‘She’ll only talk to you. I tried telling her you’re busy.’ Sian tutted. ‘A right stroppy little madam. She should be at school!’
Despite everything, Terry smiled. Danielle Hindle. When he and Cashman had visited the Hindle household Terry had been unsurprised by the chaos presided over by Maxine, the older sister who was a little younger than Stella. Unlike Stella, Maxine was smothered in make-up and had no respect for the police.
Danielle Hindle, her skirt tucked into her knickers, was doing a handstand by the noticeboard in the foyer. ‘Not at school?’ He did mock stern. He needed a laugh.
‘Yeah, well, you said to come if I could help.’ Danielle walked two paces on her hands then toppled. Catching herself like an acrobat, she landed upright. ‘You said I was a detective.’
‘I did.’ Terry was glad the super wasn’t around to hear him recruiting kids into the force. He had no memory of saying Danielle could be a detective, but since they’d found Sarah Ferris’s body he’d barely slept so he probably had. He sat on the bench in the foyer. ‘What have you found?’
She came and sat next to him. She was chewing gum. He opted not to tell her it was dangerous to do gymnastics with something in your mouth.
‘Lee’s my boyfriend now. Nicola cries still. Even after our funeral.’ She did the spinning gum thing on her finger. Terry said nothing about that either. He felt disproportionate disappointment. He’d dared hope that the girl had a lead. Something that boxed off Parsley. Instead she’d come to tell him she was going out – did kids go out this young? – with Lee Marshall. ‘That’s nice. Lee needs someone supporting him at this difficult time. Now, Danielle, if you’ll excuse me, I have to—’
‘He put her bracelet on.’
‘Lee?’
‘The man from Abba.’ The girl glanced at the door as if afraid of someone.
‘Did you see him?’ Terry kept calm.
‘I went back to the playground. He was in the dark. He goes, “Run away or I’ll murder you too. He was sticking it on her.”’ Danielle’s green eyes were saucer round like a cat’s. ‘I swear on my life.’
Terry guessed that Danielle Hindle was seldom taken seriously. He’d hesitate too if it weren’t that he knew she was telling the truth. They had kept back two pieces of information. Sarah’s bracelet had been restored to her wrist, and that the murder weapon was a brick. Apart from the team, two people knew this. The killer and victim. And a witness. Parsley had been seen fastening the charm bracelet onto Sarah’s wrist. The case was closing before his eyes.
‘I believe you. Go on.’
‘I hid in the bandstand and saw him do it.’ Danielle Hindle was precise and unflappable. Terry’s mind was racing. She’d convince any jury. Even without a confession, the judge would send Derek Parsley down.
‘So, am I a detective?’
‘Yes,’ Terry agreed absently. He’d get justice for little Sarah. He’d make Stella proud.
Chapter Ten
2019
Stella tugged Stanley’s lead as he tried to lift his leg against the marble ‘headstone’ on Wormwood Scrubs Common.
‘Your father didn’t see you for weeks.’ Suzie Darnell nodded at the memorial.
Although mother and daughter knew the names off by heart, they paused to reread the gold lettering inscribed within an oval frame below the London Metropolitan Police Crest.
HERE FELL
PS
CHRISTOPHER HEAD
PC
GEOFFREY FOX
PC
DAVID WOMBWELL
12th AUGUST 1966
‘It was only two days, Mum.’ This was an old chestnut. ‘Dad had no choice.’
Years after Terry’s death in 2011 – Stella’s parents had separated in 1973 – Suzie Darnell groused that Terry had put the force before his family.
‘We all have choices.’ Suzie continued along Braybrook Street. A long road of terraced houses facing the common. ‘Those men will never be grandfathers.’
‘Some of them are.’ Stella regretted suggesting the Scrubs for their Sunday afternoon walk. It was going to spark contentious memories. The air was cold, the grey sky threatened rain although Stella’s weather app had said that there would only be a shower at nightfall. If they’d gone to Richmond Park they could have sheltered under a tree.
‘If Terry’d been in that patrol car, you’d have had no father.’
Jack reckoned that the slaying of the officers on the day that Suzie became a mother had shocked her more than she could admit. The terrible event brought home to her that her husband did a dangerous job. Suzie had loved Terry and she still did.
