Spider Trap Page 26

  What he was also doing was imagining the research effort that must have gone into it, and the irony that, all the time Michael Grant had been beavering away gathering information on Spider Roach, Roach must have been doing exactly the same thing on Grant, saving up the juicy revelations, one by one, until the moment came to launch his devastating attack.

  ‘Well,’ Suzanne had suggested tentatively, ‘if you’d like a break, a drive down to the country . . .’

  He’d accepted readily, too readily he now thought. Maybe she’d intended it as a hypothetical option for some time in the future, instead of which he’d got straight in the car and motored down.

  ‘We’re here!’ Suzanne’s voice came from the foot of the stairs, accompanied by a chatter of children’s voices, home from school. Miranda rushed in first, with the unselfconscious assumption that she would be found adorable, which she duly was. Brock knelt to give her a hug, then straightened as her older brother came in, holding out his hand stiffly, right shoulder tilted higher than the left as if expecting to have his arm twisted. Brock shook the hand, then gave him a hug too. He’d brought some presents, a Meccano set for Stewart, who had a practical bent, and a puppet theatre for Miranda, who was already something of a performance artist. They accepted them enthusiastically, but Brock thought he also sensed a wariness, as if perhaps they associated gifts with adult guilt, with being abandoned and returned to.

  Stewart had homework to do before teatime, and while he got on with that Brock helped Miranda erect her theatre from the kit in the box. Later they ate together and talked about inconsequential things, TV shows and movies they’d seen, what they were going to do that weekend. Brock had the impression they were all being careful. When the children went to bed he stood to leave, but Suzanne said they hadn’t had a chance to talk, and he agreed to stay for coffee.

  They sat in armchairs on opposite sides of the fireplace and Brock remarked that the kids were looking happy. Suzanne spread her hand and rocked it like a bird caught in turbulence.

  ‘You’ve been having problems?’ he asked.

  She sighed, then said, ‘Look, if you insist on driving back tonight you won’t be able to have a drink, and then I won’t be able to have one, but I need one if we’re going to talk about things—it’s the Aussies’ fault, they got me drinking more than I used to.’

  ‘What do you suggest?’

  ‘Well, there’s a spare bed.’

  He nodded. ‘Suits me. I don’t have a job to go to in the morning.’

  ‘Right!’ She got to her feet and fetched a bottle of wine and a corkscrew, which she handed to him while she went for glasses. On the way back she carefully shut the living-room door and when she spoke she kept her voice low.

  ‘Cheers,’ she said. ‘No, they’re doing pretty well, considering. Do you know, when they ran out of money Stewart started knocking on neighbours’ doors, offering to wash their cars. In the snow. Nobody thought to ask what was going on. And I was 12,000 miles away. It’s amazing Amber survived on the headland in that cold.’

  ‘How’s she doing now?’

  ‘It’s a terrible thing to say, but the stronger she gets the more trouble she becomes. She gets fretful, then abusive, then aggressive. What I’m most worried about is when she’s completely recovered physically and starts demanding the children back.’

  ‘Can she do that?’

  ‘I’m getting advice.’

  He refilled her glass, unable to express the sadness he felt for her. ‘Would it help, do you think, if I came with you to see her in hospital?’

  She looked surprised, then smiled. ‘I don’t know . . . Not now. Maybe later? Anyway, tell me about your disaster.’

  So he did, and at the end of it she said, ‘Poor you. And you still don’t really know what happened to those two teenagers or the three men on the waste ground. You must be furious.’

  ‘Am I? I don’t know. When you peel away the hurt pride and the frustration, maybe I feel relieved. Coming on Roach again was like scratching at an old wound. Who needs it?’

  ‘I’ll drink to that.’

  ‘The only thing is that I did have a theory about those men, and now I’ll never know.’

  ‘To do with the old files you were going through?’

  ‘Yes. What I couldn’t understand was how they’d been disposed of—three shallow trenches in open ground. It seemed unnecessarily exposed and risky, when the Roaches had a safe and discreet way of getting rid of their victims.’

