Read Online Silent Playgrounds by Danuta Reah - Free Book Online Page A

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 tothe 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. McCarthy could detect disapproval in her set face. After a minute, Allan spoke again. ‘I found her. When I came back from work. I don’t know if she meant it.’
    ‘And Emma?’ McCarthy prompted quietly.
    ‘Emma just … She packed her bags that same day. Wouldn’t speak to me.’ He looked at the two officers, trying to gauge their understanding. ‘She just left. I tried to contact her at the college, but they said she’d never enrolled. Didn’t even come to her own mother’s funeral.’ His voice was bewildered.
    The search for Lucy the day before had identified witnesses who remembered seeing Emma in the park, round about the time Jane Fielding said that she and Lucy had left. A woman walking back from delivering her daughter to school saw Emma and Lucy in the playground near the gate, and had wondered why Lucy wasn’t at school. There was a dog walker who remembered a young woman answering Emma’sdescription on the path to