The Playroom

Book 0: Karen Sharpe

by John Connor

Genres: Mystery; Hard-Boiled; Police Procedurals; Female Sleuths; Crime Fiction; Suspense

Synopsis

Excellent second novel featuring Yorkshire Detective Constable Karen Sharpe. The daughter of a Bradford judge is kidnapped and a massive, round-the-clock investigation begins. Knowing the chances of Sophie surviving will diminish dramatically after the first twenty-four hours, Detective Chief Superintendent John Munro begins to crack under the pressure of holding together an enquiry swamped with leads. Meanwhile, DC Karen Sharpe is pursuing her own single-handed enquiry into historic child abuse allegations when an MP is accused of rape ten years before. The task of finding corroboration looks hopeless, but Sharpe keeps at it - anything rather than face up to her own tangled personal life. The truth is more complex and frightening, leading back to still unresolved events from a year before. Karen's enquiry uncovers connections with the kidnapping, and, in an explosion of violence and bloodshed, Karen is left fighting not just to find Sophie, but to save herself.

Release date: April 21, 2011

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 464

Sample

She was with her mummy again. She was sitting on the table in their dining room and her mother was leaning towards her, laughing. She could hear the laughter, hear its lightness and warmth. Her mother had on her head a light shade, which she had taken from the bulb above the table. She had put it on her head to be funny, pulling faces at her, speaking in a strange voice. It was a wide, flat sixties design that looked like a Chinese peasant hat and her mother was making her eyes into slits, pretending to be oriental.

She felt like nobody in the world could hurt her. She was laughing the way only two-year-olds can laugh, without any memory of pain. Around them the house was hot and comfortable. There were no men, no father figures, no one to hit her or make her do things to them she didn’t want to do.

The image ran through her mind. There was no aching now, no pounding in her head, no parched mouth or stabbing pains in her gut. All that had gone. The image was protecting her. She felt as if she were floating. She had never remembered the memory before. Before she had been brought here her first memory had always been the same. She was five or six years old and her mother was brushing her hair. Her mother hated her hair, told her it was frizzy and ugly. She had tried to get rid of it, cutting it off or pulling it back into pigtails. She had stood there crying as her mum dragged it back from her scalp, forcing it into an elastic band, to ‘keep it out of her eyes’, pulling it so hard it had come out at the roots …

The memory made her panic. Immediately, she remembered other things that weren’t so good. Only a year ago her mum had stopped her seeing a boy from the other end of the street. He had been nice to her, told her she was pretty, bought her sweets from the corner shop. But her mother had read her diary and found out what she had felt for the boy. When she caught her mum reading her private thoughts she had hit her. Not hard, just lashing out with frustration, slapping her arm through tears of rage and betrayal.

Things had been bad between them since then. Too bad to want to think about. Sometimes she had thought there was something wrong with her mum.

Her mother had handed her over to the man who had put her here, in this hole in the ground. She had seen the look in her eyes as she leaned towards her and told her to behave for him. Eyes shifting from her. Had she known it was going to happen? Before it had become impossible to cry she had screamed for her mum so much her throat had closed up, silencing her.

She could not cry any more, could not even open her eyes. Her body was dried up, vanishing. She was only vaguely aware of it now. Everything that was happening was going on inside her head, behind her eyelids. She couldn’t move. There had been two others down there with her. Two little girls. Before the pain had crippled them all, before they had become too weak, they had tried desperately to get out of the place, digging and clawing at the damp, earthen walls with their bare fingers until the nails were stripped away and her hands felt like enormous balloons of searing pain.

It had been no use. They had hit stones and rocks immediately. The darkness was so total it wasn’t even possible to work out where they should have been digging. Then they had started to get really thirsty. The ache had swollen inside her head so that all she could do was lie on the dirt floor of the trench in a huddle, trying to keep the chill out, trying to console the other two. They had been worse than her, more frightened.

She was still hanging onto them now. She had forgotten their names, knew only that they were twelve, a year younger than her, that once they had been warm and had kept her warm. She had tried to help them, told them repeatedly that they would get out of this, that they should just go to sleep and wait.

