Barry Maitiland: Spider Trap

‘Did he survive?’

‘Last I heard he was in a coma. The weird thing was that when they got him to hospital they found something very strange in his pocket.’

‘What was that?’

McCulloch paused-for effect, Kathy thought. ‘A human jawbone,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘Yes.We’ve no idea where it came from.We’re checking where he went down there.Want to take a look?’

They walked over to the group, some of whom were pulling on rubber boots. McCulloch spoke to one of them, and together they set off along the laneway leading to the footbridge. From the middle of the bridge they had a clear view down over the scene of the previous evening’s drama where the snow, lightly dusted by another fall during the night, was churned up all over the area where Adam Nightingale had made his crossing.

‘We think he came down the embankment over there,’ the officer pointed,‘and got part-way onto the wasteland.That’s what we’re looking at now.’

They saw two dark figures stooping over an area of trampled snow. One of them looked up and waved. A moment later the officer’s radio crackled. He listened for a moment then turned to McCulloch. ‘They think they’ve found something, Skip. Maybe you should see for yourself. You’ll need boots.’

They got them from the van, then followed the uniformed man through the hole that the rescue team had cut in the fence and climbed down to the side of the tracks. They tramped along the edge of the ballast, breath steaming in the cold air, then turned into the waste ground along a path trampled in the snow. The two men ahead looked up and moved to make space for them to see what they’d found. At first Kathy thought it was just a piece of smooth grey stone buried among the debris of frozen leaves and earth. Then she made out a pattern of dark lines wriggling across its surface, very like the suture lines on the dome of an old skull. McCulloch squatted down and swept loose material away, then stopped and sat back on his haunches. Two eye sockets stared up at them from the frozen ground.

‘Well,’ he grunted and brushed off another lump of dirt, exposing a small neat hole punched through the forehead.

‘Well, well.’ He looked at Kathy and said,‘Your boss’ll love this.’

Actually it was hard to make out what Brock’s reaction was to the find. He came straight away to see for himself, and dismissed McCulloch’s suggestion that they might hand it over to someone else to deal with. Instead, he arranged for DI Bren Gurney to come down from Queen Anne’s Gate to take charge of the site, and insisted that Dr Mehta, the forensic pathologist working on the two murdered girls, should also deal with this case. ‘Keeps things simple,’he said.‘Don’t want anyone else under our feet.’

Kathy, meanwhile, made her way back along Cockpit Lane to the local police station, where McCulloch had arranged facilities for the investigation.As she came to the area closed off to traffic for the markets,she heard a loud throbbing bass rhythm behind her and turned to see an electric-blue Peugeot convertible approaching. The front window slid down, ragga music booming out, and a beefy brown arm followed, draped with a large assortment of gold jewellery. The hand formed itself into the shape of a pistol, aimed at a young man tending the first of the stalls, who gave a quick flash of bright white teeth before the car roared away down a side street.

The goods on sale in the market were cheap and cheerful, the kind of things that a poor neighbourhood most needed-children’s shoes and clothes, toiletries, parkas, CDs, plastic buckets, cutlery, gloves, small electrical appliances. Almost all the customers were West Indian,the traders too,rubbing their hands and stamping their feet to keep warm as they spruiked their goods. As Kathy threaded through the crowded stalls she felt people looking at her. She wondered if they knew she was police, or if it was just the physical difference, her pale skin and blonde hair, an ashen northerner in a snow-bound Caribbean market.

She took the right fork where Cockpit Lane divided in front of the church of St Barnabas, and after a couple of blocks came to the police station, where she made some phone calls and picked up a car. An hour later she was in North London, at the offices of the Youth Justice Board with whom Dana and Dee-Ann had been registered.

She was met by a male senior manager and a younger woman, who was a Youth Offending Teams caseworker. The man wasn’t familiar with the murdered girls and Kathy suspected he was primarily there to protect his department from fallout. He told her that Dana and Dee-Ann had shared the same designated YOT manager, who was currently on maternity leave. Their deputising manager was also absent, on stress leave. Mandy, by his side, on secondment to the YOT from the National Probation Service, looked barely older than the two victims but had worked with them in the past and was, the man assured Kathy, very conversant with their cases.

The two spoke to each other in a professional private language that Kathy didn’t altogether follow, full of acronyms and special meanings, and she had to ask them to elaborate so that she could take notes. It seemed that between them, Dana and Dee-Ann had pretty well covered the full gamut of custodial and noncustodial sentences, community orders and programs available to the courts. They’d been ASROd and OSAPd, undergone Anger Replacement Training and Personal Reduction in Substance Misuse counselling, been curfewed, locked up and paroled. After the last breach, Mandy explained, the YOT had recommended electronic tagging, but the magistrate had instead put them on the Think First program, from which they’d promptly absconded. They had been missing now for three weeks and an arrest order had been issued.

Satisfied that Kathy seemed sufficiently baffled, the man told her apologetically that he had other business to attend to, but said that Mandy could fill in the details. He made Kathy promise that if there were any residual issues she would email him immediately. After the door closed behind him, Mandy was silent for a moment,then she said,‘I’ve never seen him in here on a Saturday before. Do you fancy a cup of coffee?’

‘I’m dying for one,’ Kathy said.

‘There’s nothing in here, but there’s a decent caf across the street.’

The place was bustling with shoppers taking a break.

‘Nothing worked,’ Mandy said.

‘What was their background?’

‘Oh, you know-abusive families, dysfunctional peer groups, disadvantaged neighbourhoods. They first met when they were fourteen, and they would say it was the first good thing that ever happened to either of them. Apart they were desperate, together they became like two different people,a bonded pair,almost a single personality.I hadn’t come across anything quite like that before.For a while they might be docile, completely absorbed in each other’s company, whispering secrets, but then they’d wind each other up, get into a kind of hysteria, and do crazy, stupid, dangerous things together. So then we decided to separate them, keep them apart. Dana immediately became violent and aggressive, while Dee-Ann went into decline, self-harming and then attempting suicide. So we gave up and put them back together again.

‘They were totally infuriating,destructive apart,manic together, uncontrollable either way. But when they were together they could also be full of fun and life, good with the other kids. They loved music and dancing. I’m really sad at what happened to them.’

‘Yes. Do you have any idea what they were doing south of the river?’

‘That was the first thing I wondered when I heard. I looked through their files. All I could find was the address of a cousin of Dee-Ann’s.I checked it on the map.It’s quite close to Cockpit Lane.’