Spider Trap Read online

  ‘It’s not theirs. I also found traces of semen on the tape. I’ve taken swabs of both of their mouths and faces, but I think only one of them was assaulted. This one . . .’ He pointed at Dee-Ann. ‘He forced her to perform oral sex on him before he killed her, Brock. That’s what I’m concluding.’

  There was silence for a moment, then Brock said, ‘Make sure, Sundeep. I want his DNA. As soon as you can.’

  ‘Is there someone we should be looking to match it to?’

  ‘Possibly. We should have his profile on record. I’ll get it sent to you.’

  ‘Oh,’ Mehta called after them as they made to leave. ‘I’m told you’re interested in this.’ He pointed to another table on which lay an assortment of grubby bones.

  ‘The schoolboy’s find?’

  ‘That’s it. The jaw belongs with the skull, all right.’

  ‘Can you tell us anything?’

  ‘Adult victim, single shot to the head, probably nine millimetre too, like the girls, but long, long ago. Lots of tests to do, but I’d guess it’s been there at least ten years. They’re finding bits all the time. Maybe tell you more on Monday.’

  ‘Many thanks.’

  They returned to Lambeth police station to find Savage and McCulloch sticking photographs on the wall. Others had been pinning up maps and aerial photographs of the area around Cockpit Lane and Cove Street. When Savage spoke he seemed enthusiastic.

  ‘The tyre yard looks abandoned—’, he pointed to photos of an archway formed from old truck tyres and a faded sign, PART WORN TYRES, ‘but the building behind has had a lot of recent work: razor ribbon along the eaves . . . security cameras . . . heavy steel doors. Whatever they’re doing in there is obviously worth a heap of protection. This is the laundrette, a unit in a row of shops with flats above. And this is the house, two streets away, where Vexx lives with his mother.’

  McCulloch pointed to a photo of Vexx himself. ‘A mean-looking bastard, six-two, eighteen stone, a serious bodybuilder with a taste for violence.’

  The picture reminded Kathy of the thick brown arm at the window of the blue Peugeot she’d seen cruising past Winnie Wellington’s stall.

  ‘What I’m thinking,’ Savage came in, ‘is that we could use an information-gathering exercise at the JOS club, as Brock suggested, as a cover to put people in position for a raid on Vexx’s properties in the early hours tonight.’

  There was a surprised silence, then several people began speaking at once. The difficulties of mounting an effective operation at such short notice bothered some, especially Savage’s own Trident team, who were accustomed to working with detailed intelligence and painstaking planning.

  ‘Will we get a warrant?’ one asked, and Savage replied grimly, ‘Leave that to me.’

  ‘We need to place Vexx in the vicinity of the murders on that night,’ someone else suggested. ‘We need to find witnesses.’

  ‘And by the time we’ve done that he’ll know we’re onto him,’ Savage countered. ‘We’ve got to move fast, hit hard.’

  Brock spoke. ‘There is another possibility,’ he said, and told them what the pathologist had discovered. ‘Dr Mehta should be able to tell us if we have a match by Monday,’ Brock said. ‘We should wait till we have that before we move on Vexx.’

  ‘You heard Michael Grant, Brock,’ Savage snapped back. ‘People want action and Saturday night is the best time. As you said yourself, that’s when the girls visited the JOS.’

  He read the doubt on Brock’s face and added, ‘If you prefer, we can mount this as a separate Trident operation.’

  Kathy caught a small smile on McCulloch’s mouth and remembered his comment when she first met him, about politics.

  Brock said firmly, ‘No, we won’t split our forces. If we do it, we do it together. Let’s take a closer look.’

  They gathered round and began to see how it might be done, and gradually it did begin to seem not only possible but even necessary, to break the silence surrounding Vexx’s activities and the deaths of the two girls. Then McCulloch took a call from one of his detectives. There were no CCTV cameras in Cockpit Lane itself, but a traffic camera on the main road two hundred yards away had recorded a Peugeot registered to Vexx at twelve forty-eight a.m. on Friday morning.

  ‘Gotcha,’ said Savage.

