Silvermeadow

11

H arry Jackson appeared to be unusually unco-operative and out of sorts. He was barking at someone on the phone when they looked into his office, and slammed down the receiver angrily when he finished the call.

‘Half my bloody staff are down with colds and flu. It’s this bleedin’ weather. And they’re forecasting snow. Why are you interested in those flamin’ huts?’

‘Just checking, Harry,’ Lowry told him soothingly. ‘DCI Brock wants us to do it personally. Just give us the keys and we’ll get out of your way.’

‘Can’t do that, Gavin. One of us’ll have to accompany you. New policy from senior management. And I can’t spare anyone.’

‘New policy? You having us on?’

‘Straight up. They’re getting pissed off with you lot, I reckon. And I can’t say as I blame them.’

‘What’s brought this on?’

‘Your guvnor’ll have to take it up with mine.’ He glared angrily through the glass window into the general office beyond, then swore. ‘Oh fuck it.’ He looked at Kathy, who shrugged. ‘Okay, I’ll go with you. Is it raining?’

‘Bucketing down.’

‘Great!’

They walked the length of the service road to the far end of the basement, where a fire exit door gave access into a corridor which eventually discharged at the extreme east end of the building. They hesitated in the shelter of the doorway, bracing themselves before braving the rain cascading out of the louring sky. This area was remote from the mall entrances and no money had apparently been wasted on landscaping or on softening the functional shell of the building. The lower part of the wall alongside them was filled with steel louvres from which came a low mechanical murmur. An electric cable looped out through the louvres and stretched out to the first of two rusty orange steel containers of the kind used for bulk transport on ships and trains, which stood a dozen yards away across a mess of puddled clay. Wooden palettes had been laid on the ground to form a makeshift path to the doors of the containers.

‘I’ll let you two get wet,’ Jackson said, handing the keys to Lowry.

‘Who uses them?’ Lowry asked.

‘The far one was used by the builders, and is empty now, or should be. The archaeologists were given the use of the near one when they found some human remains here, early on in the construction.’

‘Is it still in use?’

‘The old geezer, Professor Orr, still has some gear in there, as far as I know. We don’t have a use for it until they decide to build the next stage of the centre, and Bo lets him potter about. She reckons it’s good PR to keep him and Mrs Rutter happy.’

‘It’s got electricity?’ Kathy asked, pointing at the cable.

‘Yeah. All modern conveniences. Some, anyway.’

Lowry ran out into the rain, jumping to avoid a broken piece of timber and coming down in a puddle, splashing the legs of his suit with yellow mud. As she watched him struggling to open the padlock on the steel door, the rain drenching him, Kathy felt a surge of sympathy. It hadn’t been his week: a TV thrown at him, his car wrecked, now his suit.

‘Is Gavin unlucky, would you say, Harry?’ Kathy asked. It was a spontaneous remark, lightly meant, but she was surprised to see the look on Jackson’s face, almost of alarm.

‘What makes you say that?’

‘Nothing really. He just seems to be having things go wrong for him.’

‘Really? Gavin always had a reputation for being a lucky bastard.’ And he glanced across with a look almost of sadness at the figure tugging in frustration at the padlocked door.

Lowry got the door open at last and went inside. Kathy took the other key and followed across the palettes, avoiding the puddle, and opened the door of the other container without difficulty. It was empty, as Harry had said. She locked up again and ran back to help Lowry.

‘This is cosy,’ she said, looking around at the table and chair, the filing cabinet and shelves of small cardboard boxes neatly labelled. It was much more comfortable than she’d expected, and even had a camp bed squeezed across the end of the room, and next to it a tall grey metal cupboard. A crudely wired distribution board was fixed to the wall above the table, and there were several electrical appliances: a desk light, two-bar fire and kettle. But cosy wasn’t the right word, she decided. Actually, it made her think of a claustrophobic, windowless prison cell.

Lowry had hung his dripping raincoat on a hook by the door and was pulling on latex gloves. He was looking vaguely worried, Kathy thought, perhaps unsure how well his team of searchers had covered this in the first place. She also pulled on gloves and they began their search. On the table there were three small glass jars, one holding paper clips, another ball-point pens, and the third an assortment of coins. In the metal cupboard she found male clothing, old work clothes, a windcheater and a battered hat. A pair of wellington boots stood beneath them, thick woollen socks stuffed in the tops, and next to them an assortment of tools standing against the side, shovels and hand trowels.

