Silent Playgrounds (17 page)

Suzanne rubbed her eyes. She’d read the transcript of Ashley’s tape right through, but she hadn’t found much to help her. It was so hard to follow, because he didn’t seem to understand her questions, muddled his responses, didn’t seem to know what he was talking about himself half the time. She wished that she could re-interview him. At the time, she hadn’t been bothered
about the lack of clarity – she’d been pleased. It had been what she was looking for. Now, she didn’t understand. Who was he talking about? Was he talking about his brother? Richard said that Ashley’s brother was in care, was autistic. Ashley had never had a family. Maybe he fantasized like Lucy.

Where was this ‘place’? Where was Ashley?

She knew he went to the Alpha Centre. Except, according to Richard, Ashley had done a runner. So he wasn’t at the centre any more. Thanks to the confidentiality system at the Alpha, she didn’t even know where he lived, in which part of Sheffield she should start looking. Except …
Use the brain God gave you, Suzanne.
He obviously wasn’t at home, or wherever he lived, because no one could find him. He couldn’t be at his usual haunts, not the ones that everyone knew about.

So where would he go, that McCarthy couldn’t find him, and Richard couldn’t find him? And what made her think she could do any better? He would go to his friends, of course. Friends that no one would know about? She didn’t know his friends. Who could he trust? Simon? She went back to the tape.

Or Lee. Lee from the Alpha Centre? The garage with Lee’s name on? She thought. Lee and Ashley were sometimes together, she remembered. She’d seen them playing snooker, seen them smoking together outside, been struck by the contrast between Ashley’s silence, his pale face and heavy dark hair, and Lee’s noisy red-headed vigour. But she’d never thought of them as friends. Lee was quick and cruel. He tormented the slow-witted Dean, was quick to take advantage of others, as she knew to her cost. She remembered Ashley’s warning. He’d seen the trap before she had. Richard had said that Ashley was a loner. Her observations seemed to confirm that. He’d also said that Ashley had learning difficulties. She’d taken that on board – Richard must know. But Lee wouldn’t have any time for someone who wasn’t bright, she was pretty sure of that.

She thought back over her encounters with Ashley. Apart from the interview, the tape, he’d shown signs of being withdrawn, but he hadn’t struck her as being unintelligent. She wondered what she would have thought if Richard hadn’t said anything. A picture came into her mind. She remembered sitting in the coffee bar one evening, after the programme was finished for the day, watching Lee challenging Richard at snooker. There had been an interested and partisan crowd round the table. She had stayed back, observing. She’d looked across the room and caught Ashley’s eye. He’d been watching her and, just for a moment, she saw a speculative, almost calculating light in his eyes. Then he’d given her his gentle smile, and turned back to the game. She hadn’t thought much about it at the time, but,
remembering it now, she was convinced. Ashley wasn’t subnormal, or special needs, or whatever label had been pinned on him. Ashley was perfectly intelligent. So why did he hide it? She felt frustrated. She hadn’t got enough information, and had no access to any more.

But she did! Richard. She was pretty sure he felt bad about what had happened. He’d tried to give her some warning, and he’d been very uncomfortable when he’d told her what was happening. She could use that. She needed a reason to contact him. He was interested in local history. They’d talked about the village where he lived, Beighton, one of the old communities that had been engulfed by the urban sprawl of Sheffield. He wanted to know something about the history of his house. ‘I keep meaning to look it up in the archives,’ he’d said, ‘when I’ve got time.’

‘I’m down in the stacks at the uni all the time,’ she’d said. ‘I’ll look up one of the old maps for you.’ One of those promises you make and never get round to. But he wasn’t to know that. If she tracked him down at the university, gave him the map, pretended that she’d found it before the trouble, he’d feel even more guilty. He’d feel he had to talk, and then she could ask him about Ashley – legitimate questions about the diagnosis of learning difficulties, and then some casual ones about Lee. Lee could find Ashley for her. She was suddenly convinced. She looked at her watch. It was almost five. She could go up to the library now, look up the map and get it copied. She needed to pick up her tapes from the department as well. Ashley’s tape, at any rate. The transcript wasn’t enough – it wasn’t finished, and
anyway, she wanted to listen to it again. If she took it out of its case, no one would notice it was missing.

She was just dumping her keys and her purse in her bag when there was a knock at the door, and Jane came in, looking pale and upset. Suzanne realized that in her relief about Ashley, she’d forgotten everything else. ‘What’s wrong?’ she said. ‘What is it?’

Jane gripped her hand. ‘Suzanne, the body in the park.’ Suzanne’s breathing tightened. Surely McCarthy wouldn’t have lied to her? ‘It’s – I don’t know how I’m going to tell Lucy. It’s Sophie. They found Sophie dead in the park.’

Suzanne felt numb. Something that had seemed only incidentally, accidentally, connected to her life, suddenly became central, focused.

‘Sophie? Your Sophie? Are they sure?’

