Silent Playgrounds

by Danuta Reah

  Who? The face she had seen in the park that day, the white glimmer, just a glimpse as he turned back, was suddenly clear in her mind. Not Ashley. She had never been wrong about that. It wasn’t Ashley. She was driving past the garage now, the garage where she had found Lee, and he had – threatened her? Warned her? What had he said? It’s not Ash you want … Lee knew! Lee knew there was someone else, and knew that that someone was dangerous. You won’t want what you’d find.

  She needed to get back, get to a phone, tell Steve, tell anyone, that Lee Bradley knew something, something about the person who’d taken the children.

  And then she saw him on the road. Lee was crossing at the lights, walking fast, his head down, his hands in his pockets, back towards the centre, towards the church where some kind of quasi occult services had taken place a few years ago, the white face of the clock on the tower shining in the moonlight.

  She was on a dual carriageway. She could turn back at the next roundabout. He’d probably run if he saw her. He’d made it clear he didn’t want to talk to her. What if she phoned the police? They could come and get Lee. But by the time they arrived, he’d be gone. She kept watching him in her mirror, slowing her car as much as she dared. She scouted the landscape. She couldn’t see a phone box. She was coming to the lights. She had to make a quick decision. She did an illegal U-turn and followed Lee back down the main road, just in time to see him disappear down the subway that led to the maze of streets below the station. Still no phone box in sight. OK. She could get through the back streets. She turned at the next left, ignored a couple of one-way signs, and saw Lee, again on the other side of the road, turning off again, moving faster now. The end of the road she was on was blocked, and she had to drive across the pavement. Then she was turning left the way Lee had gone, but he’d vanished.

  Lucy could feel him standing over her. She wanted him to go away, to go right away so she could call out, struggle her feet out of the stuff that was holding them, run away as fast and as far as she could. Michael was making that snoring noise again, and she could tell it made the Ash Man angry because he muttered again, and then walked across and shoved Michael with his foot.

  Then she heard him moving around them in the dark. She heard a sound, a clanging, rattling noise, and then a splashing sound. A heavy smell began to fill the air, a smell like the car, a sweet, sticky smell that made her feel sick and made her chest feel tight. She began to struggle her legs again.

  Then he was standing over her. She could see better now, see those feet in muddy trainers. She lay still. She was scared. She was more scared than she’d been in the secret shelves when he’d come looking for her, more scared than she’d been when she’d lost her daddy in London. It was a cold, still kind of scaredness that made everything very slow and very bright. She felt as though she was a long way away, watching, but any minute the scaredness was going to come up close and she would start shouting and screaming and fighting, and then the monster would come and then he would kill her like he’d killed Sophie and Emma. She felt the tears on her face again, running down into her nose and into her hair.

  ‘I was going to take you with me, little Luce,’ he said. But he wasn’t talking to her, he was talking to himself. ‘But it’s too late for that,’ Tamby! she said in her mind. But she knew Tamby wasn’t coming. She knew the monster had got him. Tamby would say, Like a mouse, like a mouse! She had to keep still, she had to keep quiet, she had to hide herself from the monster. She felt something hard press against her neck. Something cold and sharp. He was whispering again. ‘I can’t …’ He was wrapping a blanket round her, gently, like Mum did when she had to go to the hospital with asthma, and for a minute she thought she was having a dream like she did when her asthma was bad and everything got not real. But he was wrapping it round her head and over her mouth and she couldn’t breathe.

  Then he lifted her up and carried her towards the place where the draught was blowing from. She could feel it, and she could smell the dusty blanket right in her face, and then she was falling and she screamed as she fell, and she heard his voice, ‘Luce!’ just before the darkness came.

  And she was falling into the darkness where no one could find her, the place where the monsters were waiting, the place where Emma was waiting, and Sophie was waiting, who had been dead and cold for days and days and days. And she could hear music and bells, and they wanted her because they were lonely down there in the dark all by themselves, and Lucy had tried, she really had, but the monsters had got her in the end.

  Suzanne had waited in the car for a few minutes, trying to think. Where would Lee have been going to, down here? Then she’d remembered the address she’d seen in his file. He used to live in the flats at the top of the hill, the tower blocks that were being demolished, and so had Ashley, once. The lads at the Alpha Centre talked about the flats. When she’d gone looking for Ashley, she’d thought that they must mean the flats at the bottom of Ecclesall Road, where Lee now lived, and where there was a convenient garage – the garage with Lee’s name on, Ashley had said. She’d never sorted that one out. But maybe these were the flats they meant, these derelict blocks where no one came, or no one had any legitimate, reason to be. You could do anything in these flats at night. Who was there to stop you? You could imprison two small children here, and no one would know. Go back or go on? There were no phones, no phones. Michael, I’m coming! She drew up in the shadow of the towers, and went forward on foot into the maze.

  The flats towered above her. The footpath was narrow now, and the walls of the blocks rising on each side of her made it seem narrower still. The lights weren’t working, and as she moved away from the road where the street lights – irregular though they were – illuminated the footpath, the darkness closed in. These pathways had been provided to make a pleasant urban ramble, a way through the complex where the walker could avoid the hazard of traffic. She knew there were green slopes on either side of her, but the ground underneath her feet felt slippery, and as she trod and stumbled on things she couldn’t see a sour smell rose up.

