Silvermeadow bak-5

by Barry Maitland

  So by rights he should now have turned away and ignored her, but instead he was walking towards her. He stopped a yard away and looked at her with his steady dark eyes, unsmiling, and said, ‘Hello, Kathy. It’s good to see you again.’

  Was it? Had she gone through all that soul-searching for no reason? He seemed perfectly sincere, genuinely glad to see her. She noticed the small pale scar across his left eyebrow and remembered herself telling him, not entirely unmaliciously, that he would no longer be perfect.

  ‘And you, Leon. Great.’

  A smile slowly formed on his face, and she hurriedly said, ‘How are things going?’ meaning his broken jaw and leg, but he replied, ‘Nothing yet. It’ll take another hour or more to get this thing apart.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘You’ve come for Brock’s briefing? You’ll need a security code to get into the centre from here. Do you have one?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘Use the one they’ve given me. Two-one-eight-nine. Want to write it down?’

  ‘No need. That’s the last four digits of your phone number.’

  ‘You’re right. Amazing memory.’ He smiled and turned back to his work.

  She went down the service passage they had used the previous evening, using the security code to emerge into the lower mall as before. The emptiness and silence were uncanny, no background music or birdsong, no movement on the escalators, no people on the gleaming terrazzo, but still something, the building’s own presence, saying yes, I’m still here even when you’re not, I still exist and maybe have secrets.

  Then a cleaner came buzzing round the corner on a ride-on floor polisher. The building reverted to background and the illusion evaporated.

  Kathy walked up the dormant escalator to the upper mall, past the deserted Christmas tree, and looked for unit 184 in the side mall beyond. She spotted Gavin Lowry outside a shopfront filled with promotional posters for Christmas in the mall, hiding the unit’s interior, and assumed this must be the place. He was tugging a cigarette out of a packet, and when he saw her he said, ‘It’s chaos in there-electricians causing havoc.’

  ‘How long have you been here?’

  ‘Couple of hours. Come on, I need a coffee.’

  They found a cafe nearby, just opening, and sat outside in an area of the mall defined by low clipped hedges in tubs. The cafe itself was tiled to resemble a Turkish bath house and the waitress who came to their table had her thick black hair tied up in a bandanna, and wore a scarlet blouse that might have suggested something oriental.

  ‘You Sonia?’ Lowry said.

  ‘That’s right,’ she said, suppressing a yawn.

  ‘Harry Jackson told us you’d look after us, Sonia. He said your coffee’s the best in the mall.’

  ‘Oh yes. I know Harry all right. Are you in his line of business, then?’

  Lowry nodded and showed her his warrant card. ‘You’ll be seeing quite a bit of us. We’re taking over that unit down there for a while. Should be good for business. Our boss is a coffee connoisseur, isn’t that right, Kathy?’

  ‘That’s nice,’ Sonia said warily. ‘What you here for anyway? Is it public relations?’

  Kathy watched Lowry tell her, show her Kerri’s picture, Sonia’s look of disgust, thinking how many times they would have to go through this, with hundreds of shopkeepers, thousands of customers. It made her feel depressed, but Lowry seemed to be enjoying it. He ended with something that sounded like a chat-up line.

  ‘You from the exotic east yourself then, Sonia?’

  ‘Yeah, Bermondsey. What’s your fancy then?’

  Looking up through the tinted acrylic vault high above their heads, Kathy caught the glimmer of sunlight on cloud, too weak to compete with the warm intensity of artificial sunlight in the mall. A group of elderly people bustled past, kitted out in tracksuits, sweatbands and dazzling white shoes as if they really meant business. The pace was set by the joggers, moving marginally more slowly than the walkers, though with greater show. On their backs they bore the motto SILVER MEADOWLISTS.

  ‘Weird sort of place, isn’t it?’ Lowry said, blowing smoke after them. ‘Connie raves about it.’

  ‘Your wife?’

  He nodded.

  ‘You have kids?’ Kathy asked.

  ‘Last time I looked,’ he said, off-hand. ‘They hated it here, for some reason. Now Connie comes on her own, when they’re at school.’

