Silent Playgrounds Page 17

  Suzanne had smiled. ‘That’s a good name. Yes. He likes playing with the computer. I’ll show you.’ She showed Lucy that each of the shelves had lights. ‘You can turn them on if you need them, but turn them off afterwards.’ Lucy didn’t want to go home then, not if Michael liked the shelves. And now she did like them, now she understood about the yellow line. It was like the minotaur again. She could kill the monster and then follow the yellow line to escape. She looked down the rows of shelves into the darkness. Not the monsters. The monsters were in the park.

  She got braver, and walked down a whole row of shelves. For a minute, she was lost again, and then there was the yellow line, and she found her way back. She didn’t want to go too far, though, not into the bit that was dark. She could play Grandmother’s Footsteps; she could pretend that the seekers were tiptoeing round the shelves, and she had to see them, to look at them to make them stop. If she didn’t see them, they could tiptoe right up to her and grab her from behind.

  She heard a faint boom, and then it was quiet again. She tiptoed round the shelf. Looked. Got you! Then she ducked behind and hid. They followed her round the shelves, and she ducked round again and caught them moving. Got you, too! It was harder to see now, because she was further away from Suzanne’s light. She didn’t turn her own light on, because then the seekers would know where to find her. There was another light now, somewhere through the shelves, across the dark bit. She could hide and scramble her way across to the other light, then she could watch and catch them when they tried to follow.

  The other light went out. Then came on again a bit nearer. Grandmother’s Footsteps. Sometimes, in the playground, you could hear them moving, and you could turn round and say, ‘Got you!’ And they had to go back to the beginning, but sometimes you couldn’t hear them at all, and then you had to guess, and when you turned round they were all as still as anything, but they were all a bit nearer, a bit closer, but you couldn’t see them move. They couldn’t move if you watched them.

  She could hear one of them now, soft feet, pad, pad, pad, getting closer. She peered round the shelf. No one. Not there. She moved across a row and into the next line of shelves, moving quietly now, listening. Pad, pad, pad, getting nearer, going slowly. They moved slowly when they weren’t close, they moved slowly so that they could stop or hide if you turned round. When they got near, they moved quickly, padpadpad, to get you before you could move.

  She crouched down and peered under the shelves. Nothing. Pad, pad, pad. Soft and slow. She ducked round the next shelf in her game and whispered, ‘Got you,’ but the game didn’t work any more. Her whisper seemed to stir the dry air, rustle among the shelves. The footsteps stopped, started again. Pad, pad. Stopped. Came closer. Pad, pad, pad. Lucy slid round the next shelf, quiet now. She could hear breathing in the dark. She looked under the shelf. She could see feet now, in those soft trainers that made no noise. The trainers were dirty, covered with dried mud. The feet turned, stepped, hesitated. Lucy held her breath. She wanted to cough, she could feel her chest getting tight. It was all right, it was just a game. She stayed still in the dim light. Tamby? she said in her mind. Like a mouse, he said.

  She turned her head, looking along the ground. No yellow line. Slowly, she turned back. No yellow line. She wanted to run among the shelves as fast as she could, run away from the muddy trainers that would come after her padpadpad, closer and closer. Then the feet turned again and began to move along the shelves, towards the end of the row, towards the aisle leading to the next row where Lucy lay hiding. Her chest tightened again, and she gave a wheezing cough. She couldn’t help it.

  Suzanne tied the ribbon on the last map book. Sod’s law, of course. The thing you want is always in the last book. It was her own fault for not taking time to use the catalogues. She’d been trying to be quick for Lucy’s sake. Lucy! She was being very quiet. ‘Lucy,’ she said, and went to the aisle where the computer terminals were. Nothing. No one there. She felt irritated. The scope for one of Lucy’s hiding games was immense down here, she suddenly realized, and if Lucy was annoyed enough with her to subject her to a full-scale hide, then she was in for an uncomfortable hour.

  But she didn’t know that Lucy was hiding. Suppose she had gone upstairs and got lost? She decided to check the door, see if Lucy was waiting there as they had agreed. Maybe Lucy had wandered off and used the yellow line to find the way out. She checked her watch. It had only been about twenty minutes since she last saw her.

