‘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.
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.’
twenty-nine
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 homemade 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?’
‘It is very good,’ Brock conceded, handing her his empty plate with only a token show of resistance.
‘You haven’t been eatin’ well lately, have you? I can see you’re lookin’ peaky. Another cuppa to go with it?’
‘Thank you.’
‘Anyway, what chance did a poor boy have of growing up straight in such a place? Some ran away to Bull Bay to become Rastas, reading the Scriptures and praising Jah and Selassie with the older dreads. Some were rescued by the likes of Father Guzowski or Monsignor Albert. Some joined the police force or the army. Some escaped overseas. But most joined the gangs and posses and got themselves a gun.’
‘Which did Billy do?’
‘Oh, he was one of Father Guzowski’s boys, no mistake about that. That’s what made it so unfair, what happened.’
There had been a spate of particularly violent murders in Jones Town during that August, Abigail said, and on this particular night the police had finally been prodded into action, sending patrols out looking for the perpetrators. They were nervous, the police, grabbing anyone they didn’t like the look of until they had a full quota to take back to the station. Billy was unlucky to be in the area that hot night, coming back from a visit to a relative in Kingston Public Hospital. He was arrested and taken in for questioning. It was chaotic at the police station, with young men being bundled into crowded cells to await their turn. Billy got talking to another prisoner, called Earl, a bit older than himself, who seemed to know the ropes and took Billy under his wing.
The police officers who questioned Billy seemed uninterested in his story of visiting the hospital, and kept trying to get him to admit that he had been in Jones Town the previous night, which he had not. Their interrogation techniques were rough, and he was returned to his cell with two thick ears and a bloody nose. There Earl went over with him what had happened and explained where he’d gone wrong, arguing with his questioners. When they took him away for a second time he followed Earl’s advice and came back without much further damage. Earl, on the other hand, returned from his session badly beaten, with a missing tooth and what later turned out to be two cracked ribs. He explained that someone in their cell had recognised him as a Shower Posse soldier and therefore a JLP supporter and had told the police, who were in the PNP camp.
It was late in the night when Billy and Earl were finally released. By way of a final insult, the cops drove the two of them and a third prisoner into the heart of a Spangler-controlled area and kicked them out, confident that they would be identified as the enemy and treated accordingly. They were saved by an old woman, who, in an extraordinary act of charity, realised their danger and took them into her home.
The next morning they set off together for the relative safety of Tivoli Gardens, where Earl lived, but on the way a car overtook them and stopped in the street ahead. Two men got out holding guns and began firing at them. Their companion was hit immediately in the head, clearly a fatal wound, while Billy and Earl jumped over a fence and ran, pursued by the gunmen. Trapped in a small yard, they grabbed whatever lay to hand and waited for the men to pass by. They heard one run past, but then the second stopped and came into their hiding place. Earl hit him with the stick he’d picked up, but it was rotten and snapped across the man’s shoulder without doing any damage. The man turned to shoot and Billy, behind him, hit him on the head with the brick he’d found. The man fell, and Earl picked up his gun and fired it at the second gunman, who had heard the commotion. He ran back to his car and fled. The man on the ground was dead. When Earl emptied his wallet he found a police badge.
They knew that they wouldn’t be safe now in Tivoli Gardens, and Billy persuaded Earl to come with him to Riverton City. They caught a bus and went straight to Father Guzowski and told him their story. He hid them for several weeks until he was able to put them both on a plane to London.
‘That’s the truth,’ she said with a sigh.
Brock didn’t doubt it. Like everyone else, he had been tempted by the notion that Michael Grant’s fall had been well deserved, that someone who had been just too good to be true had been exposed as a huge fraud. All of the newspapers had accepted this line, whether guardedly or with vicious relish, but it had never squared with Brock’s own assessment of the man, despite the fact that Grant had lied to him about not knowing Joseph Kidd in Jamaica.
‘I know that’s how it happened because his grandmother got her friend to write to tell me the whole story, and to ask me to look out for him if he got to London. Then Father Maguire told me he was coming and I said we’d take him in, despite . . . well, despite experience.’
Brock gave her a quizzical smile over the rim of his teacup.
‘We’d already had dealings with the Forrest family comin’ over here that weren’t so happy, but I thought I knew my little Billy, and I wasn’
t wrong.’
‘There are other Forrests here?’
‘Just the one, Billy’s older brother, or half-brother you would say—same mother, but who knows who their fathers were? Sailors passing through. He was quite a bit older than Billy, closer to my age, and he came over a couple of years after we did.’
Abigail had become reluctant and subdued in telling this part of her story, and Brock said, ‘Trouble, was he?’
She nodded. ‘Good-looking boy, and a great one for the ladies. He even . . . well, I was an attractive woman in those days. Mr Lavender had to tell him to get out. But it wasn’t just the flirting. He brought his bad ways over with him, the drugs, and got in with a bad crowd. It was on account of him that Mr Lavender got hurt. When he fell out with him, my husband threatened to go to the police about his drug dealing, and he told his friends, who came and beat Mr Lavender up bad.’
‘The Roaches?’
‘Mr Lavender never said a word, not even to me, but I’d seen Billy’s brother hanging around with them. I didn’t want to see Billy—Michael, as he now was—goin’ the same way. It tells you what a good man my husband was that he agreed to take him in, God bless his soul.’
‘What happened to this brother?’
‘I don’t know. He moved on, thank goodness, and Michael fulfilled all my hopes for him.’
‘What was the brother’s name?’
‘Robbie, Robbie Forrest. He was a rascal, that one.’ She shook her head, but the memory stirred something warmer than disapproval, and she smiled to herself. ‘He had one gold tooth.’ She tapped one of her front teeth. ‘Lost it in a fight back home, he said, and forced the man who’d knocked it out to give him a new one, in gold. The man with the golden kiss, he used to say. I sometimes wonder what ever became of him.’
‘So where is Michael now, Abigail?’
‘I really don’t know.’
‘I can understand your reluctance, but I may be able to help him.’
‘But it’s true, I don’t know.’ She hesitated. ‘He did phone me on Monday evening. He said that things were impossible and he couldn’t go home. He said that he and Jennifer were goin’ away for a while, till things settled down. He didn’t say where . . .’
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