‘Yes, well, Naomi may know something.’ Mrs Tait stopped and looked fixedly at Brock. ‘You’re wondering, aren’t you, about Naomi? You’re wondering if she’s in the same boat? Well I can tell you straight away, she’s not. Naomi has not touched drugs.’
Brock shrugged. ‘Well, I know how difficult it is to be sure-’
‘No.’ She shook her head determinedly. ‘I know. We’ve been through it twice already. We know the signs all too well, believe me, Chief Inspector. We had it all from our daughter: the little lies to borrow money, the money gone from your purse, the strange phone calls at odd hours, things missing from the house, the moods. We got to know those signs very well. And when Kimberley started we knew straight away, although she denied it till she was blue in the face and convinced everyone else, her sisters included, everyone except Jack and me. And Naomi’s seen it too, and she knows what happens. She’s not like Kimberley. She won’t end up the same way.’
‘She never borrows no money,’ Jack Tait said, leaning forward to emphasise the point. ‘She saves every penny of her work money. Every penny.’
‘It must be tough for you both,’ Brock said.
‘You cope, don’t you? You have to. We’d had our dreams of what we’d do when Jack retired, go live by the sea near our friends. But that wasn’t to be. We were needed here, to look after our grandchildren.’
‘This’ll give you some idea what our Naomi’s like,’ Jack Tait said. He got stiffly to his feet and went over to the mantelpiece and lifted a piece of paper out of a bowl. He handed it to Brock proudly. It was a lottery ticket. ‘Once a month she buys us one of these out of her pay from the sandwich shop. She says, one day we’ll win, and we’ll be able to buy a house in Westcliff big enough for us all. And she believes it too.’
They heard the front door bang and the sounds of Naomi discarding her bag and coat in the hall.
Her reaction to Brock’s questions was almost a mirror of her grandparents. She nodded sadly, and said she knew that Kerri had been trying things-speed, she thought, and Ecstasy, which she’d got from boys at parties. Lisa and herself had tried to make her stop, but Kerri said it was exciting, and they were stupid. They’d had an argument over it, which was the reason Kerri had stopped confiding in them about her plans.
‘We should have told someone, shouldn’t we? Her mum or something. Then maybe she’d have been all right.’
‘It may have nothing to do with what happened to her, Naomi,’ Brock assured her. ‘But we want to check everything. What about these boys? Do you know who they are? Do they go to Silvermeadow?’
Naomi shook her head. Lisa and she had tried to find out, but Kerri kept it a secret.
‘You’re sure she said “boys”?’
She pondered. ‘Boys, or “this boy”. I’m not sure. I thought there might be more than one, but I’m not sure. She told lies sometimes, just to wind us up.’
As they got back in their car, Brock said to Kathy, ‘This doesn’t sound like much. What do you think?’
‘I agree. She was trying things, but most of them do. She wasn’t exactly a junkie. They never found needle marks on the body, did they?’
‘No.’
‘I feel very sorry for Mrs Tait, trying so hard to do the right thing, worn out.’
‘Mmm. Might be better than being stuck in a cottage with old Jack at Westcliff, though, don’t you think?’
Kathy smiled. ‘Maybe.’
‘So what now? I was really hoping forensic would give us something more concrete to work on.’ Brock folded his arms and frowned out of the window as Kathy edged the car into the traffic of the high street. ‘The thought of this turning into one of those interminable cases, hundreds of fruitless leads, thousands of interviews, millions of words…’ He shook his head. ‘Have you been keeping in touch with what Leon’s been up to?’
She nodded. ‘Pretty much.’
‘I hope he’s giving us his undivided attention.’
‘I’d say so, yes.’
‘Someone said they saw him laughing yesterday, and whistling, for God’s sake. Leon doesn’t whistle.’
‘Maybe he’s happy.’
‘I don’t want him happy,’ Brock growled. ‘I want him dissatisfied and frustrated, like me. I want him harrying those lab people till they find us something useful.’
‘Maybe the samples from the compactors will give us something.’
‘That’s a long shot. She was pretty well wrapped up. And clean-no semen traces, no foreign hairs, no fibres. We find a body, and then it tells us nothing. They’ve got equipment can read your life story from a single hair, and all they can tell us is that she was a teenager who experimented with Ecstasy.’
Kathy found Speedy alone at his console that afternoon. She saw him grinning to himself as she came in the room, but he didn’t turn round. He continued ignoring her as she came to his side. Kathy looked down at the control panel, at the keyboards, the rotating dials, the sliding knobs, and spotted a simple switch at one end, marked ON- OFF. She reached forward and pushed it to off, and all the screens simultaneously went blank.
‘Oi!’ He blinked at the dead screens, then jerked round as if she’d physically hurt him.
‘I’d like your attention, Speedy,’ Kathy said softly. ‘I’d like to know what you thought you were playing at, making that tape.’
His mouth formed into the smirk again, and Kathy wondered if he’d had facial surgery after his accident. ‘Did you like it?’ he asked, with exaggerated innocence.
‘I asked what you thought you were doing.’
‘Just a little present. I thought you’d appreciate a demo, of what we can do. Something personal, just between you and me.’ His smirk trembled on the point of becoming a sneer.
‘You like making demos, do you? Make a habit of it?’
He held her gaze without answering.
‘You’re quite a creepy bloke, aren’t you, Speedy?’ she said. ‘What seems strange to me is that you’ve got all this talent for spying on people, but you can’t give us a damn thing about that girl.’ She stared at his expression, trying to decipher it, trying to work out if he really meant to look like that, or whether the muscles were damaged and he couldn’t do anything else. ‘You sure you haven’t got any little demos of girls in the mall? Any of her?’
Still no answer.
‘I’d tell you to watch your step,’ Kathy went on, ‘only that wouldn’t be appropriate. Just be careful, eh? Or I might have to give you a demo of what I can do.’
She pressed the switch back on and turned away as the screens flickered to life, and saw Harry Jackson standing in the doorway, watching them.
‘Have we got a problem, Kathy?’ he said carefully.
‘I don’t think so, Harry. Speedy was just showing me how things work around here.’
After the excitement generated by the first walk-through, the second attracted an even larger crowd. Chief Superintendent Forbes, who until now had been reluctant to appear committed to the Silvermeadow connection, had decided to attend, his uniform adding an element of formal pomp to the group waiting at the west entrance in front of the TV cameras to receive the girls.
The moment of their arrival was given some unexpected drama by the sudden eruption of a man from the crowd, who walked swiftly to Lisa’s side just as she was stepping out of the police car. Looking like a pale office worker at the end of a long week, in limp dark suit and tie, he had a placard hanging round his neck with the message I AM UNEMPLOYED BUT HAVE NOT GIVEN UP. BUY A PEN?1. He held a bunch of the coloured pens in his fist, and raised them up to the cameras as they recorded his brief moment in the spotlight before two security men bundled him away.
Kathy turned to Sharon at her side and said, ‘Know him?’
‘Yes, he’s one of our regulars. We don’t let him inside, but he often hangs around the entrances, looking pathetic, until we move him on. I’ve never seen him here after dark though. It’s this walk-through, it’s attracting everyone. Bigger than the Titanic, I reckon.’
And that was true, Kathy thought, looking at the crush of people in the mall, straining for a sight of the parade. In death Kerri was bigger than Snow White, Mauna Loa and Santa Claus combined.
As they moved forward, Kathy caught sight of a figure in the crowd she recognised, a boy of about twelve, with long black curls coming out from under the baseball cap reversed on his head, the boy she’d seen at the bookshop on Sunday morning and at Starkey’s games arcade. She moved into the crush and worked her way to his side.
