Silent Playgrounds Read online

  Another time, he’d pulled a small sketch pad out of his pocket and shown her some of his work. To her untutored eye, it looked good: bold line drawings catching the movement and atmosphere of the city. She recognized the shops near Hunters Bar, and the park. They were delineated with a few strokes of the pencil, lively and vivid, filling the paper with a sense of movement. She was impressed and told him so. He’d given her a quick, private smile.

  It was Adam he reminded her of, that must have been what gave her that flash of recognition when she saw him. He had the same warm smile. Adam’s face used to light up like that when he saw her, and Adam had that same confiding way of talking. I’ll tell you a secret, Suzanne, he’d say when he was – what? – seven, eight? And he’d whisper in her ear about some misdemeanour that she was to keep secret from their father. I won’t tell, she would say. That was her role. She had to protect her father from worry, and Adam from their father’s anger. But you mustn’t do it again.

  She was tidying the kitchen now, but she had lost the momentum and realized she was aimlessly moving things from one surface to another. She ran hot water into the sink, scooped up the dishes that were scattered across the worktops, and dumped them in the water. She’d wash them later. She thought about her study, the papers on her desk, her computer with the pages of data half typed up. Screw work. She was going out for a walk.

  Late that afternoon, Barraclough was trawling through the records, trying to find Sandra Allan’s baby, the child born sometime towards the end of the 1970s, or possibly 1980. Sandra’s recent death saved a lot of work. Copies of her birth certificate were in the file. Barraclough checked. She’d been born in Castleford, West Yorkshire, in 1963, daughter of Thomas Ford, van driver, and Elizabeth Ford. Were the parents still living in the area? Where were they when Sandra’s baby was born?

  Barraclough checked the file on Sandra Allan’s death. Next of kin was obviously Dennis Allan. She couldn’t find any reference in the notes to Sandra’s parents. She went back to the database and checked. Yes. A Thomas Ford, with a matching date of birth, had died five years ago in St James’s Hospital, Leeds. She could get the address off the death certificate, if this was the right Thomas Ford. That would give her an address for Elizabeth Ford, Sandra’s mother.

  She looked at the time. There were a couple of people coming in from the house-to-house that she was supposed to interview. She’d have to get back to it tomorrow.

  The man from the museums department, John Draper, wore baggy jeans and Jesus sandals. He carried a folder of papers, some books and an air of energetic enthusiasm. McCarthy, who had arranged to meet Mr Draper at Shepherd Wheel, felt depressed. He was doubtful about the value of this contact, and didn’t relish the thought of listening to yet another academic demonstrate his boundless knowledge of an area of minuscule breadth, minuscule relevance to the present day and minuscule interest to anyone with a life to live. And all delivered in a tone of patronizing deprecation for the benefit of the stupid Plod who couldn’t walk and chew gum at the same time.

  In the event, McCarthy found himself getting interested as John Draper explained quickly and succinctly how the power of the river system had been harnessed, and how the chains of workshops and wheels had grown up along the five rivers that had carved out the valleys on which the city was built. ‘No problems with recycling and waste,’ Draper said. ‘Not from your power source, anyway.’

  ‘There must have been a price.’ McCarthy knew that someone always paid for the free lunch.

  ‘Oh, yes, there was an environmental cost,’ Draper agreed. ‘Wildlife patterns were disrupted. And the mills did pollute. Waterways were seen as natural sewers – chuck in all your waste and see it vanish. To become someone else’s problem. Still, that’s not what you’re here for.’

  McCarthy looked along the dam. All the activity had died down now, the search of the workshop moving on to the laboratory and the scientists. ‘I’m not sure exactly what we are here for,’ he admitted. ‘It just seems as though someone has been using this system, and what I need to know is: were they just exploiting what was here, or have they been manipulating it somehow?’

  ‘Manipulating it?’ Draper looked puzzled. ‘Oh, I see what you mean. Liz Delaney said that the wheel was turning when the body was found?’

