Child's Play

by Alison Taylor

  ‘So that leaves you, doesn’t it?’

  Daisy flexed her fingers. ‘What does?’

  ‘As the only other person who knew how to lure Sukie into the woods.’

  Daisy escaped up the steps. Near the top, she stumbled when her foot slipped on a clump of lichen.

  Recovering her balance, she unhooked the hasp on the door, pushed it open and vanished.

  Again forced to follow her, Janet wondered if she were not, like Sukie before her, being led straight into a death trap.

  7

  When Nona arrived home, she found a note from her husband stuck under the tomato-shaped magnet on the refrigerator door. ‘Gone to Mam’s,’ it read. ‘Back for lunch. Love, Gwynfor.’

  A mug of coffee at her elbow, she leafed through the Sunday papers, before going for a long, leisurely soak, taking a colour supplement with her. The hot water and a generous dollop of foaming bath lotion were balm to her aching body, and as her eyes began to close of their own accord she dropped the magazine over the side of the tub.

  She had no recollection of dreaming. Instantly awake, heart once again pounding thunderously in her ears, words hung in front of her eyes as if on a banner. Scrambling willy-nilly out of the tub, she grabbed a towel and ran to the bedroom, leaving a trail of sodden footprints on the carpet and bubbles floating everywhere.

  As she punched out numbers on the telephone, her fingers felt as stiff as twigs. Janet’s mobile rang and rang, but no one responded. She tried to call McKenna, but heard an echoing void. Frantically she called the operations room. ‘Get hold of Superintendent McKenna!’ she cried, when the duty operator answered. ‘Tell him Janet’s in terrible danger! Daisy Podmore killed that girl.’ As the operator started to ask for details, Nona shouted her down: ‘Just tell him! Now!’ She cut the connection and again rang Janet’s mobile, but there was still no response. Weeping, she slumped on the side of the bed, the telephone clutched in her wet hands. When she next called McKenna’s mobile, a disembodied voice told her to leave a message.

  ‘Last night,’ she began, choking back the tears, ‘Daisy kept saying the killer could be waiting outside the flat and she wouldn’t have a bath, because, she said, the killer “could break in and hold me down in the water until I drowned like Sukie”.’ Sobbing uncontrollably, she went on, ‘I’ve only just realised what she said. She could only know about that if she killed her.’ Then, in a whisper: ‘I’m sorry. I’m so dreadfully sorry!’

  8

  Bent over a large wicker hamper, Daisy was rummaging for something.

  Janet remained by the door, well out of her reach. As her eyes adapted to the gloom, she saw more hampers stacked against a wall, stools upended on each other, rolled-up nets in a corner, and rows of folded deckchairs and trestle tables. There were three doors on the opposite wall, and she thought they must lead to the changing rooms and perhaps a kitchen. Dust motes drifted across the light that slanted through the closed louvres at the windows, and the place stank of mildew.

  ‘Sod it!’ Daisy dropped the lid. ‘There are just plates and things in here.’ She turned to Janet. ‘Help me lift that top one,’ she said, pointing to the stack. ‘I know there are racquets somewhere.’

  ‘I’ve already said I don’t want to play tennis.’

  ‘Why not?’ Daisy demanded. ‘What else are we going to do?’

  Janet shrugged. ‘Talk?’

  Daisy sat down heavily on the lid and began to swing her legs, heels cutting swathes through the dust on the floorboards. ‘What about?’ She looked up. ‘You’re not allowed to talk about Torrance or Sukie unless I’ve got a solicitor with me.’ Her eyes were accusing. ‘You shouldn’t have made me say what I did. You’d get into trouble if I snitched.’ Then she offered her ghastly smile. ‘But I won’t, so you needn’t worry.’

  Playing for time, Janet glanced at her watch. ‘I suppose we could have a game of tennis,’ she said. ‘Tell you what, you put up one of the nets and I’ll look for the racquets.’

  ‘I knew you’d see sense.’ Daisy jumped to her feet, trotted over to the corner and gathered up the nearest net.

