Barry Maitiland - Spider Trap

When Brock moved a third piece,his other bishop,into the line of fire, Adam took it with a small jag of regret; either Brock was humouring him or he’d forgotten everything he’d ever known about chess. But the sacrifice of three major pieces had cleared the board in front of Brock’s queen, while shifting Adam’s pieces to the sides. Brock now moved his queen straight up to Adam’s back row, attacking his king.

‘Checkmate, I’m afraid.’

Adam’s mouth opened and closed.‘Oh . . .’

Brock picked up his three sacrificed pieces and laid them out, one by one. ‘Did you know they were there, Adam?’ he asked quietly.‘The bodies?’

‘No, I swear.’

Brock pointed at the outline of the boy’s leg in its frame beneath the blanket.‘Seven hundred and fifty volts direct current, enough power to push a train.You took an awful big risk blundering through the snow just to find a foxhole.’

The boy shrugged and pushed the chess set back to Brock. ‘Thanks, I don’t want this.’

‘Suit yourself,’ Brock said. ‘You can give me another game, though.’

At the sandwich counter, Kathy and Mrs Nightingale picked up their cups of tea and took them to a table.

‘He’s got an electronic thing he plays chess with,’ Adam’s mother said. ‘I don’t know what he’d want with that old wallet. What’s your boss up to then?’

‘Just trying to be friendly,’Kathy said.‘Do you believe Adam’s story about the foxes?’

‘I’ve brought him up to tell the truth.’

‘But if it was something he thought you’d be angry about?’

Adam’s mother looked uneasy. She stirred her tea, round and round.

‘We need some help on this, Mrs Nightingale.’

The woman shot her a hostile glance and spoke in a low rush, not wanting anyone else to hear.‘That’s easy for you to say.Who knows what you’re diggin’ up on that waste ground? And whoever put them there sure didn’t want them disturbed, that’s plain. And now my son’s name and picture is in every newspaper. Yes, it’s easy for you to say.’

‘But surely he’s in no danger if he didn’t know the bodies were there, if he was looking for something else?’

Mrs Nightingale thought about that.‘Maybe,maybe not.’She concentrated on her tea for a moment and then, as if changing the subject,said,‘Do you know what “brown bread”is?’

Kathy was puzzled.‘Well,yes.Bread made with wholemeal-’

‘No, no, no, not that kind of brown bread. I mean, is it a name for something, a slang name? Like . . . drugs, maybe?’

Kathy saw the worry in Mrs Nightingale’s eyes. ‘You think Adam was looking for drugs?’

‘No! I’m not saying that at all! You’re putting words into my mouth.’

‘Please.’ Kathy gently put her hand over the other woman’s. ‘Tell me.’

‘Oh . . . How do I know what’s for the best? Just now, before you came, Adam’s friend Jerry came to see him. I left them for a minute to go to the bathroom. When I came back they were talking. I stood on the outside of the curtain and listened to them. Jerry said like,“But why did you go over there?” and Adam said, “I was lookin’ for brown bread”.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘I thought I was mistaken the first time, but Jerry repeated it, see.“You were lookin’for brown bread? In the snow? You’re crazy, Adam.”And Adam said,“I thought the foxes had found it.”When Jerry left I asked Adam what he was talkin’ about, and he denied it, said I’d heard it all wrong, but I hadn’t. He’s a stubborn boy, but he’s not big, and some of the other boys pick on him at school because he’s good at his sums. I think he wanted to prove something, get some respect.’ She shook her head angrily.

Kathy said,‘I’ll ask around,see if I can find out what it means.’

‘Yes, and you let me know, won’t you? I mean, it couldn’t be somethin’ sexual, could it? Not in all that snow?’

Kathy saw that in her mind she had been going through all the possible ways in which a thirteen-year-old boy might transgress.‘I’ll let you know.’

Later, in the car with Brock, she told him about the conversation.

He pondered.‘Brown bread? Well,it’s cockney rhyming slang, meaning “dead”. Could that be it? “The dead”. Did they know all along that the bodies were there? I quizzed Adam again, but he denied it.’

‘We could try Jerry.’

‘Yes, let’s do that.’

She drove straight to the school, where the afternoon classes had begun. The headmistress arranged for Jerry to be brought to her office, and Brock asked her to stay for the interview.When the boy was seated in front of them, Brock said sternly,‘I have just one question, Jerry: what do you know about brown bread?’

The boy gawped, swallowed, then shook his head. ‘Nudin’. I don’t know nudin’ about that.’ He kicked one foot awkwardly against the other.

The headmistress looked puzzled as Brock pressed him. Kathy thought he looked scared, refusing even to repeat the phrase, but he wouldn’t change his story and in the end they let him go.

‘What was that all about?’ the teacher asked, and Brock explained. She said brown bread meant nothing special to her, and Brock asked her to keep it to herself.

They returned to Mafeking Road, and as they turned into it from Cockpit Lane they passed a crowded corner cafe called Stamp and Go, and for a brief moment they caught the rich smells of Jamaican food. Brock growled, ‘Cheese sandwiches and a tea bag for us, I suppose.’

When they got back to the warehouse they found everyone crowded around one of the tables. Another set of arm and hand bones had been dug up, and one of the SOCOs was carefully scraping at the mud in which they were caked while another stood by with a camera. The reason for the excitement was a dark band around the wrist. As the spatula teased away at the dirt they caught a glint of glass and someone said,‘Yes, it’s a watch, all right.’

That evening Kathy took the tube from her place in Finchley down the Northern line to Kentish Town, then walked, guided by her A-Z, to the address Tom had given her. It turned out to be a basement flat halfway along a terrace, and she wondered if it was significant that he, the undercover officer, lived below ground level, while she perched on the twelfth floor of a tower block.

The door was opened by Tom, wearing a Hawaiian shirt, cream trousers, a striped apron and oven gloves. His face seemed slightly flushed but very cheerful, and he was backed up by a rich smell of cooking coming from somewhere inside. He drew her in, kissed her on the cheek and took her coat.

‘Look, I hope this is all right, but on my way to see you today I came across this cafe in Cockpit Lane called Stamp and Go. Have you seen it? Have you smelled it?’ He laughed. ‘And next door there was this grocer with Caribbean spices and vegetables and bottles of sauce. And it took me back to Jamaica-only this was Jamaica in the snow, so crazy. And I thought well, you should be getting into this. I mean if you want to understand the people you’ve got to understand what they eat.’

‘You’re right.’ She sniffed.‘And you’re the excellent chef you mentioned?’

He beamed.‘Absolutely.I love cooking,when there’s a point.’

‘Well, after all this snow, a tropical evening sounds great.’

‘That’s what I thought, and I have the perfect thing to set the scene. One moment.’ He raised a magician’s finger and hurried away. The whole basement flat had been knocked into a single space from front to back, with a kitchen bay at the side, from which she heard the clink of ice cubes. She took in the cupboard of a fold-down bed against one wall, some new-looking leather furniture, and a flat screen TV and a laptop. Everything looked efficient and impersonal. But no books. That was what was wrong -no books.