Читать книгу: «Silent Playgrounds»

1

It was dark now, the blackness pressing close, concealing the high roof spaces, the far corners, the heavy, shrouded shapes. Water ran behind the shuttered window, drip … drip … dripdripdrip … drip. The only light came from the glowing coals. Under the grate, the ashes whispered down onto the hearth. The warmth of the fire was fading, but even at its height, it hadn’t pushed the shadows back far. The flagstones of the floor were damp; the timbers were rotting and crumbling. The metal of the grate was rusty. But the metal in front of him was bright, its edge catching the firelight, imprisoning it in the brightness of the steel, turning it a deep glowing red. The voices in his head:

When?

Soon, Ashley, soon.

How soon?

Now.

TAKE CARE IF WALKING ALONE BY ALLOTMENTS

The words were written in red felt-tip on a piece of lined A4. The paper was attached to the bottom of the notice at the entrance to the park, DOGS MUST BE ON A LEAD. The writing was unformed, the hand, perhaps, of a child. The paper gleamed white in the sun. It had rained in the night, but the paper wasn’t wet or smeared. The rain had stopped about five in the morning. At six, on that particular day, the contractors took their cleaning truck through the park, emptied the bins, collected the litter and the broken glass. A newspaper girl saw the paper as she cut through the park on the way to the next block of houses on her round. She stopped to read it, shrugged, then went on her way.

It was still there when Suzanne passed shortly after ten. She had set herself the task of jogging through the two parks that formed a finger of green into the city, close to the street of red-brick terraces where she lived. There and back, it was probably about two miles, and yesterday she had almost managed it without a break. Today she would do it, and then look to extending her run further through the woods. She reviewed her plan for the day as she ran. Friday. A lot to do. It was her weekend to have Michael, and she liked to have those weekends carefully planned, filled with places to go and people to spend time with.

The notice caught her eye, and she stopped to read it.

Strange. What had happened to make someone put up a warning notice? She looked along the main path which ran on past the smooth grass and the carefully planted flower beds, narrowing and darkening as it disappeared into the shadows under the trees. About a year ago, a woman had been attacked in these woods. She looked round her. The park was deserted at this time in the morning, but the bright sun of early summer, the flowers and the fresh green of the new leaves made the woods look gentle and benign. Why the allotments? They were on the other side of the river.

She shouldn’t have stopped. She was feeling tired now and she was cooling down. She could have gone on for ages if she hadn’t stopped. Her eyes went back to the piece of paper, and she felt a touch of unease at the thought of the lonely path through the woods, so busy at the weekends when families followed the route to the old dam, so deserted during the week when the children were at school and their parents at work. Stop it!

She set off again at a brisk walk, watching the shadows as she passed out of the sun and under the trees. There was no wind, and the path was dappled and still. The park seemed empty. The early dog walkers had gone, and the late dog walkers weren’t out yet.

The path forked. She could cross the river here and walk on the other side where the track was narrow and muddy. The Porter Brook ran through woods and parks now, but its banks used to house the small mills and workshops that harnessed the strength of the river to power the trip-hammers and grinding wheels of the nascent steel industry. You could still see the remains of the old works – places where the river was diverted with goits and weirs, the old dams that were abandoned, silted up or turned into playgrounds. At weekends or on holidays, people walked by the dams and fed the water-birds that inhabited them now, or sailed model boats or fished.

Suzanne paused for a moment, then followed the path across the bridge to the narrow track that ran by the allotments. She picked her way round puddles formed where the mud had been churned up by the passage of mountain bikes. The path was still in the shadow of the trees, but the allotments were in full sun. She looked across at them. Some were carefully tended, neat rows of green, raked, weeded, staked; but most were neglected or abandoned, bushes and brambles and wild raspberries growing among and through old sheds and allotment huts. It was quiet. An elderly couple in jerseys and wellies were working on a patch near the stream, but the other allotments were empty. She could see a thin curl of smoke from a chimney protruding from the roof of a hut. She wondered if she should ask the couple about the notice. Take care …

She frowned, then realized that her walk had slowed almost to a standstill. She speeded up her pace, and headed determinedly along the path. She began to alter her step to a jog again. Jog six, walk six, jog six, walk six. It was peaceful in the park, away from the demands of work and home. She could let her mind roam in a loose, unfocused way, watching the patterns of light on the path, the way the water swirled and eddied round rocks and banks. It was like the library, almost. A place where she could just be, with no thoughts ahead, and no thoughts behind.

