Silvermeadow (12 page)

‘Just the boat? Was she going to hitch-hike?’

‘I think so. But she wouldn’t tell us what she was planning exactly, like it was a secret. Just that she was going to see her dad. But we thought that was what she was planning to do, hitch-hike.’

Her grandmother shook her head sadly. ‘Oh, that’s terrible, Naomi. A young girl like that on her own! Didn’t you try to stop her? Promise me you’ll never do anything so stupid.’

Naomi ignored her. ‘She said, after she got to Germany and sorted things out, she’d ring her mum and put her mind at rest. But we weren’t to say nothing, not to nobody.’

Mrs Tait passed round their cups of tea, fussing slightly, mollifying, removing her husband’s newspaper and positioning his saucer securely on a special rubber mat attached to the chair arm. ‘They’re good girls. They work hard and do their best, Sergeant. You can’t blame them. But I just wish you’d told us, love. I really do.’

The girl lowered her head, bottling up any reply.

‘Anyway, you want to help us now, don’t you, Naomi?’ Kathy said.

‘Of course she does!’

Naomi gave a reluctant little nod.

‘I’d like to take you, and Lisa too, over to Silvermeadow, and get you to show me round. Show me the places you and Kerri liked to hang out, the people you know there. Will you do that?’

‘Okay.’ The idea seemed to perk her up a little.

‘Of course she will!’ Mrs Tait passed round the shortbread, eager for Naomi to have a chance to make amends.

‘What about Kerri’s bag, the one like a frog, do you know where she got that from?’

‘Yes, a place in the mall. A bag shop.’

‘Good. Maybe you can help me find another one like it.’

‘That’s the way, old girl,’ Jack said, a little restored, lifting his cup to his mouth and blowing on his tea.

Lisa lived in Jonquil Court, distinguished from Crocus by the wrecked children’s play equipment corralled within a high chain-link fence in one corner. She was a paler, less confident version of Kerri’s picture, with the same length of fair hair cut in the same way, almost as if she had modelled herself on her friend. She confirmed Naomi’s account practically word for word, and agreed to come to Silvermeadow on condition Naomi was going too.

As Kathy took the girls back to her car she turned it over in her mind. Both of them seemed certain that Kerri had planned to surprise her father. Or perhaps to
test
him, Kathy thought, picking up on something Lisa had said, that Kerri idolised her dad and made excuses for his absence. For the girl would know, as soon as he opened his front door and saw her standing there, she would know from his expression if he really loved her. What if he’d got wind of it beforehand? Maybe she’d written, hinting at what she intended, and he’d tried to stop her. Or maybe she had reached him and he had tried to bring her back.

But the Hamburg police had confirmed that the company he worked for was quite certain that Stefan Vlasich was in Poland all through the period Kerri was missing. He was still there, waiting for a plane that would now bring him over to bury his daughter, and they would have their chance to interview him when he arrived. A simpler explanation was that she had started hitch-hiking, and had been picked up by someone on their way to make a delivery to Silvermeadow. Someone who had murdered her and then used the simplest and most anonymous disposal method available.

Kathy was about to set off with the two girls when her phone rang. It was Miriam Sangster.

‘Can I talk to you again?’ the constable said.

‘I thought you’d have gone off duty by now, Miriam,’ Kathy said.

‘I’m still here. There’s something I wanted to tell you. It won’t take long, but it’s quite urgent.’

‘I’m not far away now, but I’ve got the girls in the car with me, Naomi and Lisa. I suppose I could call in at the station.’

‘No, don’t come in. I’ll meet you round the corner in the high street, near the pillar-box outside the post office. It’ll be quicker for you. I’ll only take a minute.’

Kathy found the place and parked on a double yellow line, making desultory conversation with the two girls in the back. She asked which of them had the best job, and they explained, reluctantly, the good points and the bad. Kerri’s had seemed the most glamorous and the most fun, in her costume and make-up, talking to the customers, whizzing about on her skates. But the skates were hard on your legs after a while, and sometimes she’d get a customer who would hassle her. No, no one special, just sometimes she’d get a troublemaker, whereas Lisa and Naomi didn’t have so much of that.

Then Kathy spotted Miriam Sangster, out of uniform now, crossing the zebra up ahead and hurrying towards the car. She got out and walked up to meet her in front of the post-office window.

‘Sorry,’ the constable said. She had the same stubborn, preoccupied look about her that Naomi had had. ‘I thought you’d want to know this.’

