Eddie stared at the picture for a long while, then lifted his eyes to Brock’s and said, sounding completely lucid, ‘But I’ve never seen her before, sir. Never.’
Kathy and Leon went down to the canteen. The tables had been arranged in two continuous parallel rows, seats ranked down each side. Kathy wondered if the cleaners or catering staff who had set the furniture out this way thought that their customers liked to be lined up in ranks. She and Desai picked up their cups from the counter and sat down on opposite sides of a table.
‘You seem a bit edgy,’ Desai said, watching the way her eyes were following the uniformed men and women coming and going.
‘Do I? Yes. I feel I should be doing something, but I’m not sure what.’
Part of the feeling, she knew, was coming from being here with Leon, behaving as if they were no more than professional colleagues rather than lovers. The functional indifference of the place seemed to mock their intimacy, and she wondered if she was being overly sensitive about it. Among the hundreds of officers who had served time here, others must have been in this situation, couples in unpublicised relationships. Did they feel out of place because of it? Did Leon? He gave no sign of it.
‘I should have thought that things were looking promising,’ he said. ‘Testor is quite a weird character, isn’t he? That stuff with the numbers. How did Brock get onto that?’
‘There was something in his file, the psychologist’s report. I didn’t really pick it up at the time. That reminds me, I have to get back to Silvermeadow to look at another file. Are you going over there?’
Leon checked his watch. ‘Brock asked me to collect Alex Nicholson for the briefing, and I need to call in at the lab first. Why don’t you come with me?’
‘No, I’ll get a lift from someone else, don’t worry.’
‘Are you all right, Kathy?’ he said suddenly, lowering his voice. ‘Are we all right?’
She looked at his face, scanning the details of eyelids, mouth, earlobes, as if needing to memorise them again. ‘Yes, yes. Sorry. I get preoccupied, you know how it is. When there are loose ends all over the place, and nothing makes much sense. You know.’
He nodded. ‘Yes, I know. I’ll catch up with you after the briefing, okay?’
‘Mm.’
‘This is an awful place, isn’t it?’ he said suddenly. ‘I keep thinking that I want to grab hold of you, pretend we’re somewhere else.’
She smiled. ‘I know. I know exactly what you mean.’
9
U nit 184 was crowded for the team briefing that afternoon when Kathy arrived. She saw Dr Alex Nicholson standing talking to Brock in front of the plans of the centre, though she didn’t recognise her at first because her long hair, previously jet black, was now an almost peroxide blonde. The psychologist had one hand in her hair, stretching, pulling at it absently while she thought about the point Brock was making. She was dressed in black jeans, trainers and a T-shirt with the message on the back PSYCHOLOGISTS DO IT IN YOUR HEAD. Kathy was struck again by how young she looked, more like a student than a teacher. Also how attractive. She’d get a solid turnout from her male students for her lectures, Kathy thought.
Brock called her over to introduce her.
‘Yes, we know each other,’ Kathy said, noticing the rather clever way the other woman had used the minimum of make-up to the maximum effect, especially around the eyes. ‘We met in Orpington.’
‘Hi.’ Alex smiled back. ‘The Angela Hannaford murder. I remember, of course. Leon said something about you working on this one.’ She turned back to Brock with a question, and Kathy wandered over to her filing tray, half- filled with new material. She sifted quickly through it, stopping at a pouch sent out from central registry. She opened it and began to flick through the file inside.
She was halfway through it when the session was opened by Chief Superintendent Forbes, who wanted everyone to know how commendable their efforts had been so far, and how tantalisingly close to success he believed them to be. The monster who had killed Kerri Vlasich was in their hands, had been identified at the scene. One last push, he concluded, one last effort to find the extra strands of evidence that must still lie waiting out there to tie him to his brutal crime, and their hard work would be rewarded with public acclaim.
Though less lofty in his vision of their future rewards, and more circumspect in relation to Testor’s guilt, Brock’s report supported Forbes’s general drift. Testor was an unusual man, not to be easily written off as a steroid junkie. He had suffered brain damage as a teenager, and his behaviour was unusual and difficult to predict. At one moment he would appear helplessly child-like, at another devious and calculating. He seemed extraordinarily passive and gentle, yet he had been capable in the past of blind and violent rage. They had been unable to find any sexual partners, of either gender, nor even evidence of sexual interest, yet his greatest hobby seemed to be his own body and its appearance. He could perform extraordinary mental feats, but also appeared to suffer confusion and genuine sporadic memory loss. And these characteristics were compounded by his eclectic drug habits. But the important thing to remember was that he knew he was odd, and had learned the hard way that his oddness got him into trouble. When pressure was put on him, as now, his instinctive reaction was to clam up, roll into a ball, and say nothing.
So he was not confident that they would get anything like a confession from him, and that meant they needed more eyewitnesses. They had one, a seven-year-old girl who, despite her age, was an extraordinarily confident witness, and who had, that morning, picked out Testor from a line-up without the least hesitation. But she was only seven. Others must have seen Testor and Kerri on that afternoon of the sixth, particularly during that crucial one- hour period from 5.30 to 6.30 p.m. when Testor had switched his meal break and couldn’t account for his whereabouts. And then there was the matter of the beating that Testor had been given on the previous Sunday evening, apparently in his own flat, after he’d been allowed home after being questioned for the first time at Hornchurch Street.
As he said this, Kathy found herself wondering about the state of Gavin Lowry’s knuckles. She glanced across at him, sitting on a table at the back of the room, looking as if he knew it all.
Eyewitnesses, then, Brock concluded, more eyewitnesses. Then he asked Leon Desai to bring them up to date on the forensic side. Leon got to his feet and spoke with his usual stylish composure.
‘The lab has now identified the antigen antibodies in Kerri’s hair, and confirmed a match with traces in the blood and some organs. It seems that during the final week of her life she took, or was given, ketamine hydrochloride. Ketamine, you probably know, is popularly known as “K”, or “special K”, and is taken as an intense hallucinogenic, but it can also cause paralysis and coma. It’s used in various proprietary forms as a veterinary anaesthetic.’
‘Hang on…’ Gavin Lowry spoke up. ‘Testor had animal steroids in his possession. Isn’t that a bit of a coincidence?’
‘Probably not,’ Leon replied. ‘It’s true that Stenbolol, the anabolic steroid you found in Testor’s room, is manufactured as a veterinary product, but it’s widely available in gyms and among body-building types. We think the batch Testor had was manufactured in Holland and never legally imported into the UK. Similarly, ketamine hydrochloride is manufactured for veterinary use, but is bought and sold on the club scene as a rather risky alternative to Ecstasy. There’s unlikely to be a link. Unfortunately the antigen tests can’t narrow the ketamine down to a particular make or source. One indication that it was a veterinary product could be the way in which it was administered. Almost all veterinary ketamine makes are presented by injection, whereas the stuff they sell for kids is in pills. The pathologist didn’t find any needle marks on Kerri’s body, but they can be hard to spot. He said’-Leon hesitated, then went on-‘he said the best way to make sure would be to remove her skin. Apparently needle marks are more visible if you hold the skin up to the light.’
There was a general whisper of disgust at the thought of skinning the girl, but not, Kathy noticed, from Dr Nicholson, who observed their discomfort from beneath her fringe with a little smile of amusement.
‘Well,’ Brock said, ‘maybe we should consider that. An injection might indicate whether or not it was self- administered, depending on where it was. Anything else, Leon?’
‘Yes. The samples from the compactors. They’ve identified blood traces.’
