Silvermeadow (32 page)

‘That’s a good point. Who else has a key to the hut, do you know?’

‘The security people, of course, and I was given one. But I had others cut when we were in the thick of our digging. Time was short, we worked round the clock, and I gave keys to some of the other people in the team. I never got them all back.’

‘Do any of them have any connection with Silvermeadow now?’

‘Not to my knowledge.’

‘So you have no theories about how these things could have got in there?’

Orr sat gauntly upright, stiff with bruised dignity. ‘I don’t care to speculate, sir. That seems to be your job.’

Brock sat with Lowry and Kathy in an adjoining room while Orr’s prints were being taken. ‘Let him stew on it for a few minutes, then we’ll go through it again. What bothers me, Gavin, is that we can’t be sure that drawer was searched the first time.’

He saw the discomfort return to Lowry’s face. When he had questioned the two officers who had searched that part of the site, one had claimed that they’d searched the drawer and seen nothing, the other that they’d never opened it.

‘What else might we have missed?’

Lowry clenched his jaw. ‘I told them to work fast, chief, and it was a huge complex to cover with the men we had. We got round the lot in half a day . . . Yeah, none of us could swear we didn’t miss something. It would take a week to do it properly. Not only that, the plans we were using were very simplified. They didn’t show all the store cupboards and plant rooms and stuff like that. We just had to use our judgement what we opened up and searched.’

Brock felt a twinge of unease. It wasn’t Lowry’s fault. He’d done exactly as Brock had instructed him. ‘Fair enough. But we may just have to do it again.’

He heard Lowry mutter under his breath, ‘Christ.’

‘What’s the problem, Gavin?’

‘Two problems, chief. Manpower—the chief super’ll do his nut. And the centre management. They’re becoming difficult. I think they want us out of there. Harry said he’d got new instructions not to give us access unaccompanied.’

‘I think I may be responsible for that,’ Kathy said. She also was looking uncomfortable, and told them about her late encounter in the games arcade the previous night, and Jackson’s reaction that morning.

‘You’re telling me that a boy was in there, playing arcade games at midnight? When the place had been locked up and secured?’ Brock’s feeling of losing control was growing by the minute. ‘Good grief, Kathy!’

‘I know. But I’ve no idea how. I searched the place myself this morning with Jackson and Starkey. There was no sign of anywhere he could have been hiding overnight, and no way he could have got out without triggering the alarms. They . . . well, I don’t think they believed me. They said I must have got confused by the flickering lights from the machines in the darkness. I wish they were right.’

Brock thought, working out the implications. Finally he said, ‘All the more reason to make another search, then.’ He thumbed through a notebook for a number, lifted the phone and dialled.

‘Harry, how are you?’

‘Not too bad, chief. What can I do for you?’ The voice was cautious.

‘Those plans you gave us of Silvermeadow, they’ve been giving us a bit of trouble.’

‘How come?’

‘They don’t show much detail. Plant rooms, store cupboards . . . We’re just beginning to realise what we missed.’

Brock let that sink in. The line was silent, then he continued, ‘You must have more accurate plans somewhere, don’t you?’

‘The property manager,’ Jackson said slowly, ‘holds the technical plans.’ He stressed ‘technical’ as if it were something dangerous and obscure. ‘But I wouldn’t imagine you’d need—’

‘I’m afraid we do. It’s beginning to look as if we’re going to have to search the damn place again.’

‘I don’t think management will buy that, chief.’

‘I’m not that keen on it myself, Harry.’ Brock’s voice hardened suddenly. ‘It’s a mistake that’s going to make us all very unpopular. I’d better speak to Ms Seager.’

‘Hang on, chief. How urgent is this?’

‘It’s urgent. I want some action tonight.’

‘Tell you what. Leave it with me for half an hour. Let me see what I can do. Let me get back to you.’

The phone rang again as soon as Brock replaced it. Bren was on the line, sounding fired up.

‘I think we’ve got something on North, Brock. Can we talk?’

‘I could do with some good news. Where are you?’

Bren was in the building. They arranged to meet and Brock rang off.

‘Gavin, something’s come up on another case Kathy and I are working on. Would you look after Orr? I doubt if you’ll get much out of him, but try anyway.’ He noticed a set look about the mouth as Lowry jumped to his feet, as if he was determined to redeem himself. ‘Don’t be too rough on him,’ Brock added, but Lowry was already through the door.

