‘We don’t have a month.’
‘What exactly are you looking for?’
‘We think that the murdered girl may have been held somewhere before the killer put her body into the compactor. We did a close search of the areas immediately in the vicinity of the machine, and a broader search of the whole complex, but we didn’t find this place, if it exists. That’s what we’re looking for, Mr Cook. What would you advise? Say you had twenty-four hours, not a month. What would you do?’
The engineer considered that for a while. ‘You have to try to think like the murderer, don’t you? That’s what you do all the time, I suppose.’ He seemed amused by that thought. ‘Well, I think you’d have a problem getting up to much in the larger units. There would be people coming and going all the time, asking questions, noticing anything odd. In the small units on the other hand-I mean the very small units, with just one or two staff at quiet times… Was it a quiet time when she disappeared?’
‘Fairly quiet.’
‘Right… Yes, you might be able to get away with it. Say you’re the sole owner of a small business. A small card shop, for instance, or coffee shop-’
‘Or a games arcade or gelato shop,’ Brock suggested.
‘That sort of thing. You could have a quiet spot of building work done as part of a larger alteration, then change your employees, and after a while there wouldn’t be anyone but you would know.’
‘Trouble is, we’ve had a reasonably close look at most of the likely candidates. But we can do it again.’
‘Yes. But I was going to say that the quietest and most undisturbed places of all, if you had access…’ Cook pondered.
‘Yes?’
‘Well, they’re not even on the plans you had. Look, I’ll show you.’
They looked over his shoulder as he adjusted the image on his computer screen again.
‘Those plans you had are the type we give visitors, members of the public. They don’t need to know about these, for instance.’ He pointed to an array of rooms on the screen. ‘Those are plant and service rooms, electricity substations and the like.’
‘We checked out a number of plant rooms along the service road,’ Lowry said.
‘Yes, but there’s plenty more. Like those, on the lowest level, around the main plenum.’ He indicated a long narrow chamber which zig-zagged across the width of the screen. ‘It runs the length of the basement beneath the loading platform.’
Brock turned to Lowry, who shrugged and shook his head.
‘Go on,’ Brock said. ‘What’s a plenum?’
‘It’s the final big duct used for gathering all the exhaust air from the centre-its lung, you might say. The whole building breathes tempered air, see, which percolates through every part and finally ends up in the plenum. It starts at roof level, where outdoor air is treated in the rooftop plant rooms, washed, scrubbed, dried, cooled or heated to twenty-two degrees C, then pumped into the upper malls. From there it gets drawn in to the shop units by extract ducts at their rear, in the ceilings of the rear service corridors, then down in a series of big drop ducts to the lowest level where it discharges along with the exhaust air from the service road and basement areas into the plenum chamber. From there it’s pulled by big fans through heat exchangers to recover waste heat, then discharged to open air again at the end of the building.’
‘Can you get into these ducts?’
‘Into the plenum, yes. There’s access for maintenance, and to the plant rooms that support it. But not for general use. Between maintenance inspections you could wander around down there for months without being disturbed, provided there wasn’t a plant failure or a rat plague or something.’
‘Good grief,’ Brock said. ‘Why the hell didn’t we know about this before?’
‘Well, probably because there’s a very good reason why your murderer wouldn’t be down there.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes, you see, the access is through the security centre. That would make it a bit tricky for him, wouldn’t it?’
They thanked Cook and crossed the corridor to the entrance to the management offices.
Brock found Bo Seager tense and preoccupied, with Nathan Tindall ominously silent on the opposite side of the room. Both seemed subdued by the presence of a solicitor representing the company which owned Silvermeadow.
Bo began by saying that Harry Jackson had not made it clear what Brock wanted a meeting for, and then asked peremptorily what they’d been doing in Allen Cook’s office. Brock’s answer, that they’d been checking the building plans to see if there could be areas they’d missed on their earlier search, didn’t seem to reassure her. From her comments he gathered that the initial euphoria over the turnover figures arising from the publicity had worn off, and this was confirmed by the solicitor, who quickly established himself as the spokesman for the management group. Their board, he explained, was now deeply disturbed that the company name should be associated with this sort of notoriety, which was absolutely contrary to the image and values they had all worked so hard to project. The board demanded a speedy resolution.
‘I understand you have been interviewing various of our tenants,’ he said. ‘May I ask whether you intend to make any arrests, or lay any charges?’
‘Not at present.’
‘From my reading of the situation, we have bent over backwards to facilitate your demands for access to Silvermeadow to assist your investigations, Chief Inspector. But enough is enough. This is private property you’re camping in.’ He smiled thinly. ‘You don’t need me to remind you that if you’d applied for a warrant to enter this centre it would have entitled you to one visit only. This open-ended, interminable access is simply unacceptable. It is disrupting my client’s operations and creating a highly negative climate at a critical point in the trading year.’ He cleared his throat and looked over at Bo Seager.
‘Four kids tried to mug Santa this morning,’ she said in a sombre tone.
‘ Santa, did you say?’ Lowry asked, looking startled.
‘Yes. Santa was in his grotto next to the magic roundabout on the upper mall, with a line of toddlers and their mums queuing up to see him, and the four of them marched up and started laying into him.’
‘What, to rob him?’
‘No, no, just for the pleasure of it. Fortunately control spotted them on the cameras coming in the west entrance, and radioed the mall security. They caught up with the little bastards just as they were getting really stuck into poor old Santa.’ She turned to Brock with a concerned frown. ‘He’s seventy-two, Chief Inspector.’ Brock noted the formal title. No more David, at least not in front of the suits. ‘He’s been doing it for twenty years. We inherited him from a department store that closed down in Dagenham. The thing was, when Harry asked these little creeps what they thought they were doing, the ringleader said, cheeky as anything, “Well, this is murder-mall, yeah?” Like it’s open season, or something.’
‘The point is, Chief Inspector,’ Nathan Tindall broke in angrily, ‘this can’t go on. We’re going to have to ask you to vacate unit 184.’
Brock turned to see what Bo had to say, but she remained silent.
‘And any further incursions will have to be supported by a warrant,’ the solicitor added, ‘which we shall oppose, bearing in mind there’s no conclusive evidence we’re aware of that a crime has been committed on this property, or that any further evidence relating to the disappearance of Kerri Vlasich is to be found here.’
Brock studied his fingernails, letting them wait for his inevitable objections, then said abruptly, ‘I agree. I was coming to the view myself that a visible police presence here was becoming counterproductive. I suggest that we make a press statement to the effect that the investigation here is being wound down and moving elsewhere.’
He was aware of Lowry looking at him, startled, while Bo Seager appeared intensely relieved.
‘Well,’ the solicitor smiled, ‘good, good.’
‘From our discussion with Mr Cook,’ Brock went on, smiling back, ‘we are just a little concerned that we may have missed one or two areas in our original search that may prevent us from making a conclusive final report. The coroner hates loose ends, you understand. That’s my only concern.’
The solicitor frowned. ‘How long, exactly, are these loose ends?’
‘Mr Cook has estimated that it might take a month to be a hundred per cent sure we haven’t missed anything.’