Lowry was working through the filing cabinet, discovering a half bottle of whisky among the files of work schedules, reports and letters. When he reached the bottom drawer he stopped suddenly and said, ‘Oh-oh.’

Kathy turned and saw him reach into the back of the drawer and pull out a black rectangle. He pulled the video out of the sleeve, examined it briefly and handed it to her. She read the title on the spine: Teenage Sex Kittens. ‘Oh dear,’ she said, and slipped it into an evidence bag. She felt disappointed but not especially surprised, like a nurse cleaning up after someone who might have been expected to behave better.

Lowry turned back and groped around some more, and after a moment sat back on his heels and offered her a second trophy, this time a coloured loop of elasticised ribbon, such as Kerri had used to hold her ponytail in place.

‘I think that’s all down here,’ he said grimly.

‘It’s enough,’ Kathy said.

They did a rapid search of the rest of the space without uncovering anything more, then put their coats on again and closed the place up.

Jackson was still standing by the open door, looking miserable. ‘Finished?’he grumbled.

‘We’ll need to put a new lock on that one, Harry,’ Lowry said. ‘We’ll be getting forensic down here.’

‘How come? Find something?’

Kathy would have said nothing, but Lowry immediately showed him the two evidence bags, which Jackson peered at intently.

‘Bloody hell,’he muttered. ‘In there? I don’t believe it. That old bastard.’

‘Keep it to yourself, eh Harry?’

‘Gavin!’ Jackson said reproachfully. ‘You don’t have to tell me.’

The sky looked dark and threatening as Kathy pulled in at the kerb opposite the high street entrance to the estate. The rain had stopped, but few people seemed willing to come back out into the raw afternoon. A double-decker splashed up to a bus stop and a few bowed figures jumped off and hurried away. In the first courtyard the old man who had spoken to them after Lowry’s near miss with the TV was outside his door, wheezing as he swept the paving. Kathy called good evening to him, and got back a suspicious glower.

Alison Vlasich was looking a little better. At least her expression was more lively, though she too had developed a cold, and this, coupled with tears and loss of sleep, had turned her pale skin raw pink beneath her eyes and nose.

‘I’d really rather go back to work,’ she said, ‘only the doctor said give it a week. I don’t know. What do you think?’

‘Why don’t you give her a ring and say you feel ready. You’re looking more yourself.’

‘Yes. I’ve been getting out a bit, to the shops and that.’

She led Kathy into the sitting room and they sat down. There were perhaps a dozen cards of condolence standing on the shelf beside the TV, including one large one with many signatures inside it.

‘From Kerri’s class,’ Alison said, following Kathy’s eyes. There was also a large bunch of red roses in a vase on the table.

‘Has Bruno been in touch today?’

‘Not today, no. Why?’

‘He’s admitted to us that he’d been planning with Kerri to help her go to her father for Christmas.’

‘Oh.’

Nothing much seemed to register on Alison Vlasich’s face, neither surprise nor anger.

‘You don’t look surprised, Alison.’

‘No,’ she whispered. ‘I suppose I’m not.’

‘You suspected this?’

‘Not so that I could put it into words… but now you say it, yes, I think I knew, really.’

‘Aren’t you angry?’

She shook her head slowly, avoiding Kathy’s eyes. ‘No. He was trying to do the right thing, for Kerri, and for me.’

‘For you?’

‘He was worried about the way Kerri was behaving, the way she was talking to me. He felt it might be better for both of us if we had a break for a while, and if Kerri got away from some of the friends she was in with.’

‘What, Naomi and Lisa?’

‘No, the other ones, wild kids. He thought, if Kerri got away for a while it might change her attitude.’

There was something in this that Kathy felt she was missing. Something about the air of guilt with which Alison Vlasich told it, and the careful and protective way she and her brother-in-law gave out each piece of information about each other. And suddenly Kathy wondered if it was possible that there was something more to the relationship between them. Was this what had made Kerri so rebellious and difficult, and led her uncle, and perhaps in the end her mother, to want to let her go?

‘So you think Mr Verdi was really trying to help?’ Kathy asked, and saw Alison glance at the bunch of roses, then away quickly, with a touch of a smile in her tired eyes. ‘Oh yes. He was just trying to do the right thing, as an uncle.’

‘He seems very devoted to his wife.’

The smile vanished.‘Yes, very.’

Kathy said, ‘There are one or two loose ends we’re trying to tie up, Alison.’ She took the plastic bag with the hair ribbon from her bag and handed it to the other woman. ‘Do you recognise this at all?’

