Silvermeadow bak-5

by Barry Maitland

  She made her way along the access deck to the next court, Crocus. Naomi’s front door was decorated with a Christmas holly wreath, the effect of its bright red plastic berries and sparkly message, YULETIDE GREETINGS, marred somewhat by the signature of the yobs graffiti gang sprayed in black aerosol across it.

  The woman who answered the door responded immediately to Kathy’s ID, as if she’d been expecting her. She was in her sixties, Kathy judged, hair pulled hard back from her face and thin framed glasses giving her a serious, slightly strained appearance.

  ‘Do come in,’ she said, speaking softly. ‘We wondered if you’d come again, after we heard.’

  ‘You know about Kerri, then? Mrs Parr, is it?’

  ‘No, Tait’s my name. I’m Naomi’s grandmother.’ They shook hands. ‘Yes, we heard about Kerri’s ring last night. News like that travels fast round here. Lisa’s mother knows the Vlasich’s neighbours. Lisa came straight round here, and she and Naomi were comforting each other till late. In fact Lisa stayed the night, and she’s only just gone home. So upset they are. It’s just so hard to believe. Kerri was such a lively girl, so full of life.’

  She showed Kathy into a living room, full of old but comfortable furniture, and introduced her to her husband, who struggled to his feet as they came in. His right arm was stiff and held to his side, his right eye watery.

  ‘It’s the police, Jack, just as we thought,’ Mrs Tait said, and he grunted and gestured at a chair for Kathy. ‘If you’re wanting to know,’ she went on, patient and well-practised in her explanation, ‘Naomi’s mother, our daughter, passed away a couple of years ago-’

  ‘Two years ago this Christmas,’ her husband interrupted, scowling at his frozen hand.

  ‘And we took responsibility for the three girls. Naomi and her small sister live here with us. Her older sister, Kimberley, is away at present. So that’s why you find us here with Naomi.’

  Kathy nodded with a sympathetic smile. She could imagine how many times this explanation had been necessary -to social security, the doctor, schools, inquisitive neighbours, parents of friends of the girls. ‘I’m sorry to bother you, Mrs Tait. I would like to have a chat to Naomi if it wouldn’t be too upsetting for her. You knew Kerri yourself then?’

  ‘Oh yes. Kerri was round here often.’

  ‘The three mouseketeers,’ Jack offered. He had a newspaper beneath his good hand on the arm of the chair, folded to the racing section.

  His wife smiled weakly at him. ‘They did a fancy dress once, the three of them, Kerri, Lisa and Naomi. They were close. And how is poor Alison Vlasich coping?’

  ‘Not too well at present.’

  ‘I must go over and see her. We know what it’s like, to lose a child.’

  ‘Give her a bell. Ask her to come here,’ Jack said. ‘You know I don’t like you going over Primrose. Rough buggers in that court. It’s not safe.’ He glared at Kathy, ready to argue the point if she cared to deny it.

  ‘Kerri was a lively girl, you say?’

  ‘Oh yes, very lively, full of beans.’

  ‘A handful,’ Jack offered.

  ‘Yes,’ Kathy agreed. ‘Mrs Vlasich gave me the impression that Kerri was being a bit rebellious lately, not telling her where she went and so on.’

  ‘I wouldn’t be surprised. It’s not easy for a woman on her own to cope with a lively teenager.’ Mrs Tait looked sadly at a group of four framed portrait photographs mounted on the wall. ‘Our daughter had three girls to bring up on her own.’

  ‘Would you say she was adventurous enough to take off by herself to see her father in Germany?’

  Mrs Tait gave it a little thought. ‘I wouldn’t be surprised. It’s the sort of thing she would do.’

  ‘Pain in the neck,’ Jack Tait said grumpily.

  ‘Don’t say that, Jack. Not now.’

  He looked sheepish and cocked his head to one side to acknowledge the scolding.

  ‘She liked to tease Jack sometimes,’ Mrs Tait explained. ‘It wasn’t cheek, really. More high spirits. Is that what happened, then? She ran away to find her dad?’

  ‘We’re not sure yet. Had she mentioned him to you recently? Maybe plans to see him for Christmas?’

  ‘No, not to us. But Naomi would be the one to ask. She would know. Shall I get her for you?’

  While she went to fetch her grand-daughter, Kathy said, ‘It must be difficult for you, Mr Tait, taking on a family again.’

  ‘We manage,’ he said stiffly. ‘Don’t you worry about that. And we’re not the only ones. You’d be surprised how many of us there are, grandmums and dads, lining up to collect the kiddies from playgroup and school. That’s the way it is these days.’ He looked grimly at the photograph of the lost daughter. ‘Something seems to have happened to the generation in between. Do you know what it is?’ He glared at Kathy, who wasn’t sure if he was really asking for her opinion.

