Child's Play

by Alison Taylor

  The path debouched without warning into a dank, muddy clearing, from which another trail climbed upwards before disappearing into a dense grove. Clearing and the path were cordoned off, and under the huge, threatening shadow of Britannia Bridge, men and women in overalls literally combed the earth for whatever it might yield, while others made plaster casts of scattered footprints and the long gouges that criss-crossed the mud.

  ‘Short of trying a match with every item of footwear in the school, I doubt if this will get us very far,’ Bryn’s handler commented. ‘And even if we got a match, who’s to say it’s relevant? This is obviously a well-frequented area.’

  ‘Where does the trail end?’ asked McKenna.

  ‘Right there.’ He indicated an area bubbling with dirty water and cordoned off with more fluorescent tape. ‘When forensics have finished,’ he went on, pointing to the carefully marked chunks of rotting wood and broken branch sticking from the mud, ‘Bryn’s going to sniff through that lot for a possible weapon.’ Tongue hanging out, Bryn was sitting near the cordon and, at the mention of his name, swivelled his head attentively. ‘I’m sure he picked up another scent on the path, aside from the dead girl’s,’ his handler added. ‘He could probably follow it back.’

  ‘It’s rather a long shot,’ McKenna said. ‘The trail’s at least forty hours old by now.’

  ‘But the air hardly gets disturbed because the trees are so dense.’

  ‘I’ll make a decision once I get the initial autopsy report.’ McKenna looked at the people toiling in the mud. ‘They’re nowhere near finished anyway, so it’ll be a while before Bryn can do any sleuthing there.’ He turned, preparing to leave, then said, ‘By the way, are the trees interfering with communications?’

  ‘Radio contact’s been OK so far, but the mobile phones are getting zapped.’ As McKenna began to walk away, the other man stopped him. ‘I don’t want to push it, sir, but Bryn shouldn’t be underestimated. He’s already had someone for wearing a skirt that used to belong to the dead girl. That’s how good he is.’

  ‘Has he really?’ McKenna said. ‘How did that come about?’

  ‘We were following the trail from the girl’s room and we’d just got to the bottom of the fire escape when I saw a crowd of girls coming up the path, so I held hack until they’d passed. One minute he’s standing quietly beside me, the next he took off so fast he pulled the leash out of my hand, going straight for the girls at the tail end of the crowd.’ The handler smiled crookedly. ‘He found the one he wanted within a couple of seconds and frightened the bejesus out of her.’

  Within yards of leaving the clearing, McKenna felt like the only human being left alive. He squelched along the defile through the cannibal mud and, in his haste, almost lost a shoe. Like a child, he looked only at the ground in front of him. When it began to rise he dared to glance upwards and saw his way marked by the beribboned branches. As he had descended, he climbed crabwise, digging in his heels at each step. At the top he stopped and leaned against a puny sycamore in near agony while his smoker’s lungs struggled to re-inflate themselves. Still with a band of pain tight round his chest, he set off once more, bathed in the deep green light that filled the woods like water. Now and then the sun found gaps in the dense foliage and flung dazzling rainbow spears to the ground, and when he finally broke cover he saw the school’s white walls had acquired a blushing, golden hue.

  Stepping over the spidery shadow cast by the antenna on its roof, he made his way to the mobile incident room which, littered with paper, cardboard boxes, overflowing waste bins and used paper cups, had clearly not been cleaned out since its last excursion. A fat, middle-aged constable with rolled-up shirtsleeves and his forehead beaded with sweat was lumbering back and forth, dragging behind him a black plastic sack already stuffed with rubbish. There was a strong but not unpleasant smell of air-freshener.

  Aside from the constable, the room’s only other occupant was Nona Lloyd, one of Bangor’s uniformed officers, although Sukie, her portrait greatly enlarged, smiled at McKenna as if still in the land of the living from her place on a whiteboard. Underneath the photograph the known facts of her brief life and mysterious death were neatly written in black felt pen. Eight unattended computers, screens flickering, sat about on table tops, and annotated plans of the grounds and buildings, fixed to cork boards along the walls, bristled with coloured pins.

