Verdi arrived with an air of benevolent mystification, Brock noted, an honest citizen trying be patient with the inexplicable ways of the police.
‘Was it really necessary to bring me over here, Chief Inspector? I am quite short-handed today.’
‘I’m afraid so.’ Brock snapped down the switch of a recording machine and intoned the time and names of those present. ‘We found a travel agent in Basildon who says you bought some tickets on the sixth of December. Tell us about them, will you?’
Verdi blinked, and Brock saw the signs of sudden panicked calculations. ‘The sixth? Perhaps you would just remind me?’
‘Why? Did you make more than one purchase of tickets around then?’
‘Well, I don’t think . . . I just don’t recall.’
‘One single ticket on the coach that stops at Silvermeadow en route from Victoria to Harwich, plus one single ticket for the night ferry from Harwich to Hamburg.’
‘Ah!’ His face creased in an exaggerated smile. ‘Yes, of course, how stupid of me.’
Stupid indeed, thought Brock, and remarkably forgetful.
‘Open tickets,’ he said, ‘valid during the following six months—’
Brock leant forward and spoke slowly, not trying to keep the anger from his voice. ‘Don’t insult my intelligence.’
Verdi drew back a little. ‘Really, Chief Inspector! You’re being very aggressive, if I may say. Maybe I should call my solicitor.’
‘Maybe you should. Lying to police conducting a murder inquiry is an extremely serious matter.’
‘Lying?’
Brock placed the computer image of Testor on the table. ‘You never saw this man before. A lie. You had no idea what your niece was doing at Silvermeadow on the sixth. A lie.’
‘This man?’ He touched his moustache nervously as if it were a charm that might help.
‘Eddie Testor.’
‘That is Eddie Testor? No, I don’t think . . . Well, maybe there is some similarity . . .’
Brock made an abrupt move of irritation.
‘No, please.’ Verdi took a scarlet handkerchief out of his pocket and wiped his face, which had gradually become almost as red. ‘All right, look, I see you’ve been talking to Eddie, and if he’s chosen to speak then I can feel free to tell you everything. I was keeping silent to protect him, you see. No, please, you’re looking as if you don’t believe it, but that’s the truth of the matter.’
It occurred to Brock that it would be easy to underestimate this man, to write him off for his bluster and his lies as a fool. He guessed that Verdi had been playing this part, part clown and part bully, for most of his life, and might have become quite adept at using it to hide bigger, deeper lies beneath the phoney surface.
‘The fact is, what can I say?’ Verdi went on. ‘I did try to help Kerri visit her father, my brother, over in Hamburg. Well, I felt it my duty, really. Alison was being very unreasonable in preventing it, and I could see it would end up destroying her relationship with Kerri, apart from causing heartache to the rest of my family—my brother and our elderly mother, who hasn’t seen her grand-daughter in three years and isn’t able to travel. Stefan, my brother, had been exchanging letters with Kerri for some months, using me as a post-box, and they had decided that they would get together for this Christmas, regardless of Alison. Anyway, I agreed to arrange Kerri’s tickets, thinking she’d go over towards the middle of December. But on the Sunday night, the fifth, she came in to see me at the shop after she’d finished her shift and said her mother was driving her mad, and she was going to leave the following day, with or without my assistance. She said she would hitch-hike if I wouldn’t help. I told her to calm down, and tried to persuade her to wait, but she was very stubborn. She wouldn’t listen, so I phoned the family in Hamburg, and this travel agent I know, and made the arrangements.
‘The following day I collected the tickets from Basildon, but I didn’t want Kerri being seen anywhere near me or the shop on the day she was to disappear, or I was sure I’d be in trouble for helping her. On Mondays and Tuesdays I leave early from Silvermeadow, so Monday afternoon was a perfect time, and I arranged for Eddie to act as the go-between, to hand over the tickets.’
‘Why Eddie?’
Verdi shrugged. ‘He was just someone I knew who had no connection at all with Kerri or, as far as most people knew, with me. I just knew that he was a very willing lad, someone who could be trusted to run an errand.’
