For Death Comes Softly

Three

‘Rose, my office, now, and bring Mellor,’ he instructed.

Detective Chief Superintendent Titmuss, my immediate boss and I, had never seen eye to eye. In my opinion he was a self-seeking pompous political animal full of prejudices and misconceptions with no right whatsoever to be in a senior position in the modern police force. I was well aware that he privately regarded me as a mild embarrassment half the time while using me publicly as a manifestation of his liberal approach to life. If there is anything worse than being kept under because you are a woman, it could well be to be the Avon and Somerset Constabulary’s only female senior detective.

Titmuss was head of the force’s Child Protection Team and it was my misfortune that he had been appointed shortly after I had joined the team six months previously as number two to his predecessor, Superintendent Steve Livings, an old friend and one of the nicest and best coppers in the business. I had known that Steve was on the verge of retirement, but he had in fact been pressing for me to head the CPT. The powers-that-be rejected his recommendation on the grounds that the job called for the rank of Superintendent and they didn’t reckon I was ready for that yet. I had always been ambitious and I was disappointed although I had been quite aware that their decision might go that way. But what neither Steve nor I had expected was that Titmuss might get the job. On paper — although in no other way, that was for sure — he was over-qualified, and to both of us he seemed the worst possible choice. Apart from anything else CPT work calls for exceptional sensitivity and anyone less sensitive than Chief Superintendent Titmuss was hard to imagine. But Chief Superintendent is a dinosaur rank nowadays and police forces never seem to know what to do with them anymore.

I had no illusions that Titmuss wanted me to be his number two anymore than I did, but my immediate attempts to find an escape route revealed that I had no chance for the foreseeable future. I was the most senior woman detective in the force — in fact the Avon and Somerset’s only woman DCI — and was considered to be the ideal appointment. Child Protection is one of the very few areas of policing officially allowed to positively discriminate between the sexes — unofficial negative discrimination is something else of course. Having a male CPT chief more or less obliged the force to have a female number two. And it was just unfortunate that Titmuss and I had at best an uncomfortable relationship, and at worst no relationship at all.

Titmuss had two ways of dealing with me. He either patronised me like hell or became impossibly officious, like some dinosaur authoritarian colonial general. That morning he was in officious mode, which, to be honest, I marginally preferred. But only marginally.

It was my first day back on the job since my so-called holiday on Abri Island, from which I was still painfully recovering. I was physically well enough but I couldn’t sleep properly at night. Both Robin Davey and the horror of being trapped on the Pencil continually invaded my dreams. I had been shaken in more ways than one, although I had no intention of sharing my near-death experience — let alone anything else — with anyone at the nick, and especially not Chief Superintendent Titmuss. Certainly I had been hoping for an hour or so to myself, to sort through my mail and messages, catch up on anything I may have missed, and down a couple of mugs of tea, before having to do my performing monkey act for the bloody man. It was not to be.

For just a few seconds I ignored his order, which had been shouted through the open door of my office at the Portishead HQ of the Avon and Somerset Constabulary. I sat quite still at my desk, mug suspended halfway to my lips, woefully watching Titmuss’s retreating back. As he approached his own office — never being one to miss an opportunity to display his superiority he wouldn’t have dreamt of talking to me in mine — he swung abruptly on his heels and seeing that I had not moved bellowed impatiently: ‘Rose!’

Resigned to my fate I hoisted myself upright, and as I did so spilt tea down my extremely expensive new cream jacket, purchased the previous day in a bid to cheer myself up.

‘At the double,’ murmured a laconic voice in my ear.

I grinned in spite of myself. Thank God for Detective Sergeant Peter Mellor — a handsome young black man in a job which doesn’t take kindly to anyone who is different. So at least he knew what that felt like. Mellor paid lip service to no one, me included. He could be cold as steel and he was an unforgiving pedantic bastard, but he was so clever it hurt, absolutely straight down the middle, and he was brilliant in the CPT, because children, even those who had good reason to fear men, instinctively trusted him. He and I had worked together regularly before both moving into Child Protection and I wouldn’t have been without him for the world — although I was sometimes not sure he always felt quite the same way about me.

When I’d first started working with Mellor I’d found him disconcertingly humourless. He’d learned. Nowadays he had developed a droll, nicely irreverent sense of humour. His timing was good too.

