Silent Playgrounds (28 page)

Her mind kept replaying images of the past twenty-four hours. She thought about Ashley pushing her back onto the chair, the sudden flaring up of passion, its sudden end. She thought about the way he’d smiled at her as he’d closed the door behind him. She thought about Steve at the hospital, when she’d read the news – or the confirmation – of Ashley’s death in his face. She thought about his face at the police station later, his anger, the things he said, the way he wouldn’t believe her.

She saw feet moving stealthily up a flight of stairs, stairs where the walls were stripped bare, heard soft footsteps moving across a carpeted floor. She could see a door in the darkness, the letter box opening, rags dropping through, the flames beginning to blister the paint, finding the bin-liner full of paper she’d left behind the door, the plastic dripping and melting, the flames
roaring up. She could see Ashley’s face, white on the pillow, framed by thick, dark hair, see his hand dangling off the side of the bed, still, cold, as the smoke crept and twisted its way across the room.

She felt cold, even though it had been a warm day, and the evening was still pleasant and mild. She twisted the knob on the gas fire for warmth, and heard the pop as the flame caught. Flames licking up the door, catching the paper, flames and smoke filling the stairway –
it wasn’t fire that killed him!
She stood up and looked for something to distract her.

Lucy’s drawings. She looked at the familiar pictures.
Me and my sisters in the park. The Ash Man’s brother in the park.
There was one she hadn’t seen before. Unlike Lucy’s other pictures, it was all in black – no colour. She looked at the caption.
The Ash Man.
Had Lucy drawn this new one after Emma’s death, after that day in the park? Was it some kind of therapy?
The Ash Man:
the person from her fantasy that had helped to fix the idea of Ashley’s involvement in Steve’s mind.

Her attempt at distraction had come round in a full circle. She felt the weight of it fall on her again. Then she heard a key in the lock, heard Lucy’s voice animated and excited, ‘… and all fire engines and …’ and Jane’s voice, calm and gentle, calling, ‘Suzanne? Suzanne? I just heard, I saw Mrs Varney …’ and then Jane was there, and she drew Suzanne into her soft embrace, and the shadows retreated, for a while.

Something had woken Lucy up. She sat up in. bed. The monsters had been chasing her, in the park, in a place
with dark tunnels, and Tamby was saying, sadly,
Be careful, little Luce. Be very, very careful.
But she was at home in bed. She was safe. The curtains moved in the draught. No peacock feather by her bed, watching out for her. Tamby. Maybe Tamby was keeping her safe. She listened, made him say
Like a mouse
in her head, but there was no one there.

They’d been to
London,
her and her mum, and her daddy had gone too. London was big and noisy and dusty, and they kept going down, down with crowds of people pushing her and shoving her and there were tunnels with trains that came screaming out, and she was quite frightened.
Be very careful!
she said to Tamby in her mind, but he wasn’t there. She’d clung onto her daddy’s hand and he’d said, ‘For Christ’s sake, Luce,’ and pulled his hand free and she was lost. And the train came roaring out of the tunnel and she screamed and then Mum was there and it was all right, and her daddy came back through the crowd holding a newspaper.

When they were coming home, a robber had stolen Mum’s bag, and her daddy had said, ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake,’ and her mum had said, ‘Hush,’ because she could see that Lucy was listening, and then she’d said, ‘It’s only a bag.’ Lucy was
pissed
off with her daddy.

Now they were home again and she was
glad.
It was quiet and green at home and her daddy wasn’t cross all the time. He wasn’t cross at home, and he brought her presents. Sometimes. Lucy turned over and tried to get comfortable. Her bed felt all
wrong.
Suzanne was staying with them. Something bad had happened when they were in London. Suzanne had had a fire. Her house
had nearly burnt down. There had been fire engines and sirens and things. Lucy would have liked seeing that. ‘Was Michael there?’ she’d asked Suzanne, jealously. Michael would boast if he’d been in a fire engine. ‘No,’ Suzanne had said, and her voice was all flat and funny. ‘Michael wasn’t there.’ And then she’d started crying and Mum had put her arms round Suzanne like she was a little girl.

