Silvermeadow

by Barry Maitland

  ‘It’s not that I fancied him, Kathy darling,’ she said. ‘Not really, cos that would be like incest almost, and anyway I’ve got a boyfriend, who’ll be here any minute actually, to take me to our dancing class, Latin American. But I had to speak to him, and tell him that we were long-lost relatives, and that if he ever needed an aunty I was here. He didn’t really take up my offer until last Sunday night, when he showed up in such a state, poor kid.’

  ‘Did he say what had happened? The black eye, the cut lip?’

  ‘Some thugs beat him up, didn’t they? He looks a great hunk of muscle, but he’s like his dad, a real softie inside.’

  ‘How did he get here?’

  ‘Taxi dropped him off.’

  ‘And he brought a bag with his things?’

  ‘Yes, that’s right.’

  ‘So he’d been to his home, then?’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘After he’d been beaten up, he went home.’

  ‘Oh yes, I suppose he did. He was done in when he arrived here. Completely exhausted. He’s hardly stirred from his bed since he got here. He’s really not been well.’

  Lowry joined them in the living room. He was carrying a number of clear plastic bags containing packets and bottles, which he laid on the coffee table.

  ‘What are these, Mrs Goldfinch? Do you know?’

  ‘From Eddie’s room?’ she said vaguely. ‘They’ll be his pills. For his body building, you know. He has to take a lot of pills.’

  ‘Where does he get them from?’

  ‘Oh, I wouldn’t know that. From his doctor, I suppose, or his friends at the gym.’

  ‘Do you take pills, Jan?’ Kathy said.

  ‘Me? Only what the doctor gives me. I’m depressed, see, since Alfred passed away. That’s my late husband. But I don’t believe in letting it show. You have a duty to add a little sunshine to the world, I always say, no matter if it’s raining in your heart.’

  Kathy thought that probably explained Aunty Jan’s remarkable unconcern at being the subject of a police raid.

  ‘That’s your pills in the bathroom cabinet is it?’ Lowry said.

  ‘Yes, they’re mine . . . Oh!’ She looked at him in alarm. ‘You haven’t touched them, have you?’

  Lowry shrugged ambiguously.

  ‘Oh no! You can’t take them away!’ Panicking, she looked to Kathy for support. ‘You mustn’t do that!’

  ‘It’s all right, Jan, I’m sure that won’t be necessary.’ She looked at Lowry, who seemed at first reluctant to cooperate, but then he reached into one of the plastic bags and took out a packet which he handed to Kathy. She made a note of the name and the chemist’s label before she returned them to Jan, who looked relieved.

  Just then the front door bell sounded and Jan jumped to her feet. ‘Oh, that’ll be him now, my boyfriend. We’re late. You don’t mind me dashing off, do you? It’s the rumba you see, my favourite. I love the hip movements, don’t you? Although my boyfriend has a bit of trouble with them, since his operation.’

  Kathy and Leon Desai stood at the window, watching Brock and Lowry working on Eddie. Kathy was very conscious of Leon’s body at her side and its stillness, observing the exchanges in the other room with hardly a blink of his dark eyes. Despite Lowry’s lip service to interviewing rules, Kathy was in no doubt that his manner was intimidatory, and was intended to be so. He sat hunched forward across the table as if short of hearing, baring his teeth in what he might claim to be a smile. His crouching posture contrasted with Eddie’s, sitting stiffly upright, head back on his thick neck, and Kathy wondered if Lowry might be physically envious of the other man, even while he seemed, with every gesture and word, to despise him utterly. Brock was sitting back, saying nothing, doing something with a pencil on a notepad as if the proceedings held no interest.

  ‘You’re a very, very stupid fellow, Eddie,’ Lowry was saying. ‘You could kill yourself taking stuff like that. You know that, don’t you?’

  ‘Sergeant,’ the duty solicitor interrupted. ‘Excuse me, but are you intending to lay charges in connection with the alleged possession of performance-enhancing drugs? Because if not, I don’t see—’

  ‘Do you mind!’ Lowry screamed at her, furious. The violence in his voice and in his cold stare set the solicitor abruptly back. There was silence for a moment as Lowry seemed to struggle with his temper, before continuing in a more reasonable tone to Eddie. ‘You do know that, don’t you? Those are animal drugs, Eddie. What they give to horses.’ He shook his head in amazement.

