Brock And Kolla - 09 - Spider Trap (20 page)

‘Oh! It was you? You got the electric shock? Everyone’s been talking about you at school.’

Adam ducked his head, embarrassed and pleased. They all got into the car, Adam in the back with Amy, and drove off.

Dr Prior was an excellent guide, explaining everything clearly and treating their questions seriously. The youngsters were captivated by the microscopes, the chemicals and the bones, but the high point was the computer imaging of Alpha and Bravo. The precise profiles of their skulls had been scanned, and then data for average Negroid soft tissue thicknesses all over the head had been applied to flesh them out. The resulting images could be rotated and viewed from any angle and with different hair and beard styles. The result for Bravo was startlingly similar to the photograph of Joseph that Father Maguire had provided, while the other was a reasonable match to the representation of Walter that Winnie had arrived at with the computer artist.

While the other three played with the computer, experimenting with dreadlocks, glasses and various Rasta beards, the anthropologist had a quiet word with Kathy.

‘How’s the investigation going? Any suspects?’

‘Nothing definite, but we are looking at some possible white suspects.’

‘What did I tell you? A race crime.’

‘But we’re not clear about motive. It could simply have been a dispute over drugs or punishing an informer.’

Dr Prior shook her head. ‘Look.’ She drew Kathy over to Bravo’s skull, mounted on a stand on the bench. Her finger traced around the bullet hole in the upper forehead.‘This is a close-range shot.’ She pointed to diagrams and hard copies of computer images on the wall, tracing the probable angle of the bullet into the skull.

‘Get down on your knees,’ Dr Prior said.

‘What?’

‘Go on, I want to show you how it was.’

Kathy’s smile faded as she saw how serious the other woman was. She knelt.

‘You’re Joseph Kidd—Bravo, right? Imagine it. Apart from soft tissue damage, we’ve just broken your right leg in the middle of the shin and crushed two of your fingers.We hit you on the left side of your head with maybe a hammer or a pickaxe handle, so hard that your skull is cracked.You’ve been unconscious for a time and you’re in deep shock. Now you find yourself on wasteland in the dark, your arms and legs are trussed with wire, you’re on your knees, there’s blood in your eyes and mouth. Imagine it.’

Dr Prior reached for a test tube from a rack on the bench, and pressed the end hard against Kathy’s forehead.‘This is a Browning automatic and now you’re going to die. We’re not doing this to make an example of you, because nobody will ever learn what happened to you. This isn’t business.We’re doing this because we want to. Understand? We’ve gone to a lot of trouble, hurting you, bringing you here, and now you will disappear. Die, you black bastard.’

There was a deathly hush in the laboratory. Kathy blinked and for a moment she saw herself, not as Joseph, but as Dee-Ann kneeling on the hard concrete floor of the garage. Then the test tube was withdrawn and she realised the other three children were staring at her.

‘Right,’she said,getting to her feet.‘Very convincing.’

At the end of the tour they thanked Dr Prior and returned Adam to his home behind Cockpit Lane. All the way back he and Amy were immersed in a hushed conversation, punctuated by little whistles and gasps.When the car pulled in to the kerb,Adam and Kathy got out. He thanked her awkwardly. ‘That was . . . really cool,’ he said, then, ‘I’m not the only one who’s been watching you, d’you know that?’

‘How do you mean?’

‘There’s a guy who’s been spying on you from behind the fences on the other side of the railway. I’ve seen him from the school window on the top floor.’

‘Probably a reporter.’

‘No, he doesn’t have a camera, just binoculars. Big ones with red lenses. He’s loosened some of the wooden palings of the fence so he can push them apart.You can’t see him, only the binoculars. He’s been there a lot, for whole days at a time. Must have warm clothes.’

As they drove Amy to her mother’s home, the girl also seemed subdued by their trip. She thanked Kathy without any of the boldness of their previous meeting.Kathy put out her hand to shake,and when Amy did likewise the girl felt the fifty pence coin pressed into her palm.

Kathy winked.‘Don’t spend it all on chips.’

She was silent as Tom drove her home. The odd little performance in the laboratory weighed on her. It wasn’t that it had told her anything new, but that replaying the actions had given them a physical presence in her mind that hadn’t been there before. That had been Dr Prior’s point, of course.

Tom broke into her thoughts,‘Tired?’

‘Just thinking.’

