Spider Trap bak-9

by Barry Maitiland

  ‘It’s possible that it’s the name of a pistol,’ Kathy said, and watched the enthusiasm drain from the other woman’s face.

  ‘Oh no. Not guns again.’

  ‘Has that been a problem here?’

  ‘Not inside the school,so far,which is a miracle I suppose,given what goes on right outside the gates these days.The shooting of the two girls next door wasn’t the only one. Somebody shot the news-agent round the corner last month, just for a packet of cigarettes.

  I’ve dreaded becoming one of those places with guards and metal detectors at the front gates.’ She shook her head in frustration.‘I’d never have thought it of Adam Nightingale, but none of them are immune,are they? Not when there are so many terrible role models out there.’

  ‘I’d like to talk to him again. It may not be what we think.’

  The boy appeared, sullen and withdrawn, and was told to sit facing Kathy while the headmistress took her seat behind her desk. Kathy waited for a moment, saying nothing, staring at Adam long enough for him to shift with discomfort, then she reached into her shoulder bag and took out something wrapped in black plastic, about the size of a hand. She put it down on the edge of the desk between her and the boy, hard enough for him to hear the clunk of metal against wood.

  He gave a sharp gasp, staring at it.‘You found it,’ he whispered. ‘It was there.’

  ‘It was like a quest,’ Kathy said later at the team meeting.‘The story had been circulating among the boys in the school for years, an urban myth, passed on from generation to generation, of a gun called Brown Bread belonging to a notorious gangsta murderer being thrown from a passing train onto the waste ground and never found. By the time it percolated down to Adam’s year it had almost faded away. Nobody really believed it except him. He was obsessed by it.The gun became a kind of talisman that would give him some respect around the place and stop him being bullied.When he saw McCulloch’s people searching the railway land he panicked and decided to get in there first.Afterwards he couldn’t admit what he’d been after without being seen as an even bigger nerd, and the bullying would’ve got worse. I let him think we found it.’

  ‘But it isn’t there?’ Brock asked Bren.

  ‘Not a chance, chief.We’ve now covered every inch of our site and along both railway banks to north and south for a distance of fifty yards with metal detectors and ground-penetrating radar. There won’t be any more surprises.’

  Bren went on to report progress at the site. More fragments of bones and clothing had been found, but neither a third cartridge nor Charlie’s skull. Someone asked about the foxes and Bren pointed out on the plan where two dens had been found. That was normal, he said, as foxes liked to have an alternative hiding place for emergencies. This being the breeding season, they’d found three dead pups in one of the dens, together with some small gnawed human and animal bones. The foxes themselves hadn’t been seen.

  He then came to the final part of his report and, although Bren rarely showed much excitement, it was obvious from his animation that he thought this was good. It was a line of reasoning that he had been developing with the forensic team, to understand the sequence and timing of the three murders. On a map of the railway land he pointed out their locations and the probable routes taken by the victims and their killers,and put forward an argument for the order of events that was almost exactly the same as Amy had suggested to Kathy in the cafe the previous evening.

  Brock was impressed. ‘Makes sense,’ he growled, as if edging closer to some hidden truth. ‘So Bravo-Joseph Kidd-was the first of a series of three separate murders and burials that began, presumably, on the eleventh of April. How long did it last?’

  ‘Can’t say for sure, chief, but Dr Prior says the skeletal remains are indistinguishable in terms of aging. She doesn’t think they were too far apart.’

  When they broke up Kathy spoke to Bren. ‘That was a neat bit of deduction.When did you work it out?’

  ‘Yesterday. It was Dr Prior’s idea mainly.’ ‘You didn’t happen to mention it to Tom Reeves yesterday,

  did you?’

  ‘Yes, I did actually. He called in to the site. Said he was just passing. He seems very interested in this case. Aren’t they keeping him busy enough in Special Branch?’

  ‘He’s on some escort duty, pretty boring I think.’

  ‘Do you reckon he’s looking for a transfer over here?’

  ‘Over here?’ Kathy was startled. ‘I don’t think so. There wouldn’t be a vacancy anyway, would there?’

  ‘S’pose not.’