  McCarthy nodded. ‘I can’t see why. There’s no logic in that.’ McCarthy didn’t like the idea of illogical crimes. Any crime, particularly an unplanned one, may seem illogical to the outside observer, but McCarthy knew that all crimes had their own internal logic, and finding that logic, that pattern, was an important key to solving the problem. Sometimes, the very illogicality was the logic – the attempt to confuse by the random act, that could never be truly random. You have left your mark, and I will find it. ‘Also, the wheel stopped again. The woman who found the body said the wheel stopped while she was in the yard.’

  ‘Let’s go and have a look,’ said Draper cheerfully. They’d met on the bridge where the road divided Bingham Park from the woods, and were standing on the bridge looking down at the weir above Shepherd Wheel Dam. They went into the park by the gap in the wall that led to the steps. Draper showed McCarthy the way the weir channelled the water along the goit and into the dam. ‘The weir has deteriorated, of course,’ he said. ‘It’s a crime the way this system has been allowed to decline.’ He caught McCarthy’s glance. ‘It’s important to keep some of our history intact, wouldn’t you agree, Inspector? Learn from our yesterdays?’

  ‘Depends what you learn.’ McCarthy was only prepared to concede so far.

  ‘Oh, no doubt. Always. True of anything.’ McCarthy looked at the shaggy-headed scholar who was studying the top of the weir with minute interest, and couldn’t decide if the man was taking the piss or not. He waited to see if the perusal was to any purpose, or if Draper was just making the most of an opportunity to commune with his beloved remains. ‘This is …’ Draper put his hand on a small bar that protruded above the edge of the path. ‘I was wondering why the water was so low.’ He looked at McCarthy. ‘In the dam. The water is very low. I was assuming it was the silting problem we’ve got along the whole system, but …’ He indicated the bar. ‘This is the shuttle that regulates the flow of water into the dam. It’s been set to virtually stop the flow.’

  ‘Someone’s shut the water off?’ McCarthy wanted this clarified.

  ‘Exactly. I’ll have to tell them. Get the flow restored.’

  McCarthy looked across the dam, where the sun was gleaming off the mud banks and turning the surface of the water into a dark mirror. Despite the disruption of the past week, he found the scene peaceful – but it was the peace of desertion, a place abandoned, where the water-birds swam undisturbed beside the overgrown allotments and the shuttered silence of Shepherd Wheel.

  The two men walked along the side of the dam. Draper looked down at the mud, marked with the prints of the water-birds, emerald green with new moss, littered with twigs fallen from the trees, soft-drink cans, sweet papers. They went down the steps at the far end of the dam and round the front of Shepherd Wheel to reach the entrance to the wheel yard. McCarthy didn’t break the silence. He had a feeling that the other man was mulling something over and he didn’t want to disrupt his train of thought. As they reached the wheel-yard gate, Draper paused with his hand on the padlock. ‘Of course, if you wanted to run water through without moving the wheel, you might think that lowering the level of water in the dam would do it. You’d be wrong, of course.’ He looked up at McCarthy, still fiddling with the key in the lock. ‘It solves your problem about the wheel stopping, though. With the water as low as this, there’d only be enough to turn the wheel for about twenty minutes. If that.’

  It seemed so obvious, McCarthy couldn’t believe he hadn’t thought of it himself. ‘Could that, what did you say, shuttle have been moved accidentally?’ Or could Emma’s death have been carefully planned, rather than the sudden outburst of killing violence that it seemed?

  ‘It’s never h
appened before that I know of,’ Draper said doubtfully. ‘It doesn’t shift to a knock.’

  Vandals? McCarthy wondered. No, vandals wouldn’t be content with the simple resetting of the level of the dam. They would have torn it apart, destroyed it. For some reason, the river workings didn’t seem to attract their attention. Draper fiddled with the key and unlocked the padlock. ‘Half these bloody keys don’t work,’ he said. They were in the wheel yard now, and Draper wandered across to look down on the decaying wheel. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘there’s been a mill here since at least 1556.’ He was silent for a moment. ‘She was in there,’ he said, ‘your little girl?’

