secured and an outside contractor comes on call with dog patrols of the outdoor site. Otherwise our security centre is manned all the time.’
‘Okay, well I don’t think we can do much more tonight. We’ll be back tomorrow morning at nine. Maybe you could arrange access for us to unit one-eight-four, so we can start to get things organised. We shall certainly be wanting to go round the shops interviewing staff, and we’ll need to organise a search of the centre too.’
‘A search, chief?’
He looked worried. Kathy noticed that he had lapsed into the slang of the force, addressing Brock as if he were his senior officer.
‘Is that a problem?’ Brock asked.
‘Not for me, chief, but it’s a big job. This is a huge place. How close do you want to look?’
‘We need to find where the girl was assaulted and undressed, and we need to find her belongings, her clothes and the frog bag.’
‘If-’ Jackson began to object, but Brock lifted a hand to interrupt.
‘Okay, I take your point about her possibly being assaulted somewhere else and brought in here only for disposal, but we need to check anyway.’
‘Sure. Well, you’ll need plans of this place for a start. I’ll get them organised, shall I?’
‘That would be very helpful.’
As she watched them shake hands, Kathy thought that Harry Jackson seemed on a bit of a high. Maybe, she thought, he misses the grubby world outside after all.
Towards midnight, Kathy drove home the long way, orbiting London on the M25 round to Junction 25, a Diana King tape playing softly. Too late now to meet up with her airline pilot, who was probably packing his boxer shorts for another trip to LA or KL in the morning. Nicole had thought they might have had a perfect relationship, since he would be away most of the time circling the globe, while she would be equally absent poking about in London’s garbage. Ah, Kathy thought, but what about the one weekend in six when they did manage to touch base together? Might they be like the gelati man, unable to handle the shock of reality, discovering that the gloss is only microns thick?
4
K athy returned to the Hornchurch Street station first thing the following morning, and found PC Miriam Sangster in the canteen, eating a meal after coming off night shift. The building seemed less bleak in the wan morning sunlight, and the emergency seemed to be over, gas supplies resumed to the kitchens and the reassuring smell of deep-fat frying heavy in the air.
Sangster struck Kathy as a brisk, intelligent woman, a wary, sceptical set to her eyes.
‘They switched me to nights,’ she said, wiping her mouth with a paper napkin. ‘Still getting used to it.’
‘I hate that shift,’ Kathy said, spreading butter on toast. ‘Did you hear about the Vlasich girl?’
‘Yes, people were talking about it. Gavin… DS Lowry’s working with you, isn’t he?’
‘Mm. But you were on your own for some of the time when you saw Mrs Vlasich, weren’t you? I thought I’d better go over it with you.’
‘Is there a problem?’ Sangster asked carefully. ‘About what I did? I wrote a fairly full report.’
Kathy sensed the other woman’s caution, just as she had with Lowry, in talking to an outsider. ‘No, no. No problem,’ she reassured her. ‘I’ve seen the report. I just wondered how you felt yourself about the business with the father.’
Sangster shook her head. ‘It was hard to tell without seeing him or the girl. There was a lot of fear on the mother’s side, as if she’d played it out so many times in her imagination, losing Kerri to the father, that when it actually happened she kept swinging from disbelief to absolute certainty. But the company he works for in Hamburg did confirm that he was abroad in Poland, not the UK, working for them on some pipeline project.’
‘Yes, I saw that in your report. But he had other relatives in Hamburg, didn’t he? They could have come over for her, I suppose?’
‘Yes. And there was a Vlasich in the computer, too, with a sex offence on his record, but that turned out to be a dead end. So without any other evidence it seemed simpler to assume she’d gone on her own, probably hitching, and probably to see her dad-she’d threatened to do it. Course, it’s easy to say now…’ she concluded defensively.
‘No, no one’s suggesting you should have done anything differently, Miriam. You spoke to her friends, didn’t you?’
‘I saw two of them at the school, Naomi and Lisa. Mrs Vlasich said they were Kerri’s closest friends, but they knew nothing. They said they had no idea she was planning to run away, and they seemed credible to me. Naomi is the brighter of the two, Naomi Parr-I’d start with her if you want to talk to them. They both have jobs at Silvermeadow, too.’
‘How do they get over there? It’s quite a way.’
‘The centre runs special bus services to bring people in from surrounding towns. One runs right past their school and the estate.’
‘Convenient.’
‘Yes. You’ve seen Mrs Vlasich, have you?’
‘Yes. When we told her the news. She was very shaken up, of course, didn’t say a lot.’
‘You mentioned Silvermeadow, did you? Did she say anything about that?’
Kathy noticed a certain hesitancy in the way Sangster said this. ‘That did seem to shake her, when we mentioned that. It seemed to hit her then. She went to pieces after that. Why?’
Sangster hesitated, then leant forward. ‘Did she mention the others?’
‘Others?’
The constable frowned and lowered her voice. ‘Gavin will say this is rubbish, but there’ve been stories going round about Silvermeadow: young girls going missing, a monster in the mall, stuff like that. Mrs Vlasich had obviously heard them, and she confided in me, after Gavin had left. The idea really terrified her.’
‘Nobody’s mentioned this. It’s not in your report.’
‘No, of course not. It’s just another one of those urban myths. You know, like that tattooed man with the hangman’s noose who’s supposedly been spotted in every other multi-storey carpark between Glasgow and Exeter, or the West African cannibal prince who lives on baby stew and has been seen-really, actually seen -with a baby’s tibia through his nose, by a friend of a friend of half the population of Leicester.’
Kathy smiled. ‘Yes, I know. And you’d heard the Silvermeadow stories yourself, had you? Before Alison Vlasich brought them up?’
‘Yes, I’d heard them, not through my job but from my partner. He’s a schoolteacher, and he was told about them by the kids in his class. He told them that they were just fairy-tales reinventing themselves, like Babes in the Woods, Little Red Riding Hood. But the kids wouldn’t have it. They knew the stories were true. They’d heard them from someone who had actually spoken to someone else who was a close relative of someone who had been there at the time. They were so convinced that he told me about it, and I agreed to check the computer. And of course there was absolutely nothing to it. I couldn’t find a single missing person report that made any mention of Silvermeadow. I told Gavin about it afterwards, and he advised me to forget it.’
‘Had he heard the stories before?’
PC Sangster lit a cigarette, thinking. ‘I don’t think so, not when I first mentioned it. But he spoke to me again a day or two later. He’d talked to someone he knows at Silvermeadow, one of the security people there, and they’d told him it was nonsense.’
‘So they’d heard of it?’
‘Oh yes. Gavin said they were really pissed off about it. They even thought one of their competitors might have deliberately started the rumours. That’s why he said to forget it. Only’-she exhaled a column of pale smoke from the side of her mouth up at the ceiling extract grille-‘when they told me she’d been traced to Silvermeadow, my blood went cold. Really, it did. I wondered what Mrs Vlasich must be thinking.’
‘Yes, I see.’
