Читать книгу Silent Playgrounds - Danuta Reah - Страница 11

When Suzanne finally fell asleep, she dreamt. It was the familiar dream, the one she had thought she was free of, of Adam, calling to her: Look at me, Suzanne! Listen to me, Suzanne! And her father: I hold you responsible for this, Suzanne! She pulled herself out of sleep in panic, gasping, disorientated. She sat up, trying to see the clock face. The sky outside was beginning to lighten. It was nearly five. Her nightdress felt damp, and her legs were tangled up in the sheets. Adam’s face stayed with her, bringing the familiar cold lump in her stomach. She pushed the image away. Over. Gone.

The relief she’d felt faded as the events of the evening before came back into her head. She tried to shut the memory of Emma firmly out of her mind, but she couldn’t stop herself from thinking about what it would be like to be held under the water as the wheel churned above you, or to feel someone’s cold hands on you with killing intent, to … The pictures in her mind were spinning out of control now. Look at me … Listen to me …

She needed to get up, do something. It was five to five. She’d go and work on the tapes again for a couple of hours, then have breakfast.

They searched the workshop at Shepherd Wheel at first light the next morning. The roads were empty as McCarthy drove from his flat towards the park. He left his car in the entrance to the park and walked the few hundred yards to Shepherd Wheel, enjoying the silence, broken by the birdsong, the emptiness, and the stillness of the morning. Shepherd Wheel looked tranquil in the early sun, the moss-covered roof glowing a warm yellow, the walls and path dappled with shadow.

A key-holder from the museums department was there to open up the workshops for them, a young woman who, McCarthy noticed, looked anything but put out at her out-of-hours excursion. If anything, she looked excited. He guessed she was in her late twenties. She had short chestnut hair in untidy curls, her face slightly flushed, eyes shining as she took in the scene. She smiled and held out her hand. ‘Liz Delaney. Hello.’

He shook her hand. ‘Steve McCarthy.’ Yesterday’s search had found very little in the yard. Now they needed to look inside the workshops themselves. There were two doors, painted municipal green, with heavy hasps for the padlocks that kept the building closed and secure. He took the keys that Liz Delaney was holding out to him. ‘How long is it since someone was last in there?’ he asked her.

‘I don’t know exactly,’ she said. ‘Someone comes up here and checks it regularly.’ She smiled up at him.

McCarthy thought, tossing the keys in his hand. ‘How long since it’s been open to the public?’

She frowned slightly and shrugged. McCarthy kept looking at her. ‘Oh, a few months, I think,’ She waited out McCarthy’s silence for a moment. ‘It’s not really my job. It was closed before I ever worked for this department.’

Actually, McCarthy knew, she was wrong. Shepherd Wheel had been open for public access at the beginning of May, just five weeks before. Before that, it had been open for European Heritage Day, or some such crap that people seemed determined to spend McCarthy’s hard-earned taxes on. But someone had had access to the place since then.

The first door opened into a small workshop with barred windows in the whitewashed walls. It was light, the window facing the early morning sun. A central aisle ran between protective barriers of wood and mesh, to keep visitors away from the grindstones. A layer of dust lay over the machines. The air smelt dry and closed in. Dead leaves lay in the aisle, where they had blown in under the door. Wheels, plates, oil cans were stacked around the room, on window sills and against the walls. Above his head, a shaft ran across the ceiling and through a hole in the wall to the next workshop. It would have carried the power from the water-wheel to the stones on either side of the aisle.

To McCarthy’s eye, the place looked untouched, abandoned. He doubted if the surreptitious visitor to Shepherd Wheel had been in here.

The second door led into a larger workshop. McCarthy pushed the door open and stepped inside. A sour, organic smell hit him in the face, very different from the dry, dusty smell of the first workshop. This room was darker, the windows that lit it still shuttered and shadowed by the trees. The air was damp, chilly after the warmth outside. The sound of water, a dripping, trickling noise, cut into the silence. Shapes lumped in the dark corners, light from the windows catching the teeth of a gear wheel, reflecting off a belt. The dust lay thick in this room too. McCarthy looked round. Behind him he could make out a fireplace in the wall. He shone his torch at it. The bars of the grate were rusty. There were ashes in the grate and in the ash bucket and on the hearth below. The dust in front of the fire was scuffed, disturbed.

He directed the light from his torch along the flag-stoned floor and up the wall. There were dark stains where the dust was disturbed, something long and trailing caught on the bars of the grate – threads? Hair? McCarthy stood back as the scene-of-crime team moved in to work. He had already observed the bundle of cloth by the old fire, the drag marks in the dust, and, as he looked more closely, the glint of tinfoil, partly blackened, in the grate. He knew it would take time to comb the workshops, test the forensic samples, continue the hunt for the murder weapon that, so far, was proving elusive. There was a clatter as the shutters swung back, and a dull light filled the room.

A. There’s nowhere to go.

Q. Oh? How do you mean?

A. There’s nowhere to go.

Q. Do you mean – in your spare time, things like that?

A. Sometimes.

Q. So what do you like to do then? In your spare time?

A. So … ?

Q. What do you do?

A. I thought we were together.

Q. What? Sorry, Ashley, I didn’t get that.

A. So, I’m sorry.

Q. Ashley, do you want to do this? Only …

A. I’m telling you!

Suzanne clicked off the recorder and glanced at the clock. Half past seven. Time for a break. She determinedly kept her mind focused on her work. She could get up to the university, put in some useful hours at the library. She could start doing some serious analysis of the tape, have something to show Maggie Lewis, her supervisor, on Wednesday when they next met. She stretched. She had showered, but hadn’t bothered to get dressed, and now she couldn’t decide whether to put some clothes on, or to have breakfast first. She had an appointment at police HQ in town. What to wear probably required a bit more thought than usual. Breakfast first, then a bit of power dressing, something to boost her morale.