Peter Mellor was usually based at Lockleaze, the former district police station which serves as the Bristol area headquarters for the CPT, but had come over to Portishead, my base as Deputy Chief, in order to brief me on anything he felt I should know about which had happened while I had been on leave. He was exceptionally able at keeping his ear to the ground, and I trusted his judgement more than that of any other cop I knew. A briefing from Mellor was always invaluable. However it appeared that on this occasion I was going to have to face the boss without that luxury.

We obediently followed Titmuss into his lair, with me rubbing my stained jacket in desultory fashion with the back of one hand.

‘Attention!’ whispered Mellor at the door.

Titmuss, who vaguely resembled a younger Captain Mainwaring without the charm, was wearing a dark pin-striped double-breasted suit so stiffly formal it was something of a miracle that he could move in it. I knew I could safely bet a month’s salary that he was going out to lunch. Or to a lunch, I should say. He was very hot on the kind of occasions any normal copper would volunteer to police an England soccer international with Germany in order to avoid. Chamber of commerce lunches, Rotary lunches, civic investitures. And you could always tell when he was going to one because of both the expression and the suit that he wore — each clearly inclined towards self-importance.

Titmuss slapped a file on the desk in front of him and peered through his round gold-framed spectacles. Even his eyebrows bristled when he was in this sort of mood.

‘We’ve had a complaint,’ he began. I felt my back involuntarily stiffen. What had Mellor and I done now, I wondered fleetingly.

‘...of an exceptionally delicate nature even within the realms of the CPT,’ he went on. ‘One that will have to be treated with extreme discretion.’

So it was just another child abuse incident. Terrible to think like that, or to be relieved at such a matter, but it was not normal for our cases to be filtered down from Titmuss. As well as being Titmuss’s deputy, I also had direct control of the Bristol and South Gloucestershire division at Lockleaze. The social services and the medical authorities, sources of most of our workload, would normally report straight to me or one of my officers — six sergeants and twenty-four constables — rather than to the big boss whose job was the overall administration of the team.

‘Just the thing for you, Rose,’ continued Titmuss, reverting briefly to patronising mode.

His inference was plain enough. The importance of CPT work is pretty obvious, but only months previously I had been heading the Avon and Somerset’s biggest murder investigation in years, the serial killing of male prostitutes and, I know it’s awful, but a major murder investigation is inclined to be the ambitious detective’s dream job. Some of us find a big murder hard to follow, and Titmuss, rather curiously as he was the CPT chief, liked to rub it in by implying that I had in some way been demoted to an area much more suitable for a woman.

I was in any case aware that was really nonsense and that I had the kind of track record which made Titmuss’s patronising approach to me quite unforgivable, but the bloody man had the knack of getting under my skin and I had to force myself to concentrate on the job in hand. Child abuse is something police officers, like the vast majority of people, find especially abhorrent, and I knew better than to allow Titmuss to get in the way of the remains of my brain.

I picked up the file and glanced at it. The child believed to have been the victim of abuse was a nine-year-old Down’s Syndrome boy. I looked at Peter Mellor. All the banter had gone from him now.

‘The woman who reported her suspicions is a teacher at the special school this boy attends,’ said Titmuss. ‘Apparently he made some remarks which might incriminate the father, usual thing...’ Titmuss paused and coughed almost nervously. ‘The boy’s name is Stephen Jeffries — his father is Richard Jeffries.’

I studied Mellor again. He looked as blank as I did.

Titmuss noticed our lack of reaction.

‘Name doesn’t mean anything to you? Good, that’s what I was hoping for, and why I want you, Rose, to handle the investigation personally along with Peter. Keep things straightforward. If the pair of you had been in CPT longer you’d be bound to know him. Richard Jeffries is a doctor, a respected Bristol GP. He is also a qualified paediatrician who many times over the years has taken part in strategy discussions.’

Mellor gave a long low whistle. I remained silent. Waiting.

Strategy discussions are a formal part of the child abuse investigation procedure when representatives from Police, Health, Housing and Social Services decide what further action should be taken in a case. Any allegation of child abuse against a doctor would be a particularly tricky one to deal with, but this was even worse — a suspect who was a paediatrician actually involved in child protection work. So that’s why we’ve had all this build up, I thought. No bloody wonder.

After a brief pause Titmuss continued. ‘This one could be very messy,’ he said, and for once I agreed with his every word. ‘Let’s try to be a jump ahead, shall we? Top priority, eh? Now get on with it.’

