‘I didn’t like it at first, though I could be convinced. But really, all we’ve got is a possible sighting of two white guys in a crowded pub, twenty-odd years ago. The witness could have got it completely wrong, you know how these things are. Maybe the two guys weren’t white, or maybe they had nothing to do with whatever was scaring Joseph.’
‘I know.’
‘You don’t think Brock’s got himself a mission, do you, putting the past to rights? That’s worrying you, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, but you’ve doubted him before, don’t forget, on the Tracy Rudd case, and he was right then. I trust his instincts.’
‘Yeah,’Tom said,as if to himself.‘Loyal Kathy.I like that.’
Tom turned into Cockpit Lane and pulled over to the kerb. ‘Half an hour?’
‘Fine. See you.’ Kathy watched the grin form in his mouth and around his eyes, and realised how much it was growing on her.
A chill east wind buffeted her as she hurried forward. More snow was promised and the wind tasted of it. She noticed a slight, dark figure standing at a shop window filled with PlayStations and digital gear. The face was covered by the hood of a parka and she was almost past before she recognised the glint of Adam Nightingale’s glasses.
‘Hello, Adam. How are you?’
He shrugged, pushing his glasses back up his nose.‘Saw them packing up from the school window. Leaving are they?’
‘Yes.’
He looked forlorn, as if a moment of meaning or excitement in his life was coming to an end, and she felt sorry for him.‘You’re interested in that forensic stuff, are you?’
He nodded.
‘Actually I’m on my way over to the laboratories where they’re working on the skeletons, reconstructing their faces.’
‘Wow. Cool. I wish . . .’ His sentence trailed off into inarticulate silence.
‘Well, I could probably arrange for you to come, but we’d have to get your mother’s permission.’
‘She’s at work.’ He whipped a mobile phone out of his jacket pocket and offered it to her.Kathy watched him press the keys,then she took the phone and spoke to his mother, who was delighted that someone was willing to take Adam off the streets for an hour or two.
‘Okay,’Kathy said to the boy.‘I’ve got some business to do.Be here in half an hour.’
The shopfront next to the pub was plastered with pictures of the MP’s handsomely smiling face alongside public service posters reading, ‘Stop the Guns’, ‘Crack Kills’, ‘Let’s Work Together’. She pushed open the door and stepped into a fug of heat and clamour, Magic FM competing with clattering keyboards, a whistling kettle and a group of women arguing loudly over the messages on a noticeboard. An electrician stood on top of a stepladder fixing a light, and in the middle of it all, oblivious to the turmoil, Michael Grant posed for a photograph being taken by a reporter from the local paper. Grant was wearing jeans and a T-shirt with the slogan OUR STRUGGLE and a clenched black fist.
He caught sight of Kathy and clapped the reporter on the shoulder and swung over to her.‘Hi! DS Kolla,right?’
She shook his hand, unable to resist the dazzle of his smile. It wasn’t just the mouth; his whole face seemed animated by it, and as they spoke he focused on her as if nothing else in the world interested him. A politician’s trick perhaps, she thought, but he did it brilliantly.
‘Come through and meet Kerrie, my office manager.’ They manoeuvred around the stepladder and approached a young black woman sitting behind a desk, arguing with someone on the other end of the phone, smacking the file in front of her to emphasise her point. She put the phone down and nodded at Grant.
‘He’ll see you at noon tomorrow. I’ll line up the media.’
‘Well done, Kerrie! Didn’t think you’d do it. This is DS Kolla from Scotland Yard.’
‘Kathy.’
‘Hello.Yes, we’ve got one or two leads for you.’ She handed Grant a sheet of paper.‘I’d better get on with organising things for tomorrow, Michael.’
‘You go ahead. I’ll take care of Kathy.’ He waved her through to a seat in a quieter area at the back of the shop and poured them both cups of coffee from a percolator.
