Silent Playgrounds (30 page)

She tried his mobile first, hoping to get him directly, but it was switched off. She had two false starts before she found the courage to dial his extension, and when
she finally got through, someone else answered. She asked to speak to him, someone took her name and she was left in the limbo of
hold
for so long she thought she must have been cut off. Then the phone clicked into life again, and his voice snapped ‘McCarthy’ into her ear.

‘Steve.’ She was thrown by the abruptness. ‘It’s me.’
Oh, Christ, woman, get a grip!
‘It’s Suzanne.’

A few beats of silence. ‘Suzanne.’ He sounded taken aback. He hadn’t known it was her.

‘It’s … look, I … I was just …’ She took a deep breath.

‘Look, Suzanne, I’m busy. Is this important?’ He was impersonal, businesslike again.

If she hadn’t heard that uncertainty in his voice when he first spoke to her, she might have hung up, but she gripped the phone and said, ‘It’s important. Something’s gone missing from the house. I didn’t realize at first. I think it went missing that night … when—’

‘OK,’ he interrupted. ‘What’s gone? When did you notice?’ She told him quickly, tried not to justify herself, just saying that the tapes were routine, standard interviews, that she had just now realized that Ashley’s was no longer on the shelves, that the tapes should have been on the shelves, not scattered on her desk. She was talking into silence, and she heard herself start to stumble over the words, to begin to justify, and stopped. Waited. His voice was tense when he spoke again. ‘You’ve had a tape of Ashley Reid for the past ten days and you didn’t think to mention it?’

‘Yes.’ There didn’t seem anything else to say. She
preferred his anger to his impersonal stonewalling.

She heard him sigh. ‘Don’t touch anything else. I’ll get someone round there. I need to talk to you.’ Before she could say anything else, he had hung up.

McCarthy decided to go round to Suzanne’s himself. He wasn’t sure if he wanted to see her, but he wanted to know about these tapes, and he wanted to know what else she knew, what else she had been hiding. He drew up outside the house, which looked derelict and forlorn, boarded up as it now was.

He went round to the back, assuming that door would be open. Lucy was in the shared back yard, sitting on a tricycle that looked too small for her, propelling it across the paving with her feet. She stopped when she saw him and looked at him in silence. ‘Hello, Lucy,’ he said. She didn’t answer, but after a moment’s thought, she gave him a rather wan smile. McCarthy remembered the friendship they’d established over skating. ‘Isn’t that a bit too small for you?’ he tried.

She shrugged and pushed it along for a short way, as if to prove him wrong. She scrutinized him again with an intensity that he found disturbing. ‘Suzanne’s house burnt down,’ she said. Was she just trying to bring him up to date with things she thought he ought to know? Or was she trying to tell him something?

‘I know.’ He wondered what to say next to keep her talking.

‘It was the monsters,’ she said, twisting the handles on her bike. ‘And Tamby …’

He took a risk. ‘It wasn’t monsters, Lucy, it was
people. There aren’t any monsters.’ Her face set in a stubborn blank. She was angry. She had expected better from him and was exasperated at his stupidity. He knew that feeling of exasperated anger well. ‘OK,’ he agreed cautiously. ‘You say it was the monsters. Tell me what happened, Lucy.’

She looked at him warily. ‘The monsters aren’t in the park any more,’ she said, ‘and Tamby …’ Her lip quivered. ‘Tamby made …’ A tear ran down her face, then another and another. She didn’t cry like his niece, Jenny, did, mouth open, howling outrage or despair. She cried silently, trying to knuckle the tears out of her eyes.

He squatted down in front of her, bringing his head to her level. ‘Lucy? What’s the matter? Is it about the monsters, about Tamby?’ She nodded, still wiping away the tears that wouldn’t stop. ‘Tell me,’ he said, gently.

‘What’s up with our Luce?’ McCarthy looked up. A man he recognized as Joel Severini was strolling across the yard, an expression of polite inquiry on his face. ‘Aren’t you supposed to get permission before you put an infant through the third degree?’ He took hold of Lucy’s wrist. She looked up at her father and then back to McCarthy. Her face was closed again, still wet with tears.

