Silent Playgrounds. Danuta Reah

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.’

      A random killer. They couldn’t exclude that possibility, Barraclough knew. A Peeping Tom in the park, someone who. had been watching Emma, watched her having sex with her boyfriend, got his own ideas about what he wanted to do. If Emma had gone to Shepherd Wheel willingly … she looked back through copies of the witness statements they’d managed to get so far. A dog walker had seen a woman answering Emma’s description walking towards Shepherd Wheel at around ten-thirty the morning of her death – Barraclough still couldn’t understand it as a rendezvous, a place to have sex. It seemed dark and uninviting. ‘Sticks a knife in her instead of his dick,’ Corvin said.

      ‘Someone who felt guilty – wants to be caught?’ Barraclough didn’t like the idea of a random killer – none of them did. These were the most difficult cases, and often the most high profile.

      ‘What about the father?’ Corvin made the logical follow-up to Barraclough’s point.

      Brooke stepped in again. ‘Dennis Allan. Nothing recent, no social services reports. But he did time in 1982. Drink-driving conviction. Killed a kid; he got a year. We talked to him last night, just a preliminary. He’s coming in first thing. Steve, you do that interview. We need to know exactly why she left home.’ He paused for a moment, then answered the unspoken question. ‘He’s not in the clear, not by a long chalk.’

      ‘What happened to Emma’s mum?’ Corvin again.

      Brooke looked at the team for a moment. His glasses caught the light, masking his expression. ‘She took an overdose. Died. The verdict was accidental death.’ A murmur ran round the room.

      ‘Guilt,’ Barraclough said.

      Emma’s father was a small man in his early fifties. He was very unlike his pretty, fair-haired daughter. What hair he had was gingerish, streaked with grey. His face was puffy, the broken veins on his cheeks standing out against his pallor. He looked unhealthy and uncomfortable. He didn’t look, to McCarthy, like a bereaved parent. Emma’s record told a story that McCarthy didn’t like. Something had gone seriously wrong in her life, long before these events, long before her mother’s death. Emma wasn’t simply a teenager traumatized by bereavement.

      They had gone through the formalities and had already established that Allan had no alibi for the previous morning. ‘What was I doing?’ he said, apparently surprised at the question. ‘I worked night shift. Came home and went to bed.’ No one had seen him, apart from the newsagent at about eight. He’d nipped in to the shop for a paper and some cigarettes. He began to look uneasy as the implications of McCarthy’s questions dawned on him. His face got more colour and his eyes went pinker round the lids. McCarthy waited to see if he would object, but he said nothing, just twisted his hands nervously.

      ‘Can we go back a few weeks, Mr Allan?’ McCarthy decided it was time for him to build up the pressure a bit. ‘I understand you lost your wife …’

      ‘In March, end of March.’ The man seemed pathetically eager to tell him.

      McCarthy had the date in front of him. March 29. Dennis Allan had come off his shift at six that morning and found his wife dead. ‘I’m sorry.’ A necessary formality. ‘Could you tell me what happened? In your own time, Mr Allan.’

      The man’s eyes got pinker, and he blinked. ‘Sandy, my wife, she …’ He seemed to be having trouble putting the words together. ‘She was ill, see, you know, in her mind. All through our marriage it was a problem. She was on pills, but they didn’t always work – made her dopey, so she’d stop them, and then …’ He looked down at his hands, twisting them together. McCarthy steepled his fingers against his mouth and nodded. Dennis Allan looked at him. ‘She was always, I mean she …’ He swallowed. ‘She used to try and harm herself, you know?’ McCarthy nodded again. ‘She didn’t mean it, not like that, not really, but when things got on top of her, she’d take her pills, you know …’ His eyes sought out Tina Barraclough’s, then McCarthy’s, looking for their understanding.

      ‘She’d take an overdose?’ Barraclough prompted.

      He looked grateful. ‘She didn’t mean it,’ he said.

      ‘But this time?’ McCarthy watched the wash of colour that flooded the man’s face.

      ‘She took a lot of pills. And with some drink. She did it while I was at work. She …’ He put his head in his hands. A display of grief, natural for a man talking about such a recent bereavement, a man doubly bereaved. McCarthy wondered why he wasn’t convinced. He waited, aware that Barraclough was hovering on the brink of saying something to the distressed man. He shook his head slightly, and she sat back.