Silvermeadow (20 page)

‘Always like her mother,’ Mr Tait said.

‘I’m sorry,’ Brock said.

‘So we can understand how Alison must feel. But was it a serious problem? Kerri was so young. Did it contribute in some way—’

‘We’re not sure yet. We need to find out as much as we can about it.’

‘Yes, well, Naomi may know something.’ Mrs Tait stopped and looked fixedly at Brock. ‘You’re wondering, aren’t you, about Naomi? You’re wondering if she’s in the same boat? Well I can tell you straight away, she’s not. Naomi has not touched drugs.’

Brock shrugged. ‘Well, I know how difficult it is to be sure—’

‘No.’ She shook her head determinedly. ‘I know. We’ve been through it twice already. We know the signs all too well, believe me, Chief Inspector. We had it all from our daughter: the little lies to borrow money, the money gone from your purse, the strange phone calls at odd hours, things missing from the house, the moods. We got to know those signs very well. And when Kimberley started we knew straight away, although she denied it till she was blue in the face and convinced everyone else, her sisters included, everyone except Jack and me. And Naomi’s seen it too, and she knows what happens. She’s not like Kimberley. She won’t end up the same way.’

‘She never borrows no money,’ Jack Tait said, leaning forward to emphasise the point. ‘She saves every penny of her work money. Every penny.’

‘It must be tough for you both,’ Brock said.

‘You cope, don’t you? You have to. We’d had our dreams of what we’d do when Jack retired, go live by the sea near our friends. But that wasn’t to be. We were needed here, to look after our grandchildren.’

‘This’ll give you some idea what our Naomi’s like,’ Jack Tait said. He got stiffly to his feet and went over to the mantelpiece and lifted a piece of paper out of a bowl. He handed it to Brock proudly. It was a lottery ticket. ‘Once a month she buys us one of these out of her pay from the sandwich shop. She says, one day we’ll win, and we’ll be able to buy a house in Westcliff big enough for us all. And she believes it too.’

They heard the front door bang and the sounds of Naomi discarding her bag and coat in the hall.

Her reaction to Brock’s questions was almost a mirror of her grandparents. She nodded sadly, and said she knew that Kerri had been trying things—speed, she thought, and Ecstasy, which she’d got from boys at parties. Lisa and herself had tried to make her stop, but Kerri said it was exciting, and they were stupid. They’d had an argument over it, which was the reason Kerri had stopped confiding in them about her plans.

‘We should have told someone, shouldn’t we? Her mum or something. Then maybe she’d have been all right.’

‘It may have nothing to do with what happened to her, Naomi,’ Brock assured her. ‘But we want to check everything. What about these boys? Do you know who they are? Do they go to Silvermeadow?’

Naomi shook her head. Lisa and she had tried to find out, but Kerri kept it a secret.

‘You’re sure she said “boys”?’

She pondered. ‘Boys, or “this boy”. I’m not sure. I thought there might be more than one, but I’m not sure. She told lies sometimes, just to wind us up.’

As they got back in their car, Brock said to Kathy, ‘This doesn’t sound like much. What do you think?’

‘I agree. She was trying things, but most of them do. She wasn’t exactly a junkie. They never found needle marks on the body, did they?’

‘No.’

‘I feel very sorry for Mrs Tait, trying so hard to do the right thing, worn out.’

‘Mmm. Might be better than being stuck in a cottage with old Jack at Westcliff, though, don’t you think?’

Kathy smiled. ‘Maybe.’

‘So what now? I was really hoping forensic would give us something more concrete to work on.’ Brock folded his arms and frowned out of the window as Kathy edged the car into the traffic of the high street. ‘The thought of this turning into one of those interminable cases, hundreds of fruitless leads, thousands of interviews, millions of words . . .’ He shook his head. ‘Have you been keeping in touch with what Leon’s been up to?’

She nodded. ‘Pretty much.’

‘I hope he’s giving us his undivided attention.’

‘I’d say so, yes.’

‘Someone said they saw him laughing yesterday, and
whistling
, for God’s sake. Leon doesn’t whistle.’

‘Maybe he’s happy.’

‘I don’t want him happy,’ Brock growled. ‘I want him dissatisfied and frustrated, like me. I want him harrying those lab people till they find us something useful.’

‘Maybe the samples from the compactors will give us something.’

