Silent Playgrounds
Silent Playgrounds
Danuta Reah
A dark psychological thriller that will hold the reader in its grip from beginning to end, Silent Playgrounds is the stunning follow-up to Danuta Reah’s highly praised debut, Only Darkness.The path through the park runs from the centre of the city into the wilds of the countryside. At weekends the area is a playground for children and walkers, but during the week it is silent and deserted.When six-year-old Lucy gets lost there one day, her disappearance sparks a chain of events leading to the murder of a young woman. Lucy tries to warn the people she cares about of the danger: she knows that there are monsters lurking in the rambling park, and she knows that they are getting closer.What should be a straightforward investigation leads DI Steve McCarthy into a web of lies and evasions, where nothing is quite as it seems and everyone seems to be hiding something. With each step forward McCarthy faces new questions, and if he is to prevent an escalation in violence, he has to find some answers – fast.
DANUTA REAH
SILENT PLAYGROUNDS
Copyright (#ulink_27b257ca-ed9c-5ba5-9bdb-859b9b07bf6e)
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk/)
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2000
Copyright © Danuta Reah 2000
Danuta Reah asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780006513162
Ebook Edition © OCTOBER 2016 ISBN: 9780007397945
Version: 2016-10-04
Dedication (#ulink_f866ca1f-930b-5c38-90b2-a24f59c497ff)
In memory of my father,
Jan Kot,
architect and artist
1913–1995
Przechodniu I powiedz Polsce, ze padlismy tu, stuzac jej wiernie. (Memorial to the Polish Parachute Brigade at Arnhem)
With many thanks to the people who gave me help when I was writing this book. I would particularly like to thank the e-mail writers’ group, Sue and Penny, for their invaluable critical advice; Superintendent Steve Hicks for helping me again with details about police procedure; Professor Green for his clarification of details of forensic pathology, and for not laughing too loudly at some of my more off-the-wall ideas; to Richard Wood for his time and his advice about tracing missing people; to the staff at Kelham Island museum for answering my questions about Shepherd Wheel; to Teresa for all her support; to Julia whose editing makes all the difference; to Alex, and, of course, to Ken for seeing this book through with me from start to finish.
People who know Sheffield will recognize many of the locations in this book – Endcliffe Park, Bingham Park, Hunters Bar, Sheffield University. Green Park flats, however, exist only in my imagination, and though I have used the university campus as a setting, the university that is described in the book exists, again, only in my imagination. The coffee in the Students’ Union is excellent, though.
I often walk through Endcliffe Park and Bingham Park, through the woods, following the route taken by Suzanne. These are just two of the many parks in Sheffield that are gradually succumbing to vandalism and neglect. Sheffield is enriched by the wild places that run almost into the centre of the city. It is sad that the people who hold the purse strings of the city do not value these places the way the people of Sheffield do. They are irreplaceable.
Epigraph (#ulink_4ef612cc-9859-5b58-a9a1-82482c96da3d)
Only the blue delphiniums show That these were gardens, long ago …
(from Silent Playgrounds, Penny Grubb)
Contents
Cover (#u26e595f9-f20f-5ccb-a4f6-3668a4523862)
Title Page (#uc5df5f50-bcbf-5927-8adf-b9c1443ccdf7)
Copyright (#ue0c9d8a8-a60e-5b2f-89c2-577692a49db6)
Dedication (#u34890cf6-0c4d-5326-ab14-4b00a1ba186f)
Epigraph (#u7595e87c-9f58-5473-a8e6-b7e07c32b8bf)
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About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
By the Same Author (#litres_trial_promo)
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1 (#ulink_f1c792ea-3654-5233-8a8f-490694dce46c)
It was dark now, the blackness pressing close, concealing the high roof spaces, the far corners, the heavy, shrouded shapes. Water ran behind the shuttered window, drip … drip … dripdripdrip … drip. The only light came from the glowing coals. Under the grate, the ashes whispered down onto the hearth. The warmth of the fire was fading, but even at its height, it hadn’t pushed the shadows back far. The flagstones of the floor were damp; the timbers were rotting and crumbling. The metal of the grate was rusty. But the metal in front of him was bright, its edge catching the firelight, imprisoning it in the brightness of the steel, turning it a deep glowing red. The voices in his head:
When?
Soon, Ashley, soon.
How soon?
Now.
TAKE CARE IF WALKING ALONE BY ALLOTMENTS
The words were written in red felt-tip on a piece of lined A4. The paper was attached to the bottom of the notice at the entrance to the park, DOGS MUST BE ON A LEAD. The writing was unformed, the hand, perhaps, of a child. The paper gleamed white in the sun. It had rained in the night, but the paper wasn’t wet or smeared. The rain had stopped about five in the morning. At six, on that particular day, the contractors took their cleaning truck through the park, emptied the bins, collected the litter and the broken glass. A newspaper girl saw the paper as she cut through the park on the way to the next block of houses on her round. She stopped to read it, shrugged, then went on her way.
It was still there when Suzanne passed shortly after ten. She had set herself the task of jogging through the two parks that formed a finger of green into the city, close to the street of red-brick terraces where she lived. There and back, it was probably about two miles, and yesterday she had almost managed it without a break. Today she would do it, and then look to extending her run further through the woods. She reviewed her plan for the day as she ran. Friday. A lot to do. It was her weekend to have Michael, and she liked to have those weekends carefully planned, filled with places to go and people to spend time with.
The notice caught her eye, and she stopped to read it.
Strange. What had happened to make someone put up a warning notice? She looked along the main path which ran on past the smooth grass and the carefully planted flower beds, narrowing and darkening as it disappeared into the shadows under the trees. About a year ago, a woman had been attacked in these woods. She looked round her. The park was deserted at this time in the morning, but the bright sun of early summer, the flowers and the fresh green of the new leaves made the woods look gentle and benign. Why the allotments? They were on the other side of the river.
She shouldn’t have stopped. She was feeling tired now and she was cooling down. She could have gone on for ages if she hadn’t stopped. Her eyes went back to the piece of paper, and she felt a touch of unease at the thought of the lonely path through the woods, so busy at the weekends when families followed the route to the old dam, so deserted during the week when the children were at school and their parents at work. Stop it!
She set off again at a brisk walk, watching the shadows as she passed out of the sun and under the trees. There was no wind, and the path was dappled and still. The park seemed empty. The early dog walkers had gone, and the late dog walkers weren’t out yet.
The path forked. She could cross the river here and walk on the other side where the track was narrow and muddy. The Porter Brook ran through woods and parks now, but its banks used to house the small mills and workshops that harnessed the strength of the river to power the trip-hammers and grinding wheels of the nascent steel industry. You could still see the remains of the old works – places where the river was diverted with goits and weirs, the old dams that were abandoned, silted up or turned into playgrounds. At weekends or on holidays, people walked by the dams and fed the water-birds that inhabited them now, or sailed model boats or fished.
Suzanne paused for a moment, then followed the path across the bridge to the narrow track that ran by the allotments. She picked her way round puddles formed where the mud had been churned up by the passage of mountain bikes. The path was still in the shadow of the trees, but the allotments were in full sun. She looked across at them. Some were carefully tended, neat rows of green, raked, weeded, staked; but most were neglected or abandoned, bushes and brambles and wild raspberries growing among and through old sheds and allotment huts. It was quiet. An elderly couple in jerseys and wellies were working on a patch near the stream, but the other allotments were empty. She could see a thin curl of smoke from a chimney protruding from the roof of a hut. She wondered if she should ask the couple about the notice. Take care …
She frowned, then realized that her walk had slowed almost to a standstill. She speeded up her pace, and headed determinedly along the path. She began to alter her step to a jog again. Jog six, walk six, jog six, walk six. It was peaceful in the park, away from the demands of work and home. She could let her mind roam in a loose, unfocused way, watching the patterns of light on the path, the way the water swirled and eddied round rocks and banks. It was like the library, almost. A place where she could just be, with no thoughts ahead, and no thoughts behind.
She got some of her best ideas in the library and the park. Suzanne’s life – now – was focused on her research into young offenders, young men who had a bleak and persistent history of crime, waste and violence. Young men like her brother, Adam. She had put together a proposal that gave substance to her intuition that many of these young men had problems with language, with communication. She wanted to see if she could quantify what she had previously only observed. Months of work in the library poring over journals, phone calls and discussions with other researchers and people who worked with young offenders had paid off and she had been accepted to start a research MSc. She had managed to get a small grant, and was now attached to a young offenders’ programme, the Alpha Project. If she could prove herself – and she could – she would get more funding and be able to go on to complete a PhD.
She was at Shepherd Wheel now, one of the old workshops that had been restored in wealthier, more optimistic times. There used to be regular working days here, when the water was released from the dam to power the wheel and the wheel turned the gears and belts that worked the grinding stones. But the cuts had put paid to that piece of heritage frivolity, and now the building was closed, locked and shuttered, the water-wheel decaying. She slowed again and, on an impulse, walked along the path past the workshop and up the steps, through the gate that led to the yard behind the mill.
The wheel lurked low down in a narrow pit. She could see the bucket boards that caught the water and turned it – empty now. She leaned over the wall and peered down into the darkness that housed the wheel. The sluice that held back the water was above her, and below her was damp stone and moss. An opaque reflection gleamed back at her. She waved, and her reflection waved back. A smell of stagnant water drifted up. She shivered. It had the darkness of a place that never got the sun.
She turned back to the path, following it along the side of the dam. Just a few weeks ago, it had been like a lake almost, with fish and water-birds. Now with the dryness of the summer, it was a stream running through channels of thick mud. Suzanne looked at the prints where birds had walked, already filling with water and fading. Closer to the bank, the mud had been disturbed, the green moss that covered it churned up, as though someone had been digging there. The stone walls of the dam were crevassed and cracked with years of neglect. She walked on, coming out at the end of the park where the woods proper started. She almost crossed the road in a mood of defiance, but the sense of work to be done, work undone, made her pause and turn back. She quickened her pace into a jog again. The run back was all downhill. She could manage that.
As she passed Shepherd Wheel for the second time, she saw a man slip out from behind the building, from the courtyard that housed the wheel where she’d been herself a short while before. Her heart jumped, and for a moment she felt a chill. Take care… Then, for a moment, she thought she recognized him: one of the young men from the Alpha Project, Ashley Reid. She got a glimpse of his face, white under his dark hair. She was about to smile and wave when she realized it was a stranger, another pale, dark-eyed young man. She looked away quickly, aware that she had been staring.
Lucy sat on the swing and pushed it as far back as her legs would allow. She lifted her feet off the ground and pulled herself into the seat. Lean back and push, lean back and push. She hadn’t been able to swing herself at the beginning of the summer. Now she could swing herself far higher than Emma would push her. Lean back and push. She’d escaped from Emma. Emma would be pissed off – Mum’s favourite word. ‘Wait in the playground,’ Emma had said. She meant the small playground, but Lucy didn’t want to do that. She liked the big playground better, even if it did mean a long walk. She’d been waiting in the small playground, feeling cross and upset. It wasn’t fair! Then suddenly he was there – ‘Come on, Lucy. Quick!’ – and they were off on a magic ride to the big playground through the woods, across the big road she wasn’t allowed to cross by herself.
Emma would know where to find her. First the swings, then the big slide, then an ice cream. If Emma wasn’t too pissed off. Lean back and push. The swing soared up. She thought she might be able to touch the leaves on the trees if she didn’t have to hold on. She closed her eyes and let the light flicker against her eyelids. Lean back and push. She worked the swing hard now, flying higher and higher, feeling the chain clank and jerk at the top of each swing. High enough! She let the swing swoop her down and up, and for a moment it seemed as though she was sitting still and the playground was a swinging blur around her. The swing dropped and lifted, dropped and lifted, a little less each time, and she began to scrape her shoes along the ground, catching each time the seat swung through its lowest point. Scuff. Scuff. She brought the swing to a stop and sat there, swaying gently, looking up. She had begun to twist the seat round and round, to give herself a twirly, when she saw that someone was watching her. He was standing by the bench at the edge of the playground, where the woods started. It was the Ash Man. She turned the swing again, and tried to twist the chain higher, to make it twirl faster. As she twirled round – chain swings were really not as good as the one her friend Lauren had in her garden, because they went jerk, jerk – she wondered where Emma was.
‘Emma’s gone.’ She looked round. He was standing behind her and was looking down at her. ‘We’ve lost Emma.’ he said. Lucy sat very still. She didn’t like the Ash Man. He went on watching her. He got hold of the chains of the swing, twisting them so much that Lucy’s feet were right off the ground. The twirly rocked her dizzy. He looked down at her. ‘We’ve lost Emma.’ he said again.
Lucy looked up at him. His face had a shadow on it from his hair. He’d said it twice. ‘I know,’ she said.
It was after half past ten by the time Suzanne got back to the park gates. The traffic on Hunters Bar roundabout was heavy, and the air tasted hot and metallic after the freshness of the park. She walked up Brocco Bank and turned up Carleton Road, the short steep road where she lived. It was a typical Sheffield street, red-brick terraces climbing up the side of the hill, the pavement a mix of flagstones and asphalt, weeds and grass growing in the cracks and against the walls.
She saw her friend and neighbour, Jane, sitting on her front step with a sketch pad on her lap and bottles of ink on the step beside her. Jane was an illustrator and most of her work appeared in children’s books. She smiled when she saw Suzanne. ‘Have you been in the park?’ Suzanne nodded, and paused to talk, leaning on the wall. She looked at the sketch pad. ‘It’s these shadows.’ Jane said. ‘I want to get the red of the brick and the black of the shadows while the sun’s just right. They want “a combination of the everyday and the eerie”.’ She looked at her painting for a moment, then rested her brush on the edge of the ink bottle. ‘What were you doing last night? That was a rather flashy Range Rover that dropped you off.’
Suzanne sighed. Jane was currently on a campaign to spice up Suzanne’s life. The women had been friends since shortly after Michael’s birth six years ago. They had met in the park where Jane was throwing bread to the ducks for the entertainment of six-month-old Lucy. To Suzanne, her family life in chaos, struggling with post-natal depression, Jane’s Madonna-like calm had seemed like a haven.
‘It was just Richard Kean from the Alpha Project,’ Suzanne said now. Richard was one of the centre’s psychologists, and one of the few people there who seemed to have any real interest in Suzanne’s work.
‘Richard? He’s the tall one with dark hair, isn’t he? So what was he doing dropping you off in the middle of the night?’
‘It was half past nine,’ Suzanne retorted, goaded.
‘That is the middle of the night for you,’ Jane said reasonably. She didn’t approve of Suzanne’s monastic life.
‘Mm.’ Suzanne was non-committal. There was nothing to tell. She had attended an evening session at the Alpha Project and Richard had dropped her off on his way home. She wanted to get Jane off the subject, so she said, ‘I saw something when I was in the park—’
Jane interrupted her. ‘Did you see Em and Lucy there?’
‘Is Em back?’ Emma, Jane’s babysitter, had been away for the past week, and Jane had had to juggle her timetable and call in favours to cope with a rapidly approaching deadline. Jane had coped as she always did, wrapped in a hazy cocoon of abstraction.
‘Yes. She just turned up this morning out of the blue.’ Jane frowned and ran her finger along a sweep of pencil on her page. ‘No phone call or anything. Actually, it was quite useful.’ She looked at the drawing again, still frowning, still dissatisfied. ‘I can’t get this right. I don’t know what I want.’ She looked up at Suzanne. ‘Lucy’s got a hospital appointment. She didn’t want to go, so I said she could have an hour in the park with Em, and an ice cream afterwards.’ Suzanne shrugged in sympathy. Lucy suffered from bad asthma, and hated her regular trips to the hospital. The ice cream was a big concession. Jane was a health freak.
Jane had been backtracking on the conversation. ‘You didn’t see them? They went to the playground.’ Suzanne had run past the playground. It had been empty. Jane frowned, pulling her attention away from her drawing. Her look of vague abstraction sharpened into focus. ‘They should have been there. I told Em not to take her to the café … You know, I’m not happy – Oh, it’s nothing serious,’ she added. ‘It isn’t so much the not turning up, it’s just …’
For the past month, Emma had looked after Lucy for a few hours each week. Before that, Jane had had Sophie, a first-year undergraduate who rented a bed-sit in the student house next door to Jane. She’d turned up on the doorstep just before the start of term and introduced herself, offering her services as a childminder. Jane, after contacting Sophie’s parents, smallholders on the east coast, was happy to take up her offer, and the arrangement had worked well. Sophie was inexperienced and unsophisticated, but she was bright and sensible and fun. Jane liked her, Lucy adored her, she was just next door and could fit in with Jane’s elastic schedule. But then, quite suddenly, she’d dropped out of her course and left.
Emma was a fellow student. She had been one of the regular visitors at the student house – a house with a lot of coming and going – but Jane and Suzanne hadn’t met her properly until after Christmas when Sophie had introduced her: ‘Do you mind if Emma comes with me and Lucy?’ And she had, imperceptibly, drifted into their lives, a quiet, rather serious young woman, a contrast to Sophie’s vivacity. She had moved in to the student house in March, and had rather diffidently offered herself as a replacement when Sophie left. Jane had been pleased at first, especially to have someone whom she and Lucy both knew, but she was starting to have second thoughts. Emma was younger than Sophie, and, Suzanne was beginning to realize, a lot less responsible. She listened with increasing unease as Jane expressed her doubts. Since Sophie had left, Emma had become moody and unreliable. Lucy had started having nightmares, nightmares about monsters, about ‘the Ash Man’, Jane said, about Emma being chased by monsters. Sometimes she’d come back from the park with the smell of tobacco smoke lingering on her clothes. ‘I know Em smokes,’ Jane said. ‘Her lungs are her business. But she knows not to smoke near Lucy.’
‘What did she say?’
‘Oh, she said she thought it wouldn’t matter in the open air. I suppose … I don’t know … I don’t want Lucy to have another upheaval. She likes Emma. It’s just …’
‘The monsters?’
‘Yes …’ Jane frowned at her painting, brushing away a tiny spider that was running on the surface. ‘No.’ She looked up at Suzanne. ‘I’ve decided. I’m not letting Emma look after her again. I’ll find someone else.’
By the time Suzanne had finished talking to Jane, it was nearly eleven. She let herself in through the back door and stepped over the pile of shoes on the doormat. The breakfast dishes were in the sink and the worktops were a mess of toast crumbs, butter and a congealing pool of spilt milk and sugar where she had eaten breakfast. A fly was exploring this, and she aimed a swat at it. It flew up, its drone filling the air for a moment, then stopping as it settled again.
She walked through the middle room to the side door to collect the post. Three brown envelopes lay on the mat. She picked them up and flicked through them. Bills, but not red ones. She put them into the in-tray she kept on the dining table. The new additions caused a minor landslide, and she had to scoop up a pile of envelopes from the floor and cram them back.
She needed to go and do some work.
Upstairs in her study, she closed the door behind her and felt a sense of peace. Her study was in the small attic room under the roof. It had a dormer window, high and narrow, that opened at just the right height for her to lean her arms on the sill and look out across the rooftops. She did that now, enjoying the high, cloudless sky and the gleam of the sunlight off the wet roofs that tumbled up the other side of the valley. In front of her, the slates of her own roof sloped down into the guttering, concealing the drop down to the road below. If she craned her neck, she could just see Jane still sitting on her front step, her head bent intently over her drawing.
But she had work to do. Inside, the study was cool and shadowed. Her desk stood in the light from the window. Further back into the room, the walls were lined with shelves of books, all sorted by subject and author. A filing cabinet, functional metallic grey, stood against one wall, and an easy chair, a splash of colour, fire-engine red, occupied one corner under a small reading lamp. Shelves at the side of her desk held her set of audio tapes, the start of her research project.
If she wanted to study the way the young men on the Alpha Project communicated, she had to record them, study their language, to see if they employed all the strategies and skills of conversation that researchers had identified over the years. When the negotiation degenerated into violence, was it because they wanted to fight, to assert themselves, to establish their dominance, or was it because they couldn’t read those subtle signals of language that meant I am being polite, I don’t like what you are saying, I am asking you to do something? When they looked blank and nodded in vague agreement to something they hadn’t heard, or hadn’t understood, was it because they didn’t want to hear, or was it because they didn’t know they hadn’t understood, or didn’t know how to say they hadn’t understood? And did the resulting frustration boil over into anti-social behaviour?
As a first step, she’d been recording quite formal interviews with some of the young men on the programme. She’d asked for, and been given, the ones with the most serious or the most persistent records. One frustrating thing was that she didn’t actually know what they had done, and might never if they themselves didn’t volunteer the information. The Alpha management had been grudging with their permission, and draconian about confidentiality.
She took the tapes of the individual interviews out of her bag. She wasn’t supposed to have them here. They were supposed to be kept secure at the university. She’d interviewed three of the young offenders so far. Dean – seventeen, and on the programme as a condition of his parole – she was sure could be violent. He had been monosyllabic, sullen, occasionally aggressive; then she’d interviewed Lee – also seventeen, bright, lively and endlessly in trouble. He’d shown flashes of insight when he forgot his manic clowning. And Ashley. That interview had been odd. She knew Ashley better than any of the others, and yet he had been halting, incoherent, illogical. She had listened to the tape several times in the four weeks since she had actually carried out the interview, and she still had trouble making sense of it.
Q. Tell me about your family, Ashley.
A. Er … It’s not …
Q. Sorry, you don’t have to tell me if you’d rather not.
A. Yes.
Q. You want to tell me?
A. Brothers and sisters?
Q. If …
A. (Laughs.) Brothers and sisters.
Q. Sorry, Ashley, I don’t understand.
A. Er … So … em … loose …
Q. What?
A. Simon.
Q. Simon is your brother?
A. Yes.
Q. Tell me about Simon.
A. (Laughs.) Simon says …
Q. Yes?
A. Not much. (Laughs.)
At the time, she had kept thinking, Odd, odd. He had become increasingly uncomfortable and, in the end, he’d cut the interview short. She wondered if he would let her tape him again. He might be the first one who could provide her with data that would support her theory. Ironically, she had been doubtful about his suitability for her research, as he was classified as having ‘learning difficulties’, and she wasn’t sure if that would skew her results. She needed more background on Ashley before she could trust her analysis. She thought about the new insights her work would give into the dark world of youth crime, which might lead to better ways of helping boys like Adam, before … Daydreaming! She pulled herself back to the work in hand.
At twelve-thirty, she packed her recording equipment away. She needed to go to the university. She rewound the tape, noting the counter number, and put it back in her briefcase. She felt buoyant and optimistic. She tested the mood, and the feeling of lightness stayed with her. It was as if something heavy and dark, something she hadn’t been aware of, had been lifted off her recently, and she was just now understanding how heavy and constricting it had been. She thought about Michael’s weekend, and instead of the chest-tightening anxiety she was accustomed to feeling, she realized she was almost looking forward to it.
Maybe she could cope with the responsibility. Maybe there was no reason to dread something awful happening. Maybe all mothers worried about their children. Maybe, dare she say it, maybe she was normal. She ran a comb through her hair and tied it back, thought about putting on some make-up and decided against it. Maybe Jane was right. Maybe it was time to come out of her shell. She picked up her briefcase and ran down the stairs. She grabbed her bag and keys and headed out. As she locked the door behind her, she saw Jane standing at her gate, looking anxiously down the road. ‘Hi,’ Suzanne greeted her on a note of query. ‘Is something wrong?’
Jane pushed her hair back off her face. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Emma and Lucy are late.’ She looked at her watch.
‘When should they have been back?’ Suzanne asked.
Jane looked at her watch. ‘Over an hour ago. Lucy’s appointment was at quarter to twelve.’
Suzanne remembered their earlier conversation, and felt a stirring of unease. Monsters … She tried to be reassuring. ‘I shouldn’t worry,’ she said. ‘Lucy will have run off and be hiding, and poor old Em will be frantic. We could go and look.’ Both women were familiar with Lucy’s disappearing stunts.
Jane’s face was tense. ‘I’ve just come back. I went right through both parks. They weren’t there. I tried the café. They hadn’t been in. Then I thought they might have come back … I don’t know what to do.’
Suzanne thought. ‘Em knows about Lucy hiding, doesn’t she?’
‘Oh yes. She’s helped Sophie deal with it. I gave her the phone. Just in case.’ She looked at Suzanne and shook her head. ‘I’ve been ringing and ringing, but there’s no reply.’
That made Suzanne pause. There didn’t seem a good explanation for that. ‘Maybe the battery’s run down. Or she’s buried it in her bag and it’s turned itself off. Maybe it’s been stolen …’ Her ideas sounded lame and she could see Jane starting to form an objection, so she hurried on. ‘But I think you ought to call someone anyway. Just in case. Maybe there’s been an accident.’
Jane began to look panicked. ‘I don’t know …’ she said.
Suzanne felt out of her depth. She was usually the one who got stressed and upset, and Jane was the one who maintained an air of imperturbable calm. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘It’ll be nothing. You’ll end up the morning mad as hell with Lucy and wondering why you got in such a state, but let’s play safe. When we’ve phoned, I’ll go back to the park and look.’
‘You’ve been through the park.’ Jane’s eyes were wide and frightened. ‘And you didn’t see them either, did you?’
Suzanne shook her head. ‘No, but I wasn’t looking.’
‘If Em had seen you, if Lucy had run off, she would have told you, she would have asked you to help. We’ve both looked. They’re not there.’
Suzanne was guiding Jane back into the house now, towards the phone. ‘Yes, they are,’ she said. ‘We just didn’t see them. It’s a big park. Do you want me to phone?’ Jane looked at her in blank panic. Suzanne hesitated. She wasn’t sure which number to ring. They needed to contact the police. As she thought about the situation, she was beginning to feel more worried. It was true that the park was big, but it was narrow for most of the way, and she knew the places that Em and Lucy went. If they had been there, she would have seen them, or they would have seen her. Lucy would probably have lain low under the circumstances, but Em would have been pleased, relieved to see her if Lucy had pulled one of her hiding stunts. She thought about Lucy, her thread-limbed fragility, her will of iron. She picked up the receiver and tried the number of Jane’s mobile. She let it ring. There was no reply. Then she dialled 999. This was either nothing, or a very serious emergency.
The mill at Shepherd Wheel was dark under the trees. The doors were padlocked, the bright metal of the hasps gleaming. The windows were shuttered and bolted. The trees stirred as a breeze blew, sending shadows dancing across the water, across the mossy roof. And it began again, faintly, just audible over the sound of the river, just audible to someone standing close to the shuttered windows, just audible to someone with sharp ears, someone who was listening. The ringing of a phone.
2 (#ulink_4d61f74f-aa77-5219-9064-a12d2003c683)
Suzanne was familiar with crisis. Crisis was something you moved through with cold detachment, an observer of your own life. Crisis was something that held you, panicked and terrified, behind a frozen façade. Crisis left you drained and wrecked once it had moved on. Crisis for Suzanne was Adam, her younger brother, dead these past six years, and it was her father’s thin, precise features, and his voice: I hold you responsible for this, Suzanne!
She listened to the policewoman telling Jane that children often went missing, that the most reliable teenager in the world could get distracted, and wanted to fast-forward the day to the time when the crisis would be over, one way or another.
Two officers had arrived in response to Suzanne’s call, with commendable but alarming rapidity. A man and a woman. The woman had introduced herself, calm, sympathetic, professional, ‘I’m Hazel Austen. I’m here about your daughter. Lucy, isn’t it?’ With a few quick questions she had the gist of the situation, and was now talking Jane through Emma’s and Lucy’s planned route and routine. ‘… going through the park right now, but I just need you to tell me …’
To distract herself from the knot of tension inside her, Suzanne let her eyes wander round the familiar room. There were pictures: framed prints, some of Jane’s paintings, Lucy’s pictures Blu-tacked erratically to the walls and door. Her toys and books were piled into one corner and tumbled on the slatted shelves that stood by the window. A photograph of Lucy with her father, Joel, was pinned to the shelves by a single drawing pin. That was new. It looked like one of Jane’s photos, and the size and curling edges suggested it was one she had developed herself. The faces, both serious, looked out from a background of blurred lights, Lucy’s fair hair tangled against the darker hair of her father. Lucy’s drawings were stuck to the wall at the height of a child’s head, slightly rumpled, slightly uneven. They were captioned in Lucy’s words and Jane’s writing, each letter carefully copied in different colours by Lucy.
The pictures were part of Lucy’s fantasy world. Flossy my cat in the park, a picture of a stripy animal with rather a lot of teeth; Me and my sisters in the park, a small, fair-haired figure with two taller figures, one fair, one dark; My mum and dad, two tall figures, both with yellow hair like Lucy; The Ash Man’s brother in the park, a dark-haired, smiling figure. Lucy’s invented family had a resident father – unlike the absent, peripatetic Joel – had cats and dogs, had sisters and sometimes brothers. The rest of her world was peopled with stranger characters, like her imaginary friend, Tamby, and the sinister Ash Man – and now, apparently, with monsters.
Suzanne and Jane had shared a bottle of wine in this room the night before, talking among the haphazard clutter while Lucy sat at the table drawing. It had seemed warm and inviting then, with Jane’s vague irrelevancies and Lucy’s intermittent chatter. Now the clutter no longer looked homely and comforting, it looked disrupted, as though a high wind had taken the room apart and let things settle where they would.
‘… cup of tea.’ Suzanne brought herself back sharply. Hazel was speaking to her. Seeing Suzanne’s blank gaze, she said again, ‘I think Jane would like a cup of tea.’
For a moment, the words meant nothing, then Suzanne said, ‘Oh. Yes, of course.’ She brought tea and biscuits from her own house, nipping across the shared yard to her back door. She went back into the room, carrying the tray, and occupied herself setting out cups, pouring tea, putting biscuits on a plate.
‘She’s very independent, and she knows about, you know, not talking to strangers … She wouldn’t go off with anyone.’ Jane was whistling in the dark, as if convincing Hazel could make it true, make it be all right. It was true that Lucy was resourceful and streetwise, Suzanne thought, but she was only six.
She passed Jane a cup of tea, and offered her support. ‘Lucy’s very sensible,’ she said to Hazel, and Jane looked at her gratefully.
Lucy’s colouring book and crayons were on the table and Suzanne moved them to one side. She tried not to look at the picture Lucy had been drawing, but it pulled at her attention and she found herself staring at it as she listened to Hazel telling Jane again that it was still early days, that most missing children turned up safe and sound. It was a typical child’s drawing, a blue sky across the top of the page, and green grass across the bottom. Two figures, a tall one and a small one, stood on the grass. Their arms came out of the sides of their bodies, each finger carefully drawn. They were holding hands. Lucy and Jane. Suzanne looked more closely. No, the taller figure had brown hair. Lucy and Sophie? She could picture Lucy sitting at the table, hunched intently over the paper, her face serious, talking her way through the picture, partly to herself, partly to her mother and Suzanne. And they’re in the park and they’re walking on the big field and also they’re holding hands and they’re smiling, look … But these faces weren’t smiling, she noticed. The mouths were turned down, grim.
She looked up and saw Jane’s eyes fall on the book. She should have put it out of sight. Jane picked it up. ‘She did this,’ she said, her focus wavering between the two women. ‘She did this last night. She’s good at …’ Her voice died away and she swallowed.
The man had now come back. He looked to where Jane and Hazel were talking, and then he signalled to Suzanne with his eyes. She went over, and he led her out of the room. Jane looked up as she went out, but only for a moment. The man was waiting by the phone in the hallway. ‘You said you phoned the mobile the babysitter has?’
‘Yes. There was no reply.’
He looked at her. ‘But it was turned on?’
Suzanne shook her head. She’d never had a mobile and didn’t know much about them. ‘I don’t know. How can you tell?’
In answer, he dialled the number and held the phone out to her. She heard the static before connection, then a recorded voice: ‘This number is currently unavailable. Please try later.’ Suzanne looked at him and shook her head. ‘No. It just rang last time.’
‘And that was … ?’
‘Half an hour ago? Just before I phoned you.’ He didn’t say anything, so Suzanne pushed. ‘What does that mean?’
‘It’s nothing. It’s not likely to be important.’
She wasn’t going to be fobbed off. ‘But it might be. So what does it mean?’
He shrugged. ‘It probably means that the battery’s run down. Or that someone switched the phone off since you last rang the number.’
Lucy had been in the park. They found traces of her, far away from where her mother said she had been going. About a mile through the woods, there was a playground close to Forge Dam, the last dam. In the café by the playground at the end of the woods, the owner came out into the sunshine for a cigarette, and said, ‘Yes, little girl, fair-haired, yes, she was here earlier this morning, around tenish. She bought an ice cream.’ He thought for a bit. ‘And a piece of cake. I asked her if it was for the ducks. I’ve seen her up here before and her mum buys cake for the ducks.’
‘Is this her?’ The officer showed him a picture and he nodded.
‘That’s the one. Has anything … ?’
‘Was anyone with her?’ The radio on the man’s jacket crackled and said something the café owner couldn’t catch. The policeman spoke briefly and quietly into the radio, then returned to his question.
‘Yes … Well, I think so.’
