The Playground Murders

by Lesley Thomson

  Until the police took it away (her dad had nicked it), her own telly had been much bigger than the Walshes’. They took her dad away too. He was in Wormwood Scrubs prison for making a man go into a coma (like sleep, but longer). Danielle’s mum got a Christmas tree from one of her men friends. It was leaning against the wall where the television had been. As she admired greetings cards pegged along a tinselled string across the room, Danielle was wistful. Her house didn’t have decorations.

  Danielle was alarmed by a huge photograph of Robbie above the gas fire. It was like an advert in a street. He had on a white shirt and a bow tie and a red waistcoat. She almost expected the larger-than-life boy to speak. She said, ‘I’m sorry he’s dead.’

  ‘That’s nice, love. Isn’t it, Bob, what Danielle said? About Robbie. She paid her condolences.’ Gill Walsh’s sentences were plucked from a jumble of incoherent thoughts.

  At thirty-nine, Bob Walsh was ten years older than his wife. Until a few weeks ago, he’d considered himself the luckiest man in the world. Gorgeous wife, two lovely kids, a thriving market stall. Then on 31st October it all went wrong. Bolt upright on the settee, he was apparently deep in the Evening Standard. In reality, Bob read the words to find a reason for his living nightmare. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Is that Robbie in his coffin?’ Danielle asked.

  ‘It’s at my sister’s wedding.’ Gill started at the question. ‘Robert looked a picture that day.’ She pulled a face as if screaming without sound. Danielle promised herself to try it later. Pleased at herself for being nice, she dredged up a hazarded gathered notion. ‘Robbie will return like Jesus. He’ll rise up.’

  The gas fire hissed. The room was stifling. The smell of liver and onions that, earlier, the depleted family had picked at, lingered.

  ‘What you on about?’ Bob Walsh flung down the paper.

  ‘Nicky doesn’t mind about Robbie. We had his funeral. She’s not sad now,’ Danielle enthused. ‘I wish I could have seen him dead. And not just Buck Rogers.’

  ‘She means well, Bob. She’s too young to understand…’ Gill flapped over the newspaper and bundled it onto her husband’s lap.

  ‘She understands, all right. She’s a troublemaker, that one!’ Bob Walsh clawed at eczema on his forearm. ‘That whole family should be locked up!’

  ‘Danielle’s being nice.’ Her hair glossy, cheeks rosy, a flowery blouse tucked into ironed jeans, Nicola was the antithesis of her wraithlike parents. Only her eyes, flicking to and fro between them, betrayed a child that was haunted.

  ‘Yes.’ Losing one child had robbed Gill of maternal skills. Her daughter confused her.

  ‘What funeral? I said you was too young to go!’ Bob worked on a time lapse.

  None of the children had been allowed to go to Robbie’s funeral. Although Kevin Hood had seen ‘the box with Robbie lying still as a stick inside’ come out of the Walshes’ house. Nicola’s parents, shot with grief, had sent her to the Hindles where, alone in the house, Danielle and Nicky spent the time parading in her big sister’s dresses, daubing on Maxine’s make-up to Abba’s LP Voulez-Vous on Maxine’s Barbie record player.

  ‘We had a funeral in the playground.’ Danielle ignored Nicola’s warning look. Since Robbie’s accident no one was meant to go to the playground.

  ‘You played a game.’ Bob Walsh’s nails rasped on his skin.

  ‘It was real!’ Danielle protested. ‘To make Nicky better.’

  ‘Where do you think you’re going? You are not going out!’ Bob Walsh took refuge in prohibition.

  ‘Let them go, Bob.’ Before he could argue, Gill scooted the children out to the street. Returning to the overheated lounge – since Robbie, she was always cold – she relaxed. Without Nicola, she could pretend that she and Bob were just starting out. With no kids to break their hearts.

  *

  At 5.35 p.m. the park gates were locked. Traffic hummed on the West Way. Wind rippled the water in the ornamental pond, rattled the clump of ornamental grasses and set up an eerie howl in the bandstand. Gill Walsh had been generous in saying it was nearly dark, it was dark. Lamplight accentuated shadows and a sense that the park was far from London’s rush-hour streets. Above, smudged clouds curdling against the mauve sky provided perspective for passing painters.

  Anyone looking downwards might have seen Danielle and Nicola scale the railings and race across the lawns to the playground. Kevin Hood and Jason Hindle were playing tag with a torch, flitting like spirits between the play equipment that in the crazy light might be slumbering dinosaurs. Sarah Ferris huddled up to her big brother on the roundabout. She was crying.

