The Playground Murders

by Lesley Thomson

  ‘Jason, manners. Guests,’ Joy Hindle shouted although her son was two feet away. Jason glared at them, upper lip curled.

  ‘What are you? Christians?’ Jason asked Jack.

  Don’t say yes, Stella silently urged Jack. She knew that yes would be the wrong answer.

  ‘They told Cathy Marshall they was friends of Lee’s.’ Joy Hindle whipped the cellophane off a packet of cigarettes.

  ‘He’s dead.’ Jason went back to the boxing. ‘Topped himself, stupid sod!’

  Nothing in the thickset man with product-moulded hair, muscles bunching under a QPR shirt, evoked the curly blond cherub, angel to his sister’s devil from the eighties’ press cuttings.

  Stella planned interviews, arranging questions into information-gathering and suspect-probing. This morning they’d been ambushed twice. She rarely operated on instinct, but her gut said leave. She reached for Jack’s hand too late to stop him cosying up to Jason on the couch.

  ‘They’ve never met Lee.’ Joy lit a cigarette and leaning over him slammed shut Jason’s tablet. Her son looked about to protest, but stopped himself.

  ‘What do you mean?’ Stella breathed in smoke and suppressed a cough.

  ‘You’re that cleaner who goes after murderers.’ Gimlet-eyed, cigarette smouldering between her lips, Joy tossed the packet between her hands like a grenade. ‘Listen, lady! Alan Ferris is a first-class bastard to Cath, but you piss about with either of them, you got me to face. Leave her alone. No point proving Danni didn’t murder those babbies, she’s guilty as sin.’ Joy jerked her head at Jason. ‘Get tea and open them biscuits.’

  Stella had assumed that, however outrageous Jack’s stories, people believed him. Joy Hindle had not. She grappled for a way to refuse tea and biscuits and flee.

  ‘Your daughter was guilty. We’re writing a book on why she killed Robbie and Sarah. To understand and stop it happening to other little children.’ Jack was nodding wisely as if he agreed with himself.

  She loved Jack. Stella’s limbs went to water and she collapsed in one of the garden chairs.

  ‘Who better to ask than her family?’ Jack furrowed his brow. ‘We really hoped we could meet you.’

  ‘You’re talking bollocks, mate.’ Jason returned with four mugs of tea in one hand and a plate of pink wafers in the other. ‘That won’t work with my mum.’

  As she took one of the mugs off Jason, Stella smelled the soap that Jack used. Absurdly, this made her warm towards him. She heard Terry, Never let a prejudice, towards or against, skew your judgement. No, OK.

  ‘The point is, why did she do it?’ Stella fixed on Jason.

  ‘Jason, tell us what you think. You two hung out in the playground.’ Jack was being man to man.

  There was a report. Then another. A gun.

  Stella gripped her tea. She should have trusted her instinct and got them out of there.

  Jason had trodden on the bubble packing. ‘Simples. She wanted a go on the slide. Robbie was in the way.’

  ‘It was an accident?’ Jack sounded disbelieving.

  ‘No way. More like she wanted to see what happened when he splattered all over the ground.’ Jason laid the plate of biscuits between him and Jack and took a handful. ‘Know what? If Danielle’s getting paid for a book, that’s blood money.’ That phrase again. ‘It belongs to her victims. That’s us.’

  ‘We’re not victims,’ his mother snapped.

  ‘Yeah. We are. We didn’t do nothing. She don’t get any name calling. We didn’t change our names.’ Slopping tea on his jeans, Jason slapped at the denim. ‘We deserve compensation.’

  ‘He’s right for once.’ A woman, metallic-coloured hair stiff with spray fanning out at an angle over her puffa jacket, an apricot poodle in her arms, filled the doorway.

  Stanley had escaped from the van.

  Stella started forward then spotted a pink collar around the dog’s neck. Not Stanley.

  ‘That’s Maxine, my eldest.’ Joy fired smoke at the ceiling. ‘Max, these are doing some book on Danni.’ She pointed her cigarette lighter at Stella. ‘She’s the daughter of that policeman who was sweet as pie then arrested Danni.’

  ‘Police. How come you let them in?’ Maxine Hindle demanded. The dog looked more outraged. Stella knew that look from Stanley.

  ‘They’re not police. She’s a cleaner. He drives trains.’ Joy knew more about them than they did about her. Stella, who never felt afraid, felt afraid.

