‘There you go then.’ He turned to Bradshaw. ‘How much was five hundred quid worth twenty-six years ago, Tilly?’
She searched and said, ‘According to the Bank of England’s inflation calculator, almost two thousand pounds, Poe.’
Poe turned to Jackson, ‘How many kids, especially those from deprived backgrounds, can handle suddenly being given the best part of two grand?’
‘It’s kind of hard when you make my argument for me.’
‘What happened?’
‘What do you think?’
Drugs, booze. Nothing good. Poe thought things through. He may have started with money as the motive but he wasn’t blinkered to everything else; lines of enquiry rarely followed a straight line. If the investigation took him away from where he was expecting it to go, so be it.
‘I’m going to need to speak to them, Mrs Jackson,’ he said. ‘See if they can shed any light on what happened that night. I’m assuming their names will be in the file?’
‘That’s going to be a bit harder than you think, Sergeant.’
‘How so?’
‘Because, Sergeant Poe, the very next day they all bought train tickets to London and, apart from some postcards to Hilary early on, no one has heard from them since.’
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
Poe was gathering his thoughts, when Reid and Evans returned. They were carrying a stack of files.
Reid saw Poe’s expression and said, ‘What’s up?’
Poe remained tight-lipped. He wasn’t prepared to venture new theories in front of strangers. Ignoring Reid’s question, he addressed Jackson and said, ‘What happened? I’m assuming that’s why there was an investigation?’
‘Partly. Some of the men on the boat said that the boys had been drinking. That they were taking sips of everything they were bringing from the bar. It was a game, I think. See who could get the most drunk.’
Poe hadn’t been a shrinking violet in his youth; he knew keeping children away from free booze was a fight no one could win. ‘And that was a no-no, I take it?’
‘An absolute no-no,’ Jackson said. ‘It’s the main difference between being looked after by the state and being looked after by a family. The state has no discretion whatsoever. If the legal age of drinking is eighteen, then no one has the authority to allow, facilitate or even turn a blind eye to it.’
It was a fair point. The state couldn’t have rogue foster carers doing whatever they wanted. Turn a blind eye to alcohol and you might turn a blind eye to cannabis or the age of consent. ‘And Hilary Swift didn’t stop them?’
‘She wasn’t there. She should have been; our regulations are clear, no unsupervised activities.’
‘So . . .’
‘So why wasn’t she? I can assure you that it formed part of our investigation, Sergeant Poe. She said her daughter came down with a sudden fever, and as half the boys were on the cruise that night, there were fewer staff at the house to call up for cover. She said in one of the numerous interviews we had with her that the men on the boat were the pillars of the community and the boys had never been in any danger.’
Reid said, ‘Sounds like bollocks.’
‘It did to us, Sergeant Reid,’ Jackson said. ‘That and the drinking forced Hilary Swift’s hand in the end. Children do run away from homes and institutions, and occasionally they manage to evade the authorities until they’re of age, but we have processes to minimise the risk of that happening as much as we can.’
‘You called it in?’ Poe asked.
‘Well, not me obviously, but yes, it was called in,’ she replied. ‘There was a police investigation, but for us, in those days, it wasn’t exactly Missing White Girl Syndrome. Mr and Mrs Middle Class’s child goes walkabout and everyone panics, but when it was one of ours we got little more than a “Well, what do you expect? That’s what they do.”’
Poe knew she was right. Although the police had tightened up on children missing from care, he shuddered to think how many had slipped through the net. He shuddered even more when he thought about all the predators out there waiting for children like the boys from Seven Pines. For their sake, he hoped they were alive, well and thriving. He’d recently read that a child forced into prostitution at the age of sixteen would have made a pimp over two hundred thousand pounds before they were too old to attract punters. And with blowjobs costing as little as twenty quid in London, that was an awful lot of perverts to service before their youth had depreciated enough for them to be cast aside.
Reid said, ‘I remember reading about those boys, actually. The investigating officers took it seriously. Their train tickets had been bought for the first train out of Carlisle the day after the cruise. Cumbria contacted the Met and asked them to look out for them.’
‘And we contacted all thirty-four councils in London,’ Jackson added. ‘Told them we were missing four boys, and if they showed up asking for assistance we were to b
e contacted immediately. A few months after they’d run off, Hilary got postcards from them. Said they were loving London. It didn’t mean the search was called off but it did ease the urgency somewhat.’