Barry Maitiland: Spider Trap

When school finished Adam ignored the crowd gathering at the police tapes and hurried away down Cockpit Lane towards the footbridge over the railway. From up there he could see the straggling line of coppers leaving for the night, making their way back to the opening they’d made in the back fence to the Mafeking Road warehouses.Worried about the fading light, he ran across the bridge and up the lane on the other side until he found the gap he’d spotted in the fence, hidden now by a drift of snow so deep that he almost had to dig a tunnel to get to the other side. Then he was through, in forbidden territory, at the top of the railway embankment. Plunging down, he was shocked by the depth of the soft snow, up to his hips in places.When he reached the bottom he crouched for a while behind a clump of bushes, out of sight of a group of kids crossing on the footbridge. His heart was pounding, his body steaming inside his parka, his legs and feet soaking.

He waited until the footbridge was deserted and there was no sound of trains, then stood up straight and advanced across the ballast, stepping cleanly over the rails, one after the other. He was across. Exhilarated, he hurried on to the corner of the mysterious triangle, reaching it just in time to crouch at the bottom of the school wall as a train roared past. Ahead of him he could make out the hillock of snow he had seen from Mr Pemberton’s classroom, beyond which lay the fox trails. He made for it, falling flat as the snow collapsed into the mounds of dead bracken beneath. His glasses fell off and he groped blindly in panic until he found them and hauled himself upright and struggled on. There were the trails-paw prints-plain as anything, and the sweep of an animal’s tail across the surface. He reached the dark patch where they converged, and at first he was disappointed, seeing the snow scraped away to reveal a few twigs half-buried in the hard ground. But when he looked more closely he felt a rush of blood to his face. It wasn’t what he’d been looking for, but in its way it was a treasure even more fantastic. He grabbed hold of it, wrenched it from the ground, and stuffed it into his jacket pocket.

He wanted to go on, but the light was fading fast and he was trembling now with the cold. He had his prize, something that none of them could ignore, and it was enough. He turned and laboured back along the furrow he’d made towards the place where he’d crossed the railway tracks. There he paused to listen, his glasses misting up on his nose, then stepped carefully across the first steel rail, then the second. As he was about to cross the third, he was startled by a man’s shout from the footbridge overhead. ‘Oi!’ He froze for a moment, and his foot wavered over the electric rail, raised up on its ceramic insulators. A wet fold of cloth brushed its surface, and a great blow slammed Adam to the ground.

Detective Sergeant Kathy Kolla found herself standing next to a grizzled middle-aged man who looked as if he’d been up all night. He turned and spoke, interrupting himself with a hacking cough. ‘Morning. Bob McCulloch, DS, Lambeth CID.’

‘Hello, Bob. Kathy Kolla, DS, Serious Crime.’

‘Ah, you’re with Brock’s mob, are you?’

‘Yes.Know him?’They both glanced down to the far end of the bare space where Brock was standing with a group, his cropped white hair and beard making him look out of place among the sharp haircuts and suits of the younger men.

‘Not personally. My gaffer mentioned that Brock worked on this patch at one time.’

‘Did he? I didn’t know that.’ There wasn’t really a lot that she did know about Brock’s early career apart from the names of some of his more famous murder cases.

‘Long ago. Got out as soon as he could, I dare say. Three chief inspectors.’ Detective Sergeant McCulloch nodded towards the

group.‘Overkill,wouldn’t you say?’

‘Pressure?’ Kathy replied.

‘Politics. Three wise monkeys. And guess who’ll be left to clear up . . . This is my boss now.’

He fell silent as the local DCI called for their attention and introduced DCI Brock as senior investigating officer, and DCI Keith Savage from the Operation Trident team, a tough-looking character who glowered at them. It was over twenty-four hours since the two girls had been found here-their bodies had long since been removed for post-mortem examination and the scene of crime team finished with their examination of the place.

The DCI went on to describe the layout of the building and what had been discovered so far.

‘They were found lying together just here . . . Cause of death was a single gunshot to the head of each girl, probably nine millimetre. The pathologist says the girls took a beating before they were shot-there was bruising to their bodies and faces. No sign of sexual interference.’

Kathy was thumbing through the crime scene photos that were being passed around. The girls had been wearing almost identical dark jeans and tops, and grey dust was visible on their knees, as if they’d been made to kneel. From some angles they appeared peacefully asleep, from others brutally violated.

‘It looks as if the killers took some precautions to clean up after themselves. Two shots were fired but no cartridges have been found. Door handles were wiped clean and something, possibly a bit of cardboard, has been used to sweep footprints from the floor as well as from the snow outside. Judging by the state of the snow and the pathologist’s estimate we believe the time of death was between one and three on Friday morning.

‘We don’t know how long they’d been squatting in here. None of the neighbours admits to having been aware of them, but from the state of the place we think several days at least. There were empty cans of food and a carton of sour milk in that corner, and they had a kind of nest over there, with a single sleeping bag. There was no heating and, as you can imagine, it was very cold in here.

‘Both girls had extensive records of delinquency and crime- shoplifting, housebreaking, bag-snatching, joy-riding in stolen cars. They worked together, most recently in the robbery of a newsagent in Hendon. Their usual territory was North London, the Harlesden area, and we don’t know what they were doing south of the river. They were known drug users and we found a small quantity of crack cocaine in their pockets, along with a pipe. And that’s about as much as we have at present. We’re currently continuing with house-to-house interviews, of course.’

‘We won’t get anywhere with that,’ McCulloch murmured to Kathy.‘See and blind, hear and deaf-they still stick to the old rule around here. They’re scared witless by the Yardie boys, and who can blame them?’

‘Ballistics?’ Brock asked.

‘One bullet fragmented, the other intact but mangled. They say it’s uncertain they’ll be able to make a match.’

The DCI seemed pleased to be handing the case over to Brock, who talked about the next stages, in which his own and DS McCulloch’s teams would focus on the murders, while the Trident group worked on their intelligence sources and the wider pattern, especially the Harlesden connection.

As they emerged from the garage, a faint morning sun was trying to break through the heavy snow clouds. In one direction Cockpit Lane wound towards the distant spire of a church, the narrow commercial street blocked to traffic for most of its length by market stalls around which activity was beginning to stir.In the other direction, beyond the school and its deserted playground, uni

formed police were standing by a van parked at a bend in the road.

‘Yours?’Kathy asked McCulloch,who was pulling on his gloves.

‘Yes, and transport police most likely. You heard about our other little drama last night? One of the kids from the school took it into his stupid head to cross the railway tracks to get onto the wasteland that lies behind here.We think he saw us searching for the murder weapon and decided to do his own investigation. Trouble was he touched the live rail on his way over. He was lucky there was someone on the railway footbridge who saw him and phoned for help. Rush hour train services out of Blackfriars were disrupted for hours.’