Barry Maitiland - Spider Trap

‘Michael did that, did he?’

‘There’s a big gap between those who work in the constituencies and those who work in Westminster. He promised to help me move up, but in the end you’ve got to help yourself, haven’t you?’

‘Is that what you did when you went to sort out Father Maguire’s papers? Help yourself?’

Kerrie gave an involuntary little jump, which she immediately tried to convert into a fussing gesture over her filing tray.

‘Was that how you crossed the gap?’ Kathy persisted. ‘By offering things you’d found out about Michael to his political enemies?’

‘Don’t be stupid.’ She turned away, shuffling papers.

‘Who are you going to work for, Kerrie? Mr Hadden-Vane?’

She was close, Kathy realised, but not close enough, for Kerrie relaxed and turned to face her with a show of defiance.

‘No. Now I’d like you to leave.’

As they stepped out into the street Brock murmured, ‘You were on the right track, Kathy, but it would have been more indirect. Hadden-Vane probably fixed her up with a job with one of his mates.’

‘Yes, I suppose so. So where do we go now?’ She turned up the collar of her coat against the March wind, feeling its implacable cold like a verdict on their situation. The truth was, they’d pretty well explored every option, and discovered each to have been anticipated and blocked long before they got there.

Ahead of them she recognised Adam Nightingale emerging from the market. He was with his friend Jerry, both gesticulating wildly to their heads and ears, white teeth flashing.

‘Hi, Adam,’ Kathy called, and the boys stopped dead and stared at them. Then without a word they hunched into their parkas and turned and fled.

When they reached the car Kathy said she’d try Tom again, and called his home and mobile numbers without result. His voice on both answering services sounded painfully normal and buoyant, like Michael Grant’s pictures in the shop window. She left more messages and rang off. Almost immediately her phone began to burble. The caller gave his name as McCulloch and Kathy recognised the gravelly voice.

‘If you’re still interested,’he said.‘The bloke you asked about, George Murray.’

‘George, yes.What about him?’

‘He was picked up by an ambulance not long ago, in Cockpit Lane. I’m going over to the hospital now.’

‘He’s been hurt?’

‘Yeah. Somebody drove a nail into his head.’

‘What?’

‘That’s what I’ve been told. They’ve taken him to St Thomas’.’

The same place they took Adam, Kathy thought, remembering the look of panic on the boy’s face when she’d said hello.

Brock dropped her at the A amp;E entrance to the hospital on Lambeth Palace Road. The entrance to the hospital car park was jammed with a long queue, and he continued on to join Westminster Bridge Road and cross the Thames. Ahead of him Parliament brooded darkly.

Kathy found McCulloch sitting on a bench in a corridor talking to the stooped figure of a small dark woman, whom she recognised as Winnie Wellington when she turned her tear-streaked face towards her. Embarrassed,Winnie wiped the tears away with the back of her hand and sat a little straighter. Kathy sat beside her and put a hand on her arm.‘I’m sorry,Winnie.’

‘I knew he’d get into trouble, dat boy. But he didn’t deserve anything like this.’

McCulloch, impassive, raised an eyebrow at Kathy and nodded his head to one side. She got to her feet and followed him a little way away.

‘What happened?’ she murmured.

‘Kids coming out of school for lunchbreak saw him stagger out of the side street opposite, clutching his head. He collapsed and they went and had a look. He had blood all over his face and someone called triple nine.When the ambulance men got there they discovered he had a six-inch nail rammed in his ear.’

Kathy screwed up her face in disgust.

‘Yeah. Extremely lucky it didn’t kill him. Punctured the eardrum of course. Very painful, apparently. They’re trying to find out what other damage it’s done inside his head. He hasn’t spoken. Any ideas?’

‘I visited him again at the girl’s flat in Cove Street. Could it be punishment for talking to me?’

‘That’s what I wondered.“See and blind,hear and deaf ”,that’s the Yardie code.’

Another horrible thought came to Kathy. ‘Yes, that, and the fact that he’s a musician.’

McCulloch grimaced. ‘Some punishment. When did you visit him?’

Kathy checked her notebook. ‘The eighth, over a week ago. The girl caught me in the flat talking to him. She could have told Vexx.’

‘Long time to wait to teach him a lesson. Maybe it was something else.’

Kathy shook her head.‘No.You’ve been reading the papers? They waited till that was all over, then they cleaned up their own backyard.’

‘Well, he certainly upset somebody.’

‘It’s Vexx.We should talk to him, and Carole, the girl.’

McCulloch raised an eyebrow.

‘Sorry,’ Kathy said.‘It’s your case. Just a suggestion. Can I sit in?’

‘Be my guest.We’ll be waiting here for a while.Talk to Winnie while I fetch us all a cup of tea.’

One of nature’s great mysteries, Brock thought, along with migrating butterflies and holes in the ozone layer, was exactly what happened to fish and chips on the way home. Recalling the delicious package of hot crisp food he’d bought in the shop, he contemplated sadly the congealed mess that now lay before him on his plate. It seemed oddly personal, this transformation, like a deliberate insult. He also thought of the last plate of fish and chips he’d eaten, with Michael Grant in the Strangers’ Dining Room, and imagined how he must be feeling now, the impostor, the boy from the Dungle, summarily crushed.

The Grant affair no longer made the six o’clock news. Brock poured himself a glass of the Dragon Stout he’d picked up at his local Paramounts. There had been a big run on it, he’d been told, and they had hardly any left. He poked around morosely in the ruined meal for the least soggy chips.

Kathy had rung him from the hospital to say that the doctors were cautiously optimistic about George’s condition. The eardrum would probably be repairable, though the nail had penetrated the inner ear, damaging the cochlea. Time would tell whether a cochlear implant might be necessary, but things could have been a lot worse. George himself was sedated and saying nothing. Kathy was frustrated, both by the wait at the hospital and by McCulloch’s cautious approach. She had the feeling that her possible involvement worried him and that he was dragging his feet.

Brock switched off the TV and tried to take the fish seriously. A slice of lemon might help. Or another beer.

He rang Suzanne. She sounded pleased to hear from him, but cautious, too. She had been to see Amber that afternoon and he gathered that the visit hadn’t gone well.

‘She gets things so out of proportion, deliberately misinterpreting everything I say to put it in the worst possible light.Anyway,

one day at a time . . . How are you?’

He gave her a summary of his day and heard her sigh.

‘It just gets worse, doesn’t it?’ she said. ‘What they did to Michael Grant, and now this boy . . . I think you should let this go, David.Have a talk to your boss and then wash your hands of it.The past is over.You can’t put it all to rights.’

He thought about that. Long after they hung up he pondered if that was really what he was trying to do. He remembered the Saturday lunchtime long ago,returning home to his abandoned flat, tweaking at that old wound, and of the conversations he had had that day with Joseph Kidd, whose remains had surfaced like an old nightmare so long after the event. But he wasn’t convinced. It wasn’t restitution he wanted so much as understanding. As startling as Hadden-Vane’s disclosures had been, they hadn’t explained what had happened on the eleventh of April 1981. In fact, thinking of the MP’s performance now, it had the mesmerising quality of an illusionist show. He closed his eyes as he recalled each stage in the performance,and tried to rekindle a half-suppressed sense of something inconclusive, unexplained, behind the dazzling revelations.