Spider Trap bak-9

by Barry Maitiland

  Tom stretched his legs to kick off his shoes and took another slurp of his drink.

  ‘And with every election the violence between the two sides gets worse and worse, with the political parties offering more and more bribes to the gangs to help them back into office. Until we get to the election of October 1980.

  ‘That year, the violence gets so bad it almost amounts to civil war. The rudies are murdering parliamentary candidates, police officers, each other. The point is to terrorise the opposition, so the violence has to be really scary and graphic-families slaughtered in their beds, victims tortured, bodies bound up in wire . . .What’s wrong?’

  Kathy was staring at him.‘We’ve found traces of rust-wire- with the bodies. And one of the hands we found had each of its middle bones fractured, at or around the time of death, according to Mehta.’

  ‘Interesting.Anyway,when the election is over the new government finally realises that things have gone too far, and they bring in the army and crack down on the gangs in a big way. An exodus of the rudies begins, heading north as “posses” to the States and Canada, and across the Atlantic as “Yardies” to the UK.’

  Tom rose somewhat unsteadily to his feet. ‘I’ve been talking too much.We should eat, don’t you think? I’ll put on some music.’

  ‘Bob Marley?’

  ‘Close. They shot him in the 1976 election, did you know that? Lucky to survive. No, this is his son, Ziggy.’

  He put on a CD and gentle reggae filled the room. Kathy took a seat at the dining table as Tom brought two steaming bowls of dark soup, each with a pale dumpling floating in the centre.

  ‘I didn’t make this either, must confess. Takes too long to do it properly. Pepperpot soup. Try it. Isn’t it great?’

  Kathy agreed.

  ‘But I am making the main course. Red Stripe pot roast. Trouble is, it won’t be ready for a while.’ He checked his watch. ‘Mmm, quite a while. I wanted to do jerk, of course, but it’s a barbecue thing really,and in this weather . . .I’ll do it for you in the summer, okay? I do a great jerk sauce.’

  ‘You really think that’s what we’ve found,a Yardie graveyard?’

  ‘Wouldn’t be surprised. When they came they brought their guns and their cocaine, and also their old rivalries, the Shower Posse and the Spanglers, Jungle and the Chi Chi Boys. They were more lethal to each other than to anybody else.’

  ‘You know a lot about this. Is that why you went to Jamaica?’

  Tom nodded. ‘In London we’d catch them and deport them and a few months later they’d be back with a new name, new passport. Genuine, too.’

  ‘How’d they do that?’

  ‘Easy.You have a customer, a UK citizen, dying for the crack you sell and more than willing to trade his birth certificate for an extra rock or two. So after a while we realised we needed some help from the cops over there, the Jamaica Constabulary Force.We brought them here to identify who it was exactly that we’d got, and in return the JCF invited us back to Jamaica, to drink their rum and eat their jerk chicken. Seems reasonable, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, absolutely.’

  ‘But Brock will know all this, especially if he was working in Lambeth back then. Hasn’t he talked about it?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘Keeps his cards close to his chest, old Brock, doesn’t he?’

  ‘He’ll tell us when he’s ready,’ Kathy said, but she was thinking about Brock’s instructions to keep the SOCOs within the bounds of the site, wanting to strictly control the information that got out. And there had been a deliberate vagueness at the press briefings about certain aspects of their finds, as if he already had suspicions that he wanted to keep to himself. Tom was absolutely right, she decided, with the clarity that a couple of large rum punches can bring-Brock was being secretive. Now she remembered another thing that had struck her as slightly odd. When they’d met Dr Mehta at the path lab that afternoon, he’d shown them a thighbone he’d cleaned up.This femur was dramatically curved,like a bow,and he’d explained that the owner had suffered from rickets, most probably due to a vitamin D or calcium deficiency in childhood. Kathy had been struck by the immobility of Brock’s expression and his lack of questions.

  ‘How’s he going with his lady friend?’

