Silvermeadow

by Barry Maitland

  ‘No. We keep pressing him, and he just keeps repeating that he can’t remember specifically, and he must have been working in the pool.’

  ‘It looks as if he’s got an alibi now.’ She told him Hislop’s story.

  There was a long silence, then a slow, deliberate, ‘Shit.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Maybe you’d better get over here and tell Brock yourself. He’ll probably want to see the book. So will Forbes. His press conference starts in an hour. His silver braid is all laid out for him.’

  When they told Eddie the good news, he seemed no wiser than before. ‘Oh, really?’ he said blankly. ‘Well, that must be it then.’

  ‘That doesn’t mean you didn’t speak to Kerri,’ Brock pressed him. ‘We know you did. It just means you didn’t speak to her for long on that occasion. You arranged to see her again later, is that it? You made a date for later?’

  ‘Mr Brock,’ Eddie said with the same patient tolerance, ‘I told you already. Maybe I can’t remember exactly what I was doing that afternoon, but I’m quite sure I never saw that girl before in my life.’

  Since there were already press cameras and reporters arriving at the building they decided to wait until the press conference was over before releasing him.

  Forbes began by introducing himself and then Stefan and Alison Vlasich, sitting on each side of him at the long table which faced the crowded room. The purpose of this press conference, he said, was to renew the appeal to the public for information concerning the whereabouts of Kerri Vlasich after she left school on the afternoon of the sixth of December. He briefly outlined the circumstances and underlined, reading from his prepared statement, the seriousness with which the police regarded such cases. This went on for a little too long, and he stumbled several times and paused for sips of water, his throat unaccountably dry. To Kathy he gave the impression of nervousness, despite the well-tailored uniform and air of command. She was aware of others in the room beginning to stir, restless.

  He then asked Mrs Vlasich to say a few words, or rather, he referred to her as ‘Mrs Kerri’, and couldn’t understand why she stared at him, wide-eyed, before she turned unsteadily to face the cameras. She winced as the lights focused on her, and made an agonising appeal, barely audible, for anyone who knew anything about her daughter’s disappearance to come forward.

  Everyone was relieved when she finished and Forbes turned to Stefan Vlasich, who delivered a couple of brief sentences in a low monotone.

  Chief Superintendent Forbes then cautiously invited questions, and there was an immediate response from all sides of the room, everyone apparently trying to ask the same thing. Eventually one managed to speak for the rest. ‘What about the man you arrested yesterday? We were expecting an announcement of charges being laid.’

  Forbes cleared his throat. ‘There seems to have been some misunderstanding. No one has been arrested. A man has been helping us with our enquiries, but no charges are being laid at this time.’

  ‘But he’s a prime suspect, isn’t he?’

  ‘Not necessarily, no. There’s nothing I can add about that at this time.’

  There was a hubbub of disappointment, then the crime reporter for the Guardian, a sharp young woman with a deceptively friendly smile, spoke up.

  ‘Are you able to give us details yet of the cause of Kerri’s death, or the circumstances?’

  ‘We’re not able to release that information yet, no.’

  ‘Are you even certain she was murdered?’

  Forbes hesitated. ‘We’re treating this as a murder inquiry.’

  ‘That’s not quite an answer, Chief Superintendent,’ the reporter said with a smile. ‘I understand this is being classified as an Area Major Investigation,’ she went on, although it hadn’t been announced, ‘and we have Chief Inspector Brock here, and other officers from Serious Crime Branch.’ She sounded puzzled. ‘Isn’t this level of response a bit unusual? Is there something you’re not telling us?’

  Forbes cleared his throat and launched into a laboured account of the seriousness with which crimes against children were regarded by the authorities.

  ‘You think this sort of thing’s getting out of control, do you?’

  Forbes didn’t like the use of that phrase, not at all. The police took all these cases very seriously, he explained, but independent analysis of crime statistics showed that the increase in reported assaults on children during the past five years was probably the result of increasing public sensitivity to the problem, rather than an actual increase in assaults per se.