  Nona, measuring the distances between the red-topped pins on a section of ground plan, turned when she heard footsteps. ‘Dr Roberts telephoned, sir,’ she told McKenna. ‘He wants you to call him.’

  ‘Thanks,’ McKenna replied, then asked, ‘what are you doing?’

  ‘Calculating the actual distance from the school to where Sukie went into the Strait.’ She stood back a little from the plan. ‘It’s not as far as it seems. Like with the drive,’ she added. ‘In a straight line, it’s barely five hundred yards from the front gate to the main school, yet it feels like miles. Everything gets distorted because of the way all the tracks twist and turn through the trees.’ Pointing from pin to pin, she defined the extent of Sukie’s final journey. ‘Give or take a few, it’s two hundred and ten yards from the school to the stables, then just another hundred and twenty through the woods to here.’ Her slightly stubby finger with its prettily manicured nail came to rest on the waterline below the place where Britannia Bridge sprang out across the Strait.

  ‘Why did she go into the stables, I wonder?’ McKenna said, half to himself.

  Nona shrugged. ‘Maybe someone had left some tack lying about and she went to put it away. It’s expensive stuff, especially saddles. Then again,’ she mused, ‘she might have been getting a titbit for her horse. There are bags of apples and pony nuts in there.’ She glanced at him. ‘I had a good look around when we arrived. Inspector Tuttle said we needed to get the lie of the land as soon as possible.’

  Looking from one plan to another, McKenna thought Jack’s advice had been sound. The layout of the whole site had been superimposed on to an Ordnance Survey map, each building drawn to scale. The main school sat at the centre of Freya’s small realm, flanked to the west by the teaching blocks, sports hall and playing fields, and to the east by staff flats and the riding arena. The stables lay south-west, he reckoned, off the track leading to the sports hall, and beyond stables and pasture were a swimming pool and open-air tennis courts. That great swath of woodland also contained a chapel, workshops, greenhouses, electricity sub-station, and two individual houses, with the name ‘Scott’ written beside one and ‘Knight/Bebb’ beside the other. A little way upstream from where Sukie had gone into the water was a boathouse.

  The large-scale floor plan of the main school showed him that the basement area housed the boiler room and maintenance and general stores, and the ground floor the refectory, kitchen and domestic offices, administration offices, headmistress’s study, Matron’s surgery, staff and pupil common rooms, a computer room and the library. Dormitories, night duty station, Matron’s flat and the infirmary were on the first floor, while the attic floor was sixth-form territory. He smiled wryly when he saw the label ‘Smokers’ Den’ on a room adjacent to the sixth-form common room.

  Leaving Nona to her measuring, McKenna shut himself in the cubbyhole reserved for senior personnel. As soon as he lifted the telephone receiver, static crackled in his ear.

  ‘I’m sorry to say,’ Eifion Roberts began, ‘that you’ll have to proceed on the basis of balanced probabilities for now, but first things first. She died from asphyxia due to drowning in salt water, but there’s also a great deal of mud, vegetable and other debris in her mouth, some of which gravitated to her lungs, indicating shallow water. She ingested a small amount of food about five hours before she died, which was probably no later than the early hours of Wednesday morning.’

  ‘How d’you know?’

  ‘I said probably, Michael,’ the pathologist reminded him. ‘Some fifty hours elapsed between when she was last seen on Tuesday and her being pulled out of the water t
his afternoon. Taking all known factors into account, including the effect of immersion on the process of decomposition, she’s been dead some forty-three to forty-six hours.’ He paused and McKenna heard paper rustle. ‘The body’s free of disease, she didn’t smoke, and I found no alcohol and no signs of the use of controlled substances. Oddly, she wasn’t particularly well-nourished — in fact, her stomach’s a little shrunken. The hymen,’ he went on, ‘was ruptured, but not necessarily through sexual intercourse. Riding, gymnastics and tampons are other possible culprits. There was no semen present, she wasn’t pregnant and hadn’t given birth. When the diatom tests are completed I’ll be able to tell you approximately where she drowned.’

  ‘She seems to have entered the water about two hundred yards downstream of Britannia Bridge. You should have samples from the area within the hour.’

