Silvermeadow

9

U nit 184 was crowded for the team briefing that afternoon when Kathy arrived. She saw Dr Alex Nicholson standing talking to Brock in front of the plans of the centre, though she didn’t recognise her at first because her long hair, previously jet black, was now an almost peroxide blonde. The psychologist had one hand in her hair, stretching, pulling at it absently while she thought about the point Brock was making. She was dressed in black jeans, trainers and a T-shirt with the message on the back PSYCHOLOGISTS DO IT IN YOUR HEAD. Kathy was struck again by how young she looked, more like a student than a teacher. Also how attractive. She’d get a solid turnout from her male students for her lectures, Kathy thought.

Brock called her over to introduce her.

‘Yes, we know each other,’ Kathy said, noticing the rather clever way the other woman had used the minimum of make-up to the maximum effect, especially around the eyes. ‘We met in Orpington.’

‘Hi.’ Alex smiled back. ‘The Angela Hannaford murder. I remember, of course. Leon said something about you working on this one.’ She turned back to Brock with a question, and Kathy wandered over to her filing tray, half-filled with new material. She sifted quickly through it, stopping at a pouch sent out from central registry. She opened it and began to flick through the file inside.

She was halfway through it when the session was opened by Chief Superintendent Forbes, who wanted everyone to know how commendable their efforts had been so far, and how tantalisingly close to success he believed them to be. The monster who had killed Kerri Vlasich was in their hands, had been identified at the scene. One last push, he concluded, one last effort to find the extra strands of evidence that must still lie waiting out there to tie him to his brutal crime, and their hard work would be rewarded with public acclaim.

Though less lofty in his vision of their future rewards, and more circumspect in relation to Testor’s guilt, Brock’s report supported Forbes’s general drift. Testor was an unusual man, not to be easily written off as a steroid junkie. He had suffered brain damage as a teenager, and his behaviour was unusual and difficult to predict. At one moment he would appear helplessly child-like, at another devious and calculating. He seemed extraordinarily passive and gentle, yet he had been capable in the past of blind and violent rage. They had been unable to find any sexual partners, of either gender, nor even evidence of sexual interest, yet his greatest hobby seemed to be his own body and its appearance. He could perform extraordinary mental feats, but also appeared to suffer confusion and genuine sporadic memory loss. And these characteristics were compounded by his eclectic drug habits. But the important thing to remember was that he knew he was odd, and had learned the hard way that his oddness got him into trouble. When pressure was put on him, as now, his instinctive reaction was to clam up, roll into a ball, and say nothing.

So he was not confident that they would get anything like a confession from him, and that meant they needed more eyewitnesses. They had one, a seven-year-old girl who, despite her age, was an extraordinarily confident witness, and who had, that morning, picked out Testor from a line-up without the least hesitation. But she was only seven. Others must have seen Testor and Kerri on that afternoon of the sixth, particularly during that crucial one-hour period from 5.30 to 6.30 p.m. when Testor had switched his meal break and couldn’t account for his whereabouts. And then there was the matter of the beating that Testor had been given on the previous Sunday evening, apparently in his own flat, after he’d been allowed home after being questioned for the first time at Hornchurch Street.

As he said this, Kathy found herself wondering about the state of Gavin Lowry’s knuckles. She glanced across at him, sitting on a table at the back of the room, looking as if he knew it all.

Eyewitnesses, then, Brock concluded, more eyewitnesses. Then he asked Leon Desai to bring them up to date on the forensic side. Leon got to his feet and spoke with his usual stylish composure.

‘The lab has now identified the antigen antibodies in Kerri’s hair, and confirmed a match with traces in the blood and some organs. It seems that during the final week of her life she took, or was given, ketamine hydrochloride. Ketamine, you probably know, is popularly known as “K”, or “special K”, and is taken as an intense hallucinogenic, but it can also cause paralysis and coma. It’s used in various proprietary forms as a veterinary anaesthetic.’

‘Hang on…’ Gavin Lowry spoke up. ‘Testor had animal steroids in his possession. Isn’t that a bit of a coincidence?’

‘Probably not,’ Leon replied. ‘It’s true that Stenbolol, the anabolic steroid you found in Testor’s room, is manufactured as a veterinary product, but it’s widely available in gyms and among body-building types. We think the batch Testor had was manufactured in Holland and never legally imported into the UK. Similarly, ketamine hydrochloride is manufactured for veterinary use, but is bought and sold on the club scene as a rather risky alternative to Ecstasy. There’s unlikely to be a link. Unfortunately the antigen tests can’t narrow the ketamine down to a particular make or source. One indication that it was a veterinary product could be the way in which it was administered. Almost all veterinary ketamine makes are presented by injection, whereas the stuff they sell for kids is in pills. The pathologist didn’t find any needle marks on Kerri’s body, but they can be hard to spot. He said’-Leon hesitated, then went on-‘he said the best way to make sure would be to remove her skin. Apparently needle marks are more visible if you hold the skin up to the light.’

There was a general whisper of disgust at the thought of skinning the girl, but not, Kathy noticed, from Dr Nicholson, who observed their discomfort from beneath her fringe with a little smile of amusement.

‘Well,’ Brock said, ‘maybe we should consider that. An injection might indicate whether or not it was self-administered, depending on where it was. Anything else, Leon?’

‘Yes. The samples from the compactors. They’ve identified blood traces.’

There was a murmur of approval at this.

‘But it’s badly contaminated, and they can’t say yet whether it’s even human.’

A groan of disappointment.

‘And it was from the orange compactor, not the blue one.’