‘You know what I mean, those three officers are not here to appreciate them.’ Suzie’s furious pace forced Stella into a trot to keep up. ‘Like me.’
‘Like you?’ Some years ago, her mum had got Stella and Jack combing through her rubbish bins for long-lost items. Stella had suspected that Suzie was getting dementia. Thankfully a false alarm. With no work to use her skills, Suzie had got depressed. Stella asked her mum to build and maintain the customer database and Suzie became her old self again. If she was depressed now, Stella would be stumped for a solution. In the early days, her mum had run Stella’s ‘bedroom-office’, but first Jackie and now Trudy did that and anyway, Suzie as her PA was a recipe for disaster, they’d constantly be at loggerheads. A deep clean was Stella’s cure for ills, but Suzie loathed embarking on so much as a polish.
‘I don’t have grandchildren.’ Suzie flew onto the common (resembling a giant bird in her Driza-Bone coat), Stanley – off his lead – galloped at her heel.
‘Yes you do! Dale has Kerry and Brian.’
‘Byron.’ Suzie snatched off her maroon beret (a new look), gave it a flap and crammed it back on her head. ‘Dale lives in Sydney. I’ve seen his kids a handful of times. I mean nothing to them. They stay at the meal table under duress. Robyn’s mother is Super Gran, knitting, babysitting, school runs and heaping them with sweets. “Lollies”, they call them. A daughter is for life, a son is yours until he gets a wife.’
‘Dale’s divorced.’ Confounded by the phrase ‘daughter for life’ Stella battled for the facts. ‘Mum, they’re teenagers. They don’t need babysitters. At their age I didn’t speak at supper time. I hated people’s mouths moving with food inside them.’ She shuddered at the memory. Still a reality…
‘Your grandparents were dead by the time you were four. Byron and Kerry call her “Nan-ma”! For Heaven’s sake, they’re nearly old enough to drive.’ Adroit at changing tack, Suzie had abandoned the babysitting/knitting argument. She grabbed a gap in the traffic and swept across Scrubs Lane.
‘What do they call you?’ Stella scanned for a change of subject but could think of nothing remarkable about the villas facing the park. Clean Slate had four clients in Dalgarno Gardens but, intimate with the database, her mum would know. Waiting while Stanley sniffed a lamp-post, she read graffiti daubed on the railway bridge.
‘Fancy climbing up there just to write “Nerd”!’ she said. ‘Jack says those tags are on Street View in 2012. The bridge is rarely cleaned.’
‘That Bella woman had babies at fifty so it’s possible.’ Beret askew, Suzie sailed into Little Wormwood Scrubs Park. Suzie always called her ‘that Bella woman’. Jackie said it was Suzie sticking up for Stella. Her mum wasn’t Switzerland when it came to taking sides.
‘Heterosexual women often stop contraception around that age because they’re not menstruating and sometimes they get pregnant.’ Stella wasn’t prone to jealousy, but preferred not to dwell on how Bella had conceived.
‘Clean Slate has four clients on Dalgarno Gardens!’
‘I know,’ her mum said.
In the park, they cut through the Sunday afternoon crowds braving unseasonal wintry weather for April. Families, children on scooters, elderly couples, an old man, head bowed, inching along aided by a walker. Two women ambled gloved hand in gloved hand across the lawn. This made Stella think of Beverly, Jackie�
�s assistant and their trainee detective who had married her long-term girlfriend. Bev had finally come out although Jackie said she’d always known. Little got past Jackie.
The Darnell women, mother and daughter, were women of action for whom leisurely perambulation was anathema. At a brisk rate they rounded the bandstand and arrived at the playground.
There were no children. Stella thought this strange for three o’clock on a Sunday afternoon.
Her nana (not so different to Nan-ma) had brought her to the playground when she was a toddler. Stella pictured Nana as always laughing which, for a woman widowed in her forties, couldn’t have been true. She’d pushed Stella on the swings and perching her on the roundabout, walked it around and around. Nana had pushed Terry on the same equipment when he was little. A symmetry that Stella would be unwise to share with her mum right now.