  ‘Danielle came from a good solid family, we can see that. You guys didn’t murder anyone, so why did she?’ Jack said. Stella thought that the Hindles might find ‘good solid family’ a stretch.

  Joy slurped her tea and grimaced. ‘Jase, this milk’s gone.’

  Maxine burst out, ‘Everything’s about her. She just wants attention. Want my opinion, there’s too much understanding and not enough hanging. Danielle was an evil cow!’

  ‘She killed a cat. That’s the first sign,’ Jason said. ‘She’d crush Tom Fluff given half a chance.’

  ‘You never told me that.’ Joy snatched up a black cat curled asleep in Jason’s corner of the couch that Stella had taken for a cushion.

  ‘She only went and gave the dead cat to the owner,’ Jason said through a mouthful of biscuit. ‘Danni squashed insects. She crushed the cat’s neck. Ask me, that was practice for Sarah. I was scared to go to sleep or she’d crush me. Danni made me wet the bed.’ Gone was the iron-man image. Jason seemed eager to talk.

  ‘You wet it anyway.’ Maxine shielded the poodle from Tom Fluff’s haughty stare.

  ‘What do you mean, she crushed a cat?’ Stella recalled that Sarah Ferris’s neck had been crushed by a brick. Police never found the brick.

  ‘She pressed on its head with a brick.’ Jason put down a half-eaten biscuit. ‘Don’t say nothing, Danni said she’d kill me.’

  ‘She better not hear you dobbed her in with two book writers.’ Maxine had gone pale. Stella felt uneasy with the Hindles – though none of them provoked the chill she got even thinking about Penelope Philips – but she was surprised that Hindle’s family were frightened of her. ‘That’s how she killed Sarah,’ Jack breathed. He too was pale. Stella remembered that when Jack was little he’d had a cat called Brunel, named after the engineer. She could answer that in a quiz about her partner if someone asked.

  ‘Have you seen Danielle since she left prison?’ Jack wiped a hand down his face.

  ‘She’d be dead if she tried coming here.’ Maxine Hindle rocked her dog like a baby. Stella wished she’d stop, the poodle looked set to bite.

  ‘I’d knife her.’ Jason began testing his biceps, perhaps to distract from the business of bed-wetting.

  ‘You’d get banged up like your sister and Eddie, God rest his stupid bloody soul!’ Perched on the other garden chair, Joy danced Tom Fluff on her lap, white-booted paws dangling.

  ‘It’s good of you to give us time. We’ll leave you in peace.’ Stella got up.

  At the door, Stella skidded on a copy of Autocar lying on the mat. Maxine steadied her with a vicelike grip. Cradling the poodle, she accompanied them out to the street.

  ‘One more thing. Did you know Lee Marshall?’ Stella did the detective exit ploy.

  ‘Only when we were kids. Alan Ferris said Lee killed Sarah, but he doted on her. He got the blame. I heard what happened to him. His wife must have been in bits. Meanwhile, Danni gets all the luck, murdering’s made her rich. Big house and car. She gets away with murder.’ The pun appeared unintentional.

  A souped-up Ford Fiesta, throbbing with a hip-hop beat, did fifty down Braybrook Street.

  ‘How do you know?’ Stella asked.

  ‘I know my sister.’ Maxine presented her dog with a twig from the path. The poodle seized it between sharp teeth. ‘Every day’s a clean slate. Those kids were then, this is now.’

  ‘Have you seen Pen— Danielle?’ Stella was thrown by her cleaning company’s name although it was a common term.

  ‘Danni will never be sorry.’
>
  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  1994

  Terry was forty-five today. Later he’d have drinks down the Ram with the team. They’d sent him a card. A picture of a vinyl disc, ‘Young Free and Single.’ Ha ha. Terry wasn’t single. He was married. It might be nearly twenty years since Suzie left, but he kept faith that his family would come home. Not that at twenty-eight Stella would live in his house. Their house.

  It was summer, but it didn’t feel like it. The weather was cold and windy. It had rained in the night. Terry was relieved to find the playground empty. He sat on the bench by the gate, put there in memory of Robbie Walsh. Who will always play here. Wet Wet Wet’s ‘Love Is All Around’ had been on the radio as he’d eaten his cornflakes. Terry had imagined dancing to it with Suzie at Stella’s wedding one day. He shifted on the bench. Now was definitely not the time to have a love song on replay in his brain.

