Silent Playgrounds (15 page)

This slow deliberation irritated McCarthy, who wanted to push the woman into some kind of speculation. ‘So what can you tell us?’ he said.

‘She was young – under twenty-five. She was, as far as I can determine, in good health.’

Come on! McCarthy thought irritably. ‘So how did she die?’

The pathologist picked up her clipboard. ‘It’ll all be in my report.’

McCarthy wondered why he always thought of her as
the pathologist,
rather than – what was her name? – Anne, or even the more formal Dr Hays. He never saw her outside of her professional environment. She seemed to have no life other than that of the dead. Maybe that was it. ‘We need a summary before the briefing,’ he said.

She looked at him over her glasses. He wondered if she had perfected that gesture as a way of asserting her authority. He waited. ‘Briefly, Inspector,’ she said, ‘there is very little to report. Cause of death is undetermined at present. She appears to have drowned in the mud.
How that happened is a matter for speculation. There is some evidence of a struggle but not much. Like your previous victim, she did not put up much of a fight for an apparently healthy young woman. The lab reports may give us more information.’ For a minute, McCarthy thought that that was all she was going to give them, but she frowned, her eyes focusing into the distance, and went on, ‘We’re looking at a murder victim, and I think she’s another victim of the same killer. That’s unofficial.’ She looked at the two officers, and for the first time she seemed to McCarthy to be taking a personal rather than a professional stance. ‘You wouldn’t drown in that mud if you just fell in. Well, you’d be unlucky. If you were unconscious, if you landed face first, if the mud was particularly soft … it might cut off your air supply. There are bruises on her arms as if someone held her down.’ She caught McCarthy’s eye. ‘Like the first one,’ she agreed.

McCarthy tried to picture a struggle by the dam, someone caught in the mud, another figure, shadowy, but becoming clearer, someone with murderous intent. The victim’s terror, the assailant’s … what? What emotions did a killer feel at such a moment? He pulled his mind back to the practicalities of the situation. It would have been messy, noisy, likely to attract attention. ‘How quick would it be?’

‘Not quick enough, I shouldn’t think,’ the pathologist said briskly.

The Duttons lived in a small village outside Hull. The M18 was quiet, and McCarthy was happy to let Barraclough
drive while he ran aspects of the case through his mind. How likely was it that both women were victims of the same killer? They were close friends, they were physically alike, they had died – or at least their bodies had been found – in more or less the same place. That was pretty conclusive. How did it look with Ashley Reid as the main suspect? A scenario with a single murder had given McCarthy no problems. His own interpretation had been an abortive sexual encounter and a sudden, vicious attack. But the evidence of planning, the evidence of a drugs connection, had made him revise his thoughts. Reid was, apparently, not very intelligent. Another murder, and one that had been successfully concealed, didn’t fit, and he was adjusting his mental picture to find ways to accommodate it.

‘What do you think?’ he asked Barraclough, out of the blue.

The sudden interruption of the long silence startled her for a moment. ‘About this latest, you mean?’

‘I wasn’t talking about the last budget.’

‘It’s not—’ He registered the brief flash of protest on her face at his tone and reflected that he probably hadn’t been very fair. He didn’t intend doing anything about it. He waited. ‘Well,’ she said, cautiously, ‘it looks as though it must be the same person – or people.’ She checked her mirror and pulled out to pass a heavy lorry. ‘It must have involved some planning, which suggests that the first one – I mean the first one we found, Emma, was probably planned as well.’

‘Not necessarily,’ but McCarthy nodded to show that he followed her logic.

‘We think that Emma’s killer knew her. So did he know Sophie as well? Or was Sophie the only intended victim and did Emma just get in the way somehow?’ She was quiet for a moment, thinking. ‘Sophie’s been in the mud for three or four weeks, they said. She was still at the university in May. Do we have a last sighting?’

McCarthy shook his head. ‘They’re looking for that now.’