She was standing in the kitchen making toast when there was a knock on the door. Before she could say anything, it was pushed half open and Joel Severini, Lucy’s father, slid round it with his slow smile. ‘How are you?’ he said, with that slight, characteristic emphasis on the ‘you’. He was wearing jeans and an unbuttoned shirt. His feet were bare.

‘Joel.’ Suzanne stopped in the kitchen doorway, suddenly aware of her thin dressing gown. She hadn’t expected to see Joel, though he had been around more often recently, now that she came to think about it. ‘What are you doing here?’ It came out more coldly than she’d intended, but she didn’t soften it with any further comment. Why bother? She didn’t like Joel, and he didn’t like her. There was no secret about that.

His eyes narrowed slightly, but he took this as an invitation to come right in, and stood opposite her, leaning his shoulder against the wall. He kept his eyes on her for a beat or two before he answered. ‘Lucy. She went missing.’

‘Yes, I know.’ Suzanne shrugged herself deeper into her dressing gown. His gaze made her uncomfortable. So? she wanted to add.

‘Well, then.’ His tone implied that her question was unnecessary. Maybe she was being unfair. Jane always insisted that Joel cared about Lucy. In his way. And he clearly had come straight over as soon as he’d heard.

‘How is she? Lucy? And Jane?’

‘They’re OK. Panic over. They’re both still asleep. Look, have you got a decent cup of tea over here?’ He looked across the yard to Jane’s back door. ‘Only it’s all flowers and herbs over there, know what I mean?’

She indicated the cupboard. ‘Help yourself.’ Maybe then he’d go.

He crossed over to the cooker and checked the kettle for water. ‘You having one?’ Suzanne shook her head. She had expected him to take some teabags and leave. She didn’t want him in her house. She waited as he made himself a drink, watching him as he moved around the room. His jeans fitted low round his narrow hips, and she could see the smooth arrow of hair on his stomach. When she had first met him, what, nearly six years ago, she had liked him. In the middle of the chaos that surrounded Michael’s birth and the sudden and unstoppable disintegration of her marriage, he had seemed gentle and sympathetic. When Dave, who was working long hours, got impatient with her, Joel would say, ‘Loosen up, Dave,’ and give her that slow smile. Sometimes when she was on her own because Dave had a gig that took him away overnight, he would drop in with some beer and spend an hour or so talking to her. It had been a seduction – or, more accurately, a non-seduction – of the most humiliating kind.

He listened, encouraging her to talk about Adam, about Michael, and said the comforting things that her father had never said to her. When she blamed herself for the way she and Dave were falling apart, he reluctantly (it seemed) criticized Dave for his lack of support, reluctantly told her about the women Dave saw when he played a gig, gradually progressing their relationship from the soothing hand on her hair, the arm round the shoulder into an (apparently unacknowledged) desire. And yes, OK, she had wanted him, even though he was Jane’s partner, even though he was Dave’s friend.

And he’d known and he’d made his move one evening when she and Dave had had a particularly vicious row. She’d managed to stop herself, even though fantasies about an encounter with him had kept her going through some of the blacker moments. He’d laughed at her – not a sympathetic laugh for her foolish scruples, or even a feigned humour disguising his anger. It had been contempt. ‘It’s called a sympathy fuck, Suzie. You won’t get too many offers coming your way. Look at you,’ he’d said. He hadn’t wanted her – the casual contempt of his words confirmed that – but he’d wanted to know he could have her. And then he’d gone, and she really had no one to blame but herself.

The drip, drip of poison that Joel had fed into her ears about Dave, he had fed into Dave’s ears about her. She couldn’t blame Joel for the break-up of her marriage, but he’d been a factor, something that had tipped a fragile balance at a crucial moment. She had never told Jane what had happened. She was too ashamed.

Dave had changed, got older, more serious, but Joel seemed no different to her now than he had six years ago. She realized with a shock that he must be over forty. He looked up suddenly and caught her looking at him. His smile widened slightly, not reaching his eyes. ‘So what happened yesterday?’ His question was unexpected, but more, it was the masked concern in his voice that surprised her. She began to tell him about the morning, about realizing that Lucy and Emma were missing, but he interrupted her. ‘No. I got all that from Jane. About fifty times. What happened after Lucy came back?’

She shook her head. ‘I don’t know anything. Jane and Lucy were gone by the time I got home.’

He drank some tea, staring out of the window, his eyes narrowed in speculation. ‘They interviewed Lucy. Jane let them. She wasn’t even allowed to sit in on it. “Oh, Lucy was fine about it,” she says.’ He looked angry.

‘I suppose Jane thought – if it helps find … I mean, Emma was – killed, wasn’t she? It wasn’t an accident?’

Joel shrugged. ‘It was too soon for them to be going after Lucy. They don’t have a clue. Look, Jane listens to you. You tell her. Tell her to make them leave Lucy alone.’ He emptied his cup into the sink, his face hard.

‘Jane knows what’s best for Lucy,’ she said. She wasn’t listening to any criticisms from Joel.