Bren looked rejuvenated, Brock thought, his big, deceptively gentle-looking countenance alight with good spirits. Burrowing away quietly in the undergrowth with a small team of his own, he had emerged into the light with something tasty, clearly.

‘One of the lines we’ve been taking is that he came here from Canada,’ he said, his soft West Country burr more pronounced than usual. ‘We’ve been checking arrivals, money transfers, that sort of thing. You wouldn’t believe the number of Canadians who have come over for Christmas. Then we thought he might have got himself a motor to get out to Silvermeadow, so we’ve been checking car hire places too. Yesterday we called in at a small independent rental outfit at Redbridge. Two weeks ago they hired a blue Golf to a man who offered a Canadian passport and driver’s licence as identification. Name of Keith Nolan. He was on our list of tourist visitors, arrived at Heathrow unaccompanied in mid-November. We also had him down as cashing several American Express travellers’ cheques issued in Montreal, at a bank in Barking on the thirtieth of November.’

Brock thought. Redbridge, Barking, both on this side of London, both within a dozen miles of Silvermeadow. And there was more coming, he could see from Bren’s manner, building up to the big one. His method was reassuringly sane and straightforward, searching the bureaucratic web of authorisations, accounts, documents in which everyone who travelled or hired or got sick or bought something became inevitably entangled. It made the Vlasich investigation at Silvermeadow seem uncomfortably messy by comparison.

‘We’ve been passing the more promising ones back to the Canadian police for checking,’ Bren continued. ‘We just got word on Nolan. He was born in the same year as North, but he died ten years ago in a road accident in Quebec.’

‘Great,’ Brock murmured. ‘I don’t suppose the car rental place took a photocopy of his identification?’

Bren grinned, and handed Brock a sheet of paper, a photocopy of two pages from a passport, including the photograph of Nolan. ‘What do you reckon?’

‘Yes,’ Brock said simply. ‘We can see what Pauline Lewins thinks, but yes, I think that’s him.’

‘So do I.’

‘We have a name, a car, a photo. What else do we need?’

‘More legs and a bit of time. We’re working on accommodation now, hotels, b and bs, rented accommodation . . .’

‘How long was the Golf hired for?’

‘Four weeks. To be returned on the twenty-eighth of December.’

‘He may have more than one alias.’

‘Sure.’

Brock saw Bren hesitate, glance at Kathy, then back to him.

‘I was wondering if you might want to get more involved now, chief.’

Of course he did. The thought of Nolan was tantalising, irresistible.

‘You’ve done well, Bren. Give me twenty-four hours to finish off a few things with Kathy at Silvermeadow, then I’m all yours.’ He didn’t really mean
finish
, for he had no hope of that. But he would need a little time to extricate himself and make sure that Kathy was put in charge of the Vlasich investigation.

Harry Jackson phoned shortly after this, sounding more confident than the last time they’d spoken. He’d arranged a meeting for Brock with Bo Seager in an hour, at 6.30 p.m., to sort out ‘ongoing protocol’, as he put it. He had also arranged for the property manager, Allen Cook, to be in his office, just along the corridor from the centre manager’s, around that time to brief Brock on available plans.

They picked up Gavin Lowry on their way down to the car. He seemed tense after questioning Orr, from which, he said, he had discovered nothing of interest. With some probing from Brock as they drove out to the motorway he admitted that the old man had irritated him a good deal. ‘Pompous old fart!’ he said in a sudden burst of anger. ‘Knows everything, and all of it completely pointless. He reminds me of our old history teacher at school. So fucking smart!’ Then he added in an undertone, ‘We sorted him.’

‘How?’ Brock asked mildly.

‘Oh, one of the boys said he’d tried to interfere with him.’

‘Had he?’

‘No. They suspended him anyway, and he had a nervous breakdown.’

Brock noticed Kathy glance sharply up at Lowry’s reflection in the rear-view mirror, then snap her eyes back to the road.

‘I hope you didn’t try the same on Orr, Gavin,’ Brock said.

‘What, plant that tape in his filing cabinet?’ Lowry laughed. ‘No, but after listening to him droning on for half an hour I was capable of it, believe me. Who the hell is Harding?’

‘Should I know?’

‘Exactly! He says, “I was with Harding in Jordan”, like you should know what the hell he’s talking about.’

