Spider Trap Page 7

  ‘We haven’t got crab tonight, have we?’

  He shook his head and raised the magic finger again as he made off to the kitchen. After a while there was the ping of a microwave and he returned with a plate.

  ‘I didn’t make these. It’s their signature dish, “stamp and go”, the name for codfish fritters. Try one. I did make the sauce.’

  They were crisp and spicy, the sauce sweet and sour.

  ‘Really good!’ She took another.

  ‘You need more jungle juice.’

  She followed him and watched as he put ice in their glasses and took a jug from the fridge.

  ‘How are your bodies going?’

  ‘Oh, we just keep finding more.’

  ‘It’s getting to you, isn’t it? Taking your mind off Teddy Vexx and those two kids.’

  Put that way it made her feel as if they were betraying Dana and Dee-Ann by letting this old case distract them. Yet something equally terrible had happened there, and nobody had known. The idea that those bodies had been waiting all this time for someone to find them and uncover their story had got to her. It had got to Brock, too, right from the beginning.

  ‘Are they male or female?’

  ‘Looks like three young adult males, in their twenties, probably. Just to be original, we call them Alpha, Bravo and Charlie. At least two were shot in the head. But we have no idea who they were. We have no missing persons that seem to fit. No dentist in London has matched the dental records we’ve sent out. Yes, maybe I am getting a bit obsessed. Who were they, and why has no one missed them?’

  ‘And you can’t narrow the time frame?’

  ‘Not on the forensic evidence of the remains, apparently. But we found a wristwatch on one of them today. It was digital.’

  Tom spooned some chopped fruit into the punch. ‘That would make it, what, post-1970 or so?’

  ‘The first mass-produced digital watches came out in 1975. You had to press a button on the side to view the display. That’s what this one looked like. They’re checking now.’

  Tom turned on the hotplate beneath a saucepan and gave it a stir, pondering. ‘Were the victims black or white?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Wouldn’t the DNA tell you?’

  Kathy dipped another fritter in the sauce. ‘Our forensic pathologist, Dr Mehta, gave us a little lecture on how race is only an adaptation to climate and we all have the same DNA.’

  ‘Is that true? I mean, wouldn’t those adapta . . .’ His rum-anaesthetised tongue fumbled the word and Kathy chuckled, a little louder than she’d intended. He had another go. ‘. . . adaptations be there in the DNA, to determine skin colour, hair type, etcetera?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘If they’re black I’d bet after October 1980.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You wanna bet? A fiver.’

  ‘Okay. But you have to tell me why.’

  ‘That’s when the Yardies came.’ He handed her the glass, splashing in an extra hit of dark rum for good measure.

  Sitting together companionably on the sofa, the few remaining fritters between them, Tom went on, ‘Jamaica’s the sort of place that makes you despair at how good people are at taking paradise and turning it into hell. We stuffed it, the English. Do you know how our high street banks got started? From the fortunes Mr Lloyd and Mr Barclay made from making Jamaica into a concentration camp for slaves to grow sugar. Then the world sugar price collapsed and we gave them independence and pissed off. Like walking out on this totally traumatised family you’ve been bashing up for several hundred years.’

  It was the first time Kathy had heard Tom express anything like a political opinion, and it seemed to her that something personal lay beneath the surface.

  ‘So, what did the Jamaicans do? Two cousins looked at their old masters and said, Yeah, we’ll have two political parties like them—you have one, the JLP, and I’ll have the other, the PNP. Now the people are starving and living in slums and their kids have to join gangs and steal to make a living, so what shall we do about that? Well, we’ll give them jobs. We’ll pay them to kick the supporters of the other party, and make sure they vote for us next time. And soon all the Rude Boys in the slums have got guns with the money we give them, and every neighbourhood and district is divided between our two sides, and the fields that used to grow sugar are now growing marijuana, at least until the Americans get fed up with us and come to burn the fields. So then the Rude Boys turn their hand to smuggling Colombian cocaine, which is more profitable still.’

  Tom stretched his legs to kick off his shoes and took another slurp of his drink.

