The Playground Murders

by Lesley Thomson

  ‘My dad’s more scary than Abba man. He gave me a thrashing with Sarah’s bicycle pump.’ Lee fired the torch at a bluish tinge on his forearm.

  ‘Poor you!’ Danielle cooed. ‘Why did he do that?’

  ‘I told Sarah off for messing with the single I bought, Spandau’s latest.’ Lee rolled down his sleeve and did up his cuff, patting it smooth.

  ‘But Sarah’s dead.’

  ‘Before. Alan remembered last night. He went mad.’ Lee warmed his palm with pretend heat from the torchlight. He couldn’t dwell on his sister’s death for long. Blindly he’d gone over that night trying to find the moment when he’d made the biggest mistake of his life.

  Danielle burst out with the chorus of ‘To Cut a Long Story Short’. She stopped when Lee didn’t join in. With a Nicola sigh, ‘You look like Martin Kemp.’

  ‘No I don’t.’ Nevertheless Lee blushed.

  ‘You’re exactly like him.’ Danielle saw she’d hit the jackpot. ‘Is your record all right? I’d kill Jason if he did that to mine.’

  ‘You don’t have any records. Maxine said.’ Lee recalled an argument between the Hindle sisters that had happened when he still had a sister.

  ‘I do,’ Danielle said.

  ‘It sticks at the start.’ Lee braked the roundabout with a foot and got off. His hands in his Levi pockets, he mooched about being Martin Kemp.

  Danielle knew that Lee had a paper round so could buy nice clothes and records of his own. No one would employ the Hindle girls in a shop, their father’s reputation had seen to that. Jumping off the roundabout, she flung herself into a handstand. It had impressed Lee in the past and with her boots… ‘Your dad should have punished Sarah, not you.’ She was clear-eyed about injustice.

  ‘He ain’t my dad. Sarah’s his real kid so he sticks up for her.’ Lee was bewildered. Sarah being dead hadn’t stopped Alan giving her special treatment.

  ‘Sarah’s spoilt.’ Danielle spoke his forming thought. ‘Not any more. Not now she’s dead.’

  ‘She’s not.’

  ‘Not dead?’ Danielle fell out of her handstand and jarred her back against the roundabout’s running board. It hadn’t hurt, but for Lee’s sake, ‘Ouch.’

  ‘Not spoilt. Sarah can’t help what Alan gives her.’ Lee was unaware of Danielle struggling to her feet.

  ‘It’s because she’s the youngest. Jason’s like that.’ Danielle clambered onto the roundabout and stood on it, feet apart to keep her balance as it slowed. ‘I was youngest till Jason. I never got spoilt. Dad likes him best too.’

  ‘Alan’s not my dad.’ Lee stamped on a freeze-thaw crack in the concrete. ‘I hate him.’

  ‘You could kill him.’ Danielle wished Lee could see her on the roundabout.

  Suddenly his torch went the other way.

  ‘I called on you, but Maxine said you’d gone here without me!’ Nicola wore her new coat trimmed with fur. Nicola’s dad sold clothes in the market and gave her the best ones.

  ‘I said to come here.’ Danielle was quick. Lee must not know that she’d lied to Nicky.

  ‘You told me Nicky wasn’t coming.’ Now Lee did point the torch at Danielle.

  Nicola’s expression hardened. ‘You’ve got on boy’s boots.’

  ‘Lee likes them.’ Danielle leapt off the roundabout and landed badly, grazing her knee. She pulled out a packet of Juicy Fruit from her dress and offered it to Lee.

  ‘Not on girls I don’t,’ Lee hurried to clarify.

  ‘Girls can wear what they like.’ Danielle fiddled with her laces.

  ‘They look nice.’ Nicola never ganged up on people.

  ‘Thanks.’ Danielle chewed laconically.

  ‘Are you missing Sarah?’ Nicky asked Lee.

  Danielle should have said that. It sounded nice.

  ‘A bit. Yes. I made a thing in the bedroom with her dolls.’ Lee was sheepish, thankful that in the dark the girls couldn’t see his face.

  ‘My sister says your dad used to make you mind her so he can do sex with your mum!’ Danielle said.

  ‘He’s not my dad,’ Lee fumed. ‘They don’t do that anyway!’

  ‘Nor do mine.’ Nicola’s lip wobbled. ‘I wish I’d been nicer to Robbie.’

  ‘You are nice.’ Lee flashed the torch on and off like Morse code. He went over to Nicola.