McCarthy cursed. She’d been about to tell him something. He stood up slowly, giving Lucy a reassuring smile. He was thinking back. Corvin had interviewed Severini after Emma’s death. Severini had had a solid alibi. He’d been working, in company, for most of the day, in his club in Leeds. The night before, he’d had
company, again in Leeds. ‘There was an authentically shagged-out schoolgirl to back that one up,’ Corvin had said. ‘Over sixteen,’ he’d added, in response to McCarthy’s query. ‘But not by much. Pity. There’s something dodgy about him. He’s an arrogant shit. I’m surprised someone hasn’t smacked his teeth in before now.’

Now, McCarthy looked at Joel Severini and remembered Suzanne’s damning assessment of the man, the first time he’d met her. Jane Fielding hadn’t demurred, he remembered, but she’d been distracted with worry for Lucy. According to Suzanne, Severini was an absent, non-providing father, but he seemed to have been around for his daughter since the park episode. He was prepared to withhold judgement. He looked down at Lucy again. ‘Do you want to tell me, Lucy?’

Severini’s face darkened, and he pulled Lucy behind him. She jerked her hand away from him. ‘Get in the house,’ he snapped. He turned to McCarthy. ‘Perhaps you’d better tell me what she’s upset about.’

‘That’s what I’d like to find out,’ McCarthy said. He was interested to note that Lucy had not obeyed her father, but had gone back to her bike and was watching the two men alertly.

McCarthy smiled reassuringly at her. He didn’t want her to see him and her father in an angry exchange. He wanted her to trust him. He wondered how he could signal that he’d listened, that he knew she had something important to tell him. Severini flashed him an angry look. Something had really got under the man’s
skin. ‘We may need to talk to her again,’ McCarthy said.

Severini had managed to regain his control, and his smile was back in place. He glanced across at the closed door of Suzanne’s house and his smile broadened. ‘Here to see Suzie? Well, well. She usually likes them a bit younger. I won’t hold you up then.’ He was just moving away when he turned back. ‘A word of warning,
Inspector.
’ He made it sound like a term of abuse. ‘She’s a bit of a head case, our Suzie.’ He looked down at Lucy. ‘Come on, you’ve got a funfair to go to.’

Lucy pulled away from him. ‘I don’t want to,’ she said. She looked stubborn, unforgiving. She backed away, then turned and walked towards the house. She looked back at McCarthy once more before she went in.

The funfair was all in colours. The stalls and rides were painted blue and red and yellow, and music played as you walked past first the waltzers, then the cyclone, then the big wheel, and each music was different, loud, happy. Voices shouted as you walked past, and people screamed as the rides swooped them up and down and round. Lucy watched the octopus whirling people above her head, the waltzers spinning them round and round, and they screamed and smiled and laughed.

Kirsten had a huge ball of candy floss on a stick, and she was letting her friends pull streamers off and eat them, and then she would open her mouth and bite into the pink mass. Lucy could feel that pink, sweet cloud in her mouth. Kirsten wouldn’t let her have any. Lucy wasn’t going to ask, but Kirsten said, anyway,
‘Lucy Fielding and all her friends can’t have any of my candy floss,’ and suddenly Lucy didn’t have any friends and Kirsten did. Even Michael had gone and had some candy floss, and now he was standing near Kirsten with his mouth all pink and sticky. Lucy didn’t care. She wouldn’t be Kirsten’s friend for all the candy floss in the fair. Candy floss was
vulgar.

‘I
don’t like candy floss,’ she said to Kirsten. ‘It’ll make your teeth fall out.’ She hoped Kirsten’s teeth would fall out. She hoped Michael’s teeth would fall out. Kirsten’s mum was calling again, ‘Keep with me, children.’ And Kirsten’s daddy was there as well, and Josh’s mum, and Lauren’s mum. Lucy had thought her daddy was going to stay, but he’d taken her to the funfair and said to Kirsten’s mum, ‘Can’t stay. Work.’ And he’d given Kirsten’s mum that special smile and Kirsten’s mum had gone all pink and said, ‘Oh, don’t worry.’

