Silent Playgrounds (18 page)

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.

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 identifiable 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 how 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.

McCarthy thought, his face expressionless. Velvet looked like a dead end, except for that photo in Emma’s room
SO WHAT DO YOU THINK OF THIS?
But that was probably to do with Sandra. McCarthy decided to leave it for now. The man was too calm, too collected. He needed a bit of time to brood, a bit of pressure, a bit of stress.

McCarthy had forgotten about his intention to look up the records – if any – on Suzanne Milner until late that morning, after Dennis Allan had left, promising to be available if he was needed. ‘I’m not going anywhere.’ he said. When McCarthy did remember, he wondered if it was worth spending the time. It was shaping up to be a long day with a lot of hassle. He wondered if there was any chance of him getting away on time. It was a beautiful sunny afternoon. Home wasn’t a particularly
attractive prospect – it felt like an extension of the office at the moment. He felt drawn to the idea of an evening drive out into the Derbyshire countryside, a walk across the tops somewhere peaceful.

Milner wasn’t a common name. It wouldn’t take long. He logged on to the system. OK, if he was looking for something, how far back should he go? He realized he didn’t know how old she was. He looked at his notes and did a quick calculation. Thirty. Obviously a respectable citizen now. She claimed to have lived in Sheffield all her life. Right. He decided to go back ten years, and keyed his query into the computer. He remembered the complications of married names and maiden names, and checked back in his notes. Right, she used her maiden name, Milner. Her married name was Harrison. He set his search up under both names, but he had a feeling that he was looking for a youth thing here. It would help to explain what, to McCarthy, looked like an obsessive interest in young offenders.

There was nothing in the records for Suzanne Elizabeth Milner. But Milner was a fairly unusual surname. There were very few Milners, with that particular spelling. It was worth spending a few minutes over. He pulled up more details for what there was, and found himself looking at information relating to one Adam Michael Milner. Michael – the name of Suzanne’s son. Coincidence? McCarthy pulled up the whole record. About ten years ago, Adam Milner had been a one-man crime wave, starting with shoplifting, vandalism – his first recorded offences at age ten – then graduating to car theft, breaking and entering.

McCarthy’s eyes skimmed the page.
There it was!
Next of kin – Suzanne Elizabeth Milner, sister. His curiosity aroused, he sent down for the file, and caught up with some paperwork while he was waiting. When it arrived, a remarkably heavy file for someone who would be – McCarthy did a quick calculation – only twenty now, he picked it up and began to fill in the gaps. Adam Milner had caused some major headaches, but reading between the lines, McCarthy got the impression of a child who was more of a fall guy than anything else. He mixed with a crowd that was pretty notorious. McCarthy recognized some of the names. Milner was the youngest and always the lad who got caught, always the lad who took the rap. A report would go in about a group of youths stoning cars, the patrol car would get there, and there would just be Adam Milner. Someone would report kids stealing from a local shop. Adam Milner would get left behind in the stampede. McCarthy flicked through the pages, calculating.