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘They had their own funeral business. I knew that because I remembered we mounted a surveillance operation against it to try to find out what they were up to. But when I went back through the files I discovered that that came later. What happened was that one of the supergrasses we had at that time, a North London gang boss, started telling us about this perfect set-up south of the river, that gangs all over the city were paying big money to make unwanted corpses disappear. We traced it to Cockpit Lane. The business was in the name of Cyrus Despinides, whose daughter Adonia was married to Spider Roach’s son Ivor. But this didn’t come out until late in the summer of 1981, at least four months after the three men on the railway land were buried. So the question was, if Ivor and his brothers killed those men, why didn’t they use the family business to dispose of them, the same way everyone else did?’

  ‘Hm, all right, why didn’t they?’

  ‘Perhaps they didn’t want Cyrus to know what they’d done. Could the three Jamaicans have been friends of his or doing business with him? So I started investigating his background. We had quite a lot about him on old files, but nothing about any dealings with Jamaicans. In fact, from what I could gather, his attitudes were extremely racist. Then I had another thought. Perhaps it was his daughter Adonia, not Cyrus, who wasn’t to know what the Roach boys had done.

  ‘Tom Reeves had collected quite a bit on Adonia. Like her daughter Magdalen, who was used to trap Tom, she was fond of the Jamaican club scene. Before she married Ivor in ’78 she’d had at least one Jamaican boyfriend, for whom she’d provided an alibi in a rape case.’

  ‘You think she was involved with the three victims?’

  ‘It’s a thought, isn’t it? With all or perhaps just one of them. A series of revenge killings, interrogating the victims, trying to find out which one of the Tosh Posse was playing around with Ivor’s wife. Then there’s the matter of her daughter Magdalen, born on the eighth of October 1981. Adonia was three months pregnant with Magdalen when the three victims were killed.’

  ‘You think one of them might have been Magdalen’s father? But . . . they were black. We’d know, surely?’

  ‘Maybe, maybe not. She’s darker than her mother. At thirty-three weeks, Adonia and Ivor went to the US on family business, and Magdalen was born there, the only child they had. Maybe they wanted to see what colour she was before they brought her home.’

  ‘You’ve just got a suspicious mind.’

  ‘True, and even if one of them was Magdalen’s father, I could hardly use it, could I? It doesn’t prove that Ivor and his brothers killed them. But all the same . . .’

  They sat in silence for a while, and then Suzanne murmured, ‘The penitent—that’s one of the meanings of the name Magdalen, isn’t it?’

  Later, they made their way upstairs. When they reached the landing Suzanne said, ‘Oh damn, the spare bed isn’t made up.’

  ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘What shall we do?’

  Kathy had prepared extremely carefully for their meeting. Though not herself suspended, she had been advised to keep out of the way while the review team was around, and she took the opportunity to buy some clothes and get her hair done. Martin had reacted with smug disingenuousness to her call, and had suggested Arnold’s, an upmarket cocktail bar where he was apparently known.

  She arrived a calculated fifteen minutes late and he was already there, looking at home in the deep green leather banquette, absorbed in a brief of evidence. He tossed it aside as she re
ached the table, and stood and kissed her on the cheek, giving her arm a squeeze.

  ‘Mm, that smells nice. Is it new? I ordered you this. It’s Arnold’s trademark.’ He pointed to a green drink on the table.

  ‘Lovely.’ She slid in at right angles to him.

  He raised his glass. ‘Great to see you. And you’re looking so good! You’ve done your hair differently.’

  ‘Well, I had to do something. Everyone’s going around with such long faces.’

  He gave a little smile. ‘I wasn’t sure you’d call.’

  ‘Nor was I. It took a little courage.’

  ‘Courage?’

  ‘Well, you know . . . History.’

  ‘Ah, history. But we’re all different now, aren’t we?’

  ‘Are we? Sometimes I think so, but then something happens and I feel just as vulnerable as I ever did.’ She guessed vulnerable was a word he’d like, a turn-on word.

  ‘I know what you mean,’ he nodded sagely. ‘Something happens and suddenly you’re back in short trousers, trying to hold back the tears.’

  Tears? Martin? ‘Your brother, you mean? Yes, of course. Are your parents still alive?’