Now their bodies, pushed up against her to either side, were cold and stiff. They didn’t move anymore, didn’t speak, didn’t even breathe. She could not remember how long they had been like that, but she knew what it meant. Before the numbness had come over her she had been able to smell them.

It meant she was alone. Alone in the darkness and sinking slowly towards them. Soon she would be there with them.

She tried to go back to the memory of the Chinese hat, to her mother laughing. She didn’t want to panic. She still believed this would be over, that she would come out of it. Her mother would open the trapdoor above her and be standing there, laughing. She would reach down into the pit and lift her out, hugging her, running her hand through her hair, whispering that she loved her, that she was safe, that it had all been a joke.

She lay there, crushed between two dead bodies in a six-foot hole beneath the cellar of a house. The look on her face was peaceful, her cracked lips bleeding as she moved her muscles into the best smile she could manage.

The yellow school bus dropped Sophie Kenyon at the bottom of The Grove, as usual. But instead of going straight home she walked slowly past the entrance to her street and took Wells Road up towards the moor, holding her satchel by its straps at arm’s length, so that it was almost dragging along the ground beside her. She kept her eyes down and as she got higher up the hill she began to cry.

A middle-aged woman with a wide hat and a brown Spaniel on a leash passed her without looking. The dog paused momentarily to sniff her leg, but Sophie didn’t notice it. She was too lost in herself.

For the same reason she didn’t see the van coming up behind her, from The Grove. When it was close, however, she heard the engine slowing and she looked up. A man was leaning through the open window of the driver’s door, speaking to her. Through the tears she couldn’t see his face well, but he was asking her if she was OK. Though his voice sounded kind and concerned, she didn’t know him, so she turned away without answering and walked on, hurrying a little. It was only as she opened the gate onto the moor that something clicked in her memory and she realized she had seen the van before.

She stopped, turned round and looked back down the road, drying her eyes so that she could see properly. The van had gone.

She looked around her. She was on the edge of Ilkley, about to step onto the moor. The area was wealthy, full of large, detached houses built at the turn of the century. Below and to both sides were high walls enclosing large gardens backing onto the moor. Some of the houses belonged to school friends or people her father knew. The whole area was familiar to her, safe. She looked back up towards the high horizon, jagged with pine trees. It was a bright summer day, too warm for either a coat or a jumper, 23 June 1997, her birthday and the start of her teenage years. Something she should have been celebrating.

She stepped onto the dirt track up to ‘the tarn’, as it was known locally. The mud under her shiny, black school shoes was baked solid by a week of high temperatures and no rain. She was wearing her navy school tunic, short white socks and a loose white shirt, open at the neck – she had removed her tie that afternoon during art class. She still had smudges of paint on her hands and fingers.

As she walked she remembered she had seen the van as she was getting off the bus last week. She had noticed because she had seen it two nights in a row, turning onto Eaton Road after her. It was a white van with a faded blue stripe along the side, as if it had once been a police van, but the stripe had been painted over. The realization triggered a tiny trace of confusion, somewhere in the back of her mind, but not enough to make her change her plans.

When she reached ‘the tarn’ she saw with dull pleasure that she had it to herself. She could see no one else in any direction. Being alone was what she preferred these days. She sat down on a bench.

She had been coming here nearly all her life, first with her mother, then with her nanny, then by herself. The place was a duck pond, surrounded by small trees and bushes, hidden from view by the folds of the moor. She liked many things about it – particularly the memories it brought: her mum standing at the water’s edge and throwing scraps of bread onto the water; the feel of her mum’s long fingers interlaced through her own; the scramble of the ducks all rushing to get the same piece of bread. She could see it all happening now as if her mum had never been taken from her. It brought a lump to her throat. She tried to ignore it and concentrate on other details. There were other reasons she liked being here. She liked sitting in silence beside the water watching the birds, dreaming she was somewhere else.

The lump got the better of her and she started to cry again. Everything about the day was miserable. They were organizing a party for her back at the house. She knew they would be wondering where she was. It was meant to be a surprise party, but she knew all about it because she had overheard them planning it one night in their bed. That wasn’t all she heard from their bed. There were louder, stranger noises too, things Trisha Merrington had told her about in science classes.

