Silvermeadow

15

T he next morning Essex was shrouded in fog. It muffled the sound of traffic on the motorway and forced it to slow to a crawl in the denser pockets, where the light of the hidden sun barely penetrated.

When she finally reached the Silvermeadow junction Kathy stopped at the top of the exit ramp and gazed out over the site. The grey building was a ghostly presence in the mist, like an alien craft freshly landed in the fold of the slope and surrounded by a scattering of cars, capsules attendant on the mother ship. In contrast to the deathly gloom of the morning, it was clearly alive, for light glimmered from its spine along the route of the mall arcade, and Kathy could almost swear that she could make out the faint tinkle of jingle bells, even at that distance. A few dark huddled figures were scurrying between the cars and the centre, parasites trapped in a world of machines.

She thought of her imaginings of the previous evening, that Kerri’s murder and North’s robbery, and all the accompanying deaths and mayhem, might be part of one conspiracy, not two, and immediately felt the improbability of the idea, as if the daylight, even daylight as dim as this, cast things in a more realistic light. Crime happened like everything else, not at evenly spaced intervals but in clusters and bunches. Feast or famine. Nothing for a time, then all at once. So Silvermeadow was catching up with its normal crime load after a quiet interval. The fact that both series of crimes had happened here was simply coincidence.

Everyone else seemed to believe this. Not that it was discussed, but when she walked down through the service road and spoke to a SOCO crew combing the basement for further evidence without much hope or enthusiasm, and again when she went upstairs to the temporarily reoccupied unit 184 and talked to the few people there, Kathy had the clear impression that everyone took it for granted that Silvermeadow was no longer relevant, that the real centre of the action had moved elsewhere. Like stage hands cleaning up on the morning after a big show, they saw themselves as far removed from the real actors, who were now waking, no doubt, to champagne breakfasts in some remote first-class hotel, or on a jumbo jet high above some distant ocean. Silvermeadow, they seemed to feel, had been the innocent setting for the robbers’ latest gig, just as it had unfortunately accommodated Kerri’s killer.

She walked along the deserted upper mall and came once again to the balcony overlooking the food court and rain forest, giving a nod to the gorilla who still crouched in his bamboo grove. But Silvermeadow wasn’t innocent. After spending a week here, nothing about the place felt coincidental or innocent. From start to finish the centre was calculated and manipulative, dressed up to deceive. If it had been a suspect rather than a place, she would have said its manner was guilty as hell.

As if the beast could sense her thoughts, the escalators in front of her gave a sudden growl, then lurched into motion, and simultaneously from the trees below came the twitter of electronic parrots. Two disparate events, Kathy thought, still caught up in her doubts. What links the parrots and the escalators? The place, the time, and the hidden hand that presses the switch. And if you wanted to find that hand, it wouldn’t matter which event you investigated, because both would lead back to the same place.

From one of the food units down below came a rattle of a security grille being raised. It came from Bruno’s Gelati, and as she watched she saw the owner step out and gaze around at his patch of the food court. He was wearing a black waistcoat over his white shirt today, and was looking very sleek and pleased with himself, his hair and moustache gleaming with oil in the bright Mediterranean glow of the lights. He moved among the tables making small fastidious adjustments, straightening a chair here, wiping a surface there. As Kathy watched him she recalled the story of the little girl he had enticed into his ice-cream van. Mr Kreemee. The thought made her feel slightly sick, but then, she reminded herself, the story had no significance for their case. Just another coincidence, that he should be here, that it should be his niece who had been taken. The world was full of coincidences, and the fact that a violent robbery had followed hard on the heels of a murder was just one more. She turned away from the rail and walked away.

By Monday Brock felt as if he had covered most of the British Isles. He had started on Sunday by going down to Southampton to check a possible sighting on a Channel ferry, and once on the move he had found himself unable to stop, with urgent calls coming in from all over the country, demanding his attention. From Southampton he was driven up to Lincolnshire to inspect a private airfield from which unauthorised flights had been reported, then over to Holyhead to question sailors on the Irish boat. He had then attended a raid on a rented farmhouse in Cumbria and been flown out on a helicopter to a Liberian tanker making odd manoeuvres in the middle of the North Sea. When he finally returned to London he was feeling numb from frantic but useless movement. Bren and the others had been no less active and no more productive in the south-east, and when Brock called his team together at Queen Anne’s Gate on the Monday evening there was a clear conviction among them that the trail had gone cold.