She needed to go to the toilet. She used to say
pee
like Mum did, but Mrs Varney said it was vulgar. That was a good word. Lucy liked that word.
Vulgar.
She climbed out of bed. The house was quiet and dark. She tiptoed along the corridor to the bathroom. She peered over the banister down the stairs, but it was dark and still down there as well. Mum must be in bed. And Dad must be in bed? She didn’t know if her daddy was there or not. Suzanne was sleeping in the front room. Lucy had helped make a bed on the settee. She went along the corridor, past the attic stairs.

The door up to the attic was open, and the stairs vanished up into darkness. Mum said that Lucy could have the room in the attic for her own one day, but Lucy didn’t want it. It was dark up there and smelt of dust and old things. A draught blew the smell into her face, and went away again.

Her eyes were becoming accustomed to the dark now, and she could see, along the corridor, the shapes of the pictures on the wall, Mum’s drawings, photographs, things from every day that looked strange and wrong in the night. Round the corner, on the way to the bathroom, it was darker, and she had to feel her way along
with her hands on the wall. But she didn’t put on the light. If you were creeping through the tunnels, escaping from the monsters, you never put on the light. She’d put the light on in the secret shelves, and the monster had nearly got her. She opened the bathroom door, and the moonlight made shadows on the floor.

She peed, the trickle sounding loud in the silence, and then the noise of the flush sounding suddenly even louder. Lucy waited, expecting the house to wake up with the noise, but everything was quiet again. She listened. Then – it was just a sound like the house stretching in its sleep, like a sound in the wood; just one of those noises, Mum would say, if Lucy got scared by noises in the night. She waited, still, glad she hadn’t turned the lights on. There it was again, the faint noise, and a sound like a slow
pad, pad
above her, like feet in muddy trainers, above her head. Lucy looked up at the ceiling. In the attic, in the old dust. Grandmother’s Footsteps.
Like a mouse, like a mouse,
she whispered to herself, listening as she crept along the corridor.
Like a mouse.

Be careful,
Tamby had told her. Mr McCarthy had told her, too.
Be careful,
he’d said.
If you see the monsters again, tell me.
But you never did see the monsters. You just heard them, heard them creeping up behind you like Grandmother’s Footsteps and when you looked there was no one there.
They’re coming. They’re coming soon!

And the monsters weren’t in the park any more. They were in the house.

Suzanne went through the motions of everyday life. She got up the next morning, woken by the sun pouring in through the window of Jane’s front room. She showered and dressed, and at Jane’s insistence ate a bowl of something dry and tasteless. She went across to her own house shortly after nine to meet Tina Barraclough for a final check that nothing had been taken from the house that they didn’t already know about. It was strange going back again for the first time after that night. It seemed much longer than a day and a night since Ashley had knocked on her door, come to her for help. She felt detached as she looked at the boarded-up window; the staircase, a black, smoky ruin; the carpets sodden under her feet. Barraclough looked at her as she came through the door and said, ‘They’ll come and put new glass in today if you phone. Have you been in touch with your insurance?’ Suzanne shook her head. She needed to, she knew. She just couldn’t be bothered yet.

‘Shall we get on with it?’ Barraclough didn’t want to linger. They checked through the house. There was nothing missing.

‘I haven’t got any valuables,’ Suzanne said, ‘apart from the computer and the TV.’

Barraclough was particularly insistent that she check her study. ‘Someone was up here,’ she said. ‘He must have had a reason.’ Suzanne looked round. The books were still scattered on the chair, the tapes scattered across her desk, the papers spilling out of the in-tray. She looked at Barraclough. ‘I don’t think there’s anything.’

‘The filing cabinet?’ Barraclough suggested.

