Silent Playgrounds. Danuta Reah

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СКАЧАТЬ water, so that they could, slowly and carefully, lift her out. The forget-me-nots caught in her hair and stuck to her face as she came out of the water. There were red marks around her mouth and, as her head lolled back against the man lifting her, a trickle of bloodstained water ran down her face. Suspicious death. She was young: seventeen, eighteen? She was wearing a T-shirt, nothing on her feet.

      Detective Inspector Steve McCarthy looked away, at the scene around him. The wheel was still and silent. There was a smell of damp stone and wood in the air, of weed and stagnant water. The yard was fading into shadows as the sun sank lower behind the trees. A breeze blew, and the trees sighed and rustled, sending the shadows chasing across the flagstones. The flagstones of the yard were mossy and overgrown. The scene-of-crime team were already going over the ground and the wheel, looking for traces of the person or the people who had dumped the girl in the water, who had set the mechanisms going. McCarthy frowned. He couldn’t understand the turning wheel. It had attracted attention to the place.

      As the team lowered the body onto the stretcher, the senior investigating officer, Detective Superintendent Tom Brooke, passed his quick, professional eye over it and looked at the pathologist. She shrugged her shoulders. ‘I can’t tell you anything at the moment. She doesn’t look as though she’s been in the water for long, but I don’t know what that current will have done to any evidence.’

      ‘What do you think, Steve?’

      ‘Some kind of freak accident?’ McCarthy, observing beside Brooke, very much wanted it to have been an accident. He had just left a murder inquiry, one that had dragged on for several weeks without so much as the identity of the victim – a vagrant, an old man someone had kicked and then slashed to death with a broken whisky bottle – being found out. He’d planned to take some leave. Another murder inquiry would put paid to that straight away.

      ‘I’ve no idea.’ The pathologist looked at McCarthy with dislike. She thought he was a cold fish. ‘I can’t tell you anything until I’ve done the PM.’ They watched as the stretcher was wheeled out of the yard to the waiting ambulance.

      The pathologist’s refusal to give an opinion didn’t bother McCarthy. He’d known before he asked the question that this was no accident. When he’d first seen the face in the water, he’d thought, Kids messing about. The park was a playground for the local teenagers in the evenings and at night. They played interesting games. From the road after dark, you could see firelight in the woods. In the mornings, the litter of broken bottles, used condoms, empty cans, told their own stories. Needles in the old toilets, graffiti on the buildings and even on the trees. Girls and boys come out to play … She could have been a member of one of the gangs, could have been messing around, got the wheel started, fallen in and drowned. Poetic justice in McCarthy’s mind. But he knew that theory was unlikely.

      The pathologist had finished packing her things together. McCarthy walked back to her car with her. ‘Do you know who she is?’ she asked.

      ‘We’ve got a seventeen-year-old answers the description, Emma Allan. We haven’t got an official identification yet. But the woman who found the body says it’s her. It’s all tied up with the missing-child case from earlier on.’ He caught the pathologist’s glance. ‘No, the child turned up safe and well.’

      ‘The woman who found her,’ the pathologist persisted, ‘can’t she make it official?’

      ‘She said it was the child at first,’ McCarthy replied, remembering the woman’s white-faced incoherence. ‘She didn’t know she’d been found.’ He anticipated the next comment. ‘It was understandable, but we don’t need an identification from someone who sees what she expects to see, rather than what’s there.’

      The pathologist looked at him for a moment and shrugged. ‘I’ll get back then,’ she said, pulling off her gloves.

      McCarthy looked at the long expanse of the park stretching away west towards the countryside and east back into the city. He’d already worked out that the park was almost impossible to seal off. The gates at either end were blocked; he’d arranged for the path closer to Shepherd Wheel to be closed, but access from the woods, the allotments, across the fields – the park was wide open. They needed to complete the searches of the scene quickly. They needed to get the yard checked, and the wheel. They still needed to find the place where the woman had been killed.

      At first, McCarthy’s money had been on the yard behind the mill, secluded and shielded from observers by trees. But there was no evidence of anything on those mossy stones. One of the SOCOs had found traces of blood on the wall of the mill, the wall that ran straight down into the water, forming one side of the wheel pit. There was a small, dark window in that wall, a few feet above the water. Brooke thought they’d find the evidence they wanted inside the locked-up mill. That scene was secure, and he was content to wait until they had more daylight to work by.

      They’d had trouble contacting a key-holder. They’d had to break open the padlock on the yard gate, but the workshop itself could wait. That reminded McCarthy of something else he needed to do. He went back to the old bridge to talk to the woman who’d found the dead girl. He’d recognized her as soon as he’d arrived. It was the woman with the wary eyes, who had watched him from her seat beside Jane Fielding, as though she was defending her friend from him. She’d said very little apart from giving him a vivid thumbnail sketch of Lucy’s father that McCarthy would have found entertaining under other circumstances.

      She had been sitting on the ground by the old workshop, her knees drawn up, her head resting on her arms. He had gone up to her, and she’d lifted her head and looked at him with shocked, blank eyes, her face drained so that the wash of colour from the sun looked almost yellow. She hadn’t seemed to take it in when he’d said to her, ‘It isn’t Lucy. Lucy’s safe. It isn’t a child.’ He’d knelt down beside her to make sure she’d understood him, and she’d stiffened as though she found his presence threatening. She’d muttered something about responsible or responsibility, and tried to stand up, weaving a little as the shock took her. He’d held her arm, and waved one of the WPCs over. ‘Look after …’ He paused.

      ‘Milner,’ she’d said. ‘Suzanne Milner. I’m fine. I just stood up too quickly. I’m fine.’

      ‘OK, Mrs Milner, but I’ll need to talk to you before you go.’ He’d given the officer some instructions, and then gone to where Brooke was waiting, watching the men working in the wheel yard. Now, as he headed back to the woman, he wondered who to get to interview her. He ran his mind over the things she might have seen and not seen, the things he needed to get her to remember. He thought about her story of the wheel slowing and stopping as she watched it. Who had stopped it?

      What did he know about her? Nothing, except she had some connection with the Fielding woman. It had all seemed like a rather arty, new-age setup – not McCarthy’s kind of thing at all. Her story puzzled him. She’d apparently climbed the gate to look in the wheel yard – a climb that McCarthy wouldn’t have liked to tackle, not with those spikes threatening vulnerable bits. He wondered what she’d expected to find.

      It was midnight. Suzanne sat at her desk, her head in her hands. She couldn’t sleep. She kept seeing that face in the water, and it kept being Lucy. There was something unreal, dreamlike, about the whole thing. The detective – what was his name? McCarthy, that was it – had told her: It isn’t Lucy. Lucy’s safe. It isn’t a child, but she couldn’t get that picture of Lucy’s face out of her mind. She’d gone round to Jane’s as soon as they told her she could go but the house was locked up and empty. She’d come back home and wandered listlessly round, picking up discarded books, shoes, cups and putting them down again. The shards of her weekend lay around her. She bit her thumbnail until a sudden pain warned her that she’d bitten it below the quick. She СКАЧАТЬ