Endangering Innocents Read online

  Days all began the same, the radio alarm clicking to the local radio station at 6.45 am. Too early, she and Matthew untangling their legs and struggling to consciousness. One of them - which one was always an arguing point - padding downstairs to bring mugs of coffee back to bed. They began every day like this, with a chat, an exchange of views, a hug. Sometimes they made love guiltily, feeling they should have been getting ready for work.

  Then it was time to shower, toss clothes around the bedroom, pull back the curtains ready for Joanna’s first choice of the day - to travel into Leek in her battered Peugeot or on the bike. Unless the weather was obviously foul, the bike invariably won. And soon the clocks would spring forward and she could work an extra hour before having to race to arrive home before dark. She wasn’t naturally a nervous person but the moors were forbidding to cross once the light had gone. And besides the loneliness, the occasional car which swept past hardly had time to register her own feeble beam before it was upon her. She had been knocked from her bike and broken her wrist a few years ago and coped poorly with the temporary disability of the plaster cast. She didn’t want another cycling accident. Next time she might not be so lucky.

  Today was bright with an ice blue sky but the dark clouds were already gathering towards the West. The stormy weather warned of by the local radio weatherman would be here by lunchtime.

  Matthew was watching her as he knotted his tie in front of the mirror.

  “The car.” She sighed.

  He turned around, a look of amusement tilting his lips. “If it’ll start.”

  She tugged open her underwear drawer. “Don’t be such a pessimist, Mat.”

  “Well - it’s a heap of junk.”

  She moved behind him, folded her arms around him. “But I like junk,” she said.

  He laughed too.

  They said little across the breakfast bar. They were both concentrating on the day ahead. Joanna’s lack of concern about Baldwin had slipped during the night, and she had woken to a sense of unease as though something besides the storm outside was brewing. And she had learned not to question Matthew about his day’s work. It made for gruesome breakfast talk. Routine Post Mortems were a poor accompaniment for cereal and fruit juice.

  At eight o’clock he stood up abruptly, anxious to be off. “Sure you wouldn’t like me to hang around while you try the engine?”

  She shook her head. “Absolutely not,” she said with dignity. “It’ll be fine.”

  “OK.” He gave her a swift, abstracted brush on the cheek and was gone, leaving her to pile the dishes into the dishwasher and lock up.

  Her car was an ancient Peugeot 205, diesel. Faded red. And Matthew was right. She really should replace it.

  She sat in and breathed a swift prayer before turning the key. The engine spluttered and died. She waited for the heating coils to warm again before trying for a second time. This time it roared into enthusiastic, defiant life. She edged away from their parking plot and took the moorland road, the spire of Grindon church to her right, the villages of Onecote and Warslow ahead. How easy a car was when it came to the big hills. She stepped on the accelerator and felt the familiar tinge of guilt. She should have biked it in really and got Matthew to pick her up on the way home.

  She was earlier in than Mike. The room still held their debris from the night before. She yawned, threw open the window and poured two coffees before reading through the pile of memos, wondering what the day ahead held.

  Very little drama, a day of checking facts, typing out statements, talking to a woman whose daughter had been arrested on a minor drugs charge. At lunchtime the heavens opened and Joanna closed the window and watched the rain splashing down the brick wall opposite.

  “I wonder if we could get an artist to paint something over the bricks,” she said, “put in some lovely sprigs of flowers. A couple of window boxes. Something. Anything but a dripping wall.”

  Mike grunted.

  “Are you hungry?”

  “You know me,” he said. “Always hungry.”

  “What about we go for lunch at the Belgian Bar?”

  “Bit of a temptation.”

  “Well - just one small beer isn’t going to do us harm.”

  “It wouldn’t - but they don’t do small beers there.”

  “Spoilsport,” she said. “OK - the sandwich shop it is.”

  They wandered passed the war memorial onto the High Street, lucky enough to have found a break in the rain for the five minute walk.

