Danuta Reah - Silent Playgrounds

Suzanne waited until she heard the engine of Joel’s bike, the roar of subdued power from a machine far too expensive for someone who claimed he couldn’t afford to support his child, so that she was sure he had left. She slipped across the yard and knocked on Jane’s door, pushing it open as she did so. Jane was at the kitchen table, a mug in her hands, staring into space. Her sketch pad was in front of her. She stood up when Suzanne came in and gave her a quick hug. ‘I heard,’ she said by way of greeting. ‘You were the one who found her.’

Suzanne returned her hug. ‘How is she? Is she all right?’

Jane nodded, sitting down at the table again. ‘Yes. She’s a bit quiet, but she’s coming round. The police took me straight across to this place where they interview children.’ Jane reached across for the teapot and poured Suzanne a cup of pale tea. The smell of camomile drifted into the room.

‘What happened? Did anyone … ?’ Jane’s serene manner could be deceptive, Suzanne knew.

‘Emma just left her, just like that, and she wandered off by herself.’ Her normally gentle face was hard. ‘Apparently Emma made a habit of dumping Lucy and going off. Bribing her to stick around. And Lucy wouldn’t, not with a hospital appointment looming. The police think that someone was with her in the playground, but Lucy says not. She said she was hiding from the monsters. But she always does these days. And she said that Tamby helped her, and there was something about the Ash Man.’ Suzanne recognized the names from the times she sat with Lucy and listened to her stories. ‘I talked to her last night, and again this morning. I think she was on her own. She knows the way to Forge Dam. We’ve walked up there together often enough. I go cold when I think of her walking through those woods. And the roads.’ Her hands tightened round her cup, then she looked at Suzanne. ‘I feel so awful. I can’t believe I just let Emma …’

Suzanne knew all about guilt. ‘You thought you knew her. We both did.’

Jane wasn’t prepared to let herself off the hook. ‘I knew Sophie,’ she said. Suzanne waited, and after a moment, Jane went on. ‘Whoever … did it must have got Emma after she left Lucy, thank God. I don’t think she saw anything. Joel said I shouldn’t have let them interview her, but …’ Jane gave her a cautionary look as they heard footsteps on the stairs. She began leafing through her sketch book. ‘I did some drawings while I was waiting,’ she said.

Lucy came in, carrying the peacock feather, a present from Sophie that was one of her treasures. ‘Hello, Lucy,’ Suzanne said, then, unable to help herself, gave the little girl a hug.

Lucy wriggled impatiently. ‘I’m busy, ’ she said.

‘I know, I’m sorry, Lucy. What are you doing?’

Lucy compressed her lips, then relented. ‘I’m playing. Tamby’s chasing the monsters.’ She looked at the two women. ‘I didn’t talk to the real police. I told Alicia about the monsters.’

‘The child protection officer,’ Jane said. ‘The one who interviewed her.’

Suzanne felt cold. ‘I know.’ We want to help the lad.

‘I’m going in the garden now,’ Lucy said.

Jane watched her as she went out into the back yard, the feather held carefully in one hand as she negotiated the step. ‘Still the monsters,’ she said. Suzanne kept her mind carefully focused on Jane as she leafed through her sketch book until she came to the page she wanted. ‘I finally got it right,’ she said. ‘I did these yesterday while I was waiting for them to interview Lucy.’

Suzanne looked at the familiar scene: the terraced houses; the wheelie bins at the entrances; the tiny front gardens, narrow strips separating the houses from the road, some cared for and blooming, some overgrown with shrubs, weeds and discarded rubbish. It was the scene she saw every day from her bedroom window, made oddly new by Jane’s pencil. The drawings caught the contrasts of light and shade, the places where the sun shone brilliantly, the places where the shadows were black and impenetrable. There was something about the drawings that made Suzanne feel uneasy. She looked more closely. There was a suggestion of something – something larger than human, something menacing – lurking in the shadows of an entrance. A hand, oversized with long nails, reached out from under the lid of a wheelie bin. An eye – an avian eye? – watched with keen intent from behind a curtain. The curtain was held back by a claw. Suzanne realized that everywhere she looked, strange things looked back, half hidden, almost completely hidden, but there. Among and around them walked people, happy, smiling, oblivious. She looked at Jane.

Jane was still looking at the drawings. ‘Monsters,’ she said.

The trees were in full leaf now, the heavy canopy hanging over the paths that wound through the woods, following the path of the Porter, down through the Mayfield Valley to the silted-up dam at Old Forge, past the café and the playground, and down into the depths of the woods, past Wire Mill Dam where the white water-lilies bloomed, down the old weirs and channels, down into the parks and down past the dark silence of Shepherd Wheel Dam. Here, houses backed onto the park, big stone houses, three storeys in the front, four in the back where the land dropped away to the river. The trees shadowed the gardens of these houses. Their roots undermined the foundations. Conifers and laurel grew close against the walls. The basements opened onto small back gardens, separated from the park by low walls.

The garden behind the first house was derelict and overgrown. The leaves of autumn were still rotting on the ground where the daisies and the dandelions pushed through. A wheelie bin lay on its side, the contents spilt on the asphalt, trodden into the mud and the moss. The foxes and the rodents had taken the edible stuff, had pulled and torn the rubbish and strewn it around the ground. A small patch of earth had been cleared, the edges cut with surgical precision. Seedlings had been planted, nasturtiums and forget-me-nots. The soil was dry, and they were wilting slightly.

The basement window was dark. The back of the house didn’t get the sun. The trees blocked it out. Through the window, the white of the walls glimmered faintly in the darkness. Drawings were taped onto the walls, each one a rectangle of white, each one with a drawing carefully placed in the very centre. The drawing was tight, small, meticulous in detail. This one, a fair-haired teenager; this one, a dark-eyed youth; this one, a young woman, laughing. Here, a child peers watchfully through tangled hair; and here, the child again, this time crouched intently over some game, not depicted in the drawing. Her hands play with the white emptiness.

Each sheet is the same size, the space between each sheet exactly measured. At first, the pictures are carefully sequenced: first, the teenage girl, next, the youth, next, the woman, next, the child; the girl, the youth, the woman, the child. But then the pictures begin to run out of sequence: the girl, the child, the youth; the girl, the child, the youth; the child, the youth; the child, the youth … and the sequence stops in the middle of the wall.

Suzanne recognized the man who was interviewing her. It was the detective who had been at Jane’s the day before, the man who had talked to her after she’d found Emma in the water. Detective Inspector McCarthy. She had dressed carefully for the interview, putting on her best suit – well, her only suit. She’d put on make-up and blow-dried her hair until the fine curls turned into a sleek bob. But despite all her careful preparations, her chest was tight and she felt panicky. She hadn’t been in a police station since that last time with Adam, the last of the many visits when Adam sat in sullen silence, until, eventually, the scared child that Suzanne could see underneath the façade of bravado would emerge. They’d always left the police stations, the youth courts, together, until the last time, when she’d had to leave alone, hearing Adam’s voice behind her. Listen to me, Suzanne!