There was little recognizable in the present-day playground from Stella’s – or Terry’s – day. Primary-coloured plastic shapes on a rubberized surface could be modern art. Gone was the witch’s hat beneath which Stella had caught her sandal. And the rocking boat onto which children piled, sending it plummeting and soaring over pretend high seas. The custard yellow chute looked safer than the skyscraping slide that Nana had forbidden Stella (a courageous and curious child) to climb. A jungle climbing frame offered only soft landings. Bars boxed in the swings, preventing children tumbling out like Mickey Beech in Stella’s class who’d knocked out half his milk teeth.
‘What’s that woman doing?’ Suzie stopped at the gate. A notice warned that no dogs or ball games were allowed.
‘Sitting.’ Stella had forgotten that Jack planned to take his kids to this very playground that afternoon. It was his access weekend. Bella had said that Stella wasn’t allowed to meet the twins, they’d suffered disruption in their infancy six months in. Stella might only be passing through Jack’s life. Bella didn’t want them getting attached. Jackie, who was allowed to babysit them, thought this absurd – Stella and Jack had basically been counting for years – and Jack shouldn’t stand for it. Stella was sorry to know them only through photographs, but respectful of the rule. She wouldn’t have wanted to meet her father’s new girlfriend, although as far as she knew there was only Lucie and Stella who had met her. Stella didn’t want to bump into Jack with his twins now. Bella would think it was planned. She nodded at the woman on the bench. ‘She’s got no coat, she must be cold.’
‘Adults shouldn’t hang around playgrounds without children. If she was a man, we’d be worried.’ Suzie could heap on disapproval at the drop of a hat.
‘Maybe she used to play here. Like Dad did.’ If they’d gone to Richmond Park they could have looked at the deer.
‘Maybe she’s wishing that someone would make her a grandmother.’ Suzie harrumphed.
‘Mum, I’m not getting pregnant!’ Slow to spot the heaviest of hints, Stella got this one.
‘You’re not too old. You’ve got a man. You know he’s fertile and he’d make a great dad.’
‘He’s already making a great dad. I’m fifty-three! I am too old.’
‘You’re not fifty-three until August, I should know.’
The maternal gene had passed Stella by. Children were noisy, messy and unpredictable. While she’d like to meet Jack’s twins there’d be time enough when they were adults and had learnt to clean.
‘…you’d be a marvellous mum,’ Suzie rhapsodized. ‘You’re lovely with kids. What about that client who sent flowers because you had her son laughing after he’d broken his arm?’
‘Mum, please! I barely have enough time for Stanley!’ Stella clipped on the poodle’s lead. He sat in anticipation of a liver treat.
As if she hadn’t heard, Suzie said, ‘Two kids were murdered in this playground. Terry solved the case.’
‘I’d forgotten.’ If this chilling information didn’t change Stella’s mind about motherhood, it got her attention.
‘Nineteen eighty. You were fourteen, thankfully too old for playgrounds. A boy and a girl were found dead.’ Suzie pursed her lips. ‘Oh. How did Creepy Lady leave without us seeing?’
‘’Spect she walked.’ Stella eyed the empty bench. Never mind being a mother, when she was with her mum, she became a crabby adolescent. Her phone rang.
‘Bev, it’s Sunday, why are you working?’
‘Carrie has come through with a time to see her mother,’ Beverly said. ‘Tomorrow afternoon. I know you’re free, I checked your online diary. Can you ask Jack?’
‘Jack?’ He was with his twins. Stella decided, ‘I’ll go anyway.’
‘Why not ring Jack and see if he’s free?’ Suzie missed nothing. ‘I hope you two haven’t fallen out. Your biological clock is ticking. You haven’t time to start again with another man.’
*
After she’d dropped Suzie at her flat in Baron’s Court, Stella drove home along the Great West Road. Beverly had texted that Jack could make the meeting. Bev could talk to Jack when he was on an access weekend. Actually, he’d never forbidden Stella to call him. It was her own rule. Stella felt excited. A case meant researching background information, interviewing witnesses, visiting a crime scene in search of missed clues. She and Jack would be a team again.
Passing over Hammersmith flyover, Stella woke Stanley as she exclaimed, ‘Where in my life do I have the time for children?’
