of the custody order, and helping the girl set off abroad all on her own. I felt responsible, and I wanted to see what Eddie had to say before I came to you. Only I couldn’t find him that night, and the next day you were talking to him, and it wasn’t till the evening that I went to his home and had it out with him.’
Brock stared at Bruno, a foot shorter than Eddie Testor and three or four stone lighter, and tried to imagine the little man beating him up.
‘Who helped you?’
‘Nobody. He’d taken something, I don’t know what, and he was in a stupid mood. He played silly buggers at first, joking around, so I hit him a couple of times to make him listen and show him I was serious. He sobered up then, and told me that the police had spoken to him, trying to find out who had helped the girl run away, and he’d been really smart and made up some story for you about another man talking to her. While he was telling me this, I realised that he had absolutely no idea that anything bad had happened to Kerri. He believed she was safely in Germany, and that you’d been trying to trick him and he’d been covering for her and me. Once I was sure about that, I thought the best thing was for us to keep quiet. How could it help you to know what we’d planned? We had no idea what had really happened. So I told Eddie that making up stories about another man was really dumb, and if you spoke to him again he should just say he’d got confused, and deny he’d ever seen the girl.’
Brock sat back and scratched his jaw, considering Verdi. The man had tinted his eyebrows as well as his hair and moustache, he realised, and the effect at close quarters was to make his every expression seem exaggerated and false, like a stage actor captured in close-up on film, overacting.
‘So your brother Stefan can confirm this story,’ he said.
‘Oh yes, certainly. You ask him.’
‘And Alison Vlasich knew nothing?’
‘Not a thing.’
‘How much money was in the envelope?’
‘Not a lot. Enough for emergencies. A couple of hundred quid.’
‘Sterling?’
‘Yes. Just a bundle of old notes I took from the till.’
‘It was very trusting of you to leave all this to Eddie, and even tell him there was money in the envelope.’
‘He’s a good boy really.’
‘Why did Ms Hislop at the fitness salon tell lies about his waxing session to give him an alibi?’
‘Oh dear…’ Verdi looked sheepishly contrite. ‘I’m sorry. That was my doing. I hope she won’t get into trouble over it. When there was all that talk on TV about a prime suspect and they showed that picture of Eddie, I thought I’d got him into real trouble, and I just wanted to do whatever I could to save him.’
‘Short of actually coming forward and clearing him yourself with the truth. Truth seems to be a rather irrelevant concept to you, Mr Verdi. You’re quite happy to pile lies on lies, and get any number of other people tangled up in the mess, if it’ll help make us buy your story. How did you persuade her to do it?’
‘Oh, you know, just a favour for an old friend.’ He chuckled impishly. ‘Please don’t be angry with her. It’s all my doing.’
Brock leant forward and said, ‘We want to search your premises, Mr Verdi.’
‘My shop? Well, yes, if you really think that’s necessary. I hope you won’t alarm the customers though.’
‘Your shop, and your home.’
‘Oh, my home? Oh no, I don’t think I could allow that. My wife is an invalid, as I told you, and very easily distressed. It would be a dreadful intrusion. No, no.’
‘Don’t worry, we’ll be very considerate of your wife’s feelings. Where do you think you’re going?’
Verdi had risen to his feet, chest thrust out as if about to deliver an operatic rendition. ‘I am going to my sick wife’s bedside, Chief Inspector! If you want to violate my house you’d better get yourself a search warrant.’
‘Sit down, Mr Verdi. By lying to us in the way that you’ve just admitted you can be charged with obstructing the police. By persuading a third party to obstruct our enquiries you can also be charged with conspiracy and incitement. This is an arrestable offence. If I arrest you for that offence I may then enter and search any of your premises, without a warrant, for evidence relating to that or a connected offence, such as the abduction of Kerri Vlasich.’
Brock’s explanation seemed to stun Verdi. Punctured, he slid slowly back down into his seat. ‘Can you do that?’ he asked faintly.
‘Yes, yes I can, actually. And I will, unless you’re prepared to accompany us to your home and invite us in to search it.’
Later, briefing Lowry, Kathy and the others, Brock said, ‘You’re looking for anything relating to Kerri: correspondence, photographs, personal articles, clothing and so on. And especially you’re looking for ketamine. That’s the key. Get Desai to brief you on what it may look like, bottles, pills, whatever. If you can find that, we’re home and dry. Look everywhere, even under the invalid’s mattress. No, especially under the invalid’s mattress.’
Verdi’s home was a small detached house, one of a row packed close together behind small front gardens- late Victorian, Brock guessed-with decorative brickwork around the doors and windows that produced a slightly fantastical effect, as if the builder had had a fairy-tale gingerbread house in mind. Mrs Verdi lived on the ground floor, her room at the front where she could sit propped up in bed or in a chair by the window, watching the traffic in the street. Brock guessed that with help from her husband she could also access a family room and kitchen at the rear, and a bathroom which had been specially built for her use.
When they had finished searching the family room, Verdi lifted his wife into her wheelchair and took her through so that they could search her bedroom. He did it with an air of wounded dignity, and surprising lack of effort, Brock thought, and he remembered that Verdi also was a regular at the gym. There was nothing but dust and old tissues under the invalid’s mattress.
Upstairs was Verdi’s territory, inaccessible to his wife, and mirroring the arrangement below, with his bedroom at the front and what he described as his ‘den’ at the rear. This room was locked, and he was obliged to hand Brock the key with a sullen look. It contained an exercise machine and some hand and bar weights, a TV/video player, and empty shelving covering one wall. When asked what the shelves were for, he said he was thinking of buying a set of encyclopaedias.
‘Miniature ones,’ Lowry muttered, measuring the spaces between the shelves. ‘Eight inches? More like paperbacks. Or videos.’
As for ketamine, the only possibility seemed to be the medicine cupboard, full of Mrs Verdi’s bottles and pills, from which samples were taken.
After less than two hours the search seemed to be exhausted and the team prepared to return to Silvermeadow. Verdi watched them packing up with a satisfied look on his face. When Brock thanked him for his co-operation, he said, ‘Don’t mention it, Chief Inspector,’ barely keeping the sarcasm out of his voice. Then he added, ‘That Rutter woman had something to do with this, didn’t she?’
‘I beg your pardon?’ Brock replied.
‘Mrs Harriet Rutter,’ he repeated, spitting out the syllables of the name. ‘She puts on airs and acts as if shopkeepers were her personal servants, and when someone like me stands up to her she gets to work with her poison tongue. I’m right, aren’t I? She put in the word against me, eh? You won’t say, but it’s true. Her and that old fool that tags along behind her. Well, if you want some advice, you should take a long look at him. I’ve seen the way he tries to talk to the young girls. He gives them little presents, has he told you that? I’ve seen him do it, winking at them like a hairy old goat. You should check him out and that hut of his.’
‘What hut is that?’
‘The site huts down below the east end of the centre. He had the use of one of them as his workroom when they were doing their excavations. Didn’t you know that? He’s been at Silvermeadow longer than any of us. He’d know better than any of us how to make someone disappear from that place.’
When they were in the car, Brock said, ‘Bruno Verdi has an amazing capacity for making me feel that he knows in advance when we’re coming for him. All that fuss about getting entry to his home, and when we go there there’s not a teacup out of place.’
‘Those empty shelves…’ Lowry said.
‘Exactly. What about the huts he was talking about, Gavin? They’ve been searched, haven’t they?’
