Play Dead

by Peter Dickinson

  ‘I want to put one thing into your mind,’ said Mr Firth. ‘We have very good reason to think that whoever was responsible for the body in the play centre must have known about the man’s previous appearance there. This isn’t simply because it may be the same man. There are other strong indications.’

  Poppy nodded. The freesias, she thought.

  ‘So somebody must have told them,’ he said.

  ‘Perhaps he told them himself.’

  ‘You think that’s likely?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Well, if you have any further thoughts I hope you’ll let me know. Ring me on this number.’

  ‘All right.’

  Poppy pushed home beside the swishing traffic thinking not about anything to do with the young man’s death but about Mr Firth’s lost daughters.

  4

  There was a message on Janet’s answerphone: ‘Hi, Poppy, if you’re in. Big Sue, this is. Play centre’s closed, of course, but some of us are meeting at Little Sue’s after dinner if you’d like to come along. Nine, Linen Walk, that is. See you soon.’

  By the time Poppy was ready to move again the rain was really teeming down, so she borrowed Janet’s rock-climbing cagoule, which reached almost to her knees, and battled her way south. Toby discovered a new game in the watery environment. He would watch the pool of water forming on the top of the push-chair cover and when it was full he’d reach up and punch the bottom of its sag, producing an effect like an elfin depth charge. His first effort sluiced straight into Poppy’s face, under the hood of the cagoule, but after that she learnt to watch for the moment of impact and turn her head away. This kept him happy for most of the journey but by the time they reached Linen Walk he was restless for new amusements.

  Linen Walk ran east/west beside the Metropolitan Line viaduct. It was said to occupy a strip of land which had been used a hundred and fifty years ago by the local washerwomen to lay out their sheets to air. Now it was a terrace of pretty but jerry-built 1880ish houses with front gardens and a pedestrian passage between them and the blackened arches of the viaduct. In the front rooms every ornament, every piece of crockery on every shelf, trembled to the passing trains. You got used to them in no time, Sue said. During the last rail strike she’d kept waking up wondering what was wrong, and little Peter, who’d been sleeping right through, had started crying in the night again.

  With the railway so close the houses might have been near-slums, a dingy blotch on the gentrification and prettification of the area, but they too had their coats of ice-cream-coloured paint, with the ornamental details picked out in white, and French-style number-plates by the doors. They changed hands frequently. There was always a ‘For Sale’ notice or two on show. Young couples bought them because they were cheap, and moved on as soon as their salaries would support a higher mortgage. Apart from the railway, they looked decidedly attractive. No traffic ran past their front doors, and there was another advantage, hidden from the street. Behind each house a strip of garden ran north, the far wall being also the wall of the park, with a door directly through. A previous owner of number 9 had altered this arrangement by building a studio across the end of the garden, which Pete’s three elder brothers used as a playroom during the school holidays. In term-time Peter, an afterthought by some years—his first name provided the P of the initials P.S.—had it to himself while his siblings were at boarding-school. It wasn’t as large or well equipped as the hut in the play centre, but much better on a wet day than anyone else’s house could have provided. Pete had largely absentee parents. They kept a yacht in a Turkish marina and seemed to spend most of their time there. Poppy couldn’t imagine what they did for a living that would pay for that and keep several children at boarding-school.

  Little Sue was a live-in nanny, small and brisk, with an East End accent she made no attempt to gentilify. The bond between her and Pete seemed to Poppy quite as strong as motherhood. She’d often arrive at the play centre not having bothered to bring the push-chair that short distance, carrying him on her hip and looking with her gamine build just like a figure in a Phil May low-life cartoon, eldest sister minding baby while mum went out to char. It was an old-fashioned­ nanny-child relationship, doomed to the traditional emotion-stunting traumas when in a few years’ time Pete, in his turn, would be wrenched away to prep school.

  The door was opened not by Sue but by an unknown woman who looked at her and snapped, ‘You’re supposed to be coming in through the park.’

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ began Poppy. ‘I didn’t …’

  At this point Toby, impatient for release, flailed again at the pool on the plastic cover. The water shot straight into Poppy’s face. Perhaps it was that that did it. Perhaps it was Poppy’s obviously cut-above-mere-nanny accent. At any rate the woman, now dimly seen through soaked spectacles, relented. It would have been a longish walk round to the back, the last part a squelch across sodden turf.

