Spider Trap bak-9

by Barry Maitiland

  Her phone trembled in her pocket and she turned back into the trees to answer it. It was Tom.

  ‘Hi, where are you?’

  ‘Playing golf.’

  ‘Don’t be sarcastic, Kathy, it’s not you. Look, I owe you a huge apology for last night.’

  ‘It’s all right.You can crash at my place whenever you want.’

  ‘I’d like to make it up to you. Can I buy you dinner tonight?’

  ‘Fine. How’s it going with Andrea?’

  ‘Oh great, we’ve had a good day. She’s given me one or two interesting things to think about.’

  ‘I’ll bet. Smart is she?’

  ‘Very. They all are, working over here, but she particularly. Oxford degree, you know. I’ll have to get her to show you around.’

  ‘Good idea. Damn.’

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘Sorry, I trod in something. My feet are soaking wet.’

  ‘Where are you, really?’

  ‘I’ll tell you tonight. And you can tell me about Andrea.’

  He took her to L’Odeon in Regent Street, which Kathy had to admit made it a handsome apology.When he gave her a hug she found herself sniffing his collar like a jealous lover. No trace of J’Adore. Maybe she’d been mistaken, what with the curry and the cigarette smoke. But then she remembered the handkerchief.What had she done with it? On balance she decided not to bring it up.

  She told him about her day and he laughed.

  ‘You really were on that golf course? Alone? In the dark?’

  ‘It wasn’t quite dark. But I felt I needed to get to grips somehow with the reality of the Roaches.’

  ‘I know what you mean. And did it help?’

  ‘Not really. I couldn’t see much. I didn’t even want to ask the professional if they played there, in case he got suspicious.’

  ‘They do play there, the three sons and their wives, and some of their children. They’re all members.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Article and picture in the Plumstead Gazette,a family golf competition day last year. The whole clan in their snappy golf gear, the women with dazzling smiles, the men and kids scowling. I feel I know everything about them, and nothing. Like you say, it’s all on paper.’

  ‘Andrea had their picture from the Plumstead Gazette? Why?’

  ‘That’s a good question. She’s got passport records of every overseas trip they’ve ever made-how did she get those? She just laughed when I asked her. And she’s got graphs tracking the share prices of their companies against the FT Index. Michael Grant sounds rational enough, but I think he’s obsessed. He’s convinced the Roaches are behind half the drugs trade south of the river, and he’s got Andrea dredging for anything that might fit into an incriminating pattern.’

  ‘How does she feel about it?’

  ‘She believes him. He’s very convincing, very impassioned. She thinks he’s wonderful.’

  ‘What’s she like?’

  ‘You can meet her. Grant’s daughter is giving a concert on Saturday evening to raise money for one of her father’s good causes.We’re invited, Brock too.Will you come? Apparently she’s very good.’

  ‘Oh, well . . . Nicole and Lloyd suggested we go out with them on Saturday.’

  ‘They could come along, then we could get a meal together afterwards.’

  ‘All right, I’ll ask her.’

  ‘You’re right, you know, about the case,’ Tom said. ‘We’re doing it all wrong, not being aggressive enough. What’s Brock doing, do you know?’

  ‘He seems to be immersed in old police files.’

  Tom shook his head. ‘More paper. It’s like he’s becoming bogged down in the past. Either we should have a go at the Roaches or we should forget about them and get on with something useful.’

  ‘What could we be doing?’

  ‘I’ve got one or two ideas.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Not now.’ He looked at her.‘There are more important things to think about, like what we’re going to eat. The steamed sea bass is supposed to be a speciality of the house, so I’m told.’

  Later she caught him looking at her with an oddly sad expression.‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘I’ve been neglecting you,’ he said.

  ‘We’ve both been a bit preoccupied with work.’

  ‘I’ll make it up to you, soon. Maybe we could go away somewhere, take a trip, get out of London.’

  ‘Where do you fancy, Jamaica?’ She smiled, but he just looked nonplussed, as if he couldn’t see that it was meant as a joke.

