Silvermeadow

7

K athy went straight to the security centre the following morning, wanting to have it out with Speedy Reynolds, but a different man, one she hadn’t seen before, was operating the cameras, and Harry Jackson came out of his office to tell her that Speedy wasn’t back on shift until that afternoon.

‘You get the daybooks all right, Kathy?’ he said.

‘Yes, great. Thanks for that, Harry.’

‘Anything else I can do, just shout. Any results yet from yesterday’s bunfight?’

‘The walk-through? No, nothing definite.’

‘Better luck this afternoon, eh?’ He seemed remarkably relaxed and jovial today.

She left him and went up to the unit to start work on the reports that had accumulated from the previous evening. As she entered the upper mall she was aware of something going on, people standing looking upwards, pointing, and when she stopped she saw that a small bird, a sparrow, had somehow got into the centre and was now flitting about distractedly beneath the vault, beating against the glass.

Towards lunchtime she took a call from Leon. They confirmed their arrangements to meet that evening, and then he asked to be put through to Brock. Kathy could tell from his tone that he had something.

‘He’s at a meeting at the Yard, Leon,’ she said. ‘We’re expecting him back shortly. Can I take a message?’

‘Yes, you’ll be interested in this, Kathy. We’ve just got the first toxicology results from Kerri’s autopsy back from the lab. They’ve been having a bit of bother because of the time interval since her death, but this is something. I’ll fax the report through now. It’s quite technical, but basically it’s about her hair.’

Hair, it seemed, provided a special kind of record of the body’s chemistry. At its point of growth, it absorbed traces of the body’s chemical responses to any antigens that might have found their way into the system. Growing at the rate of around twelve millimetres a month, hair of the length of Kerri’s represented a couple of years’ record of body chemistry, a print-out of specific bodily responses to antigens, and in particular drugs. Her hair, in effect, provided a two-year record of her drug history.

From this it appeared that Kerri had been experimenting with something, probably Ecstasy, over something like a four-month period before her death. In addition, the millimetre of hair closest to the root showed that in the final days of her life she had taken substantial amounts of an unknown antigen.

‘She was drugged?’ Kathy asked.

‘Drugged or drugging.’

‘Will they be able to identify it?’

‘The hair doesn’t carry traces of the drug itself, only of the body’s chemical response to it, so they can’t always tell. But they may have something later today or tomorrow.’

Leon’s information made Kathy impatient to act, but she thought Brock would want to be involved, and his meeting was lasting longer than planned. While she waited, Kathy moved on from the reports, which held nothing new, to Harry’s daybooks, sitting untouched on the table. She began working backwards through the latest one without enthusiasm. Having already skimmed it once she expected to find nothing, but she forced herself to it, almost as a kind of penance for her shopping spree the day before.

Since she had the photocopies she had made in the security room, she used them to mark items of possible interest with a coloured marker as she went, reading from the original books whose entries were more legible. It was only because she used this method that she came across the missing page. At first, when she turned up a photocopied sheet that didn’t correspond to the next daybook page, she thought she’d got the loose photocopies out of sequence. But when she checked the dates she found she had two extra photocopied sheets, covering a week in the middle of August, for which there were no book entries. She would never have detected the missing page otherwise, because it had been sliced out with such care, so close to the binding, that its stub was invisible. It must have been removed sometime between Sunday afternoon, when Kathy had photocopied it, and Monday morning, when the books had been delivered to unit 184.

What made it odder was that there seemed to be nothing of interest in the missing entries. They recorded a mild heart attack on the Monday, nothing on Tuesday, two cars broken into in the carpark on Wednesday, a confused woman taken home on the Thursday, and some graffiti sprayed on one of the perimeter signs on the Friday night. All in all, a typical, uneventful Silvermeadow week.

Brock was very interested in Desai’s report, and he and Kathy decided to drive over to speak to Kerri’s mother again. A social worker was with her this time, and she was much more composed than before, but still very pale and fragile.

‘I think it helped, seeing Kerri,’ she whispered. ‘I knew then that it was true that she was dead. It helped me to face it. Has Stefan been to see her?’

‘Yes,’ Brock said. ‘You haven’t seen him?’

‘No. I heard he was over here, but we won’t see each other, except at the funeral.’ She turned quickly away and wiped a hand across her eyes. ‘Did you want to ask me something?’

‘Yes. It isn’t an easy thing to raise with you, Mrs Vlasich, especially so soon, but I think we must.’

‘Oh…’ The woman lowered her eyes to the carpet and waited without expression for whatever was coming.

‘Kerri was a sociable girl, I remember you saying, Mrs Vlasich. And I suppose she and her friends would go to parties and so on.’

Alison Vlasich gave an uncertain shrug.

‘And I daresay that Kerri was, like all kids, trying things, experimenting, eh? They have to try smoking, don’t they, and alcohol? And these days other things too.’