  ‘You might as well come through now,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, thank you so much.’

  The woman was presumably the normally absent Mrs Simpson, Pete’s mother. She had a shock of coarse, leonine hair, a Mediterranean tan, snub nose, tough little chin and pouting mouth. Discontent looked to be second nature to her, but she waited patiently enough while Poppy tilted the excess water off the push-chair and then wheeled it down the tiled hail, through the kitchen and out into the garden.

  The TV was on in the playroom, with a video of Ghostbusters cartoons, absolutely forbidden at home by Janet’s stern code. But in the Nafia you accepted the customs of the household, except where sweets were concerned, so as soon as Toby was out of his straps and coat he ran across and settled down with the other children to be zombified. The roof was leaking into a bucket in one corner, and the nannies had built a barrier of push-chairs round it to keep the children away, so Poppy added hers and at last, thankfully, stripped off the overwhelming cagoule.

  ‘Great you could come,’ said Little Sue.

  ‘I’m afraid I didn’t realise we were supposed to use the park door. Mrs Simpson let me in, but she didn’t seem too pleased about it.’

  ‘Doesn’t matter. Big Sue must of forgot to say. Cup of tea?’

  ‘Those answer gadgets, they always faze me,’ said Big Sue. ‘Shove up, Fran—there’s room on here for three, even if one of them’s me, and Poppy can tell us the news.’

  As well as the Sues, Laura was there, and Nell, Fran, and Gina, a jolly and intelligent Mauritian who appeared to be disgracefully exploited by her employers but was unable to complain because she hadn’t got a work permit. They had pushed the sofas and chairs into a semicircle so that they could watch the children while they talked.

  ‘Tea’s just what I need,’ said Poppy. ‘But I’m afraid I don’t know any more than’s in the papers.’

  ‘Lovely pictures of you,’ said Big Sue.

  ‘I thought they were horrible,’ said Poppy.

  ‘Didn’t mean it like that. Course it must of felt horrible.’

  ‘Looked like you might of been going to faint when you came out of the hut,’ said Fran.

  ‘I expect I did,’ said Poppy.

  ‘Got you to look at him, didn’t they?’ said Big Sue, determined not to miss anything. Then, realising that this wasn’t the occasion for the simple gusto of the uninvolved, she added, ‘That’s a bit rough on you.’

  ‘I suppose somebody’s got to,’ said Poppy.

  ‘Was it him, Poppy?’ said Fran. ‘The fellow who tried to follow you that other time?’

  ‘I think so,’ said Poppy. ‘I hadn’t seen him that close, and he’d got a beard then. I don’t know if he’d shaved it himself, or …’

  ‘No, they done that,’ said Little Sue. ‘Least, that’s what it says here … where was it? … hold on …’

  She scuffled among the scatter of papers on the floor. Poppy glimpsed pictures of herse
lf, of Toby, the WPC, the hut.

  ‘Not all they did to him, either,’ said Big Sue meaningfully.

  ‘That’s not right,’ said Poppy. ‘I mean, if it actually says …’

  ‘Not straight out, it doesn’t. They aren’t allowed, are they? But they tell you, good as …’

  They were all looking at her now, even Laura. This was more than nosiness and prurience—they too felt the nightmare. And anyway, what gave her the right to know the truth, and them not?

  ‘Don’t pass this on,’ she said. ‘I got it from Jim Bowles—you know, the crossing warden—and I don’t want to get him into trouble. He used to be a policeman and he’s still got friends in the police station. He says they think the man didn’t die in the hut. He’d been gassed somewhere, with carbon monoxide, apparently—you know, you get it in car exhaust—and then they’d brought him along to the play centre and stripped him—his clothes were neatly folded under the Lego table—and laid him out naked on the table and decorated his penis with freesias. That’s all.’

  The silence of disbelief.

  ‘Freesias?’ said three of them together.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Poppy. ‘Jim says they’d fastened them on with elastic bands.’

