Spider Trap

by Barry Maitland

  ‘Not quite. Something more fun, I think.’ He pointed up at the sky, and after squinting at the cloud for a moment Kathy was able to make out a tiny object dropping fast towards them. A little later and the growing dot was accompanied by a thumping noise that became a deafening clatter as the helicopter passed overhead and dropped behind a copse of trees. Tom restarted the car and drove after it to a set of gates beside a notice for the Metropolitan Police Air Support Unit.

  ‘I thought we might hitch a ride,’ Tom said. ‘Okay?’

  He was friends with the inspector who ran the police staff on the base, a former Special Branch man, who introduced them to the pilot. They had a cup of coffee together while the Twin Squirrel was being refuelled, and he pointed out the aircraft’s special features: the Nitesun searchlight, the Skyshout loudspeaker system, and the gyro-stabilised, thermal-imaging video camera.

  Tom was trying to impress her, Kathy realised, and doing quite a good job, though she’d have been more impressed if he’d volunteered what he’d been doing the night before.

  They climbed in, fastened seatbelts, and rose into the blustery air. Below them the canopy of Epping Forest spread away to the north. Spiralling higher, the full extent of the city became clearer, sprawling away to the distant horizons, east, south and west. They headed down the Lee Valley, following the chain of reservoirs, marshes and waterways towards the great silver snake of the Thames, crossing it near the Isle of Dogs and losing altitude over the ant-line of cars on the Dover road across Blackheath.

  Now Kathy realised what Tom had in mind. Soon she could see the pattern of tees, greens and bunkers on the golf course like a neat abstract painting, and recognised the belt of trees from where she had looked across the eighteenth fairway to The Glebe. Then it was laid out below them, an irregular octagon of roofs around the central space in which she could make out someone washing a car and two others on the tennis court. The tennis players paused in their game as the shadow of the chopper passed over them.

  Tom was taking pictures and gestured for her to look at something to do with the stream across the golf course, but she couldn’t work out what he was saying. The helicopter banked into a wide sweep to the south before returning across Shooters Hill and heading back over the river towards base.

  ‘It was a great trip,’ she said to the pilot as they stepped out onto solid ground again, and she meant it, for the noise, the buffeting wind, the vibration, the exhilaration of height had energised her and she felt her face tingling with life. They thanked Tom’s friend, who said he couldn’t join them for lunch, but recommended a nearby pub, the Owl, which had its own pet owl in a cage in the garden.

  Over pies and beer, Tom said, ‘Did you get the point about the stream?’ He, too, seemed charged by their flight.

  She said she hadn’t, so he got out his camera and replayed his pictures on the monitor screen.

  ‘You can see the route of it back here, beyond the old church, where there’s a winding line of willows. It curls around the church towards the original glebe house, then disappears.’ He clicked on through the frames. ‘Then we come to the Roaches’ compound, and on the other side the stream emerges again to form that hazard across the golf course, becomes the small lake near the clubhouse, and continues north to run into the Thames somewhere around Woolwich.’ He sat back with a quizzical smile, waiting for her conclusions.

  ‘So it’s been culverted where it runs around the Roaches’ place?’

  ‘Not around, under. To put together a big enough site for his family compound on the edge of the golf course, Spider had to build The Glebe across the stream. It runs in a culvert right under the development. And for maintenance purposes, there are two manhole access points into the central courtyard.’

  As he made this revelation, Tom had a look of breezy elation on his face that made Kathy think of Biggles or the Famous Five, and she wondered if their aerial adventure had made him slightly drunk.

  ‘How do you know this?’

  ‘Because I’ve seen the plans lodged with the local authority. Planning approval was conditional on providing adequate means of access for council engineers.’

  ‘Andrea?’

  He gave a smug little smile. ‘Actually, no. I dug this up myself.’

  ‘You’re not seriously suggesting . . .’

  Tom’s eyes lit up with mischief as he followed what was going through her mind, daring her to say it.

  ‘. . . posing as a council engineer?’