Lucy didn’t want her daddy
anyway.
She wanted to have a go on something. There were stalls where you could win a big teddy bear, and stalls where you could win big plastic toys. There were hot dogs and hamburgers, and the smell of them made Lucy’s mouth water, though Mum said they were disgusting. Like Sophie with the maggots.
Disgusting.
Maybe the hamburgers were made of maggots.

‘Who wants to go on the dodgems?’ Kirsten’s mum said.

Lucy looked at everybody shouting to go on the ride. The cars stopped and there was a scramble, and Lucy went for a car with Michael, but Kirsten was there, and
Kirsten pushed her and she couldn’t get in the car, and then all the cars were full, and it was just Lucy and Kirsten’s mum watching. ‘Never mind, Lucy,’ Kirsten’s mum said. But she looked pleased. And off the cars went, and Lucy looked at the fair, and she could see now that all the colours were dirty, and the man on the dodgems had dirty hands and hairy arms, and the music was too loud. And everywhere she looked, the colours were cracked and peeling off, and the smell of the hot dogs and the maggot-burgers made her feel sick. Kirsten’s mum was calling, ‘Oh, watch out, Lauren, he’s going to—. Oh, he missed! Look out, Josh!’ Lucy stepped back. Then she stepped back again. Kirsten’s mum didn’t notice.

There was a crowd of people watching the dodgems. She moved round them, in and out, and soon she couldn’t see Kirsten’s mum. Then she went round the next ride, and the next, and then she had the fairground all to herself. There were a lot of people, but there was no Kirsten, and no Michael eating Kirsten’s candy floss, and no Kirsten’s mum saying
Never mind.
The waltzers whipped past her, noise and screaming and bright colours, and at the other side of her the octopus swooped and dipped. Her daddy was going to take her on the octopus this year, he’d said. He’d
promised.
But suddenly she knew he wouldn’t. She watched it going up higher and higher and then coming down like flying. A voice boomed out, ‘Come and ride with us,’ and the music blared again, but in the moment’s silence, she heard it, ‘Lucy! Lucy!’

She looked round, but there was no one there. The
noise from the waltzers was too loud. She slipped round the back of the ride, and she was at the edge of the fairground, where she could see wires trailing on the ground, and machines made strange noises, and there weren’t colours any more. There it was again. ‘Lucy!’ She looked. Over in the trees, across the stream. Over in the woods in the shadows, she could just see him, like a shape in the darkness, and he was waving to her.
Come here, come here.
Tamby. And the cold, achy feeling that had been inside her went away. Tamby! She could feel the smile stretching her face. She waved back and began to scramble over the wires and cables. Tamby was back and he would keep her safe; he would know what to do now the monsters were in the house.

She skipped over the last cable and began to run, towards the trees, towards the dark shadows where he was waiting for her, when she heard voices calling. This time they came from the funfair. ‘Lucy! Lucy!’ She looked over her shoulder. Kirsten’s daddy was climbing over the wires, waving at her. She didn’t want to be found. She was going to find Tamby, and then Tamby would take her home. She didn’t want to be at Kirsten’s treat any more. She turned back to the trees where Tamby was waiting, but he wasn’t there any more. She stopped and looked. Trees and shadows, dark places where there might be monsters. But there was no sign of Tamby.
Tamby,
she whispered. But there was just the silence in the trees and the music of the funfair.

McCarthy sat at Suzanne’s desk and scrolled the transcripts down the screen. ‘I’ll need to print these,’ he said. ‘Take them back with me.’

‘There’s nothing there, is there?’ she said, her voice still strained from the smoke damage to her throat.