His eyes met hers. ‘You’d know, would you, Suzie?’ Her eyes dropped. He was right. How would she know? ‘I phoned Dave,’ he went on. ‘He’s mightily pissed off with you.’ He was still smiling. ‘Just think. If you’d brought Mike straight here, Lucy would have been home, and you’d never have got involved.’ She didn’t say anything. He put the empty cup down, not taking his eyes off her. He had to pass her on his way to the door. He put his hand lightly on her shoulder and she flinched, shaking him off. His eyes brightened. ‘Be sure your sins will find you out, hey, Suzie?’ he said. She heard him laughing as she slammed the door shut behind him.

The incident room was set up. Brooke was just finishing the first briefing of the inquiry, and the various teams were organizing their specific tasks. Tina Barraclough assessed the situation and waited to see what was going to happen. This was her first major inquiry since she had been promoted to detective constable, and she wanted to do a good job, make her mark. She looked at the people she would be working most closely with. Steve McCarthy she knew. She’d worked with him before. She’d have to keep on her toes because she remembered him as impatient and autocratic. Pete Corvin, her sergeant, was an unknown quantity. He was a heavy-set, red-faced man who looked more like a bouncer than a detective sergeant. Mark Griffith and Liam Martin, the other two DCs, she knew well enough. She’d worked with Mark when he was in uniform, and knew them both from the pub.

Emma Allan had died of asphyxiation. There were cuts inside her mouth and throat, knife wounds, the pathologist said, as though someone had thrust the blade hard into the girl’s mouth in a moment of rage. She had choked on the blood. The absence of defence injuries suggested that she had, up to the moment of the attack, trusted her assailant. There were needle marks on her arm. Tinfoil found in the grate had been used for cooking heroin, but they found no further evidence of drugs use there – no needles, no syringes, no wraps.

Steve McCarthy filled in the background. He ran through the events of the day before when Lucy Fielding had gone missing. It had looked at first like a crossed wires thing, something they were all familiar with, where a mother thought a child should be in one place, the person with the child thought they should be somewhere else. But a routine check had made the alarm bells ring.

Emma Allan, seventeen, had already come to police attention. At fourteen, she had been a persistent truant, involved in shoplifting and petty crime. She had run away from home twice before her fifteenth birthday, but after that had seemed to settle her differences with her parents, until recently. She had been reported missing by her father in March, after her mother’s death. She had a recent caution for possession, and had been picked up at the house of a known heroin user who funded his habit by dealing. ‘She gave the Fielding woman false information. She was passing herself off as a student, but she’d never registered at the university. She was too young, anyway,’ McCarthy said.

The picture of Emma’s recent life was unclear. Her father claimed not to have seen his daughter since the last time she left home. ‘Did he try? Did he look?’ Barraclough had problems with parents who didn’t look out for their children.

‘He said he did.’ McCarthy was adding a note to the sheet of paper he held. He looked at the team. ‘So far, we know that Emma was friendly with a student, Sophie Dutton. She looked after the Fielding child until about a month ago. Dutton lived at 14, Carleton Road, next door to Jane Fielding. It’s a student house. It’s empty now. We don’t know how well she knew the other tenants – that’s something that needs checking. But according to Fielding, and the other woman’ – he checked his notes again – ‘Milner, Emma Allan and Sophie Dutton were together a lot.’

‘Has Dutton got a record?’ Corvin was making the obvious connection.

McCarthy shrugged. ‘There’s nothing on file. According to Fielding, Dutton is driven snow. Doesn’t smoke, doesn’t drink, comes from a country village on the east coast.’ His unspoken scepticism was shared by the group. The clean-living Sophie Dutton sketched by McCarthy was an unlikely close friend for someone with Emma Allan’s interests and background.

‘How did they come to be friends? University students are pretty cliquey.’ Barraclough knew about the divide that existed between town and gown. McCarthy shook his head. They didn’t have that information.

‘We need to talk to the Dutton woman urgently,’ Brooke told the team. ‘We need to find out more about Emma’s recent background, find out where she was living, what she was doing, and who she was doing it with.’ He polished his glasses, his face looking strangely unfocused without them. ‘When did Dutton leave? She went back to her parents, is that right?’

McCarthy nodded. ‘According to the Fielding woman, she left in May. We’re trying to contact her at her parents’ now.’

Emma’s missing clothes had been found in a bundle by the hearth: blue jeans, pants and sandals. They weren’t torn or damaged in any way. There was no evidence of sexual assault. The pathologist was less certain about sexual activity. There had been no evidence, but the water would probably have destroyed it.

Brooke was winding up now. ‘OK. Any questions?’

‘One thing I can’t understand.’ Barraclough was reading through her notes. ‘I can understand why he might have dumped her under the water-wheel. He just had to push her through that back window – the yard is well screened. It might have been days – weeks – before she was found. But why set the wheel going? Did he want us to find her?’

Nobody had a good answer to that. ‘Someone a few bricks short of a load?’ Corvin suggested.

McCarthy nodded. ‘It could be. There’s been a flasher in that park recently, and there was the attack in those woods a couple of miles along the path, at Wire Mill Dam. That was twelve months ago. The case is still open.’