  ‘Were, not are.’ Miss Blythe, Danielle’s teacher, had said Danielle had a very high IQ. In English lessons, she understood the difference between then and now. ‘Sarah can’t be nice to Robbie now because he’s dead and gone. And so is she.’

  ‘Maxine said you got to go indoors,’ Nicola told her.

  ‘She can stuff it.’ Danielle jutted out her chin. ‘Anyway dead people walk, Miss Blythe said so.’

  ‘She said your dad’s back from prison.’

  ‘It wasn’t prison. He goes off selling clothes. He makes loads. More than your dad.’ Danielle stamped her boots.

  All the local children knew that Eddie Hindle’s business trips were at Her Majesty’s Pleasure.

  ‘I might go now,’ Danielle said as if the idea had just occurred.

  ‘You the last one?’ The keeper was locking the park gate when she reached it.

  About to lie on principle, Danielle pictured Lee kissing Nicky on the swings. ‘There’s two in the playground. They wouldn’t come even though I told them to.’

  *

  ‘Where you been?’ Eddie Hindle was sprawled on the couch, a cigarette burning on his lower lip. A second-time-around Mod in suit and tipped back trilby, Hindle was trim and dashing.

  ‘Out.’

  ‘Got you a present.’ He sucked on his cigarette.

  Danielle knew that his presents were nicked. A doll, a bracelet that Maxine hated, perfume for her mum. He’d given Danielle the boots because they didn’t fit Jason. This time it seemed Jason had got a gun. He was playing with it by the telly (rented because her mum was sick of it being carted off).

  Jason rat-a-tatted at her with the gun. Danielle pictured him flying off the slide like Robbie who her dad had said, ‘cracked his head open like an egg.’ Lee would be nice when she cried. Jason would never grow into the Doc Martens.

  ‘How long are you here?’ Danielle asked Eddie the question she always asked.

  ‘For good, darlin’!’ Eddie always replied.

  Chapter Fourteen

  2019

  ‘Did you ask Trudy to do this?’ Jack was reading the notes that Trudy had typed from the Philips case meeting.

  ‘No, I haven’t involved Trudy in detective stuff. She did it off her own bat.’

  ‘That was nice.’ Habitually suspicious of good deeds, Jack tried for a positive response. ‘Another brain. Although perhaps too many cooks.’

  After supper, Jack had suggested going upstairs and discussing the case after. He’d expected Stella to argue, but she’d begun unbuttoning his shirt before they got to the bedroom. Two hours later they’d been startled awake by Stanley barking. Stella was in time to see a cat high-tailing over the back wall.

  At five past two, Jack in T-shirt and boxers, Stella in her dad’s dressing gown, sat in the kitchen drinking tea and reading the file Carrie had brought.

  ‘Can there be too many cooks?’ Stella rarely cooked. Supper had been microwaved shepherd’s pies with frozen peas in deference to Jackie’s ‘eat more vegetables’ campaign. Jack had brought a bottle of Merlot. She tapped her police notebook. ‘Trudy missed a bit.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Bev pointed out that Penelope Philips had an alibi so why did Carrie still believe that Penelope killed Rachel? Carrie said, quote, “My mother is the jealous type. Never get on the wrong side of her.”’ Stella drew a biro line between paragraphs in Trudy’s report where the text should have been.

  Jack vaguely remembered the comment, but it had been blown to kingdom-come when Carrie had mentioned Cashman. After that he’d been unable to concentrate. ‘Penelope Philips could have got home, found Cater there and realized about the affair. She tota
lly lost it. I’d want to kill Cashman if I found him in your spare bedroom.’ Jack was instantly furious for revealing that, just after they’d had the best sex ever, he’d let slip that he considered Cashman a threat. Jackie said that Cashman was in their relationship because Jack put him there. Stella rarely experienced jealousy, she wouldn’t get it. And nor did he want her to get it. If Stella thought he was jealous of her, she’d flee to the hills.

  ‘You couldn’t kill anyone.’ Rifling through the papers, Stella sounded like she was convincing herself. ‘Here’s the CCTV image of Penelope Philips in London. Oh.’

  ‘What?’ Did Stella ever compare Cashman to him? Jack blotted out the image of Cashman and Stella in the very same bed upstairs. Jackie had to remind Jack that he had children with another woman. Jack knew he needed to shape up.

  ‘Look at the street name.’ Stella was examining the CCTV picture.