She looked up warily. ‘What are you saying?’

‘What I’m saying is,’ he said gently, ‘that we know Kerri had been experimenting with drugs for some time, several months, and we’d like to know a bit more about that.’

Mrs Vlasich put her hand to her mouth, shaking her head.

‘It may have nothing to do with her death, but we need to be sure. Can you help us?’

He let her take her time, and eventually she said, ‘I didn’t know.’

‘Not even a guess? A hint?’

She shook her head. ‘But I was always afraid. It’s what you hear, isn’t it? Teenagers, round here especially. I used to ask her at first, when she started going out: do the others take drugs, Kerri? She always said no. She didn’t like me asking though, said it was stupid, and so after a while I stopped.’ Her voice trailed away. Then she blinked as if an uncomfortable thought had just surfaced. ‘She never had any money. She didn’t earn a lot at the food court, but I never really knew what she spent it on. She never brought any home.’ Another long silence, then, ‘You should speak to her friends, to Naomi and Lisa. They might know.’

Brock nodded. ‘We’re going to ask them. But it’s just possible that we may have overlooked something that Kerri left behind here. I know we have already had a good look at her room, but we didn’t know then what we know now, so we’d like to check your flat again, with your permission.’

Mrs Vlasich agreed, and they spent an hour going through the place again, but found nothing. If Kerri Vlasich had possessed drugs at the time of her death she most probably had taken them with her.

Naomi hadn’t yet returned home from school, so her grandparents invited Brock and Kathy to come in to wait for her.

‘They’re coping as well as might be expected,’ Mrs Tait said. ‘Poor Lisa is taking it especially hard. She says she’ll never go back to Silvermeadow when this is over. She’s going to give up her job there. Naomi doesn’t show it so much, on the surface…’

‘Sterner stuff,’ her husband muttered.

‘But underneath she’s shattered too, I can tell.’

They listened in sombre silence to what Brock had to say, and didn’t seem surprised by his suggestion that Kerri had been using drugs.

‘I don’t think poor Alison can really have been surprised,’ Mrs Tait said eventually. ‘It’s everywhere these days. So hard for the children to avoid.’

‘Especially over there in Primrose,’ Jack Tait growled.

‘Everywhere, Jack. We, of all people, know that.’ She looked steadily at Brock and said quietly, ‘That was how our daughter, Naomi’s mother, died, you see. She tried so hard, but she kept going back to it. Things would get her down, and then she would go back to it. You know, don’t you? You must see it every day.’

Brock nodded. ‘Yes.’

‘A scourge,’ Mr Tait said. ‘A curse.’

‘And now Kimberley, Naomi’s elder sister, is in the same trouble.’ She glanced across at the photographs on the wall. ‘The one on the left.’ To Kathy it seemed as if the family portraits were taking on the character of a gallery of missing persons, or perhaps a shrine. Brock got up and looked at the pictures dutifully.

‘Always like her mother,’ Mr Tait said.

‘I’m sorry,’ Brock said.

‘So we can understand how Alison must feel. But was it a serious problem? Kerri was so young. Did it contribute in some way-’

‘We’re not sure yet. We need to find out as much as we can about it.’

‘Yes, well, Naomi may know something.’ Mrs Tait stopped and looked fixedly at Brock. ‘You’re wondering, aren’t you, about Naomi? You’re wondering if she’s in the same boat? Well I can tell you straight away, she’s not. Naomi has not touched drugs.’

Brock shrugged. ‘Well, I know how difficult it is to be sure-’

‘No.’ She shook her head determinedly. ‘I know. We’ve been through it twice already. We know the signs all too well, believe me, Chief Inspector. We had it all from our daughter: the little lies to borrow money, the money gone from your purse, the strange phone calls at odd hours, things missing from the house, the moods. We got to know those signs very well. And when Kimberley started we knew straight away, although she denied it till she was blue in the face and convinced everyone else, her sisters included, everyone except Jack and me. And Naomi’s seen it too, and she knows what happens. She’s not like Kimberley. She won’t end up the same way.’

‘She never borrows no money,’ Jack Tait said, leaning forward to emphasise the point. ‘She saves every penny of her work money. Every penny.’

‘It must be tough for you both,’ Brock said.

‘You cope, don’t you? You have to. We’d had our dreams of what we’d do when Jack retired, go live by the sea near our friends. But that wasn’t to be. We were needed here, to look after our grandchildren.’

‘This’ll give you some idea what our Naomi’s like,’ Jack Tait said. He got stiffly to his feet and went over to the mantelpiece and lifted a piece of paper out of a bowl. He handed it to Brock proudly. It was a lottery ticket. ‘Once a month she buys us one of these out of her pay from the sandwich shop. She says, one day we’ll win, and we’ll be able to buy a house in Westcliff big enough for us all. And she believes it too.’

