She stopped outside a large household furnishings store on the lower mall, and gazed idly at the ranks of beds disappearing off into the distance. So many! What on earth was the difference? She strolled in, and a young man immediately came over.
‘Morning, madam. Can I help you?’
‘It’s okay, I’m with the police team, following up the visits yesterday. But I was just looking at your beds. I need a new one, actually.’
‘Well, you’ve come to the right place here.’
‘But what’s the difference between them all?’
It took him a little while to cover just a bare overview of the intricacies of inner springing and foam, orthopaedic and lumbar support, and during the course of it she was persuaded to try a few of the mattress types, which she did, a bit cautiously at first, imagining herself being spotted by colleagues in the mall as she slipped off her shoes and lay down and bounced. But the mall was quiet this Monday morning, and she soon entered into the spirit of the thing, and actually did decide which one she would have got, if she had actually been intending to buy something.
‘I can do a special on that one,’ the young man said, and quoted quite a decent discount price.
‘That’s good,’ she said. ‘I’ll think about it.’
‘Not for too long though,’ he said. ‘This is a special for the run-up to Christmas.’
‘Oh, I see. But it would be difficult,’ she said.
‘How come?’
‘Well, for a start, I live on the twelfth floor of a block in Finchley.’
‘Not a problem. Finchley? We’re delivering that way this afternoon.’
‘But I won’t be there.’
‘Neighbour?’
There was Mrs P in the next flat, for whom Kathy often did favours, and who had a key.
‘But I have an old bed I’d have to get rid of first.’
‘We’ll take it away for you. No charge.’
‘Really?’ That easy. ‘Maybe I could… but then I’d need bedside cabinets, and reading lamps.’
‘I’ll show you our range: modern, traditional, cottage style.’
‘And new bedding, of course. I’d need completely new bedding.’ And about time, she thought.
‘Pop into Davis’s next door. They’ve got a huge range there. Pick out what you want and tell them that we’re delivering for you this afternoon. We’ll fix it up with them.’
Half an hour later Kathy left Davis’s feeling rather numb. It was all so amazingly easy. This wasn’t like battling through the supermarket or the chain store in the high street on a Saturday morning. This was shopping. She felt she’d never really understood before.
There was a vast electrical goods shop further along the mall. There seemed no harm in wandering in, just to get a preliminary idea of what was on the market these days. She had the place to herself. This time two sales assistants fell over each other to serve her. When she came out again, tucking her hot little credit card back in her purse, she made another call to Mrs P, to let her know there would also be a delivery of a new combined washing machine and drier, to be connected on delivery and the old machine taken away, as well as a video/TV, same deal. Oh, and the hair drier and toaster, her old ones being practically antiques. And the waffle maker. She detected a certain avid curiosity from Mrs P, who asked if she might have first refusal on the old stuff.
It was a heady combination, she decided, sex and shopping. She felt oddly elated and exhausted, and thought she’d better sit down calmly somewhere and have a cup of coffee.
She was so dazed that she didn’t realise at first that the couple sitting at the next table in the Cafe de l’Opera were making surreptitious little signals to her. Then she recognised them: the woman with the petition about the music in the mall, together with the tweedy old gent who’d doffed his hat to her when she’d been drinking coffee with Gavin Lowry.
‘Oh, hello,’ she smiled.
‘Would you care to join us?’ the little woman asked, and Kathy, remembering the residents’association, thought, why not? I might as well look as if I’m working, instead of daydreaming of Leon naked in that bloody great bed.
‘Robbie was just telling me that he’d seen you at the weekend with your husband,’ Mrs Rutter beamed, ‘and I said that I’d met you with your children, and so we thought, aha!, a new family we should get to know. This is Robbie Orr, by the way, and I’m Harriet Rutter.’
‘Kathy Kolla,’ she shook their hands, ‘and I’d better explain about the family.’
They looked grave but also extremely interested by what Kathy had to tell them.
‘Ah!’ Mrs Rutter nodded at her companion. ‘Of course we saw the officers here yesterday, but there were conflicting rumours going round as to what they were doing, and I was rather too busy with my own work to question them directly.’
