Danuta Reah - Silent Playgrounds

‘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.