Play Dead by Peter Dickinson Page B

kill him.’
    â€˜Ali, now, you mustn’t give yourself nightmares. Wasn’t that way, hardly at all. First, he’d been gassed—gassed himself most like—in a garage or shed somewhere big enough to hold a car, and then …’
    â€˜Not in the play centre? How do they know it wasn’t in the play centre? What do you mean, gassed?’
    â€˜Notice his cheeks at all?’
    â€˜Yes, of course. That awful colour. As if he’d been painted.’
    â€˜Carbon monoxide, that is. You get it in car exhaust. Does something to your blood, turns it that colour. And about him being moved, you can tell that straight off if he’s laid any length of time dead, before they come to move him. Soon as your heart stops pumping the blood around it sinks down in your body and gathers in whichever bit of you’s downest, and then after a bit it sticks there, so it looks like a ruddy great bruise all over that part. This fellow it’s not blue, like a bruise—it’s that red. Down in his feet and legs, and the hams and the bottom of his back. Notice his hand? White, so it must’ve been up. He couldn’t’ve died where you saw him, with his hand tied down like that. No, he was sitting somehow, with his head hanging forward on to his arm, as it might be on the dashboard of a car. Lot of people do themselves in like that, with car exhaust. There was that MP, only the other day.’
    â€˜You keep saying he did it himself.’
    â€˜Stands to reason. I don’t see him sitting still having that done to him. I wouldn’t.’
    â€˜But something had been done to him, hadn’t it? I mean more than just moving him?’
    â€˜I was coming to that. Let’s take it he did himself in in a car somewhere, and then somebody found him, and—don’t ask me why—they moved him out and brought him along to the play centre—hey had to break in—and they stripped him off—his clothes were all folded neat under the table, I forgot to tell you—and they laid him out and tied him down and then—Poppy, you got to believe this—they fastened a bouquet of flowers round his cock. That’s how they left him.’
    â€˜Flowers?’
    â€˜Smelly little ones you get from florists.’
    â€˜Freesias?’
    â€˜That’s them. Used a couple of elastic bands.’
    Poppy stared at him. Relief streamed through her like an injected drug.
    â€˜The feminine touch,’ he said.
    â€˜What do you mean?’
    â€˜Don’t take it serious. Just something one of my mates at the station came up with.’
    â€˜But it isn’t a joke, Jim. They think it’s something to do with the girls at the play centre, don’t they? I don’t believe they really think it was suicide. They’re saying we somehow lured him into a car and gassed him and then we took him along to the play centre and decorated his penis with flowers and left him on the Lego table?’
    â€˜No one’s saying it was you, Poppy.’
    â€˜I tell you, it can’t have been any of us! You simply don’t understand what the play centre means to us, what a help it is, what a community! I tell you it’s absolutely inconceivable that any of us would choose to desecrate it by doing something like this. Can’t they see? I mean even supposing we’d caught him and killed him we simply wouldn’t have dreamed of then taking the body along there. None of us. It’s quite impossible. I can’t prove it, but I absolutely know. You’ll just have to take it from me.’
    â€˜You’ve got it wrong, Poppy love. Police work’s not like that. You don’t start off saying “This is what must’ve happened” and then trying to prove it. You look into all the possibilities, such as the girls being involved, some of them, for instance.’
    â€˜Well, I’m not going to help them, or you, or anyone else, look into