Silvermeadow

by Barry Maitland

  ‘Oooh . . .’ the girl wailed, and Brock, looking benignly unconcerned, as if this was always happening, murmured, ‘There, there. Don’t worry.’ He refrained from wiping the splashes off the front of his shirt and trousers while Kathy sat the girl down and gave her tissues.

  ‘Maybe we should take Lisa home,’ Kathy said.

  5

  Kathy was beginning to feel that she was condemned to repeat this journey backwards and forwards endlessly, between two worlds, Silvermeadow and Herbert Morrison, that couldn’t possibly coexist, like whoever it was, the god of thresholds, who looked both ways at once. Or the ferryman who took the dead across the river to Hades. Question was, which of them really was Hades, in this case?

  She saw Lisa safely back to her flat, whose threshold mat proclaimed BASS, and looked very much as if it had been acquired from the local.

  Then she went to Hornchurch Street to see how DS Lowry was making out with the hammer man. Gavin was taking a break from his exertions when she arrived, supping from a polystyrene cup of tea and looking introspective and thoughtful, especially when he caught sight of Kathy.

  ‘He’s a nutter,’ he observed without malice. ‘You don’t realise it at first. But then the signal lights start flashing: the repetitions, the forgetfulness, the displacements.’

  ‘Displacements?’

  ‘Yeah. Like, now he comes to think of it, there is this other guy he’s seen eyeing up the girls, this other body builder, this other steroid junkie. Not him of course.’

  ‘Ah. Well, Brock should be along shortly. He’s talking to one of the girl’s school friends. She may know something about this bloke.’

  ‘Hmm. And what about you? What’ve you been up to?’

  ‘Just that. The school friends. They admit now that Kerri was planning to run away to see her father.’

  ‘So how did she end up in the Silvermeadow compactor?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘Anything else I should know about?’ he asked, and drained his tea slowly.

  ‘Don’t think so.’

  He gave a weary sigh, crushed the cup in his fist and tossed the bits into a bin. ‘Oh well. Such is life.’ He turned and walked away.

  Kathy shuttled back, along quiet Sunday streets, then the link road to the motorway, the motorway itself busy now with weekend traffic, and finally the Silvermeadow turnoff and the expanse of carpark getting fuller all the time, drawing life in from the highways. She went in by way of the service road ramp again and found the blue compactor reassembled and in use, the SOCO team having moved on to the orange machine deepest inside the basement.

  They’d taken their overalls off and were sitting together on the edge of the loading dock, eating pizza, and the smell made Kathy feel hungry.

  ‘Pepperoni,’ Desai said. ‘Have some. We won’t finish this. If you don’t have it it’ll just end up in the compactor.’

  He gave her a slice.

  ‘Any progress?’ she asked.

  ‘We’re getting the hang of it now. By the time we get to the third one we’ll be stripping it down in no time. But I don’t know if we’ve got anything useful. Dozens of samples, but who knows what of?’

  He took her over to the compactor, its bright orange panels half-dismantled, and showed her where the deposits had gathered in the corners and seams of the compression chamber. ‘Oil, hydraulic fluid, fibres, gorgonzola cheese, who knows?’ He straightened and added, ‘What’s it like outside?’

  ‘Cool, dull.’

  ‘I wouldn’t mind some fresh air. You want a stroll?’

  They walked back along the service road to the ramp, then up into the grey December afternoon and began to follow the pavement that skirted the perimeter of the building.

  ‘Getting on all right with DS Lowry, are you?’ he asked suddenly.

  ‘Not too bad. Why? Do you know him?’

  ‘Not personally. But the guys I’m working with do. I’ve been listening to them talking about him. He’s ambitious. Looks after number one. Maybe you should watch your back.’

  Kathy looked at him sharply, wondering if he was having a dig at her. The question of trust.

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘you know me. Trust nobody.’

  He gave a wry smile. ‘I haven’t forgotten,’ he said softly.

  ‘I’ll bear it in mind. Thanks.’ They stepped aside for a couple pushing twins in a double stroller, then Kathy added, ‘I didn’t think you’d speak to me again, when I saw you down there this morning.’

