Silent Playgrounds Read online

  McCarthy was aware of Suzanne Milner as he reinforced his warning to Lucy. Be careful. Don’t play alone. He shouldn’t have taken it out on her – he’d assumed that Lucy was playing, apparently unsupervised, a few hundred yards from the park where she’d vanished just a few days ago, but Suzanne’s swift response to his arrival demonstrated that she had been doing as she said, watching out. Lucy skated off up the passageway. He nodded to Barraclough who went after her, and he stood up slowly, watching Suzanne. She looked as if she wanted to say something. She ran her hand through her hair, pushing it off her face. She looked at McCarthy uncertainly.

  ‘What’s wrong, Suzanne?’ Her T-shirt was tight-fitting, and she obviously wasn’t wearing anything underneath it. He was aware of a faint perfume that hung around her. He kept his face impassive, his eyes on hers.

  ‘Nothing,’ she said, after a brief pause. There obviously was something, though. He could see her trying to work out the words. He waited. For a moment, he thought she was going to turn away and go back in, when she touched his arm. ‘Steve …’

  ‘What is it?’ She was biting her lip, looking undecided.

  ‘Jane said that you’d found someone else in the park.’ He said nothing; waited. ‘Another … Someone else.’ She didn’t want to spell it out.

  ‘Yes.’ Suddenly, McCarthy was alert. What was her interest in this, apart from ordinary curiosity? This didn’t look like curiosity. He remembered that he’d planned to look her up, to see if there was anything on record that would explain her contradictory attitude. He’d do that when he got back to the station. He leant his arm against the car and looked at her. ‘She didn’t know who it was, or anything. If it was a … man or a woman. I just wondered …’

  McCarthy knew the information would be in the late edition of the local paper today. It would be in the nationals tomorrow and on the news. There was no reason not to answer her questions, but he wanted to know why it was so important to her. Her hands were clasping and unclasping – a nervous tic that he’d noticed before. She looked down, following his eyes, then wrapped her arms round her waist. ‘I just wondered, was it …’ She was having trouble controlling her voice. It caught, and she looked away, biting her lip. She took a deep breath. ‘Was it Ashley Reid?’ Now she was looking straight at him with the intent stare of someone who has asked a question and knows the answer is something she doesn’t want to hear. She knew, McCarthy thought, that he was going to say yes.

  He almost gave her the answer she expected, just to see what she would do, what she would tell him in the moment of shock, but instead, he shook his head slowly. ‘No. It wasn’t Ashley Reid.’

  She relaxed as the tension went out of her. ‘I thought … I’m sorry.’ She brushed her hand across her eyes. ‘I thought it was him.’

  And why the fuck, McCarthy wondered, would she think that?

  McCarthy left Barraclough to deal with Jane Fielding once they had broken the news about Sophie. He listened to the sounds of tea being made, Barraclough’s calm voice engaging her in conversation, casual and informal. McCarthy had formed the opinion that Jane Fielding’s vague dreaminess was actually a useful shield for a shrewd mind. He hoped that Barraclough might be able to get behind that shield while shock and distress kept the woman distracted.

  He went to find Lucy who had stayed in the back room as they talked to her mother. Jane Fielding didn’t miss that. ‘Don’t tell her,’ she warned. McCarthy shook his head.

  Lucy was sitting at the table, and watched him expressionlessly as he came into the room. She wrapped a protective arm round something on the table in front of her. ‘I’m doing drawing,’ she offered by way of an overture, and McCarthy took this as an invitation to sit at the table with her.

  ‘Can I see?’ he asked.

  She thought about it. ‘This one isn’t finished,’ she said. ‘You can see the others.’ She slipped down from her chair and took his hand. ‘Over here,’ she said, pulling him across the room where drawings were pinned haphazardly to the wall. To McCarthy’s eyes, they were a random jumble of childish scribbles, brightly coloured, depicting a world where flowers and animals were as tall as people, houses were boxes that sprouted chimneys at awkward angles on their roofs, the sky was a blue line and the sun shone unremittingly. He looked at some of the captions for guidance. He had a feeling that Lucy would judge him by his response to her drawings. My dog in the park. Flossy my cat in the park. Me and my sisters in the park. ‘You haven’t got a dog,’ he said.