  ‘Mum is. She was devastated, of course. He was her favourite. Oh, I don’t mean that in a resentful way. It was just a fact of life. Doted on him.’

  ‘What did he do? I’ve forgotten.’

  ‘Academic, earned a pittance, wrote incomprehensible books about philosophy that were reviewed at inordinate length in the TLS and sold about a dozen copies.’

  ‘A philosopher?’

  ‘Yuh. I told him, ages ago, he should get onto the popularising bandwagon, get on the box, write some bestsellers—The Hegel Diet, Kiss me Kant, that kind of thing.’

  She smiled. ‘He scorned your advice, then?’

  ‘Of course, like always. But time has proved me right, hasn’t it? They’re all at it now. Daniel Connell could have been a household name. Never mind, what does it matter— money, fame—when you’re gone?’

  A moment’s silence, then Kathy raised her glass. ‘To Daniel.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah. To Daniel. Poor old sod.’

  ‘But it could have been confusing, having two household names in the one family.’

  He gave his modestly roguish grin. ‘Now you’re being outrageously flattering, Kathy. I’m hardly that, hovering behind my notorious clients, a nameless legal functionary in the crowd.’

  She laughed a little too much to show how absurd that idea was, and he ordered another round.

  Finally he picked up the juicy little bait she’d offered at the start. ‘So they’re all going around with long faces, are they?’

  ‘Oh God, yes! You should see the place. Brock’s been suspended, and Tom Reeves, of course.’

  ‘Mm, I had heard that. How do you feel?’

  ‘Well, it always hurts to realise you’ve been beaten.’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘But I suppose I wasn’t altogether surprised. After we were so completely outmanoeuvred the first time, when we tried to arrest Ricky Roach, it just seemed too easy to snatch some incriminating documents from Ivor’s study and hope to make it stick.’

  ‘Did you try to tell them that?’

  ‘Yes, but Tom was so desperate to believe in what he’d done, and Brock too, being obsessed with trapping Roach. It was psychologically perfect, wasn’t it, offering something so completely over the top to people who couldn’t stop themselves from swallowing it? I had seen the warning signs, but I still didn’t see how they’d pull it off. They’re rather brilliant, aren’t they, in their way, the Roaches?’

  ‘You’re joking,’ Martin snorted. ‘They’re a bunch of thugs. They’ve made it in business through stubborn bullying. They couldn’t finesse a trick in a million years. It’s not their style.’

  ‘So they had great advice?’

  ‘You could say that.’ Martin was poker-faced, the playfulness gone from his manner. This was business, and Kathy sensed herself being led along a carefully selected route.

  ‘But . . .’ She looked thoughtful. ‘You know, there was a moment, when I saw Nigel Hadden-Vane pull his handkerchief out of his pocket, that I remembered that funny story you told me about the MP, and I thought, Martin anticipated all this. But of course that was impossible.’

  He gave an enigmatic little smile. ‘Was it?’

  ‘Well, yes. You told me the story days before Tom stole those papers, and long before Michael Grant and his committee got involved. You couldn’t possibly have known that would happen.’

  ‘Hm.’ Still the mystery smile. ‘You know what I think?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I think we should have dinner.’

  ‘Aren’t you expected somewhere?’

  ‘Nothing important. What about you?’

  ‘Nothing special.’

  ‘Good. I’ll just make a couple of calls.’

  ‘I’ll powder my nose.’ She got to her feet and left him to tell his lies.

  In the taxi across the West End, and in the restaurant, Martin spoke of other things, things that touched upon their mutual lives but indirectly, like the increasingly erratic mental condition of his father-in-law, the former judge, and the state of the housing market in Finchley and Kathy’s chances of getting a better place. Kathy suspected this was part of a test, and didn’t attempt to steer things back to work.

  Then, much later, ruminating over the last of the excellent red that had accompanied the main course, Martin returned to their earlier conversation.

  ‘You know, I couldn’t help noticing a subtle change in your way of talking about your boss,’ he said.

  ‘Really?’ Kathy had always sensed Martin’s antagonism towards her relationship with Brock. ‘In what way?’

  ‘More objective, more independent-minded. Am I right?’