  Later, he drove her home. She asked him up for a nightcap but he refused, saying he needed to get a few things prepared for the morning.

  Kathy wasn’t required in court until ten that day, and decided to pay another visit to the flat above the laundrette in Cove Street. She guessed that George, if he was living there, was probably not an early riser. As she pulled into the kerb outside the tyre yard she saw the woman step out of the flat onto the access deck, this time unencumbered by her twins. Kathy waited while she hurried down the stairs and ran towards the street, then she went up to the front door. There was a light visible through the frosted window.

  She knocked, waited, then knocked again. Finally the door opened.

  ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah . . .’ George grumbled, wiping his hands on a cloth.‘Wha-’

  He stared at Kathy and his mouth stayed open as he recognised her.

  ‘Morning,’ she said.‘Can I come in?’

  He recovered himself, sticking his head out of the door and darting his eyes up and down the deck and over the street below. ‘What you want?’

  ‘A few words, George.’ From somewhere inside a baby began to cry, then another, their wails rising to a coordinated shriek. ‘Won’t take a minute.’

  He looked harassed.‘All right then.’

  She followed the sounds of distress as he closed the door behind her, and found the source on the floor of a cramped living room, two shiny brown sets of limbs thrashing on newspaper.

  ‘Oh, phew.’ A pair of soiled, freshly opened nappies lay next to their bottoms.

  ‘Yeah, ’orrible, innit?’

  ‘Got fresh nappies? I’ll give you a hand, if you like.’

  She squatted down and they took one each.

  ‘You’re better at this than me,’ Kathy muttered, trying not to breathe.‘Are they yours?’

  He shook his head, mouth turned down with disgust. ‘No way.Where you parked?’

  ‘Outside the tyre yard.’

  ‘Anybody see you come up here?’

  ‘I don’t think so, why?’

  ‘The landlord don’t like coppers. He’d get really pissed off if he knew you were here.’

  ‘Teddy Vexx, eh?’

  ‘Teddy, yeah. How do you know that? What you want anyway?’

  ‘Winnie’s worried about you, George.Why did you leave?’

  ‘She got on my nerves, nagging all the time, wouldn’t stop telling me what to do. I couldn’t take it no more. Carole said I could move in here as long as I helped out with the twins.’

  From the look on his face as he stared down at them he wasn’t sure he’d made the right choice. Kathy noticed a keyboard and some sophisticated-looking electronic gear on the table, mixed up with the jumble of breakfast things.‘You working, George?’

  ‘Off and on.’

  ‘Where did you nick that stuff?’

  ‘Give over, that’s all mine. That’s the other reason I had to leave Winnie-she couldn’t stand me practising.’

  ‘Is your group playing at the moment?’

  ‘Yeah,at the JOS.It’s the place,man.We just started there.It’s our big break.’ For a moment he grew a little stiffer with pride, then he sagged again.‘What do you want, anyway?’

  ‘Where are the binoculars?’

  George looked startled.‘What binoculars?’

  ‘I want to know why you spied on us when we were digging up those bodies on the railway land.’


  Now he was acting offended.‘I never did! Who told you that?’

  ‘Don’t lie to me.We found a spliff you were smoking over there. Pretty potent.You want me to arrest you and talk to you on tape?’

  ‘Oh . . .’ He slumped into a chair, shaking his head in disbelief. ‘This is so unfair. All the stuff that’s goin’ on and you pick on the little people like me.’

  ‘Stop moaning, George, and tell me what you were doing.’

  ‘I don’t know. They paid me, that’s all that mattered to me, but I don’t know what was the point. I sat up there freezing day after day and I said,What’s the point? They’ve cleared the snow, they’ve put up tents, I can’t see anything. And he just said, How many

  tents? Where are they? He wanted a daily report.’

  ‘Who did?’

  ‘Teddy. But it was for somebody else. He was doing a favour for somebody who was interested, I don’t know who.’

  ‘You must have some idea. How did Teddy contact him? Did they meet? Did you ever see Teddy talking to him?’