‘You take work too seriously, you know that?’

‘Do I?’

‘Yes. I bought you a book to take your mind off things.’ He reached across to the glovebox and handed her a paper bag.‘I think you’ll like it. It draws you in, makes you forget everything else. But a bit heavy for tonight, perhaps. You need something buoyant. A movie? Maybe an old favourite? What’s the best movie you’d like to see again?’

She thought.‘
The Blues Brothers
.’

‘Yes!’ He tapped the steering wheel. ‘Brilliant. And appropriate, too—1980.’

‘It’s not as old as that, is it?’

‘Want to bet?’

She laughed.‘I’m not making any more bets with you or your immediate family. Are you sure?’

‘Yep. I can remember seeing it on my first blind date. I was twelve. I had to borrow some money from my mum afterwards to buy the sunglasses. What do you say we get takeaway and
The Blues Brothers
.’

‘I thought you were playing squash tonight?’

‘I cancelled.’

‘Well, that sounds good, if I can fit in a bath somewhere.’

And so it was. As she lay in her bath, aware of his presence in the room outside, she realised that she hadn’t felt so awkward about having him in her flat this time. He seemed to fit into the small space without intrusion, opening a bottle and following her instructions for a salad. It was a talent, she felt, for sympathetic manners, adjusting his dimensions (for he was actually quite a big bloke) to the available psychological space. Or maybe it was just part of Special Branch training, melting in, lulling the mark.

The meal wasn’t bad, the film great.When it was finished they stayed sitting on the sofa together and she was acutely aware of his physical presence so close beside her, like a source of warmth and life. He told her how much he’d enjoyed being with her over the previous days, and when he got up to leave they kissed, and it seemed natural and inevitable. She even felt a small tug of regret as he disappeared into the lift.

The following morning she drove back down to Cockpit Lane, where the Saturday morning market was in full swing. The wind had died down, the dark clouds dispersed and, although it was still cold, sunshine lit up the colourful striped awnings of the stalls. She drove down Mafeking Road to the warehouse. A single car stood in the yard, and when she went inside she found one of the SOCOs making a final inspection.

‘Lucky to catch me,’ he said. ‘Just about to lock up and give back the keys.’

‘Give me two minutes.’

She went through to the rear boundary, now reinstated and sealing off access to the railway land. She scanned the fences at the top of the embankment on the far side of the rail tracks. Most were brick or metal panels but among them she made out a section of wooden palings, almost opposite where the school stood. She left the warehouse and made her way back around Cockpit Lane to the footbridge across the railway beyond the school. From there she was able to see the wooden fence again, and estimate how far away it was.

She turned into the street running behind the railway embankment and paced the distance to the start of a row of small brick houses. She knocked at the first front door and, when there was no reply,walked down the narrow side passage to the backyard. There was the wooden fence,with no sign of disturbance.She tried the next house, again with no reply at the front door, but with a huge Rottweiler in the back, hurling itself against the gate as she tried to look over.

A young man, yawning and scratching his crotch, answered the third door. Kathy showed her identification and said she was investigating reports of a prowler in the street. The man shrugged and said he’d heard nothing, but she was welcome to look around the yard. There, in a corner hidden from sight of the house by a small shed, she found an area of ground cleared of snow, in front of a section of fencing in which the nails had been removed to allow the boards to be slid apart. From this sheltered hide she had a perfect panorama of the whole of the crime scene site. She searched the place thoroughly but could find no traces that might interest the SOCOs—no footprints, no cigarette butts or sweet wrappers, no threads caught on the rough wooden boards, which would probably yield no fingerprints. Whoever it was had been careful. She was turning to leave when her eye caught a tiny flake of white in the trampled ground. Using a key she flicked away dirt until she could see more of a scrap of paper, which eventually revealed itself as the remains of a hand-rolled cigarette end, crumpled, shrivelled and stamped into the earth.

Brock, too, was prowling—in his case at Queen Anne’s Gate, restlessly roaming the empty offices. From long experience he sensed that both murder inquiries in Cockpit Lane might be approaching some sort of turning point, in which, for good or ill, evidence would begin to swing their random searches into more deliberate directions. For his own reasons he had been more preoccupied with the older murders, but in the other case they had now accumulated a considerable list of people who had seen the two girls during their stay in the area, and the interviews were beginning to reveal distinctive patterns.