  He raised a challenging eyebrow, his grin suggesting the effects of drink, but Kathy remembered that ploy too, his way of luring people into confidences under the impression that he’d switched off. Martin never switched off.

  ‘You may be right. Yes, I’m sure you are. I mean, it’s been a long time. You get to know people’s ways.’

  ‘Do you remember that old Carly Simon song we were both crazy about, “You’re So Vain”? And I was thinking about Brock, that he probably thinks this song was about him. Am I right?’

  It took Kathy a moment to catch on. ‘You mean the Dragon Stout business?’

  Martin gave a sly nod.

  ‘Well, yes, but it was a trap for him originally, wasn’t it? Only he didn’t fall for it, and Tom took it to Grant instead. I mean, the Roaches, or their very clever advisors, could hardly have anticipated that, could they? But they recovered so quickly, that’s what amazed me. All that information, all those witnesses lined up.’ She leaned forward to stare into his eyes. ‘It was amazing, Martin. You must have had a hair-raising weekend.’

  He smiled expansively. ‘Pretty relaxing, actually. Feet up, game of golf . . .’

  ‘Well, how did you do it?’

  ‘Couldn’t tell you that now, could I? Like the magician, if he explains how he does it, nobody’s interested any more.’

  Kathy sat back, nodding, knowing not to push. ‘You are a bit of a magician, aren’t you, Martin?’

  He narrowed his dark eyes and spoke more forcefully. ‘You mentioned information. How right you are. That’s what we’re both about, information. It’s our lifeblood. People have this odd picture of the cops, like anglers sitting around the edge of the water, keeping their feet dry, dipping their lines in and hoping to catch a big fish. But it isn’t like that, is it? You have to go down into the dark water, both you and I, and swim with the sharks. It’s the only way we get our information. Brock used to know that, in the old days. I think it’s what you’ve come to understand now.’

  Kathy wasn’t sure she’d followed the switching metaphors. She smiled neutrally. ‘Maybe so.’

  ‘We all need allies, Kathy, friends. I thought we made pretty g
ood allies at one time, before Brock took you under his wing. I’m not talking about betraying loyalties, just about having sources, for mutual advantage. It can get pretty cold out there, in the dark water. Tom found that out, didn’t he?’

  ‘Yes, maybe you’re right.’

  ‘Of course I am. You’re going places, Kathy, no doubt about that. We should be friends.’

  She frowned, as if needing time to think about this.

  ‘Anyway,’ Martin gave a dismissive flap of his hand. ‘What about dessert?’

  He had made his pitch, she felt, or at least half of it. The other half came later, after they got the taxi back to his office, where he picked up his car to drive her home. It was a cold night, and then the rain began as they reached Kentish Town. The beating of the wipers and the dull glow of streetlights on drab buildings contrasted with the snugness of their capsule, dry, warm and smelling of new leather.

  ‘You’ll think about what I said, won’t you?’ he asked as his headlights swept across the forecourt of her block.

  ‘Of course.’

  He pulled in to a visitor’s space, and as she detached her seatbelt he leaned over and cupped her cheek and kissed her mouth. She had to suppress a reaction of panic as she felt his tongue slide against her lips. Clammy, oppressive memories filled her head, of the claustrophobic intensity of treacherous love with him.

  He pulled away at last. He was excited, breathing heavily. ‘What about a nightcap then,’ he said, not a question, reaching for the door handle.

  ‘Not tonight, Martin.’

  He turned back to her, lips pressed tight to contain his irritation. ‘Don’t be a tease, Kathy.’

  ‘I think you’re being the tease. You drop hints and mysterious pearls of wisdom all evening, but I’m really none the wiser. I still don’t know what you did to us.’

  He took a deep breath, exasperated. ‘Got to sing for my supper, do I? Carly Simon, Kathy, remember? This wasn’t about Brock.’

  ‘Who then? Not Tom, surely. Michael Grant?’

  He stared ahead through the running film of water on the windscreen for a moment, and when he looked at her again he was calm, in control. ‘Not Brock, not Tom, not Grant. This was about Spider, Kathy. All about Spider. About keeping him safe, at all costs. Brock, Tom, Grant were collateral damage—most welcome to Spider, of course, vindictive old bastard that he is.’