‘OK.’ Barraclough ran the details through her mind again. ‘The obvious thing is the drugs connection. If Emma was dealing on the campus, trod on someone’s toes …’

‘It’s possible. But don’t forget there are a lot of small-time dealers around the university. If she got in someone’s way, she might have got beaten up, but why take the risk of killing her?’

‘Do you think Sophie left because someone was threatening her?’ Barraclough looked at him for a moment and then back at the road.

McCarthy shrugged. ‘Something happened. But don’t forget the trouble in the Allan family.’

Barraclough said, ‘Emma left home in March. After a row with her mum. A few weeks later, Sophie is killed. You think there’s a connection?’

McCarthy nodded. ‘It might all tie in with the drugs thing again. They have a row because they find out that Emma’s got herself involved in trouble? They have a row because they aren’t getting their cut? Or it’s something else altogether.’

They needed to put more pressure on Dennis Allan,
find out what he was hiding. McCarthy went back to his thoughts as Barraclough negotiated her way through the centre of Hull. Too many connections.

The Duttons lived in an old farmhouse about half an hour’s drive from the centre of Hull. The village, Penby, was typical of the area: small, dispersed, set in the middle of flat spreading fields separated by dykes. The houses were red-brick with pantile roofs; the outbuildings were utilitarian. The roads were narrow and in poor repair. ‘Third one along,’ said Barraclough as they came to a T-junction. She turned the car and pulled up on the grass verge. The ground was muddy. There was a short drive up to the house that ran past the kitchen door and along to a garage. The door stood open, but there was no one in sight.

‘Are they expecting us?’ Barraclough thought it was probably a stupid question as she asked it, and McCarthy’s lack of acknowledgement confirmed this. He knocked on the door, waited and then knocked again.

‘Sorry. I was feeding the hens.’ A woman came round from the back of the house. She gave them a smile that tried to conceal her anxiety. She was wearing trousers and rubber boots. Her short hair was jet black. Barraclough found herself wondering where Sophie had got her colouring from – if this was Sophie’s mother. Barraclough could see no resemblance.

‘Mrs Dutton?’

She nodded and offered McCarthy her hand. ‘Maureen,’ she said.

‘I’m Detective Inspector McCarthy from South Yorkshire Police …’ Barraclough listened as he went through the formalities of introduction, watching the woman’s face. ‘Mrs Dutton, is your husband here?’ McCarthy moved nearer to the purpose of their visit, and Barraclough found she didn’t want to be there, didn’t want to see the woman’s friendly, worried face collapse into grief and dismay. For her, Barraclough thought, her daughter was still alive. For McCarthy, and for Barraclough herself, Sophie Dutton was almost certainly dead.

The woman’s eyes began to hunt around the room, as if she was looking for something normal and everyday to fix on. ‘He’ll have seen you arrive. He’s been expecting you,’ she said. ‘Would you like a cup of tea? Or coffee, or something?’ She crossed the kitchen and filled the kettle as she spoke, looking at them inquiringly.

‘Shall we wait till your husband gets here?’ McCarthy said, and the uncharacteristic gentleness in his voice surprised Barraclough.

Maureen Dutton looked round, cleared her throat, said, ‘We could go through to the other room. It’s a bit more comfortable.’ She took them through to a sitting-room at the front of the house. It had the same rather shabby used look about it that the kitchen did. A pair of boots stood on the low table. Books and magazines were piled up in corners. A settee in one corner, opposite the television, presented a homely enclave with some knitting stuffed under a cushion, an open book on the arm, a pair of slippers on the floor.