  As Daisy started towards the door, Janet walked around the wall. She put one of the stools on the floor, climbed on to it and, stretching for the lid of the topmost hamper, called over her shoulder, ‘I’ll give you a shout if I need help with anything.’ She thought she heard Daisy grunt, but the sudden clatter as two golfing umbrellas rolled off the hamper and hit the floor obliterated any noise from outside.

  9

  Ready to accost her, McKenna waited for the headmistress to re-emerge from her house, but the door stayed firmly shut. Eventually he started back along the woodland path, facing the fact that she was likely to get away scot-free — a humourless pun — trudging on unawares when the gravel gave way to tarmac. A frantic horn blast from the driver of the security van jolted him back to his senses. Barely avoiding the van’s front bumper, he staggered on to the verge just in time.

  He concentrated on taking stock of his surroundings. Between the trees, the bright blue glimmer of the swimming pool was now visible. Briefly, Janet and Daisy were once again in sight, but they were soon absorbed by the woods. Fixing his eyes on the point where they disappeared, he set off at a fast walk, but had barely covered fifty yards before he was forced to drop his gaze. The glitter of sunlight on water, the swaying branches, the shifting shadows, played tricks with his vision, and more than once he was sure he glimpsed Janet retracing steps she had already taken.

  10

  Once Janet agreed to a game, Daisy stepped out of the pavilion’s rear door feeling almost light-hearted. While they were knocking the ball back and forth — not too strenuously because her breasts hurt more than ever — she would unload her burden of guilt and shame and fear, without having to stand still, look into Janet’s eyes and witness her scorn and disgust. Hugging the net loosely to her chest, she was about to descend the steps when there was a violent tug on her trouser hem. She glanced down into the face of her killer, and in the split second before she crashed earthwards realised how easily, and how bitterly, she had been duped.

  The net unfurled, winding itself around her. There was a dull crack as she hit the bottom step, and when she came to rest, her head was lolling at an impossible angle.

  The girl who had been lying in wait beneath the steps darted towards her. Snatching a handful of curls, she lifted Daisy’s head. It flopped heavily and had it not been for the grinding of broken bone, Daisy might have been a rag doll stuffed with sawdust.

  Exultant with success, the girl let go and, without a backward glance, melted away into the woods. She stopped once on her way back to school, to extract a strand of Daisy’s hair that had stuck between her fingers.

  11

  The water in the pool plashed gently against the coping and the wind whispered through the leaves, and as McKenna entered the tunnel of trees beyond the pool house the sound of hymn singing hung in the air. The sudden bleep of his mobile was a strident intrusion in that harmonious world.

  The trees interfered with the signal. With the handset angled skywards, he asked the operator to repeat the message. The shock anchored him to the ground as firmly as the shadow of each tree was held fast about its roots. When he began to run he had to look down to be sure his feet were not embedded in cannibal mud.

  Stretching endlessly ahead, the tree tunnel was alive with shadows and menace and snatches of music; abruptly, it debouched into what seemed like a huge green cage. He clung to the netting, gasping for breath, seeing the puddles, the lofty umpire’s perches, the leaf-strewn veranda of the pavilion. Then a movement to the side of the building caught his eye. He turned slowly and his blood ran like ice as a figure emerged from the snarl of undergrowth. Bindweed tangled with her hair and clung to her clothes, her face was streaked with dirt and for one breath-stealing moment he thought she was Sukie’s ghost.

  Janet staggered a few paces, then fell to her knees. ‘Daisy’s dead,’ she moaned, holding her he
ad. ‘She lost her footing on the steps and it’s all my fault.’

  Monday 10 July

  When Sukie’s funeral was being arranged, John Melville exercised the one prerogative left to him and forbade McKenna from attending. Everything else was taken out of his hands by Hester’s parents.

  The service was held in the medieval chapel on their estate, where generations of ancestors had submitted to their rites of passage. Topped with a spray of white roses, Sukie’s casket lay on the floor before the altar. Shoulder to shoulder, Hester’s parents occupied the first pew. John was behind his father-in-law, his left hand curled round the time-worn carving on the arm rest, his right pulling wretchedly at his black silk tie.