There was silence as they tried to work out the implications of this, and the thought passed through Kathy’s mind, how come forensic evidence so often seemed to be two-edged, clarifying and confusing at the same time?

Then it was Alex Nicholson’s turn. She disarmed them immediately by saying that they knew far more about it than she did, and she had nothing brilliant to offer, but maybe it would be helpful if she sort of facilitated-she apologised for the word, which she hated, but they knew what she meant-a discussion, to get ideas out into the open. They might begin with Kerri’s motivation. If she was really running away to see her father, why would she have been talking to Eddie Testor? Was it a chance meeting? Did she know him? Did she buy drugs from him? Could it be that she never had any intention of going to Germany, but instead wanted to frighten and punish her mother, and had used her friends to spread the false story unwittingly?

The group was slow to respond to this, but gradually one or two offered their ideas, which she wrote up on a white board, and a more general discussion began to build up. She was good at it, Kathy conceded, even with such a large and unfamiliar group, getting them to participate. Kathy herself said nothing for some time. She thought the focus on Kerri’s character and motivation was leading nowhere, for the reason that they didn’t really know enough; anything seemed possible. And so eventually she decided to lob a little hand grenade into the debate.

‘What if this has nothing to do with Kerri and her father?’ she asked. ‘What if Kerri was no more than a chance victim? What if this has happened before at Silvermeadow?’

The room went very quiet.

Alex Nicholson was writing on the board at that moment, but she immediately swung round and fixed Kathy with bright eyes. ‘Yes!’ she said, as if she’d been waiting all the time for someone to suggest this. ‘What about that?’

Lowry broke in, irritated. ‘What if? What if? Come on, Kathy, we’ve killed this one. There’s no evidence this has happened before.’

‘But why shouldn’t it?’ Alex said. ‘The method of disposing of the victim was perfect, or should have been. So perfect that it must have been very deliberate, surely. Not a lucky chance. So then, why couldn’t it have happened before? Perhaps many times. Come on, Gavin’-Kathy thought it interesting that she already knew their names- ‘let’s just explore the idea for a minute. Because it changes everything, doesn’t it?’

She let them think about it, then said, ‘Kathy’s right. Kerri becomes almost incidental, merely this month’s target. The whole focus shifts. Instead of looking at character and motivation, we look instead at…?’ She left it hanging in the air, but they didn’t get it. Nobody spoke, and eventually she answered her own question. ‘Place! The setting becomes the central thing. Right? The place where it happens!’ She turned to Brock, as if to check whether it was all right to go on, and he nodded with an indulgent little smile and she turned back to the group, and abruptly the tutorial was over and the lecture began.

‘You see, one of the central concepts of the work that we’ve been doing at Liverpool is the idea that there is a pattern to the places that a serial offender chooses for his attacks. Kathy, of course, remembers this from the Hannaford case, where we used this. The pattern of where the victims are found can tell you things about the offender, most importantly where he himself is located in relation to the attack sites.

‘But in this case we have the opposite: we have one single location, to which the victims and the attacker come. The place is the thing that draws them together. We can tell nothing about our offender from the distribution of sites, because there is only one site, but maybe we can tell a great deal about him from the character of the site, because this is a very unusual and distinctive place. We can imagine him being drawn here, coming here a lot, being very comfortable here, so that he keeps reusing the same location. So, you have to ask yourself, what is so special about this place for him?’

She took a breath and leant back against the table behind her, confident that she had their full attention.

‘There’s a phenomenon in shopping centres. You can see it if you watch people near the entrances, coming in. They march in, purposeful, heading straight for whatever it is they’ve come here for. They aim to buy it and get off home. But then something happens. Their eye is caught by the shop displays, and they begin to appear distracted. Their path becomes erratic. They slow down, and wander from one side of the mall to the other. The music is playing, and they stop and look at this thing and that. Maybe they take off their coat, because it’s nice and warm in here. They have a kind of vacant look on their face now, and after a while they notice that they’re tired, and that they’re carrying shopping bags full of things they never thought of buying when they first arrived. So they sit down on one of the nice seats in the mall, next to a fountain, under a potted tree, and watch a fashion parade or listen to the local school band playing a selection of Gershwin melodies, and they try to remember what the hell it was they came here for in the first place.’

Kathy noticed several smiles of recognition at this, and recalled how rapidly she’d been drawn into buying, almost without thought.

‘This phenomenon is well known enough to have a name,’ Alex continued. ‘It’s called the Gruen Transfer. The name comes from Victor Gruen, the architect who designed the first enclosed shopping mall, at Edina in Minneapolis in 1956. He had a vision, you see, that the modern shopping centre could be more than just a collection of shops, it could be a complete integrated environment, separate from the world outside, a perfect machine for consumption.

‘Yes, a machine. The terms they use sound like they’re talking about a machine. There are “magnet” stores that attract customers as if they were iron filings, and draw them past all the smaller shops, and sort of pump them around in “flows”. If the distance between the magnets is too great, the flows are weakened and the efficiency of the machine is impaired. The aim is to get the maximum number of consumers past every single shop window. Dead-end malls, inaccessible upper floors, are a no-no. Everything has to pump and flow smoothly. In a well-organised centre there’s a kind of ecological balance to it all-sorry, I’m mixing my metaphors. At the top of the food chain are the big magnet stores, or “anchors”. They’re top because they attract customers from miles around, so they can negotiate low rents with the developer, who’s anxious to persuade them to come in. The small shops, which are dependent on the magnets to pull the customers past their doors, must pay higher rents, proportionately, to be able to take part in the process. And the developer is dependent on the small shops getting as big a turnover as possible, to pay the rents he needs to build and maintain the place.

