Barry Maitiland - Spider Trap

escorting the sinister colonel’s wife around Harrods while her husband was negotiating at the peace conference. He put his arm around her.‘I blew it last night, didn’t I? Too

much rum punch and Red Stripe. Sorry about that.’ ‘I enjoyed it. Anyway, there’s plenty of time.’ ‘That was the first time I’d invited a woman to my flat in

years, you know. I got a bit carried away.’ She stroked a slick of rain-damp hair from his brow, feeling a growing warmth inside her, but also an unease that wasn’t just to

do with having a man in her private space. Perhaps it was the lack of preparation for meeting his little girl, or more likely the sighting of Teddy Vexx again that afternoon.

‘What’s wrong?’

‘Nothing. I’m just tired.’

‘Sure.’He smiled and shrugged on his jacket,still wet.‘Thanks for the pizza. And thanks for being so nice to Amy.’

‘And thank you for the stuff on Brown Bread. I’ll speak to Brock first thing. He’ll want to see this as soon as possible.’

The next morning Kathy met Brock on his way into the office. She showed him Tom’s information on Brown Bread and he raised an eyebrow.

‘Could be something in it, I suppose.You could speak to the boy again. He might say more without me around. Tom Reeves seems to be taking quite an interest in the case.’ Brock gave her a little smile.

‘Yes, well . . . the Jamaican connection, you know.’

She returned to her computer and tried to find references to the six Brown Bread shootings, but without success. Neither of the records of the two shootings that ballistics had linked to the cartridge cases found on the railway land carried any references to ‘Brown Bread’. Finally she rang up her friend Nicole Palmer in Criminal Records at the National Identification Service, to ask for her help.

‘And how’s the boyfriend?’ Nicole asked.‘I hear he’s back.’

‘Nothing gets past Palmer of the NIS, does it?’

‘The real question is why you kept it a secret, Kathy. I had to rely on Lloyd bumping into him. He said that you were going out again.’

‘Bit early to say.’

‘Oh, come on, Kathy. Get in there. He’s perfect.’

‘Apart from the odd prolonged disappearance.’

‘That’s his work. And according to Lloyd he’s getting out of Special Branch as soon as he can.We need to talk about this. I’m worried about your attitude.’

Kathy laughed. Nicole was perfect for the NIS, she thought. She just loved information,the more human and intimate the better.

‘If you can get me anything on Brown Bread by lunchtime I’ll buy you a sandwich.’

‘Done.’

The headmistress at Camberwell Secondary seemed pleased to see Kathy again.‘I can’t pretend we don’t find all this pretty exciting. It’s a struggle to keep the kids’ attention in the classes on the upper floor, from where they can see your people working, and it’s the only topic in the staff room. Have you found out what brown bread means?’

‘It’s possible that it’s the name of a pistol,’ Kathy said, and watched the enthusiasm drain from the other woman’s face.

‘Oh no. Not guns again.’

‘Has that been a problem here?’

‘Not inside the school,so far,which is a miracle I suppose,given what goes on right outside the gates these days.The shooting of the two girls next door wasn’t the only one. Somebody shot the news-agent round the corner last month, just for a packet of cigarettes.

I’ve dreaded becoming one of those places with guards and metal detectors at the front gates.’ She shook her head in frustration.‘I’d never have thought it of Adam Nightingale, but none of them are immune,are they? Not when there are so many terrible role models out there.’

‘I’d like to talk to him again. It may not be what we think.’

The boy appeared, sullen and withdrawn, and was told to sit facing Kathy while the headmistress took her seat behind her desk. Kathy waited for a moment, saying nothing, staring at Adam long enough for him to shift with discomfort, then she reached into her shoulder bag and took out something wrapped in black plastic, about the size of a hand. She put it down on the edge of the desk between her and the boy, hard enough for him to hear the clunk of metal against wood.

He gave a sharp gasp, staring at it.‘You found it,’ he whispered. ‘It was there.’

‘It was like a quest,’ Kathy said later at the team meeting.‘The story had been circulating among the boys in the school for years, an urban myth, passed on from generation to generation, of a gun called Brown Bread belonging to a notorious gangsta murderer being thrown from a passing train onto the waste ground and never found. By the time it percolated down to Adam’s year it had almost faded away. Nobody really believed it except him. He was obsessed by it.The gun became a kind of talisman that would give him some respect around the place and stop him being bullied.When he saw McCulloch’s people searching the railway land he panicked and decided to get in there first.Afterwards he couldn’t admit what he’d been after without being seen as an even bigger nerd, and the bullying would’ve got worse. I let him think we found it.’

‘But it isn’t there?’ Brock asked Bren.

‘Not a chance, chief.We’ve now covered every inch of our site and along both railway banks to north and south for a distance of fifty yards with metal detectors and ground-penetrating radar. There won’t be any more surprises.’

Bren went on to report progress at the site. More fragments of bones and clothing had been found, but neither a third cartridge nor Charlie’s skull. Someone asked about the foxes and Bren pointed out on the plan where two dens had been found. That was normal, he said, as foxes liked to have an alternative hiding place for emergencies. This being the breeding season, they’d found three dead pups in one of the dens, together with some small gnawed human and animal bones. The foxes themselves hadn’t been seen.

He then came to the final part of his report and, although Bren rarely showed much excitement, it was obvious from his animation that he thought this was good. It was a line of reasoning that he had been developing with the forensic team, to understand the sequence and timing of the three murders. On a map of the railway land he pointed out their locations and the probable routes taken by the victims and their killers,and put forward an argument for the order of events that was almost exactly the same as Amy had suggested to Kathy in the cafe the previous evening.

Brock was impressed. ‘Makes sense,’ he growled, as if edging closer to some hidden truth. ‘So Bravo-Joseph Kidd-was the first of a series of three separate murders and burials that began, presumably, on the eleventh of April. How long did it last?’

‘Can’t say for sure, chief, but Dr Prior says the skeletal remains are indistinguishable in terms of aging. She doesn’t think they were too far apart.’

When they broke up Kathy spoke to Bren. ‘That was a neat bit of deduction.When did you work it out?’

‘Yesterday. It was Dr Prior’s idea mainly.’ ‘You didn’t happen to mention it to Tom Reeves yesterday,

did you?’

‘Yes, I did actually. He called in to the site. Said he was just passing. He seems very interested in this case. Aren’t they keeping him busy enough in Special Branch?’

‘He’s on some escort duty, pretty boring I think.’

‘Do you reckon he’s looking for a transfer over here?’

‘Over here?’ Kathy was startled. ‘I don’t think so. There wouldn’t be a vacancy anyway, would there?’

‘S’pose not.’

As she went back to her desk, Kathy turned this over in her mind. She was finding herself thinking about Tom more and more these days, but the idea of him moving into Brock’s team made her feel distinctly uncomfortable. Experience had taught her to keep her private life separate from her work, but there was also the matter of her rank and position in the team. As detective sergeant, Kathy had already passed the exams for inspector, but her promotion was on hold because it would mean moving to another unit, which she refused to do. If there was any possibility of an inspector position becoming available at Queen Anne’s Gate, she was determined it was going to be hers.