  Cars pulled in briefly for their owners to dash in through the rain, pick up their lunch and scuttle back to their cars. They threaded between a van and an estate car. Joanna glanced along the line. “Well, well, well,” she said. “Look who else fancied sandwiches for lunch.”

  The blue van had pulled in on double yellow lines while Baldwin had slipped inside the shop. He hurried out without noticing them, two greasy bags in his hands. He climbed into the van and pulled away.

  “We could have got him then,” Mike observed. “He was on double yellows.”

  Joanna nodded, said nothing. But she wished she hadn’t seen Baldwin. It reminded her that he was still here, lurking around the small town with questionable intentions.

  They took their turn in the queue, eyeing up the long French sticks full of salad and chicken or beef or tuna. Joanna chose a Cornish pasty, Mike a beef and salad roll. They both passed on the cakes but lifted some flavoured water from the shelves.

  They munched their food back at the station and washed the lot down with some coffee.

  Joanna wiped the crumbs away from round her mouth. “Oh - that was nice.” She looked squarely at Korpanski. “So what do you think about Baldwin?”

  Mike’s eyes were dark and heavy as he looked back at her. “I don’t know.”

  Joanna moved forward, watched the rain cascade down the bricks again. “And the trouble is if we get it wrong.”

  “So far though there isn’t anything to get wrong. There isn’t anything at all. Under the law Baldwin’s an innocent man.”

  “I wonder what’s in his mind,” she said.

  3 pm

  An hour later she was restless. She picked up her waterproof from the back of a chair. “I have to go back to the school,” she said. “And see if he’s there. I’ll use my car. He won’t recognise it.”

  Korpanski stood up too.

  So they played the watching game, watching parents glide towards the kerb in their cars, wait for the school gates to open. There was no sign of the blue van.

  They watched and waited. At one minute to three-thirty the school gates were thrown open. The children streamed out, quickly grabbed by waiting adults. In a few minutes it was all over. The cars slipped away, the children were gone.

  Except one. She was watching through the window of the infants’ class, anxious eyes roving the street. Vicky Salisbury moved behind her as though she was putting books away, replacing chairs underneath the desks. Tidying up. A red Nissan Micra pulled up right outside the school gate. No one got out. There was the sound of the horn being blasted. The child disappeared from the window. In the same minute Madeline was running across the schoolyard. The passenger door of the Nissan was thrown open. The child disappeared.

  Joanna heaved a sigh of relief. “All safe. Maybe, Mike,” she said, leaning forward to fire the engine, “he did listen to us after all. Maybe he won’t be back.”

  “Maybe,” Korpanski echoed.

  “Pessimist,” she said.

  Chapter Five

  As there was no word from the school for the next few days Joanna made the assumption that Baldwin had seen sense. It was a decision she would regret.

  Good Friday the thirteenth.

  The supermarkets sold no alcohol for the hours that Christ had hung on the cross. The children would be let out of school early today. They would peel out of the gates bearing Easter gifts for their loved ones. Baskets of tiny chocolate eggs, pictures of Easter bunnies, coloured paper eggs. Cardboard crosses. />
  He could not resist being there. The lure was too strong.

  3 pm

  “The children were especially excited today,” Victoria would say later. “It was the last day of term before the Easter break. They were taking their pictures home to their mothers and fathers. We were pinning their coloured-in Easter eggs to the wall. Some were going away on holiday. It felt like the beginning of spring.”

  Buttoning the coats of the tiny ones against the cold meant she was bending down when the first of the cars slid into position outside the school.

  The wind was fresh. The mums stayed in their cars, keeping the heaters on, unsure exactly when the school gates would be opened. Those that left their cars or who had walked from the nearby village wrapped their arms around them and shivered, their faces turned away from the wind. One mum leaned her bike against the wall and waited, the only one of them warm enough. She unbuckled the plastic child seat ready and hoped the teacher would let the children out before she cooled down. Her leggings were thin and her anorak not quite windproof. Inside the classroom Daniel Pascoe stood on his chair and made the teacher cross.