  Stella had said she’d pop into the pub and give him his present. She’d cancelled. She had a boyfriend and he had tickets to Four Weddings and a Funeral. Not that she’d told him any of this. Suzie put him in the picture. He’d seen Stella hand in hand with some boy – he wouldn’t say man – on King Street last week. He’d been driving with nowhere to pull in. He should have beeped his horn.

  He was risking everything coming to the playground.

  When Terry got the letter – the first for a year – he’d thrown it away. Then chucking a tea bag in the bin, he’d seen it and had to read it. He’d considered moving except she’d find him. She would always find him.

  He would tell her to stop writing. OK, so she’d done her time, but she’d never shown remorse. He was a policeman. It was his job to catch the bad people. That should be enough. It was not.

  He’d know Danielle Hindle anywhere. Arms like a robot, fast walking like she had stuff to do. Girl on a mission. Not a girl now. Her body language might be the same, but the well-to-do woman in a wool coat and Russian-style fur hat laden with West End shopping bags was miles from the bubble-gum touting kid in bovver boots who’d paid such close attention to the sonorous declamations of bewigged adults. This escapee from a shopping spree at Harrods with gelled nails, her hair tinted a tasteful auburn, carrying the air of entitlement of a smart denizen of South Ken or Gloucester Road, was born again. A far cry from the kid on Braybrook Street.

  Terry needed to hear Hindle express remorse. Some crimes haunted him because he’d never solved them. He’d solved this one. The killer was walking towards him. Like a drug fix he needed her to say she was sorry for the murders (he was in no doubt that she’d pushed Robbie off the slide). Hindle had to acknowledge that she’d ruined lives. Then he could forget her.

  Hindle joined him on the bench. She was pregnant.

  ‘I have to go.’ He’d been a bloody idiot.

  ‘I just got here!’ She looked stricken. Terry felt sickened, as when he let Stella down. She wasn’t Stella.

  ‘Danielle, if someone sees us you’ll go back to prison. I’ll lose my job.’

  ‘No one will see us.’ She laid protective hands on her stomach, wanting him to see. Lucie used to say that Hindle ran rings around him. The girl, described in court as cool and manipulative, complained in her letters how life was unfair. As if life was a game at which you could cheat.

  ‘It’s Penelope. Think Thunderbirds!’ She flashed a smile of even white teeth. ‘I’m having a baby. I was keen to tell you face to face. Before the police inform the papers.’

  ‘The police don’t do that.’ Terry knew there were bad apples who leaked stuff to the media. Christ, he’d accidentally done it himself. Lucie held secrets that could get him disciplined. Now it gradually sank in. Hindle was still manipulating him. She’d suggested she would talk about her crimes. She only wanted to tell him she was going to be a mother. She’d duped him. And of course he knew her new identity. Not via the police, Hindle had told him in a letter. He cleared his throat. ‘Are you allowed to keep it? The baby?’

  ‘What kind of question is that?’ She flared up. ‘What, you think I don’t have the right to kids? I changed Jason’s nappies enough. I’ve got a law degree!’

  ‘You told me.’ Terry knew all Danielle’s achievements. He read her letters. He read the papers. Lucie May told him. Murderers getting top marks in exams sold copies. ‘Is the father sticking by you?’

  ‘Sticking by me? Like I’m damaged goods? Chris thinks he’s lucky to have me. He’s an antiques dealer. With his own business and a big house.’ She flourished her Mulberry handbag.

  ‘How did you meet him?’ Terry’s mind was on Stella’s new man. Whippersnapper in posh strides. ‘Did he write to you in prison?’ Hindle wouldn’t have been allowed letters from strangers, but rules got broken. Some women felt sorry for men in for murder, even married them. Fewer men. It was sick to be attracted to a child-killer.

  ‘I went for a secretarial job in his shop. I’m a fast typist. It was love at first sight. Don’t look like that, it happens.’ She nudged his arm. ‘When the kid’s old enough I’m going to train as a dealer. He promised.’

  ‘I’m not looking like anything.’ Terry shrank from her. He did know you could fall in love right there and then. He’d loved Suzie from the moment he’d pulled her over for driving without due care and attention. He hadn’t booked her. Bad apple. But the girl he’d put in prison was not capable of love. ‘Can you trust this man to keep your secret?’

  ‘What secret?’

  ‘Who you are? Your past.’

  She touched her hat as it needed adjusting. ‘Chris knows me now, that’s what counts.’

  ‘You haven’t told him.’

  ‘Don’t start. You got any idea of the prejudice against ex-cons? The law helps the rich get richer. My dad couldn’t get a job because he’d been inside.’ Her upmarket accent slipped to Shepherd’s Bush. ‘He sold my story.’