  But George was too afraid of Teddy Vexx, and knew he’d already said too much.‘You’ve no idea,no idea at all,what he can do. Just leave me alone. I don’t know nuffing.’

  ‘You should get away from Teddy and his friends, George. Concentrate on your music.’

  ‘I don’t have no money, do I? And he got us the gig at the JOS.’

  ‘Good luck.’

  George darted ahead of her to the door and looked cautiously around outside before letting her go. Behind them the twins started bawling again.

  When she got to court she found herself on hold once again, and she took the opportunity to make a couple of phone calls. She started with the Rainbow Coordinator at Greenwich Borough. When she got through she told him about the camera at the gates of the golf club, and he promised to check and get back to her. Then she rang Nicole and told her about the invitation to the concert on Saturday night.

  ‘What sort of music is it?’ Nicole asked.

  ‘I don’t know. Classical, I think. It’s for a good cause, not sure what.’

  ‘Oh well, we’ll give it a go.’ She made a note of the arrangements, then added, ‘What’s got into your boss these days, Kathy? He’s driving us mad with his demands for old files, buried in the deepest recesses. Is he writing a history book or something?’

  TWENTY

  On Saturday morning Brock sat at his desk surrounded by columns of stacked files that looked as if they’d been unearthed from some ancient crypt. Dot had attempted to rearrange them, he saw, perhaps to make an easier route to the door, but she hadn’t made much impression.From her withering looks the previous day he understood that she no longer considered the situation tenable. He sympathised, of course, but he couldn’t stop now, not having come this far. The problem was that the material evoked so many memories, so many side trails, that it was easy to get distracted. To focus his researches he had pinned a large sheet of detail paper over the top of the Brown Bread wall, and it was now covered with a hand-drawn timeline and incident record chart decipherable only to himself. Maybe today, maybe tomorrow, something would emerge out of the mist. He knew he couldn’t go on much longer. Then the phone rang, his mobile not the office one.‘Hello?’

  The caller said nothing for a moment. He heard an intake of

  breath, and repeated,‘Hello? Brock here.’ ‘Hello, David.’ It was his turn to be silent, giving the buzzing in his ears a

  chance to subside.‘Suzanne,’ he said at last. ‘Was that you at the airport on Tuesday?’ ‘Yes . . . yes it was. I got cold feet when I saw the children.’ ‘I’m coming up to town this morning. Do you want to meet?’ ‘Yes,’ he said.‘I’d like that.’

  Kathy also had a surprise in store that Saturday morning. Tom picked her up at nine for what he described as a mystery trip. He was wearing a warm jacket, and she noticed the strap of a camera hanging from its pocket. They headed north and east on roads she didn’t know, and after a while she began to see signs for the Lee Valley Regional Park, Waltham Abbey and Epping Forest. They drove through woodland on narrow lanes over rising ground, and eventually emerged on a hilltop, where Tom pulled over in front of a panoramic view back across the city. It was a fresh, blustery morning, with sunlight piercing the gaps in high cloud to pick out parts of the Thames basin in pools of brightness. Suddenly the sound of birdsong and the hum of distant traffic were punctuated by the sharp staccato rattle of gunfire.

  ‘Now do you know where we are?’

  Kathy shook her head.

  ‘Lippitts Hill? You haven’t been to the firing range here?’

  ‘Oh, yes, but I must have come a different way. Have you brought me for a morning’s shooting then?’

  ‘Not quite. Something more fun, I think.’ He pointed up at the sky, and after squinting at the cloud for a moment Kathy was able to make out a tiny object dropping fast towards them. A little later and the growing dot was accompanied by a thumping noise that became a deafening clatter as the helicopter passed overhead and dropped behind a copse of trees. Tom restarted the car and drove after it to a set of gates beside a notice for the Metropolitan Police Air Support Unit.

  ‘I thought we might hitch a ride,’ Tom said.‘Okay?’

