Spider Trap bak-9

by Barry Maitiland

  ‘With her DNA? Not much chance of getting that now.’

  But Kathy was thinking of the handkerchief that Tom had left at her flat, smelling of J’Adore, and trying to remember if she’d thrown it out.

  After driving across town to Finchley, they made their way to Sundeep Mehta’s pathology lab, where Brock explained the nature of the tests he wanted done.

  ‘There are possibly three DNA sources here,’ he said, giving him the handkerchief.‘Kathy’s and two others.I want them tested against the DNA extracted from the three skeletons on the railway ground. A paternity test. Discreet, quick and in your name only, if you don’t mind, Sundeep.’

  The pathologist still hadn’t forgiven Brock for failing to arrest Mr Teddy Vexx for Dana and Dee-Ann’s murders, but he was addicted to mysteries and smiled conspiratorially at the odd procedure.‘I hear you’ve been having a spot of bother,old chap.’

  ‘You could say that.’

  ‘Twenty-four hours?’

  ‘Make it four.’

  ‘Four? My dear fellow, the processing lab is out at Abingdon.’

  ‘That’s one of the reasons I came to you.’

  Sundeep pouted.‘Leave it with me. I’ll give you a ring. Shall we take an elimination sample from Kathy, or is it her daddy we’re looking for?’

  He chuckled as he took a swab from Kathy’s mouth before they left for Cockpit Lane.

  Father Maguire answered their knock on the presbytery door with painful slowness. They saw the twitch of the curtain, heard the shuffle of his feet, and finally caught a narrow sighting of him through the barely opened door. He didn’t remember them at first, and Brock had to introduce them.When the old man finally hauled the heavy door open his figure seemed more than ever diminished by the overscaled Victorian architecture that surrounded him. He was wearing an old grey cardigan and faded tartan slippers, and when he turned to lead them to the main room Kathy noticed that his clerical collar was yellowed and the seat of his black trousers was shiny with age.

  ‘Sorry . . .’ He’d caught Kathy looking at a tray with the remains of tea and a boiled egg.‘My housekeeper isn’t with me at present. The siege, you know. It got too much for her. Gave her nervous palpitations. I had to tell her to go home.’

  ‘Siege?’

  ‘The press. They were out there for so long. I don’t know what they expected to get from me.I had to disconnect the doorbell.’He sounded exhausted and defeated. ‘The worst thing, of course, is knowing what Michael must think of me. I go over it all again and again, working out what I should have said. He’s such a good man, has achieved so much, yet I betrayed him to his enemies. They snatched the words from out of my mouth and used them to destroy him. Now he must regard me as Judas incarnate.’

  ‘I’m sure he doesn’t,’ Brock said gently. ‘It was quite clear to everyone that you were trying to support and defend him. That’s what made their choice of you so very effective. They were extremely cunning.’

  ‘But were they telling the truth? Did Michael really commit a murder in Jamaica? I’m sure Father Guzowski never told me that, only that the police would kill him if they caught him. Some of them, you know, were as bad as the people they were up against.’

  ‘I don’t know what the truth is.’

  ‘I’ve tried to find Father Guzowski’s letter among my papers, but I can’t. It’s so long ago and everything’s in such a mess. I haven’t been very good with my paperwork, I’m afraid. Michael wanted me to write an account of our work here and did help me try to organise things a little, but of course he won’t be interested in continuing now. It’s like a terrible cloud, poisoning everything we’ve done, our whole lives and work.’

  ‘He was helping organise your papers?’

  ‘Well, not Michael himself.When he could spare her he sent over the girl who runs his constituency office.’

  ‘Kerrie?’

  ‘That’s her. Very efficient young woman. Just what I needed.’

  ‘So has Michael not been in touch with you?’ Brock asked.

  The priest shook his head sadly.‘I pray for him,but I’ve heard nothing.’

  ‘Apparently he and his family haven’t been seen at their home since Monday. Have you any idea where he might have gone? I really would like to talk to him.’

  ‘To arrest him, do you mean?’

  ‘No, no. I’d just like to talk to him about what happened on Monday.’