‘It may not look like it, Kathy, but this is a war room. We’re involved in a life and death struggle, literally.’ He tapped the slogan on his chest. ‘This isn’t idle rhetoric. We have a three-pronged youth crisis here-unemployment, drugs and crime. My job is to motivate my community to action, to break the vicious circle. We’re on the same side, Kathy, and we’ll do anything we can to help you take the drug kings, the crime bosses, out of the picture.’
‘Right, I appreciate that, sir.’
‘Michael, please.’ He glanced at the sheet of paper.‘These are people we’ve found who can remember Joseph. They’ve all expressed a willingness to help. To save you having to traipse all over the district, one of the girls on the front desk can set up times when they can come in here to talk with you, if that suits. I think they’d feel more comfortable here than at the police station.’
Kathy scanned the list, half a dozen names and addresses. ‘That’s great.You’re doing my job for me.’
‘It’s a start.’
‘We’re making up posters of the three victims on the railway land. This is what we’ve got so far.’ Kathy handed him photographs of Dr Prior’s reconstructions.‘Joseph Kidd and the one we believe was called Walter.’
Grant gasped as he took in the lifelike images.‘How on earth did you get these?’
Kathy explained.‘Do you recognise them?’
‘Yes . . .Well, Joseph, certainly. It’s very close. The other one looks familiar, but I’m not sure.’
Kathy handed him the third image, based on Winnie’s sketchy memory of the other member of the Tosh Posse.‘This is the one we have the least information about-no name and no skull to make a reconstruction from.’
Grant stared for a moment, then shook his head. ‘No. This means nothing to me. But once you have the posters we can put them in the front window here, and I’m sure we can persuade shopkeepers in the area to do the same.’
‘You’re being very helpful, Michael. Thank you.’
They arranged for Grant’s office to set up interviews on the following Monday, and Kathy left. Adam was waiting outside.
The Subaru drew up a few minutes later and Tom got out and spoke to Kathy and Adam while Amy waited in the car, watching. Kathy led the boy over to introduce him.
‘Adam, this is Inspector Reeves’s daughter Amy, who wants to be a forensic pathologist. Amy, this is Adam, who is helping us with our inquiries.’ She paused while Amy’s face froze at the form of words.‘He’s coming with us.’
‘Coming with us?’ she whispered.‘In our car?’
‘Yes, that’s all right, isn’t it?’ Then she added casually, ‘Adam was the one who found the skeletons.’
‘Oh! It was you? You got the electric shock? Everyone’s been talking about you at school.’
Adam ducked his head, embarrassed and pleased. They all got into the car, Adam in the back with Amy, and drove off.
Dr Prior was an excellent guide, explaining everything clearly and treating their questions seriously. The youngsters were captivated by the microscopes, the chemicals and the bones, but the high point was the computer imaging of Alpha and Bravo. The precise profiles of their skulls had been scanned, and then data for average Negroid soft tissue thicknesses all over the head had been applied to flesh them out. The resulting images could be rotated and viewed from any angle and with different hair and beard styles. The result for Bravo was startlingly similar to the photograph of Joseph that Father Maguire had provided, while the other was a reasonable match to the representation of Walter that Winnie had arrived at with the computer artist.
While the other three played with the computer, experimenting with dreadlocks, glasses and various Rasta beards, the anthropologist had a quiet word with Kathy.
‘How’s the investigation going? Any suspects?’
‘Nothing definite, but we are looking at some possible white suspects.’
‘What did I tell you? A race crime.’
‘But we’re not clear about motive. It could simply have been a dispute over drugs or punishing an informer.’
Dr Prior shook her head. ‘Look.’ She drew Kathy over to Bravo’s skull, mounted on a stand on the bench. Her finger traced around the bullet hole in the upper forehead.‘This is a close-range shot.’ She pointed to diagrams and hard copies of computer images on the wall, tracing the probable angle of the bullet into the skull.
‘Get down on your knees,’ Dr Prior said.
‘What?’
‘Go on, I want to show you how it was.’
Kathy’s smile faded as she saw how serious the other woman was. She knelt.
