The Playground Murders

by Lesley Thomson

  ‘I have to get on,’ she told Cashman. The brief involved removing white paint (applied for privacy during the investigation) off the front windows and vacuuming up fingerprint powder. Steam cleaning and fumigation throughout. Stella’s company didn’t yet offer physical restoration so she’d outsourced to a carpentry firm to make good the floorboards.

  No amount of deep cleaning would erase history. Already, Stella knew, the place was known as the Murder House. The home of what reporter Lucie May had called the Antiquarian Killer.

  ‘Philips’ wife is in a safe house, her daughter lives in London. She’s something legal.’ Cashman was back to chatty.

  ‘Safe from who? Christopher Philips is in prison.’ Stella shouldn’t have asked, she wanted Cashman gone so that they could get on with the job.

  ‘There’s always vigilantes. Someone who’s spent years searching and—’ Cashman caught sight of himself in a fingerprint-clouded mirror and set about smoothing his hair. ‘Homicide has long-term repercussions. Terry said it makes victims of everyone. Years later people still hurt. Only the killer walks free.’ He moved out of the way for Darren to pass with a biohazard container; Donette and Shelley were manipulating a giant roll of plastic sheeting through the front door.

  ‘Unless there’s anything else…’

  Hoisting the police tape as if it had weight, Cashman hesitated on the doorstep. ‘Actually, Stell, I was wondering about a drink. For old time’s…’ The cliché died on his lips.

  ‘It looks like I’ll be full-on here.’ Stella tried to sound regretful although the prospect of cleaning made her spirits soar.

  ‘Another time.’ Cashman ducked under the tape and strode away up the street.

  ‘Another time.’ Stella gathered up the tape. It was no longer a crime scene. It was a deep-cleaning situation.

  *

  The unremitting light revealed infinite marks and stains, abrasions and foreign matter in the garage. It banished dark corners and shadows. Not that Stella believed in ghosts. They were more Jack’s thing. He chatted to phantoms, in subway tunnels, in his house and as he drove his train past disused stations. He claimed that dead people were everywhere. Flitting a duster in someone’s bedroom or over keyboards in an office, Stella could dismiss this as one of Jack’s many flights of fancy. But alone in the place where Rachel Cater’s body had been so violently disposed of, Stella was haunted not by ghosts, but by Rachel’s last moments. As she powered the steam cleaner over the garage floor, directing it over the shaft cover (the deposition site), Stella – usually determinedly rational – imagined the young woman crumpled at the bottom. Had she woken and realized her fate? Ridiculous though it was, Stella felt that by removing all trace of the murder she was complicit in the crime.

  She diverted herself with Cashman. He’d been strict on confidentiality. He knew her well enough to know she didn’t gossip. He had suggested coffee yet Stella wasn’t convinced that he’d come all the way to Winchcombe just for that. Or had he? Jackie said that Stella never gauged her effect on men. They fall for you hook, line and sinker. During their fling Martin (she corrected herself to ‘Cashman’ which kept him at a distance) had enlisted her help on a case; he was confidential when it suited.

  Why would he think she was investigating a murder that was solved? Did the police think they’d got the wrong man? Why was Cashman in Gloucestershire? Terry would never let an innocent man go to prison to keep up his solve rate. Was Cashman checking on the work of other detectives? All angles led back to the coffee. He’d been smart and tidy. He’d come to ask her out.

  Returning to the house, Stella heard shouts. A woman was yelling at Donette in the hall. Stella’s staff knew to keep the prying public away from a scene. Inevitably they came; posing as meter readers, Jehovah’s Witnesses, even collectors for charities, intent on seeing where a crime had been committed or a person had died.

  Stella’s dad had taught her to appraise witnesses at speed. Late twenties. Blonde hair hairdresser-messed, black fitted leather jacket, floaty dress with orange splodges that looked like stains. The woman’s high heels raised her to about five-seven, well shy of Stella’s six feet, but enabling her to tower over Donette.

  ‘I’m afraid you can’t come on site without protective clothing.’ Stella pushed up the visor on her helmet. ‘You have no authority.’

  ‘I have more authority than you! Site? This is my home,’ the woman replied hotly. ‘Every minute you’re arguing is another minute that Daddy is languishing in jail!’

  ‘You’re Carrie.’ Cashman had referred to the Philipses’ daughter. Grown up, lives away from home. And now, it seemed, back.