  ‘Why d’you say “seems”?’

  McKenna rubbed his forehead. ‘Bryn followed her from the school to the water’s edge, but that doesn’t constitute proof. The scent could be a leftover from another trip, particularly as she went via the stables.’

  ‘He’s not stupid! He’d have trailed her back were that the case. She was hardly likely to swim home up the Strait.’

  ‘Are you sure she didn’t go off one of the bridges?’

  ‘Fallers and jumpers usually look as if they’ve dropped a hundred and fifty feet onto concrete instead of water. She hasn’t got a single broken bone.’

  ‘A man fell off Menai Bridge some years ago and survived with barely a scratch.’

  ‘Quite,’ Roberts agreed. ‘I look on him as the exception that proves the rule.’

  ‘You’re not helping, Eifion.’

  ‘That’s what I meant by balanced probabilities.’

  ‘Then tell me what probabilities to balance.’

  ‘Although you don’t know enough about her to discount suicide, there are more certain ways of disposing of yourself than lying face down in the shallows.’

  ‘So what about an accident?’ McKenna argued. ‘Perhaps she fell and stunned herself.’

  ‘But what was she doing there at that time of night in the first place? She wasn’t dressed for trysting.’

  ‘Girls don’t necessarily, these days.’

  ‘But they will dab on the lipstick and perfume, which she hadn’t. In my view, she’d thrown on the first things to hand and that suggests she went out in a hurry, probably to do something of a practical nature. Don’t forget,’ Roberts went on, ‘she was ready for bed when last seen. Who saw her, by the way? Did she speak to them?’

  ‘No. Two form mates just caught a glimpse of her.’ McKenna fidgeted with his pen. ‘Aren’t you making a lot of assumptions?’

  ‘I’m creating a hierarchy.’ After a moment’s silence Roberts asked, ‘You say she went to the stables? Any idea why?’

  ‘Not a clue. Her horse was in the paddock with the others on Wednesday morning. Nor was there a single hoof print anywhere near the trail Bryn followed.’

  ‘Right. I’ll get back to work and I need to know as soon as possible about any injuries or falls she’d had in the past month or so.’

  ‘How badly damaged is the body?’

  ‘She’s had less of a battering than people usually get in the Strait, but there are still plenty of contusions and lacerations, including some to the head. But such are the biochemical changes caused by immersion in water it’s a bugger trying to distinguish between ante- and post-mortem injuries.’

  ‘How soon will you be able to report on the injuries?’

  ‘Once I can exclude pre-existing trauma, perhaps twenty-four hours. The harbour master tells me low tide occurred just after one on Wednesday morning, so she wouldn’t have moved far until the tide picked her up as it rose. She’d be near unrecognisable had she been carried under the bridges and through the Swillies up to Puffin Island where the tide turns, so she was probably washed out the other way, caught in the currents and brought back.’

  8

  As McKenna crossed the forecourt to the school the policeman at the doors saluted. ‘Inspector Tuttle’s kept everyone bar the cooks in the refectory, sir,’ he said, holding one door open, ‘which is down that corridor to the right. The cooks are still clearing up after the evening meal.’

  The subdued roar of many voices reached McKenna long before he had walked the length of the corridor. Opening one of the refectory’s heavy double doors, he stepped into a room that looked at first sight as big as a football pitch, seething with girls, staff and police officers. Evening sunshine poured through huge windows, here and there touching silvered epaulettes, small hair ornaments and spectacle frames.

  Long tables, simple slabs of unadorned wood on sturdy legs, had been pushed together to form an unbroken length around three sides of the room. At the far end, under a panoply of portraits, smaller tables stood on a dais, with women of varying ages, sizes, and manner of dress grouped around them on plain wooden chairs. In the well below, girls sat in rows on the floor, while others rubbed shoulders with the police officers, social workers and solicitors on the benches at each table. Leaning, sitting and squatting against the opposite wall were still more girls. The noise in the room bounced off the ceiling, humming in McKenna’s ears.

  Every girl wore a navy-blue skirt, he noticed, but their shirts were striped with the house colours of red, blue, yellow and green. Searching the sea of faces, he located Dewi, in earnest discussion with an ample woman dressed as a nurse. As he threaded his way around the crowded walls, causing a stir of interest, faces turned to look and he felt the scrutiny of many eyes.