They gathered-Bren, Brock, Kathy and three others- in The Bride of Denmark, a very small pub improbably assembled in the basement of their annex offices by a former owner of the building, from the fragments of Victorian London pubs demolished by the Blitz or redevelopment projects. It had been a labour of great love and eccentricity, and Brock felt a personal obligation to protect it from the threats of the Met’s Property Services Department, which regarded the presence of a pub inside a police headquarters building as dangerously frivolous. Over the years he had armed himself with a number of important-sounding opinions from heritage bodies, and staff turnover at PSD had ensured a level of amnesia about departmental squabbles that weren’t likely to enhance anyone’s career prospects. The main snug could barely hold the six of them, the pew seats and the tiny bar behind which Brock sat nursing a large glass of whisky staring at a large stuffed salmon facing him from a glass case on the opposite wall. He perfectly understood its attitude of grim preoccupation. As they talked, the lack of options now available became painfully apparent.

‘It stands to reason,’ Bren murmured. ‘North wouldn’t have set up a smooth snatch like that without having an equally slick getaway lined up. I’ll bet they dispersed and were on a boat or in the air before we’d even twigged what had happened.’

As baffling as the escape route was the silence that had surrounded the whole operation. The police had rounded up and questioned all North’s known associates and relatives without the least hint of a contact, and usually well-informed snouts and sources seemed as surprised by the coup as everyone else. Bren took this especially to heart. ‘I had a week,’ he said. ‘We knew for a week that he was around, and apart from the Nolan lead I didn’t get one whisper of where he was or what he was up to.’ Keith Nolan, if he existed, had still not been traced, nor had his papers been used to leave the country.

Forensic examination of the 9mm bullets used to kill the two guards, and of the bags which the robbers had handled, had also yielded nothing. Now the only hope seemed to lie with the dozens of security video tapes recovered from Silvermeadow that Saturday from individual stores as well as the centre’s main system. Teams were still sifting through this material, building up a portrait gallery of thousands of people who were in the centre in the minutes during and immediately after the robbery.

Brock drained his glass. ‘So we do it the hard way. It usually comes down to that anyway. While we wait to see what the tapes tell us, we’d better go back to the beginning. North had information from the inside. Someone at Armacorp or at Silvermeadow, probably both. Let’s focus on that.’

‘He might have worked it out for himself,’ Bren objected. ‘The Saturday evening pick-up followed a pretty dependable routine.’

‘What about Speedy Reynolds? Couldn’t he have been the contact?’ Kathy suggested. A couple of heads shook in disagreement. ‘I know we’ve been through this before, but it is bloody odd that one of their security people should die in suspicious circumstances just two days before a major robbery.’

‘Not if he’d been involved in a second serious crime that had occurred a week before, which he had,’ Bren said with weary emphasis. ‘The evidence ties him firmly to Kerri’s murder, not North’s hold-up, Kathy. Let’s not make things any more complicated than they have to be.’

Brock valued Bren’s tendency to keep things simple and focused, though he found Kathy’s willingness to complicate them much more interesting. However, there was another reason why he should back Bren’s approach, at least for the time being.

‘He’s also not in a position to help us, Kathy,’ Brock said quietly. ‘Like the two Armacorp guards who were murdered, one or both of whom could also have been North’s inside source. So we should probably concentrate on the more hopeful assumption that his contact, if there was one, is still alive.’

‘If he is then he’s still in place,’ one of the others said. ‘We haven’t been able to identify anyone from either Armacorp or Silvermeadow who’s gone missing over the last few days.’

‘Right,’ Brock said, and began to divide up the tasks, most of them already covered during the previous days and which now would have to be done again.

At the end of it he looked thoughtfully at Kathy. ‘Not convinced?’ he said.

She shrugged. ‘I don’t…’ she began, then stopped. ‘Doesn’t matter.’

‘Tell you what,’Brock said, guessing that she’d not want to voice her doubts until she had something concrete to offer, but trusting her instincts, ‘why don’t you have another look at Speedy’s movements, just to be sure. And while you’re at it, you can go over the work schedules of all the centre security staff for the last few weeks again, see if you can spot anything that the rest of us missed.’

Kathy nodded. ‘Yes. Right.’

‘We’ve run out of ideas,’ Kathy said, pushing the piece of veal around with her fork. They had decided to take a late meal at their local Italian, La Casa Romana, after it had become clear that Leon was mildly pissed off at spending another night kicking his heels in the flat on his own.

‘If you don’t want that I’ll eat it,’ he said.

She passed it over. ‘How was your day then?’

‘Boring. Checking statements of evidence. Again.’

