‘Tell me, when did she die? Do they know?’
‘We don’t know for certain it’s Kerri’s body yet, Miriam.’
‘Oh come off it, Kathy. When did she die?’
Kathy could follow the train of thought, and she looked down to sip from her tea. ‘Some time this week. They’re not certain.’
‘So it could have been Thursday, say,’ the constable added softly. ‘She might still have been alive when I told her mother that it had nothing to do with Silvermeadow…’
‘Miriam, you couldn’t-’
‘And I didn’t do a bloody thing to check.’
‘You phoned the people where she worked, didn’t you? No one had seen her.’
‘Yes.’ Miriam Sangster crushed out her cigarette with a bitter little flourish and got to her feet. ‘Really thorough that was, wasn’t it?’ She swung away, then stopped and turned back. ‘If you can avoid telling Gavin that I told you this, I’d be grateful. We do have to go on working together when this is over.’
‘Sure.’ Kathy smiled reassuringly. There was something ever so slightly self-consciously casual about Miriam’s use of his first name that made Kathy wonder if she and Gavin had ever done more than work together.
At this hour on a Sunday morning the carpark was bare, the building as forlorn as a vast abandoned circus tent in a macadam desert. Kathy parked next to the head of the service road ramp and descended to the striped barrier, where the man at the control window looked up briefly from his Sunday paper, glanced at her ID and nodded her in. She walked along the service road past the first compactor area, its tape untouched from the previous night, and on towards the sound of metallic clanging, men’s voices, a dog’s sudden bark. Turning the corner she saw the blue compactor taken half apart, white overalls crawling over its loosened panels on the ground, a dog and its handler working further along the service road. The man in blue denim overalls wielding the large spanner was presumably the mechanic, talking to a SOCO with hands on hips, whose face Kathy couldn’t see. She was aware of the mechanic registering her, his eyes flicking over to give her a quick appraisal. The SOCO turned to see what he was looking at, and Kathy saw the Indian features and recognised Leon Desai.
There was no reason at all why the laboratory liaison sergeant shouldn’t be there. Brock had undoubtedly insisted on it, and Kathy should have anticipated it. But she hadn’t, and the sudden sight of him there brought the colour up on her cheeks. The last time she had seen him he’d been in a hospital bed, crippled in the line of duty, and they had parted on bad terms. He had lain there in all his martyred dignity and accused her, quite rightly, of not having trusted him. She could remember his words precisely- you’re so bloody determined to trust nobody -as if it had been a deliberate policy on her part, a character flaw, rather than a mistake. She had left under a private cloud from beneath which it had taken her some time to crawl.
So by rights he should now have turned away and ignored her, but instead he was walking towards her. He stopped a yard away and looked at her with his steady dark eyes, unsmiling, and said, ‘Hello, Kathy. It’s good to see you again.’
Was it? Had she gone through all that soul-searching for no reason? He seemed perfectly sincere, genuinely glad to see her. She noticed the small pale scar across his left eyebrow and remembered herself telling him, not entirely unmaliciously, that he would no longer be perfect.
‘And you, Leon. Great.’
A smile slowly formed on his face, and she hurriedly said, ‘How are things going?’ meaning his broken jaw and leg, but he replied, ‘Nothing yet. It’ll take another hour or more to get this thing apart.’
‘Ah.’
‘You’ve come for Brock’s briefing? You’ll need a security code to get into the centre from here. Do you have one?’
She shook her head.
‘Use the one they’ve given me. Two-one-eight-nine. Want to write it down?’
‘No need. That’s the last four digits of your phone number.’
‘You’re right. Amazing memory.’ He smiled and turned back to his work.
She went down the service passage they had used the previous evening, using the security code to emerge into the lower mall as before. The emptiness and silence were uncanny, no background music or birdsong, no movement on the escalators, no people on the gleaming terrazzo, but still something, the building’s own presence, saying yes, I’m still here even when you’re not, I still exist and maybe have secrets.
Then a cleaner came buzzing round the corner on a ride-on floor polisher. The building reverted to background and the illusion evaporated.
Kathy walked up the dormant escalator to the upper mall, past the deserted Christmas tree, and looked for unit 184 in the side mall beyond. She spotted Gavin Lowry outside a shopfront filled with promotional posters for Christmas in the mall, hiding the unit’s interior, and assumed this must be the place. He was tugging a cigarette out of a packet, and when he saw her he said, ‘It’s chaos in there-electricians causing havoc.’
‘How long have you been here?’
‘Couple of hours. Come on, I need a coffee.’
They found a cafe nearby, just opening, and sat outside in an area of the mall defined by low clipped hedges in tubs. The cafe itself was tiled to resemble a Turkish bath house and the waitress who came to their table had her thick black hair tied up in a bandanna, and wore a scarlet blouse that might have suggested something oriental.
‘You Sonia?’ Lowry said.
‘That’s right,’ she said, suppressing a yawn.
‘Harry Jackson told us you’d look after us, Sonia. He said your coffee’s the best in the mall.’
‘Oh yes. I know Harry all right. Are you in his line of business, then?’
Lowry nodded and showed her his warrant card. ‘You’ll be seeing quite a bit of us. We’re taking over that unit down there for a while. Should be good for business. Our boss is a coffee connoisseur, isn’t that right, Kathy?’
‘That’s nice,’ Sonia said warily. ‘What you here for anyway? Is it public relations?’
Kathy watched Lowry tell her, show her Kerri’s picture, Sonia’s look of disgust, thinking how many times they would have to go through this, with hundreds of shopkeepers, thousands of customers. It made her feel depressed, but Lowry seemed to be enjoying it. He ended with something that sounded like a chat-up line.
‘You from the exotic east yourself then, Sonia?’
‘Yeah, Bermondsey. What’s your fancy then?’
Looking up through the tinted acrylic vault high above their heads, Kathy caught the glimmer of sunlight on cloud, too weak to compete with the warm intensity of artificial sunlight in the mall. A group of elderly people bustled past, kitted out in tracksuits, sweatbands and dazzling white shoes as if they really meant business. The pace was set by the joggers, moving marginally more slowly than the walkers, though with greater show. On their backs they bore the motto SILVER MEADOWLISTS.
‘Weird sort of place, isn’t it?’ Lowry said, blowing smoke after them. ‘Connie raves about it.’
‘Your wife?’
He nodded.
‘You have kids?’ Kathy asked.
‘Last time I looked,’ he said, off-hand. ‘They hated it here, for some reason. Now Connie comes on her own, when they’re at school.’
‘And you know Bren Gurney.’
Lowry turned back from watching Sonia making their coffees behind the counter. ‘Yeah. Used to play rugger with him. And we went on the inspector’s course together. He came out top, and I was second. We’ve got a lot in common, I reckon.’
Kathy doubted that, but said nothing.
‘How do you work with him, the old man?’ Lowry continued, voice becoming more intimate. ‘Your boss. Keeps a close eye on you, does he?’
‘Not really.’
‘Cunning old bugger, Bren said. Close.’
‘Did Bren say that?’
‘Something like that.’
With a soft clash of seraglio bangles Sonia appeared with their coffees, a thimbleful of espresso for Kathy,