  ‘And with every election the violence between the two sides gets worse and worse, with the political parties offering more and more bribes to the gangs to help them back into office. Until we get to the election of October 1980.

  ‘That year, the violence gets so bad it almost amounts to civil war. The rudies are murdering parliamentary candidates, police officers, each other. The point is to terrorise the opposition, so the violence has to be really scary and graphic—families slaughtered in their beds, victims tortured, bodies bound up in wire . . . What’s wrong?’

  Kathy was staring at him. ‘We’ve found traces of rust— wire—with the bodies. And one of the hands we found had each of its middle bones fractured, at or around the time of death, according to Mehta.’

  ‘Interesting. Anyway, when the election is over the new government finally realises that things have gone too far, and they bring in the army and crack down on the gangs in a big way. An exodus of the rudies begins, heading north as “posses” to the States and Canada, and across the Atlantic as “Yardies” to the UK.’

  Tom rose somewhat unsteadily to his feet. ‘I’ve been talking too much. We should eat, don’t you think? I’ll put on some music.’

  ‘Bob Marley?’

  ‘Close. They shot him in the 1976 election, did you know that? Lucky to survive. No, this is his son, Ziggy.’

  He put on a CD and gentle reggae filled the room. Kathy took a seat at the dining table as Tom brought two steaming bowls of dark soup, each with a pale dumpling floating in the centre.

  ‘I didn’t make this either, must confess. Takes too long to do it properly. Pepperpot soup. Try it. Isn’t it great?’

  Kathy agreed.

  ‘But I am making the main course. Red Stripe pot roast. Trouble is, it won’t be ready for a while.’ He checked his watch. ‘Mmm, quite a while. I wanted to do jerk, of course, but it’s a barbecue thing really, and in this weather . . . I’ll do it for you in the summer, okay? I do a great jerk sauce.’

  ‘You really think that’s what we’ve found, a Yardie graveyard?’

  ‘Wouldn’t be surprised. When they came they brought their guns and their cocaine, and also their old rivalries, the Shower Posse and the Spanglers, Jungle and the Chi Chi Boys. They were more lethal to each other than to anybody else.’

  ‘You know a lot about this. Is that why you went to Jamaica?’

  Tom nodded. ‘In London we’d catch them and deport them and a few months later they’d be back with a new name, new passport. Genuine, too.’

  ‘How’d they do that?’

  ‘Easy. You have a customer, a UK citizen, dying for the crack you sell and more than willing to trade his birth certificate for an extra rock or two. So after a while we realised we needed some help from the cops over there, the Jamaica Constabulary Force. We brought them here to identify who it was exactly that we’d got, and in return the JCF invited us back to Jamaica, to drink their rum and eat their jerk chicken. Seems reasonable, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, absolutely.’

  ‘But Brock will know all this, especially if he was working in Lambeth back then. Hasn’t he talked about it?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘Keeps his cards close to his chest, old Brock, doesn’t he?’

  ‘He’ll tell us when he’s ready,’ Kathy said, but she was thinking about Brock’s instructions
to keep the SOCOs within the bounds of the site, wanting to strictly control the information that got out. And there had been a deliberate vagueness at the press briefings about certain aspects of their finds, as if he already had suspicions that he wanted to keep to himself. Tom was absolutely right, she decided, with the clarity that a couple of large rum punches can bring—Brock was being secretive. Now she remembered another thing that had struck her as slightly odd. When they’d met Dr Mehta at the path lab that afternoon, he’d shown them a thighbone he’d cleaned up. This femur was dramatically curved, like a bow, and he’d explained that the owner had suffered from rickets, most probably due to a vitamin D or calcium deficiency in childhood. Kathy had been struck by the immobility of Brock’s expression and his lack of questions.

  ‘How’s he going with his lady friend?’

  Kathy was surprised. She couldn’t remember mentioning this to Tom. ‘She’s still in Australia. I got a Christmas card from her, snorkelling on the Great Barrier Reef.’

  ‘Why the hell doesn’t he go out there after her? I would.’