  Kathy was surprised. She couldn’t remember mentioning this to Tom. ‘She’s still in Australia. I got a Christmas card from her, snorkelling on the Great Barrier Reef.’

  ‘Why the hell doesn’t he go out there after her? I would.’

  Brock wasn’t talking about that either, Kathy thought, but her thoughts were becoming increasingly blurry and euphoric, and it wasn’t Brock’s love-life she was interested in just now. ‘You sounded very nostalgic about Jamaica.Was there someone special you met there?’

  Now it was Tom who looked startled.‘Your glass is empty,’he said abruptly,getting to his feet.‘We should switch to Red Stripe.’ He made his way to the kitchen where he checked the oven, then returned with a couple of bottles.‘This is obligatory, I’m afraid. It’s in the pot roast.’He sat down again.‘I did have some good friends there. Some who aren’t around any more.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Oh well.’ They clinked bottles and Tom began another funny story about tropical sanitation. As he rambled on, Kathy thought how intriguing it was, discovering someone else’s life, but also how tricky. There were plenty of ghosts from her own past that she wouldn’t want to share with him, not yet.

  Much later, full of Red Stripe and pot roast, they collapsed on the sofa in an untidy heap.It had taken so long for the meal to reach what Tom felt was its full potential that it was now late in the night. He reached out a hand and stroked her hair.

  ‘I love your hair,’ he sighed exhaustedly.

  It was straight,short and very pale blonde.‘Bit out of place in Jamaica,’ she said, and then something she’d meant to ask earlier stumbled into her head.‘Have you ever heard of a phrase “brown bread”? Does it mean anything to you?’

  ‘Mm?’

  ‘Brown bread.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It’s what the boy was looking for on the railway land, apparently, when he found the body.’

  Tom mumbled something incoherent and Kathy closed her eyes, utterly relaxed.When she opened them again her phone was bleeping inside her shoulder bag on the floor at her feet. She blinked at her watch in disbelief, seeing seven-fifteen. Beside her, Tom lay sprawled in a contorted heap like The Body in the Bog. Swearing softly, she disentangled herself from his legs and groped for the phone. There was a message from Brock calling a case conference at Dr Mehta’s laboratory at nine a.m.

  SEVEN

  On her way out she roused Tom from whichever tropical beach he was lazing on in his dreams. She rushed to the tube and sat on the northbound train in a daze, still half asleep. At home she rapidly showered, cleaned her teeth, and made some tea and toast. Feeling only a little less fragile, she returned to central London, this time to Embankment station, where she caught a cab to the hospital where Dr Mehta had his laboratory. She made it just in time.

  She felt the tension as soon as she stepped into the room. Dr Mehta was with Brock over by the window, arguing fiercely. She’d never seen him angry before, and the others looked mildly embarrassed. It seemed the pathologist was scolding Brock for releasing Teddy Vexx after Mehta had provided the crucial forensic evidence against him.‘I pulled out every stop!’ he protested angrily. ‘I twisted people’s arms, gave up my weekend, ruined my mother’s eightieth birthday party! And what do you do? You mess it up! You let the animal go free!’

  Brock said something placatory, but Mehta wasn’t having any of it.‘Well, don’t be surprised when I’m less than enthusiastic about going the extra yards the next time!’ He turned away in a huff and started talking to someone else.

  Brock, looking unperturbed, came over to Kathy and introduced her to a man from the Forensic Services Command Unit whom she hadn’t met before. On the other side of the long table the
three forensic experts were taking their seats. They represented,Brock murmured,‘flesh,bones and teeth’.Sundeep Mehta, ‘flesh’, the forensic pathologist, sat in the middle as nominal leader of the group.‘Teeth’sat on his left,in the person of Professor Lyons, forensic odontologist,a studious-looking elderly man in a white lab coat stained at the sleeves with something yellow. On Dr Mehta’s right a black woman, Dr Prior, was ‘bones’, the team’s forensic anthropologist. She looked to Kathy to be about her own age, early thirties,and was immersed in a document while Mehta worked out some of his anger in an energetic conversation with the odontologist about fees. Apparently, three bodies in a single incident would attract a separate case fee for each, whereas if they found any more, charges must be made at either a half daily rate or a reduced case rate, but whether this applied to all the bodies, or only the fourth and subsequent ones, was a matter for debate.