  She looked at him assessingly. ‘I have really,’ she said.

  ‘Oh.’ McCarthy needed a guide. This child fantasized, Alicia Hamilton had said so, but he had no way of telling the fantasy from the reality. ‘Where is he?’

  Lucy looked at him. ‘My dog’s a girl,’ she said.

  ‘My dog was a girl, too,’ he said, feeling his way.

  ‘What was her name?’ Lucy looked interested.

  ‘Sally,’ McCarthy said.

  Lucy nodded. ‘That’s a good name. My dog’s called Sally too. She lives in the park.’

  McCarthy felt as though he was stepping on cobwebs. ‘What about your cat? And your sisters? Where do they live?’

  ‘In the park.’ She was a bit impatient with his slowness. ‘We all live in the park. All of these are in the park,’ and she encompassed the wall of drawings with an expansive gesture.

  McCarthy looked again. My dog in the park. Flossy my cat in the park. Me and my sisters in the park. There was another one with writing on. He looked closely. The Ash Man’s brother in the park. These were all pictures of people smiling, the blue sky above, the ubiquitous sun shining. These were happy pictures. There was one painting that was pinned in a corner away from the others. This one had no writing, there was no sun and no blue sky. The figure loomed at the front of the drawing, the face wasn’t smiling. He looked down at Lucy. She was watching him carefully. He thought he knew who this might be, but he wasn’t sure how she’d react if he got it wrong. He waited and, after a moment, she said, ‘That’s in the park too. That’s the Ash Man.’

  Q. So where do you go in the evenings? When you go out?

  A. So … ?

  Q. In the evenings, Ashley. Where do you go?

  A. The Alpha.

  Q. Yes, I know. But what do you do when you don’t go to the Alpha?

  A. To the Alpha …

  Q. But when you don’t go?

  A. (Pause.)

  Q. Ashley? I know you go to the Alpha some evenings. What do you do on the other evenings?

  A. On the other evenings … er … (pause) … the flat.

  Q. Where’s that?

  A. The garage. With … Lee’s name on … and … em … so … sometimes, not now.

  Q. What did you do last night?

  A. Went to the place so … (Pause.)

  Q. Which place, Ashley?

  A. I’m telling you. It was in the park and so … she said she was going.

  Q. Yes.

  A. And I couldn’t … (Pause.)

  Q. But which place is this, Ashley? Is it the flat?

  A. No … (Pause.) By the flats … em … Simon brings the stuff so … she didn’t like that. (Pause.) It was loose, you see, and so didn’t want …

  Suzanne rubbed her eyes. She’d read the transcript of Ashley’s tape right through, but she hadn’t found much to help her. It was so hard to follow, because he didn’t seem to understand her questions, muddled his responses, didn’t seem to know what he was talking about himself half the time. She wished that she could re-interview him. At the time, she hadn’t been bothered about the lack of clarity – she’d been pleased. It had been what she was looking for. Now, she didn’t understand. Who was he talking about? Was he talking about his brother? Richard said that Ashley’s brother was in care, was autistic. Ashley had never had a family. Maybe he fantasized like Lucy.

  Where was this ‘place’? Where was Ashley?

  She knew he went to the Alpha Centre. Except, according to Richard, Ash
ley had done a runner. So he wasn’t at the centre any more. Thanks to the confidentiality system at the Alpha, she didn’t even know where he lived, in which part of Sheffield she should start looking. Except … Use the brain God gave you, Suzanne. He obviously wasn’t at home, or wherever he lived, because no one could find him. He couldn’t be at his usual haunts, not the ones that everyone knew about.

  So where would he go, that McCarthy couldn’t find him, and Richard couldn’t find him? And what made her think she could do any better? He would go to his friends, of course. Friends that no one would know about? She didn’t know his friends. Who could he trust? Simon? She went back to the tape.