  ‘Are they?’ Kathy asked Leon. ‘Did you get a look at them?’

  He nodded. ‘Yes. Stenbolol, the anabolic steroid, is a veterinary product, usually used for geldings in training. It’s popular among body builders because it’s available in tablet and paste form, rather than by injection like most animal anabolic steroids. Eddie could have got them from anywhere—they’re common enough. He also had human testosterone tablets, and a cocktail of tranquillisers, too.’

  ‘What sort of doses have you been taking, Eddie?’ Lowry pressed him.

  The solicitor frowned and sat forward to whisper in Eddie’s ear.

  ‘I’m asking, Eddie,’ Lowry said in a menacing tone aimed at the lawyer, ‘because I understand that taking heavy doses of this stuff can make you very tense and angry, is that right? Do you find that? Does it put you on a short fuse? Does it make you really mad when people muck you about? Does it make you want to sort them out with those great big bulging muscles of yours?

  ‘And maybe your clever solicitor can understand now the relevance of my question to you, Eddie. Because if you’d been taking them before you got talking to Kerri, and if she mucked you about and wouldn’t give you what you wanted, and if the steroids made you very, very angry with her, well, that might be something we should bear in mind, isn’t it? You might not have been in full control of your faculties, see? You know all about that, don’t you, Eddie, because you’ve used that excuse before. But the problem is, if you don’t tell us about that now, if you keep silent, the court won’t want to know about it if you try to bring it up later, when we’ve brought you to trial. Ask your brief, Eddie—go on, ask her. True or false, it’ll be too late then.’

  Lowry thumped the table with the flat of his hand and got to his feet and paced away as if he couldn’t stand to look at Testor any more. Eddie stared after him, then turned slowly and looked at his solicitor.

  Desai shook his head. ‘I don’t think Gavin’s making any impression at all,’ he murmured. ‘I don’t think Testor has a clue what he’s talking about.’

  The solicitor was frowning. She leant forward across the table to say something to Brock, who stooped to hear her point. While the two of them were taken up in this, Lowry, stretching his frame, sauntered round the table and suddenly ducked his head against Eddie Testor’s ear, muttering something which the microphones didn’t pick up. The body builder flinched abruptly, his eyes widened, and he shrank away from Lowry as if from a freezing draught. Lowry straightened, smiling grimly to himself, and strolled away.

  ‘I wonder what he said,’ Kathy murmured.

  Desai shrugged. ‘Fancy a coffee?’

  ‘In a minute,’ Kathy said. ‘Brock’s going to have a go.’

  ‘Eddie,’ Brock began, sounding as if he was only noticing him for the first time. ‘Are you feeling all right? The lip, I mean. It looks sore. You sure?’

  Eddie made no response.

  ‘You like working at the pool, don’t you?’

  Eddie studied his fingers fixedly, waiting for the trap.

  ‘I can understand that. It looks like a really nice place to work. I haven’t been able to find the time to go down there yet, but I will, for a swim. How much will that cost me, for a swim?’

  ‘Two fifty,’ Testor whispered, ‘three fifty at peak time.’

  Brock nodded, as if this confirmed something that had been on his mind. ‘I was reading about the pool in the brochures. An average length of fifty-three
metres, width of eighteen and a half metres, and depth of one point six metres, that’s what the brochure said, and I was trying to multiply the numbers together to work out how many litres it holds, at one thousand litres to the cubic metre.’

  ‘One million five hundred and sixty-eight thousand eight hundred,’ Eddie Testor said without hesitation.

  Brock chuckled and nodded his head. ‘That’s absolutely right,’ he said, and slid his notebook across the table to Testor. ‘But it took me five minutes to work it out.’ He grinned at the solicitor, who was looking very puzzled. ‘No really, I’m impressed, Eddie.’

  Testor ducked his head, clearly pleased with the compliment although reluctant to acknowledge it.