  Someone began to laugh, and in a moment as the tension ravelled away the studio was filled with their whooping. Poppy felt the hysteria rise inside her like the uprush of a wave in a cliff cleft, uncontrollable, bursting up into a fountain of sound. It was as though the affronted spirit of the play centre had embodied itself into a force, a pagan godling, local, earth-powerful, and had possessed them into this communal release, selves lost in the summoned presence. Something was shaking her knee. She looked down and saw Toby there, trying to attract her attention, his face full of puzzled alarm. She caught him up and hugged him, rocking to and fro in the dance of laughter. A soft thing nuzzled at her lips. Toby had managed to wriggle an arm free and was holding his hand across her mouth, trying to seal the maenad cry back in. She mastered the uprush, held herself still and with her free hand straightened her specs over her streaming eyes. Around her the laughter of the others dwindled as the god withdrew.

  ‘No,’ said Toby. ‘Go way. No.’

  He stared at her with masculine command, Pentheus confronting the Bacchae, and put his hand back over her mouth in case the laughter should erupt once more.

  ‘It’s all right,’ she mumbled. ‘I’ve stopped. I won’t do it again.’

  ‘All gone,’ he confirmed, then slithered down and stumped back to the idiocies of the cartoon. The women adjusted themselves into their workaday sanities with eye-dabs and sighings and shakes of the head. They glanced at each other, half-shamed, half-pleased. Gina had hiccups. Big Sue was bright red, her whole body heaving. Little Sue was giggling, her eyes darting around and her face full of mischief. Laura had her head turned away, and Nell, sitting cross-legged on the floor, was talking to Nelson, who like Toby must have felt the wild-wood female revel as some kind of threat and run to her for reassurance. The fall of her pale hair hid her face, and as usual Poppy was struck by the way the bond between mother and son seemed automatically to constrain their poses into an aesthetically satisfying group, so that, skill-less though she was at any kind of art work, she felt that if she’d at that moment had charcoal and paper to hand she could have sketched her own Mother and Child. Could Nell really have made the transition from that wildness to this serenity in so short a space?

  Laura turned, her face stiff and angry. She clearly had not been caught in the godling’s grip.

  ‘It’s not decent,’ she said. ‘He’s dead. He’s dead. Please.’

  ‘Course it’s not, love,’ said Big Sue. ‘But oh dear. Elastic bands. That’s just perfect.’

  Her body quivered with an after-tremor of the eruption. Nell looked up. No, she had not been laughing either.

  All that clamour had come from just five throats.

  ‘They’re trying to make it look as if it was us,’ she said.

  ‘The cops, you mean?’ said Fran.

  ‘All of them,’ said Nell. ‘If Poppy’s right, if Bowles is telling the truth—did he say he saw the flowers, Poppy?’

  ‘I don’t think so. I think it was something he was told.’

  ‘They could’ve been pulling his leg,’ said Little Sue. ‘Jim takes himself so serious, you know.’

  ‘It doesn’t make that much difference,’ said Nell. ‘Whoever set this up wanted to make it look as if it was us, and if it suits the police to go along with that they will.’

  ‘Last evening,’ said Fran, ‘they came round, a couple of them, and they were on at me to say how we’d talked about finding the bastard that day he was at the play centre, and what we’d do with him when we’d found him.’

  ‘Me too,’ said Little Sue.

  There were murmurs from the others.

  ‘Yes,’ said Poppy. ‘Inspector Firth was asking me about that again this morning.’

  ‘What did you tell him?’ said Nell.

  ‘I said we were naturally shocked and angry, and some of us expressed our anger in the way you’d expect, but it was just talk, it didn’t mean anything. I refused to tell him any details, what was said, or who’d said it. I tried to persuade him that it was absolutely impossible that any of us could have done something like that in the play centre. It means too much.’

  ‘How’d he take that?’ said Big Sue.

  ‘Well of course he took the line that he had to explore all possibilities …’

  ‘Gah!’ said Little Sue.

  ‘It’s how men think,’ said Nell.

  ‘My Trev was on about it half the night,’ said Big Sue. ‘Couldn’t let it alone. Didn’t know it was only flowers then, of course. There’d been talk going round in the crowd, and when I told Trev … Like picking a scab it was. Over and over and over.’

