This Little Piggy by Bea Davenport Read Free Book Online

eliminating as many local people’s prints as we can. Fat lot of use it’s been.”
    “This is going to sound daft.” Clare crossed her legs and looked down at her notebook. Seaton leaned back in his chair and made it obvious he was enjoying the view. “There’s a kid up on Sweetmeadows who says she saw a man throw the baby over the balcony. She says there was a second man on the ground who picked the kid up and that they ran off towards the bins, where Jamie’s body was found.”
    Seaton gave another sharp laugh. “You’ve been talking to young Amy Hedley.”
    “That’s right.”
    Seaton took a slow sip of tea. “I wouldn’t pay her too much attention, Miss Jackson. She’s a fantasist. The mother’s been known to us for a while. Nothing serious, just the odd bit of shoplifting. Class B drugs. Drunk and disorderly.”
    “Tina?” Clare couldn’t keep the surprised tone out of her voice. “She seemed quite responsible.”
    “She is, if you’re comparing her with most of the tenants on that estate. Though I wouldn’t set too much store by anything she says.”
    “But little Amy? She seems really bright. And I got the sense that she was quite scared by the whole thing.”
    Seaton shook his head. “She has, how shall I say it… a very vivid imagination. Does it sound likely to you? It doesn’t to me.”
    “You checked it out, though?”
    Seaton raised his wiry brows. “We did. We check out every line of inquiry, no matter how far-fetched it seems.”
    “Sorry. I’m not suggesting you ignored her. It’s just that it seems to be a massive thing to make up, even for a kid with a vivid imagination.”
    “I’d have thought journalists would be used to people making things up. That you would come up against that every day.”
    Clare gave Seaton a small smile. “We do. But children, they tend to tell it how it is, in my experience.”
    Seaton shrugged. “Welcome to my world, Miss Jackson. Sometimes the kids are worse than the adults. Even Amy’s mother swears the lass made it up, just to get some attention. Anyway, we asked her some questions. Her story kept changing around, from one version to another. It just doesn’t get us anywhere, I’m afraid.”
    Clare chewed the end of her pen. “So are you checking out this idea that it was some kind of payback for Rob Donnelly breaking the strike?”
    Seaton gave a low sigh. “We have to look into it, because that’s what the family are saying. Some of the family, anyway. Not Rob Donnelly, I notice. He thinks it’s all rubbish.”
    Clare sat forward a little. “But what do you think? Is there anything in it?”
    “We’re asking questions, of course we are. But you know, I’ve known these men all my life. My dad was a miner, my granddad was a miner. I was the first lad in our family not to leave school and head straight down the mine. Things aren’t good between the miners and the police at the moment, but that’ll all blow over soon enough.”
    He shook his head again. “Most of these men are the absolute salt of the earth, if you ask my opinion. Decent men with wives and kids, pushed into a hopeless strike, all wanting nothing more than to get back to work and bring some money in. You’re not telling me that any one of the strikers from round here would harm a kiddie. I don’t believe it.”
    Clare slotted her pen into the spirals at the top of her notebook. She thought about Amy again. “Funny, isn’t it? How differently everyone thinks about the strike. The miners don’t think it’s pointless, they think they’re fighting for their jobs.
    “And I’ve been out on those picket lines, just like you have. There’s so much anger against those who don’t support it, whether it’s the press, the scabs, the police. You can see it. It’s hard to predict what that kind of anger will drive people to do.”
    “I’m disappointed, Clare,” Seaton said. “You’re trying to drum up a problem about the strikers. We’ve only had little