Maureen Dutton’s eyes looked through the window behind them and her face cleared. ‘Here’s Tony now,’ she said. Barraclough looked at the big, solid man coming across the field towards the gate. Thick black hair, grey beard, dressed in working clothes, like his wife. They waited in silence as he pulled off his boots and came through from the kitchen. He shook hands with McCarthy, and, after a slight pause, with Barraclough. ‘You don’t have to be embarrassed,’ he said, looking at them. ‘You’ve come to tell us our Sophie’s in trouble. We know she’s been mixing with a bad crowd. She’s been a bit … headstrong, lately.’ They had prepared themselves, braced themselves for the worst. Sophie was in trouble, and they were going to deal with it. They were going to stand by her and help her get through it. Barraclough could tell by the expression on the man’s face, and the way the woman straightened her back.
We don’t want to hear this, but we’re ready.

‘In what way, Mr Dutton?’ McCarthy said.

‘It’s Tony. Well, she was …’ He looked at his wife.

‘She wanted to find her mother,’ Maureen Dutton said, baldly. ‘We always knew she might want to do that. We’d never have stood in her way.’

‘Sophie was adopted?’ McCarthy’s voice was that of someone clarifying a point, but Barraclough could detect the slight edge in his voice.

‘Yes. We took her when she was four. There was never any question of her not knowing.’ Maureen Dutton looked at her husband, and the two of them moved closer together. ‘Then, when she started looking, there was a letter. Her mother had written a letter to
be given to her if she ever tried to find her birth family. That’s why she took the place at Sheffield, I think. That’s where her family came from.’

‘And did she find her mother?’

‘No. I don’t know … She hardly writes or phones.’ Maureen Dutton bit her lip.

‘Did you have a …’ McCarthy tried to select a diplomatic word. ‘Was there any disagreement about it?’

‘No.’ She looked sad. ‘Not from us. But I think Sophie felt guilty, felt that she was letting us down – we’d perhaps try to persuade her against it.’

‘I did.’ Tony Dutton looked grim. ‘Whoever her mother is – well, she wasn’t that interested in Sophie when she was little. Put Sophie into care. You don’t do that to your kid.’ McCarthy was aware of Barraclough’s nod of approval. ‘I’m worried she’ll get hurt, that’s all.’

‘Tony’s right.’ Maureen Dutton shook her head. ‘But you can’t budge Sophie once she’s made her mind up. I’d just like to know what’s happened. I don’t push it, because she’s very touchy about it. She’ll talk when she’s ready.’

Tony Dutton shifted his feet uncomfortably. ‘Look, there’s no point in beating about the bush,’ he said after a moment. ‘You’d better tell us what it is she’s got herself involved with.’

Before McCarthy could answer, Maureen picked up a small photograph from the mantelpiece. ‘Sophie,’ she said. McCarthy looked at it and showed it to Barraclough. The girl from the photograph found in Emma’s bag looked back at them. In this picture, she looked younger, less sophisticated. It was taken outside the
house they were now in, and she was smiling in the kitchen doorway, muddy boots on her feet and a small white dog in her arms. Barraclough had a sudden flash of the blurred, waxy face on the autopsy table. She braced herself.

McCarthy looked at the Duttons who were waiting, their tension becoming more apparent, for him to tell them why he was there. ‘Mr Dutton, Mrs Dutton. I’m not here because Sophie is in trouble with the law. I’m afraid it’s more serious than that. We’re investigating a second death.’ Barraclough saw the woman’s face clench, her lips move silently. ‘The body of a young girl was found this morning, in Sheffield, and we think’ – Barraclough saw the man’s hand grip his wife’s arm – ‘that it’s your daughter, Sophie.’

The life on a smallholding doesn’t stop in the face of tragedy. Neither of the Duttons would let the other go alone to identify the body of their daughter, and it was the small hours of Wednesday morning before Brooke’s team had the confirmation they were expecting. The lady in the lake was Sophie Dutton. Her father, trying to numb his grief with rage, had insisted on talking to Brooke, had threatened to lay complaints against the whole team, had hit out blindly against an attack that came from inside him. McCarthy recognized guilt. This was the useless, agonizing guilt of the parent who had not been able to protect his child.