They heard the front door bang and the sounds of Naomi discarding her bag and coat in the hall.

Her reaction to Brock’s questions was almost a mirror of her grandparents. She nodded sadly, and said she knew that Kerri had been trying things-speed, she thought, and Ecstasy, which she’d got from boys at parties. Lisa and herself had tried to make her stop, but Kerri said it was exciting, and they were stupid. They’d had an argument over it, which was the reason Kerri had stopped confiding in them about her plans.

‘We should have told someone, shouldn’t we? Her mum or something. Then maybe she’d have been all right.’

‘It may have nothing to do with what happened to her, Naomi,’ Brock assured her. ‘But we want to check everything. What about these boys? Do you know who they are? Do they go to Silvermeadow?’

Naomi shook her head. Lisa and she had tried to find out, but Kerri kept it a secret.

‘You’re sure she said “boys”?’

She pondered. ‘Boys, or “this boy”. I’m not sure. I thought there might be more than one, but I’m not sure. She told lies sometimes, just to wind us up.’

As they got back in their car, Brock said to Kathy, ‘This doesn’t sound like much. What do you think?’

‘I agree. She was trying things, but most of them do. She wasn’t exactly a junkie. They never found needle marks on the body, did they?’

‘No.’

‘I feel very sorry for Mrs Tait, trying so hard to do the right thing, worn out.’

‘Mmm. Might be better than being stuck in a cottage with old Jack at Westcliff, though, don’t you think?’

Kathy smiled. ‘Maybe.’

‘So what now? I was really hoping forensic would give us something more concrete to work on.’ Brock folded his arms and frowned out of the window as Kathy edged the car into the traffic of the high street. ‘The thought of this turning into one of those interminable cases, hundreds of fruitless leads, thousands of interviews, millions of words…’ He shook his head. ‘Have you been keeping in touch with what Leon’s been up to?’

She nodded. ‘Pretty much.’

‘I hope he’s giving us his undivided attention.’

‘I’d say so, yes.’

‘Someone said they saw him laughing yesterday, and whistling, for God’s sake. Leon doesn’t whistle.’

‘Maybe he’s happy.’

‘I don’t want him happy,’ Brock growled. ‘I want him dissatisfied and frustrated, like me. I want him harrying those lab people till they find us something useful.’

‘Maybe the samples from the compactors will give us something.’

‘That’s a long shot. She was pretty well wrapped up. And clean-no semen traces, no foreign hairs, no fibres. We find a body, and then it tells us nothing. They’ve got equipment can read your life story from a single hair, and all they can tell us is that she was a teenager who experimented with Ecstasy.’

Kathy found Speedy alone at his console that afternoon. She saw him grinning to himself as she came in the room, but he didn’t turn round. He continued ignoring her as she came to his side. Kathy looked down at the control panel, at the keyboards, the rotating dials, the sliding knobs, and spotted a simple switch at one end, marked ON-OFF. She reached forward and pushed it to off, and all the screens simultaneously went blank.

‘Oi!’ He blinked at the dead screens, then jerked round as if she’d physically hurt him.

‘I’d like your attention, Speedy,’ Kathy said softly. ‘I’d like to know what you thought you were playing at, making that tape.’

His mouth formed into the smirk again, and Kathy wondered if he’d had facial surgery after his accident. ‘Did you like it?’ he asked, with exaggerated innocence.

‘I asked what you thought you were doing.’

‘Just a little present. I thought you’d appreciate a demo, of what we can do. Something personal, just between you and me.’ His smirk trembled on the point of becoming a sneer.

‘You like making demos, do you? Make a habit of it?’

He held her gaze without answering.

‘You’re quite a creepy bloke, aren’t you, Speedy?’ she said. ‘What seems strange to me is that you’ve got all this talent for spying on people, but you can’t give us a damn thing about that girl.’ She stared at his expression, trying to decipher it, trying to work out if he really meant to look like that, or whether the muscles were damaged and he couldn’t do anything else. ‘You sure you haven’t got any little demos of girls in the mall? Any of her?’

Still no answer.

‘I’d tell you to watch your step,’ Kathy went on, ‘only that wouldn’t be appropriate. Just be careful, eh? Or I might have to give you a demo of what I can do.’

She pressed the switch back on and turned away as the screens flickered to life, and saw Harry Jackson standing in the doorway, watching them.

‘Have we got a problem, Kathy?’ he said carefully.

‘I don’t think so, Harry. Speedy was just showing me how things work around here.’

After the excitement generated by the first walk-through, the second attracted an even larger crowd. Chief Superintendent Forbes, who until now had been reluctant to appear committed to the Silvermeadow connection, had decided to attend, his uniform adding an element of formal pomp to the group waiting at the west entrance in front of the TV cameras to receive the girls.