Little creases of worry formed around her eyes as Alison Vlasich took it and examined it carefully. ‘It’s the type that Kerri wore.’

‘Could it have belonged to her?’

‘I don’t think it could be hers, no. It’s blue, you see, and Kerri liked to wear red, and green especially, because she had green eyes.’ This memory had a sudden paralysing effect. She sat, immobile, as she tried to come to terms with it, and eventually Kathy reached forward and gently took the bag from her fingers.

‘I’m sorry, Alison,’ she said. ‘Would you like me to make a cup of tea or something?’

‘Oh… I didn’t think.’ She stood up abruptly. ‘I’ll do it.’

They went together into the little kitchen, where Alison put on the kettle.

‘Do you remember Kerri ever mentioning a man called Orr? Or the Professor, something like that? An elderly man who’s a bit of a regular at Silvermeadow.’

‘No, never.’

‘What about a younger man called Testor, Eddie Testor, who works in the leisure centre?’

‘Sorry, no. Are they suspects?’

‘They’re just part of a long list of names we’re trying to sort out, Alison. It doesn’t matter. Would you mind if I had another look in Kerri’s bedroom?’

Alison shrugged and turned away, setting out teacups on a flower-patterned plastic tray.

Kathy went through to the girl’s room, unchanged since their first visit. Kerri herself was beginning to become a cipher in all this, she thought, the victim, an increasingly remote figure, and the room, with its commonplace postcards and posters and small possessions, was a sobering reminder that she had been real, and ordinary. There was the table at which she would have sat, daydreaming over unopened homework books perhaps, and written letters to her father. On the table was a small hand-painted box, containing mementoes, trinkets and foreign coins. She opened the box and tipped the contents out onto the desktop. There were Italian lire, Belgian and French francs, Spanish pesetas, German pfennigs. There was one coin unlike the rest, very old, black and misshapen, its faces so worn smooth that it was impossible to make out any lettering. She lifted it up to the light as Alison came in to the room.

Kathy handed it to her. ‘Any idea what this is?’

‘No. Is it important?’

‘Probably not. Can I hang onto it for a day or two?’

‘You can have it as far as I’m concerned.’

They returned to the sitting room and sipped at their tea in silence for a while. Then Kathy said, ‘You have friends at work, Alison?’

‘Yes, well, work-mates, you know. I like the hospital. There’s always lots of things happening, lots of people around. You can’t feel too sorry for yourself there.’

‘PC Sangster mentioned to me that when this all started, you told her a story about an old woman in the hospital who thought she’d lost her daughter at Silvermeadow, do you remember?’

‘Yes. I feel embarrassed about that now. I think I got it mixed up. She explained that you hear lots of funny stories like that, that mean nothing.’

‘Yes, but all the same, we could check it again, just to be sure. Can you remember who the nurse was who heard her talking about it?’

‘No. It was one of those friend-of-a-friend stories.’

‘Could you ask around for me, do you think?’

She looked doubtful. ‘I could try, I suppose.’

Kathy could see that the idea of raising such a thing with the people at work troubled her, and said, ‘Just a name. Someone I could follow it up with.’

*

Robbie Orr was mortally outraged by Brock’s suggestion that the pornographic video tape belonged to him. They had found him and Harriet Rutter at Silvermeadow in Plaza Mexico again, this time watching an unveiling of next year’s new Ford among the haciendas and cacti, and she had insisted on accompanying him to Hornchurch Street. They had sat her in a waiting area, no more than a row of seats in the corridor near a temperamental coffee machine, looking out of place and out of sorts, while Orr was taken to an interview room.

‘How dare you insinuate, sir,’ he bellowed, eyes blazing, ‘that I am the owner of such trash!’

‘It’s not a criminal offence,’ Brock said calmly, thinking that Orr’s outrage seemed rather excessive, unless he understood the context of the find, and the construction that might be put upon it. ‘It’s just that we’d like to establish whose it is. It was found in the site hut, in your filing cabinet, among your reports and papers.’

‘Nonsense!’ Orr roared. ‘Impossible!’

‘It’s true.’

‘Well, someone else has put it there.’

‘Who?’

‘One of your people perhaps! I’ve read about this- police fabricating evidence when they run out of ideas. Well, let me assure you that you’ve taken on the wrong man this time, sir. I have a reputation for probity, you will find, and friends to support it. Why, the chancellor of my old university is a friend of the Home Secretary-’

‘Let’s not get carried away, Professor,’ Brock murmured. ‘The video was found in your filing cabinet by two of my officers. Actually we’re less interested in it than in what was found with it.’ He showed Orr the hair band.

