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(Continued from previous posts.)
When Jenny finally got round to reporting that Ian was missing, she did it by calling in at the local police station. She was so hesitant and confused that at first the desk sergeant didn’t take her seriously. Then, when she persisted – and perhaps more importantly when Michael started shouting at him to listen to her – he called me and send me back home with them to talk with the whole family about what had happened.
Looking back, this was a totally inappropriate response, but I suppose he thought they were trouble-makers and that it was all a storm in a teacup that would right itself soon enough.
When I got there, the two youngest boys were huddled up together on the sofa, looking scared out of their wits and Paul, aged thirteen, who had been left in charge while Jenny and Michael went down to the station, was standing over them with his fists clenched. I wasn’t sure whether this was to intimidate them or to word off anyone who might try to attack the family.
I asked Jenny to make a cup of tea, to keep her busy while I talked to the boys. They were wary at first, but Michael told them to answer my questions and it wasn’t long before they started to open up a bit. I soon realised that things were serious. Paul, after a lot of coaxing, told me that Ian had been the subject of bullying ever since he moved up to secondary school – particularly on the way home. It had got so bad that he’d started bunking off before the last lesson of the day in order to get away before the bullies got out. He couldn’t get into the house until Michael got home, so he would hang around on street corners until his brother returned.
What made the alarm bells start ringing for me was when Paul said that Ian had struck up a friendship with a man whom he had met on the streets. It all sounded very innocent on the face of it – just a matter of the man taking him into a café to get him out of the rain sometimes and giving him occasional packets of crisps and cans of pop – but it made me very uneasy. These days we’d talk about grooming, but, as I said, this was the nineteen seventies.
I told Jenny that I had no choice but to call in CID and organise a proper search for Ian. Michael made a lot of fuss about this idea – which was quite rich, seeing as he was the one who was so indignant that the police weren’t taking them seriously. I suppose he was afraid that Ian – or the family as a whole – would be in trouble.
So there we were, with a full-scale hunt going on for young Ian and Detective Inspector Paul Murdishaw in charge of what we all hoped would not turn out to be a murder enquiry. Murdishaw’s assistant was a certain Detective Sergeant Richard Paige, a gentle giant with pale yellow hair and penetrating blue eyes. He didn’t say much, but I could see that he was watching the family closely and taking everything in.