  He shrugged and gave a sigh that formed a small cloud of breath in the cool air. ‘Oh, look, that was months ago, and you know how it is when you’re lying in a hospital bed, feeling fragile and sorry for yourself . . . or maybe you don’t.’

  ‘You didn’t sound fragile, Leon. You sounded lucid and angry, and I deserved it. So thanks for talking to me again.’

  They walked on in silence, thrusting their hands deeper into their pockets and hunching up their collars as they rounded a corner and met the north-east wind head on. The contours of the hill, carved up by the earthworks for the shopping centre, dropped sharply here to the lower half of the site. A derelict corner lay below them, a couple of deserted builders’ huts in a wire compound, weeds struggling up through raw clay, a battered sign announcing the next development phase.

  Desai laughed softly.

  ‘What’s funny?’

  ‘I was just thinking, about that time. The thing that really pissed me off, lying there with tape over my eyes and mouth in that derelict flat with Sammy Starling and his gun, the thing that most bothered me . . . Well, no, the thing that most bothered me was that I might be sick and choke myself, like that bloke last year. But after that, the thing that annoyed me was the thought that you would go to my funeral thinking I was gay. You remember, the conversation in the pub?’

  Kathy smiled. ‘When I discovered you were living with your mum, and that you’d taken me for a quiet drink to a pub where all the most glamorous girls turned out to be fellers. Yes, I remember. I did wonder. But I decided you probably weren’t.’

  They turned about and began to retrace their steps, walking slowly.

  ‘When you’re in a situation like that,’ he went on, ‘you tend to rethink your priorities. When I was lying there, and I realised how much it did bother me what you thought, I decided that, if I ever got out of it and saw you again, I’d make sure you knew exactly where I stood, regardless of what Bren had said. But of course it didn’t work out like that. Instead I got stuck into you for not trusting me.’

  His phone rang and he cupped it to his ear while Kathy stood there wondering what on earth he was talking about. Where he stood? What Bren had said?

  ‘Yes Phil, she’s here with me . . . The reception’s better because I’m outside in the carpark, that’s why . . . Yes, I’ll tell her . . . Fine.’

  A savage little gust of wind whipped the hem of Kathy’s long coat and ruffled Desai’s black hair like raven’s feathers, and she thought there was something different about him now apart from the little scar, something easier, less arrogant, not quite so anally retentive, as Bren used to put it, as if his experience had reconciled him to himself in some way.

  ‘Phil checking up on you,’ he grinned. ‘Brock has left some document from the security manager on his desk, and would like you to have a look at it. If you go in this entrance here you’re only fifty yards from our unit.’

  ‘Leon, what did you mean just now, about telling me where you stood, regardless of what Bren had said? What had he said?’

  ‘Oh . . . that’s all in the past, Kathy. Water under the bridge. Evocative, that expression, don’t you think? It’s one of my father’s favourites. I remember he took us to the Victoria Falls one year, when I was a very small boy, before we got kicked out of East Africa, and we all stood there watching the water thundering below us, and he said, now that’s what I call water under the bridge.’

  ‘You’re being whimsical and evasive. What did Bren say to you?’

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nbsp; ‘He spoke in confidence, Kathy, and he would be embarrassed if I told you. He’s very protective of you, you know. He’s a good friend.’

  ‘Yes, I know that. But I still want to know.’

  He frowned down at his trainers. ‘Now I’m embarrassed, Kathy. This is all in the past. He . . . he was aware of a certain interest on my part . . . a certain leaning, and he felt obliged to put me right.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  Desai spread his hands, exasperated, as if she was being obtuse. ‘All right, if you’re going to give me the bloody third degree, he told me about your continuing obsession with this lawyer chap, whatever his name is, Connell, and advised me not to waste my time. Get a life, Leon were his exact words—rather ironic, I thought later when I was lying on Sammy’s floor with a gun at my head.’

  Kathy stopped dead and stared at him. ‘Bren told you that?’

  But Desai was already on his way. ‘Better get on,’ he called back over his shoulder. ‘Got to get this job finished. See you later.’

