‘Yes, I saw that in your report. But he had other relatives in Hamburg, didn’t he? They could have come over for her, I suppose?’
‘Yes. And there was a Vlasich in the computer, too, with a sex offence on his record, but that turned out to be a dead end. So without any other evidence it seemed simpler to assume she’d gone on her own, probably hitching, and probably to see her dad-she’d threatened to do it. Course, it’s easy to say now…’ she concluded defensively.
‘No, no one’s suggesting you should have done anything differently, Miriam. You spoke to her friends, didn’t you?’
‘I saw two of them at the school, Naomi and Lisa. Mrs Vlasich said they were Kerri’s closest friends, but they knew nothing. They said they had no idea she was planning to run away, and they seemed credible to me. Naomi is the brighter of the two, Naomi Parr-I’d start with her if you want to talk to them. They both have jobs at Silvermeadow, too.’
‘How do they get over there? It’s quite a way.’
‘The centre runs special bus services to bring people in from surrounding towns. One runs right past their school and the estate.’
‘Convenient.’
‘Yes. You’ve seen Mrs Vlasich, have you?’
‘Yes. When we told her the news. She was very shaken up, of course, didn’t say a lot.’
‘You mentioned Silvermeadow, did you? Did she say anything about that?’
Kathy noticed a certain hesitancy in the way Sangster said this. ‘That did seem to shake her, when we mentioned that. It seemed to hit her then. She went to pieces after that. Why?’
Sangster hesitated, then leant forward. ‘Did she mention the others?’
‘Others?’
The constable frowned and lowered her voice. ‘Gavin will say this is rubbish, but there’ve been stories going round about Silvermeadow: young girls going missing, a monster in the mall, stuff like that. Mrs Vlasich had obviously heard them, and she confided in me, after Gavin had left. The idea really terrified her.’
‘Nobody’s mentioned this. It’s not in your report.’
‘No, of course not. It’s just another one of those urban myths. You know, like that tattooed man with the hangman’s noose who’s supposedly been spotted in every other multi-storey carpark between Glasgow and Exeter, or the West African cannibal prince who lives on baby stew and has been seen-really, actually seen -with a baby’s tibia through his nose, by a friend of a friend of half the population of Leicester.’
Kathy smiled. ‘Yes, I know. And you’d heard the Silvermeadow stories yourself, had you? Before Alison Vlasich brought them up?’
‘Yes, I’d heard them, not through my job but from my partner. He’s a schoolteacher, and he was told about them by the kids in his class. He told them that they were just fairy-tales reinventing themselves, like Babes in the Woods, Little Red Riding Hood. But the kids wouldn’t have it. They knew the stories were true. They’d heard them from someone who had actually spoken to someone else who was a close relative of someone who had been there at the time. They were so convinced that he told me about it, and I agreed to check the computer. And of course there was absolutely nothing to it. I couldn’t find a single missing person report that made any mention of Silvermeadow. I told Gavin about it afterwards, and he advised me to forget it.’
‘Had he heard the stories before?’
PC Sangster lit a cigarette, thinking. ‘I don’t think so, not when I first mentioned it. But he spoke to me again a day or two later. He’d talked to someone he knows at Silvermeadow, one of the security people there, and they’d told him it was nonsense.’
‘So they’d heard of it?’
‘Oh yes. Gavin said they were really pissed off about it. They even thought one of their competitors might have deliberately started the rumours. That’s why he said to forget it. Only’-she exhaled a column of pale smoke from the side of her mouth up at the ceiling extract grille-‘when they told me she’d been traced to Silvermeadow, my blood went cold. Really, it did. I wondered what Mrs Vlasich must be thinking.’
‘Yes, I see.’
‘Tell me, when did she die? Do they know?’
‘We don’t know for certain it’s Kerri’s body yet, Miriam.’
‘Oh come off it, Kathy. When did she die?’
Kathy could follow the train of thought, and she looked down to sip from her tea. ‘Some time this week. They’re not certain.’
‘So it could have been Thursday, say,’ the constable added softly. ‘She might still have been alive when I told her mother that it had nothing to do with Silvermeadow…’
‘Miriam, you couldn’t-’
‘And I didn’t do a bloody thing to check.’
‘You phoned the people where she worked, didn’t you? No one had seen her.’
‘Yes.’ Miriam Sangster crushed out her cigarette with a bitter little flourish and got to her feet. ‘Really thorough that was, wasn’t it?’ She swung away, then stopped and turned back. ‘If you can avoid telling Gavin that I told you this, I’d be grateful. We do have to go on working together when this is over.’
‘Sure.’ Kathy smiled reassuringly. There was something ever so slightly self-consciously casual about Miriam’s use of his first name that made Kathy wonder if she and Gavin had ever done more than work together.
At this hour on a Sunday morning the carpark was bare, the building as forlorn as a vast abandoned circus tent in a macadam desert. Kathy parked next to the head of the service road ramp and descended to the striped barrier, where the man at the control window looked up briefly from his Sunday paper, glanced at her ID and nodded her in. She walked along the service road past the first compactor area, its tape untouched from the previous night, and on towards the sound of metallic clanging, men’s voices, a dog’s sudden bark. Turning the corner she saw the blue compactor taken half apart, white overalls crawling over its loosened panels on the ground, a dog and its handler working further along the service road. The man in blue denim overalls wielding the large spanner was presumably the mechanic, talking to a SOCO with hands on hips, whose face Kathy couldn’t see. She was aware of the mechanic registering her, his eyes flicking over to give her a quick appraisal. The SOCO turned to see what he was looking at, and Kathy saw the Indian features and recognised Leon Desai.
There was no reason at all why the laboratory liaison sergeant shouldn’t be there. Brock had undoubtedly insisted on it, and Kathy should have anticipated it. But she hadn’t, and the sudden sight of him there brought the colour up on her cheeks. The last time she had seen him he’d been in a hospital bed, crippled in the line of duty, and they had parted on bad terms. He had lain there in all his martyred dignity and accused her, quite rightly, of not having trusted him. She could remember his words precisely- you’re so bloody determined to trust nobody -as if it had been a deliberate policy on her part, a character flaw, rather than a mistake. She had left under a private cloud from beneath which it had taken her some time to crawl.
So by rights he should now have turned away and ignored her, but instead he was walking towards her. He stopped a yard away and looked at her with his steady dark eyes, unsmiling, and said, ‘Hello, Kathy. It’s good to see you again.’
Was it? Had she gone through all that soul-searching for no reason? He seemed perfectly sincere, genuinely glad to see her. She noticed the small pale scar across his left eyebrow and remembered herself telling him, not entirely unmaliciously, that he would no longer be perfect.
‘And you, Leon. Great.’
A smile slowly formed on his face, and she hurriedly said, ‘How are things going?’ meaning his broken jaw and leg, but he replied, ‘Nothing yet. It’ll take another hour or more to get this thing apart.’