The Outcast Dead (24 page)

‘Where’s Hecate?’ asks Cathbad, taking the tray from Ruth.

‘Asleep upstairs.’ For once, she doesn’t correct Cathbad about the name. If Michael is found, she thinks, she’ll never worry about such trivial things again.

*

Nelson leaves soon afterwards. He is needed at the station but promises to call back later. He also says that Michael’s disappearance will be covered on all news channels.

‘That’s good,’ says Darren. ‘The more publicity the better.’

‘More limelight for Tim,’ sneers Judy.

‘Tim’s with the search team,’ says Nelson. ‘I’ll do the TV.’

At nine o’clock, Clough drops round to report on the search. He too looks exhausted, barely pausing to exchange greetings with Ruth (who answered the door) before hurrying into the sitting room. He shows no surprise at seeing Cathbad, or Thing, who jumps to his feet, tail wagging.

‘All right, Michael?’

Ruth had forgotten that Clough always calls Cathbad by his given name. Darren gives a start.

‘Michael?’

‘It’s my baptismal name,’ says Cathbad. ‘No-one really uses it anymore.’ He glares at Clough.

Judy, though, is oblivious to anything but the news. She questions Clough intently. The house-to-house team have come up with nothing but there was one sighting of a short-haired woman putting a child in a car. The witness gave the car colour and make but couldn’t come up with a number-plate.

‘Are all units on to it?’

‘Top priority,’ promises Clough. ‘We’ll find them.’

Judy says nothing. She must knows the odds of this
better than anyone. She asks complicated questions about funding and man hours. Clough tells her that the helicopter search will begin again at first light. It’s the first time that anyone has suggested the possibility that Michael will still be missing in the morning. Darren covers his face with his hands. Judy doesn’t react at all. She has shown no emotion since the storm of weeping in Cathbad’s arms.

‘We can get local search teams going too,’ says Clough. ‘People will want to help now it’s been on the news.’

‘What about a psychic?’ asks Cathbad. ‘Have you consulted a psychic?’

‘No,’ says Clough with exaggerated patience. ‘We haven’t contacted a psychic.’

Judy turns on him, eyes flashing. ‘Well, do it! I thought you said you wouldn’t leave any stone unturned.’

‘OK, Judy,’ says Clough. ‘Anything you want.’

‘Madam Rita from Yarmouth is very good,’ says Cathbad.

*

Ruth leaves at ten. There’s nothing she can do for Judy, who seems oblivious to everyone, except perhaps Thing, who is now sitting beside her with his head on her lap, eyes liquid with sympathy. Nelson is due back in an hour and Ruth thinks she should remove Kate before he starts lecturing her about bedtimes. Cathbad helps carry Kate to the car.

‘I’ll call in the morning,’ says Ruth.

‘I’ll let you know anyway as soon as we have news.’

Ruth looks at Cathbad, impressed, despite everything, by his certainty.

‘Please do,’ she says. ‘I’ll be … I’ll be thinking of you.’

Cathbad smiles as if this isn’t the worst cliché in the world. ‘I know you will, Ruthie. Thank you.’

‘Bye Cathbad.’

The drive home is quiet and oddly comforting. Safe in her car, with Kate sleeping in the back, Ruth doesn’t feel that she has to think about Judy or Cathbad or Michael or what will happen if the search teams fail to find the abductor. She only has to think about changing gear and turning the wheel. New Road is pitch black but, as she gets closer to her house, she thinks that she sees some little lights far out towards the shore. They are moving in a wavery, uncertain way, first this way and then that. Cockle pickers? Druids celebrating the solstice six days too late? Or just the last vestiges of the June sun? ‘The west yet glimmers with some streaks of day.’ Where’s that from?
Macbeth
, she thinks, a play far too full of bloody babes and murdered children for her liking.

The security light comes on as she carries Kate to the front door. Tonight, though, Ruth finds herself disliking its searchlight glare. She preferred the darkness in the car. While it’s still night there is still a chance that they will find Michael. Morning will bring the helicopter and the house-to-house search and heartbreak for Judy.

