They returned to their tea.
‘So do you enter an incident onto the computer yourself, if you’ve got something to report?’ Kathy asked.
‘No, we’ve still got the daybooks for that, I’m glad to say. Computers aren’t my strong point. Harry’s a great stickler for the daybooks. I reckon it’s what he grew up with in the force, isn’t it?’
‘Show me.’
They were a collection of thick red hard-bound A4 books of blue lined pages, numbered in sequence, each covering about six months, and they contained the terse reports, handwritten in ball-point, of each incident recorded by the attending security staffer.
‘Here’s my last one,’ Sharon said, opening the most recent book. ‘Here. I like to use green ink. Three days ago: seventeen-oh-six hours; fire started in rubbish container opp. unit two-one-five; perp unknown; S.W. attended; no action. Harry likes us to keep it short and sweet. Just the bare facts. Then at the end of the week Speedy enters them in his database.’
‘That’s fascinating,’ Kathy said.
‘Don’t you have that in the force?’
‘Yes, something like that. But this is much more detailed, every little incident recorded.’
‘That’s Harry-Mr Zero Tolerance, that’s what he is.’
‘My boss wanted me to check the details of a couple of things in Harry’s report, so I suppose the daybooks would be the place to look?’
‘Yeah, help yourself. I’d offer to help but I’m meant to be keeping an eye on the screens.’
‘No, that’s fine. I’ll manage. How long have you been here, Sharon?’
‘Just on a year.’
Kathy started four books back, in the previous year. After a while, scanning through the plethora of small crises, she hit upon the first reference to Norma Jean X. There were two other mentions in that month, six in the next, and then a cascade of Norma Jean incidents. The reports came from a variety of security staff, whose developing mood could be sensed both in what they wrote-1042: NJ warned about loitering… 1155: NJ escorted AGAIN-and in the increasing force with which their ball-point messages had been scored into the pages of the book. There were gaps for a week or two, when presumably she was being detained elsewhere, but then she was back again, like the daughter from hell, grazing in the aisles of the food stores, shoplifting in the boutiques, embarrassing sheepish dads with offers of her body for cash, pinching their wives’ handbags, shooting up drugs in the toilets, falling asleep on the mall benches, and the daybook reports came to sound more and more like the comments of angry and frustrated parents, underlined, capitalised, and even, when things got really bad, containing words which Harry Jackson had felt obliged to obscure and initial with his stern purple fountain pen. Norma Jean’s assault lasted, off and on, for almost five months, and then, mysteriously and without comment, it ceased.
Brock scanned the file on Eddie Testor that had been couriered down, and watched Lowry interviewing him on the video screen for some time before he joined them. The man seemed very alert, almost eager in his manner, answering Lowry’s questions rapidly and without hesitation. He admitted misrepresenting his background to his present employer, but said he’d been forced into it in order to get a job, and had been helped to massage his CV by a professional employment consultant, whom he named. His record at work had been described as very satisfactory by the management of the leisure centre. He had one caution on his employee’s file, a note of a verbal warning from a supervisor that his behaviour with some small boys in the surf-‘larking about’-was inappropriate.
His manner changed somewhat when Brock came into the room. Brock noticed the shift, an avoidance of eye contact, a small hesitation at the start of each reply, and then a developing surliness whenever Brock spoke.
‘Tell us again,’ Brock said, placing Kerri’s enlarged portrait photograph on the table between them, ‘about the man you saw talking to her.’
‘May not have been her. Lots of girls look like that. Could have been anyone.’
‘Yes, all right. Recently?’
A shrug and a scowl.
‘Try to picture them talking together,’ Brock said softly. ‘Never mind the girl, concentrate on the man. Picture the man. Does he look a bit like you, Eddie?’
‘No! Not like me at all. He’s a smoothy.’
‘A smoothy? What does that mean?’
‘Smooth. Slippery smooth.’
Later, outside the interview room, Brock rubbed his palm backwards and forwards across his jaw, scratching his beard, thinking.
‘He claims he was working between five p.m. and nine p.m. on the Monday, after an hour meal break. We’re waiting to hear from the manager at the leisure centre.’
‘Did you get a chance to look at his file, Gavin?’
‘A fairly quick scan, chief, during our last break. But I’ve met him before, this one.’
‘Did you read the parole psychologist’s final report?’
‘Not in detail.’
‘Worth a look.’
‘He’s a nutter, chief.’
‘Yes, but they come in different shapes and sizes. This one doesn’t seem to have any interest in women. He doesn’t hate them, or like them, or respond to them in any way. Remarkable, eh?’
‘He’s got bits missing in his head.’
‘Did you notice the way his mood changed when I came into the room?’
‘Yes. I wondered if you two had met before.’
‘No, never.’ Brock turned the pages of the file until he came to a photograph of the car that Testor had attacked. It was spectacularly beaten flat, a crumpled metal pancake, like a cartoon car that a cartoon elephant had sat on.
‘Like what happened to Kerri,’ Lowry said.
‘Mmm.’ Brock rubbed his chin again. ‘A Jaguar, almost vintage, British racing green. It’s the same type and colour as the car that was owned by the man who ran the home he spent five years in when he was a little boy. He didn’t mention that at his trial. It came up almost by accident when the prison psychologist was interviewing him for the parole board. And the man driving the flattened car was elderly. He had grey hair, like the man who ran the home. Like me. It was at the home that he had the accident to his head.’
A uniformed man looked round the door with a message for Lowry, who read it and cursed softly under his breath. ‘The manager has confirmed the times of Testor’s shifts. He was at work from five p.m. all week. Hard to see how he could have fitted it in.’
Brock closed the file and handed it to Lowry. ‘I really wonder whether Testor isn’t more of a danger to me than to girls like Kerri, Gavin.’
‘Fine,’ Lowry muttered as Brock turned to leave. ‘I’ll let the bastard loose.’
Towards five that afternoon, seated again at his table in unit 184, Brock received, not a summons exactly, but an invitation, firmly couched, to meet with Bo Seager and some of her senior management team at six, to report on progress. There was a hint of coolness in the way the invitation was delivered that suggested all was not well. There were times, Brock reflected, when a potentially hostile committee could be best handled by a lone figure, vulnerable and outnumbered, but also, for that very reason, at an advantage; there were other times when a show of manpower worked better. He thought about that and about the formidable Bo Seager, and asked Kathy and, when he checked in soon after, Gavin Lowry to accompany him.
Finger food had been sent up from Penelope’s Pantry, and a couple of bottles of chilled chardonnay opened for the occasion. Harry Jackson had reported back to hear the briefing and pour the wine, and there was another man there also, a thin-faced unsmiling man with rimless glasses and a tumbler of mineral water who was introduced as Nathan Tindall, finance manager. For a fleeting moment as they sat down, Brock was reminded of a medieval court, the queen flanked by her ministers, the ascetic chancellor and the bluff knight.
‘Are we to expect Chief Superintendent Forbes?’ Bo asked silkily, raising her glass.
‘He’s otherwise engaged at present, Ms Seager,’ Brock said. ‘I’m sure he would have wanted to be here if he’d had more notice.’
‘That’s nice. I’ll look forward to meeting him one day. Harry tells me he’s actually running the investigation, is