She hated her father’s new wife, more than she had ever hated anything in her life. The woman was too young, too stupid, too pretty. She didn’t even speak English properly. She knew why he was with her, knew what was going on and thought it was pathetic. Because of her, because he was with her and because he was continually taking her side, she was beginning to hate her dad as well.

She felt sick thinking about what she would have to go back to. There would be bunting and balloons, party games, musical chairs and ducking apples – as if she were eight years old. To make things worse they had secretly invited all her friends. The whole thing would be embarrassing, juvenile. She looked at her watch. Ten to five. They would be beginning to worry about her already. She stood up with a sigh.

He was standing right in front of her. She hadn’t noticed him approach because she had been too lost in her own thoughts.

‘Sophie?’ he asked.

She recognized the voice at once. He was the driver of the van.

‘I work for your dad.’

She frowned. ‘What do you mean?’ He was standing too close to her, boxing her in. She looked quickly to either side. The paths were deserted still. ‘My dad doesn’t have anybody working for him,’ she said. She was about to add, ‘He’s a judge,’ but quickly thought better of it. What if this man was someone her father had sent to prison, someone dangerous?

‘I look after him,’ the man said. ‘I actually work for the police.’

She looked up at him, relaxing a little, but still worried. ‘Look after him?’

‘I work with something called Special Branch. Your dad has to deal with a lot of evil people at work. You must know that already. I watch over him. It’s my job to protect him from them.’

She frowned again. Her father had never mentioned this. She took a step back. ‘What do you want? Have you got ID?’

He stepped forwards, towards her, at the same time digging in his pocket and flashing a pass at her, a laminated piece of card with his photograph on it. She had time to register the face – his – and the West Yorkshire Police logo, then it was gone. She noticed he was wearing a dark grey suit. ‘Something bad has happened,’ he said. Your dad is in Bradford, in a safe place. You can’t go back to your house. I’ve been sent to bring you out to him.’

Her heart began to beat faster. ‘What has happened?’

He smiled at her. ‘We are in a hurry, Sophie,’ he said. ‘Follow me back to the van and I’ll tell you on the way.’ He began to walk away from her.

She followed, feeling suddenly panicky, frightened. ‘What has happened?’

‘Nothing to worry about.’ He was two steps ahead of her, walking swiftly. ‘We just can’t go back to your house. Not right now.’

‘Why?’

‘Some men are there. They are trying to kill your dad.’

She gasped in shock, stopping.

He stopped as well and leaned towards her, putting an arm around her shoulder. ‘I shouldn’t have told you,’ he said. His voice was gentle. ‘What you need to know is that your father is safe and we are dealing with it. I’ll take you to him and you can have the party later, when all this is over.’

She looked down at his hand, where it was resting against her upper arm. The nails on his fingers were bitten back, cracked, the tips of the fingers stained yellow. She felt a ripple of disgust run through her.

‘Let’s go,’ he said, still holding onto her.

She had to walk quickly to keep up with him. The way he had his arm around her meant she would actually fall over if she didn’t hurry. She tried to control the panic she was feeling about her dad until they got back to Wells Road. Once there she saw the van parked up by the gate to the moor.

He stepped over to the passenger door, taking his arm from her, then paused.

‘Best if you travel in the back,’ he said. ‘We don’t want them spotting you.’

She nodded and followed him to the back of the van. As he was opening the doors, she said, her voice trembling, ‘Are you sure my daddy is OK?’

He opened the door and smiled at her. He had a nice smile, reassuring. ‘He’s safe,’ he said, pointing into the van, indicating that she should step in. She saw that the back of it was empty except for a mattress lying on the floor. It looked dirty. There were no windows. ‘And you will be too,’ he said to her. ‘Once we get you out of here.’

The mattress puzzled her and she hesitated. But only for a second.

She climbed inside, then turned round to look at him, but already the door was slamming shut.

DC Karen Sharpe looked at the woman called Pamela Mathews. They were in one of the interview rooms used by the CPT – the Child Protection and Domestic Violence Team – at Eccleshill Police Station. In front of Karen, on the table between them, were nine sheets of A4 covered with her own dense, nearly illegible handwriting.