  But he could see that the old man wasn’t convinced. He had betrayed Michael Grant once and he wasn’t about to do it again. ‘Could be anywhere,I suppose,’he said vaguely.‘If I were him I’d probably take my family far away, to the Outer Hebrides perhaps, until things blow over. I’m sure if he’d felt he needed your help he would have asked for it.’ This thought seemed to stiffen his resolve. ‘I’ll see you out now, if you don’t mind. I have things to do, a funeral service to prepare . . .’

  They buttoned up their coats and made their way down the path to the street. A few daffodils in the lee of the presbytery were bravely heralding the end of winter. There should have been more, Kathy realised,from the number of cut stalks around them.The rest were probably on sale in the market. As they reached the end of Cockpit Lane, where it divided each side of the churchyard, she looked down to the market and saw people gathering at its far end, and the pulsing lights of an ambulance.

  Across the street, large pictures of Michael Grant’s face still beamed with misplaced confidence from the windows of his constituency office. It was locked, but there was a light on at the back and eventually their persistent knocking brought Kerrie to the door. She mimed a message at them through the glass, pointing to the ‘closed’ sign, and Kathy responded by holding up her identification.

  She opened the door a little and placed herself firmly in the gap.

  ‘Sorry, didn’t recognise you. Michael’s not here.’

  ‘Just a few words, Kerrie,’ Kathy said, and moved forward. The woman reluctantly stood aside.While she locked the door behind them, they moved towards the single desk lamp lit at the back of the office. A computer was switched on there, and the letter that was lying in the printer tray caught Kathy’s attention.

  Dear Mr Grant, she read, I regret that I have decided to resign my position . . .

  Kerrie appeared at her side and snatched the letter away.‘What is it you want?’

  ‘We’re looking for Michael, Kerrie.’

  She snorted.‘So are a lot of people.Good luck.’

  ‘You don’t know where he is?’

  ‘No idea. He’s not been in touch since Monday and he’s not answering his mobile.’

  ‘You’ve decided to quit, have you?’

  ‘None of your business, but yes, as a matter of fact. There’s no point in staying here.’

  ‘What will you do?’

  ‘I’m moving to a staff position in Westminster, if you must know. It’s a natural step up, after the experience I’ve had in the constituency.’

  ‘But not with Michael? With another MP?’

  ‘How long do you think he’s going to have an office over there, do you reckon? He’s not the only one allowed to have ambition, you know.’

  Kerrie was angry as well as defensive, and Kathy felt she was catching sight of a drama she hadn’t been aware of before.‘No,of course not. Did you resent being stuck here?’

  ‘I’ve done my time here, that’s all. It’s a dead end, I have to move closer to the centre if I’m going to get on. That’s the trouble, isn’t it? If you’re any good at what you do, the boss tries to keep you stuck.’

  ‘Michael did that, did he?’

  ‘There’s a big gap between those who work in the constituencies and those who work in Westminster. He promised to help me move up, but in the end you’ve got to help yourself, haven’t you?’

  ‘Is that what you did when you went to sort out Father Maguire’s papers? Help yourself?’

  Kerrie gave an involuntary little jump, which she immediately tried to convert into a fussin
g gesture over her filing tray.

  ‘Was that how you crossed the gap?’ Kathy persisted. ‘By offering things you’d found out about Michael to his political enemies?’

  ‘Don’t be stupid.’ She turned away, shuffling papers.

  ‘Who are you going to work for, Kerrie? Mr Hadden-Vane?’

  She was close, Kathy realised, but not close enough, for Kerrie relaxed and turned to face her with a show of defiance.

  ‘No. Now I’d like you to leave.’

  As they stepped out into the street Brock murmured, ‘You were on the right track, Kathy, but it would have been more indirect. Hadden-Vane probably fixed her up with a job with one of his mates.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose so. So where do we go now?’ She turned up the collar of her coat against the March wind, feeling its implacable cold like a verdict on their situation. The truth was, they’d pretty well explored every option, and discovered each to have been anticipated and blocked long before they got there.

  Ahead of them she recognised Adam Nightingale emerging from the market. He was with his friend Jerry, both gesticulating wildly to their heads and ears, white teeth flashing.