‘You’re Joseph Kidd-Bravo, right? Imagine it. Apart from soft tissue damage, we’ve just broken your right leg in the middle of the shin and crushed two of your fingers.We hit you on the left side of your head with maybe a hammer or a pickaxe handle, so hard that your skull is cracked.You’ve been unconscious for a time and you’re in deep shock. Now you find yourself on wasteland in the dark, your arms and legs are trussed with wire, you’re on your knees, there’s blood in your eyes and mouth. Imagine it.’
Dr Prior reached for a test tube from a rack on the bench, and pressed the end hard against Kathy’s forehead.‘This is a Browning automatic and now you’re going to die. We’re not doing this to make an example of you, because nobody will ever learn what happened to you. This isn’t business.We’re doing this because we want to. Understand? We’ve gone to a lot of trouble, hurting you, bringing you here, and now you will disappear. Die, you black bastard.’
There was a deathly hush in the laboratory. Kathy blinked and for a moment she saw herself, not as Joseph, but as Dee-Ann kneeling on the hard concrete floor of the garage. Then the test tube was withdrawn and she realised the other three children were staring at her.
‘Right,’she said,getting to her feet.‘Very convincing.’
At the end of the tour they thanked Dr Prior and returned Adam to his home behind Cockpit Lane. All the way back he and Amy were immersed in a hushed conversation, punctuated by little whistles and gasps.When the car pulled in to the kerb,Adam and Kathy got out. He thanked her awkwardly. ‘That was . . . really cool,’ he said, then, ‘I’m not the only one who’s been watching you, d’you know that?’
‘How do you mean?’
‘There’s a guy who’s been spying on you from behind the fences on the other side of the railway. I’ve seen him from the school window on the top floor.’
‘Probably a reporter.’
‘No, he doesn’t have a camera, just binoculars. Big ones with red lenses. He’s loosened some of the wooden palings of the fence so he can push them apart.You can’t see him, only the binoculars. He’s been there a lot, for whole days at a time. Must have warm clothes.’
As they drove Amy to her mother’s home, the girl also seemed subdued by their trip. She thanked Kathy without any of the boldness of their previous meeting.Kathy put out her hand to shake,and when Amy did likewise the girl felt the fifty pence coin pressed into her palm.
Kathy winked.‘Don’t spend it all on chips.’
She was silent as Tom drove her home. The odd little performance in the laboratory weighed on her. It wasn’t that it had told her anything new, but that replaying the actions had given them a physical presence in her mind that hadn’t been there before. That had been Dr Prior’s point, of course.
Tom broke into her thoughts,‘Tired?’
‘Just thinking.’
‘You take work too seriously, you know that?’
‘Do I?’
‘Yes. I bought you a book to take your mind off things.’ He reached across to the glovebox and handed her a paper bag.‘I think you’ll like it. It draws you in, makes you forget everything else. But a bit heavy for tonight, perhaps. You need something buoyant. A movie? Maybe an old favourite? What’s the best movie you’d like to see again?’
She thought.‘The Blues Brothers.’
‘Yes!’ He tapped the steering wheel. ‘Brilliant. And appropriate, too-1980.’
‘It’s not as old as that, is it?’
‘Want to bet?’
She laughed.‘I’m not making any more bets with you or your immediate family. Are you sure?’
‘Yep. I can remember seeing it on my first blind date. I was twelve. I had to borrow some money from my mum afterwards to buy the sunglasses. What do you say we get takeaway and The Blues Brothers.’
‘I thought you were playing squash tonight?’
‘I cancelled.’
‘Well, that sounds good, if I can fit in a bath somewhere.’
And so it was. As she lay in her bath, aware of his presence in the room outside, she realised that she hadn’t felt so awkward about having him in her flat this time. He seemed to fit into the small space without intrusion, opening a bottle and following her instructions for a salad. It was a talent, she felt, for sympathetic manners, adjusting his dimensions (for he was actually quite a big bloke) to the available psychological space. Or maybe it was just part of Special Branch training, melting in, lulling the mark.
