‘Yes, that’s pretty much what they told us. Go on.’
‘Then I came across Norma Jean.’ She sucked in her breath as if the memory was troubling. ‘A right pain she was. Young, under sixteen we thought, and a vagrant. I remember her causing trouble round here a couple of summers ago, begging, soliciting. Then when the weather turned chilly she took a fancy to Silvermeadow and started making a nuisance of herself there. We were called out a couple of times. I attended once—she’d been found in the women’s toilets, out cold with a needle in her arm and someone else’s handbag on the floor beside her. She was put in a shelter, then juvenile detention. But she kept coming back. The youth offender team took her under their wing for a while, but no one could really handle her. She was like a headache that wouldn’t go away. And then one day someone in the canteen said, whatever happened to Norma Jean? And we realised that the headache seemed to have disappeared. No one had heard of her for weeks. It was wonderful.’
‘She wasn’t reported missing?’
‘No way. Nobody gave a damn. I just phoned her last social worker. She said the same thing. Sometime around March, Norma Jean stopped being a bother, and everybody breathed a great big sigh of relief. She’d tried to follow it up, but couldn’t find out anything. In theory, Norma Jean is still on her load.’
Kathy didn’t say anything at first, not wanting to sound dismissive. Miriam Sangster was clearly taking this very much to heart.
‘Yes, all right,’ the constable said, ‘there are hundreds of Norma Jeans, thousands.’
‘She probably just moved on, Miriam. Decided to go somewhere she wasn’t so well known.’
‘Yes. But still, I thought our records showed that no one had disappeared from Silvermeadow. Now I can’t be certain, can I?’
‘Tell you what. I’ll check her out in the Silvermeadow security records. They may have something on her that we don’t.’
‘Thanks.’
‘And let me know if you find anything else. You said that Mrs Vlasich had heard some stories at the hospital?’
‘Yes, but I think she got it confused. A cook had heard it from a nurse who’d supposedly heard an old woman say she’d lost her young daughter at Silvermeadow. Sounded like classic urban myth stuff.’
‘Yes, well, frankly I’d forget about it. You’ve done about as much as you can.’
The other woman nodded reluctantly, relieved all the same. ‘I hope you get something soon.’
The girls seemed to brighten a little once they were under the dappled artificial sunshine of the mall, as if this was where they were most at home, whereas Kathy felt the same sense of disorientation as before. It was full of people again now, not as in a city street hurrying past without eye contact, but a relaxed crowd such as one might find at a fairground, perhaps, or a fête, sharing some implied sense of community and well-being. Yet there seemed no substance to it here, no relationships and ties that one might hope to uncover between people in a real street or town. Here everyone was afloat, gliding through a fantasy. She recalled Bo Seager’s remark about sharks following the shoals. A shark could easily pass unnoticed here.
They walked down the main mall, the girls pointing out the stores where they liked to window shop, the characters they knew by sight or reputation, and gradually the shock of Kerri’s murder seemed to fade from their minds, as if time and reality were suspended in the magic grove, and all the intractable grubbiness of life dissolved away in the glowing golden light. From time to time their eyes would be drawn to a sparkling shop display, and Kathy would pause with them and find herself drawn into their conversation, checking out some lovely thing that none of them had a use for. Then she would have to turn away, and remember what they were supposed to be doing, and get them moving again. Lulled by the scented air, the music not too loud or too soft but just right, it was hard to imagine that anything unpleasant could ever have really happened here—an abduction, a murder. In here the foetal figure waiting for the incinerator was no more than a chimera, a bad dream.
They stood at the balcony overlooking the food court for a while, listening to the sounds of fountains and waterfalls from the rain forest on this side of the lagoon, and the girls pointed out where they worked, and the other food stalls that formed the perimeter of the court. Between Mexican Pete’s and the Peking Duck was the Soda Factory, done up like an American drugstore counter in stainless steel and red leather stools. Then there was Snow White’s Pancake Parlour, and they were silent for a moment as they watched the girls on their roller skates, gliding skilfully on long legs between the tables.