  ‘Hi, Adam,’ Kathy called, and the boys stopped dead and stared at them. Then without a word they hunched into their parkas and turned and fled.

  When they reached the car Kathy said she’d try Tom again, and called his home and mobile numbers without result. His voice on both answering services sounded painfully normal and buoyant, like Michael Grant’s pictures in the shop window. She left more messages and rang off. Almost immediately her phone began to burble. The caller gave his name as McCulloch and Kathy recognised the gravelly voice.

  ‘If you’re still interested,’he said.‘The bloke you asked about, George Murray.’

  ‘George, yes.What about him?’

  ‘He was picked up by an ambulance not long ago, in Cockpit Lane. I’m going over to the hospital now.’

  ‘He’s been hurt?’

  ‘Yeah. Somebody drove a nail into his head.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That’s what I’ve been told. They’ve taken him to St Thomas’.’

  The same place they took Adam, Kathy thought, remembering the look of panic on the boy’s face when she’d said hello.

  Brock dropped her at the A amp;E entrance to the hospital on Lambeth Palace Road. The entrance to the hospital car park was jammed with a long queue, and he continued on to join Westminster Bridge Road and cross the Thames. Ahead of him Parliament brooded darkly.

  Kathy found McCulloch sitting on a bench in a corridor talking to the stooped figure of a small dark woman, whom she recognised as Winnie Wellington when she turned her tear-streaked face towards her. Embarrassed,Winnie wiped the tears away with the back of her hand and sat a little straighter. Kathy sat beside her and put a hand on her arm.‘I’m sorry,Winnie.’

  ‘I knew he’d get into trouble, dat boy. But he didn’t deserve anything like this.’

  McCulloch, impassive, raised an eyebrow at Kathy and nodded his head to one side. She got to her feet and followed him a little way away.

  ‘What happened?’ she murmured.

  ‘Kids coming out of school for lunchbreak saw him stagger out of the side street opposite, clutching his head. He collapsed and they went and had a look. He had blood all over his face and someone called triple nine.When the ambulance men got there they discovered he had a six-inch nail rammed in his ear.’

  Kathy screwed up her face in disgust.

  ‘Yeah. Extremely lucky it didn’t kill him. Punctured the eardrum of course. Very painful, apparently. They’re trying to find out what other damage it’s done inside his head. He hasn’t spoken. Any ideas?’

  ‘I visited him again at the girl’s flat in Cove Street. Could it be punishment for talking to me?’

  ‘That’s what I wondered.“See and blind,hear and deaf ”,that’s the Yardie code.’

  Another horrible thought came to Kathy. ‘Yes, that, and the fact that he’s a musician.’

  McCulloch grimaced. ‘Some punishment. When did you visit him?’

  Kathy checked her notebook. ‘The eighth, over a week ago. The girl caught me in the flat talking to him. She could have told Vexx.’

  ‘Long time to wait to teach him a lesson. Maybe it was something else.’

  Kathy shook her head.‘No.You’ve been reading the papers? They waited till that was all over, then they cleaned up their own backyard.’

  ‘Well, he certainly upset somebody.’

  ‘It’s Vexx.We should talk to him, and Carole, the girl.’

  McCulloch raised an eyebrow.

  ‘Sorry,’ Kathy said.‘It’s your case. Just a suggestion. Can I sit in?’

  ‘Be my guest.We’ll be waiting here for a while.Talk to Winnie while I fetch us all a cup of tea.’

  One of nature’s great mysteries, Brock thought, along with migrating butterflies and holes in the ozone layer, was exactly what happened to fish and chips on the way home. Recalling the delicious package of hot crisp food he’d bought in the shop, he contemplated sadly the congealed mess that now lay before him on his plate. It seemed oddly personal, this transformation, like a deliberate insult. He also thought of the last plate of fish and chips he’d eaten, with Michael Grant in the Strangers’ Dining Room, and imagined how he must be feeling now, the impostor, the boy from the Dungle, summarily crushed.

  The Grant affair no longer made the six o’clock news. Brock poured himself a glass of the Dragon Stout he’d picked up at his local Paramounts. There had been a big run on it, he’d been told, and they had hardly any left. He poked around morosely in the ruined meal for the least soggy chips.