‘Who was it? Could you describe the person who was with her?’
Feeling more uneasy now, the café owner thought back. He hadn’t really seen, now he came to think of it. She’d come to the side window of the café twice, once for ice cream and once for cake and a drink. He hadn’t actually seen anyone. ‘I don’t know,’ he said, slowly. ‘I just assumed … I didn’t see anyone.’
It had been a quiet morning, a quiet day. Some walkers had passed through earlier, shortly after nine, and had stopped for a cup of tea. He’d seen people go past on their way up to the dam or beyond. The path formed part of the Sheffield Round Walk, and also offered a walkers’ route into the Derbyshire Peak District. It was a busy path. Some of the passers-by might have stopped at the dam, spent the day fishing, he didn’t know. He’d kept an eye on the café – quiet as he’d said – done his books, had the telly on for some of the time. The officer, making notes, realized gloomily that if this became a real inquiry, someone would have the job of tracking these people down, asking them what they had seen, trying to find out if there was anyone who’d been through that way who hadn’t come forward, and if that person hadn’t come forward was it because he knew all too well what had happened to the missing child.
Suzanne knew that something had made the police more concerned now. The arrival of a man in civilian clothes, a detective, made the knot in her stomach tighten. She felt uneasy around the police. She had too many memories of Adam, the voice on the phone. I’m afraid we’ve got Adam here again. He’s been … And her father. You deal with it, Suzanne. This is your responsibility. She’d trusted them then, listened to them, done what they’d said. She could still hear the woman’s voice. Just tell us where Adam is. We want to help the lad, Suzanne.
The man introduced himself as Detective Inspector Steve McCarthy. He checked quickly through the same things Hazel had done, asking one or two more questions as he went. Suzanne was impressed by his efficiency, but found him brusque and cold. Then he began asking about Emma – how well Jane knew her, what she did, where she lived. Jane’s face went whiter as he told her that Emma wasn’t a student, and had never been an official tenant at number fourteen.
Suzanne hadn’t realized before how much they had taken Emma on trust, because they knew her – or thought they did. This was why the police were so concerned. There was something wrong with Emma. She moved to sit on the arm of Jane’s chair. She put her arm round Jane and said, ‘We know Emma well. We both do. She’s Sophie’s friend.’ He raised an eyebrow at her in query, and she realized what a thin recommendation it sounded.
She told him about Sophie, about her parents, her tutor, the course she had been doing. ‘That’s how we got to know Emma,’ she explained. When he said nothing, she asked, ‘What’s wrong? There’s something about Emma, isn’t there?’
‘We just need some background,’ he said. He’d evaded her question. His face was expressionless as he made some notes, then he moved on to ask about Lucy’s father. ‘Where does he live? Does he see Lucy often? Would Lucy go round there?’
Jane shook her head. Suzanne couldn’t stay quiet. ‘Lucy always saw Joel here.’ Suzanne wouldn’t refer to Joel as Lucy’s dad. He didn’t deserve the title. He was hardly ever there. He devoted his time, as far as she could tell, to his undefined business interests around clubs and warehouse parties. When he did see Lucy, he took all the icing for a while – bringing presents sometimes, playing with her sometimes, but never consistent, never there when she needed him. When he let Lucy down – which he always did, in the end, forgetting her birthday: It’s only a date on the calendar. Loosen up, Jane; promising to come to her party and not turning up: I can’t stand an afternoon of screeching kids; saying, ‘Of course I’ll come and see you in the play, sweetheart,’ and never arriving, so Lucy cried and refused to perform and said, ‘We can’t start yet, my daddy’s not here’: Look, something cropped up. Stop nagging, Jane – when he let Lucy down, Jane always made excuses for him, always made him look good in Lucy’s eyes. But how to explain it? She tried to sum it up briefly and thought she saw a glimmer of amusement in the man’s eyes. ‘Joel wouldn’t kidnap Lucy.’ she added. ‘He’d pay a ransom for someone to take her off his hands.’
Jane put her face in her hands, then looked up. ‘Joel doesn’t live in Sheffield.’ she said wearily. ‘Lucy won’t be there.’ Suzanne intercepted a quick look between DI McCarthy and Hazel Austen. She flushed. She could have told them that straight away. Jane forestalled the next question. ‘Leeds,’ she said. ‘He lives in Leeds. And he’s in London at the moment, working.’ Her face, normally pale, was white, and she looked exhausted. The words were beginning to spill out as though this was her last defence, and when the words were gone there would be nothing left. ‘She’ll be hungry. She hasn’t had any lunch. She’s small – it’s the asthma. She’s very brave, Lucy, but she does get frightened in the dark. She’s got to be back before it gets dark. She’ll be frightened on her own.’ She looked at the man who was listening impassively to her words. ‘I need to go and find her.’
McCarthy looked at Jane for a moment and seemed to relent. His voice was gentler. ‘There are people out now looking for her.’ Suzanne caught his eye for a second, and read there his belief that Lucy was one of the few. She felt a terrible sense of helplessness.
Lucy crept round the bushes and listened. The sounds were changing. There had been footsteps before, soft on the old leaves, backwards and forwards in the bushes. She’d stayed quiet as anything. She’d heard the whoosh of a bike on the muddy path, but she hadn’t looked. She’d run away from the Ash Man, but there were monsters in the woods.
She’d found places between the stones, places where she could hide and no one would find her. She’d heard someone calling once: ‘Lucy! Lucy!’ But it wasn’t a voice she knew, so she’d kept quiet, like a mouse, she’d whispered to Tamby in her head. But now she could hear children calling in the playground. Maybe it was safe now. She scrambled through the bushes and found her way down to the path again. She didn’t go to the playground. She wanted to go home. She wasn’t supposed to walk through the woods by herself, and most of all she wasn’t supposed to cross the roads. She wished that Sophie was there. Sophie knew what to do.
She hopped down the shallow steps that led to the stream and balanced on the stones that marked the edge of the path. She jumped from one stone to the next, from one foot to the other, moving quickly before she lost her balance. Then she was at the place where the path divided, and she climbed quickly up to the dam. Sometimes people were there fishing, and Lucy and Sophie used to watch them. Lucy liked to look at the boxes with wriggling maggots in. Once, Lucy saw one of the fishermen eating them, but Sophie said that was disgusting. ‘He really was,’ Lucy had said. ‘Really. I saw them in his mouth.’ Disgusting. Lucy looked round. Emma wasn’t there. There were no fishermen. There was no one at the dam, no one anywhere. She wanted Sophie. She wanted her mum. She wanted to go home. Her chest felt sore, and she didn’t have her medicine. Emma had her medicine. She walked further along the path to the end of the dam. She was tired, as well. She was at the cottages now and the long steps that led back down to the stream. She scrambled down them, being careful to step on each step just once, and not put her foot on the cracks. If you weren’t careful like that, the monsters would get you.
Suzanne looked at her watch and realized with a jolt of guilt that she should be at the school waiting for Michael. She should have been there watching him singing in his class concert. She’d promised. And she’d promised Dave. She looked at Jane. She didn’t want to talk about collecting children from school, remind Jane that she should have been collecting Lucy now. ‘I’ll be back soon,’ she said.
She ran down the hill to the school gates, fortunately only five minutes away. She thought about Michael waiting on his own in the playground, maybe setting off by himself to find her. It could happen so easily, one slip, one moment of inattention and … 7 hold you responsible for this, Suzanne! She was suddenly aware of the air she was breathing, feeling it insubstantial in her lungs as though all the oxygen had been leached out of it. Her face and hands were tingling and she had stabbing pains in her chest. She was in the playground now, outside the pre-fab that housed Michael’s class. She made herself stop, leant against the low wall and concentrated on getting her breathing under control.
It used to happen all the time. As soon as she found herself alone and responsible for Michael she would panic. She remembered Dave’s look, first of sympathy, then concern and finally exasperation and anger. ‘Postnatal depression,’ her doctor had said, airily. But it had never got any better.
All her earlier sense of well-being had vanished into a black pit of fear and guilt and tension. She realized that she couldn’t do it. Not now, not with Lucy gone, not with all the things that the weekend might bring. That decision helped her to calm down, and she was able to step through the classroom door and be there for the end of the concert.
She waved to Michael whose face brightened when he saw her. Lisa Boyden, Michael’s teacher, slipped across to her with a whispered query about Lucy. Of course, the police would have checked the school. She shook her head to indicate that there was no news, and waited impatiently for the concert to finish.
It was gone four by the time she got Michael out of the school gates. He was full of chatter, pleased to see her, looking forward to his weekend, full of his day, full of the concert, ready to forgive her lateness as she had turned up in the end. She smiled, though her face felt frozen. She said, ‘Did you?’ and ‘Did they?’ and ‘That’s good,’ as they walked up the road, concentrating on keeping her breathing under control, not hearing a word he said. She felt his talk fading away as he became aware of her inattention, saw his face go puzzled and unhappy. She wanted to pick him up and hug him and tell him she was sorry. Instead, she said, ‘We’re going to Dad’s first.’ He looked at her and nodded, a resignation on his face that hurt because it seemed a little too worldly, a little too knowing. Responsible!
Dave lived on the other side of the park and, preoccupied, she turned them both through the park gates. ‘Look at all the policemen!’ Michael was suddenly delighted. ‘There’s been a robber,’ he said.
Suzanne looked around her. There were two patrol cars parked by the playing field, and men in uniform were talking to people, showing them pictures. There was a van, a police van, with dark lettering underneath its standard insignia. She screwed up her eyes to read it. UNDERWATER SEARCH. The dams. Her chest tightened. ‘Yes, I expect they’ve caught him,’ she said, trying to keep her voice under control. ‘Come on, let’s get to Dad’s. Let’s see what he’s doing.’
‘I want to watch. I want to stay.’ Michael began to force tears into his voice, dragging on her hand. He could tell she was in a hurry.
She swallowed her impatience. They had to get out of the park before … ‘Come on, Michael.’ Her panic came out as anger and she hated herself for it. He subsided and came, showing rebellion with scuffing shoes and intermittent draggings.
As they approached Dave’s house, Suzanne could hear the sound of music pouring out of the stereo, the discordant rhythms of the modern composers that she hated and Dave loved. At least he was in. She pressed the bell, remembered that it didn’t work and knocked on the door. ‘Dad won’t hear that,’ Michael observed practically, and hammered on the door with his fists.
‘All right. I heard you.’ Dave’s truculent expression softened when he saw Michael, then changed back as he looked at Suzanne. He swung his son up to his shoulder in greeting. ‘Hi, Mike the tyke. Come home early?’
‘Can I watch cartoons?’ He’d forgotten Suzanne, forgotten the burglar in the park – he was just glad to be home, Suzanne saw with a stab of pain.
‘Go on, Mike. I’ll join you in a minute,’ Dave said, still looking at Suzanne, still unfriendly. He knew why she was here. ‘Well?’ He was making no concessions. ‘Can’t you even manage …’ He looked at her more closely, and his face showed exasperation and impatience.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. Getting the words out round her uneven breathing, she told him about Lucy, about the escalating build-up to what seemed an inevitable ending. ‘I don’t want Michael around if … I don’t think he should be near that.’ It would have sounded sensible and practical if she could have said it coherently.
‘Does Mike understand that? Christ, Suze, I can see the problem …’ Which, of course, he could. ‘But how often does Mike get to spend time with you?’ Suzanne felt the guilt twist in her. Dave was right.
‘It’s been hours now,’ she said. ‘And there’s something the police aren’t telling us. I think something’s happened.’ He looked at her and nodded, recognizing her assessment of the situation. ‘If I’m wrong, Michael can come back tomorrow, he can have his weekend …’
Dave shook his head. ‘He’s not a bloody pet, Suze. If he comes home tonight, he stays home. You can have him next weekend instead. I’m going away, and it’ll be easier without Mike.’ Was this the new girlfriend she’d heard about? Michael had talked about her before – what was the name? Carol? Carol does eggs with faces on … She felt confused, disorientated, with a sense of everything suddenly out of her control. ‘If you’re so worried about Jane,’ he went on, his impatience making him cruel, ‘you’d better get yourself sorted out.’
Jane. And Lucy. She’d been gone nearly an hour. Anything could have happened. She tried a conciliatory goodbye to Dave, but his face remained unforgiving. Michael was watching cartoons and shrugged her off impatiently when she tried to kiss him.
Her head was pounding. Dave was right. She needed to get herself under control before she went back. She decided to walk back through the park, and went on up the road to come in at a gate further into the woods. She couldn’t help Jane any more. What could she do or say? There was nothing to do or say. That detective had understood that, she realized. He knew that words were useless. It was what you did that counted.
She turned in to the park. She’d taken Michael by the road after they’d seen the searching police. Now she wanted to look, to see what was going on in the further reaches. Uneasily, she thought about that odd notice – it had been pushed out of her mind by later events. She should have told someone. She’d have to tell them as soon as she got back. But it couldn’t have anything to do with this. Lucy and Emma had gone to the playground in the first park. There was a main road and a long path between there and here. She looked round. There were no police. No patrol car, no one looking through the bushes – this part of the park was deserted. It was as if they had given up and gone home.
The sun was low in the sky now, the shadows of the trees slanting across the path. Suzanne walked slowly, letting the quiet ease her tension and letting the park take over her senses. She could see the pattern of light and shadow on the path. She could feel the early evening sun on her arms. She stood there under the trees, listening to the sound of children playing in the distance, the sound of the birds on the dam, the sound … That was new, different. A rhythmic, creaking sound that she didn’t recognize, and water, churning, running fast under pressure. She looked round trying to locate the source. Sound could be deceptive down in the park – it bounced off walls, off trees, deceived you into looking for it in the wrong directions and the wrong places. She realized that she’d been hearing the sound for a while. Her eyes moved round to Shepherd Wheel on the other side of the stream. That was it, that was where it was coming from. It took a moment before she could identify the noise, and then she wasn’t sure. It was – surely – the sound of the water-wheel turning.
She almost walked on, but why was the wheel working at this time of day? Why was the wheel working at all? The council had closed the place down, oh, years ago. Slowly she turned and crossed the bridge over the stream. As she walked towards the building she looked for a way in. The doors and windows were closed and shuttered. She followed the path round to the yard. The gate was padlocked. She frowned. She could hear the wheel clearly now: creak, creak. She shook the gate. The lock rattled. She went back and tried the door. It was bolted solid, the padlock bright and polished.
The events of the day coalesced into a picture she didn’t want to see. Lucy. The strange young man. The turning wheel. The gate was high metal bars, with a line of spikes at the top: the fence was the same, but it was overgrown with ivy and she was able to hook her foot into a branch and hoist herself up to grip the top of the fence. The branch snapped and she scraped her leg as she slipped, but she managed to keep her hold, to haul herself up further, her foot feeling for another hold in the ivy. There! Now she had her knee on the bar at the top of the fence. That would support her as she edged over the rusty spikes. God knows what she would do if she slipped and impaled herself. Now she had a foot on the other side of the fence. Awkwardly crouched over, she pulled herself across and, holding onto the spikes, lowered herself into the yard.
Her arms ached and her leg smarted where she had scraped it. It had occurred to her as she dropped into the yard that she would be in trouble if there were drunks or vandals, because she had no easy way out, but the lack of voices, of human sound, had reassured her, and she was right. There was no one there, just the wheel, turning and turning, the sluice open, the water falling onto the blades, the wheel turning down, down into the shadows, darker under the trees now that the sun was lower. The water cascaded, throwing out a spray of droplets that shone in rainbow colours where the sun caught them. As she watched, the flood of water narrowed, became a trickle, the rainbow lights faded and the wheel slowed, slowed and stopped. She moved closer to the railing and looked over the edge, down into the darkness where the wheel had turned.
Flowers in the water. Someone had scattered blue flowers that swirled in the turbulence left by the wheel, and the rays of the sun came through the canopy of the trees and turned the surface of the water into patterns of silver and blue, light and flowers, water and forget-me-nots. The bright light dimmed as a cloud crossed the sun, and the water was suddenly transparent, the stones on the wall beneath the water a soft yellow, the fronds of the fern dancing where they dipped below the surface. There was her reflection again, staring up at her from deep down, down beneath the wheel, down in the shadows, in the darkness. But the face was a bleached white, the eyes blank, staring, and the hair waving in the current was pale gold.
She didn’t remember climbing back out of the yard. She didn’t remember stopping the cyclist on the path. She just remembered sitting on the dry and stony ground, her back pressed against the wall as the feet ran past her.
Lucy. Lucy in the water under the churning wheel.
3 (#ulink_3d40546b-5308-5eb7-a8b1-6d6ffb288b89)
The body of the young woman had been pulled partly into the conduit that took the water back into the stream. A diver had gone down into the narrow space to free her from the grip of the water, so that they could, slowly and carefully, lift her out. The forget-me-nots caught in her hair and stuck to her face as she came out of the water. There were red marks around her mouth and, as her head lolled back against the man lifting her, a trickle of bloodstained water ran down her face. Suspicious death. She was young: seventeen, eighteen? She was wearing a T-shirt, nothing on her feet.
Detective Inspector Steve McCarthy looked away, at the scene around him. The wheel was still and silent. There was a smell of damp stone and wood in the air, of weed and stagnant water. The yard was fading into shadows as the sun sank lower behind the trees. A breeze blew, and the trees sighed and rustled, sending the shadows chasing across the flagstones. The flagstones of the yard were mossy and overgrown. The scene-of-crime team were already going over the ground and the wheel, looking for traces of the person or the people who had dumped the girl in the water, who had set the mechanisms going. McCarthy frowned. He couldn’t understand the turning wheel. It had attracted attention to the place.
As the team lowered the body onto the stretcher, the senior investigating officer, Detective Superintendent Tom Brooke, passed his quick, professional eye over it and looked at the pathologist. She shrugged her shoulders. ‘I can’t tell you anything at the moment. She doesn’t look as though she’s been in the water for long, but I don’t know what that current will have done to any evidence.’
‘What do you think, Steve?’
‘Some kind of freak accident?’ McCarthy, observing beside Brooke, very much wanted it to have been an accident. He had just left a murder inquiry, one that had dragged on for several weeks without so much as the identity of the victim – a vagrant, an old man someone had kicked and then slashed to death with a broken whisky bottle – being found out. He’d planned to take some leave. Another murder inquiry would put paid to that straight away.
‘I’ve no idea.’ The pathologist looked at McCarthy with dislike. She thought he was a cold fish. ‘I can’t tell you anything until I’ve done the PM.’ They watched as the stretcher was wheeled out of the yard to the waiting ambulance.
The pathologist’s refusal to give an opinion didn’t bother McCarthy. He’d known before he asked the question that this was no accident. When he’d first seen the face in the water, he’d thought, Kids messing about. The park was a playground for the local teenagers in the evenings and at night. They played interesting games. From the road after dark, you could see firelight in the woods. In the mornings, the litter of broken bottles, used condoms, empty cans, told their own stories. Needles in the old toilets, graffiti on the buildings and even on the trees. Girls and boys come out to play … She could have been a member of one of the gangs, could have been messing around, got the wheel started, fallen in and drowned. Poetic justice in McCarthy’s mind. But he knew that theory was unlikely.
The pathologist had finished packing her things together. McCarthy walked back to her car with her. ‘Do you know who she is?’ she asked.
‘We’ve got a seventeen-year-old answers the description, Emma Allan. We haven’t got an official identification yet. But the woman who found the body says it’s her. It’s all tied up with the missing-child case from earlier on.’ He caught the pathologist’s glance. ‘No, the child turned up safe and well.’
‘The woman who found her,’ the pathologist persisted, ‘can’t she make it official?’
‘She said it was the child at first,’ McCarthy replied, remembering the woman’s white-faced incoherence. ‘She didn’t know she’d been found.’ He anticipated the next comment. ‘It was understandable, but we don’t need an identification from someone who sees what she expects to see, rather than what’s there.’
The pathologist looked at him for a moment and shrugged. ‘I’ll get back then,’ she said, pulling off her gloves.
McCarthy looked at the long expanse of the park stretching away west towards the countryside and east back into the city. He’d already worked out that the park was almost impossible to seal off. The gates at either end were blocked; he’d arranged for the path closer to Shepherd Wheel to be closed, but access from the woods, the allotments, across the fields – the park was wide open. They needed to complete the searches of the scene quickly. They needed to get the yard checked, and the wheel. They still needed to find the place where the woman had been killed.
At first, McCarthy’s money had been on the yard behind the mill, secluded and shielded from observers by trees. But there was no evidence of anything on those mossy stones. One of the SOCOs had found traces of blood on the wall of the mill, the wall that ran straight down into the water, forming one side of the wheel pit. There was a small, dark window in that wall, a few feet above the water. Brooke thought they’d find the evidence they wanted inside the locked-up mill. That scene was secure, and he was content to wait until they had more daylight to work by.
They’d had trouble contacting a key-holder. They’d had to break open the padlock on the yard gate, but the workshop itself could wait. That reminded McCarthy of something else he needed to do. He went back to the old bridge to talk to the woman who’d found the dead girl. He’d recognized her as soon as he’d arrived. It was the woman with the wary eyes, who had watched him from her seat beside Jane Fielding, as though she was defending her friend from him. She’d said very little apart from giving him a vivid thumbnail sketch of Lucy’s father that McCarthy would have found entertaining under other circumstances.
She had been sitting on the ground by the old workshop, her knees drawn up, her head resting on her arms. He had gone up to her, and she’d lifted her head and looked at him with shocked, blank eyes, her face drained so that the wash of colour from the sun looked almost yellow. She hadn’t seemed to take it in when he’d said to her, ‘It isn’t Lucy. Lucy’s safe. It isn’t a child.’ He’d knelt down beside her to make sure she’d understood him, and she’d stiffened as though she found his presence threatening. She’d muttered something about responsible or responsibility, and tried to stand up, weaving a little as the shock took her. He’d held her arm, and waved one of the WPCs over. ‘Look after …’ He paused.
‘Milner,’ she’d said. ‘Suzanne Milner. I’m fine. I just stood up too quickly. I’m fine.’
‘OK, Mrs Milner, but I’ll need to talk to you before you go.’ He’d given the officer some instructions, and then gone to where Brooke was waiting, watching the men working in the wheel yard. Now, as he headed back to the woman, he wondered who to get to interview her. He ran his mind over the things she might have seen and not seen, the things he needed to get her to remember. He thought about her story of the wheel slowing and stopping as she watched it. Who had stopped it?
What did he know about her? Nothing, except she had some connection with the Fielding woman. It had all seemed like a rather arty, new-age setup – not McCarthy’s kind of thing at all. Her story puzzled him. She’d apparently climbed the gate to look in the wheel yard – a climb that McCarthy wouldn’t have liked to tackle, not with those spikes threatening vulnerable bits. He wondered what she’d expected to find.
It was midnight. Suzanne sat at her desk, her head in her hands. She couldn’t sleep. She kept seeing that face in the water, and it kept being Lucy. There was something unreal, dreamlike, about the whole thing. The detective – what was his name? McCarthy, that was it – had told her: It isn’t Lucy. Lucy’s safe. It isn’t a child, but she couldn’t get that picture of Lucy’s face out of her mind. She’d gone round to Jane’s as soon as they told her she could go but the house was locked up and empty. She’d come back home and wandered listlessly round, picking up discarded books, shoes, cups and putting them down again. The shards of her weekend lay around her. She bit her thumbnail until a sudden pain warned her that she’d bitten it below the quick. She wondered about phoning Dave, but that would give him a chance to say those things again: Can’t you even …? He’s not a bloody pet, Suze … !
She sorted through some of the papers that were in her Monday’s to-do pile, ordering them by size, large on the top, small on the bottom, then reversing the order. They wouldn’t make a neat pyramid either way, because they were different shapes and sizes. She went and stood by the window, looking out into the now dark street.
Q. But, you haven’t told me. Where do you go in the evenings? You know, going out, seeing your friends, things like that.
A. Simon’s got somewhere.
Q. Simon? Is that your brother?
A. Er … not … I can’t … (Pause 5 seconds.)
Q. In the evenings, Ashley. You said that Simon’s got somewhere. Is that where you go?
A. Yes.
Q. Where is it?
A. It’s … I can’t … em … It’s … you go down by the garage, where Lee’s name is.
Q. Lee? Do you see Lee in the evenings?
A. Not … It’s so and … em … they said it was all going to be different. I don’t know, I didn’t know …
Q. What? I’m sorry, Ashley, I don’t follow you.
A. Doesn’t matter.
The tape ran on. Her mind, in the way that it did when she was tired, drifted away from her. She was in the office at the Alpha Project, talking to Richard Kean, the Alpha psychologist. He’d made the rules clear. ‘You can’t have access to the confidential records,’ he’d said. ‘And that includes their police records, I’m afraid. Not at this stage. They all have the kinds of profile you were looking for: persistent, destructive criminal behaviour.’ She’d nodded in agreement. She wasn’t about to argue after the weeks of careful negotiation it had taken her to get through the door of the centre. She’d … The machine clicked, and she realized that the tape had run on to its end. Maybe she ought to go to bed. She wasn’t concentrating. She pressed the REWIND button and watched as the numbers on the counter reversed themselves. Then she pressed PLAY.
Q. Tell me about your family, Ashley.
A. Er … It’s not …
Q. Sorry, you don’t have to tell me if you’d rather not.
A. Yes.
Q. You want to tell me?
A. Brothers and sisters?
Q. If …
A. (Laughs.) Brothers and sisters.
Q. Sorry, Ashley, I don’t understand.
A. Er … So … em … loose …
Q. What?
A. Simon.
Q. Simon is your brother?
A. Yes.
She’d asked Richard about that, after she’d taped Ashley. ‘Ashley says he has a brother. I’d got the impression he was an only child.’
Richard had pulled at his lip, thinking. ‘Well, if he’s been talking to you … It isn’t confidential as such. Ashley’s background is very disrupted. He has a brother who went into care years ago. He was autistic; the family couldn’t cope. Then when they found out Ashley had problems, that was when he went into care as well.’ He was more forthcoming these days, more inclined to treat her like another professional. ‘That’s the root of Ashley’s problem, I think. No one wanted him. He’s never had anyone who really cared about him. That’s hard to cope with.’
The tape ran on. Never had anyone who loved him. Suzanne had loved Adam, but that hadn’t been enough. Her mind was too tired to resist the images. The wet stone had sprouted weeds and ferns, a lush growth that flourished away from the light. The stones were green with lichen. Far down, the water was racing, smooth and strong. Someone was looking up at her from under the water, but she couldn’t make out the features, the current was too fast. Then it cleared, and the eyes opened and looked at her with fear and panic and pleading. Adam’s face, looking up at her from under the water.
Lucy lay in bed, the covers pulled up to her chin. It was late. She was tired, but she didn’t want to go to sleep. Not yet. She’d been to a place with her mum, and talked about the park to Alicia. Alicia said she was a policeman, but she wasn’t a proper one, in a uniform, with a hat. There were voices downstairs – Mum and Dad talking. Her daddy had come all the way from London on his motor bike. She heard Daddy’s voice getting louder. He was cross with Mum.
She turned over in bed. She hadn’t told. She’d kept the secret, but she didn’t know what to do now. She wished Sophie was there. Sophie would know. She turned over again. Her bed wouldn’t get comfortable. She looked at the window. It was dark outside. She couldn’t see it because the curtains were drawn, but she knew the dark was there. It was OK, though. Tamby would be watching. Chasing… Sophie would say, monsters… But Tamby would watch. All safe, she told him in her head.
She heard Daddy’s voice: ‘For fuck’s sake, Jane, what did she say?’ and then his voice got quieter. She knew what they were talking about. They thought she didn’t know, but she did. They were talking about Emma. The monsters had got Emma, Lucy knew that. Emma was the grown-up and Lucy was the little girl, but Lucy knew about monsters. She’d tried to tell Emma, but Emma wouldn’t listen. Emma thought it was safe to play with the monsters, but Lucy knew. You play with the monsters one, two, three times, and they get you. Lucy sighed. She had tried to look out for Emma, she really had.
Daddy’s voice, loud again. ‘I want to know what she said!’
She looked at the curtain. It was moving, just a bit, just the way it did when it was draughty. It’s just the draught, Mum said. Lucy didn’t know where to watch, and the dark made it harder. It was like that game they played in the yard at school, Grandmother’s Footsteps. You turned your back and they all came for you, moving so quietly you couldn’t hear them. You turned really quickly, but they were still as anything. You never saw them move, but each time you turned, they were in a different place, nearer and nearer. But they couldn’t move as long as you were looking at them.
She was only six, but she knew about the monsters.
4 (#ulink_eaba74c9-ca57-5e83-98cb-d26a7d8a7ed5)
When Suzanne finally fell asleep, she dreamt. It was the familiar dream, the one she had thought she was free of, of Adam, calling to her: Look at me, Suzanne! Listen to me, Suzanne! And her father: I hold you responsible for this, Suzanne! She pulled herself out of sleep in panic, gasping, disorientated. She sat up, trying to see the clock face. The sky outside was beginning to lighten. It was nearly five. Her nightdress felt damp, and her legs were tangled up in the sheets. Adam’s face stayed with her, bringing the familiar cold lump in her stomach. She pushed the image away. Over. Gone.
The relief she’d felt faded as the events of the evening before came back into her head. She tried to shut the memory of Emma firmly out of her mind, but she couldn’t stop herself from thinking about what it would be like to be held under the water as the wheel churned above you, or to feel someone’s cold hands on you with killing intent, to … The pictures in her mind were spinning out of control now. Look at me … Listen to me …
She needed to get up, do something. It was five to five. She’d go and work on the tapes again for a couple of hours, then have breakfast.
They searched the workshop at Shepherd Wheel at first light the next morning. The roads were empty as McCarthy drove from his flat towards the park. He left his car in the entrance to the park and walked the few hundred yards to Shepherd Wheel, enjoying the silence, broken by the birdsong, the emptiness, and the stillness of the morning. Shepherd Wheel looked tranquil in the early sun, the moss-covered roof glowing a warm yellow, the walls and path dappled with shadow.
A key-holder from the museums department was there to open up the workshops for them, a young woman who, McCarthy noticed, looked anything but put out at her out-of-hours excursion. If anything, she looked excited. He guessed she was in her late twenties. She had short chestnut hair in untidy curls, her face slightly flushed, eyes shining as she took in the scene. She smiled and held out her hand. ‘Liz Delaney. Hello.’
He shook her hand. ‘Steve McCarthy.’ Yesterday’s search had found very little in the yard. Now they needed to look inside the workshops themselves. There were two doors, painted municipal green, with heavy hasps for the padlocks that kept the building closed and secure. He took the keys that Liz Delaney was holding out to him. ‘How long is it since someone was last in there?’ he asked her.
‘I don’t know exactly,’ she said. ‘Someone comes up here and checks it regularly.’ She smiled up at him.
McCarthy thought, tossing the keys in his hand. ‘How long since it’s been open to the public?’
She frowned slightly and shrugged. McCarthy kept looking at her. ‘Oh, a few months, I think,’ She waited out McCarthy’s silence for a moment. ‘It’s not really my job. It was closed before I ever worked for this department.’
Actually, McCarthy knew, she was wrong. Shepherd Wheel had been open for public access at the beginning of May, just five weeks before. Before that, it had been open for European Heritage Day, or some such crap that people seemed determined to spend McCarthy’s hard-earned taxes on. But someone had had access to the place since then.
The first door opened into a small workshop with barred windows in the whitewashed walls. It was light, the window facing the early morning sun. A central aisle ran between protective barriers of wood and mesh, to keep visitors away from the grindstones. A layer of dust lay over the machines. The air smelt dry and closed in. Dead leaves lay in the aisle, where they had blown in under the door. Wheels, plates, oil cans were stacked around the room, on window sills and against the walls. Above his head, a shaft ran across the ceiling and through a hole in the wall to the next workshop. It would have carried the power from the water-wheel to the stones on either side of the aisle.
To McCarthy’s eye, the place looked untouched, abandoned. He doubted if the surreptitious visitor to Shepherd Wheel had been in here.
The second door led into a larger workshop. McCarthy pushed the door open and stepped inside. A sour, organic smell hit him in the face, very different from the dry, dusty smell of the first workshop. This room was darker, the windows that lit it still shuttered and shadowed by the trees. The air was damp, chilly after the warmth outside. The sound of water, a dripping, trickling noise, cut into the silence. Shapes lumped in the dark corners, light from the windows catching the teeth of a gear wheel, reflecting off a belt. The dust lay thick in this room too. McCarthy looked round. Behind him he could make out a fireplace in the wall. He shone his torch at it. The bars of the grate were rusty. There were ashes in the grate and in the ash bucket and on the hearth below. The dust in front of the fire was scuffed, disturbed.
He directed the light from his torch along the flag-stoned floor and up the wall. There were dark stains where the dust was disturbed, something long and trailing caught on the bars of the grate – threads? Hair? McCarthy stood back as the scene-of-crime team moved in to work. He had already observed the bundle of cloth by the old fire, the drag marks in the dust, and, as he looked more closely, the glint of tinfoil, partly blackened, in the grate. He knew it would take time to comb the workshops, test the forensic samples, continue the hunt for the murder weapon that, so far, was proving elusive. There was a clatter as the shutters swung back, and a dull light filled the room.