Chapter Eleven
2019
Two thirty p.m. Little Wormwood Scrubs Park. A woman sat on a bench in the playground. The prison dominated the skyline, a black fortress against the grey. Leaves rustled as a breeze carried them across the rubberized ground. The sun had gone in. The woman observed to herself that there was a nip in the air.
A tall man in a black coat cavorted with two children. A boy and a girl aged about three. He had the same liquid brown eyes as the girl and fine features as the boy so, the woman presumed, he was their father. The boy had the sort of blond hair that would darken with time.
Despite the equipment – a chute, swings, jungle climbing frame – they kicked a football about. They could have gone into the park for that, she noted with irritation. The man had an accurate back-heel pass that sent his daughter into a fury because her brother got to the ball first. Her own style was to kick wildly then rush after the ball, her flapping Batman cape making her demonic.
Glancing up, the woman noted with satisfaction that a camera fixed to a pole by the gate had been smashed by kids. It captured nothing.
The temperature dropped further. The woman, in her mid-forties, her face wrapped in a scarf, decided that the dad had the look of Liam Gallagher. Or the other brother. So far Liam hadn’t whipped out his phone to snap his kids’ every move. Nor was his head buried in Facebook, like most mums.
Jack had seen the woman. Unreasonably he’d wanted the playground to themselves. Someone on their own – no children – made him wary. A man on his own would have put Jack on high alert. He told himself to relax.
Milly was particularly excitable today. Into everything, bellowing for Jack and Justin to ‘watch me!’, she hurtled down the chute or demanded Jack push her on the swings. (‘Do more up!’) Justin wasn’t watching. Clasping Portus Teddy who went everywhere with him (Jack dreaded Portus going missing on his watch), he’d straggled off to the railings and would be examining insects. Justin was a budding naturalist. Bella said he’d be a botanical illustrator like her. Jack was reminded of himself at that age, studying the intricate engineering of spider’s webs.
Lucie said children were a menace. ‘So much for caring for you when you’re old. They’ll have you in a nursing home the first time you forget what day it is.’
Aware that Justin’s insipient independence tended to mean he got less adult attention, Jack went over to his little boy. His heart flipped when Justin showed him a woodlouse on its way to the shops.
‘That’s not yours,’ the woman on the bench told Milly. The nosy girl had found a discarded sweatshirt draped over the bench.
‘Is it
yours?’ Milly asked.
‘It’s far too small for me.’ The woman looked away. ‘Some kid has left it.’
‘It is mine as I do have it.’ Milly twisted her shoulders in a fashion no doubt intended to charm.
‘It’s wrong to steal.’
‘It’s not stealing. I did finded it.’
‘Found. It’s rude to answer back.’ The woman was tiring of the interchange.
‘You said things to me so I answered back at you.’ Milly spoke with elaborate care. She examined the sweatshirt and pulled a face. ‘It’s dirty.’
‘Don’t touch it then.’
‘Milly!’ Jack had only taken his eyes off Milly for a second.
With a shrug Milly pranced across the playground to her father.
The woman folded her arms and looked the other way. Some children could really get on your nerves.
*
Jack watched his daughter fly along the pavement, cape billowing. She leapt and swerved to avoid the cracks as he did. Justin, more contemplative, paused then did a jump or stopped altogether to watch the progress of a beetle. Milly had Jack’s rampant curiosity. ‘What’s this?’ ‘Why?’ It had driven his father to distraction. Justin, like Jack, saw the minutiae of other worlds. Nearly three years of being a parent hadn’t dulled Jack’s amazement that two small people shared his characteristics yet had independent personalities.
Jack was happy to delay getting to Bella’s flat in Dalgarno Gardens. He hated saying goodbye to Justin and Milly. Usually he had them to stay for a night in the week, but he was doing extra driving shifts for London Underground. A wave of sickness had drastically depopulated the rota. Jack wouldn’t see his children for ages.
Milly was at the entrance to Bella’s flats. When he caught her up, Jack was astonished to see her reach the buzzer. They were growing up so fast.
‘Hello?’ Although they were a minute early for the appointed handover time and the intercom system had a camera, Bella always answered as if she wasn’t expecting them. Motherhood hadn’t come naturally to her.
The Playground Murders Page 8