‘I’ll knock the bastard’s head off,’ Leon said.
‘That wouldn’t look good. He’s a cripple, confined to a chair.’
‘Why’s he done it? He’s obviously trying to embarrass you.’
Kathy tried to remember exactly what he’d said, something about looking at it before she decided whether it was ‘worth a wider audience’, and she felt a cold chill creep over her skin.
‘He couldn’t exactly blackmail me with it, could he?’ she said. ‘Just make me look stupid. Bouncing on a bed at the height of a murder inquiry. I feel bloody stupid. Imagine if Brock saw it!’
Leon put an arm round her shoulders. ‘How many days off have you had in the last month? I don’t think you have to feel guilty about buying a bed. I don’t think you need to feel guilty about anything.’
‘No.’ But that was the result all the same. It made you feel guilty, so you’d be looking over your shoulder next time.
It had a dampening effect on the rest of the evening, and Kathy found herself making sure the lights were off, the curtains drawn and the door to the sitting room closed before she took off her clothes and slid under the new duvet with Leon.
Brock, too, felt on edge as he cooked some pasta for his dinner. Partly it was the lonely sound of rain spattering against the kitchen window, partly Bo Seager’s conversation, but mostly it was a matter of timing. The machine had been organised and set in motion, so far without result. Data was being amassed, but key pieces were missing, forensic most of all. There would be action soon enough, but not yet. There was no point beating the table about it. It was only a matter of timing. It would come.
He really wanted to ring Suzanne, but thought it might be a bit soon after their last conversation. Not good to sound pushy. And then he thought of Bo Seager’s explanation for Kathy’s air of intensity, and smiled. If only things were that simple. Kathy was surely driven by deeper demons than that. Although, now he came to think of it, she had seemed different that day. Calm. Almost euphoric. Probably the anticipation of a fresh case.
He opened a bottle of red, drizzled some olive oil on a chunk of bread, and sat down to eat. When he was finished he put his feet up and dialled a number on his phone.
‘Suzanne?’
‘David! I’m glad you called. I wasn’t sure when to ring you, with your new case. How is it?’
‘Just getting started.’
‘I saw someone on TV tonight. A rather pompous man in uniform, talking about a murdered girl. Is that your case?’
‘You’ve got it. Probably abducted from one of those big new shopping centres.’
‘Silvermeadow, yes, I’ve read about that place. I’d love to see it. Do you like it?’
‘Not my cup of tea. Huge place, a sort of shopping fantasyland.’
‘ Th e Ladies ’ Paradise.’
‘What’s that?’
‘It’s a book. Zola. About a wonderful new department store that takes over Paris. I’ll lend you my copy if I can find it.’
‘Thanks. How are your plans?’
‘Our trip? Well, I’ve got dates for a pantomime, Pete r Pan. Will you come with us?’
‘Certainly. I always had a soft spot for Captain Hook.’
‘Oh. That’s interesting.’
‘And accommodation?’
‘The place I’d had recommended is booked up. I’m trying somewhere else.’
‘You’re daft. I told you what to do. Stay here. It’ll be so much simpler.’
‘The children will wreck your calm sanctum, David. You’d hate it. We’d end up fighting.’
‘Rubbish. Anyway, maybe I need my calm sanctum being shaken up a bit. You can get too set in your ways, I’m told.’
‘Your job does all the shaking up you need. Two small children.. .’
‘Bugger the children, Suzanne. I’d like you to stay here. Just to try.’
‘Ah… Well, put like that, so eloquently, I’d have to give it serious thought.’
‘Exactly.’
Later, on the edge of sleep, a chain of thoughts passed through his mind. He had to force himself awake to reconstruct it. It went something like this: pantomime- improbable characters (Widow Twankey, Captain Hook, etc.)-the improbable Italian, Bruno Verdi, in the food court-the joke about Guiseppe Verdi not being such a great composer if he’d been called the English equivalent of his name, plain Joe Green-they were checking Bruno Verdi, but what about Bernie Green? Then he’d fallen deeply asleep.
7
K athy went straight to the security centre the following morning, wanting to have it out with Speedy Reynolds, but a different man, one she hadn’t seen before, was operating the cameras, and Harry Jackson came out of his office to tell her that Speedy wasn’t back on shift until that afternoon.
‘You get the daybooks all right, Kathy?’ he said.
‘Yes, great. Thanks for that, Harry.’
‘Anything else I can do, just shout. Any results yet from yesterday’s bunfight?’
‘The walk-through? No, nothing definite.’
‘Better luck this afternoon, eh?’ He seemed remarkably relaxed and jovial today.
She left him and went up to the unit to start work on the reports that had accumulated from the previous evening. As she entered the upper mall she was aware of something going on, people standing looking upwards, pointing, and when she stopped she saw that a small bird, a sparrow, had somehow got into the centre and was now flitting about distractedly beneath the vault, beating against the glass.
Towards lunchtime she took a call from Leon. They confirmed their arrangements to meet that evening, and then he asked to be put through to Brock. Kathy could tell from his tone that he had something.
‘He’s at a meeting at the Yard, Leon,’ she said. ‘We’re expecting him back shortly. Can I take a message?’
‘Yes, you’ll be interested in this, Kathy. We’ve just got the first toxicology results from Kerri’s autopsy back from the lab. They’ve been having a bit of bother because of the time interval since her death, but this is something. I’ll fax the report through now. It’s quite technical, but basically it’s about her hair.’
Hair, it seemed, provided a special kind of record of the body’s chemistry. At its point of growth, it absorbed traces of the body’s chemical responses to any antigens that might have found their way into the system. Growing at the rate of around twelve millimetres a month, hair of the length of Kerri’s represented a couple of years’ record of body chemistry, a print-out of specific bodily responses to antigens, and in particular drugs. Her hair, in effect, provided a two-year record of her drug history.
From this it appeared that Kerri had been experimenting with something, probably Ecstasy, over something like a four-month period before her death. In addition, the millimetre of hair closest to the root showed that in the final days of her life she had taken substantial amounts of an unknown antigen.
‘She was drugged?’ Kathy asked.
‘Drugged or drugging.’
‘Will they be able to identify it?’
‘The hair doesn’t carry traces of the drug itself, only of the body’s chemical response to it, so they can’t always tell. But they may have something later today or tomorrow.’
Leon’s information made Kathy impatient to act, but she thought Brock would want to be involved, and his meeting was lasting longer than planned. While she waited, Kathy moved on from the reports, which held nothing new, to Harry’s daybooks, sitting untouched on the table. She began working backwards through the latest one without enthusiasm. Having already skimmed it once she expected to find nothing, but she forced herself to it, almost as a kind of penance for her shopping spree the day before.
Since she had the photocopies she had made in the security room, she used them to mark items of possible interest with a coloured marker as she went, reading from the original books whose entries were more legible. It was only because she used this method that she came across the missing page. At first, when she turned up a photocopied sheet that didn’t correspond to the next daybook page, she thought she’d got the loose photocopies out of sequence. But when she checked the dates she found she had two extra photocopied sheets, covering a week in the middle of August, for which there were no book entries. She would never have detected the missing page otherwise, because it had been sliced out with such care, so close to the binding, that its stub was invisible. It must have been removed sometime between Sunday afternoon, when Kathy had photocopied it, and Monday morning, when the books had been delivered to unit 184.