  Kathy had rung him from the hospital to say that the doctors were cautiously optimistic about George’s condition. The eardrum would probably be repairable, though the nail had penetrated the inner ear, damaging the cochlea. Time would tell whether a cochlear implant might be necessary, but things could have been a lot worse. George himself was sedated and saying nothing. Kathy was frustrated, both by the wait at the hospital and by McCulloch’s cautious approach. She had the feeling that her possible involvement worried him and that he was dragging his feet.

  Brock switched off the TV and tried to take the fish seriously. A slice of lemon might help. Or another beer.

  He rang Suzanne. She sounded pleased to hear from him, but cautious, too. She had been to see Amber that afternoon and he gathered that the visit hadn’t gone well.

  ‘She gets things so out of proportion, deliberately misinterpreting everything I say to put it in the worst possible light.Anyway,

  one day at a time . . . How are you?’

  He gave her a summary of his day and heard her sigh.

  ‘It just gets worse, doesn’t it?’ she said. ‘What they did to Michael Grant, and now this boy . . . I think you should let this go, David.Have a talk to your boss and then wash your hands of it.The past is over.You can’t put it all to rights.’

  He thought about that. Long after they hung up he pondered if that was really what he was trying to do. He remembered the Saturday lunchtime long ago,returning home to his abandoned flat, tweaking at that old wound, and of the conversations he had had that day with Joseph Kidd, whose remains had surfaced like an old nightmare so long after the event. But he wasn’t convinced. It wasn’t restitution he wanted so much as understanding. As startling as Hadden-Vane’s disclosures had been, they hadn’t explained what had happened on the eleventh of April 1981. In fact, thinking of the MP’s performance now, it had the mesmerising quality of an illusionist show. He closed his eyes as he recalled each stage in the performance,and tried to rekindle a half-suppressed sense of something inconclusive, unexplained, behind the dazzling revelations.

  He woke abruptly, two hours later, with the realisation of what had troubled him. In his presentation to the committee, Hadden-Vane had questioned whether Michael Grant had a personal reason for his campaign against Roach, a suggestion that Brock had found entirely plau
sible. This had been the basis on which he had called Father Maguire as a witness, yet the priest had thrown no light on that idea, and instead the MP had used him to expose Grant’s past in Jamaica. Hadden-Vane hadn’t answered his own question. Perhaps he didn’t know the answer,or didn’t want to know.Perhaps it lay in the relationship between Grant and his fellow immigrant, Joseph Kidd. Brock wondered who might know, and his thoughts returned as they had once before, to Abigail Lavender, who had taken Grant in when he first arrived in the UK, and whose influence had been so formative on his subsequent career.It seemed all the stranger now, after what Hadden-Vane had uncovered, that Grant hadn’t put her on his list of people Kathy should speak to,nor invited her to his daughter’s concert. And she was still alive, for he remembered her name cropping up in Kathy’s last report, with an address in Roehampton.

  He got stiffly to his feet, picked up the empty glass and the remnants of his fish supper and headed for the kitchen. As he reached the door the phone rang.

  ‘Brock, my dear chap! Not woken you up, I hope?’

  ‘Sundeep, you’re working late.’

  ‘Well, not exactly, but the lab is, and I asked them to phone me at home with their result. Bingo! You win the lottery.’

  ‘Really?’ Brock felt a tightening in his chest, of relief really, and excitement at an idea well-formed against all the odds. ‘You’ve got a match?’

  ‘That’s right. Care to take a punt on which of the three was Daddy?’

  ‘Number two, Bravo? Joseph Kidd?’

  ‘Wrong! It was the mysterious number three, the man without a head. He was the father of the lady whose handkerchief you gave us.’

  ‘Really?’ The killers had worked through the other two to get to him. Robbie, surname unknown.

  ‘Does the lady know?’

  ‘That’s a good question, Sundeep. A very good question.’

  TWENTY-NINE

  Kathy took her morning coffee into the monitor room and watched McCulloch on the screen. On the other side of the table Mr Teddy Vexx sat with his arms folded, motionless, eyes hooded as if in meditation. Martin Connell, next to him, seemed almost diminutive alongside his bulk.