  The phrase sounded strange to McCarthy. A little girl. A drug user. A sexually active woman. A little girl. ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘And the wheel was turning. She’d been pushed in from the inside?’ McCarthy nodded. ‘Pushed into the water, and … The wheel is damaged – I’m surprised it turned.’ McCarthy waited, not feeling the impatience he usually felt when experts waffled their way to the point. He felt as though Draper was putting his thoughts together out loud. ‘There’s a long tail goit here,’ Draper said. ‘The water channels back through a conduit – comes out about fifty metres from the wheel. Small and narrow. When the mill isn’t working, there isn’t enough current to move anything much through it. She’d probably have jammed in there anyway. Maybe he opened the pentrough to wash her into the conduit.’

  He caught McCarthy’s eye. ‘Sorry. Look, the water comes through here’ – he indicated the wooden tank above the wheel – ‘from the dam, and turns the wheel. It falls into the channel below the wheel, then it runs out through that conduit’ – he indicated a narrow archway in the stone, under the water – ‘and back into the stream about fifty yards along. If you dumped a body down in that channel and ran some water through, it would wash the body into the conduit. Shut the water off again and there it stays. I wonder how long before anyone would have thought to look?’

  Logic. It was clear and logical. Would they have looked? Would they even have looked in Shepherd Wheel, locked up and secure? Would they have looked at all for a missing, troubled seventeen-year-old with a history of drug abuse? But the wheel turned. The killer hadn’t expected that. The wheel turned. ‘Thank you, Mr Draper,’ he said.

  The blocks were abandoned now. The warren of deck access, walkways, stairs, lifts – which hadn’t worked when the flats were inhabited, and certainly didn’t work now – was in darkness, the windows and doors of each flat boarded up as they became empty, the stairways sealed off, the lift doors jammed shut. They stood in dark stillness, waiting for the demolition team that would, eventually, erase them.

  As the bona fide inhabitants moved out, other inhabitants moved in. The boarding was ripped off the doors and windows, the pipework and the cables were pulled out, the old boilers ripped off the walls in a swift and brutal asset strip. The flats were left open to the rain and the wind, the wood rotted, damp pervaded the concrete, water dripped on the walkways and formed in puddles on the landings. But they provided shelter of a kind. In some of the flats, there were signs of habitation: graffiti on the walls, the remains of fires on bricks in the middle of rooms, blankets, cups, plates.

  Lee picked his way along the front of the second block. A burnt-out car blocked the pavement and he turned into the flats along the lower walkway. The flats had been boarded up, but most flats showed signs of later entry: boarding pulled off the doors, off the windows, broken glass, trailing wires. The walkway stank of piss and, from the broken-in doorways, the smell of shit made him gag. He knew what was in those flats, the silver foil, the needles, the detritus of a habit he abhorred. Pills were OK, crack and brown were for wankers.

  He moved quickly, ignoring a figure slumped by the stairwell. Lee could handle himself, but he preferred to avoid trouble if he could. Mostly. He squeezed past the broken security barriers, went up the landings almost to the top of the tower, then along the deck. He counted the flats until he came to the one he wanted.

  Lee put his head to the door and listened. Silence. He looked round. Nothing. He knocked lightly on the door. ‘Lee.’

  After a moment, the bolts on the door were pulled back. Lee slipped through, pulling the wad of money out of his pocket. A few minutes later, he was running quietly down the stairs, a small zip-lock wallet tucked safely inside his jacket.

  7

  Monday morning, the lab reports from the post-mortem on Emma Allan came through, along with the results of samples taken from the search of Shepherd Wheel. There were detailed accounts of timings, fibres, detritus, blood analysis, body fluid analysis, stomach contents, that confirmed what they were already pretty sure of. Emma Allan had died in Shepherd Wheel between about ten and noon on the day she vanished. This was useful, important to confirm, because they all knew the danger of reading the obvious, jumping to conclusions, and getting it badly wrong while precious time ticked away. Fibres from the grate proved to be blue cotton denim, of the kind used to make jeans. It came from a strong, heavy-duty weave, work jeans rather than fashion jeans, the report suggested.

