it sounds as if we’re going to be involved in a lot of checking and interviewing. It’s possible that we’ll have to bring a number of officers here for a while at least. We could bring our own mobile offices onto the site, but if you’ve got anywhere suitable it might be more discreet.’
‘How about unit one-eight-four?’ Jackson suggested.
‘Yes,’ Bo Seager agreed. ‘It’s on the next side mall, and vacant right now. The shopfitting for the next tenants doesn’t start till after Christmas. There’s a phone line and a staff toilet.’
‘Sounds ideal. What time do you close tonight?’
‘Ten o’clock. Another half an hour or so.’
‘Then I think we’ll have a quick look at the compactors now.’
Bo Seager held out her hand, and Kathy now noticed the lines of fatigue round her eyes. ‘I’ve told Harry to help in any way he can, Chief Inspector. These things happen, I guess, even in the most carefully planned set-ups. It’s an aberration, a glitch. Let’s get it cleared up as painlessly as possible, huh?’
Brock smiled and took the offered hand. Kathy could guess what he was thinking. She hadn’t seen the aberration herself, the smashed figure, so the sentiment was understandable, given her perspective.
Jackson led the way out of the management offices, on the way picking up a handful of glossy brochures with maps of the centre and dispensing them to the detectives like a tour guide. They followed him to the locked fire door at the end of the service corridor, where he demonstrated the security procedure, tapping his code into the keypad before opening the door and ushering them through to a bare concrete stair landing.
‘Is that recorded at all, Harry?’ Lowry asked. ‘Your opening the door?’
‘Oh dear me yes, Gavin. All the security doors are networked. The computer records the PIN of anyone opening a door, with time and location. We can provide a printout of all that.’
‘Does every employee have a separate number?’ Brock asked.
‘Not everyone, no. Each tenant applies to us for numbers for their staff, usually senior staff only. They don’t bother to get one for every salesgirl and cleaner.’
‘So, if a manager was busy, say, and needed to send one of the lads down to the service bay to pick up a delivery, what would he do?’
Jackson was ahead of them on the stair, his voice echoing back up as he replied. ‘Get someone with a code to go down.’
‘Or give the lad someone else’s number,’ Brock suggested.
‘Strictly forbidden!’
‘Still,’ Kathy heard Brock murmur. ‘It is Christmas…’
They reached the bottom and pushed the bar on another fire door and found themselves on a loading platform on the edge of the service area, the air suddenly humid and sharp with the stench of diesel fumes. High overhead the underside of the concrete slab was strung with colour-coded pipes and ducts, and somewhere in the background, out of sight, they heard the growl and warning signal of a truck reversing. With an athletic hop Jackson jumped down to the roadway, keeping up his tour-guide commentary of Interesting Facts.
‘Strong, eh?’ he said, sniffing the air, keeping a watchful eye on their descent to the slab, wet with the trails of truck tyres coming in from the outside. ‘We’ve had a lot of traffic down here today. Diesel fumes are heavier than air, right? So most of the big extract ducts are at low level.’ He pointed to grilles in the face of the wall below the edge of the loading platform. ‘Even so, it can get a bit thick on a busy day.’
‘Where’s the blue compactor from here, Harry?’ Lowry said, turning the plan in his hand as though trying to orient himself.
‘Round that corner. Not far.’
‘Security cameras down here?’
‘Only at the entrance to the service road. Not in this area, unfortunately. Not normally considered a hot spot, see? All the shop units backing onto the service road’-he waved a hand at the row of blank doors along the length of the loading platform-‘are alarmed, and we’ve never had a break-in attempt from down here.’
They marched briskly along the service road to the corner, where the space broadened out into a manoeuvring area. The reversing truck was ahead of them, along with several others backed against delivery bays on the far side. To their right, three figures in white overalls were stooped behind a crime scene tape examining the control panel on a large blue steel box.
They got to their feet as they saw the group approaching, one of them nodding at Gavin Lowry. ‘Don’t reckon much on trying to take this thing apart. It’s got hydraulic lines, compression springs… Reckon we could do it, or ourselves, a bit of damage if we tried. We need an experienced mechanic.’
‘I can arrange that,’ Jackson said. ‘We have a maintenance contract with the suppliers. Don’t know about tonight, though.’
They agreed to leave the compactors until the morning, the SOCOs moving off to search the surrounding roadways and access corridors.
Kathy stared at the mute blue box, trying to imagine how it would have been done. A loading platform ran down its far side and across the back end, providing the height from which waste could be hoisted into the feeder scoop on the top of the machine. The platform had a ramp connecting it to the roadway, so that laden trolleys could be rolled up. And the girl had been light, only eighty-eight pounds Brock had told her. One man could have managed it without difficulty, and probably quite openly, with her packed inside the plastic bag inside a cardboard box. The box itself would probably tell them nothing-next to the compactor was a big wire trailer full of loose boxes waiting to be loaded into the machine, any one of which would have done.
Brock walked up the ramp, pulled a large box out of the trailer and took it to the scoop on the machine. It fitted easily through the opening. ‘Then what?’ he called to Jackson, looking up at him from the roadway.
‘Hit the green button.’
He did so. The machine gave a slight lurch and a snort, as if waking from a nap. An amber warning light on its top began flashing, a steel cover slid automatically across the feeder opening, and with a deep throbbing the motor cut in. After a moment’s pause the compactor began vibrating with the passage of the hydraulic ram down its interior. There was a sound of crackling and crunching as the material inside was crushed harder and harder against the far end. Then a moment of heavy, throbbing consolidation followed by a long, deep sigh as the hydraulic pressure was released, the ram withdrawn slowly. When that was complete, the light and motor switched off and with a final shudder the machine went back to sleep.
They walked back with a cold breeze fanning their faces, refreshing in the humid, fumy fug of the service road, until they saw a striped barrier across the way ahead, controlling access at the foot of the entry ramp, a guard visible at a control window to one side.
Jackson led them into a large, brightly lit room glittering with VDUs, computer screens and zoned alarm panels alive with winking multi-coloured lights. As he described the functions of the pieces of equipment and introduced them to his operatives, Kathy noticed that Harry Jackson had relaxed.
‘Nothing like a bit of technology to make everyone feel more secure, eh?’ he said. ‘That’s what people want to keep the bogeyman at bay these days. In the States the latest thing is to have your security centre right up there, in the mall, where everyone can see you behind plate glass, with all your computers and communication equipment, and they can all feel safe in the knowledge that Speedy there is keeping his beady little eyes on everything on legs.’ He nodded at one of the figures watching the VDUs, a pony-tailed man who raised a hand in acknowledgement without turning away from his flickering screens, his jaw muscles working on gum. ‘Although it wouldn’t be Speedy sitting there, nor me come to that, because we’re not photogenic enough.’
He gave a laugh, and raised a smile from Lowry.
‘Straight up, Gavin, it’s true. You should see the girls they have on mall patrol in some of those places in Florida! They look like Hollywood film extras. Leads to a glamourisation of the industry, see?’ He shot a quick glance at Kathy to see if he’d said something inappropriate. Or perhaps her silence was beginning to bother him. ‘I suppose it’ll come to us all, eventually.’
‘You keep yourself in pretty good shape, Harry,’ Lowry said. ‘You’ve lost a bit of weight since I saw you last.’
‘I do my best, Gavin. At my age you’ve got to take care of yourself. And we’ve got everything here at Silvermeadow, you know. I work out at the gym three times a week, and have a swim most days.’
‘What sort of crime do you get here, Harry?’ Brock asked.
‘Shop theft’s the main thing, as you’d expect. We work closely with the tenants’ own staff on that. Mostly it’s
