Silent Playgrounds (23 page)

‘No one told me. I found out.’

She was quiet for so long he thought she’d decided not to say any more, but eventually she said in a rather muffled voice, ‘How long have you known about Adam?’ She lay forward in the heather, supporting herself on her elbows. She had a heather flower in her hands and was slowly picking it to pieces.

‘Only a day. I looked it up.’

She was frowning in concentration, studying the
flower in an effort, he thought, to keep her mind off things she didn’t want to think about. ‘Why?’

He rolled onto his side, facing her, propping his head on his hand. ‘I wondered why it was a battlefield every time I talked to you.’ He took hold of her wrist lightly, running his fingers a little way up and down her arm. ‘What happened to your brother was criminal negligence – but not yours, Suzanne. You did everything you could. Who else did anything?’

‘Adam, he …’ The tone of calm rationality she’d adopted cracked a bit. She coughed. ‘Adam, he … I … didn’t … I could have …’

‘Could have what?’ He wanted to pin her down to what, exactly, she thought she could have done differently.

‘Could have done something,’ she said. ‘
Something.
I just left it. In the end, I just left it and he … did it. I should have … I don’t know. I just know I didn’t do anything.’ She rubbed her hand across her forehead in a gesture of tired despair.

‘A lot of people made mistakes where your brother was concerned. Some people made worse than mistakes.’

‘It isn’t that easy,’ she said. He squinted up at the sun. The sky was cloudless. He couldn’t think of anything else to say. She was probably right. She wasn’t stupid – she must have worked out a long time ago that the people charged with the care of her brother hadn’t done their job properly. But he had been her brother, her responsibility, and he had died. The fact that she should never have had that responsibility didn’t seem to be an issue with her.

Her head was bent so that he couldn’t see her face, just her hair falling forward. It had dried in the sun and he could see threads of chestnut and gold running through it. And …

‘Grey.’ he said. ‘A grey hair. You worry too much.’ He didn’t want to talk any more. He could feel himself drifting into deep waters.

She looked at him and shook her head. ‘I can’t help it.’ she said.

No more talking. He put his arm round her, pulling her down towards him as he lay back in the heather again. He could smell that faint perfume as he kissed her, and feel her breasts pressing against him. He slipped his hand under her top and ran it up and down her back, gently, slowly. He felt her stiffen and wondered if he’d misread her again, but then he felt her relax against him. He didn’t want to rush her – they had all afternoon. For a while, they just lay there in the sun and he let his hands run over her skin, feeling it smooth and warm against the slight roughness of his hands.

He kissed her again and pushed her top up, rolling over, holding her close, so that she was lying beside and below him. He was still kissing her as he put his hand on her breast, as her mouth opened under his. Her nipple felt hard against his fingers. He helped her pull the T-shirt over her head. ‘It’s going to be bloody uncomfortable in all this heather,’ he murmured.

She was unbuckling his belt, undoing his trousers, pushing them down to free him. Her skirt had ridden up round her waist. He kissed her stomach, running his tongue round her navel. He pulled her pants down
round her knees, and felt her legs move as she worked them down the rest of the way and kicked them off. He slipped his hand between her legs and she made a sound somewhere between a gasp and a moan. He wanted to bury his face in that musky wetness, but now he couldn’t wait, and the scratches from the heather in their half-undressed state seemed just another sensation as he pushed into her and there was just their breathing, and the heat of the sun, and the way she was moving and her gasp of, ‘Steve’ … as he felt her hips jerk and then he was holding her tightly and he was saying, ‘Suzanne, oh Christ’ … And then they were lying on a bed of twigs and leaves, and his clothes were tangled uncomfortably round him, and he could smell her perfume mixing with the smell of heather and the smell of sex, and he felt happier than he had since … when? Since he couldn’t remember.

Barraclough was winding up her search for Sandra’s baby. She knew what she was going to find. Sandra had been pregnant at the end of the seventies, after Velvet broke up. Sophie Dutton had been born in 1980. She had been adopted, and had come to Sheffield in search of her mother. She had never communicated the results of her search to her adoptive family, but Emma Allan had become her close friend.

Sophie had probably found Sandra Ford quite quickly – she may already have had the name, some means of contact from the letter her mother had left for her. And had the neurotic, worn-down woman living her complaining life in a shabby maisonette with
her ineffectual husband proved to be the kind of disappointment that Barraclough imagined she would be? Sophie probably had dreams about her real mother, dreams that may have carried her through the troughs of adolescence, provided a more vital background than a smallholding on the east coast could provide, no matter how loving her adoptive parents had been. And instead she had found Sandra Ford. But she had also found Emma, her half-sister. Emma, troubled and constrained, the child of a difficult marriage, the child of deceit. Sophie and Emma had been inseparable, everyone had said it. And how had Dennis Allan reacted to this?