  ‘And you’re Stella Victoria Darnell!’ Kicking off a shoe and massaging a stockinged foot Carrie Philips uttered Stella’s full name as if it was a swear word. ‘I want you to sort out this mess.’

  ‘That’s what I’m in—’ Stella was reeling from Carrie Philips’ saying her middle name. Stella told no one.

  ‘Don’t waste your time doing poxy cleaning.’

  ‘It’s my job…’ Stella didn’t say that there was little more useful and rewarding.

  ‘Don’t bullshit me! It’s not your proper job.’ Carrie Philips flung a look of scorn at the Planet 2000 vacuum by the stairs. ‘You solve murders. I want you to find the true killer of Rachel Cater and set my father free!’

  Chapter Four

  31st October 1980

  ‘Get up there,’ said Danielle. ‘Dare you.’

  ‘I don’t feel like it.’ Robbie was scared, but he wasn’t going to tell Danielle.

  ‘You’re scared.’ Danielle whacked one of the struts of the very high slide making the metal ring. Her slide. That would teach Robbie to call her smelly. Danielle had taken time devising Robbie’s punishment. But she’d chosen the date of the punishment that afternoon in a lesson on the history of Halloween. It was All Souls Eve. The day, her teacher said, that it was once believed the dead walked. Danielle would prove it.

  Robbie, three days short of his sixth birthday and ten-year-old Danielle were alone in the playground. Robbie was meeting his classmate Kevin Hood. They always went to cubs together. Danielle had followed him.

  ‘Kevin’s coming.’ Robbie said stoutly. He sensed danger.

  ‘Don’t you ever cheek me again. Yeah?’

  ‘No never.’ The boy trembled.

  Danielle grabbed Robbie and propelled him up the ladder in front of her.

  ‘I can’t.’ Robbie wailed.

  At the top everything was spinning, the park, the bandstand, the flower beds. All of the playground. Robbie just stopped himself saying that he wanted his mum.

  ‘Don’t ever. Call me. Smelly again.’ Danielle jerked him to the top of the slide.

  Robbie was struck by the irony that he’d shouted it to Danielle Hindle in the school corridor to get her attention, and now he had her all to himself. Despite his terror he gave a snigger.

  ‘How dare you laugh at me.’ Hindle gave the boy a push. Hardly a push. She never touched him. Not at all.

  She contemplated the ground. How like a broken doll Robbie looked. He wasn’t walking. He wasn’t dead.

  The last of the sun broke from a cloud and flooded the concrete with light.

  Danielle saw a movement in the bandstand. Someone was watching. Not someone… Sarah Ferris.

  *

  Kevin Hood found Robbie sprawled in the playground. Exasperated that Robbie was playing being shot dead and wouldn’t stop, Kevin went by himself. An hour and a half later, over chicken nuggets and baked beans, he mentioned it to his mum.

  Robbie had been dead when the police found him. When they questioned Kevin, the little boy had remarked that he’d got fed up with Robbie being the wounded robber who got nursed by Sarah. Had Kevin Hood pushed his friend off the slide?

  If timings were correct, it seemed not. Michael Sutherland, the pathologist, reported that Robert Walsh had been dead for over an hour when Kevin had found him. Joy Hindle and her girls Maxine and Da
nielle had seen Kevin going into the park at half past four. They were his alibi.

  *

  1st December

  Robbie Walsh wasn’t the first child to die in a British playground – since the nineteen fifties injuries and fatalities were common – but he was the first to die in 1980. His face was splashed over the Hammersmith and Fulham Chronicle. Paying tribute, Miss Barnes his teacher said, ‘Robbie was honest, curious and helpful, he’ll be so dreadfully missed.’ The inquest heard that the boy was frightened of heights. He could have panicked and slipped. He hit the ground head first, fracturing his skull in three places. The coroner ruled accidental death. A child safety group told Lucie May, the Chronicle’s chief reporter, that the ‘height of the tower slide was equivalent to a first-storey window’ and that most playgrounds were death traps. The iron equipment (Ocean Wave ‘witch’s hat’, roundabout and rocking boat) had crushed the limbs and shortened the lives of Britain’s children for decades. Wartime bombsites had been safer.

  To quote Lucie May, ‘Little Robbie’s untimely death has left a hole in the community, neighbours adored the mischievous lad who put a smile on everyone’s face.’ May went on, ‘According to Parks and Recreation Committee Minutes, a move “to update the equipment and replace the concrete with softer material is pending.” What new tragedy must strike our kids before “pending” becomes “action”?’

