‘Nonsense!’ Orr roared. ‘Impossible!’
‘It’s true.’
‘Well, someone else has put it there.’
‘Who?’
‘One of your people perhaps! I’ve read about this- police fabricating evidence when they run out of ideas. Well, let me assure you that you’ve taken on the wrong man this time, sir. I have a reputation for probity, you will find, and friends to support it. Why, the chancellor of my old university is a friend of the Home Secretary-’
‘Let’s not get carried away, Professor,’ Brock murmured. ‘The video was found in your filing cabinet by two of my officers. Actually we’re less interested in it than in what was found with it.’ He showed Orr the hair band.
Orr peered at it for a moment. ‘You don’t mean to say that this belonged to the lassie?’ His fury seemed to evaporate as he said it.
Brock raised an eyebrow but didn’t reply. If Orr knew the answer to that then he would mostly likely stick to a pose of outraged innocence. Brock waited, eyes fixed on his face.
‘But that is… monstrous…’ Orr said, with rather less confidence. ‘In my filing cabinet? All I keep in there, apart from the papers, is a wee bottle of whisky.’
‘Yes, we found that too.’
‘You’re serious about this?’
‘Very.’
‘I don’t know what to say.’ Orr’s indignation had gone. ‘Well, for a start, you can take my fingerprints. You’ll find they won’t match anything on those things.’
‘That would be most helpful. We’ll do it now, if you don’t mind. One of my officers will fix it up.’
As he got to his feet, Brock sensed the man’s mood change again. From outrage to shock, he now moved on to prickly martyrdom. A thought occurred to him.
‘In any case,’ he said scathingly, ‘why in blazes would I keep a video in the site hut when there’s no machine there to view it on, eh? It makes no sense.’
‘That’s a good point. Who else has a key to the hut, do you know?’
‘The security people, of course, and I was given one. But I had others cut when we were in the thick of our digging. Time was short, we worked round the clock, and I gave keys to some of the other people in the team. I never got them all back.’
‘Do any of them have any connection with Silvermeadow now?’
‘Not to my knowledge.’
‘So you have no theories about how these things could have got in there?’
Orr sat gauntly upright, stiff with bruised dignity. ‘I don’t care to speculate, sir. That seems to be your job.’
Brock sat with Lowry and Kathy in an adjoining room while Orr’s prints were being taken. ‘Let him stew on it for a few minutes, then we’ll go through it again. What bothers me, Gavin, is that we can’t be sure that drawer was searched the first time.’
He saw the discomfort return to Lowry’s face. When he had questioned the two officers who had searched that part of the site, one had claimed that they’d searched the drawer and seen nothing, the other that they’d never opened it.
‘What else might we have missed?’
Lowry clenched his jaw. ‘I told them to work fast, chief, and it was a huge complex to cover with the men we had. We got round the lot in half a day… Yeah, none of us could swear we didn’t miss something. It would take a week to do it properly. Not only that, the plans we were using were very simplified. They didn’t show all the store cupboards and plant rooms and stuff like that. We just had to use our judgement what we opened up and searched.’
Brock felt a twinge of unease. It wasn’t Lowry’s fault. He’d done exactly as Brock had instructed him. ‘Fair enough. But we may just have to do it again.’
He heard Lowry mutter under his breath, ‘Christ.’
‘What’s the problem, Gavin?’
‘Two problems, chief. Manpower-the chief super’ll do his nut. And the centre management. They’re becoming difficult. I think they want us out of there. Harry said he’d got new instructions not to give us access unaccompanied.’
‘I think I may be responsible for that,’ Kathy said. She also was looking uncomfortable, and told them about her late encounter in the games arcade the previous night, and Jackson’s reaction that morning.
‘You’re telling me that a boy was in there, playing arcade games at midnight? When the place had been locked up and secured?’ Brock’s feeling of losing control was growing by the minute. ‘Good grief, Kathy!’
‘I know. But I’ve no idea how. I searched the place myself this morning with Jackson and Starkey. There was no sign of anywhere he could have been hiding overnight, and no way he could have got out without triggering the alarms. They… well, I don’t think they believed me. They said I must have got confused by the flickering lights from the machines in the darkness. I wish they were right.’
Brock thought, working out the implications. Finally he said, ‘All the more reason to make another search, then.’ He thumbed through a notebook for a number, lifted the phone and dialled.
‘Harry, how are you?’
‘Not too bad, chief. What can I do for you?’ The voice was cautious.
‘Those plans you gave us of Silvermeadow, they’ve been giving us a bit of trouble.’
‘How come?’
‘They don’t show much detail. Plant rooms, store cupboards… We’re just beginning to realise what we missed.’
Brock let that sink in. The line was silent, then he continued, ‘You must have more accurate plans somewhere, don’t you?’
‘The property manager,’ Jackson said slowly, ‘holds the technical plans.’ He stressed ‘technical’ as if it were something dangerous and obscure. ‘But I wouldn’t imagine you’d need-’
‘I’m afraid we do. It’s beginning to look as if we’re going to have to search the damn place again.’
‘I don’t think management will buy that, chief.’
‘I’m not that keen on it myself, Harry.’ Brock’s voice hardened suddenly. ‘It’s a mistake that’s going to make us all very unpopular. I’d better speak to Ms Seager.’
‘Hang on, chief. How urgent is this?’
‘It’s urgent. I want some action tonight.’
‘Tell you what. Leave it with me for half an hour. Let me see what I can do. Let me get back to you.’
The phone rang again as soon as Brock replaced it. Bren was on the line, sounding fired up.
‘I think we’ve got something on North, Brock. Can we talk?’
‘I could do with some good news. Where are you?’
Bren was in the building. They arranged to meet and Brock rang off.
‘Gavin, something’s come up on another case Kathy and I are working on. Would you look after Orr? I doubt if you’ll get much out of him, but try anyway.’ He noticed a set look about the mouth as Lowry jumped to his feet, as if he was determined to redeem himself. ‘Don’t be too rough on him,’ Brock added, but Lowry was already through the door.
Bren looked rejuvenated, Brock thought, his big, deceptively gentle-looking countenance alight with good spirits. Burrowing away quietly in the undergrowth with a small team of his own, he had emerged into the light with something tasty, clearly.
‘One of the lines we’ve been taking is that he came here from Canada,’ he said, his soft West Country burr more pronounced than usual. ‘We’ve been checking arrivals, money transfers, that sort of thing. You wouldn’t believe the number of Canadians who have come over for Christmas. Then we thought he might have got himself a motor to get out to Silvermeadow, so we’ve been checking car hire places too. Yesterday we called in at a small independent rental outfit at Redbridge. Two weeks ago they hired a blue Golf to a man who offered a Canadian passport and driver’s licence as identification. Name of Keith Nolan. He was on our list of tourist visitors, arrived at Heathrow unaccompanied in mid-November. We also had him down as cashing several American Express travellers’ cheques issued in Montreal, at a bank in Barking on the thirtieth of November.’
Brock thought. Redbridge, Barking, both on this side of London, both within a dozen miles of Silvermeadow. And there was more coming, he could see from Bren’s manner, building up to the big one. His method was reassuringly sane and straightforward, searching the bureaucratic web of authorisations, accounts, documents in which everyone who travelled or hired or got sick or bought something became inevitably entangled. It made the Vlasich investigation at Silvermeadow seem uncomfortably messy by comparison.