She got some of her best ideas in the library and the park. Suzanne’s life – now – was focused on her research into young offenders, young men who had a bleak and persistent history of crime, waste and violence. Young men like her brother, Adam. She had put together a proposal that gave substance to her intuition that many of these young men had problems with language, with communication. She wanted to see if she could quantify what she had previously only observed. Months of work in the library poring over journals, phone calls and discussions with other researchers and people who worked with young offenders had paid off and she had been accepted to start a research MSc. She had managed to get a small grant, and was now attached to a young offenders’ programme, the Alpha Project. If she could prove herself – and she could – she would get more funding and be able to go on to complete a PhD.

She was at Shepherd Wheel now, one of the old workshops that had been restored in wealthier, more optimistic times. There used to be regular working days here, when the water was released from the dam to power the wheel and the wheel turned the gears and belts that worked the grinding stones. But the cuts had put paid to that piece of heritage frivolity, and now the building was closed, locked and shuttered, the water-wheel decaying. She slowed again and, on an impulse, walked along the path past the workshop and up the steps, through the gate that led to the yard behind the mill.

The wheel lurked low down in a narrow pit. She could see the bucket boards that caught the water and turned it – empty now. She leaned over the wall and peered down into the darkness that housed the wheel. The sluice that held back the water was above her, and below her was damp stone and moss. An opaque reflection gleamed back at her. She waved, and her reflection waved back. A smell of stagnant water drifted up. She shivered. It had the darkness of a place that never got the sun.

She turned back to the path, following it along the side of the dam. Just a few weeks ago, it had been like a lake almost, with fish and water-birds. Now with the dryness of the summer, it was a stream running through channels of thick mud. Suzanne looked at the prints where birds had walked, already filling with water and fading. Closer to the bank, the mud had been disturbed, the green moss that covered it churned up, as though someone had been digging there. The stone walls of the dam were crevassed and cracked with years of neglect. She walked on, coming out at the end of the park where the woods proper started. She almost crossed the road in a mood of defiance, but the sense of work to be done, work undone, made her pause and turn back. She quickened her pace into a jog again. The run back was all downhill. She could manage that.

As she passed Shepherd Wheel for the second time, she saw a man slip out from behind the building, from the courtyard that housed the wheel where she’d been herself a short while before. Her heart jumped, and for a moment she felt a chill. Take care… Then, for a moment, she thought she recognized him: one of the young men from the Alpha Project, Ashley Reid. She got a glimpse of his face, white under his dark hair. She was about to smile and wave when she realized it was a stranger, another pale, dark-eyed young man. She looked away quickly, aware that she had been staring.

Lucy sat on the swing and pushed it as far back as her legs would allow. She lifted her feet off the ground and pulled herself into the seat. Lean back and push, lean back and push. She hadn’t been able to swing herself at the beginning of the summer. Now she could swing herself far higher than Emma would push her. Lean back and push. She’d escaped from Emma. Emma would be pissed off – Mum’s favourite word. ‘Wait in the playground,’ Emma had said. She meant the small playground, but Lucy didn’t want to do that. She liked the big playground better, even if it did mean a long walk. She’d been waiting in the small playground, feeling cross and upset. It wasn’t fair! Then suddenly he was there – ‘Come on, Lucy. Quick!’ – and they were off on a magic ride to the big playground through the woods, across the big road she wasn’t allowed to cross by herself.

