Spider Trap Read online

  Praise for Spider Trap

  ‘He is a classic storyteller ... In Spider Trap, Maitland is in top form.’—The Age

  ‘Tightly plotted and fast-paced, this is top-class crime fiction.’—Good Reading

  ‘With surprise twists and turns, there’s a palpable undercurrent of menace in this immensely satisfying read. In a word, absorbing.’—Herald Sun

  ‘Gripping stuff with a big climax … A damn good read.’

  —Wairarapa Times-Age

  ‘A first-rate crime novel by an author who is at the top of his game.’—Canberra Times

  ‘In his best tale yet, Maitland elegantly weaves race, violence, alienation and the insidiousness of family connections into multiple story lines. His strength is never to allow the narrative to occlude the archaeological dig into what lies behind the murderous event.’—The Australian

  ‘Fans will enjoy this one while first-time readers should want more.’—Bookseller & Publisher

  ‘… one of the top five crime writers in the world.’

  —The Australian

  ‘Perfect fireside reading.’—Sunday Times

  Also by Barry Maitland

  The Marx Sisters

  The Malcontenta

  All My Enemies

  The Chalon Heads

  Silvermeadow

  Babel

  The Verge Practice

  No Trace

  BARRY

  MAITLAND

  spider trap

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  This edition published in 2007

  First published in Australia in 2006

  Copyright © Barry Maitland 2006

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

  Allen & Unwin

  83 Alexander Street

  Crows Nest NSW 2065

  Australia

  Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

  Fax: (61 2) 9906 2218

  Email: [email protected]

  Web: www.allenandunwin.com

  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

  Maitland, Barry.

  Spider trap.

  ISBN 978 1 74175 183 3 (pbk.).

  1. Brock, David, (Fictitious character) - Fiction.

  2. Kolla, Kathy, (Fictitious character) - Fiction. 3. Murder -

  Fiction. I. Title.

  A823.3

  Typeset by Midland Typesetters, Australia

  Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Good stories need good sources. For inspiration, information and wise counsel I am indebted to many, including Pauline Edwards and her moving memoir of growing up in Jamaica, Trench Town, Dai Havard MP, Dr Tim Lyons, Andrew Harrison, Scott Farrow and the crew at Southwark OCU, Lyn and Kirsten Tranter, Annette Barlow, Christa Munns and Ali Lavau, and especially my wife Margaret.

  Contents

  one

  two

  three

  four

  five

  six

  seven

  eight

  nine

  ten

  eleven

  twelve

  thirteen

  fourteen

  fifteen

  sixteen

  seventeen

  eighteen

  nineteen

  twenty

  twenty-one

  twenty-two

  twenty-three

  twenty-four

  twenty-five

  twenty-six

  twenty-seven

  twenty-eight

  twenty-nine

  thirty

  thirty-one

  thirty-two

  thirty-three

  one

  Snow began to fall over the city late on Thursday night, in mean little flakes at first, but then in plump silent gobbets. By dawn, when the security guard reached the school at the end of Cockpit Lane, the whole of London lay under a muffling blanket of white. As he checked the gates and fences he noticed what looked like a fresh trail leading through the snow beside the empty garage building next door, as if something had been dragged from its rear entrance. He was very much inclined to ignore it, but the garage was technically part of the school premises, and there had been a spate of fires recently. Investigating, he found the door slightly ajar. Inside, his flashlight picked out two figures curled up together on the bare concrete floor. He took them for children and might have said they were asleep, except that it was far too cold to be lying like that without blankets. They didn’t respond to his challenge, and he noticed a spatter of dark stains all around them on the floor. When he moved closer he made out plastic tape binding their wrists, and then the shocking wounds in the backs of their heads.

  The murders in Cockpit Lane might have passed without much public notice except that the victims were two young girls, only sixteen years old, both shot through the head. They had also died in the constituency of Michael Grant, Member of Parliament for Lambeth North and a vigorous campaigner against crime in his inner South London community. The youngest black member of the House of Commons, Grant was a charismatic speaker whose compelling voice and handsome face were soon all over the media, describing the Cockpit Lane girls, Dana and Dee-Ann, as only the latest in a long series of tragic victims of, as he put it, an evil alliance of poverty, drugs, guns and criminal business interests operating in the district.

  The press immediately dubbed the shootings a ‘Yardie’ massacre, despite police reservations about the use of the term, which implied the involvement of Jamaican immigrants. To the press it was Yardie because it was violent, guns and drugs were involved (crack cocaine was found in the girls’ pockets), and both the victims and just about everyone else in the neighbourhood were of West Indian origin.

  By late afternoon, media interest in the tragedy had risen to such a pitch that Scotland Yard announced the formation of a Major Inquiry Team, led by Detective Chief Inspector David Brock and officers from Homicide Command, together with local detectives. They would be supported by members of the Operation Trident squad, which had been established some years earlier to combat gun crime in London’s black communities.