  Lucy wasn’t by the door. Suzanne felt uneasy. She ran her options through her mind. If Lucy was angry, was hiding, then calling would be a bad move, because it would tell Lucy that Suzanne was looking for her, was maybe worried, and that the game was worth playing. If, on the other hand, Lucy had wandered out of the stacks, then she needed finding at once. ‘Lucy,’ she called. ‘Shall we go and get some sweets?’ Lucy wasn’t allowed sweets. Jane would kill her, but Suzanne reckoned it was a price worth paying to flush Lucy out. Silence. ‘Lucy?’ she tried again. Nothing.

  She’d better go and get the librarian, get the campus security on the job. She felt nervous, but at the same time convinced that Lucy hadn’t gone far. For all her hiding games and her monsters, Lucy was a sensible child. ‘Lucy!’ The still, dry air mocked her with silence. There was a sense of falling dust. She needed to go and get help, but something made her reluctant to leave this level, to leave the stacks where she was sure that Lucy was, somewhere. Then she heard a sound across the stack, coming from the far shelves. A cough, just one, but it sounded tight, asthmatic. Oh, God! Lucy!

  ‘Lucy!’ she called. ‘I’m coming.’ She grabbed her bag that had Lucy’s inhaler in it and, as she ran, dodging among the shelves, trying to pinpoint the place the sound had come from, she heard someone else moving through the stack, soft sounds moving fast. She ran up the far aisle, looking down each row. It had been from here, she was sure. She heard the muffled boom of the door, and again, and then she was looking down at Lucy who was crouched on the floor, reaching for breath. Suzanne whipped out the inhaler and held it to the child’s mouth. She heard the hiss of the release, and then Lucy was breathing more easily, then more easily still. She sat up against the shelf, and looked at Suzanne warily. Suzanne waited.

  ‘It was a monster,’ Lucy said.

  ‘What was? Lucy, it was asthma. Why did you go so far?’ Her fright was making her feel angry. Lucy looked at her, her face closing into stubborn blankness. Suzanne tried to get her mind back on track. ‘I was just worried, Lucy, when I couldn’t find you.’

  Lucy thought about this, and relented. ‘It was Grandmother’s Footsteps,’ she said. ‘And the monster made me have asthma. But it was all right, because of Tamby. The monster’s gone now.’

  As they made their way across the campus towards the students’ union, Suzanne’s eye was caught by someone moving quickly away from the library entrance. A tall, dark-haired figure. She stared. It surely couldn’t be … The figure turned for just a moment, and Ashley’s eyes caught hers across the car park. Then he was gone. She made to follow, then looked down at Lucy who was still pale, still short of breath. For a moment, the frustration almost overwhelmed her, then she managed a smile. ‘Come on, Lucy,’ she said. ‘Let’s get you a drink.’ And turned away.

  10

  Thursday morning, McCarthy’s phone rang as he was reading through Paul Lynman’s statement again. Polly Andrews had confirmed Lynman’s story in its essential details, apparently without any prompting. And a supply of pills – almost pure MDMA if the preliminary reports from the lab were correct – had been found concealed in the roof space in Carleton Road. However, Lynman had left 14, Carleton Road to move in with Polly Andrews, a fact that neither of them had thought to mention. And the forensic evidence from the suitcase and the zip-lock bag containing the pills had been interesting. Emma Allan’s prints were there, which was to be expected if Lynman’s story was true. But two other people had left prints on those bags. Neither set belonged to anyone who was identifia
ble through police records, but one set matched the nameless set found in Shepherd Wheel. They needed to get Lynman and Andrews in again and put them through the wringer.

  The phone was an unwelcome distraction. He picked it up. ‘McCarthy.’

  It was Anne Hays, the pathologist. ‘I wanted to talk to your boss, but he’s in a meeting,’ she said. ‘I thought this had better not wait. I’ve been doing some more tests on the blood from the Allan case. The samples from the father.’ McCarthy made an affirmative noise. Those samples hadn’t led anywhere in the end. They had found no traces of Dennis Allan in Shepherd Wheel. ‘Partly, I was following a hunch …’

  McCarthy wondered if it was a characteristic of pathologists that they never got to the point. ‘And?’

  ‘This is just based on blood group, you understand. The DNA will take longer – that’s with the lab now.’

  ‘Yes.’ McCarthy understood that.

  ‘Well, Emma’s blood group is O. Dennis Allan is AB. I went back into the records to look at the mother’s blood group. We did the PM here. She was A.’