Sophie’s background, after her adoption, had been unexceptionable. Her mother had, according to Tony Dutton, effectively abandoned her, signing her over to local authority care and vanishing. In consequence, they knew very little about her family background. ‘We think her mother may have had another child,’ he said. ‘She talked about “the other baby”, used to ask about “the other baby”. Me and Maureen, we’d have given
anything …’ He stopped talking for a moment and looked at his wife. ‘But those that don’t care for them can just have them like shelling peas.’ He was reaching for his anger again.

Maureen Dutton sat in calm silence, and Barraclough thought that she looked like a porcelain figure, like a doll, like someone whose reality had been hollowed out of her from the inside, leaving no visible damage, no wounds, leaving … nothing.

Kath Walker, Ashley Reid’s aunt, greeted Barraclough and Corvin with a grudging, ‘You’d better come in,’ and sat unsmiling as they explained what they wanted. There was no point, she told them, in their asking about her husband. ‘Bryan and I separated ten years ago,’ she said, in answer to Corvin’s query. ‘We’re divorced now. I haven’t seen him since two Christmases ago. He drinks,’ she added. ‘Our Michelle keeps in touch. He sees her sometimes. When he’s short of cash.’ Barraclough looked at the woman’s severe face, her carefully groomed hair, the way she sat upright and rigid, and wondered what it would have been like to be delivered to this woman at the age of four, young, bewildered, vulnerable. ‘There was nothing but trouble from the word go,’ she said, when Corvin asked her about Ashley and his brother, Simon. ‘Not surprising, really. Bryan’s sister, Carolyn, she was into all that hippie stuff. Drugs. Music. “Free love”, they called it.’

‘But you and your husband took the kids in,’ Corvin said, as if acknowledging the generosity of the gesture.

Kath Walker looked at him stonily. ‘We were family.

Those kids needed somewhere. “Just for a few months,” Carolyn said. “Give me a chance to settle in my job, get us somewhere to live. Just a few months.” Next thing we know, she’s gone back to America. Bryan and me, we couldn’t have another, so we thought … But those two …’

‘What was the problem, Mrs Walker?’ Barraclough thought she had seen a gentler side to the woman under those words.

‘Bad blood.’ Kath Walker’s mouth snapped shut.

‘Bad blood?’ The woman obviously hadn’t liked her sister-in-law, but what about the father, what about Phillip Reid?

‘It was in his family,’ she said. ‘In Bryan’s family. They all went wrong. Simon, the older lad, he was wrong in the head. We couldn’t have that, not with our Michelle. He’d just look at you, like you weren’t there, and he’d stare at things in this creepy way he had. He was always doing the same thing, over and over and over. And then if you got him mad …’ She looked at the two officers. ‘They put him away.’

‘When was that, Mrs Walker?’ McCarthy had said he wanted Simon Reid located.

She squinted her eyes, calculating. ‘She, Carolyn, brought them to us in 1984. That was when it was, 1984. Once we knew she wasn’t coming back. We couldn’t manage Simon.’

‘So what happened to Simon. Is he still in care?’ Barraclough had not been able to locate Simon in the records.

‘He was only there for a few weeks, then Bryan’s
mother took him on. He went to live with her.’ She waited, then added, ‘I don’t know any more than that. I had my hands full with the other lad. And Bryan.’ Simon’s grandmother was Catherine Walker, she told them, but she had been in a home for several years. Kath Walker had no knowledge of who had taken Simon in after this. Barraclough sighed, thinking of the paperwork ahead.

‘So what happened to Ashley in the end?’ Barraclough tried not to make the question confrontational. Their information said that Simon Reid was autistic. Could she have coped with an autistic nephew, along with a second, younger child, a child of her own, an alcoholic husband and a pub to run? She didn’t think she could have done it. Who was she to judge this woman?

‘He was trouble, too. We were watching him, in case he went the same way as Simon. Bryan wasn’t having that. Bryan always wanted a lad, but Ashley, he wasn’t a proper lad, not like we wanted. He wanted his brother and he wanted his mum. “You’ll have to want,” I told him in the end. She left him. She didn’t want him and the sooner he got that sorted, the better.’ She met Barraclough’s expression head on. ‘It’s not always best to be soft with kids. Sometimes they need to know the worst. Ashley needed to know his mum wasn’t coming back.’

