pocket of her coat her fingers found the small black disc she had taken from the box on Kerri’s desk, and she held it up for him to see. ‘You did give her old coins, didn’t you? What were they? Gifts, tokens?’
Orr stiffened. ‘I gave coins to many of the young people in the mall,’ he growled.
‘Why?’
His lip curled at her with contempt. ‘Not for the reason your sordid police mind imagines, I dare say. I wasn’t trying to buy them, Sergeant. They have far too smart an estimate of their own worth to sell themselves for trinkets. I wanted them to learn a different lesson about money. The coins came from this hillside. I found them near the bones of the Saxon children. Small change. Part of the hoard the Vikings were looking for. I wanted them to know that children like them were murdered for these coins. That the coins survived, but the children did not. But I was naive. Today the children are more greedy, and the people that hunt them more evil.’
He rocked back on his heels, and reached behind him with his left hand to grip the table, as if running out of steam.
‘I didn’t come here to trap you,’ Kathy said quietly. ‘If you know something, let me help you.’
He looked at her sadly. ‘Have you arrested Verdi?’
‘No.’
‘Have you found his lair?’
She shook her head, startled.
‘Then you can’t help me.’ He turned away dismissively.
‘What do you know about a lair?’ she asked. ‘We’ve been looking-’
‘In all the wrong places, no doubt.’ He turned to her again, a smile of patronising superiority twitching his whiskers.
He’s been a teacher for years, she thought. He can’t help turning every conversation into a seminar. ‘Well, I don’t know. We know its walls are bare concrete blocks-’
He looked sharply at her. ‘Oh yes? How do you know that?’
‘A witness says she saw a photograph of Verdi in a bare room, with a girl.’
He nodded. ‘But where is it?’
‘We don’t know. We’ve been searching disused factories, garages-’
He made a scoffing noise. ‘Pathetic!’
‘It was the best we could come up with.’
He pondered, and she thought, Come on, you can’t resist telling me something.
‘Are you familiar with the legend of the Minotaur, Sergeant?’
‘Not really. It was a monster, wasn’t it?’
‘Aye, half man and half beast. It lived on human sacrifice, the youth of Thebes.’
‘And where was its lair?’
‘In the labyrinth at Knossos, on the island of Crete. I spoke to your chief inspector about my time there, you may remember. The labyrinth was within, or some said beneath, the palace.’
Kathy thought about that. ‘If you’re suggesting that Silvermeadow is the palace… We’ve been all over it, and beneath it. That’s where we found-’
‘Aye, I heard. The remains of human sacrifice.’
‘But no lair.’
He said nothing.
‘Did they catch the Minotaur?’
‘The hero Theseus slew it, yes.’
‘How did he find it?’
‘A young woman showed him the way. Ariadne. Alas, I fear you will not be my Ariadne, Sergeant. Too bad. Now please go away.’
Kathy felt her patience ebbing. His dismissal reminded her of every dismissal she’d ever experienced at school. ‘Sorry,’ she said briskly. ‘I can’t do that. It looks as if someone’s forced that lock. I’ll have to get security.’
She reached into her bag and took out her phone.
‘Don’t do that!’ He spun round and shouted at her, his earlier agitation flaring up again.
She glanced at his right hand, still jammed in his coat pocket, then began to press the numbers.
The hand suddenly lurched into movement as if of its own accord, hauling out of the pocket one of the largest and heaviest-looking handguns Kathy had ever seen. He pointed it at her, the barrel wobbling alarmingly, and lifted his other hand to try to steady it.
‘Bloody hell!’ Kathy breathed. ‘What is that?’
‘The phone!’ he barked, flecks of spittle on his lips. ‘Put it down! Put it down!’
She shrugged and slipped it back in her bag.
‘No, no! Put it on the floor! Put it on the floor and step back!’
Kathy did exactly as he said, her eyes on the trembling fingers that held the swaying ordnance.
He stepped forward and swung a clumsy kick at the phone, missed, tried again and connected, sending it spinning away. ‘Foolish woman!’ he gasped. ‘You foolish, foolish-’
‘Where on earth did you get that?’ Kathy asked, trying desperately to sound completely calm and unconcerned by his obvious incompetence with the gun.
‘The very place,’ he said, and gave a rather wild little laugh. ‘Knossos, Crete. The island was full of small arms after the war. I bought this from a village boy for two packets of cigarettes-two more for the box of ammunition.’
‘Over fifty years ago? Have you ever fired it?’
‘I tried it once after I bought it, on the beach. Nearly deafened me.’
‘Are you sure it still works?’
‘We’ll have to see, won’t we? Sit down.’
He nodded towards the chair. Kathy moved carefully towards it, and he matched her steps in a slow-motion ballet to position himself between her and the door. When he was satisfied, he lowered the gun to his side, much, Kathy suspected, to the relief of them both. She tried to read the expression on his face. Not anger, she thought, nor fear. More like perplexity.
‘This is awkward, isn’t it?’ she said slowly. ‘You can’t lock me in here because the lock is broken, and you can’t let me go.’
He nodded sharply, as if this was exactly what he’d been thinking.
‘Would it help if I were to say that I’m as anxious as you are to find this room, if it exists?’
‘It exists,’ he said flatly.
‘How do you know?’
‘I’ve found it.’
‘You’ve been there?’
He shook his head. She followed his glance over to the table, covered by the sheets of plans. She noticed coloured pencil marks.
‘Those are the plans we worked from,’ she said, puzzled. ‘What could we have missed?’
A hint of the smug tutorial smile crept back onto his face. ‘They have been tampered with.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Because when I first arrived here, when the construction of the building had hardly begun, they gave me a set of the plans so that we would know where to concentrate the digging. I still have them.’
‘We know those plans have been modified since then-’
‘I know that. But they’ve also been tampered with. A room has been removed. A special room. I saw them build it.’
Kathy stared at him, not sure what to believe, and then Allen Cook’s comment came into her head: Harry Jackson has a lad who’s a bit of a computer whiz, and I pa y him to work on it from time to time. Speedy Reynolds of course. He could have done anything to the plans and nobody would have been the wiser.
‘You saw this room being built? What was special about it?’
‘It was right in the middle of the food court, shaped as an octagon, a pit containing a stage that could move up and down for spectacles and events. But it was too large, too ambitious, the costs got out of hand. Then one of