They descended on the escalator and came to the shore of the volcanic lagoon. There was a uniformed copper standing there in conversation with one of the locals, who was explaining what happened.
‘Yeah, well, first you get yer warning tremors and rumblings see.’
‘Right, right.’ The officer nodded seriously, as if this was significant evidence.
‘Well then yer water starts moving, ominous right, and you ’ear the sound of frightened birds. Then the eruption starts—bangs and roars from the mountain—then smoke and sparks comin’out from the peak, and after a while molten lava starts flowing down the sides.’
‘Molten lava! You’re having me on.’
‘No, right up. Course it’s not yer actual molten lava, naturally. It’s an illusion, see, made with coloured lights hidden down the sides of the volcano. But it’s convincing. Then the water foams up, and that native canoe over there tips up in the air and sinks under the waves, like a whirlpool’s sucked it down. You should see it, mate. You’ll be impressed. Get your mates down here, on the hour.’
‘Yeah.’ The policeman nodded thoughtfully. Kathy could imagine the scene that afternoon: small children and grannies complaining that they couldn’t see for all the hulking great coppers in the front row.
But Lisa and Naomi were bored by this. They’d seen Mauna Loa erupt so many times. They led Kathy across to the far side of the food court, where an abrupt leap took place from the Pacific to Ali Baba’s Arabian Nights. Large pots belonging to the Forty Thieves stood at the entrance of the Grand Bazaar, the name written in Arabic-style neon lettering over the cave-like entry, guarded by a turbaned mannequin with a flute frozen in the act of charming a cobra out of its basket.
‘Do they have snake-charmers in Arabia?’ Kathy asked, then saw from the look on the girls’ faces that the question made no sense.
Inside the Bazaar the lighting levels dropped sharply, small spotlights dazzling like stars overhead against a black ceiling, a theme taken up in many of the shops. These were clearly aimed at the teen market—lurid T-shirt boutiques, a Doc Martens store, pop CDs, an electronic games arcade and a salon offering challenging concepts in hair and the piercing of body parts.
There seemed to be something going on here, voices raised above the general noise. Two uniformed officers, a man and a woman, were talking to the agitated tenant of the games arcade, a black man with dreadlocks.
‘Look!’ he yelled at them, brandishing his arms, rattling the gold bangles on his wrists. ‘You lot think that every black guy wearing a bit of gold jewellery is nicking stuff or selling drugs, don’t you? That’s what it is, innit?’
‘Keep your voice down please, sir,’ the male officer said.
‘No, I won’t shut up, ’cos it’s true, innit? I get this all the time, don’t I? You think I’m selling these kids drugs, is that it?’
‘Are you?’ the woman cut in.
All around them in the unit, teenage boys were easing away from the machines they had been playing and slipping away into the mall. Among them Kathy saw the boy she’d seen that morning outside the bookshop. He glanced back over his shoulder, then skipped into a run and disappeared into the crowd.
‘Hang on, you stay right there.’ The male officer left his colleague and moved over to two boys trying to leave. He bent forward and started talking to them. One of them shrugged and reluctantly began to turn out his pockets.
‘No, it’s okay.’ The woman smiled. She seemed calm and in control. ‘We’ve received some information regarding Mr Starkey, and we’re just persuading him to close up shop so we can talk to him. We can manage, thanks.’
‘What information?’ the man shouted. ‘What you fucking talking about?’
‘Watch your language, Winston,’ the woman PC said sharply.
Kathy turned back to the girls, and they continued on through the Bazaar until the dark mall opened into a small square from which another set of escalators led upwards towards light and another abrupt change of scene. Here they were on a gallery with large observation windows along one wall, overlooking the leisure centre and pool. It was busy down there, full of little kids with their dads, grandparents sitting under the palm trees and striped umbrellas on the astroturf waving encouragingly to the bodies in the surf, children sliding down the curling multi-coloured intestines of the water chutes, whooping and screaming silently beyond the glass. And there was surf too, surging from the wave machine at the deep end of the huge pool and spreading out across its surface to lap finally on the sandy beach.