The moment of their arrival was given some unexpected drama by the sudden eruption of a man from the crowd, who walked swiftly to Lisa’s side just as she was stepping out of the police car. Looking like a pale office worker at the end of a long week, in limp dark suit and tie, he had a placard hanging round his neck with the message I AM UNEMPLOYED BUT HAVE NOT GIVEN UP. BUY A PEN?1. He held a bunch of the coloured pens in his fist, and raised them up to the cameras as they recorded his brief moment in the spotlight before two security men bundled him away.

Kathy turned to Sharon at her side and said, ‘Know him?’

‘Yes, he’s one of our regulars. We don’t let him inside, but he often hangs around the entrances, looking pathetic, until we move him on. I’ve never seen him here after dark though. It’s this walk-through, it’s attracting everyone. Bigger than the Titanic, I reckon.’

And that was true, Kathy thought, looking at the crush of people in the mall, straining for a sight of the parade. In death Kerri was bigger than Snow White, Mauna Loa and Santa Claus combined.

As they moved forward, Kathy caught sight of a figure in the crowd she recognised, a boy of about twelve, with long black curls coming out from under the baseball cap reversed on his head, the boy she’d seen at the bookshop on Sunday morning and at Starkey’s games arcade. She moved into the crush and worked her way to his side.

‘Hi,’ she said, slipping a hand under his arm.

He looked up into her face, startled, saying nothing.

‘My name’s Kathy. I’m with the police. What’s your name?’

‘Wiff,’ he said in a soft whisper.

‘Wiff what?’

‘Wiff Smiff.’

‘I’ve seen you around the mall, Wiff. You spend quite a bit of time here, don’t you? Has anybody asked you if you ever saw this girl?’

He stared at the picture for a long time without speaking. His skin was very white, as if it was never exposed to the sun.

‘Well?’

He looked up, a blank expression on his face, and shook his head.

‘How old are you, Wiff?’

Wiff gazed at Kathy’s face for such a long time without replying that she wondered if he was quite right in the head. Then his eyes flicked to someone behind her, and as if he’d suddenly been switched on he gave a whoop and cried, ‘Sherro! I’m coming too!’, and before she could stop him he slipped out of her grip and went tearing off up the mall, weaving through the crowd of shoppers until he was lost to sight.

Surprisingly, Orville Forbes and Bo Seager seemed to have hit it off, walking side by side in the wake of the little figure with the green frog on her back, and when the chief superintendent held a further press briefing at the end of the walk-through, the centre manager was there too, the pair of them standing against a backdrop of tropical palms and Christmas fairy lights.

The hope was that on one of these two early evenings someone with a pattern of regular visits to Silvermeadow at the beginning of the week might be able to place her there with certainty. It was beginning to look like a vain hope until Gavin Lowry ushered a young girl and an older woman into unit 184 towards six p.m. They were shown into an area screened off from the rest of the unit, and used for interviews and small meetings, while Lowry briefed Brock.

‘I think I’ve found a positive sighting, chief,’ he said, fairly bursting with it. ‘They usually come on Tuesdays, and only Tuesdays, only last week they were here on the Monday. I found them down in the food court.’

Belinda Tipping was aged seven, as she immediately informed Brock when they were introduced. Her grandmother, elderly and looking overwhelmed, was her companion.

‘Now, you come here every Tuesday afternoon, is that right, Belinda?’ Lowry asked.

‘Yes, I told you. I come with my gran.’

‘Yes, well I want you to tell the chief inspector here, because he’s the big chief, all right?’

Belinda looked flirtatiously at Brock. ‘I used to come with Wendy,’ she confided.

‘Ah.’ Brock smiled at her. ‘And who’s Wendy?’

‘My big sister. She doesn’t come any more, though. Not since she ran away with Mr Palmer across the street. Mrs Palmer won’t speak to us any more now.’

Her gran coughed warningly. Belinda ignored her and smiled sweetly at Brock. ‘My gran brings me after school. I like to see the fireworks coming out of the top of the mountain.’

‘Yes, that’s right,’ her grandmother confirmed. ‘Every Tuesday. Then we go to my son’s and I stay the night. Except last week it was Monday, because of my appointment with the specialist.’

‘And what can you tell us about this girl?’ Brock pointed to the enlarged photographs of Kerri and of the girl with the frog bag pinned on the wall.

‘We saw her here last Monday,’ Belinda said.

‘You’re quite certain it was her, Belinda?’ Brock queried, sceptical. ‘Are you good at noticing things?’

‘Oh yes.’ The little girl was completely confident. ‘I’m very good at noticing things. I noticed the girl, because I want to have my hair in a ponytail like that. It was tied up in a red and green ribbon. And I noticed the green bag, like a frog. I told Gran I wanted one like that for Christmas.’