‘Did you know he had a criminal record?’
Verdi frowned. ‘The road-rage case, you mean? Yes, I knew about that. But I’ve never seen that side of him, and frankly I think he’s got over all that. But of course, when Harry told me that Kerri had been murdered, that came straight into my mind.’
‘Did you give him the black eye?’
Verdi lowered his head. ‘When I got my thoughts together that Saturday night, after I heard what had happened to Kerri, my first thought was that Eddie had done something to her. There is something a bit weird about the boy, do you know what I mean? Sometimes he seems a bit simple or something. Maybe just too wrapped up inside his own head, I don’t know. Anyway, that was the way my mind went.’
‘Then why the hell didn’t you say something to us?’
‘I . . . I wasn’t sure what to do. I was in the wrong, wasn’t I? Helping Kerri and my brother to break the terms of the custody order, and helping the girl set off abroad all on her own. I felt responsible, and I wanted to see what Eddie had to say before I came to you. Only I couldn’t find him that night, and the next day you were talking to him, and it wasn’t till the evening that I went to his home and had it out with him.’
Brock stared at Bruno, a foot shorter than Eddie Testor and three or four stone lighter, and tried to imagine the little man beating him up.
‘Who helped you?’
‘Nobody. He’d taken something, I don’t know what, and he was in a stupid mood. He played silly buggers at first, joking around, so I hit him a couple of times to make him listen and show him I was serious. He sobered up then, and told me that the police had spoken to him, trying to find out who had helped the girl run away, and he’d been really smart and made up some story for you about another man talking to her. While he was telling me this, I realised that he had absolutely no idea that anything bad had happened to Kerri. He believed she was safely in Germany, and that you’d been trying to trick him and he’d been covering for her and me. Once I was sure about that, I thought the best thing was for us to keep quiet. How could it help you to know what we’d planned? We had no idea what had really happened. So I told Eddie that making up stories about another man was really dumb, and if you spoke to him again he should just say he’d got confused, and deny he’d ever seen the girl.’
Brock sat back and scratched his jaw, considering Verdi. The man had tinted his eyebrows as well as his hair and moustache, he realised, and the effect at close quarters was to make his every expression seem exaggerated and false, like a stage actor captured in close-up on film, overacting.
‘So your brother Stefan can confirm this story,’ he said.
‘Oh yes, certainly. You ask him.’
‘And Alison Vlasich knew nothing?’
‘Not a thing.’
‘How much money was in the envelope?’
‘Not a lot. Enough for emergencies. A couple of hundred quid.’
‘Sterling?’
‘Yes. Just a bundle of old notes I took from the till.’
‘It was very trusting of you to leave all this to Eddie, and even tell him there was money in the envelope.’
‘He’s a good boy really.’
‘Why did Ms Hislop at the fitness salon tell lies about his waxing session to give him an alibi?’
‘Oh dear . . .’ Verdi looked sheepishly contrite. ‘I’m sorry. That was my doing. I hope she won’t get into trouble over it. When there was all that talk on TV about a prime suspect and they showed that picture of Eddie, I thought I’d got him into real troubl
e, and I just wanted to do whatever I could to save him.’
‘Short of actually coming forward and clearing him yourself with the truth. Truth seems to be a rather irrelevant concept to you, Mr Verdi. You’re quite happy to pile lies on lies, and get any number of other people tangled up in the mess, if it’ll help make us buy your story. How did you persuade her to do it?’
‘Oh, you know, just a favour for an old friend.’ He chuckled impishly. ‘Please don’t be angry with her. It’s all my doing.’
Brock leant forward and said, ‘We want to search your premises, Mr Verdi.’
‘My shop? Well, yes, if you really think that’s necessary. I hope you won’t alarm the customers though.’
‘Your shop, and your home.’
‘Oh, my home? Oh no, I don’t think I could allow that. My wife is an invalid, as I told you, and very easily distressed. It would be a dreadful intrusion. No, no.’
‘Don’t worry, we’ll be very considerate of your wife’s feelings. Where do you think you’re going?’
