Silent Playgrounds (27 page)

Ashley reached out his hand and she smiled and took it. They were walking along the road, and it was all right now, it was safe, everything was OK. She looked at him, but he was looking behind them, and she couldn’t see his face properly.
Listen to me, Suzanne!

She was awake again. Something had woken her. The wind was making the door shake now. She listened for a minute. Gusting, a draught,
rattle, rattle.
She turned over again and pulled the pillow across to muffle the noise. Again the wind gusted, rising almost to a shriek, the shadows danced madly against the curtain, and the twigs of the cotoneaster scraped against the glass. She squinted at the clock. Three-thirty.

She closed her eyes again, and sleep came in the form of a long, dizzying fall. She was falling so fast that it was getting difficult to breathe. The air was catching in her throat and making her cough. She was in a field – the air would be clear here – chasing Adam across the grass, but she was still coughing. The field was burning, and Adam was running towards the flames.

There was a crackling noise and a bang, and she opened her eyes, but her dream went on. She was coughing in a thick darkness, and there was a smell of … of something burning, rubber, plastic. She struggled up, pushing the blanket off her. There was smoke in the room and it was thick and black. There were crackling, popping noises from the hall. She ran to the door, turned the handle. It wouldn’t open. She tried again, rattling the door in its frame. It was jammed.

How … ? Then she realized that the fire was just outside.

The window. She could open the window. She undid the catch and pulled at the handles, feeling the window rattle, and a draught of cold air sucked and swirled into the room. The window stuck. The fire roared and smoke billowed. She gasped with effort and the smoke gripped and froze her throat. She couldn’t breathe. She retched and choked. The crackling of the flames was louder, and she thought she could see their flicker through the thickening smoke. She couldn’t breathe. She groped round for something hard, something solid. She pulled books off the shelves, grabbing one as it fell, and smashed it into the glass. It rebounded and fell behind the settee. She reached for another one, a heavier one, that slipped and almost fell as she fumbled at it. She lined it up this time, and drove the edge of the book at the window with the force of her body behind it. The glass shattered and she fell forward through a blast of cold air. A sharp pain ran through her arm.

She was on the ground, lying in the flower bed outside the front of the house, retching and choking, reaching for clean air to fill her lungs. The entry was filled with smoke. Ashley! Ashley was still in the house! He was round the back in Michael’s room! She couldn’t stand up, so she crawled, the frantic screams in her head coming out as faint whispers, and she fell down the step onto the pavement as the silent road watched her.

McCarthy looked at the charring on the door. There was a sickening smell of burning, and the hall, the stairs
and the landing were a blackened mess. The floor was awash with dirty water. ‘It’s mostly smoke damage,’ the fire officer was saying. ‘The fire itself was pretty small. There was something on the stairs that made a lot of smoke – very toxic, that.’

‘How did it happen?’ McCarthy knew that this was no accident. He felt frustrated at being here. He wanted to go to the hospital, to find out for himself how Suzanne was.

‘Arson,’ the fire officer said. He rubbed his fingers against the wood of the door and held them out to McCarthy. The smell was unmistakable. It reminded McCarthy of winter days in his grandfather’s greenhouse, in the humid warmth with the smell of out-of-season blossom. Paraffin. ‘Someone poured an accelerant through the letter box. Then they jammed the box open – give a good draught, you see. No, there’s nothing accidental about this.’

McCarthy hadn’t thought so from the minute he’d arrived, alerted by a call from the patrol that had routinely attended the fire. Ashley Reid had been found at Suzanne Milner’s house, and was at the Northern General Hospital. It was almost daylight now, past five, and the scene-of-crime team were starting to work. ‘OK if I go in?’ he said. The fire officer waved him past, and McCarthy went through the door.

It looked very different from the way he remembered it. The stairs which ran straight up in front of him were smoke blackened, the wall a mess of soot and charred paper. To his left and to his right the doors were both coated with the same thick, greasy residue. The one to
the left was slightly open. McCarthy looked at the door he’d come through, the one that had been attacked by whoever had started the fire. There was a Yale lock, bolts and a security chain. Using the end of a pen, he tested the bolts. They moved freely.

He went through the door on the left. The smoke had done its bit in here, and the water from the fire hoses made the carpet spongy under his feet. He walked through the room to the kitchen beyond. Apart from the broken lock on the back door, it was virtually untouched. The fire fighters had come in this way. McCarthy looked round. There was a plate on the worktop. Two cups were in the sink. One of the SOCOs was testing the door for fingerprints.

He went through to the front room. The door was closed, as it had apparently been during the fire. There was smoke damage in here, not quite as bad as the entrance and the dining room, but, instead, blackened areas around the door, and stains on the ceiling. According to the officers attending, the door to this room had been blocked, a piece of wood jammed under the handle. Suzanne had got out through the window, smashing the glass. One pane was knocked completely out; some jagged pieces of glass were lying on the floor. McCarthy saw blood on one of the shards, saw drops on the brickwork and the ground outside. He felt that sense of frustrated anxiety again.

