‘Are you saying three separate corpses?’
‘It’s not possible to be sure at the moment. The remains have been extensively disturbed, most probably by animals.’
‘Or schoolboys,’ someone quipped. It was a notion that had been absorbing a lot of police attention, the possibility that Adam was only one of many visitors removing trophies from the place. Yet all of the interviews in the neighbourhood had met with the same response, that no one had ever heard of anyone getting onto the waste ground before, or known of the possibility of human remains being buried there.
‘Could there be more? That Marlowe hasn’t found yet?’
‘It’s possible. We’ll be digging up the whole site, all one and a half acres of it, grid square by grid square, but that will take time.’
He waved an arm across the breadth of the area and, at the windows of the upper classrooms of Camberwell Secondary, dozens of grinning schoolkids waved back at him.
‘What about the age of the remains? Any more information there?’
This was the crucial question; until they had some fix on that it was impossible to focus the investigation, and so far the pathologist had been frustratingly reluctant to commit himself.
‘We’ve definitely ruled out an old burial ground or Blitz victims, as has been suggested. They are modern, probably between ten and forty years old. That’s as close as we can get at present.’
‘So you can confirm that they are murder victims?’
‘That would seem to be the likely conclusion. We have evidence of what appear to be gunshot wounds.’
And two spent cartridge cases, Kathy knew. Just then she felt a hand touch her arm, and turned to see Tom Reeves at her side. She smiled and they moved away from the others so that they could talk.
‘How’s it going?’ he asked.
‘Fine. Aren’t you guarding your mass-murderer?’
‘I got an hour off and decided to come over. They told me you were here. I was worried about you. You were pretty stressed yesterday.’
‘A good night’s sleep helped. But thanks.’
‘Maybe you should talk to somebody.’
‘I did, over lunch yesterday.’ She smiled at him and he grinned back.
‘Look, if you’re going to work around here you need to get some background. How do you fancy some Jamaican food tonight? I know an excellent chef.’
‘That sounds interesting. All right.’
‘Good. This is where I live . . .’ He gave her a handwritten card. ‘Can you come there? About seven?’
‘Fine. I’ll phone if I’m delayed.’
‘I’d better get back. See you.’
She watched him stride away, amazed that he’d now divulged both his mobile number and his home address. Maybe he really was giving up the undercover life.
The press conference was breaking up and she waited until Brock was able to get away. They had heard that Adam Nightingale had recovered consciousness and might be fit enough to be interviewed. As she drove him up to Waterloo she described her visit to the Roach compound.
‘Definitely promising. Adonia couldn’t rule out the two girls as her attackers. She was badly shaken up by the attack, and the family has rallied around her, especially the daughter,Magdalen. She seemed very protective of her mother, but I got the impression that she doesn’t get on so well with her father. He stops her smoking around the house and so on. Do we know why she’s still living with them?’
‘Pretty common these days, isn’t it?’
‘Yes. It’s just that I had the impression she was used to her own space. She had to be reminded about the smoking, for instance. I might do some digging. Anyway, there was one definite flaw in their story. Adonia said they were particularly upset that the thieves snatched her necklace, a very personal gift from Ivor when Magdalen was born, but that she found it again under the floor mat of the car when it was returned. I checked with the forensic team that dealt with it, and they say that’s impossible, they would have found it first.’
‘Can we believe them?’ Brock asked. ‘People are under pressure, sometimes they cut corners.’
‘He sounded pretty convincing to me. Apparently, at the stage they went over the car there was still doubt about how serious Adonia’s injuries would turn out to be, and they treated it as a potential murder scene.’
‘So you’re thinking that Vexx recovered the necklace for Ivor, who slipped it into the car for Adonia to find later?’
‘Something like that. It’s plausible.’
‘Ivor would have to have been pretty crazy to get involved personally in the murders. The Roaches are so-called respectable businessmen now, although they always did take personal affronts very hard.’
‘We could look for indirect contact, then,’ Kathy said. ‘Phone records. If Ivor asked Vexx to track down the people who stole his wife’s car, there’d be a phone call when he succeeded.’
