opened the conversation, introducing him and Kathy, she turned away and asked what had happened to Miriam, and when he said that PC Sangster was no longer working on this investigation she looked anxiously at Kathy.
‘Are you on your own, Alison?’ Kathy asked, as they sat down.
The woman gave a little nod.
‘Is there anyone we can call, to be with you?’
They watched her reaction, numbness spreading through her. ‘You’ve found Kerri?’ she asked, very slowly. ‘Is that it?’
Lowry took the plastic bag containing the ring from his pocket, and handed it to her. She stiffened and nodded immediately.
‘You’re sure it’s hers?’
‘Yes.’ Her responses were becoming slower and slower, as if she might save her daughter by delaying their news.
‘Might she have given it to someone else? Swapped it with a friend?’
‘No, that’s impossible. Her father sent it to her, for her last birthday. She’s worn it constantly since.’ Alison Vlasich stared at the floor in front of her, at the flowery Axminster, and added dully, ‘Have you come to take me to see her?’
‘No,’ Brock told her gently. ‘We have found someone, a girl of Kerri’s age, with this ring. She seems to have been involved in an accident. It would be better if we make sure who she is before you see her. Has Kerri been to the dentist recently?’
The question made no sense to her, but Mrs Vlasich answered anyway, giving the name of a local practice.
‘Is she dead, this girl?’
‘Yes.’
‘Where… where was the accident?’
‘We’re not certain. But it may have been at Silvermeadow…’
The name had an effect like an electric shock. She went rigid, staring at Brock for an instant, then folded abruptly in half, her hands over her face, sobbing hysterically.
It took a little while to organise a neighbour to stay with Alison Vlasich before they headed off again along the deck around Primrose Court. Their visit had stirred activity. Voices could be heard in the cold night air, and from time to time the patter of running footsteps on the upper deck above them. They took a staircase, comprehensively tagged with graffiti, to the ground. Lowry was ahead of them, hurrying, and as he stepped out into the open a weird sound of whistling made him stop and look up. Out of the darkness overhead Brock was briefly aware of a black object tumbling down through the rain. Before Lowry could move, it smashed to the ground beside him with a shattering explosion. He leapt away and stood staring at the debris.
‘A television set,’ he said, breathless. ‘A fucking TV!’
From overhead they heard a shout, some laughter, then running feet again, like the sound of scurrying rats.
Light suddenly flooded out from one of the front doors and the small figure of an old man lunged forward, bellowing, ‘What? What did they use this time?’
Lowry told him, ‘A TV.’
‘Oh, you’re lucky, mate! Last week it was a bleedin’ dog. From the top deck. What a bleedin’ mess that was!’
‘Who?’ Lowry asked. ‘Who was it?’
‘Kids,’ the man said dismissively. ‘They’ll have calmed down in a year or two. Be full of ’eroin by then, eh? That’ll keep the little bastards quiet.’
There was a further delay while Lowry reported the incident on his phone, demanding a full-scale raid on the estate from an uncooperative duty sergeant.
While they waited, sheltering under an overhang from the sleeting rain, Kathy said to Brock, ‘Two things. The way she reacted to the name Silvermeadow.’
Brock nodded. ‘And the other?’
‘PC Sangster. I’d like to talk to her.’
‘Good idea.’He rubbed a hand across his beard. ‘Never mind, Kathy. It could be worse. You could be stuck in some hideously comfortable room, eating and drinking too much, being chatted up by a ridiculously handsome merchant banker with a yen to get you across his pillion.’
‘An airline pilot. That’s what he was. But it would never have worked. I don’t have the leathers, see.’
3
T raffic was heavy on the motorway, the freezing rain continued to gust in across the Essex flats, and Kathy had difficulty keeping Lowry’s tail lights in sight through the sluicing water. Along the way Brock briefed her on North, the real reason why they were there. She felt a disconcerting sense of having been through this before, for in her first encounter with Brock he had been doing exactly this, using the cover of another murder investigation in order to get a lead on this same elusive North. It had been her first murder case as investigating officer, and she had been both flattered and intimidated to have a senior Yard detective like Brock looking over her shoulder. After she got used to him he had seemed benign, fatherly and harmless. Later she had discovered that he had been trying to track down whoever it was in her division who was supplying information to North’s lawyer. Since she was having an affair with the lawyer at the time, she had been the unwitting prime suspect.
She wasn’t sure how far back Brock and North went, but they were already long-standing adversaries at that time, four years before. Brock had led a team drawn from the Serious Crime Branch and Robbery Squad to hunt North following a series of violent robberies in the London area, culminating in what the tabloids dubbed the ‘City Securities Slayings’, in which two young police officers had been shot dead by the escaping gang. North had fled abroad, but had been lured back to the UK and arrested by Brock, only to escape again while in transit between prisons.
‘You say he was with a little girl?’ Kathy asked.
‘Yes. That’s a mystery. He had a wife and a six-year-old boy when he escaped abroad, but we’ve kept an eye on them over the years and there’s been no hint of contact from him. The wife said she’d had enough of him, and eventually we believed her. She and the boy are living in Southampton now. If he had a girlfriend at that time we didn’t know of it.’
‘The girl might just be cover, someone he borrowed for the day.’
‘Maybe.’ Brock looked unhappy. ‘But who would lend their child to an animal like North, for God’s sake?’
It was a chilling thought. Kathy said, ‘And Lowry and the others, they’re in on this?’
‘No, only those that already knew-Forbes, PC Sangster and her inspector. We’ve asked them to keep it to themselves. Simpler that way. As far as Lowry and the rest are concerned, you and I are investigating the disappearance of Kerri Vlasich. And we will do that, while Bren and his team get on with hunting North. The priority is to sift through the security camera tapes from the centre to get any further sightings of him. If we are very lucky there might a shot of him using a credit card, or getting into a bus or a taxi or car. We’re putting a couple of women officers in shifts into the shop where he was seen, in the hope he might return.’
After a while they saw the sign SILVERMEADOW and followed Lowry up the exit slip road to an overpass bridge. From the top of the embankment the view opened up to the west, the blackness of the night fractured by tall lighting masts illuminating a vast carpark with the brilliance of a football stadium. Beyond the cars, thousands of them, lay the indeterminate outline of a huge building which might have been an assembly plant, or a large warehouse complex. Only the electric hype of the entrances, lit up like pinball machines, signified that this was a place at which the public was welcome.
They parked as near as they could to one of the beckoning entrances, beneath a sign which said REMEMBER! ORANGE CAR PARK, AISLE K 4. They hurried through the rain towards the brilliant orange neon WELCOME TO SILVERMEADOW sign. Beneath it, silhouetted against the glass doors, stood a group of motionless figures, waiting. As they hurried closer, Kathy could make out uniforms.
