Brock And Kolla - 09 - Spider Trap (39 page)

‘Because they’d murdered a police officer!’ Hadden-Vane roared, and the priest bowed forward, his face in his hands.

Michael Grant was on his feet. He shouted something incoherent at his tormentor across the table and began to struggle towards him, knocking his chair over and pushing aside his neighbour, who got in his way. His face was transformed by anger, mouth open in a furious snarl, his movements wild and violent. All around him people began to move in confusion, some to block him and others to get out of his way.The Clerk and a door attendant joined in,and Grant became locked in a tight scrum in the middle of the room. Beyond him, well out of range, Hadden-Vane was backed against the oak panelling,a look of elation on his face,dabbing at his mouth with his blue handkerchief.

twenty-seven

F
rom the window of the living room on the first floor Brock could see yellow and purple crocus tips pushing up through the last remaining crust of old snow against the fence of the garden below. If he listened carefully, he could hear the murmur of traffic on the high street, and the occasional muffled jangle of the bell on the front door of the antiques shop through the floor. He sat at the window, holding a mug of coffee, suspended.

Unlike Tom Reeves, whose suspension would become, after due process, an absolute rupture, his own, he’d been assured, was a temporary state designed to satisfy the ruffled sensibilities of the brass. All the same, it felt like being shouldered out of the way, out of the stream of life. Suicides were suspended, as were punch bags, victims in comas, and people holding their breath in fright. He wondered if that was how Suzanne’s daughter had felt before she stretched herself out above the cliffs.

While he’d been waiting for the coffee to brew, he’d come across the pile of newspapers, tactfully stacked away beneath the kitchen table for disposal. It looked as if she’d bought every one, their headlines a study in sanctimonious outrage . . .

‘Extraordinary scenes in Parliament’

‘MP was a
YARDIE GUNMAN
.’

‘PM condemns renegade MP’

‘Tragedy of Boy from the Dungle’

Her voice on the phone had been tentative. She hadn’t realised that he was involved, until Ginny had mentioned it, and was shocked when he told her he was suspended.What was he doing?

What he was doing was reading the papers and wondering at the speed with which they, as opposed to the police, had been able to uncover so much information in so little time.Here was a picture of a hovel beside a rubbish tip,where Michael Grant had grown up, and there an old lady,his grandmother,whose surname,Forrest,was the one that should have been on his passport. Here was Father Guzowski surrounded by small children, and there the sainted priest again, eyes closed, in a casket after his murder.

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 care-ful.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 reached 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.’