Silent Playgrounds (24 page)

She looked at Adam’s photograph, and Ashley’s pale face seemed to come between her and the picture she knew so well. His dark, serious eyes looked out instead of Adam’s, his heavy dark hair imposed itself on Adam’s short curls. His smile – cautious and guarded – replaced Adam’s cheerful grin. She had let Adam down – her father had been right. In the end, it had been her responsibility. She couldn’t let Ashley down.

The district nurse was a brisk woman with a no-nonsense voice and the air of someone who had more to fit into a twenty-four-hour day than could be reasonably accommodated. She introduced herself as Janet Middleton, and talked to Barraclough while she was packing up her car. ‘I’ll have to get on with this,’ she said. ‘You don’t mind.’ It wasn’t a question.

‘You visit Rita Cooke on the Gleadless Estate, is that right, Mrs Middleton?’

Janet Middleton checked the contents of her bag. ‘Yes. Well, she was on my list for a few months.’

‘You were there on the twenty-ninth of March, is that right?’ Barraclough realized she was repeating herself. There was something about the woman that reminded her of a particularly fierce headteacher she’d had at junior school.

‘Yes, I saw her Mondays.’

The efficiency that could put a day to a date reinforced the feeling, and her polite, professional smile
began to feel slightly ingratiating. ‘That was the day that her neighbour died, do you remember that?’

Janet Middleton nodded, her face serious. ‘Yes. I met her a few times. She kept Mrs Cooke company, and she’d lend a hand with her shopping and things. A nice woman, but not a very happy one.’ She grimaced. ‘That’s probably twenty-twenty hindsight. Mrs Cooke was upset.’

‘Did you talk to us at the time?’ Barraclough asked.

‘No. There was no need. I mean it was all over by the time I arrived. Just a few interested neighbours hanging around, and poor old Rita in a right old tizz. She’d made a mess of putting her clock forward. She was an hour ahead of herself. She gave me earache for being so early.’

Barraclough thought. She’d forgotten that the twenty-eighth was the day the clocks went forward. But they wouldn’t have missed that, the officers investigating the death. Rita Cooke’s time was one of the things that supported Dennis Allan’s story. ‘Did you tell her?’

Janet Middleton laughed and shook her head. ‘The last thing you do is tell someone of Rita’s age that they’ve forgotten something. You particularly don’t tell Rita. I just changed the clocks and didn’t say anything. No harm done.’

Except, Barraclough thought, that Dennis Allan had actually come home an hour earlier than they’d thought. Would it have made a difference? He must have left work early. Why?

Janet Middleton was watching her sharply. ‘I’m right, aren’t I? No harm done.’

Barraclough knew better than to try and fool this woman, but equally, she didn’t want any gossip floating round until they were sure. ‘It sorts out a bit of a discrepancy in the timing,’ she said. ‘It wasn’t a serious problem.’

Dennis Allan lit a cigarette and stared at the table in front of him. He didn’t seem so much to be stonewalling as trying to think his way through what had become a problem he could no longer cope with. McCarthy had been working at establishing a rapport with the man, letting him see that they understood the nature of the shock that had precipitated – perhaps – the events of the case. And they seemed to be edging nearer something, something that was making McCarthy tense with impatience, waiting as they moved closer, moved away, moved closer again. Now he was going in harder.

Brooke thought Allan was their intelligent killer. McCarthy wasn’t so sure. Allan was certainly hiding something, but his distress and tension became more marked when they moved towards his wife’s death, rather than the death of his daughter, or of Sophie Dutton. He still claimed that his feelings towards Emma weren’t changed by his wife’s revelations. ‘She was still my daughter. That doesn’t change. It wasn’t Em’s fault. It was Sandy …’

McCarthy let the silence build up. ‘Let’s talk about your wife, about Sandra.’ He saw the man’s eyes flinch. His defences had gone up.
Come at him slowly.

He spent a minute looking at the notes in the file relating to Sandra Allan. He didn’t need to – he knew
them almost word for word, but he wanted to wind the tension up a bit. He began by taking Allan back over his first meeting with Sandra and the early days of their relationship. He was aware of Allan’s solicitor shifting in his seat, and kept his eyes firmly on Allan’s, establishing a rapport based on his strength and the other man’s weakness.

‘Your ex-manager, Peter Greenhead,’ he said, still watching Allan. The man’s face flushed. ‘He’s done well.’

‘I know.’ Allan sounded petulant, grudging.

