her staring into space, playing with the long chain of beads that hung round her neck. But when he was outside he looked back and saw her white face at the window, a smeared dirty window that those thin hands had never polished. Their eyes met for a moment and convention forced him to grin uneasily. She gave no answering smile but only stared, her face as pale and wan as the moon between clouds of heavy hair.
Mrs. Crantock was a neat and cheerful woman who wore her greying black hair in crisp curls and a string of cultured pearls against her pink twinset. At Burden’s request she left immediately to keep Mrs. Lawrence company. Her husband had already gone off with the search parties and only Julian and his fourteen-year-old sister remained in the house,