Spider Trap bak-9

by Barry Maitiland

  ‘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 break 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 counter-attack, 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 b
read? 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 cafe 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 cafe 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.

  ‘We haven’t got crab tonight, have we?’

  He shook his head and raised the magic finger again as he made off to the kitchen. After a while there was the ping of a microwave and he returned with a plate.

  ‘I didn’t make these. It’s their signature dish,“stamp and go”, the name for codfish fritters. Try one. I did make the sauce.’

  They were crisp and spicy, the sauce sweet and sour.

  ‘Really good!’ She took another.

  ‘You need more jungle juice.’

  She followed him and watched as he put ice in their glasses and took a jug from the fridge.

  ‘How are your bodies going?’

  ‘Oh, we just keep finding more.’

  ‘It’s getting to you, isn’t it? Taking your mind off Teddy Vexx and those two kids.’

  Put that way it made her feel as if they were betraying Dana and Dee-Ann by letting this old case distract them.Yet something equally terrible had happened there, and nobody had known. The idea that those bodies had been waiting all this time for someone to find them and uncover their story had got to her. It had got to Brock, too, right from the beginning.

  ‘Are they male or female?’

  ‘Looks like three young adult males, in their twenties, probably. Just to be original, we call them Alpha, Bravo and Charlie. At least two were shot in the head. But we have no idea who they were.We have no missing persons that seem to fit. No dentist in London has matched the dental records we’ve sent out.Yes,maybe I am getting a bit obsessed.Who were they, and why has no one missed them?’

  ‘And you can’t narrow the time frame?’

  ‘Not on the forensic evidence of the remains, apparently. But we found a wristwatch on one of them today. It was digital.’

  Tom spooned some chopped fruit into the punch. ‘That would make it, what, post-1970 or so?’

  ‘The first mass-produced digital watches came out in 1975.You had to press a button on the side to view
the display. That’s what this one looked like. They’re checking now.’

  Tom turned on the hotplate beneath a saucepan and gave it a stir,pondering.‘Were the victims black or white?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Wouldn’t the DNA tell you?’

  Kathy dipped another fritter in the sauce. ‘Our forensic pathologist, Dr Mehta, gave us a little lecture on how race is only an adaptation to climate and we all have the same DNA.’

  ‘Is that true? I mean, wouldn’t those adapta . . .’ His rumanaesthetised tongue fumbled the word and Kathy chuckled, a little louder than she’d intended. He had another go. ‘. . . adaptations be there in the DNA, to determine skin colour, hair type, etcetera?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘If they’re black I’d bet after October 1980.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You wanna bet? A fiver.’

  ‘Okay. But you have to tell me why.’

  ‘That’s when the Yardies came.’ He handed her the glass, splashing in an extra hit of dark rum for good measure.

  Sitting together companionably on the sofa, the few remaining fritters between them,Tom went on,‘Jamaica’s the sort of place that makes you despair at how good people are at taking paradise and turning it into hell.We stuffed it, the English. Do you know how our high street banks got started? From the fortunes Mr Lloyd and Mr Barclay made from making Jamaica into a concentration camp for slaves to grow sugar. Then the world sugar price collapsed and we gave them independence and pissed off. Like walking out on this totally traumatised family you’ve been bashing up for several hundred years.’

  It was the first time Kathy had heard Tom express anything like a political opinion, and it seemed to her that something personal lay beneath the surface.

  ‘So,what did the Jamaicans do? Two cousins looked at their old masters and said,Yeah, we’ll have two political parties like them- you have one, the JLP, and I’ll have the other, the PNP. Now the people are starving and living in slums and their kids have to join gangs and steal to make a living, so what shall we do about that? Well, we’ll give them jobs.We’ll pay them to kick the supporters of the other party,and make sure they vote for us next time.And soon all the Rude Boys in the slums have got guns with the money we give them,and every neighbourhood and district is divided between our two sides, and the fields that used to grow sugar are now growing marijuana, at least until the Americans get fed up with us and come to burn the fields. So then the Rude Boys turn their hand to smuggling Colombian cocaine, which is more profitable still.’