Barraclough nodded. Maybe the woman was right, but there were ways and there were ways. ‘So what happened with Ashley in the end?’

‘Well, you know about that.’ Kath Walker didn’t
drop her gaze. ‘We had to let him go. He was wrong in the head, like his brother. Bad blood.’

‘How do you mean, Mrs Walker?’ Corvin’s voice sounded cheerful in Barraclough’s ears.

‘It’s that family,’ the woman said. ‘It came out with Bryan in drink. And his mother, she’s not been able to look after herself for years. Senile.’ She said it like an obscenity.

‘What about Carolyn? What about their mother? What happened to her?’ The social services hadn’t managed to track her down, but their resources were limited, Barraclough knew. Had she been in touch with her brother or her sister-in-law? Had she at least tried to find out what had happened to her children?

Kath Walker’s face was set and cold. ‘We had a couple of letters, after she went back,’ she said.

Corvin tried again. ‘And nothing after that?’ Kath Walker shook her head. ‘You don’t have a current address for her?’

Again, the head shake. ‘I gave the last address we had to the social.’

‘What about her husband?’ Corvin asked. ‘Phillip Reid.’

Kath Walker sniffed and raised her eyebrows. ‘Husband,’ she said.

‘But they were married,’ Corvin said.

‘Oh, yes, but only because they had to, for him to get into the country. She had work, but he didn’t. Passports and things. He was off as soon as she was expecting again. Bryan had to send her money. I ask you!’

‘Do you know where he is now?’

The woman shook her head. ‘No, and I don’t want to. Nor did Carolyn. I said, “What about their father?” when she asked us to take the lads. “He doesn’t care,” she said. “I’ve got to do this myself.”’ She looked at Corvin and Barraclough. ‘And before you ask, the answer’s no, I haven’t heard from him since.’

Polly Andrews had said that Emma stowed her belongings, or some of them, in the roof space when she was sharing a room with Sophie Dutton. The original search of Sophie’s room had not included the roof space – the search team had found no access to it. Now they were back, to see if Emma’s missing things were still up there, ignored or forgotten by the cleaners.

The attic room looked dustier, less bare and empty than Corvin remembered it. The smears from the fingerprint powder were still on the windows, and the carpet and mattress looked dirty. The housing officer looked round and clicked his tongue. ‘The standard of cleaning gets worse each year,’ he said. ‘OK, access to the roof space.’ He indicated the wardrobe against the dormer wall, and two of the search team braced themselves against it, staggering a bit as it moved more easily than they expected. ‘It’s only cheap, pre-fab stuff,’ the housing officer said apologetically. ‘Right.’ He pointed to a small, vertical trap that was flush with the wall and hard to see. ‘We sealed off the roof space in the other room, but this trap-door provides access where it’s needed. Private landlords use these as fire exits – you used to be able to get right along the row through the roofs – but that’s illegal now.’

Corvin nodded, and one of the team unlocked the trap and it fell onto the floor. A puff of dusty air blew out. He shone his torch into the darkness, illuminating the sloping roof, the beams with insulation fibre running between them, and saw, stuffed round the corner for ease of collection, a suitcase and a rolled-up sleeping bag. He reached in and pulled them out. A torn piece of paper fell onto the floor. Corvin looked the case over. There were no identifying marks on the outside, no address or name label. The case was blue, a weekend case, plastic, scuffed, but not too heavy, suggesting it was full of clothes or something light.