Jane nodded. ‘Her parents identified her this morning.’ But Jane hadn’t come round for comfort, or just to tell Suzanne the news. ‘They want me to look at some pictures, of people that Sophie might have known. I saw the people she went round with. I want to help. I want to do it as soon as possible. I want them to catch him.’ Jane’s usual air of vague detachment had gone. She was focused the way she focused on her work, on her daughter. ‘I want to go with them now. Suzanne, could you look after Lucy for me?’

Suzanne still felt frozen with shock. She heard the words as if they were coming from a distance. ‘Yes. Of course. I was going to walk up to the library. She wouldn’t mind spending half an hour in the stacks, would she?’

‘That would be perfect. I don’t want her near the news or anything. I want to tell her myself.’ Jane’s lips were compressed the way Lucy’s were when she was concentrating, when she was expressing disapproval.

‘Don’t worry.’ Suzanne ushered Jane out of the door, and watched as she got into the car with McCarthy. She noticed that Tina Barraclough wasn’t with them, and found herself wondering if Jane would enjoy McCarthy’s undivided attention as much as she had said she would. She looked back up the road towards the student house. The police cars were still there, and now a university housing department van.

Sophie. Sophie wasn’t a dead woman in the park, a murder victim. She was the happy-go-lucky student who looked after Lucy, who’d been more like a big sister to Lucy than a carer.

She realized that she hadn’t been surprised when the complex, troubled Emma had come so seriously to grief. But Sophie was happy and full of life. It was ridiculous that Sophie was dead. That was the word that kept coming into her mind. Ridiculous. No one had the right to take that life away from her.
It’s all we get,
Suzanne pleaded to the figure, dark and faceless, who seemed to lurk in the back of her mind.
It’s all we get.

People moving like random particles across the forecourt, weaving in and out of the straight lines of the cars, parked in rows. Unpredictable movement, no order, no pattern. People bumping into him, looking at him, expectant. Say, ‘Sorry.’
Can’t tell, can’t tell.

Simon could understand the laboratory where the
bottles and jars were ordered and labelled and what they contained was predictable in what it would do and the way it would behave. He could understand the library, once he was in among the shelves and the books all in rows, all with a place where they belonged.

But sometimes, whispering and laughing and people-sound interfering with the patterns in his head. A face. ‘Hi, Simon!’ Fellow student. Say, ‘Hello,’ ‘Fancy a coffee?’ Coffee, people, conversation, no pattern, no order, nothing to understand. Say, ‘Can’t just now. Thanks.’ Lost them! Looking, looking. Just a moment ago, over by the shelves, over by the door.
Where? Where?

There.

Lucy sat at the computer terminal and wriggled herself into a more comfortable position. Suzanne was just round the corner, looking at books, books that were huge and had to be lifted off the shelves with two hands. They were dusty and had made Lucy sneeze. ‘You’d better keep out of the way of this dust,’ Suzanne had said, and she had shown Lucy how to search on the computers. ‘You just stay here,’ she said.

But the computers were boring. She looked round her. The shelves were all around her, towering up to the ceiling. Everywhere you looked, there were shelves,
secret shelves,
Lucy thought. You could get lost in the secret shelves. Suzanne told her, ‘Don’t go far. If you do get lost, follow the yellow line’ – she showed Lucy a yellow line on the floor – ‘until you get to the door, then wait for me. I’ll come and find you.’

It was like the story about the monster in the maze. The
minotaur.
Lucy had a picture of a man fighting the minotaur. She slipped off her stool and crouched down at the bottom of the shelf, looking underneath it. You could just see through to the other side, and there were more shelves and more shelves. She squirmed along on her stomach, trying to see. There were Suzanne’s feet. She was standing on tiptoe. She must be reaching up to a high shelf. She didn’t know Lucy was watching. Lucy wriggled further along.

It was very quiet in the library, in the
stacks.
‘There’s no one else down here usually, not now the exams are over,’ Suzanne had said. ‘So no one will mind if you go on the computer.’ Suzanne had taken her into the library up some steps. There were lots of people there. Then they’d gone through a small door and down some stairs, and there were all the secret shelves, miles of secret shelves, but Suzanne had said, ‘Come on,’ and they’d gone to another door and down more steps. The door had swung shut behind them with a
boom.
There was another door at the bottom of the steps. ‘Come on,’ Suzanne had said. That door had closed like a whisper. And it was so quiet, Lucy’s ears felt squashed, and the air felt old and dry.

More shelves, more secret shelves. Lucy had run round them, laughing, wanting to make a noise, and then she didn’t know where she was. Everywhere she looked, there were just shelves. In front of her, rows and rows, and in the distance it got dark. Behind her, just the same. She looked to where the door was, but there were just shelves again. Then Suzanne was there,
and told her about the yellow line. Lucy thought that maybe she wanted to go home. ‘Does Michael like the secret shelves?’ she asked.

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.