Verdi had risen to his feet, chest thrust out as if about to deliver an operatic rendition. ‘I am going to my sick wife’s bedside, Chief Inspector! If you want to violate my house you’d better get yourself a search warrant.’
‘Sit down, Mr Verdi. By lying to us in the way that you’ve just admitted you can be charged with obstructing the police. By persuading a third party to obstruct our enquiries you can also be charged with conspiracy and incitement. This is an arrestable offence. If I arrest you for that offence I may then enter and search any of your premises, without a warrant, for evidence relating to that or a connected offence, such as the abduction of Kerri Vlasich.’
Brock’s explanation seemed to stun Verdi. Punctured, he slid slowly back down into his seat. ‘Can you do that?’ he asked faintly.
‘Yes, yes I can, actually. And I will, unless you’re prepared to accompany us to your home and invite us in to search it.’
Later, briefing Lowry, Kathy and the others, Brock said, ‘You’re looking for anything relating to Kerri: correspondence, photographs, personal articles, clothing and so on. And especially you’re looking for ketamine. That’s the key. Get Desai to brief you on what it may look like, bottles, pills, whatever. If you can find that, we’re home and dry. Look everywhere, even under the invalid’s mattress. No, especially under the invalid’s mattress.’
Verdi’s home was a small detached house, one of a row packed close together behind small front gardens—late Victorian, Brock guessed—with decorative brickwork around the doors and windows that produced a slightly fantastical effect, as if the builder had had a fairy-tale gingerbread house in mind. Mrs Verdi lived on the ground floor, her room at the front where she could sit propped up in bed or in a chair by the window, watching the traffic in the street. Brock guessed that with help from her husband she could also access a family room and kitchen at the rear, and a bathroom which had been specially built for her use.
When they had finished searching the family room, Verdi lifted his wife into her wheelchair and took her through so that they could search her bedroom. He did it with an air of wounded dignity, and surprising lack of effort, Brock thought, and he remembered that Verdi also was a regular at the gym. There was nothing but dust and old tissues under the invalid’s mattress.
Upstairs was Verdi’s territory, inaccessible to his wife, and mirroring the arrangement below, with his bedroom at the front and what he described as his ‘den’ at the rear. This room was locked, and he was obliged to hand Brock the key with a sullen look. It contained an exercise machine and some hand and bar weights, a TV/video player, and empty shelving covering one wall. When asked what the shelves were for, he said he was thinking of buying a set of encyclopaedias.
‘Miniature ones,’ Lowry muttered, measuring the spaces between the shelves. ‘Eight inches? More like paperbacks. Or videos.’
As for ketamine, the only possibility seemed to be the medicine cupboard, full of Mrs Verdi’s bottles and pills, from which samples were taken.
After less than two hours the search seemed to be exhausted and the team prepared to return to Silvermeadow. Verdi watched them packing up with a satisfied look on his face. When Brock thanked him for his co-operation, he said, ‘Don’t mention it, Chief Inspector,’ barely keeping the sarcasm out of his voice. Then he added, ‘That Rutter woman had something to do with this, didn’t she?’
‘I beg your pardon?’ Brock replied.
‘Mrs Harriet Rutter,’ he repeated, spitting out the syllables of the name. ‘She puts on airs and acts as if shopkeepers were her personal servants, and when someone like me stands up to her she gets to work with her poison tongue. I’m right, aren’t I? She put in the word against me, eh? You won’t say, but it’s true. Her and that old fool that tags along behind her. Well, if you want some advice, you should take a long look at him. I’ve seen the way he tries to talk to the young girls. He gives them little presents, has he told you that? I’ve seen him do it, winking at them like a hairy old goat. You should check him out and that hut of his.’
‘What hut is that?’
‘The site huts down below the east end of the centre. He had the use of one of them as his workroom when they were doing their excavations. Didn’t you know that? He’s been at Silvermeadow longer than any of us. He’d know better than any of us how to make someone disappear from that place.’
