Silent Playgrounds (33 page)

Hazel Austen was standing in the doorway of 12, Carleton Road as McCarthy arrived. ‘We’re checking the house, sir,’ she reported quickly. She directed him upstairs. The house felt like a tomb. Suzanne was sitting on one of the beds, a bed with a child’s quilt designed to look like a racing car. Her arms were wrapped round herself, and her story was an incoherent stream of words about fields and voices. She was hyperventilating, and the more she tried to control her panic, the more incoherent she became. McCarthy sat on the bed beside her. He ignored the quick exchange of glances between Barraclough and Corvin, and put his arm round her, pulling her against him, letting her feel the closeness, stopping the words against his chest. He said meaningless things like ‘It’s OK’ and ‘It’ll be all right’ until the rigidity of shock began to leave her. Then, carefully, he began to ask the questions.

‘I was dreaming,’ she said. ‘I fell asleep next door, upstairs, in the attic. I was going to do some work on that transcript. I wanted …’

McCarthy tightened his arms round her. ‘It’s OK,’ he said again.

‘I woke up. I thought I heard someone calling. Just quietly. Calling Lucy’s name. I wasn’t properly awake. It might have been part of the dream. And then there was a car. In the road. That wasn’t part of the dream. It went off very fast. And I came back
and …’ Her voice was starting to waver out of control.

McCarthy was speaking against her hair. He didn’t care if Corvin and Barraclough could hear him or not. ‘You’re doing fine, Suzanne. I need to know a bit more, sweetheart. Just a bit more. Was the door locked when you came back?’

Her hands dug into him as she tried to control her breathing. ‘I don’t … No. No, it wasn’t.’

‘And there was no one here?’ He kept his voice quiet and insistent. Set up a pattern. Question, answer, question, answer.

She shook her head. ‘No.’ As she responded to each question, the picture came clearer. He had some kind of time scale now. She must have been back for about half an hour before she found that the children had gone. He closed his eyes. A lot could happen in half an hour. If the car she had heard was involved, they could be a long way from here by now.

‘Sir?’ One of the search team was in the doorway. McCarthy looked at him. ‘We’ve found something in the attic’ McCarthy gestured impatiently for the man to go on. ‘It’s the trap-door to the roof space. It’s open. You can get into the other houses, both directions.’ The student house, empty and accessible to someone with a key, someone who might want to move between the three houses, Sophie’s room, Jane’s attic and – yes – Suzanne’s study. ‘We found this next door.’ A peacock feather.

Suzanne looked at it. ‘That’s Lucy’s,’ she said.

Suzanne felt a cold isolation, almost an exhilaration as though she was riding through a storm. The storm howled and crashed but, just for the moment, she was protected from it. Just now, just for the moment, it wasn’t touching her. She watched a policewoman talking to the pale, shocked Jane. She listened to the voices around her as they searched Jane’s house, the student house, her house. She heard them talking about Joel. No one knew where Joel was.

She thought about Dave. She must have said something, because the policewoman shook her head. ‘He was out when we tried to contact him. We’ve got someone at the house waiting for him, and we’ve got a call out. We’ll tell him as soon as we can.’ Suzanne returned to her seat by the window. Steve had gone, and she didn’t want to talk to anyone else. She wanted to keep this coldness round her for as long as possible, like the numbness after a physical blow, before the pain hit. Michael would be frightened. If he was still alive, he would be frightened. Her mind split. If he was still alive he would be suffering. If he was dead then it would be over.

Less than two weeks ago, she had run down the stairs from her study, feeling the optimism of the early summer sun and feeling as though, after all, it would all be all right. Her child, her work, her life. And now it was gone, blown away by something that reached out from nowhere and destroyed it.
Michael!

If –
if
– the children were found, if they were safe, Michael would want Dave. Dave was the one he went to, not her. And Carol, he might want Carol who did
eggs with faces on. The police were looking for the children, that was what they were there for, that was what they did. Finding Dave was not their first priority. She could feel the cold barrier start to crumble, and she tried to strengthen it by working out where Dave might be. The pubs would be closing now, though some of the places Dave went were slow about drinking-up time, closed the doors for their regulars, their musicians and stand-up comics and other performers, and let the night go on into the small hours. Where might he go? She looked at Jane, who gave her a washed-out smile. ‘Where’s … ?’

Jane shrugged. ‘She’s gone to make tea. Oh, Suzanne …’ There was a blind panic in her eyes that was so unlike Jane, Suzanne couldn’t face it. It was like that day, just ten days ago, when Lucy had gone missing and Emma died. Suzanne had run away then, as well.

