Silent Playgrounds (16 page)

As they pulled into Carleton Road, McCarthy saw that Lucy Fielding was sitting on the steps outside number twelve. She was tugging at the lace on her roller boot. He shelved the matter of Sophie Dutton. He wanted to talk to Lucy.

Lucy looked up as he opened the car door, and he saw a blank watchfulness come over her face.

Suzanne listened to the rattle of Lucy’s skates on the paved yard, on the asphalt of the passage and on the flagstones at the front. Jane was shut away in the room she used for a studio, working, and Suzanne was keeping an eye on Lucy as she played in the yard and on the street. Using the sound as a guide to Lucy’s whereabouts, she wandered through to the front room, worrying at a ragged nail with her teeth and thinking again about what Jane had told her, about someone else, about another body in the park. She had listened to the local news the evening before but there was nothing.
The paper, that morning, had carried a brief, uninformative story. She could see Ashley’s face in her mind, the way his eyes came alive as he saw her, so like the way Adam’s used to light up as she came through the door from school or, later, from work.
Suzanne, Suzanne, look what I’ve done! Look at me, Suzanne! Listen to me, Suzanne!

She realized she had let her attention drift, and she could no longer hear the rattle of Lucy’s skates on the paving stones. She looked out of the window and saw that the police van that had been outside the student house all morning was gone, but two squad cars were parked higher up the road. She’d been aware of disturbance for most of the day. The houses were all linked, and noise travelled easily from one to the other.

Lucy was outside on the pavement, she saw with relief. But she was talking to someone. Suzanne squinted through the branches of the cotoneaster that grew raggedly in her front garden. McCarthy! What was he doing here? He was leaning against his car, and he and Lucy seemed to be involved in some kind of discussion. Was he supposed to talk to her without Jane? Suzanne tried to see what was happening. Tina Barraclough was in the car, her chin on her arm in the open window as she listened to what Lucy was saying. As Suzanne watched, she saw McCarthy lift his foot up and point to his shoe. Lucy responded by lifting her roller-bladed foot and apparently demonstrating some quality of her skates that McCarthy had been asking about.

They were talking about skating. It seemed so incongruous, somehow. Since their encounter in the coffee
bar, McCarthy had grown in her mind into a figure like her father, someone who filled her with an undefined unease. But as she watched him amiably chatting with Lucy about skating, he looked friendly and approachable. He knelt down and tightened the lace on one of Lucy’s boots, talking to her as he did so. Lucy nodded, looking solemn.

Suzanne thought about calling Jane, then she decided it would be quicker if she went out herself and saw to what was happening. She took a deep breath and went through the side door into the passage, and then out into the bright sun of the road. McCarthy and Lucy both looked at her, and she was disconcerted to see the same sudden blanking of their faces. She was used to Lucy, who always responded to the new behind a closed and uncommitted mask, while she decided how to react. In McCarthy, she found it unnerving.

He stood up as she came onto the pavement. ‘Suzanne,’ he said, by way of a greeting. His tone was neutral.

‘Did you want something?’ She kept her voice cool, aware of the contrast between her middle-class accents and the northern ones around her.

‘I was showing him my skates,’ Lucy said, apparently deciding that Suzanne’s intervention was benign. ‘His skates had the wheels in the wrong place so he kept falling over.’

‘Spent most of the time landing on my arse,’ McCarthy agreed with a companionable grin at Lucy. Lucy giggled.

‘You can have a go with mine,’ she offered. Suzanne
was surprised. Lucy was usually very self-contained and unwilling to make overtures of friendship to people she didn’t know.

‘Not with my big feet,’ McCarthy said. ‘Anyway, I’ve got further to fall now.’ Lucy nodded, seeing the sense in this. McCarthy suddenly turned his attention to Suzanne. His face was impassive again. ‘I’m here to see Miss Fielding,’ he said. ‘She doesn’t seem to be in. Are you looking after …’ He nodded at Lucy who was showing off on her skates, doing turns and twirls.

‘I’m … yes. Jane’s in, but she’s working. She won’t hear the door. You’ll need to—’

He interrupted her. ‘It’s not very bright having her out here with no one looking out for her after what happened on Friday.’

Suzanne flushed. She had remembered, as he joked with Lucy, how much she’d liked him that morning they’d talked in the coffee bar, but now her misgivings came flooding back. ‘I was watching her from the window,’ she said, aware that she sounded defensive, but also feeling that his implied criticism was unfair.

He was about to say something but, before he could respond, Lucy came skimming up and brought herself to a stop, staggering slightly as she’d been moving faster than she usually did, to impress McCarthy with her skill. ‘It’s easy,’ she said.

‘You’re a good skater, Lucy,’ said Barraclough from the car window, joining in the conversation for the first time. Lucy gave her a closed look and declined to comment.

McCarthy crouched down again in front of Lucy and said, ‘Remember what I said, Lucy, OK?’

Lucy nodded, her face serious. McCarthy touched a finger to the end of her nose, and she smiled at him. Suzanne was struck again by the rapport that seemed to have sprung up between them. She watched, thinking of Joel, and thinking how much better it would be for Lucy to have had a father who would fight her corner – McCarthy’s criticism had made her angry, but it was motivated by a genuine concern, and a valid one. And how much better it would have been to have had a father who could have engaged her in that gentle humour, been interested in what she was doing. For a moment, she wanted to confide in him, tell him about her worries for Ashley, about her problems with the Alpha Centre. Then her father’s patrician features formed in her mind, and his voice,
Can’t you do anything right?
in those tones of weary exasperation. And she saw Ashley’s pale face
(Listen to me!)
under the water, in the dam, cold, silent, dead.

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.’