‘We’ll be holding a reconstruction later today, and giving out information to the public. I have some leaflets here, and I wondered if you might like to take them for your members.’
‘Of course.’
‘Shocking business,’ Orr said. Beside Mrs Rutter he looked lanky and craggy and slightly manic, tufts of grizzled hair sticking out of his ears and nostrils and forming the little beard which bobbed up and down as he spoke. ‘Was she seen here, then, on the day she disappeared?’ She had his accent now, clipped, Scottish east coast from Edinburgh or Fife.
‘That’s what we need to establish, Mr Orr. It seems probable from what else we know that she did come here on that afternoon or evening, but we need witnesses.’
‘Professor,’ Mrs Rutter said.
‘Pardon?’
‘Robbie is Professor Orr,’ Mrs Rutter beamed. ‘I thought I should let you know, but you must call us Robbie and Harriet.’
‘Oh. Thank you.’
‘A highly distinguished man. A professor of archaeology.’
‘Former professor of archaeology, now retired,’ he said. ‘A mere amateur historian now, and thorn in Boadicea’s flesh.’
Harriet burst into more trilling laughter. Kathy guessed that this was rather excessive for her, brought on by Professor Orr’s presence.
‘I’m sorry, Kathy. You must excuse us. This is one of our little in-jokes. Boadicea is our name for the manager of this shopping centre. A harridan of a woman, whom Robbie puts securely in her place.’
‘Her ambition, do you see,’ Orr added, acknowledging the compliment with a smile that made his beard jump, ‘is to do, in shopping terms, to London and the Home Counties pretty much what Queen Boadicea did to Roman Britain-which is to say, lay it waste.’
More appreciative laughter.
‘Boadicea-Bo Seager; yes, very good.’ Kathy smiled.
‘You know her, do you?’ They looked at her in surprise.
‘I’ve met her, yes. And I can see what you mean.’
‘Robbie was here before any of us, fighting the good fight. Before the centre was even built.’
‘It was my last major project, Kathy-may I call you that? Sergeant seems wrong somehow. Whenever anyone uses the word sergeant I immediately picture my old drill sergeant, the most terrifying man in all the world. Conditioning, I suppose. You’re not too terrifying, are you, Kathy?’
His beard gave a playful little leap and Kathy thought, you’re a bit of a lad, aren’t you, Robbie?
‘ Well, tell Kathy about your work here, Robbie,’ Mrs Rutter scolded him.
‘Ah yes. Well now, would you be aware of the reason for the name Silvermeadow, Kathy?’
‘No, I’m afraid not.’
‘It’s like this. Do you know that great big ugly structure out there in the upper carpark, with illuminated advertisements for the films showing at the picture house and so on?’
‘Yes.’
‘It’s hard to believe it now, but that used to be the edge of a small wood, a copse really, on the crest of the hill. And one hundred and seventy years ago, a farmer who was ploughing up there, extending his field into the wood, unearthed a hoard of
Saxon silver.’
‘Really?’
‘Aye. It’s believed that it was buried by a nobleman fleeing from the Battle of Maldon, which was fought twenty miles east of here. Would you be familiar with the Battle of Maldon from your schooldays, Kathy?’
‘Er, don’t think I am. Must have been asleep during that one.’
‘Shame on you!’ he teased. ‘Not a huge battle by modern standards, of course, but a great battle for its time all the same, between the Saxons and the Viking horde. I’m talking here of the true Battle of Maldon, of AD 991, not the legendary battle of 994, said to have lasted for fourteen days.’
‘Right.’
‘Aye. Well, anyway, these shopping centre people had no knowledge of the origin of the name. They merely noticed it on their maps as Silvermeadow Hill, and I suppose the combination of images that it conjured up, of hard cash on the one hand and a pastoral fairyland on the other, must have had a strong appeal to them.’
He arched one bushy eyebrow at her, a slightly manic gleam developing in his eye as he made the point. ‘Their choice of name was completely cynical, of course, suggesting that their monstrous new construction had some sort of connection with this place. I’m quite sure they never even considered whether this miserable little hill might have had a history at all. To them, it was merely a suitably positioned piece of real estate that might as well have been in Illinois or Manitoba.
