Large pots belonging to the Forty Thieves stood at the entrance of the Grand Bazaar, the name written in Arabic- style neon lettering over the cave-like entry, guarded by a turbaned mannequin with a flute frozen in the act of charming a cobra out of its basket.
‘Do they have snake-charmers in Arabia?’ Kathy asked, then saw from the look on the girls’ faces that the question made no sense.
Inside the Bazaar the lighting levels dropped sharply, small spotlights dazzling like stars overhead against a black ceiling, a theme taken up in many of the shops. These were clearly aimed at the teen market-lurid T-shirt boutiques, a Doc Martens store, pop CDs, an electronic games arcade and a salon offering challenging concepts in hair and the piercing of body parts.
There seemed to be something going on here, voices raised above the general noise. Two uniformed officers, a man and a woman, were talking to the agitated tenant of the games arcade, a black man with dreadlocks.
‘Look!’ he yelled at them, brandishing his arms, rattling the gold bangles on his wrists. ‘You lot think that every black guy wearing a bit of gold jewellery is nicking stuff or selling drugs, don’t you? That’s what it is, innit?’
‘Keep your voice down please, sir,’ the male officer said.
‘No, I won’t shut up, ’cos it’s true, innit? I get this all the time, don’t I? You think I’m selling these kids drugs, is that it?’
‘Are you?’ the woman cut in.
All around them in the unit, teenage boys were easing away from the machines they had been playing and slipping away into the mall. Among them Kathy saw the boy she’d seen that morning outside the bookshop. He glanced back over his shoulder, then skipped into a run and disappeared into the crowd.
‘Hang on, you stay right there.’ The male officer left his colleague and moved over to two boys trying to leave. He bent forward and started talking to them. One of them shrugged and reluctantly began to turn out his pockets.
Kathy didn’t know the officers. The woman was trying to make some point with the operator of the arcade, who was now adopting an exaggerated pose of silence. Kathy walked over and showed the woman her warrant card. ‘Can I help?’
‘No, it’s okay.’ The woman smiled. She seemed calm and in control. ‘We’ve received some information regarding Mr Starkey, and we’re just persuading him to close up shop so we can talk to him. We can manage, thanks.’
‘What information?’ the man shouted. ‘What you fucking talking about?’
‘Watch your language, Winston,’ the woman PC said sharply.
Kathy turned back to the girls, and they continued on through the Bazaar until the dark mall opened into a small square from which another set of escalators led upwards towards light and another abrupt change of scene. Here they were on a gallery with large observation windows along one wall, overlooking the leisure centre and pool. It was busy down there, full of little kids with their dads, grandparents sitting under the palm trees and striped umbrellas on the astroturf waving encouragingly to the bodies in the surf, children sliding down the curling multi- coloured intestines of the water chutes, whooping and screaming silently beyond the glass. And there was surf too, surging from the wave machine at the deep end of the huge pool and spreading out across its surface to lap finally on the sandy beach.
‘You come up here do you?’ Kathy asked, looking at the benches for spectators along the gallery.
‘Sometimes, when we have a break at work.’
‘What, to check out the good-looking boys?’ Kathy suggested.
Lisa giggled and Naomi glowered disapprovingly at her.
‘What’s down there?’ Kathy asked. To the right she could see the shops of the main upper mall, but to the left the gallery continued across the end of the leisure centre, then narrowed to a set of glass doors.
‘That’s the gym and fitness centre,’ Naomi said, offhand.
‘Can we go in?’
‘If you want.’
Through the glass doors the public gallery continued as a narrower bridge, with a view on one side over squash courts, and on the other into a gymnasium full of machines. The floor of these rooms was only a few metres below the gallery level here, and the people working out below seemed almost close enough to touch. They stood for a while watching a couple of young women capably thrashing a ball around one of the squash courts, then turned to view a muscular male through the other window, pounding the leather arms of the machine in which he lay. He was almost directly below them, the beads of sweat visible on his body as he lifted and dropped, an expression of intense effort on his face as the column of weights behind his head rose and fell with every grunt.
He stopped abruptly, opened his eyes and sat up. Then, as if he could sense that he was being observed, he turned his head and looked up and gave Kathy and the girls a sly grin. She watched his eyes track down each of their bodies in turn, and she turned away from the glass and they walked back the way they had come. She noticed a red blush on Lisa’s cheek, and saw Naomi mutter something in her ear which made the other girl pull away with a complaining, ‘Naomi!’
‘So, where else do you go?’ Kathy asked.
‘That’s about all,’ Naomi replied. ‘Sometimes we go to the cinema down on the lower mall, just off the food court the other way. They have eight screens.’
‘Ten,’ Lisa corrected.
Naomi shrugged.
‘Are there any pubs, clubs?’
‘Yeah, down past the cinema, but we don’t go there.’
‘Never?’
They shook their heads.
‘Do fellers come into the food court from the pub? Having had too much to drink?’
‘The security are very hot on that. Mr Jackson.’
‘You know Mr Jackson, do you?’
‘He’s nice,’ Lisa said. ‘He gives us sweets, and vouchers for things on offer.’
Naomi rolled her eyes. Big deal.
‘What about the shop where Kerri got her bag?’
‘Oh yes, it’s on this level. We’ll take you there.’
Along the way they were stopped by a silver-haired woman wanting their signatures on a petition. Though small, she was formidable and not easily bypassed. Pinned to her cardigan was a printed identification which covered a significant portion of her chest on account of the length of its message and the size of the letters:
HARRIET RUTTER, PRESIDENT, SILVERMEADOW RESIDENTS’ ASSOCIATION.
The woman beamed up at Kathy. ‘We are petitioning for significant improvements in the choice of music which is played here in the centre,’ she said briskly, with a piping Home Counties accent. ‘It is currently repetitious and bland, and we are pressing the management for a more enlightened choice, encompassing a mixture of classical and popular works, selected by a democratically elected committee.’
‘A residents’ association?’ Kathy said. ‘Do people actually live here?’
‘Aha, well, no, not exactly. We had a great deal of debate over that word. A great deal.’ Mrs Rutter raised an eyebrow and pursed her lips in a way that managed to suggest that there had been a great deal of foolishness spoken before her own view on the matter had prevailed. ‘You see, there’s really no appropriate word for what we are. We don’t live here, no, of course not. No one could live here.’ She looked about her with a smile at the absurdity of the idea. ‘We come from all around, many from miles away. On the other hand, we are not just customers or consumers or users or stakeholder s-such dreadful terms! We don’t come here just to buy things, you see. We toyed with the Friends of Silvermeadow, but that makes it sound like an orphanage, don’t you think, or a zoo. We’re simply concerned citizens, for whom Silvermeadow has become a kind of focus in our lives, and it occurred to us, after we’d bumped into each other in repeated encounters such as this, that we should form an association.’
‘I see,’ Kathy nodded, thinking that this might have its uses. ‘And you’re the president.’
‘Yes. Here, let me give you one of our leaflets. You may be interested in joining us. You’ll find our mission