  ‘This is Matron,’ Dewi said when McKenna reached them.

  ‘Are you in charge?’ she asked. The remnants of a Scottish accent quavered in her voice. ‘I’d like to talk to you.’

  ‘Is it important?’

  Tears suddenly welled in her large, slightly bulging eyes. ‘Of course it’s important! It’s about poor Sukie.’

  ‘Give me fifteen minutes or so,’ McKenna told her, then drew Dewi out of earshot. ‘The security guards who were here Tuesday night are down at the main gates. See what they’ve got to say about visitors, whether official or not, trespassers and, most important, the girls’ nocturnal activities.’ He looked at the girls once more and saw an epidemic of yawning breaking out. ‘How many have been seen so far?’

  ‘Fifty. Sixty, maybe,’ Dewi said. ‘We started on the lower-school kids so they could get away to do their homework before bedtime.’

  ‘Any pointers yet?’

  ‘No, sir. Not a thing.’ He paused, gazing absently around the room. ‘Something might show up when we start collating statements, but even though the girls have been under surveillance since coming out of lessons, I expect there’ll be a lot of cross-contamination in what they tell us. Or,’ he added with a frown, ‘don’t tell us. Everyone, from the deputy head to the smallest kid on the block, gives you the feeling she’s scared to open her mouth without the headmistress’s say-so.’

  ‘Then we need to make them realise that if someone in this room is a killer, any one of them could be the next victim.’ From the corner of his eye he saw a girl with a long flaxen plait moving through the crowd towards them. ‘We’ve got a visitor.’

  Dewi glanced round. ‘That’s Torrance.’ His face mottled with embarrassment. ‘She’s American. I met her this morning.’

  ‘Hi, there, David,’ she said, then looked at McKenna and smiled.

  ‘I’m Superintendent McKenna,’ he told her. ‘Can I help you?’

  ‘Well, as we’ll be stuck here for hours, I guess I should sort out evening stables. Usually we do our own horses, but this isn’t usually.’

  ‘Don’t horses live out in the summer?’ Dewi asked. Her eyes twinkled. ‘They do, but they still need watering and the once-over.’

  ‘Will you need help?’ asked McKenna.

  She nodded. ‘I’d like to take Alice Derringer.’

  ‘You’ll have to be supervised, of course,’ McKenna sai
d blandly.

  ‘How else?’ Torrance replied easily. ‘I’ll go get Alice.’

  McKenna watched her tap the shoulder of a thin, dark-haired girl. ‘I’ll send someone else to see the security guards,’ he told Dewi, ‘while you learn what evening stables is all about. You can also find out why she chose some kid to help and not one of the other horse owners, or, for that matter, whoever’s in charge of riding.’

  Dewi, absently watching Alice’s face light up with the same joy he had seen that morning, said to McKenna, ‘Have you heard about the clanger Bryn the Wonder Dog dropped? Alice was with the girl he targeted. So was Daisy Podmore,’ he added, pointing to the sumptuous-looking girl seated on Alice’s right. ‘They’re all best mates, apparently.’

  ‘His handler mentioned it,’ McKenna replied. ‘Which girl was it?’

  As Alice scrambled to her feet, Dewi gestured to the girl suddenly exposed on her left. She too had dark hair and, like Alice, wore the green shirt of Tudor House. ‘She’s called Grace Blackwell.’ He grinned. ‘Her father’s a vicar, so her and Janet should get on like a house on fire.’

  ‘How can a vicar,’ McKenna wondered, ‘afford to send his daughter here? Even if he’s got a good stipend?’

  Dewi shrugged. ‘Maybe he’s got a private income.’ After a moment’s thought, he said, ‘Then again, maybe he hasn’t. His daughter wears hand-me-downs as a matter of course. After she’d given us an ear bashing about letting dangerous dogs roam loose around the school, Matron told us Grace has quite a few of Sukie’s old clothes. They fit her perfectly, apparently.’

  ‘Bryn didn’t touch the girl, did he?’