  ‘No… not really. What do you think?’

  ‘I haven’t got a clue. Not a bleedin’ clue.’

  He shook his head, baffled. Kathy got to her feet and went over to look at the photographs on the wall. They formed a triangle, the Taits’ dead daughter at the top, her three girls below her.

  ‘Is this Naomi?’ Kathy asked, pointing to the eldest, a bright, cheerful-looking girl with long black hair, very like her mother, kneeling between two panting golden retrievers.

  ‘No, that’s her big sister, Kimberley. Naomi’s the middle one.’

  She had square, plainer features, her dark hair cut short like a boy’s, a stubborn set to her mouth. And as Kathy looked at the picture the girl herself came into the room behind her and said hello at her grandmother’s prompting. Then she sat down, face pale, eyes lowered, and Mrs Tait said softly that she would make them all a cup of tea.

  ‘Are you feeling all right, Naomi?’ Kathy said. ‘It must have been a terrible shock.’

  The girl nodded, not looking up.

  ‘We very much need your help, to find who may have done this.’

  ‘Done…?’ The girl raised her eyes to meet Kathy’s, her voice little more than a whisper.

  ‘We’re still trying to work out the details of what happened, Naomi, but it seems likely that Kerri was murdered. Probably at or near the Silvermeadow shopping centre.’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  Kathy frowned, surprised by the question. There was something obdurate about Naomi, as if determined to believe nothing without the hard evidence under her nose.

  Her grandfather had caught the tone of scepticism in her voice too, and said, ‘Don’t you be cheeky, young lady.’

  ‘Well, that’s the best indication we have so far as to how she met her end,’ Kathy said. ‘Why? Does it surprise you?’

  ‘Only, we were at Silvermeadow that afternoon, the Monday she went missing, and we didn’t see her there.’

  ‘We?’

  ‘Lisa and me. We caught the four-fifteen bus. We didn’t see Kerri.’

  ‘You’d seen Kerri at school that day, hadn’t you, Naomi? How did she seem?’

  Naomi frowned at her feet. ‘We didn’t talk much.’

  ‘Did she seem different from usual in any way?’

  A shrug.

  ‘Speak up, girl, when the detective asks you something,’ her grandfather grumbled.

  ‘Wouldn’t she normally have gone to Silvermeadow with you?’ Kathy went on. ‘Didn’t she give a reason for not going with you?’

  The girl’s expression had become a scowl, fixed on one toe. ‘We were going to work. She wasn’t on that afternoon. I dunno.’

  ‘Where do you two work then?’

  ‘Lisa wipes the tables in the food court, and I help in the sandwich bar, on the preparation mostly.’

  Kathy wondered if it was accidental that Kerri, the pretty blonde, was out front with the customers, in her short skirt and roller blades, while the stolid Naomi was back in the kitchen. ‘The thing is, Naomi, she went home that afternoon and packed a bag as if she was planning to g
o away somewhere. You’d think, wouldn’t you, that she would have said something to her closest friends. Some hint, surely?’

  Silence.

  Jack Tait said, ‘Speak up, girl,’ rapping his fingertips on the newspaper.

  Mrs Tait had come into the room with a tray. She set it down and stooped beside Naomi and put an arm round her shoulders. ‘Come on, love,’ she urged. ‘Do try to think.’

  The girl relented, gracelessly. ‘Yes. She told us. She said she was planning to go away.’

  Mrs Tait drew back, looking worried.

  Kathy said, ‘That isn’t what you told the officer who came to see you before, is it, Naomi?’

  ‘She made us promise not to tell anyone, see. She said she was going to Germany to stay with her dad.’

  ‘Oh bleedin’ heck,’ Jack Tait muttered. His fingers abruptly stopped tapping the newspaper.

  ‘Well, what else could I do?’ Naomi glared defiantly at him, and Kathy caught a glimpse of his eye meeting his grand-daughter’s and then sliding away, so that for a moment she seemed the adult, the one with the difficult responsibilities to deal with.

  ‘Had she arranged this with her father?’ Kathy asked. ‘Was he going to meet her somewhere?’

  ‘I don’t think so. She said it would be a surprise. She said she’d saved enough money to buy a ticket for the Channel ferry.’

  ‘Just the boat? Was she going to hitch-hike?’

  ‘I think so. But she wouldn’t tell us what she was planning exactly, like it was a secret. Just that she was going to see her dad. But we thought that was what she was planning to do, hitch-hike.’

  Her grandmother shook her head sadly. ‘Oh, that’s terrible, Naomi. A young girl like that on her own! Didn’t you try to stop her? Promise me you’ll never do anything so stupid.’

