Silvermeadow (25 page)

There was a murmur of approval at this.

‘But it’s badly contaminated, and they can’t say yet whether it’s even human.’

A groan of disappointment.

‘And it was from the orange compactor, not the blue one.’

There was silence as they tried to work out the implications of this, and the thought passed through Kathy’s mind, how come forensic evidence so often seemed to be two-edged, clarifying and confusing at the same time?

Then it was Alex Nicholson’s turn. She disarmed them immediately by saying that they knew far more about it than she did, and she had nothing brilliant to offer, but maybe it would be helpful if she sort of facilitated—she apologised for the word, which she hated, but they knew what she meant—a discussion, to get ideas out into the open. They might begin with Kerri’s motivation. If she was really running away to see her father, why would she have been talking to Eddie Testor? Was it a chance meeting? Did she know him? Did she buy drugs from him? Could it be that she never had any intention of going to Germany, but instead wanted to frighten and punish her mother, and had used her friends to spread the false story unwittingly?

The group was slow to respond to this, but gradually one or two offered their ideas, which she wrote up on a white board, and a more general discussion began to build up. She was good at it, Kathy conceded, even with such a large and unfamiliar group, getting them to participate. Kathy herself said nothing for some time. She thought the focus on Kerri’s character and motivation was leading nowhere, for the reason that they didn’t really know enough; anything seemed possible. And so eventually she decided to lob a little hand grenade into the debate.

‘What if this has nothing to do with Kerri and her father?’ she asked. ‘What if Kerri was no more than a chance victim? What if this has happened before at Silvermeadow?’

The room went very quiet.

Alex Nicholson was writing on the board at that moment, but she immediately swung round and fixed Kathy with bright eyes. ‘Yes!’ she said, as if she’d been waiting all the time for someone to suggest this. ‘What about that?’

Lowry broke in, irritated. ‘What if? What if? Come on, Kathy, we’ve killed this one. There’s no evidence this has happened before.’

‘But why shouldn’t it?’ Alex said. ‘The method of disposing of the victim was perfect, or should have been. So perfect that it must have been very deliberate, surely. Not a lucky chance. So then, why couldn’t it have happened before? Perhaps many times. Come on, Gavin’—Kathy thought it interesting that she already knew their names— ‘let’s just explore the idea for a minute. Because it changes everything, doesn’t it?’

She let them think about it, then said, ‘Kathy’s right. Kerri becomes almost incidental, merely this month’s target. The whole focus shifts. Instead of looking at character and motivation, we look instead at . . . ?’ She left it hanging in the air, but they didn’t get it. Nobody spoke, and eventually she answered her own question. ‘Place! The setting becomes the central thing. Right? The place where it happens!’ She turned to Brock, as if to check whether it was all right to go on, and he nodded with an indulgent little smile and she turned back to the group, and abruptly the tutorial was over and the lecture began.

‘You see, one of the central concepts of the work that we’ve been doing at Liverpool is the idea that there is a pattern to the places that a serial offender chooses for his attacks. Kathy, of course, remembers this from the Hannaford case, where we used this. The pattern of where the victims are found can tell you things about the offender, most importantly where he himself is located in relation to the attack sites.

‘But in this case we have the opposite: we have one single location, to which the victims and the attacker come. The place is the thing that draws them together. We can tell nothing about our offender from the distribution of sites, because there is only one site, but maybe we can tell a great deal about him from the character of the site, because this is a very unusual and distinctive place. We can imagine him being drawn here, coming here a lot, being very comfortable here, so that he keeps reusing the same location. So, you have to ask yourself, what is so special about this place for him?’

She took a breath and leant back against the table behind her, confident that she had their full attention.