  She looked up. Far above her the sky was clear and she could see the gleam of the moon, illuminating the edge of a cloud just on the limit of her vision. Down here, it was dark. She wasn’t sure what she was following any more. She was lost. There was a sense of movement, a feeling of things that rustled and whispered round each corner. Sometimes she thought she could hear the sound of footsteps ahead of her and thought she had caught up with Lee, but each corner she turned surrounded her with empty silence.

  She tried to orient herself. She’d come from the road, past two blocks and round the back of a third. As she moved round the corner of the block into the open space, she saw a red car, its wing scraped against one of the heavy pillars that supported the towers. Its doors were open. She touched the bonnet. It was still warm. Joyriders. She looked nervously about her but she couldn’t see anyone. They must have run as soon as they’d dumped the car.

  She edged past it, and moved into the courtyard, a concrete area surrounded by the towering flats. Rows of garages opened onto it, but, like the flats, they were derelict. The entrance to the stairwell was blocked and chained. The lower windows were boarded up. She looked round, up. There was no sign of life. The garages were deserted, their doors wrenched off, the fronts black rectangles open to the night. She looked behind her. The garages here still had their doors, one or two of them. A cloud crossed the moon, and the courtyard darkened. There was no one but joyriders here any more. These flats were deserted, sealed up, waiting to be demolished.

  She thought about Michael, and about Lucy. She thought, He is somewhere. My son is somewhere. He is frightened, he is suffering, right now. I need to be with him. I have to be with him. Maybe she was dreaming, maybe she would wake up soon to the mundane reality of looking after Michael, of providing cheese triangles and strawberry yoghurt, of doing eggs with faces on, of worrying, endlessly worrying, that somehow the black alchemy she worked would begin to affect him, begin to twi
st and pervert the course of his childhood, until … A great wash of coldness swamped her as she realized that it had happened. It had come from a direction she hadn’t seen, hadn’t expected, hadn’t guarded against. It was here, now, and it had carried Lucy away with it too.

  She didn’t know where she was. She turned round, looking for the path that had brought her into this courtyard, the route away from here. Then the moon came out again, and the pale light shone on the garage doors, illuminating the graffiti – the tags, the patterns, the words, the names. And it was there. The red of the paint looked black in the moonlight, but she knew it was red because she had seen it before at the Alpha Centre: the circle, the LB, the slash. Lee’s tag. This was the garage with Lee’s name on, this was the place Ashley had talked about.

  And then she heard the footsteps, soft and quick, echoing from the stairwell of the deserted block.

  The intelligent killer. The face of the man they were hunting wavered and changed in front of McCarthy’s eyes. First, Joel Severini smiled challengingly at him, then the face became a blur, the face of Simon Walker, sometimes with his father’s look of challenge and hostility, sometimes with his brother’s wary gaze.

  The park was still and dark. They had turned out in force, quick and silent. Whoever waited in the shadows of Shepherd Wheel, he had killed three times. There was no possibility of a stand-off here. They needed to go in quickly, be in there and in control before he would know or could know what was happening. He had nothing to lose.

  Shepherd Wheel was a black shape in the darkness. To McCarthy it looked too lifeless, too still. The park was full of night-time noises. There was the distant rumble of the city traffic. Closer, owls called, the sudden shriek of one answered by the long cry of its mate. The trees whispered and sighed, and the river rushed and tumbled across the stones. The sounds masked each other. McCarthy listened. The traffic. The night-birds. People shouting several streets away. The river. Something else.

  Suzanne looked up at the tower of flats in front of her. It would take her a year to look in all these flats. But she remembered the sounds she’d heard ahead of her as she picked her way along the path, and the feet on the stairs. There was something here, something alive and moving. Dogs? Rats? People? Did Lee still come here sometimes looking for – for what? The person who wasn’t Ashley. It’s not Ash you want … you won’t want what you‘d find.

  She needed to keep moving. If her momentum stopped, even for a moment, she would fall like a puppet whose strings had been cut, fall onto the ground and never get up again. She’d followed Lee on a gamble, an outside chance, and she had to see it through. She went towards the entrance to the block, the barred and chained stairwell, and looked up into the darkness. She had heard footsteps, and she thought she could see something moving, higher up where the stairs hung out over the shaft. She pulled at the bars, and saw at once that they weren’t secure. The chain that was wound round them had been cut and it was possible to pull them back and squeeze through. Easy, in fact.

  She felt the surge of adrenalin take her, and she was through and onto the stairway. The stairwell smelt damp, smelt of cats and the musty smell of rodents, and of other things she didn’t want to identify. She went up two flights, listening, thankful that she was wearing soft shoes. Then she stopped. Listened. There it was. Maybe just two landings above her, the sound of feet on the stairs, the muffled pad of rubber on concrete. She ran up the next two flights, feeling as light as if she were truly in a dream, flying up the stairs, then stopping again, listening.