I left his office with a sinking heart, in little doubt that I was in a no win situation. In addition I was bogged down with paperwork as usual and the Jeffries case was far from all I had to deal with. The Avon and Somerset CPT investigates 800 cases of suspected child abuse every year, and around a quarter of these are in the Bristol and South Gloucestershire area. I had difficulty enough keeping a jump ahead of Titmuss, let alone anything else.

However we had been told to give top priority to the Jeffries investigation — not without justification I had to admit — and top priority it would get. There was one up side to it all. As I was now heading a specific enquiry it made sense for me to move over at once to Lockleaze, which houses its own customised computer system, the filed records of previous child abuse cases going back a minimum of seven years, and a victim suite, designed to look like a sitting room in an ordinary house so as not to cause unnecessary distress to children we needed to question during an investigation. Only at Lockleaze could I ensure that I would always be at the hub of the action. So I installed myself there that afternoon in a temporary new office which had been hastily cleared for me. It was little more than a broom cupboard — after all the old police station was already so overcrowded that there were not even enough desks to go round should all the detective constables based there ever have turned up for duty at the same time — but it put me at a welcome distance from Titmuss the Terrible. And I found, as I began to set up the investigation and organise a team to check out Dr Jeffries as discreetly as possible, that I did not miss the comparative luxury and space of Portishead at all.

The next day Mellor and I drove across the city to Stephen Jeffries’ school, Balfour House, which specialised in tutoring handicapped children, to see the teacher who had reported her suspicions.

Claudia Smith was a pretty young woman in her late twenties who seemed to me to be perhaps overly confident, but she had been trained to understand children like Stephen Jeffries and to spot any problems they might have, and there was no doubting the sincerity of her concern.

‘I’ve been teaching Stephen for two years and in the last few months I have noticed some disturbing aspects to his behaviour,’ she explained, brushing aside locks of the rather lank almost black hair which seemed to habitually fall across her face. ‘He seems to have become rather hyperactive and he has started to touch the other children, particularly the girls, in a way that if not always overtly sexual is certainly over familiar. Once he actually appeared to me to be simulating sexual intercourse with one of our little girls.

‘Now Stephen has always been exceptionally affectionate, as Down’s Syndrome children usually are, but that was when I seriously began to suspect that something was very wrong. I began to talk to him, in a general way, about his life at home. To try to lead him out.’

Claudia Smith paused. Neither Mellor nor I spoke. She studied us for a moment, an appraising look in her speckled greenish-brown eyes.

‘I do know who Stephen’s father is,’ she said after a few seconds. ‘I should imagine he’s about the last man in the world you’d want to be investigating in a case like this.’

She was a bright lady, Claudia Smith, and she was dead right, of course. However I answered her formally.

‘I can assure you Miss Smith that Dr Jeffries will be investigated as thoroughly as any other father would be under these kind of circumstances,’ I said. ‘So please continue.’

She nodded, possibly a little apologetically, I thought.

‘I asked Stephen about bathtime,’ she went on. ‘In my experience that’s a classic opportunity. He told me his father nearly always bathed him, and, it took a while, but eventually he told me that his father would undress and get in the bath with him. Then they played a game...’

This time when she paused I knew it was simply because she was finding it hard to find the right words. I sympathised totally. There are no right words, really. I had already heard enough descriptions of these kind of games, often directly from the children involved, to last me a lifetime.

‘Stephen told me that his father liked him to play with his “joystick”,’ Claudia Smith continued, and she did not sound quite so coolly confident now.

It would have been funny if it weren’t so sick. Baby words and pet names are a common part of the child abuser’s repertoire. Everything Claudia Smith described to us indicated a classic case of paternal abuse. Proving it, however, would be something else. Less than five per cent of police investigations into child abuse result in a prosecution. Trying to get to the truth in these cases is always a minefield, and this time we were up against an expert in the field.

The team investigating Richard Jeffries came up with nothing at all suspicious in his past. If there was anything then it was certainly going to take more than two or three days to unearth. In fact the doctor’s record and his character appeared to be exemplary. His father had been a doctor before him and after gaining his medical degree Dr Jeffries had taken a paediatrician speciality at a London teaching hospital before returning to his home town of Bristol where he had become a popular and respected GP and a pillar of local society. His marriage of fifteen years seemed solid enough and he and his wife Elizabeth were generally regarded as having coped admirably with the birth of their Down’s Syndrome son which had come as a complete surprise as Elizabeth Jeffries had been well below the danger age. There was a second unaffected child, five-year-old Anna.