A. There’s nowhere to go.
Q. Oh? How do you mean?
A. There’s nowhere to go.
Q. Do you mean – in your spare time, things like that?
A. Sometimes.
Q. So what do you like to do then? In your spare time?
A. So … ?
Q. What do you do?
A. I thought we were together.
Q. What? Sorry, Ashley, I didn’t get that.
A. So, I’m sorry.
Q. Ashley, do you want to do this? Only …
A. I’m telling you!
Suzanne clicked off the recorder and glanced at the clock. Half past seven. Time for a break. She determinedly kept her mind focused on her work. She could get up to the university, put in some useful hours at the library. She could start doing some serious analysis of the tape, have something to show Maggie Lewis, her supervisor, on Wednesday when they next met. She stretched. She had showered, but hadn’t bothered to get dressed, and now she couldn’t decide whether to put some clothes on, or to have breakfast first. She had an appointment at police HQ in town. What to wear probably required a bit more thought than usual. Breakfast first, then a bit of power dressing, something to boost her morale.
She was standing in the kitchen making toast when there was a knock on the door. Before she could say anything, it was pushed half open and Joel Severini, Lucy’s father, slid round it with his slow smile. ‘How are you?’ he said, with that slight, characteristic emphasis on the ‘you’. He was wearing jeans and an unbuttoned shirt. His feet were bare.
‘Joel.’ Suzanne stopped in the kitchen doorway, suddenly aware of her thin dressing gown. She hadn’t expected to see Joel, though he had been around more often recently, now that she came to think about it. ‘What are you doing here?’ It came out more coldly than she’d intended, but she didn’t soften it with any further comment. Why bother? She didn’t like Joel, and he didn’t like her. There was no secret about that.
His eyes narrowed slightly, but he took this as an invitation to come right in, and stood opposite her, leaning his shoulder against the wall. He kept his eyes on her for a beat or two before he answered. ‘Lucy. She went missing.’
‘Yes, I know.’ Suzanne shrugged herself deeper into her dressing gown. His gaze made her uncomfortable. So? she wanted to add.
‘Well, then.’ His tone implied that her question was unnecessary. Maybe she was being unfair. Jane always insisted that Joel cared about Lucy. In his way. And he clearly had come straight over as soon as he’d heard.
‘How is she? Lucy? And Jane?’
‘They’re OK. Panic over. They’re both still asleep. Look, have you got a decent cup of tea over here?’ He looked across the yard to Jane’s back door. ‘Only it’s all flowers and herbs over there, know what I mean?’
She indicated the cupboard. ‘Help yourself.’ Maybe then he’d go.
He crossed over to the cooker and checked the kettle for water. ‘You having one?’ Suzanne shook her head. She had expected him to take some teabags and leave. She didn’t want him in her house. She waited as he made himself a drink, watching him as he moved around the room. His jeans fitted low round his narrow hips, and she could see the smooth arrow of hair on his stomach. When she had first met him, what, nearly six years ago, she had liked him. In the middle of the chaos that surrounded Michael’s birth and the sudden and unstoppable disintegration of her marriage, he had seemed gentle and sympathetic. When Dave, who was working long hours, got impatient with her, Joel would say, ‘Loosen up, Dave,’ and give her that slow smile. Sometimes when she was on her own because Dave had a gig that took him away overnight, he would drop in with some beer and spend an hour or so talking to her. It had been a seduction – or, more accurately, a non-seduction – of the most humiliating kind.
He listened, encouraging her to talk about Adam, about Michael, and said the comforting things that her father had never said to her. When she blamed herself for the way she and Dave were falling apart, he reluctantly (it seemed) criticized Dave for his lack of support, reluctantly told her about the women Dave saw when he played a gig, gradually progressing their relationship from the soothing hand on her hair, the arm round the shoulder into an (apparently unacknowledged) desire. And yes, OK, she had wanted him, even though he was Jane’s partner, even though he was Dave’s friend.
And he’d known and he’d made his move one evening when she and Dave had had a particularly vicious row. She’d managed to stop herself, even though fantasies about an encounter with him had kept her going through some of the blacker moments. He’d laughed at her – not a sympathetic laugh for her foolish scruples, or even a feigned humour disguising his anger. It had been contempt. ‘It’s called a sympathy fuck, Suzie. You won’t get too many offers coming your way. Look at you,’ he’d said. He hadn’t wanted her – the casual contempt of his words confirmed that – but he’d wanted to know he could have her. And then he’d gone, and she really had no one to blame but herself.
The drip, drip of poison that Joel had fed into her ears about Dave, he had fed into Dave’s ears about her. She couldn’t blame Joel for the break-up of her marriage, but he’d been a factor, something that had tipped a fragile balance at a crucial moment. She had never told Jane what had happened. She was too ashamed.
Dave had changed, got older, more serious, but Joel seemed no different to her now than he had six years ago. She realized with a shock that he must be over forty. He looked up suddenly and caught her looking at him. His smile widened slightly, not reaching his eyes. ‘So what happened yesterday?’ His question was unexpected, but more, it was the masked concern in his voice that surprised her. She began to tell him about the morning, about realizing that Lucy and Emma were missing, but he interrupted her. ‘No. I got all that from Jane. About fifty times. What happened after Lucy came back?’
She shook her head. ‘I don’t know anything. Jane and Lucy were gone by the time I got home.’
He drank some tea, staring out of the window, his eyes narrowed in speculation. ‘They interviewed Lucy. Jane let them. She wasn’t even allowed to sit in on it. “Oh, Lucy was fine about it,” she says.’ He looked angry.
‘I suppose Jane thought – if it helps find … I mean, Emma was – killed, wasn’t she? It wasn’t an accident?’
Joel shrugged. ‘It was too soon for them to be going after Lucy. They don’t have a clue. Look, Jane listens to you. You tell her. Tell her to make them leave Lucy alone.’ He emptied his cup into the sink, his face hard.
‘Jane knows what’s best for Lucy,’ she said. She wasn’t listening to any criticisms from Joel.
His eyes met hers. ‘You’d know, would you, Suzie?’ Her eyes dropped. He was right. How would she know? ‘I phoned Dave,’ he went on. ‘He’s mightily pissed off with you.’ He was still smiling. ‘Just think. If you’d brought Mike straight here, Lucy would have been home, and you’d never have got involved.’ She didn’t say anything. He put the empty cup down, not taking his eyes off her. He had to pass her on his way to the door. He put his hand lightly on her shoulder and she flinched, shaking him off. His eyes brightened. ‘Be sure your sins will find you out, hey, Suzie?’ he said. She heard him laughing as she slammed the door shut behind him.
The incident room was set up. Brooke was just finishing the first briefing of the inquiry, and the various teams were organizing their specific tasks. Tina Barraclough assessed the situation and waited to see what was going to happen. This was her first major inquiry since she had been promoted to detective constable, and she wanted to do a good job, make her mark. She looked at the people she would be working most closely with. Steve McCarthy she knew. She’d worked with him before. She’d have to keep on her toes because she remembered him as impatient and autocratic. Pete Corvin, her sergeant, was an unknown quantity. He was a heavy-set, red-faced man who looked more like a bouncer than a detective sergeant. Mark Griffith and Liam Martin, the other two DCs, she knew well enough. She’d worked with Mark when he was in uniform, and knew them both from the pub.
Emma Allan had died of asphyxiation. There were cuts inside her mouth and throat, knife wounds, the pathologist said, as though someone had thrust the blade hard into the girl’s mouth in a moment of rage. She had choked on the blood. The absence of defence injuries suggested that she had, up to the moment of the attack, trusted her assailant. There were needle marks on her arm. Tinfoil found in the grate had been used for cooking heroin, but they found no further evidence of drugs use there – no needles, no syringes, no wraps.
Steve McCarthy filled in the background. He ran through the events of the day before when Lucy Fielding had gone missing. It had looked at first like a crossed wires thing, something they were all familiar with, where a mother thought a child should be in one place, the person with the child thought they should be somewhere else. But a routine check had made the alarm bells ring.
Emma Allan, seventeen, had already come to police attention. At fourteen, she had been a persistent truant, involved in shoplifting and petty crime. She had run away from home twice before her fifteenth birthday, but after that had seemed to settle her differences with her parents, until recently. She had been reported missing by her father in March, after her mother’s death. She had a recent caution for possession, and had been picked up at the house of a known heroin user who funded his habit by dealing. ‘She gave the Fielding woman false information. She was passing herself off as a student, but she’d never registered at the university. She was too young, anyway,’ McCarthy said.
The picture of Emma’s recent life was unclear. Her father claimed not to have seen his daughter since the last time she left home. ‘Did he try? Did he look?’ Barraclough had problems with parents who didn’t look out for their children.
‘He said he did.’ McCarthy was adding a note to the sheet of paper he held. He looked at the team. ‘So far, we know that Emma was friendly with a student, Sophie Dutton. She looked after the Fielding child until about a month ago. Dutton lived at 14, Carleton Road, next door to Jane Fielding. It’s a student house. It’s empty now. We don’t know how well she knew the other tenants – that’s something that needs checking. But according to Fielding, and the other woman’ – he checked his notes again – ‘Milner, Emma Allan and Sophie Dutton were together a lot.’
‘Has Dutton got a record?’ Corvin was making the obvious connection.
McCarthy shrugged. ‘There’s nothing on file. According to Fielding, Dutton is driven snow. Doesn’t smoke, doesn’t drink, comes from a country village on the east coast.’ His unspoken scepticism was shared by the group. The clean-living Sophie Dutton sketched by McCarthy was an unlikely close friend for someone with Emma Allan’s interests and background.
‘How did they come to be friends? University students are pretty cliquey.’ Barraclough knew about the divide that existed between town and gown. McCarthy shook his head. They didn’t have that information.
‘We need to talk to the Dutton woman urgently,’ Brooke told the team. ‘We need to find out more about Emma’s recent background, find out where she was living, what she was doing, and who she was doing it with.’ He polished his glasses, his face looking strangely unfocused without them. ‘When did Dutton leave? She went back to her parents, is that right?’
McCarthy nodded. ‘According to the Fielding woman, she left in May. We’re trying to contact her at her parents’ now.’
Emma’s missing clothes had been found in a bundle by the hearth: blue jeans, pants and sandals. They weren’t torn or damaged in any way. There was no evidence of sexual assault. The pathologist was less certain about sexual activity. There had been no evidence, but the water would probably have destroyed it.
Brooke was winding up now. ‘OK. Any questions?’
‘One thing I can’t understand.’ Barraclough was reading through her notes. ‘I can understand why he might have dumped her under the water-wheel. He just had to push her through that back window – the yard is well screened. It might have been days – weeks – before she was found. But why set the wheel going? Did he want us to find her?’
Nobody had a good answer to that. ‘Someone a few bricks short of a load?’ Corvin suggested.
McCarthy nodded. ‘It could be. There’s been a flasher in that park recently, and there was the attack in those woods a couple of miles along the path, at Wire Mill Dam. That was twelve months ago. The case is still open.’
A random killer. They couldn’t exclude that possibility, Barraclough knew. A Peeping Tom in the park, someone who. had been watching Emma, watched her having sex with her boyfriend, got his own ideas about what he wanted to do. If Emma had gone to Shepherd Wheel willingly … she looked back through copies of the witness statements they’d managed to get so far. A dog walker had seen a woman answering Emma’s description walking towards Shepherd Wheel at around ten-thirty the morning of her death – Barraclough still couldn’t understand it as a rendezvous, a place to have sex. It seemed dark and uninviting. ‘Sticks a knife in her instead of his dick,’ Corvin said.
‘Someone who felt guilty – wants to be caught?’ Barraclough didn’t like the idea of a random killer – none of them did. These were the most difficult cases, and often the most high profile.
‘What about the father?’ Corvin made the logical follow-up to Barraclough’s point.
Brooke stepped in again. ‘Dennis Allan. Nothing recent, no social services reports. But he did time in 1982. Drink-driving conviction. Killed a kid; he got a year. We talked to him last night, just a preliminary. He’s coming in first thing. Steve, you do that interview. We need to know exactly why she left home.’ He paused for a moment, then answered the unspoken question. ‘He’s not in the clear, not by a long chalk.’
‘What happened to Emma’s mum?’ Corvin again.
Brooke looked at the team for a moment. His glasses caught the light, masking his expression. ‘She took an overdose. Died. The verdict was accidental death.’ A murmur ran round the room.
‘Guilt,’ Barraclough said.
Emma’s father was a small man in his early fifties. He was very unlike his pretty, fair-haired daughter. What hair he had was gingerish, streaked with grey. His face was puffy, the broken veins on his cheeks standing out against his pallor. He looked unhealthy and uncomfortable. He didn’t look, to McCarthy, like a bereaved parent. Emma’s record told a story that McCarthy didn’t like. Something had gone seriously wrong in her life, long before these events, long before her mother’s death. Emma wasn’t simply a teenager traumatized by bereavement.
They had gone through the formalities and had already established that Allan had no alibi for the previous morning. ‘What was I doing?’ he said, apparently surprised at the question. ‘I worked night shift. Came home and went to bed.’ No one had seen him, apart from the newsagent at about eight. He’d nipped in to the shop for a paper and some cigarettes. He began to look uneasy as the implications of McCarthy’s questions dawned on him. His face got more colour and his eyes went pinker round the lids. McCarthy waited to see if he would object, but he said nothing, just twisted his hands nervously.
‘Can we go back a few weeks, Mr Allan?’ McCarthy decided it was time for him to build up the pressure a bit. ‘I understand you lost your wife …’
‘In March, end of March.’ The man seemed pathetically eager to tell him.
McCarthy had the date in front of him. March 29. Dennis Allan had come off his shift at six that morning and found his wife dead. ‘I’m sorry.’ A necessary formality. ‘Could you tell me what happened? In your own time, Mr Allan.’
The man’s eyes got pinker, and he blinked. ‘Sandy, my wife, she …’ He seemed to be having trouble putting the words together. ‘She was ill, see, you know, in her mind. All through our marriage it was a problem. She was on pills, but they didn’t always work – made her dopey, so she’d stop them, and then …’ He looked down at his hands, twisting them together. McCarthy steepled his fingers against his mouth and nodded. Dennis Allan looked at him. ‘She was always, I mean she …’ He swallowed. ‘She used to try and harm herself, you know?’ McCarthy nodded again. ‘She didn’t mean it, not like that, not really, but when things got on top of her, she’d take her pills, you know …’ His eyes sought out Tina Barraclough’s, then McCarthy’s, looking for their understanding.
‘She’d take an overdose?’ Barraclough prompted.
He looked grateful. ‘She didn’t mean it,’ he said.
‘But this time?’ McCarthy watched the wash of colour that flooded the man’s face.
‘She took a lot of pills. And with some drink. She did it while I was at work. She …’ He put his head in his hands. A display of grief, natural for a man talking about such a recent bereavement, a man doubly bereaved. McCarthy wondered why he wasn’t convinced. He waited, aware that Barraclough was hovering on the brink of saying something to the distressed man. He shook his head slightly, and she sat back. McCarthy could detect disapproval in her set face. After a minute, Allan spoke again. ‘I found her. When I came back from work. I don’t know if she meant it.’
‘And Emma?’ McCarthy prompted quietly.
‘Emma just … She packed her bags that same day. Wouldn’t speak to me.’ He looked at the two officers, trying to gauge their understanding. ‘She just left. I tried to contact her at the college, but they said she’d never enrolled. Didn’t even come to her own mother’s funeral.’ His voice was bewildered.
The search for Lucy the day before had identified witnesses who remembered seeing Emma in the park, round about the time Jane Fielding said that she and Lucy had left. A woman walking back from delivering her daughter to school saw Emma and Lucy in the playground near the gate, and had wondered why Lucy wasn’t at school. There was a dog walker who remembered a young woman answering Emma’s description on the path to Shepherd Wheel, walking fast: ‘I noticed her because she looked a bit anxious.’ She had been alone. He was quite certain she had had no child with her. So what had happened to Lucy? McCarthy hoped the key would lie in the interview that the child protection team had recorded the evening before, shortly after a tired but otherwise unharmed Lucy had turned up in the woods half a mile above Shepherd Wheel.
But Lucy’s story was confusing and inconclusive. She was very young – just six – and fantasized and wove the things that happened to her into stories and daydreams. The child protection officer, Alicia Hamilton, was able to clarify some of the more puzzling aspects of her story. ‘It could be something or nothing,’ she had said as she discussed the tape of Lucy’s interview with the team, ‘but it seems that Emma invented this game of chasing the monsters. But there’s a bit more to it than that.’ Then Emma went to chase the monsters and I went to the swings. Well, she did but I ran away.
‘That bit’s interesting.’ Hamilton had stopped the tape. ‘It takes a while to sort out – you’ll see in a minute – but it looks as though Emma had a bit of a scam going. According to Lucy, Emma would go and chase off the monsters, and Lucy would stay in the playground. Then, as long as she was good, Emma would get her an ice cream.’ Lucy’s story was clear to this point, even to the point of knowing that whatever Emma was doing, it was dangerous.
I told her. One time, two times, three times. Then they get you.
But later on in the tape, the child’s fantasies became impenetrable.
Why did you go into the woods, Lucy?
Because the monsters. Because the Ash Man …
Tell me about the Ash Man, Lucy.
He’s Tamby’s friend. Only not really. Tamby’s my friend.
Who’s Tamby, Lucy?
He’s my friend.
What about the Ash Man?
The Ash Man … the Ash Man is Emma’s friend.
Tell me about him.
I said. He’s Emma’s friend. And Tamby is, too.
‘Her mother says that these are characters in her stories. “Tamby” is someone she pretends to play with in the garden and in the park. This “Ash Man” is some kind of giant or ogre …’ McCarthy felt his head begin to ache. Hamilton went on. ‘It isn’t all fantasy. There was someone – someone must have taken her up to the Forge Dam playground. It’s too far for a little thing like that to walk to by herself. And someone gave her money to buy ice cream. But who it was, Lucy can’t – or won’t – tell us.’
Suzanne waited until she heard the engine of Joel’s bike, the roar of subdued power from a machine far too expensive for someone who claimed he couldn’t afford to support his child, so that she was sure he had left. She slipped across the yard and knocked on Jane’s door, pushing it open as she did so. Jane was at the kitchen table, a mug in her hands, staring into space. Her sketch pad was in front of her. She stood up when Suzanne came in and gave her a quick hug. ‘I heard,’ she said by way of greeting. ‘You were the one who found her.’
Suzanne returned her hug. ‘How is she? Is she all right?’
Jane nodded, sitting down at the table again. ‘Yes. She’s a bit quiet, but she’s coming round. The police took me straight across to this place where they interview children.’ Jane reached across for the teapot and poured Suzanne a cup of pale tea. The smell of camomile drifted into the room.
‘What happened? Did anyone … ?’ Jane’s serene manner could be deceptive, Suzanne knew.
‘Emma just left her, just like that, and she wandered off by herself.’ Her normally gentle face was hard. ‘Apparently Emma made a habit of dumping Lucy and going off. Bribing her to stick around. And Lucy wouldn’t, not with a hospital appointment looming. The police think that someone was with her in the playground, but Lucy says not. She said she was hiding from the monsters. But she always does these days. And she said that Tamby helped her, and there was something about the Ash Man.’ Suzanne recognized the names from the times she sat with Lucy and listened to her stories. ‘I talked to her last night, and again this morning. I think she was on her own. She knows the way to Forge Dam. We’ve walked up there together often enough. I go cold when I think of her walking through those woods. And the roads.’ Her hands tightened round her cup, then she looked at Suzanne. ‘I feel so awful. I can’t believe I just let Emma …’
Suzanne knew all about guilt. ‘You thought you knew her. We both did.’
Jane wasn’t prepared to let herself off the hook. ‘I knew Sophie,’ she said. Suzanne waited, and after a moment, Jane went on. ‘Whoever … did it must have got Emma after she left Lucy, thank God. I don’t think she saw anything. Joel said I shouldn’t have let them interview her, but …’ Jane gave her a cautionary look as they heard footsteps on the stairs. She began leafing through her sketch book. ‘I did some drawings while I was waiting,’ she said.
Lucy came in, carrying the peacock feather, a present from Sophie that was one of her treasures. ‘Hello, Lucy,’ Suzanne said, then, unable to help herself, gave the little girl a hug.
Lucy wriggled impatiently. ‘I’m busy,’ she said.
‘I know, I’m sorry, Lucy. What are you doing?’
Lucy compressed her lips, then relented. ‘I’m playing. Tamby’s chasing the monsters.’ She looked at the two women. ‘I didn’t talk to the real police. I told Alicia about the monsters.’
‘The child protection officer,’ Jane said. ‘The one who interviewed her.’
Suzanne felt cold. ‘I know.’ We want to help the lad.
‘I’m going in the garden now,’ Lucy said.
Jane watched her as she went out into the back yard, the feather held carefully in one hand as she negotiated the step. ‘Still the monsters,’ she said. Suzanne kept her mind carefully focused on Jane as she leafed through her sketch book until she came to the page she wanted. ‘I finally got it right,’ she said. ‘I did these yesterday while I was waiting for them to interview Lucy.’
Suzanne looked at the familiar scene: the terraced houses; the wheelie bins at the entrances; the tiny front gardens, narrow strips separating the houses from the road, some cared for and blooming, some overgrown with shrubs, weeds and discarded rubbish. It was the scene she saw every day from her bedroom window, made oddly new by Jane’s pencil. The drawings caught the contrasts of light and shade, the places where the sun shone brilliantly, the places where the shadows were black and impenetrable. There was something about the drawings that made Suzanne feel uneasy. She looked more closely. There was a suggestion of something – something larger than human, something menacing – lurking in the shadows of an entrance. A hand, oversized with long nails, reached out from under the lid of a wheelie bin. An eye – an avian eye? – watched with keen intent from behind a curtain. The curtain was held back by a claw. Suzanne realized that everywhere she looked, strange things looked back, half hidden, almost completely hidden, but there. Among and around them walked people, happy, smiling, oblivious. She looked at Jane.
Jane was still looking at the drawings. ‘Monsters,’ she said.
The trees were in full leaf now, the heavy canopy hanging over the paths that wound through the woods, following the path of the Porter, down through the Mayfield Valley to the silted-up dam at Old Forge, past the café and the playground, and down into the depths of the woods, past Wire Mill Dam where the white water-lilies bloomed, down the old weirs and channels, down into the parks and down past the dark silence of Shepherd Wheel Dam. Here, houses backed onto the park, big stone houses, three storeys in the front, four in the back where the land dropped away to the river. The trees shadowed the gardens of these houses. Their roots undermined the foundations. Conifers and laurel grew close against the walls. The basements opened onto small back gardens, separated from the park by low walls.
The garden behind the first house was derelict and overgrown. The leaves of autumn were still rotting on the ground where the daisies and the dandelions pushed through. A wheelie bin lay on its side, the contents spilt on the asphalt, trodden into the mud and the moss. The foxes and the rodents had taken the edible stuff, had pulled and torn the rubbish and strewn it around the ground. A small patch of earth had been cleared, the edges cut with surgical precision. Seedlings had been planted, nasturtiums and forget-me-nots. The soil was dry, and they were wilting slightly.
The basement window was dark. The back of the house didn’t get the sun. The trees blocked it out. Through the window, the white of the walls glimmered faintly in the darkness. Drawings were taped onto the walls, each one a rectangle of white, each one with a drawing carefully placed in the very centre. The drawing was tight, small, meticulous in detail. This one, a fair-haired teenager; this one, a dark-eyed youth; this one, a young woman, laughing. Here, a child peers watchfully through tangled hair; and here, the child again, this time crouched intently over some game, not depicted in the drawing. Her hands play with the white emptiness.
Each sheet is the same size, the space between each sheet exactly measured. At first, the pictures are carefully sequenced: first, the teenage girl, next, the youth, next, the woman, next, the child; the girl, the youth, the woman, the child. But then the pictures begin to run out of sequence: the girl, the child, the youth; the girl, the child, the youth; the child, the youth; the child, the youth … and the sequence stops in the middle of the wall.
Suzanne recognized the man who was interviewing her. It was the detective who had been at Jane’s the day before, the man who had talked to her after she’d found Emma in the water. Detective Inspector McCarthy. She had dressed carefully for the interview, putting on her best suit – well, her only suit. She’d put on make-up and blow-dried her hair until the fine curls turned into a sleek bob. But despite all her careful preparations, her chest was tight and she felt panicky. She hadn’t been in a police station since that last time with Adam, the last of the many visits when Adam sat in sullen silence, until, eventually, the scared child that Suzanne could see underneath the façade of bravado would emerge. They’d always left the police stations, the youth courts, together, until the last time, when she’d had to leave alone, hearing Adam’s voice behind her. Listen to me, Suzanne!
She pulled herself back to the present. She needed to be alert, she realized as she looked into the cold eyes of the man on the other side of the table. She’d answered questions the night before about finding Emma, but he went over those again, clearly unhappy with parts of her story. Suzanne found she couldn’t account for her decision to investigate the wheel. To her, it was as obvious as looking round if someone shouted Watch out! but he seemed unable to understand or accept this.
‘So it wasn’t easy to get into the yard,’ he was saying again.
‘No, I had to climb over the fence.’
‘Over those railings? That’s a dangerous climb.’
That was true, it had been. Suzanne wondered why she hadn’t thought about that before she climbed – she’d just done it. McCarthy hadn’t actually asked her a question, so she said nothing. After a moment, he said, ‘What I’m trying to establish, Mrs Milner—’
‘Ms,’ Suzanne interrupted. She saw his eyes appraise her briefly, dismissively. She remembered Joel watching her in the kitchen that morning.
‘Ms Milner, is why you went to all that trouble unless you had a reason to think something was wrong.’
‘Do you always know why you do things?’ She regretted the question as soon as she’d asked it. It made her sound defensive. He had a habit, she noticed, of not replying, of not acknowledging something that was said. He was leaning back in his chair, staring Suzanne in the eye, as though he expected something else from her. She could feel her breathing start to get uneven, and tried to distract herself, to make herself relax. She studied her hands. Her nails were OK apart from the one she’d bitten down yesterday. There was some dirt caught under her thumb, and she tried to scratch it out. She was glad she’d taken the time to put some varnish on. It made her feel more confident for some reason. Her breathing steadied, but she was still unable to think of an answer to his question. ‘I don’t know …’ she said in the end, in the absence of anything else to say. She saw his face harden slightly, and reinforced her answer. ‘I don’t know. You know what was happening. Maybe I thought it was something to do with Lucy.’
‘Did you think that?’
‘I don’t know.’ Impasse. He waited in silence. She felt the pressure building up again. She half expected to see, across the desk, the woman who had talked to her, that last time, about Adam. We want to help the lad, Suzanne. She deliberately began a mental review of the scale for testing communication that she’d been adapting for use at the Alpha Project. You asked a series of questions that had fairly obvious answers, then tested the responses you actually got against a checklist: No response. Contextually inappropriate response – like Ashley when she was asking about his family … It was strange, the way Ashley had reacted in the interview. She tried to remember if he’d shown any signs of those odd responses when she’d been talking to him in the coffee bar …
‘… in the yard, Ms Milner?’
‘Sorry. Could you just …’
Again that slight hardening of the face, which she could understand this time. She should have been paying attention. It made him seem a bit more human. ‘Did you see anything that might have made you think something was wrong in the yard?’
‘Right. Sorry. I’m a bit tired.’ She tried a smile. There was no reason to be antagonistic, she told herself. This wasn’t to do with Adam. He didn’t respond, but waited for her to answer. But not that human. ‘Well, not that evening, I mean apart from, you know …’ Oh, for Christ’s sake get on with it, Suzanne! ‘I mean … are you asking about the evening, or the morning?’
‘You were in the park yesterday morning?’ She realized then that she hadn’t told them. She’d let them think that her evening visit was her only visit to the park that day. His voice was neutral, but she thought she could detect exasperation underlying it. She felt stupid, but she felt angry as well. Didn’t he understand? Was he so used to violence, to sudden death, that he just went on like an automaton, and expected everyone else to be the same?
‘Yes.’ There didn’t seem to be anything else to say.
‘What time?’
Suzanne thought. ‘I went into the park about half past nine, and I got home at around ten-thirty. I go running. Jogging. I went through Endcliffe Park, and then I crossed over the main road and went on through Bingham Park.’ She went on to tell him about the notice she’d seen.
He let his exasperation show now. ‘Why didn’t you tell me this yesterday?’
She felt her face flush. She hated to be caught out. ‘It just … The whole thing. Lucy. I couldn’t think of anything else.’
He nodded, clearly unsatisfied, and went back to the notice. He seemed as puzzled by it as she had been, and asked her about people in the park, people she saw regularly, any problems with flashers, any other odd or worrying people, anything. She found herself saying No … no … no, never … no.
Then she told him about the wheel yard, about the gate being open, about her visit to the wheel. His face didn’t change, but she felt as though she could read the thoughts behind those expressionless eyes. She stepped hard on her desire to apologize, to explain, and tried to go through her story calmly and clearly. He took her over and over it. She closed her eyes, trying to make the picture clear. ‘It was my reflection,’ she said. ‘I waved at it, and it waved back.’ The sinister, farcical picture of Emma, dead, waving back at her disturbed her equilibrium further, and her voice tailed away in her explanations.
It seemed it was almost over. She began to relax now that he wasn’t pushing her for information she didn’t have, wasn’t asking her questions she couldn’t answer, wasn’t making her feel like a culpable fool for keeping information back. It was important to explain that she hadn’t seen either Lucy or Em, but she needed to tell him about the man – the youth? – she had seen near Shepherd Wheel. ‘I only saw one person in that part of the park.’ She sent her mind back to the odd, jumpy feeling the figure had given her. ‘I thought it was someone I knew at first, but …’
‘Who was that?’ McCarthy’s tone was bland, but she knew at once she’d made a mistake.
‘Oh, it wasn’t,’ she said quickly. Too quickly. ‘I just thought it was. At first.’ She could feel her chest start to tighten and the air she was breathing becoming thin and insubstantial. She concentrated. Breathe slowly, evenly. Keep calm. I hold you responsible for this! Her father’s litany. McCarthy just went on looking at her. More prevarication would only make it worse. After all, it hadn’t been Ashley. Her voice came out in uneven jerks, and she had to stop speaking and gulp for air. ‘Just for a moment. I thought … it was Ashley Reid … from the Alpha Project … only it wasn’t …’ It couldn’t have been more unconvincing if she’d deliberately lied.
McCarthy was working through the computer files. He was angry, and he wanted to talk to whoever had interviewed Suzanne Milner the evening before. He should have done it himself. But they had the information now. At around a quarter past ten, the wheel yard had been open, and someone, a young man answering a particular description, had been around there, actually coming from the direction of the yard.
He was puzzled as well as angry. He was good at reading people in interview situations, but Suzanne Milner had been strange. Yesterday she’d been fiercely protective of her friend, later she had been almost flattened by shock. Today she had presented the façade of a carefully groomed academic and had managed to get right up his nose. She’d come in, a picture of cool elegance, very different from the old-jeans-and-sweater image she’d projected yesterday. At first he’d interpreted her attitude as hostility. She’d sat there straight-backed, tilting her head and studying her fingernails before she answered each question, shooting quick glances at him and looking away as soon as he met her eyes. She seemed to be treating the whole thing as a game, giving him minimal, uncooperative answers to the questions he needed answering.
But it was a façade, he’d realized, as the interview had moved on. What he had mistaken for hostility was, in fact, tension, but it seemed more a tension associated with her surroundings than with him. It was almost as if she was having trouble concentrating on the interview at all.
He looked at his notes. Her confusion about the park – he could accept that. She’d been in shock, focused on finding the dead woman in the water. Her sheer embarrassment at having to admit that she’d been near Shepherd Wheel at the crucial time, and hadn’t mentioned it, had been convincing.
But had she tried to slide that sighting past him? If so, why mention it at all? It was odd. He’d known there was something else, and he’d been right. Ashley Reid from the Alpha programme. Why were alarm bells ringing in his mind? He knew that name. OK, let’s see what Ashley who wasn’t there might have been doing. Let’s see what he’d been doing the last time he’d been arrested and charged. He typed the commands into the machine, and waited.
The photograph on the screen showed a young man with heavy dark hair and dark eyes. He looked out at McCarthy with a faint smile, his eyes wary. He was nineteen – a bit older than most of those sent on the programme. McCarthy ran the record back. Reid had served a short youth custody sentence three years ago – got into a fight and glassed his opponent. Most of his other offences were typical of a disruptive juvenile: shoplifting, twoc, minor vandalism. But Reid had moved on to breaking and entering. He had more than one conviction. He should have been sent down. Why the Alpha Project? McCarthy read on. Reid was classified as having ‘learning difficulties’. McCarthy was surprised. The face that looked at him from the photograph didn’t give that impression. He’d been identified as particularly suitable for the experimental programme that was running at the Alpha Project. Not so much bad as easily led, his probation officer had said, the fall guy for more intelligent companions. That had been the argument that had kept him out of prison.