  ‘And you know Bren Gurney.’

  Lowry turned back from watching Sonia making their coffees behind the counter. ‘Yeah. Used to play rugger with him. And we went on the inspector’s course together. He came out top, and I was second. We’ve got a lot in common, I reckon.’

  Kathy doubted that, but said nothing.

  ‘How do you work with him, the old man?’ Lowry continued, voice becoming more intimate. ‘Your boss. Keeps a close eye on you, does he?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘Cunning old bugger, Bren said. Close.’

  ‘Did Bren say that?’

  ‘Something like that.’

  With a soft clash of seraglio bangles Sonia appeared with their coffees, a thimbleful of espresso for Kathy, caffe latte for Lowry.

  ‘Thanks darling,’ Lowry said, then to Kathy, ‘You haven’t met our SIO, have you?’

  ‘Forbes? No, never heard of him before. Harry Jackson didn’t seem impressed. You don’t like him?’

  Lowry smiled grimly. ‘Orville M. Forbes. Old Mother Forbes. Doesn’t matter whether I like him, Kathy. The problem is, as everybody’s so well aware these days, there are just too many chiefs in this force and not enough fucking Indians. So the people who are paid to think about these things imagine they can recycle old papershufflers like Forbes into born-again coal-face detectives and leaders of major investigations.’ He shook his head grimly. ‘Snowball’s chance. He wouldn’t have the faintest idea where to begin. And he knows it. That’s why he’s persuaded them to bring in your guv’nor, to save his skin.’

  ‘Do you think so?’

  ‘I’m certain of it. He’s scared shitless that he’ll screw up his first major crime investigation with the eyes of the world focused on him. He told me once he has a recurring nightmare. He’s a schoolboy again, playing cricket, standing in the outfield with a long easy catch coming straight at him, and he drops it and loses the match, and all his friends and teachers and family are there to see it.’

  They watched a tall elderly man, bewhiskered, stiff-backed, marching by. He was wearing a heather-green Harris tweed jacket and matching cap, and swinging a gnarled walking stick, a laird taking a brisk constitutional through his glen. As he passed he doffed his hat to them.

  ‘Jesus…’ Lowry muttered. ‘This place is full of weirdos.’

  ‘Does it matter, about Forbes? As long as he keeps out of our way.’

  ‘But he won’t, he can’t. He’s petrified by failure and greedy for success. He’ll worry, and dabble, and interfere, and stuff us up. People like us have got to persuade people like Forbes, the grey crust through which we must eventually rise if we are ever to achieve seniority in this lifetime, that they should pack it in and bugger off to Bognor.’

  ‘How do we do that?’

  ‘By subjecting them to stress. They don’t like stress. Can’t take it any more. If you load them up with stress, they soon begin to dream of early retirement… or something else.’

  ‘Something else?’

  Lowry stretched his arms out and ran the flat of his palm down the short hair of his nape. ‘My last boss passed away on the job, Kathy. His secretary came in with his coffee one morning, and there he was, stretched out across his desk, cold as yesterday’s toast. Stroke, probably down to stress, the doctor said.’ He paused, glanced at Kathy, then picked up the glass of creamy liquid that Sonia had placed in front of him. ‘I like to think that was my personal contribution to resolving the unbalanced staff profile of the Metropolitan Police.’

  ‘You killed him with stress?’ She stared at him,
trying to decipher his expression.

  Lowry licked his lips, then allowed them to form a little smile. ‘He didn’t realise it, of course. He thought I was trying to help.’

  Kathy decided this was some kind of test of her sense of humour. ‘Well, well. So now you want to kill Forbes the same way?’

  He nodded thoughtfully.

  ‘Brock knows, you know,’ Kathy said.

  That made him sit up. ‘What?’

  ‘That you’ve been told to report directly to Forbes. Without telling Brock. Forbes did tell you to do that, didn’t he?’

  Lowry stared at her for a long moment before the little smile reappeared. ‘What made you think of that?’

