Hell in Hull
Digby Durrant
CRADLE SONG by Robert Edric Doubleday, £12.99, pp. 469. ISBN 0385605749 Robert Edric returns to his old stamping ground Hull for his new book, but unlike his others this is a brutal crime novel — though one with a difference. Five years ago a photographer, Martin Roper, went to prison for the murder of one of several missing but presumed dead girls. Despite the fact he'd confessed to it he'd appealed after two years, hoping to get his sentence reduced in return for information. The appeal was immediately rejected. Now Roper has appealed again, but successfully. Smart and Finch are sent from the National Crime Squad who want to know why the police closed the case so quickly without following up their suspicions that Roper was the killer of the other girls as well and why they hadn't investigated the paedophile ring for whom Roper had worked.
One of the dead girls, Nicola, is the daughter of a businessman who has hired a local private detective, Leo Rivers, to investigate her death, Leo finds the girl who introduced Nicola to Roper but wishes he hadn't when he wakes in hospital with a smashed jaw and fractured ribs and shortly afterwards learns that the girl he'd been to see had also been beaten up and then thrown out of her window. After leaving hospital Leo sees Roper in prison and decides he's not a murderer. Two days before his appeal Roper is stabbed to death in his cell.
This very crude simplification, which this complex, long and detailed book often requires, makes it clear there's no great mystery to solve. This is a straightforward case of police involvement with a ring of paedophiles whose sexual assaults on the girls often end in beatings, mutilations and sometimes death. What, you might ask, are we armchair detectives doing here?
The answer is to watch Smart, Finch, and Leo, as they transform what they know into what they can prove taking us with them on every step of the way. It is this close involvement that gives the book the feel of a bleak and unsparing documentary and sets it apart from being just another thriller. Often you can't see the wood for the trees, details are forgotten and then remembered, constant repetition is a necessity. Eventually the team gamble that Roper has secreted the information for them to find in one of the computers the police had accumulated. The rest of the book is a slow game of chess with Roper, a voice from the grave, assisting the police in their enquiries.
For those who stick the course, Cradle Song will be a rewarding experience, but for those who prefer elegant fantasy figures like P. D. James's Adam Dalgeish with his love of poetry and distaste for violence I doubt it. This is murder at its most foul, crime at the deep end. One of the murderers awaiting trial in agony with multiple burns after an attack on his own life is told, 'Hurry up and get well ... Nothing looks more pathetic than a bandaged man standing in the dock.'
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