  ‘Not exactly that, perhaps. But let’s face it, the only conclusive evidence we’re likely to get against Roach will be inside The Glebe, yes?’

  ‘You want to break and enter?’

  ‘ “Covert entry” sounds so much better than “break and enter”, don’t you think? Sounds almost legitimate. Like nobody need know a thing about it.’

  ‘Tom . . .’

  ‘A moonless night,’ he mused, turning away to contemplate the owl in its cage outside the window. ‘The new moon is next Thursday . . .’

  Kathy began to protest at how ridiculous the idea was, how impractical and potentially disastrous, until she saw his shoulders shake and realised he was having her on.

  ‘Tom!’ She punched his arm.

  He turned back, laughing, and she joined in.

  ‘All right, you got me going.’

  And yet, the reason she had fallen for it was that she had seen a quality in him that made it seem all too plausible. You might call it impatience with due process, or reckless courage, or the Nelson touch. She admired it, but also mistrusted it. Maybe she recognised a shade of it in herself.

  ‘I called in on Brock yesterday,’ Tom said later, as they were finishing their lunch. ‘Have you seen his office lately? Like a paper recycling dump. We have to do something, Kathy, bring him back to the real world.’

  They had arranged to meet at a small restaurant in Chelsea, a favourite haunt from years ago when Suzanne had lived in nearby Belgravia before she had moved down to the coast to open her antiques shop in Battle. Brock wasn’t sure what to make of her choice of venue, whether it was meant to resurrect the feelings they had shared when they first met, or to demonstrate how different things were now. He felt both sensations tugging at him as he stepped across the familiar threshold. Nothing had changed, not the decor, the layout of tables, or even the management. He was the first to arrive, and took his seat at a secluded table at the rear, ordered a dry martini because that was what they had done in those days, and sat watching the door with a trepidation he hadn’t felt in a long time.

  She’d had her hair cut he realised as he rose to his feet, remembering the travel-worn figure he’d seen at Heathrow. The thick, shoulder-length dark hair had been trimmed back to her jawline in a new style he liked. He smiled to himself, for he too had visited the barber on his way over here. For a moment, as she approached, he wasn’t sure what to expect. Then her face broke into that warm generous smile of hers and she was holding out her hands to him.

  ‘David!’

  He took the offered hands, then pulled her closer and wrapped his arms around her. ‘Suzanne,’ he murmured, with enormous relief. The maître d’ beamed approvingly and eased out her chair and they sat.

  ‘Oh, dry martini! Yes, please.’

  For a moment they said nothing, hands laid on the white tablecloth with fingertips just touching in mute contact. She looked reinvigorated, he thought, charged with new life.

  ‘Thank you for ringing,’ he said, ‘for suggesting this.’

  ‘I wasn’t sure if it was a mistake, until I saw you just now. How have you been?’

  ‘The same. You look marvellous. The trip has done you good.’

  ‘Yes, I feel refreshed . . . in different ways.’

  But he detected a shadow behind her words, and had the sudden awful suspicion that the purpose of this meeting was to make a final break.

  ‘A new perspective?’

  ‘Yes . . .’

  He sensed some hard thing about to emer
ge, but then she veered away and spoke about the things she had done: riding horses on a cattle station, scuba diving on a reef, hiking through a rainforest.

  Her martini arrived and he raised his glass to hers. ‘Welcome home.’

  She lowered her eyes. ‘Did you miss me?’

  ‘Every day. Three months is a long time.’

  She was about to reply to that when the waiter came for their order, and when he left she instead turned the conversation to the restaurant and its memories. Did he remember the old couple that always sat at that table over there, and how they’d invented their story from small clues—his taste in shoes, her silver-tipped walking stick, the tiny appointment diaries they would compare? And how they would get tired of that, or discover a new clue, and invent a completely new story for them?

  ‘I had this idea that I could change our story too,’ she went on. ‘I used to think you were suffering from a malignant condition that I called Brock’s Paradox, a belief that you could only keep a relationship alive by not allowing it to reach its full potential.’ She gave a little smile. ‘I thought if I could get you away for long enough I could show you that it needn’t apply, so I planned a long trip for us, overseas, but at the last minute you backed out. Work, you said.’