‘But, as Gruen realised, the underlying driving force is the psychology of the consumers, who are at the bottom of the food chain-the plankton that the higher forms of commercial life feed on. And to manipulate that psychology, almost any device is admissible, no matter how outlandish or weird it might at first appear. You can take your customers to the Polynesian islands, transport them to the Arabian Nights, you can raid history, literature, the movies, fairy-tales, anything at all that will distract them and keep them happily absorbed inside the machine. Whatever it takes, in fact, to sustain the Gruen Transfer.

‘When you just had individual shops along a street, there wasn’t a whole lot you could do to stimulate your customers’ fantasies beyond sticking a Christmas tree in the window once a year. The cold reality of the street kept getting in the way. They really had to press their noses to the window and imagine awfully hard. But in an indoor mall, all that changes. The real world of the street is banished. The boundaries separating the consumer from the consumed are dissolved away. Fantasy and reality become interchangeable parts of the process of consumption. You can possess whatever you see.’

‘Including the girl dressed up like Snow White who brings you your pancakes,’ Brock said.

‘Exactly, yes. That’s really the point I was coming to. That it might be significant that Kerri actually worked here, and wore that uniform and a big happy smile, like she was an accessory, part of the whole fun process, like the wrapping paper and the music and the finger-licking food.

‘He loves the mall, he eats the food, he wants the things he sees. He feels they’re available, that they’re really his, because that’s the message of the mall. And he’s become an insider, an expert in the culture of the mall. He knows how it works, he knows the security codes, he knows how they dispose of their garbage.’

Kathy didn’t share in the general buzz of animated conversation that followed this presentation. She felt a chill in her stomach that came not so much from what Alex Nicholson had said as from the reverberations it set up with the file she had been reading just before the briefing started. It was the file on the lapsed prosecution of Dragan Vlasich.

One afternoon in the summer of 1992, the senior physical education teacher of an east London secondary school was looking out of the staff-room window at the children passing through the front gates and dispersing down the street. Parked near the gates was an ice-cream van. It was very distinctive, with an enormous illuminated fibreglass ice-cream cone mounted on the roof and the name MR KREEMEE emblazoned on the side. Mr Kreemee had been parked there regularly for the past several afternoons, catching the departing kids, and the teacher had noticed that one child in particular, a pretty, fair-haired girl called Helen Singleton from class 2E, had lingered by the hatch in the side of the van, talking to Mr Kreemee as he served the queue of her schoolmates. On this particular afternoon the teacher watched the queue dwindle until only Helen was left. Then he saw the side hatch on the van close, the girl walk to the rear of the van, the rear door open and her step inside. The door closed abruptly, and shortly afterwards the light inside the fibreglass cone went out. He quickly rounded up a couple of other young male teachers from the staff room, and they ran down to the street.

When they yanked open the rear door of the van they found Mr Kreemee inside on his hands and knees in front of Helen Singleton, who was seated on a stool. He claimed afterwards that he was offering her different combinations of toppings on her ice-cream cone and had dropped some on the floor, but the teachers didn’t see it that way. They hauled Mr Kreemee out into the street and took him and the child back into the school, where Mr Kreemee, alias Dragan Vlasich, received some bruises and abrasions while waiting for the police to arrive. He was charged under section 20 of the Sexual Offences Act 1956, which states that it is an offence for a person acting without lawful authority or excuse to take an unmarried girl under the age of sixteen out of the possession of her parent or guardian against his or her will.

Vlasich claimed that it was all a terrible mistake, that when he was closing up to move to another location Helen had begged to see how the Kreemee ice-cream machine worked, that he had merely intended for her to look in through the back door, but that she had climbed in and the wind had blown the door shut behind her. Helen herself seemed confused, but didn’t contradict his story. The teachers had intervened before any act of indecency had occurred, if that was what had been in Vlasich’s mind. The Crown Prosecution Service hesitated, then abandoned the case. The charges were withdrawn for lack of evidence.

By the time Kathy finally managed to get Brock on his own to tell him about Verdi/Vlasich, twenty-four hours had elapsed since Harriet Rutter and Robbie Orr had first alerted her to him. Brock seemed startled by her information about his name change, as if it was something he might have half suspected and then dismissed. Then, as she told him about Vlasich’s career as Mr Kreemee, he looked troubled.

‘You could have let me know about this before, Kathy,’ he said.

‘I’m sorry. I tried to ring you last night on your mobile, but couldn’t get through. Then this morning I was caught up in the hunt for Testor. I only got to look at the Vlasich file just before the briefing started.’

He nodded, frowning deeply. ‘Yes, of course.’

‘You don’t like it,’ Kathy said.

‘It stinks, don’t you think?’

‘Yes. It gives me a bad feeling too.’

They were interrupted by Harry Jackson’s discreet cough. ‘Evening, folks. Phil said your team meeting was over and I might show my face. Ms Seager asked me to pass on all our congratulations on your result, and ask if there’s anything we can be doing.’

‘Thanks, Harry,’ Brock said, preoccupied. ‘We haven’t actually got a result as yet, but we’re hopeful. Did you know him?’

‘Testor? Not in any professional capacity. I’ve spoken to him a few times, down the gym and the pool. Soon as I saw your photograph I recognised him. Bit of a queer ’un, eh?’

‘You never had any inkling of trouble with him?’

‘Can’t say we did. But I hear he has a record, eh? Assault and criminal damage?’

‘That’s right. But he wasn’t one of your rehabilitation projects, like Speedy?’

‘No way. I hardly knew him.’

