Silent Playgrounds (29 page)

Barraclough spent half an hour on the phone, contacting the vital statistics office in Sacramento, California. McCarthy had tossed the notes of his interview with Kath Walker at her, and said, ‘I want the death certificate.’ She half expected bureaucracy, delay, a series of frustrating hoops to jump through. Instead her request was received with courtesy and efficiency and the relevant record was promised by fax, ‘momentarily’. She rang off in a flurry of ‘thank yous’ and ‘you’re
welcomes’. She thought about Carolyn Walker – Carolyn Reid. Barraclough had very clear ideas about a parent’s, particularly a mother’s, responsibilities. She had felt hostility towards the unknown mother of Sophie Dutton because the woman had abdicated her responsibility towards her daughter, and, as it turned out, towards her son. But now …

Carolyn must have been twenty-three when Simon was born, twenty-five when she had the twins. Her husband seemed to have abandoned her in a strange country with a young child and two on the way. Barraclough wondered how well she would have coped herself. But Carolyn had tried. For four years, she’d brought the children up. Then, for some reason, she couldn’t manage any more. Had she been ill? Four years after leaving her children, Carolyn was dead, at thirty-three. She’d come back to the country where she had family, she’d got work. She’d planned to make a home for her children, once she had settled in to her new job. And then she had gone, leaving her boys with the brother who had tried to look after her, and who wanted sons, her daughter to the lottery of the adoption system. Barraclough frowned. Surely Carolyn could have done better than that. She
wanted
Carolyn to have done better than that.

She checked her watch, and went through to the fax. Corvin was there, looking at some papers. She checked the tray, and the promised record from Sacramento was there. ‘I’ve got it,’ she said. ‘Carolyn Reid’s death certificate.’

They looked at it. Carolyn Reid had died in December
1988, of pneumocystis carinii pneumonia. Barraclough felt a pang of disappointment. She’d expected some kind of secret. She’d been expecting another murder. But pneumonia … ? She looked at Corvin.

‘Thought so,’ he said. He looked pleased.

Barraclough looked at him blankly. ‘What?’

Corvin tapped the paper. ‘AIDS,’ he said. ‘That type of pneumonia, it’s a classic way to go, if you’ve got AIDS. I did a course.’ Barraclough was surprised. He went on, pleased to show his knowledge. ‘It was big in San Francisco – started with the …’ He looked at Barraclough and modified what he was going to say. ‘Started in the gay community.’ He looked at the certificate again. ‘She was a nurse. Must have done her training over here before she went to the States. That’s probably how she got to stay. They couldn’t find nurses who’d work with AIDS cases.’

‘Is that how she got it? Working?’ Carolyn had known she was going to die.

Corvin shrugged. ‘Who knows? It could have been. Or she got it off her husband. Or from someone else. It was party time over there. Mind you, a nurse should have known to be careful.’

‘I wonder why she went back.’ Barraclough would have wanted her family.

Corvin grinned. ‘You’re too young,’ he said. ‘You don’t remember. The papers were jumping up and down. The gay plague, they called it. Hospitals wouldn’t treat you; undertakers wouldn’t bury you. If you’d got it, you’d have been lynched. And no one would have taken the kids.’

Kath Walker had known. After her sister-in-law had died, the Walkers had known. And they had got her son out of their house as fast as they could and they’d kept his mother’s death a secret. Barraclough felt her eyes sting. Carolyn had done what she could. It hadn’t been her fault it wasn’t enough.

Lucy sat in the playground on the little wooden stump, next to the gardens. All the children in Lucy’s class had planted seeds in the spring. Mum had given her some
herbs.
Lucy had put her seeds in one of the little wooden tubs. She didn’t want her seeds to be near Kirsten’s. Kirsten said, ‘My seeds will have flowers on.’ Lucy had said, ‘So will mine. And you can eat mine, too.’ Now there were plants with green leaves growing. That was basil, that was chives, that was dill. Basil and chives and dill. Basil and chives and dill. It made a song in her head. She pushed her hand into the soil and felt it soft and damp and crumbly against her fingers.

She was going to Kirsten’s party after school. Kirsten’s mum was taking all of Kirsten’s class to the funfair. Lucy didn’t want to go. But her mum said she should, and if she didn’t Kirsten would think she had won. She would think that Lucy was frightened to go.