Might it have seemed better to him if Sophie were to go, to leave, to be removed from their lives for ever? And then, had the thunderbolt of Emma’s birth hit him, and had Emma become something else he must remove from his life, destroy? And his wife, of course, conveniently dead as well. It made a clear and elegant pattern. It was like dropping the last pieces into a jigsaw puzzle, feeling them slip in without resistance.

And it was here in the records. Sandra Ford, now living in Sheffield, had had a child in – but that couldn’t be right. March 1978. Two years before Sophie Dutton was born. Barraclough had been so
sure.
But it was clear and unequivocal. Sandra Ford had given birth to a girl. She had called her daughter Phillipa. What had happened to her?

Barraclough thought about the unhappiness that had haunted Sandra’s adult life, then went back to the registers. And there it was, dated for the same day as the
birth, a death certificate, showing that Sandra Ford’s child had lived for only a few hours.

Then she realized something else, something she should have seen at once. In 1978, the year of her daughter’s birth and death, Sandra Ford had been just fifteen years old.

Suzanne came floating up from empty space. Her dreams these past few nights had been filled with images of tension, places where she hunted in vain in gathering darkness, buildings with endless corridors tracked in a growing panic until she jerked awake to realize, once more, she was dreaming –
listen to me, Suzanne, listen, listen, listen …
But now she was waking up from a sleep of welcome blankness, into a bed that felt crumpled, the sheet bunched underneath her, a smell of cool air, soap, sex. Someone was moving around. That was what had woken her. She opened her eyes into a white dimness, where Steve McCarthy was quietly taking something out of a drawer over by the window which was covered by a translucent blind. He looked as though he’d just come out of the shower. His hair was wet and tousled, and he was carrying a towel. He must have heard her move, because he looked round, saw she was awake and smiled. ‘I didn’t mean to wake you yet,’ he said. ‘You looked as though you needed the sleep.’ He looked tired.

She sat up, rubbing her eyes, and checked her watch. Six o’clock. ‘What are you … ?’

‘I’ve got some stuff I need to do before I go in. Should have done it last night, but I got distracted.’ He sat down on the side of the bed, pulled up the sheet and wrapped it round her. ‘Cover yourself up, or I’m not going to get it done.’

She laughed, feeling that buoyancy that had lifted her spirits before. Steve McCarthy. Five years of self-imposed celibacy spectacularly broken in one afternoon and one night. She wound her arms round his neck and kissed him. For a moment, he responded, then he pulled himself away. ‘Come on. Or I’ll have to lock you up for obstruction.’ He held her wrists lightly in one hand. ‘Shit. I’m in no state to get my clothes on now.’

She laughed again and let him stand up. ‘I’ll get up in a minute.’ But she lay back down again and let her mind drift. She could feel the sting of the scratches on her arms and back that she hadn’t noticed at the time. Everything had changed so suddenly. After their quick, almost frantic coupling in the heather, they’d walked back down the path, stopping once to kiss and to look at each other with bewilderment. He’d said, ‘My place?’ and she’d nodded, not wanting to leave him and not wanting to go back to the emptiness she had left behind just a couple of hours before.

He lived in a flat in a modern block. She got a vague impression of impersonal comfort. She didn’t really notice much. He took her straight into the bedroom and they pulled each other’s clothes off as they fell onto the bed. A detached part of her mind was amazed. How was it that a cold, unemotional man like Steve McCarthy could be a warm and passionate lover? They
spent the rest of the afternoon and the evening there. As the sun got lower in the sky, it shone through the bedroom window, sending the shadows slanting long and dark across the room. He lay on his side, looking at her, letting his fingers trail lightly across her skin. ‘You’re lovely,’ he said. He went and got a bottle of wine from the kitchen, and later he phoned for a pizza. ‘I don’t do food,’ he said.

‘What’s wrong with dial-a-pizza?’ she said. ‘As long as it hasn’t got pineapple on,’ and he laughed and looked relieved. He seemed to take it for granted that she was staying, and she couldn’t think of any reason why not. Her last memory was the clock display showing 00:03 as she drifted off to sleep with Steve’s arms wrapped round her.

She woke up and realized she must have fallen asleep again. He was dressed now, sitting on the side of the bed, leaning forward, looking at her. When he saw she was awake, he said, ‘I have to go soon. I’ll be in the shit with Brooke for vanishing yesterday, so I need to get in. I’ve got a lot to do.’

She rubbed her eyes. ‘I thought it was your day off yesterday.’

‘It was. It doesn’t make any difference.’ He didn’t look too serious. He was watching her with a half-smile, very different from the detached, impassive McCarthy that she had been familiar with. ‘I’ll take you home – you’ve got time to grab a shower, things like that.’ He pushed her hair back from her face, and traced the outline of her mouth with his fingers. ‘I could think of things I’d rather do today,’ he said.