‘Is that right? Do you remember that, Mrs Tipping?’ Brock asked.

‘I do remember Belinda talking about a frog bag,’ she said. ‘She talked about it all the way back on the bus. But I didn’t notice the girl. I was too busy trying to get us to the bus station before the bus left. It was definitely last week.’

‘And where did you see her, Belinda? Was it down in the food court, where you spoke to Sergeant Lowry tonight?’

‘No. We had been there. Gran and me usually sit by the side of the lagoon, where the canoe is. They keep those seats for the children. Except…’ She put her hand to her face and smothered a giggle.

‘Except what?’

‘Except today, he’-she pointed accusingly at Lowry- ‘sat on one.’

Lowry coloured. ‘Well, I wanted to talk to people like you and your gran, didn’t I, Belinda? Tell us where the girl was.’

‘Upstairs, on this level, near the windows that look over the pool, talking.’

‘Belinda showed me exactly where on our way here, chief,’ Lowry explained. ‘She saw the girl as she and Mrs Tipping passed along the main upper mall towards the east entrance where the bus station is. She looked down the side corridor towards the observation deck over the pool. The distance would have been twenty yards.’

‘Talking, did you say, Belinda?’

The girl didn’t seem to mind their attention one bit, all focused on her and her little voice.

‘Yes. To a man.’

Lowry’s face split in a grin of triumph. ‘Tell the chief inspector what you told me about the man, Belinda. Tell him what he looked like.’

‘He was a funny man.’

‘Funny? In what way?’

‘He had no hair.’

‘No hair? You mean he was bald?’

She shrugged and looked at her gran, who said, ‘You know, dear. Like grandpa.’

‘No.’ The girl shook her head. ‘Grandpa has some hair, round his ears. This man had no hair. His head was like an egg. Mr Egghead, that’s what he was.’

Brock and Lowry exchanged a look.

‘Was he an old man or a young man?’

Her nose wrinkled up with thought. ‘Probably he wa s old. Like him.’ She pointed at Lowry, who was thirty-six. ‘Only he’s got some hair.’

She couldn’t remember what he was wearing.

‘When he was standing talking to the girl, was he taller than her?’

‘Oh yes.’

‘Where did the top of her head come up to on him, would you say?’ Brock stood beside Lowry and pointed his hand at the level of his eyes, then lowered it as she shook her head. She wrinkled her nose and said ‘There!’ when his hand had dropped below the shoulder.

‘And he had big shoulders,’ she added. ‘Like the Incredible Hulk. Only not green.’

‘What about the time? Can you pin-point the time?’

‘Yes,’ Mrs Tipping said. ‘We’d been watching the five o’clock eruption, as usual. I had a cup of tea, and Belinda an ice-cream.’

‘A gel a to,’ Belinda corrected.

‘I was feeling tired, my veins were playing up, and I didn’t want to get up. Then I saw the time, almost five-thirty, and I realised we’d have to get a move on or we’d miss the bus. So we got up, went up the escalator and along the upper mall to the east entrance. The bus leaves at five-forty, and we got there with a few minutes to spare. So you can work it out. It must have been almost exactly five-thirty-five when we passed the spot where Belinda says she saw the girl.’

‘Good.’ Brock nodded. ‘And you’re sure you can’t remember anything else about the man, Belinda? You didn’t see if he gave the girl anything, or if he touched her?’

She shook her head.

‘Could they have been arguing, do you think?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘All right. Now we’ve got a very clever artist here, who can make up people’s faces on her computer, and I’d like you to talk to her, and help her to make a picture of this Mr Egghead for us to see. Would you like to do that?’

‘Oh yes. I like computers.’

‘Well I can see you’re a very bright girl, Belinda. Your gran can stay here and have a cup of tea while you’re busy.’

By the time she was satisfied with the picture, Belinda had attracted a big crowd of officers, eager to see the result.

It wasn’t Eddie Testor, not exactly, but it was very close. The girl had seemed to want to exaggerate and idealise the egg-like head shape, like Humpty Dumpty, with a small face, and the police artist had to nudge her carefully towards a realistic result without violating the obviously vivid picture in the girl’s mind.

Taken with the bulging shoulders and the location, it was hard to avoid the conclusion that Belinda had seen Kerri Vlasich talking to Eddie Testor at almost exactly 5.35 on the evening of her disappearance. Brock turned away, trying to avoid showing on his face the relief he felt. It would have been better if the girl had been older, and if the grandmother had seen the green bag too, but all the same, Belinda was a convincing witness. Kerri had come to Silvermeadow that night. Now there surely could be no doubt.

He saw Chief Superintendent Forbes entering the unit and went over to explain what had happened.