‘You come up here do you?’ Kathy asked, looking at the benches for spectators along the gallery.
‘Sometimes, when we have a break at work.’
‘What, to check out the good-looking boys?’ Kathy suggested.
Lisa giggled and Naomi glowered disapprovingly at her.
‘What’s down there?’ Kathy asked. To the right she could see the shops of the main upper mall, but to the left the gallery continued across the end of the leisure centre, then narrowed to a set of glass doors.
‘That’s the gym and fitness centre,’ Naomi said, offhand.
‘Can we go in?’
‘If you want.’
Through the glass doors the public gallery continued as a narrower bridge, with a view on one side over squash courts, and on the other into a gymnasium full of machines. The floor of these rooms was only a few metres below the gallery level here, and the people working out below seemed almost close enough to touch. They stood for a while watching a couple of young women capably thrashing a ball around one of the squash courts, then turned to view a muscular male through the other window, pounding the leather arms of the machine in which he lay. He was almost directly below them, the beads of sweat visible on his body as he lifted and dropped, an expression of intense effort on his face as the column of weights behind his head rose and fell with every grunt.
He stopped abruptly, opened his eyes and sat up. Then, as if he could sense that he was being observed, he turned his head and looked up and gave Kathy and the girls a sly grin. She watched his eyes track down each of their bodies in turn, and she turned away from the glass and they walked back the way they had come. She noticed a red blush on Lisa’s cheek, and saw Naomi mutter something in her ear which made the other girl pull away with a complaining, ‘Naomi!’
‘So, where else do you go?’ Kathy asked.
‘That’s about all,’ Naomi replied. ‘Sometimes we go to the cinema down on the lower mall, just off the food court the other way. They have eight screens.’
‘Ten,’ Lisa corrected.
Naomi shrugged.
‘Are there any pubs, clubs?’
‘Yeah, down past the cinema, but we don’t go there.’
‘Never?’
They shook their heads.
‘Do fellers come into the food court from the pub? Having had too much to drink?’
‘The security are very hot on that. Mr Jackson.’
‘You know Mr Jackson, do you?’
‘He’s nice,’ Lisa said. ‘He gives us sweets, and vouchers for things on offer.’
Naomi rolled her eyes. Big deal.
‘What about the shop where Kerri got her bag?’
‘Oh yes, it’s on this level. We’ll take you there.’
Along the way they were stopped by a silver-haired woman wanting their signatures on a petition. Though small, she was formidable and not easily bypassed. Pinned to her cardigan was a printed identification which covered a significant portion of her chest on account of the length of its message and the size of the letters: HARRIET RUTTER, PRESIDENT, SILVERMEADOW RESIDENTS’ ASSOCIATION.
The woman beamed up at Kathy. ‘We are petitioning for significant improvements in the choice of music which is played here in the centre,’ she said briskly, with a piping Home Counties accent. ‘It is currently repetitious and bland, and we are pressing the management for a more enlightened choice, encompassing a mixture of classical and popular works, selected by a democratically elected committee.’
‘A residents’ association?’ Kathy said. ‘Do people actually live here?’
‘Aha, well, no, not exactly. We had a great deal of debate over that word. A great deal.’ Mrs Rutter raised an eyebrow and pursed her lips in a way that managed to suggest that there had been a great deal of foolishness spoken before her own view on the matter had prevailed. ‘You see, there’s really no appropriate word for what we are. We don’t live here, no, of course not. No one could live here.’ She looked about her with a smile at the absurdity of the idea. ‘We come from all around, many from miles away. On the other hand, we are not just customers or consumers or users or stakeholders—such dreadful terms! We don’t come here just to buy things, you see. We toyed with the Friends of Silvermeadow, but that makes it sound like an orphanage, don’t you think, or a zoo. We’re simply concerned citizens, for whom Silvermeadow has become a kind of focus in our lives, and it occurred to us, after we’d bumped into each other in repeated encounters such as this, that we should form an association.’
