Silvermeadow

20

B runo Verdi shook his head sadly when they confronted him with the story, as if now he’d heard just about everything.

‘You’re not serious?’ he said. ‘My God, if it wasn’t poor Kerri they were talking about I’d be laughing. Instead I just feel sick. Where do kids get these ideas? Watching too many movies, eh? Too much TV. Drug rings? Serial killers? Perverts? What kind of fantasies are these? Whatever happened to childhood innocence, eh?’

‘It went out with Mr Kreemee,’ Kathy said.

‘Now, now, now. If you’re going to be nasty I’m simply not going to say another word till I have a solicitor present.’ He stroked his moustache with an air of complacency.

‘You deny these allegations then, do you Mr Verdi?’

‘Of course I deny them!’ he said, angry now. ‘They’re ridiculous. Nothing but teenage fantasies. I’m really quite shocked, Chief Inspector,’ addressing himself entirely to Brock now, ‘that you would give them a second thought. Where is the evidence, eh? Where is this secret room, this photograph, these video tapes? These are the sick imaginings of two young drug dealers who maybe think that if they give you a good story you’ll go easy on them! Eh? I’m right, aren’t I? You must see this.’

They questioned him for almost three hours, until there was no more to say. Never once did his confidence falter.

After they released him, Kathy spoke again to Naomi.

‘The room that this man had, his den, did Wiff say anything about it? Did he know where it was?’

She thought for a moment. ‘I think he said it wasn’t far away. That’s all.’

‘Did he give any idea of how big it was, what it looked like?’

‘No, nothing.’

‘What about the photograph he showed you? What sort of room was that taken in?’

Again she frowned in thought. ‘It was quite a big room, I think. You could see a wall in the background, and a chair.’

‘Wallpaper? Curtains?’

‘No. Bare blocks, like a garage, or a factory.’

‘Anything else? Close your eyes and try to see the scene again. Is there a light fitting or furniture?’

‘I assumed they were on a bed. I don’t really know. I can’t picture anything else.’

‘But you’re absolutely convinced the man was Bruno Verdi, the man who runs the ice-cream place? It couldn’t just have been someone who looks like him? With a moustache?’

‘No, no. It was definitely him. He was looking straight at the camera, with his teeth bared.’ She shuddered. ‘You mustn’t tell him that I told you this. He’d kill me if he knew.’

‘I’m afraid he already knows, Naomi.’

‘What?’ The girl said it with a yelp of fright. ‘You told him about me and Lisa?’

‘We told him that friends of Kerri were helping us. He’ll be able to work it out. He denies it all, of course.’

Naomi had begun to rock with agitation in her seat. ‘Then you mustn’t let him go until you’ve got proof! Don’t you see?’

‘I’m afraid we’ve had to let him go. We have no evidence to back up your story. Don’t worry. You’ll be staying here for a while. He can’t hurt you here.’

‘And then what?’ she moaned. ‘You don’t know. You don’t know what he’s like. Wiff warned me.’

Her words bothered Kathy, especially when Naomi was released into her grandparents’ care, in view of her age and the proximity of Christmas. Kathy didn’t think the proximity of Christmas would inhibit Bruno Verdi if her story was true, and Brock agreed that he should be kept under twenty-four-hour surveillance for the time being. A search was begun of industrial buildings and garages around Silvermeadow and in the neighbourhood of Verdi’s home, but no den was found.

Kathy, meanwhile, had heard nothing further from Leon. Several times she almost rang him, but then stopped herself with the thought that it would be a weakness, and that Christmas was itself a kind of a test, and once that barrier was passed then perhaps…

As she’d left his house that morning, Brock had made some comment about sharing a Christmas Day lunch if she wasn’t doing anything else, but they didn’t speak of it again and she assumed he’d forgotten.

As evening drew on, Kathy found herself in a deserted office in the Hornchurch Street station, listening to the sounds of a party somewhere far away in the bowels of the building. It was Christmas Eve after all, and the whole building had experienced a sudden excrescence of glittery decorations and tipsy bonhomie.

She didn’t want to go home to her empty flat, and the thought of her large bed and glossy appliances struck her as ridiculous. Since her credit card statement had arrived she’d found it impossible to recapture the mood in which she’d splashed out, and she thought of herself as having suffered a crazy spell, a black-out, yet another victim of the Gruen Transfer.

But it wasn’t just that. He had been there too, part of the transaction. It had been a signal to herself, and maybe to him also, of where she thought she was heading. Perhaps that was part of what had gone wrong.

Any road, she said to herself, in her Aunt Mary’s flat Yorkshire brogue, and immediately winced with guilt. She had still done nothing about their Christmas presents. In her head she heard Uncle Tom’s gloating: Told you so! So wrapped up in herself she’s forgot us.

And to what purpose? North had got clean away, and so, in his own way, had Verdi. She couldn’t believe that Naomi’s vivid description of the photograph had been invented, yet they had nothing. Again and again they had uncovered lies: Verdi, Testor, Harry Jackson, Lisa and Naomi. The ground had been thick with them and they had duly unearthed them, one by one, like diligent archaeologists scraping back the layers, finding shards which in the end amounted to nothing. She remembered her training, the law lecturer who had kept on at them, nagging: There are only three kinds of admissible evidence: forensic, witness and confession. Now they had ended up with no confession, no witness, and the only useful forensic evidence likely to be in a room that they couldn’t find, and perhaps didn’t even exist.

By rights, she thought, there was only one place it should be, this hidden room, and that was at Silvermeadow itself, the focus of everything. Yet this was the one place it couldn’t be, surely, the place that had been searched not once, but twice.

She suddenly found the idea of Silvermeadow, its lights and warmth and bustle, rather appealing, which was a measure, she assumed, of how depressed she must be feeling. A shriek of drunken laughter echoed from the corridor. Better there than here, anyway. She would get a card and present for the relatives, and a single cracker, funny hat and microwave Christmas dinner for herself.