Barry Maitiland - Spider Trap

‘That’s not her,’Mahreen said,and Kathy saw that it was a much younger woman waiting for them, in her twenties. She had large attractive dark eyes, thick black hair and a golden complexion, as if she’d just stepped off a hot Mediterranean beach.

She shook their hands,unsmiling.‘I’m Magdalen Roach.’She spoke rapidly. ‘My mother’s waiting for you inside. She tries to pretend that she’s all right, but she isn’t. The doctor’s still very worried about her head and she’s taking a lot of painkillers. It would be better if you didn’t bother her.’

‘Oh, we do understand, Magdalen,’ Mahreen said, all calm concern.‘Don’t you worry, we won’t distress your mum. This is Kathy, she’s a detective. A couple of minutes and we’ll be on our way.’

Magdalen reluctantly led them into an expansive living room, dominated by an oversized gold and crystal chandelier, beneath which a fuller, middle-aged version of the daughter sat in a huge leather sofa. Adonia Roach had the thick black hair and dark good looks of her Greek family, and still carried the slightest trace of accent in her voice. She was carefully groomed, dressed in the finest cashmere, against which the heavy bruising on one side of her face and the bandage strapping her left hand and arm struck a discordant note.

‘Please excuse me not getting up to welcome you,’ she said. ‘My hip is still quite painful.Will you have coffee?’ She looked up at her daughter, who nodded and left. ‘You really didn’t need to come all this way just to see how I was.’

‘It’s part of our community outreach policy, Mrs Roach,’ Mahreen explained enthusiastically.‘Support for victims of crime. And of course, there’s always a chance that you might have remembered something else now that you’ve had a little time to recover from the initial shock.’

‘Oh, I’ve done my best to put it out of my mind. Being thrown to the ground like that . . .’ She gave a little start at the sound of a jarring crack of crockery from another room.

‘Terrible.’

‘Yes, the shock . . . It all happened so fast. I suppose they must have been waiting for me to come out to the car, but I didn’t see them until they snatched the keys out of my hand. Then the other one grabbed my bag and it caught on my arm and they just swung me around and I fell …Well,you know.’

‘You were visiting your mother, you said?’

‘Yes, she’s a widow, lived in Camberwell for years.’

‘And do you visit her regularly?’

‘Every week.’

‘At the same time?’

‘Usually Monday. It doesn’t clash with her other activities. She keeps herself very busy.’

‘And you said the two who attacked you were slightly built?’

‘Yes, thin. One was a bit taller than me, the other about my height, but that was only an impression . . . I could be wrong, with the scarves over their faces and their hoods and baggy jeans, I don’t know.’

‘But definitely West Indian?’

‘Yes,yes.Not . . .’she glanced cautiously at Mahreen,‘. . .Asian.’

‘We’ve got some photos for you to look at, Mrs Roach,’ Mahreen purred, and Kathy handed her the sheaf of pictures she’d brought.

‘Too thick-set . . . too . . . oh, I don’t know.’

‘Try covering the lower part of their faces.’

‘Yes, but . . . This one’s a girl, and this one. It wasn’t a girl.’

‘You’re sure about that?’

‘Well, I assumed . . .’ She put her hand over the lower part of Dee-Ann’s face.‘I just don’t know. It could have been any of them.’

Magdalen came in with the coffee tray, which she placed on the table at her mother’s side.While Adonia poured, her daughter picked up the photos and thumbed through them. She paused over the two girls, Kathy noticed. ‘You recognise any of them, Magdalen?’ she asked.

‘Me? Why should I?’

‘Maybe visiting your grandmother? If they come from around there.’

‘No.’ She tossed the photos back and took a pack of cigarettes from the mantelpiece.

‘Not in here, darling.You know your father . . .’

Magdalen bit her lip and put them back.‘Yes, sorry.’

‘It was the violence that really upset me. I mean they found the car the next day, undamaged. The other detective said that’s often the case with joy-riders. And I didn’t care about the money and credit cards. So why did they have to be so violent?’

Her daughter sat down beside her and put a protective arm around her shoulders.

‘Oh . . .’ Adonia put a tissue to her eyes.‘I’m sorry, I’ve gone soft in my old age.’

‘I think you’ve been incredibly brave, Mrs Roach,’ Mahreen said, and glanced at Kathy, who added, ‘Yes. That sort of thing is always very hard to come to terms with, for you, and for your family.Your husband must have been very upset.’

‘Yes …’She hesitated.‘Yes,of course.’

Kathy noticed that she was fingering a gold chain with a golden heart pendant at her throat.‘You said that they pulled the pendant from your throat. That must have been frightening too.’

‘Oh yes!’ Adonia looked wide-eyed, and her fingers froze.

‘But you got it back?’

‘Thank goodness. It was very personal-my husband gave it to me when Magdalen was born. I found it later under the floor mat in the car. They must have dropped it when they drove away.’ Adonia took her daughter’s hand.‘And the doctors say I’ll make a full recovery. So really, I was lucky. But suppose it had been my mother instead of me. It could so easily have been. She wouldn’t have survived.’

The press liked Brock, Kathy could see that. They liked the slightly rumpled look, the way he scratched his white cropped beard meditatively as he considered a question, and the edge of dry humour that was never far away, even on such a case as this. It made a change from the close-shaved, close-mouthed men who usually briefed them.

With growing interest in the mysterious finds on the waste ground, Brock had invited them and their telephoto lenses down from their helicopters and their observation posts on the footbridge and the far embankment, down to the crime scene itself, now almost entirely stripped of snow and vegetation, gridded with bright pink tapes and dotted with three large tents.

‘A third area was located this morning by Marlowe,’ Brock said,and a black labrador was led forward by its handler.‘Marlowe is a cadaver dog, with specialist training in HHRD-Historical Human Remains Detection.’ Brock waited while they wrote it down.‘He works with archaeologists as well as us.You could say he’s got a PhD in old bones. He detected this morning’s finds through two feet of frozen ground.’

The photographers formed a scrum around the dog,lights flash-ing.Marlowe accepted their interest with philosophical detachment, live humans apparently exciting him far less than dead ones.

‘So far we’ve recovered a human fibula, a tibia, a pelvic bone and a bone from either a hand or a foot from that site.’

‘Are you saying three separate corpses?’

‘It’s not possible to be sure at the moment. The remains have been extensively disturbed, most probably by animals.’

‘Or schoolboys,’ someone quipped. It was a notion that had been absorbing a lot of police attention, the possibility that Adam was only one of many visitors removing trophies from the place. Yet all of the interviews in the neighbourhood had met with the same response, that no one had ever heard of anyone getting onto the waste ground before, or known of the possibility of human remains being buried there.

‘Could there be more? That Marlowe hasn’t found yet?’

‘It’s possible.We’ll be digging up the whole site,all one and a half acres of it, grid square by grid square, but that will take time.’