  A. On the other evenings … er … (pause) … the flat.

  Q. Where’s that?

  A. The garage. With … Lee’s name on … and … em … so … sometimes, not now.

  Q. What did you do last night?

  A. Went to the place so … (Pause.)

  Or Lee. Lee from the Alpha Centre? The garage with Lee’s name on? She thought. Lee and Ashley were sometimes together, she remembered. She’d seen them playing snooker, seen them smoking together outside, been struck by the contrast between Ashley’s silence, his pale face and heavy dark hair, and Lee’s noisy red-headed vigour. But she’d never thought of them as friends. Lee was quick and cruel. He tormented the slow-witted Dean, was quick to take advantage of others, as she knew to her cost. She remembered Ashley’s warning. He’d seen the trap before she had. Richard had said that Ashley was a loner. Her observations seemed to confirm that. He’d also said that Ashley had learning difficulties. She’d taken that on board – Richard must know. But Lee wouldn’t have any time for someone who wasn’t bright, she was pretty sure of that.

  She thought back over her encounters with Ashley. Apart from the interview, the tape, he’d shown signs of being withdrawn, but he hadn’t struck her as being unintelligent. She wondered what she would have thought if Richard hadn’t said anything. A picture came into her mind. She remembered sitting in the coffee bar one evening, after the programme was finished for the day, watching Lee challenging Richard at snooker. There had been an interested and partisan crowd round the table. She had stayed back, observing. She’d looked across the room and caught Ashley’s eye. He’d been watching her and, just for a moment, she saw a speculative, almost calculating light in his eyes. Then he’d given her his gentle smile, and turned back to the game. She hadn’t thought much about it at the time, but, remembering it now, she was convinced. Ashley wasn’t subnormal, or special needs, or whatever label had been pinned on him. Ashley was perfectly intelligent. So why did he hide it? She felt frustrated. She hadn’t got enough information, and had no access to any more.

  But she did! Richard. She was pretty sure he felt bad about what had happened. He’d tried to give her some warning, and he’d been very uncomfortable when he’d told her what was happening. She could use that. She needed a reason to contact him. He was interested in local history. They’d talked about the village where he lived, Beighton, one of the old communities that had been engulfed by the urban sprawl of Sheffield. He wanted to know something about the history of his house. ‘I keep meaning to look it up in the archives,’ he’d said, ‘when I’ve got time.’

  ‘I’m down in the stacks at the uni all the time,’ she’d said. ‘I’ll look up one of the old maps for you.’ One of those promises you make and never get round to. But he wasn’t to know that. If she tracked him down at the university, gave him the map, pretended that she’d found it before the trouble, he’d feel even more guilty. He’d feel he had to talk, and then she could ask him about Ashley – legitimate questions about the diagnosis of learning difficulties, and then some casual ones about Lee. Lee could find Ashley for her. She was suddenly convinced. She looked at her watch. It was almost five. She could go up to the library now, look up the map and get it copied. She needed to pick up her tapes from the department as well. Ashley’s tape, at any rate. The transcript wasn’t enough – it wasn’t finished, and anyway, she wanted to listen to it again. If she took it out of its case, no one would notice it was missing.

  She was just dumping her keys and her purse in her bag when there was a knock at the door, and Jane came in, looking pale and upset. Suzanne realized that in her relief about Ashley, she’d forgotten everything else. ‘What’s wrong?’ she said. ‘What is it?’

  Jane gripped her hand. ‘Suzanne, the body in the park.’ Suzanne’s breathing tightened. Surely McCarthy wouldn’t have lied to her? ‘It’s – I don’t know how I’m going to tell Lucy. It’s Sophie. They found Sophie dead in the park.’

  Suzanne felt numb. Something that had seemed only incidentally, accidentally, connected to her life, suddenly became central, focused.

  ‘Sophie? Your Sophie? Are they sure?’

  Jane nodded. ‘Her parents identified her this morning.’ But Jane hadn’t come round for comfort, or just to tell Suzanne the news. ‘They want me to look at some pictures, of people that Sophie might have known. I saw the people she went round with. I want to help. I want to do it as soon as possible. I want them to catch him.’ Jane’s usual air of vague detachment had gone. She was focused the way she focused on her work, on her daughter. ‘I want to go with them now. Suzanne, could you look after Lucy for me?’

  Suzanne still felt frozen with shock. She heard the words as if they were coming from a distance. ‘Yes. Of course. I was going to walk up to the library. She wouldn’t mind spending half an hour in the stacks, would she?’