A random killer. They couldn’t exclude that possibility, Barraclough knew. A Peeping Tom in the park, someone who. had been watching Emma, watched her having sex with her boyfriend, got his own ideas about what he wanted to do. If Emma had gone to Shepherd Wheel willingly … she looked back through copies of the witness statements they’d managed to get so far. A dog walker had seen a woman answering Emma’s description walking towards Shepherd Wheel at around ten-thirty the morning of her death – Barraclough still couldn’t understand it as a rendezvous, a place to have sex. It seemed dark and uninviting. ‘Sticks a knife in her instead of his dick,’ Corvin said.

‘Someone who felt guilty – wants to be caught?’ Barraclough didn’t like the idea of a random killer – none of them did. These were the most difficult cases, and often the most high profile.

‘What about the father?’ Corvin made the logical follow-up to Barraclough’s point.

Brooke stepped in again. ‘Dennis Allan. Nothing recent, no social services reports. But he did time in 1982. Drink-driving conviction. Killed a kid; he got a year. We talked to him last night, just a preliminary. He’s coming in first thing. Steve, you do that interview. We need to know exactly why she left home.’ He paused for a moment, then answered the unspoken question. ‘He’s not in the clear, not by a long chalk.’

‘What happened to Emma’s mum?’ Corvin again.

Brooke looked at the team for a moment. His glasses caught the light, masking his expression. ‘She took an overdose. Died. The verdict was accidental death.’ A murmur ran round the room.

‘Guilt,’ Barraclough said.

Emma’s father was a small man in his early fifties. He was very unlike his pretty, fair-haired daughter. What hair he had was gingerish, streaked with grey. His face was puffy, the broken veins on his cheeks standing out against his pallor. He looked unhealthy and uncomfortable. He didn’t look, to McCarthy, like a bereaved parent. Emma’s record told a story that McCarthy didn’t like. Something had gone seriously wrong in her life, long before these events, long before her mother’s death. Emma wasn’t simply a teenager traumatized by bereavement.

They had gone through the formalities and had already established that Allan had no alibi for the previous morning. ‘What was I doing?’ he said, apparently surprised at the question. ‘I worked night shift. Came home and went to bed.’ No one had seen him, apart from the newsagent at about eight. He’d nipped in to the shop for a paper and some cigarettes. He began to look uneasy as the implications of McCarthy’s questions dawned on him. His face got more colour and his eyes went pinker round the lids. McCarthy waited to see if he would object, but he said nothing, just twisted his hands nervously.

‘Can we go back a few weeks, Mr Allan?’ McCarthy decided it was time for him to build up the pressure a bit. ‘I understand you lost your wife …’

‘In March, end of March.’ The man seemed pathetically eager to tell him.

McCarthy had the date in front of him. March 29. Dennis Allan had come off his shift at six that morning and found his wife dead. ‘I’m sorry.’ A necessary formality. ‘Could you tell me what happened? In your own time, Mr Allan.’

The man’s eyes got pinker, and he blinked. ‘Sandy, my wife, she …’ He seemed to be having trouble putting the words together. ‘She was ill, see, you know, in her mind. All through our marriage it was a problem. She was on pills, but they didn’t always work – made her dopey, so she’d stop them, and then …’ He looked down at his hands, twisting them together. McCarthy steepled his fingers against his mouth and nodded. Dennis Allan looked at him. ‘She was always, I mean she …’ He swallowed. ‘She used to try and harm herself, you know?’ McCarthy nodded again. ‘She didn’t mean it, not like that, not really, but when things got on top of her, she’d take her pills, you know …’ His eyes sought out Tina Barraclough’s, then McCarthy’s, looking for their understanding.

‘She’d take an overdose?’ Barraclough prompted.

He looked grateful. ‘She didn’t mean it,’ he said.

‘But this time?’ McCarthy watched the wash of colour that flooded the man’s face.

‘She took a lot of pills. And with some drink. She did it while I was at work. She …’ He put his head in his hands. A display of grief, natural for a man talking about such a recent bereavement, a man doubly bereaved. McCarthy wondered why he wasn’t convinced. He waited, aware that Barraclough was hovering on the brink of saying something to the distressed man. He shook his head slightly, and she sat back. McCarthy could detect disapproval in her set face. After a minute, Allan spoke again. ‘I found her. When I came back from work. I don’t know if she meant it.’

‘And Emma?’ McCarthy prompted quietly.

‘Emma just … She packed her bags that same day. Wouldn’t speak to me.’ He looked at the two officers, trying to gauge their understanding. ‘She just left. I tried to contact her at the college, but they said she’d never enrolled. Didn’t even come to her own mother’s funeral.’ His voice was bewildered.

The search for Lucy the day before had identified witnesses who remembered seeing Emma in the park, round about the time Jane Fielding said that she and Lucy had left. A woman walking back from delivering her daughter to school saw Emma and Lucy in the playground near the gate, and had wondered why Lucy wasn’t at school. There was a dog walker who remembered a young woman answering Emma’s description on the path to Shepherd Wheel, walking fast: ‘I noticed her because she looked a bit anxious.’ She had been alone. He was quite certain she had had no child with her. So what had happened to Lucy? McCarthy hoped the key would lie in the interview that the child protection team had recorded the evening before, shortly after a tired but otherwise unharmed Lucy had turned up in the woods half a mile above Shepherd Wheel.

But Lucy’s story was confusing and inconclusive. She was very young – just six – and fantasized and wove the things that happened to her into stories and daydreams. The child protection officer, Alicia Hamilton, was able to clarify some of the more puzzling aspects of her story. ‘It could be something or nothing,’ she had said as she discussed the tape of Lucy’s interview with the team, ‘but it seems that Emma invented this game of chasing the monsters. But there’s a bit more to it than that.’ Then Emma went to chase the monsters and I went to the swings. Well, she did but I ran away.