  Beyond the hissing radiators, through the tall windows of the upstairs classroom, Adam Nightingale could see over the back wall of the school playground to the dazzling white wasteland beyond, across which the thin black lines of the railway tracks traced a sweeping curve. On seeing the snow, his mother’s first words that morning had been, ‘That’s it, Adam, we’re goin’ back to Jamaica.’ They wouldn’t, of course. She always said that when it snowed, but he thought it was magic.

  The class was unsettled, whispering and passing notes. When they’d arrived for school that morning they’d been met by the sight of ambulances and police cars blocking the Lane. They’d stood in huddled groups, lit by the strobing lights, straining to catch the squawk of the police radios. Gradually a little information had rippled through the excited mob, just enough to breed rumours and questions. Were the girls from Camberwell Secondary? Had they been raped? Throughout the morning, classes had been distracted by the sirens a
nd the helicopters. When the bell rang for their lunchbreak, they’d rushed out into the street, hung around the police barrier and pestered the cops asking questions in the Cockpit Lane street market and searching the alleyways and backyards.

  There were many empty seats when school started again in the afternoon, and the teachers struggled against the mood of distracted restlessness. Adam felt the horrible excitement more than anyone. It ate away at him and made him feel almost physically ill. He had his own ideas about what had really happened, but as usual no one was interested in what he had to say. It was the guns that fascinated them most and there had been much technical discussion about Uzis and Mach 10s, Brownings and Glocks, but the others only scoffed when he offered his opinions. He felt as if he might literally explode with frustration at the familiar sense of insignificance, of being excluded.

  Mr Pemberton was oblivious to it all. He was drawing a graph on the board, a sweeping curve just like that of the rail line. A parabola, he said. Nobody paid any attention.

  The train tracks formed one curving side of a triangle of railway land bordered by the school wall and by the back fences of the warehouses along Mafeking Road. The walls and fences were too high to climb, and so this inaccessible little bit of wilderness in the middle of crowded inner London had become an island of mystery to the kids of Camberwell Secondary. There were stories of valuable things buried there, of stolen goods thrown from trains, and of strange animals in hidden lairs. Adam’s mind often turned to these stories when he lay alone in bed at night, imagining himself a hero, penetrating the mysterious triangle and making a stupendous discovery.

  Now the coppers were on the railway land, searching with sticks and metal detectors along the border against the school and garage where the girls were found. They must be looking for the killer’s gun, Adam thought, possibly thrown over the back wall. The sight of them filled him with anguish. Suppose those probing sticks, those powerful detectors, found something else, another prize, the great prize—his prize.

  A train came rumbling around the bend from the Elephant and Castle direction, giving off vivid flashes of blue light where snow had drifted across the electric rail. In his nightly imaginings Adam had worked out a way of getting onto the triangle, in theory. In theory, because it would mean approaching from the other side of the tracks, and stepping over the high voltage electric rails that powered the trains. Adam shivered at the thought of that, imagining the treasure hunter turned to a cinder in a flash of blue.

  Pemberton droned on, writing a formula with his squeaky marker, y=ax2+b, as if he could reduce the curve of the tracks, smooth and dangerous, to a few symbols on a board. From his desk by the window, Adam peered through his glasses at the undulating white landscape and was almost sure that he could make out the faint lines of fox trails converging on a darker patch, far beyond where the coppers were searching. He’d first spotted the foxes during a boring English lesson last year. This morning they’d have woken to find the entrance to their hide covered in snow, and if they’d dug themselves out and gone foraging they’d have left tracks that a hunter could follow back to their den, and to the trophies they might have hidden there, including, perhaps, the great prize. With a little glow he imagined the kudos, the respect, that would come to anyone who retrieved it. In his head he traced each stage of the journey he must make to reach it, replaying the various difficulties and the final triumph. He also imagined the awful possibility that the coppers would find it first. By the time the maths lesson came to an end, Adam had reached a decision. He couldn’t put it off. This was a day of awesome events. This time he would really have to do it.

  He considered asking Jerry, his only real friend, to come along as a witness. But Jerry was clumsy, with big awkward feet. If you could picture anyone tripping over the third rail and going up in a ball of blue flame, it would be Jerry. So Adam decided to go alone, that afternoon, as soon as the cops had left.

  When school finished Adam ignored the crowd gathering at the police tapes and hurried away down Cockpit Lane towards the footbridge over the railway. From up there he could see the straggling line of coppers leaving for the night, making their way back to the opening they’d made in the back fence to the Mafeking Road warehouses. Worried about the fading light, he ran across the bridge and up the lane on the other side until he found the gap he’d spotted in the fence, hidden now by a drift of snow so deep that he almost had to dig a tunnel to get to the other side. Then he was through, in forbidden territory, at the top of the railway embankment. Plunging down, he was shocked by the depth of the soft snow, up to his hips in places. When he reached the bottom he crouched for a while behind a clump of bushes, out of sight of a group of kids crossing on the footbridge. His heart was pounding, his body steaming inside his parka, his legs and feet soaking.