  Phil called out to her as she walked passed his desk. ‘Oi! Kathy! Keep me informed of your movements, eh? I run a tight ship, all right?’

  ‘Yes, Phil.’

  ‘You okay? You look a bit peaky. Haven’t caught something from that kid you brought in earlier, have you? Only if you’re going to throw up somewhere I’d advise against the DCI’s desk. Once is enough for one day.’

  ‘Very funny.’

  She sat down at Brock’s desk, which did still reek mildly after Lisa’s accident. At an adjoining table two clerks were working their way through a print-out of the door access codes used during the period Kerri might have been taken to the service road, and putting names against them from a second print-out listing authorised code users. Kathy barely registered what they were doing, thinking instead of what Leon Desai had said. She shook her head and forced herself to concentrate on the report lying on Brock’s desk from Harry Jackson, itemising incidents at Silvermeadow.

  It was an impressive document, with spreadsheets and dot points and 3D pie charts of incidents by type, and participants by postal area, age and gender, and coloured AutoCAD plans of the centre with numbered stars for locations, and even a couple of scanned crime-scene images for those readers with a short attention span. All in all, considering the time available, it was a tribute to the computer facilities and skills of Harry’s team. But it only went back six months, and for all its apparent wealth of data it contained no real details, such as names.

  ‘Security centre, Phil,’ Kathy said as she passed his desk. ‘Going to talk to the staff. Is Harry Jackson around, do you know?’

  ‘I believe he’s salvaging what’s left of his weekend.’

  ‘Good.’

  Sharon was there, however, keeping an eye on the screens. She was more confident and chatty without the men around, and she made a cup of tea for them both.

  ‘I’ve been reading the report that Harry prepared for DCI Brock,’ Kathy said. ‘Really impressive.’

  ‘Oh yeah, it’s good isn’t it? He and Speedy were at it till late last night. The data room was a mess this morning.’

  ‘Where’s that? I don’t remember seeing it before.’

  ‘It’s just through there . . .’ Sharon showed Kathy a small windowless room off the main office crammed with computer equipment. ‘Speedy’s the ace with this stuff. The rest of us don’t know how to use half of it. He does special jobs for Ms Seager, like her business reports and stuff, and for the maintenance engineer too, circuit diagrams and I don’t know what.’

  ‘So Speedy’s pretty bright, is he? He doesn’t just stare at the screens all day.’

  ‘Oh yeah, he’s good. He says you don’t need legs when you can drive this stuff.’

  They returned to their tea.

  ‘So do you enter an incident onto the computer yourself, if you’ve got something to report?’ Kathy asked.

  ‘No, we’ve still got the daybooks for that, I’m glad to say. Computers aren’t my strong point. Harry’s a great stickler for the daybooks. I reckon it’s what he grew up with in the force, isn’t it?’

  ‘Show me.’

  They were a collection of thick red hard-bound A4 books of blue lined pages, numbered in sequence, each covering about six months, and they contained the terse reports, handwritten in ball-point, of each incident recorded by the attending security staffer.

  ‘Here’s my last one,’ Sharon said, opening the most recent book. ‘Here. I like to use green ink. Three days ago: seventeen-oh-six hours; fire started in rubbish container opp. unit two-one-five; perp unknown; S.W. attended; no action. Harry likes us to keep it short and sweet. Just the bare facts. Then at the end of the week Speedy enters them in his database.’

  ‘That’s fascinating,’ Kathy said.

  ‘Don’t you have that in the force?’

  ‘Yes, something like that. But this is much more detailed, every little incident recorded.’

  ‘That’s Harry—Mr Zero Tolerance, that’s what he is.’

  ‘My boss wanted me to check the details of a couple of things in Harry’s report, so I suppose the daybooks would be the place to look?’

  ‘Yeah, help yourself. I’d offer to help but I’m meant to be keeping an eye on the screens.’

  ‘No, that’s fine. I’ll manage. How long have you been here, Sharon?’

  ‘Just on a year.’

