‘ Well, tell Kathy about your work here, Robbie,’ Mrs Rutter scolded him.
‘Ah yes. Well now, would you be aware of the reason for the name Silvermeadow, Kathy?’
‘No, I’m afraid not.’
‘It’s like this. Do you know that great big ugly structure out there in the upper carpark, with illuminated advertisements for the films showing at the picture house and so on?’
‘Yes.’
‘It’s hard to believe it now, but that used to be the edge of a small wood, a copse really, on the crest of the hill. And one hundred and seventy years ago, a farmer who was ploughing up there, extending his field into the wood, unearthed a hoard of Saxon silver.’
‘Really?’
‘Aye. It’s believed that it was buried by a nobleman fleeing from the Battle of Maldon, which was fought twenty miles east of here. Would you be familiar with the Battle of Maldon from your schooldays, Kathy?’
‘Er, don’t think I am. Must have been asleep during that one.’
‘Shame on you!’ he teased. ‘Not a huge battle by modern standards, of course, but a great battle for its time all the same, between the Saxons and the Viking horde. I’m talking here of the true Battle of Maldon, of AD 991, not the legendary battle of 994, said to have lasted for fourteen days.’
‘Right.’
‘Aye. Well, anyway, these shopping centre people had no knowledge of the origin of the name. They merely noticed it on their maps as Silvermeadow Hill, and I suppose the combination of images that it conjured up, of hard cash on the one hand and a pastoral fairyland on the other, must have had a strong appeal to them.’
He arched one bushy eyebrow at her, a slightly manic gleam developing in his eye as he made the point. ‘Their choice of name was completely cynical, of course, suggesting that their monstrous new construction had some sort of connection with this place. I’m quite sure they never even considered whether this miserable little hill might have had a history at all. To them, it was merely a suitably positioned piece of real estate that might as well have been in Illinois or Manitoba.
‘But the place did have a history, you see. For after the battle one of the Saxon noblemen and his party were pursued here by the victorious Vikings, as rapacious for silver as the developers of this shopping centre. Indeed, I have no doubt there is a strong genetic connection.’
‘What happened?’
‘The Saxon party arrived here in the late afternoon, exhausted and demoralised, and buried their precious silver in the wood. Then they came down here, where we are now, in the lee of the hill, and made a fire and a camp for the night. They must have thought themselves safe from pursuit. But the Norsemen had not given up, and with the first dawn light they swept over the hill and descended on the Saxons like wolves, slaughtering them, every one.’ Orr paused for effect, sweeping his hand about him. ‘Eight men and boys, all murdered here, their corpses buried on the spot. Here they lay, undisturbed, for precisely one thousand years.’ He leant towards Kathy and fixed her with a wild stare. ‘ Precisely, mind you, that’s the uncanny thing. One millennium, to the day, perhaps the very hour, until they were disturbed by a bulldozer beginning the construction of this place.’
Kathy nodded, imagining the effect of his theatrical story-telling on his lady admirers in the Silvermeadow Residents’ Association.
‘Well, they had to stop, of course, as soon as the skeletons came to light. A proper archaeological assessment had to be made. I was nearby, at the local university, and this was my period, the Viking incursions. I lived here on the site for months, in those site huts you can still see round the east end of the building, with a team of volunteers, students and young people from all over, trying to establish what else was here before they chewed it up in their great machines.’
The imagery struck Kathy as oddly apt, given what had happened to Kerri Vlasich. But then the whole of Orr’s tale, with his rather exultant account of past murder, had an uncomfortable resonance with Kerri’s death.
‘And was there anything else?’
‘No. Oh there were a few surprises beneath the ground for them-a hidden spring, a pocket of sand-but nothing for me. My volunteers left at the end of that first summer, but I returned, from time to time. The construction workers got to know me, the mad professor.’ He chuckled, eyes twinkling. ‘They adopted me, like a mascot, an old goat.’
‘And now he’s one of us,’ Mrs Rutter said. ‘One of our most distinguished members.’
‘Oh now Harriet…’ he admonished her.
‘You must enjoy coming here,’ Kathy said.
‘I should describe it as a love-hate relationship,’ she said. ‘It’s terribly convenient, and comfortable, and we meet all our friends here. But it’s also very crass, of course, so commercial.’
‘It’s worse than that, Harriet. It’s deadening, it feeds on life.’
‘How do you mean?’ Kathy asked.
‘I mean that it feeds on all the real places around here, all the real towns and villages that have been steadily growing and developing for a thousand years, and are now having the life-blood sucked out of them by this great hulking parasite!’ His eyes blazed at the word. ‘And I also mean that it takes the life out of people, too. It is an offence against our natures, Kathy. It sanitises us, deodorises us, and turns us into shadows. Look at them!’ he roared, sweeping an upturned hand like a claw towards the shoppers meandering past. ‘It’s turning a warrior race, the hammer of the Scots, the butchers of the Welsh and Irish, the ravagers of half the globe, into a docile herd of consumers who care for nothing but woolly jumpers and soft music.’
Harriet Rutter gave a delighted chuckle. ‘And yet we keep coming back, do we not, Robbie?’
‘Aye,’ he nodded, calm again, wiping some spittle from his chin. ‘We keep coming back. The only thing that can be said for it is that: just as it has no past, so it also has no future. It didn’t grow out of anything that was here before and nothing will grow out of it; it will not age or acquire the patina of time, and no archaeologist will ever excavate its ruins; for when its usefulness is over its owners, caring nothing for it, will simply bulldoze it, sweep it away, and not a trace of it will remain.’
Brock was taking an early working lunch, munching a pie while he worked through the piles of reports covering his table. Kathy spotted a Sainsbury’s bag by his chair.
‘I’m getting bogged down, Kathy,’ he complained. ‘Buried in paper.’
‘Sorry, you should let me do that,’ she said, guilty at her morning lapse. She still couldn’t quite believe that she’d bought all that stuff. On impulse.
‘No, no. I want you out there, finding out about the girl. There’s a lot about Miss Kerri Vlasich that we don’t know, I’d say. You all right?’
‘Yes. Why?’
‘Just thought you looked a bit… distant. Phil thinks you might be going down with something.’
Going down with something. Well, it did feel a bit like that.
‘No, I’m fine, really. Why don’t you get Gavin Lowry to do it then?’
‘He’s the one shovelling most of it onto my desk,’ Brock said, thoughtful. ‘Yes, you’re right. He can do this. He elected himself to meet the father at Gatwick this afternoon, but we should go. We’ll bring him here for the walk-through. Watch his reaction.’
‘Good idea.’
‘You missed our SIO’s visit,’ Brock said dryly.
‘Oh dear.’
‘Never mind. You’ll see him on TV tonight. He’s made a public statement, appealing for information. You do have a TV, don’t you?’
‘Yes, of course. Gavin isn’t loading the chief super down with paperwork, then?’
Brock smiled. ‘Too nimble on his feet for that, is our Orville. I get the impression he knows Gavin pretty well. He was highly amused when I brought up Gavin’s little worry about reporting direct to him. Said he’d only asked him to let him know if we were short of anything. Didn’t want me to get the impression they were penny-pinching.’