The meal wasn’t bad, the film great.When it was finished they stayed sitting on the sofa together and she was acutely aware of his physical presence so close beside her, like a source of warmth and life. He told her how much he’d enjoyed being with her over the previous days, and when he got up to leave they kissed, and it seemed natural and inevitable. She even felt a small tug of regret as he disappeared into the lift.
The following morning she drove back down to Cockpit Lane, where the Saturday morning market was in full swing. The wind had died down, the dark clouds dispersed and, although it was still cold, sunshine lit up the colourful striped awnings of the stalls. She drove down Mafeking Road to the warehouse. A single car stood in the yard, and when she went inside she found one of the SOCOs making a final inspection.
‘Lucky to catch me,’ he said. ‘Just about to lock up and give back the keys.’
‘Give me two minutes.’
She went through to the rear boundary, now reinstated and sealing off access to the railway land. She scanned the fences at the top of the embankment on the far side of the rail tracks. Most were brick or metal panels but among them she made out a section of wooden palings, almost opposite where the school stood. She left the warehouse and made her way back around Cockpit Lane to the footbridge across the railway beyond the school. From there she was able to see the wooden fence again, and estimate how far away it was.
She turned into the street running behind the railway embankment and paced the distance to the start of a row of small brick houses. She knocked at the first front door and, when there was no reply,walked down the narrow side passage to the backyard. There was the wooden fence,with no sign of disturbance.She tried the next house, again with no reply at the front door, but with a huge Rottweiler in the back, hurling itself against the gate as she tried to look over.
A young man, yawning and scratching his crotch, answered the third door. Kathy showed her identification and said she was investigating reports of a prowler in the street. The man shrugged and said he’d heard nothing, but she was welcome to look around the yard. There, in a corner hidden from sight of the house by a small shed, she found an area of ground cleared of snow, in front of a section of fencing in which the nails had been removed to allow the boards to be slid apart. From this sheltered hide she had a perfect panorama of the whole of the crime scene site. She searched the place thoroughly but could find no traces that might interest the SOCOs-no footprints, no cigarette butts or sweet wrappers, no threads caught on the rough wooden boards, which would probably yield no fingerprints. Whoever it was had been careful. She was turning to leave when her eye caught a tiny flake of white in the trampled ground. Using a key she flicked away dirt until she could see more of a scrap of paper, which eventuall
y revealed itself as the remains of a hand-rolled cigarette end, crumpled, shrivelled and stamped into the earth.
Brock, too, was prowling-in his case at Queen Anne’s Gate, restlessly roaming the empty offices. From long experience he sensed that both murder inquiries in Cockpit Lane might be approaching some sort of turning point, in which, for good or ill, evidence would begin to swing their random searches into more deliberate directions. For his own reasons he had been more preoccupied with the older murders, but in the other case they had now accumulated a considerable list of people who had seen the two girls during their stay in the area, and the interviews were beginning to reveal distinctive patterns.
He came to Bren’s desk and noticed an unopened priority delivery pouch from Forensic Services. Opening it, he discovered the report of the review that he had ordered of the available ballistics evidence from the Brown Bread shootings. All of the surviving bullets and cartridge cases had been re-examined in the laboratories to confirm their common source. In one case, the murder of Johnny Mulroy, both cartridges and viable bullets had been recovered from the crime scene,and it was this that made it possible to tie all of the others, in which one or the other was missing, to a single source, Brown Bread.
Brock read the report carefully until he came to an addendum sheet at the end, which stopped him short. He scanned it again, unable to believe what he was reading, and when he reached for a phone he realised that he had been holding his breath. According to the report,the single intact bullet found at the scene of Dana and Dee-Ann’s murder had also been fired by Brown Bread.
He got through to Forensic Services, but the person he wanted wasn’t at work this Saturday morning, and it took some insistence to get a contact number for the author of the report. When he eventually reached him, the man confirmed the result. Both of the multiple murders in Cockpit Lane, committed twenty-four years apart, had been carried out using the same weapon. The scientist who had made the connection had recently worked on the Dee-Ann case and had recognised the markings straight away on the Johnny Mulroy bullet. The result had been confirmed by a second examiner.
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