she said, and we thought it was her nickname for him, but she said, no, he really was her uncle, but they didn’t speak, and he gave her the creeps. That’s what she said, and I could believe it, because we saw the way he watched her too, from the front of his ice-cream place, watching her and the other girls on their roller skates. It made my skin crawl.’
‘You obviously don’t like him,’ Kathy said carefully. ‘But is there anything concrete you can tell me?’
‘The man’s clearly a phoney,’ Orr said. ‘He knows about as much about Italy as Harriet’s cat. I asked him once where he came from, and he said Rome. So I said, ah Rome, my favourite city, the Ponte Vecchio, the Pitti Palace, the Uffizi, and he just smiled and agreed. Well, you get my point-all those places are in Florence! He had no idea. I even tried a bit of Italian on him. I may be a bit rusty, but he just mumbled something and walked off.’
‘ Rude man!’ Mrs Rutter hissed.
‘I’d say “gelato” is about as much Italian as he knows,’ Orr said dismissively.
After they left, Kathy tried to make sense of what they had said. Clearly there was some kind of feud between the ‘residents’ and the Small Traders’ Association, and some more personal animosity between their two leading figures, but the story of an ‘uncle’ seemed bizarre. Surely they must have misinterpreted something Kerri had said, and embellished it for Kathy’s benefit. Easy enough to check, she thought, and picked up the phone.
It rang for some time before Alison Vlasich answered cautiously. ‘Yes?’
‘Mrs Vlasich? It’s Sergeant Kolla from the police. How are you?’ The words came out automatically, and Kathy winced as she said them.
‘Oh, you know… what you’d expect I suppose.’ The voice sounded weary and flat.
‘Yes. Of course. I just wondered if there was anything we could do.’
‘No, I don’t think so. The social worker is very good to me.’
‘Oh, that’s great. Look, maybe you could help me with something. Is there another member of your family working at Silvermeadow, by any chance?’
There was a long silence. Eventually Kathy broke it. ‘Hello? Are you still there, Alison?’
‘No,’ the voice said faintly. ‘No one of my family.’
‘Oh, fine. You see, someone told us that they thought Kerri had an uncle working there…’
‘Yes.’
‘Pardon?’
‘Yes.’ The voice was almost inaudible.
‘Yes, she had an uncle?’
Another pause. ‘That’s right.’
‘But I thought you just said…’
Every answer seemed to take for ever, and Kathy began to think she’d have to drive over to talk to the woman face to face.
‘Not in my family. He’s in my ex-husband’s family.’
‘What relation is he to your ex-husband, Alison?’ Kathy said, trying to sound as if it were a matter of no great significance.
‘He’s Stefan’s brother.’
‘Stefan’s brother works at Silvermeadow? What does he do there?’
Kathy heard her sigh, then, ‘He runs an ice-cream shop.’
‘And he’s called Vlasich?’ Kathy persisted.
‘Not any more. He used to be Dragan Vlasich. Now he’s Bruno Verdi.’
Kathy stared at the notepad in front of her, shook her head. ‘Alison, you never mentioned this before.’
‘Didn’t I? No… it didn’t seem important.’
And Bruno Verdi hadn’t mentioned it either, she thought, nor Stefan Vlasich. What the hell’s going on?
‘Did Kerri and her uncle get on, Alison?’
‘He helped her to get her job,’ she whispered.
‘But did they get on? Were they on good terms?’
‘I’m tired now. I’ve taken a sleeping pill.’ And the line went dead.
Kathy thought. She remembered someone, early on, referring to another Vlasich with a record, apparently unconnected with this family. She went over to the computer and logged in, and tapped her request, and waited, until it came up on the screen: Dragan Vlasich, charged in June 1992 under the Sexual Offences Act 1956, the charge dropped in September of that year.
She tried to ring Brock, but his mobile requested her to leave a message, and she put down the phone and thought some more. Well, that was why they’d kept quiet, wasn’t it? Knowing what was on his file, they must be trying to protect him, Alison and Stefan. And surely neither of them would do that if they thought it remotely possible that he could have harmed their daughter. Looked at in that way, their silence seemed to vindicate him rather than the opposite.
She stretched, feeling the tension in her back from crouching over the phone, when it rang.
‘Kathy! Hi, it’s me.’
She smiled, hearing his voice. ‘Hi, Leon,’ she said softly. ‘Where are you?’
‘Your place. And I’m cooking, and if you’re not home in an hour you’ll regret it.’
She laughed. She’d given him a key, and introduced him to Mrs P. ‘Well, I don’t want to have any regrets. So I’d better come home.’
But she did detour by way of the food court, not with any intention of approaching Verdi yet, but just to get another look at him. Only he wasn’t there, the place was being run by the old gondolier and a youth. Kathy watched them for a while from the upper level, then went down on the escalator and spoke to the man in the striped T-shirt and scarlet bandanna.
‘Mr Verdi about?’
‘Not tonight,’ the gondolier said, with an incongruous cockney accent. ‘Mondays and Tuesdays he leaves early.’
‘Every Monday and Tuesday?’
‘Yeah. Why?’
‘I wanted to ask him something. He’ll be at home, will he?’
The man took off his boater and scratched his head. ‘Don’t reckon so. He visits his mother, I think. In a hospital or something.’
‘Ah. Doesn’t matter. I’ll get him another time. Thanks.’
Kathy walked away. She recalled the file entry about Stefan Vlasich, and how he now lived in Hamburg with his mother.
Leon had prepared veal escalopes in a cream and mushroom sauce, with boiled potatoes and broccoli, and was immensely pleased with himself.
‘This is wonderful,’ Kathy said, as he poured her a glass of wine and sat down.
‘I really enjoyed doing it,’ he beamed. ‘It was so nice to be able to cook for someone else. So therapeutic. I forgot about everything else.’
Kathy laughed, then yawned.
‘You’re tired.’
‘No, just relaxed, coming back to this. Thanks.’ She took his hand.
‘Tough day?’
‘Not really. I had a word with Speedy over that tape. He claimed it was just his mischievous sense of humour. Wheelchair or not, I reckon he’s pretty good at making people feel uncomfortable. Anyway, looks like we’ve got a prime suspect. You remember the lifeguard in the pool that Gavin Lowry questioned earlier? We’ve got a witness that saw him and Kerri together on the evening of the sixth.’
‘So she really was there. I’m glad of that, Kathy, because the forensic evidence has been pretty useless so far.’
‘Not your fault.’
‘Maybe you won’t need Alex Nicholson then.’
Kathy looked up from her veal. ‘What?’
‘You remember her? From the Hannaford case?’
‘Of course. The forensic psychologist.’
