‘Wouldn’t she normally have gone to Silvermeadow with you?’ Kathy went on. ‘Didn’t she give a reason for not going with you?’
The girl’s expression had become a scowl, fixed on one toe. ‘We were going to work. She wasn’t on that afternoon. I dunno.’
‘Where do you two work then?’
‘Lisa wipes the tables in the food court, and I help in the sandwich bar, on the preparation mostly.’
Kathy wondered if it was accidental that Kerri, the pretty blonde, was out front with the customers, in her short skirt and roller blades, while the stolid Naomi was back in the kitchen. ‘The thing is, Naomi, she went home that afternoon and packed a bag as if she was planning to go away somewhere. You’d think, wouldn’t you, that she would have said something to her closest friends. Some hint, surely?’
Silence.
Jack Tait said, ‘Speak up, girl,’ rapping his fingertips on the newspaper.
Mrs Tait had come into the room with a tray. She set it down and stooped beside Naomi and put an arm round her shoulders. ‘Come on, love,’ she urged. ‘Do try to think.’
The girl relented, gracelessly. ‘Yes. She told us. She said she was planning to go away.’
Mrs Tait drew back, looking worried.
Kathy said, ‘That isn’t what you told the officer who came to see you before, is it, Naomi?’
‘She made us promise not to tell anyone, see. She said she was going to Germany to stay with her dad.’
‘Oh bleedin’ heck,’ Jack Tait muttered. His fingers abruptly stopped tapping the newspaper.
‘Well, what else could I do?’ Naomi glared defiantly at him, and Kathy caught a glimpse of his eye meeting his grand-daughter’s and then sliding away, so that for a moment she seemed the adult, the one with the difficult responsibilities to deal with.
‘Had she arranged this with her father?’ Kathy asked. ‘Was he going to meet her somewhere?’
‘I don’t think so. She said it would be a surprise. She said she’d saved enough money to buy a ticket for the Channel ferry.’
‘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.’