Suzanne looked. The top drawer was open. She couldn’t remember if she’d opened it herself or not. She checked the files. As far as she could tell, everything was there. She couldn’t remember the details. But why would anyone want to steal photocopies of papers from academic journals? She remembered her passport and her birth certificate – they were both there. She looked at Barraclough and shrugged. ‘There’s nothing,’ she said.

Barraclough’s next appointment was with Simon Walker’s personal tutor. He was a younger man than Barraclough expected, in his early thirties, she guessed, with friendly eyes and curly brown hair. She recognized him from Fagan’s, one of her regular Wednesday evening haunts – though not this past fortnight. She always thought of university dons as elderly, vague and out of touch with the world that everyone else inhabited. Matthew Kiernan,
Doctor
Kiernan, she amended, seemed very much in contact with Barraclough’s reality. Matthew Kiernan showed every intention
of using their previous contact as an excuse to chat her up, and she rather reluctantly pulled him back to business.

‘Simon,’ he said. ‘It’s a bit of a coincidence, you coming here. I was just about to write to Simon.’

‘Why?’ The detective was now to the fore. She could see him recognize this and switch to a more impersonal mode. Other things were for other times. Maybe.

‘He was absent from lectures and labs for the last six weeks of teaching. That’s not unusual – not too unusual – with final-year students. It’s unusual for Simon.’ That crucial month. The time that seemed to have elapsed between Sophie’s death and Emma’s.

‘You mean he’s missing?’ She remembered Sophie, and felt a sense of foreboding.

‘No. He’s been around. He just hasn’t been attending classes properly. He’s been in, he’s been doing the work – that’s why I haven’t chased him up before.’

Barraclough checked her notes. ‘Dr Kiernan, I haven’t been able to get all the background detail on Simon that I need, but I do know that he was diagnosed as autistic when he was a child.’

Matthew Kiernan nodded. ‘Yes, so I understand.’

Barraclough waited, then when he didn’t say any more, she said, ‘So, how come he’s here, doing a degree course? Autism is a severe disorder, and this is …’
This is a university!
she wanted to say.

‘Not a place for the mentally impaired?’ Kiernan finished for her. OK, he wasn’t above the thick Plods syndrome that McCarthy was always going on about. Maybe he wasn’t so attractive. Kiernan went on, ‘I’m
sorry. You said you didn’t have the background. Simon has Asperger’s Syndrome.’

‘I haven’t come across – I’m sorry, I didn’t catch the name?’ Barraclough remembered Polly’s description of Simon as ‘creepy’.

‘Asperger’s Syndrome.’ He looked down, chewing his lip, then caught her eye with a slightly apologetic smile. ‘Actually, neither had I. Until I met Simon. It’s a form of autism – it affects the way the brain processes information. There’s no intellectual impairment – if Simon can sort his way through the last stages of the course, he’ll get a good degree. He’s a brilliant – an inspired – chemist. He has problems with language, with communicating. He has trouble forming social relations – so his behaviour can be a bit odd. That’s why he was allowed to stay in the hall of residence. That’s only for first years, usually. I was a bit surprised he decided to go into shared accommodation for his final year. It didn’t last. He isn’t good in groups.’

Barraclough thought. ‘You said he had problems socially. Was he ever – did any of the students feel threatened by Simon?’

‘Oh, no.’ Kiernan was quick to reject that. ‘No. Nothing like that. They just found him a bit odd sometimes – he doesn’t always react the way you’d expect.’ He saw the question forming on Barraclough’s face and said, ‘I can’t give you any examples, I can’t explain.’ He looked at Barraclough’s incomprehension. ‘Simon’s very bright. He listens. But he doesn’t talk, or hardly at all. He can’t explain things. He expects you to understand. He’s not good with people. He’s more comfortable
with things.’ He ran his fingers through his hair. ‘I think he’s had something on his mind recently. I asked him if everything was OK, but he just said something about, “It’s knowing how far to go,” and seemed to want me to comment. I said, “I suppose so,” or something like that, and that was it.’