  ‘It occurred to me down below last night, when Jolly Harry asked you to bypass his boss in the same way.’

  Lowry’s grin broadened. ‘You’ve got the advantage of being a woman, Kathy. You’ll have your own way to get through the grey crust. They’ll pull you up in the name of gender balance. But that doesn’t mean we can’t give each other a helping hand, does it?’

  Kathy sipped at her coffee, watching the early shoppers now drifting along the mall. Across the way was a bookshop, and outside it a small boy studying a pyramid of books about Manchester United. He didn’t look like the type you’d usually find near a bookshop: baseball cap reversed over longish black locks, baggy jacket and pants, dark eyes watchful in a thin pale face. And a mobile phone clipped to his belt, of course. The essential teenage fashion accessory. She wondered if she might be witnessing one of Harry Jackson’s ‘exception events’ in progress, and she looked around for a ‘hot spot’ camera, imagining Speedy in the basement silently panning in on the boy. Maybe all this time he’d been watching Lowry and herself, reading their lips.

  ‘What about Brock, then?’ Lowry said.

  ‘You want to kill him too? I don’t think he’d fold so easily, Gavin.’

  ‘Getting a bit old for this lark though, isn’t he? Why isn’t he higher than DCI?’

  ‘He’s what he wants to be. He doesn’t want to spend his life chairing meetings.’

  ‘Bollocks. People only say that sort of thing when they haven’t been given the option. Maybe he did something naughty once…’ He sat back, musing, stroking the back of his head. ‘Something they buried. Something that might come to light again if he tried to go higher… Maybe we should look.’

  Kathy shook her head, suddenly tiring of this. She had thought of asking him what he thought of the possibility that Kerri Vlasich might not be the only one to have disappeared through the blue compactor, but now she decided to say nothing. ‘Forget it, Gavin. Come on, we’d better see how things are going.’ She got up and went to the counter to pay Sonia.

  They found Brock seated at a desk at the back of the unit, his jacket off, sleeves rolled up, talking into a mobile phone while he signed a requisition form on a clipboard that a clerk held out for him. All around him unit 184 was being rapidly transformed, and Kathy had to step back to allow furniture removers to pass by with desks and chairs. The patterns left by shelving and display racks stripped from the pinboard walls were being obscured by enlarged plans of the centre and of the surrounding area, schedules and gridded roster sheets. A couple of electricians were working on ladders up in the suspended ceiling void, other technicians were setting up computer workstations. A dozen uniformed men and women were already there, standing chatting together, and a second group had followed Kathy and Gavin Lowry inside.

  Brock nodded as he saw them approach, finished his call and said, ‘Gavin, help our action manager organise the search teams over there, will you? We need to get these characters moving. Kathy, you haven’t seen Leon Desai by any chance?’

  ‘Yes, ten minutes ago.’

  ‘How’s he doing? I can’t raise him on his mobile-there seems to be a dead spot down there.’

  ‘He thinks another hour before they’ve finished dismantling the machine. I don’t think they’ve got anything yet.’

  ‘Hmm. OK, well, we can’t wait. Let’s get this thing moving.’ His brow furrowed, a last moment of uncertainty. Kathy had seen that look before. ‘Always difficult to be sure,’ he said. ‘Go in too early and you don’t know what questions to ask, too late and the trail may be cold, the answers faded away. I’d like to have given them pictures of the girl’s father to take round with them, but I don’t think we can wait.’ He grunted and shook his head, as if to shake the doubts away, then got to his feet and called for their attention.

  He was good at this, Kathy thought, striking the right balance between recognising the sombre mood of a murder inquiry and giving them the taste for a hunt that might last a long time. He announced that the pathologist had now confirmed the identity of the body as Kerri Vlasich, through her dental records. He then gave a very brief account of the background, with the calm of someone who had been down such tracks many times before, and spoke of the incinerator and compactor with just an edge of outrage in his voice, so that the frisson would be implanted and maintained, even though they were forbidden from mentioning these details to the public, and above all to the press.