He looked round. A bed had been made up on the couch, a makeshift job with cushions and a rug. Then he went up the stairs, looked in the room at the head of the stairs. A bedroom, Suzanne’s by the look of it.
The bed was undisturbed. Though the landing walls had been thick with smoke, in here the damage was minimal. A dressing gown lay across the bed. McCarthy picked it up. There was a faint perfume on it that took him back, disconcertingly, to the afternoon in the heather, and to the night in his flat.

The other room was chaos. The bed – a single bed – was pulled away from the wall. The bedding was strewn over the floor. McCarthy wondered how much of this was from the rescue. He understood that Reid had been pulled unconscious from the smoke-filled room and rushed to the ambulance that was waiting outside. He needed to talk to someone who’d been there. He went along the corridor to the bathroom. Here, there was no evidence of damage at all, apart from the smell of the fire. A damp towel lay on the floor, and some clothes, jeans, a T-shirt, were discarded by the side of the bath. The clothes were filthy and torn.

A further flight of stairs led up to the attic. McCarthy looked up the stairway. It wound round, making a steep and dangerous climb. The stairs were dark and windowless. He pressed the light switch. Nothing. Maybe the electricity was off.

He came down the stairs again and went back to the front room. His phone rang as he was still formulating his message. It was Brooke. McCarthy listened to what he had to say, confirmed, listened again, and hung up. He stood in the middle of Suzanne’s front room, watching the early morning sun make shadow patterns on the carpet and glitter off the shards of glass scattered around the window and on the ground outside.

There was a photograph on the wall, a portrait of a smiling boy with curly hair and freckles. He recognized the face from his search through the records. Adam Milner, the brother Suzanne had loved, protected, given up her childhood for, and lost. He felt an ache inside him, the ache he’d long ago learnt to ignore … no, not ignore, dismiss.
Not my concern, not my problem.

Ashley Reid was dead.

Barraclough couldn’t tell if McCarthy had been exasperated or angry when the records department at Sheffield University produced the name Simon Walker. He was a third-year student in the Department of Chemistry. He had lived in one of the halls of residence for the first two years of his course, briefly at 14, Carleton Road, then moved to a flat on Oakbrook Road, beside Bingham Park, just a few hundred yards from Shepherd Wheel.

Barraclough could hear the music of the funfair as she got out of the car. It was back down the road in Endcliffe Park, but the breeze was carrying the music, the creak and rumble of the machines, and the shouts and screams and the amplified voices calling to people to come and buy. She hadn’t outgrown funfairs. She felt an urge to be spending the evening in the candy-floss and hot-dog environment, spinning on the waltzer, winning a huge green teddy bear on some rigged shooting gallery. Instead she was here to work, here in search of Simon Walker at his last known address.

The house was on the main road overlooking Bingham Park. It was a stone house that backed onto the
park, its bay window dark, with torn nets, the upper-storey window obscured by a blanket, another house fallen victim to the creeping blight of multiple occupancy. The paint was chipped and peeling, the wood of the window frames starting to crumble at the base. At the back, the land dropped down into the park, down towards the river. The small back garden was below the level of the road, a basement flat opening out onto it.

Simon Walker had rented the basement flat, but the flat itself was empty when Corvin, armed with a warrant, arrived with the search team. ‘I knew he’d be trouble,’ the landlord grumbled as he unlocked the door.

‘How do you mean?’ Corvin asked as they went into the room. Barraclough could smell the damp. She’d lived in enough run-down bed-sits in the earlier days of her career for the smell to take her back to a life of takeaways and cheap red wine, transient passions in front of fumy gas fires – a time of her life she had thoroughly enjoyed and had no desire to revisit.

The landlord considered Corvin’s question suspiciously. ‘He’s a bit of a weirdo,’ he said after a moment.

Barraclough was looking round the room as he spoke. It was not what she had been expecting. Student flats were sordid and messy – everyone knew that. This one was meticulously tidy. More than that, Barraclough thought. The books on the shelves were lined up and carefully arranged according to size. There was a small kitchen separated from the rest of the room by a breakfast bar. The single wall cupboard was filled with tins of sweetcorn, standing in neat rows in piles of three.
She looked at the table in the window. Two unopened letters were lined up square with the table edge. On one wall was a sheet of paper filled with complex diagrams forming lozenge-shaped patterns, with letters and numbers attached to the lines. On the other wall, opposite the window, were marks, straight lines, as though something had been carefully lined up there in several rows. Whatever it was had been removed, leaving pieces of tape behind.