For us the next stage was to pay the Jeffries family a visit and arrange for their children to be interviewed on video at Lockleaze. We always try to do this by agreement with parents, and we normally do get co-operation. Parents, innocent or guilty, generally realise that not allowing their children to be interviewed will almost certainly just make matters worse.

In accordance with Titmuss’s instructions I continued to take an active role personally in the Jeffries case and it was Mellor and I who, a couple of days after talking to Claudia Smith, went around to the Jeffries’ home in the Clifton area of Bristol. The house was an imposing Victorian villa with views across the city.

It was just before six thirty on a typically cold and wet November evening and already dark when Elizabeth Jeffries answered the door. We had chosen the time of our visit carefully — late enough to stand a good chance of catching both parents at home on a day when Dr Jeffries had no evening surgery and his wife was not at the hospital where she worked occasional shifts as a night nurse, and not so late as to be provocative — and we had got it right. Hearing strange voices, no doubt, Richard Jeffries quickly appeared in the hallway behind his wife, and as the couple stood at the door, almost silhouetted in the bright light from within the house, both seemed ill at ease — although perhaps not more than anyone would be when confronted unexpectedly with a brace of police officers.

They led us into an immaculate sitting room which was tastefully if unimaginatively decorated in cream and white and formally furnished with a smattering of what I guessed to be genuine antiques. The curtains were not drawn and through the French windows I could see an attractively lit landscaped garden which even in the late Autumn, when gardens invariably look at their worst, contrived to give the impression of being well-cared for.

Richard Jeffries was a pleasant-faced man with thinning sandy hair, gentle grey eyes, and an obvious tendency towards plumpness that appeared to be only just under control. He was about five feet nine inches tall, dressed in dark blue slacks and a comfortable-looking paler-blue pullover with a string of multi-coloured elephants striding around it. As he stood in the middle of his thick-pile fitted carpet gesturing to Mellor and I to sit, I thought that he looked the picture of middle-class niceness. I knew him to be aged forty-three, and that his wife was five years younger. Elizabeth Jeffries was about the same height as her husband but slimmer and darker. Her brown eyes were bright and intelligent and I somehow suspected at once that she might prove more difficult to deal with than the man we were investigating.

I told them both in matter-of-fact language that there was concern at Balfour House about their son’s welfare, that one of the teachers felt the boy was showing telltale signs of sexual abuse.

‘Have you any idea what may have happened to lead to this, Dr Jeffries?’ I asked quietly.

At first Richard Jeffries just seemed stunned. He shook his head and glanced anxiously at his wife who sat in shocked silence. Or maybe she merely wasn’t ready to speak. I wasn’t sure of Elizabeth Jeffries yet.

‘There’s nobody, I can’t believe it,’ Dr Jeffries began falteringly, then his voice hardened. ‘I’d kill anyone who hurt that child,’ he said.

‘You should know that Stephen has related some rather disturbing incidents to his teachers,’ said Mellor in an expressionless voice.

Richard Jeffries seemed merely mildly perplexed. ‘But he’s never said anything to us, has he, Liz?’

His wife murmured her agreement, and continued to sit quite still staring straight ahead. However, I reckoned I could see the beginning of hostility in those intelligent brown eyes. She was ahead of her husband, I was quite sure of it.

Ultimately a flush began to spread across Richard Jeffries’ benign features as realisation dawned.

‘You’re accusing me, aren’t you?’ he said suddenly.

‘No, Dr Jeffries, we don’t go around making accusations of this kind of gravity,’ I told him levelly. ‘We need to talk to everyone who would have had even the opportunity to abuse Stephen. And as his father you obviously have the maximum opportunity.’

Richard Jeffries glanced at his wife again. For just a few seconds he looked quite frightened. Then his anger erupted.

‘What the hell is going on?’ he asked suddenly. ‘This is a disgrace, Detective Chief Inspector. Look at my children, come on, see for yourself if they look abused.’

One side of the sitting room took the form of big sliding doors. He flung them open to reveal his two children playing contentedly in a playroom which seemed to contain everything conceivable for their entertainment ranging from a Victorian rocking horse to a state-of-the-art computer.