Lucy sighed. She was glad they were home, but it hadn’t really felt like home. It was like someone had come in and changed it while they were away. Suzanne’s house looked all strange when Lucy saw it in the morning. There was wood over the window, and the bush with white flowers was all squashed and broken.

She looked over the playground wall to the shops. There was the big cat that lived at the bookshop. It slept on the piles of books in the sun, and Lucy would stroke it sometimes, and it opened its pink mouth and licked its paws. There was Mrs Varney who saw Lucy and waved. Lucy waved back and made a small smile, but it didn’t feel right.

Really, she was looking for Tamby. She’d looked for him when she and Mum had got back from London. She’d looked out of her window, but there was no one there. She’d whispered the secret things, but he hadn’t replied.
Like a mouse,
she whispered now. A breeze made the leaves dance across the playground and scattered dust on her face and on her dress. Lucy looked across the big roundabout to the park gate. Then she looked over to the shops again, then up at the sky. Now, she didn’t know where the monsters were.

Michelle Walker was a vivacious young woman who greeted them like old friends and giggled and flirted with Corvin as she made them both coffee. She was vague in response to Corvin’s questions about her father. He seemed to have no stable address. She hadn’t seen him for several months. ‘He’ll turn up again,’ she said. ‘He always does. Dad’s a boozer. He was the last person who should have been a landlord. Talk about Dracula in charge of the blood bank.’ She laughed. ‘But I don’t know where he is at the moment.’

‘Tell me about your dad,’ Corvin said. Barraclough was surprised that he’d seen through her laughter.

Michelle made a rueful face. ‘He’s an alcoholic,’ she
said flatly. ‘I can remember a time when he wasn’t, when I was little, but for most of my life, he’s had a problem with drink. Then Mum threw him out, and he went right downhill. He’s …’ Her face was sad. ‘I give him money, food, clean him up a bit when he comes round, but I don’t like to see him now. I don’t like to see him like that.’

Corvin nodded. ‘OK. We’re interested in your cousins,’ he said. She frowned. ‘Your cousins, Ashley Reid and Simon Walker. I understand they lived with you and your parents when you were children.’

‘I don’t really remember Simon,’ she said. ‘He had something wrong with him. I didn’t have much to do with him. He frightened me, to tell you the truth. Kids are frightened of things that aren’t, you know, normal.’ She bit her lip, still serious. ‘I remember Ashley. I haven’t thought about him for years.’

‘Can you tell us anything about him?’ Corvin said. ‘Can you remember what happened, why he went into care?’

‘You’d be better asking Mum,’ she said. ‘Or Dad, if you can get hold of him. He’ll be in one of his usual haunts. I’ll tell you what I can. I was only nine when Ashley came to live with us.’ She smiled at them. ‘I didn’t like him. I was jealous, I suppose. You know how kids are. He wouldn’t leave us alone, me and my friends. We used to …’ she grimaced. ‘Kids are hateful. We used to lock him in the shed. And then he’d wet himself or something, so he’d get into bother with Dad. You didn’t want to get on the wrong side of Dad, not when he’d been drinking.’

‘Had a temper, did he? Your dad?’

‘He was great when I was small,’ she said, answering Corvin’s smile with her own. ‘But it was the drink, later on, it made him … I knew to keep out of the way when he’d had a few.’

‘Why did they take the lads in?’ It seemed to Corvin to have been a family with enough troubles of their own.

‘It was only a temporary arrangement at first. Then it seemed to become permanent. Mum couldn’t have any more kids. She couldn’t carry them. Dad wanted a boy.’ Michelle twined her finger in her hair and tugged at it. ‘Maybe that’s why I was jealous. He wanted a boy who was a proper man, you know? I remember Mum saying to Ashley, “Boys don’t kiss.” I used to get a kiss and a cuddle, but Mum wasn’t very good at that kind of thing. She was very hot on that, lads not being … you know … They thought Ashley was soft, needed toughening up. He used to cry all the time when he first came. He thought his mum was coming back. And then he missed Simon, I suppose. I hated it.’ She pulled a face again. ‘Me and Donna, we got Ashley all dressed up when he was about five. We said we’d play with him and we dressed him up in my party dress and we put make-up on him and everything. Then we let Dad find him. He didn’t half give him a leathering. He didn’t half go at him. I thought it was all right at the time. I thought it was what everyone did. Dad used to take his belt to me as well. But it was …’ She shrugged her shoulders. ‘Poor little sod,’ she said.