  A second funeral was Danielle Hindle’s brainwave. Two months on and Robbie’s death was making his sister Nicola annoying. A funeral was for crying, Danielle said. Nicola hadn’t been allowed to go to Robbie’s. If they had one Nicola would stop her snivelling and cheer up. By inadvertently offering a child the chance to grieve a loved one, Danielle was ahead of her time. Once she’d got over the idea that it was naughty, Nicola appreciated attention focused on her little brother who, as if he’d never been born, was never mentioned at home.

  ‘We should do it where I found Robbie being dead,’ said Kevin Hood.

  ‘You don’t do funerals where people die, they happen in churches where they burn bodies. This roundabout is the cata-fouck. My dad said it’s called that.’ Danielle did a handstand because ages ago Lee had said she was good at them.

  ‘The what?’ Lee flexed his shoulders. He was too grown-up for this stuff.

  ‘Catapult!’ Jason crowed. As Danielle’s brother he granted himself authority in the impending ceremony. He was quickly disabused of this.

  ‘Kev, you carry the coffin.’ Danielle held up a shoebox. She led them to a bench by the railings. ‘This is the church.’

  The children – Nicky and Lee who were ten like Danielle, and six-year-olds Jason and Kevin with Sarah, Lee’s half-sister – crowded around Danielle. It was properly dark. The group paid no heed to the park’s closing time. Danielle produced the torch her father had stolen from Woolworths from her hand-me-down coat and illuminated an inscription on the bench.

  FOR ROBERT (ROBBIE) WALSH 1974–1980

  HE WILL ALWAYS PLAY HERE

  The children were puzzled by the forever nature of death. The last line encouraged Kevin to look for Robbie whenever he came to the playground. Even Danielle, puzzled by little, harboured expectations that Robbie would return.

  ‘Why should Kevin carry it?’ Nicola wondered out loud.

  ‘Kevin and Robbie were best mates,’ Danielle reminded her.

  ‘I’m his sister.’ Nicola unwrapped a stick of chewing gum and fed it between her lips. She chucked the wrapping away into the darkness.

  ‘You are my best sister!’ Sarah let go of her brother and snatched Nicola’s hand.

  ‘That’s not a coffin. It’s for stupid shoes.’ Lee shoved his hands in the back pockets of his camouflage trousers. The children contemplated the image of strappy sandals with block heels on the box. £6.99. Eddie Hindle hadn’t parted with money, he’d filched them from Dolcis in Kings Street.

  ‘It is a coffin.’ Danielle was haughty. ‘Maxine said Robbie’s coffin went behind curtains and got set on fire.’

  ‘That’s a lie.’ Nicola choked back a sob.

  ‘It’s OK, Nick.’ Lee kicked at the asphalt with his cherry-red DMs, new from Shepherd’s Bush Market. ‘We won’t do that. It’s not real.’

  ‘It is real!’ Forgetting that the purpose of the ceremony was to make Lee want to be her boyfriend, Danielle blazed, ‘It’s all right for you, Lee. Your sister hasn’t been murdered. Nick hasn’t got Robbie and we have to stop her crying.’

  ‘It’s not working so far.’ Lee flicked his hair back.

  ‘Will this make Robbie come and play?’ Kevin risked the burning question.

  ‘No.’ Danielle grabbed Kevin into a hug then catching herself, pushed him off. ‘Robbie is already here. In a minute he’ll be at peace.’

  ‘Oh.’ Kevin pondered on ‘peas’, which were like sick.

  ‘There’s no curtains here, so you’ll have to go without.’ Danielle wielded her mother’s stricture. Aiming the torch into the playground, she yelled, ‘Jason, stop mucking about and get over here.’

  Her brother was scattering grit at the bottom of the slide for when someone landed.

  ‘Kevin and Jason, carry Robbie. Nicky, you’re Best Mourner, you lead the way.’ This was generous. Danielle longed to go first. ‘When I say “Go” you come towards us. Me and Lee will sit very close in the front row of the church. We’re his mum and dad.’ She swept onto the bench and bashing the wood with a fist, indicated for Lee to join her. He mooched over.

  ‘Can I be a bridesmaid?’ Sarah ventured.

  ‘You walk with me. Robbie loved you.’ Nicky swung Sarah’s hand.

  ‘That’s nice,’ Lee let slip.