Following the usual legal declaration on the first page there was a preamble Karen used every time she took a statement, giving the witness’s name and a small amount of background history – their home circumstances, marital position etc. Pamela had given her age as twenty-three and an address in Otley. After the preamble the story began.

Detectives took statements in one of three ways. You either wrote down what was said, as it was said – in which case it usually came out a jumbled-up mess – or you gave the witness the paper and told them to do it themselves unaided (it came out worse), or you got them to sit with you and tell the whole thing as it came to them, from start to finish, taking notes and asking clarifying questions as you went along, then going back over it all again when they were finished and writing the statement for them.

Karen always picked the latter option. She listened carefully, got a sense of what was going on, went back over unclear parts and got things straight, then she took the victim through it all again, directing their focus where she needed it and writing as she went. Lastly she read it back to them and got them to sign it as accurate. She began to read Pamela what she had written:

I can recall clearly that the man told me that my mum and dad were in danger. And that was why I got into the van with him. He was a young man – not as old as my dad – but apart from this I can remember little about him. He spoke well, not like someone without an education. Once I was in the van he continued to talk to me as he was closing the doors. This was in the back of the van. I noticed he was getting into the back of the van with me and started to ask him about this. As he turned towards me he hit me with something. He struck me in the face. I don’t know what he used. I fell down and I was bleeding from the head and crying.

After that I could feel him doing something to my arm, then I was falling asleep or passing out. As I started to lose consciousness I could hear him talking softly to me – as if he cared about me – he was stroking my hair and I couldn’t move. I was paralysed by the thing he had given me, the drug he had injected into my arm. He told me that I shouldn’t be frightened; he said he was taking me somewhere safe. That was all I can remember him saying.

I was thirteen years old and I was terrified. I can remember how terrified I was, even now. It was so frightening because I didn’t know what was going on. I was shouting for my mummy but he had something in my mouth. He was pushing it into my mouth so that I was beginning to choke and couldn’t breathe. Then everything went black.

I woke up somewhere dark with my head hurting. When I could see I realized I was tied up on some kind of bed and couldn’t really move. I started shouting out, crying and begging for help. I had no clothes on and I was cold. I can remember I could touch one of the walls with the fingers of my hand – it was rough and damp, more like a cave than the wall of a house. I don’t know how long I was like that, but no one heard me and no one came. I was shivering and frightened and I wet myself, but still no one came.

I don’t know how long I was kept there by myself. I drifted in and out of sleep, I think. Most of the time I was awake I was either crying to myself or shouting for my mum. Sometimes I just lay there listening and trembling.

The first time he came back I must have been asleep because I woke up with the lights really bright in my eyes and he was injecting something into my arm again. I know now that was what he was doing, at the time I could just feel a sharp pain and then the effects, afterwards. I started to struggle, to try to fight him, but I was tied down very tightly. I don’t know what he gave me but it didn’t knock me out, instead I went limp. My heart was racing and I could see and hear everything, but I had no energy, no ability to move or shout or even speak.

When I was like that, dumb and paralysed, he untied me and sat me up and began to feed me from a baby bottle. I had to suck on it to get some kind of liquid into my throat. But I could hardly even suck. It took all my concentration to move my mouth. I don’t know what it was he was feeding me. I couldn’t taste anything, but I was so thirsty I tried to suck in as much as I could. He was talking to me as he did all this, but I can’t remember now what he was saying. I was terrified of him. When I had drunk enough of the liquid he rolled me over onto my tummy, still on the bed I had been tied to. He took my new dress off me. It was a dress my mother had given me for my birthday. He tore it. Then I could feel him doing something to my bottom, from behind. But everything was numb and I couldn’t move. I could feel him on top of me. He was so heavy I had difficulty breathing, but I didn’t know what he was doing. I could hear him panting and shouting things, but I didn’t know why. I still – to this day – do not know what he did to me. Because of the drugs, I think, it didn’t hurt me.