  Naomi ignored her. ‘She said, after she got to Germany and sorted things out, she’d ring her mum and put her mind at rest. But we weren’t to say nothing, not to nobody.’

  Mrs Tait passed round their cups of tea, fussing slightly, mollifying, removing her husband’s newspaper and positioning his saucer securely on a special rubber mat attached to the chair arm. ‘They’re good girls. They work hard and do their best, Sergeant. You can’t blame them. But I just wish you’d told us, love. I really do.’

  The girl lowered her head, bottling up any reply.

  ‘Anyway, you want to help us now, don’t you, Naomi?’ Kathy said.

  ‘Of course she does!’

  Naomi gave a reluctant little nod.

  ‘I’d like to take you, and Lisa too, over to Silvermeadow, and get you to show me round. Show me the places you and Kerri liked to hang out, the people you know there. Will you do that?’

  ‘Okay.’ The idea seemed to perk her up a little.

  ‘Of course she will!’ Mrs Tait passed round the shortbread, eager for Naomi to have a chance to make amends.

  ‘What about Kerri’s bag, the one like a frog, do you know where she got that from?’

  ‘Yes, a place in the mall. A bag shop.’

  ‘Good. Maybe you can help me find another one like it.’

  ‘That’s the way, old girl,’ Jack said, a little restored, lifting his cup to his mouth and blowing on his tea.

  Lisa lived in Jonquil Court, distinguished from Crocus by the wrecked children’s play equipment corralled within a high chain-link fence in one corner. She was a paler, less confident version of Kerri’s picture, with the same length of fair hair cut in the same way, almost as if she had modelled herself on her friend. She confirmed Naomi’s account practically word for word, and agreed to come to Silvermeadow on condition Naomi was going too.

  As Kathy took the girls back to her car she turned it over in her mind. Both of them seemed certain that Kerri had planned to surprise her father. Or perhaps to test him, Kathy thought, picking up on something Lisa had said, that Kerri idolised her dad and made excuses for his absence. For the girl would know, as soon as he opened his front door and saw her standing there, she would know from his expression if he really loved her. What if he’d got wind of it beforehand? Maybe she’d written, hinting at what she intended, and he’d tried to stop her. Or maybe she had reached him and he had tried to bring her back.

  But the Hamburg police had confirmed that the company he worked for was quite certain that Stefan Vlasich was in Poland all through the period Kerri was missing. He was still there, waiting for a plane that would now bring him over to bury his daughter, and they would have their chance to interview him when he arrived. A simpler explanation was that she had started hitch-hiking, and had been picked up by someone on their way to make a delivery to Silvermeadow. Someone who had murdered her and then used the simplest and most anonymous disposal method available.

  Kathy was about to set off with the two girls when her phone rang. It was Miriam Sangster.

  ‘Can I talk to you again?’ the constable said.

  ‘I thought you’d have gone off duty by now, Miriam,’ Kathy said.

  ‘I’m still here. There’s something I wanted to tell you. It won’t take long, but it’s quite urgent.’

  ‘I’m not far away now, but I’ve got the girls in the car with me, Naomi and Lisa. I suppose I could call in at the station.’

  ‘No, don’t come in. I’ll meet you round the corner in the high street, near the pillar-box outside the post office. It’ll be quicker for you. I’ll only take a minute.’

  Kathy found the place and parked on a double yellow line, making desultory conversation with the two girls in the back. She asked which of them had the best job, and they explained, reluctantly, the good points and the bad. Kerri’s had seemed the most glamorous and the most fun, in her costume and make-up, talking to the customers, whizzing about on her skates. But the skates were hard on your legs after a while, and sometimes she’d get a customer who would hassle her. No, no one special, just sometimes she’d get a troublemaker, whereas Lisa and Naomi didn’t have so much of that.

  Then Kathy spotted Miriam Sangster, out of uniform now, crossing the zebra up ahead and hurrying towards the car. She got out and walked up to meet her in front of the post-office window.

  ‘Sorry,’ the constable said. She had the same stubborn, preoccupied look about her that Naomi had had. ‘I thought you’d want to know this.’

  ‘Fire away.’

  ‘Okay.’ She took a deep breath, then began, speaking low although the street was deserted this cold Sunday morning. ‘When I tried to check that rumour, about Silvermeadow, remember?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I was checking missing persons, and there were no references to the centre at all. But this morning, after we spoke, I tried a different line. Obvious really. I called up all the reports we’d had from Silvermeadow. There weren’t a lot, considering its size. A couple of ram raids, a few dozen shoplifters they decided to prosecute, some car thefts, some heart attacks, one fatal, that we attended, that sort of stuff.’

  ‘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 j
ust 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 fete, 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.