  He waited until the footbridge was deserted and there was no sound of trains, then stood up straight and advanced across the ballast, stepping cleanly over the rails, one after the other. He was across. Exhilarated, he hurried on to the corner of the mysterious triangle, reaching it just in time to crouch at the bottom of the school wall as a train roared past. Ahead of him he could make out the hillock of snow he had seen from Mr Pemberton’s classroom, beyond which lay the fox trails. He made for it, falling flat as the snow collapsed into the mounds of dead bracken beneath. His glasses fell off and he groped blindly in panic until he found them and hauled himself upright and struggled on. There were the trails—paw prints—plain as anything, and the sweep of an animal’s tail across the surface. He reached the dark patch where they converged, and at first he was disappointed, seeing the snow scraped away to reveal a few twigs half-buried in the hard ground. But when he looked more closely he felt a rush of blood to his face. It wasn’t what he’d been looking for, but in its way it was a treasure even more fantastic. He grabbed hold of it, wrenched it from the ground, and stuffed it into his jacket pocket.

  He wanted to go on, but the light was fading fast and he was trembling now with the cold. He had his prize, something that none of them could ignore, and it was enough. He turned and laboured back along the furrow he’d made towards the place where he’d crossed the railway tracks. There he paused to listen, his glasses misting up on his nose, then stepped carefully across the first steel rail, then the second. As he was about to cross the third, he was startled by a man’s shout from the footbridge overhead. ‘Oi!’ He froze for a moment, and his foot wavered over the electric rail, raised up on its ceramic insulators. A wet fold of cloth brushed its surface, and a great blow slammed Adam to the ground.

  two

  Detective Sergeant Kathy Kolla found herself standing next to a grizzled middle-aged man who looked as if he’d been up all night. He turned and spoke, interrupting himself with a hacking cough. ‘Morning. Bob McCulloch, DS, Lambeth CID.’

  ‘Hello, Bob. Kathy Kolla, DS, Serious Crime.’

  ‘Ah, you’re with Brock’s mob, are you?’

  ‘Yes. Know him?’ They both glanced down to the far end of the bare space where Brock was standing with a group, his cropped white hair and beard making him look out of place among the sharp haircuts and suits of the younger men.

  ‘Not personally. My gaffer mentioned that Brock worked on this patch at one time.’

  ‘Did he? I didn’t know that.’ There wasn’t really a lot that she did know about Brock’s early career apart from the names of some of his more famous murder cases.

  ‘Long ago. Got out as soon as he could, I dare say. Three chief inspectors.’ Detective Sergeant McCulloch nodded towards the group. ‘Overkill, wouldn’t you say?’

  ‘Pressure?’ Kathy replied.

  ‘Politics. Three wise monkeys. And guess who’ll be left to clear up . . . This is my boss now.’

  He fell silent as the local DCI called for their attention and introduced DCI Brock as senior investigating officer, and DCI Keith Savage from the Operation Trident team, a tough-looking character who glowered at them. It was over twenty-four hours since
the two girls had been found here—their bodies had long since been removed for postmortem examination and the scene of crime team finished with their examination of the place.

  The DCI went on to describe the layout of the building and what had been discovered so far.

  ‘They were found lying together just here . . . Cause of death was a single gunshot to the head of each girl, probably nine millimetre. The pathologist says the girls took a beating before they were shot—there was bruising to their bodies and faces. No sign of sexual interference.’

  Kathy was thumbing through the crime scene photos that were being passed around. The girls had been wearing almost identical dark jeans and tops, and grey dust was visible on their knees, as if they’d been made to kneel. From some angles they appeared peacefully asleep, from others brutally violated.

  ‘It looks as if the killers took some precautions to clean up after themselves. Two shots were fired but no cartridges have been found. Door handles were wiped clean and something, possibly a bit of cardboard, has been used to sweep footprints from the floor as well as from the snow outside. Judging by the state of the snow and the pathologist’s estimate we believe the time of death was between one and three on Friday morning.

  ‘We don’t know how long they’d been squatting in here. None of the neighbours admits to having been aware of them, but from the state of the place we think several days at least. There were empty cans of food and a carton of sour milk in that corner, and they had a kind of nest over there, with a single sleeping bag. There was no heating and, as you can imagine, it was very cold in here.

  ‘Both girls had extensive records of delinquency and crime—shoplifting, housebreaking, bag-snatching, joyriding in stolen cars. They worked together, most recently in the robbery of a newsagent in Hendon. Their usual territory was North London, the Harlesden area, and we don’t know what they were doing south of the river. They were known drug users and we found a small quantity of crack cocaine in their pockets, along with a pipe. And that’s about as much as we have at present. We’re currently continuing with house-to-house interviews, of course.’