  Once the decision was taken, things happened quickly and comparatively smoothly. More people were drafted in, the team broken down into task groups, detailed maps and photos assembled and observers sent out to watch and report on the various locations. By evening, enough had been achieved for most people to be sent home for a few hours’ break. Kathy caught the tube to Finchley Central and walked back through the cold streets to her flat, where she ran a bath and defrosted a lasagne from the freezer. Later, she looked out from her twelfth-floor window at the headlights on the streets below, people heading for a Saturday night out, and remembered Tom Reeves. She didn’t call, but watched TV for a while, then pulled on her coat, feeling the knot of anticipation in her stomach.

  She joined the others arriving at the station just before midnight, greeting each other with croaky murmurs and wintry coughs. After she’d changed into overalls and boots and a protective vest, she took her place in the queue to be issued with her Glock pistol. With mugs of tea and chocolate bars they assembled for their final briefing from Brock and Savage, both of them precise, confident and apparently relaxed. There had been no sign of activity at the tyre yard or repair shop, the laundrette had now closed for the night, and Vexx’s mother was said to have watched TV alone in the living room of her house until ten, when she’d gone to bed. Vexx had been seen at the JOS club, where he usually spent his Saturday nights, but had just been reported as having left and gone home, unaccompanied.

  Then they were making their way down to the transport, clustering into their groups—the rooftop snipers, the dog-handlers, the paramedics, the cameramen, the heavy squads laden with battering rams and bolt-cutters.

  Kathy had been assigned to the house. The van drove down Cove Street, past the club booming with sound and activity, then the darkened laundrette, and turned into the back streets. It drew to a halt at the end of a narrow lane and two of the men got out. There was a large dog in the backyard, they knew, as in most of the yards around here and Kathy was glad she was going in through the front. As the van continued around the corner into the street they saw Vexx’s Peugeot 307 standing at the kerb.

  A sharp crack and the front door slammed inward. Kathy and two others ran upstairs. They found Vexx’s mother asleep in bed in the front room, the other two bedrooms empty. The two men continued up to the attic floor while Kathy waited, tense, on the landing, pistol gripped in both hands, straining for telltale sounds. But she didn’t hear the bathroom door open behind her, and gave a spasmic jump when a deep voice at her ear murmured, ‘Lookin’ for me, darlin’?’

  She turned to see Mr Teddy Vexx, all 252 naked pounds of him, towering inches away, wearing nothing but an assortment of gold chains around his neck.

  ‘Christ!’ She hopped back, bringing up the gun.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said softly. ‘The little girls were impressed too.’

  As they led him downstairs to the van, now dressed, the first reports started coming in over the radio from the other sites, of empty rooms and deserted buildings. Even the dogs had disappeared.

  four

  The returning teams made no attempt to hide their frustration, banging their equipment and kicking their boots. The adrenaline was still fizzing and it had nowhere to go. Tools and weapons were locked away again with a niggling sense of anticlimax. Vexx, too, was locked away, the sole arrest of the night. Only the drug sniffer dogs, snuffling in the corners of the deserted repair shop behind the tyre yard, gave grounds for hope, and forensic teams had moved in.

  There was nothing for the rest of them to do and they began to drift away. Kathy finished her paperwork for Vexx’s arrest and handed it in to the duty inspector, feeling raw and edgy. She returned home and
went to bed, but found it impossible to sleep.

  She felt lousy the next morning. Thinking fresh air might help, she tramped out through the snow to buy a paper, then ordered toast and coffee in an empty café. Her mind flicked back to Vexx, stark naked, and his jibe about the girls. He’d been trying to rile her, of course, and he’d succeeded, though he wouldn’t be smiling if they made the DNA match.

  On impulse she dug out the cheque stub on which she’d written Tom Reeves’s number and dialled it.

  His voice was a mumble, as if he’d just woken up, and for a horrible moment she thought she must have caught him in bed with someone. Then he apologised and said he’d had a mouthful of muesli.

  ‘I just wondered if you were free for lunch?’ she said.

  He seemed keen, and they arranged to meet at a pub they’d visited together once before, in Camden Town.

