‘I wonder what he said,’ Kathy murmured.
Desai shrugged. ‘Fancy a coffee?’
‘In a minute,’ Kathy said. ‘Brock’s going to have a go.’
‘Eddie,’ Brock began, sounding as if he was only noticing him for the first time. ‘Are you feeling all right? The lip, I mean. It looks sore. You sure?’
Eddie made no response.
‘You like working at the pool, don’t you?’
Eddie studied his fingers fixedly, waiting for the trap.
‘I can understand that. It looks like a really nice place to work. I haven’t been able to find the time to go down there yet, but I will, for a swim. How much will that cost me, for a swim?’
‘Two fifty,’ Testor whispered, ‘three fifty at peak time.’
Brock nodded, as if this confirmed something that had been on his mind. ‘I was reading about the pool in the brochures. An average length of fifty-three metres, width of eighteen and a half metres, and depth of one point six metres, that’s what the brochure said, and I was trying to multiply the numbers together to work out how many litres it holds, at one thousand litres to the cubic metre.’
‘One million five hundred and sixty-eight thousand eight hundred,’ Eddie Testor said without hesitation.
Brock chuckled and nodded his head. ‘That’s absolutely right,’ he said, and slid his notebook across the table to Testor. ‘But it took me five minutes to work it out.’ He grinned at the solicitor, who was looking very puzzled. ‘No really, I’m impressed, Eddie.’
Testor ducked his head, clearly pleased with the compliment although reluctant to acknowledge it.
‘Let’s see,’ Brock continued. ‘If we assume the earth is a perfect sphere with a radius of six thousand three hundred and fifty kilometres, and the volume is pi times the radius cubed, what is the volume of the earth in cubic kilometres?’
Testor looked unhappy. ‘Pi times…?’
‘Take a value for pi of three point one four one five nine,’ Brock added.
‘Oh.’ Eddie’s face brightened. ‘Eight hundred and four billion three hundred and ninety-seven million, four hundred and fifty-three thousand four hundred and twenty-one point two five.’
Brock laughed out loud. ‘That is simply amazing. I’ve heard of people who can do this, but you’re the first I’ve ever met, Eddie. How do you do it?’
Testor gave a shy smile. ‘I don’t know.’
‘Astonishing.’ Brock looked at the solicitor. ‘Isn’t it?’
She gave a guarded smile, looking at Brock a little oddly.
‘You really don’t know how you do it?’ Brock asked again.
‘The answer just sort of comes into my head. I don’t know how.’
‘Well, you’ve got a very special kind of head there then, Eddie. Very special. Is that why you got that black eye? Has that got something to do with it?’
Testor looked unhappy, winced as he pulled a face.
‘Your mouth hurts?’
He nodded.
‘It was someone you knew, wasn’t it, Eddie?’
Testor’s face formed a deep scowl of denial.
‘I can’t do sums in my head like you, Eddie,’ Brock said amiably, ‘but I can see some things that are obvious. If it was a stranger who knocked you down in the street, like you said, your clothes would have been wet and dirty, but they weren’t. There was blood on your tracksuit top from your mouth, but no dirt or rain. And things were upset in your flat, the chair knocked over, and the lamp. It seems obvious to me that you were knocked down in your flat, after you let the people in. So I assume you knew them. That’s obvious, isn’t it? Like two times two?’
Eddie wouldn’t meet Brock’s eyes. He stared down at his hands and made little flexing motions with his shoulders.
‘Why did they hit you, Eddie? Was it to do with the way your mind works? Did they not like that?’
There was no reply.
After a moment, Brock took Kerri’s photograph from the file and placed it in front of him. ‘Tell me what goes through your mind when you look at her now, Eddie,’ he said gently. ‘Is it as simple as long multiplication? Or is it more difficult and complicated? Try to tell me.’
Eddie stared at the picture for a long while, then lifted his eyes to Brock’s and said, sounding completely lucid, ‘But I’ve never seen her before, sir. Never.’
Kathy and Leon went down to the canteen. The tables had been arranged in two continuous parallel rows, seats ranked down each side. Kathy wondered if the cleaners or catering staff who had set the furniture out this way thought that their customers liked to be lined up in ranks. She and Desai picked up their cups from the counter and sat down on opposite sides of a table.
‘You seem a bit edgy,’ Desai said, watching the way her eyes were following the uniformed men and women coming and going.
‘Do I? Yes. I feel I should be doing something, but I’m not sure what.’
Part of the feeling, she knew, was coming from being here with Leon, behaving as if they were no more than professional colleagues rather than lovers. The functional indifference of the place seemed to mock their intimacy, and she wondered if she was being overly sensitive about it. Among the hundreds of officers who had served time here, others must have been in this situation, couples in unpublicised relationships. Did they feel out of place because of it? Did Leon? He gave no sign of it.
‘I should have thought that things were looking promising,’ he said. ‘Testor is quite a weird character, isn’t he? That stuff with the numbers. How did Brock get onto that?’
‘There was something in his file, the psychologist’s report. I didn’t really pick it up at the time. That reminds me, I have to get back to Silvermeadow to look at another file. Are you going over there?’
Leon checked his watch. ‘Brock asked me to collect Alex Nicholson for the briefing, and I need to call in at the lab first. Why don’t you come with me?’
‘No, I’ll get a lift from someone else, don’t worry.’
‘Are you all right, Kathy?’ he said suddenly, lowering his voice. ‘Are we all right?’
She looked at his face, scanning the details of eyelids, mouth, earlobes, as if needing to memorise them again. ‘Yes, yes. Sorry. I get preoccupied, you know how it is. When there are loose ends all over the place, and nothing makes much sense. You know.’
He nodded. ‘Yes, I know. I’ll catch up with you after the briefing, okay?’
‘Mm.’
‘This is an awful place, isn’t it?’ he said suddenly. ‘I keep thinking that I want to grab hold of you, pretend we’re somewhere else.’
She smiled. ‘I know. I know exactly what you mean.’
9
U nit 184 was crowded for the team briefing that afternoon when Kathy arrived. She saw Dr Alex Nicholson standing talking to Brock in front of the plans of the centre, though she didn’t recognise her at first because her long hair, previously jet black, was now an almost peroxide blonde. The psychologist had one hand in her hair, stretching, pulling at it absently while she thought about the point Brock was making. She was dressed in black jeans, trainers and a T-shirt with the message on the back PSYCHOLOGISTS DO IT IN YOUR HEAD. Kathy was struck again by how young she looked, more like a student than a teacher. Also how attractive. She’d get a solid turnout from her male students for her lectures, Kathy thought.
Brock called her over to introduce her.
‘Yes, we know each other,’ Kathy said, noticing the rather clever way the other woman had used the minimum of make-up to the maximum effect, especially around the eyes. ‘We met in Orpington.’
‘Hi.’ Alex smiled back. ‘The Angela Hannaford murder. I remember, of course. Leon said something about you working on this one.’ She turned back to Brock with a question, and Kathy wandered over to her filing tray, half-filled with new material. She sifted quickly through it, stopping at a pouch sent out from central registry. She opened it and began to flick through the file inside.