‘There’s a phenomenon in shopping centres. You can see it if you watch people near the entrances, coming in. They march in, purposeful, heading straight for whatever it is they’ve come here for. They aim to buy it and get off home. But then something happens. Their eye is caught by the shop displays, and they begin to appear distracted. Their path becomes erratic. They slow down, and wander from one side of the mall to the other. The music is playing, and they stop and look at this thing and that. Maybe they take off their coat, because it’s nice and warm in here. They have a kind of vacant look on their face now, and after a while they notice that they’re tired, and that they’re carrying shopping bags full of things they never thought of buying when they first arrived. So they sit down on one of the nice seats in the mall, next to a fountain, under a potted tree, and watch a fashion parade or listen to the local school band playing a selection of Gershwin melodies, and they try to remember what the hell it was they came here for in the first place.’

Kathy noticed several smiles of recognition at this, and recalled how rapidly she’d been drawn into buying, almost without thought.

‘This phenomenon is well known enough to have a name,’ Alex continued. ‘It’s called the Gruen Transfer. The name comes from Victor Gruen, the architect who designed the first enclosed shopping mall, at Edina in Minneapolis in 1956. He had a vision, you see, that the modern shopping centre could be more than just a collection of shops, it could be a complete integrated environment, separate from the world outside, a perfect machine for consumption.

‘Yes, a machine. The terms they use sound like they’re talking about a machine. There are “magnet” stores that attract customers as if they were iron filings, and draw them past all the smaller shops, and sort of pump them around in “flows”. If the distance between the magnets is too great, the flows are weakened and the efficiency of the machine is impaired. The aim is to get the maximum number of consumers past every single shop window. Dead-end malls, inaccessible upper floors, are a no-no. Everything has to pump and flow smoothly. In a well-organised centre there’s a kind of ecological balance to it all—sorry, I’m mixing my metaphors. At the top of the food chain are the big magnet stores, or “anchors”. They’re top because they attract customers from miles around, so they can negotiate low rents with the developer, who’s anxious to persuade them to come in. The small shops, which are dependent on the magnets to pull the customers past their doors, must pay higher rents, proportionately, to be able to take part in the process. And the developer is dependent on the small shops getting as big a turnover as possible, to pay the rents he needs to build and maintain the place.

‘But, as Gruen realised, the underlying driving force is the psychology of the consumers, who are at the bottom of the food chain—the plankton that the higher forms of commercial life feed on. And to manipulate that psychology, almost any device is admissible, no matter how outlandish or weird it might at first appear. You can take your customers to the Polynesian islands, transport them to the Arabian Nights, you can raid history, literature, the movies, fairy-tales, anything at all that will distract them and keep them happily absorbed inside the machine. Whatever it takes, in fact, to sustain the Gruen Transfer.

‘When you just had individual shops along a street, there wasn’t a whole lot you could do to stimulate your customers’ fantasies beyond sticking a Christmas tree in the window once a year. The cold reality of the street kept getting in the way. They really had to press their noses to the window and imagine awfully hard. But in an indoor mall, all that changes. The real world of the street is banished. The boundaries separating the consumer from the consumed are dissolved away. Fantasy and reality become interchangeable parts of the process of consumption. You can possess whatever you see.’

‘Including the girl dressed up like Snow White who brings you your pancakes,’ Brock said.

‘Exactly, yes. That’s really the point I was coming to. That it might be significant that Kerri actually worked here, and wore that uniform and a big happy smile, like she was an accessory, part of the whole fun process, like the wrapping paper and the music and the finger-licking food.

‘He loves the mall, he eats the food, he wants the things he sees. He feels they’re available, that they’re really his, because that’s the message of the mall. And he’s become an insider, an expert in the culture of the mall. He knows how it works, he knows the security codes, he knows how they dispose of their garbage.’

Kathy didn’t share in the general buzz of animated conversation that followed this presentation. She felt a chill in her stomach that came not so much from what Alex Nicholson had said as from the reverberations it set up with the file she had been reading just before the briefing started. It was the file on the lapsed prosecution of Dragan Vlasich.