She couldn’t do anything to help Jane. There was only one thing she could do. ‘I’ve got to find Dave,’ she said. ‘I’ve got to go and look for him.’ She didn’t wait for Jane’s reply, couldn’t even meet her eyes. She needed to get out of there before Hazel came back and stopped her. They didn’t understand that Michael would need Dave more than anyone, and this was the only thing left she could do for her son.

She checked her pocket. She had her car keys. She’d go and find Dave, for Michael.

They needed a description of the car that Suzanne had heard in Carleton Road shortly after ten o’clock. House after house was empty, the blight of the student ghetto
having hit the area some years ago. Barraclough tried five houses before she found someone in. She was lucky. A disgruntled man not only confirmed Suzanne’s story about the car, but had seen someone loading something in the boot. ‘Something big, bundles, something like that,’ he said. He couldn’t describe the man he’d seen, but he was more definite about the car. ‘It was a Punto,’ he said. ‘I used to have one. Red.’ He hadn’t really seen the number plate, but he thought it was an R registration. ‘Drove off like a lunatic,’ he said.

She took the information back to McCarthy who was waiting for feedback on any recent information about cars – stolen or driving erratically – in the city that night. He radioed her information through, and the response was almost instant. A red Punto or Corsa, with an R registration, had been reported driving into Bingham Park at ten-forty-two. No one had followed up the call. It had been listed as low priority.

‘Shepherd Wheel,’ McCarthy said.

Suzanne drove away from the city centre. The road was brightly lit, a congested mass of cars and taxis as people spilt out of the pubs looking for the next place to continue their night’s entertainment. They walked three and four abreast, wandering onto the roads, laughing, shouting, pushing each other. These were all young, teens, early twenties; these were not the places Dave would go. Suzanne had tried Dave’s local pubs, but he hadn’t been in. She’d tried two of the town pubs she knew he went to, where he’d played some sessions, and where he met up with friends on his rare free nights. She had hoped that if he wasn’t there, someone would say,
Oh, yes, Dave Harrison, he’s gone to …
But no one had seen him. Maybe he was home already. Maybe he was listening to a police officer and knowing that, despite his best vigilance, she had let Michael down, let the monsters take him.

A taxi blared its horn at her and flashed its lights as it swerved past. She’d let the lights change. She pulled through on red, swerving to avoid a car coming through the junction the other way. Another angry blast and a
finger lifted through the open window. She tried to concentrate. She was coming up to the big roundabout now, the one she always felt tense about negotiating. Tonight she didn’t care. She pulled out and let the other cars get out of her way. She didn’t know what to do. There didn’t seem any point in driving aimlessly round places that Dave may or may not have gone to. She didn’t know any more of his haunts, not these days. She should be back home, waiting. She was heading towards the bottom of Ecclesall Road, the place where she had had her encounter with Lee.

Her mind was beginning to work more clearly now. The numbness of shock was wearing off, and the pain was starting to gnaw at her.
Michael! I’m coming!
Who had taken the children? Who could want to take Lucy and Michael?

Lucy had gone missing before. Everyone thought that was because Emma had been attacked, but what if whoever had taken Emma had wanted Lucy as well? And Lucy, ever resourceful, had managed to get away. But that person had come back, had watched and waited and chosen the moment. Steve was looking. He must have worked that out as well. And the person who’d taken Michael and Lucy
must
be the same person who’d broken into her house, killed Ashley and nearly killed her as well. The person who’d killed Emma and Sophie. Knives and mud and flames. The car veered as she gripped the wheel against the pictures of Michael, Lucy …

Who? The face she had seen in the park that day, the white glimmer, just a glimpse as he turned back,
was suddenly clear in her mind. Not Ashley. She had never been wrong about that. It wasn’t Ashley. She was driving past the garage now, the garage where she had found Lee, and he had – threatened her? Warned her? What had he said?
It’s not Ash you want …
Lee knew! Lee knew there was someone else, and knew that that someone was dangerous.
You won’t want what you’d find.

She needed to get back, get to a phone, tell Steve, tell anyone, that Lee Bradley knew something, something about the person who’d taken the children.

And then she saw him on the road. Lee was crossing at the lights, walking fast, his head down, his hands in his pockets, back towards the centre, towards the church where some kind of quasi occult services had taken place a few years ago, the white face of the clock on the tower shining in the moonlight.