Stephen and Anna were sitting on the floor in the middle of a toy railway track. The boy was wearing jeans, trainers and a bright red Thomas The Tank Engine tee shirt while his younger sister was dressed ready for bed in snug-looking pink pyjamas. They both looked up and beamed at their father who introduced me and Mellor without mentioning that we were police officers.

‘Come and say hello,’ said Richard Jeffries.

Both children obediently got up from the floor and came towards us. I studied Stephen Jeffries carefully. He had the typical features of Down’s Syndrome children and, it appeared, just as Claudia Smith had told us, the typical affectionate nature.

The boy stared at Mellor and I nervously and after taking a few uncertain steps towards us went straight to his father, took his hand, and, his shyness now overcoming him, half hid behind Dr Jeffries who spoke to him soothingly and ruffled his spiky fair hair. The little girl, as if unwilling to let her brother have all the attention, also then went to her father and grasped him by the leg.

Jeffries, his face still pink from shock and anger, looked down at them both with fondness, and in turn the children looked up at him with what appeared to be complete adoration. Certainly it seemed to me that neither child showed any sign of awkwardness or unease with their father.

Abruptly Richard Jeffries crouched down and put an arm around each child hugging them to him. A gesture to which they responded eagerly.

‘Is this the problem, Detective Chief Inspector?’ he asked me. ‘Physical contact is particularly important to Down’s Syndrome children, perhaps you know that. I like to cuddle my children. Have we got to the stage where a man cannot do that any more? If so then I reckon we live in a pretty sick place.’

He was obviously very distressed. To be honest, at that stage I found his reactions to be quite understandable, and also almost exactly what I would expect from an innocent man accused of something so abhorrent. But you don’t take risks with child abuse.

‘It’s a little bit more than that, I’m afraid, Dr Jeffries,’ I said. Although I wasn’t entirely convinced.

He knew the ropes of course, knew as well as I did that the next stage was for his children to be interviewed by a police officer and a social worker on video in the victim suite at Lockleaze. I had never before dealt with a suspect accused of a crime which it was part of his job to try to prevent, and I rather hoped I wouldn’t have to do so again. Certainly I had no idea whether or not he would choose to co-operate. Fortunately he did, which I suppose I might have expected. After all Richard Jeffries would be well aware how lack of co-operation could rebound and possibly result in children being judged at risk and even taken into care at a much earlier stage than would otherwise happen during an investigation. He also knew the lengths which were gone to, even if sometimes this jeopardised the construction of a case, not to upset children in any way. He stood up, still holding Stephen by the hand.

‘All right, DCI Piper, talk to my children,’ he said coldly. ‘We have nothing to hide in this family.’

Elizabeth Jeffries had remained sitting on the sofa by the fire. She got up then, walked to her husband’s side, took his free hand, and began to speak for the first time.

‘I haven’t said anything before because I can barely trust myself,’ she announced. Her eyes were very dark now, her lips trembled as she spoke, yet her voice was controlled and even colder than her husband’s. ‘I just don’t believe that anyone could suspect Richard of such a terrible thing. He has devoted his life to children. He adores Stevie, look at the boy, just look at him...’

I did so. Little Anna had again grasped one of her father’s legs and Stephen appeared to be trying to climb up the other. He was laughing and giggling to himself, the picture of a happy contented child, although, picking up on his mother’s distress, he did glance at her anxiously.

‘It’s all right, darling, everything will be fine,’ said Richard Jeffries to his wife. ‘We must just keep things normal.’ He gestured down at Stephen and Anna. ‘Whatever we do, we mustn’t upset the children.’

Elizabeth Jeffries visibly pulled herself together then. ‘You’re right, of course, Richard,’ she said at once. Then, with some difficulty, she proceeded to extricate Stephen and Anna from their father’s legs. ‘Come along, you two,’ she instructed, leading them out of the room. ‘Let’s leave your father to talk to the nice lady and gentleman.’

I don’t suppose either Stephen or Anna detected the heavily laden sarcasm in her last phrase, but Mellor and I certainly did, which had no doubt been her intention.

It was nearly seven when we left the Jeffries’ Clifton home, having arranged for the two children to be interviewed at the victim suite at Lockleaze the next day. I went straight back to my own place not far away — one untidy rented room with kitchen area and its own small bathroom, somewhat laughably described as a studio flat.