He was angry with her, and his encounter with Severini hadn’t helped, but his first white-hot rage had cooled a little. Maybe he had expected too much. He remembered that she had tried to tell him something, just as they were leaving his flat, and he’d been too preoccupied to pay much attention. He looked at her, feeling that confused mix of exasperation and anger – and other things that he couldn’t afford to acknowledge. ‘There might be,’ he said. ‘I think there is.’ The name
Simon
had leapt off the screen at him as soon as he’d seen it. The rest looked like gibberish, but he needed to go through it, and he needed the tapes to help him make sense of it. ‘I wish you’d told me about these,’ he said.

She looked away from him, and bit at her thumbnail. ‘I didn’t think …’

‘You didn’t,’ he said sharply. ‘That’s exactly what you didn’t do.’ He hit the print button and watched as the paper began to slide through the machine. He was angry with her about so many things. She’d had some kind of contact with Ashley Reid and hadn’t told him. If they’d been able to find Reid earlier, he would probably still be alive. She’d had tapes with what might prove to be important information, and she hadn’t told him. She’d left his bed and gone straight off in pursuit of Reid. If he was going to be honest with himself, that made him angrier than anything, that they could have shared all of that, and she’d still gone off after Reid.

She seemed to be reading his mind. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I …
Listen!
Ashley’s never been here. I didn’t know where he was.’ He ignored that and took the papers out of the printer, checking to make sure he’d got everything. She tried again. ‘I didn’t find him. He found me.’

He suppressed an urge to meet her halfway. It would be so easy to accept what she said, accept that she’d made some bad mistakes – but that they
were
mistakes. Then he could take her home with him and spend the night blotting out the last forty-eight hours. He kept his voice neutral. ‘Let’s stick to the facts for now,’ he said. He saw her flinch at that, and part of him – part of him he didn’t like very much, but couldn’t seem to control – felt pleased. ‘I’m going to need you to go over these transcripts with me. I need to make sense of them.’

For an hour, they focused on the sheets of paper. In the absence of the tape, he had to rely on her knowledge of it, and kept pushing her to remember. He wasn’t
happy with her belief that some of the tape just didn’t make sense. ‘It made sense to him. I want to know what that sense was,’ he said. ‘This bit. Exactly how did he say it? Come on, Suzanne. How did he say it?’

The garage. With … Lee’s name on … and … em … so
…
sometimes, not now.
She struggled as she tried to remember. He made notes, moved on to the next bits.
I’m telling you. It was in the park and so she said she was going… No… By the flats… em… Simon brings the stuff so she didn’t like that… It was loose, you see, and so didn’t want
…

He went over and over it and, after a while, what had looked like meaningless nonsense began to form itself into some kind of sense. He was beginning to see patterns, and something was tugging at his mind, the signal that told him he’d seen more than he was aware of, and needed time to let these things come to the surface. He looked at her. ‘OK, I think that’s as much as we can do here. I’ll …’ Belatedly, his conscience stabbed him. She looked ill. Her face was white. She hadn’t recovered from the effects of the fire and he’d bawled her out and put her through a gruelling interrogation about the transcripts. He touched her hand. It was cold. ‘You need to rest,’ he said. ‘You should be in bed.’

She pushed her hair back from her face. ‘I don’t know what else I can say.’ He didn’t want to get into that. He didn’t even want to think about it. He’d just get angry and say something he’d – probably – regret later. ‘I don’t want to go back,’ she said, ‘not while Joel’s there.’ She stood up and looked round. ‘I’ll just stay here till Jane gets back.’

McCarthy thought she looked ready to fall over. He was tired of being a bastard. He still didn’t know what he thought, he still felt angry, but he said, ‘You need to look after yourself.’ Then, against his better judgement, he added, ‘I’ll phone you. We need to talk. I’ll phone in a couple of days.’

‘OK,’ she said. ‘But I’m fine, honestly.’ She watched him as he went down the stairs.

After Steve had gone, Suzanne went back to her desk. She printed out another set of transcripts, and began to go through them again. Her thoughts seemed to be slow, as though her mind had lost all its energy. She found herself staring at the papers and seeing black lines of print running meaninglessly down the page. The sound of the phone made her jump, her arm knocking the papers from her desktop onto the floor. Her heart was thumping in her throat as she picked it up. ‘Hello.’

‘Suzanne.’ It was Dave.