‘What kind of checks do you do on your tenants?’

‘I went through that with Gavin, chief. Credit checks and records of other leasings, that’s basically it. We wouldn’t run a criminal record check unless there was a bad smell coming from somewhere. And that has happened. Once or twice we got wind of a company with dodgy investors and decided to keep them out. But we certainly don’t do checks on tenants’ employees, if that’s what you mean. That’s down to them.’

‘But you probably have a blacklist, don’t you, Harry? I mean, apart from your daybooks and computer records, a careful ex-copper like you would likely have a blacklist of people who don’t feel right for some reason, wouldn’t you?’

Jackson smiled and tapped his nose. ‘I couldn’t admit that to you now, could I, chief? You’ve got to be careful these days, the way people are-litigious.’

Brock grunted, looking disappointed. ‘Yes, yes of course. I understand.’ He looked pointedly at his watch, then at Kathy, and said, ‘Well…’

‘But off the record,’ Jackson cut in, ‘between the two of us-sorry Kathy, three of us-if there was someone you were interested in, and if I knew him and had a feeling about him, well there’d be no harm in my passing on a view, informally like, would there now?’

‘I should hope not, Harry.’ Brock bent down to collect his papers from the table, as if no longer interested.

‘Was there someone, someone else?’ Jackson asked tentatively.

‘Well’-Brock straightened with a sigh-‘feelings can be misleading, of course, as we all know, Harry. Going round this place I’ve had a few doubts about some of the characters we’ve met. But of course, they’re in the business of selling, and people in that situation have to put on a bit of an act, don’t they?’

‘Someone in particular, chief?’ Harry asked again.

‘Well, take the chairman of the small traders group, what’s his name, the ice-cream man…’

‘Bruno? Bruno Verdi?’

‘Yes, that’s the one. He’d have to be a phoney, wouldn’t he?’

Jackson looked stunned. ‘Bruno? Well… I don’t know about that, chief. A bit larger than life, maybe. But you shock me there, mentioning him in the same breath as a nutter like Testor, you really do.’

‘So you’ve never had any reason to think of him as dodgy in any way?’

‘Dodgy? No, quite the opposite. Bruno is a pillar of the community hereabouts. Very strong on law and order and keeping our guard up. He keeps a sharp eye on what goes on, and encourages his fellow traders to do the same. I rely on people like Bruno.’

‘Live alone, does he?’

‘No, he’s married. Christ, if living alone was a crime I’d be up there on your suspect list.’

Brock smiled. ‘Me too. No, I just wondered if he had someone to vouch for his movements.’

‘Why? Has someone been putting the bad word on him?’

‘I’m just naturally suspicious, Harry. We’re checking again everyone whose code was used on the exit doors that evening of the sixth.’

‘Ah, right. With you now, chief. Well, if I was asked to say who springs to mind when the word “dodgy” was mentioned, I’d be more inclined to think of the operator of a certain games arcade down in the Bazaar.’

‘Winston Starkey,’ Brock said. ‘Yes, his code was used too. Anything specific, Harry?’

‘I take it you checked his record.’

‘Remarkably clean.’

‘Hmm. The kids who go there are always causing trouble. I reckon he encourages them.’

‘You keep a particular eye on Starkey, do you?’

‘As you say, chief, we all have our little blacklists.’

It took a further hour before Brock and Kathy were able to leave the unit and go down to the food court to see Verdi. He welcomed them as if they were old friends, and it seemed to Kathy that he had been expecting them. She assumed Alison Vlasich must have spoken to him.

When Brock said they wanted a private word, he showed them into a storeroom at the back of the shop. There was a chair at a small table heaped with invoices, and Verdi brought two more aluminium chairs in from the cafe and closed the connecting door. They sat down, refusing his offer of a little refreshment.

‘Have you tried my pistachio flavour?’ he urged them. ‘The peach? You must try, before you go.’ Kathy pictured him on his hands and knees in the van with the little girl.

The room was lined with shelving containing boxes of disposable containers and spoons, paper napkins and detergent, as well as dried-food ingredients, and there was a pervasive smell of vanilla.

‘We were surprised to learn that you are a close relative of the dead girl, Mr Verdi,’ Brock began.

‘Ah, yes. I am her uncle,’ he said, smiling sadly. ‘So tragic.’

‘But you never mentioned this.’

Verdi shrugged, an exaggerated Latin shrug. ‘I was so devastated that first evening, when I heard what had happened. I nearly fainted, you remember? And afterwards, well, it never came up.’ He passed a hand in a smoothing gesture across his bushy moustache.

‘It seems a strange thing to want to conceal.’

‘No, no! I never tried to conceal it! It just never came up. I suppose I assumed that Alison might have mentioned it, if it was important. No?’

Brock shook his head. ‘No. She didn’t mention it either.’

‘Oh, well… I suppose Stefan told you, then?’

Kathy thought, if Alison didn’t warn him to expect us, who did?

‘You’ve met your brother since he came over, have you? Only he seemed reluctant to come in here when he first arrived, and that seems odd, if his brother was working here. Has he been to see you?’

‘Actually, no. My brother and I have had our differences in the past. We prefer not to meet.’

‘What about your sister-in-law? How do you get on with her?’

‘Alison? We’re not close. We’re not enemies, mind. Just distant.’

‘You helped Kerri get her job here at Silvermeadow, I understand.’

‘Yes, that’s true. Alison mentioned that Kerri was looking for a bit of work, and I spoke to the people at Snow White’s.’

‘I suppose you drove her home after work, did you?’