The sight of him concentrating on her made a shiver run through her, as though he was running his fingers lightly across her skin. His face seemed to soften and her breathing became uneven. Her face felt warm. They looked at each other in silence for a moment, then he leant forward to kiss her, pulling the sheet away.

The phone rang making them both jump. ‘Shit!’ He buried his face in her neck, and she held him tight, willing him not to answer it. But he picked up the receiver and gave her a resigned smile. ‘McCarthy.’ He put his hand over the mouthpiece. ‘Work. OK, Suzanne, help yourself to anything you need. I’ll make coffee when I’ve dealt with this.’ She heard him talking as she got up. ‘Yes, OK. What? When? You’re sure? OK, about … give me half an hour.’ She turned on the shower and the noise of the water drowned him out.

He was in the kitchen making coffee when she went through towelling her wet hair. ‘You need to go,’ she said. The call must have been important – he had changed, was the McCarthy she remembered from the interview room. He looked abstracted, distant.

‘Yes. It’s OK, have a coffee, we’ve got time.’ He offered her a cigarette and pushed a cup over to her, flicking through the pages of a folder he had open in front of him.

‘Is anything wrong?’ She wasn’t sure how to react. She found herself thinking of him as a different person, as McCarthy. The man she had just spent the night with was Steve – Steve whom she felt comfortable with, relaxed with.

He smiled at her, Steve again, but still distracted. ‘No. Just something on the case, something we didn’t expect.’ He indicated cereals, bread, milk. ‘Help yourself.’ He was back with the file. Suzanne could recognize the absorption. This was how she was when something in her research began to ring bells, when a previously hidden pattern began to emerge. And she thought about her work, and about the chaos in the house, the half-stripped walls. She thought about the empty weekend in front of her. Suddenly it seemed unbearably lonely. She sipped the coffee, feeling the tension that had vanished yesterday afternoon building up inside her again.

She looked at Steve, absorbed in his work, and wondered if she should tell him about – about what? It was all supposition. She had nothing to tell him except her own belief that Ashley was not responsible for Emma’s death. He could only act like a policeman. She needed something concrete to bring him. Ashley talked to her. He didn’t talk to anyone else – or no one at the Alpha, anyway. He might talk to her, and she would
listen,
like he’d asked her to … Then she would have something to bring to Steve.

He looked at his watch, and then looked across at her. ‘Ready?’ She nodded. ‘You haven’t eaten anything.’

‘I’ll have something when I get back.’ The tension had taken her appetite away.

He took her hand and circled his fingers round her forearm. ‘You’re too thin.’ She liked it that he was concerned. She tried to remember the last time someone
had said something like that to her. She needed to trust him.

‘Steve …’ He looked a query at her as he locked the door. ‘It’s …’ She could see the lines of fatigue etched in his face. She thought about the gruelling schedule he seemed to work to, and wondered how long it was since he’d had a full night’s sleep. She had nothing useful to tell him, and he didn’t need her worries. ‘It doesn’t matter.’ He didn’t pursue it, and she wasn’t sure if she was relieved or sorry. He dropped her off at Carleton Road with a promise to phone her the following day, Sunday.

She let herself into the house, and the depression and the dread were waiting for her as soon as she crossed the threshold.

It was the news about Corvin’s and Barraclough’s visit to Manchester that had galvanized McCarthy. According to Peter Greenhead, Dennis Allan had known very well about his wife’s first child. And something else, more unexpected, had turned up. Carolyn, Velvet’s singer. Was she Ashley Reid’s mother?

Brooke grunted at him when he arrived in the incident room for the briefing. ‘What do you think this is, Benidorm?’ So he knew McCarthy had been out of circulation for part of the previous day. He decided the best policy would be no comment.

Brooke was clear about what he wanted. ‘We need to know if there’s a connection here. If Emma Allan’s parents – whoever her father was – and Reid’s parents knew each other, then it’s relevant. And what kind of
hornet’s nest did Sophie Dutton stir up when she started looking for her mother? OK, she wasn’t Sandra’s child—’

‘Unless Sandra got pregnant again,’ Corvin said. ‘Greenhead said she put it about.’

‘Right. Check it.’ McCarthy saw Barraclough wince. She’d been landed with the archive-checking for this case. Brooke looked at her. ‘Any progress with this brother of Reid’s? This Simon? Reid could be hiding out with him, wherever he is.’

Barraclough said quickly, ‘I’ve got an address for the grandmother. The Beeches. It’s an old people’s home at Grenoside.’ The outskirts of Sheffield.

Brooke nodded. ‘OK. Steve, fill us in on Dennis Allan.’