‘But the place did have a history, you see. For after the battle one of the Saxon noblemen and his party were pursued here by the victorious Vikings, as rapacious for silver as the developers of this shopping centre. Indeed, I have no doubt there is a strong genetic connection.’
‘What happened?’
‘The Saxon party arrived here in the late afternoon, exhausted and demoralised, and buried their precious silver in the wood. Then they came down here, where we are now, in the lee of the hill, and made a fire and a camp for the night. They must have thought themselves safe from pursuit. But the Norsemen had not given up, and with the first dawn light they swept over the hill and descended on the Saxons like wolves, slaughtering them, every one.’ Orr paused for effect, sweeping his hand about him. ‘Eight men and boys, all murdered here, their corpses buried on the spot. Here they lay, undisturbed, for precisely one thousand years.’ He leant towards Kathy and fixed her with a wild stare. ‘ Precisely, mind you, that’s the uncanny thing. One millennium, to the day, perhaps the very hour, until they were disturbed by a bulldozer beginning the construction of this place.’
Kathy nodded, imagining the effect of his theatrical story-telling on his lady admirers in the Silvermeadow Residents’ Association.
‘Well, they had to stop, of course, as soon as the skeletons came to light. A proper archaeological assessment had to be made. I was nearby, at the local university, and this was my period, the Viking incursions. I lived here on the site for months, in those site huts you can still see round the east end of the building, with a team of volunteers, students and young people from all over, trying to establish what else was here before they chewed it up in their great machines.’
The imagery struck Kathy as oddly apt, given what had happened to Kerri Vlasich. But then the whole of Orr’s tale, with his rather exultant account of past murder, had an uncomfortable resonance with Kerri’s death.
‘And was there anything else?’
‘No. Oh there were a few surprises beneath the ground for them-a hidden spring, a pocket of sand-but nothing for me. My volunteers left at the end of that first summer, but I returned, from time to time. The construction workers got to know me, the mad professor.’ He chuckled, eyes twinkling. ‘They adopted me, like a mascot, an old goat.’
‘And now he’s one of us,’ Mrs Rutter said. ‘One of our most distinguished members.’
‘Oh now Harriet…’ he admonished her.
‘You must enjoy coming here,’ Kathy said.
‘I should describe it as a love-hate relationship,’ she said. ‘It’s terribly convenient, and comfortable, and we meet all our friends here. But it’s also very crass, of course, so commercial.’
‘It’s worse than that, Harriet. It’s deadening, it feeds on life.’
‘How do you mean?’ Kathy asked.
‘I mean that it feeds on all the real places around here, all the real towns and villages that have been steadily growing and developing for a thousand years, and are now having the life-blood sucked out of them by this great hulking parasite!’ His eyes blazed at the word. ‘And I also mean that it takes the life out of people, too. It is an offence against our natures, Kathy. It sanitises us, deodorises us, and turns us into shadows. Look at them!’ he roared, sweeping an upturned hand like a claw towards the shoppers meandering past. ‘It’s turning a warrior race, the hammer of the Scots, the butchers of the Welsh and Irish, the ravagers of half the globe, into a docile herd of consumers who care for nothing but woolly jumpers and soft music.’
Harriet Rutter gave a delighted chuckle. ‘And yet we keep coming back, do we not, Robbie?’
‘Aye,’ he nodded, calm again, wiping some spittle from his chin. ‘We keep coming back. The only thing that can be said for it is that: just as it has no past, so it also has no future. It didn’t grow out of anything that was here before and nothing will grow out of it; it will not age or acquire the patina of time, and no archaeologist will ever excavate its ruins; for when its usefulness is over its owners, caring nothing for it, will simply bulldoze it, sweep it away, and not a trace of it will remain.’
Brock was taking an early working lunch, munching a pie while he worked through the piles of reports covering his table. Kathy spotted a Sainsbury’s bag by his chair.
‘I’m getting bogged down, Kathy,’ he complained. ‘Buried in paper.’