  ‘They should be in bed.’ Danielle was livid. If she’d known Lee would be there she wouldn’t have called for Nicola. The funeral hadn’t worked. Nicky still cried for nothing. Danielle was running out of ways to put Lee off Nicky who by rights should be dead too.

  ‘I had to bring Sarah, my mum’s at the pictures with Alan.’ Lee pulled a face of embarrassment rather than annoyance. He hated his stepfather, but he loved his half-sister.

  ‘You could have left her.’ Losing her own sibling made Nicola untypically grudging.

  ‘She’s not allowed to be alone. Danielle brought Jason.’

  ‘He brought himself,’ Danielle corrected Lee. ‘Jason’s thick. He can be left alone.’

  ‘Sarah’s lost her charm bracelet, we’ve been looking for it.’ Lee ran a hand over his new buzz cut. Which no one had mentioned.

  ‘Did you find it?’ Nicola was concerned.

  ‘Those things are stupid,’ Danielle said.

  ‘Alan gave it to her. I gave her a charm. Best Sister. It cost all my money.’ Lee beat a rhythm with his fingers on the roundabout at this memory.

  ‘You all have to find it!’ Sarah scuttled over to Jason and Kevin who were testing the limits of the rocking boat.

  ‘I’ve looked everywhere.’ Lee stopped drumming. In a fatalistic tone he said, ‘Alan’ll kill me.’

  ‘It’s not your fault.’ Nicola sat beside him. Lee shuffled closer to her. ‘Sarah should have been careful. I’m not allowed to wear jewellery out.’

  ‘Your dad will blame you.’ Danielle agreed with Lee. She wandered over to the swings.

  ‘He’s not my dad!’ Lee took out a cigarette, stolen from his stepfather, then put it back in his Harrington.

  ‘Maybe it’s at home,’ Nicola said.

  ‘She had it when we left, she was going on about it. She likes my charm most.’ Lee looked briefly happier.

  ‘Who’s that?’ A yell.

  Nicola and Lee looked to where Kevin was pointing. A face, pale as the moon, was suspended. It rose and fell. A chain creaked. Up. Down. Up.

  ‘I’m a murder-er!’ The voice was like a sigh.

  ‘It’s Robbie!’ Jason screamed. ‘He’s back.’

  ‘Stop it!’ Lee strode to the swings. He grabbed the torch and thrust it at the apparition.

  ‘Scared you!’ Danielle’s wild laughter clattered around the playground. In the glare, the pinch-faced ten-year-old, hair straggling around her neck, did resemble the dead returned.

  ‘You scared Sarah,’ Nicola said gently.

  ‘Yeah. You did.’ Lee flashed the torch at the small children, smiling sheepishly, none of them looked scared. ‘I’ll get it in the neck from Alan if she has nightmares.’

  ‘What’s a murderer?’ Sarah asked.

  ‘See?’ Lee, his buzz cut making him look tougher than he dared to be, patted the girl. ‘Danielle’s mucking about, babe, don’t listen.’

  ‘I saw the man from Abba by the off-licence. He’s coming.’ Danielle’s eyes were wild. ‘He’s a murderer.’

  The group closed ranks.

  But Nicola stayed. They all knew that Danielle decided when they went.

  ‘You’ve never seen a murderer,’ Jason told his sister.

  ‘You don’t know anything,’ Danielle grated. ‘Shut up!’

  ‘I have seen one,’ Sarah confided to Lee in a stage whisper.


  ‘No. You haven’t,’ said Danielle. The person in the bandstand on the night when Robbie had died (Danielle didn’t call it murder) had been Sarah. Tell-tale. That girl needed teaching a lesson.

  ‘Don’t talk like that, Sarah!’ Lee knew that if Sarah came out with that at home, his stepfather would string him up. ‘No one’s seen one.’

  ‘If someone makes someone dead they are a murd-rah.’ Sarah felt her way towards comprehension then announced, ‘I know one.’

  Nicola let out a blood-curdling scream and clutched Lee’s arm in fright.

  In the dying light, a man in a duffel coat, a pocket torn loose, the other bulging with a can of pale ale, shambled past the witch’s hat towards them. Every child knew who he was.

  The man from Abba.

  ‘Come on!’ Lee shouted.

  The children ran for their lives.

  A boy in love, drugged by the exquisite sensation of Nicola holding onto him, Lee forgot about his baby sister. By the time he came to his senses, it was too late.