  He was friends with the inspector who ran the police staff on the base, a former Special Branch man, who introduced them to the pilot. They had a cup of coffee together while the Twin Squirrel was being refuelled, and he pointed out the aircraft’s special features: the Nitesun searchlight, the Skyshout loudspeaker system, and the gyro-stabilised, thermal-imaging video camera.

  Tom was trying to impress her, Kathy realised, and doing quite a good job, though she’d have been more impressed if he’d volunteered what he’d been doing the night before.

  They climbed in, fastened seatbelts, and rose into the blustery air. Below them the canopy of Epping Forest spread away to the north. Spiralling higher, the full extent of the city became clearer, sprawling away to the distant horizons, east, south and west. They headed down the Lee Valley, following the chain of reservoirs, marshes and waterways towards the great silver snake of the Thames, crossing it near the Isle of Dogs and losing altitude over the ant-line of cars on the Dover road across Blackheath.

  Now Kathy realised what Tom had in mind.Soon she could see the pattern of tees,greens and bunkers on the golf course like a neat abstract painting, and recognised the belt of trees from where she had looked across the eighteenth fairway to The Glebe.Then it was laid out below them, an irregular octagon of roofs around the central space in which she could make out someone washing a car and two others on the tennis court. The tennis players paused in their game as the shadow of the chopper passed over them.

  Tom was taking pictures and gestured for her to look at something to do with the stream across the golf course, but she couldn’t work out what he was saying. The helicopter banked into a wide sweep to the south before returning across Shooters Hill and heading back over the river towards base.

  ‘It was a great trip,’ she said to the pilot as they stepped out onto solid ground again, and she meant it, for the noise, the buffeting wind, the vibration, the exhilaration of height had energised her and she felt her face tingling with life. They thanked Tom’s friend, who said he couldn’t join them for lunch, but recommended a nearby pub, the Owl, which had its own pet owl in a cage in the garden.

  Over pies and beer, Tom said,‘Did you get the point about the stream?’ He, too, seemed charged by their flight.

  She said she hadn’t, so he got out his camera and replayed his pictures on the monitor screen.

  ‘You can see the route of it back here, beyond the old church, where there’s a winding line of willows. It curls around the church towards the original glebe house, then disappears.’ He clicked on through the frames. ‘Then we come to the Roaches’ compound,and on the other side the stream emerges again to form that hazard across the golf course, becomes the small lake near the clubhouse,and continues north to r
un into the Thames somewhere around Woolwich.’ He sat back with a quizzical smile, waiting for her conclusions.

  ‘So it’s been culverted where it runs around the Roaches’ place?’

  ‘Not around, under. To put together a big enough site for his family compound on the edge of the golf course, Spider had to build The Glebe across the stream. It runs in a culvert right under the development. And for maintenance purposes, there are two manhole access points into the central courtyard.’

  As he made this revelation,Tom had a look of breezy elation on his face that made Kathy think of Biggles or the Famous Five, and she wondered if their aerial adventure had made him slightly drunk.

  ‘How do you know this?’

  ‘Because I’ve seen the plans lodged with the local authority. Planning approval was conditional on providing adequate means of access for council engineers.’

  ‘Andrea?’

  He gave a smug little smile.‘Actually,no.I dug this up myself.’

  ‘You’re not seriously suggesting . . .’

  Tom’s eyes lit up with mischief as he followed what was going through her mind, daring her to say it.

  ‘. . . posing as a council engineer?’

  ‘Not exactly that, perhaps. But let’s face it, the only conclusive evidence we’re likely to get against Roach will be inside The Glebe, yes?’

  ‘You want to break and enter?’

  ‘ “Covert entry” sounds so much better than “break and enter”, don’t you think? Sounds almost legitimate. Like nobody need know a thing about it.’

  ‘Tom …’

  ‘A moonless night,’ he mused, turning away to contemplate the owl in its cage outside the window. ‘The new moon is next Thursday . . .’

  Kathy began to protest at how ridiculous the idea was, how impractical and potentially disastrous, until she saw his shoulders shake and realised he was having her on.

  ‘Tom!’ She punched his arm.

  He turned back, laughing, and she joined in.