My first four days back at work had been quite busy and fraught enough to keep any normal person’s mind occupied, and certainly, one would have thought, to stop any nonsensical fantasising about Robin Davey — a man quite clearly and literally otherwise engaged. And one with whom I had been seriously angry when I had finally left his island.

Nonetheless, during the week or so since I had returned from Abri, almost every time the phone rang, certainly at home, I had wondered fleetingly if the caller might be Robin Davey. Ridiculous. I gave myself a number of stern and rather cruel lectures, along the lines that I was behaving in a way the likes of Titmuss would consider quite typical of a childless emotionally battered old bag fast approaching middle age. However, I still couldn’t quite get Davey out of my thoughts — although I did cross Abri Island, much as I had loved the place, off my list of possible future holiday destinations.

The next day Elizabeth Jeffries accompanied young Stephen and Anna to Lockleaze as arranged. A woman detective constable in an unmarked car picked them up at their home, drove them to the station and escorted them in through the plain blue painted door, which faces the row of shops to one side of Gainsborough Square, and up a flight of stairs directly into the victim suite. The Lockleaze suite, used for interviewing adult victims of rape and other sexual offences as well as children, is converted from the old Inspector’s flat, dating from the days when district inspectors used to live over the shop, and its separate front door means that it can be accessed without having to enter the police station proper at all. Mellor and I and Freda Lewis, one of the most experienced and respected social workers in the district, greeted Mrs Jeffries and her children in the sitting room with its soothing blue and grey colour scheme, big squashy sofa and armchairs, and play area equipped with an inviting selection of toys. The room is designed to be unlike anything you would expect to find in a police station and as unintimidating as possible. Only the two video cameras bolted into a corner of the ceiling — one in a fixed position to give an overall view of the room and a second which can be manoeuvred by remote control from the technical room next door for close-ups and angle shots — give any indication that it is in any way different to a normal sitting room.

Stephen Jeffries homed straight in on a big plastic Thomas The Tank Engine, obviously a favourite of his, while his sister, after a little coaxing, found paper and wax crayons and began to draw, giving me chance to explain the procedure to their mother.

I told Elizabeth Jeffries that we would wish to interview each child separately, and that she could stay with the child being interviewed if she wished or wait with the second child in our family room where she could watch the interview on a monitor. Fortunately she opted for the family room which all of us in the CPT prefer, because children, even in perfectly innocent situations, tend to be far less forthcoming in the presence of their parents.

Mrs Jeffries was protective and affectionate towards her children and cold and dismissive towards Mellor and me. She did not, however, seem to know quite what to make of Freda Lewis, a quietly spoken woman in her mid-fifties who had an ability to deal with the most emotive issues with simple logic and cool common sense. Freda had long, straight, rather straggly greying hair and part of her still existed in a kind of sixties’ time warp. Summer and Winter she wore full-length flowing floral skirts with lace shawls. She looked a bit like an overgrown schoolgirl and she had about her a natural warmth and childlike forthrightness to which children instinctively responded.

I had called in Freda to interview the Jeffries children along with Peter Mellor. It is normal procedure for a police officer to be joined by a social worker, and I knew that Peter was rather better with children than I was.

The first interview was to be with Stephen. Elizabeth Jeffries and her daughter were settled into the family room with its TV monitor and yet more toys, while I prepared to watch the proceedings on another monitor in the technical room where two note-taking DCs operated the cameras and a double recording machine.

Unlike Stephen’s teacher, Claudia Smith, Mellor and Freda Lewis were not allowed to ask the children leading questions. This had been found in the past to produce some highly suspect evidence. Children sometimes give answers for effect, or even merely the answers they think adults want to hear. And interviewing a Down’s Syndrome child is fraught with the greatest dangers of all.

Mellor and Freda spent almost a couple of hours with Stephen, watching him at play, gently probing into his day-to-day home life. Eventually the subject of bathtime did arise. For just a moment Stephen seemed uneasy. I thought he was reluctant to look either Freda or Peter Mellor in the eye, but I could not be sure that this was not just his natural shyness.

Ultimately ‘I like to bath with my daddy’ was the nearest we got to the story Claudia Smith had come up with. Stephen would take this no further, and certainly made no mention of secret games or his daddy’s ‘joystick’.

It was more or less lunchtime when Freda Lewis eventually escorted Stephen to join his mother and sister in the family room, so I despatched a DC to the McDonald’s drive-in just up the road for a bag of Big Macs, which the children attacked energetically while none of us adults seemed to have much appetite at all.