  As she went back to her desk, Kathy turned this over in her mind. She was finding herself thinking about Tom more and more these days, but the idea of him moving into Brock’s team made her feel distinctly uncomfortable. Experience had taught her to keep her private life separate from her work, but there was also the matter of her rank and position in the team. As detective sergeant, Kathy had already passed the exams for inspector, but her promotion was on hold because it would mean moving to another unit, which she refused to do. If there was any possibility of an inspector position becoming available at Queen Anne’s Gate, she was determined it was going to be hers.

  She met Nicole for a quick lunch as arranged, but she too had been unable to find any references to Brown Bread. It seemed it existed only as an old piece of intelligence buried in the internal files of Special Branch. After some probing interrogation and advice from her friend, Kathy paid for the lunch and returned to the office, where she rang Tom’s mobile.

  ‘Hi, can you talk?’ she asked.

  ‘They’re halfway through a hugely expensive lunch at the Connaught, no doubt at British taxpayers’ expense.’

  ‘Lucky you.’

  ‘Not me. I’m sitting outside drinking a cup of coffee. How are you?’

  ‘Okay. What were you doing on the site at Mafeking Road yesterday?’

  ‘Looking for you,of course.Had to make do with Bren Gurney.’

  ‘And he told you about his theory of how the murders were committed, which you then told Amy.’

  ‘Ah. It’s a fair cop. Are you mad at us?’

  ‘Not really. I should have worked it out.’

  ‘Amy was nervous about meeting you, but she told me later that she liked you.’

  ‘Well, it looks like I owe her fifty pence. Now I wonder if I can ask a favour?’

  ‘Sure, go ahead.’

  She told him about her difficulty in tracing the Brown Bread shootings, and he said he’d make some calls. He got back to her half an hour later with one name, Johnny Mulroy, a thief and police informant who had been murdered by Brown Bread in 1985. Tom said it would involve a lot more research to track down the other five shootings, but for Kathy that one was enough. She knew of the Johnny Mulroy case, because it was one of the two shootings that ballistics had tied to the cartridges on the railway land.

  ‘That’s great, Tom. Thank you. I owe you.’

  ‘How about a drink after work tonight?’ He mentioned a bar and she agreed, then went to see Brock and told him what she had.

  He was very interested in Brown Bread now.‘We need those other five cases, Kathy. If we can tie the Roaches to any one of them, then we can tie them to our three corpses.’

  ‘It’ll mean a trawl through Special Branch files.’

  He nodded.‘I’ll speak to them.’

  She was the first to arrive at the bar that evening. She sat watching the door, and felt a warm buzz of pleasure when he appeared. Nicole was right, she decided, he was exactly what she needed.

  He kissed her cheek, his face cool from the night air.‘Hi,’ he said, then stood back a moment and stared at her.

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘Nothing,’he said.‘I came through the door there and saw the most beautiful girl in London sitting at the bar, and she was waiting for me.’

  She laughed, pleased by his flattery. ‘I’m a cop, Tom, highly trained to detect bullshit.’

  ‘But I mean it.’ He ordered a drink
and sat beside her. ‘How was your day?’

  ‘Good. Brock was very impressed with what you gave me. He said he’d speak to your people about searching out the other cases.’

  ‘Yes, he did it. I thought I was in trouble when my boss called me in and asked me how come I’d been giving information to Brock. But he seemed happy enough when I explained. He’s keen on interdepartmental cooperation. I think it’s in our mission statement somewhere. Anyway, it seems the colonel and his wife are heading back to Africa and no longer need me, thank goodness, so the boss offered my services to Brock to follow up on the Brown Bread cases. Good, eh? I’ll get to work with you.’

  ‘Oh . . . yes. That’s great, Tom.’

  ‘Yeah. I’m to report to Queen Anne’s Gate tomorrow at eight-thirty to brief Brock on what’s involved.’ He took a deep pull at his lager. ‘I must admit, it feels good to get involved with some real detective work again.’

  THIRTEEN

  The next morning, Kathy met Tom in the front lobby of the Queen Anne’s Gate offices and took him up through the labyrinth of corridors and staircases that had been knocked together from the original houses that made up the terrace.