Emma would know where to find her. First the swings, then the big slide, then an ice cream. If Emma wasn’t too pissed off. Lean back and push. The swing soared up. She thought she might be able to touch the leaves on the trees if she didn’t have to hold on. She closed her eyes and let the light flicker against her eyelids. Lean back and push. She worked the swing hard now, flying higher and higher, feeling the chain clank and jerk at the top of each swing. High enough! She let the swing swoop her down and up, and for a moment it seemed as though she was sitting still and the playground was a swinging blur around her. The swing dropped and lifted, dropped and lifted, a little less each time, and she began to scrape her shoes along the ground, catching each time the seat swung through its lowest point. Scuff. Scuff. She brought the swing to a stop and sat there, swaying gently, looking up. She had begun to twist the seat round and round, to give herself a twirly, when she saw that someone was watching her. He was standing by the bench at the edge of the playground, where the woods started. It was the Ash Man. She turned the swing again, and tried to twist the chain higher, to make it twirl faster. As she twirled round – chain swings were really not as good as the one her friend Lauren had in her garden, because they went jerk, jerk – she wondered where Emma was.

‘Emma’s gone.’ She looked round. He was standing behind her and was looking down at her. ‘We’ve lost Emma.’ he said. Lucy sat very still. She didn’t like the Ash Man. He went on watching her. He got hold of the chains of the swing, twisting them so much that Lucy’s feet were right off the ground. The twirly rocked her dizzy. He looked down at her. ‘We’ve lost Emma.’ he said again.

Lucy looked up at him. His face had a shadow on it from his hair. He’d said it twice. ‘I know,’ she said.

It was after half past ten by the time Suzanne got back to the park gates. The traffic on Hunters Bar roundabout was heavy, and the air tasted hot and metallic after the freshness of the park. She walked up Brocco Bank and turned up Carleton Road, the short steep road where she lived. It was a typical Sheffield street, red-brick terraces climbing up the side of the hill, the pavement a mix of flagstones and asphalt, weeds and grass growing in the cracks and against the walls.

She saw her friend and neighbour, Jane, sitting on her front step with a sketch pad on her lap and bottles of ink on the step beside her. Jane was an illustrator and most of her work appeared in children’s books. She smiled when she saw Suzanne. ‘Have you been in the park?’ Suzanne nodded, and paused to talk, leaning on the wall. She looked at the sketch pad. ‘It’s these shadows.’ Jane said. ‘I want to get the red of the brick and the black of the shadows while the sun’s just right. They want “a combination of the everyday and the eerie”.’ She looked at her painting for a moment, then rested her brush on the edge of the ink bottle. ‘What were you doing last night? That was a rather flashy Range Rover that dropped you off.’

Suzanne sighed. Jane was currently on a campaign to spice up Suzanne’s life. The women had been friends since shortly after Michael’s birth six years ago. They had met in the park where Jane was throwing bread to the ducks for the entertainment of six-month-old Lucy. To Suzanne, her family life in chaos, struggling with post-natal depression, Jane’s Madonna-like calm had seemed like a haven.

‘It was just Richard Kean from the Alpha Project,’ Suzanne said now. Richard was one of the centre’s psychologists, and one of the few people there who seemed to have any real interest in Suzanne’s work.

‘Richard? He’s the tall one with dark hair, isn’t he? So what was he doing dropping you off in the middle of the night?’

‘It was half past nine,’ Suzanne retorted, goaded.

‘That is the middle of the night for you,’ Jane said reasonably. She didn’t approve of Suzanne’s monastic life.

‘Mm.’ Suzanne was non-committal. There was nothing to tell. She had attended an evening session at the Alpha Project and Richard had dropped her off on his way home. She wanted to get Jane off the subject, so she said, ‘I saw something when I was in the park—’

Jane interrupted her. ‘Did you see Em and Lucy there?’

‘Is Em back?’ Emma, Jane’s babysitter, had been away for the past week, and Jane had had to juggle her timetable and call in favours to cope with a rapidly approaching deadline. Jane had coped as she always did, wrapped in a hazy cocoon of abstraction.