Barraclough showed him the sheet of paper they’d found pinned to the wall in Simon’s flat, the one with the diagrams. ‘Does this mean anything to you?’

He looked at it closely, and frowned slightly. ‘It’s … he said, and stopped. He looked at her. ‘Simon had it?’ Barraclough nodded and waited. ‘Of course, it isn’t significant. It isn’t hard to get hold of this. It’s …’ He pointed at the diagrams. ‘These are the chemical precursors to MDMA.’ He looked at the sheet. ‘This bit, it’s a process for using safrole to get MDP-2-P.’ He caught Barraclough’s look of incomprehension. ‘Sorry. Making MDMA, Ecstasy, isn’t a particularly difficult process, not for a trained chemist. The problem is getting the chemicals. They’re restricted. This is a process for getting round that. Talk to your drugs people. They’ll know what this is.’ He asked the question Barraclough had been waiting for. ‘Is Simon in trouble?’

And Barraclough had no answer she could give. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Could Simon do this, get this, MDP-what-you-said, working in the lab?’

Now Kiernan looked wary. ‘Our security is pretty tight,’ he said. Which didn’t answer Barraclough’s question. And if she’d understood him, Simon had worked irregular hours, used the labs outside of official times. She didn’t want him to clam up, so she left the subject.
This was something to hand over to drugs. ‘It’s probably nothing,’ she said. ‘I was just curious.’

Kiernan wasn’t fooled. He looked concerned. ‘His grandmother’s in a home,’ he said. ‘She’s got Alzheimer’s. There’s no family otherwise.’

‘I’ll let you know,’ Barraclough said.

‘Please,’ he said, looking worried. Then he smiled at her. ‘Will I see you at Fagan’s on Wednesday?’

‘Possibly,’ Barraclough smiled back. If he did, it would be because the case was over.

McCarthy decided to talk to Kath Walker himself this time. She may have been telling the truth when she said that she’d had no contact with Ashley or with Simon in the years since they had left the Walkers’ care, but he wasn’t convinced. She had certainly not mentioned Sandra Ford, and her visit in search of Phillip Reid.

She was younger than he expected from Corvin’s description, attractive and smartly dressed. She made no comment when he introduced himself and told her what he wanted, other than saying, ‘You’d better come in.’ The house was cold, and the room she took him into was almost clinically clean and tidy. She received the news of her nephew’s death with little emotion. ‘He was born to trouble,’ was all she said.

‘Mrs Walker,’ he said, ‘when my colleagues talked to you, you told them you hadn’t heard from the boys’ father, Phillip Reid. Is that right?’

She looked at him. ‘That’s what I said, and that’s right.’

‘But you had heard
of
him, hadn’t you? Before Carolyn brought the children back from America?’

‘Yes.’ She met his gaze squarely.

It was like pulling teeth. McCarthy kept his voice patient. ‘Can you tell me about that, Mrs Walker? Anything at all that you heard about your brother-in-law?’

She was silent for a moment, thinking. ‘It was a couple of years before Carolyn came back. Eighty-one? Eighty-two? We’d been getting letters – she was only working part time, well, with the three of them to look after, it was difficult. Bryan had to send her money. Not that we were exactly rolling in it. I was sorry for her, I won’t deny it, but I said to Bryan, you’ve got to think about your own first. He was soft on her, she was his little sister, he was soft before the drink got a hold. Anyway, next thing we know, there’s this lass on the doorstep. She’s looking for Don, she means Phillip, she says. “You’re a few miles out,” Bryan tells her. “He’s in America.” Well, it’s all tears, and she’s in trouble, and he’s forgotten to leave her his address but she could always contact him through us. “That’s news to me,” I tell her. Bryan was soft. “She’s just a kid,” he said. He hated Phillip Reid, said he’d … let Carolyn down, that’s what he said. He kept in touch with the lass, Sandra, she was called. She
was
just a kid, really, but, like I say, you look after your own, and we couldn’t help her. We didn’t even know that he was back. Anyway, she was all right, she got married to her boyfriend. It’s a wise man knows his own child, that’s what I say.’