One afternoon in the summer of 1992, the senior physical education teacher of an east London secondary school was looking out of the staff-room window at the children passing through the front gates and dispersing down the street. Parked near the gates was an ice-cream van. It was very distinctive, with an enormous illuminated fibreglass ice-cream cone mounted on the roof and the name MR KREEMEE emblazoned on the side. Mr Kreemee had been parked there regularly for the past several afternoons, catching the departing kids, and the teacher had noticed that one child in particular, a pretty, fair-haired girl called Helen Singleton from class 2E, had lingered by the hatch in the side of the van, talking to Mr Kreemee as he served the queue of her schoolmates. On this particular afternoon the teacher watched the queue dwindle until only Helen was left. Then he saw the side hatch on the van close, the girl walk to the rear of the van, the rear door open and her step inside. The door closed abruptly, and shortly afterwards the light inside the fibreglass cone went out. He quickly rounded up a couple of other young male teachers from the staff room, and they ran down to the street.

When they yanked open the rear door of the van they found Mr Kreemee inside on his hands and knees in front of Helen Singleton, who was seated on a stool. He claimed afterwards that he was offering her different combinations of toppings on her ice-cream cone and had dropped some on the floor, but the teachers didn’t see it that way. They hauled Mr Kreemee out into the street and took him and the child back into the school, where Mr Kreemee, alias Dragan Vlasich, received some bruises and abrasions while waiting for the police to arrive. He was charged under section 20 of the Sexual Offences Act 1956, which states that it is an offence for a person acting without lawful authority or excuse to take an unmarried girl under the age of sixteen out of the possession of her parent or guardian against his or her will.

Vlasich claimed that it was all a terrible mistake, that when he was closing up to move to another location Helen had begged to see how the Kreemee ice-cream machine worked, that he had merely intended for her to look in through the back door, but that she had climbed in and the wind had blown the door shut behind her. Helen herself seemed confused, but didn’t contradict his story. The teachers had intervened before any act of indecency had occurred, if that was what had been in Vlasich’s mind. The Crown Prosecution Service hesitated, then abandoned the case. The charges were withdrawn for lack of evidence.

By the time Kathy finally managed to get Brock on his own to tell him about Verdi/Vlasich, twenty-four hours had elapsed since Harriet Rutter and Robbie Orr had first alerted her to him. Brock seemed startled by her information about his name change, as if it was something he might have half suspected and then dismissed. Then, as she told him about Vlasich’s career as Mr Kreemee, he looked troubled.

‘You could have let me know about this before, Kathy,’ he said.

‘I’m sorry. I tried to ring you last night on your mobile, but couldn’t get through. Then this morning I was caught up in the hunt for Testor. I only got to look at the Vlasich file just before the briefing started.’

He nodded, frowning deeply. ‘Yes, of course.’

‘You don’t like it,’ Kathy said.

‘It stinks, don’t you think?’

‘Yes. It gives me a bad feeling too.’

They were interrupted by Harry Jackson’s discreet cough. ‘Evening, folks. Phil said your team meeting was over and I might show my face. Ms Seager asked me to pass on all our congratulations on your result, and ask if there’s anything we can be doing.’

‘Thanks, Harry,’ Brock said, preoccupied. ‘We haven’t actually got a result as yet, but we’re hopeful. Did you know him?’

‘Testor? Not in any professional capacity. I’ve spoken to him a few times, down the gym and the pool. Soon as I saw your photograph I recognised him. Bit of a queer ’un, eh?’

‘You never had any inkling of trouble with him?’

‘Can’t say we did. But I hear he has a record, eh? Assault and criminal damage?’

‘That’s right. But he wasn’t one of your rehabilitation projects, like Speedy?’

‘No way. I hardly knew him.’

‘What kind of checks do you do on your tenants?’

‘I went through that with Gavin, chief. Credit checks and records of other leasings, that’s basically it. We wouldn’t run a criminal record check unless there was a bad smell coming from somewhere. And that has happened. Once or twice we got wind of a company with dodgy investors and decided to keep them out. But we certainly don’t do checks on tenants’ employees, if that’s what you mean. That’s down to them.’

‘But you probably have a blacklist, don’t you, Harry? I mean, apart from your daybooks and computer records, a careful ex-copper like you would likely have a blacklist of people who don’t feel right for some reason, wouldn’t you?’