‘Fire away.’

‘Okay.’ She took a deep breath, then began, speaking low although the street was deserted this cold Sunday morning. ‘When I tried to check that rumour, about Silvermeadow, remember?’

‘Yes.’

‘I was checking missing persons, and there were no references to the centre at all. But this morning, after we spoke, I tried a different line. Obvious really. I called up all the reports we’d had from Silvermeadow. There weren’t a lot, considering its size. A couple of ram raids, a few dozen shoplifters they decided to prosecute, some car thefts, some heart attacks, one fatal, that we attended, that sort of stuff.’

‘Yes, that’s pretty much what they told us. Go on.’

‘Then I came across Norma Jean.’ She sucked in her breath as if the memory was troubling. ‘A right pain she was. Young, under sixteen we thought, and a vagrant. I remember her causing trouble round here a couple of summers ago, begging, soliciting. Then when the weather turned chilly she took a fancy to Silvermeadow and started making a nuisance of herself there. We were called out a couple of times. I attended once—she’d been found in the women’s toilets, out cold with a needle in her arm and someone else’s handbag on the floor beside her. She was put in a shelter, then juvenile detention. But she kept coming back. The youth offender team took her under their wing for a while, but no one could really handle her. She was like a headache that wouldn’t go away. And then one day someone in the canteen said, whatever happened to Norma Jean? And we realised that the headache seemed to have disappeared. No one had heard of her for weeks. It was wonderful.’

‘She wasn’t reported missing?’

‘No way. Nobody gave a damn. I just phoned her last social worker. She said the same thing. Sometime around March, Norma Jean stopped being a bother, and everybody breathed a great big sigh of relief. She’d tried to follow it up, but couldn’t find out anything. In theory, Norma Jean is still on her load.’

Kathy didn’t say anything at first, not wanting to sound dismissive. Miriam Sangster was clearly taking this very much to heart.

‘Yes, all right,’ the constable said, ‘there are hundreds of Norma Jeans, thousands.’

‘She probably just moved on, Miriam. Decided to go somewhere she wasn’t so well known.’

‘Yes. But still, I thought our records showed that no one had disappeared from Silvermeadow. Now I can’t be certain, can I?’

‘Tell you what. I’ll check her out in the Silvermeadow security records. They may have something on her that we don’t.’

‘Thanks.’

‘And let me know if you find anything else. You said that Mrs Vlasich had heard some stories at the hospital?’

‘Yes, but I think she got it confused. A cook had heard it from a nurse who’d supposedly heard an old woman say she’d lost her young daughter at Silvermeadow. Sounded like classic urban myth stuff.’

‘Yes, well, frankly I’d forget about it. You’ve done about as much as you can.’

The other woman nodded reluctantly, relieved all the same. ‘I hope you get something soon.’

The girls seemed to brighten a little once they were under the dappled artificial sunshine of the mall, as if this was where they were most at home, whereas Kathy felt the same sense of disorientation as before. It was full of people again now, not as in a city street hurrying past without eye contact, but a relaxed crowd such as one might find at a fairground, perhaps, or a fête, sharing some implied sense of community and well-being. Yet there seemed no substance to it here, no relationships and ties that one might hope to uncover between people in a real street or town. Here everyone was afloat, gliding through a fantasy. She recalled Bo Seager’s remark about sharks following the shoals. A shark could easily pass unnoticed here.

They walked down the main mall, the girls pointing out the stores where they liked to window shop, the characters they knew by sight or reputation, and gradually the shock of Kerri’s murder seemed to fade from their minds, as if time and reality were suspended in the magic grove, and all the intractable grubbiness of life dissolved away in the glowing golden light. From time to time their eyes would be drawn to a sparkling shop display, and Kathy would pause with them and find herself drawn into their conversation, checking out some lovely thing that none of them had a use for. Then she would have to turn away, and remember what they were supposed to be doing, and get them moving again. Lulled by the scented air, the music not too loud or too soft but just right, it was hard to imagine that anything unpleasant could ever have really happened here—an abduction, a murder. In here the foetal figure waiting for the incinerator was no more than a chimera, a bad dream.

They stood at the balcony overlooking the food court for a while, listening to the sounds of fountains and waterfalls from the rain forest on this side of the lagoon, and the girls pointed out where they worked, and the other food stalls that formed the perimeter of the court. Between Mexican Pete’s and the Peking Duck was the Soda Factory, done up like an American drugstore counter in stainless steel and red leather stools. Then there was Snow White’s Pancake Parlour, and they were silent for a moment as they watched the girls on their roller skates, gliding skilfully on long legs between the tables.