McCarthy raised a sceptical eyebrow. Then he noticed that Reid had an outstanding charge against him, one that was due to go to court. University campus security had found him late one night in the shadows behind the chemistry building, the route across the car park that made a useful, but lonely, shortcut. He was facing a charge of going equipped for burglary. He’d been carrying a torch, a lock-knife and some heavy-duty adhesive tape. In McCarthy’s eyes, in that location, that wasn’t going equipped for burglary, it was going equipped for rape.
The world of chemicals is ordered, predictable and, for those who understand it, safe. It was evening, and Simon let his eyes follow the straight lines of the tiles running along the shiny floor, across, making right angles and patterns of squares. Small squares, and larger squares each containing four small squares, and larger squares still each containing four of the smaller squares each containing four of the small squares and on and on forever. Order.
He mixed the three solutions, acetimide in water, calcium hypochlorate in water, sodium hydroxide careful now in water. Watch the heat! He put the solutions in the freezer.
There were heavy benches in rows. Strips of light on the ceiling, bright, bright, bouncing off the surface of the glass, the bottles, the tubes, the shapes, the curves. The light mixing and shattering into chaos.
The important thing was to keep the temperature low. Experiment had shown him that a stainless steel bowl suspended in a mixture of ice and salt worked fine, as long as he was careful and patient. Molecules sit in their patterns, break down on the right stimulus, recombine in patterns that it is easy to predict. Absorbing and beautiful.
The light reflecting, refracting, lines against the glassware, shattering again and again and again.
He put the first solution in the bowl, stirring to get the temperature down. Then, slowly, carefully, he added the second, working under the fume hood. Care! Once, once only the order, the ratios, the time, something was wrong, and the disinfectant smell of chlorine began to seep into the room.
Now he could sit and wait. Two hours. Tonight he’d brought his drawing pad with him. He opened it to a new page. The sheer whiteness, the blankness of it pleased him, and he sat looking at it for a long time. Footsteps on the shiny floor. A face, smiling. Just a face. Faces need to be drawn, carefully delineated in sharp pencil lines to give them meaning. ‘Hello, Simon. I haven’t seen you at …’ Malcolm. Tutor. Tune it out. Not important. The beauty of the white began to evade him, and he picked up his pencil. ‘… so close to your finals.’ Nod. That’s not enough. Say, ‘Yes.’ It was important to get it right in the centre. The pencil began to create a picture, fine lines, fine detail, unclear at first to anyone who can’t see the patterns that have always been so clear to Simon.
‘… catching up. This lab’s empty tonight, but Barry’s next door if you need anything. They’ll be locking up at nine.’ Their eyes meeting. Simon, looking away, nodding. Say, ‘OK. All right.’ Footsteps. Door. Gone. Simon looked at the clock, and returned to his drawing.
Two hours. He added the contents of the third flask now, cool not cold. The solution turned a clear white, like milk, like paper.
Hours to wait now. Leave, down the shiny corridors and the lights in the ceiling, and the chaos as the people walk here, there, and all the patterns disturbed. Say, ‘Goodnight.’ The security man, old, ‘Night.’ Looking down, not noticing, used to Simon’s comings and goings. Out of sight and back to the room with the shiny floor. Wait.
Lights out. The security man, back soon. Wait, watch, sleep. Sleep. Dream …
The torchlight wavering on the path ahead. Fading, as though the batteries were giving up. The rain spattering against them, and a puddle gleaming in the thin light. And on the path ahead … Staggering under the weight as she slumped against him. The stuff had been good, strong. Quiet, be very quiet. The path by the dam, now. The night, black beyond the circle of faint light on the ground. The torchlight catching the rain, shining and glittering. Shining and glittering like the mud in the dam, the thick, black mud and the sucking sounds drawing your feet in and releasing them. And the place where the mud was disturbed, the place where you could dig.
Oh, no. Please not that. And the gleam colder than the gleam of firelight, making the metal burn with ice.
Not that! And the soft, muffling sound of the mud in the darkness.
Simon’s eyes snapped open. That dream again, and now there was another one, rushing along a shadowed path, looking for something that wasn’t there, feeling it hard on his heels, the chaos, the chaos, the chaos.
He looked at the clock, its black hands on its white face calming him, steadying his breathing. Just a dream, Si. Don’t worry about it. Several hours had passed. It was midnight. The night watchman never came up here so late. Simon began heating the water bath.
5 (#ulink_bbeadaa0-5d8f-5b0d-88f5-be4e7469b8bb)
Dennis Allan’s home – once Emma’s home – was a maisonette on the estate overlooking Gleadless Valley. Tina Barraclough got lost on her first attempt to find the address, working her way through the confusing maze of two- and three-storey blocks that studded the valley side. From the distance, the estate gave a sense of openness, of green parkland dotted here and there with buildings whose fronts were multicoloured with fluttering curtains, washing hanging on the balconies, painted doors. From closer up, the decay was more apparent. There was rubbish on the grass, bare, muddy patches. The paintwork on the buildings was peeling. Nearby, the blocks were boarded up. Further down the hill, they were encased in scaffolding, surrounded by the mud and rubble of a building site, tarpaulins and polythene sheeting flapping in the summer breeze.
The Allans’ block was one that was awaiting refurbishment. Police cars were parked in front of the row of garages that formed a basement to the building. Barraclough pulled up beside them. The doors of the garages were uneven and chipped, decorated with tags and slogans and names: CASSIE B AND CLAIRE D WOZ ERE! BAZ FOR CLAIRE D! SLAGS LIVE HERE. The garages had once been painted in primary colours, red and blue and yellow. Traces of the paint could still be seen.
Barraclough went up the concrete stairway to the first deck, to number twelve, the Allans’ maisonette. Though the rubbish chute seemed to be jammed, stuck open and overflowing, the stairway itself was swept clean, the front doors painted and most of the windows trim with nets and potted plants. One or two doors were open as people watched the police team arrive, but the doors closed again as quickly when neighbours were approached. Barraclough opened the door to number twelve and went in.
Having got permission to search the house, Brooke had given instructions for the place to be turned over. ‘I want anything – anything at all that tells you what’s been going on there. Anything that says Emma went back after he says she left, anything that tells us about her. I want the lot.’
The maisonettes were laid out to a pattern. Barraclough had a friend who lived in a council maisonette on another estate, and she could have found her way round this one with her eyes closed. A kitchen to the left of the front door, a corridor leading into an L-shaped living-room with French windows opening onto a small balcony. Upstairs, a windowless bathroom, a separate toilet, also windowless and smelling faintly of urine. A bedroom and a tiny second bedroom – Emma’s. According to her father, the room hadn’t been touched since she left. ‘I wanted her to think she could come back. I wanted her back,’ he said.
Emma had been seventeen. Barraclough was twenty-four. She wondered if those seven years would be a big enough gap to make a barrier. She could remember being seventeen. She couldn’t remember seventeen feeling any different from the way twenty-four felt, except that life seemed both easier and more difficult at twenty-four. Barraclough cast her mind back. Seventeen had been rows with her mother about her exams. Had it been arguments about late nights and boys, or was that from when she was younger? Barraclough felt as though she’d been making her own decisions for a long time, but maybe her mind was deceiving her. Seventeen. Emma had lived here with her mother who apparently thought nothing about inflicting her own miseries on her family. Her father – was he the ineffectual ditherer he seemed, or did that pathetic exterior hide a more sinister, more manipulative psyche? Emma must have been unhappy. She’d run away twice. Why had she come back – and why had she finally left?
Barraclough looked round the small room, trying to get a feel for Emma, get a picture of the living girl, rather than the dead woman on the slab in the mortuary. There was a single bed under the window, and a melamine wardrobe against the wall, the kind that had hanging space and shelves and drawers. It was clean and tidy, and the bed was made up. The room was the room of a younger girl, the room of someone who was growing up, moving on. Emma had not bothered to change or update it. The bedding and curtains were brightly coloured with a cartoon motif – Bart Simpson. Eat my shorts. Emma’s choice? Her mother’s? Either way, the bedding and curtains were faded. They weren’t new. A torn Spice Girls poster was above the bed, something that Emma would probably be embarrassed to own if she had retained much awareness of the room. A photograph of Royal Trux, one that looked as though it had been cut from a magazine, was pinned to the opposite wall.
Barraclough opened the wardrobe door. A stained fleece dressing gown hung on a hook – it looked too small for Emma to have worn it recently – and a party dress, black, Lycra, very short, halter-neck top. A real jaw-dropper. A RECLAIM THE STREETS flyer was stuck to the inside of the wardrobe door. A pair of old trainers lay on the bottom.
She pulled open the drawers. There was nothing there apart from a half-empty packet of Rizlas, the card of the packet torn, and the remains of a cigarette. Barraclough picked up some of the tobacco and sniffed it. The undersides and backs of the drawers yielded nothing. She looked round the room again. There was a rucksack on the back of the door. She opened it and looked inside. It was empty apart from a couple of flyers – free parties by the look of things, Smokescreen and DIY Sound System. Underground, deep house. She checked the side pockets of the bag – for a moment, she thought she’d found a diary and her heart jumped, but it was a wallet, the kind you get from banks and building societies for holding cards. She flicked through it. It contained a cash card, a bus pass and a chain store credit card. Odd, for an unemployed teenager. Had Emma been in debt? She flicked through the cards to see if there was anything else in the wallet, and a couple of photographs dropped out. She picked them up. The first one showed a young woman at a party or a disco – the background was dark, with people indistinct in the background. The light – possibly a flash – had caught the woman, and she was laughing and holding her hand up in protest. For a moment, Barraclough thought it must be Emma, but the hair was darker. On the front of the photograph someone – the woman in the picture? – had written TO EM. She turned the photograph over. On the back, in a different hand, it said SOPHE. HULL, ’97. Sophie Dutton?
The second photograph was a snapshot of a group of people, blurry and out of focus. It looked as though they were setting up some musical equipment. In the foreground, clearer than the other figures, was a woman, about the same age as the woman in the first picture, Sophe, but the picture was older. There was something about the style of clothes, the make-up, that said seventies, and not seventies revival, either. The clothes looked clumsy, without the stylishness of more recent fabrics and designs. Barraclough looked more closely. The woman could be a younger version of a photo she’d noticed downstairs, a very young Sandra Allan. She looked at the other people in the picture, but it was impossible to make out any detail. She turned the picture over. There was a date scribbled in faded ink. It looked like November 197—The last digit was unclear, and there was another word she couldn’t quite read:—ELVET. Above that, in what looked like more recent ink, someone had written, so WHAT ABOUT THIS? She looked at the photo again. There was something about the woman – girl, really. The way she was standing, awkward, unbalanced. Barraclough frowned. It reminded her of … Of course! The woman in the photograph, the woman who was probably Sandra Allan, was pregnant. She looked at the smudged date again. Sandra Allan had had a child before she had Emma. What had happened to it?
Dennis Allan’s face flushed as he looked at the photograph that McCarthy passed to him. ‘Do you recognize any of these people?’ McCarthy asked him.
He shook his head, then said, ‘Sandra, of course. I don’t know …’ He peered at the picture. ‘I don’t recognize any of them,’ he said. ‘It’s hard to tell.’ McCarthy nodded. The photograph was indistinct. ‘I don’t know where this came from,’ he said. He’d known Sandra towards the end of the seventies, he said. He’d been in a band, and Sandra had been the singer for a while. ‘I left in ’77,’ he said.
McCarthy asked him about Sandra’s pregnancy. Allan’s face flushed again. ‘We lost touch when the band broke up,’ he said. He caught McCarthy’s look and said with real indignation, ‘It wasn’t mine. I wasn’t her boyfriend.’ The band, Velvet, had broken up in ’78, when another member had left. ‘I met Sandra again in ’81,’ he said. ‘We got married in 1982, just before Emma was born.’ His face looked forlorn.
Barraclough liked nosy neighbours. She particularly liked house-bound nosy neighbours. Best of all, she liked house-bound nosy neighbours who were quite up-front about their hobby. It was always a frustration and a delay to find your way tactfully around ‘I mind my own business’ and ‘I keep myself to myself.’ Rita Cooke was seventy-three. She had the shuffling gait and twisted hands of arthritis, but her mind was whip sharp, as, apparently, were her eyes. And she’d lived next door to the Allan family for ten years. ‘I don’t know which was worse,’ she said happily, pouring Barraclough a cup of tea. ‘That Sandra, always got a long face on her, always sighing and moaning. She’d come round here and it was, “Oh, Dennis’s done this and Dennis’s done that and poor me.” What she needed was a few real problems, take her mind off herself.’
‘What did her husband do? What did she complain about?’ Barraclough took another biscuit.
‘Oh, something and nothing. He worked nights, you see, and she didn’t like being on her own, or he wouldn’t back her up with the girl – “He lets her talk to me how she likes” – or he didn’t understand about how ill she was. You know. Mind you’ – Rita Cooke wanted to be fair – ‘he was just as bad. In his way. “Yes, love, yes, love, oh, what shall I do? Oh, I can’t cope.” It’s no wonder that child went to the bad.’ She waited for Barraclough to pick up the bait.
‘How do you mean, Mrs Cooke?’ Barraclough asked obligingly.
‘Oh well, I only know what I saw. She was out all the time. All night, sometimes. And she had some very odd-looking friends, not that they came here much. Not unless there wasn’t anyone here.’
Barraclough nodded. ‘Would you recognize any of them?’ she said.
Mrs Cooke gave her a sharp look. ‘I might be getting on, but I’ve still got my sight,’ she said. Barraclough hastily nodded again. ‘There was one lad – didn’t like the look of him at all. He used to hang around a lot and wait for her. I’d have sent him off, but you’ve got to be careful these days.’ Barraclough got a description of the youth. Tall, pale, dark hair and eyes. ‘Quite good-looking,’ Mrs Cooke conceded.
Barraclough asked her about Sandra Allan’s death. For the first time, the old woman seemed a bit reluctant to speak. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘She had a big row with the lass – shouting and screaming. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but it went on for a while. Then the lass is off out, door slamming, and he starts. I’ve never heard him shout at her before. She went out for about half an hour …’ Barraclough checked the time. They knew about that. She’d gone to the chemist to collect a prescription, the prescription for the pills that she later overdosed on. ‘Then she didn’t go out again. I saw him going out to work, four o’clock that was. I thought she was going to come round here like usual when she was upset, but she never did. It was quiet after that. I heard him come back at six the next morning. Then I got woken up again by the ambulance.’ The old lady frowned, looking uncertain, frail. ‘I never thought she’d do it,’ she said, looking at Barraclough with troubled eyes.
Suzanne gave up on work. She felt as though something trusted and familiar had let her down. She looked out of her kitchen window and saw Jane in her small yard, working in the early evening sun on the tubs she used to grow herbs. Lucy was crouched over some game involving building blocks and the animals from her wooden farm. Mother and daughter.
She remembered her own mother, that close, intense relationship that had been the centre of Suzanne’s child universe. She could remember coming in from school every day, her mother lying on the settee, the disorder of the morning still to clear up, the food to prepare before her father came back from work.
As a child, she had just accepted her mother’s illness. As an adult, she could see that it had deprived her of the things that a normal childhood should have: a mother who looked after you, friends, uninterrupted schooling. But as a child, she had liked it. It had made her feel important and wanted. She remembered her mother the year before Adam was born, always on the settee, always in bed. But she could remember a party, her friends round a bonfire, sausages on sticks and her mother laughing as she watched them bob for apples. When had that been? You’ve worn your mother out, Suzanne! How can you be so thoughtless! Her father. She shook her head. Memories of childhood were not what she wanted just now.
She knocked on the window and, when Jane looked up, she mouthed, Tea? Jane smiled and nodded and, five minutes later, Suzanne was carrying mugs of tea out into the garden, and some apple juice for Lucy. The day was fine, the sky a deep blue, with just a few clouds racing in the breeze that kept the air warm rather than baking hot. Suzanne took off the sweatshirt she’d been wearing over her T-shirt, and sat on the low wall that divided the two gardens, watching Jane work. ‘It’s just tea,’ she said, indicating the mug.
‘That’s OK.’ Jane pulled up a long-rooted dandelion and looked at it. ‘You know, they used to cultivate these things. I tried making dandelion coffee once. It was disgusting.’
Suzanne looked across at Lucy who seemed to be involved in her game, oblivious to the conversation between the two adults. ‘Have you heard anything more?’ Jane looked at her. ‘From the police, about Emma.’ Surely Jane didn’t need reminding.
‘Yes, I know.’ Jane went on looking at Suzanne, then she said, ‘You still look very tense. I don’t know – I haven’t heard anything directly.’
‘How do you mean, directly?’
Jane knelt back on her heels and sipped the milkless tea Suzanne had given her. ‘I’m sure this stuff is better for you than people say,’ she said, indicating her mug. ‘Of course, you just don’t know what’s in it.’
Suzanne wasn’t sure if Jane was being deliberately evasive, or if she was just thinking out loud while she sorted out an answer to Suzanne’s question. She couldn’t ask again, because Lucy came over and looked at the glass of apple juice. ‘Is that mine?’ Suzanne nodded, and Lucy picked it up carefully, holding it with both hands.
‘Sorry,’ Suzanne apologized. ‘It’s a bit full.’ Lucy nodded, concentrating as she lifted the glass to her mouth. ‘What are you doing?’ Suzanne indicated Lucy’s game over at the other side of the yard.
‘Playing.’ Lucy drank some more juice and looked at the level in her glass. ‘I’m going to take some for the people,’ she said.
‘People?’ Suzanne looked across to where wooden toys were assembled on some twigs and leaves. The peacock feather was stuck in the ground like a flag above them.
‘They’re on a boat,’ Lucy explained. ‘Escaping from the monsters. Tamby’s guarding them.’ She carried her glass carefully back to where she’d been playing.
Jane pulled a face. ‘Still monsters,’ she said. ‘They spent a long time with Emma’s father,’ she went on, ‘but I don’t know why. Joel told me.’
Suzanne had to do a quick mental pivot to realize that Jane was now answering her earlier question. ‘Emma’s father? How does Joel know?’
Jane shrugged. ‘Joel made it his business to know. I don’t ask. Joel wanted to know if there was anything they weren’t telling us – that we should know. He was worried.’
‘Well, so he should be.’ Suzanne wasn’t giving any ground on Joel. ‘She is his child. His only child.’ This concern, uncharacteristic of Joel in her experience, made her feel slightly warmer towards him.
‘Oh, she isn’t. His only one, I mean.’ Jane sat back on her heels, detaching a snail from one of the plants. She looked at it. ‘I don’t want that.’ She threw it over the wall into the garden of the student house. ‘He had a child from his marriage.’
Suzanne was genuinely shocked. She hadn’t known. ‘He never said anything. I’m sure he never told Dave.’
‘No. There’s no contact.’ Jane had finished working on the tubs now, and was looking at them with calm pleasure.
‘What, never?’
Jane fixed her blue eyes on Suzanne. ‘Never.’ She gauged Suzanne’s reaction for a moment, then said, ‘I know how it looks. And I don’t have many illusions about Joel. I know what he’s like. But there’s Lucy, you see.’ She rested back on her heels, her hands clasped round her cup. ‘Joel was just a bit of fun – I knew he wasn’t someone to take seriously. I didn’t actually plan for Lucy to happen.’ Suzanne nodded. Jane rarely talked about this. She was a very self-contained and private person. ‘Lucy needs to know that her father loves her,’ Jane said, glancing back at where Lucy was still absorbed in her game. ‘And if that means I have to make allowances for him, well, what does it matter? If I pressure Joel into doing more, he’ll just vanish. And what good will that be for Lucy? She’ll find out what he’s like as she gets older, but, just now, she needs to know he loves her.’
‘Does he?’ Suzanne had never, until recently, seen much sign of this in Joel.
Jane sighed and shook her head. ‘I don’t know. As much as he’s capable, maybe. Though this thing has really given him a jolt. He was straight up as soon as I told him – he was pissed off that I didn’t call him straight away – and he’s sticking around. Oh, he’s off today because he’s working, but he’s coming back tonight.’
Suzanne felt depressed at the thought of Joel being around. She remembered her encounter with him that morning. ‘He seemed upset that the police had interviewed Lucy,’ she said doubtfully. She found Joel in his new incarnation as concerned father a bit hard to believe.
Jane nodded. ‘He said I shouldn’t have allowed it. He thought it had upset her. I think she needed to talk about it, and she needs to know that someone is doing something. It was good for her to see the police – she knows that there’s someone to chase the monsters away. And we all needed to find out what happened – to Lucy, as well as Emma. I think Joel knows that really. He just hates to admit he’s wrong.’
‘Do you know any more about what happened to Lucy?’ Suzanne looked across the garden to where Lucy was rearranging her toys, her face serious.
Jane shook her head. ‘Lucy still says she went to the playground on her own, then she hid in the woods because she didn’t want to go to the hospital, I think. But it all got mixed up with Tamby. Each time she tells it, it gets more and more like one of her stories. I agree with Joel about any more interviews. I’ve told the police I’m not asking her again. I want her to forget.’
Suzanne needed to talk. Jane listened quietly as Suzanne told her about the interview with DI McCarthy, and her worry that she’d unwittingly implicated Ashley. ‘I tried to explain,’ she said, ‘but he didn’t believe me.’
Jane looked at her with exasperation. ‘You worry too much. Leave it up to them. It’s not your problem any more. You did the right thing. You told them what you saw. They’ll deal with it.’ She thought for a moment. ‘McCarthy. Was he the fair-haired one? Cold and distant? There’s something very sexy about men like that. He should have been wearing a uniform.’
‘Who? Who should have?’ Suzanne was thrown.
‘Your DI McCarthy. And you had him to yourself for a whole hour?’ Jane sighed. ‘All Lucy and I got was some female with a stuffed rabbit.’ She looked at Suzanne. ‘It’s not your problem,’ she emphasized.
Suzanne looked at Lucy who was engaged in carefully burying one of her toys in the narrow border at the bottom of the yard, her hands and face muddy, her hair tousled, her face intent.
Dennis Allan sat at the small coffee table in the front room. It was dark; the heavy curtains were drawn. He didn’t want people looking in, staring, whispering. He’d heard what they had been saying. Him… his wife… now his daughter… the police… murder… murderer… Murderer. He held his hands round the mug of coffee, sipping it occasionally, not noticing that it was cold. How had it happened? He looked at the photographs on the glass cabinet, safe in their frames, safe like he wasn’t any more, like his family wasn’t any more. Sandy in her wedding dress, white, he’d wanted that, though his mum had had a bit to say. Well, under the circumstances, Emma already on the way … Emma, in one of those oval frames the school photos came in, ten, smiling. Emma and Sandy on holiday, squinting in the sun, smiling. Emma in cut-off jeans, her blonde hair dyed a funny yellow, that awful stud through her nose, not smiling any more. Emma last Christmas by the tree, caught unawares, playing with the cat. Smiling now.
How had it happened? He’d tried so hard. I did try, Sandy. Nothing. I love you, Emma. Nothing. The answer came, unwelcome and unasked for. Like mother, like daughter. His own mother’s sour disapproval that had blighted the early years of his marriage. He felt his eyes fill with tears. He was weak. People thought he was weak. He’d seen the veiled contempt in the eyes of the detective. Did they think he didn’t notice? They thought they were so clever. Well, let them work it out.
Eight o’clock that evening, Suzanne decided she was going to the pub. There was a comedy night, she could talk to some friends, have a drink and just get away from it for a while. She put on the black trousers she’d bought several weeks ago and hadn’t worn yet and a silk top that Jane had given her. She twisted her hair back and caught it in a clip, put on some lipstick.
She was just checking the contents of her purse when there was a knock at the door. Suzanne opened it. She was surprised to see Richard Kean, the psychologist and her mentor from the Alpha Centre, his head almost touching the top of the doorframe, his bulk filling the small entrance hall as he came in. Richard had never been in her house before. She invited him into the front room, wondering what it was he wanted. He looked at her, taking in her make-up, the new clothes. Suzanne always dressed conventionally, even severely, for work. Until recently, she’d dressed conventionally, severely, for everything. ‘Sorry, I’ve interrupted you. You’re going out.’
‘No, that’s fine. I’m only going to the local. Do you want a coffee?’ Suzanne wondered if he might join her down at the pub.
‘I’d rather have a cold drink.’ He looked hot.
‘Beer? Or a soft drink?’
‘Coke? I’m driving.’ Suzanne went through to the kitchen to get the drinks. He wasn’t likely to want a trip to the pub if he was driving. When she came back into the room he was standing by the wall looking at her photographs. ‘Is this your son?’ He was in front of the picture of Adam, the one taken just after his eleventh birthday. ‘He’s about the same age as my Jeff.’
‘No.’ Suzanne swallowed a sudden bitter taste. ‘No, that’s my brother, Adam.’
‘Oh, right, he looks a bit like you. Is this recent?’
‘No.’
‘What does he do, then? Is he an academic too?’
Suzanne found it hard to say. ‘No. Adam – he died, when he was fourteen. Six years ago.’
‘I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.’ He looked embarrassed. He didn’t ask any questions. He didn’t want to know. ‘Look, Sue, this is really a business visit. It couldn’t wait until Monday. I had a call from Keith Liskeard.’ Suzanne recognized the name of the Alpha director. ‘He says he’s had the CID round asking questions.’
Suzanne’s stomach lurched. She should have warned them. ‘About Ashley?’ she said.
Richard looked serious. ‘You do know about it.’
‘Well, yes …’
He went on before she could tell him what had happened. ‘Look, Sue, I realize you were in a difficult situation – if you saw Ashley you had to tell them, no one’s saying you shouldn’t have done. But you should have let us know. I would have hoped you’d have come to us before you went to the police. It’s part of the commitment you make—’
‘Wait a minute!’ Suzanne was caught completely off balance. ‘What exactly do you think happened? What do you think I said?’
‘I can understand when there’s been a crime like that, if you saw Ashley near the scene you’d naturally—’
‘I didn’t.’ Suzanne felt a cold push of anger.
‘What do you mean?’ He looked confused.
‘I didn’t see Ashley and I didn’t tell them I’d seen Ashley. I didn’t volunteer to talk to them, I had to …’
‘Yes, that’s what I’m saying …’ He tried to pick up the initiative again but she overrode him.
‘It’s all a stupid misunderstanding. I specifically told them, specifically told DI fucking McCarthy that I didn’t see Ashley.’
He looked at her in silence for a minute. He obviously didn’t believe her. ‘There are some issues with Ashley at the moment. This couldn’t come at a worse time for him.’
‘What do you mean?’
He looked uncomfortable. ‘I’m sorry, I can’t say.’
Their endless confidentiality! Maybe if she’d been given the information that Richard was referring to … ‘Why don’t you ask Ashley? He’ll tell you where he was.’
Richard looked uneasy. ‘It’s almost certainly because of these other issues … He hasn’t been to the centre since Thursday evening. We need to find him, get him to tell his story to the police before this gets out of hand.’
Suzanne found that her anger was being taken over by a sense of insecurity – had she done something wrong, something stupid? ‘I think you’d better go,’ she said.
‘Yes. I’m … OK, right.’ He turned in the doorway. ‘Keith is very unhappy about it,’ he warned.
She went to the pub by herself in the end, but left early. She talked to a few people: some of Dave’s friends who’d been her friends as well when she and Dave were married; one or two people she knew from the university. It could have been a pleasant evening, but she found that she didn’t really want to talk to anyone. The comedy evening was a let-down as well, though the rest of the audience seemed to enjoy it well enough. To her, the comedian’s laddish jokes were pointless and unfunny. She left early. He heckled her as she was leaving. ‘There’s another one off for her pension!’ It seemed that being over twenty-five was funny in itself now.
She walked back past the park gates and paused, looking down the path towards the woods. It was dark. She could see a small group of people hanging around in the shelter near the entrance. Teenagers, she assumed, though it was too dark to tell. Further in, the shadows were black under the trees. She could see a light flickering in the darkness, but otherwise it was quiet and still. The group by the shelter watched her as she stood under the street light. She could walk through the gate, follow the path to the third bridge, go out the gate there and be on Dave’s doorstep, be where Michael was. She couldn’t think of anything that would induce her to walk into that black silence.
6 (#ulink_6da9f011-acfe-51a8-ab42-89c59bd116a5)
Steve McCarthy had been home for an hour. He’d got home after eight-thirty and gone straight to his computer to log on to the network. His evenings would be like this now, until this case was over. There was always more information pouring in, more details often burying important details, and he intended staying on top of it all.
McCarthy was ambitious. He’d joined the police after leaving school, choosing to go straight in rather than going on to do a degree. He still wasn’t sure if that had been the wisest decision. He’d done well, promotions had come in good time, sometimes sooner than his best expectations, and he knew he was seen as a team player with a good future ahead of him. He was thirty-two, and the next hike up the promotions ladder was the important one.
He was working on their current database now, getting it to look for patterns in relation to other offences in the Sheffield area over recent months. He typed another command into the computer, getting it to sort the information in relation to drug offences. While he was waiting, he dug his fork into the takeaway he’d picked up from the Chinese on the way back. Cold. He looked down at the polystyrene tray. His chicken chow mein had somehow transformed itself into a grey, glutinous mass. He pushed it away impatiently. He could get something out of the freezer later, stick it in the microwave. He picked up his mug of coffee with little optimism. Cold as well. He couldn’t work without coffee. He went through to the kitchen and pushed the switch on the coffee machine.
The flat was modern, two-bedroomed. McCarthy had bought it because it was fitted out, convenient and he could move straight in. He’d heard someone say once, or he’d read somewhere, that a house should be a machine for living. McCarthy understood that. He wanted the place he lived in to service him. He wanted to go in and find it warm when the weather was cold, cool when it was hot. He wanted to be able to cook at the push of a button, wash at the flick of a switch. He wanted to have any disorder that living created reordered before he returned.
‘Christ, McCarthy,’ Lynne, his last girlfriend, had said, ‘why don’t you just lock yourself away in a cupboard at the end of the day?’ Another time she’d said, ‘What you need, McCarthy, is a wife. An automatic, rechargeable, super-turbo, fuel-injection wife.’ He’d laughed and started massaging her back, running his hands over her neck and shoulders in the way he knew she liked, because he hadn’t wanted to have another of their vicious, cutting rows, and she’d pulled him into the chair and they’d had a quick wham bam thank you, ma’am – or thank you, sir, and then they’d gone into the bedroom and spent longer, spent most of the evening, exploring each other and drinking wine. But he and Lynne only had that: they had sex and they had the job. They couldn’t spend all their time screwing and working – though to McCarthy it had sometimes seemed as though that was exactly what they did – and the relationship had ended when Lynne got the job that he had aimed at, got his promotion in fact, and the whole flimsy edifice had fallen apart in the volcanic aftermath. He still felt angry and bitter about that, and he determinedly shut it out of his mind.
He took the coffee back into his workroom and looked at the screen. There was very little there that he didn’t already know. He noted the fact that Ashley Reid had a drugs caution – hardly surprising he’d missed it, McCarthy thought, in the long list attached to that young thug’s name. And, now, this could be interesting: Paul Lynman, one of the tenants at 14, Carleton Road, the student house, had a conviction for possession. McCarthy pulled up the details. OK, it looked like a my-round deal – he’d been caught with almost enough speed to pull down a dealing charge – but not quite. He’d insisted, wisely, that it was for his own use, but he’d probably been buying for a friend as well as for himself. Worth chasing up, though. There was nothing conclusive, no real links. McCarthy rubbed the skin between his eyebrows in an effort to concentrate. He’d heard something about a problem at the Alpha Centre, something about Es and speed. And had there been some kind of action round the university? He needed to talk to someone from drugs.
He looked at his watch. Ten-thirty. He wondered what to do with the rest of the evening. Listen to music? Watch the telly? He felt a sense of things closing around him, as though his life was shrinking to the walls of this flat, the route to and from the office, the office itself. Maybe Lynne had been right. Maybe he should start looking for that cupboard.
Sunday morning, Suzanne got up early, was showered, dressed and at her desk by eight o’clock. She planned to put in a solid day’s work, to forget everything that had happened since Friday. For an hour, she tried to read and make notes from a research paper that she’d had on her desk for a week. Her mind refused to focus. When she reached the end of the ten dense, closely printed pages, she realized she might as well not have read it at all. She tossed it irritably into her paper tray, not bothering to put it into its correct basket. She rubbed her forehead, and looked at the waiting tasks arrayed around her desk. She thought about Jane’s method for focusing – there was some kind of yoga trick. Something to do with emptying the mind. She closed her eyes and tried to concentrate on the nothingness that was behind her eyelids.