  She propped her chin on a hand and looked at him quizzically. ‘Where did Brock’s Paradox come from, do you think? Was it your wife leaving you? Or does it go further back? Something to do with your mother?’

  Brock was recalling that it was on the tenth anniversary of his divorce that he’d first seen Suzanne, been immediately struck by the woman getting out of the red sports car and going into the small antiques shop she ran just off Sloane Square. He had followed her inside and got her to tell him all about her cabinet of eighteenth-century English glassware.

  ‘So things didn’t quite work out as I’d planned. Quite the opposite, in fact. The thing was that, even though I’d put thousands of miles between us, every time I saw something interesting—green shoots coming out of the ground after a bushfire, an electric storm out to sea, a flock of pink-chested parrots filling a tree—I mentally turned to you to compare notes. I thought I could change you, and there I was, unable to change myself. You were still inside my head, and I decided I didn’t want to let you go.’

  ‘I’m glad,’ he said, and was.

  ‘But that wasn’t why I came home.’

  The waiter appeared with oysters and a bottle of white wine.

  ‘Last week I got a panicky phone call from Ginny, who’s been running the shop.’

  Brock stiffened. Had Roach made a move against her after all? It would be ironic if he’d been the cause of bringing her back.

  ‘Stewart had been in touch with her. He said that he and Miranda had been living on their own for the past two weeks, without anyone knowing—doing their own shopping and cooking, getting themselves off to school— but now they’d run out of money, and didn’t know what to do. He was quite apologetic. He had no idea where their mother was.’

  Suzanne’s grandchildren would now be ten and eight, Brock reckoned, and it was their return to the care of their mother, after Suzanne had looked after them for a number of years in her absence, that had precipitated Suzanne’s plans for an overseas trip.

  ‘Ginny called the police, who traced Amber to the psychiatric hospital in Hastings. Apparently, she’d been found lying on a headland outside the town after taking an overdose. She had no identification.’

  ‘Oh no. I’m sorry.’

  ‘You know what she was like, always erratic in her moods. After she came back from living with that man in Greece she went through a black period, very depressed. Her doctor referred her to a psychiatrist who diagnosed her as suffering from Bipolar I Disorder. That did make sense. It’s a long-term illness, and it seemed to explain a pattern of extreme mood swings over the years. Also it’s heritable, and her father had similar symptoms—and you know he killed himself. The thing is that it’s treatable, with drugs and psychotherapy, and when she went on the medication she improved so much that I was tremendously relieved. When she said she wanted to look after the children again, I was really confident that she could do it. She was doing fine when I left . . .’

  Neither of them had touched their oysters, and Suzanne’s voice had dropped to a flat murmur. Brock tasted his wine and she followed suit.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I should have kept in touch with them. I never thought.’

  ‘No, you couldn’t, not after the way we parted. It seems the hospital disagrees with the diagnosis. They think she’s suffering from Borderline Personality Disorder, which has similar symptoms but is less amenable to treatment. Also, when the social services went to the house to see the children, they found drugs—cannabis and metham-phetamine. It seems Amber had never really given them up. I didn’t know. I should have been more careful. When I got home I discovered she’d taken things from my house, little things she could sell, and Ginny told me she’d discovered things missing from the shop.’

  He watched the distress building in her, and reached out to put his hand over hers. ‘You don’t deserve this. It isn’t your fault.’

  She took a deep breath, reining her feelings in. ‘Anyway, I wanted you to know; that’s why I’ve come home.’ She picked up her fork and stabbed it at a grey mollusc.

  They ate in silence, then she said, with a forced attempt to change the subject, ‘So, and what are you doing at the moment?’

  He told her about Dee-Ann and Dana, and despite her preoccupation, she gradually became drawn into the story.

  ‘Michael Grant, yes, I’ve seen him on TV. I thought he was very impressive. I wish there were more like that at Westminster. So the other three victims were his contemporaries. I suppose he could have been one of them, if things had been different.’