  ‘Well, not exactly, Chief Superintendent,’ the Guardian reporter objected calmly, as if she’d known he’d say that. ‘The figures for assaults by strangers tend to be obscured by the much larger number of assaults within the family, which tend to be more readily reported now. But if we extract the family assaults, it’s clear that stranger assaults have been increasing at a fairly alarming rate, isn’t it? Practically an epidemic.’

  Forbes looked startled. It seemed as though he hadn’t been told about the breakdown of the statistics. It occurred to Kathy that the reporter had been better briefed by somebody than he had.

  Then he recovered. ‘We can argue about statistics,’ he glowered at the reporter, ‘but meanwhile, Mrs Vlasich’s daughter has been found dead in suspicious circumstances. Let’s just concentrate on that, shall we? We’d like you to emphasize that we’re particularly looking for witnesses who were in the Silvermeadow shopping centre and in the carpark outside from about five-fifteen p.m. onwards on the sixth, especially within an hour of that time.’

  ‘Did Kerri have a medical condition, Mrs Vlasich?’ someone called out.

  ‘Who was her favourite pop group?’

  The questions, innocuous and inane, flitted backwards and forwards for a while, and then the Guardian reporter put up her hand again. Forbes avoided noticing her for as long as he could, but eventually her voice cut in. ‘Can you tell us when you last ran a major crime investigation, Chief Superintendent Forbes?’

  The room went dead quiet. Forbes looked stunned.

  ‘Only, there’s been a suggestion that the force is so top-heavy with senior officers who haven’t been actively involved in crime-fighting for years that they can’t afford to put young officers, more in touch with the latest methods, in charge of important investigations like this. Is there any truth in that, would you say?’

  Forbes stared at her for a long moment. Then he took a deep breath, drew himself up straight and said, ‘If there are no more relevant questions, I believe Mr and Mrs Vlasich have had enough,’ and he swept up his papers, rose to his feet, and escorted the couple out of the room.

  When they were all safely back in the office next door, Lowry beamed at his chief. ‘Well done, sir. You dealt with her really well.’

  Forbes shook his head. He looked flushed, wiping a handkerchief across his brow. ‘She seemed bloody well prepared. Hell’s teeth, what a bitch!’ Then he looked at Brock. ‘Perhaps she’s right. Perhaps this is all getting out of hand. We haven’t even established that it was murder yet, and the cost! I had a look at the man-hour summaries last night, Brock. You should do the same.’

  ‘Yes, I’ve seen them. Let’s stick with it for a little longer, sir,’ Brock murmured. ‘Like you said, one more push.’

  Kathy returned to the briefing room. The Guardian reporter was speaking to her photographer. She nodded to him and turned to leave. Kathy followed, out through the front doors and down the steps. She caught up with her on the pavement and introduced herself with a smile.

  ‘Gavin Lowry said to say thanks,’ Kathy said, ‘and to let him know if you need anything else.’

  The reporter stared at Kathy for a moment, face blank, then raised one eyebrow and gave her a little smile. ‘You lot!’ she said. ‘You’re worse than we are. I’ve been trying to get somebody to do that to my editor for months.’

  She saw the smile disappear from Kathy’s face.

  ‘Come on,’ the reporter
said. ‘You know these old bastards need shafting.’

  Kathy found Eddie Testor down in the basement carpark with Lowry and a couple of officers, waiting.

  ‘Is his solicitor going to take him?’ she asked.

  ‘No,’ one of the men said. ‘She had to go to court. We’re organising a lift in a patrol car.’

  ‘That’s no good. They’ll spot him straight away and tail you all the way.’

  She looked at the cars parked around them and saw Lowry’s, blocking a couple of others. ‘What about it, Gavin?’ she asked. ‘We could take him in your car.’

  ‘I’ve got better things to do,’ he said, eyeing Testor sideways with distaste.

  ‘If you’re thinking of thanking the Guardian reporter, I already did it for you.’

  ‘Eh?’ He looked startled for a moment, then gave her a crooked smile and pulled his keys from his pocket. ‘Take him yourself if you’re that keen.’

  ‘All right.’ She held out her hand and he took the car key off the ring and gave it to her.

