The Playground Murders

by Lesley Thomson

  Upstairs in what had been Penny and Chris’s bedroom were more china dogs, a golden retriever in a running pose, a spaniel begging. A mausoleum of a four-poster was stacked with rows of cushions, each diminishing in size down the counterpane. A style that Jack found disquieting. Where did the cushions go at night?

  ‘Very nice.’ Out of character, Stella never remarked on clients’ décor.

  ‘He fucked her right there.’ Penny ignored the compliment.

  ‘According to what we’ve read Rachel had never been to your house until that day.’ Stella stuck to facts.

  ‘Chris is a born liar.’ Jack thought he detected hesitation. Did Christopher Philips tell lies or had his betrayal poisoned Penny’s view of him? ‘Carrie shouldn’t have contacted you. What does she know? It was me on Terry’s team. Me he trusts. He knows I’m innocent. It’s in our letters.’ Penny’s use of the present tense was downright creepy.

  ‘Terry?’ Stella flashed a shocked look at Jack. Jack offered a shrug.

  Jack mouthed, ‘What letters?’ Cashman was apparently concerned with Rachel’s murder, but Terry had been dead seven years.

  ‘Your father. We corresponded until the day he died.’ Penny had a True Host’s perception. She continued the tour. More dogs, more cushions. With her husband out of the way, Penny Philips’ taste had free rein. Was she making the best of a catastrophe or had her plan worked? Kill the mistress. Frame the husband. The modus operandi of a True Host.

  ‘Carrie’s room.’ Penny Philips straightened the duvet on a single bed and tucked a chair under a school desk. Textbooks were on shelves along with a microscope. There were also books on true crime, the Moors Murders, Ted Bundy in the States, Rachel Nickell. The seeds of Carrie’s determination to be a criminal barrister? Or instruction manuals for the murder that she would one day commit? Jack wondered if Stella was thinking the same thing.

  Carrie had said that she’d moved out with no intention of coming back. Did her mother hope that Carrie would return? Rachel Cater’s ghost didn’t haunt the house, but the presence of a girl doing her homework hunched over the desk was palpable.

  ‘My daughter isn’t talking to me. My husband won’t let me visit him in prison.’ Penny Philips looked fleetingly sad. Jack wasn’t fooled. True Hosts imitated emotions to a T. ‘Carrie says I killed that tart in revenge. Had she confronted me like they say she was going to, I’d have locked myself in the toilet and cried my heart out. I did that anyway. Me and Chris had the perfect life. Now I’ll have to start again. New house. New name.’

  Was doing a jigsaw a metaphor? Jack liked patterns. Penny would have to reconstruct her life. In her mid-forties there was time, but it was a big thing. If Penny Philips was a True Host then it would be business as usual. Something jarred. True Hosts were in charge of their lives. It was they who decided the fate of others. For her all apparent distress, by mentioning Terry, Penny had wanted to wrongfoot Stella. Seeing Stella clutching Stanley and staring off out of the window, Philips had succeeded. Jack longed to hold her. Penny ushered him out of the room.

  ‘Where’s your girlfriend?’ She stopped at the bottom of the stairs. Stella wasn’t behind them.

  They found her still by the window.

  ‘What are you looking at?’ Penny was sharp.

  ‘It’s a lovely view.’ Stella nodded at the hills beyond the town. The contours were outlined in Spring sunshine. Seemingly idyllic.

  Frowning, Penny signalled for Stella to leave, keeping them in sight as they returned downstairs.

  Jack made a silent resolution. They must get out of the house.

  ‘…there’s me thinking Chris was different to other men. Stupid! People say my girl inherited my brains – as you know she’s got a very high IQ like me – except Carrie thinks the police got it wrong so she’s not so smart.’

  Jack hadn’t read anything about Carrie’s IQ. Personally he didn’t hold much store by that kind of thing. It was only one way of looking at a person and missed out the best bits like ghosts and happiness.

  The kitchen was unexpectedly homely. Kenwood Chef, bread-maker, jars of pulses, spices, rice, quinoa, copper pans and utensils hung from butcher’s hooks. It suggested that eating was integral to the household. The knife block was empty.

  Penny unlocked a door by a bright yellow plastic dustbin and marched them past a terrace scattered with tables and chairs to an old building that was bigger than most houses.