  When they reached the top floor she introduced him to Brock’s secretary Dot, and said, ‘Look in on me when you’re finished. I’ll be in the case room on the ground floor, down the corridor from the entrance.’

  ‘I think I’ll need Ariadne’s thread to find my way out again.’

  ‘Dot’ll show you the way, or she can give me a ring to come and get you.’

  Kathy returned to the case room, where she settled at a computer and got back to trying to find references to a possible missing person called Walter.Around her other team members dribbled in, starting the day with cups of coffee and yawning accounts of what they’d done the previous night.

  Tom appeared after half an hour, looking bouncy and cheerful. He said hello to Bren and the others, then Kathy walked with him to the front door.‘How did it go?’

  ‘Good,especially after I recognised the picture of Spider Roach on his wall.You didn’t mention that you were interested in him.’

  ‘No, I didn’t. How do you know him?’

  ‘We did a little bit of work on him, some time ago.We helped put a couple of his business buddies away. You should have mentioned it.’

  ‘I didn’t know we were working together then.’

  ‘He’s asked me to report back later this afternoon with whatever I’ve found,so maybe I’ll see you then.’He waved goodbye,and Kathy returned to her search.

  It was frustrating work, and there were continual interruptions, so that she felt she’d achieved nothing by the time Tom returned. He, on the other hand, seemed to have done well. He was carrying a box of files and papers, and she showed him to a meeting room for his briefing, where they were joined by Brock and Bren.

  He had been able to identify all six of the shootings referred to in the Special Branch memo. They comprised four murders, one attempted murder and one drive-by shooting. They included the two shootings that ballistics had linked to the railway land cartridges, and they had all occurred between 1981 and 1987. Tom had marked the pattern of their locations across a map of South London, like a cluster of hits on a target.

  ‘Interesting,’ Brock said, unfolding his half-lens glasses and peering at the map intently, as if he might decipher some hidden message. ‘You’ve pretty well exactly defined Spider Roach’s territory during the 1980s. It’s like the map of some lethal dog pissing on lampposts.’ He stuck a finger at Cockpit Lane at the centre.‘And that was his kennel.’

  He sat back down with a look of satisfaction.

  Tom went on to summarise what he knew about the victims. Apart from their own three corpses, there had been two West Indian, one South Asian and three white victims, all male. Two of them had criminal records-Johnny Mulroy, and a well-known Jamaican disc jockey whose charges of drug trafficking were pending at the time of his death. Three other men were local businessmen and the sixth appeared to be a chance victim caught up in a car theft.

  ‘Indiscriminate and non-racial,’ Brock said.‘That’s Spider.’

  Kathy noticed Tom give a grudging nod of agreement, his theory of feuding Yardie gangsters apparently demolished.

  ‘What now?’ Brock asked.

  ‘We should reopen the files on the six cases. There may be witness statements describing the gunmen, maybe facial composites, fingerprints even.’

  ‘But all of these cases were unsolved, yes? And the matching gun was never found?’

  ‘That’s right. In most of the cases the ballistic evidence isn’t very helpful, which is why you didn’t get a match straight away. The name “Brown Bread” came from undercover sources. Apparently it was widely believed among young Jamaicans at the time that the disc jockey had been shot by a gun of that name, and that the gun had been used in a number of other shootings, which were narrowed down to those six.’

  ‘We should get ballistics to review all the evidence,’ Bren suggested.‘They’ve got better equipment now.’

  They discussed the individual cases for a while, Brock listening in silence, then he sat up and told them what they would do. There were three urgent lines of inquiry, he said. The first, to be investigated by a team led by Bren, would reopen the six Brown Bread cases that Tom had discovered; a second team would scour the dozens of possible sources of film and still photographs taken in Brixton on the night of the riots;and the third,led by Kathy,would work the area from Cockpit Lane down to the centre of Brixton looking for eyewitnesses from that night, starting with whatever sources Michael Grant had promised to find.

  ‘Tom,’ he added, ‘you’ve been a great help with this, and I’m sure there’s more about Brown Bread and the Roach family tucked away in Branch files. Are you interested in spending a bit more time helping us?’

