Silent Playgrounds Read online

  She needed to sort things out. It was all getting out of control. She needed to identify the problems, so that she could deal with them one by one. She tested them in her mind. Joel. Should she tell Jane about her encounter with him? It would sound like nothing to someone who hadn’t seen it. Wait and see. Joel’s new-found concern for Lucy would soon evaporate, and then he would be back to occasional visits. The Alpha Project. Leave it and see what happened? It was probably better not to wait. She could phone Keith Liskeard tomorrow and arrange to see him. Then she could explain exactly what had happened. She’d better talk to Maggie, her supervisor, as well. She should have done that today.

  Ashley. Without meaning to, she’d focused police attention on Ashley, and he’d responded the way Adam had done. He’d run away. When Richard had told her that Ashley was missing, she’d thought of Adam. The Alpha grapevine was very efficient. As soon as the police started looking for him, he would have known, she was sure of that. And he would know where the information had come from. Ashley had trusted her.

  She tried to shut it out, but she kept hearing Steve McCarthy’s voice: I hold you responsible for this. No, he’d said, You‘re not responsible… In her mind, his face became like her father’s, his eyes looking at her with cold judgement. There is right, and there is wrong, Suzanne. I expect you to know the difference.

  It’s not that simple, she pleaded, but his face was gone. She was looking over the bars of a cot, looking at the tiny face against the white of the shawl, the fists clenched, the face screwed up, the mouth seeking. ‘He’s going to cry,’ she said. ‘Can I hold him?’

  ‘That’s right, Suzanne, you hold him, see, like this …’ And the weight of him in her arms, the baby smell and the dark blue eyes that looked at her. ‘Your little brother, Suzanne. You’re going to be a big help to your mother, I know you are.’ Her mother. A white face on the pillow, a thin, tired whisper. Take care of him, Suzanne. She was entranced by his face, his hands, his smallness.

  She knew where she was going. She went out through the gate and crossed the road into the next park. To her left was a grassy slope that was a sea of daffodils in the spring. The path was wide and straight in front of her, inviting her into the cool shadows of the woods. She looked at the noticeboard. The piece of paper was gone. TAKE CARE … Her feet felt heavy, and she was tempted to turn around and go home, but she knew she mustn’t. The trees were shading her eyes from the sun now, but it gleamed through the branches in sudden flashes, dazzling her as she walked.

  She came to the bridge, the one that led to Shepherd Wheel. She looked across at the building. It was locked up and silent. It looked the same as it always did, and it looked as though it had closed itself up on dark secrets. She mustn’t let her imagination run away with her. It was just a workshop. She was glad that the wheel yard would be locked. If it had been open, she would have had to go round, look down again into that dark, still water.

  There were tapes across the doors, black and yellow police tapes, which looked like ribbons tied on a statue – inappropriate and incongruous. She crossed the bridge. There was no barrier there, and the police can’t have been too worried about their crime scene any more, because there was no one there to keep people away. She walked along the path and up the slope to Shepherd Wheel Dam, the dam that existed to power the wheel. The water was still low, but the flow between the mud banks looked stronger, as though the dam was filling up again. The ducks quacked mournfully at her as she passed.

  She stopped at the end of the dam, where it met the stream. There were steps up to another bridge here, to the road. Suzanne looked at the water. It tumbled down a weir that returned it to the main stream. She looked back at the dam. The shadows rippled across the surface of the water. Shepherd Wheel was still and silent under the trees. Suzanne had made a decision.

  She knew what she had to do. She had to find Ashley.