  ‘This was the stables, but we don’t ride so it’s the garage. There’s room for three cars.’ Scooting them inside, Penny was back in show-home mode. The air was tainted by petrol, Jack guessed from a sit-on mower and a quad bike by one wall. There were no cars. There was an array of tools, hammers, screwdrivers, saws, shears, secateurs, a hedge cutter, a billhook… What was that for?

  Penny stamped a foot on a metal cover in the middle of the space.

  The drainage shaft.

  Jack knew that forensics had excavated from the side of the shaft to retrieve Rachel’s body without destroying evidence. As well as the screed floor, they’d fitted a new cover. A clumsy job with lumps and dips in the surrounding concrete.

  ‘This is the longest I’ve lived anywhere. Chris wanted to put down roots,’ Penny Philips said. ‘I can leave now.’

  ‘Isn’t this your dream home?’ Jack reminded her. A tease. He knew – and Penny Philips would know that he knew – that True Hosts didn’t have dream homes.

  ‘There’s been a murder here. It’s forever tainted.’ Penny grabbed a tyre iron from the wall. Jack grabbed at Stella, but Penny was already levering up the drain cover.

  A stench of blood and putrefying flesh drifted up from the shaft that, had she never been found, would have been Rachel Cater’s grave.

  Stanley began to whimper as if he too could detect the murdered woman, her broken body crumpled far below at the bottom of the shaft. Jack saw brown smears of dried blood where the corpse had bumped against the sides as Christopher Philips chucked Rachel in like so much rubbish. Even if the auctioneer hadn’t killed her, the act was callous. Had he chosen the deposition site in panic or was it a calculated choice?

  The stains and smell were in Jack’s – and Stanley’s – imagination. Rachel’s body had been wrapped in plastic and besides Stella had cleaned the shaft. It would more hygienic than most people’s dinner tables.

  ‘Chris never told me this was here. It’s defunct. Carrie could ask herself why I didn’t know. The police say Chris planned the murder.’ Smacking the tyre iron on her palm Penny might be a plumber discussing the pros and cons of the sewer system. ‘Are we done?’

  ‘Done? Yes!’ Jack wanted them outside and driving away. Not teetering on the brink of a gaping pit with a psychopath.

  ‘Not quite.’ Stella cleared her throat. ‘Why is Carrie convinced that you murdered Rachel Cater?’

  ‘You’re joking me!’ Penny’s laugh was a snarl. ‘Wait. She didn’t tell you? I thought that’s what this was all about.’

  ‘Tell us what?’ Stella asked.

  ‘How d’you think I knew Terry? My girl couldn’t get to Terry because he’s dead. So what does she do? She only goes and cosies up to his daughter! She knows what buttons to press.’

  The huntin’ shootin’ accent had made way for far-from-posh West London. Doing voices was another True Host trait. They were chameleons. There was a sharp rise in tension; Jack had a clear run to the exit. Stella did not.

  ‘Carrie read an interview with Stella in some freebie rag.’

  Jack often worried that publicity would expose Stella to cranks and stalkers. And murderers. A reason he liked to go unseen and unsung. Trudy had observed of Carrie: There’s something she’s not saying.

  ‘Come out and say it.’ Penny Philips slammed a hand on a green button above the quad bike and a shutter rose.

  ‘Say what?’ Stella was peering down the shaft, Stanley wide-eyed on her shoulder.

  Come on! Jack stopped himself from dragging her away.

  Penny
spoke above screeching metal as slowly – too slowly – the shutter lifted.

  ‘I’m the girl they call the Playground Killer.’

  Chapter Nineteen

  1980

  ‘I will be on the news like you. I no you sed not to speack to the reporter so I did not say nothing anything. Lee and Nicola told her lots, but the reporter liked me best. Miss May started on about the charms. You should arest her and lock her into prison with Derick Parsley then she cant write stupid stuff. Meet me in the Play ground arfter school. She said I will be famus.

  From Constable Danielle Hindle aged ten. (My new name.)

  Seated on a swing in the deserted playground, Terry reread Danielle’s letter. As he’d told Lucie, Danielle’s spelling wasn’t great. Actually it was terrible, worse than Stella’s at ten. The teachers had said she was smart. He supposed she could express herself which was half the battle. As for Stella, by that age she was living with Suzie and her only letters were Christmas and birthday thank-yous. On Basildon Bond paper. He’d kept them. Some months ago, going through them, Terry had noted how often Stella had put, ‘I was pleased to receive your thoughtful gift’ and it dawned on him that Suzie had made Stella write. She’d stood over Stella dictating the banal phrase. Stella hadn’t written especially to him. Suzie always said his presents were wrong. When Stella got flu and missed an access weekend, he’d come to see her. Squatting down to kiss her in bed Terry had spotted the Tiny Tears doll still in its box under the bed.