  ‘Tell him he’s got a castration complex,’ said Nell.

  ‘I wouldn’t dare! Do you think he has?’

  ‘I wouldn’t be surprised—they mostly seem to. Anyway, given half a chance that’s the line the police will take.’

  Poppy remembered the book Mr Firth had made for Toby, and felt she had to make at least a token defence of him.

  ‘I think you’re wrong,’ she said. ‘At any rate this time. Mr Firth told me he himself thought the odds were about twenty to one against it being any of us.’

  ‘You don’t know them like I do,’ said Fran. ‘OK, they aren’t all sods, and there’s some of them doing their best, the way they see it. But good or bad they’ll put words into your mouth, soon as look at you. Not just to do you down, not always. Some of them are like that, but mostly all they want is to make life easier for themselves, cutting a few corners. They think they know what’s happened, and they’ll do anything they can to prove it.’

  ‘It’s more than that,’ said Nell. ‘OK, men aren’t all bastards, but there’s a bastard in all of them, and the ones who took it into their heads they wanted to become policemen are good as telling you what kind of bastard they’re likely to be. Best thing you can do is tell them nothing.’

  ‘I don’t agree,’ said Poppy. ‘That just makes it look as if we’ve got something to hide, and if we all refuse to say anything then they’ll think it’s a conspiracy, and if we can conspire to keep silent then we can conspire to do other things. I think we should admit we talked a bit about finding the man and teaching him a lesson, but it was just talk, and we knew it was.’

  ‘Trouble is,’ said Fran, ‘they treat you different, Poppy. Voice like yours, they’re going to be nice to you unless they think they’ve really got something on you. Someone like me, though, they’ll keep on and on at till they’ve worn me down and I start saying things just to be shot of them.’

  ‘It’s the system,’ said Nell. ‘It’s happening all the time. It’s how they get confessions out of innocent people.
’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Sue. ‘Like when my Trev had his van nicked.’

  She embarked on her favourite story, about Trevor’s van, loaded with plumbing supplies, being stolen from outside a transport café. He’d had a conviction for shop-lifting when he was a teenager, but he’d gone adequately straight since then. At first his main concern was not to let Sue know he’d been in bed with the manageress in her caravan behind the café at the time of the theft, so he’d blustered and lied. Then, as Trevor’s kind of luck would have it, the police got an anonymous telephone call from a man (the manageress’s regular lover, insane with jealousy—often Sue was unable to continue for laughter by the time she reached this point) and searched the caravan and found getting on for a kilo of hard drugs in a compartment under the floor. Trevor had spent several weeks on remand, charged for the time being with connivance in the theft of his own van, but then that was picked up somewhere up north being driven by a pair of runaway lovers who’d clearly got nothing to do with Trevor but had been selling off the contents of the van piecemeal to finance their escapade, and the manageress in revenge implicated the lover and thus, casually, exonerated Trevor.

  Poppy only half listened, having heard most of the story before. She was concerned about Nell. After the abortive closure of the Sabina Road squat Nell, good as her word, had stayed only a couple of nights in the flat and then moved on. It had all been perfectly amicable, and Nell had continued to bring Nelson to the play centre, but now there seemed to be a definite constraint between her and Poppy. Poppy felt she mustn’t expect, let alone ask for, any increase of friendship on the strength of the brief and not very demanding help she’d given Nell, and she guessed that Nell, though grateful for Nelson’s sake, would not want to be drawn at all into Poppy’s world and interests and values, and in fact positively needed to re-establish the barrier between them. This didn’t stop Poppy continuing to like and admire Nell, and wish for her friendship, but her tentative moves in that direction had been set gently aside.

  Was Nell happy, she wondered, in anything more than her love for her son? Was she actually as in control of her life as she liked to seem? There’d been that time, for instance, when the man had first come to watch the play centre and they’d driven him away with their stares. She had reacted differently from the others. Poppy wouldn’t have expected her to join them in their primitive revenge fantasies, but it was surprising that she hadn’t taken the obvious opportunity for one of her bitter little harangues on the destructive impulses of the male. Instead she had seemed to be running away, protecting Nelson, presumably, though he’d been up by the slide, well away from the man’s focus of interest.