‘Oh. Dave.’ She tried to keep the flatness out of her voice.

‘I heard what happened,’ he said. ‘Are you all right?’

How could she answer that? She wasn’t all right. But that wasn’t what he meant. ‘I’m OK,’ she said. ‘Sore throat, a few bruises, nothing major.’ Steve hadn’t asked. He hadn’t said,
Are you all right?
He’d just been angry. Except his anger at the hospital had been the anger of anxiety. It had been later that they found those fingerprints, things she couldn’t explain. And now he believed that she and Ashley … She didn’t know what he believed. He wouldn’t talk to her.

‘Suzanne?’

Dave had said something and was expecting an answer. She pushed her mind back. ‘Sorry. The line’s a bit …’

‘Listen, is your place habitable? What are you doing?’ Surely he wasn’t going to offer her accommodation.

‘I’m staying with Jane, just for a few days.’

‘Oh. Right. Good.’ He seemed to be filling in time, as though he wanted to say something and couldn’t quite bring himself to. She waited. ‘Listen, Suzanne, Mike heard about the fire. It was all over the playground apparently. He’s upset. I was wondering, I don’t like to ask when … but if you’re at Jane’s … and if you’re sure you aren’t too bad …’

It wasn’t like Dave to hedge. ‘You want me to have Michael to come and stay?’ Dave had never –
never
– asked her to have Michael outside of her official access.

‘He asked,’ Dave said. ‘He’s worried that you’re hurt. If …’ He sounded quite embarrassed. Then his voice changed, became brisker. ‘It’s not reasonable when you’ve got all the rest to cope with. Drop in for a coffee, let Mike see you’re OK, that’ll do.’ He sounded happier now he was taking control.

‘No. Just a minute.’ Suzanne felt something she couldn’t quite identify. Michael thought something had happened to her. He was upset. He wanted her. ‘He can come and stay. Of course he can. He can share with Lucy. They love that.’ Dave demurred, but she overrode his sudden misgivings. Maybe Michael did need her, just a bit. It would be safe if they were staying at Jane’s.

They ended the phone call in a few desultory pleasantries,
and she put the phone down realizing that now she had something she needed to do.

When McCarthy got back to the incident room, he copied the transcripts and his notes for circulation at the briefing. He knew that there was no point in sitting and staring at them any longer. He needed to let his mind work on them, come back to them later. He directed his mind away from the picture he had of Suzanne’s white face as she told him she was fine. That led to other pictures of her – pictures of her lying in the heather, pictures of her in his bed. Did it matter, did it really matter that she’d lied to him? She had hardly known him, not well enough to trust.

But he had work to do. Now wasn’t the time for personal stuff. They’d found the links between the victims. The common link was their father, Phillip Reid. Phillip Reid who had run off to America, abandoning his pregnant girlfriend, Phillip Reid who had left his wife in another country with a young child and twins on the way, Phillip Reid who had come back and fathered Emma, then vanished again. But he had been near, had been around, had had some kind of contact with Emma, his daughter – a sexual relationship, Dennis Allan said. A business relationship, Polly Andrews had implied. Had he been in contact with any of the other children? Had Carolyn’s letter to Sophie allowed her to track her father down? Had Sophie led him to Ashley and Simon? And Simon had turned out to have a talent he could use – Simon, isolated by his condition – Simon was valuable. Unless the investigation got too close to the drugs. Then
Simon would no longer be an asset, he would be a danger. They had to find him!

Liam Martin was sorting through the papers they’d collected from Simon Walker’s room. McCarthy went across to have a look. He picked up a folder and flicked through it. ‘Looks like a load of junk, sir,’ Martin volunteered. The folder McCarthy was looking at contained half-completed forms, each one stopping at a smudge or a crossing out, as though Walker had been unable to accept any error and had had to start again. But then he’d kept the incomplete forms. McCarthy flicked through them. Applications for a driving licence. Applications for a student travel card. Bank forms, job applications, research grants. Several pieces of notepaper with the address of the Hall of Residence and the words
Dear Sir.
Definitely a few bricks short.