‘Yes. She just turned up this morning out of the blue.’ Jane frowned and ran her finger along a sweep of pencil on her page. ‘No phone call or anything. Actually, it was quite useful.’ She looked at the drawing again, still frowning, still dissatisfied. ‘I can’t get this right. I don’t know what I want.’ She looked up at Suzanne. ‘Lucy’s got a hospital appointment. She didn’t want to go, so I said she could have an hour in the park with Em, and an ice cream afterwards.’ Suzanne shrugged in sympathy. Lucy suffered from bad asthma, and hated her regular trips to the hospital. The ice cream was a big concession. Jane was a health freak.

Jane had been backtracking on the conversation. ‘You didn’t see them? They went to the playground.’ Suzanne had run past the playground. It had been empty. Jane frowned, pulling her attention away from her drawing. Her look of vague abstraction sharpened into focus. ‘They should have been there. I told Em not to take her to the café … You know, I’m not happy – Oh, it’s nothing serious,’ she added. ‘It isn’t so much the not turning up, it’s just …’

For the past month, Emma had looked after Lucy for a few hours each week. Before that, Jane had had Sophie, a first-year undergraduate who rented a bed-sit in the student house next door to Jane. She’d turned up on the doorstep just before the start of term and introduced herself, offering her services as a childminder. Jane, after contacting Sophie’s parents, smallholders on the east coast, was happy to take up her offer, and the arrangement had worked well. Sophie was inexperienced and unsophisticated, but she was bright and sensible and fun. Jane liked her, Lucy adored her, she was just next door and could fit in with Jane’s elastic schedule. But then, quite suddenly, she’d dropped out of her course and left.

Emma was a fellow student. She had been one of the regular visitors at the student house – a house with a lot of coming and going – but Jane and Suzanne hadn’t met her properly until after Christmas when Sophie had introduced her: ‘Do you mind if Emma comes with me and Lucy?’ And she had, imperceptibly, drifted into their lives, a quiet, rather serious young woman, a contrast to Sophie’s vivacity. She had moved in to the student house in March, and had rather diffidently offered herself as a replacement when Sophie left. Jane had been pleased at first, especially to have someone whom she and Lucy both knew, but she was starting to have second thoughts. Emma was younger than Sophie, and, Suzanne was beginning to realize, a lot less responsible. She listened with increasing unease as Jane expressed her doubts. Since Sophie had left, Emma had become moody and unreliable. Lucy had started having nightmares, nightmares about monsters, about ‘the Ash Man’, Jane said, about Emma being chased by monsters. Sometimes she’d come back from the park with the smell of tobacco smoke lingering on her clothes. ‘I know Em smokes,’ Jane said. ‘Her lungs are her business. But she knows not to smoke near Lucy.’

‘What did she say?’

‘Oh, she said she thought it wouldn’t matter in the open air. I suppose … I don’t know … I don’t want Lucy to have another upheaval. She likes Emma. It’s just …’

‘The monsters?’

‘Yes …’ Jane frowned at her painting, brushing away a tiny spider that was running on the surface. ‘No.’ She looked up at Suzanne. ‘I’ve decided. I’m not letting Emma look after her again. I’ll find someone else.’

By the time Suzanne had finished talking to Jane, it was nearly eleven. She let herself in through the back door and stepped over the pile of shoes on the doormat. The breakfast dishes were in the sink and the worktops were a mess of toast crumbs, butter and a congealing pool of spilt milk and sugar where she had eaten breakfast. A fly was exploring this, and she aimed a swat at it. It flew up, its drone filling the air for a moment, then stopping as it settled again.

She walked through the middle room to the side door to collect the post. Three brown envelopes lay on the mat. She picked them up and flicked through them. Bills, but not red ones. She put them into the in-tray she kept on the dining table. The new additions caused a minor landslide, and she had to scoop up a pile of envelopes from the floor and cram them back.

She needed to go and do some work.

