Silent Playgrounds

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

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.