  Above her again, but closer now. A soft pad, pad on the stairs, someone who was getting tired with the climb. Her energy seemed inexhaustible, but she slowed now, so that she wouldn’t get too close, wouldn’t alarm the climber on the stairs until he had led her to the flat. Another landing. They must be near the top now. And another landing. Her chest felt tight and her legs felt strangely weak, but the energy was still pushing her on. She stopped again to listen. No one climbing above her. He had been just one landing ahead. He must have left the stairs at the next landing. She moved quickly but more carefully now. She kept in the shadows as she looked up towards the top of the next flight. No one.

  She went up, keeping close to the wall, and when she got near the top, she crouched down and looked along the walkway. A long, concrete path, a street in the sky, with the doors of the flats on one side, and the drop into space on the other, protected by a waist-high wall and railings. Up here, the boarding on the flats seemed intact, as though the looters couldn’t be bothered to climb this high in search of booty. Or maybe they’d been stripped, and then boarded up again, once there was nothing to interest the thief. Vandals would be deterred by the climb.

  She needed to find the flat. The walkway stretched behind and in front of her. The person she had been following could have gone either way. She listened again. Just silence now. She hesitated, then decided. If he had turned left, she would probably have seen him from the landing below. She turned right, and crept past the doors of the flats, listening, looking for signs of entry, signs of life in the deserted tower. Each door was boarded up. Each window was a blank sheet of chipboard, solid, unbroken. She was coming to the place where the walkway joined the next block. She reached the end and was faced with bars. She couldn’t get any further. She remembered the bars at the entrance, and shook them, but they seemed solid and immovable.

  Then a voice spoke quietly behind her. ‘You can’t get through there. And you can’t go back now.’

  Her heart lurched as she spun round. He was there behind her, just a shape in the darkness. She couldn’t make out his features, but her eyes were drawn down to his hands. He was holding something that glinted in the moonlight. A knife. ‘Lee?’ she whispered.

  There was a soft laugh. ‘No.’ Then he took her arm and drew her back along the walkway. ‘Don’t fight,’ he whispered. ‘Don’t try anything. You won’t be the first one I’ve used this on.’

  The children! Just let me be in time for the children! It was too late for anything else. She followed.

  20

  McCarthy tried to keep his mind focused on the now, but his usual detachment had left him. His mind made pictures of Lucy telling him about Tamby and about the monsters, tears trickling down her face and into her hair as she spoke. She’d knuckled them away fiercely, leaving smears of dirt on her cheeks. He thought about skates with wheels in the wrong places and drawings of imaginary dogs and cats, and real brothers and sisters. He thought about Lucy choking in the mud.

  There was a flicker of light under the trees and, as they moved forward, the sound that had been there in the background for a while, a sound of running water, a churning sound, suddenly loud as it reflected off the trees, hit him. He remembered that sound, and he was running as he gave the command to go, running towards the yard, running towards the pit where the wheel turned and turned, carrying the water down into darkness.

  McCarthy was over the fence into the wheel yard before he’d had time to think about the obstacle. He could hear feet running behind him. He kicked his shoes off and vaulted the low railings round the wheel, stopping himself on the wall to drop as carefully as he could into the pit. The wheel, massive and heavy, was still turning, and if it caught him, it would drag him under and crush him. The water was up to his thighs, and the suction made him stagger. A child couldn’t fight against this. He remembered the museums expert, John Draper, telling him about the conduit: fifty metres long, small and narrow. The perfect place to hide small bodies. He knew where it was, the stone tunnel under the water. He was finding it hard to keep his balance. There was no room to move. The wheel turned relentlessly behind him, threatening to pull him under the water and grind him against the wall. He could hear confused shouts, voices from above him, but he didn’t see how anyone could help. He ducked down, trying to feel the tunnel entrance, but there was nothing there. He came up, choking, and yelled to Martin and Griffith who were at the railings. ‘Get that fucking thing stopped! And get
some lights!’ and ducked under the water again. This time he was thinking more clearly. He could do nothing if the children had been sucked into the conduit. It was too small to give him access. He came up for air, ducked down again, feeling down the wall, and as he felt the pattern of the stone change he felt something soft and heavy. It was cloth, thick, like a blanket, jammed in the remains of the metal bars that had kept detritus out of the waterway.

  It was jammed tight. He reached into the tunnel, got a firm hold of it. It was wrapped round something heavy, something that the current was trying to suck away from him. He pulled hard, then, as it came free of the conduit, he got his arm round it and twisted to free it from the bars. For a moment, he was stuck. He needed to breathe, but he couldn’t get his head above the water without letting go, and if he let go now, that would be it. With his lungs in agony, and flashes of light exploding in front of his eyes, he wrenched at the iron, and the blanket came free. He stood up, choking and gasping for air, trying to support himself against the walls as the water swirled and sucked at him. The wheel slowed, slowed and stopped. He lifted the bundle up to the reaching arms, trying not to see the white face and the yellow hair, trying not to feel how cold she was. Lucy. His arms felt heavy as he got hold of the railing to pull himself up, and then he was falling back into the water as there was a soft whoof behind him and a blast of heat as the windows of Shepherd Wheel blew out in a sheet of flame.