caffe latte for Lowry.
‘Thanks darling,’ Lowry said, then to Kathy, ‘You haven’t met our SIO, have you?’
‘Forbes? No, never heard of him before. Harry Jackson didn’t seem impressed. You don’t like him?’
Lowry smiled grimly. ‘Orville M. Forbes. Old Mother Forbes. Doesn’t matter whether I like him, Kathy. The problem is, as everybody’s so well aware these days, there are just too many chiefs in this force and not enough fucking Indians. So the people who are paid to think about these things imagine they can recycle old papershufflers like Forbes into born-again coal-face detectives and leaders of major investigations.’ He shook his head grimly. ‘Snowball’s chance. He wouldn’t have the faintest idea where to begin. And he knows it. That’s why he’s persuaded them to bring in your guv’nor, to save his skin.’
‘Do you think so?’
‘I’m certain of it. He’s scared shitless that he’ll screw up his first major crime investigation with the eyes of the world focused on him. He told me once he has a recurring nightmare. He’s a schoolboy again, playing cricket, standing in the outfield with a long easy catch coming straight at him, and he drops it and loses the match, and all his friends and teachers and family are there to see it.’
They watched a tall elderly man, bewhiskered, stiff-backed, marching by. He was wearing a heather-green Harris tweed jacket and matching cap, and swinging a gnarled walking stick, a laird taking a brisk constitutional through his glen. As he passed he doffed his hat to them.
‘Jesus…’ Lowry muttered. ‘This place is full of weirdos.’
‘Does it matter, about Forbes? As long as he keeps out of our way.’
‘But he won’t, he can’t. He’s petrified by failure and greedy for success. He’ll worry, and dabble, and interfere, and stuff us up. People like us have got to persuade people like Forbes, the grey crust through which we must eventually rise if we are ever to achieve seniority in this lifetime, that they should pack it in and bugger off to Bognor.’
‘How do we do that?’
‘By subjecting them to stress. They don’t like stress. Can’t take it any more. If you load them up with stress, they soon begin to dream of early retirement… or something else.’
‘Something else?’
Lowry stretched his arms out and ran the flat of his palm down the short hair of his nape. ‘My last boss passed away on the job, Kathy. His secretary came in with his coffee one morning, and there he was, stretched out across his desk, cold as yesterday’s toast. Stroke, probably down to stress, the doctor said.’ He paused, glanced at Kathy, then picked up the glass of creamy liquid that Sonia had placed in front of him. ‘I like to think that was my personal contribution to resolving the unbalanced staff profile of the Metropolitan Police.’
‘You killed him with stress?’ She stared at him, trying to decipher his expression.
Lowry licked his lips, then allowed them to form a little smile. ‘He didn’t realise it, of course. He thought I was trying to help.’
Kathy decided this was some kind of test of her sense of humour. ‘Well, well. So now you want to kill Forbes the same way?’
He nodded thoughtfully.
‘Brock knows, you know,’ Kathy said.
That made him sit up. ‘What?’
‘That you’ve been told to report directly to Forbes. Without telling Brock. Forbes did tell you to do that, didn’t he?’
Lowry stared at her for a long moment before the little smile reappeared. ‘What made you think of that?’
‘It occurred to me down below last night, when Jolly Harry asked you to bypass his boss in the same way.’
Lowry’s grin broadened. ‘You’ve got the advantage of being a woman, Kathy. You’ll have your own way to get through the grey crust. They’ll pull you up in the name of gender balance. But that doesn’t mean we can’t give each other a helping hand, does it?’
Kathy sipped at her coffee, watching the early shoppers now drifting along the mall. Across the way was a bookshop, and outside it a small boy studying a pyramid of books about Manchester United. He didn’t look like the type you’d usually find near a bookshop: baseball cap reversed over longish black locks, baggy jacket and pants, dark eyes watchful in a thin pale face. And a mobile phone clipped to his belt, of course. The essential teenage fashion accessory. She wondered if she might be witnessing one of Harry Jackson’s ‘exception events’ in progress, and she looked around for a ‘hot spot’ camera, imagining Speedy in the basement silently panning in on the boy. Maybe all this time he’d been watching Lowry and herself, reading their lips.
‘What about Brock, then?’ Lowry said.
‘You want to kill him too? I don’t think he’d fold so easily, Gavin.’
‘Getting a bit old for this lark though, isn’t he? Why isn’t he higher than DCI?’
‘He’s what he wants to be. He doesn’t want to spend his life chairing meetings.’
‘Bollocks. People only say that sort of thing when they haven’t been given the option. Maybe he did something naughty once…’ He sat back, musing, stroking the back of his head. ‘Something they buried. Something that might come to light again if he tried to go higher… Maybe we should look.’
Kathy shook her head, suddenly tiring of this. She had thought of asking him what he thought of the possibility that Kerri Vlasich might not be the only one to have disappeared through the blue compactor, but now she decided to say nothing. ‘Forget it, Gavin. Come on, we’d better see how things are going.’ She got up and went to the counter to pay Sonia.
They found Brock seated at a desk at the back of the unit, his jacket off, sleeves rolled up, talking into a mobile phone while he signed a requisition form on a clipboard that a clerk held out for him. All around him unit 184 was being rapidly transformed, and Kathy had to step back to allow furniture removers to pass by with desks and chairs. The patterns left by shelving and display racks stripped from the pinboard walls were being obscured by enlarged plans of the centre and of the surrounding area, schedules and gridded roster sheets. A couple of electricians were working on ladders up in the suspended ceiling void, other technicians were setting up computer workstations. A dozen uniformed men and women were already there, standing chatting together, and a second group had followed Kathy and Gavin Lowry inside.
Brock nodded as he saw them approach, finished his call and said, ‘Gavin, help our action manager organise the search teams over there, will you? We need to get these characters moving. Kathy, you haven’t seen Leon Desai by any chance?’
‘Yes, ten minutes ago.’
‘How’s he doing? I can’t raise him on his mobile-there seems to be a dead spot down there.’
‘He thinks another hour before they’ve finished dismantling the machine. I don’t think they’ve got anything yet.’
‘Hmm. OK, well, we can’t wait. Let’s get this thing moving.’ His brow furrowed, a last moment of uncertainty. Kathy had seen that look before. ‘Always difficult to be sure,’ he said. ‘Go in too early and you don’t know what questions to ask, too late and the trail may be cold, the answers faded away. I’d like to have given them pictures of the girl’s father to take round with them, but I don’t think we can wait.’ He grunted and shook his head, as if to shake the doubts away, then got to his feet and called for their attention.
He was good at this, Kathy thought, striking the right balance between recognising the sombre mood of a murder inquiry and giving them the taste for a hunt that might last a long time. He announced that the pathologist had now confirmed the identity of the body as Kerri Vlasich, through her dental records. He then gave a very brief account of the background, with the calm of someone who had been down such tracks many times before, and spoke of the incinerator and compactor with just an edge of outrage in his voice, so that the frisson would be implanted and maintained, even though they were forbidden from mentioning these details to the public, and above all to the press.
They would begin by dividing their forces, Gavin Lowry taking some to continue the search begun by the SOCO team, spreading out through the huge centre and beyond into the surrounding carparks and service areas, the remainder interviewing the staff in the shops.
The questions: names, addresses and phone numbers of all employees; names, addresses and phone numbers of all suppliers who made deliveries between the nominated dates; possible sightings of the girl in the