  ‘That would be perfect. I don’t want her near the news or anything. I want to tell her myself.’ Jane’s lips were compressed the way Lucy’s were when she was concentrating, when she was expressing disapproval.

  ‘Don’t worry.’ Suzanne ushered Jane out of the door, and watched as she got into the car with McCarthy. She noticed that Tina Barraclough wasn’t with them, and found herself wondering if Jane would enjoy McCarthy’s undivided attention as much as she had said she would. She looked back up the road towards the student house. The police cars were still there, and now a university housing department van.

  Sophie. Sophie wasn’t a dead woman in the park, a murder victim. She was the happy-go-lucky student who looked after Lucy, who’d been more like a big sister to Lucy than a carer.

  She realized that she hadn’t been surprised when the complex, troubled Emma had come so seriously to grief. But Sophie was happy and full of life. It was ridiculous that Sophie was dead. That was the word that kept coming into her mind. Ridiculous. No one had the right to take that life away from her. It’s all we get, Suzanne pleaded to the figure, dark and faceless, who seemed to lurk in the back of her mind. It’s all we get.

  People moving like random particles across the forecourt, weaving in and out of the straight lines of the cars, parked in rows. Unpredictable movement, no order, no pattern. People bumping into him, looking at him, expectant. Say, ‘Sorry.’ Can’t tell, can’t tell.

  Simon could understand the laboratory where the bottles and jars were ordered and labelled and what they contained was predictable in what it would do and the way it would behave. He could understand the library, once he was in among the shelves and the books all in rows, all with a place where they belonged.

  But sometimes, whispering and laughing and people-sound interfering with the patterns in his head. A face. ‘Hi, Simon!’ Fellow student. Say, ‘Hello,’ ‘Fancy a coffee?’ Coffee, people, conversation, no pattern, no order, nothing to understand. Say, ‘Can’t just now. Thanks.’ Lost them! Looking, looking. Just a moment ago, over by the shelves, over by the door. Where? Where?

  There.

  Lucy sat at the computer terminal and wriggled herself into a more comfortable position. Suzanne was just round the corner, looking at books, books that were huge and had to be lifted off the shelves with two hands. They were dusty and had made Lucy sneeze. ‘You’d better keep out of the way of this dust,’ Suzanne had said, and she had shown Lucy how to search on the computers. ‘You just
stay here,’ she said.

  But the computers were boring. She looked round her. The shelves were all around her, towering up to the ceiling. Everywhere you looked, there were shelves, secret shelves, Lucy thought. You could get lost in the secret shelves. Suzanne told her, ‘Don’t go far. If you do get lost, follow the yellow line’ – she showed Lucy a yellow line on the floor – ‘until you get to the door, then wait for me. I’ll come and find you.’

  It was like the story about the monster in the maze. The minotaur. Lucy had a picture of a man fighting the minotaur. She slipped off her stool and crouched down at the bottom of the shelf, looking underneath it. You could just see through to the other side, and there were more shelves and more shelves. She squirmed along on her stomach, trying to see. There were Suzanne’s feet. She was standing on tiptoe. She must be reaching up to a high shelf. She didn’t know Lucy was watching. Lucy wriggled further along.

  It was very quiet in the library, in the stacks. ‘There’s no one else down here usually, not now the exams are over,’ Suzanne had said. ‘So no one will mind if you go on the computer.’ Suzanne had taken her into the library up some steps. There were lots of people there. Then they’d gone through a small door and down some stairs, and there were all the secret shelves, miles of secret shelves, but Suzanne had said, ‘Come on,’ and they’d gone to another door and down more steps. The door had swung shut behind them with a boom. There was another door at the bottom of the steps. ‘Come on,’ Suzanne had said. That door had closed like a whisper. And it was so quiet, Lucy’s ears felt squashed, and the air felt old and dry.

  More shelves, more secret shelves. Lucy had run round them, laughing, wanting to make a noise, and then she didn’t know where she was. Everywhere she looked, there were just shelves. In front of her, rows and rows, and in the distance it got dark. Behind her, just the same. She looked to where the door was, but there were just shelves again. Then Suzanne was there, and told her about the yellow line. Lucy thought that maybe she wanted to go home. ‘Does Michael like the secret shelves?’ she asked.