  Chapter Six

  1980

  Hooking his jacket off his chair, Detective Inspector Terry Darnell headed out. He’d be home early for once. Not that Suzie would call twenty past seven early. Or that he called it home since Suzie no longer lived there. She’d left him seven years ago, taking Stella with her. The house was a bolt-hole where he microwaved shop-bought shepherd’s pie and fell into bed. Mostly alone. Terry kept the place spick and span for when his family returned. ‘The Twelfth of Never, Popsicle,’ Lucie, his erstwhile sleeping partner said. ‘Get real, Tezza, they’re gone for good.’

  Terry never told Lucie that he couldn’t give up hope. Going by Lucie’s waspish remarks about his family, she knew.

  A hand caressing the brass handrail, Terry hurried down the stairs. For the middle-aged detective, the art deco police station with wood-panelled corridors and marble floors – a homage to a past civic pride – was his true home.

  He’d reached the stables when his pager buzzed. Back in the call room, he found a spare phone and punched in CID. ‘Darnell.’

  ‘Guv, we’ve got a body.’ Martin Cashman always sounded out of breath. Not because he was unfit, but because keeping fit, he moved fast.

  Terry’s mood lifted. Suzie used to accuse him of caring more about victims than his family. Yes, all right, he wanted justice for the crime, but she had no idea how much he cared for her and for their daughter. Right now though, a body meant not going back to his empty house. A body meant the day wasn’t over.

  Siren blaring, Cashman gunned the Ford along Shepherd’s Bush Road. Absorbing the details, Terry felt dread. Not this. Never this. They’d caught the case that no detective, however crap their private life is or dedicated they are, ever wants.

  *

  In the eighteen fifties the West London Line railway cut Wormwood Scrubs Common in two. The larger tract of land of bushes and trees was a hint of rural freedom within sight of the prison. The ‘offcut’ beyond the tracks, the property of the Metropolitan Board of Works, was named Little Wormwood Scrubs and by the twentieth century was a park. Bandstand, café, annually planted beds and an ornamental pond fed by Counters Creek, a river which ran underground through Hammersmith and Kensington to appear as a green-slimed trickle into the Thames at Chelsea.

  There had been a playground in the park since the Second World War when children, scrambling over rubble and girders on the bombsites, inspired a vision of a space in which they could learn and play.

  A boy in the nineteen fifties, Terry was in the vanguard of this lucky generation. Growing up near the prison, Little Wormwood Scrubs had been his battleground. He’d flung himself down the slide, driven the iron rocking horse hard and sent the juggernaut-heavy roundabout into what passed for a spin. With other boys, he was a robber, cowboy and the cop he was to become. Blood – real and imaginary – was spilt. Their games were serious, harsh rehearsals for life.

  No game that Terry had played was as serious as the death of a child.

  In the glare of arc lamps the playground could be a bombsite, the swings gutted ironwork, the witch’s hat a house mangled by the Luftwaffe’s payload. White-suited forensics picked over the concrete and hunched around the slide.

  A woman constable guarded the scene. As Terry made his way between flower beds that, dug for winter, might be fresh graves, a fine rain dampened his face and blurred the kids crowding around the gate, their high-pitched voices like geese: ‘Who’s dead, miss? Is there a body? Let us have a look? Miss! Miss…’

  Three decades became yesterday, the boys and girls could be Terry’s mates. The kid in the baseball cap was Ray Chilton reincarnated. Ray, who had stolen a jar of gobstoppers while the owner was out back getting Terry’s copy of the Beano. So implicating Terry in his crime. A gum-chewing girl recalled Evelyn Roper who’d rammed her hand down Terry’s shorts behind the drinking fountain and claimed he’d got her ‘up the duff’. The girl was eyeballing Janet the WPC as if contemplating her next meal. Terry felt the ghost of his ice-cold fear when, hazy on the facts of life, he’d submitted to blackmail and handed Roper his weekly pocket money. Nowadays, Terry dealt with the facts of death.

  Five kids. Turning up his collar against the insidious drizzle, Terry brooded on how in the blink of an eye he’d be scanning their adult rap sheets. Shepherd’s Bush and Acton was a brick’s throw from the avenues of Kensington. Ray Chilton was behind the high walls of the Scrubs now. Aggravated burglary and resisting arrest, Terry had a scar to prove it. When this lot were too old for kiss chase, their career choice was real cops or real robbers.