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Danuta Reah
A dark psychological thriller that will hold the reader in its grip from beginning to end, Silent Playgrounds is the stunning follow-up to Danuta Reah’s highly praised debut, Only Darkness.The path through the park runs from the centre of the city into the wilds of the countryside. At weekends the area is a playground for children and walkers, but during the week it is silent and deserted.When six-year-old Lucy gets lost there one day, her disappearance sparks a chain of events leading to the murder of a young woman. Lucy tries to warn the people she cares about of the danger: she knows that there are monsters lurking in the rambling park, and she knows that they are getting closer.What should be a straightforward investigation leads DI Steve McCarthy into a web of lies and evasions, where nothing is quite as it seems and everyone seems to be hiding something. With each step forward McCarthy faces new questions, and if he is to prevent an escalation in violence, he has to find some answers – fast.
DANUTA REAH
SILENT PLAYGROUNDS
Copyright (#ulink_27b257ca-ed9c-5ba5-9bdb-859b9b07bf6e)
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk/)
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2000
Copyright © Danuta Reah 2000
Danuta Reah asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks
HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication
Source ISBN: 9780006513162
Ebook Edition © OCTOBER 2016 ISBN: 9780007397945
Version: 2016-10-04
Dedication (#ulink_f866ca1f-930b-5c38-90b2-a24f59c497ff)
In memory of my father,
Jan Kot,
architect and artist
1913–1995
Przechodniu I powiedz Polsce, ze padlismy tu, stuzac jej wiernie. (Memorial to the Polish Parachute Brigade at Arnhem)
With many thanks to the people who gave me help when I was writing this book. I would particularly like to thank the e-mail writers’ group, Sue and Penny, for their invaluable critical advice; Superintendent Steve Hicks for helping me again with details about police procedure; Professor Green for his clarification of details of forensic pathology, and for not laughing too loudly at some of my more off-the-wall ideas; to Richard Wood for his time and his advice about tracing missing people; to the staff at Kelham Island museum for answering my questions about Shepherd Wheel; to Teresa for all her support; to Julia whose editing makes all the difference; to Alex, and, of course, to Ken for seeing this book through with me from start to finish.
People who know Sheffield will recognize many of the locations in this book – Endcliffe Park, Bingham Park, Hunters Bar, Sheffield University. Green Park flats, however, exist only in my imagination, and though I have used the university campus as a setting, the university that is described in the book exists, again, only in my imagination. The coffee in the Students’ Union is excellent, though.
I often walk through Endcliffe Park and Bingham Park, through the woods, following the route taken by Suzanne. These are just two of the many parks in Sheffield that are gradually succumbing to vandalism and neglect. Sheffield is enriched by the wild places that run almost into the centre of the city. It is sad that the people who hold the purse strings of the city do not value these places the way the people of Sheffield do. They are irreplaceable.
Epigraph (#ulink_4ef612cc-9859-5b58-a9a1-82482c96da3d)
Only the blue delphiniums show That these were gardens, long ago …
(from Silent Playgrounds, Penny Grubb)
Contents
Cover (#u26e595f9-f20f-5ccb-a4f6-3668a4523862)
Title Page (#uc5df5f50-bcbf-5927-8adf-b9c1443ccdf7)
Copyright (#ue0c9d8a8-a60e-5b2f-89c2-577692a49db6)
Dedication (#u34890cf6-0c4d-5326-ab14-4b00a1ba186f)
Epigraph (#u7595e87c-9f58-5473-a8e6-b7e07c32b8bf)
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Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
By the Same Author (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
1 (#ulink_f1c792ea-3654-5233-8a8f-490694dce46c)
It was dark now, the blackness pressing close, concealing the high roof spaces, the far corners, the heavy, shrouded shapes. Water ran behind the shuttered window, drip … drip … dripdripdrip … drip. The only light came from the glowing coals. Under the grate, the ashes whispered down onto the hearth. The warmth of the fire was fading, but even at its height, it hadn’t pushed the shadows back far. The flagstones of the floor were damp; the timbers were rotting and crumbling. The metal of the grate was rusty. But the metal in front of him was bright, its edge catching the firelight, imprisoning it in the brightness of the steel, turning it a deep glowing red. The voices in his head:
When?
Soon, Ashley, soon.
How soon?
Now.
TAKE CARE IF WALKING ALONE BY ALLOTMENTS
The words were written in red felt-tip on a piece of lined A4. The paper was attached to the bottom of the notice at the entrance to the park, DOGS MUST BE ON A LEAD. The writing was unformed, the hand, perhaps, of a child. The paper gleamed white in the sun. It had rained in the night, but the paper wasn’t wet or smeared. The rain had stopped about five in the morning. At six, on that particular day, the contractors took their cleaning truck through the park, emptied the bins, collected the litter and the broken glass. A newspaper girl saw the paper as she cut through the park on the way to the next block of houses on her round. She stopped to read it, shrugged, then went on her way.
It was still there when Suzanne passed shortly after ten. She had set herself the task of jogging through the two parks that formed a finger of green into the city, close to the street of red-brick terraces where she lived. There and back, it was probably about two miles, and yesterday she had almost managed it without a break. Today she would do it, and then look to extending her run further through the woods. She reviewed her plan for the day as she ran. Friday. A lot to do. It was her weekend to have Michael, and she liked to have those weekends carefully planned, filled with places to go and people to spend time with.
The notice caught her eye, and she stopped to read it.
Strange. What had happened to make someone put up a warning notice? She looked along the main path which ran on past the smooth grass and the carefully planted flower beds, narrowing and darkening as it disappeared into the shadows under the trees. About a year ago, a woman had been attacked in these woods. She looked round her. The park was deserted at this time in the morning, but the bright sun of early summer, the flowers and the fresh green of the new leaves made the woods look gentle and benign. Why the allotments? They were on the other side of the river.
She shouldn’t have stopped. She was feeling tired now and she was cooling down. She could have gone on for ages if she hadn’t stopped. Her eyes went back to the piece of paper, and she felt a touch of unease at the thought of the lonely path through the woods, so busy at the weekends when families followed the route to the old dam, so deserted during the week when the children were at school and their parents at work. Stop it!
She set off again at a brisk walk, watching the shadows as she passed out of the sun and under the trees. There was no wind, and the path was dappled and still. The park seemed empty. The early dog walkers had gone, and the late dog walkers weren’t out yet.
The path forked. She could cross the river here and walk on the other side where the track was narrow and muddy. The Porter Brook ran through woods and parks now, but its banks used to house the small mills and workshops that harnessed the strength of the river to power the trip-hammers and grinding wheels of the nascent steel industry. You could still see the remains of the old works – places where the river was diverted with goits and weirs, the old dams that were abandoned, silted up or turned into playgrounds. At weekends or on holidays, people walked by the dams and fed the water-birds that inhabited them now, or sailed model boats or fished.
Suzanne paused for a moment, then followed the path across the bridge to the narrow track that ran by the allotments. She picked her way round puddles formed where the mud had been churned up by the passage of mountain bikes. The path was still in the shadow of the trees, but the allotments were in full sun. She looked across at them. Some were carefully tended, neat rows of green, raked, weeded, staked; but most were neglected or abandoned, bushes and brambles and wild raspberries growing among and through old sheds and allotment huts. It was quiet. An elderly couple in jerseys and wellies were working on a patch near the stream, but the other allotments were empty. She could see a thin curl of smoke from a chimney protruding from the roof of a hut. She wondered if she should ask the couple about the notice. Take care …
She frowned, then realized that her walk had slowed almost to a standstill. She speeded up her pace, and headed determinedly along the path. She began to alter her step to a jog again. Jog six, walk six, jog six, walk six. It was peaceful in the park, away from the demands of work and home. She could let her mind roam in a loose, unfocused way, watching the patterns of light on the path, the way the water swirled and eddied round rocks and banks. It was like the library, almost. A place where she could just be, with no thoughts ahead, and no thoughts behind.
She got some of her best ideas in the library and the park. Suzanne’s life – now – was focused on her research into young offenders, young men who had a bleak and persistent history of crime, waste and violence. Young men like her brother, Adam. She had put together a proposal that gave substance to her intuition that many of these young men had problems with language, with communication. She wanted to see if she could quantify what she had previously only observed. Months of work in the library poring over journals, phone calls and discussions with other researchers and people who worked with young offenders had paid off and she had been accepted to start a research MSc. She had managed to get a small grant, and was now attached to a young offenders’ programme, the Alpha Project. If she could prove herself – and she could – she would get more funding and be able to go on to complete a PhD.
She was at Shepherd Wheel now, one of the old workshops that had been restored in wealthier, more optimistic times. There used to be regular working days here, when the water was released from the dam to power the wheel and the wheel turned the gears and belts that worked the grinding stones. But the cuts had put paid to that piece of heritage frivolity, and now the building was closed, locked and shuttered, the water-wheel decaying. She slowed again and, on an impulse, walked along the path past the workshop and up the steps, through the gate that led to the yard behind the mill.
The wheel lurked low down in a narrow pit. She could see the bucket boards that caught the water and turned it – empty now. She leaned over the wall and peered down into the darkness that housed the wheel. The sluice that held back the water was above her, and below her was damp stone and moss. An opaque reflection gleamed back at her. She waved, and her reflection waved back. A smell of stagnant water drifted up. She shivered. It had the darkness of a place that never got the sun.
She turned back to the path, following it along the side of the dam. Just a few weeks ago, it had been like a lake almost, with fish and water-birds. Now with the dryness of the summer, it was a stream running through channels of thick mud. Suzanne looked at the prints where birds had walked, already filling with water and fading. Closer to the bank, the mud had been disturbed, the green moss that covered it churned up, as though someone had been digging there. The stone walls of the dam were crevassed and cracked with years of neglect. She walked on, coming out at the end of the park where the woods proper started. She almost crossed the road in a mood of defiance, but the sense of work to be done, work undone, made her pause and turn back. She quickened her pace into a jog again. The run back was all downhill. She could manage that.
As she passed Shepherd Wheel for the second time, she saw a man slip out from behind the building, from the courtyard that housed the wheel where she’d been herself a short while before. Her heart jumped, and for a moment she felt a chill. Take care… Then, for a moment, she thought she recognized him: one of the young men from the Alpha Project, Ashley Reid. She got a glimpse of his face, white under his dark hair. She was about to smile and wave when she realized it was a stranger, another pale, dark-eyed young man. She looked away quickly, aware that she had been staring.
Lucy sat on the swing and pushed it as far back as her legs would allow. She lifted her feet off the ground and pulled herself into the seat. Lean back and push, lean back and push. She hadn’t been able to swing herself at the beginning of the summer. Now she could swing herself far higher than Emma would push her. Lean back and push. She’d escaped from Emma. Emma would be pissed off – Mum’s favourite word. ‘Wait in the playground,’ Emma had said. She meant the small playground, but Lucy didn’t want to do that. She liked the big playground better, even if it did mean a long walk. She’d been waiting in the small playground, feeling cross and upset. It wasn’t fair! Then suddenly he was there – ‘Come on, Lucy. Quick!’ – and they were off on a magic ride to the big playground through the woods, across the big road she wasn’t allowed to cross by herself.
Emma would know where to find her. First the swings, then the big slide, then an ice cream. If Emma wasn’t too pissed off. Lean back and push. The swing soared up. She thought she might be able to touch the leaves on the trees if she didn’t have to hold on. She closed her eyes and let the light flicker against her eyelids. Lean back and push. She worked the swing hard now, flying higher and higher, feeling the chain clank and jerk at the top of each swing. High enough! She let the swing swoop her down and up, and for a moment it seemed as though she was sitting still and the playground was a swinging blur around her. The swing dropped and lifted, dropped and lifted, a little less each time, and she began to scrape her shoes along the ground, catching each time the seat swung through its lowest point. Scuff. Scuff. She brought the swing to a stop and sat there, swaying gently, looking up. She had begun to twist the seat round and round, to give herself a twirly, when she saw that someone was watching her. He was standing by the bench at the edge of the playground, where the woods started. It was the Ash Man. She turned the swing again, and tried to twist the chain higher, to make it twirl faster. As she twirled round – chain swings were really not as good as the one her friend Lauren had in her garden, because they went jerk, jerk – she wondered where Emma was.
‘Emma’s gone.’ She looked round. He was standing behind her and was looking down at her. ‘We’ve lost Emma.’ he said. Lucy sat very still. She didn’t like the Ash Man. He went on watching her. He got hold of the chains of the swing, twisting them so much that Lucy’s feet were right off the ground. The twirly rocked her dizzy. He looked down at her. ‘We’ve lost Emma.’ he said again.
Lucy looked up at him. His face had a shadow on it from his hair. He’d said it twice. ‘I know,’ she said.
It was after half past ten by the time Suzanne got back to the park gates. The traffic on Hunters Bar roundabout was heavy, and the air tasted hot and metallic after the freshness of the park. She walked up Brocco Bank and turned up Carleton Road, the short steep road where she lived. It was a typical Sheffield street, red-brick terraces climbing up the side of the hill, the pavement a mix of flagstones and asphalt, weeds and grass growing in the cracks and against the walls.
She saw her friend and neighbour, Jane, sitting on her front step with a sketch pad on her lap and bottles of ink on the step beside her. Jane was an illustrator and most of her work appeared in children’s books. She smiled when she saw Suzanne. ‘Have you been in the park?’ Suzanne nodded, and paused to talk, leaning on the wall. She looked at the sketch pad. ‘It’s these shadows.’ Jane said. ‘I want to get the red of the brick and the black of the shadows while the sun’s just right. They want “a combination of the everyday and the eerie”.’ She looked at her painting for a moment, then rested her brush on the edge of the ink bottle. ‘What were you doing last night? That was a rather flashy Range Rover that dropped you off.’
Suzanne sighed. Jane was currently on a campaign to spice up Suzanne’s life. The women had been friends since shortly after Michael’s birth six years ago. They had met in the park where Jane was throwing bread to the ducks for the entertainment of six-month-old Lucy. To Suzanne, her family life in chaos, struggling with post-natal depression, Jane’s Madonna-like calm had seemed like a haven.
‘It was just Richard Kean from the Alpha Project,’ Suzanne said now. Richard was one of the centre’s psychologists, and one of the few people there who seemed to have any real interest in Suzanne’s work.
‘Richard? He’s the tall one with dark hair, isn’t he? So what was he doing dropping you off in the middle of the night?’
‘It was half past nine,’ Suzanne retorted, goaded.
‘That is the middle of the night for you,’ Jane said reasonably. She didn’t approve of Suzanne’s monastic life.
‘Mm.’ Suzanne was non-committal. There was nothing to tell. She had attended an evening session at the Alpha Project and Richard had dropped her off on his way home. She wanted to get Jane off the subject, so she said, ‘I saw something when I was in the park—’
Jane interrupted her. ‘Did you see Em and Lucy there?’
‘Is Em back?’ Emma, Jane’s babysitter, had been away for the past week, and Jane had had to juggle her timetable and call in favours to cope with a rapidly approaching deadline. Jane had coped as she always did, wrapped in a hazy cocoon of abstraction.
‘Yes. She just turned up this morning out of the blue.’ Jane frowned and ran her finger along a sweep of pencil on her page. ‘No phone call or anything. Actually, it was quite useful.’ She looked at the drawing again, still frowning, still dissatisfied. ‘I can’t get this right. I don’t know what I want.’ She looked up at Suzanne. ‘Lucy’s got a hospital appointment. She didn’t want to go, so I said she could have an hour in the park with Em, and an ice cream afterwards.’ Suzanne shrugged in sympathy. Lucy suffered from bad asthma, and hated her regular trips to the hospital. The ice cream was a big concession. Jane was a health freak.
Jane had been backtracking on the conversation. ‘You didn’t see them? They went to the playground.’ Suzanne had run past the playground. It had been empty. Jane frowned, pulling her attention away from her drawing. Her look of vague abstraction sharpened into focus. ‘They should have been there. I told Em not to take her to the café … You know, I’m not happy – Oh, it’s nothing serious,’ she added. ‘It isn’t so much the not turning up, it’s just …’
For the past month, Emma had looked after Lucy for a few hours each week. Before that, Jane had had Sophie, a first-year undergraduate who rented a bed-sit in the student house next door to Jane. She’d turned up on the doorstep just before the start of term and introduced herself, offering her services as a childminder. Jane, after contacting Sophie’s parents, smallholders on the east coast, was happy to take up her offer, and the arrangement had worked well. Sophie was inexperienced and unsophisticated, but she was bright and sensible and fun. Jane liked her, Lucy adored her, she was just next door and could fit in with Jane’s elastic schedule. But then, quite suddenly, she’d dropped out of her course and left.
Emma was a fellow student. She had been one of the regular visitors at the student house – a house with a lot of coming and going – but Jane and Suzanne hadn’t met her properly until after Christmas when Sophie had introduced her: ‘Do you mind if Emma comes with me and Lucy?’ And she had, imperceptibly, drifted into their lives, a quiet, rather serious young woman, a contrast to Sophie’s vivacity. She had moved in to the student house in March, and had rather diffidently offered herself as a replacement when Sophie left. Jane had been pleased at first, especially to have someone whom she and Lucy both knew, but she was starting to have second thoughts. Emma was younger than Sophie, and, Suzanne was beginning to realize, a lot less responsible. She listened with increasing unease as Jane expressed her doubts. Since Sophie had left, Emma had become moody and unreliable. Lucy had started having nightmares, nightmares about monsters, about ‘the Ash Man’, Jane said, about Emma being chased by monsters. Sometimes she’d come back from the park with the smell of tobacco smoke lingering on her clothes. ‘I know Em smokes,’ Jane said. ‘Her lungs are her business. But she knows not to smoke near Lucy.’
‘What did she say?’
‘Oh, she said she thought it wouldn’t matter in the open air. I suppose … I don’t know … I don’t want Lucy to have another upheaval. She likes Emma. It’s just …’
‘The monsters?’
‘Yes …’ Jane frowned at her painting, brushing away a tiny spider that was running on the surface. ‘No.’ She looked up at Suzanne. ‘I’ve decided. I’m not letting Emma look after her again. I’ll find someone else.’
By the time Suzanne had finished talking to Jane, it was nearly eleven. She let herself in through the back door and stepped over the pile of shoes on the doormat. The breakfast dishes were in the sink and the worktops were a mess of toast crumbs, butter and a congealing pool of spilt milk and sugar where she had eaten breakfast. A fly was exploring this, and she aimed a swat at it. It flew up, its drone filling the air for a moment, then stopping as it settled again.
She walked through the middle room to the side door to collect the post. Three brown envelopes lay on the mat. She picked them up and flicked through them. Bills, but not red ones. She put them into the in-tray she kept on the dining table. The new additions caused a minor landslide, and she had to scoop up a pile of envelopes from the floor and cram them back.
She needed to go and do some work.
Upstairs in her study, she closed the door behind her and felt a sense of peace. Her study was in the small attic room under the roof. It had a dormer window, high and narrow, that opened at just the right height for her to lean her arms on the sill and look out across the rooftops. She did that now, enjoying the high, cloudless sky and the gleam of the sunlight off the wet roofs that tumbled up the other side of the valley. In front of her, the slates of her own roof sloped down into the guttering, concealing the drop down to the road below. If she craned her neck, she could just see Jane still sitting on her front step, her head bent intently over her drawing.
But she had work to do. Inside, the study was cool and shadowed. Her desk stood in the light from the window. Further back into the room, the walls were lined with shelves of books, all sorted by subject and author. A filing cabinet, functional metallic grey, stood against one wall, and an easy chair, a splash of colour, fire-engine red, occupied one corner under a small reading lamp. Shelves at the side of her desk held her set of audio tapes, the start of her research project.
If she wanted to study the way the young men on the Alpha Project communicated, she had to record them, study their language, to see if they employed all the strategies and skills of conversation that researchers had identified over the years. When the negotiation degenerated into violence, was it because they wanted to fight, to assert themselves, to establish their dominance, or was it because they couldn’t read those subtle signals of language that meant I am being polite, I don’t like what you are saying, I am asking you to do something? When they looked blank and nodded in vague agreement to something they hadn’t heard, or hadn’t understood, was it because they didn’t want to hear, or was it because they didn’t know they hadn’t understood, or didn’t know how to say they hadn’t understood? And did the resulting frustration boil over into anti-social behaviour?
As a first step, she’d been recording quite formal interviews with some of the young men on the programme. She’d asked for, and been given, the ones with the most serious or the most persistent records. One frustrating thing was that she didn’t actually know what they had done, and might never if they themselves didn’t volunteer the information. The Alpha management had been grudging with their permission, and draconian about confidentiality.
She took the tapes of the individual interviews out of her bag. She wasn’t supposed to have them here. They were supposed to be kept secure at the university. She’d interviewed three of the young offenders so far. Dean – seventeen, and on the programme as a condition of his parole – she was sure could be violent. He had been monosyllabic, sullen, occasionally aggressive; then she’d interviewed Lee – also seventeen, bright, lively and endlessly in trouble. He’d shown flashes of insight when he forgot his manic clowning. And Ashley. That interview had been odd. She knew Ashley better than any of the others, and yet he had been halting, incoherent, illogical. She had listened to the tape several times in the four weeks since she had actually carried out the interview, and she still had trouble making sense of it.
Q. Tell me about your family, Ashley.
A. Er … It’s not …
Q. Sorry, you don’t have to tell me if you’d rather not.
A. Yes.
Q. You want to tell me?
A. Brothers and sisters?
Q. If …
A. (Laughs.) Brothers and sisters.
Q. Sorry, Ashley, I don’t understand.
A. Er … So … em … loose …
Q. What?
A. Simon.
Q. Simon is your brother?
A. Yes.
Q. Tell me about Simon.
A. (Laughs.) Simon says …
Q. Yes?
A. Not much. (Laughs.)
At the time, she had kept thinking, Odd, odd. He had become increasingly uncomfortable and, in the end, he’d cut the interview short. She wondered if he would let her tape him again. He might be the first one who could provide her with data that would support her theory. Ironically, she had been doubtful about his suitability for her research, as he was classified as having ‘learning difficulties’, and she wasn’t sure if that would skew her results. She needed more background on Ashley before she could trust her analysis. She thought about the new insights her work would give into the dark world of youth crime, which might lead to better ways of helping boys like Adam, before … Daydreaming! She pulled herself back to the work in hand.
At twelve-thirty, she packed her recording equipment away. She needed to go to the university. She rewound the tape, noting the counter number, and put it back in her briefcase. She felt buoyant and optimistic. She tested the mood, and the feeling of lightness stayed with her. It was as if something heavy and dark, something she hadn’t been aware of, had been lifted off her recently, and she was just now understanding how heavy and constricting it had been. She thought about Michael’s weekend, and instead of the chest-tightening anxiety she was accustomed to feeling, she realized she was almost looking forward to it.
Maybe she could cope with the responsibility. Maybe there was no reason to dread something awful happening. Maybe all mothers worried about their children. Maybe, dare she say it, maybe she was normal. She ran a comb through her hair and tied it back, thought about putting on some make-up and decided against it. Maybe Jane was right. Maybe it was time to come out of her shell. She picked up her briefcase and ran down the stairs. She grabbed her bag and keys and headed out. As she locked the door behind her, she saw Jane standing at her gate, looking anxiously down the road. ‘Hi,’ Suzanne greeted her on a note of query. ‘Is something wrong?’
Jane pushed her hair back off her face. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Emma and Lucy are late.’ She looked at her watch.
‘When should they have been back?’ Suzanne asked.
Jane looked at her watch. ‘Over an hour ago. Lucy’s appointment was at quarter to twelve.’
Suzanne remembered their earlier conversation, and felt a stirring of unease. Monsters … She tried to be reassuring. ‘I shouldn’t worry,’ she said. ‘Lucy will have run off and be hiding, and poor old Em will be frantic. We could go and look.’ Both women were familiar with Lucy’s disappearing stunts.
Jane’s face was tense. ‘I’ve just come back. I went right through both parks. They weren’t there. I tried the café. They hadn’t been in. Then I thought they might have come back … I don’t know what to do.’
Suzanne thought. ‘Em knows about Lucy hiding, doesn’t she?’
‘Oh yes. She’s helped Sophie deal with it. I gave her the phone. Just in case.’ She looked at Suzanne and shook her head. ‘I’ve been ringing and ringing, but there’s no reply.’
That made Suzanne pause. There didn’t seem a good explanation for that. ‘Maybe the battery’s run down. Or she’s buried it in her bag and it’s turned itself off. Maybe it’s been stolen …’ Her ideas sounded lame and she could see Jane starting to form an objection, so she hurried on. ‘But I think you ought to call someone anyway. Just in case. Maybe there’s been an accident.’
Jane began to look panicked. ‘I don’t know …’ she said.
Suzanne felt out of her depth. She was usually the one who got stressed and upset, and Jane was the one who maintained an air of imperturbable calm. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘It’ll be nothing. You’ll end up the morning mad as hell with Lucy and wondering why you got in such a state, but let’s play safe. When we’ve phoned, I’ll go back to the park and look.’
‘You’ve been through the park.’ Jane’s eyes were wide and frightened. ‘And you didn’t see them either, did you?’
Suzanne shook her head. ‘No, but I wasn’t looking.’
‘If Em had seen you, if Lucy had run off, she would have told you, she would have asked you to help. We’ve both looked. They’re not there.’
Suzanne was guiding Jane back into the house now, towards the phone. ‘Yes, they are,’ she said. ‘We just didn’t see them. It’s a big park. Do you want me to phone?’ Jane looked at her in blank panic. Suzanne hesitated. She wasn’t sure which number to ring. They needed to contact the police. As she thought about the situation, she was beginning to feel more worried. It was true that the park was big, but it was narrow for most of the way, and she knew the places that Em and Lucy went. If they had been there, she would have seen them, or they would have seen her. Lucy would probably have lain low under the circumstances, but Em would have been pleased, relieved to see her if Lucy had pulled one of her hiding stunts. She thought about Lucy, her thread-limbed fragility, her will of iron. She picked up the receiver and tried the number of Jane’s mobile. She let it ring. There was no reply. Then she dialled 999. This was either nothing, or a very serious emergency.
The mill at Shepherd Wheel was dark under the trees. The doors were padlocked, the bright metal of the hasps gleaming. The windows were shuttered and bolted. The trees stirred as a breeze blew, sending shadows dancing across the water, across the mossy roof. And it began again, faintly, just audible over the sound of the river, just audible to someone standing close to the shuttered windows, just audible to someone with sharp ears, someone who was listening. The ringing of a phone.
2 (#ulink_4d61f74f-aa77-5219-9064-a12d2003c683)
Suzanne was familiar with crisis. Crisis was something you moved through with cold detachment, an observer of your own life. Crisis was something that held you, panicked and terrified, behind a frozen façade. Crisis left you drained and wrecked once it had moved on. Crisis for Suzanne was Adam, her younger brother, dead these past six years, and it was her father’s thin, precise features, and his voice: I hold you responsible for this, Suzanne!
She listened to the policewoman telling Jane that children often went missing, that the most reliable teenager in the world could get distracted, and wanted to fast-forward the day to the time when the crisis would be over, one way or another.
Two officers had arrived in response to Suzanne’s call, with commendable but alarming rapidity. A man and a woman. The woman had introduced herself, calm, sympathetic, professional, ‘I’m Hazel Austen. I’m here about your daughter. Lucy, isn’t it?’ With a few quick questions she had the gist of the situation, and was now talking Jane through Emma’s and Lucy’s planned route and routine. ‘… going through the park right now, but I just need you to tell me …’
To distract herself from the knot of tension inside her, Suzanne let her eyes wander round the familiar room. There were pictures: framed prints, some of Jane’s paintings, Lucy’s pictures Blu-tacked erratically to the walls and door. Her toys and books were piled into one corner and tumbled on the slatted shelves that stood by the window. A photograph of Lucy with her father, Joel, was pinned to the shelves by a single drawing pin. That was new. It looked like one of Jane’s photos, and the size and curling edges suggested it was one she had developed herself. The faces, both serious, looked out from a background of blurred lights, Lucy’s fair hair tangled against the darker hair of her father. Lucy’s drawings were stuck to the wall at the height of a child’s head, slightly rumpled, slightly uneven. They were captioned in Lucy’s words and Jane’s writing, each letter carefully copied in different colours by Lucy.
The pictures were part of Lucy’s fantasy world. Flossy my cat in the park, a picture of a stripy animal with rather a lot of teeth; Me and my sisters in the park, a small, fair-haired figure with two taller figures, one fair, one dark; My mum and dad, two tall figures, both with yellow hair like Lucy; The Ash Man’s brother in the park, a dark-haired, smiling figure. Lucy’s invented family had a resident father – unlike the absent, peripatetic Joel – had cats and dogs, had sisters and sometimes brothers. The rest of her world was peopled with stranger characters, like her imaginary friend, Tamby, and the sinister Ash Man – and now, apparently, with monsters.
Suzanne and Jane had shared a bottle of wine in this room the night before, talking among the haphazard clutter while Lucy sat at the table drawing. It had seemed warm and inviting then, with Jane’s vague irrelevancies and Lucy’s intermittent chatter. Now the clutter no longer looked homely and comforting, it looked disrupted, as though a high wind had taken the room apart and let things settle where they would.
‘… cup of tea.’ Suzanne brought herself back sharply. Hazel was speaking to her. Seeing Suzanne’s blank gaze, she said again, ‘I think Jane would like a cup of tea.’
For a moment, the words meant nothing, then Suzanne said, ‘Oh. Yes, of course.’ She brought tea and biscuits from her own house, nipping across the shared yard to her back door. She went back into the room, carrying the tray, and occupied herself setting out cups, pouring tea, putting biscuits on a plate.
‘She’s very independent, and she knows about, you know, not talking to strangers … She wouldn’t go off with anyone.’ Jane was whistling in the dark, as if convincing Hazel could make it true, make it be all right. It was true that Lucy was resourceful and streetwise, Suzanne thought, but she was only six.
She passed Jane a cup of tea, and offered her support. ‘Lucy’s very sensible,’ she said to Hazel, and Jane looked at her gratefully.
Lucy’s colouring book and crayons were on the table and Suzanne moved them to one side. She tried not to look at the picture Lucy had been drawing, but it pulled at her attention and she found herself staring at it as she listened to Hazel telling Jane again that it was still early days, that most missing children turned up safe and sound. It was a typical child’s drawing, a blue sky across the top of the page, and green grass across the bottom. Two figures, a tall one and a small one, stood on the grass. Their arms came out of the sides of their bodies, each finger carefully drawn. They were holding hands. Lucy and Jane. Suzanne looked more closely. No, the taller figure had brown hair. Lucy and Sophie? She could picture Lucy sitting at the table, hunched intently over the paper, her face serious, talking her way through the picture, partly to herself, partly to her mother and Suzanne. And they’re in the park and they’re walking on the big field and also they’re holding hands and they’re smiling, look … But these faces weren’t smiling, she noticed. The mouths were turned down, grim.
She looked up and saw Jane’s eyes fall on the book. She should have put it out of sight. Jane picked it up. ‘She did this,’ she said, her focus wavering between the two women. ‘She did this last night. She’s good at …’ Her voice died away and she swallowed.
The man had now come back. He looked to where Jane and Hazel were talking, and then he signalled to Suzanne with his eyes. She went over, and he led her out of the room. Jane looked up as she went out, but only for a moment. The man was waiting by the phone in the hallway. ‘You said you phoned the mobile the babysitter has?’
‘Yes. There was no reply.’
He looked at her. ‘But it was turned on?’
Suzanne shook her head. She’d never had a mobile and didn’t know much about them. ‘I don’t know. How can you tell?’
In answer, he dialled the number and held the phone out to her. She heard the static before connection, then a recorded voice: ‘This number is currently unavailable. Please try later.’ Suzanne looked at him and shook her head. ‘No. It just rang last time.’
‘And that was … ?’
‘Half an hour ago? Just before I phoned you.’ He didn’t say anything, so Suzanne pushed. ‘What does that mean?’
‘It’s nothing. It’s not likely to be important.’
She wasn’t going to be fobbed off. ‘But it might be. So what does it mean?’
He shrugged. ‘It probably means that the battery’s run down. Or that someone switched the phone off since you last rang the number.’
Lucy had been in the park. They found traces of her, far away from where her mother said she had been going. About a mile through the woods, there was a playground close to Forge Dam, the last dam. In the café by the playground at the end of the woods, the owner came out into the sunshine for a cigarette, and said, ‘Yes, little girl, fair-haired, yes, she was here earlier this morning, around tenish. She bought an ice cream.’ He thought for a bit. ‘And a piece of cake. I asked her if it was for the ducks. I’ve seen her up here before and her mum buys cake for the ducks.’
‘Is this her?’ The officer showed him a picture and he nodded.
‘That’s the one. Has anything … ?’
‘Was anyone with her?’ The radio on the man’s jacket crackled and said something the café owner couldn’t catch. The policeman spoke briefly and quietly into the radio, then returned to his question.
‘Yes … Well, I think so.’
‘Who was it? Could you describe the person who was with her?’
Feeling more uneasy now, the café owner thought back. He hadn’t really seen, now he came to think of it. She’d come to the side window of the café twice, once for ice cream and once for cake and a drink. He hadn’t actually seen anyone. ‘I don’t know,’ he said, slowly. ‘I just assumed … I didn’t see anyone.’