  Possibly because of Emma’s immersion, scrapings from under her fingernails revealed no traces of her attacker. Or possibly she had put up little resistance, either because she knew and trusted her attacker, or because of the interesting cocktail of recreational drugs in her bloodstream, including heroin. Her earlier caution for possession was clearly just a tip of a much larger iceberg. This was no real surprise.

  But there was one unexpected plum in the pie – one that even McCarthy hadn’t expected. They had found three sets of recent prints during the search of Shepherd Wheel. One set was still unidentified. One set was Emma Allan’s, as they’d expected. But someone else had been in that workshop, and had touched things after Emma had touched them. His prints overlay Emma’s, smudged them. He was on the computer. He was well known to the local force. Ashley Reid.

  At the briefing, there was the buzz that indicates an investigation is starting to move. Brooke turned the briefing over to McCarthy to cover the Reid connection. McCarthy ran through the details: the possible sighting, the prints and Reid’s recent arrest. ‘It isn’t enough. We don’t know when Allan left those prints,’ McCarthy pointed out. ‘If she was in there on one day, she could have been in there on another. Probably was. The Fielding child said that Emma used to go off when they went to the park.’ He remembered Lucy’s voice, matter of fact, unemphatic. And Emma went to chase the monsters and I went to the playground. ‘We’ve been trying to bring Reid in as a witness since Saturday. No one knows where he is.’

  McCarthy passed round the drugs information he’d pulled up at the weekend, and went over his interview with Suzanne Milner again. ‘What’s a bit odd here is that Milner mentioned Reid specifically to say she hadn’t seen him. Barraclough?’

  ‘Why did she mention him? How did his name come up?’

  McCarthy didn’t know. It puzzled him as well. ‘Either she saw him and didn’t want to say – but she walked into it and had to make the best of it, or it’s like she said: she saw someone she thought looked like him. She was very defensive about it. I don’t know how well she knows him.’

  He ran through the details of Reid’s most recent arrest, noting the expressions of exasperation and anger when they heard the fact that Reid had got bail. ‘Why would they do that?’ Barraclough could still be surprised by court decisions.

  ‘I didn’t check back on all the details. He was already on the Alpha programme, under supervision.’ Barraclough looked disgusted. McCarthy caught her eye and nodded his agreement. ‘We’ve got to find him. We’ll need samples – the prints won’t be enough on their own. We want him pinned down on this. There’s nothing that points to the father, but we haven’t got the results back on his samples yet. And it would help if that sighting could be confirmed.’

  McCarthy was tired and the day had barely started. The dead face of the woman in the water kept returning to him. The buzz from the early ne
ws, the match-up with fingerprints in Shepherd Wheel, was replaced with a sense of urgency. They knew the signs. Ashley Reid was dangerous, and he was still out there.

  Suzanne spent the morning in the library. She’d spent much of the previous night trying to think of ways to undo the damage, and drawn a blank. She felt angry at the way her actions had been interpreted, but she knew that, in a situation like this, crying ‘unfair’ was pointless. Anyway, as soon as she’d mentioned Ashley’s name, as soon as she’d seen that gleam of interest in DI McCarthy’s eyes, she should have contacted Richard and told him. She was at fault.

  The only thing to do was to press on with her work, and so she was at the computer catalogue by eight-thirty, doing one of her regular checks through journals looking for recent research into language disorders. The terminals were awkwardly placed, the seats too high, and she had to lean forward to see the screen. Her hair fell in her eyes and she fished around in her bag until she found a clip. She twisted her hair back off her face and jammed the clip in place. Better.

  After half an hour’s searching she found the reference she’d been looking for. Someone in California was researching into evidence of brain damage in persistent offenders. She wasn’t sure if it would be relevant, but language disorders could arise from certain types of brain damage. It was possible that she and this researcher were coming at the same problem from different angles. As she skimmed the paper, she recognized things that were relevant to her research: … clear evidence from imaging of the frontal lobe… aphasia… sociopathic patterns of behaviour … She jotted the reference on an index card and took the journal to one of the reading desks.