Upstairs in her study, she closed the door behind her and felt a sense of peace. Her study was in the small attic room under the roof. It had a dormer window, high and narrow, that opened at just the right height for her to lean her arms on the sill and look out across the rooftops. She did that now, enjoying the high, cloudless sky and the gleam of the sunlight off the wet roofs that tumbled up the other side of the valley. In front of her, the slates of her own roof sloped down into the guttering, concealing the drop down to the road below. If she craned her neck, she could just see Jane still sitting on her front step, her head bent intently over her drawing.

But she had work to do. Inside, the study was cool and shadowed. Her desk stood in the light from the window. Further back into the room, the walls were lined with shelves of books, all sorted by subject and author. A filing cabinet, functional metallic grey, stood against one wall, and an easy chair, a splash of colour, fire-engine red, occupied one corner under a small reading lamp. Shelves at the side of her desk held her set of audio tapes, the start of her research project.

If she wanted to study the way the young men on the Alpha Project communicated, she had to record them, study their language, to see if they employed all the strategies and skills of conversation that researchers had identified over the years. When the negotiation degenerated into violence, was it because they wanted to fight, to assert themselves, to establish their dominance, or was it because they couldn’t read those subtle signals of language that meant I am being polite, I don’t like what you are saying, I am asking you to do something? When they looked blank and nodded in vague agreement to something they hadn’t heard, or hadn’t understood, was it because they didn’t want to hear, or was it because they didn’t know they hadn’t understood, or didn’t know how to say they hadn’t understood? And did the resulting frustration boil over into anti-social behaviour?

As a first step, she’d been recording quite formal interviews with some of the young men on the programme. She’d asked for, and been given, the ones with the most serious or the most persistent records. One frustrating thing was that she didn’t actually know what they had done, and might never if they themselves didn’t volunteer the information. The Alpha management had been grudging with their permission, and draconian about confidentiality.

She took the tapes of the individual interviews out of her bag. She wasn’t supposed to have them here. They were supposed to be kept secure at the university. She’d interviewed three of the young offenders so far. Dean – seventeen, and on the programme as a condition of his parole – she was sure could be violent. He had been monosyllabic, sullen, occasionally aggressive; then she’d interviewed Lee – also seventeen, bright, lively and endlessly in trouble. He’d shown flashes of insight when he forgot his manic clowning. And Ashley. That interview had been odd. She knew Ashley better than any of the others, and yet he had been halting, incoherent, illogical. She had listened to the tape several times in the four weeks since she had actually carried out the interview, and she still had trouble making sense of it.

Q. Tell me about your family, Ashley.

A. Er … It’s not …

Q. Sorry, you don’t have to tell me if you’d rather not.

A. Yes.

Q. You want to tell me?

A. Brothers and sisters?

Q. If …

A. (Laughs.) Brothers and sisters.

Q. Sorry, Ashley, I don’t understand.

A. Er … So … em … loose …

Q. What?

A. Simon.

Q. Simon is your brother?

A. Yes.

Q. Tell me about Simon.

A. (Laughs.) Simon says …

Q. Yes?

A. Not much. (Laughs.)

At the time, she had kept thinking, Odd, odd. He had become increasingly uncomfortable and, in the end, he’d cut the interview short. She wondered if he would let her tape him again. He might be the first one who could provide her with data that would support her theory. Ironically, she had been doubtful about his suitability for her research, as he was classified as having ‘learning difficulties’, and she wasn’t sure if that would skew her results. She needed more background on Ashley before she could trust her analysis. She thought about the new insights her work would give into the dark world of youth crime, which might lead to better ways of helping boys like Adam, before … Daydreaming! She pulled herself back to the work in hand.

At twelve-thirty, she packed her recording equipment away. She needed to go to the university. She rewound the tape, noting the counter number, and put it back in her briefcase. She felt buoyant and optimistic. She tested the mood, and the feeling of lightness stayed with her. It was as if something heavy and dark, something she hadn’t been aware of, had been lifted off her recently, and she was just now understanding how heavy and constricting it had been. She thought about Michael’s weekend, and instead of the chest-tightening anxiety she was accustomed to feeling, she realized she was almost looking forward to it.