Orr peered at it for a moment. ‘You don’t mean to say that this belonged to the lassie?’ His fury seemed to evaporate as he said it.

Brock raised an eyebrow but didn’t reply. If Orr knew the answer to that then he would mostly likely stick to a pose of outraged innocence. Brock waited, eyes fixed on his face.

‘But that is… monstrous…’ Orr said, with rather less confidence. ‘In my filing cabinet? All I keep in there, apart from the papers, is a wee bottle of whisky.’

‘Yes, we found that too.’

‘You’re serious about this?’

‘Very.’

‘I don’t know what to say.’ Orr’s indignation had gone. ‘Well, for a start, you can take my fingerprints. You’ll find they won’t match anything on those things.’

‘That would be most helpful. We’ll do it now, if you don’t mind. One of my officers will fix it up.’

As he got to his feet, Brock sensed the man’s mood change again. From outrage to shock, he now moved on to prickly martyrdom. A thought occurred to him.

‘In any case,’ he said scathingly, ‘why in blazes would I keep a video in the site hut when there’s no machine there to view it on, eh? It makes no sense.’

‘That’s a good point. Who else has a key to the hut, do you know?’

‘The security people, of course, and I was given one. But I had others cut when we were in the thick of our digging. Time was short, we worked round the clock, and I gave keys to some of the other people in the team. I never got them all back.’

‘Do any of them have any connection with Silvermeadow now?’

‘Not to my knowledge.’

‘So you have no theories about how these things could have got in there?’

Orr sat gauntly upright, stiff with bruised dignity. ‘I don’t care to speculate, sir. That seems to be your job.’

Brock sat with Lowry and Kathy in an adjoining room while Orr’s prints were being taken. ‘Let him stew on it for a few minutes, then we’ll go through it again. What bothers me, Gavin, is that we can’t be sure that drawer was searched the first time.’

He saw the discomfort return to Lowry’s face. When he had questioned the two officers who had searched that part of the site, one had claimed that they’d searched the drawer and seen nothing, the other that they’d never opened it.

‘What else might we have missed?’

Lowry clenched his jaw. ‘I told them to work fast, chief, and it was a huge complex to cover with the men we had. We got round the lot in half a day… Yeah, none of us could swear we didn’t miss something. It would take a week to do it properly. Not only that, the plans we were using were very simplified. They didn’t show all the store cupboards and plant rooms and stuff like that. We just had to use our judgement what we opened up and searched.’

Brock felt a twinge of unease. It wasn’t Lowry’s fault. He’d done exactly as Brock had instructed him. ‘Fair enough. But we may just have to do it again.’

He heard Lowry mutter under his breath, ‘Christ.’

‘What’s the problem, Gavin?’

‘Two problems, chief. Manpower-the chief super’ll do his nut. And the centre management. They’re becoming difficult. I think they want us out of there. Harry said he’d got new instructions not to give us access unaccompanied.’

‘I think I may be responsible for that,’ Kathy said. She also was looking uncomfortable, and told them about her late encounter in the games arcade the previous night, and Jackson’s reaction that morning.

‘You’re telling me that a boy was in there, playing arcade games at midnight? When the place had been locked up and secured?’ Brock’s feeling of losing control was growing by the minute. ‘Good grief, Kathy!’

‘I know. But I’ve no idea how. I searched the place myself this morning with Jackson and Starkey. There was no sign of anywhere he could have been hiding overnight, and no way he could have got out without triggering the alarms. They… well, I don’t think they believed me. They said I must have got confused by the flickering lights from the machines in the darkness. I wish they were right.’

Brock thought, working out the implications. Finally he said, ‘All the more reason to make another search, then.’ He thumbed through a notebook for a number, lifted the phone and dialled.

‘Harry, how are you?’

‘Not too bad, chief. What can I do for you?’ The voice was cautious.

‘Those plans you gave us of Silvermeadow, they’ve been giving us a bit of trouble.’

‘How come?’

‘They don’t show much detail. Plant rooms, store cupboards… We’re just beginning to realise what we missed.’

Brock let that sink in. The line was silent, then he continued, ‘You must have more accurate plans somewhere, don’t you?’

‘The property manager,’ Jackson said slowly, ‘holds the technical plans.’ He stressed ‘technical’ as if it were something dangerous and obscure. ‘But I wouldn’t imagine you’d need-’

‘I’m afraid we do. It’s beginning to look as if we’re going to have to search the damn place again.’