  ‘No! It’s wrong,’ Danielle fumed. Later she would see that this was when it all went wrong. Nicola being nice to his sister turned Lee’s head.

  The four children, the boys carrying the shoebox reverentially as if their friend’s remains were inside, the girls in front, processed around the swings to the roundabout.

  ‘Put the coffin on the rounda… cataf… stick it on there.’ Danielle was tiring of the whole thing.

  Kevin and Jason plonked the box on the roundabout. Danielle and Lee came over.

  Danielle gave Nicky a sprig of privet (in lieu of the single red rose reportedly on Robbie’s coffin) and unfolding a scrap of paper intoned, ‘We’re here to say farewell to Nick’s brother Robbie. Fare. Well. Robbie.’ The others mumbled a response. Danielle shone the torch at Nicola. ‘Say something to him.’

  ‘Like what?’ Nicky looked petrified.

  ‘What’s in there?’ Jason piped.

  ‘Robbie’s ashes.’ Danielle batted her brother.

  ‘They’re in a pot by the fire. Did you steal them?’ Nicky was aghast.

  ‘It’s earth,’ Danielle admitted. ‘From the park. With one of Jason’s soldiers on top.’ Then unknowingly philosophical, ‘It’s all the same in the end.’

  ‘Which soldier?’ Jason demanded. ‘If it’s Buck Rogers I’ll kill you!’

  ‘Sssh!’ The solemnity of the occasion allowed Danielle to avoid admitting that Buck Rogers lay on damp loam scooped from a pansy bed. Borrowing from her nan when Danielle’s granddad died, she instructed Nicola, ‘Talk to Robbie, see him on his way.’

  ‘I don’t know what to say.’

  ‘Say about Robbie stealing your pocket money.’ Jason was inspired.

  ‘He never.’ Nicola was fighting tears.

  ‘We got Bazooka gum!’ Jason strutted about the roundabout. ‘The sweetshop lady sold us two cigarettes.’

  ‘That lady’s dead now,’ Danielle said as if one was a consequence of the other. ‘Robbie won’t do it again. Nicky, think of a nice thing.’

  Everyone went quiet.

  Quavering, Nicola stammered, ‘Robbie, you was my brother… and I… I’ll love him. You. To the end of time and always kiss you goodnight.’ She hurled the privet onto the roundabout, missing the shoebox.

  ‘It’s time to let go of Robbie and get better.’ Holding
Nicola’s arm in a vice-like grip, Danielle made Lee set the roundabout in motion.

  The shoebox-casket glided into the darkness.

  Chapter Five

  9th December 1980

  ‘Can Nicky come out?’ Danielle balanced on her hands outside the Walshes’ house on Braybrook Street.

  ‘It’s a bit late, love. It’s nearly dark.’ Gill Walsh, her hands moving about as if swishing water, appeared not to notice that the girl was standing on her head. Gill was glammed up and dressed to the nines, not for a night down the Palais, but because she never knew when she’d open her door and be on the news. She regarded Danielle, a skinny thing in jeans and a skimpy top, shivering on her step, with doubt. Since her son’s death Gill’s senses were dulled. Everything came from far away. Before her life had changed for ever, Gill minded that her two went round with the Hindles. Dreaming of a housing estate in Morden with a garage, she’d fretted that Nicky and Robbie’s accents would get common. Then after Robbie’s death, Joy Hindle shooed off a reporter. F*** off, pushy bitch! Not how Gill would have put it, but she’d been obscurely grateful when the man went. Recalling this, Gill relented, what was the harm? In the dusk Danielle didn’t look scary. Her pinched face was beseeching, her teeth chattered against the bitter night.

  ‘I’ll give her a call.’

  Danielle twirled and skipped on the path. She’d had a fight with Jason. He’d said he was going to tell their dad that she’d stamped on his Action Man gun. For once Maxine hadn’t sided with Jason: ‘Shut your neck!’ Cheered by this, Danielle had come to call for Nicola. She’d be nice if Nicky cried.

  ‘She’s in the toilet, best you wait in the lounge, it’s freezing out here.’ Gill Walsh was back.

  The children always met in the playground. Danielle had never been inside the Walshes’ house which Nicky said they owned so they didn’t need a rent book. A silver Christmas tree twisted with tinsel and white lights was in a bucket crudely wrapped in Christmas paper. A veneer cabinet housed a television showing Top of the Pops. Schoolgirls sang about loving Grandma. Danielle hated the song although she’d like to be on television.