‘That bit’s interesting.’ Hamilton had stopped the tape. ‘It takes a while to sort out – you’ll see in a minute – but it looks as though Emma had a bit of a scam going. According to Lucy, Emma would go and chase off the monsters, and Lucy would stay in the playground. Then, as long as she was good, Emma would get her an ice cream.’ Lucy’s story was clear to this point, even to the point of knowing that whatever Emma was doing, it was dangerous.

I told her. One time, two times, three times. Then they get you.

But later on in the tape, the child’s fantasies became impenetrable.

Why did you go into the woods, Lucy?

Because the monsters. Because the Ash Man …

Tell me about the Ash Man, Lucy.

He’s Tamby’s friend. Only not really. Tamby’s my friend.

Who’s Tamby, Lucy?

He’s my friend.

What about the Ash Man?

The Ash Man … the Ash Man is Emma’s friend.

Tell me about him.

I said. He’s Emma’s friend. And Tamby is, too.

‘Her mother says that these are characters in her stories. “Tamby” is someone she pretends to play with in the garden and in the park. This “Ash Man” is some kind of giant or ogre …’ McCarthy felt his head begin to ache. Hamilton went on. ‘It isn’t all fantasy. There was someone – someone must have taken her up to the Forge Dam playground. It’s too far for a little thing like that to walk to by herself. And someone gave her money to buy ice cream. But who it was, Lucy can’t – or won’t – tell us.’

Suzanne waited until she heard the engine of Joel’s bike, the roar of subdued power from a machine far too expensive for someone who claimed he couldn’t afford to support his child, so that she was sure he had left. She slipped across the yard and knocked on Jane’s door, pushing it open as she did so. Jane was at the kitchen table, a mug in her hands, staring into space. Her sketch pad was in front of her. She stood up when Suzanne came in and gave her a quick hug. ‘I heard,’ she said by way of greeting. ‘You were the one who found her.’

Suzanne returned her hug. ‘How is she? Is she all right?’

Jane nodded, sitting down at the table again. ‘Yes. She’s a bit quiet, but she’s coming round. The police took me straight across to this place where they interview children.’ Jane reached across for the teapot and poured Suzanne a cup of pale tea. The smell of camomile drifted into the room.

‘What happened? Did anyone … ?’ Jane’s serene manner could be deceptive, Suzanne knew.

‘Emma just left her, just like that, and she wandered off by herself.’ Her normally gentle face was hard. ‘Apparently Emma made a habit of dumping Lucy and going off. Bribing her to stick around. And Lucy wouldn’t, not with a hospital appointment looming. The police think that someone was with her in the playground, but Lucy says not. She said she was hiding from the monsters. But she always does these days. And she said that Tamby helped her, and there was something about the Ash Man.’ Suzanne recognized the names from the times she sat with Lucy and listened to her stories. ‘I talked to her last night, and again this morning. I think she was on her own. She knows the way to Forge Dam. We’ve walked up there together often enough. I go cold when I think of her walking through those woods. And the roads.’ Her hands tightened round her cup, then she looked at Suzanne. ‘I feel so awful. I can’t believe I just let Emma …’

Suzanne knew all about guilt. ‘You thought you knew her. We both did.’

Jane wasn’t prepared to let herself off the hook. ‘I knew Sophie,’ she said. Suzanne waited, and after a moment, Jane went on. ‘Whoever … did it must have got Emma after she left Lucy, thank God. I don’t think she saw anything. Joel said I shouldn’t have let them interview her, but …’ Jane gave her a cautionary look as they heard footsteps on the stairs. She began leafing through her sketch book. ‘I did some drawings while I was waiting,’ she said.

Lucy came in, carrying the peacock feather, a present from Sophie that was one of her treasures. ‘Hello, Lucy,’ Suzanne said, then, unable to help herself, gave the little girl a hug.

Lucy wriggled impatiently. ‘I’m busy,’ she said.

‘I know, I’m sorry, Lucy. What are you doing?’

Lucy compressed her lips, then relented. ‘I’m playing. Tamby’s chasing the monsters.’ She looked at the two women. ‘I didn’t talk to the real police. I told Alicia about the monsters.’

‘The child protection officer,’ Jane said. ‘The one who interviewed her.’

Suzanne felt cold. ‘I know.’ We want to help the lad.

‘I’m going in the garden now,’ Lucy said.

Jane watched her as she went out into the back yard, the feather held carefully in one hand as she negotiated the step. ‘Still the monsters,’ she said. Suzanne kept her mind carefully focused on Jane as she leafed through her sketch book until she came to the page she wanted. ‘I finally got it right,’ she said. ‘I did these yesterday while I was waiting for them to interview Lucy.’

Suzanne looked at the familiar scene: the terraced houses; the wheelie bins at the entrances; the tiny front gardens, narrow strips separating the houses from the road, some cared for and blooming, some overgrown with shrubs, weeds and discarded rubbish. It was the scene she saw every day from her bedroom window, made oddly new by Jane’s pencil. The drawings caught the contrasts of light and shade, the places where the sun shone brilliantly, the places where the shadows were black and impenetrable. There was something about the drawings that made Suzanne feel uneasy. She looked more closely. There was a suggestion of something – something larger than human, something menacing – lurking in the shadows of an entrance. A hand, oversized with long nails, reached out from under the lid of a wheelie bin. An eye – an avian eye? – watched with keen intent from behind a curtain. The curtain was held back by a claw. Suzanne realized that everywhere she looked, strange things looked back, half hidden, almost completely hidden, but there. Among and around them walked people, happy, smiling, oblivious. She looked at Jane.