  ‘Which means?’ McCarthy thought he knew what this meant, but he wanted it in the black and white this woman never seemed willing to provide.

  ‘It means, Inspector,’ she said briskly, ‘that Dennis Allan was not Emma’s father.’

  Half an hour later, Brooke, called from his meeting by McCarthy, was in his office with Anne Hays and McCarthy himself. He polished his glasses as he listened to the pathologist outline her findings again. ‘I think it must have been at the back of my mind,’ she said. ‘It was only a couple of months ago we did the PM on Sandra Allan. It was just a hunch.’

  ‘Steve?’

  McCarthy had been running this new information through his mind, matching it up with what they already had. ‘There was a major row between Emma and her mother, then between Dennis Allan and his wife. Something happened that day to make her take an overdose – a serious one. Suppose he just found out. Suppose Emma found out that her dad wasn’t her dad …’ He looked at Brooke and shook his head. ‘I don’t know how. But if she did, she has a major row with Sandra and leaves home. It was as serious as that – she left home and didn’t go to her mother’s funeral.’

  ‘She didn’t forgive her father, either,’ Brooke said.

  ‘She was seventeen.’ Anne Hays had a seventeen-year-old daughter of her own. ‘It’s a very judgemental age, very black and white. To err is human, to forgive is not our policy.’

  Brooke gave a rueful grimace. His own daughter was fifteen. ‘Then there’s the Sophie Dutton complication. Was she Sandra Allan’s child?’

  ‘DC Barraclough’s looking into that,’ McCarthy said.

  Brooke nodded. ‘Let me know as soon as she finds something. Anyway, Emma and her parents have a massive row. She didn’t go back. Then there was the row between Allan and his wife. Either he knew and was angry she’d let the daughter find out, or he didn’t know – until then.’ McCarthy thought about Allan’s demeanour during the interview. He had been hostile, evasive. McCarthy was certain the man had been lying about something.

  ‘He was ashamed of what he found out?’ Brooke suggested. ‘He felt a fool – having another man’s child landed on him?’ It was possible. It didn’t account for the fact that, to both McCarthy and Brooke, he had looked guilty, not ashamed. ‘Is there anything to link him to the killing? To Shepherd Wheel?’

  McCarthy shook his head. ‘There was a lot of useful stuff came out of Shepherd Wheel – fingerprints, hair, fibres – but none of it links with Allan.’

  ‘So what are we saying?’ Brooke asked. ‘We’re saying he might have killed his daughter because she wasn’t his? Wouldn’t it have been the wife he went for?’ Sandra Allan’s death had apparently been accidental. It had resulted from an overdose, an overdose she had taken after her husband went to work, taking pills she had collected from the local pharmacy after he had left. But there had been no suicide note.

  If Dennis Allan had killed the girl he had thought was his daughter, what was the connection with the death of Sophie Dutton? Sandra Allan had had a child before Emma was born. Was Sophie Dutton Emma’s half-sister? And if she was, how did this connection link with her death? What about the drug connection? And what about Ashley Reid?

  The information gave Brooke enough to bring Dennis Allan in for questioning and to have another look at the flat, this time in search of information about the Allans’ marriage. Barraclough sat at her desk, working with the team going through bags of papers retrieved from the flat. She had a photograph album in front of her, and was making notes of names and dates, friends and contacts from the early days of Allan’s career. ‘Look at this,’ she said to Kerry McCauley, the other DC in Corvin’s group. She was looking at a photo of Dennis Allan from 1972. ‘You could see what she saw in him.’ A young man with auburn curls framing an attractive, slightly androgynous face leant against the wing of a sporty-looking car. There was another picture of the same man with what was clearly a rock group, very early seventies, a lot of feathers and psychedelia.

  Corvin came over to have a look. ‘He was in the music business,’ Barraclough said. ‘It looks as if he was doing quite well – sports cars, flash clothes,’

  ‘It’s only a souped-up Cortina,’ Corvin said. ‘He wasn’t doing that well. Everyone was in a rock group in those days.’

