Cry of the Children by J.M. Gregson Page B

lank and grey and escaping from the single slide that was her only attempt at control. There was a greyness also about her complexion, which suggested that her sour face saw little of the clean country air around Ledbury.
    She looked at them curiously when they announced themselves and presented their warrant cards. She didn’t like policemen and wouldn’t normally have welcomed them into her house, but murder had a grisly and universal glamour which no other crime possessed. She wanted to be able to relate accurate details about the CID interest in her lodger to her neighbours and her daughter. For a few days it would give her an importance that she had never felt before.
    â€˜His room’s on the landing. Second door on the right.’ She clutched Hook’s arm as her visitors moved past her. ‘He wasn’t here on Saturday night. I don’t know where he was, mind, but he wasn’t here.’ She invested her words with all the heavy import she could give them. Bert sensed that the man behind the second door on the right of the landing couldn’t expect much support here. For no reason he could analyze, Bert hoped he wouldn’t need it.
    Dean Gibson must have heard the voices downstairs. Probably he had heard what his landlady had said to them. The door opened virtually as Lambert knocked, so that detective and quarry almost collided with each other and were left with their faces scarcely a foot apart. It was like a clumsily mistimed move in amateur dramatics, which makes the audience titter when there should be a significant silence.
    The room was small and scarcely adequate for three adults, but it did not smell stale. Gibson had opened the single small window, so that the grubby curtain wafted gently and they could hear the noises from the supermarket car park below them. Hook said, ‘I’m sure Mrs Jackson would let us use her living room downstairs for this, if we ask her nicely and—’
    â€˜I’d rather do it here. More private, like, if you don’t mind sitting on the bed.’ Gibson wasn’t a native of these parts; he had a Birmingham accent, though not a strong one. He took the only chair in the room and gestured towards the single bed. The two big men sat down cautiously on the edge of it. It wasn’t comfortable, but they’d questioned people in places much worse than this.
    They knew from the file Chris Rushton had already opened on this man that Dean Gibson was thirty-three. He looked much older. His hair was greasy and already thinning drastically; he had a three-day growth of stubble on his chin and cheeks. He was thin and narrow-shouldered, and he had three sticking plasters on his fingers. His sweater had a stain on the front and a hole in one elbow. It was easy to see how his wife might have abandoned him for the far more presentable Matthew Boyd.
    Lambert said, ‘We had some difficulty finding you, Mr Gibson. Your last address was in Malvern. You seem to have moved around a lot since you left your wife.’
    â€˜I take work where I can get it. I don’t have a car now. I try to live as near as possible to the place where I work.’ He stared at his questioner steadily, but his eyes blinked far more frequently than they should have.
    Lambert looked back at him hard, then said tersely, ‘You know why we’re here.’
    â€˜Yes. Have you found her?’
    They would have had to tell him, and quickly. Now he had given them the opening. ‘I think so. I was notified on my way here that the body of a small girl has been found. I am afraid we are almost certain that it is Lucy.’
    Gibson clutched suddenly at his torso with both arms. For a long, agonizing moment he did not speak. When he spoke, it was in a voice quite different from the little they had heard from him previously. ‘I knew it. I knew she was gone. If they don’t turn up within the first day, they’re gone, aren’t