have a life together and he was makin that life. He was learning cookin and he meant to be a real chef. You ask round about that. You see what they say."
Cooking. Chef. Nkata took out the slender leather diary he used as a notebook, and he jotted the words down in pencil. He didn't have the heart to press Navina for more information. From what she'd already said, he reckoned there was going to be a treasure trove of facts about Jared Salvatore at the Peckham police station.
He said, "You be all right, Navina? You got someone I c'n ring for you?"
She said, "My mum," and for the first time she seemed sixteen and also what she probably was at heart, which was afraid, like so many of the girls who grew up in an environment where no one was safe and everyone was suspect.
Her mum worked in the kitchen at St. Giles Hospital, and when Nkata spoke to her by phone, she said she'd be home at once. "She i'n't startin, is she?" the woman asked anxiously and then said, "Thank Jesus for that, at least," when Nkata told her it was something of a different nature entirely but her presence would be a great comfort to the girl.
He left Navina in anticipation of her mother's arrival, and he went from Clifton Estate to Peckham police station, which was only a short distance along the High Street. In reception, a white special constable was working behind the counter, and he spent just a shade longer than seemed necessary at his tasks before he acknowledged Nkata. Then he said, "Help you?," with a face that managed to be perfectly blank.
Nkata took a certain pleasure in saying, "DS Nkata," as he showed his warrant card to the man. He explained why he'd come. As soon as he mentioned the Salvatore family name, it seemed he would need no further introduction. Finding someone at the station who didn't know the Salvatores would have been more challenging than finding someone who'd mixed with them at one time or another. Aside from Felipe doing time in Pentonville, there was another brother languishing in remand on a charge of assault. The mother had a record going back to her adolescence and the other boys in the family were apparently doing what they could to better it before they reached their twenties. So the real question was, who in the station did DS Nkata want to talk to, because just about anyone could give him an earful.
Nkata said that whoever had taken Navina Cryer's missing-persons report about Jared Salvatore would do. This, of course, brought up the delicate question of why no one had bothered to file such a report, but he didn't want to travel that road. Surely someone had listened to the girl if not formally recording what she'd said. That was the person he wanted to find.
Constable Joshua Silver turned out to be the man. He came to fetch Nkata from reception and ushered him into an office shared by seven other officers, where space was at a minimum and noise was at a maximum. He had something of a cubby hole carved out between a bank of perpetually ringing phones and a row of ancient filing cabinets, and he guided Nkata to this. Yes, he admitted, he'd been the person to whom Navina Cryer had spoken. Not the first time she'd come to the station, when she hadn't apparently got beyond reception, but the second and third times. Yes, he'd written down the information she'd offered, but truth to tell, he hadn't taken her seriously. The Salvatore yobbo was thirteen years old. Silver reckoned the boy'd done a runner, what with the girl on her way to popping. There was nothing in his past that suggested he'd be apt to hang round waiting for any blessed events to be occurring.
"Kid's been in trouble since he was eight years old," the constable said. "He came up before the magistrate first when he was nine-bag snatching from an old lady, this was-and the last time we hauled his bum through the door, it was for breaking into a Dixon's. Planned to sell the takings in one of the street markets, our Jared."
"You knew him personally?"
"As good as anyone round here, yeah."
Nkata handed over a photo of the body that Felipe Salvatore had named as that of his brother. Constable Silver examined it and nodded his confirmation of Felipe's identification. It was Jared, all