She was on a dual carriageway. She could turn back at the next roundabout. He’d probably run if he saw her. He’d made it clear he didn’t want to talk to her. What if she phoned the police? They could come and get Lee. But by the time they arrived, he’d be gone. She kept watching him in her mirror, slowing her car as much as she dared. She scouted the landscape. She couldn’t see a phone box. She was coming to the lights. She had to make a quick decision. She did an illegal U-turn and followed Lee back down the main road, just in time to see him disappear down the subway that led to the maze of streets below the station. Still no phone box in sight. OK. She could get through the back streets. She turned at the next left, ignored a couple of one-way signs, and saw Lee, again on the other side of the road,
turning off again, moving faster now. The end of the road she was on was blocked, and she had to drive across the pavement. Then she was turning left the way Lee had gone, but he’d vanished.

Lucy could feel him standing over her. She wanted him to go away, to go right away so she could call out, struggle her feet out of the stuff that was holding them, run away as fast and as far as she could. Michael was making that snoring noise again, and she could tell it made the Ash Man angry because he muttered again, and then walked across and shoved Michael with his foot.

Then she heard him moving around them in the dark. She heard a sound, a clanging, rattling noise, and then a splashing sound. A heavy smell began to fill the air, a smell like the car, a sweet, sticky smell that made her feel sick and made her chest feel tight. She began to struggle her legs again.

Then he was standing over her. She could see better now, see those feet in muddy trainers. She lay still. She was scared. She was more scared than she’d been in the secret shelves when he’d come looking for her, more scared than she’d been when she’d lost her daddy in London. It was a cold, still kind of scaredness that made everything very slow and very bright. She felt as though she was a long way away, watching, but any minute the scaredness was going to come up close and she would start shouting and screaming and fighting, and then the monster would come and then he would
kill
her like he’d killed Sophie and Emma. She felt the tears on her face
again, running down into her nose and into her hair.

‘I was going to take you with me, little Luce,’ he said. But he wasn’t talking to her, he was talking to himself. ‘But it’s too late for that,’
Tamby!
she said in her mind. But she knew Tamby wasn’t coming. She knew the monster had got him. Tamby would say,
Like a mouse, like a mouse!
She had to keep still, she had to keep quiet, she had to hide herself from the monster. She felt something hard press against her neck. Something cold and sharp. He was whispering again. ‘I can’t …’ He was wrapping a blanket round her, gently, like Mum did when she had to go to the hospital with asthma, and for a minute she thought she was having a dream like she did when her asthma was bad and everything got not real. But he was wrapping it round her head and over her mouth and she couldn’t breathe.

Then he lifted her up and carried her towards the place where the draught was blowing from. She could feel it, and she could smell the dusty blanket right in her face, and then she was falling and she screamed as she fell, and she heard his voice, ‘Luce!’ just before the darkness came.

And she was falling into the darkness where no one could find her, the place where the monsters were waiting, the place where Emma was waiting, and Sophie was waiting, who had been dead and cold for days and days and days. And she could hear music and bells, and they wanted her because they were lonely down there in the dark all by themselves, and Lucy had tried, she really had, but the monsters had got her in the end.

Suzanne had waited in the car for a few minutes, trying to think. Where would Lee have been going to, down here? Then she’d remembered the address she’d seen in his file. He used to live in the flats at the top of the hill, the tower blocks that were being demolished, and so had Ashley, once. The lads at the Alpha Centre talked about
the flats.
When she’d gone looking for Ashley, she’d thought that they must mean the flats at the bottom of Ecclesall Road, where Lee now lived, and where there was a convenient garage –
the garage with Lee’s name on,
Ashley had said. She’d never sorted that one out. But maybe these were the flats they meant, these derelict blocks where no one came, or no one had any legitimate, reason to be. You could do anything in these flats at night. Who was there to stop you? You could imprison two small children here, and no one would know. Go back or go on? There were no phones, no phones.
Michael, I’m coming!
She drew up in the shadow of the towers, and went forward on foot into the maze.

The flats towered above her. The footpath was narrow now, and the walls of the blocks rising on each side of her made it seem narrower still. The lights weren’t working, and as she moved away from the road where the street lights – irregular though they were – illuminated the footpath, the darkness closed in. These pathways had been provided to make a pleasant urban ramble, a way through the complex where the walker could avoid the hazard of traffic. She knew there were green slopes on either side of her, but the ground underneath her feet felt slippery, and as she trod and
stumbled on things she couldn’t see a sour smell rose up.

