Barry Maitland - Silvermeadow

Praise for Silvermeadow

Maitland is a crime writer who can make the counterfeit of fiction feel real.Weekend Australian

... at least as good as anything Rendell, James or Rankin have written.Australian Book Review

Maitland is a skilled plotter who knows how to pace a novel and steadily build the suspense... its a terrific read.Sunday Times, UK

The novel opens strongly, quickly grabs the readers attention and keeps a firm grip on it to the final pages.Canberra Times

... gripping police procedural... a welcome addition to a series that thoroughly deserves the acclaim it has won. Nottingham Evening Post, UK

Also by Barry Maitland

The Marx Sisters

The Malcontenta

All My Enemies

The Chalon Heads

Babel

The Verge Practice

No Trace

Spider Trap

BARRY

MAITLAND

silvermeadow

The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

This edition published in 2007
First published in Australia in 1999

Copyright Barry Maitland 1999

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

Allen & Unwin
83 Alexander Street
Crows Nest NSW 2065
Australia

Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

Fax: (61 2) 9906 2218

Email: info@allenandunwin.com

Web: www.allenandunwin.com

National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

Maitland, Barry.

Silvermeadow.

ISBN 978 1 74175 265 6.

1. Kolla, Kathy (Fictitious character). 2. Brock, Detective Chief Inspector (Fictitious character). 3. Police - Fiction. 4. Shopping malls - England London Fiction. 5. London (England) Fiction. I. Title.

823.914

Typeset by Midland Typesetters, Australia
Printed in Australia by McPhersons Printing Group

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To my faithful supporters club
Margaret, Duncan and Pip.

Contents

O n a bleak December morning, the east wind gusting in across the Essex marshes and dousing the city in cold rain, Alison Vlasich decided, finally, to go to the police.

She was standing in her daughters room when she reached this decision. The silence inside the flat seemed intensified by the muffled moans and buffeting of the wind outside. It was an uncanny, nagging silence, and in her state, both panicky and weary, she couldnt decide whether it was really there or whether it was just a numbness inside her head. Then she realised that Kerris bedside clock, with its happy Mickey Mouse face and loud comforting tick, was gone.

It had taken two sleepless nights and many hours of fruitless phone calls to bring her to this point. The only time shed previously rung the police was when old Mr Plum had collapsed outside her front door after hed returned home to find his flat crawling with preteen burglars. Mrs Vlasichs 999 call had produced such an intimidating array of sirens and flashing lights that she was inclined not to repeat the experience. No, she thought, on the whole, the best thing would be to go down in person to the local police station and speak to someone face to face about the fear that was now making her feel quite physically sick. This was how they did it on TV on The Bill, she told herself, pouring out their troubles to a big, attentive, reassuring desk sergeant with a name like Derek or Stan, who would then take it upon himself to make sure things got properly sorted out.

She put on a little make-up, noticing with surprise how pale she had become, then zipped up her anorak and stepped out onto the rain-swept deck. She hurried away, avoiding the stairs and lifts at this end of the block, following the zigzag route of the deck as it passed through court after court until she came at last to the big ramps at the south-east corner of the estate. Below her she saw the glow of the Tesco shopfront on the other side of the street, the dark bulk of The Merry Jester by the traffic lights, the Esso station opposite, and the concrete framework of the police station, tucked in between the last block of housing and the primary school.

She had some trouble finding the public entrance to the police station. It wasnt the nice timber and glass doorway that she thought they had on TV at Sun Hill, but a brutal aluminium job with wired glass and a closed-circuit television camera mounted overhead that looked as if it had been designed to keep out the IRA or gangs of teenagers.

Inside there was a kind of waiting room with metal seats but no counter, and no friendly desk sergeant. No one at all, in fact. In the far wall was another door with wired glass and no handle. Beside the door was a notice: ONE PERSON AT A TIME ONLY PERMITTED IN THE INQUIRY AREA.

Mrs Vlasich looked through the wired glass and saw an elderly man in a cap leaning on a counter, deep in conversation with a uniformed officer on its other side. She tried to push the door, but it was firmly locked and the two inside didnt notice her. She stepped back and saw a button mounted on the wall with a sign: PRESS FOR ATTENTION. She pressed, and heard a buzz beyond the locked door. Nothing happened. The two men continued with their conversation, the man with the cap gesticulating to elaborate a point.

She pressed the buzzer again, and this time the door clicked open. She pushed at it, but was stopped in her tracks before she could step inside by the policemans voice.

Please wait out there until Im finished with this gentleman, he said to her, quite sharply, before she had a chance to say anything.

She hesitated, then began to explain how urgent her problem was, but the door had clicked shut again in her face.

She sat down and waited. Five minutes. Ten minutes. The room was extremely depressing, bare but not what youd call clean. There was a large stain of some brown liquid that had dried under a chair in the corner. She didnt see how people could have had coffee in here. Unless the regulars knew the score and came equipped with vacuum flasks.

Fifteen minutes. Alison Vlasich sighed, got to her feet and looked through the wired glass of the locked door. The old man was still talking, the officer writing out a report. She clenched her fists and walked out.

Ten minutes later she arrived home again. The driving rain had soaked through her anorak, and her shirt was wet. She put on a fresh blouse, picked up the phone and dialled 999.

Its my daughter, she said. Shes been abducted.

Half an hour after her call two people came, a stern-looking woman in uniform and a man in a suit. They both seemed very young. She was so flustered by now that she didnt catch either of their names the first time, and had to ask them to repeat them: Police Constable Sangster and Detective Sergeant Lowry. They all sat down and she gave them her daughters name, Kerri, and age, fourteen last birthday in July.

Why had it taken her almost forty-eight hours to report Kerri missing? She bit her lip and twisted her fingers and tried to explain, the effort almost more than she could manage. The flat was empty when shed got home from work on Monday evening, two days ago. Shed looked in Kerris bedroom and seen that her daughter had changed her clothes after school, and had then presumably gone out again. When Kerri hadnt appeared by seven that evening, Alison Vlasich had had another look in the girls room and realised that she had taken her pyjamas and her frog bag.