Putting Kate down on her bed Ruth finds herself envying her parents. They would know what to do in these circumstances. They would kneel down and pray.
They would ask God to protect Michael and restore him to his parents, all three of them. But Ruth can’t do this. She wants to, she wants to so badly that she actually kneels down on the floor of Kate’s bedroom next to the building bricks and discarded teddies. She wants to pray but she can’t because of the little niggling reason of not believing in God. Ruth doesn’t believe that a benevolent power is shaping her destiny. She doesn’t believe in anything much apart from nature. Cathbad would say that Nature herself is a kind goddess but Ruth doesn’t agree. Erik used to quote a poem about seeing rocks ground into powder and seas sucked dry. Ruth didn’t know what he meant at the time but she thinks she does now. Everything, in the end, turns to dust.

Ruth gets to her feet, covers Kate with a blanket and tiptoes into her own room. She lies down on her bed but doesn’t feel like sleep. She listens to Radio 4 for a while but even Today in Parliament has lost its power to soothe. Eventually she picks up the book beside her bed.
Poems
by Alfred Lord Tennyson. ‘To Ruth,’ reads the inscription, ‘with very best wishes from Frank Barker.’

Ruth opens a page at random.

‘The hills are shadows,’ Ruth repeats. She has no idea what it all means or why Frank gave her this book ‘with very best wishes’. All she can do is hope and pray to the uncaring goddess that Michael will come home safely.

Ruth is woken by a pounding on the door. In her sleep-fuddled state she thinks it must be Cathbad, coming to look for Michael, or Nelson asking for safe passage across the marshes. ‘I’m coming,’ she mutters, feeling for her slippers under the bed. She pads downstairs and opens the door and sees, not a wild-eyed druid in a cloak, but a balding middle-aged man and two boys carrying sleeping bags.

‘Say hi to Auntie Ruth,’ says Simon.

Ruth gapes at him. In the horror of Michael’s disappearance she has completely forgotten her alter-ego as Auntie Ruth. Is it really Tuesday already? She asks Simon the time.

‘About eight, I think. We started at four a.m.’ he adds, as if this is normal behaviour.

‘Well, you must be starving,’ says Ruth, making an effort. ‘Come in and have some breakfast.’

‘Where’s Kate?’ asks Jack, her younger nephew. Ruth
is grateful that he, alone of all her family and friends, seems capable of getting her name right.

‘She’s normally awake by now,’ she says, ‘but she had a bit of a late night. We both did.’

‘Been out partying?’ asks Simon. He is wearing a huge backpack that makes him looks like a snail. Maybe he too is carrying all his worldly goods with him.

‘Not quite,’ says Ruth.

She takes Jack upstairs. Kate is sitting up in bed and seems enchanted to see her cousin. She last saw him at Christmas and Ruth is surprised that his name comes so readily to her lips.

‘Jack,’ she beams. ‘My Jack.’

‘Hi, Kate,’ says Jack from the doorway. It’s quite sweet really.

Ruth and the children come back downstairs to find that Simon has filled the sitting room with camping equipment. There’s a tent, two more rucksacks, two cold boxes and what looks like an inflatable football pitch.

‘Thought we could have some footie games on the beach,’ says Simon. ‘It’s quite small in here, isn’t it?’

‘Yes,’ says Ruth. She goes into the kitchen to make breakfast. She’s pretty sure that Simon will expect the full English. It’s a concept which, like footie, is almost entirely alien to her.

She puts bacon under the grill, listening to Jack and George teaching Kate how to blow up a beach ball. Without thinking she switches on the radio.

‘Police in Norfolk are still searching for Michael Foster,
the one-year-old boy abducted yesterday. Michael was taken from his childminder’s house in Castle Rising by a woman claiming to have authority from his mother. Childminder Deborah Squires described the woman as being in her twenties or early thirties with short, dark hair. Police are also searching for the owner of a white Skoda seen in the area yesterday. Detective Chief Inspector Harry Nelson of the Norfolk CID called on the public to come forward if they have any knowledge of the woman or the car. The parents are desperate. They love Michael and just want him back safely.’

It sounds so unreal, hearing it on the news. She didn’t even know that Michael’s surname was Foster. And Detective Chief Inspector Harry Nelson of the Norfolk CID sounds like a stranger, not the man she saw yesterday, worrying that Kate would be too hot under the wedding-present duvet. She’s so deep in thought that she doesn’t notice Simon appearing in the doorway. He’s still wearing his backpack.

‘We heard that on the radio coming up,’ he says. ‘About the little boy being abducted. Terrible isn’t it?’

‘It’s my friend’s baby,’ says Ruth. ‘My friend’s baby is missing.’

Simon stares at her as the kitchen fills with the smell of burning bacon.