  If Stella had been living at home – this house was her real home – early on Christmas morning she’d have been tearing into his and Suzie’s bedroom pleading to open her presents like she had the year before Suzie left him. Stella had liked the Sherlock Holmes set. Blanching at her carefully inscribed sentences, the politeness of a stranger, Terry had chucked out Stella’s letters.

  Lucie had said Terry let Danielle – and Stella – get the better of him. He did have a soft spot for Danielle Hindle. The girl wanted to be a detective. Like Stella. Then Suzie told him that Stella had ‘grown out of the silly idea’. Pulling back on the swing, Terry slipped the letter inside his jacket pocket. He lifted his feet off the concrete and swung forward. Without kids racing about playing games the playground was bleak, just concrete and iron. A place of murder.

  It would make his life easier if, like Danielle Hindle had suggested, the press were penned up during an investigation. Crazy slip telling Lucie about the letters. And she’d got to the kids. Terry scooted the swing higher. Lucie was only loyal to her story. Parsley’s suicide had given her bigger fish to fry. She might forget the letters.

  Late afternoon. The light was fading. The park would be closing. He had escaped the circus at the police station. End of investigation drinks, Christmas drinks. Terry didn’t feel like celebrating either. Lennon’s ‘War is Over’, all over the radio since his fatal shooting, kept playing in Terry’s head. He thought of Sean Lennon, the little boy aged five had lost his dad. Lucie had planted a niggle in his mind. Sutherland, the pathologist, reported that Sarah Ferris hadn’t died where she was found. SOCO discovered drops of blood in a gap in laurel bushes outside the fence. The drops suggested that Parsley moved her. Why? It was like he’d wanted to be caught.

  Terry leaned into the swing, legs outstretched, building momentum. People compared solving an investigation to a jigsaw. An actual jigsaw was a futile pastime. The assembly of the picture depicted on the puzzle box only to dismantle it on completion. At the start of a case Terry had no idea what it would look like. Had he made the wrong pieces fit the wrong picture?

  Derek Parsley had been sprawled in his cell, cut down from the window bars by the duty officer. Terry had stormed in and been stopped from doing mouth to mouth.

  ‘No!’

  Terry thrust his legs upwards as the swing flew down. The shout was an echo from his boyhood. Mr Greenwood had taken the sixteen-year-old out of the technical class. Terry was wanted at home. ‘Son, your dad’s dead. He’s had a heart attack.’

  ‘Not my dad!’

  Terry had stood in his parents’ front garden and shouted at the sky where God was supposed to be.

  He flew up and up. As a boy he’d swung until he was nearly upside down. Speed defying gravity. Terry braked with the heel of his shoe. He’d been so intent on a confession that he’d failed to protect Parsley from himself. He’d practically walked that confession out of the man. ‘Come on, Derek, you’ll feel better if you tell us what you did. We know, but we want to hear it from you.’ Parsley had confessed. But now no one had felt better. Terry had failed himself too.

  Baying mobs had stopped traffic on Hammersmith Broadway, screaming and pelting eggs and soft fruit at the police station. Child-Killer Skips Justice. Lucie’s front page demanded to know why Parsley wasn’t on suicide watch. She left out the bit about the SIO getting his end away (Terry punished himself with crude tabloid speak) while the prime suspect was knotting bedsheets for his noose. People had wanted Derek Parsley hanged, but at their behest not his.

  Terry had robbed the Walsh and Ferris families of an explanation in court. Not that you could explain the unexplainable. He rested a cheek on one of the swing chains. Parsley had been like a frightened kid, out of his depth. If he’d been found fit to plead, likely he’d have been deemed not guilty by reason of insanity. There was no good outcome for murder except to turn the clock back.

  Terry got off the swing. You didn’t come back from a cock-up like this.

  The moving swing ghosted his presence. If only he could turn the clock back. To when his dad was alive. To when little Robbie and Sarah had played carefree games in the playground. To undo every mistake he’d ever made.