  ‘Yes, absolutely.’

  ‘Then, if you’re agreeable, I might ask your boss if you could be spared to work over here with us for, say, a couple of weeks. What do you think?’

  ‘I think he’ll probably be delighted,’ Tom grinned.

  He was right, apparently, and the next morning he arrived with several boxes of files, as well as a carrier bag containing assorted bits and pieces, including his coffee mug, as if he were moving in for the duration. Bren gave him a desk next to his own, and they settled down to work on the old case files.When Kathy later went to see what they were up to, she was surprised to find the two of them in the basement, in the Bride of Denmark, the curious little private snug bar which the previous owners, a publishing firm, had lovingly constructed out of bits retrieved from bombed and demolished London pubs. Bren and Tom were leaning on the ancient bar, beer bottles in hand, heads together as if they were old mates at their local. The Bride was, to say the least,an anachronism in a Scotland Yard office building,studiously overlooked by Admin, and only Brock had ever invited outsiders down there. Kathy had never seen any of the team take a drink except at Brock’s invitation. Bren knew this, of course, and there was an awkward moment as he saw Kathy stoop through the low vault to come in.

  ‘Kathy, hi. I was just showing Tom around.Would you, er, care for one?’

  ‘No thanks.’

  ‘Isn’t this just the most amazing place?’ Tom said. He waved the hand holding the bottle, almost empty. ‘The stuffed lion, the salmon, the mahogany. I mean, who would believe it?’

  ‘Well, just don’t go telling any of your mates at the Branch,’ Kathy said.‘If head office hears we’re down here boozing all day they’ll have the wreckers over in no time.’

  ‘Relax, Kathy,’ Tom said expansively.‘I’m not likely to let them in on this now, am I?’ As if he were no longer one of them.‘And you know you’re partial to a drop now and again. I was telling Bren about Red Stripe. Maybe I’ll buy a case for the Bride next time I’m down Cockpit Lane.’

  Kathy frowned at Bren, who winced with embarrassment. ‘I just came down to see how you’re going with the case fil
es.’

  ‘It’s coming along,’ Bren said.‘Tom dug up a lot of useful stuff. How about you?’

  ‘Yes, making some progress. I’m going over to see the MP soon,to see what he’s come up with.Well,see you.’

  ‘Yes.’ Bren hurriedly finished his bottle and began gathering up the bottle tops as if cleaning up a crime scene.

  Tom followed Kathy out.‘Hey, you okay? You sound fed up.’

  ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘Um, I’m going out with some of the blokes tonight to play squash, otherwise . . .You free tomorrow evening?’

  ‘No, I’m going to see some friends this weekend.’ It wasn’t quite true, but she suddenly felt she wanted a bit of time to herself.

  ‘Are you sure you’re not mad at me over something? Is it Amy, me springing her on you like that?’

  ‘No. I liked Amy.’

  ‘I’m glad. She’s been talking a lot about you. She had some idea you were taking her to a path lab, but I told her that wasn’t possible.’

  Kathy didn’t remember actually saying she’d take the girl to Dr Prior, but she said, ‘I may have mentioned something along those lines.Yes,I will try.When would she be free?’

  ‘Oh well, if you’re sure . . . any afternoon after school, I suppose.’

  ‘I’ll see what I can do, Tom. No promises.’

  She got on the phone when she returned to her desk. Dr Prior was cooperative.

  ‘Yes, no problem, but could you make it tonight? I’m off to a conference in Germany on Monday and I won’t be back for a while.’

  Kathy phoned Tom, who phoned Amy’s school (a small domestic emergency, he explained) to speak to Amy, and within twenty minutes it was arranged.

  Tom gave Kathy a lift to Michael Grant’s constituency office in Cockpit Lane in his Subaru, saying he would pick up his daughter while she was busy.

  ‘I really appreciate you doing this for Amy,’ he said. ‘She’s beside herself.’

  ‘It’s a pleasure.’ Kathy felt she’d maybe been too defensive about Tom moving into Queen Anne’s Gate. Perhaps things would be all right.‘What do you think about Brock’s idea that the Roaches are behind all the killings?’ she asked.