‘Sorry, you should let me do that,’ she said, guilty at her morning lapse. She still couldn’t quite believe that she’d bought all that stuff. On impulse.
‘No, no. I want you out there, finding out about the girl. There’s a lot about Miss Kerri Vlasich that we don’t know, I’d say. You all right?’
‘Yes. Why?’
‘Just thought you looked a bit… distant. Phil thinks you might be going down with something.’
Going down with something. Well, it did feel a bit like that.
‘No, I’m fine, really. Why don’t you get Gavin Lowry to do it then?’
‘He’s the one shovelling most of it onto my desk,’ Brock said, thoughtful. ‘Yes, you’re right. He can do this. He elected himself to meet the father at Gatwick this afternoon, but we should go. We’ll bring him here for the walk-through. Watch his reaction.’
‘Good idea.’
‘You missed our SIO’s visit,’ Brock said dryly.
‘Oh dear.’
‘Never mind. You’ll see him on TV tonight. He’s made a public statement, appealing for information. You do have a TV, don’t you?’
‘Yes, of course. Gavin isn’t loading the chief super down with paperwork, then?’
Brock smiled. ‘Too nimble on his feet for that, is our Orville. I get the impression he knows Gavin pretty well. He was highly amused when I brought up Gavin’s little worry about reporting direct to him. Said he’d only asked him to let him know if we were short of anything. Didn’t want me to get the impression they were penny-pinching.’
Stefan Vlasich showed little reaction to anything when they picked him up at the airport. He had broad, impassive Slavic features, and seemed determined to show no signs of emotion. He’d been working in the forests near Jaroslaw in eastern Poland, near the Ukraine border, he growled, staring stolidly at the Surrey countryside flashing past the patrol car window. Communications had not been good. It had taken longer than it should have to get him back to Warsaw and catch a plane. How long had he been there, in the forests? He swivelled his blank eyes round at Brock and said, ‘Four weeks. Almost five. Living night and day in a camp with twenty others, laying pipeline. The police spoke to the supervisors. They confirmed it, did
n’t they? What, you think I came over here and killed my own daughter?’
‘We’ll have to go over all this in a formal interview, Mr Vlasich,’ Brock said. ‘I’m sorry, but it’s necessary for the record. But tell me now, will you? I’m curious. You really had no idea at all that your daughter was planning to visit you?’
Kathy was in the front passenger seat, next to the police driver, Brock and Vlasich in the back, Vlasich directly behind her so that she had to swivel right round to see his face.
‘No. No idea,’ he said, and turned away to watch the slip road curve onto the M25.
They crossed the Thames through the Dartford tunnel and emerged into the flat industrial wastes of Essex, and Kathy tried to imagine an earlier landscape, of marshes and Saxon hamlets, without success.
‘Are you taking me to see her?’ Vlasich asked heavily.
Brock replied, ‘Later, Mr Vlasich.’
They passed Junction 29, and then the driver began signalling his turn, and Vlasich said, ‘Where are we?’ Then, seeing the Silvermeadow sign, ‘What is this?’
‘We’re calling in here first, Mr Vlasich,’ Brock said. ‘It’s possible that Kerri died here.’
The vast carpark panorama opened up as the slip road reached the crest.
‘What?’ There was a note of sudden alarm in Vlasich’s voice, the more startling after its persistent monotone.
Kathy twisted round in her seat, but her attention was caught by Brock’s expression as he studied the other man, watchful, attentive, the hunter’s focus in his eyes.
‘She worked here, you know,’ Brock said, sounding the same as before. ‘We’re staging a walk-through with someone who looks like Kerri. We’d like you to witness it, if you wouldn’t mind. Is that all right?’
Kathy turned to look at Vlasich. He was staring at the long low bulk of the building ahead. ‘No… I don’t want… I won’t do this. I don’t want to go in there.’
‘I can understand it might be distressing for you,’ Brock said carefully, sounding more curious than sympathetic. ‘But your observations might help us. You may recognize someone. Something might jog your memory, about something Kerri might have said, or hinted.’
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