Silent Playgrounds (11 page)

He caught McCarthy’s eye. ‘Sorry. Look, the water comes through here’ – he indicated the wooden tank above the wheel – ‘from the dam, and turns the wheel. It falls into the channel below the wheel, then it runs out through that conduit’ – he indicated a narrow archway in the stone, under the water – ‘and back into the stream about fifty yards along. If you dumped a body
down in that channel and ran some water through, it would wash the body into the conduit. Shut the water off again and there it stays. I wonder how long before anyone would have thought to look?’

Logic. It was clear and logical. Would they have looked? Would they even have looked in Shepherd Wheel, locked up and secure? Would they have looked at all for a missing, troubled seventeen-year-old with a history of drug abuse? But the wheel turned. The killer hadn’t expected that. The wheel turned. ‘Thank you, Mr Draper,’ he said.

The blocks were abandoned now. The warren of deck access, walkways, stairs, lifts – which hadn’t worked when the flats were inhabited, and certainly didn’t work now – was in darkness, the windows and doors of each flat boarded up as they became empty, the stairways sealed off, the lift doors jammed shut. They stood in dark stillness, waiting for the demolition team that would, eventually, erase them.

As the bona fide inhabitants moved out, other inhabitants moved in. The boarding was ripped off the doors and windows, the pipework and the cables were pulled out, the old boilers ripped off the walls in a swift and brutal asset strip. The flats were left open to the rain and the wind, the wood rotted, damp pervaded the concrete, water dripped on the walkways and formed in puddles on the landings. But they provided shelter of a kind. In some of the flats, there were signs of habitation: graffiti on the walls, the remains of fires on bricks in the middle of rooms, blankets, cups, plates.

Lee picked his way along the front of the second block. A burnt-out car blocked the pavement and he turned into the flats along the lower walkway. The flats had been boarded up, but most flats showed signs of later entry: boarding pulled off the doors, off the windows, broken glass, trailing wires. The walkway stank of piss and, from the broken-in doorways, the smell of shit made him gag. He knew what was in those flats, the silver foil, the needles, the detritus of a habit he abhorred. Pills were OK, crack and brown were for wankers.

He moved quickly, ignoring a figure slumped by the stairwell. Lee could handle himself, but he preferred to avoid trouble if he could. Mostly. He squeezed past the broken security barriers, went up the landings almost to the top of the tower, then along the deck. He counted the flats until he came to the one he wanted.

Lee put his head to the door and listened. Silence. He looked round. Nothing. He knocked lightly on the door.
‘Lee.’

After a moment, the bolts on the door were pulled back. Lee slipped through, pulling the wad of money out of his pocket. A few minutes later, he was running quietly down the stairs, a small zip-lock wallet tucked safely inside his jacket.

Monday morning, the lab reports from the post-mortem on Emma Allan came through, along with the results of samples taken from the search of Shepherd Wheel. There were detailed accounts of timings, fibres, detritus, blood analysis, body fluid analysis, stomach contents, that confirmed what they were already pretty sure of. Emma Allan had died in Shepherd Wheel between about ten and noon on the day she vanished. This was useful, important to confirm, because they all knew the danger of reading the obvious, jumping to conclusions, and getting it badly wrong while precious time ticked away. Fibres from the grate proved to be blue cotton denim, of the kind used to make jeans. It came from a strong, heavy-duty weave, work jeans rather than fashion jeans, the report suggested.

Possibly because of Emma’s immersion, scrapings from under her fingernails revealed no traces of her attacker. Or possibly she had put up little resistance, either because she knew and trusted her attacker, or because of the interesting cocktail of recreational drugs in her bloodstream, including heroin. Her earlier
caution for possession was clearly just a tip of a much larger iceberg. This was no real surprise.

But there was one unexpected plum in the pie – one that even McCarthy hadn’t expected. They had found three sets of recent prints during the search of Shepherd Wheel. One set was still unidentified. One set was Emma Allan’s, as they’d expected. But someone else had been in that workshop, and had touched things after Emma had touched them. His prints overlay Emma’s, smudged them. He was on the computer. He was well known to the local force. Ashley Reid.

At the briefing, there was the buzz that indicates an investigation is starting to move. Brooke turned the briefing over to McCarthy to cover the Reid connection. McCarthy ran through the details: the possible sighting, the prints and Reid’s recent arrest. ‘It isn’t enough. We don’t know when Allan left those prints,’ McCarthy pointed out. ‘If she was in there on one day, she could have been in there on another. Probably was. The Fielding child said that Emma used to go off when they went to the park.’ He remembered Lucy’s voice, matter of fact, unemphatic.
And Emma went to chase the monsters and I went to the playground.
‘We’ve been trying to bring Reid in as a witness since Saturday. No one knows where he is.’