‘I don’t think management will buy that, chief.’

‘I’m not that keen on it myself, Harry.’ Brock’s voice hardened suddenly. ‘It’s a mistake that’s going to make us all very unpopular. I’d better speak to Ms Seager.’

‘Hang on, chief. How urgent is this?’

‘It’s urgent. I want some action tonight.’

‘Tell you what. Leave it with me for half an hour. Let me see what I can do. Let me get back to you.’

The phone rang again as soon as Brock replaced it. Bren was on the line, sounding fired up.

‘I think we’ve got something on North, Brock. Can we talk?’

‘I could do with some good news. Where are you?’

Bren was in the building. They arranged to meet and Brock rang off.

‘Gavin, something’s come up on another case Kathy and I are working on. Would you look after Orr? I doubt if you’ll get much out of him, but try anyway.’ He noticed a set look about the mouth as Lowry jumped to his feet, as if he was determined to redeem himself. ‘Don’t be too rough on him,’ Brock added, but Lowry was already through the door.

Bren looked rejuvenated, Brock thought, his big, deceptively gentle-looking countenance alight with good spirits. Burrowing away quietly in the undergrowth with a small team of his own, he had emerged into the light with something tasty, clearly.

‘One of the lines we’ve been taking is that he came here from Canada,’ he said, his soft West Country burr more pronounced than usual. ‘We’ve been checking arrivals, money transfers, that sort of thing. You wouldn’t believe the number of Canadians who have come over for Christmas. Then we thought he might have got himself a motor to get out to Silvermeadow, so we’ve been checking car hire places too. Yesterday we called in at a small independent rental outfit at Redbridge. Two weeks ago they hired a blue Golf to a man who offered a Canadian passport and driver’s licence as identification. Name of Keith Nolan. He was on our list of tourist visitors, arrived at Heathrow unaccompanied in mid-November. We also had him down as cashing several American Express travellers’ cheques issued in Montreal, at a bank in Barking on the thirtieth of November.’

Brock thought. Redbridge, Barking, both on this side of London, both within a dozen miles of Silvermeadow. And there was more coming, he could see from Bren’s manner, building up to the big one. His method was reassuringly sane and straightforward, searching the bureaucratic web of authorisations, accounts, documents in which everyone who travelled or hired or got sick or bought something became inevitably entangled. It made the Vlasich investigation at Silvermeadow seem uncomfortably messy by comparison.

‘We’ve been passing the more promising ones back to the Canadian police for checking,’ Bren continued. ‘We just got word on Nolan. He was born in the same year as North, but he died ten years ago in a road accident in Quebec.’

‘Great,’ Brock murmured. ‘I don’t suppose the car rental place took a photocopy of his identification?’

Bren grinned, and handed Brock a sheet of paper, a photocopy of two pages from a passport, including the photograph of Nolan. ‘What do you reckon?’

‘Yes,’ Brock said simply. ‘We can see what Pauline Lewins thinks, but yes, I think that’s him.’

‘So do I.’

‘We have a name, a car, a photo. What else do we need?’

‘More legs and a bit of time. We’re working on accommodation now, hotels, b and bs, rented accommodation…’

‘How long was the Golf hired for?’

‘Four weeks. To be returned on the twenty-eighth of December.’

‘He may have more than one alias.’

‘Sure.’

Brock saw Bren hesitate, glance at Kathy, then back to him.

‘I was wondering if you might want to get more involved now, chief.’

Of course he did. The thought of Nolan was tantalising, irresistible.

‘You’ve done well, Bren. Give me twenty-four hours to finish off a few things with Kathy at Silvermeadow, then I’m all yours.’ He didn’t really mean finish, for he had no hope of that. But he would need a little time to extricate himself and make sure that Kathy was put in charge of the Vlasich investigation.

Harry Jackson phoned shortly after this, sounding more confident than the last time they’d spoken. He’d arranged a meeting for Brock with Bo Seager in an hour, at 6.30 p.m., to sort out ‘ongoing protocol’, as he put it. He had also arranged for the property manager, Allen Cook, to be in his office, just along the corridor from the centre manager’s, around that time to brief Brock on available plans.

They picked up Gavin Lowry on their way down to the car. He seemed tense after questioning Orr, from which, he said, he had discovered nothing of interest. With some probing from Brock as they drove out to the motorway he admitted that the old man had irritated him a good deal. ‘Pompous old fart!’ he said in a sudden burst of anger. ‘Knows everything, and all of it completely pointless. He reminds me of our old history teacher at school. So fucking smart!’ Then he added in an undertone, ‘We sorted him.’