‘Excellent! Exactly what we needed, a witness. Thank God.’ The relief certainly showed on his face. The last press briefing had turned out to be an uncomfortable affair, since he had no real fresh information to give the reporters, who were becoming frustrated by the police’s reluctance to spell out exactly what evidence they had linking Kerri’s disappearance with Silvermeadow. ‘Pity we didn’t know this an hour ago. Premature to call the media back now, do you think?’

‘Let’s follow it up first,’ Brock said. Seeing Lowry looking their way, he waved him over and told Forbes, ‘Gavin was the one who found the witness.’

Lowry accepted Forbes’s congratulations with a cool smile, then turned to Brock. ‘Pick him up, shall we, chief?’

‘Yes, let’s do that. You care to come along, Orville?’

The chief superintendent checked his watch. ‘I’ve got something else lined up unfortunately, Brock. I think I can leave it in your and Gavin’s capable hands, eh?’ He gave them a confident smile. ‘You’ve got my mobile number, haven’t you? Keep me in touch. Let’s get a swift confession, shall we? I have a feeling in my bones that we’re getting close here. An excellent result. Well done again, Gavin.’

But it didn’t prove to be that easy. Eddie Testor wasn’t to be found at the leisure centre, although he had been scheduled for duty that afternoon. After some enquiries it transpired that he’d phoned in sick the previous day, saying that he’d caught a bug and had been told to go to bed for a day or two. But he wasn’t at his home, either, a rented flat above a video store in the centre of Romford. No one in the store or the neighbouring flats and shops had seen him for a couple of days.

Eddie Testor, it seemed, had disappeared.

By the time Kathy got back to unit 184 that evening, after following up a number of reports from the police information desks in the malls, the excitement generated by Belinda and the hunt for Testor had evaporated. Phil, the action manager, still at his sentry post by the door, filled her in in lugubrious detail. ‘Best you pack it in for the night, Kathy,’ he concluded. ‘You’re not getting paid for this anyway, not with my overtime budget.’

‘Thanks, Phil.’ She did feel weary, and thought of Leon.

She went to a phone in a quiet corner and was dialling his number when she heard a familiar female voice in the background.

‘We particularly wish to speak with Sergeant Kolla,’ the voice said, in a piercing tone. ‘We have information for her… There she is! We can see her over there. Sergeant! Sergeant Kolla!’

Reluctantly, Kathy put down the receiver and turned to see Phil vainly trying to restrain Harriet Rutter. The use of the first person plural was probably not a case of the royal we, she saw, for the tall figure of Professor Orr was there too, looming in support in the background.

She took them into the interview space and sat them down and tried to look enthusiastic. ‘You’ve got some information, Mrs Rutter?’

‘We feel so stupid. You see, we knew the poor girl. We knew her quite well, didn’t we Robbie?’

Orr nodded without comment.

‘A lively young thing, bubbling with life. I can’t believe it’s her. It was only just now, when we were passing one of your posters, that Robbie said to me, isn’t that our young friend at Snow White’s? And I said, good heavens, yes!’

‘And how exactly did you know her, Mrs Rutter?’

‘Well, we like to get to know the young people who work here. And she was a favourite of ours. Robbie has a weakness for Snow White’s pancakes, and I love the milk shakes… Yes!’ She laughed, slightly shame-faced. ‘Milk shakes!’

‘Strawberry,’ Orr said.

‘Quite delicious. I’d never had one before. She persuaded me to try it, Kerri did. She said I must try it at least once in my life, and she said it so mischievously, that I just agreed. And it was delicious. So we made it a regular thing, a pancake and strawberry milk shake. Once a week.’

‘On a Monday?’ Kathy asked hopefully.

‘No, Wednesday. I don’t know why. No reason, really. It’s just nice to have little habits, to mark the days of the week.’

‘Yes?’ Kathy smiled, waiting for more, but there didn’t seem to be any more. ‘So, did you a see Kerri on the Monday? The sixth?’

They shook their heads. ‘No. We just thought you’d want to know. .. that we knew her.’

They saw the look that Kathy wasn’t quite able to keep out of her eyes.

‘Oh, you’re disappointed,’ Mrs Rutter said, and they both frowned at once, as if she’d reproached them.

‘No, no. Not at all. Every little bit of information is useful,’ Kathy lied. They just want to find out what’s going on, she thought, want to be part of it, like everybody else, play a little role in the drama in the mall. It would probably be humiliating for the secretary of the Silvermeadow Residents’ Association not to play a part, to be able to speak as an insider to her committee.

‘Have you had a good response from the public?’ Mrs Rutter asked stiffly.

‘Oh, we’ve had a lot of reports, yes.’

‘But have you had a positive lead?’ she insisted, slightly belligerent now, as if she had a right to know.

‘Have you got a suspect?’ Orr put in bluntly.

