Spider Trap Read online

  She got a bottle of verdelho from the fridge and poured two glasses, giving him one. In return he handed her the envelope he’d taken from his jacket pocket. Inside she found a single sheet of paper with a short paragraph of print. She sipped her wine and read.

  The Browning 9mm Hi-Power automatic pistol remains the weapon of choice among Yardie gang members. These guns are often difficult to trace as they are sold, exchanged and passed around between different users. On the other hand, tracking the use of the same weapon in various locations can be employed to reveal previously unknown connections between different groups (see ATF case study US/1/84). Sometimes individual guns acquire a reputation and a nickname, often playing on the Browning label, as in ‘Brown Maggie’, ‘Big Brownie’ and ‘Brown Bread’. The last, never traced, is believed to have been used in at least six separate shootings across South London in the 1980s.

  She stared at it, surprised that he’d remembered. ‘Hell. Why didn’t we find this?’

  ‘It’s one of a series of Special Branch internal intelligence memos. I tracked it down this morning. I couldn’t find any other reference to the six shootings, but you’re bound to have that gun somewhere on your files, probably from the days before records were computerised.’

  ‘Yes, thank you, Tom. That’s terrific. Brock’ll be delighted.’

  ‘As long as you are.’ He hesitated, then said, ‘If he needs more, just let me know. I can maybe do some digging.’

  ‘Okay. He’s interested in your having been to Jamaica.’

  ‘Oh yes? Well, this should earn you a few Brownie points.’

  She laughed. ‘That’s right, and I got a few this morning when I worked out the date of the shooting.’

  ‘Yes, tell me about that.’

  So she told him about her day, and then he told her about his, escorting the sinister colonel’s wife around Harrods while her husband was negotiating at the peace conference.

  He put his arm around her. ‘I blew it last night, didn’t I? Too much rum punch and Red Stripe. Sorry about that.’

  ‘I enjoyed it. Anyway, there’s plenty of time.’

  ‘That was the first time I’d invited a woman to my flat in years, you know. I got a bit carried away.’

  She stroked a slick of rain-damp hair from his brow, feeling a growing warmth inside her, but also an unease that wasn’t just to do with having a man in her private space. Perhaps it was the lack of preparation for meeting his little girl, or more likely the sighting of Teddy Vexx again that afternoon.

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘Nothing. I’m just tired.’

  ‘Sure.’ He smiled and shrugged on his jacket, still wet. ‘Thanks for the pizza. And thanks for being so nice to Amy.’

  ‘And thank you for the stuff on Brown Bread. I’ll speak to Brock first thing. He’ll want to see this as soon as possible.’

  twelve

  The next morning Kathy met Brock on his way into the office. She showed him Tom’s information on Brown Bread and he raised an eyebrow.

  ‘Could be something in it, I suppose. You could speak to the boy again. He might say more without me around. Tom Reeves seems to be taking quite an interest in the case.’ Brock gave her a little smile.

  ‘Yes, well . . . the Jamaican connection, you know.’

  She returned to her computer and tried to find references to the six Brown Bread shootings, but without success. Neither of the records of the two shootings that ballistics had linked to the cartridge cases found on the railway land carried any references to ‘Brown Bread’. Finally she rang up her friend Nicole Palmer in Criminal Records at the National Identification Service, to ask for her help.

  ‘And how’s the boyfriend?’ Nicole asked. ‘I hear he’s back.’

  ‘Nothing gets past Palmer of the NIS, does it?’

  ‘The real question is why you kept it a secret, Kathy. I had to rely on Lloyd bumping into him. He said that you were going out again.’

  ‘Bit early to say.’

  ‘Oh, come on, Kathy. Get in there. He’s perfect.’

  ‘Apart from the odd prolonged disappearance.’

  ‘That’s his work. And according to Lloyd he’s getting out of Special Branch as soon as he can. We need to talk about this. I’m worried about your attitude.’

  Kathy laughed. Nicole was perfect for the NIS, she thought. She just loved information, the more human and intimate the better.

  ‘If you can get me anything on Brown Bread by lunchtime I’ll buy you a sandwich.’

  ‘Done.’

  The headmistress at Camberwell Secondary seemed pleased to see Kathy again. ‘I can’t pretend we don’t find all this pretty exciting. It’s a struggle to keep the kids’ attention in the classes on the upper floor, from where they can see your people working, and it’s the only topic in the staff room. Have you found out what brown bread means?’

  ‘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 newsagent 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 tea
m, 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 café 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.