  Barraclough felt as though she had been relegated to the paperwork when the interesting, the important things were happening elsewhere. She looked at the notes in front of her. Where had Emma been in those last weeks of her life? She had left her father’s house and gone to Carleton Road. She had left Carleton Road. at the end of May, but there was nothing to tell them where she had gone. She had given Jane Fielding the address of her father’s flat, but she hadn’t been living there. And yet she’d been around, active, and apparently earning money. Polly had seen her. Polly’s story had given them a link they hadn’t had before – Emma had a boyfriend called Ash. Polly wasn’t able to confirm it, but given everything else they had, the prime candidate was Ashley Reid. Ashley Reid … Barraclough frowned. Emma had clearly been a troubled and difficult young woman, but everything that Barraclough had seen told her that Emma was also bright and intelligent. According to the information they had from the Alpha Centre, Ashley Reid was of below average intelligence. What would the attraction have been? And then, according to Polly, Emma had found someone else. Jealousy. One of the clearest motives in the book. Barraclough knew her Shakespeare.

  They’d requested Reid’s file from social services. She had been landed with the job of going through it. His life – his nineteen years – had been difficult. Barraclough saw enough of the effects of crime not to be sentimental about offenders, but as she read through Reid’s file, she felt the anger she often felt at the lives some people were born to.

  Ashley had not come into the care of social services until early 1989, when he was nine. His parents were Carolyn Reid, formerly Walker, and Phillip Reid. His parents were British, but he had been born in America, where his parents had emigrated in 1978. His mother had brought him to England and left him and his elder brother, Simon, with their uncle, her brother Bryan, in 1984. It seemed to have been an unofficial arrangement. Barraclough frowned. Surely there should have been some kind of official involvement. She said as much to Corvin, who was reading through Polly Andrews’s statement.

  ‘Not if they were told the kid was with his mum and it was all happy families,’ he said. ‘Not unless there was reason to worry. They’ve got enough on without looking for work.’

  ‘I wonder if the uncle and aunt are still around.’ Barraclough looked at the names. Bryan and Kath Walker. ‘I wonder what they could tell us.’ She went back to the file. The social services had been unable to trace either parent. Ashley’s mother had apparently gone back to America. There was no reference to his father in any of these notes. Bryan and Kath Walker had taken both boys in, but Simon had gone into care early on. He was autistic, and too much for his aunt and uncle to handle. They had brought Ashley up with their own child, who was five years older. Michelle. Would Ashley have kept contact with his cousin? She made a note to check.

  After five years, the Walkers put Ashley into care. They described him as being ‘out of control’. There was some kind of friction between the children. There had been attempts to track Carolyn Reid down. The Walkers had reported her last known address in Utah, but, as far as Barraclough could tell, there had been no trace of the woman. She’d abandoned her children and vanished. The notes reported problems with Ashley’s development. They described him as being in reasonable physical condition but withdrawn. He had behavioural difficulties and a low reading age. As far as Barraclough could tell, no one had made a specific diagnosis to account for his problems. He’d been moved around the care system, but had never been adopted or even put into long-term foster care. As he got older, the problems that had plagued his adolescent years began. Truanting, vandalism, theft, violence. A child is for life, not just for Christmas …

  She needed to find out where Ashley’s family was now.

  Simon coming through the park, in the dark through the woods. The pathways made patterns in front of his eyes. The lines and cracks of the tree bark told stories of how the tree had grown and developed and thrived. He stopped and watched the way the street lights played on the patterns as the breeze blew the leaves about, making shadows and light, shadows and light. Here, the path was steep, t
aking him up a narrow track that led to the wall. Here, it led through the passage and then the gate.

  Then the road, quiet, the street lamps lit but shadowed by tall hedges and shrubs. Walls of brick, rectangles, doorways. Spaces of light and planes of shadow, planes with the shadows washing like water across and back.

  A face at the window, a pale blur with dark smudges for eyes, fine hair tangled round her face. Like a drawing, then recognition, a blank square and her face in the middle, quiet and still looking out into the darkness. Then – gone. Lucy.

  Lucy climbed into bed and lay back against the pillows. He was still there. He was in his place, watching. She could tell when she looked out of the window. He was hiding in the darkness, but she could see his feet just where the light shone under the tree. A car went down the road, and Lucy watched the light run across the ceiling. They were coming. They were getting closer. She couldn’t watch all the time. The policewoman wanted to know, but Lucy wasn’t telling. Emma didn’t understand. Lucy knew. And Lucy wasn’t telling. Not anyone.

