Death Row - Mark Pearson [47]
The woman ignored him. Her stare was fixed on Delaney. ‘Why is he doing this? Why now? Why my boy?’
Delaney shook his head. ‘We don’t know what has happened yet, Mrs Woods. I know you are concerned and you have every right to be feeling the way you do right now. But we have every available person out there looking for your boy. And we will find him. I can promise you that.’
Duncton glared reprovingly at him as Delaney walked out the room, but it had as much effect as throwing a ping-pong ball would have had stopping a determined rhinoceros.
Delaney walked down the hallway to the kitchen that lay at the end of it. It was a kitchen that had been designed sometime in the 1950s and hadn’t been updated since. It was clean if not exactly clutter-free. A butler-style sink with a curtain under it stood beneath a double window looking out onto a long back garden.
Graham Harper was filling a metal kettle from the tap. His hands were shaking as though the weight were too much for him to hold. Maybe that was the case, thought Delaney, as Harper put it rattling onto a small gas stove and lit the ring beneath it: the old man looked as though he was made of skin and bone and air.
‘I need to ask you a few questions,’ Delaney said.
Graham Harper spun round, startled. Delaney worried for a moment that he was going to drop dead of a heart attack because of the way he stared at him. He stood there for a moment or two as if he was really scrutinising him, and then his eyes became mobile, darting left and right as though he’d been suddenly frightened. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘I’m a policeman, remember?’ said Delaney, puzzled at the shift in the old man’s attitude, wondering suddenly if maybe he had dementia issues. ‘We were just down at your allotment.’
The old man looked at him for a moment or two longer and then blinked as if coming out of dream.
‘Yes, of course.’ He opened the cupboard and brought out some tea bags.
‘I’m sorry to have startled you,’ said Delaney.
The man looked back, the skin on his forehead like paper wrinkled into a thousand creases. ‘It’s been a bit of a day.’
And if that wasn’t the understatement of the year, Delaney didn’t know what was. Maybe the guy was senile. He wondered if anyone had checked with his doctor. Maybe he had left the kid with some relative or friend and had clean forgotten about it. He made a mental note to track down Harper’s physician.
‘Yeah,’ he said and pulled up a chair. It had been a bit of a day, all right.
The scream shrieked in the air as though someone was being tortured.
Graham Harper picked the kettle off the gas ring and the whistling mercifully stopped. ‘Would you like a cup of tea, detective?’ he asked.
Delaney shook his head. The English. Here was a man who not a few hours before had had his grandchild abducted under his very own nose and was now worried about the social niceties of making tea for his guest.
‘No, thanks. I just want to go over what happened with you again.’
‘I’ve told everybody a hundred times. I don’t know. I was in my shed. Two minutes later I came out and he had gone. I assumed he was playing up in the woods – I let him dig for bottles there.’
Harper moved to the dresser beside the door into the kitchen and handed Delaney a small blue bottle, about five inches high and with hexagonal sides. ‘It’s Victorian, a poison bottle. They used blue for poison.’
Delaney looked at the object. ‘Is it worth anything?’
The elderly man shrugged and took it back from him. ‘Not really. But Archie liked to dig, see if he could find any more. I was going to get him a metal detector for Christmas …’ He broke off, took the bottle back and turned away, busying himself pouring out his tea.
Delaney waited until he’d finished and then asked, ‘You say he liked to dig?’
‘If the weather was good, yes.’
‘What with?’
Graham Harper seemed puzzled as he sat opposite Delaney, supping his tea noisily through discoloured teeth. ‘I’m sorry, what do you mean?’
‘What did he dig with? There was a spade in your shed