Silent Playgrounds. Danuta Reah

Fading, as though the batteries were giving up. The rain spattering against them, and a puddle gleaming in the thin light. And on the path ahead … Staggering under the weight as she slumped against him. The stuff had been good, strong. Quiet, be very quiet. The path by the dam, now. The night, black beyond the circle of faint light on the ground. The torchlight catching the rain, shining and glittering. Shining and glittering like the mud in the dam, the thick, black mud and the sucking sounds drawing your feet in and releasing them. And the place where the mud was disturbed, the place where you could dig.

      Oh, no. Please not that. And the gleam colder than the gleam of firelight, making the metal burn with ice.

      Not that! And the soft, muffling sound of the mud in the darkness.

      Simon’s eyes snapped open. That dream again, and now there was another one, rushing along a shadowed path, looking for something that wasn’t there, feeling it hard on his heels, the chaos, the chaos, the chaos.

      He looked at the clock, its black hands on its white face calming him, steadying his breathing. Just a dream, Si. Don’t worry about it. Several hours had passed. It was midnight. The night watchman never came up here so late. Simon began heating the water bath.

       5

      Dennis Allan’s home – once Emma’s home – was a maisonette on the estate overlooking Gleadless Valley. Tina Barraclough got lost on her first attempt to find the address, working her way through the confusing maze of two- and three-storey blocks that studded the valley side. From the distance, the estate gave a sense of openness, of green parkland dotted here and there with buildings whose fronts were multicoloured with fluttering curtains, washing hanging on the balconies, painted doors. From closer up, the decay was more apparent. There was rubbish on the grass, bare, muddy patches. The paintwork on the buildings was peeling. Nearby, the blocks were boarded up. Further down the hill, they were encased in scaffolding, surrounded by the mud and rubble of a building site, tarpaulins and polythene sheeting flapping in the summer breeze.

      The Allans’ block was one that was awaiting refurbishment. Police cars were parked in front of the row of garages that formed a basement to the building. Barraclough pulled up beside them. The doors of the garages were uneven and chipped, decorated with tags and slogans and names: CASSIE B AND CLAIRE D WOZ ERE! BAZ FOR CLAIRE D! SLAGS LIVE HERE. The garages had once been painted in primary colours, red and blue and yellow. Traces of the paint could still be seen.

      Barraclough went up the concrete stairway to the first deck, to number twelve, the Allans’ maisonette. Though the rubbish chute seemed to be jammed, stuck open and overflowing, the stairway itself was swept clean, the front doors painted and most of the windows trim with nets and potted plants. One or two doors were open as people watched the police team arrive, but the doors closed again as quickly when neighbours were approached. Barraclough opened the door to number twelve and went in.

      Having got permission to search the house, Brooke had given instructions for the place to be turned over. ‘I want anything – anything at all that tells you what’s been going on there. Anything that says Emma went back after he says she left, anything that tells us about her. I want the lot.’

      The maisonettes were laid out to a pattern. Barraclough had a friend who lived in a council maisonette on another estate, and she could have found her way round this one with her eyes closed. A kitchen to the left of the front door, a corridor leading into an L-shaped living-room with French windows opening onto a small balcony. Upstairs, a windowless bathroom, a separate toilet, also windowless and smelling faintly of urine. A bedroom and a tiny second bedroom – Emma’s. According to her father, the room hadn’t been touched since she left. ‘I wanted her to think she could come back. I wanted her back,’ he said.

      Emma had been seventeen. Barraclough was twenty-four. She wondered if those seven years would be a big enough gap to make a barrier. She could remember being seventeen. She couldn’t remember seventeen feeling any different from the way twenty-four felt, except that life seemed both easier and more difficult at twenty-four. Barraclough cast her mind back. Seventeen had been rows with her mother about her exams. Had it been arguments about late nights and boys, or was that from when she was younger? Barraclough felt as though she’d been making her own decisions for a long time, but maybe her mind was deceiving her. Seventeen. Emma had lived here with her mother who apparently thought nothing about inflicting her own miseries on her family. Her father – was he the ineffectual ditherer he seemed, or did that pathetic exterior hide a more sinister, more manipulative psyche? Emma must have been unhappy. She’d run away twice. Why had she come back – and why had she finally left?

      Barraclough looked round the small room, trying to get a feel for Emma, get a picture of the living girl, rather than the dead woman on the slab in the mortuary. There was a single bed under the window, and a melamine wardrobe against the wall, the kind that had hanging space and shelves and drawers. It was clean and tidy, and the bed was made up. The room was the room of a younger girl, the room of someone who was growing up, moving on. Emma had not bothered to change or update it. The bedding and curtains were brightly coloured with a cartoon motif – Bart Simpson. Eat my shorts. Emma’s choice? Her mother’s? Either way, the bedding and curtains were faded. They weren’t new. A torn Spice Girls poster was above the bed, something that Emma would probably be embarrassed to own if she had retained much awareness of the room. A photograph of Royal Trux, one that looked as though it had been cut from a magazine, was pinned to the opposite wall.

      Barraclough opened the wardrobe door. A stained fleece dressing gown hung on a hook – it looked too small for Emma to have worn it recently – and a party dress, black, Lycra, very short, halter-neck top. A real jaw-dropper. A RECLAIM THE STREETS flyer was stuck to the inside of the wardrobe door. A pair of old trainers lay on the bottom.

      She pulled open the drawers. There was nothing there apart from a half-empty packet of Rizlas, the card of the packet torn, and the remains of a cigarette. Barraclough picked up some of the tobacco and sniffed it. The undersides and backs of the drawers yielded nothing. She looked round the room again. There was a rucksack on the back of the door. She opened it and looked inside. It was empty apart from a couple of flyers – free parties by the look of things, Smokescreen and DIY Sound System. Underground, deep house. She checked the side pockets of the bag – for a moment, she thought she’d found a diary and her heart jumped, but it was a wallet, the kind you get from banks and building societies for holding cards. She flicked through it. It contained a cash card, a bus pass and a chain store credit card. Odd, for an unemployed teenager. Had Emma been in debt? She flicked through the cards to see if there was anything else in the wallet, and a couple of photographs dropped out. She picked them up. The first one showed a young woman at a party or a disco – the background was dark, with people indistinct in the background. The light – possibly a flash – had caught the woman, and she was laughing and holding her hand up in protest. For a moment, Barraclough thought it must be Emma, but the hair was darker. On the front of the photograph someone – the woman in the picture? – had written TO EM. She turned the photograph over. On the back, in a different hand, it said SOPHE. HULL, ’97. Sophie Dutton?

      The second photograph was a snapshot of a group of people, blurry and out of focus. It looked as though they were setting up some musical equipment. In the foreground, clearer than the other figures, was a woman, about the same age as the woman in the first picture, Sophe, but the picture was older. There was something about the style of clothes, the make-up, that said seventies, and not seventies revival, either. The clothes looked clumsy, without the stylishness of more recent fabrics and designs. Barraclough looked more closely. The woman could be a younger version of a photo she’d noticed downstairs, a very young Sandra Allan. She looked at the other people in the picture, but it was impossible to make out any detail. She turned the picture over. There was a date scribbled in faded ink. It looked like November 197—The last digit was unclear, and there was another word she couldn’t quite read:—ELVET. Above that, in what looked like more recent ink, someone had written, so WHAT ABOUT THIS? She looked at the photo again. There was something about the woman – girl, really. The way she