‘That’s a long shot. She was pretty well wrapped up. And clean—no semen traces, no foreign hairs, no fibres. We find a body, and then it tells us nothing. They’ve got equipment can read your life story from a single hair, and all they can tell us is that she was a teenager who experimented with Ecstasy.’

Kathy found Speedy alone at his console that afternoon. She saw him grinning to himself as she came in the room, but he didn’t turn round. He continued ignoring her as she came to his side. Kathy looked down at the control panel, at the keyboards, the rotating dials, the sliding knobs, and spotted a simple switch at one end, marked ON–OFF. She reached forward and pushed it to off, and all the screens simultaneously went blank.

‘Oi!’ He blinked at the dead screens, then jerked round as if she’d physically hurt him.

‘I’d like your attention, Speedy,’ Kathy said softly. ‘I’d like to know what you thought you were playing at, making that tape.’

His mouth formed into the smirk again, and Kathy wondered if he’d had facial surgery after his accident. ‘Did you like it?’ he asked, with exaggerated innocence.

‘I asked what you thought you were doing.’

‘Just a little present. I thought you’d appreciate a demo, of what we can do. Something personal, just between you and me.’ His smirk trembled on the point of becoming a sneer.

‘You like making demos, do you? Make a habit of it?’

He held her gaze without answering.

‘You’re quite a creepy bloke, aren’t you, Speedy?’ she said. ‘What seems strange to me is that you’ve got all this talent for spying on people, but you can’t give us a damn thing about that girl.’ She stared at his expression, trying to decipher it, trying to work out if he really meant to look like that, or whether the muscles were damaged and he couldn’t do anything else. ‘You sure you haven’t got any little demos of girls in the mall? Any of her?’

Still no answer.

‘I’d tell you to watch your step,’ Kathy went on, ‘only that wouldn’t be appropriate. Just be careful, eh? Or I might have to give you a demo of what
I
can do.’

She pressed the switch back on and turned away as the screens flickered to life, and saw Harry Jackson standing in the doorway, watching them.

‘Have we got a problem, Kathy?’ he said carefully.

‘I don’t think so, Harry. Speedy was just showing me how things work around here.’

After the excitement generated by the first walk-through, the second attracted an even larger crowd. Chief Superintendent Forbes, who until now had been reluctant to appear committed to the Silvermeadow connection, had decided to attend, his uniform adding an element of formal pomp to the group waiting at the west entrance in front of the TV cameras to receive the girls.

The moment of their arrival was given some unexpected drama by the sudden eruption of a man from the crowd, who walked swiftly to Lisa’s side just as she was stepping out of the police car. Looking like a pale office worker at the end of a long week, in limp dark suit and tie, he had a placard hanging round his neck with the message
I AM UNEMPLOYED BUT HAVE NOT GIVEN UP. BUY A PEN
£1. He held a bunch of the coloured pens in his fist, and raised them up to the cameras as they recorded his brief moment in the spotlight before two security men bundled him away.

Kathy turned to Sharon at her side and said, ‘Know him?’

‘Yes, he’s one of our regulars. We don’t let him inside, but he often hangs around the entrances, looking pathetic, until we move him on. I’ve never seen him here after dark though. It’s this walk-through, it’s attracting everyone. Bigger than the
Titanic
, I reckon.’

And that was true, Kathy thought, looking at the crush of people in the mall, straining for a sight of the parade. In death Kerri was bigger than Snow White, Mauna Loa and Santa Claus combined.

As they moved forward, Kathy caught sight of a figure in the crowd she recognised, a boy of about twelve, with long black curls coming out from under the baseball cap reversed on his head, the boy she’d seen at the bookshop on Sunday morning and at Starkey’s games arcade. She moved into the crush and worked her way to his side.

‘Hi,’ she said, slipping a hand under his arm.

He looked up into her face, startled, saying nothing.

‘My name’s Kathy. I’m with the police. What’s your name?’

‘Wiff,’ he said in a soft whisper.

‘Wiff what?’

‘Wiff Smiff.’

‘I’ve seen you around the mall, Wiff. You spend quite a bit of time here, don’t you? Has anybody asked you if you ever saw this girl?’

He stared at the picture for a long time without speaking. His skin was very white, as if it was never exposed to the sun.

‘Well?’

He looked up, a blank expression on his face, and shook his head.

‘How old are you, Wiff?’