‘How?’ Brock asked mildly.

‘Oh, one of the boys said he’d tried to interfere with him.’

‘Had he?’

‘No. They suspended him anyway, and he had a nervous breakdown.’

Brock noticed Kathy glance sharply up at Lowry’s reflection in the rear-view mirror, then snap her eyes back to the road.

‘I hope you didn’t try the same on Orr, Gavin,’ Brock said.

‘What, plant that tape in his filing cabinet?’ Lowry laughed. ‘No, but after listening to him droning on for half an hour I was capable of it, believe me. Who the hell is Harding?’

‘Should I know?’

‘Exactly! He says, “I was with Harding in Jordan”, like you should know what the hell he’s talking about.’

‘You weren’t too rough on him, were you, Gavin?’

‘Not nearly rough enough, chief,’ Lowry growled back. ‘Not nearly.’

They arrived early for the meeting with Bo Seager, and found the office of the property manager, Allen Cook. He was a brisk, wiry man, with the certificate of an engineering degree framed on the wall behind his desk. He eyed Brock with interest as he listened to what he wanted, one technician to another. When Brock showed him the plans that Harry had supplied he shook his head dismissively.

‘Very crude. Detailed building plans are all on the computer there, and you can have a print-out at any scale of detail or layer of system you want, from structural grids to electrical or plumbing layouts. I imagine you’ll want the spatial plans, with partitions, doors, room layouts and so on.’

‘Yes, that sounds like it.’

‘There’s a slight problem though. These plans are essentially the original construction set, which we’ve modified and updated from time to time to include work done by tenants. You have to understand that up to half of the value of construction in a shopping centre like this is fitting-out work done by the individual tenants’ contractors. They come into the basic shell that the owner provides, and they put in their own ceilings, partitions, services, fittings, finishes. They have to get this work approved by the owner, and they lodge copies of their plans with us to put on to our master. But they don’t all work on AutoCAD like us, or a compatible software system. Some don’t do their plans on a computer at all, and they give us paper sets.’

He went over to a plan chest of wide, shallow steel drawers and pulled one of them open and drew out a construction drawing from the top of the pile inside. He laid it on the table, spreading it with his palm to flatten its creases.

‘This is the contractor’s fitting-out drawing for a shoe shop in unit seventy-three, a medium standard unit. They put in a toilet and small staff room at the back there, and an office here, this curving wall between men’s and women’s shoes and this wavy ceiling, shelving, racks, a store front that folds away, plus the services-lighting, air-conditioning ducting, smoke detectors, sprinklers, plumbing-all tapping into the main lines we bring to the rear of the unit. The problem is that someone at this end then has to put this manually into our master plan-it would be difficult to scan a plan like this directly in. This has not been done consistently. I’ve been here nine months now, and I’ve hardly begun to get to grips with the backlog of plans that haven’t been entered onto the master set. Harry Jackson has a lad who’s a bit of a computer whiz, and I pay him to work on it from time to time, but he can’t keep up.

‘Also, as you can see’-he pointed to pencilled notes and alterations on the original print drawing-‘changes get made during the course of construction. In this case they had to change their toilet layout when they discovered where we’d put the connection point for their drainage, and that altered the layout of all the surrounding walls, just slightly. I couldn’t guarantee that what’s down there now is exactly like this, either. I know they also changed the alignment of the curved wall, because there was a grid of sprinkler heads already in the ceiling, and the wall would have interfered with them.

‘Now if we compare this sheet to the master plan on the computer. ..’ He went over to the machine on the next table and worked at the coloured plan on its screen until he found and enlarged the area around unit 73. ‘Very different, you see? Our master hasn’t been updated yet. You get the picture.’

Brock was feeling the way he often did when people demonstrated computers to him. Irritated and depressed. He could sympathise now with Jackson’s warning description of Cook’s plans as ‘technical’. And he could understand why he’d stuck to his ‘crude’ plans.

‘Frustrating, I know,’ the engineer said. He went over to a rack standing in a corner of the room, and slid from it a set of plans clipped together on a wooden handle, and laid these down on the table. ‘This is probably the sort of thing you want. One to five hundred scale plans of the spatial layouts of each level, with the landlord’s structure in black lines and tenants’additions, as far as we’ve recorded them, in red. I can give it to you at an enlarged scale if you want, one to two hundred say, but that would cover several sheets for each level.’