She looked up. Far above her the sky was clear and she could see the gleam of the moon, illuminating the edge of a cloud just on the limit of her vision. Down here, it was dark. She wasn’t sure what she was following any more. She was lost. There was a sense of movement, a feeling of things that rustled and whispered round each corner. Sometimes she thought she could hear the sound of footsteps ahead of her and thought she had caught up with Lee, but each corner she turned surrounded her with empty silence.

She tried to orient herself. She’d come from the road, past two blocks and round the back of a third. As she moved round the corner of the block into the open space, she saw a red car, its wing scraped against one of the heavy pillars that supported the towers. Its doors were open. She touched the bonnet. It was still warm. Joyriders. She looked nervously about her but she couldn’t see anyone. They must have run as soon as they’d dumped the car.

She edged past it, and moved into the courtyard, a concrete area surrounded by the towering flats. Rows of garages opened onto it, but, like the flats, they were derelict. The entrance to the stairwell was blocked and chained. The lower windows were boarded up. She looked round, up. There was no sign of life. The garages were deserted, their doors wrenched off, the fronts black rectangles open to the night. She looked behind her. The garages here still had their doors, one or two of them. A cloud crossed the moon, and the courtyard
darkened. There was no one but joyriders here any more. These flats were deserted, sealed up, waiting to be demolished.

She thought about Michael, and about Lucy. She thought,
He is somewhere. My son is somewhere. He is frightened, he is suffering, right now. I need to be with him. I have to be with him.
Maybe she was dreaming, maybe she would wake up soon to the mundane reality of looking after Michael, of providing cheese triangles and strawberry yoghurt, of doing eggs with faces on, of worrying, endlessly worrying, that somehow the black alchemy she worked would begin to affect him, begin to twist and pervert the course of his childhood, until … A great wash of coldness swamped her as she realized that it had happened. It had come from a direction she hadn’t seen, hadn’t expected, hadn’t guarded against. It was here, now, and it had carried Lucy away with it too.

She didn’t know where she was. She turned round, looking for the path that had brought her into this courtyard, the route away from here. Then the moon came out again, and the pale light shone on the garage doors, illuminating the graffiti – the tags, the patterns, the words, the names. And it was there. The red of the paint looked black in the moonlight, but she knew it was red because she had seen it before at the Alpha Centre: the circle, the LB, the slash. Lee’s tag. This was the garage with Lee’s name on, this was the place Ashley had talked about.

And then she heard the footsteps, soft and quick, echoing from the stairwell of the deserted block.

The intelligent killer. The face of the man they were hunting wavered and changed in front of McCarthy’s eyes. First, Joel Severini smiled challengingly at him, then the face became a blur, the face of Simon Walker, sometimes with his father’s look of challenge and hostility, sometimes with his brother’s wary gaze.

The park was still and dark. They had turned out in force, quick and silent. Whoever waited in the shadows of Shepherd Wheel, he had killed three times. There was no possibility of a stand-off here. They needed to go in quickly, be in there and in control before he would know or could know what was happening. He had nothing to lose.

Shepherd Wheel was a black shape in the darkness. To McCarthy it looked too lifeless, too still. The park was full of night-time noises. There was the distant rumble of the city traffic. Closer, owls called, the sudden shriek of one answered by the long cry of its mate. The trees whispered and sighed, and the river rushed and tumbled across the stones. The sounds masked each other. McCarthy listened. The traffic. The night-birds. People shouting several streets away. The river. Something else.

Suzanne looked up at the tower of flats in front of her. It would take her a year to look in all these flats. But she remembered the sounds she’d heard ahead of her as she picked her way along the path, and the feet on the stairs. There was something here, something alive and moving. Dogs? Rats? People? Did Lee still come here sometimes looking for – for what? The person who
wasn’t Ashley.
It’s not Ash you want
…
you won’t want what you‘d find.

She needed to keep moving. If her momentum stopped, even for a moment, she would fall like a puppet whose strings had been cut, fall onto the ground and never get up again. She’d followed Lee on a gamble, an outside chance, and she had to see it through. She went towards the entrance to the block, the barred and chained stairwell, and looked up into the darkness. She had heard footsteps, and she thought she could see something moving, higher up where the stairs hung out over the shaft. She pulled at the bars, and saw at once that they weren’t secure. The chain that was wound round them had been cut and it was possible to pull them back and squeeze through. Easy, in fact.