  Her doubts eased a little when she saw him come through the door, tall, confident, the dark hair swept back, the warm smile in his eyes as he spotted her. He came over and kissed her cheek and asked how she was. She’d already finished one glass of wine and he went to the bar to fetch a bottle, then sat opposite her and began to make small talk in that easy voice of his. The wine helped a little, but she still felt edgy and out of kilter. Eventually he asked her what was wrong and she told him about the previous night. He listened intently, then nodded and said, ‘Oh, Kathy, I understand.’ She looked up from the beer mat she’d been scouring with her nail and saw that he really did—he’d been through similar things so many times himself—and a weight lifted from her. He asked some questions and they talked it through some more and when he went to pick up the food she did feel much better. She told herself it was the wine.

  When he returned he said, ‘Interesting, the Jamaican thing. Have you ever been there?’

  ‘To Jamaica? No. You?’

  He nodded. ‘Yeah, with the Branch. In fact, I had thought about trying to get onto the Trident team. I’ve met one or two of them.’

  ‘You still want to get out of Special Branch?’

  ‘Yeah. This last thing was the end. And I’m really sorry about how it must have seemed to you, disappearing without notice, without explanation. I don’t want to live like that, Kathy. I want out.’

  ‘Was it bad?’

  ‘Actually it was fairly routine. I think I was being tested, to see if I could go back to undercover duties, but it didn’t work, not for me anyway.’

  He had referred before to some problem he’d had on undercover operations, and how he’d been transferred to the Branch’s A Squad, providing protection for VIPs. He’d also spoken of being at odds with his immediate superiors, who seemed to be blocking his requests to move elsewhere.

  ‘Are you back at work now?’ Kathy asked.

  He rolled his eyes. ‘I’m protecting a colonel and his wife, a mass-murderer by all accounts, attending a peace conference in London for a couple of weeks.’

  The conversation returned to the things that were troubling Kathy, to her doubts about the case against Vexx, and to all the things she didn’t understand about the two teenage girls. ‘They were children, Tom. What had they done to provoke such cold-blooded violence?’ she asked.

  ‘As to the violence, Kathy,’ Tom replied, ‘you know how it is with the Yardies. All about territory and respect. You step on the wrong guy’s foot in the wrong dance hall and you’re dead. It sounds like someone was making an example of those two. Where are you holding Vexx?’

  When she told him he pulled the newspaper out of his jacket pocket and said, ‘I was reading something else about Cockpit Lane . . . Yes, here you go.’

  Kathy scanned the brief report on the discovery of human remains near the site of the railway accident involving schoolboy Adam Nightingale, reported to be still in a medically induced coma.

  ‘You seem to be in the thick of the action,’ Tom said. ‘I’m envious.’

  Just then Kathy’s phone beeped with a message from Brock, asking if she could come in. She checked her watch. ‘I have to get back, Tom. Thanks for lunch. It was good to catch up again.’ It sounded as if she was saying goodbye, and she saw him hesitate, then smile and say, ‘Yes, great.’ He kissed her on the cheek and added, ‘We didn’t have much time together. Shall we do it again?’

  ‘Fine,’ she said, and made for the door. The words ‘time together’ stuck in her mind. She thought they sounded quite good.

  She bumped into Brock pacing down the corridor of the station.

  ‘Kathy, right. We’ve got him. Sundeep’s made the match to Vexx’s DNA.’ He looked reinvigorated, and relieved perhaps, as if a gamble he didn’t really expect to win had paid off.

  ‘That was quick.’

  ‘Yes. Sundeep’s pulled out all the stops on this one. He has a daughter Dee-Ann’s age, did you know?’

  ‘Ah. No, I didn’t.’

  ‘Yes. We’ve been doing extra tests and Savage is about to interview Vexx now. So far he’s said nothing, just talked to his brief. That’s another story.’

  Kathy found it hard to read his expression. ‘Oh? What’s the problem?’

  ‘Come and see.’

  She followed him to the video monitoring room where they took seats in front of a screen. When she focused on the picture she felt a small jolt as she recognised Vexx’s lawyer. ‘Martin Connell,’ she said. ‘I see what you mean.’

  In a way, she owed the fact that she worked for Brock to Martin Connell, with whom she’d been having an affair when Brock had first taken an interest in her. It was the reason he had. Connell represented the wealthiest, the most celebrated, the most notorious of criminal clients. With Martin Connell on your side you knew that no defence weapon, however dubious or unscrupulous, would be overlooked. You also knew that when you were found not guilty, few would believe it was true, although they would wonder who your friends were.

