The Risk of Darkness Read Free Page B

don’t know about you but I generally get a feel about a place by mooching about it. We’ve no evidence, there’s nothing … but I want to get your reaction.”
    Serrailler and Chapman went to Herwick with Lester Hicks in the back. Hicks was a taciturn Yorkshireman, small and chunkily built with a shaved head and the chauvinist attitude which Simon had encountered before in Northern men. Although apparently without imagination, he came across as sane and level-headed.
    Herwick was a town on the fringes of the York plain and seemed to have spread haphazardly. The outskirts were a ribbon of industrial units, DIY warehouses and multiplexes, the town centre full of charity shops and cheap takeaways.
    “What’s the work here?”
    “Not enough … chicken packing factory, several big call centres but they’re cutting back—all that work’s going abroad, it’s cheaper. Big cement works … otherwise, unemployment. Right, here we go. This is the Painsley Road … there’s a link road to the motorway a couple of miles further on.” They continued slowly and then took a left turn. “This is where the Tyler house is … number 202 …”
    It was a road without feature. Semis and a few run-down detached houses; a couple of shoppingrows—newsagent, fish-and-chip shop, bookmaker, launderette; an undertaker’s with lace-curtained windows and a flat-roofed building at the back.
    The Tyler house was two doors away from it. Bright red herringbone bricks were newly laid where a front garden had been. The fence was gone too.
    They slowed.
    “Scott should have approached the house from this end … he would have come from the junction.”
    No one took any notice of the car crawling along the kerb. A woman pushed a pram, an old man drove along the pavement in an invalid buggy. Two dogs mated by the side of the road.
    “What kind of people?” Serrailler asked.
    “Tylers? He’s a plumber, the wife works as a shrink-wrapper in the chicken factory. Decent sort. Kids seem fine.”
    “How have they been?”
    “Father doesn’t say much but he’s blaming himself for not fetching the boy by car.”
    “Scott’s parents?”
    “On the verge of killing one another … but I think they always have been. His sister seems to carry the weight of the family on her shoulders.”
    “And she’s …”
    “Thirteen going on thirty. Here’s where Scott would have turned the corner … this road leads to his own house. It’s in a small close a couple of hundred yards down, set off the main road.”
    “No sighting of him along here?”
    “No sighting, period.”
    Another bleak road, with the houses set behind fences or scruffy privet hedges. Three large blocks of flats. A disused Baptist chapel with wooden bars across the doors and windows. Traffic was steady but not heavy.
    “It’s hard to believe nobody saw the boy.”
    “Oh they’ll have seen him … just didn’t register.”
    “It must have looked normal then, there can’t have been any sort of struggle, just as there can’t have been any when David Angus was taken. No one misses the sight of a child being forcibly dragged into a car.”
    “Someone they both knew?”
    “Both boys can’t have known the same person, that’s way off being likely. So, we’ve got two different kidnappers. Each one well enough known to the child to …” Simon trailed off. They all knew it was not worth his finishing the sentence.
    “This is Richmond Grove. It’s number 7 … bottom right.”
    The houses were crammed on to a skimpy plot. Simon could guess how much noise came through thin dividing walls, how small the area of garden at the back of each one.
    Chapman turned off the car engine. “Want to get out?”
    Serrailler nodded. “Will you wait here?”
    He walked slowly round. The curtains of number 7 were drawn. There was no car, no sign of life. He looked at the house for a long time, trying to picture the gap-toothed boy coming out of the door, swimming bag over his shoulder,