  ‘Let’s see,’ Brock continued. ‘If we assume the earth is a perfect sphere with a radius of six thousand three hundred and fifty kilometres, and the volume is pi times the radius cubed, what is the volume of the earth in cubic kilometres?’

  Testor looked unhappy. ‘Pi times . . . ?’

  ‘Take a value for pi of three point one four one five nine,’ Brock added.

  ‘Oh.’ Eddie’s face brightened. ‘Eight hundred and four billion three hundred and ninety-seven million, four hundred and fifty-three thousand four hundred and twenty-one point two five.’

  Brock laughed out loud. ‘That is simply amazing. I’ve heard of people who can do this, but you’re the first I’ve ever met, Eddie. How do you do it?’

  Testor gave a shy smile. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Astonishing.’ Brock looked at the solicitor. ‘Isn’t it?’

  She gave a guarded smile, looking at Brock a little oddly.

  ‘You really don’t know how you do it?’ Brock asked again.

  ‘The answer just sort of comes into my head. I don’t know how.’

  ‘Well, you’ve got a very special kind of head there then, Eddie. Very special. Is that why you got that black eye? Has that got something to do with it?’

  Testor looked unhappy, winced as he pulled a face.

  ‘Your mouth hurts?’

  He nodded.

  ‘It was someone you knew, wasn’t it, Eddie?’

  Testor’s face formed a deep scowl of denial.

  ‘I can’t do sums in my head like you, Eddie,’ Brock said amiably, ‘but I can see some things that are obvious. If it was a stranger who knocked you down in the street, like you said, your clothes would have been wet and dirty, but they weren’t. There was blood on your tracksuit top from your mouth, but no dirt or rain. And things were upset in your flat, the chair knocked over, and the lamp. It seems obvious to me that you were knocked down in your flat, after you let the people in. So I assume you knew them. That’s obvious, isn’t it? Like two times two?’

  Eddie wouldn’t meet Brock’s eyes. He stared down at his hands and made little flexing motions with his shoulders.

  ‘Why did they hit you, Eddie? Was it to do with the way your mind works? Did they not like that?’

  There was no reply.

  After a moment, Brock took Kerri’s photograph from the file and placed it in front of him. ‘Tell me what goes through your mind when you look at her now, Eddie,’ he said gently. ‘Is it as simple as long multiplication? Or is it more difficult and complicated? Try to tell me.’

  Eddie stared at the picture for a long while, then lifted his eyes to Brock’s and said, sounding completely lucid, ‘But I’ve never seen her before, sir. Never.’

  Kathy and Leon went down to the canteen. The tables had been arranged in two continuous parallel rows, seats ranked down each side. Kathy wondered if the cleaners or catering staff who had set the furniture out this way thought that their customers liked to be lined up in ranks. She and Desai picked up their cups from the counter and sat down on opposite sides of a table.

  ‘You seem a bit edgy,’ Desai said, watching the way her eyes were following the uniformed men and women coming and going.

  ‘Do I? Yes. I feel I should be doing something, but I’m not sure what.’

  Part of the feeling, she knew, was coming from being here with Leon, behaving as if they were no more than professional colleagues rather than lovers. The functional indifference of the place seemed to mock their intimacy, and she wondered if she was being overly sensitive about it. Among the hundreds of officers who had served time here, others must have been in this situation, couples in unpublicised relationships. Did they feel out of place because of it? Did Leon? He gave no sign of it.

  ‘I should have thought that things were looking promising,’ he said. ‘Testor is quite a weird character, isn’t he? That stuff with the numbers. How did Brock get onto that?’

  ‘There was something in his file, the psychologist’s report. I didn’t really pick it up at the time. That reminds me, I have to get back to Silvermeadow to look at another file. Are you going over there?’

  Leon checked his watch. ‘Brock asked me to collect Alex Nicholson for the briefing, and I need to call in at the lab first. Why don’t you come with me?’

  ‘No, I’ll get a lift from someone else, don’t worry.’

  ‘Are you all right, Kathy?’ he said suddenly, lowering his voice. ‘Are we all right?’