Jane was still looking at the drawings. ‘Monsters,’ she said.

The trees were in full leaf now, the heavy canopy hanging over the paths that wound through the woods, following the path of the Porter, down through the Mayfield Valley to the silted-up dam at Old Forge, past the café and the playground, and down into the depths of the woods, past Wire Mill Dam where the white water-lilies bloomed, down the old weirs and channels, down into the parks and down past the dark silence of Shepherd Wheel Dam. Here, houses backed onto the park, big stone houses, three storeys in the front, four in the back where the land dropped away to the river. The trees shadowed the gardens of these houses. Their roots undermined the foundations. Conifers and laurel grew close against the walls. The basements opened onto small back gardens, separated from the park by low walls.

The garden behind the first house was derelict and overgrown. The leaves of autumn were still rotting on the ground where the daisies and the dandelions pushed through. A wheelie bin lay on its side, the contents spilt on the asphalt, trodden into the mud and the moss. The foxes and the rodents had taken the edible stuff, had pulled and torn the rubbish and strewn it around the ground. A small patch of earth had been cleared, the edges cut with surgical precision. Seedlings had been planted, nasturtiums and forget-me-nots. The soil was dry, and they were wilting slightly.

The basement window was dark. The back of the house didn’t get the sun. The trees blocked it out. Through the window, the white of the walls glimmered faintly in the darkness. Drawings were taped onto the walls, each one a rectangle of white, each one with a drawing carefully placed in the very centre. The drawing was tight, small, meticulous in detail. This one, a fair-haired teenager; this one, a dark-eyed youth; this one, a young woman, laughing. Here, a child peers watchfully through tangled hair; and here, the child again, this time crouched intently over some game, not depicted in the drawing. Her hands play with the white emptiness.

Each sheet is the same size, the space between each sheet exactly measured. At first, the pictures are carefully sequenced: first, the teenage girl, next, the youth, next, the woman, next, the child; the girl, the youth, the woman, the child. But then the pictures begin to run out of sequence: the girl, the child, the youth; the girl, the child, the youth; the child, the youth; the child, the youth … and the sequence stops in the middle of the wall.

Suzanne recognized the man who was interviewing her. It was the detective who had been at Jane’s the day before, the man who had talked to her after she’d found Emma in the water. Detective Inspector McCarthy. She had dressed carefully for the interview, putting on her best suit – well, her only suit. She’d put on make-up and blow-dried her hair until the fine curls turned into a sleek bob. But despite all her careful preparations, her chest was tight and she felt panicky. She hadn’t been in a police station since that last time with Adam, the last of the many visits when Adam sat in sullen silence, until, eventually, the scared child that Suzanne could see underneath the façade of bravado would emerge. They’d always left the police stations, the youth courts, together, until the last time, when she’d had to leave alone, hearing Adam’s voice behind her. Listen to me, Suzanne!

She pulled herself back to the present. She needed to be alert, she realized as she looked into the cold eyes of the man on the other side of the table. She’d answered questions the night before about finding Emma, but he went over those again, clearly unhappy with parts of her story. Suzanne found she couldn’t account for her decision to investigate the wheel. To her, it was as obvious as looking round if someone shouted Watch out! but he seemed unable to understand or accept this.

‘So it wasn’t easy to get into the yard,’ he was saying again.

‘No, I had to climb over the fence.’

‘Over those railings? That’s a dangerous climb.’

That was true, it had been. Suzanne wondered why she hadn’t thought about that before she climbed – she’d just done it. McCarthy hadn’t actually asked her a question, so she said nothing. After a moment, he said, ‘What I’m trying to establish, Mrs Milner—’

‘Ms,’ Suzanne interrupted. She saw his eyes appraise her briefly, dismissively. She remembered Joel watching her in the kitchen that morning.

‘Ms Milner, is why you went to all that trouble unless you had a reason to think something was wrong.’

‘Do you always know why you do things?’ She regretted the question as soon as she’d asked it. It made her sound defensive. He had a habit, she noticed, of not replying, of not acknowledging something that was said. He was leaning back in his chair, staring Suzanne in the eye, as though he expected something else from her. She could feel her breathing start to get uneven, and tried to distract herself, to make herself relax. She studied her hands. Her nails were OK apart from the one she’d bitten down yesterday. There was some dirt caught under her thumb, and she tried to scratch it out. She was glad she’d taken the time to put some varnish on. It made her feel more confident for some reason. Her breathing steadied, but she was still unable to think of an answer to his question. ‘I don’t know …’ she said in the end, in the absence of anything else to say. She saw his face harden slightly, and reinforced her answer. ‘I don’t know. You know what was happening. Maybe I thought it was something to do with Lucy.’

‘Did you think that?’