‘Oh.’

‘Brock can’t be too popular at the moment, can he? Letting North commit murder and armed robbery right under his nose.’

Kathy thought he sounded rather sanctimonious as he said this. ‘Under my nose actually.’

Leon shrugged, chewing. ‘His operation. So why have you run out of ideas?’

Kathy found this question rather irritating too, almost as if he were trying to rile her. In fact, she decided, he was trying to rile her. ‘Maybe because we’ve had no bloody help from forensics,’ she told him tartly.

He didn’t look up from his plate. ‘There wasn’t much to go on from what I heard. Two nine-millimetre bullets? Not even the cases.’

‘I don’t mean that. I mean before.’

‘Before?’ He looked at her now, puzzled.

‘Yes. I mean, you couldn’t be sure that Kerri Vlasich had ever been in Speedy Reynolds’ house, or that someone else hadn’t been there and removed something, or that he’d really killed Wiff, or… or any damned thing.’

She was tired, she knew, and the wine had relaxed her caution with him, her care to do the right thing, which sometimes was an effort. But it was more than that. She wanted to get angry, she realised. She wanted to blow away the fog that had been gathering in her head around this bloody case.

‘And what has that got to do with Upper North?’ he said coolly. It was a classic Desai defence, she thought. When attacked, go for the logical jugular, not the emotional underbelly.

‘I don’t know, do I? Because the forensic stuff is all so inconclusive.’

‘Kathy…’ He laid down his knife and fork with deliberate patience. ‘No one has suggested any connection whatsoever between Kerri Vlasich’s death and the robbery of the security truck, have they? Or have I missed something?’

‘You mean apart from the coincidence of time and place?’

‘That was circumstance, not coincidence. If you have a huge shopping centre with stacks of people and money passing through it, you’re going to get crimes happening there. That’s life, not a conspiracy. If the two things had happened in Brentwood high street, you wouldn’t have given it a second thought, even though it’s probably got a lot less shops and visitors than Silvermeadow mall.’

There was some justice in that, but Kathy didn’t want to hear it. She changed tack and went for the underbelly. ‘That’s just blinkered thinking,’ she said, slightly surprised to hear how passionate she sounded, when she really wasn’t sure just what she thought. ‘You want to put everything in neat and tidy compartments, right? You want to separate things and put ribbons around them’-she was about to say ‘like degrees after your name’, but stopped herself-‘but life isn’t like that, Leon. Life is all mixed up, for God’s sake.’

He stared at her for a moment in surprise. She had spoken too loudly, she realised, and people at neighbouring tables were eyeing her.

‘I think maybe you’re a bit mixed up, Kathy,’ he said eventually, quite softly.

‘That’s condescending crap!’ she snapped back, and turned away from him. She felt herself trembling, and the thought came into her head, What the hell am I doing? She realised that John, the proprietor, was gazing at her from behind the bar, a slightly puzzled look on his face. He caught her eye and came over to them.

‘All done here?’ he said. ‘Like to see the dessert menu? Coffees?’

They both said no, giving him flat smiles, and without looking at each other.

‘I should tell you that we won’t be open tomorrow night, just in case you were thinking of coming in.’

‘Something on?’ Leon said.

‘Gran’s ninetieth. We’re having a family get-together. Five generations.’

‘Five?’

‘Yeah. Gran’s ninety, Mum’s sixty-six, I’m forty-one, Gina’s twenty-one, and her baby’s almost two.’

‘Wonderful,’ Leon said, without enthusiasm. ‘Give Gran our best.’

‘Yeah, I will. So we’re closing the restaurant to have the party in here. But we’re having open house for our regulars between six and seven to drink the health of the old lady, if you can join us.’

‘Thanks, John,’ Leon said. ‘We’d like to do that, but we’re going up north tomorrow evening. At least,’ he added coolly, ‘I am.’

Later, when they got home, Kathy grabbed him and kissed him and they told each other they were being silly and needed to have a good swim, or a good fuck. Though even while they were doing that, Kathy couldn’t help thinking: What do you mean, you are?

Afterwards, curled against him, Kathy asked him drowsily what he’d meant.

‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Are you still on?’

‘Of course.’

‘Good. I’ve booked a room at the Adelphi. For two nights.’

‘Two?’

‘Yes. I thought we could come back on Thursday evening, give us more time. The train leaves tomorrow at eight p.m. What do you think?’

‘Perfect,’ she said sleepily.

‘You’ll get away from work in time?’

‘Of course. I do have a life…’