He opened the suitcase. As he’d suspected, it contained clothes: a pair of jeans, a couple of sweatshirts clearly in need of a wash, and some towels, also dirty. A pair of worn trainers were stuffed into the bottom of the case. These weren’t Emma’s clothes, or Sophie’s. These belonged to a man and, judging by the size of the trainers, a big man, or a tall man at any rate. At the bottom of the case there was a zip-lock bag. The bag was stuffed full, and Corvin could see through the transparent surface that there were bundles of pills wrapped in plastic bags inside, and a notebook with a red cover. Well, well. Emma’s stockroom. An analysis of her supply might lead to their supplier.

Carefully, he pulled out the notebook and flicked through the pages. He was hoping for a list of customers, or something else that would give them more of a lead into Emma’s drugs life, but most of the pages had been torn out. Those that were left were blank. He looked inside the cover. Under the pencilled-in price was the
name s.
DUTTON,
and the address, 14,
CARLETON ROAD,
then, in larger figures, the year, 1999. He remembered Polly Andrews saying, ‘Sophie wants to be a writer.’ This could have been her diary. But she, or someone else, had made sure that no one was going to read it. He picked up the piece of paper from the floor. It was a small piece, lined, ripped across. Closely written words in blue ink: …
and the park was beautiful We talked, really talked, for the first time. We talked about the river and the trees and the birds …
The writing ran off the edge of the torn page …
just like me. I didn’t know, I really didn’t know
… Corvin shrugged. It meant nothing to him. ‘Get forensics to go over this lot,’ he said. ‘And get copies of this’ – he indicated the paper – ‘straight away.’

One of the team called him over. The man had found marks on the carpet that they’d missed last time, marks of a piece of furniture that had stood there for some time, leaving its impression indelibly etched on the cheap carpet. This was obviously the place where the wardrobe had once stood. Corvin had wondered why, if Emma and Sophie used the roof space regularly for storage, the wardrobe had been pulled across it. He looked at the carpet where the wardrobe now stood. The carpet didn’t have the same, single set of deep marks. Instead, there was a larger flattened area, as though the wardrobe had been regularly moved and put back not quite in the same place.

It was gone half past three by the time McCarthy’s car pulled up outside the Fielding house. Jane Fielding had known Sophie for nearly a year and Emma for several
months. There were things McCarthy needed to know that maybe she could tell him. He wasn’t unhappy with the timing. He wanted a chance to talk to Lucy. He wasn’t sure what he was going to say – he didn’t have a lot to do with children. He thought about his occasional – very occasional – visits to his sister’s, when he became this stranger called Uncle Steve, and found himself the object of the curiosity of his nephew and niece who, disturbingly, carried traces of his sister and his mother in their faces. He played football, he bought presents and they seemed to like him. He remembered how strange it felt when four-year-old Jenny had thrown her arms round his neck and told him she loved him. ‘Cupboard love,’ Sheila had observed, drily. She had no illusions about her brother.

Brooke, as senior investigating officer, had decided that Lucy would not make a credible witness in court; McCarthy was in full agreement with that. Thirty seconds’ innocent prattle about monsters and the defence would have a field day, but an informal, unofficial chat might just give them some pointers. She was, apparently, a bright child. Her story of monsters, of ‘the Ash Man’, of ‘Tamby’ interested him and frustrated him. He wanted someone to translate those stories into terms he could understand. He wanted to find out if all of this existed only in Lucy’s imagination, or if she was trying to tell them something they needed to know, only they couldn’t hear her.

‘Have you noticed,’ he said to Barraclough, ‘that there seem to be children involved round the edges of this case?’ He wanted Barraclough’s perspective.

She thought. ‘There’s Lucy, of course, and then that earlier child Sandra Allan had. And Sophie Dutton was adopted.’

‘Have you completed that search? For the first child?’

Barraclough shook her head. ‘I’m getting back onto it tomorrow,’ she said. They had both done the arithmetic. Sophie Dutton had been born in 1980. Sandra Allan had been pregnant sometime in the late 1970s. Sophie Dutton could have been that missing child, and if so, it would explain the bond that had apparently developed between her and Emma. And had Sandra’s death been the push that finally drove her away?