Barry Maitiland - Spider Trap

‘I didn’t make this either, must confess. Takes too long to do it properly. Pepperpot soup. Try it. Isn’t it great?’

Kathy agreed.

‘But I am making the main course. Red Stripe pot roast. Trouble is, it won’t be ready for a while.’ He checked his watch. ‘Mmm, quite a while. I wanted to do jerk, of course, but it’s a barbecue thing really,and in this weather . . .I’ll do it for you in the summer, okay? I do a great jerk sauce.’

‘You really think that’s what we’ve found,a Yardie graveyard?’

‘Wouldn’t be surprised. When they came they brought their guns and their cocaine, and also their old rivalries, the Shower Posse and the Spanglers, Jungle and the Chi Chi Boys. They were more lethal to each other than to anybody else.’

‘You know a lot about this. Is that why you went to Jamaica?’

Tom nodded. ‘In London we’d catch them and deport them and a few months later they’d be back with a new name, new passport. Genuine, too.’

‘How’d they do that?’

‘Easy.You have a customer, a UK citizen, dying for the crack you sell and more than willing to trade his birth certificate for an extra rock or two. So after a while we realised we needed some help from the cops over there, the Jamaica Constabulary Force.We brought them here to identify who it was exactly that we’d got, and in return the JCF invited us back to Jamaica, to drink their rum and eat their jerk chicken. Seems reasonable, doesn’t it?’

‘Yes, absolutely.’

‘But Brock will know all this, especially if he was working in Lambeth back then. Hasn’t he talked about it?’

‘Not really.’

‘Keeps his cards close to his chest, old Brock, doesn’t he?’

‘He’ll tell us when he’s ready,’ Kathy said, but she was thinking about Brock’s instructions to keep the SOCOs within the bounds of the site, wanting to strictly control the information that got out. And there had been a deliberate vagueness at the press briefings about certain aspects of their finds, as if he already had suspicions that he wanted to keep to himself. Tom was absolutely right, she decided, with the clarity that a couple of large rum punches can bring-Brock was being secretive. Now she remembered another thing that had struck her as slightly odd. When they’d met Dr Mehta at the path lab that afternoon, he’d shown them a thighbone he’d cleaned up.This femur was dramatically curved,like a bow,and he’d explained that the owner had suffered from rickets, most probably due to a vitamin D or calcium deficiency in childhood. Kathy had been struck by the immobility of Brock’s expression and his lack of questions.

‘How’s he going with his lady friend?’

Kathy was surprised. She couldn’t remember mentioning this to Tom. ‘She’s still in Australia. I got a Christmas card from her, snorkelling on the Great Barrier Reef.’

‘Why the hell doesn’t he go out there after her? I would.’

Brock wasn’t talking about that either, Kathy thought, but her thoughts were becoming increasingly blurry and euphoric, and it wasn’t Brock’s love-life she was interested in just now. ‘You sounded very nostalgic about Jamaica.Was there someone special you met there?’

Now it was Tom who looked startled.‘Your glass is empty,’he said abruptly,getting to his feet.‘We should switch to Red Stripe.’ He made his way to the kitchen where he checked the oven, then returned with a couple of bottles.‘This is obligatory, I’m afraid. It’s in the pot roast.’He sat down again.‘I did have some good friends there. Some who aren’t around any more.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Oh well.’ They clinked bottles and Tom began another funny story about tropical sanitation. As he rambled on, Kathy thought how intriguing it was, discovering someone else’s life, but also how tricky. There were plenty of ghosts from her own past that she wouldn’t want to share with him, not yet.

Much later, full of Red Stripe and pot roast, they collapsed on the sofa in an untidy heap.It had taken so long for the meal to reach what Tom felt was its full potential that it was now late in the night. He reached out a hand and stroked her hair.

‘I love your hair,’ he sighed exhaustedly.

It was straight,short and very pale blonde.‘Bit out of place in Jamaica,’ she said, and then something she’d meant to ask earlier stumbled into her head.‘Have you ever heard of a phrase “brown bread”? Does it mean anything to you?’

‘Mm?’

‘Brown bread.’

‘Why?’

‘It’s what the boy was looking for on the railway land, apparently, when he found the body.’

Tom mumbled something incoherent and Kathy closed her eyes, utterly relaxed.When she opened them again her phone was bleeping inside her shoulder bag on the floor at her feet. She blinked at her watch in disbelief, seeing seven-fifteen. Beside her, Tom lay sprawled in a contorted heap like The Body in the Bog. Swearing softly, she disentangled herself from his legs and groped for the phone. There was a message from Brock calling a case conference at Dr Mehta’s laboratory at nine a.m.

On her way out she roused Tom from whichever tropical beach he was lazing on in his dreams. She rushed to the tube and sat on the northbound train in a daze, still half asleep. At home she rapidly showered, cleaned her teeth, and made some tea and toast. Feeling only a little less fragile, she returned to central London, this time to Embankment station, where she caught a cab to the hospital where Dr Mehta had his laboratory. She made it just in time.

She felt the tension as soon as she stepped into the room. Dr Mehta was with Brock over by the window, arguing fiercely. She’d never seen him angry before, and the others looked mildly embarrassed. It seemed the pathologist was scolding Brock for releasing Teddy Vexx after Mehta had provided the crucial forensic evidence against him.‘I pulled out every stop!’ he protested angrily. ‘I twisted people’s arms, gave up my weekend, ruined my mother’s eightieth birthday party! And what do you do? You mess it up! You let the animal go free!’

Brock said something placatory, but Mehta wasn’t having any of it.‘Well, don’t be surprised when I’m less than enthusiastic about going the extra yards the next time!’ He turned away in a huff and started talking to someone else.

Brock, looking unperturbed, came over to Kathy and introduced her to a man from the Forensic Services Command Unit whom she hadn’t met before. On the other side of the long table the three forensic experts were taking their seats. They represented,Brock murmured,‘flesh,bones and teeth’.Sundeep Mehta, ‘flesh’, the forensic pathologist, sat in the middle as nominal leader of the group.‘Teeth’sat on his left,in the person of Professor Lyons, forensic odontologist,a studious-looking elderly man in a white lab coat stained at the sleeves with something yellow. On Dr Mehta’s right a black woman, Dr Prior, was ‘bones’, the team’s forensic anthropologist. She looked to Kathy to be about her own age, early thirties,and was immersed in a document while Mehta worked out some of his anger in an energetic conversation with the odontologist about fees. Apparently, three bodies in a single incident would attract a separate case fee for each, whereas if they found any more, charges must be made at either a half daily rate or a reduced case rate, but whether this applied to all the bodies, or only the fourth and subsequent ones, was a matter for debate.

Brock cleared his throat and Mehta broke off and frowned at Kathy.‘Sergeant Kolla,how are you? Is this everyone,Brock?’

Brock said yes.

‘No Inspector Gurney?’

‘He’s on site this morning.’

‘Very well.’