McCarthy passed round the drugs information he’d pulled up at the weekend, and went over his interview with Suzanne Milner again. ‘What’s a bit odd here is that Milner mentioned Reid specifically to say she hadn’t seen him. Barraclough?’

‘Why did she mention him? How did his name come up?’

McCarthy didn’t know. It puzzled him as well. ‘Either she saw him and didn’t want to say – but she walked into it and had to make the best of it, or it’s like she said: she saw someone she thought looked like him. She was very defensive about it. I don’t know how well she knows him.’

He ran through the details of Reid’s most recent arrest, noting the expressions of exasperation and anger when they heard the fact that Reid had got bail. ‘Why would they do that?’ Barraclough could still be surprised by court decisions.

‘I didn’t check back on all the details. He was already on the Alpha programme, under supervision.’ Barraclough looked disgusted. McCarthy caught her eye and nodded his agreement. ‘We’ve got to find him. We’ll need samples – the prints won’t be enough on their own. We want him pinned down on this. There’s nothing that points to the father, but we haven’t got the results back on his samples yet. And it would help if that sighting could be confirmed.’

McCarthy was tired and the day had barely started. The dead face of the woman in the water kept returning to him. The buzz from the early news, the match-up with fingerprints in Shepherd Wheel, was replaced with a sense of urgency. They knew the signs. Ashley Reid was dangerous, and he was still out there.

Suzanne spent the morning in the library. She’d spent much of the previous night trying to think of ways to undo the damage, and drawn a blank. She felt angry at the way her actions had been interpreted, but she knew
that, in a situation like this, crying ‘unfair’ was pointless. Anyway, as soon as she’d mentioned Ashley’s name, as soon as she’d seen that gleam of interest in DI McCarthy’s eyes, she should have contacted Richard and told him. She was at fault.

The only thing to do was to press on with her work, and so she was at the computer catalogue by eight-thirty, doing one of her regular checks through journals looking for recent research into language disorders. The terminals were awkwardly placed, the seats too high, and she had to lean forward to see the screen. Her hair fell in her eyes and she fished around in her bag until she found a clip. She twisted her hair back off her face and jammed the clip in place. Better.

After half an hour’s searching she found the reference she’d been looking for. Someone in California was researching into evidence of brain damage in persistent offenders. She wasn’t sure if it would be relevant, but language disorders could arise from certain types of brain damage. It was possible that she and this researcher were coming at the same problem from different angles. As she skimmed the paper, she recognized things that were relevant to her research: …
clear evidence from imaging of the frontal lobe… aphasia… sociopathic patterns of behaviour
… She jotted the reference on an index card and took the journal to one of the reading desks.

She worked in the quiet of the stacks; the endless rows of shelves and the pools of light in the darkness restored her equilibrium. As she read, she felt the excitement of seeing solid backing for her intuitions. Here
was someone who was identifying organic brain damage in persistent offenders. Damage in areas of the brain that affected language. Physical evidence to support her more indirect observations. Recent events had shaken her faith in her abilities. For the first time since her interview with DI McCarthy, she began to think that it might be all right after all.

Soon after eleven, she began to flag. She realized she’d been working for nearly three hours without a break, so she left her books and notes on the desk and headed across the campus towards the students’ union. The sun was shining and the sky was clear. She closed her eyes and turned her face up to the sky, enjoying the warmth and the patterns of light and shade against her eyelids.

When she opened her eyes, she was a bit disconcerted to find herself face to face with DI McCarthy himself, coming down the steps from the road past the red-brick admin, building that gave the university its ivy-covered centre. They had almost collided. He looked faintly surprised, possibly at the sight of her standing there like a sun-worshipper. She grimaced, then hastily smoothed her features out. She felt at a disadvantage. She would rather have her rematch with McCarthy in the severe garb of professionalism, but she was dressed for working in the stacks in old jeans and a T-shirt. There were ink stains on her fingers from a leaking ballpoint, and, for all she knew, on her face as well. The clip was coming out of her hair. She thought she caught a gleam of amusement in his eye, but when she looked again, he was his austere, impassive self. ‘Ms
Milner,’ he said. He sounded pleasant enough, but he didn’t smile.

Suzanne nodded in acknowledgement. She didn’t know what to call him. She thought maybe you said ‘constable’ or ‘sergeant’ but she wasn’t sure if you said ‘inspector’. Or would it be ‘Inspector McCarthy’? She settled for a wary, ‘Hello,’ catching at her hair as the clip fell out and clattered onto the pavement. ‘It’s Suzanne, by the way.’

‘Steve,’ he said. He picked up the hair clip and gave it to her.

‘Thanks.’ She pulled her hair off her face again and pushed the clip back in.

She expected him to move on, but he stayed where he was, looking at her and then at the open campus ahead of him. ‘I don’t usually come into the university,’ he said. ‘Is there anywhere to get a cup of coffee round here?’

‘There’s a coffee bar in the students’ union,’ she said. ‘You can get espresso and americano and things there.’

