one suspected that John Dresser was dead. Transcripts and tapes of early questioning by the police indicate that their initial belief was that the boys took John in an act of mischief, grew tired of his company, and left him somewhere to fend for himself. Although each of the boys was already known to the police, they were none of them known for anything more than truancy, acts of petty vandalism, and minor thefts. (One does wonder how Ian Barker, with a history of small animal torture, managed to go unnoticed for so long, however.) It was only when repeated witnesses began to step forward in the first thirty-six hours following John's disappearance - communicating the level of the toddler's distress - that the police seem to have developed a sense that something more ominous than a prank had occurred.
A search for the little boy had already begun, and as the area surrounding the Barriers was picked through by police and by concerned citizens in an organised and ever-widening circumference, it was not overlong before the Dawkins building site came under scrutiny.
Constable Martin Neild, twenty-four years old at the time and a brand-new father, was the individual who found the body of John Dresser, alerted to the possibility of its proximity by the sight of John's blue snowsuit crumpled and bloodied on the ground near a disused Port-A-Loo. Inside this loo, Neild found the baby's body, stuffed callously into the chemical toilet. Nield reports that he "wanted to think it was a doll or something," but he knew otherwise.
Chapter Fifteen
"WHAT'S THE DECISION ABOUT SUNDAY LUNCH, ISABELLE? I've mentioned it to the boys, by the way. They're quite keen."
Isabelle Ardery pressed her fingers to her forehead. She'd taken two paracetamol but they'd done nothing to ease her headache. Nor had they done much for her stomach. She knew she should have eaten something before gulping them down, but the thought of food on top of an already roiling gut was more than she could have managed.
She said, "Let me speak to them, Bob. Are they there?"
He said, "You don't sound quite yourself. Are you unwell, Isabelle?" Which wasn't what he meant, of course. Unwell was a euphemism, and only barely. Unwell stood in place of everything else he didn't intend to ask but fully intended to communicate.
She said, "I was up late last night. I'm on a case. You might have read about it. A woman's been murdered in a North London cemetery ... ?"
He clearly wasn't interested in that part of her life, only in the other. He said, "Hitting it rather hard then, are you?"
"There are usually late nights when it comes to a murder investigation," she replied, deliberately choosing to misunderstand him. "You know that, Bob. So may I speak to the boys?
Where are they? Certainly they're not out somewhere at this hour of the morning."
"Still asleep," he said. "I don't like to wake them."
"Surely they can go back to sleep if I just say hello."
"You know how they are. And they need their rest."
"They need their mother."
"They have a mother, as things stand. Sandra's quite - "
"Sandra has two children of her own."
"You aren't suggesting she treats them differently, I hope. Because, frankly, I'm not listening to that. Because, also frankly, she treats them a damn sight better than their natural mother does since she's fully conscious and in possession of all her faculties when she's round them. Do you really want to have this kind of conversation, Isabelle? Now, are you coming for lunch on Sunday or are you not?"
"I'll send the boys a note," she said quietly, beating down her incipient rage. "May I assume, Bob, that you and Sandra aren't forbidding my sending a note to them?"
"We're not forbidding anything," he said.
"Oh please. Let's not pretend." She rang off without a goodbye. She knew she'd pay for that later - Did you actually hang up on me, Isabelle? Surely we must have been disconnected somehow, yes? - but at the moment, she could do nothing else. To remain on the line with him meant being exposed to an extended display of his ostensible paternal concern, and she wasn't up to it. She wasn't, in fact, up to much that morning, and she was going to have to do something to alter that before heading into work.
Four cups of black coffee - all right, it was Irish coffee, but she could be forgiven for that as she'd used only a dash of