At some point I was moved. He drugged me again to move me, I think, because I can recall little of the journey. It might only have been a move from one part of the house to another. I don’t know. I can remember lying in a kind of stupor. I wasn’t tied up or anything. I just felt so sluggish I couldn’t really move. I think that by this point I must have been feeling numb, I think the fear must have gone from me, because I can recall lying on a big bed somewhere, with sheets and warmth and light. And I remember feeling very happy. I think they must have shot me up with heroin or coke or some kind of narcotic drug. I can’t recall them cleaning me up but they must have because I smelled different, even to myself. Maybe they sprayed perfume on me. I don’t know. They had dressed me as well – in clothes which weren’t mine. A dress, tights, a bra, knickers. I had never worn a bra before.

I lay on that bed and it was like I was floating in some kind of dream. Through the floor I could hear feet moving and music. It was like they were having a party somewhere else in the building. At some point a woman came in and she started brushing my hair as I lay there. She gave me something to drink and smiled at me. I just looked at her and smiled back. I had forgotten everything that was happening.

Later on they came down in a group. I don’t know who they were. They came into the room and they were laughing. There were at least three of them. As they were coming through the door I heard one of them say, ‘This is the playroom, the room where little girls play.’ Then they all laughed, as if it were a joke.

They did things to me and I just lay there. I couldn’t react, I couldn’t feel pain. I just lay there like a pillow or a bag of rags. They moved me around and did what they wanted to me.

Some time after they were gone I was able to move. Not so much that I could walk around, but so that I could look at where I was. The noise from downstairs was still continuing. I saw that I wasn’t alone in the room. There were two other girls in there with me. I don’t know their names or how old they were. They were both lying on beds. There were four beds in the room, but only three had mattresses. The room had wallpaper and pictures of fish jumping through a sea. There were childish mobiles hanging from the ceiling and, in one corner, a doll’s house and some toys. All around the walls, from the door to the window, they had painted a huge, twisting, Chinese dragon, with a gaping mouth and flames – not frightening, but childish. It looked like a child had painted it. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I think now that this must have really been a playroom, a room belonging to some children.

I don’t remember speaking to the other two girls. They were dressed up as I was, in fancy dresses and underwear. I remember one of the girls kept saying that her tummy was hurting and she was bleeding. I could see the blood on the sheets around her. She was sobbing and holding a blanket to her mouth. I don’t know how old she was.

At some point they came again, but there were more of them this time and this time I could feel things and I knew what was happening. It lasted a long time. They tore the clothes off me and hit me. I started to cry and struggle, but they pinned my arms back. Two of them pinned my arms back and held my legs while he did it to me. I can remember him now. He was fat and sweating and he didn’t look at me. At one point he collapsed on top of me and they threw some cold water on him. I think he was drunk and drugged. I think he was actually passing out. He was hurting me, inside me. I was shouting at him. I was shouting and screaming so loudly that they pushed something in my mouth and he kept going. I saw his face very clearly. All the lights were on. It was the man I saw on TV last week. I have no doubt about it. He was younger then, but still fat. His eyes were the same. His name is Geoff Reed.

He raped me and didn’t care. When he was finished another one took over and they turned me over and I could feel that they were doing it from behind me, to my bottom. I had my face pressed sideways and I could see the one called Geoff Reed sitting in a chair watching, his trousers around his ankles. He was wearing a flower – a red rosette – in the lapel of his jacket and he had a champagne glass in his hand. He was celebrating something. I am sure of it. From the way they were talking to him I thought the party was his, or for him.

Karen stopped and slid the last few sheets across the table to Pamela and pointed to where she should sign them. Pamela took the pen from her with difficulty. She was a nervous wreck, shaking uncontrollably, hands covering and uncovering her face in quick, compulsive gestures, clearly terrified of something that Karen could only guess at – because as far as her present circumstances were concerned, she had refused to give Karen a single detail.

The present circumstances looked unpleasant. Karen had mentally ticked off and noted them as she walked the woman to the interview room. Beneath her hands Pamela’s face was a mess. Both eyes were blackened, the right so badly it had closed up. Her lips were split in several places, her nose swollen and showing signs of deviation. From the way she spoke she wasn’t getting any air through it. There was dried blood around her mouth from where the nose was still haemorrhaging. The blood was running in a steady trickle across her top lip, into the mouth and out again, making her occasionally sputter as she spoke. When she had first opened her mouth, Karen had caught a glimpse of a bloody coagulation in her lower jaw, where several teeth had been knocked out. She had also observed three areas to the rear of the woman’s head where clumps of hair were missing.