Verdi gave an amused little smile. ‘No, never. I live in the opposite direction, Chief Inspector. It was up to her to arrange her own transport. She was a very independent young lady.’ More smoothing of the moustache.

‘You got on well with her?’

‘Well enough.’

‘You were closer to her than to her mother, would you say?’

‘No, I wouldn’t say that. Look, that family has had its problems, with Alison and Stefan splitting up, and I didn’t really want to get involved or take sides or anything. We don’t have a lot of contact.’

He wasn’t in the least perturbed by the questions, behind the defence of his moustache and his comic character. Brock said abruptly, ‘Tell us about your change of name, Mr Verdi. How did that come about?’

‘It was a matter of commitment, Chief Inspector.’ He smiled complacently. ‘That’s really what it was.’

‘Commitment?’

‘If you want to excel in anything, you have to be prepared to give yourself one hundred and ten per cent to it. I wanted to be the leading Italian ice-cream man in Essex. So I became Bruno Verdi, the gelato maestro.’

‘That seems a little extreme.’

‘Is it? You want to be the best detective in Scotland Yard, eh? So you stop being Mr Brock, you become Chief Inspector Brock, which is something else entirely. Am I right?’

‘What happened to Mr Kreemee?’ Brock said quietly.

Verdi smiled to himself, his lids lowering briefly in reflection as if an anticipated moment had arrived. ‘Mr Kreemee was just a stage, my apprenticeship if you like. Long hours for small change, at the mercy of the weather. But this’-he waved his hand round at their surroundings-‘ this is where it was leading. This is what it was all about.’

‘Helen Singleton, she was a stage too, was she? An apprenticeship?’

‘Ah,’ he shook his head sadly, ‘now I wish you hadn’t said that, Chief Inspector, I really do. That was an unfortunate misunderstanding that was cleared up at the time to the complete satisfaction of the police, but only after I had been exposed to a great deal of prejudice and abuse, and it isn’t right that you should bring it up again now.’

‘Where were you on the afternoon and evening of the sixth of December last, Mr Verdi?’ Brock said.

‘Good, at last. Now we can put all these insinuations to rest.’ He smiled broadly. ‘Every Monday and Tuesday afternoon I leave early, at around three p.m., and go home. My wife is very ill. She suffers from multiple sclerosis. On Monday afternoons I take her to the clinic in Basildon for her weekly physiotherapy treatment, which lasts from four till six. I am with her all the time. Then we pick up takeaway Indian at the Koh-i-noor in Moor Street, and return home. On Tuesday, it’s her hydrotherapy pool session.’

He reached across for a piece of paper on the table and presented it to Brock with a flourish. ‘There. I’ve written down the names of the nurse and physiotherapist who saw me that Monday afternoon. It would be so strange if I wasn’t there with my wife that they would definitely have noticed my absence. I used a credit card at the Indian restaurant, so I suppose you can get a time for that. All right?’

‘Very comprehensive, Mr Verdi.’

‘Yes. You see, if there was one time of the week when I simply couldn’t abduct Kerri or anyone else, it would be Monday afternoon. No hard feelings, Chief Inspector-no, really, I mean that. I am a very strong supporter of the police, and I am glad that you have grilled me like this, because I know you will do the same with every other possible suspect.’ He smiled broadly and wiped his moustache. ‘Now, are you sure about that pistachio? It really is superb.’

They got to their feet and Verdi had his hand on the doorknob when Brock took the computer image of Eddie Testor out of his pocket and showed it to him. ‘Do you know this man?’

Verdi shook his head. ‘Sorry, no. Is he a suspect too?’

‘Thanks for your help. We’ll let you get back to your customers.’

They went back out into the food court, and walked in silence until they reached the top of the escalators, when Brock exclaimed, ‘One hundred and ten per cent is right. One hundred and ten per cent phoney.’ Then he added, ‘The couple who put you onto him in the first place, Kathy, is it worth speaking to them again?’

‘I get the feeling there’s a bit of animosity there. They were probably just stirring up trouble.’

‘Yes. All the same, I think I’ll talk to them.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Unless we’re getting somewhere with Testor, in which case it may not be necessary.’

But they weren’t getting anywhere with Eddie Testor. Brock had given him to a team of three young detectives, two men and a woman, all of about his age, but the switch hadn’t produced any results. Instead he had begun to complain of severe headaches and had given the name of his GP, who he said was familiar with his problem. The doctor had confirmed that he suffered periodically from severe migraines, identified the medication he should be given from among those found in his room, and said that he should be allowed to go to bed for twelve hours in a darkened room. Brock agreed that he be returned to his Aunty Jan.

Kathy tried the mobile phone number on the card that Mrs Rutter had given her, and was answered almost immediately by a whispered voice. ‘Yes?’

‘Oh, Mrs Rutter? It’s DS Kolla. Can we talk?’

‘Wait a moment, dear,’ the voice whispered, and then, after a minute, she spoke again at normal volume but breathing audibly. ‘I’m sorry, Sergeant. I’m at a concert. How can I help you?’

Kathy imagined her clambering over angry concert goers at the Festival Hall. ‘I’m sorry to disturb you, Mrs Rutter. Perhaps I should speak to you later. Where are you?’

‘In the Plaza Mexico, dear, in the upper mall. We’ve been listening to a splendid performance by the school orchestra of St Vincent’s. But we’ve had enough, I think, so your call was timely.’ She immediately agreed to come to unit 184 with Robbie Orr.

‘I think they live here,’ Kathy said to Lowry, who’d just arrived back at the unit. She told him about Verdi.

‘Oh yes?’ he said. ‘I might sit in on this. Okay?’