‘Certainly worth a look. And how has time dealt with Adonia? She was very attractive, I remember.’
‘Not too bad, she’s still very handsome, but pretty jittery underneath. I think the car-jacking shook her up more than she’s realised.’
‘Or maybe just being married to Ivor has.’
‘Well, her daughter Magdalen’s the glamorous one now.’
‘I don’t remember a daughter. Do you know what Adonia did?’
‘No?’
‘She was a beautician—for the dead. Her father Cyrus ran a funeral parlour, next to the Ship pub on Cockpit Lane. Young Adonia could make the most ravaged corpse look beautiful.’
They had reached the Albert Embankment. Across the river the finials of the Houses of Parliament bristled dark against the heavy sky, like a long rank of bayonets.
Kathy pondered. ‘All the same, it’s hard to believe the Roaches would have had two kids killed like that because they roughed up Adonia and stole her car.’
‘Nothing would surprise me about the Roaches, Kathy.’
‘Are you going to tell Keith Savage?’
‘DCI Savage wants to shift the focus of his team’s efforts to Harlesden. I think I’ll leave him to it until we have something more definite. Were there any witnesses to the car-jacking, or fingerprints on the recovered car?’
‘It seems not.’
Mrs Nightingale was at Adam’s bedside, looking like a permanent fixture, and scowled at the arrival of the two detectives, as if they could only have come to make further trouble for her son. The boy seemed remarkably unscathed, peering through his thick glasses at an electronics magazine, trying to avoid eye contact with the visitors while his mother fussed.
They chatted for a while, about the burn on Adam’s leg and his memory of what had happened. He told them that he had noticed fox tracks in the snow on the waste ground from the classroom window, and wanted to follow them to their hide before the snow melted and he lost the chance. His mother harangued him for his foolishness, but neither Brock nor Kathy was quite convinced by his explanation.
Finally Brock abandoned his questions and took a leather wallet out of the pocket of his coat. He offered it to Adam and said, ‘I’m told you’re a chess player, Adam. Have you seen one of these before?’
The boy opened it cautiously. Inside, the leather had been formed into a grid of tiny pockets, eight by eight, into which fitted slivers of black and white plastic, printed with the symbols of chess pieces.
‘It’s a travelling chess set,’ Brock said. ‘Have you got one?’
The boy shook his head, raising a sceptical eyebrow as he examined the little pieces.
‘It’s yours, if you want it,’ Brock said. ‘I haven’t used it in ages.’
Adam looked at him dubiously, then at his mother.
‘You can give me a game, if you like,’ Brock added.
Mrs Nightingale’s nose screwed up with suspicion. ‘I expect you’ve got more important things to do with your time, sir.’
‘I was up half the night,’ Brock sighed, stretching his back. ‘I don’t mind a brea
k for five minutes.’
‘Good idea,’ Kathy said. ‘Why don’t you and I get a cup of tea, Mrs Nightingale?’ She took the woman’s arm before she could refuse. Brock reached over to the little chessboard and took a black and a white piece, one in each hand, shuffled them behind his back and asked Adam to pick one. The boy pointed at the hand holding the white, and made the first move. The game developed routinely, Adam carefully studying each move, trying to work out how good his opponent was, until the detective suddenly pushed a bishop forward to attack. Adam moved a knight to counterattack, and after considering this for a moment Brock seemed to lose interest in his attack and moved a pawn on the other side of the board. Adam saw a major mistake. He poked his glasses back on his nose and kept his face expressionless as he made sure. Yes, the copper had definitely screwed up. He moved his knight forward to take the bishop. Brock frowned briefly, then abruptly moved one of his own knights, right into the path of Adam’s queen. Adam swiftly took that too, elated at what he would tell Jerry. This guy was supposed to be smart, he’d just seen him live on telly, and Adam was wiping the floor with him.
When Brock moved a third piece, his other bishop, into the line of fire, Adam took it with a small jag of regret; either Brock was humouring him or he’d forgotten everything he’d ever known about chess. But the sacrifice of three major pieces had cleared the board in front of Brock’s queen, while shifting Adam’s pieces to the sides. Brock now moved his queen straight up to Adam’s back row, attacking his king.