  Kathy started four books back, in the previous year. After a while, scanning through the plethora of small crises, she hit upon the first reference to Norma Jean X. There were two other mentions in that month, six in the next, and then a cascade of Norma Jean incidents. The reports came from a variety of security staff, whose developing mood could be sensed both in what they wrote—1042: NJ warned about loitering . . . 1155: NJ escorted AGAIN—and in the increasing force with which their ball-point messages had been scored into the pages of the book. There were gaps for a week or two, when presumably she was being detained elsewhere, but then she was back again, like the daughter from hell, grazing in the aisles of the food stores, shoplifting in the boutiques, embarrassing sheepish dads with offers of her body for cash, pinching their wives’ handbags, shooting up drugs in the toilets, falling asleep on the mall benches, and the daybook reports came to sound more and more like the comments of angry and frustrated parents, underlined, capitalised, and even, when things got really bad, containing words which Harry Jackson had felt obliged to obscure and initial with his stern purple fountain pen. Norma Jean’s assault lasted, off and on, for almost five months, and then, mysteriously and without comment, it ceased.

  Brock scanned the file on Eddie Testor that had been couriered down, and watched Lowry interviewing him on the video screen for some time before he joined them. The man seemed very alert, almost eager in his manner, answering Lowry’s questions rapidly and without hesitation. He admitted misrepresenting his background to his present employer, but said he’d been forced into it in order to get a job, and had been helped to massage his CV by a professional employment consultant, whom he named. His record at work had been described as very satisfactory by the management of the leisure centre. He had one caution on his employee’s file, a note of a verbal warning from a supervisor that his behaviour with some small boys in the surf—‘larking about’—was inappropriate.

  His manner changed somewhat when Brock came into the room. Brock noticed the shift, an avoidance of eye contact, a small hesitation at the start of each reply, and then a developing surliness whenever Brock spoke.

  ‘Tell us again,’ Brock said, placing Kerri’s enlarged portrait photograph on the table between them, ‘about the man you saw talking to her.’

  ‘May not have been her. Lots of girls look like that. Could have been anyone.’

  ‘Yes, all right. Recently?’

  A shrug and a scowl.

  ‘Try to picture them talking together,’ Brock said softly. ‘Never mind the girl, concentrate on the man. Picture the ma
n. Does he look a bit like you, Eddie?’

  ‘No! Not like me at all. He’s a smoothy.’

  ‘A smoothy? What does that mean?’

  ‘Smooth. Slippery smooth.’

  Later, outside the interview room, Brock rubbed his palm backwards and forwards across his jaw, scratching his beard, thinking.

  ‘He claims he was working between five p.m. and nine p.m. on the Monday, after an hour meal break. We’re waiting to hear from the manager at the leisure centre.’

  ‘Did you get a chance to look at his file, Gavin?’

  ‘A fairly quick scan, chief, during our last break. But I’ve met him before, this one.’

  ‘Did you read the parole psychologist’s final report?’

  ‘Not in detail.’

  ‘Worth a look.’

  ‘He’s a nutter, chief.’

  ‘Yes, but they come in different shapes and sizes. This one doesn’t seem to have any interest in women. He doesn’t hate them, or like them, or respond to them in any way. Remarkable, eh?’

  ‘He’s got bits missing in his head.’

  ‘Did you notice the way his mood changed when I came into the room?’

  ‘Yes. I wondered if you two had met before.’

  ‘No, never.’ Brock turned the pages of the file until he came to a photograph of the car that Testor had attacked. It was spectacularly beaten flat, a crumpled metal pancake, like a cartoon car that a cartoon elephant had sat on.

  ‘Like what happened to Kerri,’ Lowry said.

  ‘Mmm.’ Brock rubbed his chin again. ‘A Jaguar, almost vintage, British racing green. It’s the same type and colour as the car that was owned by the man who ran the home he spent five years in when he was a little boy. He didn’t mention that at his trial. It came up almost by accident when the prison psychologist was interviewing him for the parole board. And the man driving the flattened car was elderly. He had grey hair, like the man who ran the home. Like me. It was at the home that he had the accident to his head.’

  A uniformed man looked round the door with a message for Lowry, who read it and cursed softly under his breath. ‘The manager has confirmed the times of Testor’s shifts. He was at work from five p.m. all week. Hard to see how he could have fitted it in.’