‘I see,’ Kathy nodded, thinking that this might have its uses. ‘And you’re the president.’
‘Yes. Here, let me give you one of our leaflets. You may be interested in joining us. You’ll find our mission statement on the second page, and an application for membership section at the back. We’ve won a good many victories for improvements here over the past eighteen months, and enjoyed ourselves enormously in the process.’ She chuckled combatively and thrust a leaflet into Kathy’s hand. ‘And the petition?’
‘I’ll think about that,’ Kathy said. ‘I haven’t really formed a view about the music.’
‘We’ll sign,’ Naomi said. ‘The music’s crap.’
‘Oh.’ Mrs Rutter was startled, but only for a moment. ‘That’s nice, dear. Here you are.’
They moved on to the bag shop, in which they found one last remaining frog bag, identical, so the girls said, to the one Kerri had bought on her last birthday with money sent by her father. Kathy bought it and they went back out into the mall.
‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Now I’d like to take you to meet my boss, Detective Chief Inspector Brock.’
Their faces fell.
‘What’s the matter? You’ll like him.’
‘We’re not in trouble, are we?’ Naomi said.
‘No, it’s all right. I think he’ll understand why you did what Kerri asked. But he’ll want to hear it from you.’
‘He’s a big wheel, is he?’
‘Yes. He’s one of the top detectives in Scotland Yard, Naomi. If anyone’s going to find out what happened to Kerri, he will.’
‘I feel sick,’ Lisa said, and looked it.
‘She felt sick last night,’ Naomi said. ‘It was hearing about Kerri. She hasn’t eaten since. Neither of us has.’
‘Well look, why don’t you come with me to meet Mr Brock, and you can sit down there, and we’ll get you something nice to eat and drink, and you’ll feel a lot better.’
Phil, the action manager, was now firmly established at a desk just inside the front door, so that no one could come or go without being checked off on his spreadsheets and schedules. Kathy reporte
d to him with the girls in tow, staring wide-eyed and intent at all the activity inside the shop unit. She sat them down beside Phil and got a paper cup of water for Lisa, then went through the unit to Brock’s table, now looking considerably more cluttered. He looked up from the papers he was reading and waved her to a seat.
‘Progress?’ she asked.
‘Six staff so far with records, one promising.’ He passed a fax across to her. ‘Eddie Testor, six months for assault and criminal damage two years ago. Road rage—he forced the other driver to pull in, then battered his car to a crumpled heap with a couple of five-pound hand-weights he happened to have with him. Offered steroid abuse in mitigation. He’s been working at the leisure centre as a lifeguard and swimming instructor, based on false references and credentials. Gavin Lowry’s interviewing him at Hornchurch Street now.’
‘Has he finished the search here?’
‘Pretty much. A few of them are still checking outside.’
‘That was quick.’
‘Yes, he doesn’t waste time. I’m on my way over to see how he’s getting on, but I’d like to talk to Kerri’s friends, see if she ever took swimming lessons from this character.’
‘I’ve just brought them in,’ Kathy said, ‘Naomi and Lisa.’
‘They’re here? You must have read my mind, Kathy.’
She told him about their change of story, showed him the green frog bag and mentioned Lisa’s physical similarity to Kerri. ‘I thought, if we wanted to stage a reconstruction . . .’
‘Yes, yes. Good idea.’ He thought for a moment. ‘I’ll talk to them.’
‘They’re a bit overwhelmed at present. I might organise some lunch for them.’
She led them over. Naomi shook Brock’s hand solemnly, but when he leant across the desk to take Lisa’s she began making little gulping noises, and with a sudden jerk of her head ejected a bolt of mushy material onto the middle of his desk. Cornflakes and toast, Kathy noted. So she had had breakfast.
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