The afternoon interview with Anna Jeffries was even less productive. The little girl, although probably even more shy than her brother, gave no signs of any unease at all when Mellor and Freda Lewis probed as much as they dared into her relationship with her father. But the interview had to be brought to a premature close when after half an hour or so she began to whimper and ask for both her mummy and her daddy.

As soon as it was all over, Elizabeth Jeffries, still coldly uncommunicative, asked to be driven home.

‘Neither of my children could tell you anything to back up these extraordinary allegations because they quite simply have nothing to tell,’ she said.

I was beginning to think she might be speaking the truth, but we certainly couldn’t halt the investigation yet. I explained to Mrs Jeffries that it was standard procedure under the circumstances for the children to be medically examined by a police forensic doctor, and that in order to cause as little distress as possible, I would like this to be done on another occasion in the medical room at the Lockleaze victim suite. For a moment I thought she was going to refuse, but she didn’t.

‘I’ll make appointments and be in touch,’ I said. Then I led Freda and Peter into my broom cupboard for a case discussion.

As we squeezed into the tiny office, with Mellor perched on a corner of the scarred wooden desk as there was room for only two chairs, I first sought Freda’s opinion.

‘It’s so hard with a Down’s Syndrome child,’ she said. ‘It would be that much easier for an abuser to convince a boy like Stephen that whatever was going on was just normal behaviour.’

‘So what do you think?’ I asked. ‘What’s your gut reaction?’

Freda frowned and leaned back in her chair. ‘I’d somehow be surprised if the girl has ever been touched,’ she ventured. ‘I just don’t know about Stephen. He has a certain reserve, a certain secretiveness about him which I would not really expect from a boy of his age, let alone a Down’s Syndrome boy.’

‘So?’ I said again.

Freda shrugged. ‘Tough one,’ she said. ‘I know Richard Jeffries, of course, which makes it hard to believe these allegations. And Stephen has given us so little today. I don’t think you should back off it, Rose, not yet, anyway — but if there is something going on I don’t know how you’re ever going to prove it.’

I was already beginning to agree with that point of view.

The next day, as procedural regulations demanded, we held a formal strategy discussion and it was decided that a Joint Investigation under Section 47 of the 1989 Children’s Act should be conducted by the police and social services, and that Anna and Stephen Jeffries should be put on the official Children At Risk register which would give the social services unlimited access to them and to their home.

The medical examinations of the two Jeffries children proved inconclusive. That was no surprise. The notorious Cleveland investigations when so many children had been wrongly removed from their homes following Dr Marietta Higg’s discredited anal reflex tests had taught us there was no short cut to the truth. The next step was to have Richard Jeffries in for questioning, although I would like to have had more to go at him with. We arranged a formal taped interview which Mellor and I conducted. As expected, Jeffries hotly denied the allegations against him.

There was really only one card to play.

‘Your son tells us you get in the bath with him,’ I said.

‘Yes, I do,’ Richard Jeffries admitted quickly.

‘Isn’t that a little odd?’

‘Not to us, Detective Chief Inspector,’ he responded.

‘You think it’s normal behaviour for a father to bath with his nine-year-old son, do you Dr Jeffries?’ I asked.

Jeffries sighed heavily. ‘I have been bathing with my son since he was a baby,’ he said in a tired voice. ‘He’s Down’s Syndrome. He needs physical contact, he needs to have affection expressed, even more than most children do. I never saw any reason to stop bathing with him. I just can’t believe there are so many sick minds around.’

We formally interviewed Mrs Jeffries too. She was more openly hostile than her husband, but if Richard Jeffries was abusing Stephen then I somehow could not believe that she knew about it. And how could he hide it from her so effectively? That was another part of the riddle.

She did know that her husband bathed along with Stephen and admitted it freely.

‘It’s just people with sick minds who would read something into that with a boy like Stevie,’ said Elizabeth, echoing her husband.

‘But he doesn’t get into the bath with your daughter?’

‘Of course not,’ Elizabeth Jeffries responded. ‘Anna is a little girl. Neither Richard nor I would think that was right.’

The case proved to be every bit as much of a nightmare as I had feared. Fortunately a little light relief beckoned. My oldest and best friend, Julia Jones, a top London showbusiness journalist, announced that she was coming to stay for a couple of days — for the first time since Simon and I had parted. That was how it was between Julia and me. We didn’t wait for polite invitations. On the Friday evening that she was due to arrive I left Lockleaze a couple of hours earlier than usual and picked her up at Bristol Temple Meads.