  He had put on a few pounds, she thought, due no doubt to many excellent meals with his beautiful wife Lynne, and her father, retired Judge Willoughby, and their four talented children, now at university she supposed. The sheer foolishness of the affair pressed in on Kathy as she studied him, but also the emotional force of it, even after all this time—because for her, at least, it had been very serious indeed. She wondered if he still made use of his friend’s flat, the one with the sleazy bedroom with the mirror on the ceiling.

  He was engaging in some initial skirmishing with Savage, points of clarification and procedure. Vexx sat beside him, massive arms crossed, eyes hooded, gold cargo glinting beneath the lights. Finally Savage began the questions.

  ‘Do you know this girl?’ he asked, showing Vexx a picture of Dee-Ann. Vexx barely dipped his eyes to look at it. He gave a grunt.

  ‘Please answer the question, Mr Vexx.’

  ‘Chief Inspector, a point of accuracy, if you please,’ Connell intervened. ‘My client’s correct name is Mr Teddy Vexx, as a single appellation. To call him Mr Vexx is a bit like me referring to you as Inspector Savage, rather than Chief Inspector Savage.’

  Savage stared at him for a moment with a look of loathing that registered vividly even on the small screen. ‘Thank you, Mr Connell.’ He turned back to Vexx. ‘Do you know this girl?’

  Vexx shrugged. ‘I don’ know. I don’ remember.’

  ‘I’m talking about within the last seventy-two hours, Mr Teddy Vexx. Have you seen this girl within the past seventy-two hours?’

  ‘No, I don’ think so.’

  ‘Please think very carefully. She was found dead early on Friday morning. Did you see her during Thursday night or Friday morning?’

  Vexx shrugged and shook his head.

  ‘Is that a no?’

  ‘Yes, it’s a no.’

  ‘Then I wonder if you can explain how your semen was found in her mouth.’

  Martin Connell, who had been pretending an interest in his paperwork, looked up at that, a quizzical arch to one eyebrow. Vexx remained impassive.

  ‘How can you explain that, Mr Teddy Ve
xx?’ Savage repeated.

  There was silence, then Connell began to say something, but Vexx held up a massive hand and he fell silent. They waited a moment, then Vexx said, ‘Maybe I did see her—’

  Connell broke in, ‘Don’t answer, Teddy. I’d like a break to consult with my client.’

  But Vexx went on, ‘I picked up a woman, maybe one or two o’clock on Friday morning. But I don’ remember her face.’

  ‘Teddy,’ Connell tried to insist, but Vexx ignored him.

  ‘Where was this?’

  ‘Camberwell, I don’ know exactly.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘She waved down my car. She wanted money for sex. I gave her a few quid an’ she gave me a blow job. I didn’t look at her face. She got out an’ I drove away.’ He turned to Martin Connell and shrugged, as if to say, What else can one do?

  Savage stared at him for a moment. Then he said, ‘Were there any witnesses?’

  ‘Yes, my business associate, Mr Jay Crocker.’

  ‘Mr Jay Crocker witnessed this?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Where was he?’

  ‘Why, in the car. He’ll tell you.’

  ‘We’ll want to examine your car.’

  ‘What’s to examine? She was in the car, man, for maybe two minutes.’

  They saw Savage take a deep breath. ‘I want a complete account of your recent movements. Let’s start with the night of Thursday last, the third of February . . .’ But they heard the fading confidence in his voice.

  Ten minutes later Brock shook his head with disgust and got to his feet. Kathy followed him out the door. As they walked silently back to the incident room, Brock’s phone rang. He listened for a while then turned to Kathy. ‘It’s Bren. They’ve found the remains of a second body on the railway land. Let’s take a look.’

  Bren Gurney, dressed in a thick coat and green boots and a beanie pulled down over his ears, was waiting on Mafeking Road to show them the way. The scene of crime people had taken over one of the empty warehouses behind the railway waste ground and had dismantled the rear fence to provide access onto the site. There were half a dozen vehicles parked in front of the building and as they tramped down its side they had to step back against the wall to let a truck, laden with snow, drive out.