  All this Victoria would remember later as vividly as though it had been seared onto her brain with a hot iron.

  Sheelagh Bradshaw started to cry because one of the boys grabbed at her picture and tore it. Just a little but Victoria had to get the sellotape out of the cupboard to fix it before Sheelagh could take it home to her mother.

  All this meant her attention was elsewhere when the van slipped into view at three fourteen.

  A few of the mothers did notice it. But by then it was too late. The gates were opened and the children were running out. Shouting, screaming, some crying. Lorna Fankers dropped her schoolbag and her sandwiches fell out. Her mum was cross that she hadn’t eaten them. Daniel Pascoe swung his schoolbag and whacked Cathy Platt in the face. Her lip bled. Her mum knelt and fussed over her before facing the young thug. Sam Owen was running with his arms stretched wide, screaming to everyone that they were going on an aeroplane.

  No one saw Madeline cross the schoolyard. Later they would puzzle about this. That their attention had been distracted in so many different directions that no one saw a small girl slip through.

  Maybe Madeline had had her wish. To be invisible.

  In fact with all the confusion it didn’t register that Madeline was missing until after three-thirty. By quarter-to-four Sally Tomkinson was ringing the police station. Joanna took the call from the desk sergeant. And her first reaction was denial. “No,” she said, her fist pressed against the side of her head. “No. This can’t have happened.”

  Mike watched the colour drain from her face and froze until she replaced the receiver. He knew that the event they had most dreaded had happened.

  “A child’s gone missing.”

  He guessed the rest of the story. All of it.

  It took them seven and a half minutes to cover the few miles to the school. Three women were clustered outside the gates. Joanna recognised two of the women - a white-faced Vicky Salisbury and an equally pale Sally Tomkinson. The third woman was small, thin-faced with brown hair and a bleached complexion. Or maybe it was simply the shock.

  Sally Tomkinson made the introductions. “This is Carly Wiltshaw, Madeline Wiltshaw’s mum. And this is the detective who came out on Monday afternoon.”

  Madeline’s mother turned a pair of accusatory redrimmed eyes on Joanna. “Where’s my little girl?” she started furiously. “You’ve been warned there’s been a pervy hanging around here. You didn’t do nothin’. And now she’s gone. And he was ‘ere today.”

  Joanna looked to the headmistress for confirmation - and got it. Mike melted away to use the carphone while she addressed the child’s mother. “Please, Mrs Wiltshaw. Just tell us what happened?”

  “Nothin’. That’s the point. I was ‘ere. I’m a good mother. I knew they was comin’ out at a quarter past. I was ‘ere by twenty past.”

  “And at what time did the children come out of school today?”

  “A little after three-fifteen.” Sally Tomkinson supplied the answer.

  Had Baldwin known the children were to be let out early today? Had he been planning this in slavering, meticulous detail even while she had been talking to him? Because this had seemed the ideal day for a snatch? A day of excitement, of confusion. A day out of the ordinary? Had he counted on one parent being late?

  Joanna’s eyes searched out the empty road. “So the children?” she continued.

  “Was already out when I got ‘ere. Some of ‘em. A couple of the laggers was trailin’ behind.”

  “And Madeline?”

  “I never even saw ‘er.” There was a look of shock on her face.

  Joanna turned towards Vicky Salisbury. She was, if anything, even whiter. She looked as though she might faint. “The children were so excited.” She could hardly get the words out. “They were jumping up and down. All sorts of things were going on when the bell went. The children. They started running.”

  “But I thought it was policy to match the children to whoever was picking them up. Keep them in until their parents had arrived?”

  “It isn’t possible when there’s just one of you and more than twenty excited …”

  “Two of you.” The crisp fact came from Sally Tomkinson.

