‘And tomorrow?’ he asked.
She shrugged, came over and slumped down beside him. ‘I’ll have to go back. I’m really sorry.’
‘That’s okay. I understand.’ He stroked her brow.
‘Tuesday evening. I’ll go with you to Liverpool.’
His fingers hesitated in their caress through her hair. ‘You sure? Can they spare you?’
‘Oh yes. This is a manhunt now. I’ll check with Brock, but I’m sure it’ll be okay.’
‘I could leave it till after Christmas.’
‘No, I want to get away with you. Really, I’m interested. I’m sorry I reacted the wrong way before.’ It occurred to her that she seemed to be saying sorry a lot. ‘What did you do tonight?’ she asked.
‘Not much. Bit of TV.’ He sounded bored and glum.
‘What about tomorrow?’
‘No idea. Do you think Brock will need me on your case?’
‘He hasn’t contacted you?’
‘No.’ He looked rather forlorn.
‘I think the Robbery Squad have their own lab liaison.’
‘Oh, well. I can wash my hair,’ he said with a sigh. ‘And watch your new microwave. And polish your new TV.’
‘Sorry.’
‘Don’t be. But maybe we should think about moving closer to that place. The way things are happening to them, they need you there permanently.’
‘I could fix you up with a job at Cuddles.’
‘Thanks. Golliwogs section, I suppose.’
Kathy laughed. ‘The lab hasn’t come up with anything new on Speedy and Wiff, has it?’
‘Not as far as I know.’ He yawned again, filling his lungs noisily. ‘They’re handing it all over to division now. Why would the kid own an antique coin, do you think?’
‘Wiff?’
‘Yes, among his stuff. Seemed odd.’
‘What did it look like?’
‘Nothing much. Small, black and worn smooth.’
‘That reminds me of something.’
‘My cock, do you mean?’
Kathy laughed and slid her hand up his thigh. ‘Yes, of course,’ she said. ‘That’s it. I think of little else.’
‘Liar,’ he said.
15
T he next morning Essex was shrouded in fog. It muffled the sound of traffic on the motorway and forced it to slow to a crawl in the denser pockets, where the light of the hidden sun barely penetrated.
When she finally reached the Silvermeadow junction Kathy stopped at the top of the exit ramp and gazed out over the site. The grey building was a ghostly presence in the mist, like an alien craft freshly landed in the fold of the slope and surrounded by a scattering of cars, capsules attendant on the mother ship. In contrast to the deathly gloom of the morning, it was clearly alive, for light glimmered from its spine along the route of the mall arcade, and Kathy could almost swear that she could make out the faint tinkle of jingle bells, even at that distance. A few dark huddled figures were scurrying between the cars and the centre, parasites trapped in a world of machines.
She thought of her imaginings of the previous evening, that Kerri’s murder and North’s robbery, and all the accompanying deaths and mayhem, might be part of one conspiracy, not two, and immediately felt the improbability of the idea, as if the daylight, even daylight as dim as this, cast things in a more realistic light. Crime happened like everything else, not at evenly spaced intervals but in clusters and bunches. Feast or famine. Nothing for a time, then all at once. So Silvermeadow was catching up with its normal crime load after a quiet interval. The fact that both series of crimes had happened here was simply coincidence.
Everyone else seemed to believe this. Not that it was discussed, but when she walked down through the service road and spoke to a SOCO crew combing the basement for further evidence without much hope or enthusiasm, and again when she went upstairs to the temporarily reoccupied unit 184 and talked to the few people there, Kathy had the clear impression that everyone took it for granted that Silvermeadow was no longer relevant, that the real centre of the action had moved elsewhere. Like stage hands cleaning up on the morning after a big show, they saw themselves as far removed from the real actors, who were now waking, no doubt, to champagne breakfasts in some remote first-class hotel, or on a jumbo jet high above some distant ocean. Silvermeadow, they seemed to feel, had been the innocent setting for the robbers’ latest gig, just as it had unfortunately accommodated Kerri’s killer.
She walked along the deserted upper mall and came once again to the balcony overlooking the food court and rain forest, giving a nod to the gorilla who still crouched in his bamboo grove. But Silvermeadow wasn’t innocent. After spending a week here, nothing about the place felt coincidental or innocent. From start to finish the centre was calculated and manipulative, dressed up to deceive. If it had been a suspect rather than a place, she would have said its manner was guilty as hell.
As if the beast could sense her thoughts, the escalators in front of her gave a sudden growl, then lurched into motion, and simultaneously from the trees below came the twitter of electronic parrots. Two disparate events, Kathy thought, still caught up in her doubts. What links the parrots and the escalators? The place, the time, and the hidden hand that presses the switch. And if you wanted to find that hand, it wouldn’t matter which event you investigated, because both would lead back to the same place.
From one of the food units down below came a rattle of a security grille being raised. It came from Bruno’s Gelati, and as she watched she saw the owner step out and gaze around at his patch of the food court. He was wearing a black waistcoat over his white shirt today, and was looking very sleek and pleased with himself, his hair and moustache gleaming with oil in the bright Mediterranean glow of the lights. He moved among the tables making small fastidious adjustments, straightening a chair here, wiping a surface there. As Kathy watched him she recalled the story of the little girl he had enticed into his ice-cream van. Mr Kreemee. The thought made her feel slightly sick, but then, she reminded herself, the story had no significance for their case. Just another coincidence, that he should be here, that it should be his niece who had been taken. The world was full of coincidences, and the fact that a violent robbery had followed hard on the heels of a murder was just one more. She turned away from the rail and walked away.
By Monday Brock felt as if he had covered most of the British Isles. He had started on Sunday by going down to Southampton to check a possible sighting on a Channel ferry, and once on the move he had found himself unable to stop, with urgent calls coming in from all over the country, demanding his attention. From Southampton he was driven up to Lincolnshire to inspect a private airfield from which unauthorised flights had been reported, then over to Holyhead to question sailors on the Irish boat. He had then attended a raid on a rented farmhouse in Cumbria and been flown out on a helicopter to a Liberian tanker making odd manoeuvres in the middle of the North Sea. When he finally returned to London he was feeling numb from frantic but useless movement. Bren and the others had been no less active and no more productive in the south-east, and when Brock called his team together at Queen Anne’s Gate on the Monday evening there was a clear conviction among them that the trail had gone cold.
They gathered-Bren, Brock, Kathy and three others- in The Bride of Denmark, a very small pub improbably assembled in the basement of their annex offices by a former owner of the building, from the fragments of Victorian London pubs demolished by the Blitz or redevelopment projects. It had been a labour of great love and eccentricity, and Brock felt a personal obligation to protect it from the threats of the Met’s Property Services Department, which regarded the presence of a pub inside a police headquarters building as dangerously frivolous. Over the years he had armed himself with a number of important-sounding opinions from heritage bodies, and staff turnover at PSD had ensured a level of amnesia about departmental squabbles that weren’t likely to enhance anyone’s career prospects. The main snug could barely hold the six of them, the pew seats and the tiny bar behind which Brock sat nursing a large glass of whisky staring at a large stuffed salmon facing him from a glass case on the opposite wall.