  The only way to keep children safe was to never let them out of your sight.

  Suzie let Stella hang about with friends after school, share Kentucky Fried Chicken buckets and see X-rated films at the Regal. Who were these friends? When they were a family, Terry used to know. He’d met one girl from her secondary school. Liz was her name. He’d liked her. Danielle Hindle’s curiosity and excitement about his work took Terry back to when he was Stella’s hero and Stella had wanted to be a detective.

  ‘Did you get my report, guv?’ Danielle had got ‘guv’ from Cashman. Hair in unruly locks, in her baggy handed-down dress secured around the waist with rope like a monk’s habit, Danielle was the proverbial urchin. There it was. The look of trust and expectation that Stella once gave him.

  ‘Report?’ He kicked a stone sending it bouncing towards the slide.

  ‘I ’specially took it to the station. So you’d see it when you woke up.’ Danielle’s spelling might be haphazard, but she had the reading age of an adult. She’d followed the Playground Murders (Lucie’s coinage) in the papers. She had read that most nights Terry stayed at the station. Detective vows ‘I won’t sleep until Sarah’s killer found.’

  ‘I did get it. Thanks, Danielle.’ He played along. Make-believe.

  ‘The man Parsley hung himself by the neck.’ Danielle adjusted her monk’s rope.

  ‘Yes.’ Terry felt uneasy. The girl missed nothing.

  ‘I bet you made him say he did it.’ She was earnest.

  ‘It’s Christmas Eve, Danni. You should get home. Your mum and dad will be worrying.’

  ‘My mum’s watching telly. Dad’s out robbing. Let’s arrest him. Teach him a lesson.’ Danielle’s eyes gleamed.

  ‘He’s your dad, Danielle.’ Terry didn’t know why he said this. Eddie Hindle should be locked up. He’d only come out and go on stealing, but it would make Terry feel that his job had a point. He wondered when Eddie Hindle had stopped being a ‘hero-dad’. ‘It’s not safe to be here, it’s nearly dark.’

  ‘The murderer is dead.’ Hands on hips, Danielle spoke as if she’d dispatched Derek Parsley herself.

  ‘He’s not the only criminal.’ Shivering, Terry pinched together the lapels of his jacket. He shouldn’t frighten her. She didn’t look frightened. ‘Your letter said you talked to that reporter,
Miss May?’

  ‘She made me.’ Quick as a flash.

  ‘You’re not in trouble.’ Terry smiled, hating himself when the girl’s face lit up. Cashman had it right when he’d said the kid craved attention.

  ‘I shouldn’t of. Have.’ Danielle scowled. ‘I said I’m sorry.’ Actually she hadn’t.

  ‘That’s OK. No harm.’ No harm. Danielle Hindle had told Lucie the very thing the hard-nosed reporter had just got out of him. How Sarah Ferris was murdered. Jesus Christ. No wonder Lucie had scoffed at his calling Danielle an incomparable witness. Danielle had handed Lucie key information. Never mind Danielle and her gymnastics Lucie must have done handstands as the girl handed her a scoop on a plate. Handstands. Terry felt a cold rush through his brain as if a hole had been drilled into his skull.

  ‘Danielle, how did you know about the brick?’

  *

  Danielle skipped along Braybrook Street. They reached the Hindle house as, on cue, Martin Cashman and WPC Janet Piper drew up in the car.

  ‘Tell them we don’t need them,’ Danielle said. ‘The murderer is dead.’

  ‘Janet and Martin are on our team, Danielle.’ Terry was getting good at games.

  Eddie and Joy were on the settee kissing like teenagers. Terry rubbed the back of his neck. He’d never do that in front of Stella. Not because he was prudish – he was – but because it was plain rude. What kind of home was this for kids? Plenty of children had crap lives, it didn’t make them… He wiped a hand down his mouth. This case was killing him.

  Maxine Hindle was slumped in an armchair flipping through Jackie magazine. Jason lay on his tummy by the unlit gas fire fiddling with odds and ends of Lego. Terry doubted that Father Christmas would be battling his way down the chimney in the Hindle household.

  Treading over sweet wrappers, Adidas trainers, a child’s bunched pair of jeans, and a baseball jacket for the Red Sox – no doubt one of Eddie’s liberations – Terry lowered the volume. Janet remained at the door. To avoid it looking like a raid, Cashman stayed in the hall.