  Brock wasn’t talking about that either, Kathy thought, but her thoughts were becoming increasingly blurry and euphoric, and it wasn’t Brock’s love-life she was interested in just now. ‘You sounded very nostalgic about Jamaica. Was there someone special you met there?’

  Now it was Tom who looked startled. ‘Your glass is empty,’ he said abruptly, getting to his feet. ‘We should switch to Red Stripe.’ He made his way to the kitchen where he checked the oven, then returned with a couple of bottles. ‘This is obligatory, I’m afraid. It’s in the pot roast.’ He sat down again. ‘I did have some good friends there. Some who aren’t around any more.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Oh well.’ They clinked bottles and Tom began another funny story about tropical sanitation. As he rambled on, Kathy thought how intriguing it was, discovering someone else’s life, but also how tricky. There were plenty of ghosts from her own past that she wouldn’t want to share with him, not yet.

  Much later, full of Red Stripe and pot roast, they collapsed on the sofa in an untidy heap. It had taken so long for the meal to reach what Tom felt was its full potential that it was now late in the night. He reached out a hand and stroked her hair.

  ‘I love your hair,’ he sighed exhaustedly.

  It was straight, short and very pale blonde. ‘Bit out of place in Jamaica,’ she said, and then something she’d meant to ask earlier stumbled into her head. ‘Have you ever heard of a phrase “brown bread”? Does it mean anything to you?’

  ‘Mm?’

  ‘Brown bread.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It’s what the boy was looking for on the railway land, apparently, when he found the body.’

  Tom mumbled something incoherent and Kathy closed her eyes, utterly relaxed. When she opened them again her phone was bleeping inside her shoulder bag on the floor at her feet. She blinked at her watch in disbelief, seeing seven-fifteen. Beside her, Tom lay sprawled in a contorted heap like The Body in the Bog. Swearing softly, she disentangled herself from his legs and groped for the phone. There was a message from Brock calling a case conference at Dr Mehta’s laboratory at nine a.m.

  seven

  On her way out she roused Tom from whichever tropical beach he was lazing on in his dreams. She rushed to the tube and sat on the northbound train in a daze, still half asleep. At home she rapidly showered, cleaned her teeth, and made some tea and toast. Feeling only a little less fragile, she returned to central London, this time to Embankment station, where she caught a cab to the hospital where Dr Mehta had his laboratory. She made it just in time.

  She felt the tension as soon as she stepped into the room. Dr Mehta was with Brock over by the window, arguing fiercely. She’d never seen him angry before, and the others looked mildly embarrassed. It seemed the pathologist was scolding Brock for releasing Teddy Vexx after Mehta had provided the crucial forensic evidence against him. ‘I pulled out every stop!’ he protested angrily. ‘I twisted people’s arms, gave up my weekend, ruined my mother’s eightieth birthday party! And what do you do? You mess it up! You let the animal go free!’

  Brock said something placatory, but Mehta wasn’t having any of it. ‘Well, don’t be surprised when I’m less than enthusiastic about going the extra yards the next time!’ He turned away in a huff and started talking to someone else.

  Brock, looking unperturbed, came over to Kathy and introduced her to a man from the Forensic Services Command Unit whom she hadn’t met before. On the other side of the long table the three forensic experts were taking their seats. They represented, Brock murmured, ‘flesh, bones and teeth’. Sundeep Mehta, ‘flesh’, the forensic pathologist, sat in the middle as nominal leader of the group. ‘Teeth’ sat on his left, in the person of Professor Lyons, forensic odontologist, a studious-looking elderly man in a white lab coat stained at the sleeves with something yellow. On Dr Mehta’s right a black woman, Dr Prior, was ‘bones’, the team’s forensic anthropologist. She looked to Kathy to be about her own age, early thirties, and was immersed in a document while Mehta worked out some of his anger in an energetic conversation with the odontologist about fees. Apparently, three bodies in a single incident would attract a separate case fee for each, whereas if they found any more, charges must be made at either a half daily rate or a reduced case rate, but whether this applied to all the bodies, or only the fourth and subsequent ones, was a matter for debate.