When Rutter and Orr arrived Phil showed them to the interview area. They seemed clearly gratified to be called upon again, announcing themselves in discreet and conspiratorial tones.

Brock shook their hands gravely. ‘An archaeologist, Professor Orr. I always thought that must be a wonderful thing, ever since I heard Michael Ventris speak on the radio when I was a boy.’

‘Ah Ventris!’ Orr’s eyes lit up. ‘I remember that broadcast well. I met him, you know. Yes, yes. Extraordinary, quite extraordinary.’ He saw the blank look on the others faces and added, ‘He deciphered Linear B, you see. Quite amazing. He had no right to do it. Well, it had baffled everyone else, and he was a total amateur, but he did it anyway. An architect, he was. Probably the only worthwhile thing any architect has done this century, I should say.’

Harriet Rutter gave one of the delighted chuckles that Kathy noticed she reserved for Orr’s little quips.

‘Did you ever work in Crete yourself?’ Brock asked.

‘Aye, indeed. Sir Arthur Evans was my inspiration, though I never met him, of course. I’m not quite that old. But I visited his house at Knossos not long after the end of the war. The commander of the German forces had used it as his residence, you know. Anyway, I stayed there and took part in the work for a couple of months. That was what I call real archaeology, with none of the modern methods they have these days: magnetometers and potentiometers and all their electronic gadgets, drenching the ground with their electro-magnetic rays… ha!’ His face twisted in a wild sort of grin. ‘When I began, with Thom, our favourite tool was the bayonet!’

‘Tom?’ Kathy queried politely.

‘Aye. I was with Thom on North Uist, don’t you know.’

The way he said this, it sounded like someone might say, I was with Scott in the Antarctic, or, I was with Armstrong on the moon.

‘Really?’ she said vaguely. She wanted to ask, Tom who?, but held her tongue.

‘I can see by the look on your face that you’ve never heard of the great Alexander Thom, young woman,’ he accused.

‘I’m afraid-’

‘One of the greatest archaeologists these islands have produced, no less. It was Alexander Thom who deciphered the meaning of the ancient stone circles and rings which exist across the face of this country. It was he who revealed the fact that, one thousand years before the earliest mathematicians of Ancient Greece, a civilisation flourished in these islands which made free use of Pythagorean triangles, and nurtured astronomers of such extraordinary accomplishment that they were familiar with the variations in the inclination of the moon’s orbit three and a half thousand years before Tycho Brahe rediscovered them!’

‘Is that right?’

‘Aye, it is right! I spent the summers of fifty-seven and fifty-eight with Dr Thom, as he then was, surveying the great slabs of Sornach Coir Fhinn and Leacach an Tigh Chloiche. I was at his side as he strode the heather, driving his bayonet into the deep peat to find the fallen stones hidden beneath the surface. And I shared his tent at night, drinking his usque, as he refined his calculations of the true value of the megalithic yard.’

‘The what?’ Brock asked.

‘The megalithic yard! It might surprise your young colleagues to learn that almost four thousand years ago, when they probably imagine these islands were populated by painted savages, there existed a common standard unit of measure, the megalithic yard, which was in use throughout the British Isles, from the English Channel to the Outer Hebrides, and was employed to set out the dimensions of all the stone circles throughout the land. Just think of that! Imagine how that standard length was maintained and propagated across a thousand miles of wild country without benefit of roads or writing. Eh? How did they communicate it? How did they agree upon it, to two decimal places?’

‘Yes, I see,’ Brock said. ‘Quite a mystery.’

Actually it doesn’t much surprise us, Kathy thought, for the good reason that none of us is that interested. She could see Lowry sitting unblinking, expressionless, almost as if he were asleep with his eyes open, while she had been thinking of the meal that Leon might have ready for her, and wishing that they could move on from the megalithic yard to more immediately pressing matters.

‘It’s a great mystery, indeed. A very great mystery,’ Orr continued. ‘But that is only one of many mysteries. For example, the skeletons of these people, the ones that we’ve discovered in their graves and burial mounds, are almost invariably young. It was practically a civilisation of teenagers, their life expectancy about thirty, that is all.’ He glared balefully in the direction of the mall. ‘Much the way our young people are heading today, one might think, from observing their goings-on in this place.’

‘You keep an eye on them, then, the children here?’ Brock said mildly, and Lowry immediately seemed to wake up and look carefully at Orr.

‘How could one not, Chief Inspector? They swagger along the mall looking as if they’ve inherited the earth, instead of a self-indulgent fantasy of dope and baubles.’

‘You’re aware of children taking drugs here?’

‘No, no, no. I don’t mean that, exactly. I’m just referring to the emptiness of their lives.’

‘But you keep your eyes open, all the same. It’s that I wanted to speak to you about. Your comments to Sergeant Kolla here about Bruno Verdi and the murdered girl, can you be more specific? Can you recall instances of him talking to her, for example? You’d assume they would talk, if they were related.’

‘I… I’m not sure…’ Orr looked suddenly uncomfortable, as if he’d been caught out telling tales he couldn’t substantiate. Or perhaps, Kathy thought, it might be that he could remember the distant past a lot more clearly than yesterday.

‘Well, that in itself was odd, you see!’ Harriet Rutter broke in. ‘When she referred to him as “Uncle Bruno” I thought, well, why don’t they behave like family, instead of eyeing each other that way?’

‘What way?’

‘I don’t know… warily, I suppose.’

‘What exactly do you mean, that she was afraid of him?’

She frowned doubtfully. ‘I couldn’t really say that was it. It might have been, but I couldn’t swear to it.’