  Hester, sinking fast in a sea of grief whipped up to storm force by her own guilt, sat as far apart from her husband as decency permitted. When the shuffle of feet disturbed her and she turned to see Jack Tuttle take his place, she barely recognised him, although she had a faint recollection of his being kind to her at some dreadful time in the past.

  As brief and furtive as the christening, Hester thought her daughter’s funeral was almost squalid, as if the life that began in shame must end thus. All within the space of a few minutes, it seemed, the vicar spoke, prayed, spoke again, offered a final prayer, then beckoned the undertaker’s men to heft the casket on their shoulders. When the small procession moved down the aisle, she fell into step two paces behind her parents. Her mother was grimly erect, iron-grey hair upswept under a huge black hat, stony features veiled in black. Her father marched to Chopin’s funeral dirge, playing on the windy old organ. One or two petals, falling from the rose spray, were trampled under his marching feet.

  The day was humid and overcast. As she emerged from the chapel, Hester noticed a group of estate workers standing very quietly beyond the wall, caps and hats doffed in respect. They stared reproachfully at her mother, who looked neither to right nor left as she pursued the jolting casket to the mouth of the open grave. The procession never wavered: the vicar, the casket, her parents, herself, her husband and that kindly policeman. She heard him trip on the loose flagstone that had rocked beneath her own feet.

  At the graveside, a fine drizzle began to settle on their heads and shoulders. On the rose petals it glistened like tears. There were more words from the vicar, the smoke and scent of incense and a spattering of holy water before the casket was lowered. Hester was dry-eyed as her daughter sank into the earth, for she had already made the decision to join her.

  She was planning her death with the same precision her grandfather was said to have applied to his military campaigns and, unlike Imogen Oliver, would not make a botch of it. Imogen had already lost one of her poisoned kidneys, and although anyone could survive with one leg and one kidney, Hester knew, in her heart of hearts, that this was only the beginning. Imogen would die by degrees, and Hester prayed it would be a long and harrowing process, for Imogen had killed Sukie as surely as if her own hands had thrust her into the greedy waters of the Strait.

  On the day the coroner issued Sukie’s burial certificate, the Oliver’s solicitor sent a cheque for every penny they had swindled out of the Melvilles, together with six months’ interest. Explaining that Imogen had suddenly and inexplicably recovered her memory, the solicitor trusted that the money would be accepted in full reparation for an error beyond anyone’s control and closed with an expression of sympathy for Sukie’s tragic death.

  Thursday 13 July

  Daisy’s funeral was a grand affair, in a huge Victorian church luminous with candles and stained glass, her coffin on a draped bier above a carpet of flowers that filled the nave with their scent. Grace’s father, imposingly robed, took the service and Grace, childlike in her surplice, led the choir.

  With Martha at her side, Alice sat ten or twelve rows from the front. Apart from Grace, Daisy’s parents and the police, who were relegated to a pew at the back, she recognised no one among the hundreds of richly dressed people around her. She had looked in vain for their school friends, the teachers, Ainsley, the house captains, and even for Dr Scott, who had vanished from school two days after Daisy’s accident. Matron, with nowhere to go, was still holed up in her flat when term ended.

  Martha prayed that bringing Alice to the funeral would break the last shackle binding her to Daisy, even if she never forgot her. Nor, Martha knew, would she forget Torrance. The emotional experiences those two girls wrought upon her would be there for the rest of her life, ebbing and flowing in her memory, evoking responses according to the climate, much as the silver water forever rushing back and forth past the school must subject itself to the four winds and the temper of the heavens. Half listening to the Reverend Blackwell’s exequies, Martha wondered for the thousandth time what lay behind Daisy’s dreadful allegation about Torrance, unless it was simply the truth. Her only comfort came from the hope that Daisy had made a mistake, judging a different kind of encounter by the light of her own prejudices.

  By craning her neck a little, Alice could view the coffin through the forest of necks before her. She had never seen a body inside a coffin and could not picture Daisy in that ornate box, although in her mind’s eye she saw every horrible detail of Daisy smashed to ruins at the foot of the pavilion steps. Imagining how the people in front would look if their necks suddenly snapped, she groped rather blindly for Martha’s hand.