It had been a quiet morning, a quiet day. Some walkers had passed through earlier, shortly after nine, and had stopped for a cup of tea. He’d seen people go past on their way up to the dam or beyond. The path formed part of the Sheffield Round Walk, and also offered a walkers’ route into the Derbyshire Peak District. It was a busy path. Some of the passers-by might have stopped at the dam, spent the day fishing, he didn’t know. He’d kept an eye on the café – quiet as he’d said – done his books, had the telly on for some of the time. The officer, making notes, realized gloomily that if this became a real inquiry, someone would have the job of tracking these people down, asking them what they had seen, trying to find out if there was anyone who’d been through that way who hadn’t come forward, and if that person hadn’t come forward was it because he knew all too well what had happened to the missing child.
Suzanne knew that something had made the police more concerned now. The arrival of a man in civilian clothes, a detective, made the knot in her stomach tighten. She felt uneasy around the police. She had too many memories of Adam, the voice on the phone. I’m afraid we’ve got Adam here again. He’s been … And her father. You deal with it, Suzanne. This is your responsibility. She’d trusted them then, listened to them, done what they’d said. She could still hear the woman’s voice. Just tell us where Adam is. We want to help the lad, Suzanne.
The man introduced himself as Detective Inspector Steve McCarthy. He checked quickly through the same things Hazel had done, asking one or two more questions as he went. Suzanne was impressed by his efficiency, but found him brusque and cold. Then he began asking about Emma – how well Jane knew her, what she did, where she lived. Jane’s face went whiter as he told her that Emma wasn’t a student, and had never been an official tenant at number fourteen.
Suzanne hadn’t realized before how much they had taken Emma on trust, because they knew her – or thought they did. This was why the police were so concerned. There was something wrong with Emma. She moved to sit on the arm of Jane’s chair. She put her arm round Jane and said, ‘We know Emma well. We both do. She’s Sophie’s friend.’ He raised an eyebrow at her in query, and she realized what a thin recommendation it sounded.
She told him about Sophie, about her parents, her tutor, the course she had been doing. ‘That’s how we got to know Emma,’ she explained. When he said nothing, she asked, ‘What’s wrong? There’s something about Emma, isn’t there?’
‘We just need some background,’ he said. He’d evaded her question. His face was expressionless as he made some notes, then he moved on to ask about Lucy’s father. ‘Where does he live? Does he see Lucy often? Would Lucy go round there?’
Jane shook her head. Suzanne couldn’t stay quiet. ‘Lucy always saw Joel here.’ Suzanne wouldn’t refer to Joel as Lucy’s dad. He didn’t deserve the title. He was hardly ever there. He devoted his time, as far as she could tell, to his undefined business interests around clubs and warehouse parties. When he did see Lucy, he took all the icing for a while – bringing presents sometimes, playing with her sometimes, but never consistent, never there when she needed him. When he let Lucy down – which he always did, in the end, forgetting her birthday: It’s only a date on the calendar. Loosen up, Jane; promising to come to her party and not turning up: I can’t stand an afternoon of screeching kids; saying, ‘Of course I’ll come and see you in the play, sweetheart,’ and never arriving, so Lucy cried and refused to perform and said, ‘We can’t start yet, my daddy’s not here’: Look, something cropped up. Stop nagging, Jane – when he let Lucy down, Jane always made excuses for him, always made him look good in Lucy’s eyes. But how to explain it? She tried to sum it up briefly and thought she saw a glimmer of amusement in the man’s eyes. ‘Joel wouldn’t kidnap Lucy.’ she added. ‘He’d pay a ransom for someone to take her off his hands.’
Jane put her face in her hands, then looked up. ‘Joel doesn’t live in Sheffield.’ she said wearily. ‘Lucy won’t be there.’ Suzanne intercepted a quick look between DI McCarthy and Hazel Austen. She flushed. She could have told them that straight away. Jane forestalled the next question. ‘Leeds,’ she said. ‘He lives in Leeds. And he’s in London at the moment, working.’ Her face, normally pale, was white, and she looked exhausted. The words were beginning to spill out as though this was her last defence, and when the words were gone there would be nothing left. ‘She’ll be hungry. She hasn’t had any lunch. She’s small – it’s the asthma. She’s very brave, Lucy, but she does get frightened in the dark. She’s got to be back before it gets dark. She’ll be frightened on her own.’ She looked at the man who was listening impassively to her words. ‘I need to go and find her.’
McCarthy looked at Jane for a moment and seemed to relent. His voice was gentler. ‘There are people out now looking for her.’ Suzanne caught his eye for a second, and read there his belief that Lucy was one of the few. She felt a terrible sense of helplessness.
Lucy crept round the bushes and listened. The sounds were changing. There had been footsteps before, soft on the old leaves, backwards and forwards in the bushes. She’d stayed quiet as anything. She’d heard the whoosh of a bike on the muddy path, but she hadn’t looked. She’d run away from the Ash Man, but there were monsters in the woods.
She’d found places between the stones, places where she could hide and no one would find her. She’d heard someone calling once: ‘Lucy! Lucy!’ But it wasn’t a voice she knew, so she’d kept quiet, like a mouse, she’d whispered to Tamby in her head. But now she could hear children calling in the playground. Maybe it was safe now. She scrambled through the bushes and found her way down to the path again. She didn’t go to the playground. She wanted to go home. She wasn’t supposed to walk through the woods by herself, and most of all she wasn’t supposed to cross the roads. She wished that Sophie was there. Sophie knew what to do.
She hopped down the shallow steps that led to the stream and balanced on the stones that marked the edge of the path. She jumped from one stone to the next, from one foot to the other, moving quickly before she lost her balance. Then she was at the place where the path divided, and she climbed quickly up to the dam. Sometimes people were there fishing, and Lucy and Sophie used to watch them. Lucy liked to look at the boxes with wriggling maggots in. Once, Lucy saw one of the fishermen eating them, but Sophie said that was disgusting. ‘He really was,’ Lucy had said. ‘Really. I saw them in his mouth.’ Disgusting. Lucy looked round. Emma wasn’t there. There were no fishermen. There was no one at the dam, no one anywhere. She wanted Sophie. She wanted her mum. She wanted to go home. Her chest felt sore, and she didn’t have her medicine. Emma had her medicine. She walked further along the path to the end of the dam. She was tired, as well. She was at the cottages now and the long steps that led back down to the stream. She scrambled down them, being careful to step on each step just once, and not put her foot on the cracks. If you weren’t careful like that, the monsters would get you.
Suzanne looked at her watch and realized with a jolt of guilt that she should be at the school waiting for Michael. She should have been there watching him singing in his class concert. She’d promised. And she’d promised Dave. She looked at Jane. She didn’t want to talk about collecting children from school, remind Jane that she should have been collecting Lucy now. ‘I’ll be back soon,’ she said.
She ran down the hill to the school gates, fortunately only five minutes away. She thought about Michael waiting on his own in the playground, maybe setting off by himself to find her. It could happen so easily, one slip, one moment of inattention and … 7 hold you responsible for this, Suzanne! She was suddenly aware of the air she was breathing, feeling it insubstantial in her lungs as though all the oxygen had been leached out of it. Her face and hands were tingling and she had stabbing pains in her chest. She was in the playground now, outside the pre-fab that housed Michael’s class. She made herself stop, leant against the low wall and concentrated on getting her breathing under control.
It used to happen all the time. As soon as she found herself alone and responsible for Michael she would panic. She remembered Dave’s look, first of sympathy, then concern and finally exasperation and anger. ‘Postnatal depression,’ her doctor had said, airily. But it had never got any better.
All her earlier sense of well-being had vanished into a black pit of fear and guilt and tension. She realized that she couldn’t do it. Not now, not with Lucy gone, not with all the things that the weekend might bring. That decision helped her to calm down, and she was able to step through the classroom door and be there for the end of the concert.
She waved to Michael whose face brightened when he saw her. Lisa Boyden, Michael’s teacher, slipped across to her with a whispered query about Lucy. Of course, the police would have checked the school. She shook her head to indicate that there was no news, and waited impatiently for the concert to finish.
It was gone four by the time she got Michael out of the school gates. He was full of chatter, pleased to see her, looking forward to his weekend, full of his day, full of the concert, ready to forgive her lateness as she had turned up in the end. She smiled, though her face felt frozen. She said, ‘Did you?’ and ‘Did they?’ and ‘That’s good,’ as they walked up the road, concentrating on keeping her breathing under control, not hearing a word he said. She felt his talk fading away as he became aware of her inattention, saw his face go puzzled and unhappy. She wanted to pick him up and hug him and tell him she was sorry. Instead, she said, ‘We’re going to Dad’s first.’ He looked at her and nodded, a resignation on his face that hurt because it seemed a little too worldly, a little too knowing. Responsible!
Dave lived on the other side of the park and, preoccupied, she turned them both through the park gates. ‘Look at all the policemen!’ Michael was suddenly delighted. ‘There’s been a robber,’ he said.
Suzanne looked around her. There were two patrol cars parked by the playing field, and men in uniform were talking to people, showing them pictures. There was a van, a police van, with dark lettering underneath its standard insignia. She screwed up her eyes to read it. UNDERWATER SEARCH. The dams. Her chest tightened. ‘Yes, I expect they’ve caught him,’ she said, trying to keep her voice under control. ‘Come on, let’s get to Dad’s. Let’s see what he’s doing.’
‘I want to watch. I want to stay.’ Michael began to force tears into his voice, dragging on her hand. He could tell she was in a hurry.
She swallowed her impatience. They had to get out of the park before … ‘Come on, Michael.’ Her panic came out as anger and she hated herself for it. He subsided and came, showing rebellion with scuffing shoes and intermittent draggings.
As they approached Dave’s house, Suzanne could hear the sound of music pouring out of the stereo, the discordant rhythms of the modern composers that she hated and Dave loved. At least he was in. She pressed the bell, remembered that it didn’t work and knocked on the door. ‘Dad won’t hear that,’ Michael observed practically, and hammered on the door with his fists.
‘All right. I heard you.’ Dave’s truculent expression softened when he saw Michael, then changed back as he looked at Suzanne. He swung his son up to his shoulder in greeting. ‘Hi, Mike the tyke. Come home early?’
‘Can I watch cartoons?’ He’d forgotten Suzanne, forgotten the burglar in the park – he was just glad to be home, Suzanne saw with a stab of pain.
‘Go on, Mike. I’ll join you in a minute,’ Dave said, still looking at Suzanne, still unfriendly. He knew why she was here. ‘Well?’ He was making no concessions. ‘Can’t you even manage …’ He looked at her more closely, and his face showed exasperation and impatience.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. Getting the words out round her uneven breathing, she told him about Lucy, about the escalating build-up to what seemed an inevitable ending. ‘I don’t want Michael around if … I don’t think he should be near that.’ It would have sounded sensible and practical if she could have said it coherently.
‘Does Mike understand that? Christ, Suze, I can see the problem …’ Which, of course, he could. ‘But how often does Mike get to spend time with you?’ Suzanne felt the guilt twist in her. Dave was right.
‘It’s been hours now,’ she said. ‘And there’s something the police aren’t telling us. I think something’s happened.’ He looked at her and nodded, recognizing her assessment of the situation. ‘If I’m wrong, Michael can come back tomorrow, he can have his weekend …’
Dave shook his head. ‘He’s not a bloody pet, Suze. If he comes home tonight, he stays home. You can have him next weekend instead. I’m going away, and it’ll be easier without Mike.’ Was this the new girlfriend she’d heard about? Michael had talked about her before – what was the name? Carol? Carol does eggs with faces on … She felt confused, disorientated, with a sense of everything suddenly out of her control. ‘If you’re so worried about Jane,’ he went on, his impatience making him cruel, ‘you’d better get yourself sorted out.’
Jane. And Lucy. She’d been gone nearly an hour. Anything could have happened. She tried a conciliatory goodbye to Dave, but his face remained unforgiving. Michael was watching cartoons and shrugged her off impatiently when she tried to kiss him.
Her head was pounding. Dave was right. She needed to get herself under control before she went back. She decided to walk back through the park, and went on up the road to come in at a gate further into the woods. She couldn’t help Jane any more. What could she do or say? There was nothing to do or say. That detective had understood that, she realized. He knew that words were useless. It was what you did that counted.
She turned in to the park. She’d taken Michael by the road after they’d seen the searching police. Now she wanted to look, to see what was going on in the further reaches. Uneasily, she thought about that odd notice – it had been pushed out of her mind by later events. She should have told someone. She’d have to tell them as soon as she got back. But it couldn’t have anything to do with this. Lucy and Emma had gone to the playground in the first park. There was a main road and a long path between there and here. She looked round. There were no police. No patrol car, no one looking through the bushes – this part of the park was deserted. It was as if they had given up and gone home.
The sun was low in the sky now, the shadows of the trees slanting across the path. Suzanne walked slowly, letting the quiet ease her tension and letting the park take over her senses. She could see the pattern of light and shadow on the path. She could feel the early evening sun on her arms. She stood there under the trees, listening to the sound of children playing in the distance, the sound of the birds on the dam, the sound … That was new, different. A rhythmic, creaking sound that she didn’t recognize, and water, churning, running fast under pressure. She looked round trying to locate the source. Sound could be deceptive down in the park – it bounced off walls, off trees, deceived you into looking for it in the wrong directions and the wrong places. She realized that she’d been hearing the sound for a while. Her eyes moved round to Shepherd Wheel on the other side of the stream. That was it, that was where it was coming from. It took a moment before she could identify the noise, and then she wasn’t sure. It was – surely – the sound of the water-wheel turning.
She almost walked on, but why was the wheel working at this time of day? Why was the wheel working at all? The council had closed the place down, oh, years ago. Slowly she turned and crossed the bridge over the stream. As she walked towards the building she looked for a way in. The doors and windows were closed and shuttered. She followed the path round to the yard. The gate was padlocked. She frowned. She could hear the wheel clearly now: creak, creak. She shook the gate. The lock rattled. She went back and tried the door. It was bolted solid, the padlock bright and polished.
The events of the day coalesced into a picture she didn’t want to see. Lucy. The strange young man. The turning wheel. The gate was high metal bars, with a line of spikes at the top: the fence was the same, but it was overgrown with ivy and she was able to hook her foot into a branch and hoist herself up to grip the top of the fence. The branch snapped and she scraped her leg as she slipped, but she managed to keep her hold, to haul herself up further, her foot feeling for another hold in the ivy. There! Now she had her knee on the bar at the top of the fence. That would support her as she edged over the rusty spikes. God knows what she would do if she slipped and impaled herself. Now she had a foot on the other side of the fence. Awkwardly crouched over, she pulled herself across and, holding onto the spikes, lowered herself into the yard.
Her arms ached and her leg smarted where she had scraped it. It had occurred to her as she dropped into the yard that she would be in trouble if there were drunks or vandals, because she had no easy way out, but the lack of voices, of human sound, had reassured her, and she was right. There was no one there, just the wheel, turning and turning, the sluice open, the water falling onto the blades, the wheel turning down, down into the shadows, darker under the trees now that the sun was lower. The water cascaded, throwing out a spray of droplets that shone in rainbow colours where the sun caught them. As she watched, the flood of water narrowed, became a trickle, the rainbow lights faded and the wheel slowed, slowed and stopped. She moved closer to the railing and looked over the edge, down into the darkness where the wheel had turned.
Flowers in the water. Someone had scattered blue flowers that swirled in the turbulence left by the wheel, and the rays of the sun came through the canopy of the trees and turned the surface of the water into patterns of silver and blue, light and flowers, water and forget-me-nots. The bright light dimmed as a cloud crossed the sun, and the water was suddenly transparent, the stones on the wall beneath the water a soft yellow, the fronds of the fern dancing where they dipped below the surface. There was her reflection again, staring up at her from deep down, down beneath the wheel, down in the shadows, in the darkness. But the face was a bleached white, the eyes blank, staring, and the hair waving in the current was pale gold.
She didn’t remember climbing back out of the yard. She didn’t remember stopping the cyclist on the path. She just remembered sitting on the dry and stony ground, her back pressed against the wall as the feet ran past her.
Lucy. Lucy in the water under the churning wheel.
3 (#ulink_3d40546b-5308-5eb7-a8b1-6d6ffb288b89)
The body of the young woman had been pulled partly into the conduit that took the water back into the stream. A diver had gone down into the narrow space to free her from the grip of the water, so that they could, slowly and carefully, lift her out. The forget-me-nots caught in her hair and stuck to her face as she came out of the water. There were red marks around her mouth and, as her head lolled back against the man lifting her, a trickle of bloodstained water ran down her face. Suspicious death. She was young: seventeen, eighteen? She was wearing a T-shirt, nothing on her feet.
Detective Inspector Steve McCarthy looked away, at the scene around him. The wheel was still and silent. There was a smell of damp stone and wood in the air, of weed and stagnant water. The yard was fading into shadows as the sun sank lower behind the trees. A breeze blew, and the trees sighed and rustled, sending the shadows chasing across the flagstones. The flagstones of the yard were mossy and overgrown. The scene-of-crime team were already going over the ground and the wheel, looking for traces of the person or the people who had dumped the girl in the water, who had set the mechanisms going. McCarthy frowned. He couldn’t understand the turning wheel. It had attracted attention to the place.
As the team lowered the body onto the stretcher, the senior investigating officer, Detective Superintendent Tom Brooke, passed his quick, professional eye over it and looked at the pathologist. She shrugged her shoulders. ‘I can’t tell you anything at the moment. She doesn’t look as though she’s been in the water for long, but I don’t know what that current will have done to any evidence.’
‘What do you think, Steve?’
‘Some kind of freak accident?’ McCarthy, observing beside Brooke, very much wanted it to have been an accident. He had just left a murder inquiry, one that had dragged on for several weeks without so much as the identity of the victim – a vagrant, an old man someone had kicked and then slashed to death with a broken whisky bottle – being found out. He’d planned to take some leave. Another murder inquiry would put paid to that straight away.
‘I’ve no idea.’ The pathologist looked at McCarthy with dislike. She thought he was a cold fish. ‘I can’t tell you anything until I’ve done the PM.’ They watched as the stretcher was wheeled out of the yard to the waiting ambulance.
The pathologist’s refusal to give an opinion didn’t bother McCarthy. He’d known before he asked the question that this was no accident. When he’d first seen the face in the water, he’d thought, Kids messing about. The park was a playground for the local teenagers in the evenings and at night. They played interesting games. From the road after dark, you could see firelight in the woods. In the mornings, the litter of broken bottles, used condoms, empty cans, told their own stories. Needles in the old toilets, graffiti on the buildings and even on the trees. Girls and boys come out to play … She could have been a member of one of the gangs, could have been messing around, got the wheel started, fallen in and drowned. Poetic justice in McCarthy’s mind. But he knew that theory was unlikely.
The pathologist had finished packing her things together. McCarthy walked back to her car with her. ‘Do you know who she is?’ she asked.
‘We’ve got a seventeen-year-old answers the description, Emma Allan. We haven’t got an official identification yet. But the woman who found the body says it’s her. It’s all tied up with the missing-child case from earlier on.’ He caught the pathologist’s glance. ‘No, the child turned up safe and well.’
‘The woman who found her,’ the pathologist persisted, ‘can’t she make it official?’
‘She said it was the child at first,’ McCarthy replied, remembering the woman’s white-faced incoherence. ‘She didn’t know she’d been found.’ He anticipated the next comment. ‘It was understandable, but we don’t need an identification from someone who sees what she expects to see, rather than what’s there.’
The pathologist looked at him for a moment and shrugged. ‘I’ll get back then,’ she said, pulling off her gloves.
McCarthy looked at the long expanse of the park stretching away west towards the countryside and east back into the city. He’d already worked out that the park was almost impossible to seal off. The gates at either end were blocked; he’d arranged for the path closer to Shepherd Wheel to be closed, but access from the woods, the allotments, across the fields – the park was wide open. They needed to complete the searches of the scene quickly. They needed to get the yard checked, and the wheel. They still needed to find the place where the woman had been killed.
At first, McCarthy’s money had been on the yard behind the mill, secluded and shielded from observers by trees. But there was no evidence of anything on those mossy stones. One of the SOCOs had found traces of blood on the wall of the mill, the wall that ran straight down into the water, forming one side of the wheel pit. There was a small, dark window in that wall, a few feet above the water. Brooke thought they’d find the evidence they wanted inside the locked-up mill. That scene was secure, and he was content to wait until they had more daylight to work by.
They’d had trouble contacting a key-holder. They’d had to break open the padlock on the yard gate, but the workshop itself could wait. That reminded McCarthy of something else he needed to do. He went back to the old bridge to talk to the woman who’d found the dead girl. He’d recognized her as soon as he’d arrived. It was the woman with the wary eyes, who had watched him from her seat beside Jane Fielding, as though she was defending her friend from him. She’d said very little apart from giving him a vivid thumbnail sketch of Lucy’s father that McCarthy would have found entertaining under other circumstances.
She had been sitting on the ground by the old workshop, her knees drawn up, her head resting on her arms. He had gone up to her, and she’d lifted her head and looked at him with shocked, blank eyes, her face drained so that the wash of colour from the sun looked almost yellow. She hadn’t seemed to take it in when he’d said to her, ‘It isn’t Lucy. Lucy’s safe. It isn’t a child.’ He’d knelt down beside her to make sure she’d understood him, and she’d stiffened as though she found his presence threatening. She’d muttered something about responsible or responsibility, and tried to stand up, weaving a little as the shock took her. He’d held her arm, and waved one of the WPCs over. ‘Look after …’ He paused.
‘Milner,’ she’d said. ‘Suzanne Milner. I’m fine. I just stood up too quickly. I’m fine.’
‘OK, Mrs Milner, but I’ll need to talk to you before you go.’ He’d given the officer some instructions, and then gone to where Brooke was waiting, watching the men working in the wheel yard. Now, as he headed back to the woman, he wondered who to get to interview her. He ran his mind over the things she might have seen and not seen, the things he needed to get her to remember. He thought about her story of the wheel slowing and stopping as she watched it. Who had stopped it?
What did he know about her? Nothing, except she had some connection with the Fielding woman. It had all seemed like a rather arty, new-age setup – not McCarthy’s kind of thing at all. Her story puzzled him. She’d apparently climbed the gate to look in the wheel yard – a climb that McCarthy wouldn’t have liked to tackle, not with those spikes threatening vulnerable bits. He wondered what she’d expected to find.
It was midnight. Suzanne sat at her desk, her head in her hands. She couldn’t sleep. She kept seeing that face in the water, and it kept being Lucy. There was something unreal, dreamlike, about the whole thing. The detective – what was his name? McCarthy, that was it – had told her: It isn’t Lucy. Lucy’s safe. It isn’t a child, but she couldn’t get that picture of Lucy’s face out of her mind. She’d gone round to Jane’s as soon as they told her she could go but the house was locked up and empty. She’d come back home and wandered listlessly round, picking up discarded books, shoes, cups and putting them down again. The shards of her weekend lay around her. She bit her thumbnail until a sudden pain warned her that she’d bitten it below the quick. She wondered about phoning Dave, but that would give him a chance to say those things again: Can’t you even …? He’s not a bloody pet, Suze … !
She sorted through some of the papers that were in her Monday’s to-do pile, ordering them by size, large on the top, small on the bottom, then reversing the order. They wouldn’t make a neat pyramid either way, because they were different shapes and sizes. She went and stood by the window, looking out into the now dark street.
Q. But, you haven’t told me. Where do you go in the evenings? You know, going out, seeing your friends, things like that.
A. Simon’s got somewhere.
Q. Simon? Is that your brother?
A. Er … not … I can’t … (Pause 5 seconds.)
Q. In the evenings, Ashley. You said that Simon’s got somewhere. Is that where you go?
A. Yes.
Q. Where is it?
A. It’s … I can’t … em … It’s … you go down by the garage, where Lee’s name is.
Q. Lee? Do you see Lee in the evenings?
A. Not … It’s so and … em … they said it was all going to be different. I don’t know, I didn’t know …
Q. What? I’m sorry, Ashley, I don’t follow you.
A. Doesn’t matter.
The tape ran on. Her mind, in the way that it did when she was tired, drifted away from her. She was in the office at the Alpha Project, talking to Richard Kean, the Alpha psychologist. He’d made the rules clear. ‘You can’t have access to the confidential records,’ he’d said. ‘And that includes their police records, I’m afraid. Not at this stage. They all have the kinds of profile you were looking for: persistent, destructive criminal behaviour.’ She’d nodded in agreement. She wasn’t about to argue after the weeks of careful negotiation it had taken her to get through the door of the centre. She’d … The machine clicked, and she realized that the tape had run on to its end. Maybe she ought to go to bed. She wasn’t concentrating. She pressed the REWIND button and watched as the numbers on the counter reversed themselves. Then she pressed PLAY.
Q. Tell me about your family, Ashley.
A. Er … It’s not …
Q. Sorry, you don’t have to tell me if you’d rather not.
A. Yes.
Q. You want to tell me?
A. Brothers and sisters?
Q. If …
A. (Laughs.) Brothers and sisters.
Q. Sorry, Ashley, I don’t understand.
A. Er … So … em … loose …
Q. What?
A. Simon.
Q. Simon is your brother?
A. Yes.
She’d asked Richard about that, after she’d taped Ashley. ‘Ashley says he has a brother. I’d got the impression he was an only child.’
Richard had pulled at his lip, thinking. ‘Well, if he’s been talking to you … It isn’t confidential as such. Ashley’s background is very disrupted. He has a brother who went into care years ago. He was autistic; the family couldn’t cope. Then when they found out Ashley had problems, that was when he went into care as well.’ He was more forthcoming these days, more inclined to treat her like another professional. ‘That’s the root of Ashley’s problem, I think. No one wanted him. He’s never had anyone who really cared about him. That’s hard to cope with.’
The tape ran on. Never had anyone who loved him. Suzanne had loved Adam, but that hadn’t been enough. Her mind was too tired to resist the images. The wet stone had sprouted weeds and ferns, a lush growth that flourished away from the light. The stones were green with lichen. Far down, the water was racing, smooth and strong. Someone was looking up at her from under the water, but she couldn’t make out the features, the current was too fast. Then it cleared, and the eyes opened and looked at her with fear and panic and pleading. Adam’s face, looking up at her from under the water.
Lucy lay in bed, the covers pulled up to her chin. It was late. She was tired, but she didn’t want to go to sleep. Not yet. She’d been to a place with her mum, and talked about the park to Alicia. Alicia said she was a policeman, but she wasn’t a proper one, in a uniform, with a hat. There were voices downstairs – Mum and Dad talking. Her daddy had come all the way from London on his motor bike. She heard Daddy’s voice getting louder. He was cross with Mum.
She turned over in bed. She hadn’t told. She’d kept the secret, but she didn’t know what to do now. She wished Sophie was there. Sophie would know. She turned over again. Her bed wouldn’t get comfortable. She looked at the window. It was dark outside. She couldn’t see it because the curtains were drawn, but she knew the dark was there. It was OK, though. Tamby would be watching. Chasing… Sophie would say, monsters… But Tamby would watch. All safe, she told him in her head.
She heard Daddy’s voice: ‘For fuck’s sake, Jane, what did she say?’ and then his voice got quieter. She knew what they were talking about. They thought she didn’t know, but she did. They were talking about Emma. The monsters had got Emma, Lucy knew that. Emma was the grown-up and Lucy was the little girl, but Lucy knew about monsters. She’d tried to tell Emma, but Emma wouldn’t listen. Emma thought it was safe to play with the monsters, but Lucy knew. You play with the monsters one, two, three times, and they get you. Lucy sighed. She had tried to look out for Emma, she really had.
Daddy’s voice, loud again. ‘I want to know what she said!’
She looked at the curtain. It was moving, just a bit, just the way it did when it was draughty. It’s just the draught, Mum said. Lucy didn’t know where to watch, and the dark made it harder. It was like that game they played in the yard at school, Grandmother’s Footsteps. You turned your back and they all came for you, moving so quietly you couldn’t hear them. You turned really quickly, but they were still as anything. You never saw them move, but each time you turned, they were in a different place, nearer and nearer. But they couldn’t move as long as you were looking at them.
She was only six, but she knew about the monsters.
4 (#ulink_eaba74c9-ca57-5e83-98cb-d26a7d8a7ed5)
When Suzanne finally fell asleep, she dreamt. It was the familiar dream, the one she had thought she was free of, of Adam, calling to her: Look at me, Suzanne! Listen to me, Suzanne! And her father: I hold you responsible for this, Suzanne! She pulled herself out of sleep in panic, gasping, disorientated. She sat up, trying to see the clock face. The sky outside was beginning to lighten. It was nearly five. Her nightdress felt damp, and her legs were tangled up in the sheets. Adam’s face stayed with her, bringing the familiar cold lump in her stomach. She pushed the image away. Over. Gone.
The relief she’d felt faded as the events of the evening before came back into her head. She tried to shut the memory of Emma firmly out of her mind, but she couldn’t stop herself from thinking about what it would be like to be held under the water as the wheel churned above you, or to feel someone’s cold hands on you with killing intent, to … The pictures in her mind were spinning out of control now. Look at me … Listen to me …
She needed to get up, do something. It was five to five. She’d go and work on the tapes again for a couple of hours, then have breakfast.
They searched the workshop at Shepherd Wheel at first light the next morning. The roads were empty as McCarthy drove from his flat towards the park. He left his car in the entrance to the park and walked the few hundred yards to Shepherd Wheel, enjoying the silence, broken by the birdsong, the emptiness, and the stillness of the morning. Shepherd Wheel looked tranquil in the early sun, the moss-covered roof glowing a warm yellow, the walls and path dappled with shadow.
A key-holder from the museums department was there to open up the workshops for them, a young woman who, McCarthy noticed, looked anything but put out at her out-of-hours excursion. If anything, she looked excited. He guessed she was in her late twenties. She had short chestnut hair in untidy curls, her face slightly flushed, eyes shining as she took in the scene. She smiled and held out her hand. ‘Liz Delaney. Hello.’
He shook her hand. ‘Steve McCarthy.’ Yesterday’s search had found very little in the yard. Now they needed to look inside the workshops themselves. There were two doors, painted municipal green, with heavy hasps for the padlocks that kept the building closed and secure. He took the keys that Liz Delaney was holding out to him. ‘How long is it since someone was last in there?’ he asked her.
‘I don’t know exactly,’ she said. ‘Someone comes up here and checks it regularly.’ She smiled up at him.
McCarthy thought, tossing the keys in his hand. ‘How long since it’s been open to the public?’
She frowned slightly and shrugged. McCarthy kept looking at her. ‘Oh, a few months, I think,’ She waited out McCarthy’s silence for a moment. ‘It’s not really my job. It was closed before I ever worked for this department.’
Actually, McCarthy knew, she was wrong. Shepherd Wheel had been open for public access at the beginning of May, just five weeks before. Before that, it had been open for European Heritage Day, or some such crap that people seemed determined to spend McCarthy’s hard-earned taxes on. But someone had had access to the place since then.
The first door opened into a small workshop with barred windows in the whitewashed walls. It was light, the window facing the early morning sun. A central aisle ran between protective barriers of wood and mesh, to keep visitors away from the grindstones. A layer of dust lay over the machines. The air smelt dry and closed in. Dead leaves lay in the aisle, where they had blown in under the door. Wheels, plates, oil cans were stacked around the room, on window sills and against the walls. Above his head, a shaft ran across the ceiling and through a hole in the wall to the next workshop. It would have carried the power from the water-wheel to the stones on either side of the aisle.
To McCarthy’s eye, the place looked untouched, abandoned. He doubted if the surreptitious visitor to Shepherd Wheel had been in here.
The second door led into a larger workshop. McCarthy pushed the door open and stepped inside. A sour, organic smell hit him in the face, very different from the dry, dusty smell of the first workshop. This room was darker, the windows that lit it still shuttered and shadowed by the trees. The air was damp, chilly after the warmth outside. The sound of water, a dripping, trickling noise, cut into the silence. Shapes lumped in the dark corners, light from the windows catching the teeth of a gear wheel, reflecting off a belt. The dust lay thick in this room too. McCarthy looked round. Behind him he could make out a fireplace in the wall. He shone his torch at it. The bars of the grate were rusty. There were ashes in the grate and in the ash bucket and on the hearth below. The dust in front of the fire was scuffed, disturbed.
He directed the light from his torch along the flag-stoned floor and up the wall. There were dark stains where the dust was disturbed, something long and trailing caught on the bars of the grate – threads? Hair? McCarthy stood back as the scene-of-crime team moved in to work. He had already observed the bundle of cloth by the old fire, the drag marks in the dust, and, as he looked more closely, the glint of tinfoil, partly blackened, in the grate. He knew it would take time to comb the workshops, test the forensic samples, continue the hunt for the murder weapon that, so far, was proving elusive. There was a clatter as the shutters swung back, and a dull light filled the room.