‘Checkmate, I’m afraid.’
Adam’s mouth opened and closed. ‘Oh . . .’
Brock picked up his three sacrificed pieces and laid them out, one by one. ‘Did you know they were there, Adam?’ he asked quietly. ‘The bodies?’
‘No, I swear.’
Brock pointed at the outline of the boy’s leg in its frame beneath the blanket. ‘Seven hundred and fifty volts direct current, enough power to push a train. You took an awful big risk blundering through the snow just to find a foxhole.’
The boy shrugged and pushed the chess set back to Brock. ‘Thanks, I don’t want this.’
‘Suit yourself,’ Brock said. ‘You can give me another game, though.’
At the sandwich counter, Kathy and Mrs Nightingale picked up their cups of tea and took them to a table.
‘He’s got an electronic thing he plays chess with,’ Adam’s mother said. ‘I don’t know what he’d want with that old wallet. What’s your boss up to then?’
‘Just trying to be friendly,’ Kathy said. ‘Do you believe Adam’s story about the foxes?’
‘I’ve brought him up to tell the truth.’
‘But if it was something he thought you’d be angry about?’
Adam’s mother looked uneasy. She stirred her tea, round and round.
‘We need some help on this, Mrs Nightingale.’
The woman shot her a hostile glance and spoke in a low rush, not wanting anyone else to hear. ‘That’s easy for you to say. Who knows what you’re diggin’ up on that waste ground? And whoever put them there sure didn’t want them disturbed, that’s plain. And now my son’s name and picture is in every newspaper. Yes, it’s easy for you to say.’
‘But surely he’s in no danger if he didn’t know the bodies were there, if he was looking for something else?’
Mrs Nightingale thought about that. ‘Maybe, maybe not.’ She concentrated on her tea for a moment and then, as if changing the subject, said, ‘Do you know what “brown bread” is?’
Kathy was puzzled. ‘Well, yes. Bread made with wholemeal—’
‘No, no, no, not that kind of brown bread. I mean, is it a name for something, a slang name? Like . . . drugs, maybe?’
Kathy saw the worry in Mrs Nightingale’s eyes. ‘You think Adam was looking for drugs?’
‘No! I’m not saying that at all! You’re putting words into my mouth.’
‘Please.’ Kathy gently put her hand over the other woman’s. ‘Tell me.’
‘Oh . . . How do I know what’s for the best? Just now, before you came, Adam’s friend Jerry came to see him. I left them for a minute to go to the bathroom. When I came back they were talking. I stood on the outside of the curtain and listened to them. Jerry said like, “But why did you go over there?” and Adam said, “I was lookin’ for brown bread”.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘I thought I was mistaken the first time, but Jerry repeated it, see. “You were lookin’ for brown bread? In the snow? You’re crazy, Adam.” And Adam said, “I thought the foxes had found it.” When Jerry left I asked Adam what he was talkin’ about, and he denied it, said I’d heard it all wrong, but I hadn’t. He’s a stubborn boy, but he’s not big, and some of the other boys pick on him at school because he’s good at his sums. I think he wanted to prove something, get some respect.’ She shook her head angrily.
Kathy said, ‘I’ll ask around, see if I can find out what it means.’
‘Yes, and you let me know, won’t you? I mean, it couldn’t be somethin’ sexual, could it? Not in all that snow?’
Kathy saw that in her mind she had been going through all the possible ways in which a thirteen-year-old boy might transgress. ‘I’ll let you know.’
Later, in the car with Brock, she told him about the conversation.
He pondered. ‘Brown bread? Well, it’s cockney rhyming slang, meaning “dead”. Could that be it? “The dead”. Did they know all along that the bodies were there? I quizzed Adam again, but he denied it.’
‘We could try Jerry.’
‘Yes, let’s do that.’
She drove straight to the school, where the afternoon classes had begun. The headmistress arranged for Jerry to be brought to her office, and Brock asked her to stay for the interview. When the boy was seated in front of them, Brock said sternly, ‘I have just one question, Jerry: what do you know about brown bread?’
