Barry Maitiland - Spider Trap

‘You need more than that,’ Brock said.

‘Had a big dinner last night.’

‘Ah yes, with Tom Reeves. So how is he these days?’

‘Fine.’She was going to leave it at that,then thought she should say more, for the purposes of barter. ‘He was called away over Christmas, so we’re just catching up again. Do you remember that other Branch bloke we worked with a couple of years back,Wayne O’Brien, who just disappeared one day? I thought the same had happened to Tom. They’re difficult people to keep track of.’

‘True enough. It’s the nature of the job. Not easy.’

‘He wants to transfer out. Anyway, he made a Jamaican dinner from stuff he bought here in the Lane-pot roast with Red Stripe beer. It was really good.You can get takeaway from the cafe, too.’ She described the other dishes.

‘I’ll have to try that. It’s ages since I tasted jerk.’

‘He said that’s next. Maybe we could do something together.’

Then,having prepared the ground,she said,‘How about you? Have you heard from Suzanne? I got a postcard from her from the Great Barrier Reef. Looked beautiful.’

He saw it coming, of course-but even so, the probe, gentle as it was, made him wince unexpectedly, like the slightest touch to an infected wound that doesn’t want to heal. The trouble was that he hadn’t been talking to anyone, so he hadn’t developed the protective form of words.And there was the other thing,too,which made it worse. In telling Kathy about 1981 he’d omitted the part about going home to the deserted house, but here he was back in Cockpit Lane again in much the same situation, twenty-four years later,locked into the same old patterns,as if nothing had progressed. He hadn’t got a postcard from the Great Barrier Reef, but he had received a Christmas card from Suzanne’s grandchildren in Hastings, back with their mother now, which had shaken him for a time.

‘No, no.We haven’t been in touch.’

‘It’s over then?’ It sounded too abrupt and she sensed Brock flinch, but she was suddenly irritated by this cocoon of silence on the subject of Suzanne; Bren whispering, his wife phoning up to casually inquire about the boss’s Christmas arrangements. She was also fairly certain that the old man wasn’t talking to anyone else.

‘I’m not sure, Kathy.’

‘I mean, I’d be very sorry because I like her so much and I think she’s great for you, but sometimes these things aren’t meant to be . . . as I’ve discovered on numerous occasions.’ She grinned and the sombre look on his face melted a little.

‘Several times I’ve got as far as the travel agent’s door,’ he confessed,‘but I never made it inside.’

‘Do you need a push? I’ll take care of everything if you want.’

‘Thanks. I know you would.We’ll see. Now . . .’ He addressed himself to the discouraging lump of pastry on his plate.‘. . . what have we got here?’

‘Are you going to tell me about the Roaches? You reacted to what Winnie said as if you’d been expecting it all along.’

He shot her a sideways glance as he chewed.‘You’re annoyed I haven’t been open with you?’

‘Well . . . I’ve been getting the feeling that you’ve had these ideas from the start that you’re not telling us about.’

‘Mm, rubbish. This pie, I mean. No, you’re right. From the beginning I’ve felt as if I were reliving the past with this one,which certainly suggested several possibilities, but I’ve been reluctant to . . .’ the image that came to his mind was of stepping back into a tangled thicket,‘. . .to jump to conclusions until I had a date for the murder, the race of the victims, and that comment from Winnie about who the two white men might have been.

‘So,Spider Roach.Spider was one of the most vicious and most successful crooks in South London. He started out as a very smart operator in long firm fraud-setting up wholesale companies to buy goods on credit, then selling them fast and going bust or disappearing without paying their debts.He found he could double his profits by combining long firm fraud with arson and insurance scams, burning down the companies’ premises and claiming for the goods, which had already been sold. Then, when he began to find it hard to get credit for his bogus companies, he discovered violence. He realised that he could persuade genuine companies, small family businesses usually, to act as the front for the fraud if only he could terrify their owners enough. The businesses were destroyed in the process, of course, and the owners usually ruined, but with sufficient violence-the threat of a brutal attack on the wife, perhaps, or on an elderly parent-they would keep quiet. He was a ruthless predator, and before long his violence escalated into murder. Spider was believed to be behind a number of particularly ugly unsolved killings in the seventies, but he was never arrested on any serious charge until 1980, when the supergrass Maxie Piggot named him for two murders. But by then juries and courts were getting wary of the evidence of supergrasses, and defence lawyers had had plenty of practice at discrediting them. The case against Spider collapsed.’

Brock pushed his plate away with a grimace of distaste and took a quick pull of his beer. ‘Cockpit Lane was the heart of Spider’s web. He and his family lived just behind the Lane. The shop next door to us here was a pawnshop he owned.What’s now the cash and carry next to it was his funeral parlour.’

‘Funerals? Adonia and her father?’

‘That’s right. He owned the premises and the Despinides operated the business. What better way to get rid of unwanted bodies? We suspected that’s what they were doing,but we couldn’t catch them. After two unsuccessful exhumations the magistrates became reluctant to go on giving us permission to dig up the Despinides’ customers.’

Kathy thought of Adonia, in her cashmere and gold jewellery. ‘My God.’

‘Anyway,Spider flourished.I should say the Spider clan,because he had three sons who all followed him into the business. He got on well with the West Indians coming into the neighbourhood,and his long firm frauds were aimed at them, offloading the kind of things they wanted and would buy up quickly-cheap booze, bedding, thermal underwear, confectionery, toys, you name it.

‘When the Jamaican bad boys started arriving in ’80 and ’81, with their cocaine and their crack and their fancy guns,some of the established London gangs got a bit shirty, but not Spider. He had discovered drugs years before when he’d pressed a chemist into one of his scams, and he’d developed a local clientele in a small way, but now he saw a huge new opportunity. The drug gangs in Jamaica were making the island a staging post for Colombian cocaine on its way north, and Spider saw the chance to tap into that golden stream. He welcomed the former Garden boys and Spanglers and all the rest, and they became his partners.’

Brock stared morosely at the slimy sausage roll lying untouched on his plate. ‘I’m still hungry. I missed my dinner last night, and breakfast this morning.’ He picked it up and bit it.

Kathy watched, feeling queasy, as if Tom’s rum punch might still lurch up in her throat. She wondered whether she should try to pacify it with a hair of the dog.‘So you were involved in trying to catch Roach?’

‘Actually it’s not as bad as it looks.’ Brock took another bite. ‘Yes, very much so. This was my patch.We knew each other well. I’d bump into him and his sons in the market, in court, in here. He always had a leery smile for me. Sometimes I even suspected he felt a little sorry for me, getting nowhere. And I knew his victims, or the people they left behind, every one. Spider Roach was my big failure,Kathy.We all have them.He was mine.’

Kathy did feel sick. She got to her feet and said,‘Can I get you another beer?’