A. There’s nowhere to go.
Q. Oh? How do you mean?
A. There’s nowhere to go.
Q. Do you mean – in your spare time, things like that?
A. Sometimes.
Q. So what do you like to do then? In your spare time?
A. So … ?
Q. What do you do?
A. I thought we were together.
Q. What? Sorry, Ashley, I didn’t get that.
A. So, I’m sorry.
Q. Ashley, do you want to do this? Only …
A. I’m telling you!
Suzanne clicked off the recorder and glanced at the clock. Half past seven. Time for a break. She determinedly kept her mind focused on her work. She could get up to the university, put in some useful hours at the library. She could start doing some serious analysis of the tape, have something to show Maggie Lewis, her supervisor, on Wednesday when they next met. She stretched. She had showered, but hadn’t bothered to get dressed, and now she couldn’t decide whether to put some clothes on, or to have breakfast first. She had an appointment at police HQ in town. What to wear probably required a bit more thought than usual. Breakfast first, then a bit of power dressing, something to boost her morale.
She was standing in the kitchen making toast when there was a knock on the door. Before she could say anything, it was pushed half open and Joel Severini, Lucy’s father, slid round it with his slow smile. ‘How are you?’ he said, with that slight, characteristic emphasis on the ‘you’. He was wearing jeans and an unbuttoned shirt. His feet were bare.
‘Joel.’ Suzanne stopped in the kitchen doorway, suddenly aware of her thin dressing gown. She hadn’t expected to see Joel, though he had been around more often recently, now that she came to think about it. ‘What are you doing here?’ It came out more coldly than she’d intended, but she didn’t soften it with any further comment. Why bother? She didn’t like Joel, and he didn’t like her. There was no secret about that.
His eyes narrowed slightly, but he took this as an invitation to come right in, and stood opposite her, leaning his shoulder against the wall. He kept his eyes on her for a beat or two before he answered. ‘Lucy. She went missing.’
‘Yes, I know.’ Suzanne shrugged herself deeper into her dressing gown. His gaze made her uncomfortable. So? she wanted to add.
‘Well, then.’ His tone implied that her question was unnecessary. Maybe she was being unfair. Jane always insisted that Joel cared about Lucy. In his way. And he clearly had come straight over as soon as he’d heard.
‘How is she? Lucy? And Jane?’
‘They’re OK. Panic over. They’re both still asleep. Look, have you got a decent cup of tea over here?’ He looked across the yard to Jane’s back door. ‘Only it’s all flowers and herbs over there, know what I mean?’
She indicated the cupboard. ‘Help yourself.’ Maybe then he’d go.
He crossed over to the cooker and checked the kettle for water. ‘You having one?’ Suzanne shook her head. She had expected him to take some teabags and leave. She didn’t want him in her house. She waited as he made himself a drink, watching him as he moved around the room. His jeans fitted low round his narrow hips, and she could see the smooth arrow of hair on his stomach. When she had first met him, what, nearly six years ago, she had liked him. In the middle of the chaos that surrounded Michael’s birth and the sudden and unstoppable disintegration of her marriage, he had seemed gentle and sympathetic. When Dave, who was working long hours, got impatient with her, Joel would say, ‘Loosen up, Dave,’ and give her that slow smile. Sometimes when she was on her own because Dave had a gig that took him away overnight, he would drop in with some beer and spend an hour or so talking to her. It had been a seduction – or, more accurately, a non-seduction – of the most humiliating kind.
He listened, encouraging her to talk about Adam, about Michael, and said the comforting things that her father had never said to her. When she blamed herself for the way she and Dave were falling apart, he reluctantly (it seemed) criticized Dave for his lack of support, reluctantly told her about the women Dave saw when he played a gig, gradually progressing their relationship from the soothing hand on her hair, the arm round the shoulder into an (apparently unacknowledged) desire. And yes, OK, she had wanted him, even though he was Jane’s partner, even though he was Dave’s friend.
And he’d known and he’d made his move one evening when she and Dave had had a particularly vicious row. She’d managed to stop herself, even though fantasies about an encounter with him had kept her going through some of the blacker moments. He’d laughed at her – not a sympathetic laugh for her foolish scruples, or even a feigned humour disguising his anger. It had been contempt. ‘It’s called a sympathy fuck, Suzie. You won’t get too many offers coming your way. Look at you,’ he’d said. He hadn’t wanted her – the casual contempt of his words confirmed that – but he’d wanted to know he could have her. And then he’d gone, and she really had no one to blame but herself.
The drip, drip of poison that Joel had fed into her ears about Dave, he had fed into Dave’s ears about her. She couldn’t blame Joel for the break-up of her marriage, but he’d been a factor, something that had tipped a fragile balance at a crucial moment. She had never told Jane what had happened. She was too ashamed.
Dave had changed, got older, more serious, but Joel seemed no different to her now than he had six years ago. She realized with a shock that he must be over forty. He looked up suddenly and caught her looking at him. His smile widened slightly, not reaching his eyes. ‘So what happened yesterday?’ His question was unexpected, but more, it was the masked concern in his voice that surprised her. She began to tell him about the morning, about realizing that Lucy and Emma were missing, but he interrupted her. ‘No. I got all that from Jane. About fifty times. What happened after Lucy came back?’
She shook her head. ‘I don’t know anything. Jane and Lucy were gone by the time I got home.’
He drank some tea, staring out of the window, his eyes narrowed in speculation. ‘They interviewed Lucy. Jane let them. She wasn’t even allowed to sit in on it. “Oh, Lucy was fine about it,” she says.’ He looked angry.
‘I suppose Jane thought – if it helps find … I mean, Emma was – killed, wasn’t she? It wasn’t an accident?’
Joel shrugged. ‘It was too soon for them to be going after Lucy. They don’t have a clue. Look, Jane listens to you. You tell her. Tell her to make them leave Lucy alone.’ He emptied his cup into the sink, his face hard.
‘Jane knows what’s best for Lucy,’ she said. She wasn’t listening to any criticisms from Joel.
His eyes met hers. ‘You’d know, would you, Suzie?’ Her eyes dropped. He was right. How would she know? ‘I phoned Dave,’ he went on. ‘He’s mightily pissed off with you.’ He was still smiling. ‘Just think. If you’d brought Mike straight here, Lucy would have been home, and you’d never have got involved.’ She didn’t say anything. He put the empty cup down, not taking his eyes off her. He had to pass her on his way to the door. He put his hand lightly on her shoulder and she flinched, shaking him off. His eyes brightened. ‘Be sure your sins will find you out, hey, Suzie?’ he said. She heard him laughing as she slammed the door shut behind him.
The incident room was set up. Brooke was just finishing the first briefing of the inquiry, and the various teams were organizing their specific tasks. Tina Barraclough assessed the situation and waited to see what was going to happen. This was her first major inquiry since she had been promoted to detective constable, and she wanted to do a good job, make her mark. She looked at the people she would be working most closely with. Steve McCarthy she knew. She’d worked with him before. She’d have to keep on her toes because she remembered him as impatient and autocratic. Pete Corvin, her sergeant, was an unknown quantity. He was a heavy-set, red-faced man who looked more like a bouncer than a detective sergeant. Mark Griffith and Liam Martin, the other two DCs, she knew well enough. She’d worked with Mark when he was in uniform, and knew them both from the pub.
Emma Allan had died of asphyxiation. There were cuts inside her mouth and throat, knife wounds, the pathologist said, as though someone had thrust the blade hard into the girl’s mouth in a moment of rage. She had choked on the blood. The absence of defence injuries suggested that she had, up to the moment of the attack, trusted her assailant. There were needle marks on her arm. Tinfoil found in the grate had been used for cooking heroin, but they found no further evidence of drugs use there – no needles, no syringes, no wraps.
Steve McCarthy filled in the background. He ran through the events of the day before when Lucy Fielding had gone missing. It had looked at first like a crossed wires thing, something they were all familiar with, where a mother thought a child should be in one place, the person with the child thought they should be somewhere else. But a routine check had made the alarm bells ring.
Emma Allan, seventeen, had already come to police attention. At fourteen, she had been a persistent truant, involved in shoplifting and petty crime. She had run away from home twice before her fifteenth birthday, but after that had seemed to settle her differences with her parents, until recently. She had been reported missing by her father in March, after her mother’s death. She had a recent caution for possession, and had been picked up at the house of a known heroin user who funded his habit by dealing. ‘She gave the Fielding woman false information. She was passing herself off as a student, but she’d never registered at the university. She was too young, anyway,’ McCarthy said.
The picture of Emma’s recent life was unclear. Her father claimed not to have seen his daughter since the last time she left home. ‘Did he try? Did he look?’ Barraclough had problems with parents who didn’t look out for their children.
‘He said he did.’ McCarthy was adding a note to the sheet of paper he held. He looked at the team. ‘So far, we know that Emma was friendly with a student, Sophie Dutton. She looked after the Fielding child until about a month ago. Dutton lived at 14, Carleton Road, next door to Jane Fielding. It’s a student house. It’s empty now. We don’t know how well she knew the other tenants – that’s something that needs checking. But according to Fielding, and the other woman’ – he checked his notes again – ‘Milner, Emma Allan and Sophie Dutton were together a lot.’
‘Has Dutton got a record?’ Corvin was making the obvious connection.
McCarthy shrugged. ‘There’s nothing on file. According to Fielding, Dutton is driven snow. Doesn’t smoke, doesn’t drink, comes from a country village on the east coast.’ His unspoken scepticism was shared by the group. The clean-living Sophie Dutton sketched by McCarthy was an unlikely close friend for someone with Emma Allan’s interests and background.
‘How did they come to be friends? University students are pretty cliquey.’ Barraclough knew about the divide that existed between town and gown. McCarthy shook his head. They didn’t have that information.
‘We need to talk to the Dutton woman urgently,’ Brooke told the team. ‘We need to find out more about Emma’s recent background, find out where she was living, what she was doing, and who she was doing it with.’ He polished his glasses, his face looking strangely unfocused without them. ‘When did Dutton leave? She went back to her parents, is that right?’
McCarthy nodded. ‘According to the Fielding woman, she left in May. We’re trying to contact her at her parents’ now.’
Emma’s missing clothes had been found in a bundle by the hearth: blue jeans, pants and sandals. They weren’t torn or damaged in any way. There was no evidence of sexual assault. The pathologist was less certain about sexual activity. There had been no evidence, but the water would probably have destroyed it.
Brooke was winding up now. ‘OK. Any questions?’
‘One thing I can’t understand.’ Barraclough was reading through her notes. ‘I can understand why he might have dumped her under the water-wheel. He just had to push her through that back window – the yard is well screened. It might have been days – weeks – before she was found. But why set the wheel going? Did he want us to find her?’
Nobody had a good answer to that. ‘Someone a few bricks short of a load?’ Corvin suggested.
McCarthy nodded. ‘It could be. There’s been a flasher in that park recently, and there was the attack in those woods a couple of miles along the path, at Wire Mill Dam. That was twelve months ago. The case is still open.’
A random killer. They couldn’t exclude that possibility, Barraclough knew. A Peeping Tom in the park, someone who. had been watching Emma, watched her having sex with her boyfriend, got his own ideas about what he wanted to do. If Emma had gone to Shepherd Wheel willingly … she looked back through copies of the witness statements they’d managed to get so far. A dog walker had seen a woman answering Emma’s description walking towards Shepherd Wheel at around ten-thirty the morning of her death – Barraclough still couldn’t understand it as a rendezvous, a place to have sex. It seemed dark and uninviting. ‘Sticks a knife in her instead of his dick,’ Corvin said.
‘Someone who felt guilty – wants to be caught?’ Barraclough didn’t like the idea of a random killer – none of them did. These were the most difficult cases, and often the most high profile.
‘What about the father?’ Corvin made the logical follow-up to Barraclough’s point.
Brooke stepped in again. ‘Dennis Allan. Nothing recent, no social services reports. But he did time in 1982. Drink-driving conviction. Killed a kid; he got a year. We talked to him last night, just a preliminary. He’s coming in first thing. Steve, you do that interview. We need to know exactly why she left home.’ He paused for a moment, then answered the unspoken question. ‘He’s not in the clear, not by a long chalk.’
‘What happened to Emma’s mum?’ Corvin again.
Brooke looked at the team for a moment. His glasses caught the light, masking his expression. ‘She took an overdose. Died. The verdict was accidental death.’ A murmur ran round the room.
‘Guilt,’ Barraclough said.
Emma’s father was a small man in his early fifties. He was very unlike his pretty, fair-haired daughter. What hair he had was gingerish, streaked with grey. His face was puffy, the broken veins on his cheeks standing out against his pallor. He looked unhealthy and uncomfortable. He didn’t look, to McCarthy, like a bereaved parent. Emma’s record told a story that McCarthy didn’t like. Something had gone seriously wrong in her life, long before these events, long before her mother’s death. Emma wasn’t simply a teenager traumatized by bereavement.
They had gone through the formalities and had already established that Allan had no alibi for the previous morning. ‘What was I doing?’ he said, apparently surprised at the question. ‘I worked night shift. Came home and went to bed.’ No one had seen him, apart from the newsagent at about eight. He’d nipped in to the shop for a paper and some cigarettes. He began to look uneasy as the implications of McCarthy’s questions dawned on him. His face got more colour and his eyes went pinker round the lids. McCarthy waited to see if he would object, but he said nothing, just twisted his hands nervously.
‘Can we go back a few weeks, Mr Allan?’ McCarthy decided it was time for him to build up the pressure a bit. ‘I understand you lost your wife …’
‘In March, end of March.’ The man seemed pathetically eager to tell him.
McCarthy had the date in front of him. March 29. Dennis Allan had come off his shift at six that morning and found his wife dead. ‘I’m sorry.’ A necessary formality. ‘Could you tell me what happened? In your own time, Mr Allan.’
The man’s eyes got pinker, and he blinked. ‘Sandy, my wife, she …’ He seemed to be having trouble putting the words together. ‘She was ill, see, you know, in her mind. All through our marriage it was a problem. She was on pills, but they didn’t always work – made her dopey, so she’d stop them, and then …’ He looked down at his hands, twisting them together. McCarthy steepled his fingers against his mouth and nodded. Dennis Allan looked at him. ‘She was always, I mean she …’ He swallowed. ‘She used to try and harm herself, you know?’ McCarthy nodded again. ‘She didn’t mean it, not like that, not really, but when things got on top of her, she’d take her pills, you know …’ His eyes sought out Tina Barraclough’s, then McCarthy’s, looking for their understanding.
‘She’d take an overdose?’ Barraclough prompted.
He looked grateful. ‘She didn’t mean it,’ he said.
‘But this time?’ McCarthy watched the wash of colour that flooded the man’s face.
‘She took a lot of pills. And with some drink. She did it while I was at work. She …’ He put his head in his hands. A display of grief, natural for a man talking about such a recent bereavement, a man doubly bereaved. McCarthy wondered why he wasn’t convinced. He waited, aware that Barraclough was hovering on the brink of saying something to the distressed man. He shook his head slightly, and she sat back. McCarthy could detect disapproval in her set face. After a minute, Allan spoke again. ‘I found her. When I came back from work. I don’t know if she meant it.’
‘And Emma?’ McCarthy prompted quietly.
‘Emma just … She packed her bags that same day. Wouldn’t speak to me.’ He looked at the two officers, trying to gauge their understanding. ‘She just left. I tried to contact her at the college, but they said she’d never enrolled. Didn’t even come to her own mother’s funeral.’ His voice was bewildered.
The search for Lucy the day before had identified witnesses who remembered seeing Emma in the park, round about the time Jane Fielding said that she and Lucy had left. A woman walking back from delivering her daughter to school saw Emma and Lucy in the playground near the gate, and had wondered why Lucy wasn’t at school. There was a dog walker who remembered a young woman answering Emma’s description on the path to Shepherd Wheel, walking fast: ‘I noticed her because she looked a bit anxious.’ She had been alone. He was quite certain she had had no child with her. So what had happened to Lucy? McCarthy hoped the key would lie in the interview that the child protection team had recorded the evening before, shortly after a tired but otherwise unharmed Lucy had turned up in the woods half a mile above Shepherd Wheel.
But Lucy’s story was confusing and inconclusive. She was very young – just six – and fantasized and wove the things that happened to her into stories and daydreams. The child protection officer, Alicia Hamilton, was able to clarify some of the more puzzling aspects of her story. ‘It could be something or nothing,’ she had said as she discussed the tape of Lucy’s interview with the team, ‘but it seems that Emma invented this game of chasing the monsters. But there’s a bit more to it than that.’ Then Emma went to chase the monsters and I went to the swings. Well, she did but I ran away.
‘That bit’s interesting.’ Hamilton had stopped the tape. ‘It takes a while to sort out – you’ll see in a minute – but it looks as though Emma had a bit of a scam going. According to Lucy, Emma would go and chase off the monsters, and Lucy would stay in the playground. Then, as long as she was good, Emma would get her an ice cream.’ Lucy’s story was clear to this point, even to the point of knowing that whatever Emma was doing, it was dangerous.
I told her. One time, two times, three times. Then they get you.
But later on in the tape, the child’s fantasies became impenetrable.
Why did you go into the woods, Lucy?
Because the monsters. Because the Ash Man …
Tell me about the Ash Man, Lucy.
He’s Tamby’s friend. Only not really. Tamby’s my friend.
Who’s Tamby, Lucy?
He’s my friend.
What about the Ash Man?
The Ash Man … the Ash Man is Emma’s friend.
Tell me about him.
I said. He’s Emma’s friend. And Tamby is, too.
‘Her mother says that these are characters in her stories. “Tamby” is someone she pretends to play with in the garden and in the park. This “Ash Man” is some kind of giant or ogre …’ McCarthy felt his head begin to ache. Hamilton went on. ‘It isn’t all fantasy. There was someone – someone must have taken her up to the Forge Dam playground. It’s too far for a little thing like that to walk to by herself. And someone gave her money to buy ice cream. But who it was, Lucy can’t – or won’t – tell us.’
Suzanne waited until she heard the engine of Joel’s bike, the roar of subdued power from a machine far too expensive for someone who claimed he couldn’t afford to support his child, so that she was sure he had left. She slipped across the yard and knocked on Jane’s door, pushing it open as she did so. Jane was at the kitchen table, a mug in her hands, staring into space. Her sketch pad was in front of her. She stood up when Suzanne came in and gave her a quick hug. ‘I heard,’ she said by way of greeting. ‘You were the one who found her.’
Suzanne returned her hug. ‘How is she? Is she all right?’
Jane nodded, sitting down at the table again. ‘Yes. She’s a bit quiet, but she’s coming round. The police took me straight across to this place where they interview children.’ Jane reached across for the teapot and poured Suzanne a cup of pale tea. The smell of camomile drifted into the room.
‘What happened? Did anyone … ?’ Jane’s serene manner could be deceptive, Suzanne knew.
‘Emma just left her, just like that, and she wandered off by herself.’ Her normally gentle face was hard. ‘Apparently Emma made a habit of dumping Lucy and going off. Bribing her to stick around. And Lucy wouldn’t, not with a hospital appointment looming. The police think that someone was with her in the playground, but Lucy says not. She said she was hiding from the monsters. But she always does these days. And she said that Tamby helped her, and there was something about the Ash Man.’ Suzanne recognized the names from the times she sat with Lucy and listened to her stories. ‘I talked to her last night, and again this morning. I think she was on her own. She knows the way to Forge Dam. We’ve walked up there together often enough. I go cold when I think of her walking through those woods. And the roads.’ Her hands tightened round her cup, then she looked at Suzanne. ‘I feel so awful. I can’t believe I just let Emma …’
Suzanne knew all about guilt. ‘You thought you knew her. We both did.’
Jane wasn’t prepared to let herself off the hook. ‘I knew Sophie,’ she said. Suzanne waited, and after a moment, Jane went on. ‘Whoever … did it must have got Emma after she left Lucy, thank God. I don’t think she saw anything. Joel said I shouldn’t have let them interview her, but …’ Jane gave her a cautionary look as they heard footsteps on the stairs. She began leafing through her sketch book. ‘I did some drawings while I was waiting,’ she said.
Lucy came in, carrying the peacock feather, a present from Sophie that was one of her treasures. ‘Hello, Lucy,’ Suzanne said, then, unable to help herself, gave the little girl a hug.
Lucy wriggled impatiently. ‘I’m busy,’ she said.
‘I know, I’m sorry, Lucy. What are you doing?’
Lucy compressed her lips, then relented. ‘I’m playing. Tamby’s chasing the monsters.’ She looked at the two women. ‘I didn’t talk to the real police. I told Alicia about the monsters.’
‘The child protection officer,’ Jane said. ‘The one who interviewed her.’
Suzanne felt cold. ‘I know.’ We want to help the lad.
‘I’m going in the garden now,’ Lucy said.
Jane watched her as she went out into the back yard, the feather held carefully in one hand as she negotiated the step. ‘Still the monsters,’ she said. Suzanne kept her mind carefully focused on Jane as she leafed through her sketch book until she came to the page she wanted. ‘I finally got it right,’ she said. ‘I did these yesterday while I was waiting for them to interview Lucy.’
Suzanne looked at the familiar scene: the terraced houses; the wheelie bins at the entrances; the tiny front gardens, narrow strips separating the houses from the road, some cared for and blooming, some overgrown with shrubs, weeds and discarded rubbish. It was the scene she saw every day from her bedroom window, made oddly new by Jane’s pencil. The drawings caught the contrasts of light and shade, the places where the sun shone brilliantly, the places where the shadows were black and impenetrable. There was something about the drawings that made Suzanne feel uneasy. She looked more closely. There was a suggestion of something – something larger than human, something menacing – lurking in the shadows of an entrance. A hand, oversized with long nails, reached out from under the lid of a wheelie bin. An eye – an avian eye? – watched with keen intent from behind a curtain. The curtain was held back by a claw. Suzanne realized that everywhere she looked, strange things looked back, half hidden, almost completely hidden, but there. Among and around them walked people, happy, smiling, oblivious. She looked at Jane.
Jane was still looking at the drawings. ‘Monsters,’ she said.
The trees were in full leaf now, the heavy canopy hanging over the paths that wound through the woods, following the path of the Porter, down through the Mayfield Valley to the silted-up dam at Old Forge, past the café and the playground, and down into the depths of the woods, past Wire Mill Dam where the white water-lilies bloomed, down the old weirs and channels, down into the parks and down past the dark silence of Shepherd Wheel Dam. Here, houses backed onto the park, big stone houses, three storeys in the front, four in the back where the land dropped away to the river. The trees shadowed the gardens of these houses. Their roots undermined the foundations. Conifers and laurel grew close against the walls. The basements opened onto small back gardens, separated from the park by low walls.
The garden behind the first house was derelict and overgrown. The leaves of autumn were still rotting on the ground where the daisies and the dandelions pushed through. A wheelie bin lay on its side, the contents spilt on the asphalt, trodden into the mud and the moss. The foxes and the rodents had taken the edible stuff, had pulled and torn the rubbish and strewn it around the ground. A small patch of earth had been cleared, the edges cut with surgical precision. Seedlings had been planted, nasturtiums and forget-me-nots. The soil was dry, and they were wilting slightly.
The basement window was dark. The back of the house didn’t get the sun. The trees blocked it out. Through the window, the white of the walls glimmered faintly in the darkness. Drawings were taped onto the walls, each one a rectangle of white, each one with a drawing carefully placed in the very centre. The drawing was tight, small, meticulous in detail. This one, a fair-haired teenager; this one, a dark-eyed youth; this one, a young woman, laughing. Here, a child peers watchfully through tangled hair; and here, the child again, this time crouched intently over some game, not depicted in the drawing. Her hands play with the white emptiness.
Each sheet is the same size, the space between each sheet exactly measured. At first, the pictures are carefully sequenced: first, the teenage girl, next, the youth, next, the woman, next, the child; the girl, the youth, the woman, the child. But then the pictures begin to run out of sequence: the girl, the child, the youth; the girl, the child, the youth; the child, the youth; the child, the youth … and the sequence stops in the middle of the wall.
Suzanne recognized the man who was interviewing her. It was the detective who had been at Jane’s the day before, the man who had talked to her after she’d found Emma in the water. Detective Inspector McCarthy. She had dressed carefully for the interview, putting on her best suit – well, her only suit. She’d put on make-up and blow-dried her hair until the fine curls turned into a sleek bob. But despite all her careful preparations, her chest was tight and she felt panicky. She hadn’t been in a police station since that last time with Adam, the last of the many visits when Adam sat in sullen silence, until, eventually, the scared child that Suzanne could see underneath the façade of bravado would emerge. They’d always left the police stations, the youth courts, together, until the last time, when she’d had to leave alone, hearing Adam’s voice behind her. Listen to me, Suzanne!
She pulled herself back to the present. She needed to be alert, she realized as she looked into the cold eyes of the man on the other side of the table. She’d answered questions the night before about finding Emma, but he went over those again, clearly unhappy with parts of her story. Suzanne found she couldn’t account for her decision to investigate the wheel. To her, it was as obvious as looking round if someone shouted Watch out! but he seemed unable to understand or accept this.
‘So it wasn’t easy to get into the yard,’ he was saying again.
‘No, I had to climb over the fence.’
‘Over those railings? That’s a dangerous climb.’
That was true, it had been. Suzanne wondered why she hadn’t thought about that before she climbed – she’d just done it. McCarthy hadn’t actually asked her a question, so she said nothing. After a moment, he said, ‘What I’m trying to establish, Mrs Milner—’
‘Ms,’ Suzanne interrupted. She saw his eyes appraise her briefly, dismissively. She remembered Joel watching her in the kitchen that morning.
‘Ms Milner, is why you went to all that trouble unless you had a reason to think something was wrong.’
‘Do you always know why you do things?’ She regretted the question as soon as she’d asked it. It made her sound defensive. He had a habit, she noticed, of not replying, of not acknowledging something that was said. He was leaning back in his chair, staring Suzanne in the eye, as though he expected something else from her. She could feel her breathing start to get uneven, and tried to distract herself, to make herself relax. She studied her hands. Her nails were OK apart from the one she’d bitten down yesterday. There was some dirt caught under her thumb, and she tried to scratch it out. She was glad she’d taken the time to put some varnish on. It made her feel more confident for some reason. Her breathing steadied, but she was still unable to think of an answer to his question. ‘I don’t know …’ she said in the end, in the absence of anything else to say. She saw his face harden slightly, and reinforced her answer. ‘I don’t know. You know what was happening. Maybe I thought it was something to do with Lucy.’
‘Did you think that?’
‘I don’t know.’ Impasse. He waited in silence. She felt the pressure building up again. She half expected to see, across the desk, the woman who had talked to her, that last time, about Adam. We want to help the lad, Suzanne. She deliberately began a mental review of the scale for testing communication that she’d been adapting for use at the Alpha Project. You asked a series of questions that had fairly obvious answers, then tested the responses you actually got against a checklist: No response. Contextually inappropriate response – like Ashley when she was asking about his family … It was strange, the way Ashley had reacted in the interview. She tried to remember if he’d shown any signs of those odd responses when she’d been talking to him in the coffee bar …
‘… in the yard, Ms Milner?’
‘Sorry. Could you just …’
Again that slight hardening of the face, which she could understand this time. She should have been paying attention. It made him seem a bit more human. ‘Did you see anything that might have made you think something was wrong in the yard?’
‘Right. Sorry. I’m a bit tired.’ She tried a smile. There was no reason to be antagonistic, she told herself. This wasn’t to do with Adam. He didn’t respond, but waited for her to answer. But not that human. ‘Well, not that evening, I mean apart from, you know …’ Oh, for Christ’s sake get on with it, Suzanne! ‘I mean … are you asking about the evening, or the morning?’
‘You were in the park yesterday morning?’ She realized then that she hadn’t told them. She’d let them think that her evening visit was her only visit to the park that day. His voice was neutral, but she thought she could detect exasperation underlying it. She felt stupid, but she felt angry as well. Didn’t he understand? Was he so used to violence, to sudden death, that he just went on like an automaton, and expected everyone else to be the same?
‘Yes.’ There didn’t seem to be anything else to say.
‘What time?’
Suzanne thought. ‘I went into the park about half past nine, and I got home at around ten-thirty. I go running. Jogging. I went through Endcliffe Park, and then I crossed over the main road and went on through Bingham Park.’ She went on to tell him about the notice she’d seen.
He let his exasperation show now. ‘Why didn’t you tell me this yesterday?’
She felt her face flush. She hated to be caught out. ‘It just … The whole thing. Lucy. I couldn’t think of anything else.’
He nodded, clearly unsatisfied, and went back to the notice. He seemed as puzzled by it as she had been, and asked her about people in the park, people she saw regularly, any problems with flashers, any other odd or worrying people, anything. She found herself saying No … no … no, never … no.
Then she told him about the wheel yard, about the gate being open, about her visit to the wheel. His face didn’t change, but she felt as though she could read the thoughts behind those expressionless eyes. She stepped hard on her desire to apologize, to explain, and tried to go through her story calmly and clearly. He took her over and over it. She closed her eyes, trying to make the picture clear. ‘It was my reflection,’ she said. ‘I waved at it, and it waved back.’ The sinister, farcical picture of Emma, dead, waving back at her disturbed her equilibrium further, and her voice tailed away in her explanations.
It seemed it was almost over. She began to relax now that he wasn’t pushing her for information she didn’t have, wasn’t asking her questions she couldn’t answer, wasn’t making her feel like a culpable fool for keeping information back. It was important to explain that she hadn’t seen either Lucy or Em, but she needed to tell him about the man – the youth? – she had seen near Shepherd Wheel. ‘I only saw one person in that part of the park.’ She sent her mind back to the odd, jumpy feeling the figure had given her. ‘I thought it was someone I knew at first, but …’
‘Who was that?’ McCarthy’s tone was bland, but she knew at once she’d made a mistake.
‘Oh, it wasn’t,’ she said quickly. Too quickly. ‘I just thought it was. At first.’ She could feel her chest start to tighten and the air she was breathing becoming thin and insubstantial. She concentrated. Breathe slowly, evenly. Keep calm. I hold you responsible for this! Her father’s litany. McCarthy just went on looking at her. More prevarication would only make it worse. After all, it hadn’t been Ashley. Her voice came out in uneven jerks, and she had to stop speaking and gulp for air. ‘Just for a moment. I thought … it was Ashley Reid … from the Alpha Project … only it wasn’t …’ It couldn’t have been more unconvincing if she’d deliberately lied.
McCarthy was working through the computer files. He was angry, and he wanted to talk to whoever had interviewed Suzanne Milner the evening before. He should have done it himself. But they had the information now. At around a quarter past ten, the wheel yard had been open, and someone, a young man answering a particular description, had been around there, actually coming from the direction of the yard.
He was puzzled as well as angry. He was good at reading people in interview situations, but Suzanne Milner had been strange. Yesterday she’d been fiercely protective of her friend, later she had been almost flattened by shock. Today she had presented the façade of a carefully groomed academic and had managed to get right up his nose. She’d come in, a picture of cool elegance, very different from the old-jeans-and-sweater image she’d projected yesterday. At first he’d interpreted her attitude as hostility. She’d sat there straight-backed, tilting her head and studying her fingernails before she answered each question, shooting quick glances at him and looking away as soon as he met her eyes. She seemed to be treating the whole thing as a game, giving him minimal, uncooperative answers to the questions he needed answering.
But it was a façade, he’d realized, as the interview had moved on. What he had mistaken for hostility was, in fact, tension, but it seemed more a tension associated with her surroundings than with him. It was almost as if she was having trouble concentrating on the interview at all.
He looked at his notes. Her confusion about the park – he could accept that. She’d been in shock, focused on finding the dead woman in the water. Her sheer embarrassment at having to admit that she’d been near Shepherd Wheel at the crucial time, and hadn’t mentioned it, had been convincing.
But had she tried to slide that sighting past him? If so, why mention it at all? It was odd. He’d known there was something else, and he’d been right. Ashley Reid from the Alpha programme. Why were alarm bells ringing in his mind? He knew that name. OK, let’s see what Ashley who wasn’t there might have been doing. Let’s see what he’d been doing the last time he’d been arrested and charged. He typed the commands into the machine, and waited.
The photograph on the screen showed a young man with heavy dark hair and dark eyes. He looked out at McCarthy with a faint smile, his eyes wary. He was nineteen – a bit older than most of those sent on the programme. McCarthy ran the record back. Reid had served a short youth custody sentence three years ago – got into a fight and glassed his opponent. Most of his other offences were typical of a disruptive juvenile: shoplifting, twoc, minor vandalism. But Reid had moved on to breaking and entering. He had more than one conviction. He should have been sent down. Why the Alpha Project? McCarthy read on. Reid was classified as having ‘learning difficulties’. McCarthy was surprised. The face that looked at him from the photograph didn’t give that impression. He’d been identified as particularly suitable for the experimental programme that was running at the Alpha Project. Not so much bad as easily led, his probation officer had said, the fall guy for more intelligent companions. That had been the argument that had kept him out of prison.
McCarthy raised a sceptical eyebrow. Then he noticed that Reid had an outstanding charge against him, one that was due to go to court. University campus security had found him late one night in the shadows behind the chemistry building, the route across the car park that made a useful, but lonely, shortcut. He was facing a charge of going equipped for burglary. He’d been carrying a torch, a lock-knife and some heavy-duty adhesive tape. In McCarthy’s eyes, in that location, that wasn’t going equipped for burglary, it was going equipped for rape.
