Barry Maitiland - Spider Trap

He woke abruptly, two hours later, with the realisation of what had troubled him. In his presentation to the committee, Hadden-Vane had questioned whether Michael Grant had a personal reason for his campaign against Roach, a suggestion that Brock had found entirely plausible. This had been the basis on which he had called Father Maguire as a witness, yet the priest had thrown no light on that idea, and instead the MP had used him to expose Grant’s past in Jamaica. Hadden-Vane hadn’t answered his own question. Perhaps he didn’t know the answer,or didn’t want to know.Perhaps it lay in the relationship between Grant and his fellow immigrant, Joseph Kidd. Brock wondered who might know, and his thoughts returned as they had once before, to Abigail Lavender, who had taken Grant in when he first arrived in the UK, and whose influence had been so formative on his subsequent career.It seemed all the stranger now, after what Hadden-Vane had uncovered, that Grant hadn’t put her on his list of people Kathy should speak to,nor invited her to his daughter’s concert. And she was still alive, for he remembered her name cropping up in Kathy’s last report, with an address in Roehampton.

He got stiffly to his feet, picked up the empty glass and the remnants of his fish supper and headed for the kitchen. As he reached the door the phone rang.

‘Brock, my dear chap! Not woken you up, I hope?’

‘Sundeep, you’re working late.’

‘Well, not exactly, but the lab is, and I asked them to phone me at home with their result. Bingo! You win the lottery.’

‘Really?’ Brock felt a tightening in his chest, of relief really, and excitement at an idea well-formed against all the odds. ‘You’ve got a match?’

‘That’s right. Care to take a punt on which of the three was Daddy?’

‘Number two, Bravo? Joseph Kidd?’

‘Wrong! It was the mysterious number three, the man without a head. He was the father of the lady whose handkerchief you gave us.’

‘Really?’ The killers had worked through the other two to get to him. Robbie, surname unknown.

‘Does the lady know?’

‘That’s a good question, Sundeep. A very good question.’

Kathy took her morning coffee into the monitor room and watched McCulloch on the screen. On the other side of the table Mr Teddy Vexx sat with his arms folded, motionless, eyes hooded as if in meditation. Martin Connell, next to him, seemed almost diminutive alongside his bulk.

‘Resuming then, Mr Vexx, you insist that you haven’t seen Mr Murray for the last two days?’

‘We’ve been over this several times,’ Martin objected smoothly.

‘I have a witness who saw your car in the vicinity of Cockpit Lane shortly before Mr Murray was found.’

‘What witness?’ Martin asked sharply.

‘A police officer,’ McCulloch snapped back.

They both turned to look at Vexx, who slowly uncrossed his arms, put his right hand into his jacket pocket, then withdrew it and reached forward with his big fist across the table towards the detective, who, despite himself, drew back. For several seconds Vexx kept his hand cupped in front of McCulloch on the table, staring into his eyes. Then he lifted his hand away and leaned back. His chair creaked. A packet of chewing gum lay where his fist had been. He said,‘I went out to buy gum.’

Kathy sighed. This wasn’t going well.

The Alton Estate at Roehampton was one of the most heroic attempts by the London County Council architects to build the New Jerusalem in the 1950s. Overlooking the rolling green of Richmond Park, its towers and slabs ranged from Scandinavian modernism on the east to the tougher concrete Brutalism of Le Corbusier on the west. Between the two sides of this stylistic argument lay a convent and a Jesuit college, and Brock wondered, as he sat in Abigail Lavender’s living room, eyeing the brightly decorated Virgins, crucifixes and papal photographs, whether this had been an attraction for her.

‘Wonderful view,’ he said.

‘Oh yes.’ She’d put on a lot of weight since he’d seen her in 1981, and she wobbled gently as she pointed out some of the sights in the park-the Royal Ballet School, the polo field, Prince Charles’ Spinney-that he would have been able to see if it weren’t for the mist.

‘I’m so glad you came to see me, sir,’ she said. She had a quiet, gentle voice that might, he imagined, turn into a powerful soprano given a decent hymn. ‘I have been so distressed about what they been doin’ to that poor boy. They lynched him, no two ways about it, as surely as if they’d hung him from a tree. I wanted to speak out, tell people what I know, but I waited to hear from Michael first. I s’pose he didn’t need my help. Maybe it would

make no difference anyway, since everybody thinks he’s guilty.’

‘What is it that you wanted to tell people, Abigail?’

‘Why, the truth!’

‘I’m very interested in that. Maybe I could help Michael if you told it to me.’

‘I’ll do that, on one condition, that you try my home-made cream sponge and chocolate macaroons.’

‘I thought you’d never ask,’ he said, and she went off chuckling to her little kitchen to prepare the feast.

‘I grew up in Riverton City, same as Michael,’ she said, when she finally settled herself in the armchair facing Brock, cups of tea balanced on their right chair arms and plates of confectionery on their left.

‘My mother and his grandmother, Mrs Forrest, were close friends.’

‘That was his name then, wasn’t it?’

‘That’s right. He was called Billy Forrest. I remember when his mother brought him to live with his grandmother, the sweetest little pickney I ever saw,and I watched him grow up until I married Mr Lavender and came away to England. Billy was seven then, and already I could see that he was different.Well, he could read for a start, and he was quiet and you could tell from looking at him that there were things going on in his head that he wasn’t telling you about. To tell the truth, I didn’t know how long he’d survive in the Dungle. Do you know about the Dungle?’

‘Michael mentioned it to me. A rubbish tip, yes?’

‘The biggest filthiest rubbish tip you ever saw. Imagine the putrid stench under the hot sun, the smoke of fires, the seagulls wheeling overhead, the rats, the skinny dogs, the flies. And then imagine the garbage trucks roaring in and the bigger boys jumping on board so they can have the first pick of the rubbish before it gets tipped out and the smaller children and the women get to work, looking for cans and bottles, bits of material, anything you can sell or eat or make a shelter and clothes from.’

Abigail could clearly see it as she spoke, and when she paused to take breath she blinked and looked around her at the spotless little flat as if still not quite able to believe that she’d escaped.

‘And then, as if bein’ poor wasn’t bad enough, there was what people did to each other in that dreadful place, the guns, the beatin’s, and what they did to the girls . . . It was bad enough then, when I was there, but it got worse, year by year, until by the time Billy left it had all got completely out of hand. The bad boys took handouts from the big politicians, Manley and Seaga’s people, to terrorise the folk on the other side. They didn’t stop at killing the men-little children and old women were murdered in their beds to teach the others what to expect. In May of that year they set fire to the Evening Tide Home for the elderly disabled, on Slipe Pen Road. A sister of my mother was living there, my Auntie May, who wasn’t well in the head. It was a PNP area, but there was a rumour goin’ round that over a hundred of the residents had voted for the JLP in the last election, so one night the PNP boys cut the phone lines and started fires. It was a big old wooden building, with seven hundred old folks inside, and it went up in an inferno. One hundred and fifty-three of the old people died that night, Auntie May among them. No one was ever arrested for that terrible deed, but the men who did it will surely face the Judgement of His Wrath.Will you have another slice of my cream sponge, Chief Inspector?’