‘Greenhead remembers your wife.’ Allan looked at him, cautious now. ‘He said,’ McCarthy flicked through the papers in his hand. ‘He said she was a bit of a groupie. He used the words “tour-bus bike”.’

Allan looked at McCarthy with honest amazement before the impact of the words hit and he flushed a deep red. ‘That’s … It … Why would Pete say something like that?’

‘Because it was true?’ McCarthy suggested. ‘Are you telling me it’s not true?’

‘No. I mean yes. It’s not true. I’m telling you it’s not true.’ Now Allan began to talk, tripping over the words, more animated than McCarthy had seen him, more energetic in defence of his dead wife’s reputation than he was in his own defence.

She had been in love with Velvet’s guitarist, Don G. It had been a bit of a joke at first. ‘She was just a kid,’ Allan said. He didn’t think the man had taken her seriously. She’d bunk off school if she knew they were rehearsing, make coffee, buy cigarettes, wash and iron
stage gear. ‘Sometimes she’d talk her way into the van, you know, if we were doing a gig nearby.’ One time, she’d travelled a bit further afield with them. ‘There didn’t seem any real harm in it,’ Allan said.

McCarthy couldn’t see anything here that necessarily contradicted what Greenhead had told them. He pointed this out to Allan, who slumped down in his chair. ‘This hasn’t got anything to do with any of this,’ he protested. ‘Sandy’s dead. Why rake it all up?’

His solicitor cleared his throat and asked for a short break. ‘I need to discuss this with my client.’ McCarthy nodded. He was happy for Allan to stew for a while.

When the interview resumed, he found, to his surprise, that Allan was willing to talk. ‘My client is prepared to tell you this to establish that it has nothing to do with the crime you are investigating,’ the solicitor said.

McCarthy was happy with that. He looked at Allan. ‘OK, Dennis,’ he said. ‘You were telling me about Sandra.’

‘I knew Don G. was into some wild stuff,’ Allan said. ‘I didn’t think he’d bother with Sandy. She was only fourteen.’ McCarthy wondered why they had allowed a fourteen-year-old to hang around the rehearsals, the tours. He didn’t say anything, he just nodded again. ‘Then after, she came to me for help,’ Allan said. ‘She’d got into some bad stuff. He’d got her into some bad stuff.’ He shook his head at McCarthy’s query. ‘Just bad stuff, you can imagine. It’s like that, performing, people get a bit …’ He twisted his hands together, cracking the knuckles. He looked at McCarthy, at his solicitor, then
looked down at the table. ‘It was threesomes, foursomes, that kind of thing, all with pills, that’s how they got her …’ McCarthy kept his face expressionless, but Allan must have seen something, because he said, ‘I didn’t know! I didn’t have a clue!’ Then Sandra had come to him when she’d found out she was pregnant. ‘She wanted someone to help her. She didn’t know who the father was. But it was too late to do anything, you know …’ He shook his head. ‘She was just a kid.’

‘What about Don G.?’ McCarthy said.

Allan’s face twisted. ‘He did a runner,’ he said. ‘Because she was under age, I suppose. She was only fourteen and he left her to cope on her own.’

‘What about her parents?’

‘They just wanted to keep it quiet. She came to Sheffield to have the baby. She had family here.’

They’d lost touch. Allan had left the band, got a job. ‘I met her again four years later,’ he said. ‘I’d always liked her, always thought she was, you know …’ His face was sad. Sandra Ford had developed a drug habit, the addiction to tranquillizers that had plagued her for the rest of her life. ‘Maybe she’d developed a taste for other things,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t make her happy. I loved her,’ he said. ‘I thought I could help her.’

She and Allan had married a few months after that, when Sandra was pregnant with Emma. ‘I thought he was gone for good,’ Allan said. ‘But I must have been wrong.’

McCarthy said, ‘This Don G. was Emma’s father?’

Allan nodded. ‘She never got over him.’ Allan shrugged. ‘Don G.. Linnet called him that. Don Giovanni,
see, because of all the women. She used to make fun of him – she was the only woman who didn’t take him seriously. Not then. But his real name was Phil. Phil Reid.’ McCarthy looked down at his notes again, not trusting himself to keep his face blank.
Reid. Phillip Reid.
He could see the pages of Barraclough’s notes as if they were in front of him.
Father: Phillip Carl Reid.
Linnet and Don G.. Carolyn and Phil. Ashley Reid’s parents.

