“I don’t have any work to do, unfortunately.”
He had meant housework, cleaning, tidying, sewing, tasks which he thought of as naturally a woman’s work, and there was plenty of that to be done. But he could hardly tell her that.
“I expect I’ll just sit and play records,” she said, shifting a dirty cup from the record player to the floor. “Or read or something.”
“As soon as we have any news, I’ll come to you. I won’t phone, I’ll come.”
Her eyes shone. “If I were the Prime Minister,” she said, “I’d make you a superintendent.”
He drove to Cheriton Forest where the search was now centred and found Wexford sitting on a log. It was misty this morning and the chief inspector was wrapped in an old raincoat, a battered felt hat pulled down over his eyes.
“We’ve got a lead on the car, Mike.”
“What car?”
“Last night when they were out in the fields one of the search party told Martin he’d seen a car parked on Mill Lane. Apparently, he had a week off in August and he took his dog walking regularly up Mill Lane and three times he noticed a car parked near the spot where Mrs. Mitchell saw the man. He noticed it because it was obstructing the lane, only leaving room for single-line traffic. A red Jaguar. Needless to say, he didn’t get the number.”
“Did he see the man?”
“He didn’t see anyone. What we want now is to find someone who regularly uses that road. A baker, for instance.”
“I’ll see to that,” said Burden.
In the course of the morning he found a baker’s roundsman who used the road every day and the driver of a van delivering soft drinks who used it only on Wednesdays and Fridays. The baker had seen the car because, coming round a corner one afternoon, he had almost hit it. A red Jaguar, he confirmed, but he hadn’t taken the number either. And although he had been on the road the day before, be had passed the swings-field hedge at two and the car wasn’t there then. At half-past four two women in a car had asked him if he had seen a little boy, but he was almost into Forby by then. The red Jaguar might have passed him, might have contained a child, but he couldn’t remember.
The soft-drinks man was less observant. He had never noticed anything out of the way on that road, either recently or in August.
Burden went back to the station and had a quick lunch in Wexford’s office. They spent the afternoon interviewing a sad little stream of men, all shifty and most undersized, who at some time or other had made overtures to children. There was the retarded nineteen-year-old whose speciality was waiting outside school gates; the middle-aged primary-school teacher, sacked by the authority years ago; the draper’s assistant who got into train compartments that contained a solitary child; the schizophrenic who had raped his own little daughter and since been discharged from mental hospital.
“Lovely job, ours,” said Burden. “I feel slimy all over.”
“There but for the grace of God . . .” said Wexford. “You might have been one of them if your parents had rejected you. I might if I’d responded to the advances made to me in the school cloakroom. They sit in darkness, they’re born, as Blake or some clever sod said, to endless night. Pity doesn’t cost anything, Mike, and it’s a damn sight more edifying than shouting about flogging and banging and castrating and what you will’
“I’m not shouting, sir, I just happen to believe in the cultivation of self-control. And my pity is for the mother and that poor kid.”
“Yes, but the quality of mercy is not strained. The trouble with you is you’re a blocked-up colander and your mercy stains through a couple of miserable little holes. Still, none of these wretched drop-outs was near Mill Lane yesterday and I don see any of them living it up in a red Jaguar.”
If you haven’t been out in the evening once in ten months the prospect of a trip to the cinema in the company of your brother-in-law and two children can seem like high living. Grace Woodville went to the hairdresser’s at three and when she came out she felt more elated than she had the first day Pat came to kiss her of her own accord. There was a nice golden-brown sweater in Moran’s window, and Grace, who hadn’t bought a garment in months, decided on an impulse to have it.
Mike should have a special dinner tonight, curried chicken. Jean had never cooked that because she didn’t like it, but Mike and the children did. She bought a chicken and by the time John and Pat came home the bungalow was filled with the rich scents of curry sauce and sweet-sour pineapple.
She had laid the table by six and changed into the new sweater. By five to seven they were all sitting in the living room, all dressed-up and rather self-conscious, more like people waiting to be taken to a party than a family off to the local cinema.
The telephone calls had begun. They came in to Kingsmarkham police station not only from people in the district, not only in Sussex, but from Birmingham and Newcastle and the north of Scotland. All the callers claimed to have seen John Lawrence alone or with a man or with two men or two women. A woman in Carlisle had seen him, she averred, with Stella Rivers; a shopkeeper in Cardiff had sold him an ice-cream. A lorry-driver had given him and his companion, a middle-aged man, a lift to Grantham. All these stories had to be checked, though all seemed to be without foundation.
People poured into the station with tales of suspicious persons and cars seen in Mill Lane. By now not only red Jaguars were suspect but black ones and green ones, black vans, three-wheelers. And mean while the arduous search went on. Working without a break, Wexford’s force continued a systematic house-to-house investigation, questioning most particularly every male person over sixteen.
Five to seven found Burden outside the Olive and Dove Hotel in Kingsmarkham High Street, facing the cinema, and he remembered his date with Grace and the children, remembered, too, that he must see Gemma Lawrence before he went off duty.
The phone box outside the hotel was occupied and a small queue of people waited. By the time they had all finished, Burden judged, a good ten minutes would have passed. He glanced again at the cinema and saw that whereas the last programme began at seven-thirty, the big picture didn’t start until an hour later. No need to phone Grace when he could easily drive to Stowerton, find out how things were with Mrs. Lawrence and be home by a quarter to eight. Grace wouldn’t expect him on time. She knew better than that. And surely even his two wouldn’t want to sit through a film about touring in East Anglia, the news and all the trailers.
For once the front door wasn’t open. The street was empty, almost every house well-lit. It seemed for all the world as if nothing had happened yesterday to disturb the peace of this quiet country street. Time passed, men and women laughed and talked and worked and watched television and said, What can you do? That’s life.
There were no lights on in her house. He knocked on the door and no one came. She must have gone out. When her only child was missing, perhaps murdered? He remembered the way she dressed, the state of her house. A good-time girl, he thought, not much of a mother. Very likely one of those London friends had come and she’d gone out with him.
He knocked again and then he heard something, a kind of shuffling. Footsteps dragged to the door, hesitated.
He called, “Mrs. Lawrence, are you all right?”
A little answering sound came, to him, half a sob and half a moan. The door quivered, then swung inwards.
Her face was ravaged and swollen and sodden with crying. She was crying now, sobbing, the tears streaming down her face. He shut the door behind him and switched on a light.