  8

  It rained that night. Early on Tuesday morning, a walker in the park took an unaccustomed turning across the river to the Shepherd Wheel Dam. This early in the morning, the ducks were unfed, and swam hopefully towards the path, circling in the water below him. He listened to the calls of the birds, and waited for a few minutes. A friend had told him about herons in the park, and he wondered if, at this quiet time of day, he might see one. He looked up at the sky. Clear and blue. It was going to be a fine day. He strolled slowly along, noting the way the mud that had built up was slowly disappearing under the water again. He looked at its soft, glistening surface and the water that ran from the weir, carrying trails of mud as though it was washing the banks away. The feet of the wading birds had left prints and he looked at them, wondering which birds had been there.

  There were things sticking out of the mud: twigs, mostly, from small branches that had fallen into the water. There were one or two empty cans, some bits of paper. His eye was caught by a twig that looked almost like a hand submerged in the mud, a hand reaching up for help. He remembered the legend of Excalibur, the arm clothed in samite – whatever samite was – reaching out of the water holding the mystical sword. He smiled to himself, walking along the path nearer to the twig, waiting for the illusion to vanish with closeness, the ‘hand’ to turn into what it was, a bunch of sticks. His mind was half occupied with problems at work – nothing serious, he was just turning things over in his head – when he was pulled back to focus on the mud again.

  It was a hand. He squinted and rubbed his eyes, trying to get the thing on the surface of the dam to change into the twig he knew it really was. It was a hand.

  It must be a doll, a shop-window dummy that someone had dumped, a … His mind ran out of ideas. It was grey, the skin wrinkled, the nails looking … He was suddenly aware of his stomach, his throat. He felt cold. He looked up. The trees were sharp against the sky, every leaf clearly defined. There was a hand sticking out of the mud. He turned back to go down the steps, and his legs wouldn’t hold him. He was sitting on the top step and the sun was shining and his hands were shaking and he didn’t think he was ever going to get warm again.

  They thought they’d got a real nutter at first, a well-dressed man, educated voice, babbling about mystic arms and samite or something. When he managed to get his story out more coherently, a car was dispatched to investigate, and eventually McCarthy found himself back by the dam, looking down as the men dug into the wet mud, opening up the shallow grave. McCarthy moved back from the edge. He didn’t allow his face to show anything, but the stench was overwhelming. He looked up at the summer trees that hung over the dam, and breathed in the air that smelt of water and cut grass. Then he moved back and looked down at the body, the features and form blurred by the processes of putrefaction, but still disturbingly human, disturbingly real. The body had been there for two or three weeks, the pathologist thought. ‘I can give you a better estimate once I’ve had a closer look.’

  The Lady of the Lake. McCarthy, who had been a fan of the King Arthur legends in his teens, had picked up the reference made by the distraught walker. But this woman – the pathologist was prepared to commit herself that far, to something they could all tell anyway – this woman hadn’t been holding up a mystical sword to a king. Her hand looked as though it had been scrabbling desperately through the mud, reaching for the surface. McCarthy hoped that was just an illusion. Two women, one in the dam, one under the wheel, both dead in the same waterway. What had John Draper said? 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. But if you wanted to dry out the mud in the dam, just a little, then lowering the level of the water would certainly do it. McCarthy watched as they lifted the body carefully from the mud and laid it on a body bag. For her, it was all academic now.

  Suzanne put the phone down. Keith Liskeard, the Alpha director, had written to Maggie Lewis, her supervisor. The research project was suspended. Indefinitely. A copy of the letter had been sent to Suzanne. She looked at the morning’s post that she hadn’t yet opened. The letter was there. She read it as she talked to Maggie, holding the phone awkwardly against her shoulder. The letter cited problems with the group, but also lack of experience in working in this context. That was an irony that roused Suzanne’s anger. ‘I want to see you,’ Maggie had said, her tone peremptory.