  ‘Dalgarno Gardens. That’s near the playground where I take the twins. Bella lives round the corner.’ Jack felt himself redden. ‘Actually, Bella said—’

  ‘I’ve got four clients in that street. When Carrie told us her mum went shopping in London, I presumed she meant Oxford Street not Shepherd’s Bush.’

  ‘There’s Westfield Shopping Centre.’ Although technology moved fast, Jack had expected a grainy black and white still, or like Street View which rendered pedestrians faceless phantoms. The shot of Philips walking along the pavement was sharp and in colour. ‘She’s not carrying any shopping bags.’

  ‘Perhaps she hadn’t been yet.’ Stella laid out the double-page spread from the Daily Mail. Beneath the heading, ‘Dead Woman Dumped in Drain’ was a shot of ‘the murder house where killer Philips cavorted with his mistress’. A circle marked the garage where the body was found. Rachel Cater, aged thirty-one, had lived with her elderly mother in a rented flat in Cheltenham. A photo of a woman with frizzed hair, glasses and a snaggle-toothed smile was captioned ‘the victim’. Jack berated himself for the surprise that Rachel wasn’t conventionally attractive. Penelope Philips, on the other hand, was stunning even in a street lens. Narrow determined features betrayed intelligence. Inset was ‘Chris and Penny’ on their wedding day in 1989 captioned, ‘betrayed Penny not ashamed of six-month bump!’ In another photo blurred by falling snow, heads down Carrie and her mother hastened to a ‘waiting police car’. In this story no one was innocent.

  ‘I don’t have a spare bedroom,’ Stella said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You said you’d kill Martin if you found him in my spare bedroom.’ Stella studied the article. ‘Unless you count my office which used to be my bedroom.’

  ‘It was an example.’ Jack drank from his empty mug in a bid to erase the stupid comment.

  ‘An example of what?’ Stella could be like Stanley with a captured sock, she wouldn’t let go.

  ‘Of how jealousy leads to murder. Not me, obviously.’ Obviously. Bella had called him a creature of the night because he walked London streets in search of murderers, looking for a person with a mind like his own. ‘Carrie believes her mother killed Rachel out of jealousy.’

  ‘That would hardly help.’ Stella fanned out cuttings on the table. Several showed Carrie Philips outside the court after her father was found guilty of the ‘heinous crime’. A fist in the air, ‘Daddy didn’t do it’ (the Mail). ‘Daughter insists father is innocent’ (the Guardian). No sign of Penelope.

  ‘Christopher Philips cleaned up after the murder. Still the police found bloodstains. Philips must not have expected to be caught.’ Stella paused. ‘Cashman was there.’

  Jack felt his insides drop. ‘You didn’t say.’

  ‘I don’t talk about clean-up scenes, you know that.’

  ‘You sometimes do,’ Jack objected. ‘There was that one in Mill Hill last month.’

  ‘That’s because you were meant to be doing it with us, but you had to babysit.’ Stella was looking at a picture of a younger Rachel in a graduation gown clutching her degree. An older woman in matching skirt and jacket, a handbag dangling from one hand, stood beside her. Proud mum with tragic Rachel. ‘Cashman said to say nothing, especially to you. This was before I met Carrie. That put the case on a need-to-know basis. You need to know.’

  ‘Why was he there? He’s in the Met.’ Jack gripped the table. How many times had Stella met Cashman?

  ‘He never said.’ Stella found an article with an aerial view of the house. The lawn stretched to the river that ran through the village. ‘Martin suggested coffee, but I said I was working.’

  Martin.

  ‘He came to Winchcombe to ask you out.’ Jack heard his voice as if from underwater. Stella needn’t have told him about the coffee. He needed to know.

  ‘No.’ Stella wasn’t duplicitous, yet Jack felt she wasn’t telling him everything. ‘Christopher Philips told police he tried to end it with Rachel Cater and she’d threatened to tell his wife and that’s why she was at his house.’

  ‘So Philips finds Rachel there and knowing she’s going to wreck his marriage has no choice but to kill her.’

  ‘There’s always a choice,’ Stella said.

  ‘He chose to have an affair with her. Rachel looks nice, that smile is warm and friendly. Her poor mum.’ Jack examined a picture of a flat in a block with wraparound balconies imitating streets. The ghostly image of a woman stared out over the rail. Jack felt a pang. The elderly woman looked scared. The photographer had got her to pose – grieving mum alone in the world – and Agnes Cater obliged. The media were heartless. Jack felt complicit.

  ‘Who apart from the Philips family had access to the house?’ Stella wondered.

  ‘They probably had a cleaner.’

