Silent Playgrounds

‘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.