‘I don’t know.’ Impasse. He waited in silence. She felt the pressure building up again. She half expected to see, across the desk, the woman who had talked to her, that last time, about Adam. We want to help the lad, Suzanne. She deliberately began a mental review of the scale for testing communication that she’d been adapting for use at the Alpha Project. You asked a series of questions that had fairly obvious answers, then tested the responses you actually got against a checklist: No response. Contextually inappropriate response – like Ashley when she was asking about his family … It was strange, the way Ashley had reacted in the interview. She tried to remember if he’d shown any signs of those odd responses when she’d been talking to him in the coffee bar …

‘… in the yard, Ms Milner?’

‘Sorry. Could you just …’

Again that slight hardening of the face, which she could understand this time. She should have been paying attention. It made him seem a bit more human. ‘Did you see anything that might have made you think something was wrong in the yard?’

‘Right. Sorry. I’m a bit tired.’ She tried a smile. There was no reason to be antagonistic, she told herself. This wasn’t to do with Adam. He didn’t respond, but waited for her to answer. But not that human. ‘Well, not that evening, I mean apart from, you know …’ Oh, for Christ’s sake get on with it, Suzanne! ‘I mean … are you asking about the evening, or the morning?’

‘You were in the park yesterday morning?’ She realized then that she hadn’t told them. She’d let them think that her evening visit was her only visit to the park that day. His voice was neutral, but she thought she could detect exasperation underlying it. She felt stupid, but she felt angry as well. Didn’t he understand? Was he so used to violence, to sudden death, that he just went on like an automaton, and expected everyone else to be the same?

‘Yes.’ There didn’t seem to be anything else to say.

‘What time?’

Suzanne thought. ‘I went into the park about half past nine, and I got home at around ten-thirty. I go running. Jogging. I went through Endcliffe Park, and then I crossed over the main road and went on through Bingham Park.’ She went on to tell him about the notice she’d seen.

He let his exasperation show now. ‘Why didn’t you tell me this yesterday?’

She felt her face flush. She hated to be caught out. ‘It just … The whole thing. Lucy. I couldn’t think of anything else.’

He nodded, clearly unsatisfied, and went back to the notice. He seemed as puzzled by it as she had been, and asked her about people in the park, people she saw regularly, any problems with flashers, any other odd or worrying people, anything. She found herself saying No … no … no, never … no.

Then she told him about the wheel yard, about the gate being open, about her visit to the wheel. His face didn’t change, but she felt as though she could read the thoughts behind those expressionless eyes. She stepped hard on her desire to apologize, to explain, and tried to go through her story calmly and clearly. He took her over and over it. She closed her eyes, trying to make the picture clear. ‘It was my reflection,’ she said. ‘I waved at it, and it waved back.’ The sinister, farcical picture of Emma, dead, waving back at her disturbed her equilibrium further, and her voice tailed away in her explanations.

It seemed it was almost over. She began to relax now that he wasn’t pushing her for information she didn’t have, wasn’t asking her questions she couldn’t answer, wasn’t making her feel like a culpable fool for keeping information back. It was important to explain that she hadn’t seen either Lucy or Em, but she needed to tell him about the man – the youth? – she had seen near Shepherd Wheel. ‘I only saw one person in that part of the park.’ She sent her mind back to the odd, jumpy feeling the figure had given her. ‘I thought it was someone I knew at first, but …’

‘Who was that?’ McCarthy’s tone was bland, but she knew at once she’d made a mistake.

‘Oh, it wasn’t,’ she said quickly. Too quickly. ‘I just thought it was. At first.’ She could feel her chest start to tighten and the air she was breathing becoming thin and insubstantial. She concentrated. Breathe slowly, evenly. Keep calm. I hold you responsible for this! Her father’s litany. McCarthy just went on looking at her. More prevarication would only make it worse. After all, it hadn’t been Ashley. Her voice came out in uneven jerks, and she had to stop speaking and gulp for air. ‘Just for a moment. I thought … it was Ashley Reid … from the Alpha Project … only it wasn’t …’ It couldn’t have been more unconvincing if she’d deliberately lied.

McCarthy was working through the computer files. He was angry, and he wanted to talk to whoever had interviewed Suzanne Milner the evening before. He should have done it himself. But they had the information now. At around a quarter past ten, the wheel yard had been open, and someone, a young man answering a particular description, had been around there, actually coming from the direction of the yard.

He was puzzled as well as angry. He was good at reading people in interview situations, but Suzanne Milner had been strange. Yesterday she’d been fiercely protective of her friend, later she had been almost flattened by shock. Today she had presented the façade of a carefully groomed academic and had managed to get right up his nose. She’d come in, a picture of cool elegance, very different from the old-jeans-and-sweater image she’d projected yesterday. At first he’d interpreted her attitude as hostility. She’d sat there straight-backed, tilting her head and studying her fingernails before she answered each question, shooting quick glances at him and looking away as soon as he met her eyes. She seemed to be treating the whole thing as a game, giving him minimal, uncooperative answers to the questions he needed answering.

But it was a façade, he’d realized, as the interview had moved on. What he had mistaken for hostility was, in fact, tension, but it seemed more a tension associated with her surroundings than with him. It was almost as if she was having trouble concentrating on the interview at all.

He looked at his notes. Her confusion about the park – he could accept that. She’d been in shock, focused on finding the dead woman in the water. Her sheer embarrassment at having to admit that she’d been near Shepherd Wheel at the crucial time, and hadn’t mentioned it, had been convincing.

But had she tried to slide that sighting past him? If so, why mention it at all? It was odd. He’d known there was something else, and he’d been right. Ashley Reid from the Alpha programme. Why were alarm bells ringing in his mind? He knew that name. OK, let’s see what Ashley who wasn’t there might have been doing. Let’s see what he’d been doing the last time he’d been arrested and charged. He typed the commands into the machine, and waited.