‘Or could it be that they had some sort of relationship that they didn’t want to reveal to others watching, in public, like yourselves?’

‘Ha!’ Orr suddenly barked. ‘Might be that!’

‘Well, it might, I suppose. Oh dear… I don’t want to slander the man. He may be a bully…’

‘Is he?’

‘Oh yes, in meetings. He loves to talk over people, and put them down. Especially women. That’s one thing I’ll say for Bo Seager-she knows how to put him in his place when he goes too far. But getting back to the poor girl, we did see them talking, do you remember, Robbie? Not too long ago. Perhaps three or four weeks ago, we were having our pancakes when he came over from his shop and tried to attract her attention. She pretended to ignore him, but he stood there, over by one of the palm trees, and stared at her until she went to him. They talked for a few minutes, and then she gave a toss of her head, and flounced off on her roller skates. Do you remember, Robbie?’

Orr looked unsure.

‘Well, we did. I remember it quite clearly.’

Brock tried to prod their memories further, but there was little they could add, and after a while they left.

Lowry looked thoughtful. ‘All right if I talk this over with Harry Jackson, chief?’ he asked.

‘I suppose so.’ Brock nodded. ‘We did ask him about Verdi and he seemed to regard him as a pillar of the community, but if you think you can get anything else out of him, go ahead.’

‘You might find out if he warned Verdi that we were interested in him,’ Kathy said. ‘The way Verdi had everything ready for us it looked as if someone had tipped him off.’

‘Harry wouldn’t do that, Kathy,’ Lowry said dismissively. ‘What, you got your sights on Verdi as your serial killer, have you? On the strength of those two old farts’ gossip?’

The way he said it, your serial killer, as if it was a personal foible, made Kathy flush. She saw Brock react too. ‘Kathy’s suggestion certainly got Alex Nicholson’s attention,’ he said quietly.

‘Yeah, but…’ Lowry shrugged, then shook his head as if he’d decided to keep his doubts to himself.

‘Yes but what?’ Kathy insisted.

‘Well, if you ask me, it got the whole discussion off track. I mean she was more interested in that idea because that’s what she does, isn’t it? Study serial killers. Stands to reason she’d get fired up about it. But I don’t reckon that helps us nail Testor, or whoever it was took Kerri.’

They broke up for the night in a mood of uneasy discontent, feeling that things should be going better than they were. Kathy phoned her flat, but the answering machine was on, then tried Leon’s mobile. It rang for some time before he answered with a muffled hello, then a curse as he appeared to drop the instrument. Finally he got himself sorted out. There was a murmur of voices in the background.

‘Ah, hi,’ he said. ‘I was about to ring you. How’s it going? Are you home? You found my note?’

‘No, I’m still at work. Where are you?’

‘I got roped into going out for a meal with some people.’

Some people? ‘Alex Nicholson?’

‘Yes. Her and a few others. Some university people. I’d hoped you could have come with us.’

‘Where to?’

He mentioned the name of a new restaurant in Chelsea that she’d read about and had thought of taking him when they next had something to celebrate.

‘That’s nice. Is it as good as they say?’

‘Not bad. Very busy. It’d be better if you were here.’

‘Well, enjoy yourself. See you later.’

She put down the phone a little too briskly, reflecting that she couldn’t have afforded to eat there anyway, not after what she’d done to her credit card recently.

The others were calling it quits for the night, yawning, pulling their coats on, offering lifts, but Kathy didn’t feel like going home and said she’d stay a bit longer. She was still there in front of the computer an hour later, working slowly through the missing persons index, when one of the centre security staff rapped on the mall door.

Kathy got up and opened it, letting the guard check her identification.

‘You’re the last one in the place,’ he said. ‘I’m locking up for the night. You staying long?’

‘Maybe another half-hour? Is that okay?’

He nodded. ‘Do you reckon you can find your way out with just the emergency lights? I could leave some of the main lights on, but then you’d have to switch them off.’

‘No, that’s fine,’ she said. ‘I have a torch, anyway. What about the carpark? Isn’t there a dog patrol out there?’

‘He won’t be here till midnight, but I wouldn’t wait till then. The dogs are very nasty. Silent, they are, until the last second, just before they bring you down.’

‘How do you know that?’

‘Cos they nearly got me one night.’

Kathy said good night and returned to her screen, continuing with her trawl of random correlations: missing girls of the same age as Kerri, same hair style, same occupation; perpetrators with surnames beginning with the letter V, of the same age as Verdi, same physical characteristics; references to ice-cream, to out-of-town shopping malls, to Snow White.

She checked her watch and was surprised to see it read 11.20 p.m. She switched off her screen, packed up her things and made for the door. As she turned off the lights in unit 184 and stepped out into the mall, she immediately understood the slight edge of concern in the security guard’s voice about her finding her way out. It wasn’t that she could get lost-she knew the layout of the place too well for that now. It was the overwhelming sense of being suddenly alone in a vast, empty darkness, a sense that triggered a momentary feeling of panic, a safety response hard-wired into the brain long ago: Get back to the cave! Get back to the fire! Find friends!

She stood absolutely motionless until the feeling passed, and as her eyes adjusted, the dark gradually became less impenetrable. Spots of moonlight, emerald green, speckled the pitchiness, further and further into the depths. It wasn’t moonlight, of course, only the glow of emergency lights and exit signs, but their effect was magical all the same, creating pools and haloes of penumbra, so that the blankness slowly transmuted into a deep and mysterious forest landscape. And it was unnervingly beautiful, the tawdry daytime fantasy transformed and become real in the darkness.