  ‘Why would a cleaner kill their client?’ The idea would be beyond Stella’s comprehension. She emptied all the papers onto the table. Jack divided newspaper cuttings from a batch of interview transcripts. A DVD was labelled ‘Cater TV coverage’. Carrie was planning to appeal her father’s sentence. Clean Slate’s work was to be the linchpin. If they found irrefutable evidence that Christopher Philips was guilty, Jack expected that Carrie wouldn’t pay their bill.

  The murder house was a large Georgian affair. Perfect for Stella and him, with Milly and Justin. A devil whispered hotly into his ear that it was also perfect for Stella and Cashman. ‘Did you pick up any clues while you were cleaning the scene?’

  ‘I got a sense of the layout. Rachel was killed in the lounge and carried out to the garage. All fifteen wounds were in her back. That suggested she trusted her attacker. Carrie believes that her mother didn’t know about Cater.’ Stella restacked papers. ‘What if Penelope Philips had guessed? Jackie once said Graham couldn’t hide that he was having an affair.’

  ‘Has Graham had an affair?’ Jack depended on Jackie and Graham, his surrogate parents, being happy. Jackie was in Manchester for a fortnight staying with her eldest whose partner had had a baby. She’d abandoned him for a ‘real’ son. Jack banished the thought. He was morphing into a green-eyed monster.

  ‘Of course not. Just that Penelope Philips’ family might be wrong in thinking that Penelope knew about Rachel.’

  ‘We see what we want to see.’ Jack saw too much.

  ‘You can’t fake CCTV. Penelope Philips was in London,’ Stella said. ‘However, she has motive and it’s too soon to rule her out. The time of death might be wrong.’

  ‘What if Rachel Cater had enemies.’ Jack contemplated the graduation picture. ‘Somehow I doubt it.’

  ‘Trudy is on it.’ Stella nodded.

  ‘Why not Bev?’ Jack was wistful for when it was just him and Stella on a case. Yet he’d pushed Stella to take solving crimes seriously and to expand her team.

  ‘With Jackie away, they’re divvying tasks.’ Stella scanned the court transcript. A giant spiral-bound document. ‘Rachel had one enemy or she’d be alive. There are positive statements from her colleagues: “Helpful in a crisis”, “thoughtful”, “unselfish”, “generous”, “always bubbly”.’

&
nbsp; ‘Not that they’d be likely to say she’d nicked a stapler or taken all the milk without buying more,’ Jack said.

  ‘Stealing a stapler isn’t a reason to kill.’ Stella was jotting down points from the transcript.

  ‘Want to bet? Offices are hotbeds of personal space protection. You know that from cleaning them.’

  ‘It says here that a Kevin Hood saw Rachel parking outside Philips’ house. He was walking his mother-in-law’s dog. He noticed that her brake light was broken. He called out, but she didn’t hear. It was just after two thirty because he heard the church bells chime.’

  Jack leaned over Stella, sniffing her hair. Rousing himself, he read Hood’s evidence aloud: ‘…I’d left my car for a valet at the garage and spent the afternoon at my mum-in-law’s on Back Lane. I got a list of jobs! I mended a pane in her greenhouse, put up a shelf in the lounge. She made scones. I collected my Audi from the garage. The purple VW was still on Abbey Terrace as I drove past. I nearly left a note about the light, but my wife says I’m a busybody. The six o’clock news came on the radio as I left Winchcombe.’ Jack sat back in his chair. ‘So this Kevin Hood has provided two time frames. Rachel arrived at the house at two thirty and she hadn’t left by six. Presumably because she was dead.’

  ‘I forgot to say.’ Stella twirled her dressing gown cord. ‘Trudy reckoned Carrie wasn’t telling us something. She found a gap in her story that didn’t add up. I kind of agree. Why is Carrie so convinced that her mother killed Rachel? She has an alibi, after all.’

  ‘Ironic, since in Trudy’s report she missed out what Carrie actually did say.’ Jack was mealy-mouthed. ‘People’s impressions are not always useful.’

  ‘Trudy wants to help.’ Stella flapped back his fringe.

  ‘Maybe she’s fed up being a boring old PA. Solving murders is sexier than typing cleaning estimates.’

  ‘Do you think so?’ Stella looked genuinely interested by what she would never for a minute have entertained.

  ‘Ignore me. I agree with Trudy. Let’s be cautious about Carrie. She’s too close to the murder to be objective. That could be a problem.’ Jack began washing their mugs at the sink.