  She looked at his face, scanning the details of eyelids, mouth, earlobes, as if needing to memorise them again. ‘Yes, yes. Sorry. I get preoccupied, you know how it is. When there are loose ends all over the place, and nothing makes much sense. You know.’

  He nodded. ‘Yes, I know. I’ll catch up with you after the briefing, okay?’

  ‘Mm.’

  ‘This is an awful place, isn’t it?’ he said suddenly. ‘I keep thinking that I want to grab hold of you, pretend we’re somewhere else.’

  She smiled. ‘I know. I know exactly what you mean.’

  9

  Unit 184 was crowded for the team briefing that afternoon when Kathy arrived. She saw Dr Alex Nicholson standing talking to Brock in front of the plans of the centre, though she didn’t recognise her at first because her long hair, previously jet black, was now an almost peroxide blonde. The psychologist had one hand in her hair, stretching, pulling at it absently while she thought about the point Brock was making. She was dressed in black jeans, trainers and a T-shirt with the message on the back PSYCHOLOGISTS DO IT IN YOUR HEAD. Kathy was struck again by how young she looked, more like a student than a teacher. Also how attractive. She’d get a solid turnout from her male students for her lectures, Kathy thought.

  Brock called her over to introduce her.

  ‘Yes, we know each other,’ Kathy said, noticing the rather clever way the other woman had used the minimum of make-up to the maximum effect, especially around the eyes. ‘We met in Orpington.’

  ‘Hi.’ Alex smiled back. ‘The Angela Hannaford murder. I remember, of course. Leon said something about you working on this one.’ She turned back to Brock with a question, and Kathy wandered over to her filing tray, half-filled with new material. She sifted quickly through it, stopping at a pouch sent out from central registry. She opened it and began to flick through the file inside.

  She was halfway through it when the session was opened by Chief Superintendent Forbes, who wanted everyone to know how commendable their efforts had been so far, and how tantalisingly close to success he believed them to be. The monster who had killed Kerri Vlasich was in their hands, had been identified at the scene. One last push, he concluded, one last effort to find the extra strands of evidence that must still lie waiting out there to tie him to his brutal crime, and their hard work would be rewarded with public acclaim.

  Though less lofty in his vision of their future rewards, and more circumspect in relation to Testor’s guilt, Brock’s report supported Forbes’s general drift. Testor was an unusual man, not to be easily written off as a steroid junkie. He had suffered brain damage as a teenager, and his behaviour was unusual and difficult to predict. At one moment he would appear helplessly child-like, at another devious and calculating. He seemed extraordinarily passive and gentle, yet he had been capable in
the past of blind and violent rage. They had been unable to find any sexual partners, of either gender, nor even evidence of sexual interest, yet his greatest hobby seemed to be his own body and its appearance. He could perform extraordinary mental feats, but also appeared to suffer confusion and genuine sporadic memory loss. And these characteristics were compounded by his eclectic drug habits. But the important thing to remember was that he knew he was odd, and had learned the hard way that his oddness got him into trouble. When pressure was put on him, as now, his instinctive reaction was to clam up, roll into a ball, and say nothing.

  So he was not confident that they would get anything like a confession from him, and that meant they needed more eyewitnesses. They had one, a seven-year-old girl who, despite her age, was an extraordinarily confident witness, and who had, that morning, picked out Testor from a line-up without the least hesitation. But she was only seven. Others must have seen Testor and Kerri on that afternoon of the sixth, particularly during that crucial one-hour period from 5.30 to 6.30 p.m. when Testor had switched his meal break and couldn’t account for his whereabouts. And then there was the matter of the beating that Testor had been given on the previous Sunday evening, apparently in his own flat, after he’d been allowed home after being questioned for the first time at Hornchurch Street.

  As he said this, Kathy found herself wondering about the state of Gavin Lowry’s knuckles. She glanced across at him, sitting on a table at the back of the room, looking as if he knew it all.

  Eyewitnesses, then, Brock concluded, more eyewitnesses. Then he asked Leon Desai to bring them up to date on the forensic side. Leon got to his feet and spoke with his usual stylish composure.