The boy gawped, swallowed, then shook his head. ‘Nudin’. I don’t know nudin’ about that.’ He kicked one foot awkwardly against the other.
The headmistress looked puzzled as Brock pressed him. Kathy thought he looked scared, refusing even to repeat the phrase, but he wouldn’t change his story and in the end they let him go.
‘What was that all about?’ the teacher asked, and Brock explained. She said brown bread meant nothing special to her, and Brock asked her to keep it to herself.
They returned to Mafeking Road, and as they turned into it from Cockpit Lane they passed a crowded corner café called Stamp and Go, and for a brief moment they caught the rich smells of Jamaican food. Brock growled, ‘Cheese sandwiches and a tea bag for us, I suppose.’
When they got back to the warehouse they found everyone crowded around one of the tables. Another set of arm and hand bones had been dug up, and one of the SOCOs was carefully scraping at the mud in which they were caked while another stood by with a camera. The reason for the excitement was a dark band around the wrist. As the spatula teased away at the dirt they caught a glint of glass and someone said, ‘Yes, it’s a watch, all right.’
six
That evening Kathy took the tube from her place in Finchley down the Northern line to Kentish Town, then walked, guided by her A-Z, to the address Tom had given her. It turned out to be a basement flat halfway along a terrace, and she wondered if it was significant that he, the undercover officer, lived below ground level, while she perched on the twelfth floor of a tower block.
The door was opened by Tom, wearing a Hawaiian shirt, cream trousers, a striped apron and oven gloves. His face seemed slightly flushed but very cheerful, and he was backed up by a rich smell of cooking coming from somewhere inside. He drew her in, kissed her on the cheek and took her coat.
‘Look, I hope this is all right, but on my way to see you today I came across this café in Cockpit Lane called Stamp and Go. Have you seen it? Have you smelled it?’ He laughed. ‘And next door there was this grocer with Caribbean spices and vegetables and bottles of sauce. And it took me back
to Jamaica—only this was Jamaica in the snow, so crazy. And I thought well, you should be getting into this. I mean if you want to understand the people you’ve got to understand what they eat.’
‘You’re right.’ She sniffed. ‘And you’re the excellent chef you mentioned?’
He beamed. ‘Absolutely. I love cooking, when there’s a point.’
‘Well, after all this snow, a tropical evening sounds great.’
‘That’s what I thought, and I have the perfect thing to set the scene. One moment.’ He raised a magician’s finger and hurried away. The whole basement flat had been knocked into a single space from front to back, with a kitchen bay at the side, from which she heard the clink of ice cubes. She took in the cupboard of a fold-down bed against one wall, some new-looking leather furniture, and a flat screen TV and a laptop. Everything looked efficient and impersonal. But no books. That was what was wrong —no books.
Tom appeared with two tall glasses of what looked like a murky fruit salad, embellished with straws and little umbrellas.
‘Cheers.’
‘Mmm.’ Kathy licked her lips, trying to identify the flavours, then felt the rum burn through. ‘Wow.’
‘Jamaican rum punch. One part sour, two parts sweet, three parts strong, four parts weak.’
‘The rum being the strong, I suppose. I get the pineapple, but what else?’
‘Guava juice, and limes.’
She sat down, feeling herself begin to defrost. The heating in the flat seemed to be on the highest setting, and she relaxed, letting the warmth seep through her from outside and in.
‘Where are all your books, Tom? I expected masses of books.’
‘In storage.’ He shrugged. ‘They take up so much room.’
‘I know.’ And they’re heavy, she thought. Not good for a quick getaway. She had said the wrong thing, flattening his exuberant mood, but not for long. ‘So you’ve been to Jamaica, have you?’ she asked.
‘Yes, great place.’
He began to tell her about the blinding white beaches of Negril, the hiking trails through the Blue Mountains, scuba diving in Montego Bay. Then some of the characters he’d met, ending up with a tale about a stay in a beach house and going to the toilet one morning with a hangover and hearing scratching noises from the bowl below and looking down to see the claws of a large crab waving up at him. It was a good story, well told, and by the end they were both laughing helplessly. Kathy guessed he’d been trying out the rum punch recipe before she arrived. It was certainly working on her.
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