Now the feeling of being quite alone in this strange place was intriguing, seductive. Kathy found that she couldn’t just turn down the nearby side-exit corridor that would take her out into the carpark without exploring the moonlit forest a little further. And as she progressed along the mall the effect of being alone in a magical fairy wood was strengthened by glimpses of tiny lights from within the darkened stores on either side. She supposed that they were the winking lights of alarms and security cameras, the LCD displays of electronic digits, but the darkness made distance and perspective illusory, so that as they emerged from behind dark obstacles and vanished again into the shadows, it appeared to Kathy that she was seeing the lights of a distant village, or the gleam of rubies and emeralds in a shadowy cave, or the eyes of watchful creatures.

She reached the main square overlooking the rain-forested food court, and stopped there, absorbing the extraordinary sense of depth through the tree canopy, imagining herself hovering over a distant jungle canyon. For a moment the illusion was so powerful that she could almost see the shifting shadows of nocturnal beasts beneath the trees, hear the rustle of predators through foliage.

She suddenly stood rigid, ears straining. She could hear the rustle of movement.

She heard it again.

It seemed to come from behind her. She turned slowly, heart thumping, and saw the bamboo thicket not far away behind her right shoulder, the one that contained the crouching gorilla. There was no movement among the bamboo leaves now, no sound, the gorilla invisible in the shadows. She knew that the darkness that allowed her imagination to create a magic forest in the mall was equally capable of magnifying her terrors. But there had been a sound.

Then she jumped as something small and blurred burst out of the thicket. For a moment it seemed to hang in the air in front of her, fluttering madly, before rising up into the vault above and swooping away in the darkness. Of course, it was the small bird that had strayed into the mall and been unable, or unwilling, to leave. It had survived two or three days now, she thought. Probably there was plenty to eat and drink in here.

Kathy was aware of an odd effect. Her sight seemed less acute than before, her whole consciousness now focused on her hearing. And as she turned back towards the balcony overlooking the lower court she realised she could now hear another sound.

It was muffled, distant, difficult to decipher. She concentrated and thought she could make out some kind of music, but strange and ethereal, the rhythm broken into disjointed snatches. It seemed to be coming from the floor of the valley below. She found the top of the escalator and began walking down the motionless steps, straining to make out the sound.

Frustratingly, it was less clear down below than up above, and she circled the food court for several minutes, bumping into tables and chairs in the darkness, unable to trace its source. Then her wandering route took her towards the snake charmer and the entrance to the Bazaar, and the tinkling sounds became a little more distinct.

It was very dark down there, the faint light sources dying in the black depths of the Bazaar. The sound was certainly becoming clearer, beeping and pinging notes which came in a rush for a few seconds, then paused briefly before flying off in some new direction. It was like the pipes of some manic Pan playing in the midnight forest of a nightmare. And then she turned the corner and saw the flickering electronic flashes bouncing around the mouth of the games arcade, and she realised what it was. One of the machines had been left on.

She moved softly towards the steel security grille that had been drawn across the front of the games arcade when it had closed down for the night. The flashing lights were much brighter now, but all the same it took her a moment to make out the shadow that swayed backwards and forwards across them, and realise that someone was in there, playing the machine. He had his back to her, absorbed in the game, a slight figure against the bulk of the machine, silhouetted against the source of the flashing lights.

She put her face to the grille and was able to make out the baseball cap reversed on his head, long curls beneath, baggy trousers, the mobile phone clipped to his belt. His whole body was weaving and jigging as if he were dancing with his electric partner, whose staccato bleeping was becoming more and more excited.

By the flickering lights of the machine, she could barely make out the rest of the arcade space. He seemed to be quite alone, only this one game active. She wondered how on earth he had got there. Had he hidden somewhere in the place when Winston Starkey had closed up for the night? Or did Starkey allow him to stay there, a homeless kid addicted to the machines-in exchange for what?

Whether he became distracted and made a mistake, or the game simply came to an end, the machine suddenly blared a triumphant fanfare of electronic trumpets and then fell silent, its lights calming to a steady post-coital glow.

He remained there for a moment, hands still on the controls, then he slowly raised his head and appeared to sniff the air.

He can smell me, Kathy thought, staying motionless as he began to turn towards her. She saw now that he was wearing knee and elbow pads, like a skateboarder.

‘Wiff,’ she said softly, not wanting to alarm him. ‘Wiff…’

He swung round abruptly, staring at the corner where she was, but not seeing her in the darkness, his eyes still blinded by the flashing game. They were wide with fright. Before she could say anything else he gave a little yelp and spun away, plunging back into the shadows at the rear of the unit.

Kathy heard a scrape of metal, a scuffling and creaking, then silence. Like a little frightened animal, she thought, he must have scurried back to his hiding place. She tried to move the security grille, but it was firmly locked. Then she pulled out her torch and shone it into the far corners of the arcade, but could see no sign of him.

‘Wiff,’ she called gently. ‘It’s all right. I’m a friend.’ She spoke towards the deepest shadows behind the furthest machines where she guessed he might be hiding. ‘Please, come and talk to me. I won’t hurt you.’

But there was no response, not a whisper of a breath nor the glimmer of a reflection from an eyeball.

Kathy looked at her watch and saw, again with surprise, how late it was, almost midnight. The dog patrol would be out in the carpark soon, and there was nothing she could do here. She switched off the torch and headed back the way she had come, hurrying now through the moonlit glades as if the silent dogs were on her trail.

She was in bed asleep when Leon returned in the small hours. He came in silently, and woke her with a kiss on her cheek. She struggled back to consciousness, smelling the cigarette smoke on his clothing and wine on his breath.