She could hear the landlord talking to Corvin as she tried to decipher the images she was seeing. ‘He had this really strange look,’ the man was saying. ‘Like he couldn’t understand a word you said,’ There were leaflets and a free paper on the mat in front of the door, and a carton of milk that had been left on the breakfast bar had gone sour, its smell adding a slight taint to the damp air.

‘OK, let’s get started,’ said Corvin.

Midday Sunday, McCarthy negotiated the one-way system through the city centre in response to an urgent summons from the pathologist. Anne Hays’s office was at the bottom of the long hill that ran down behind the university. It was an undistinguished building among modern industrial blocks, next to the dual carriageway where the tramway ran towards Hillsborough. It was a place where people came and sat in a waiting room to find out the usually unremarkable truths that lay behind the deaths of their loved ones, to collect the certificates that would allow them to bury their dead. McCarthy felt that same frustration he’d felt earlier, of having to be in one place when he wanted to be somewhere else.

A disgruntled security guard, his Sunday disrupted by the events of the night before, was on the door. McCarthy gave him a nod of acknowledgement as he went to the lift and said, ‘Dr Hays is expecting me.’

He pressed the button for the second floor, and when he stepped out of the lift, turned right along the narrow, blue-carpeted corridor. The lights were fluorescent, recessed. The walls looked flimsy, as though they would cave in at a touch. The doors, spaced at regular intervals, were made of simulated wood with windows at the top, which let a vestige of natural light into the corridor.

He found Anne Hays’s office and knocked. He wondered if she would actually say, ‘Come,’ and when she did, he opened the door and went in. She was sitting at her desk, and raised her eyebrows coolly at him as if she held him personally responsible for this latest incumbent of her table. ‘Good morning, Mr McCarthy.’ She was as formal as ever. She must have made an early start, but she was meticulously neat, and as correct as she always was with him – no reflections on the vagaries of teenage girls or the iniquities of the NHS system for his benefit. He wondered why she had asked him to call in, rather than submitting her report through to the investigating team.

She stood up. ‘I’m afraid I’ve got something for you,’ she said. ‘You’d better come and see this.’ She led McCarthy to the lift and they went down to the morgue. ‘We did the post-mortem this morning,’ she said, leading him to one of the fridges where the bodies were stored. ‘We still need all the lab stuff, but I can tell you this now. It wasn’t immediately obvious.’ She unzipped the cover and pulled it back to expose the face.

McCarthy waited, wondering when she’d get to the point. He looked down at Ashley Reid, his face congested and swollen, disfigured by bruising and – something else. McCarthy looked more closely, and then back at Anne Hays, wanting now to know what she had to tell him. He had thought she was a young woman. Now she looked older. The light was giving her face that papery fragility of old skin, transparent and delicate. He was afraid for a moment that, if she smiled, her face would crumble and dissipate in the draught from the ventilation fan. He shook his head to clear it. He was tired.

She waited for his reaction before she went on. ‘… They tried their best to resuscitate the boy – nineteen, it’s a crime.’ So far, McCarthy thought, they were in complete agreement. ‘So he was a bit battered by the time I got him. But I’m afraid there’s no doubt.’ Again, McCarthy was struck by the look of academic inquiry on her face, judicious, slightly distanced. ‘Congestion of the face, petechiae, bruising to the neck.’ She showed him, gently manoeuvring the head that lay between them. ‘It would all be concealed by the smoke damage, of course. And, of course, no smoke in the lungs … You can understand how it happened. They got him out of there and went straight into resuscitation. Your first aim in a case like this is to save life.’

It took a moment for McCarthy to realize what she was telling him. Ashley Reid had not died in the fire. He had been dead before the lethal smoke reached him.

The forensic team worked fast. They knew which prints they had to match, and went straight to them. It was
no surprise that they had an immediate hit with Ashley Reid’s prints, but the second match they found was less expected. They had no name to go with these, but someone else had left fingerprints in Suzanne Milner’s house, on the passage door, on the stair rail, and on her desk in her attic study. These prints matched with the unknown set found in Shepherd Wheel after Emma Allan’s death.

Brooke called the team together late Sunday afternoon. He was angry, and made little attempt to hide it. They had had three promising lines of inquiry, two of which looked like coming up with their killer – Brooke would have put money on Dennis Allan as the killer of the daughter who was not his daughter, and the woman he thought was his wife’s other child. But Dennis Allan had been in custody when Ashley Reid was killed, was guilty of another crime altogether, and, with his solicitor urgently coaching him, was unlikely to be charged with anything, or anything much. How easily could guilt distort the memory of a man who had found his disturbed wife apparently dead from an overdose after the row they had had, which had precipitated her suicide?