‘It was odd, though. I’ve never really known what
happened. They were always on at Ashley about not doing well at school, not doing the work, but then something happened. It was Christmas, and there was all this muttering and Mum going round with a face like this’ – she pulled her face into a mask of horrified disgust –’and the next I knew, they were putting Ashley in care. I always thought that what finished it for Dad was Ashley being retarded. They said at the school that he had, what do you call it, learning difficulties. But I don’t really know. Mum won’t talk about it.’ She looked at them. ‘I
do
think about him,’ she said. ‘I wonder what happened to him. Is he all right?’

Suzanne was left with the chaos of the fire. After Tina Barraclough had gone, she stayed in her study, wondering how the disorder from the destroyed house had found its way up here. She supposed the police search had been responsible for some of it. She looked at the litter of tapes on her desk. They needed sorting back onto the shelves. She frowned. She thought she remembered doing that, come to think of it, last time she worked up here, the night that Ashley … She could see his pale face and dark eyes, but now he didn’t look like Adam at all. Who did Ashley remind her of? It didn’t matter. Ashley was dead. She closed her eyes, and she could hear his voice.
I’m sorry
…
love
…

She should have known. Now, when she looked back, she could see it clearly – the warm look in his eyes when he watched her, the way he sought her out and brought her things. He didn’t court her with flowers and words, he brought her drawings, Coke from the
machine, gave her his time and protected her from the casual cruelty of the Alpha Centre as best he could.

And Steve? Steve thought she was lying to him – had been lying all along. Possibly the one betrayal he wouldn’t be able to forgive. And she had been lying, but not in the way he thought. She’d come so close to telling him, and instead she had gone looking for Ashley, and drawn him into the trap that someone had devised.

She’d planned to give the tapes to Steve. She’d forgotten about that. That was one thing she could still do. She looked quickly through the pile on the desk. Ashley’s tape wasn’t there. That was right, she could remember putting it back on the shelf. She looked on the shelf, but it wasn’t there either. Puzzled, she checked in the recorder, but that was empty.

With her unease changing to alarm, she went through the tapes on the shelves again, this time checking that each tape was in the right case. Nothing. She pulled out her desk drawers and tipped the contents onto the floor, raking through each pile, knowing the tape had to be there and she just wasn’t seeing it. She piled the stuff back into the drawers again and shoved them into the desk.
Think!
She hadn’t, she knew she hadn’t taken it downstairs. She forced her mind back to that evening, and it was still as clear as if it had happened just a few hours ago. She had finished working, and she had put the tapes back on the shelves. She remembered that now. She had stood by the window looking out into the road. That was when she had seen Ashley – only she hadn’t realized it was Ashley at the
time – watching the house. She pressed her fingers against her eyes. She’d come downstairs, and no, she hadn’t been carrying anything, she’d gone straight to the door to look out. The tapes were up here.

But the other tapes, the tapes she’d put away with Ashley’s tapes, were all still there, strewn on the desk. She looked under the desk again, under the easy chair, crawled around on the floor trying to see if it had been kicked carelessly into the shadow in a corner. Nothing. She rubbed her forehead with the back of her hand. The police had been up here searching. Had they found the tape and taken it? She hadn’t looked at the list of things they’d taken away. It took her a while to find it, stuffed into the in-tray under a pile of unopened letters, the post from the last few days. She checked the list. No tapes were mentioned.

She went back up to the study and sat down, her head in her hands. The tape had gone. Ashley’s tape had gone. And she hadn’t told anyone about it, thinking it didn’t matter, wasn’t relevant. She thought. There
wasn’t
anything on the tape that was relevant. For a minute, she was tempted to say nothing, to keep quiet about it. But she couldn’t do that. Relevant or not, she had to tell someone. She had to tell Steve. She dreaded talking to him, knowing she would hear that cold, impersonal tone in his voice, an impatience to get her off the phone, but she couldn’t go behind his back to someone else.