  They would begin by dividing their forces, Gavin Lowry taking some to continue the search begun by the SOCO team, spreading out through the huge centre and beyond into the surrounding carparks and service areas, the remainder interviewing the staff in the shops.

  The questions: names, addresses and phone numbers of all employees; names, addresses and phone numbers of all suppliers who made deliveries between the nominated dates; possible sightings of the girl in the photograph during this period or before; accounts of any unusual incidents in or around the shop during the period; accounts of any unusual incidents in the service road areas and service corridors during the period. Questions with both open and hidden intent, hoping to draw out witnesses, observations, insights, but also designed to sniff out discrepancies, and to harvest names to match against the roll-call of known offenders.

  Then Brock asked Phil, their action manager, to distribute the plans provided by Harry Jackson, and to read out the lists of officers’ names and the sections of the centre each would cover. Later there would be an exhibits officer and a statement reader and all the other stock characters from the cast of a major investigation, if indeed that was what this was to be. Because of course it could still turn out to be something altogether simpler and cruder than they were assuming. A tiff, a rape, even a mugging, done on impulse and readily uncovered, the compactor a panicked improvisation.

  As the briefing broke up, Lowry said to Brock, ‘Could I have a quick word, chief, off the record?’ He sounded uncharacteristically tentative.

  Brock looked up. ‘Certainly.’ He raised his eyebrows at Kathy beside him, who began to move away.

  ‘No, I don’t mind Kathy hearing it. In fact I’d prefer if she did.’

  ‘All right. I know the problem. You haven’t got enough men to do a thorough search.’

  Lowry shrugged. ‘That’s true.’

  ‘Do what you can, Gavin, and as quickly as you can. If the killer took that much trouble to dispose of the body, the chances of him leaving her clothing behind are slim. It also seems unlikely that there would have been blood stains. Our best chance is that someone noticed something unusual, so I want your team to do a reasonable search as fast as possible, then join the others interviewing staff.’

  ‘Sure, I understand. That wasn’t what I wanted to ask you. It’s awkward really. I’m in a slightly difficult spot.’

  Lowry stared at his shoes. Brock said nothing.

  ‘Mr Forbes has asked me to report to him, on a daily basis, chief. On the progress of the investigation. Without reference to you. I don’t feel comfortable about it.’

  ‘I see.’ Brock looked annoyed. ‘Did you tell him that?’

  ‘No, sir. At the time I didn’t think too much about it. We’ve known each other a few years, him and me. But I can see now that I’d be putting myself in a false position. Like a spy.’

  ‘Yes
… well, I’ll speak to him. All right?’

  Lowry hung his head. ‘Thing is, he’ll be annoyed I mentioned it to you. I wondered if you might put it to him that you brought the subject up first-asked me straight out if I’d been asked to report independently, and I had to admit that I had.’

  Brock gave a little snort. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘I’ll do it tactfully.’

  ‘Thanks, chief. Thanks a lot.’

  Lowry nodded and left. When he was behind Brock he glanced back and gave Kathy another of his guarded little smiles.

  ‘Well,’ Brock grunted at Kathy. ‘What do you make of him?’

  ‘I think we’re making him nervous. Bren knows him, apparently. Maybe you should ask him. Lowry thinks they’re very alike.’

  Brock caught the intonation, raised his eyebrows and turned back to his paperwork.

  Behind him the room was emptying, men and women, both uniformed and plainclothes, collecting clipboards and interview kits as they went out to find their designated areas.

  Kathy returned to the Herbert Morrison estate after the briefing, her task to find out more about Kerri Vlasich. She parked in one of the visitor parking spaces inside Primrose Court, skirted the exploded TV set on the ground and walked up to the first deck level. A woman she didn’t recognise, a neighbour, answered the door and led her inside.

  Alison Vlasich was seated in an armchair, motionless and very pale. When she lifted her face to Kathy her expression was blank, the empty stare signifying that nothing mattered any more. She didn’t even recognise Kathy, who had to explain they had met the previous day. After ten fruitless minutes Kathy got to her feet. The neighbour could tell her nothing useful, and she left.