  Most of the photos were of Allan with musicians. As she turned the pages, the same faces began appearing: Dennis Allan with a man and woman. The man had long hair, a moustache and beard; the woman, too, was very much of the times, her auburn hair parted in the middle and hanging like curtains round her face. Some of these pictures had names and dates written underneath them: VELVET, 1975; LINNET, DON G., ’76. There was one picture of the trio on a stage, the men with guitars, the woman singing. Velvet. She remembered the photograph they’d found in Emma’s room:—ELVET, 197—The photograph that Dennis Allan had claimed not to recognize. Velvet. It must be the name of a band. Don G.? Linnet? Nicknames? Other bands?

  There were other pictures: Allan with a rather severe-looking woman, neat and elegant. There was a facial resemblance – was this Allan’s mother? Several pictures of Allan with young women, in mini-skirts, flared jeans, all with long straight hair, heavily made-up eyes and pale lips. As far as Barraclough could tell, the same woman didn’t appear twice. No sign of Sandra.

  She turned the pages over. ‘Velvet’ appeared intermittently. There was no indication that they’d been particularly successful. They seemed to have done gigs in various parts of the country: Leeds, Summer ’75, King’s Head, Barnsley, ’75, Castleford, March, ’76. The line-up seemed to vary sometimes. In ’76, a different figure appeared in the pictures, someone who, though he was dressed in the – she supposed you would call it slightly hippie – style that the others affected, looked much more like a business man, an entrepreneur. Had Velvet found a manager? This man was Pete, Peter. By the end of 1977, the woman with the auburn hair no longer appeared in the pictures. Barraclough looked closely. Here, for the first time, a slim, very pretty girl, a lot of wavy fair hair, standing with her arms round the two men. Sandra. She looked at the writing under the picture. All it said was Huddersfield, 1977.

  This time, Dennis Allan wanted a solicitor. He proved more robust under questioning than McCarthy expected. He was quiet, polite and adamant. He insisted he knew nothing about his daughter’s death. ‘I loved Emma, Inspector,’ he said, twisting a broken rubber band through his fingers. He flinched when McCarthy asked him about Emma’s parentage. His face flushed and his eyelids reddened. ‘I didn’t know,’ he said. ‘I … That was what we had the row about. Emma knew. I don’t know how, but she knew, and she just threw it at Sandy that day. I came back in the middle of it. She just told me, just like that.’ He looked at McCarthy in appeal. ‘I didn’t want it to come out,’ he said. ‘Not now they’re dead, not now Emma’s dead and Sandy’s dead.’

  McCarthy pressed him, wanting to know the when and the h
ow of Emma’s awareness, but Allan shook his head. ‘Sandy said that no one knew.’ But someone had known, and that person had apparently told Emma. On his solicitor’s advice, Allan said no more. ‘My client has explained the omission in his earlier statement,’ the solicitor said. ‘I think anyone would find that explanation reasonable, Inspector McCarthy.’ Similarly, he refused to answer questions about Sandra, other than to claim ignorance again of any earlier child. McCarthy wasn’t satisfied, but he decided to leave it for the moment.

  Allan couldn’t tell them much about the people in the photographs. He insisted he couldn’t remember their names. ‘You were in a band with them for, what, three years, Mr Allan, and you’re asking me to believe you can’t remember their names?’ McCarthy waited.

  ‘I can’t remember,’ Allan insisted. ‘It was twenty-five years ago. I started a band, I’d been playing guitar for quite a few gigs. Then I started Velvet with some of the musicians who were around. We didn’t get a lot of work. It wasn’t always the same people.’ He looked at the photo with names written underneath it. ‘That was Linnet,’ he said, indicating the woman. He caught McCarthy’s look. ‘I think she was Lyn, she sang, so Linnet. Why not? It was the seventies. Everyone was using different names.’ In the first flash of humour McCarthy had seen, he added, ‘We had one singer who called herself Gandalf.’ He shook his head when McCarthy asked him about the man. ‘I don’t remember,’ he said. ‘He was just Don G.’

  He laughed rather bitterly when McCarthy asked him about the smartly dressed man who appeared in the photographs from 1976, Pete. ‘That was our manager, our so-called manager,’ he said. ‘Peter Greenhead.’ He apparently had no problems with that name. ‘It was a rip-off from start to finish.’ Greenhead had worked with the band for less than a year. At the end of that time, he owned the rights to the few songs they had written, and ended their contract, taking their singer with him. Shortly after that, Allan had left. He didn’t know what had happened to the others.