Maybe she could cope with the responsibility. Maybe there was no reason to dread something awful happening. Maybe all mothers worried about their children. Maybe, dare she say it, maybe she was normal. She ran a comb through her hair and tied it back, thought about putting on some make-up and decided against it. Maybe Jane was right. Maybe it was time to come out of her shell. She picked up her briefcase and ran down the stairs. She grabbed her bag and keys and headed out. As she locked the door behind her, she saw Jane standing at her gate, looking anxiously down the road. ‘Hi,’ Suzanne greeted her on a note of query. ‘Is something wrong?’

Jane pushed her hair back off her face. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Emma and Lucy are late.’ She looked at her watch.

‘When should they have been back?’ Suzanne asked.

Jane looked at her watch. ‘Over an hour ago. Lucy’s appointment was at quarter to twelve.’

Suzanne remembered their earlier conversation, and felt a stirring of unease. Monsters … She tried to be reassuring. ‘I shouldn’t worry,’ she said. ‘Lucy will have run off and be hiding, and poor old Em will be frantic. We could go and look.’ Both women were familiar with Lucy’s disappearing stunts.

Jane’s face was tense. ‘I’ve just come back. I went right through both parks. They weren’t there. I tried the café. They hadn’t been in. Then I thought they might have come back … I don’t know what to do.’

Suzanne thought. ‘Em knows about Lucy hiding, doesn’t she?’

‘Oh yes. She’s helped Sophie deal with it. I gave her the phone. Just in case.’ She looked at Suzanne and shook her head. ‘I’ve been ringing and ringing, but there’s no reply.’

That made Suzanne pause. There didn’t seem a good explanation for that. ‘Maybe the battery’s run down. Or she’s buried it in her bag and it’s turned itself off. Maybe it’s been stolen …’ Her ideas sounded lame and she could see Jane starting to form an objection, so she hurried on. ‘But I think you ought to call someone anyway. Just in case. Maybe there’s been an accident.’

Jane began to look panicked. ‘I don’t know …’ she said.

Suzanne felt out of her depth. She was usually the one who got stressed and upset, and Jane was the one who maintained an air of imperturbable calm. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘It’ll be nothing. You’ll end up the morning mad as hell with Lucy and wondering why you got in such a state, but let’s play safe. When we’ve phoned, I’ll go back to the park and look.’

‘You’ve been through the park.’ Jane’s eyes were wide and frightened. ‘And you didn’t see them either, did you?’

Suzanne shook her head. ‘No, but I wasn’t looking.’

‘If Em had seen you, if Lucy had run off, she would have told you, she would have asked you to help. We’ve both looked. They’re not there.’

Suzanne was guiding Jane back into the house now, towards the phone. ‘Yes, they are,’ she said. ‘We just didn’t see them. It’s a big park. Do you want me to phone?’ Jane looked at her in blank panic. Suzanne hesitated. She wasn’t sure which number to ring. They needed to contact the police. As she thought about the situation, she was beginning to feel more worried. It was true that the park was big, but it was narrow for most of the way, and she knew the places that Em and Lucy went. If they had been there, she would have seen them, or they would have seen her. Lucy would probably have lain low under the circumstances, but Em would have been pleased, relieved to see her if Lucy had pulled one of her hiding stunts. She thought about Lucy, her thread-limbed fragility, her will of iron. She picked up the receiver and tried the number of Jane’s mobile. She let it ring. There was no reply. Then she dialled 999. This was either nothing, or a very serious emergency.

The mill at Shepherd Wheel was dark under the trees. The doors were padlocked, the bright metal of the hasps gleaming. The windows were shuttered and bolted. The trees stirred as a breeze blew, sending shadows dancing across the water, across the mossy roof. And it began again, faintly, just audible over the sound of the river, just audible to someone standing close to the shuttered windows, just audible to someone with sharp ears, someone who was listening. The ringing of a phone.