And Ashley Reid? Reid’s death might have, could have cleared the whole thing up for him, though Brooke had never been as hot on Reid as McCarthy had been. The lad’s apparent low intelligence had seemed to count him out as anything more than an accomplice, a puppet manipulated by more intelligent strings. But McCarthy’s latest report suggested that Reid was of average or above average intelligence, more than capable of planning and carrying out the two killings. But not, unfortunately,
capable of planning and carrying out his own murder. The evidence was unequivocal. Reid had died of strangulation, manual strangulation. Though the scene had been disturbed by the rescue, it looked as though he had been attacked in the room where he had been sleeping. He’d been subdued by a blow to the head, and then had the life choked out of him. The fire had apparently been set in an effort to conceal this fact. Despite the initial appearances, the fire had been set and started from inside the house.

‘Whoever it was came along prepared, then?’ Griffith asked. A premeditated attack with Reid’s killer stalking him to Suzanne Milner’s house, equipped for murder and arson.

‘No.’ Brooke indicated part of the fire report. ‘Whoever it was used an accelerant that was already at the scene. Milner had been decorating. There was a bottle of paraffin on the landing. She said so.’ An opportunistic attack? An unintended death?

Whoever it was who had strangled Ashley Reid, it wasn’t Suzanne Milner. She was lucky to be alive. Someone had locked her in the downstairs room and nearly killed her as well. Her story was clear and consistent, but there were gaps. Barraclough knew – they all knew – she wasn’t telling all of the truth. She claimed that Reid had come to her house that evening. She admitted that she had gone looking for him, but said that Reid had arrived independently. The evidence from the house suggested otherwise. Though a great deal of it had been destroyed by the fire and the damage done in extinguishing it, and in the attempts to rescue Ashley
Reid, there was still enough to cast serious doubts on Suzanne’s version of events. She claimed that Reid had never been inside the house before that night, and had only been in the downstairs rooms, the bathroom and the small bedroom. But Reid’s fingerprints were in other places, particularly in the attic room that Suzanne Milner apparently used as a study. McCarthy was outlining their findings now, talking about fresh prints, overlaid prints – evidence of much more than a single night would account for.

Barraclough pulled her attention back to the briefing. ‘So was she harbouring him all this time?’ Brooke said.

McCarthy seemed uncharacteristically indecisive. He shook his head. ‘I don’t know. She says she wasn’t.’

‘Why would she harbour someone like Reid?’ That was Liam Martin. It was a good point, Barraclough thought. Corvin made a crude suggestion that brought the relief of laughter. McCarthy’s face set in cold, unforgiving lines.

Barraclough thought that she had never seen him so angry. They had interviewed Suzanne as soon as she left the hospital – against medical advice – just over an hour ago. Barraclough had felt sorry for her. She looked shocked and ill – as well she might – and had seemed to find it hard to concentrate. She kept saying, ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ as if she couldn’t understand the questions she was being asked. She seemed bewildered by the evidence and retreated into confused silence.

For the first time in the years she had known him, Barraclough saw McCarthy lose it. As Suzanne repeated for the third time that Ashley Reid had never been in
her house apart from that one night, he’d slammed his fist down on the desk and shouted, ‘Exactly how stupid do you think I am, Suzanne?’

She had shaken her head, looking shocked and exhausted. McCarthy had said something about a break and slammed out of the room, leaving Barraclough to sort out the formalities. He’d sent Corvin in to complete the interview.

Thinking about this now, Barraclough remembered the scene at the hospital earlier that afternoon, when she had gone with McCarthy to talk to Suzanne, before the evidence from the house had come through. The nurse had said with some sharpness, ‘She’s not being very reasonable, but we can’t force her to stay. Try and talk some sense into her,’ and they had found Suzanne pulling on a torn and smoke-stained jumper, trying to collect her possessions together. McCarthy had told Barraclough to wait outside the cubicle, but she’d been able to see and hear most of what went on. Suzanne had tried to push past him, fighting him as he stopped her, saying, ‘I’ve got to talk to him! I didn’t listen! He tried to tell me and I didn’t listen!’

McCarthy had grabbed her by the shoulders and shaken her until she’d shut up and looked at him, seen in his face the news he had to tell her. Then he hadn’t said anything, had just put his arms round her, and all he’d said was, ‘Suzanne, it’s all right, it’s all right.’

But it wasn’t, Barraclough thought now, watching him in the incident room. Something wasn’t all right with McCarthy at all.

The numbing effects of shock wore off as Sunday evening faded into Sunday night. Suzanne didn’t know what to do. Her house was still being examined by police, by scene-of-crime investigators. She couldn’t have faced going there anyway. Jane was due back with Lucy later that night. She had a spare key to Jane’s, and now she was sitting in Jane’s back room on the edge of the reclining chair, in the middle of Lucy’s toys and drawings, watching the evening sky over the roofs of the houses. Lucy’s one-eared teddy bear was tucked in a corner of the chair, and Suzanne picked it up, turning it round and round in her hands as she watched the evening star slowly become visible in the fading light.