  Vicky Salisbury’s cheeks flashed with colour. “The classroom assistant was buttoning up the children’s coats, tying trainer laces, making sure some of the littler children weren’t mown down by the bigger boys. I was putting the sellotape back in the cupboard. We were both doing a hundred things at once. The children were noisy. It can be like Bedlam.”

  “And Madeline?” Joanna asked again.

  “I didn’t see her go.”

  Joanna looked around. “Have you a photograph?”

  Sally Tomkinson produced one - the school photograph. Joanna stared at it.

  She had known it would be this child - the solemn, quiet child with a pudding-basin haircut and flat features. The child who had already aroused Baldwin’s attention. There was always one child who attracted these people. Some subliminal eye contact exchanged and from then on the child was in their sights.

  “We shall need to keep this.”

  “We’ve got copies.”

  Joanna glanced around again. “Where’s the classroom assistant? Mrs Parsons.”

  “She was so upset. I let her go home. She didn’t notice Madeline leave either. I asked her.” Sally Tomkinson spoke defiantly, almost defensively.

  “Is it possible Madeline slipped away before the bell rang?”

  “Definitely not.”

  Joanna nodded. All this would have to wait until later. Now she felt a terrible urgency to find the child before … She stole a swift glance at Mike and he read her perfectly.

  “We’ll want you all down the station later,” she said. “In the meantime some uniform officers will arrive and take statements. Detective Sergeant Korpanski and I will follow up some leads. We’ll be in touch.”

  She waited until she and Mike were in the car before daring to speak. “Haig Road,” she said.

  While Mike drove she was in contact with the station. Uniformed officers were detailed to take statements from the two teachers and Madeline’s parents. Someone would be despatched to the classroom assistant’s home to interview her. Before an hour had passed more officers would be interviewing the parents of all the children in Madeline’s class and a vehicle alert was put on Baldwin’s blue van. They would search the school and its surrounds for any sign of the missing child. Photographs and descriptions would buzz around the town. They got an emergency warrant to search Baldwin’s flat.

  They flashed the blue light and made sixty through the streets and along the Buxton road, the tyres shrieking as they rounded the corner into Haig Road. The council flats stared back at them innocently. There was no sign of Baldwin - or of anyone. A dog barked frenetically a few doors away. Joanna felt a terrible thumping sense of urgency. They p
ulled up outside number fourteen. It looked deserted and there was no sign of the blue van.

  They hammered on the door but there was no response.

  They walked round the back of the flat, peering in through the windows. It looked empty.

  She was invisible.

  “Can I help you?”

  The occupant of 14b was leaning over the stairs. A slim blonde girl who looked about seventeen. A baby on her hip staring curiously. “I don’t think he’s in.”

  They climbed a couple of steps towards her. “No? When did you last see him?”

  “He popped in a few minutes ago. You just missed him. He was in a tearing hurry. Must have forgot something.”

  Mike’s eyebrows were knotted. “Was he alone?”

  “I didn’t look in the van but I didn’t notice anyone with him.”

  Mike and Joanna exchanged glances. “Which way did he go?”

  “I don’t know.” The girl looked from one to the other. “Look - what is all this about?”

  “We’re police officers,” Joanna said. “Just making some enquiries. That’s all.”

  “So - what’s Josh done?”

  “Hopefully nothing,” Joanna said. “We just want to make sure. Routine enquiries.”

  It wasn’t enough for the girl. “What sort of routine enquiries?”

  “As I said,” Joanna replyed. “We just want to make sure.”

  The girl’s eyes had narrowed with suspicion. “You think he’s done something?”

  “We just want to make sure,” Joanna said for the third time.

  They clattered down the stairs, the girl leaning back over. “I wouldn’t have thought …”

  The two-way radio was crackling. She picked it up from the dashboard. “Piercy.”

  “We’ve got the blue van, Joanna.” DS Alan King was speaking.