*

Nelson has never known the team so subdued. In any case that involves children the black humour and cheerful callousness that usually accompanies police work vanishes
overnight, but the abduction of Michael is something else altogether. Clough is close to tears. ‘I just saw the little fellow last week,’ he keeps saying, as if this is relevant to anything. Even Tim, who hardly knows Judy, looks haggard. He has worked all night with the search teams and is now collating the reports. Tanya offers to go over to see Judy, ‘just for support.’ ‘No,’ says Nelson, ‘I need you here.’ He knows that Tanya is the last person Judy would want to see. The trouble is, the best officer at all that touchy-feely stuff is Judy herself.

Nelson begins the briefing by showing a map of the King’s Lynn and Castle Rising area.

‘The playground is here. The car was seen here. Judy lives here, the Grangers’ house is here. It’s likely that the abductor lives or works in easy reach of these places. I’m starting a fingertip search this morning. But we have to think: is there anything that links Judy and the Grangers, apart from geography?’

‘The abductor may have known that Judy was part of the team looking for Poppy,’ says Tim.

‘She wasn’t high profile,’ says Clough. ‘She didn’t do the TV appeal.’

‘Yes, but when they brought Poppy back they could have looked in and seen us in the house,’ says Tanya, not without a certain self-importance.

‘But how would they know that Judy had a child?’ says Clough. ‘They knew the childminder and everything.’

‘It would be fairly easy to find out,’ says Nelson. ‘We know that this person plans ahead.’

‘I checked Justine Thomas again,’ says Clough. ‘She went out with the kids twice, once to the park by The Walks and once to pick the eldest up from school – what’s his name, Bailey. It’s hard to see how she can have found time to abduct Michael.’

‘Even so,’ says Nelson, ‘she fits the description. What sort of car does she drive?’

‘Sporty little Golf. Silver.’

‘That’s pretty close to white. We’re looking for a white car.’

‘But a Golf’s not a Skoda,’ objects Tanya.

‘The public always gets cars wrong,’ says Nelson. ‘Actually they’re pretty similar. Volkswagen owns Skoda. Either way, we should keep her under surveillance.’

‘There could be a link with the Donaldson case,’ says Tim. ‘Justine Thomas gave information that helped us charge Bob Donaldson. Judy was closely involved in the case.’

‘Good point,’ says Nelson. ‘Let’s check on Bob’s movements. He’s out on bail.’ This is a sore point as Nelson opposed bail, but Nirupa Khan had prevailed.

‘I thought we were looking for a woman,’ says Clough.

‘A slight man could be mistaken for a short-haired woman,’ says Nelson. ‘Bob had reason to resent both Justine and Judy. Follow it up, can you Tim?’

‘Sure,’ says Tim. ‘I think this whole Childminder thing is key. Maybe we’re looking for an ex-childminder or someone wrongly accused of abusing a child in their care.’

‘You sound like Madge Hudson,’ says Nelson, but he
has to admit that Tim has a point. Madge’s (unsolicited) opinion is that the capital C in Childminder implies that this is the abductor’s whole identity. ‘It’s as if they’re a superhero, like Batman or Zorro. Someone righting wrongs whilst in disguise.’

‘So we’re looking for someone in a bat suit,’ Nelson had said.

Madge had smiled tolerantly. ‘The definite article is significant too.
The
Childminder. Like The Terminator or The Avenger. It’s indicative of a monomaniacal sense of self-importance.’

‘OK,’ Nelson says now. ‘Tanya, you do a trawl for any police cases involving childminders. Highlight anything in this area or anything involving abduction.’

‘Right,’ says Tanya. Normally she would complain about being given office-based work but today no-one is complaining.

‘Cloughie, you check up on the door-to-door. Make sure the uniforms haven’t missed anything.’

‘OK, Boss.’

‘Is anyone at Judy’s house?’ asks Tanya.

‘The house is under surveillance,’ says Nelson,’ but I want police presence to be low-key. Remember the abductor returned Poppy at a time when the house was quiet. I’m hoping that they may do the same again.’

‘We ought to see how she is,’ says Clough.

‘I will,’ says Nelson. ‘I’ll call in now. After all, someone needs to keep Cathbad under control.’

*

But Cathbad is not at the house. He is sitting on a bench outside the Old Customs House with his daughter. As it’s still early the only other inhabitants of the quay are an aged tramp and a woman who appears to be giving a solo aerobics exhibition.