Silvermeadow (19 page)

‘Hell . . .’ Kathy breathed. ‘That’s us.’

The picture jumped: a new scene, bright lights, the camera panning across a shopfront, stopping, then zooming in on a woman lying on a bed, shoes off, bouncing, then sitting up with a self-conscious smirk on her face.

‘The bastard . . .’ Kathy whispered. ‘The creepy little bastard.’

The screen went blank.

Afterwards Kathy tried to recall what had gone through her head. She remembered the stories of people who wouldn’t let travellers take their photographs for fear that some part of them would be stolen, and for the first time she understood what they meant. She did feel robbed, intruded upon, assaulted, and the fact that she had no physical damage to show for it only somehow made it more insidious. And she also understood for the first time the fuss that people made about surveillance cameras, which up until then had seemed neutral, even benign.

But it was Speedy that most bothered her, the hand controlling the camera, the intention behind the electronic eye. The way he had giggled and squirmed when he handed her the tape, and called her ‘babe’.

‘I’ll knock the bastard’s head off,’ Leon said.

‘That wouldn’t look good. He’s a cripple, confined to a chair.’

‘Why’s he done it? He’s obviously trying to embarrass you.’

Kathy tried to remember exactly what he’d said, something about looking at it before she decided whether it was ‘worth a wider audience’, and she felt a cold chill creep over her skin.

‘He couldn’t exactly blackmail me with it, could he?’ she said. ‘Just make me look stupid. Bouncing on a bed at the height of a murder inquiry. I
feel
bloody stupid. Imagine if Brock saw it!’

Leon put an arm round her shoulders. ‘How many days off have you had in the last month? I don’t think you have to feel guilty about buying a bed. I don’t think you need to feel guilty about anything.’

‘No.’ But that was the result all the same. It made you feel guilty, so you’d be looking over your shoulder next time.

It had a dampening effect on the rest of the evening, and Kathy found herself making sure the lights were off, the curtains drawn and the door to the sitting room closed before she took off her clothes and slid under the new duvet with Leon.

Brock, too, felt on edge as he cooked some pasta for his dinner. Partly it was the lonely sound of rain spattering against the kitchen window, partly Bo Seager’s conversation, but mostly it was a matter of timing. The machine had been organised and set in motion, so far without result. Data was being amassed, but key pieces were missing, forensic most of all. There would be action soon enough, but not yet. There was no point beating the table about it. It was only a matter of timing. It would come.

He really wanted to ring Suzanne, but thought it might be a bit soon after their last conversation. Not good to sound pushy. And then he thought of Bo Seager’s explanation for Kathy’s air of intensity, and smiled. If only things were that simple. Kathy was surely driven by deeper demons than that. Although, now he came to think of it, she had seemed different that day. Calm. Almost euphoric. Probably the anticipation of a fresh case.

He opened a bottle of red, drizzled some olive oil on a chunk of bread, and sat down to eat. When he was finished he put his feet up and dialled a number on his phone.

‘Suzanne?’

‘David! I’m glad you called. I wasn’t sure when to ring you, with your new case. How is it?’

‘Just getting started.’

‘I saw someone on TV tonight. A rather pompous man in uniform, talking about a murdered girl. Is that your case?’

‘You’ve got it. Probably abducted from one of those big new shopping centres.’

‘Silvermeadow, yes, I’ve read about that place. I’d love to see it. Do you like it?’

‘Not my cup of tea. Huge place, a sort of shopping fantasyland.’

‘
Th
e
Ladies
’
Paradise
.’

‘What’s that?’

‘It’s a book. Zola. About a wonderful new department store that takes over Paris. I’ll lend you my copy if I can find it.’

‘Thanks. How are your plans?’

‘Our trip? Well, I’ve got dates for a pantomime,
Pete
r
Pan
. Will you come with us?’

‘Certainly. I always had a soft spot for Captain Hook.’

‘Oh. That’s interesting.’

‘And accommodation?’

‘The place I’d had recommended is booked up. I’m trying somewhere else.’

‘You’re daft. I told you what to do. Stay here. It’ll be so much simpler.’

‘The children will wreck your calm sanctum, David. You’d hate it. We’d end up fighting.’

‘Rubbish. Anyway, maybe I need my calm sanctum being shaken up a bit. You can get too set in your ways, I’m told.’

‘Your job does all the shaking up you need. Two small children . . .’

‘Bugger the children, Suzanne. I’d like you to stay here. Just to try.’

‘Ah . . . Well, put like that, so eloquently, I’d have to give it serious thought.’

‘Exactly.’

Later, on the edge of sleep, a chain of thoughts passed through his mind. He had to force himself awake to reconstruct it. It went something like this: pantomime— improbable characters (Widow Twankey, Captain Hook, etc.)—the improbable Italian, Bruno Verdi, in the food court—the joke about Guiseppe Verdi not being such a great composer if he’d been called the English equivalent of his name, plain Joe Green—they were checking Bruno Verdi, but what about Bernie Green? Then he’d fallen deeply asleep.

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.