Brock stared at the plans, rubbing his hand through his beard, his feeling of irritation becoming rapidly compounded by a sense of unease. ‘So inside their own shops, tenants could have built rooms, cupboards, cavities that don’t appear on these plans at all, and that you don’t know about?’

Cook nodded. ‘Certainly. We should have a record of it somewhere, but I couldn’t guarantee it. You know, they get a builder in for a job they’ve agreed with us, and then they say to him, “While you’re here, give us a price for putting up an extra couple of walls over there.” It happens. And it’s always a last-minute rush, and they know if they apply to us for approval it’ll slow them down… You understand.’

‘And what would be the best way for us to check this?’

Cook considered. ‘The best way would be to hire a team of surveyors to come in and make a survey, take spot room dimensions using laser equipment, check variations. I’d love it if you did. We could use an accurate set of plans.’

‘How long would that take?’

‘This is a big place. At least a month to do it thoroughly, I should think. And it would cost.’

‘We don’t have a month.’

‘What exactly are you looking for?’

‘We think that the murdered girl may have been held somewhere before the killer put her body into the compactor. We did a close search of the areas immediately in the vicinity of the machine, and a broader search of the whole complex, but we didn’t find this place, if it exists. That’s what we’re looking for, Mr Cook. What would you advise? Say you had twenty-four hours, not a month. What would you do?’

The engineer considered that for a while. ‘You have to try to think like the murderer, don’t you? That’s what you do all the time, I suppose.’ He seemed amused by that thought. ‘Well, I think you’d have a problem getting up to much in the larger units. There would be people coming and going all the time, asking questions, noticing anything odd. In the small units on the other hand-I mean the very small units, with just one or two staff at quiet times… Was it a quiet time when she disappeared?’

‘Fairly quiet.’

‘Right… Yes, you might be able to get away with it. Say you’re the sole owner of a small business. A small card shop, for instance, or coffee shop-’

‘Or a games arcade or gelato shop,’ Brock suggested.

‘That sort of thing. You could have a quiet spot of building work done as part of a larger alteration, then change your employees, and after a while there wouldn’t be anyone but you would know.’

‘Trouble is, we’ve had a reasonably close look at most of the likely candidates. But we can do it again.’

‘Yes. But I was going to say that the quietest and most undisturbed places of all, if you had access…’ Cook pondered.

‘Yes?’

‘Well, they’re not even on the plans you had. Look, I’ll show you.’

They looked over his shoulder as he adjusted the image on his computer screen again.

‘Those plans you had are the type we give visitors, members of the public. They don’t need to know about these, for instance.’ He pointed to an array of rooms on the screen. ‘Those are plant and service rooms, electricity substations and the like.’

‘We checked out a number of plant rooms along the service road,’ Lowry said.

‘Yes, but there’s plenty more. Like those, on the lowest level, around the main plenum.’ He indicated a long narrow chamber which zig-zagged across the width of the screen. ‘It runs the length of the basement beneath the loading platform.’

Brock turned to Lowry, who shrugged and shook his head.

‘Go on,’ Brock said. ‘What’s a plenum?’

‘It’s the final big duct used for gathering all the exhaust air from the centre-its lung, you might say. The whole building breathes tempered air, see, which percolates through every part and finally ends up in the plenum. It starts at roof level, where outdoor air is treated in the rooftop plant rooms, washed, scrubbed, dried, cooled or heated to twenty-two degrees C, then pumped into the upper malls. From there it gets drawn in to the shop units by extract ducts at their rear, in the ceilings of the rear service corridors, then down in a series of big drop ducts to the lowest level where it discharges along with the exhaust air from the service road and basement areas into the plenum chamber. From there it’s pulled by big fans through heat exchangers to recover waste heat, then discharged to open air again at the end of the building.’

‘Can you get into these ducts?’

‘Into the plenum, yes. There’s access for maintenance, and to the plant rooms that support it. But not for general use. Between maintenance inspections you could wander around down there for months without being disturbed, provided there wasn’t a plant failure or a rat plague or something.’

‘Good grief,’ Brock said. ‘Why the hell didn’t we know about this before?’

‘Well, probably because there’s a very good reason why your murderer wouldn’t be down there.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes, you see, the access is through the security centre. That would make it a bit tricky for him, wouldn’t it?’

They thanked Cook and crossed the corridor to the entrance to the management offices.

Brock found Bo Seager tense and preoccupied, with Nathan Tindall ominously silent on the opposite side of the room. Both seemed subdued by the presence of a solicitor representing the company which owned Silvermeadow.