  Suzanne had prevaricated, and had managed to postpone the meeting until the following week. She knew what Maggie wanted – a talk, one of those ‘little talks’ that somehow ended up being documented, and became part of the paper that dogged you through your working life. She wanted to have something to offer Maggie in her own support. She knew why Maggie was reacting so badly. The research funds were limited. Suzanne had talked her into supporting the programme at the Alpha Centre, on the grounds that it would attract a lot more money once they had some concrete findings. And now, what could they do with the money they’d committed to Suzanne? It was too late to start another research programme, to try again somewhere else.

  Suzanne had had to admit to Maggie that she’d been aware of the problem since Saturday night. ‘I was coming in tomorrow to tell you,’ she’d said, knowing that it sounded thin. She had said, without much hope, ‘Richard, Richard Kean seemed to think the problem could be sorted out.’

  ‘That’s not what Keith Liskeard said when I phoned him.’ Maggie was really angry, and Suzanne couldn’t blame her. ‘He said that they now realized that the Alpha wasn’t a suitable venue for primary research.’ They’d to-and-froed a bit and, by the end of the conversation, Maggie had softened somewhat, was prepared to concede that Suzanne was perhaps sinned against as well as sinning, but the word – unspoken – unprofessional hung in the air between them. Maggie scheduled a meeting for the following week, with the threat of a meeting with the Head of Department to follow. Suzanne knew that unless she could vindicate herself completely, her prospects as a research academic were seriously damaged.

  She felt tired. She looked at the photo on her desk: Michael giving his toothy camera smile, the smile that had appeared as he got old enough to be camera-conscious. His first school photograph. She looked beyond it to the wall. Adam smiled back at her.

  Her mother should never have had her second child. Adam was a late arrival in her parents’ lives. Her father must have been over fifty when Adam was born. And her mother … Of course, Adam ruined your mother’s health, her father would say, as the little boy sat quietly at the table, carefully pulling the crusts off his sandwiches. Multiple sclerosis – Suzanne was able to give a name to the illness that had made her mother an invalid for most of Suzanne’s life, and had killed her when she, Suzanne, was thirteen. And it was true, the strain of a late pregnancy had caused the already advanced illness to run riot through her mother’s body. Take care of him, Suzanne …

  The doctors had advised an abortion when the pregna
ncy was diagnosed, but Eleanor Milner wouldn’t hear of it. Worst mistake we ever made, Suzanne’s father said when he brought Adam back from the police station after yet another incident of vandalism, another incident of stealing. I thought I brought you up to know right from wrong! That had been aimed at Suzanne, who apparently no longer knew or, at least, was not able to instil in Adam this difference. She had tried, but her best had proved useless, or worse than useless.

  That last time. She remembered the familiar face of the policewoman who worked with the juveniles. Another break-in, a warehouse this time. Adam and his friends, after sweets, boxes of sweets. She shook herself impatiently. The thought of it could still make her eyes sting. This time, it had been worse. The watchman had seen them and given chase. One of the lads had hit out, and the man had been hurt. Adam had run, hidden himself away, terrified of the consequences.

  She remembered the policewoman’s voice, calm and implacable. Just tell us where Adam is. We want to help the lad, Suzanne. But there was only one kind of help the police could give. She could still hear Adam’s despairing cry as the magistrate handed down the sentence, the time that was, in weeks, so short, but to Adam, lonely and frightened, must have seemed like an eternity he couldn’t face. Listen to me, Suzanne … She’d told them, told them that Adam wouldn’t be able to cope with what was happening to him. They’d been brisk, offering her impersonal reassurance.

  And she’d let him down. She’d gone in search of lawyers, of social workers, of the people who’d been so clear that all Adam needed was help and support. And left Adam, left him to be taken away on his own and terrified. She could remember the report, not even front page, buried on page three of the newspaper: THIRD SUICIDE IN YOUNG OFFENDERS’ CENTRE. She remembered her father’s face when the police officers had arrived that morning, and she had had to tell him. I hold you responsible for this!