Cry of the Children Read Online Free PDF Page B

louder, and even George, who had spent much of the afternoon asserting his senior status, clung hard to his grandad’s arm through this new experience.
    Then it was home to the meal Christine had prepared for her family, and amusement at the boys’ tales of the football and the fair and Grandad’s pretended fear of the Caterpillar. John had stood at the door with Christine to see their daughter Caroline and Richard and their grandchildren drive away, the boys waving furiously at them through the windows as the car disappeared into the gathering darkness.
    As the grandparents dropped happily into armchairs and sipped the glasses of port Christine had set beside them, Lambert found himself fighting to stay awake. ‘I didn’t used to be like this,’ he announced resentfully to the ceiling.
    â€˜None of us used to be like this,’ said Christine firmly. ‘Get real, John. You’re getting older like everyone else. Chief superintendents don’t have a divine dispensation to keep their energy whilst the rest of the world ages around them.’
    â€˜I had a depressing morning.’ He preferred to blame that rather than his happy efforts with George and Harry for the exhaustion he now felt.
    â€˜You weren’t at the station long. What was it that left you so depressed?’ Christine gazed at him steadily over the top of her glass. Her question came softly, but it was a challenge nevertheless. For years during the early part of his career, when her children had been small and she’d felt isolated with them in her home, John had shut her out of his working life completely. He’d worked long hours as a detective sergeant and then as a detective inspector without even being prepared to reveal the cases he had been assigned to. Often she’d picked up more from the press than she had from her husband about his successes and failures. He’d been away so much and cut himself off from her so completely that their marriage had almost failed. The union that now looked so solid and unshakeable to his juniors at Oldford CID had almost foundered on the rocks of his passion for results.
    He had realized later, much later, that he had been driven above all in those days by a fear of failure. He had confessed as much to Christine now, but that hadn’t prevented them from sailing very near to the rocks of divorce in those early years. Christine still wondered what might have happened if she had not resumed the teaching she loved when the children reached school age. Now they were so solid and had been through so much together that it seemed as though she was studying two other people, ignorant and vulnerable, when she looked back to those years. Yet her instinctive reaction when he mentioned his work was still to encourage him to talk to her about it.
    John gave her a small, tight smile, as if he wished to convey to her that he understood all of this and was sorry for the past. ‘You’ll read about it, in due course. Two CID men in their twenties have got themselves into trouble. They used their fists in a brawl outside a pub before a Bristol City football match. They were off duty at the time and no doubt didn’t announce themselves as coppers.’
    â€˜It’s daft, but it’s the kind of thing young men get themselves involved in before they realize it’s happening.’
    John Lambert smiled sadly. ‘That’s more or less what they said. If that was all they’d done, I’d have given them an earful and sent them on their way – possibly even left that to someone further down the line. But they’ve now done much worse. They tried to pressurize a witness into withdrawing his statement. They’ll end up in the Crown Court in a couple of months’ time.’
    Christine knew that he was only speaking about what would become public knowledge in due course. He still never mentioned anything that should remain confidential; she