When they were in the car, Brock said, ‘Bruno Verdi has an amazing capacity for making me feel that he knows in advance when we’re coming for him. All that fuss about getting entry to his home, and when we go there there’s not a teacup out of place.’
‘Those empty shelves . . .’ Lowry said.
‘Exactly. What about the huts he was talking about, Gavin? They’ve been searched, haven’t they?’
Lowry didn’t answer straight away. ‘I . . . Yes, they must have been.’
‘You don’t sound very confident.’
‘I was inside the building when we did the initial search, chief. Another team worked the carpark and external site areas. They’d have covered the site huts.’
‘Get Harry Jackson to open them up for you when we get back. You and Kathy. Just to be on the safe side.’
11
Harry Jackson appeared to be unusually unco-operative and out of sorts. He was barking at someone on the phone when they looked into his office, and slammed down the receiver angrily when he finished the call.
‘Half my bloody staff are down with colds and flu. It’s this bleedin’ weather. And they’re forecasting snow. Why are you interested in those flamin’ huts?’
‘Just checking, Harry,’ Lowry told him soothingly. ‘DCI Brock wants us to do it personally. Just give us the keys and we’ll get out of your way.’
‘Can’t do that, Gavin. One of us’ll have to accompany you. New policy from senior management. And I can’t spare anyone.’
‘New policy? You having us on?’
‘Straight up. They’re getting pissed off with you lot, I reckon. And I can’t say as I blame them.’
‘What’s brought this on?’
‘Your guvnor’ll have to take it up with mine.’ He glared angrily through the glass window into the general office beyond, then swore. ‘Oh fuck it.’ He looked at Kathy, who shrugged. ‘Okay, I’ll go with you. Is it raining?’
‘Bucketing down.’
‘Great!’
They walked the length of the service road to the far end of the basement, where a fire exit door gave access into a corridor which eventually discharged at the extreme east end of the building. They hesitated in the shelter of the doorway, bracing themselves before braving the rain cascading out of the louring sky. This area was remote from the mall entrances and no money had apparently been wasted on landscaping or on softening the functional shell of the building. The lower part of the wall alongside them was filled with steel louvres from which came a low mechanical murmur. An electric cable looped out through the louvres and stretched out
to the first of two rusty orange steel containers of the kind used for bulk transport on ships and trains, which stood a dozen yards away across a mess of puddled clay. Wooden palettes had been laid on the ground to form a makeshift path to the doors of the containers.
‘I’ll let you two get wet,’ Jackson said, handing the keys to Lowry.
‘Who uses them?’ Lowry asked.
‘The far one was used by the builders, and is empty now, or should be. The archaeologists were given the use of the near one when they found some human remains here, early on in the construction.’
‘Is it still in use?’
‘The old geezer, Professor Orr, still has some gear in there, as far as I know. We don’t have a use for it until they decide to build the next stage of the centre, and Bo lets him potter about. She reckons it’s good PR to keep him and Mrs Rutter happy.’
‘It’s got electricity?’ Kathy asked, pointing at the cable.
‘Yeah. All modern conveniences. Some, anyway.’
Lowry ran out into the rain, jumping to avoid a broken piece of timber and coming down in a puddle, splashing the legs of his suit with yellow mud. As she watched him struggling to open the padlock on the steel door, the rain drenching him, Kathy felt a surge of sympathy. It hadn’t been his week: a TV thrown at him, his car wrecked, now his suit.
‘Is Gavin unlucky, would you say, Harry?’ Kathy asked. It was a spontaneous remark, lightly meant, but she was surprised to see the look on Jackson’s face, almost of alarm.
‘What makes you say that?’
‘Nothing really. He just seems to be having things go wrong for him.’
‘Really? Gavin always had a reputation for being a lucky bastard.’ And he glanced across with a look almost of sadness at the figure tugging in frustration at the padlocked door.
Lowry got the door open at last and went inside. Kathy took the other key and followed across the palettes, avoiding the puddle, and opened the door of the other container without difficulty. It was empty, as Harry had said. She locked up again and ran back to help Lowry.
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