The photograph on the screen showed a young man with heavy dark hair and dark eyes. He looked out at McCarthy with a faint smile, his eyes wary. He was nineteen – a bit older than most of those sent on the programme. McCarthy ran the record back. Reid had served a short youth custody sentence three years ago – got into a fight and glassed his opponent. Most of his other offences were typical of a disruptive juvenile: shoplifting, twoc, minor vandalism. But Reid had moved on to breaking and entering. He had more than one conviction. He should have been sent down. Why the Alpha Project? McCarthy read on. Reid was classified as having ‘learning difficulties’. McCarthy was surprised. The face that looked at him from the photograph didn’t give that impression. He’d been identified as particularly suitable for the experimental programme that was running at the Alpha Project. Not so much bad as easily led, his probation officer had said, the fall guy for more intelligent companions. That had been the argument that had kept him out of prison.

McCarthy raised a sceptical eyebrow. Then he noticed that Reid had an outstanding charge against him, one that was due to go to court. University campus security had found him late one night in the shadows behind the chemistry building, the route across the car park that made a useful, but lonely, shortcut. He was facing a charge of going equipped for burglary. He’d been carrying a torch, a lock-knife and some heavy-duty adhesive tape. In McCarthy’s eyes, in that location, that wasn’t going equipped for burglary, it was going equipped for rape.

The world of chemicals is ordered, predictable and, for those who understand it, safe. It was evening, and Simon let his eyes follow the straight lines of the tiles running along the shiny floor, across, making right angles and patterns of squares. Small squares, and larger squares each containing four small squares, and larger squares still each containing four of the smaller squares each containing four of the small squares and on and on forever. Order.

He mixed the three solutions, acetimide in water, calcium hypochlorate in water, sodium hydroxide careful now in water. Watch the heat! He put the solutions in the freezer.

There were heavy benches in rows. Strips of light on the ceiling, bright, bright, bouncing off the surface of the glass, the bottles, the tubes, the shapes, the curves. The light mixing and shattering into chaos.

The important thing was to keep the temperature low. Experiment had shown him that a stainless steel bowl suspended in a mixture of ice and salt worked fine, as long as he was careful and patient. Molecules sit in their patterns, break down on the right stimulus, recombine in patterns that it is easy to predict. Absorbing and beautiful.

The light reflecting, refracting, lines against the glassware, shattering again and again and again.

He put the first solution in the bowl, stirring to get the temperature down. Then, slowly, carefully, he added the second, working under the fume hood. Care! Once, once only the order, the ratios, the time, something was wrong, and the disinfectant smell of chlorine began to seep into the room.

Now he could sit and wait. Two hours. Tonight he’d brought his drawing pad with him. He opened it to a new page. The sheer whiteness, the blankness of it pleased him, and he sat looking at it for a long time. Footsteps on the shiny floor. A face, smiling. Just a face. Faces need to be drawn, carefully delineated in sharp pencil lines to give them meaning. ‘Hello, Simon. I haven’t seen you at …’ Malcolm. Tutor. Tune it out. Not important. The beauty of the white began to evade him, and he picked up his pencil. ‘… so close to your finals.’ Nod. That’s not enough. Say, ‘Yes.’ It was important to get it right in the centre. The pencil began to create a picture, fine lines, fine detail, unclear at first to anyone who can’t see the patterns that have always been so clear to Simon.

‘… catching up. This lab’s empty tonight, but Barry’s next door if you need anything. They’ll be locking up at nine.’ Their eyes meeting. Simon, looking away, nodding. Say, ‘OK. All right.’ Footsteps. Door. Gone. Simon looked at the clock, and returned to his drawing.

Two hours. He added the contents of the third flask now, cool not cold. The solution turned a clear white, like milk, like paper.

Hours to wait now. Leave, down the shiny corridors and the lights in the ceiling, and the chaos as the people walk here, there, and all the patterns disturbed. Say, ‘Goodnight.’ The security man, old, ‘Night.’ Looking down, not noticing, used to Simon’s comings and goings. Out of sight and back to the room with the shiny floor. Wait.

Lights out. The security man, back soon. Wait, watch, sleep. Sleep. Dream …

The torchlight wavering on the path ahead. Fading, as though the batteries were giving up. The rain spattering against them, and a puddle gleaming in the thin light. And on the path ahead … Staggering under the weight as she slumped against him. The stuff had been good, strong. Quiet, be very quiet. The path by the dam, now. The night, black beyond the circle of faint light on the ground. The torchlight catching the rain, shining and glittering. Shining and glittering like the mud in the dam, the thick, black mud and the sucking sounds drawing your feet in and releasing them. And the place where the mud was disturbed, the place where you could dig.

Oh, no. Please not that. And the gleam colder than the gleam of firelight, making the metal burn with ice.

Not that! And the soft, muffling sound of the mud in the darkness.

Simon’s eyes snapped open. That dream again, and now there was another one, rushing along a shadowed path, looking for something that wasn’t there, feeling it hard on his heels, the chaos, the chaos, the chaos.

He looked at the clock, its black hands on its white face calming him, steadying his breathing. Just a dream, Si. Don’t worry about it. Several hours had passed. It was midnight. The night watchman never came up here so late. Simon began heating the water bath.