Barry Maitiland - Spider Trap

Tom appeared with two tall glasses of what looked like a murky fruit salad, embellished with straws and little umbrellas.

‘Cheers.’

‘Mmm.’ Kathy licked her lips, trying to identify the flavours, then felt the rum burn through.‘Wow.’

‘Jamaican rum punch. One part sour, two parts sweet, three parts strong, four parts weak.’

‘The rum being the strong, I suppose. I get the pineapple, but what else?’

‘Guava juice, and limes.’

She sat down, feeling herself begin to defrost. The heating in the flat seemed to be on the highest setting, and she relaxed, letting the warmth seep through her from outside and in.

‘Where are all your books, Tom? I expected masses of books.’

‘In storage.’ He shrugged.‘They take up so much room.’

‘I know.’ And they’re heavy, she thought. Not good for a quick getaway. She had said the wrong thing, flattening his exuberant mood, but not for long. ‘So you’ve been to Jamaica, have you?’ she asked.

‘Yes, great place.’

He began to tell her about the blinding white beaches of Negril, the hiking trails through the Blue Mountains, scuba diving in Montego Bay. Then some of the characters he’d met, ending up with a tale about a stay in a beach house and going to the toilet one morning with a hangover and hearing scratching noises from the bowl below and looking down to see the claws of a large crab waving up at him.It was a good story,well told,and by the end they were both laughing helplessly. Kathy guessed he’d been trying out the rum punch recipe before she arrived. It was certainly working on her.

‘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 rumanaesthetised 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.