They descended on the escalator and came to the shore of the volcanic lagoon. There was a uniformed copper standing there in conversation with one of the locals, who was explaining what happened.

‘Yeah, well, first you get yer warning tremors and rumblings see.’

‘Right, right.’ The officer nodded seriously, as if this was significant evidence.

‘Well then yer water starts moving, ominous right, and you ’ear the sound of frightened birds. Then the eruption starts—bangs and roars from the mountain—then smoke and sparks comin’out from the peak, and after a while molten lava starts flowing down the sides.’

‘Molten lava! You’re having me on.’

‘No, right up. Course it’s not yer actual molten lava, naturally. It’s an illusion, see, made with coloured lights hidden down the sides of the volcano. But it’s convincing. Then the water foams up, and that native canoe over there tips up in the air and sinks under the waves, like a whirlpool’s sucked it down. You should see it, mate. You’ll be impressed. Get your mates down here, on the hour.’

‘Yeah.’ The policeman nodded thoughtfully. Kathy could imagine the scene that afternoon: small children and grannies complaining that they couldn’t see for all the hulking great coppers in the front row.

But Lisa and Naomi were bored by this. They’d seen Mauna Loa erupt so many times. They led Kathy across to the far side of the food court, where an abrupt leap took place from the Pacific to Ali Baba’s Arabian Nights. Large pots belonging to the Forty Thieves stood at the entrance of the Grand Bazaar, the name written in Arabic-style neon lettering over the cave-like entry, guarded by a turbaned mannequin with a flute frozen in the act of charming a cobra out of its basket.

‘Do they have snake-charmers in Arabia?’ Kathy asked, then saw from the look on the girls’ faces that the question made no sense.

Inside the Bazaar the lighting levels dropped sharply, small spotlights dazzling like stars overhead against a black ceiling, a theme taken up in many of the shops. These were clearly aimed at the teen market—lurid T-shirt boutiques, a Doc Martens store, pop CDs, an electronic games arcade and a salon offering challenging concepts in hair and the piercing of body parts.

There seemed to be something going on here, voices raised above the general noise. Two uniformed officers, a man and a woman, were talking to the agitated tenant of the games arcade, a black man with dreadlocks.

‘Look!’ he yelled at them, brandishing his arms, rattling the gold bangles on his wrists. ‘You lot think that every black guy wearing a bit of gold jewellery is nicking stuff or selling drugs, don’t you? That’s what it is, innit?’

‘Keep your voice down please, sir,’ the male officer said.

‘No, I won’t shut up, ’cos it’s true, innit? I get this all the time, don’t I? You think I’m selling these kids drugs, is that it?’

‘Are you?’ the woman cut in.

All around them in the unit, teenage boys were easing away from the machines they had been playing and slipping away into the mall. Among them Kathy saw the boy she’d seen that morning outside the bookshop. He glanced back over his shoulder, then skipped into a run and disappeared into the crowd.

‘Hang on, you stay right there.’ The male officer left his colleague and moved over to two boys trying to leave. He bent forward and started talking to them. One of them shrugged and reluctantly began to turn out his pockets.

Kathy didn’t know the officers. The woman was trying to make some point with the operator of the arcade, who was now adopting an exaggerated pose of silence. Kathy walked over and showed the woman her warrant card. ‘Can I help?’

‘No, it’s okay.’ The woman smiled. She seemed calm and in control. ‘We’ve received some information regarding Mr Starkey, and we’re just persuading him to close up shop so we can talk to him. We can manage, thanks.’

‘What information?’ the man shouted. ‘What you fucking talking about?’

‘Watch your language, Winston,’ the woman PC said sharply.

Kathy turned back to the girls, and they continued on through the Bazaar until the dark mall opened into a small square from which another set of escalators led upwards towards light and another abrupt change of scene. Here they were on a gallery with large observation windows along one wall, overlooking the leisure centre and pool. It was busy down there, full of little kids with their dads, grandparents sitting under the palm trees and striped umbrellas on the astroturf waving encouragingly to the bodies in the surf, children sliding down the curling multi-coloured intestines of the water chutes, whooping and screaming silently beyond the glass. And there was surf too, surging from the wave machine at the deep end of the huge pool and spreading out across its surface to lap finally on the sandy beach.