McCarthy wasn’t in the mood for homespun
wisdom. ‘Why didn’t you tell us this before?’ he said.

The woman held his gaze. ‘They didn’t ask me,’ she said.

McCarthy went over the details of Simon Walker again, but she seemed to know no more than she had told Corvin. She expressed surprise that Simon had done well and was working for a degree. ‘You said something about Simon to my sergeant,’ McCarthy said, referring to Corvin’s notes. ‘You said, “if you got him mad” … What did you mean?’

‘He’d got a wicked temper on him. He was a big lad, too. Strong. Nothing would stop him. Bryan’s big, he’s got a heavy hand on him, but that lad … He had a wicked temper.’

McCarthy thought. He didn’t want to leave the woman any more ‘you didn’t ask’ loopholes. ‘Carolyn Reid,’ he said. He saw the woman’s mouth tighten. ‘What happened to Carolyn?’

Kath Walker tucked the corners of her mouth in. ‘I thought you were supposed to be the detectives,’ she said. ‘She’s dead. She died after she went back to America.’

McCarthy held on to his patience.
If you’d wanted to know that, you should have asked. I’m not a mind-reader.
‘When was that, Mrs Walker?’

For the first time, she looked uncomfortable. ‘In 1988,’ she said, after a moment. ‘Christmas 1988.’

McCarthy did the sums in his head. ‘What happened to her? She was only thirty-three.’

The answer was too quick, too prepared. ‘I don’t know. I didn’t ask. She was ill.’

‘Ashley went into care shortly after she died?’ McCarthy said.

Kath Walker stiffened. ‘He might have done,’ she said.

McCarthy felt something tug at his mind. He kept his face blank. ‘Where did she die?’ he said. At first, Kath Walker insisted that she didn’t know, but eventually conceded that she might. ‘It may have been the hospital in San Francisco,’ she said.

‘San Francisco,’ McCarthy made a note. ‘Not Utah?’ She ignored that. He ran the interview through his mind. There was something she’d said that had caught his attention. He didn’t want to let it go. ‘Mrs Walker, you said—’

‘Is this going to take much longer?’ Her voice was sharp.

McCarthy had had enough. ‘This is a murder investigation, Mrs Walker. You have already withheld important information from officers investigating, and if I wanted to, I could arrest you and take you back to HQ.’ He’d be on dodgy ground, but he was just about pissed off enough to risk it. ‘I’d prefer not to deal with the paperwork. Now—’

‘I can’t answer questions no one’s asked me,’ she said, defiantly.

‘Mrs Walker, stop treating me like a fool, and stop pretending you’re one. Now, you said Carolyn was working part time, “with the three of them”. But her husband had left by then. What did you mean?’

She seemed slightly more friendly now, since he had been rude to her. He should have played her that way
from the beginning. ‘The three of them. The three kids.’ She stopped, caught McCarthy’s eye and went on. ‘Didn’t you know? There was Simon, and there were the twins, Ashley and Sophie. Carolyn kept the girl with her. She had a job, see, over in Hull. Nursing. One day, it’s “I’ll have the children once I’m settled in,” then next thing we know, she’s gone.’ For once, surprise left McCarthy at a loss. The woman saw it and moved in triumphantly. ‘Some detective,’ she said.

Now they knew where Sophie Dutton fitted into the picture. She was the third child of Phillip and Carolyn Reid. Simon, with his damaged mind, Ashley, damaged in some undefined way. Sophie, the adopted child of loving parents, had walked into a maelstrom and had died. Emma was dead, and Ashley was dead. Brooke would have given a ransom to see the letter Carolyn had left for her daughter. It had directed her to Sheffield, possibly to her family, or to her brother or her twin. Kath Walker was adamant that no one had come looking for Ashley and Simon. To her cousin? They needed to talk to Michelle Walker, Kath and Bryan’s daughter.