Bo began by saying that Harry Jackson had not made it clear what Brock wanted a meeting for, and then asked peremptorily what they’d been doing in Allen Cook’s office. Brock’s answer, that they’d been checking the building plans to see if there could be areas they’d missed on their earlier search, didn’t seem to reassure her. From her comments he gathered that the initial euphoria over the turnover figures arising from the publicity had worn off, and this was confirmed by the solicitor, who quickly established himself as the spokesman for the management group. Their board, he explained, was now deeply disturbed that the company name should be associated with this sort of notoriety, which was absolutely contrary to the image and values they had all worked so hard to project. The board demanded a speedy resolution.

‘I understand you have been interviewing various of our tenants,’ he said. ‘May I ask whether you intend to make any arrests, or lay any charges?’

‘Not at present.’

‘From my reading of the situation, we have bent over backwards to facilitate your demands for access to Silvermeadow to assist your investigations, Chief Inspector. But enough is enough. This is private property you’re camping in.’ He smiled thinly. ‘You don’t need me to remind you that if you’d applied for a warrant to enter this centre it would have entitled you to one visit only. This open-ended, interminable access is simply unacceptable. It is disrupting my client’s operations and creating a highly negative climate at a critical point in the trading year.’ He cleared his throat and looked over at Bo Seager.

‘Four kids tried to mug Santa this morning,’ she said in a sombre tone.

‘ Santa, did you say?’ Lowry asked, looking startled.

‘Yes. Santa was in his grotto next to the magic roundabout on the upper mall, with a line of toddlers and their mums queuing up to see him, and the four of them marched up and started laying into him.’

‘What, to rob him?’

‘No, no, just for the pleasure of it. Fortunately control spotted them on the cameras coming in the west entrance, and radioed the mall security. They caught up with the little bastards just as they were getting really stuck into poor old Santa.’ She turned to Brock with a concerned frown. ‘He’s seventy-two, Chief Inspector.’ Brock noted the formal title. No more David, at least not in front of the suits. ‘He’s been doing it for twenty years. We inherited him from a department store that closed down in Dagenham. The thing was, when Harry asked these little creeps what they thought they were doing, the ringleader said, cheeky as anything, “Well, this is murder-mall, yeah?” Like it’s open season, or something.’

‘The point is, Chief Inspector,’ Nathan Tindall broke in angrily, ‘this can’t go on. We’re going to have to ask you to vacate unit 184.’

Brock turned to see what Bo had to say, but she remained silent.

‘And any further incursions will have to be supported by a warrant,’ the solicitor added, ‘which we shall oppose, bearing in mind there’s no conclusive evidence we’re aware of that a crime has been committed on this property, or that any further evidence relating to the disappearance of Kerri Vlasich is to be found here.’

Brock studied his fingernails, letting them wait for his inevitable objections, then said abruptly, ‘I agree. I was coming to the view myself that a visible police presence here was becoming counterproductive. I suggest that we make a press statement to the effect that the investigation here is being wound down and moving elsewhere.’

He was aware of Lowry looking at him, startled, while Bo Seager appeared intensely relieved.

‘Well,’ the solicitor smiled, ‘good, good.’

‘From our discussion with Mr Cook,’ Brock went on, smiling back, ‘we are just a little concerned that we may have missed one or two areas in our original search that may prevent us from making a conclusive final report. The coroner hates loose ends, you understand. That’s my only concern.’

The solicitor frowned. ‘How long, exactly, are these loose ends?’

‘Mr Cook has estimated that it might take a month to be a hundred per cent sure we haven’t missed anything.’

This produced a spluttered protest.

Brock let it run for a moment, then lifted his eye to see Bo Seager’s reaction. She was considering him closely. She shook her head and said, ‘No.’

‘The problem is that some of your tenants seem to have been building rabbit warrens inside their tenancies, without getting approvals. I have to say that the fire brigade might be concerned at some of the things we’ve seen. Without a definitive plan-’

‘How long?’ Bo said.

‘We might be able to do enough to satisfy the coroner in, say, twenty-four hours. But we’d need complete access.’

Bo looked at him coolly for a moment, then turned to the solicitor and murmured something about peanuts. He shook his head sharply, and Bo looked back at Brock without a trace of expression on her face.

‘Tell you what,’ she said, ‘let me consult with my colleagues here and get back to you. We may have to get approval from above. Will tomorrow morning be okay?’

‘Tonight, Bo. There are some areas we want to check tonight.’

‘Leave it with me.’