‘I can’t discuss that I’m afraid,’ Kathy said, trying to be patient. ‘There are a number of leads we’re following up.’

Mrs Rutter nodded, as if she’d had her answer. ‘We know how you work. Look to the family first, eh? That’s usually where the answer lies, isn’t it?’

‘Really, Mrs Rutter, I can’t discuss it.’

‘That’s all right,’ she said, huffily. ‘That was our first thought too. That ridiculous little man. She said he gave her the creeps. Well, if it was him…’ She stopped and changed her mind. ‘It doesn’t matter. Come along, Robbie. We’ve taken up enough of the sergeant’s time.’

‘Mrs Rutter, hang on,’ Kathy said. ‘What little man? Who are you talking about?’

‘Her uncle, of course.’

‘Uncle?’

‘Well, that’s what she called him. Bruno Verdi, I’m talking about, or whatever his real name is. The so-called chairman of the Small Traders’ Association.’ She said the words with contempt. ‘That arrogant, trumped-up little man who presumes to tell the rest of us how this place should be run!’

‘You think Mr Verdi is Kerri’s uncle?’

They saw the disbelief on Kathy’s face and hesitated, as if some long-cherished gossip were coming under attack. ‘That was how Kerri referred to him one time,’ Mrs Rutter said stoutly. ‘“Uncle Bruno’s watching me again,” she said, and we thought it was her nickname for him, but she said, no, he really was her uncle, but they didn’t speak, and he gave her the creeps. That’s what she said, and I could believe it, because we saw the way he watched her too, from the front of his ice-cream place, watching her and the other girls on their roller skates. It made my skin crawl.’

‘You obviously don’t like him,’ Kathy said carefully. ‘But is there anything concrete you can tell me?’

‘The man’s clearly a phoney,’ Orr said. ‘He knows about as much about Italy as Harriet’s cat. I asked him once where he came from, and he said Rome. So I said, ah Rome, my favourite city, the Ponte Vecchio, the Pitti Palace, the Uffizi, and he just smiled and agreed. Well, you get my point-all those places are in Florence! He had no idea. I even tried a bit of Italian on him. I may be a bit rusty, but he just mumbled something and walked off.’

‘ Rude man!’ Mrs Rutter hissed.

‘I’d say “gelato” is about as much Italian as he knows,’ Orr said dismissively.

After they left, Kathy tried to make sense of what they had said. Clearly there was some kind of feud between the ‘residents’ and the Small Traders’ Association, and some more personal animosity between their two leading figures, but the story of an ‘uncle’ seemed bizarre. Surely they must have misinterpreted something Kerri had said, and embellished it for Kathy’s benefit. Easy enough to check, she thought, and picked up the phone.

It rang for some time before Alison Vlasich answered cautiously. ‘Yes?’

‘Mrs Vlasich? It’s Sergeant Kolla from the police. How are you?’ The words came out automatically, and Kathy winced as she said them.

‘Oh, you know… what you’d expect I suppose.’ The voice sounded weary and flat.

‘Yes. Of course. I just wondered if there was anything we could do.’

‘No, I don’t think so. The social worker is very good to me.’

‘Oh, that’s great. Look, maybe you could help me with something. Is there another member of your family working at Silvermeadow, by any chance?’

There was a long silence. Eventually Kathy broke it. ‘Hello? Are you still there, Alison?’

‘No,’ the voice said faintly. ‘No one of my family.’

‘Oh, fine. You see, someone told us that they thought Kerri had an uncle working there…’

‘Yes.’

‘Pardon?’

‘Yes.’ The voice was almost inaudible.

‘Yes, she had an uncle?’

Another pause. ‘That’s right.’

‘But I thought you just said…’

Every answer seemed to take for ever, and Kathy began to think she’d have to drive over to talk to the woman face to face.

‘Not in my family. He’s in my ex-husband’s family.’

‘What relation is he to your ex-husband, Alison?’ Kathy said, trying to sound as if it were a matter of no great significance.

‘He’s Stefan’s brother.’

‘Stefan’s brother works at Silvermeadow? What does he do there?’

Kathy heard her sigh, then, ‘He runs an ice-cream shop.’

‘And he’s called Vlasich?’ Kathy persisted.

‘Not any more. He used to be Dragan Vlasich. Now he’s Bruno Verdi.’

Kathy stared at the notepad in front of her, shook her head. ‘Alison, you never mentioned this before.’

‘Didn’t I? No… it didn’t seem important.’

And Bruno Verdi hadn’t mentioned it either, she thought, nor Stefan Vlasich. What the hell’s going on?

‘Did Kerri and her uncle get on, Alison?’

‘He helped her to get her job,’ she whispered.

‘But did they get on? Were they on good terms?’

‘I’m tired now. I’ve taken a sleeping pill.’ And the line went dead.