  Testor looked bemused, but he followed her to the car and got in the back and lay down and let her cover him with Lowry’s raincoat and newspapers. She closed the door firmly on him and nodded to his minders.

  ‘Good luck,’ one of them said.

  There were reporters waiting in the road that accessed the rear of the building, expecting this, but instead of turning towards them, and so out onto the high street, Kathy turned left into the narrow service lane that ran behind the primary school, then out into the residential street beyond. After a couple of minutes she checked her mirror and said, ‘All clear, Eddie. I’ll stop and let you get in the front.’

  She watched him out of the corner of her eye, slowly stretching the belt across his oversize chest and shoulders. When he finally succeeded she caught the look on his face as he surveyed the garbage in the car.

  ‘Terrible, isn’t it? It’s not my car. Belongs to DS Lowry. What a slob.’

  He didn’t say anything.

  ‘You two didn’t hit it off, did you? What did he say to you, at the end of the interview yesterday? Nobody else heard.’

  Silence.

  ‘I’m not trying to trap you, Eddie. You could admit to every crime in the book in here and I wouldn’t be able to use a word of it. It’s only what you say in the station, properly witnessed, that counts. So you can relax.’

  He said nothing at first and they drove on in silence, but then, as they got closer to his aunt’s house he muttered, ‘Thanks anyway.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘You know, taking me away from there. I can’t stand them cameras. The lights and noise they make, shouting at you all the time. I can’t stand it.’

  ‘Don’t worry. People have a short memory. Keep out of sight and in a day or two they’ll have forgotten all about you.’

  But not yet, she realised, as she turned into the court in front of Aunty Jan’s house. Distracted by the sight of the red paint, she didn’t immediately appreciate the mood of the crowd milling around the front gate. Eddie’s reaction was also slow, and they had spotted his distinctive pink skull long before he realised what was happening. Shouts went up and furious faces converged on the car, pressing against the windows as Eddie shrank from them. They closed around the rear of the car so that Kathy couldn’t reverse back onto the street, and for a moment they were motionless, the people glaring through the glass. Then the car began to rock, fists began banging on the roof, and a terrible howling noise grew from the crowd.

  There was another sound too, Kathy realised, of Eddie whimpering.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ she said calmly, observing the distorted, almost animalistic expressions on the faces glaring in at them with a curious sense of detachment. There was no two-way radio in Lowry’s car and she didn’t think she had time to use her mobile phone. There was no sign of a uniform in the courtyard. She raised her wallet to the window by her side, showing her warrant card to the faces, but they didn’t see, or didn’t want to see.

  ‘Oh hell . . .’

  She put the car into first gear, held her hand on the horn, and let out the clutch gently. Slowly, painfully slowly, the car began to inch its way forward against the bodies pressing in on it, while she prayed that the lock would be sufficient to turn in one manoeuvre.

  They became angrier, realising what she was doing, and some began chanting. Then the people at the back scattered and the car was abruptly hit a jarring crunch, and Kathy saw a metal dustbin rolling away from the rear wing. Some youths were picking it up to throw it again, and now a brick landed on the bonnet, shattering into pieces and scattering the people in front. More bricks came flying in as she accelerated, and just as she reached the street the dustbin struck again, collapsing the rear windscreen into the back seat.

  ‘Shit, shit, shit!’ Kathy fumed as she threw the car round the corner and hurtled away. She drove over a mile before she pulled in to the kerb. Eddie was crouched beside her, his arms covering his head, sobbing.

  ‘It’s all right now,’ she said, aware of her heart thumping in her chest as she fumbled with the phone. ‘What about your aunt?’ she said, having almost to shout above his sobbing. ‘Eddie! Stop this! Is your aunt in there?’

  ‘I dunno,’ he wailed.

  She stared at him. This was the thug who’d battered a car to a heap with rage, and who may yet have tipped Kerri Vlasich into the compactor. She put her hand to her left ear to block out his noise and made her report into the phone. When she was finished she took a few deep breaths, trying to calm herself.

  Eddie’s head was shaking under the cover of his enormous arms. The sobbing had died away, and she heard a mumbled word. He sounded just like a terrified child.

  ‘What did you say, Eddie? Put your arms down and tell me.’

