But the Hamburg police had confirmed that the company he worked for was quite certain that Stefan Vlasich was in Poland all through the period Kerri was missing. He was still there, waiting for a plane that would now bring him over to bury his daughter, and they would have their chance to interview him when he arrived. A simpler explanation was that she had started hitch-hiking, and had been picked up by someone on their way to make a delivery to Silvermeadow. Someone who had murdered her and then used the simplest and most anonymous disposal method available.
Kathy was about to set off with the two girls when her phone rang. It was Miriam Sangster.
‘Can I talk to you again?’ the constable said.
‘I thought you’d have gone off duty by now, Miriam,’ Kathy said.
‘I’m still here. There’s something I wanted to tell you. It won’t take long, but it’s quite urgent.’
‘I’m not far away now, but I’ve got the girls in the car with me, Naomi and Lisa. I suppose I could call in at the station.’
‘No, don’t come in. I’ll meet you round the corner in the high street, near the pillar-box outside the post office. It’ll be quicker for you. I’ll only take a minute.’
Kathy found the place and parked on a double yellow line, making desultory conversation with the two girls in the back. She asked which of them had the best job, and they explained, reluctantly, the good points and the bad. Kerri’s had seemed the most glamorous and the most fun, in her costume and make-up, talking to the customers, whizzing about on her skates. But the skates were hard on your legs after a while, and sometimes she’d get a customer who would hassle her. No, no one special, just sometimes she’d get a troublemaker, whereas Lisa and Naomi didn’t have so much of that.
Then Kathy spotted Miriam Sangster, out of uniform now, crossing the zebra up ahead and hurrying towards the car. She got out and walked up to meet her in front of the post-office window.
‘Sorry,’ the constable said. She had the same stubborn, preoccupied look about her that Naomi had had. ‘I thought you’d want to know this.’
‘Fire away.’
‘Okay.’ She took a deep breath, then began, speaking low although the street was deserted this cold Sunday morning. ‘When I tried to check that rumour, about Silvermeadow, remember?’
‘Yes.’
‘I was checking missing persons, and there were no references to the centre at all. But this morning, after we spoke, I tried a different line. Obvious really. I called up all the reports we’d had from Silvermeadow. There weren’t a lot, considering its size. A couple of ram raids, a few dozen shoplifters they decided to prosecute, some car thefts, some heart attacks, one fatal, that we attended, that sort of stuff.’
‘Yes, that’s pretty much what they told us. Go on.’
‘Then I came across Norma Jean.’ She sucked in her breath as if the memory was troubling. ‘A right pain she was. Young, under sixteen we thought, and a vagrant. I remember her causing trouble round here a couple of summers ago, begging, soliciting. Then when the weather turned chilly she took a fancy to Silvermeadow and started making a nuisance of herself there. We were called out a couple of times. I attended once-she’d been found in the women’s toilets, out cold with a needle in her arm and someone else’s handbag on the floor beside her. She was put in a shelter, then juvenile detention. But she kept coming back. The youth offender team took her under their wing for a while, but no one could really handle her. She was like a headache that wouldn’t go away. And then one day someone in the canteen said, whatever happened to Norma Jean? And we realised that the headache seemed to have disappeared. No one had heard of her for weeks. It was wonderful.’
‘She wasn’t reported missing?’
‘No way. Nobody gave a damn. I just phoned her last social worker. She said the same thing. Sometime around March, Norma Jean stopped being a bother, and everybody breathed a great big sigh of relief. She’d tried to follow it up, but couldn’t find out anything. In theory, Norma Jean is still on her load.’
Kathy didn’t say anything at first, not wanting to sound dismissive. Miriam Sangster was clearly taking this very much to heart.
‘Yes, all right,’ the constable said, ‘there are hundreds of Norma Jeans, thousands.’
‘She probably just moved on, Miriam. Decided to go somewhere she wasn’t so well known.’
‘Yes. But still, I thought our records showed that no one had disappeared from Silvermeadow. Now I can’t be certain, can I?’
‘Tell you what. I’ll check her out in the Silvermeadow security records. They may have something on her that we don’t.’
‘Thanks.’
‘And let me know if you find anything else. You said that Mrs Vlasich had heard some stories at the hospital?’
‘Yes, but I think she got it confused. A cook had heard it from a nurse who’d supposedly heard an old woman say she’d lost her young daughter at Silvermeadow. Sounded like classic urban myth stuff.’
‘Yes, well, frankly I’d forget about it. You’ve done about as much as you can.’
The other woman nodded reluctantly, relieved all the same. ‘I hope you get something soon.’
The girls seemed to brighten a little once they were under the dappled artificial sunshine of the mall, as if this was where they were most at home, whereas Kathy felt the same sense of disorientation as before. It was full of people again now, not as in a city street hurrying past without eye contact, but a relaxed crowd such as one might find at a fairground, perhaps, or a fete, sharing some implied sense of community and well-being. Yet there seemed no substance to it here, no relationships and ties that one might hope to uncover between people in a real street or town. Here everyone was afloat, gliding through a fantasy. She recalled Bo Seager’s remark about sharks following the shoals. A shark could easily pass unnoticed here.
They walked down the main mall, the girls pointing out the stores where they liked to window shop, the characters they knew by sight or reputation, and gradually the shock of Kerri’s murder seemed to fade from their minds, as if time and reality were suspended in the magic grove, and all the intractable grubbiness of life dissolved away in the glowing golden light. From time to time their eyes would be drawn to a sparkling shop display, and Kathy would pause with them and find herself drawn into their conversation, checking out some lovely thing that none of them had a use for. Then she would have to turn away, and remember what they were supposed to be doing, and get them moving again. Lulled by the scented air, the music not too loud or too soft but just right, it was hard to imagine that anything unpleasant could ever have really happened here-an abduction, a murder. In here the foetal figure waiting for the incinerator was no more than a chimera, a bad dream.
They stood at the balcony overlooking the food court for a while, listening to the sounds of fountains and waterfalls from the rain forest on this side of the lagoon, and the girls pointed out where they worked, and the other food stalls that formed the perimeter of the court. Between Mexican Pete’s and the Peking Duck was the Soda Factory, done up like an American drugstore counter in stainless steel and red leather stools. Then there was Snow White’s Pancake Parlour, and they were silent for a moment as they watched the girls on their roller skates, gliding skilfully on long legs between the tables.
They descended on the escalator and came to the shore of the volcanic lagoon. There was a uniformed copper standing there in conversation with one of the locals, who was explaining what happened.
‘Yeah, well, first you get yer warning tremors and rumblings see.’
‘Right, right.’ The officer nodded seriously, as if this was significant evidence.
‘Well then yer water starts moving, ominous right, and you ’ear the sound of frightened birds. Then the eruption starts-bangs and roars from the mountain-then smoke and sparks comin’out from the peak, and after a while molten lava starts flowing down the sides.’
‘Molten lava! You’re having me on.’
‘No, right up. Course it’s not yer actual molten lava, naturally. It’s an illusion, see, made with coloured lights hidden down the sides of the volcano. But it’s convincing. Then the water foams up, and that native canoe over there tips up in the air and sinks under the waves, like a whirlpool’s sucked it down. You should see it, mate. You’ll be impressed. Get your mates down here, on the hour.’
‘Yeah.’ The policeman nodded thoughtfully. Kathy could imagine the scene that afternoon: small children and grannies complaining that they couldn’t see for all the hulking great coppers in the front row.
But Lisa and Naomi were bored by this. They’d seen Mauna Loa erupt so many times. They led Kathy across to the far side of the food court, where an abrupt leap took place from the Pacific to Ali Baba’s Arabian Nights.