Kathy thought. She remembered someone, early on, referring to another Vlasich with a record, apparently unconnected with this family. She went over to the computer and logged in, and tapped her request, and waited, until it came up on the screen: Dragan Vlasich, charged in June 1992 under the Sexual Offences Act 1956, the charge dropped in September of that year.

She tried to ring Brock, but his mobile requested her to leave a message, and she put down the phone and thought some more. Well, that was why they’d kept quiet, wasn’t it? Knowing what was on his file, they must be trying to protect him, Alison and Stefan. And surely neither of them would do that if they thought it remotely possible that he could have harmed their daughter. Looked at in that way, their silence seemed to vindicate him rather than the opposite.

She stretched, feeling the tension in her back from crouching over the phone, when it rang.

‘Kathy! Hi, it’s me.’

She smiled, hearing his voice. ‘Hi, Leon,’ she said softly. ‘Where are you?’

‘Your place. And I’m cooking, and if you’re not home in an hour you’ll regret it.’

She laughed. She’d given him a key, and introduced him to Mrs P. ‘Well, I don’t want to have any regrets. So I’d better come home.’

But she did detour by way of the food court, not with any intention of approaching Verdi yet, but just to get another look at him. Only he wasn’t there, the place was being run by the old gondolier and a youth. Kathy watched them for a while from the upper level, then went down on the escalator and spoke to the man in the striped T-shirt and scarlet bandanna.

‘Mr Verdi about?’

‘Not tonight,’ the gondolier said, with an incongruous cockney accent. ‘Mondays and Tuesdays he leaves early.’

‘Every Monday and Tuesday?’

‘Yeah. Why?’

‘I wanted to ask him something. He’ll be at home, will he?’

The man took off his boater and scratched his head. ‘Don’t reckon so. He visits his mother, I think. In a hospital or something.’

‘Ah. Doesn’t matter. I’ll get him another time. Thanks.’

Kathy walked away. She recalled the file entry about Stefan Vlasich, and how he now lived in Hamburg with his mother.

Leon had prepared veal escalopes in a cream and mushroom sauce, with boiled potatoes and broccoli, and was immensely pleased with himself.

‘This is wonderful,’ Kathy said, as he poured her a glass of wine and sat down.

‘I really enjoyed doing it,’ he beamed. ‘It was so nice to be able to cook for someone else. So therapeutic. I forgot about everything else.’

Kathy laughed, then yawned.

‘You’re tired.’

‘No, just relaxed, coming back to this. Thanks.’ She took his hand.

‘Tough day?’

‘Not really. I had a word with Speedy over that tape. He claimed it was just his mischievous sense of humour. Wheelchair or not, I reckon he’s pretty good at making people feel uncomfortable. Anyway, looks like we’ve got a prime suspect. You remember the lifeguard in the pool that Gavin Lowry questioned earlier? We’ve got a witness that saw him and Kerri together on the evening of the sixth.’

‘So she really was there. I’m glad of that, Kathy, because the forensic evidence has been pretty useless so far.’

‘Not your fault.’

‘Maybe you won’t need Alex Nicholson then.’

Kathy looked up from her veal. ‘What?’

‘You remember her? From the Hannaford case?’

‘Of course. The forensic psychologist.’

‘Yeah. Well, she’s in London, and Brock’s arranged for her to come down to Silvermeadow to talk to us. Didn’t he mention it?’

‘No, I don’t think so.’ You know damn well so, she thought. Dr Nicholson was young and attractive and on that last occasion had seemed, to Kathy’s way of thinking, to have had her eye on Leon Desai. She would certainly have remembered if Brock had mentioned it.

‘Do you keep in touch with her, then?’ she asked, toying with her broccoli.

‘Alex? Yes, now and then. She went to Liverpool soon after the Hannaford case to join the forensic psychology unit at the university. She phoned me last week to say she’d be in London. I told Brock, and he got in touch with her.’

Stop it, Kathy thought. Tell him what you think.

‘I thought you fancied her,’ she said. ‘On the Hannaford case.’

‘Did you? Why did you think that?’ He grinned, and the way he grinned told her that maybe it was true.

She smiled back. ‘I don’t know. I just thought that. Anyway, she’s going to give us her thoughts, is she?’

‘She told Brock she’d be interested to have a look, because of the setting. That interested her, apparently. So I’m glad at least that we’ve established that Kerri really was there, otherwise it might have been a waste of time.’

Kathy wiped the last sauce from her plate and put down her knife and fork. ‘Well, that was wonderful. If you ever decide to run off with someone else-Alex Nicholson, say-promise you’ll leave me your recipes.’ She thought she got the tone about right-light-hearted banter.

‘Kathy,’ he said seriously, reaching forward and taking her hands, ‘I’ve still got lots of recipes to try out on you. You’ve no idea.’