He perfectly understood its attitude of grim preoccupation. As they talked, the lack of options now available became painfully apparent.
‘It stands to reason,’ Bren murmured. ‘North wouldn’t have set up a smooth snatch like that without having an equally slick getaway lined up. I’ll bet they dispersed and were on a boat or in the air before we’d even twigged what had happened.’
As baffling as the escape route was the silence that had surrounded the whole operation. The police had rounded up and questioned all North’s known associates and relatives without the least hint of a contact, and usually well-informed snouts and sources seemed as surprised by the coup as everyone else. Bren took this especially to heart. ‘I had a week,’ he said. ‘We knew for a week that he was around, and apart from the Nolan lead I didn’t get one whisper of where he was or what he was up to.’ Keith Nolan, if he existed, had still not been traced, nor had his papers been used to leave the country.
Forensic examination of the 9mm bullets used to kill the two guards, and of the bags which the robbers had handled, had also yielded nothing. Now the only hope seemed to lie with the dozens of security video tapes recovered from Silvermeadow that Saturday from individual stores as well as the centre’s main system. Teams were still sifting through this material, building up a portrait gallery of thousands of people who were in the centre in the minutes during and immediately after the robbery.
Brock drained his glass. ‘So we do it the hard way. It usually comes down to that anyway. While we wait to see what the tapes tell us, we’d better go back to the beginning. North had information from the inside. Someone at Armacorp or at Silvermeadow, probably both. Let’s focus on that.’
‘He might have worked it out for himself,’ Bren objected. ‘The Saturday evening pick-up followed a pretty dependable routine.’
‘What about Speedy Reynolds? Couldn’t he have been the contact?’ Kathy suggested. A couple of heads shook in disagreement. ‘I know we’ve been through this before, but it is bloody odd that one of their security people should die in suspicious circumstances just two days before a major robbery.’
‘Not if he’d been involved in a second serious crime that had occurred a week before, which he had,’ Bren said with weary emphasis. ‘The evidence ties him firmly to Kerri’s murder, not North’s hold-up, Kathy. Let’s not make things any more complicated than they have to be.’
Brock valued Bren’s tendency to keep things simple and focused, though he found Kathy’s willingness to complicate them much more interesting. However, there was another reason why he should back Bren’s approach, at least for the time being.
‘He’s also not in a position to help us, Kathy,’ Brock said quietly. ‘Like the two Armacorp guards who were murdered, one or both of whom could also have been North’s inside source. So we should probably concentrate on the more hopeful assumption that his contact, if there was one, is still alive.’
‘If he is then he’s still in place,’ one of the others said. ‘We haven’t been able to identify anyone from either Armacorp or Silvermeadow who’s gone missing over the last few days.’
‘Right,’ Brock said, and began to divide up the tasks, most of them already covered during the previous days and which now would have to be done again.
At the end of it he looked thoughtfully at Kathy. ‘Not convinced?’ he said.
She shrugged. ‘I don’t…’ she began, then stopped. ‘Doesn’t matter.’
‘Tell you what,’Brock said, guessing that she’d not want to voice her doubts until she had something concrete to offer, but trusting her instincts, ‘why don’t you have another look at Speedy’s movements, just to be sure. And while you’re at it, you can go over the work schedules of all the centre security staff for the last few weeks again, see if you can spot anything that the rest of us missed.’
Kathy nodded. ‘Yes. Right.’
‘We’ve run out of ideas,’ Kathy said, pushing the piece of veal around with her fork. They had decided to take a late meal at their local Italian, La Casa Romana, after it had become clear that Leon was mildly pissed off at spending another night kicking his heels in the flat on his own.
‘If you don’t want that I’ll eat it,’ he said.
She passed it over. ‘How was your day then?’
‘Boring. Checking statements of evidence. Again.’
‘Oh.’
‘Brock can’t be too popular at the moment, can he? Letting North commit murder and armed robbery right under his nose.’
Kathy thought he sounded rather sanctimonious as he said this. ‘Under my nose actually.’
Leon shrugged, chewing. ‘His operation. So why have you run out of ideas?’
Kathy found this question rather irritating too, almost as if he were trying to rile her. In fact, she decided, he was trying to rile her. ‘Maybe because we’ve had no bloody help from forensics,’ she told him tartly.
He didn’t look up from his plate. ‘There wasn’t much to go on from what I heard. Two nine-millimetre bullets? Not even the cases.’
‘I don’t mean that. I mean before.’
‘Before?’ He looked at her now, puzzled.
‘Yes. I mean, you couldn’t be sure that Kerri Vlasich had ever been in Speedy Reynolds’ house, or that someone else hadn’t been there and removed something, or that he’d really killed Wiff, or… or any damned thing.’
She was tired, she knew, and the wine had relaxed her caution with him, her care to do the right thing, which sometimes was an effort. But it was more than that. She wanted to get angry, she realised. She wanted to blow away the fog that had been gathering in her head around this bloody case.
‘And what has that got to do with Upper North?’ he said coolly. It was a classic Desai defence, she thought. When attacked, go for the logical jugular, not the emotional underbelly.
‘I don’t know, do I? Because the forensic stuff is all so inconclusive.’
‘Kathy…’ He laid down his knife and fork with deliberate patience. ‘No one has suggested any connection whatsoever between Kerri Vlasich’s death and the robbery of the security truck, have they? Or have I missed something?’
‘You mean apart from the coincidence of time and place?’
‘That was circumstance, not coincidence. If you have a huge shopping centre with stacks of people and money passing through it, you’re going to get crimes happening there. That’s life, not a conspiracy. If the two things had happened in Brentwood high street, you wouldn’t have given it a second thought, even though it’s probably got a lot less shops and visitors than Silvermeadow mall.’
There was some justice in that, but Kathy didn’t want to hear it. She changed tack and went for the underbelly. ‘That’s just blinkered thinking,’ she said, slightly surprised to hear how passionate she sounded, when she really wasn’t sure just what she thought. ‘You want to put everything in neat and tidy compartments, right? You want to separate things and put ribbons around them’-she was about to say ‘like degrees after your name’, but stopped herself-‘but life isn’t like that, Leon. Life is all mixed up, for God’s sake.’
He stared at her for a moment in surprise. She had spoken too loudly, she realised, and people at neighbouring tables were eyeing her.
‘I think maybe you’re a bit mixed up, Kathy,’ he said eventually, quite softly.
‘That’s condescending crap!’ she snapped back, and turned away from him. She felt herself trembling, and the thought came into her head, What the hell am I doing? She realised that John, the proprietor, was gazing at her from behind the bar, a slightly puzzled look on his face. He caught her eye and came over to them.
‘All done here?’ he said. ‘Like to see the dessert menu? Coffees?’
They both said no, giving him flat smiles, and without looking at each other.
‘I should tell you that we won’t be open tomorrow night, just in case you were thinking of coming in.’
‘Something on?’ Leon said.
‘Gran’s ninetieth. We’re having a family get-together. Five generations.’
‘Five?’
‘Yeah. Gran’s ninety, Mum’s sixty-six, I’m forty-one, Gina’s twenty-one, and her baby’s almost two.’
‘Wonderful,’ Leon said, without enthusiasm. ‘Give Gran our best.’
‘Yeah, I will. So we’re closing the restaurant to have the party in here. But we’re having open house for our regulars between six and seven to drink the health of the old lady, if you can join us.’