  ‘Sir, sir. What’s gone on?’ Gum-chewing girl shouted when Janet opened the gate for Terry. It was a school night, for Christ’s sake. Didn’t their parents care what they were up to? He had no idea of Stella’s whereabouts. She decided whether to see him on access weekends. Twice she’d opted out. Stella was fourteen, so legally Terry had the right to keep an eye on her. In practice that was a joke.

  The tent was behind the witch’s hat. Terry knew this was the second fatality involving a child in weeks. He recalled pictures of the boy in a QPR strip – Robert something – who’d fallen off the slide and smashed in his skull. The boy had died on Halloween. All Souls’ Eve. The night when (a bid to keep him indoors out of mischief) Terry’s mum would remind him that the dead walked. Not murder, so CID had bowed out, but Terry had read Lucie’s thing in the paper. When Stella was little and his mum lived nearby, he’d brought Stella here. She’d been fearless on the same slide and demanded Terry push her on the swings. Higher. Higher! Now a teenager (the word scared him), Stella was too old to come to harm in a playground. The ways in which she could be hurt increased daily.

  The odour of faeces hit him when he flapped open the tent. The child’s bowels had evacuated. His first body had been a road traffic accident. He’d gulped in air to avoid throwing up. Ten years on, in his mid-thirties, Terry could wolf down a full English before a violent crime scene.

  Nothing prepared you for this.

  The girl lay face up on the concrete. Her skirt was rucked at the back revealing white frilly knickers, otherwise she looked arranged. Hair coiled around her neck, white socks pulled up to her knees, a Fair Isle cardigan buttoned up. Her hands, dusted with dirt, were folded together on her lap. Like a stone saint in a church. The neatness stopped his heart. Her killer had a signature.

  Terry put the little girl’s age at five, perhaps six. A graze on her knee was raw pink where she’d picked at the scab. Worn soles and scuffed uppers told him she’d chased about and taken risks, no doubt in this playground. Like his Stella, this girl hadn’t been afraid of getting hurt. She should have been afraid. The wound on her knee would never heal.

  A police photographer moved around the tent, taking pictures from every angle. Each flashbulb pop made the girl appear to shift as if this was a game and she would spring into life.

  ‘This is a rotten business, Detective Inspector Darnell.’ Replacing a thermometer in its lea
ther case, Michael Sutherland the pathologist spoke softly as if not to wake the girl. ‘Death was between two and four hours ago. I’ll know better back at base.’ The bow tie, brogues and trilby suggested that Sutherland had been called away from a gentlemen’s club circa 1932. In fact he was a Shepherd’s Bush lad who’d been in Terry’s class at Old Oak Primary. Where Terry could chat with strangers gleaning clues from laconic conversation, Sutherland, always a shy boy, had kept his nose in a book. Bodies were a medical phenomenon to be cut open, the organs weighed, tested and bottled. As if sharing a private language, a corpse would yield to Michael the manner of their death and the life they’d led. Chalk and cheese, Terry and Mike had been friends at school and, over the odd pint, they still were.

  ‘Any thoughts on cause of death, Mike?’

  ‘Judging by bruising on her nose and beneath her chin and petechial dotting in her eyes, the killer pinched her nostrils shut and suffocated her. Then for good measure crushed her neck with a crude object – a brick or stone. See those rough abrasions? The attacker applied considerable strength, the hyoid is crushed.’ He indicated dark bruising and ripped skin on the girl’s neck.

  ‘Are you sure?’ Terry grimaced.

  ‘Not until I’m back.’ Sutherland never speculated. Like Terry, he knew not to fall foul of counsels’ searing interrogation. He confined himself to incontrovertible facts.

  ‘Death would not have been quick.’ Sutherland contemplated the girl. ‘All the same, no sign of a struggle, no skin lodged in her fingernails, but look at the size of her. Sarah would have been no match for the slightest attacker.’

  ‘Sarah?’

  ‘There’s a name tag.’ Sutherland pulled a face as if to say he was smart, but not that smart. He lifted her shoulder and tipped the collar of her cardigan.

  Squatting beside Sutherland, Terry read a sewn-in label. Sarah Ferris. A lock of the girl’s hair flicked his hand. Soft as a cat’s. He caught a whiff of shampoo. Terry could identify all kinds of smells, flowers, cleaning fluids, bodily fluids, drains and perfume. The shampoo was Boots Apple Blossom. Sarah’s mum used Persil’s Non-Biological. Clean clothes, clean hair. Sarah Ferris may have been out past her bedtime, but she was cared for. The reassuring smells of daily living were cut with the particulate odour of body fluids.