  ‘Exactly. This is why he’s taking such a personal interest in the case, that and his suspicions about Roach.’

  ‘But if he has evidence against him he should give it to you, surely?’

  ‘He’s giving us access to his files, but I don’t know if he’s holding something back. So far we’ve seen nothing we can act on. We’re looking for a pattern of incrimination, you could say. My lot are beginning to think I’m obsessed.’

  ‘What, you?’ She laughed. ‘Don’t they know you by now?’

  ‘When your hair turns grey people start to look for signs of a similar deterioration inside your head. Kind of applied metonymy. Even Dot’s giving me funny looks.’

  ‘And how’s Kathy?’

  ‘Okay, I think. She’s going out with a bloke who’s working with us at the moment, on secondment from Special Branch. I’m keeping a close eye on him.’

  ‘I’m sure she’ll be glad about that. Why don’t you just let her get on with it?’

  ‘I don’t interfere!’ he protested. ‘I’m just not sure about her taste for Special Branch officers. Why can’t she meet a nice lawyer or something? Someone with a safe desk job. Anyway, you can catch up with her yourself this evening, if you feel like it, and Michael Grant too.’ He explained about the concert. ‘And maybe afterwards . . .’

  ‘I have to get back this afternoon, David,’ she said quickly. ‘I’ve got a note of the train times. Thanks.’

  ‘Of course.’ He stiffened, mentally cursing himself for spoiling everything. ‘They’re staying with you now are they, the children?’

  ‘Yes, back to the old routine. I must say they seem happy about it. I wonder what went on, what they saw.’

  The main course came, and suddenly they both discovered that they were very hungry. Later, over a shared dessert, Brock casually came out with the question that had been haunting him all week. It seemed that the tall, tanned man pushing Suzanne’s trolley at the airport was an acquaintance of her sister’s from Sydney, who just happened to be on the same flight.

  twenty-one

  The concert was to be held in a new library and community centre in Michael Grant’s constituency. The radical-looking
structure, a prismatic blue oblong supported along one side by oddly angled columns, looked as if it had been dropped in, by helicopter perhaps, among the jumble of scruffy buildings cowering beneath the street lights and drizzle along the high street. As she and Tom made their way towards it, Kathy could see other people, some in suits with umbrellas and others in anoraks and jeans, heading under the raking columns towards the entrance. They waited in the shelter of the overhang until they saw Nicole and Lloyd running towards them, hugged and shook hands and made their way inside, where a stairway took them up into the belly of a curving pod, within which they found themselves in the foyer of the community hall.

  Michael Grant was there, welcoming visitors. He shook their hands warmly, showing where they could leave their coats and find a glass of orange juice or wine, and said to Tom, ‘You must introduce your friends to Andrea. There she is, over there.’

  He gestured towards a very attractive young woman who was talking animatedly with another couple. As they approached, however, the group broke up and the young woman turned away to speak to someone else. Tom led Kathy and the other two past her to a small, erect, grey-haired woman whose glass was being refilled.

  ‘Andrea!’ he cried, and bent to kiss her on the cheek.

  ‘Tom!’ The elderly woman’s eyes twinkled with delight. ‘And is this Kathy? At last, I’ve heard so much about you.’ She took Kathy’s hand and squeezed it hard.

  Andrea, Kathy later discovered, had been the CEO of a merchant bank in the City and then the head of a large charity before retiring, becoming very bored, and joining Grant’s office. As she talked, pointing out people who were present, it was clear that her mind and her wit were razor sharp. It transpired that the attractive young woman they had seen was Michael Grant’s daughter Elizabeth, who would be performing for them that evening with three of her friends from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama.

  ‘She’s extremely talented,’ Andrea whispered, ‘and very beautiful. Isn’t that the most perfect complexion? Creamy butterscotch. One day, when the mixing pot has done its work, we’ll all have skin like that, the ultimate human colouring. Too late for a wrinkled old mouse like me.’