  Eddie Hindle had died in an RTI earlier that year after a night celebrating a bank raid. Terry had known it would end badly for Hindle. The ever-longer sentences as his crimes escalated. He hadn’t anticipated the banal ending. Hindle had tripped in a gutter and fallen under a twenty-seven bus on Hammersmith Broadway.

  ‘We’re going to be a proper family.’

  ‘Hasn’t your probationary officer advised you to be honest?’

  ‘I should never of listened to you. You lied to me.’ Her eyes bored into him.

  ‘You lied to me.’ He had lied to her.

  They sat in silence. Across the playground two crows were squabbling over a hamburger bun. No kids about, it was too cold. Terry found himself scanning for childhood ghosts, those boys now men. Delving deeper into time, he saw his mum pushing him on the roundabout. Unlike the other mums who walked it around, she’d have one high-heeled shoe on the running board and scoot it up to speed.

  ‘Like I wrote in my letter, it’s a girl.’ Penelope spoke as if their previous interchange hadn’t happened. ‘She’ll love me. Chris isn’t God’s gift, but it’s not about looks. She’s called Carrie like Carrie Fisher in Star Wars. I saw the film after I went away.’

  Went away. Much of police work was running up a down escalator. Stupid to expect that Hindle regretted anything. Terry got up again. She didn’t notice.

  ‘I haven’t got a dad.’ She was staring at the spot where Sarah Ferris had been found. ‘I’m twenty-four. If I was your daughter, it would have been different. Thinking about it, Stella could be my sister. If this was a boy I’d have named him Terry. Carrie sounds a bit like it, doesn’t it?’

  ‘How do you know about Stella?’ His head reeled; he’d never replied to the letters. He’d told her nothing about his life.

  ‘I’d love to bring Carrie here to play.’ She was pettish. ‘If I told Mum, can you see her face? I’d have come in Chris’s Jag ’cept it’s at the garage. That’d put the wind up Jason! He told the papers I tried to kill him when we were kids. God knows what they paid him for that. He’s still at home having his socks darned. I saw him through the window. Little gobsh
ite!’

  ‘If you’re seen here the baby will be taken away. You’re breaching the terms of your licence.’ Stupid to be the police officer now. He took a step away from the bench. He couldn’t leave, he had to hear her say it…

  ‘I’m sorry that I killed them. I did a terrible thing. Robbie was getting on my nerves. I pushed him. I was horrified by what I’d done. I’m sorry. Sarah said she’d tell. I was top of the class, my life ahead. It was wrong. I am so sorry…’

  He heard only the cawing of the crows picking and tearing at the mouldy bun.

  She got heavily to her feet. ‘Don’t worry, Terry, I won’t let on I saw you. They’ll believe me, people do.’ Her smile chilled him.

  For a dreadful moment, Terry thought she was going to kiss him. But she went on ahead out of the playground. At the gate, she called back, ‘I’ll write when Carrie’s born.’

  ‘Don’t…’ But she was out of earshot. It was cold, yet Terry was sweating. Watching her stalk past the bandstand, the bags swinging, Terry saw the girl, hands swishing the air. He’d forgotten to tell Penelope to stop writing.

  ‘That looked cosy, darling!’

  ‘Lucie! What are you doing here?’ Shit.

  Safari jacket, cargo pants, camera slung around her neck.

  ‘My job.’ Lucie bared her teeth in a wolfish grin. ‘What’s your excuse?’

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  2019

  ‘Maxine propelled herself pole position for prime suspect.’ Jack put down the ginger beers and dropped a scattering of tomato ketchup and vinegar sachets beside the glasses. He took two bags of crisps from his coat. Jack’s appetite was insatiable. Lucie said he had hollow legs.

  ‘If Maxine has seen Penelope, she’s unlikely to have mistaken Cater for her.’

  ‘What if Maxine intended to frame Danielle?’ Jack said.

  ‘Good point, although it didn’t work,’ Stella agreed. ‘I still go for mistaken identity. We also have Jason and Joy Hindle, plus all the playground gang. Nicola Walsh and Kevin Hood. Let’s keep Cathy and Alan Ferris.’ Stella was scribbling the names in her notebook. ‘Let’s also keep open Penelope killing Rachel. She comes home. Finds Rachel there. Rachel tells her about the affair, Penelope goes mad and kills her. Sometimes things are exactly what they seem.’