Danuta Reah - Silent Playgrounds

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.’