  He mumbled something she couldn’t pick up.

  ‘Put your arms down, Eddie. I can’t hear what you’re saying. There’s no one around now. There’s nothing to be afraid of.’

  He slowly straightened himself, head drooping on unyielding pectorals, and whispered, ‘He said that this time they’ll put me away in a special prison, where the other men will use me like a girl.’

  Kathy waited, watching his head rocking from side to side. Then he added, ‘It’s just not fair. All I did was give her the ticket.’ And he burst into a flood of tears, unable to contain them any longer.

  Among the debris on the floor were several packets of tissues. Kathy reached for one of them and slowly undid the wrapping and waited until the flow of tears died away.

  ‘Here,’ she said gently, handing the packet to him. He accepted it, and she said, ‘You’d better tell me all about it, Eddie. There’s no point going on like this.’

  He sniffed and wiped and finally nodded. ‘I was just doing a favour for Mr Verdi, that’s all.’

  ‘You know Mr Verdi, do you?’

  ‘A bit,’ he said cautiously. ‘He works out at the gym. He . . . he’s friendly to me.’

  Kathy thought that the word ‘friendly’ didn’t come out very easily. And she also remembered that Verdi had denied recognising Eddie’s picture.

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Well, he wanted to do a favour for this girl he knew, only he didn’t want nobody to know.’

  ‘What sort of favour?’

  ‘Her mum and dad had split up, and she wanted to go and see her dad in Germany, only her mum wouldn’t let her go, which was really unfair, he said. So Mr Verdi agreed to help her, give her a ticket and some cash. He said he’d get into trouble if her mum found out, so he wanted me to give her the envelope one Monday evening, when he would be at the hospital with his wife, and nobody could say he had anything to do with it.’

  ‘What exactly did you do?’

  ‘She was going to come in to Silvermeadow on the bus that arrives at five twenty-five. I was to change my shift break around so I could meet her at five-thirty at the windows overlooking the pool, and give her the envelope. That was all. And that was what happene
d. This girl with the green frog bag, like Mr Verdi said, came in right on time, and I waved the envelope and she came over and said, “Hello Eddie, I’m Kerri. Is that for me?” and I gave it to her, just like Mr Verdi had said.’

  ‘You hadn’t met the girl before?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And it was the girl in our photographs?’

  He looked sheepish. ‘I suppose.’

  ‘Did you see what was in the envelope?’

  ‘I didn’t actually see. It was sealed up, but it was tickets and some money—Mr Verdi said.’

  ‘Mr Verdi trusted you with money, Eddie? He wasn’t afraid you might take it for yourself?’

  ‘Oh no!’ He looked shocked at the idea. ‘I wouldn’t do that to Mr Verdi.’

  ‘You know him pretty well then?’

  Eddie shrugged. ‘He’s an important man at Silvermeadow. He knows the people who run things.’

  ‘I see. And what happened after you gave the girl the money?’

  ‘She left. I don’t know where . . . along the mall.’

  ‘And you went to your waxing.’

  Eddie shook his head sadly. ‘No. I went and got a hamburger in the food court.’

  ‘But Kim Hislop said—’

  He looked very uncomfortable. ‘I ’spect she was trying to help me. Maybe she got it mixed up. I don’t know. I don’t want to get her into no trouble.’

  Kathy shook her head. ‘Eddie, why the hell didn’t you tell us this at the beginning? You’ve caused lots of people trouble by lying like that.’

  ‘Sorry,’ he whispered, squirming in his seat. ‘I couldn’t, see. Cos I’d promised Mr Verdi.’

  ‘I understand. But now you must put things right, by telling Mr Brock everything. Okay? Mr Brock is a much more important man than Mr Verdi, believe me, and he can make a lot more trouble if you don’t come clean.’

  He nodded vigorously. ‘Yeah, yeah. I want to do that. I couldn’t keep it in no more.’

  The press had gone from Hornchurch Street by the time they got back, and Kathy was able to drive in without difficulty. She took Eddie to an interview room to make his statement to Brock. When it was over they made some rapid phone calls, then sent a car to Silvermeadow to pick up the gelato king.