Wiff gazed at Kathy’s face for such a long time without replying that she wondered if he was quite right in the head. Then his eyes flicked to someone behind her, and as if he’d suddenly been switched on he gave a whoop and cried, ‘Sherro! I’m coming too!’, and before she could stop him he slipped out of her grip and went tearing off up the mall, weaving through the crowd of shoppers until he was lost to sight.

Surprisingly, Orville Forbes and Bo Seager seemed to have hit it off, walking side by side in the wake of the little figure with the green frog on her back, and when the chief superintendent held a further press briefing at the end of the walk-through, the centre manager was there too, the pair of them standing against a backdrop of tropical palms and Christmas fairy lights.

The hope was that on one of these two early evenings someone with a pattern of regular visits to Silvermeadow at the beginning of the week might be able to place her there with certainty. It was beginning to look like a vain hope until Gavin Lowry ushered a young girl and an older woman into unit 184 towards six p.m. They were shown into an area screened off from the rest of the unit, and used for interviews and small meetings, while Lowry briefed Brock.

‘I think I’ve found a positive sighting, chief,’ he said, fairly bursting with it. ‘They usually come on Tuesdays, and only Tuesdays, only last week they were here on the Monday. I found them down in the food court.’

Belinda Tipping was aged seven, as she immediately informed Brock when they were introduced. Her grandmother, elderly and looking overwhelmed, was her companion.

‘Now, you come here every Tuesday afternoon, is that right, Belinda?’ Lowry asked.

‘Yes, I told you. I come with my gran.’

‘Yes, well I want you to tell the chief inspector here, because he’s the big chief, all right?’

Belinda looked flirtatiously at Brock. ‘I used to come with Wendy,’ she confided.

‘Ah.’ Brock smiled at her. ‘And who’s Wendy?’

‘My big sister. She doesn’t come any more, though. Not since she ran away with Mr Palmer across the street. Mrs Palmer won’t speak to us any more now.’

Her gran coughed warningly. Belinda ignored her and smiled sweetly at Brock. ‘My gran brings me after school. I like to see the fireworks coming out of the top of the mountain.’

‘Yes, that’s right,’ her grandmother confirmed. ‘Every Tuesday. Then we go to my son’s and I stay the night. Except last week it was Monday, because of my appointment with the specialist.’

‘And what can you tell us about this girl?’ Brock pointed to the enlarged photographs of Kerri and of the girl with the frog bag pinned on the wall.

‘We saw her here last Monday,’ Belinda said.

‘You’re quite certain it was her, Belinda?’ Brock queried, sceptical. ‘Are you good at noticing things?’

‘Oh yes.’ The little girl was completely confident. ‘I’m very good at noticing things. I noticed the girl, because I want to have my hair in a ponytail like that. It was tied up in a red and green ribbon. And I noticed the green bag, like a frog. I told Gran I wanted one like that for Christmas.’

‘Is that right? Do you remember that, Mrs Tipping?’ Brock asked.

‘I do remember Belinda talking about a frog bag,’ she said. ‘She talked about it all the way back on the bus. But I didn’t notice the girl. I was too busy trying to get us to the bus station before the bus left. It was definitely last week.’

‘And where did you see her, Belinda? Was it down in the food court, where you spoke to Sergeant Lowry tonight?’

‘No. We had been there. Gran and me usually sit by the side of the lagoon, where the canoe is. They keep those seats for the children. Except . . .’ She put her hand to her face and smothered a giggle.

‘Except what?’

‘Except today, he’—she pointed accusingly at Lowry— ‘sat on one.’

Lowry coloured. ‘Well, I wanted to talk to people like you and your gran, didn’t I, Belinda? Tell us where the girl was.’

‘Upstairs, on this level, near the windows that look over the pool, talking.’

‘Belinda showed me exactly where on our way here, chief,’ Lowry explained. ‘She saw the girl as she and Mrs Tipping passed along the main upper mall towards the east entrance where the bus station is. She looked down the side corridor towards the observation deck over the pool. The distance would have been twenty yards.’

‘Talking, did you say, Belinda?’

The girl didn’t seem to mind their attention one bit, all focused on her and her little voice.

‘Yes. To a man.’

Lowry’s face split in a grin of triumph. ‘Tell the chief inspector what you told me about the man, Belinda. Tell him what he looked like.’

‘He was a funny man.’

‘Funny? In what way?’

‘He had no hair.’

‘No hair? You mean he was bald?’