Silent Playgrounds - Danuta Reah

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but she wasn’t a proper one, in a uniform, with a hat. There were voices downstairs – Mum and Dad talking. Her daddy had come all the way from London on his motor bike. She heard Daddy’s voice getting louder. He was cross with Mum.

      She turned over in bed. She hadn’t told. She’d kept the secret, but she didn’t know what to do now. She wished Sophie was there. Sophie would know. She turned over again. Her bed wouldn’t get comfortable. She looked at the window. It was dark outside. She couldn’t see it because the curtains were drawn, but she knew the dark was there. It was OK, though. Tamby would be watching. Chasing… Sophie would say, monsters… But Tamby would watch. All safe, she told him in her head.

      She heard Daddy’s voice: ‘For fuck’s sake, Jane, what did she say?’ and then his voice got quieter. She knew what they were talking about. They thought she didn’t know, but she did. They were talking about Emma. The monsters had got Emma, Lucy knew that. Emma was the grown-up and Lucy was the little girl, but Lucy knew about monsters. She’d tried to tell Emma, but Emma wouldn’t listen. Emma thought it was safe to play with the monsters, but Lucy knew. You play with the monsters one, two, three times, and they get you. Lucy sighed. She had tried to look out for Emma, she really had.

      Daddy’s voice, loud again. ‘I want to know what she said!’

      She looked at the curtain. It was moving, just a bit, just the way it did when it was draughty. It’s just the draught, Mum said. Lucy didn’t know where to watch, and the dark made it harder. It was like that game they played in the yard at school, Grandmother’s Footsteps. You turned your back and they all came for you, moving so quietly you couldn’t hear them. You turned really quickly, but they were still as anything. You never saw them move, but each time you turned, they were in a different place, nearer and nearer. But they couldn’t move as long as you were looking at them.

      She was only six, but she knew about the monsters.

       4

      When Suzanne finally fell asleep, she dreamt. It was the familiar dream, the one she had thought she was free of, of Adam, calling to her: Look at me, Suzanne! Listen to me, Suzanne! And her father: I hold you responsible for this, Suzanne! She pulled herself out of sleep in panic, gasping, disorientated. She sat up, trying to see the clock face. The sky outside was beginning to lighten. It was nearly five. Her nightdress felt damp, and her legs were tangled up in the sheets. Adam’s face stayed with her, bringing the familiar cold lump in her stomach. She pushed the image away. Over. Gone.

      The relief she’d felt faded as the events of the evening before came back into her head. She tried to shut the memory of Emma firmly out of her mind, but she couldn’t stop herself from thinking about what it would be like to be held under the water as the wheel churned above you, or to feel someone’s cold hands on you with killing intent, to … The pictures in her mind were spinning out of control now. Look at me … Listen to me …

      She needed to get up, do something. It was five to five. She’d go and work on the tapes again for a couple of hours, then have breakfast.

      They searched the workshop at Shepherd Wheel at first light the next morning. The roads were empty as McCarthy drove from his flat towards the park. He left his car in the entrance to the park and walked the few hundred yards to Shepherd Wheel, enjoying the silence, broken by the birdsong, the emptiness, and the stillness of the morning. Shepherd Wheel looked tranquil in the early sun, the moss-covered roof glowing a warm yellow, the walls and path dappled with shadow.

      A key-holder from the museums department was there to open up the workshops for them, a young woman who, McCarthy noticed, looked anything but put out at her out-of-hours excursion. If anything, she looked excited. He guessed she was in her late twenties. She had short chestnut hair in untidy curls, her face slightly flushed, eyes shining as she took in the scene. She smiled and held out her hand. ‘Liz Delaney. Hello.’

      He shook her hand. ‘Steve McCarthy.’ Yesterday’s search had found very little in the yard. Now they needed to look inside the workshops themselves. There were two doors, painted municipal green, with heavy hasps for the padlocks that kept the building closed and secure. He took the keys that Liz Delaney was holding out to him. ‘How long is it since someone was last in there?’ he asked her.

      ‘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?

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