McCarthy thought quickly and said, ‘There’s something about Sandra Allan’s death. That’s what made Allan jumpy when I interviewed him. I think we should go back to that, talk to the neighbours again. I need something to put pressure on.’

Brooke wound up. The drugs connection seemed to be no more than a student deal. ‘Don’t ignore it,’ he said. ‘Emma Allan was supplying, she was a heroin user, and she’d taken something the day she died. They’ve had drugs problems at the Alpha Centre, and Ashley Reid is a clear link there. But as far as we know, Sophie Dutton wasn’t involved at all.’

‘What about Lynman and Andrews?’ Corvin wanted to know.

‘We’re charging them,’ Brooke said, his face set. ‘With dealing, and with wasting police time. That might frighten the name of Emma’s supplier out of Andrews.’

Brooke looked at the pictures on the wall. Sophie and Emma looked back at him, their similarity noticeable to someone who was looking for it. ‘Are we being spun around by a lot of detail?’ he said. ‘Are we just looking for someone with a taste for girls who look like that?’ He shook his head. ‘Right. Steve, get your people on the Allan thing. I want to know why he’s been lying to us. And I want to know if this Linnet woman is Carolyn Reid. If she is, I want to know where she is. I want to know if there’s a connection between Dennis Allan and Ashley Reid.’

Half an hour later, McCarthy, going through the urgent stuff on his desk, caught up with the details of Corvin’s visit to Manchester. ‘You think Greenhead knows something?’ he said, following on from the report back in the briefing.

‘There was something he knew about Sandra Ford, but whether it’s got anything to do with this … We’re going back over twenty years.’ Corvin thought. ‘I don’t think he’d cover up for a murder, not unless he stood to go down for it.’

‘What about having another go at him?’

Corvin shook his head. ‘If we go after him again, he’ll surround himself with lawyers nine deep. I’ve had dealings with him before.’

McCarthy thought about it. ‘So we either need something concrete we can push him with, or a reason to get him to co-operate?’

‘It’d be easier,’ Corvin said.

As the door closed behind her and she looked up at the stripped wall and the litter of torn wallpaper on the stairs, Suzanne’s feelings seemed to flatten and darken. A heavy fatigue was draining the energy out of her, as if, once she was on her own, she had no reason to keep upright, keep going.

She knew this feeling well, and she knew what she had to do to fight it. She dredged up some small reserves and began to sweep the strips of wallpaper down the stairs. This time it worked, and she felt her energy returning. Once she had cleared the stairs and landing and taken up the dust sheets that she’d put down to protect the carpet, she felt better. But it was dark on the landing and the stairs, and the darkness threatened to bring back the depression she had so far managed to defeat. She bundled all the paper into a bin bag and put it by the door. She’d take it out later. What to do next? She allowed the thought of her research to drift into her mind. She sampled it, and decided it wouldn’t hurt to look. One thing she could do would be to finish typing up her handwritten transcripts, get all the interviews onto the computer.

She tested the thought again, and found she could cope with it. She went up the stairs to the attic and closed her study door behind her. She frowned as she looked round at the papers strewn on her desk. Maybe next week she could timetable a couple of hours for tidying up her study. The thought quite appealed to her. She switched on her computer and pulled the transcripts out of her desk drawer.

The mechanical act of copy typing allowed her mind
to drift. She steered it away from the places where the blackness was lurking and allowed it to focus on more gentle things. Sunny days. Landscapes laid out in front of her, slightly misty with the new green. Shadows on the rocks. The heather moors and the bilberries.

Steve … She tried that thought with the caution of someone stepping onto uncertain ground, feeling for the place where the solid land gave way to the grassy overhang. He was going to phone her tomorrow, and then … ? Time would tell. What was he doing now? That was the wrong question to ask. He was looking for Ashley.

Her hand drifted to her notebook and the addresses she had found. Ashley had lived on the Green Park estate, where the tower blocks were being demolished. And so had Lee, before his family were moved. Lee had his family. Ashley had no one. The story she had seen in his file, just in her brief reading, had told her that. Care. Lack-of-care. One children’s home after another, institutional, bleak and cold. She thought about something Richard had said, one of the few things he’d told her about Ashley.
Some of the lads – they have horrific backgrounds, things you can’t imagine. But it isn’t always that which does the damage. Take Ashley. Ashley’s never had anyone who loved him, not for himself. That’s the root of Ashley’s problem, I think. No one wanted him. He’s never had anyone who really cared about him. That’s hard to cope with.
It was probably easier to hide behind a façade of clouded perception, and keep your real self hidden deep. But Ashley had shown her a bit of his real self, enough to make her care. Lee would know something, she was
sure, now. He wouldn’t tell her anything, but he might pass a message on. He might tell Ashley she wanted to talk to him.