‘You weren’t too rough on him, were you, Gavin?’

‘Not nearly rough enough, chief,’ Lowry growled back. ‘Not nearly.’

They arrived early for the meeting with Bo Seager, and found the office of the property manager, Allen Cook. He was a brisk, wiry man, with the certificate of an engineering degree framed on the wall behind his desk. He eyed Brock with interest as he listened to what he wanted, one technician to another. When Brock showed him the plans that Harry had supplied he shook his head dismissively.

‘Very crude. Detailed building plans are all on the computer there, and you can have a print-out at any scale of detail or layer of system you want, from structural grids to electrical or plumbing layouts. I imagine you’ll want the spatial plans, with partitions, doors, room layouts and so on.’

‘Yes, that sounds like it.’

‘There’s a slight problem though. These plans are essentially the original construction set, which we’ve modified and updated from time to time to include work done by tenants. You have to understand that up to half of the value of construction in a shopping centre like this is fitting-out work done by the individual tenants’ contractors. They come into the basic shell that the owner provides, and they put in their own ceilings, partitions, services, fittings, finishes. They have to get this work approved by the owner, and they lodge copies of their plans with us to put on to our master. But they don’t all work on AutoCAD like us, or a compatible software system. Some don’t do their plans on a computer at all, and they give us paper sets.’

He went over to a plan chest of wide, shallow steel drawers and pulled one of them open and drew out a construction drawing from the top of the pile inside. He laid it on the table, spreading it with his palm to flatten its creases.

‘This is the contractor’s fitting-out drawing for a shoe shop in unit seventy-three, a medium standard unit. They put in a toilet and small staff room at the back there, and an office here, this curving wall between men’s and women’s shoes and this wavy ceiling, shelving, racks, a store front that folds away, plus the services—lighting, air-conditioning ducting, smoke detectors, sprinklers, plumbing—all tapping into the main lines we bring to the rear of the unit. The problem is that someone at this end then has to put this manually into our master plan—it would be difficult to scan a plan like this directly in. This has not been done consistently. I’ve been here nine months now, and I’ve hardly begun to get to grips with the backlog of plans that haven’t been entered onto the master set. Harry Jackson has a lad who’s a bit of a computer whiz, and I pay him to work on it from time to time, but he can’t keep up.

‘Also, as you can see’—he pointed to pencilled notes and alterations on the original print drawing—‘changes get made during the course of construction. In this case they had to change their toilet layout when they discovered where we’d put the connection point for their drainage, and that altered the layout of all the surrounding walls, just slightly. I couldn’t guarantee that what’s down there now is exactly like this, either. I know they also changed the alignment of the curved wall, because there was a grid of sprinkler heads already in the ceiling, and the wall would have interfered with them.

‘Now if we compare this sheet to the master plan on the computer . . .’ He went over to the machine on the next table and worked at the coloured plan on its screen until he found and enlarged the area around unit 73. ‘Very different, you see? Our master hasn’t been updated yet. You get the picture.’

Brock was feeling the way he often did when people demonstrated computers to him. Irritated and depressed. He could sympathise now with Jackson’s warning description of Cook’s plans as ‘technical’. And he could understand why he’d stuck to his ‘crude’ plans.

‘Frustrating, I know,’ the engineer said. He went over to a rack standing in a corner of the room, and slid from it a set of plans clipped together on a wooden handle, and laid these down on the table. ‘This is probably the sort of thing you want. One to five hundred scale plans of the spatial layouts of each level, with the landlord’s structure in black lines and tenants’additions, as far as we’ve recorded them, in red. I can give it to you at an enlarged scale if you want, one to two hundred say, but that would cover several sheets for each level.’

Brock stared at the plans, rubbing his hand through his beard, his feeling of irritation becoming rapidly compounded by a sense of unease. ‘So inside their own shops, tenants could have built rooms, cupboards, cavities that don’t appear on these plans at all, and that you don’t know about?’

Cook nodded. ‘Certainly. We
should
have a record of it somewhere, but I couldn’t guarantee it. You know, they get a builder in for a job they’ve agreed with us, and then they say to him, “While you’re here, give us a price for putting up an extra couple of walls over there.” It happens. And it’s always a last-minute rush, and they know if they apply to us for approval it’ll slow them down . . . You understand.’