Barry Maitiland - Spider Trap

‘Probably a reporter.’

‘No, he doesn’t have a camera, just binoculars. Big ones with red lenses. He’s loosened some of the wooden palings of the fence so he can push them apart.You can’t see him, only the binoculars. He’s been there a lot, for whole days at a time. Must have warm clothes.’

As they drove Amy to her mother’s home, the girl also seemed subdued by their trip. She thanked Kathy without any of the boldness of their previous meeting.Kathy put out her hand to shake,and when Amy did likewise the girl felt the fifty pence coin pressed into her palm.

Kathy winked.‘Don’t spend it all on chips.’

She was silent as Tom drove her home. The odd little performance in the laboratory weighed on her. It wasn’t that it had told her anything new, but that replaying the actions had given them a physical presence in her mind that hadn’t been there before. That had been Dr Prior’s point, of course.

Tom broke into her thoughts,‘Tired?’

‘Just thinking.’

‘You take work too seriously, you know that?’

‘Do I?’

‘Yes. I bought you a book to take your mind off things.’ He reached across to the glovebox and handed her a paper bag.‘I think you’ll like it. It draws you in, makes you forget everything else. But a bit heavy for tonight, perhaps. You need something buoyant. A movie? Maybe an old favourite? What’s the best movie you’d like to see again?’

She thought.‘ The Blues Brothers .’

‘Yes!’ He tapped the steering wheel. ‘Brilliant. And appropriate, too-1980.’

‘It’s not as old as that, is it?’

‘Want to bet?’

She laughed.‘I’m not making any more bets with you or your immediate family. Are you sure?’

‘Yep. I can remember seeing it on my first blind date. I was twelve. I had to borrow some money from my mum afterwards to buy the sunglasses. What do you say we get takeaway and The Blues Brothers .’

‘I thought you were playing squash tonight?’

‘I cancelled.’

‘Well, that sounds good, if I can fit in a bath somewhere.’

And so it was. As she lay in her bath, aware of his presence in the room outside, she realised that she hadn’t felt so awkward about having him in her flat this time. He seemed to fit into the small space without intrusion, opening a bottle and following her instructions for a salad. It was a talent, she felt, for sympathetic manners, adjusting his dimensions (for he was actually quite a big bloke) to the available psychological space. Or maybe it was just part of Special Branch training, melting in, lulling the mark.

The meal wasn’t bad, the film great.When it was finished they stayed sitting on the sofa together and she was acutely aware of his physical presence so close beside her, like a source of warmth and life. He told her how much he’d enjoyed being with her over the previous days, and when he got up to leave they kissed, and it seemed natural and inevitable. She even felt a small tug of regret as he disappeared into the lift.

The following morning she drove back down to Cockpit Lane, where the Saturday morning market was in full swing. The wind had died down, the dark clouds dispersed and, although it was still cold, sunshine lit up the colourful striped awnings of the stalls. She drove down Mafeking Road to the warehouse. A single car stood in the yard, and when she went inside she found one of the SOCOs making a final inspection.

‘Lucky to catch me,’ he said. ‘Just about to lock up and give back the keys.’

‘Give me two minutes.’

She went through to the rear boundary, now reinstated and sealing off access to the railway land. She scanned the fences at the top of the embankment on the far side of the rail tracks. Most were brick or metal panels but among them she made out a section of wooden palings, almost opposite where the school stood. She left the warehouse and made her way back around Cockpit Lane to the footbridge across the railway beyond the school. From there she was able to see the wooden fence again, and estimate how far away it was.

She turned into the street running behind the railway embankment and paced the distance to the start of a row of small brick houses. She knocked at the first front door and, when there was no reply,walked down the narrow side passage to the backyard. There was the wooden fence,with no sign of disturbance.She tried the next house, again with no reply at the front door, but with a huge Rottweiler in the back, hurling itself against the gate as she tried to look over.

A young man, yawning and scratching his crotch, answered the third door. Kathy showed her identification and said she was investigating reports of a prowler in the street. The man shrugged and said he’d heard nothing, but she was welcome to look around the yard. There, in a corner hidden from sight of the house by a small shed, she found an area of ground cleared of snow, in front of a section of fencing in which the nails had been removed to allow the boards to be slid apart. From this sheltered hide she had a perfect panorama of the whole of the crime scene site. She searched the place thoroughly but could find no traces that might interest the SOCOs-no footprints, no cigarette butts or sweet wrappers, no threads caught on the rough wooden boards, which would probably yield no fingerprints. Whoever it was had been careful. She was turning to leave when her eye caught a tiny flake of white in the trampled ground. Using a key she flicked away dirt until she could see more of a scrap of paper, which eventually revealed itself as the remains of a hand-rolled cigarette end, crumpled, shrivelled and stamped into the earth.

Brock, too, was prowling-in his case at Queen Anne’s Gate, restlessly roaming the empty offices. From long experience he sensed that both murder inquiries in Cockpit Lane might be approaching some sort of turning point, in which, for good or ill, evidence would begin to swing their random searches into more deliberate directions. For his own reasons he had been more preoccupied with the older murders, but in the other case they had now accumulated a considerable list of people who had seen the two girls during their stay in the area, and the interviews were beginning to reveal distinctive patterns.

He came to Bren’s desk and noticed an unopened priority delivery pouch from Forensic Services. Opening it, he discovered the report of the review that he had ordered of the available ballistics evidence from the Brown Bread shootings. All of the surviving bullets and cartridge cases had been re-examined in the laboratories to confirm their common source. In one case, the murder of Johnny Mulroy, both cartridges and viable bullets had been recovered from the crime scene,and it was this that made it possible to tie all of the others, in which one or the other was missing, to a single source, Brown Bread.

Brock read the report carefully until he came to an addendum sheet at the end, which stopped him short. He scanned it again, unable to believe what he was reading, and when he reached for a phone he realised that he had been holding his breath. According to the report,the single intact bullet found at the scene of Dana and Dee-Ann’s murder had also been fired by Brown Bread.

He got through to Forensic Services, but the person he wanted wasn’t at work this Saturday morning, and it took some insistence to get a contact number for the author of the report. When he eventually reached him, the man confirmed the result. Both of the multiple murders in Cockpit Lane, committed twenty-four years apart, had been carried out using the same weapon. The scientist who had made the connection had recently worked on the Dee-Ann case and had recognised the markings straight away on the Johnny Mulroy bullet. The result had been confirmed by a second examiner.