Beneath it all Karen guessed she might be attractive. She would be about five feet six inches, in her bare feet. She had shoulder-length black, frizzy hair, which even in her present condition she had applied some kind of product to, in a vain attempt to unravel the frizz and turn it into a tight curl. Karen could smell the perfume in the product, though the odour was vying with the stronger smell of stale alcohol coming from her breath. Her face was difficult to judge, bruised as it was, but the one eye Karen could see was a good, clear blue and there was a dense pattern of freckles across the skin, from her forehead to her toes. She was so skinny that Karen guessed she would have been anorexic in her teens, maybe still was.

The face and head wasn’t the only problem. Both arms were bruised, showing characteristic green and yellow patterns typical of gripping injuries about two, maybe three, days old. She held one of her fingers so delicately that Karen felt sure it was fractured. She limped. When she stood up it was apparent that she suffered sharp pains in the chest that made her pause and hold her breath; broken ribs perhaps. Beneath the knee-length denim skirt she wore, there was extensive bruising to both calves and thighs. On the upper surface of her right foot – visible through the straps of the sandals she was probably wearing so as not to irritate it – there was an ugly, infected burn at the centre of which was a small, circular, weeping sore roughly the dimensions of a cigarette end.

But none of this had anything to do with the story she was telling.

Karen leaned towards her across the table and asked again the same questions she had already asked three times: ‘You are sure about this, Pamela? What you have told me, what we have written into this statement – it all happened ten years ago?’

‘Yes.’

Karen sighed. ‘So when will that have been?’

‘Nineteen eighty-seven. The summer of nineteen eighty-seven.’

‘And you have only just recently remembered it all?’

Pamela nodded.

‘When? Exactly when did you remember it?’

‘Two weeks ago. On Wednesday.’

Karen looked at the wall calendar, a picture of the South Pennines in deep snow, a West Yorkshire Police helicopter hovering over a flock of startled sheep. She traced the days back from Tuesday, 24 June 1997.

‘The eleventh?’ she asked. ‘The eleventh of June 1997?’

‘That’s it. It was a programme on TV. They were interviewing him, speaking to him. I saw his face and remembered him. I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to remember any of this …’

‘And you didn’t even know it had happened before you saw the TV programme?’

‘No. I mean … no … not clearly …’

‘Not clearly? Or not at all?’

The woman stared at her hands, the muscles in her face working. ‘Not at all,’ she said finally. ‘Not like that – like a memory. But I’ve always known that something was wrong …’

Karen waited for her to sign the pages, then took the sheets back off her. It was a recovered memory case. She had two in her tray already. Without some kind of corroborative evidence they went nowhere, weren’t even charged. Getting corroboration from ten years ago was usually a non-starter.

But this one was different. She studied the statement in front of her, then looked up at Pamela Mathews and experienced a tiny thrill of pleasure – the feeling she got when she was about to start on something dangerous. Geoff Reed, the man Pamela said she had recognized on TV, was the longest serving MP in Bradford. The statement in front of Karen ought to have been burning a hole through the table.

John Munro sat on the largest sofa in the room and waited, looking around him at the balloons, bunting and streamers. There was a large painted banner above the door – ‘HAPPY THIRTEENTH BIRTHDAY, SOPHIE.’ Maybe they were still hoping she would walk through the door and they could pick up where they had left off, as if nothing had happened.

The judge was keeping them waiting. Though they said it happened frequently in his courts, Munro thought it inappropriate in the present circumstances. He had arranged – with a woman he assumed was a housekeeper – to meet His Honour Judge Kenyon at 2 p.m. Both Ricky Spencer and he had arrived, independently, with ten minutes to spare. It was now fifteen minutes past. Spencer was still on his feet, pacing around the room, looking at the pictures and decorations.

‘Sit down, Ricky. You’re making me nervous.’

Spencer was staring at a huge oil painting hanging over the main mantelpiece, depicting some kind of hunting scene in the rain. ‘It’s all very standard,’ he said, without looking back at Munro.