Barry Maitiland: Spider Trap

‘Did you tell Ivor?’

‘Teddy did. He said he’d contact Da-Ivor the next day and explain what had happened.He said I had to get rid of the gun,and told me a place in Deptford, on the way home, to throw it in the river. But I was so shaken up I forgot, and when I got home I hid it in my cupboard. The next day Ivor went berserk when he heard from Teddy. I was scared and told him I’d got rid of the gun, and he calmed down a bit. Then you started digging up the bodies on the railway land and he started on at me again.I didn’t understand why. Later he told me I had to do that stuff with Tom to put things right. That’s the truth.’

Kathy didn’t doubt it. It had always seemed so implausible for Ivor or his brothers to have risked so much, at that stage in their negotiations with the authorities, by becoming involved in the girls’murders,far less to have failed afterwards to dispose of the gun and then to have left it lying around where Adonia could find it.

‘You knew all this, Adonia?’ Kathy asked.

The woman nodded. ‘I heard Ivor shouting at Magdalen the day after it happened. Of course, I didn’t understand all the implications that he saw. It was a judgement on him, a judgement on us all . . . But it was an accident, what Magdalen did.You heard her …’

Magdalen had turned into her mother’s arms. ‘I can’t think any more,’she mumbled.‘I just want to sleep.’

‘You will,’Kathy said.‘It’ll be much easier when all this is out in the open.’

It was the only lie she’d told that evening, Kathy thought. They sat there in silence for a while, the three of them under the chandelier, weighed down by the burden that the past had placed on them. Finally, Kathy roused herself. She cautioned Magdalen and led the two women out to her car.