The world of chemicals is ordered, predictable and, for those who understand it, safe. It was evening, and Simon let his eyes follow the straight lines of the tiles running along the shiny floor, across, making right angles and patterns of squares. Small squares, and larger squares each containing four small squares, and larger squares still each containing four of the smaller squares each containing four of the small squares and on and on forever. Order.
He mixed the three solutions, acetimide in water, calcium hypochlorate in water, sodium hydroxide careful now in water. Watch the heat! He put the solutions in the freezer.
There were heavy benches in rows. Strips of light on the ceiling, bright, bright, bouncing off the surface of the glass, the bottles, the tubes, the shapes, the curves. The light mixing and shattering into chaos.
The important thing was to keep the temperature low. Experiment had shown him that a stainless steel bowl suspended in a mixture of ice and salt worked fine, as long as he was careful and patient. Molecules sit in their patterns, break down on the right stimulus, recombine in patterns that it is easy to predict. Absorbing and beautiful.
The light reflecting, refracting, lines against the glassware, shattering again and again and again.
He put the first solution in the bowl, stirring to get the temperature down. Then, slowly, carefully, he added the second, working under the fume hood. Care! Once, once only the order, the ratios, the time, something was wrong, and the disinfectant smell of chlorine began to seep into the room.
Now he could sit and wait. Two hours. Tonight he’d brought his drawing pad with him. He opened it to a new page. The sheer whiteness, the blankness of it pleased him, and he sat looking at it for a long time. Footsteps on the shiny floor. A face, smiling. Just a face. Faces need to be drawn, carefully delineated in sharp pencil lines to give them meaning. ‘Hello, Simon. I haven’t seen you at …’ Malcolm. Tutor. Tune it out. Not important. The beauty of the white began to evade him, and he picked up his pencil. ‘… so close to your finals.’ Nod. That’s not enough. Say, ‘Yes.’ It was important to get it right in the centre. The pencil began to create a picture, fine lines, fine detail, unclear at first to anyone who can’t see the patterns that have always been so clear to Simon.
‘… catching up. This lab’s empty tonight, but Barry’s next door if you need anything. They’ll be locking up at nine.’ Their eyes meeting. Simon, looking away, nodding. Say, ‘OK. All right.’ Footsteps. Door. Gone. Simon looked at the clock, and returned to his drawing.
Two hours. He added the contents of the third flask now, cool not cold. The solution turned a clear white, like milk, like paper.
Hours to wait now. Leave, down the shiny corridors and the lights in the ceiling, and the chaos as the people walk here, there, and all the patterns disturbed. Say, ‘Goodnight.’ The security man, old, ‘Night.’ Looking down, not noticing, used to Simon’s comings and goings. Out of sight and back to the room with the shiny floor. Wait.
Lights out. The security man, back soon. Wait, watch, sleep. Sleep. Dream …
The torchlight wavering on the path ahead. Fading, as though the batteries were giving up. The rain spattering against them, and a puddle gleaming in the thin light. And on the path ahead … Staggering under the weight as she slumped against him. The stuff had been good, strong. Quiet, be very quiet. The path by the dam, now. The night, black beyond the circle of faint light on the ground. The torchlight catching the rain, shining and glittering. Shining and glittering like the mud in the dam, the thick, black mud and the sucking sounds drawing your feet in and releasing them. And the place where the mud was disturbed, the place where you could dig.
Oh, no. Please not that. And the gleam colder than the gleam of firelight, making the metal burn with ice.
Not that! And the soft, muffling sound of the mud in the darkness.
Simon’s eyes snapped open. That dream again, and now there was another one, rushing along a shadowed path, looking for something that wasn’t there, feeling it hard on his heels, the chaos, the chaos, the chaos.
He looked at the clock, its black hands on its white face calming him, steadying his breathing. Just a dream, Si. Don’t worry about it. Several hours had passed. It was midnight. The night watchman never came up here so late. Simon began heating the water bath.
5 (#ulink_bbeadaa0-5d8f-5b0d-88f5-be4e7469b8bb)
Dennis Allan’s home – once Emma’s home – was a maisonette on the estate overlooking Gleadless Valley. Tina Barraclough got lost on her first attempt to find the address, working her way through the confusing maze of two- and three-storey blocks that studded the valley side. From the distance, the estate gave a sense of openness, of green parkland dotted here and there with buildings whose fronts were multicoloured with fluttering curtains, washing hanging on the balconies, painted doors. From closer up, the decay was more apparent. There was rubbish on the grass, bare, muddy patches. The paintwork on the buildings was peeling. Nearby, the blocks were boarded up. Further down the hill, they were encased in scaffolding, surrounded by the mud and rubble of a building site, tarpaulins and polythene sheeting flapping in the summer breeze.
The Allans’ block was one that was awaiting refurbishment. Police cars were parked in front of the row of garages that formed a basement to the building. Barraclough pulled up beside them. The doors of the garages were uneven and chipped, decorated with tags and slogans and names: CASSIE B AND CLAIRE D WOZ ERE! BAZ FOR CLAIRE D! SLAGS LIVE HERE. The garages had once been painted in primary colours, red and blue and yellow. Traces of the paint could still be seen.
Barraclough went up the concrete stairway to the first deck, to number twelve, the Allans’ maisonette. Though the rubbish chute seemed to be jammed, stuck open and overflowing, the stairway itself was swept clean, the front doors painted and most of the windows trim with nets and potted plants. One or two doors were open as people watched the police team arrive, but the doors closed again as quickly when neighbours were approached. Barraclough opened the door to number twelve and went in.
Having got permission to search the house, Brooke had given instructions for the place to be turned over. ‘I want anything – anything at all that tells you what’s been going on there. Anything that says Emma went back after he says she left, anything that tells us about her. I want the lot.’
The maisonettes were laid out to a pattern. Barraclough had a friend who lived in a council maisonette on another estate, and she could have found her way round this one with her eyes closed. A kitchen to the left of the front door, a corridor leading into an L-shaped living-room with French windows opening onto a small balcony. Upstairs, a windowless bathroom, a separate toilet, also windowless and smelling faintly of urine. A bedroom and a tiny second bedroom – Emma’s. According to her father, the room hadn’t been touched since she left. ‘I wanted her to think she could come back. I wanted her back,’ he said.
Emma had been seventeen. Barraclough was twenty-four. She wondered if those seven years would be a big enough gap to make a barrier. She could remember being seventeen. She couldn’t remember seventeen feeling any different from the way twenty-four felt, except that life seemed both easier and more difficult at twenty-four. Barraclough cast her mind back. Seventeen had been rows with her mother about her exams. Had it been arguments about late nights and boys, or was that from when she was younger? Barraclough felt as though she’d been making her own decisions for a long time, but maybe her mind was deceiving her. Seventeen. Emma had lived here with her mother who apparently thought nothing about inflicting her own miseries on her family. Her father – was he the ineffectual ditherer he seemed, or did that pathetic exterior hide a more sinister, more manipulative psyche? Emma must have been unhappy. She’d run away twice. Why had she come back – and why had she finally left?
Barraclough looked round the small room, trying to get a feel for Emma, get a picture of the living girl, rather than the dead woman on the slab in the mortuary. There was a single bed under the window, and a melamine wardrobe against the wall, the kind that had hanging space and shelves and drawers. It was clean and tidy, and the bed was made up. The room was the room of a younger girl, the room of someone who was growing up, moving on. Emma had not bothered to change or update it. The bedding and curtains were brightly coloured with a cartoon motif – Bart Simpson. Eat my shorts. Emma’s choice? Her mother’s? Either way, the bedding and curtains were faded. They weren’t new. A torn Spice Girls poster was above the bed, something that Emma would probably be embarrassed to own if she had retained much awareness of the room. A photograph of Royal Trux, one that looked as though it had been cut from a magazine, was pinned to the opposite wall.
Barraclough opened the wardrobe door. A stained fleece dressing gown hung on a hook – it looked too small for Emma to have worn it recently – and a party dress, black, Lycra, very short, halter-neck top. A real jaw-dropper. A RECLAIM THE STREETS flyer was stuck to the inside of the wardrobe door. A pair of old trainers lay on the bottom.
She pulled open the drawers. There was nothing there apart from a half-empty packet of Rizlas, the card of the packet torn, and the remains of a cigarette. Barraclough picked up some of the tobacco and sniffed it. The undersides and backs of the drawers yielded nothing. She looked round the room again. There was a rucksack on the back of the door. She opened it and looked inside. It was empty apart from a couple of flyers – free parties by the look of things, Smokescreen and DIY Sound System. Underground, deep house. She checked the side pockets of the bag – for a moment, she thought she’d found a diary and her heart jumped, but it was a wallet, the kind you get from banks and building societies for holding cards. She flicked through it. It contained a cash card, a bus pass and a chain store credit card. Odd, for an unemployed teenager. Had Emma been in debt? She flicked through the cards to see if there was anything else in the wallet, and a couple of photographs dropped out. She picked them up. The first one showed a young woman at a party or a disco – the background was dark, with people indistinct in the background. The light – possibly a flash – had caught the woman, and she was laughing and holding her hand up in protest. For a moment, Barraclough thought it must be Emma, but the hair was darker. On the front of the photograph someone – the woman in the picture? – had written TO EM. She turned the photograph over. On the back, in a different hand, it said SOPHE. HULL, ’97. Sophie Dutton?
The second photograph was a snapshot of a group of people, blurry and out of focus. It looked as though they were setting up some musical equipment. In the foreground, clearer than the other figures, was a woman, about the same age as the woman in the first picture, Sophe, but the picture was older. There was something about the style of clothes, the make-up, that said seventies, and not seventies revival, either. The clothes looked clumsy, without the stylishness of more recent fabrics and designs. Barraclough looked more closely. The woman could be a younger version of a photo she’d noticed downstairs, a very young Sandra Allan. She looked at the other people in the picture, but it was impossible to make out any detail. She turned the picture over. There was a date scribbled in faded ink. It looked like November 197—The last digit was unclear, and there was another word she couldn’t quite read:—ELVET. Above that, in what looked like more recent ink, someone had written, so WHAT ABOUT THIS? She looked at the photo again. There was something about the woman – girl, really. The way she was standing, awkward, unbalanced. Barraclough frowned. It reminded her of … Of course! The woman in the photograph, the woman who was probably Sandra Allan, was pregnant. She looked at the smudged date again. Sandra Allan had had a child before she had Emma. What had happened to it?
Dennis Allan’s face flushed as he looked at the photograph that McCarthy passed to him. ‘Do you recognize any of these people?’ McCarthy asked him.
He shook his head, then said, ‘Sandra, of course. I don’t know …’ He peered at the picture. ‘I don’t recognize any of them,’ he said. ‘It’s hard to tell.’ McCarthy nodded. The photograph was indistinct. ‘I don’t know where this came from,’ he said. He’d known Sandra towards the end of the seventies, he said. He’d been in a band, and Sandra had been the singer for a while. ‘I left in ’77,’ he said.
McCarthy asked him about Sandra’s pregnancy. Allan’s face flushed again. ‘We lost touch when the band broke up,’ he said. He caught McCarthy’s look and said with real indignation, ‘It wasn’t mine. I wasn’t her boyfriend.’ The band, Velvet, had broken up in ’78, when another member had left. ‘I met Sandra again in ’81,’ he said. ‘We got married in 1982, just before Emma was born.’ His face looked forlorn.
Barraclough liked nosy neighbours. She particularly liked house-bound nosy neighbours. Best of all, she liked house-bound nosy neighbours who were quite up-front about their hobby. It was always a frustration and a delay to find your way tactfully around ‘I mind my own business’ and ‘I keep myself to myself.’ Rita Cooke was seventy-three. She had the shuffling gait and twisted hands of arthritis, but her mind was whip sharp, as, apparently, were her eyes. And she’d lived next door to the Allan family for ten years. ‘I don’t know which was worse,’ she said happily, pouring Barraclough a cup of tea. ‘That Sandra, always got a long face on her, always sighing and moaning. She’d come round here and it was, “Oh, Dennis’s done this and Dennis’s done that and poor me.” What she needed was a few real problems, take her mind off herself.’
‘What did her husband do? What did she complain about?’ Barraclough took another biscuit.
‘Oh, something and nothing. He worked nights, you see, and she didn’t like being on her own, or he wouldn’t back her up with the girl – “He lets her talk to me how she likes” – or he didn’t understand about how ill she was. You know. Mind you’ – Rita Cooke wanted to be fair – ‘he was just as bad. In his way. “Yes, love, yes, love, oh, what shall I do? Oh, I can’t cope.” It’s no wonder that child went to the bad.’ She waited for Barraclough to pick up the bait.
‘How do you mean, Mrs Cooke?’ Barraclough asked obligingly.
‘Oh well, I only know what I saw. She was out all the time. All night, sometimes. And she had some very odd-looking friends, not that they came here much. Not unless there wasn’t anyone here.’
Barraclough nodded. ‘Would you recognize any of them?’ she said.
Mrs Cooke gave her a sharp look. ‘I might be getting on, but I’ve still got my sight,’ she said. Barraclough hastily nodded again. ‘There was one lad – didn’t like the look of him at all. He used to hang around a lot and wait for her. I’d have sent him off, but you’ve got to be careful these days.’ Barraclough got a description of the youth. Tall, pale, dark hair and eyes. ‘Quite good-looking,’ Mrs Cooke conceded.
Barraclough asked her about Sandra Allan’s death. For the first time, the old woman seemed a bit reluctant to speak. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘She had a big row with the lass – shouting and screaming. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but it went on for a while. Then the lass is off out, door slamming, and he starts. I’ve never heard him shout at her before. She went out for about half an hour …’ Barraclough checked the time. They knew about that. She’d gone to the chemist to collect a prescription, the prescription for the pills that she later overdosed on. ‘Then she didn’t go out again. I saw him going out to work, four o’clock that was. I thought she was going to come round here like usual when she was upset, but she never did. It was quiet after that. I heard him come back at six the next morning. Then I got woken up again by the ambulance.’ The old lady frowned, looking uncertain, frail. ‘I never thought she’d do it,’ she said, looking at Barraclough with troubled eyes.
Suzanne gave up on work. She felt as though something trusted and familiar had let her down. She looked out of her kitchen window and saw Jane in her small yard, working in the early evening sun on the tubs she used to grow herbs. Lucy was crouched over some game involving building blocks and the animals from her wooden farm. Mother and daughter.
She remembered her own mother, that close, intense relationship that had been the centre of Suzanne’s child universe. She could remember coming in from school every day, her mother lying on the settee, the disorder of the morning still to clear up, the food to prepare before her father came back from work.
As a child, she had just accepted her mother’s illness. As an adult, she could see that it had deprived her of the things that a normal childhood should have: a mother who looked after you, friends, uninterrupted schooling. But as a child, she had liked it. It had made her feel important and wanted. She remembered her mother the year before Adam was born, always on the settee, always in bed. But she could remember a party, her friends round a bonfire, sausages on sticks and her mother laughing as she watched them bob for apples. When had that been? You’ve worn your mother out, Suzanne! How can you be so thoughtless! Her father. She shook her head. Memories of childhood were not what she wanted just now.
She knocked on the window and, when Jane looked up, she mouthed, Tea? Jane smiled and nodded and, five minutes later, Suzanne was carrying mugs of tea out into the garden, and some apple juice for Lucy. The day was fine, the sky a deep blue, with just a few clouds racing in the breeze that kept the air warm rather than baking hot. Suzanne took off the sweatshirt she’d been wearing over her T-shirt, and sat on the low wall that divided the two gardens, watching Jane work. ‘It’s just tea,’ she said, indicating the mug.
‘That’s OK.’ Jane pulled up a long-rooted dandelion and looked at it. ‘You know, they used to cultivate these things. I tried making dandelion coffee once. It was disgusting.’
Suzanne looked across at Lucy who seemed to be involved in her game, oblivious to the conversation between the two adults. ‘Have you heard anything more?’ Jane looked at her. ‘From the police, about Emma.’ Surely Jane didn’t need reminding.
‘Yes, I know.’ Jane went on looking at Suzanne, then she said, ‘You still look very tense. I don’t know – I haven’t heard anything directly.’
‘How do you mean, directly?’
Jane knelt back on her heels and sipped the milkless tea Suzanne had given her. ‘I’m sure this stuff is better for you than people say,’ she said, indicating her mug. ‘Of course, you just don’t know what’s in it.’
Suzanne wasn’t sure if Jane was being deliberately evasive, or if she was just thinking out loud while she sorted out an answer to Suzanne’s question. She couldn’t ask again, because Lucy came over and looked at the glass of apple juice. ‘Is that mine?’ Suzanne nodded, and Lucy picked it up carefully, holding it with both hands.
‘Sorry,’ Suzanne apologized. ‘It’s a bit full.’ Lucy nodded, concentrating as she lifted the glass to her mouth. ‘What are you doing?’ Suzanne indicated Lucy’s game over at the other side of the yard.
‘Playing.’ Lucy drank some more juice and looked at the level in her glass. ‘I’m going to take some for the people,’ she said.
‘People?’ Suzanne looked across to where wooden toys were assembled on some twigs and leaves. The peacock feather was stuck in the ground like a flag above them.
‘They’re on a boat,’ Lucy explained. ‘Escaping from the monsters. Tamby’s guarding them.’ She carried her glass carefully back to where she’d been playing.
Jane pulled a face. ‘Still monsters,’ she said. ‘They spent a long time with Emma’s father,’ she went on, ‘but I don’t know why. Joel told me.’
Suzanne had to do a quick mental pivot to realize that Jane was now answering her earlier question. ‘Emma’s father? How does Joel know?’
Jane shrugged. ‘Joel made it his business to know. I don’t ask. Joel wanted to know if there was anything they weren’t telling us – that we should know. He was worried.’
‘Well, so he should be.’ Suzanne wasn’t giving any ground on Joel. ‘She is his child. His only child.’ This concern, uncharacteristic of Joel in her experience, made her feel slightly warmer towards him.
‘Oh, she isn’t. His only one, I mean.’ Jane sat back on her heels, detaching a snail from one of the plants. She looked at it. ‘I don’t want that.’ She threw it over the wall into the garden of the student house. ‘He had a child from his marriage.’
Suzanne was genuinely shocked. She hadn’t known. ‘He never said anything. I’m sure he never told Dave.’
‘No. There’s no contact.’ Jane had finished working on the tubs now, and was looking at them with calm pleasure.
‘What, never?’
Jane fixed her blue eyes on Suzanne. ‘Never.’ She gauged Suzanne’s reaction for a moment, then said, ‘I know how it looks. And I don’t have many illusions about Joel. I know what he’s like. But there’s Lucy, you see.’ She rested back on her heels, her hands clasped round her cup. ‘Joel was just a bit of fun – I knew he wasn’t someone to take seriously. I didn’t actually plan for Lucy to happen.’ Suzanne nodded. Jane rarely talked about this. She was a very self-contained and private person. ‘Lucy needs to know that her father loves her,’ Jane said, glancing back at where Lucy was still absorbed in her game. ‘And if that means I have to make allowances for him, well, what does it matter? If I pressure Joel into doing more, he’ll just vanish. And what good will that be for Lucy? She’ll find out what he’s like as she gets older, but, just now, she needs to know he loves her.’
‘Does he?’ Suzanne had never, until recently, seen much sign of this in Joel.
Jane sighed and shook her head. ‘I don’t know. As much as he’s capable, maybe. Though this thing has really given him a jolt. He was straight up as soon as I told him – he was pissed off that I didn’t call him straight away – and he’s sticking around. Oh, he’s off today because he’s working, but he’s coming back tonight.’
Suzanne felt depressed at the thought of Joel being around. She remembered her encounter with him that morning. ‘He seemed upset that the police had interviewed Lucy,’ she said doubtfully. She found Joel in his new incarnation as concerned father a bit hard to believe.
Jane nodded. ‘He said I shouldn’t have allowed it. He thought it had upset her. I think she needed to talk about it, and she needs to know that someone is doing something. It was good for her to see the police – she knows that there’s someone to chase the monsters away. And we all needed to find out what happened – to Lucy, as well as Emma. I think Joel knows that really. He just hates to admit he’s wrong.’
‘Do you know any more about what happened to Lucy?’ Suzanne looked across the garden to where Lucy was rearranging her toys, her face serious.
Jane shook her head. ‘Lucy still says she went to the playground on her own, then she hid in the woods because she didn’t want to go to the hospital, I think. But it all got mixed up with Tamby. Each time she tells it, it gets more and more like one of her stories. I agree with Joel about any more interviews. I’ve told the police I’m not asking her again. I want her to forget.’
Suzanne needed to talk. Jane listened quietly as Suzanne told her about the interview with DI McCarthy, and her worry that she’d unwittingly implicated Ashley. ‘I tried to explain,’ she said, ‘but he didn’t believe me.’
Jane looked at her with exasperation. ‘You worry too much. Leave it up to them. It’s not your problem any more. You did the right thing. You told them what you saw. They’ll deal with it.’ She thought for a moment. ‘McCarthy. Was he the fair-haired one? Cold and distant? There’s something very sexy about men like that. He should have been wearing a uniform.’
‘Who? Who should have?’ Suzanne was thrown.
‘Your DI McCarthy. And you had him to yourself for a whole hour?’ Jane sighed. ‘All Lucy and I got was some female with a stuffed rabbit.’ She looked at Suzanne. ‘It’s not your problem,’ she emphasized.
Suzanne looked at Lucy who was engaged in carefully burying one of her toys in the narrow border at the bottom of the yard, her hands and face muddy, her hair tousled, her face intent.
Dennis Allan sat at the small coffee table in the front room. It was dark; the heavy curtains were drawn. He didn’t want people looking in, staring, whispering. He’d heard what they had been saying. Him… his wife… now his daughter… the police… murder… murderer… Murderer. He held his hands round the mug of coffee, sipping it occasionally, not noticing that it was cold. How had it happened? He looked at the photographs on the glass cabinet, safe in their frames, safe like he wasn’t any more, like his family wasn’t any more. Sandy in her wedding dress, white, he’d wanted that, though his mum had had a bit to say. Well, under the circumstances, Emma already on the way … Emma, in one of those oval frames the school photos came in, ten, smiling. Emma and Sandy on holiday, squinting in the sun, smiling. Emma in cut-off jeans, her blonde hair dyed a funny yellow, that awful stud through her nose, not smiling any more. Emma last Christmas by the tree, caught unawares, playing with the cat. Smiling now.
How had it happened? He’d tried so hard. I did try, Sandy. Nothing. I love you, Emma. Nothing. The answer came, unwelcome and unasked for. Like mother, like daughter. His own mother’s sour disapproval that had blighted the early years of his marriage. He felt his eyes fill with tears. He was weak. People thought he was weak. He’d seen the veiled contempt in the eyes of the detective. Did they think he didn’t notice? They thought they were so clever. Well, let them work it out.
Eight o’clock that evening, Suzanne decided she was going to the pub. There was a comedy night, she could talk to some friends, have a drink and just get away from it for a while. She put on the black trousers she’d bought several weeks ago and hadn’t worn yet and a silk top that Jane had given her. She twisted her hair back and caught it in a clip, put on some lipstick.
She was just checking the contents of her purse when there was a knock at the door. Suzanne opened it. She was surprised to see Richard Kean, the psychologist and her mentor from the Alpha Centre, his head almost touching the top of the doorframe, his bulk filling the small entrance hall as he came in. Richard had never been in her house before. She invited him into the front room, wondering what it was he wanted. He looked at her, taking in her make-up, the new clothes. Suzanne always dressed conventionally, even severely, for work. Until recently, she’d dressed conventionally, severely, for everything. ‘Sorry, I’ve interrupted you. You’re going out.’
‘No, that’s fine. I’m only going to the local. Do you want a coffee?’ Suzanne wondered if he might join her down at the pub.
‘I’d rather have a cold drink.’ He looked hot.
‘Beer? Or a soft drink?’
‘Coke? I’m driving.’ Suzanne went through to the kitchen to get the drinks. He wasn’t likely to want a trip to the pub if he was driving. When she came back into the room he was standing by the wall looking at her photographs. ‘Is this your son?’ He was in front of the picture of Adam, the one taken just after his eleventh birthday. ‘He’s about the same age as my Jeff.’
‘No.’ Suzanne swallowed a sudden bitter taste. ‘No, that’s my brother, Adam.’
‘Oh, right, he looks a bit like you. Is this recent?’
‘No.’
‘What does he do, then? Is he an academic too?’
Suzanne found it hard to say. ‘No. Adam – he died, when he was fourteen. Six years ago.’
‘I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.’ He looked embarrassed. He didn’t ask any questions. He didn’t want to know. ‘Look, Sue, this is really a business visit. It couldn’t wait until Monday. I had a call from Keith Liskeard.’ Suzanne recognized the name of the Alpha director. ‘He says he’s had the CID round asking questions.’
Suzanne’s stomach lurched. She should have warned them. ‘About Ashley?’ she said.
Richard looked serious. ‘You do know about it.’
‘Well, yes …’
He went on before she could tell him what had happened. ‘Look, Sue, I realize you were in a difficult situation – if you saw Ashley you had to tell them, no one’s saying you shouldn’t have done. But you should have let us know. I would have hoped you’d have come to us before you went to the police. It’s part of the commitment you make—’
‘Wait a minute!’ Suzanne was caught completely off balance. ‘What exactly do you think happened? What do you think I said?’
‘I can understand when there’s been a crime like that, if you saw Ashley near the scene you’d naturally—’
‘I didn’t.’ Suzanne felt a cold push of anger.
‘What do you mean?’ He looked confused.
‘I didn’t see Ashley and I didn’t tell them I’d seen Ashley. I didn’t volunteer to talk to them, I had to …’
‘Yes, that’s what I’m saying …’ He tried to pick up the initiative again but she overrode him.
‘It’s all a stupid misunderstanding. I specifically told them, specifically told DI fucking McCarthy that I didn’t see Ashley.’
He looked at her in silence for a minute. He obviously didn’t believe her. ‘There are some issues with Ashley at the moment. This couldn’t come at a worse time for him.’
‘What do you mean?’
He looked uncomfortable. ‘I’m sorry, I can’t say.’
Their endless confidentiality! Maybe if she’d been given the information that Richard was referring to … ‘Why don’t you ask Ashley? He’ll tell you where he was.’
Richard looked uneasy. ‘It’s almost certainly because of these other issues … He hasn’t been to the centre since Thursday evening. We need to find him, get him to tell his story to the police before this gets out of hand.’
Suzanne found that her anger was being taken over by a sense of insecurity – had she done something wrong, something stupid? ‘I think you’d better go,’ she said.
‘Yes. I’m … OK, right.’ He turned in the doorway. ‘Keith is very unhappy about it,’ he warned.
She went to the pub by herself in the end, but left early. She talked to a few people: some of Dave’s friends who’d been her friends as well when she and Dave were married; one or two people she knew from the university. It could have been a pleasant evening, but she found that she didn’t really want to talk to anyone. The comedy evening was a let-down as well, though the rest of the audience seemed to enjoy it well enough. To her, the comedian’s laddish jokes were pointless and unfunny. She left early. He heckled her as she was leaving. ‘There’s another one off for her pension!’ It seemed that being over twenty-five was funny in itself now.
She walked back past the park gates and paused, looking down the path towards the woods. It was dark. She could see a small group of people hanging around in the shelter near the entrance. Teenagers, she assumed, though it was too dark to tell. Further in, the shadows were black under the trees. She could see a light flickering in the darkness, but otherwise it was quiet and still. The group by the shelter watched her as she stood under the street light. She could walk through the gate, follow the path to the third bridge, go out the gate there and be on Dave’s doorstep, be where Michael was. She couldn’t think of anything that would induce her to walk into that black silence.
6 (#ulink_6da9f011-acfe-51a8-ab42-89c59bd116a5)
Steve McCarthy had been home for an hour. He’d got home after eight-thirty and gone straight to his computer to log on to the network. His evenings would be like this now, until this case was over. There was always more information pouring in, more details often burying important details, and he intended staying on top of it all.
McCarthy was ambitious. He’d joined the police after leaving school, choosing to go straight in rather than going on to do a degree. He still wasn’t sure if that had been the wisest decision. He’d done well, promotions had come in good time, sometimes sooner than his best expectations, and he knew he was seen as a team player with a good future ahead of him. He was thirty-two, and the next hike up the promotions ladder was the important one.
He was working on their current database now, getting it to look for patterns in relation to other offences in the Sheffield area over recent months. He typed another command into the computer, getting it to sort the information in relation to drug offences. While he was waiting, he dug his fork into the takeaway he’d picked up from the Chinese on the way back. Cold. He looked down at the polystyrene tray. His chicken chow mein had somehow transformed itself into a grey, glutinous mass. He pushed it away impatiently. He could get something out of the freezer later, stick it in the microwave. He picked up his mug of coffee with little optimism. Cold as well. He couldn’t work without coffee. He went through to the kitchen and pushed the switch on the coffee machine.
The flat was modern, two-bedroomed. McCarthy had bought it because it was fitted out, convenient and he could move straight in. He’d heard someone say once, or he’d read somewhere, that a house should be a machine for living. McCarthy understood that. He wanted the place he lived in to service him. He wanted to go in and find it warm when the weather was cold, cool when it was hot. He wanted to be able to cook at the push of a button, wash at the flick of a switch. He wanted to have any disorder that living created reordered before he returned.
‘Christ, McCarthy,’ Lynne, his last girlfriend, had said, ‘why don’t you just lock yourself away in a cupboard at the end of the day?’ Another time she’d said, ‘What you need, McCarthy, is a wife. An automatic, rechargeable, super-turbo, fuel-injection wife.’ He’d laughed and started massaging her back, running his hands over her neck and shoulders in the way he knew she liked, because he hadn’t wanted to have another of their vicious, cutting rows, and she’d pulled him into the chair and they’d had a quick wham bam thank you, ma’am – or thank you, sir, and then they’d gone into the bedroom and spent longer, spent most of the evening, exploring each other and drinking wine. But he and Lynne only had that: they had sex and they had the job. They couldn’t spend all their time screwing and working – though to McCarthy it had sometimes seemed as though that was exactly what they did – and the relationship had ended when Lynne got the job that he had aimed at, got his promotion in fact, and the whole flimsy edifice had fallen apart in the volcanic aftermath. He still felt angry and bitter about that, and he determinedly shut it out of his mind.
He took the coffee back into his workroom and looked at the screen. There was very little there that he didn’t already know. He noted the fact that Ashley Reid had a drugs caution – hardly surprising he’d missed it, McCarthy thought, in the long list attached to that young thug’s name. And, now, this could be interesting: Paul Lynman, one of the tenants at 14, Carleton Road, the student house, had a conviction for possession. McCarthy pulled up the details. OK, it looked like a my-round deal – he’d been caught with almost enough speed to pull down a dealing charge – but not quite. He’d insisted, wisely, that it was for his own use, but he’d probably been buying for a friend as well as for himself. Worth chasing up, though. There was nothing conclusive, no real links. McCarthy rubbed the skin between his eyebrows in an effort to concentrate. He’d heard something about a problem at the Alpha Centre, something about Es and speed. And had there been some kind of action round the university? He needed to talk to someone from drugs.
He looked at his watch. Ten-thirty. He wondered what to do with the rest of the evening. Listen to music? Watch the telly? He felt a sense of things closing around him, as though his life was shrinking to the walls of this flat, the route to and from the office, the office itself. Maybe Lynne had been right. Maybe he should start looking for that cupboard.
Sunday morning, Suzanne got up early, was showered, dressed and at her desk by eight o’clock. She planned to put in a solid day’s work, to forget everything that had happened since Friday. For an hour, she tried to read and make notes from a research paper that she’d had on her desk for a week. Her mind refused to focus. When she reached the end of the ten dense, closely printed pages, she realized she might as well not have read it at all. She tossed it irritably into her paper tray, not bothering to put it into its correct basket. She rubbed her forehead, and looked at the waiting tasks arrayed around her desk. She thought about Jane’s method for focusing – there was some kind of yoga trick. Something to do with emptying the mind. She closed her eyes and tried to concentrate on the nothingness that was behind her eyelids.
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Danuta Reah
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Триллеры
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: A dark psychological thriller that will hold the reader in its grip from beginning to end, Silent Playgrounds is the stunning follow-up to Danuta Reah’s highly praised debut, Only Darkness.The path through the park runs from the centre of the city into the wilds of the countryside. At weekends the area is a playground for children and walkers, but during the week it is silent and deserted.When six-year-old Lucy gets lost there one day, her disappearance sparks a chain of events leading to the murder of a young woman. Lucy tries to warn the people she cares about of the danger: she knows that there are monsters lurking in the rambling park, and she knows that they are getting closer.What should be a straightforward investigation leads DI Steve McCarthy into a web of lies and evasions, where nothing is quite as it seems and everyone seems to be hiding something. With each step forward McCarthy faces new questions, and if he is to prevent an escalation in violence, he has to find some answers – fast.