The sins of the fathers.

The rest of Dennis Allan’s story came out slowly but inexorably. McCarthy began the task of pulling out of the man the story they now realized that he wanted to tell: the story of Sandra Allan’s death. McCarthy read through the statement Allan had made at the time. ‘Dennis, you said on’ – he checked the date – ‘… on the twenty-ninth of March that you got home from work at six a.m.’

Allan looked at his hands, and nodded. ‘Yes.’

‘And found Sandra dead. That’s what you told us.’ Silence. ‘Is that right, Dennis?’

‘Yes.’ He whispered the word.

McCarthy looked at him. The guilt was etched on his face. ‘Is it? Dennis?’ He was aware of the solicitor shifting in his seat, thinking about intervening, but McCarthy had the whip hand now and silenced him with a look.

Dennis Allan’s voice was quiet. ‘It was Mrs Cooke saying I’d not got back until six. If it hadn’t been for that, I would have said something before, something …’ His voice faded, and he stared in front of him, his eyes
unfocused. When he spoke again, his voice was a monotone. ‘I’d left the house to go to work, and I was so angry, so angry with her. I’d done everything, I’d done so much. She kept telling me I couldn’t cut it, I wasn’t like Pete, I wasn’t like Phil. Oh, yes, she used to talk about him. Then it was, “Don’t leave me, I can’t cope, I’ll kill myself.”’ He looked at McCarthy. ‘I could have made it back, you know. But Sandy, she wouldn’t leave Sheffield. They said it was agoraphobia, but now I wonder … She must have met up with Don G. again in Sheffield. Did she hope he’d come back?’ He rubbed his hands together as though they were cold.

‘I did try to start another band, but then there was the accident. She’d been at me again, we’d got no money, Emma was small, she wouldn’t stop crying, I don’t know. I just went out and got drunk. Then I got in the car … I wouldn’t have done it if she’d just … ‘McCarthy remembered Allan’s drink-drive conviction, the dead child, the prison sentence.

Allan was silent. McCarthy judged the moment, and offered him a cigarette. Allan took it, and after a couple of drags he said, ‘I left work early. I couldn’t let it go. I had to sort it out with her. She was on the bed. Her breathing was all funny and she’d been sick and … There was this smell, and I couldn’t … It wasn’t like when she’d done it before. She’d left a note. I didn’t know what to do. I read the note. I was going to phone …’ He caught McCarthy’s eye. ‘I was. But I read the note, and then I just sat there, I didn’t know what to do.’ He looked at McCarthy with tears streaming down his face. Despite himself, McCarthy felt sorry for
the man. ‘And then I went back and I sat by the bed. And I held her hand and I told her … because I did, you see, I really did, that’s why I stayed all those years, I loved her. But she wasn’t breathing any more, not that I could tell. And I stayed a bit longer because there wasn’t any hurry now, and then I phoned for the ambulance.’ His hand was shaking as he drew on the cigarette.

‘What happened to the note?’ McCarthy kept his voice neutral, pushing Allan along the path he’d already chosen.

‘I threw it away. I burnt it before I phoned. I washed the ashes down the sink. I couldn’t let anyone see it. I couldn’t!’ He put his face in his hands.

McCarthy wondered what revelations the note had contained to disturb him so much. Wondered what revelation could be worse than the one Sandra had already given him. ‘You’ll have to tell me now,’ he said. ‘You know that, don’t you?’

Allan’s head drooped down towards the desk. He nodded once, briefly, almost imperceptibly. ‘Yes.’ His voice was hesitant, unsure.

‘What did she say in the note? What did Sandra say?’ McCarthy leant forward, getting closer to the man, trying to promote the feel of an exchange of confidentialities, of privacy, of secrets.

Allan kept his eyes on the table, his voice low, a monotone. ‘It said about Emma, that now I’d found out, and it would all be over.’

McCarthy waited. He could understand why Allan had destroyed the note at the time, but now, this was
no secret. What else was it that Allan didn’t want to tell him? ‘Dennis?’ he prompted.

Allan’s voice was a whisper. ‘It said about Em. It said that Em had this boyfriend. It said that … That was why she’d done it … Sandy … She said it was her fault for not telling the truth. She said Em had a right to know.’ He pressed his hands against his face. McCarthy waited. ‘She said that … Em’s boyfriend … The man she was seeing … It was Don G. It was Phil Reid. And Em didn’t know.’