A second folder contained personal documents and included a passport. McCarthy looked at the photograph. Simon Walker had his brother’s dark hair and eyes. The passport had never been used. There was also a birth certificate, exam certificates, GCSE and A Level. Whatever else Simon Walker had had problems with, he had passed his exams to date with commendably high grades. Martin showed him the papers they’d already sorted. In among the mountains of irrelevant junk – he’d apparently kept every leaflet, every flier, every circular – were more links with Sophie, Emma and Ashley. He had cards with addresses on, lists of personal details. He had photographs, each one carefully marked: Sophie, Emma, Ashley. There was one of Sophie in the park, smiling in the sunlight. There was
one of Ashley and Emma, taken in front of a wall of pictures, frustratingly indistinct. Emma was laughing, her head on Ashley’s chest, her eyes glazed, her pupils black wells. Ashley had his arms round her, supporting her. His face was serious. McCarthy looked at the picture. He’d only seen Ashley Reid on police records, and, finally, in death. He thought about the ugliness of the swollen, congested face that Anne Hays had showed him, the ruin of this pale, dark-eyed beauty. No wonder Suzanne had been beguiled.

But nothing they had found told them about Walker’s current whereabouts, or the whereabouts of Phillip Reid.

Lucy sat on the carpet and pulled the yellow knitted pyjamas onto her teddy bear. She hadn’t played with her teddy bear for quite a long time. She was too big for a teddy bear
really,
but tonight she was going to take it to bed with her. Michael was watching television. She looked at the screen as he started laughing. It was
The Simpsons.
Sometimes that made Lucy laugh too, but tonight she didn’t feel like laughing.

Tamby was safe. She’d seen him. But Tamby had gone away again, and even though she’d sat in the garden watching, even when Michael got cross because she wouldn’t play, and then Mum had said, ‘Come and play with Michael, Lucy,’ she’d waited, but he hadn’t come.

She could hear her daddy’s voice. He was cross again. He was cross with Mum about Michael. ‘…
her
fucking brat,’ he said. She wished her daddy would go back to
his house, go back to his house in Leeds. Now Mum was talking in the voice she used when Lucy wouldn’t take her medicine. ‘It’s just for a night …’ Lucy shuffled herself across nearer the door. ‘… just
great,
just fucking
great.
Listen, Jane …’ and she heard cups banging in the kitchen. Her daddy was making coffee. Mum never banged cups. Mum never got cross.

Then Lucy heard footsteps in the passage outside, and the door opening. Suzanne came into the room, carrying sheets and quilts. She had Michael’s racing-car quilt. Lucy thought it was
silly.
She didn’t want a quilt like a car, she wanted a quilt that was a horse. Mum was going to make her one. Suzanne smiled at them, but her smile looked all wrong to Lucy. It looked more like someone crying only pretending they weren’t. ‘Shall we do your bed?’ Suzanne said to Michael. She looked at Lucy. ‘Do you want to help?’

Lucy thought about it. ‘OK,’ she said, standing up. Michael stood up too, his eyes staying on the TV screen as the three of them left the room.

McCarthy’s phone rang, and he picked it up wearily. The tension of the past three days was beginning to get to him. He was having trouble focusing. The different strands of the investigation floated randomly in his mind, and as he reached for the patterns he knew must be there, they drifted away into a confusion of names, faces, events. Barraclough put her head round his door, saw him pick up the phone, and put a cup of coffee on his desk. He nodded his thanks as he said, ‘McCarthy,’ and took a swallow of the coffee. It was black and sweet
and, in a moment, he felt the artificial alertness of the caffeine.

It was one of the technicians from the fingerprinting section. ‘We’ve matched up those prints you sent us,’ he said, his cheerfulness a sharp contrast to the tension and foreboding that was weighing McCarthy down. He listened as the technician told him what they’d found. The prints taken from Simon Walker’s flat, the only prints they had found there, matched the previously unmatched ones they had found at Shepherd Wheel, and the ones they had found at Suzanne’s house after the fire.