  Brock cleared his throat and Mehta broke off and frowned at Kathy. ‘Sergeant Kolla, how are you? Is this everyone, Brock?’

  Brock said yes.

  ‘No Inspector Gurney?’

  ‘He’s on site this morning.’

  ‘Very well.’

  Mehta sniffed at a scrap of paper. ‘I have a message that Morris Munns has something he wants to show us. He should be along shortly. Now, this is really your meeting, Brock. We can only charge extra for police case conferences, not our own.’ He gave Brock a grim look, inviting him to challenge him, but Brock said nothing. ‘Anyway I thought we’d better speak to you, because we had another discussion last night and we seem to be approaching a preliminary consensus on your three skeletons.’

  At that moment there was a tap on the door and a woman hurried in with a sheaf of papers which she handed to Mehta, who said, ‘Perfect timing, Jenny.’

  The documents were the combined forensic reports of the three specialists, fresh off the photocopier. Each person was given a set, and Mehta directed them to the final summary for the profile that had now emerged of the three victims, Alpha, Bravo and Charlie. It confirmed that they were all males, and provided rather specific estimates of their heights—167, 185 and 181 centimetres respectively— and ages—twenty-three, nineteen and twenty-eight. Both Alpha and Bravo were right-handed, whereas Charlie was left. Available teeth were generally in good condition, with no fillings or other signs of dental treatment. As children, Bravo had had rickets and Charlie had suffered multiple fractures to his left leg. Both Alpha and Bravo had probably died from single gunshot wounds to the head, whereas the cause of death of Charlie, whose skull had not yet been found, was unknown. The size of the entry wounds were consistent with the two nine-millimetre calibre cartridge cases found on the site.

  All three skeletons showed evidence of fractures, which Dr Prior felt were probably sustained close to the time of death, although Dr Mehta wasn’t so sure, emphasising how difficult perimortem trauma was to distinguish. There were sufficient traces of oxidised iron strands in the surrounding soil to support the conjecture that all three had been bound with wire to arms and legs at the time of burial. It was not possible to determine whether they had died together or on separate occasions, nor whether death had occurred on the railway site or at some other place, although the presence of spent cartridges might suggest the former. Fabric traces in the ground suggested that all three bodies had been clothed at the time of burial, but these traces weren’t substantial enough to yield mor
e specific information, apart from the remains of a shoe, a belt buckle, two zip fasteners and some buttons, which were being further investigated.

  The condition of the remains indicated a date of death between ten and forty years previously. A Seiko digital wristwatch with plastic case and LED display had been found on the wrist of Charlie, indicating an earliest date for his death of 1978, when this model first came on the market. So far, the evidence did not warrant a closer estimate for date of death than the seventeen-year period from 1978 to 1995. Maternally inherited mitochondrial DNA had been obtained from the remains of all three victims.

  ‘Sorry about the date, Brock,’ Sundeep said, not sounding at all sorry. ‘I suppose that’s the thing you’re most interested in, but we’ve tried everything—benzidine test, precipitin test, demonstrable fatty acids, nitrogen content. No go, I’m afraid. The only other time-related fact we have is that ballistics have matched the cartridge cases to a gun used in two other shootings in South London during the mid-eighties, but that doesn’t really narrow your time frame, does it?’

  ‘This bit about “indicators of non-Caucasian ancestry”, Sundeep,’ Brock queried. ‘Can we be more specific?’

  As they’d been reading the summary, Kathy had noticed Dr Prior shake her head several times. Now she answered Brock’s question.

  ‘They were black,’ she said bluntly.

  It was Dr Mehta’s turn to shake his head. ‘Dr Prior, I’ve been trying to emphasise to our colleagues here that such a term is arbitrary and meaningless in science. Racial categories have no biological reality.’ He sounded testy.

  Dr Prior gazed calmly back at him and said, ‘That’s nonsense, Dr Mehta. You’ve completely ignored my evidence in your summary. The morphological arguments are compelling and well established. Race is a biological fact, and the three victims were as black as I am. I think the police need to know that.’