  Good Catholic that he was, McKenna felt deeply uncomfortable in an Anglican church, almost as if he were committing an act of betrayal. He had no idea what to do with himself, how to present his worship and respects, when to kneel, to stand or to pray, despite discreet instructions on the Order of Service set before each mourner.

  The territory must be alien to Janet too, he thought, glancing surreptitiously at her bowed head. Her face was pale and she had lost weight in the past few weeks. The fine cloth of her black suit hung very loose.

  During the investigation into Daisy’s death she was suspended from duty. Two independent autopsies, exhaustive inspections of the site and finally, a coroner’s inquest, determined cause of death as misadventure, to which poor maintenance of the school grounds had been a contributing factor. Janet was officially exonerated, but nonetheless, continued to blame herself, and confessed to McKenna that because Daisy had thoroughly unnerved her, she had encouraged her to leave the pavilion. That small, so human, lapse of professionalism, had held the most devastating consequences — if, he reflected, that were her only lapse. He glanced again at her bowed head, then at the hands clasped loosely in her lap, knowing he was not alone in being plagued by doubts. Were those pale, blue-veined hands stained with Daisy’s blood, he wondered, yet again? Was that why she seemed almost paralysed with guilt? Or had she simply taken on her own shoulders the lion’s share of their collective liability? Nona Lloyd had been on sick leave since the day after Daisy’s death, so crushed by the weight of her own self-reproach that she now needed psychiatric help. Suddenly, he realised he had not had a chance to ask her whether the necklace in the jeweller’s photograph matched any of those she found among Imogen’s possessions. One more oversight, he told himself, and although it was probably of no importance, it might, on the other hand, be the key to solving the puzzle that had outwitted them all.

  Janet felt suffocated by the press of black-clad bodies at every turn. She could see nothing of the service, bar the occasional glimpse of Grace’s father bobbing up and down before the altar. She stared blankly into space, seeing instead Daisy in a heap on the ground, remembering how she first thought the girl had tripped over the tennis net and stunned herself, and how annoyed she was when she set about disentangling her. She would never forget the absolute horror of realising she was dead.

  The coroner had been satisfied that the marks on the top step and on Daisy’s shoes proved unequivocally that she had slipped on one of the clumps of lichen that grew like tumours on every surface. Daisy’s own words to Nona were accepted as condemning evidence that she had killed Sukie, although no one could suggest a motive, bey
ond the tenuous theory that she had harboured a lunatic compulsion to avenge Imogen’s leg.

  Janet had seen Daisy’s parents at the inquest, but doubted that she would today be able to pick them out from the crowd. She had no idea whether they accepted either theory or verdict, although there had been no murmurings to the contrary. What do I believe? she wondered. In her heart of hearts, she believed Daisy had been terribly wronged, and that both truth and retribution were being sacrificed to the easy answer.

  For Jack, Daisy’s funeral was surrounded by so much ceremony that, thankfully, there was little room left for feeling. He had found Sukie’s funeral one of the saddest experiences of his life and he could still hear Hester’s voice, telling him she did not care who had killed Sukie, or why, for it only mattered to her that Sukie was dead.

  After Daisy’s death, convinced the resolution to hand was simultaneously too plausible and riddled with too many doubts, he and McKenna had argued furiously with their chief constable for permission to continue the investigation. Given limited authority until the final forensic tests on Sukie’s clothes were completed, they had searched Daisy’s effects, watched over by her parents, but found nothing to indicate whether she had or had not killed Sukie, or attempted to kill Torrance. As the Podmores’ chauffeur was about to shut Daisy’s trunk and a suite of leather suitcases in their car boot, Jack remembered her backpack was still in the staff flat, and because she had been under constant police scrutiny from the moment she opened her mouth with the steamy allegations about Torrance, he let her parents take it away without bothering to rummage through its contents.

  In the light of Daisy’s revelations to Janet about Imogen’s accident, Nancy and Charlotte were again questioned. Remembering what Avril had told him, Jack approached Charlotte with cautious sympathy, wondering what soul-destroying assaults she had suffered from those whose mantle she would later inherit, but she had learned her lessons well and, in Avril’s words, she ‘blanked’ him.