Julia was quite meticulous in her personal habits and, also earning considerably more than I did, lived in some style and total order in a luxury flat overlooking the River Thames near Chelsea Bridge. She was not impressed with my accommodation. I had moved into my room with a loo, which was about all it was really, when I tired of the police quarters to which I had resorted immediately after my marriage broke up. The so-called studio flat boasted a single divan and a rickety sofa which could, with some difficulty, be transformed into an equally rickety bed, and which Julia eyed with a considerable lack of enthusiasm. Her manner made it quite apparent that she rather wished she had booked herself into a nearby hotel and when I indicated that I was planning to make us pasta for supper on the rather grimy hob balanced on a metal table in what passed as the kitchen area, she could no longer conceal her horror.

‘But you can’t cook!’ she exclaimed, fully aware that throughout my married life Simon had done all the cooking and pretty well everything else in our house as well. Even I had to admit that he may have had a point in having regarded me as a thoroughly lousy wife.

‘I’m learning,’ I said. ‘I’ve had no alternative. I can’t afford to eat out all the time. You’ll be surprised, honestly.’

‘No, I won’t,’ she announced, tossing her impressive head of bouncy red hair in a way that dared me to challenge her. ‘Learn on somebody else. We’re going out. I’ve still got an expense account, just about. Remember.’

We went to a rather good little Chinese restaurant I had discovered within easy walking distance. Even Julia, who was a fearful Chinese food snob and thought there were no really good Chinese restaurants in the UK outside London or Manchester, admitted that it wasn’t bad and tucked in enthusiastically to a virtual banquet of assorted fishy starters, crispy duck with pancakes, her favourite chilli beef and my favourite chicken with cashew nuts.

We giggled our way through the evening as usual. We were an odd couple Julia and I, not least physically. She was a good six feet tall and towered over me. Our mutual friends thought that anyone seeing us together would automatically assume Julia was the cop and I was the journalist. We had definitely got things the wrong way around, they said. Julia, however, insisted that was nonsense as her extra height had been essential in order for her to see over other people’s heads during her many years of standing on doorsteps — whereas a police officer could just arrest anyone who got in her way and have them promptly despatched to jail, she said.

However we might have looked, Julia and I had a magical friendship. She was the only contemporary from my schooldays that I was still in touch with, or come to that, would even have wished to be still in touch with. Whenever we met, after not having seen each other for months sometimes, it was always as if we had parted company only the day before. We were so close that often it seemed as if we could read each other’s minds. I confided in Julia in a way I never had with anyone else in my life, really, not even Simon.

Only Julia knew how deeply affected I had been by the serial murder case I had headed around the time Simon and I were breaking up, and how, partly in a final bid to save my marriage, I had come close then to resigning from the force. So when she asked me how The Job was going, it was more than a polite enquiry and one of the few more serious moments of our evening.

‘God knows,’ I sighed. ‘Being deputy chief of the CPT no longer looks like such a great career move with Titmuss the Terrible in charge. And as for moving into Child Protection after nearly cracking up on a murder case — well I must be barking mad, mustn’t I?’

‘Probably,’ Julia remarked through a mouthful of beef and noodles. ‘You didn’t nearly crack up, though. You’d nearly had enough, that’s all, and it’s different.’

‘Maybe,’ I responded. ‘Nonetheless, Child Protection is considered the highest risk area of all for breakdowns among police officers. Did you know they only let you do the job for a maximum of five years?’

‘As long as that?’ Julia enquired, her eyes open wide in mock amazement. ‘Heavens, Rose, that’s about five times as long as I’ve known you stick at anything.’

I found myself giggling again. That was usually the way with Julia. A night out and a few drinks with her had always been better than any of the therapy sessions the force and the world in general suddenly appeared to be rife with.

After we’d finished two bottles of house white and moved on to a couple of large brandies of uncertain origin, I decided to treat her to a full account of my Abri Island adventure. Well, I really needed to tell someone, and who better than Julia. She sussed out my feelings for Robin Davey at once, the old bat.

‘When are you seeing him again?’ she asked.

‘He’s engaged to be married,’ I said sturdily.

‘So?’ she enquired, calling for more brandies.