He shrugged. ‘Hot and full of caffeine would do for now.’ He looked at her again as though he’d just thought of something. ‘Have you got some time? There’s something I wanted to ask you. I’ll get you a coffee.’

Suzanne was suspicious.
Something I wanted to ask you.
‘Is it something to do with—’ She almost said ‘Ashley’, but caught herself in time. ‘With Emma?’

‘There are one or two gaps you could fill in.’ He looked at her, waiting to see what she would say. She
thought about Jane, what Jane had said the other day. Jane would probably have made a pass at the bleak DI McCarthy. She wondered how he would react to that. In her experience, very few men put up much resistance to Jane, but she thought she might put her money on McCarthy.

She realized she hadn’t said anything, and he was looking at her questioningly. ‘All right,’ she said, cautiously.

He did smile then, at her wariness, and said, ‘Don’t worry. They fed me before they let me out this morning.’ That surprised her into laughing. OK, possibly he did have his human side. They walked across to the students’ union in silence.

The coffee bar was quiet. McCarthy bought her a double espresso, pausing to chat to the woman who was serving the coffee, getting involved in a quick exchange of banter, just for a moment seeming very different from the man who’d been brusque and unsympathetic with Jane, and cold and impatient with her. Maybe he just compartmentalized a lot.

He offered her a cigarette and then lit one for himself. Before he could say anything, she said, ‘What are you doing up here?’

He looked at her for a moment before answering. ‘Trying to track down Sophie Dutton.’

Suzanne was surprised. ‘Sophie’s gone home. Didn’t you know?’

He didn’t answer that, just kept on looking at her as he knocked the ash off his cigarette. ‘I wanted to talk to you about the Alpha Project.’ He stopped as though
he had just thought of something, and looked at her with genuine curiosity. ‘Why there?’ he said.

Suzanne ran the question through her mind, looking for pitfalls. It seemed safe enough. ‘Why not?’ she countered.

He seemed to take that as serious comment. ‘Most of those lads should be locked up,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t choose to spend any time with them. If I didn’t have to.’

Suzanne set her jaw. ‘There are reasons,’ she said, ‘for the way they are.’

‘Oh, there are always reasons,’ he agreed. ‘It doesn’t make them any less dangerous.’

She looked at her hands. She wondered if he really believed what he was saying, or if he was trying to get her wound up and talking incautiously. ‘I don’t think they’re dangerous,’ she said. ‘It’s mostly car theft, stuff like that.’

‘Car theft is dangerous enough, if you get hit by a joyrider.’ That was a debating point. Any driver was dangerous if you thought about it like that. She waited to see what else he would say. ‘What you need to remember is that most of them are seriously disturbed. Don’t judge them by your own rules.’

She had the feeling that he was warning her about something. She thought about the lads she’d got to know. OK, Dean was aggressive and difficult. He had a history of disturbed behaviour and substance abuse. The centre workers always treated him with caution. Richard had once admitted to her that he thought Dean’s case was a hopeless one. And Lee masked something
sinister behind his quick wit. Ashley was different, though: quieter, less aggressive. She wanted to get him off the topic. ‘And that’s just the social workers?’ she tried.

He started to say something, then laughed as he caught her eye, and she smiled back in a moment of rapport. Jane was right. He was attractive. She relaxed a bit. She wondered why he was just talking, not asking her questions about Emma. Maybe he was trying to put her at ease.

‘You still haven’t told me,’ he said. ‘Why the Alpha Centre?’

‘It was the best place for my research.’ She explained her theory about people whose communication skills were damaged. She was used to being on the receiving end of scepticism, but he seemed genuinely interested and asked her some surprisingly well-informed questions. Then she wondered why she was surprised. Criminal behaviour was as much his area of expertise as it was Richard’s. She told him about the Californian research she had found that morning, and the way it supported the work she was doing. He listened, and told her about some of the people he’d had to deal with. She found herself warming to him, finding him easier to talk to than she’d expected. He seemed prepared to accept her as an expert in her own field. She told him about the reactions she’d had from the Alpha workers: Neil’s dour disapproval, Richard’s earnest solemnity.

He smiled at that. ‘They can be a bit protective,’ he said. She could hear something underlying his diplomatic words, and looked at him quickly. He met her
eyes, and she read an unspoken opinion that was close to her own. She felt that unexpected sense of rapport again. She was starting to enjoy herself. He went back to her research programme. ‘So how often are you up there?’

‘I just do the one afternoon and the one evening.’ That was all she’d been allowed.

‘A week?’ He reached across for the ashtray as he spoke.

‘Yes …’ She pushed it over to him.

‘How many hours a week?’ He stubbed the cigarette out half smoked, unlike her own student habit of smoking them down to the filter.

‘It depends. Three hours, four maybe.’ She couldn’t see where he was going.

‘And you work with all the lads together?’