  Brock cleared his throat and Mehta broke off and frowned at Kathy.‘Sergeant Kolla,how are you? Is this everyone,Brock?’

  Brock said yes.

  ‘No Inspector Gurney?’

  ‘He’s on site this morning.’

  ‘Very well.’

  Mehta sniffed at a scrap of paper.‘I have a message that Morris Munns has something he wants to show us. He should be along shortly. Now, this is really your meeting, Brock. We can only charge extra for police case conferences, not our own.’ He gave Brock a grim look, inviting him to challenge him, but Brock said nothing.‘Anyway I thought we’d better speak to you,because we had another discussion last night and we seem to be approaching a preliminary consensus on your three skeletons.’

  At that moment there was a tap on the door and a woman hurried in with a sheaf of papers which she handed to Mehta, who said,‘Perfect timing, Jenny.’

  The documents were the combined forensic reports of the three specialists, fresh off the photocopier. Each person was given a set, and Mehta directed them to the final summary for the profile that had now emerged of the three victims, Alpha, Bravo and Charlie. It confirmed that they were all males, and provided rather specific estimates of their heights-167, 185 and 181 centimetres respectively-and ages-twenty-three, nineteen and twenty-eight. Both Alpha and Bravo were right-handed,whereas Charlie was left. Available teeth were generally in good condition, with no fillings or other signs of dental treatment. As children, Bravo had had rickets and Charlie had suffered multiple fractures to his left leg. Both Alpha and Bravo had probably died from single gunshot wounds to the head, whereas the cause of death of Charlie, whose skull had not yet been found, was unknown. The size of the entry wounds were consistent with the two nine-millimetre calibre cartridge cases found on the site.

  All three skeletons showed evidence of fractures, which Dr Prior felt were probably sustained close to the time of death, although Dr Mehta wasn’t so sure, emphasising how difficult perimortem trauma was to distinguish. There were sufficient traces of oxidised iron strands in the surrounding soil to support the conjecture that all three had been bound with wire to arms and legs at the time of burial. It was not possible to determine whether they had died together or on separate occasions, nor whether death had occurred on the railway site or at some other place, although the presence of spent cartridges might suggest the former. Fabric traces in the ground suggested that all three bodies had been clothed at the time of burial, but these traces weren’t substantial enough to yield more specific information, apart from the remains of a shoe, a belt buckle, two zip fasteners and some buttons, which were being further investigated.

  The condition of the remains indicated a date of death between ten and forty years previously. A Seiko digital wristwatch with plastic case and LED display had been found on the wrist of Charlie, indicating an earliest date for his death of 1978, when this model first came on the market. So far, the evidence did not warrant a closer estimate for date of death than the seventeen-year period from 1978 to 1995. Maternally inherited mitochondrial DNA had been obtained from the remains of all three victims.

  ‘Sorry about the date, Brock,’ Sundeep said, not sounding at all sorry. ‘I suppose that’s the thing you’re most interested in, but we’ve tried everything-benzidine test, precipitin test, demonstrable fatty acids, nitrogen content. No go, I’m afraid. The only other time-related fact we have is that ballistics have matched the cartridge cases to a gun used in two other shootings in South London during the mid-eighties, but that doesn’t really narrow your time frame, does it?’

  ‘This bit about “indicators of non-Caucasian ancestry”, Sundeep,’ Brock queried.‘Can we be more specific?’

  As they’d been reading the summary, Kathy had noticed Dr Prior shake her head several times. Now she answered Brock’s question.

  ‘They were black,’ she said bluntly.

  It was Dr Mehta’s turn to shake his head.‘Dr Prior, I’ve been trying to emphasise to our colleagues here that such a term is arbitrary and meaningless in science. Racial categories have no biological reality.’ He sounded testy.

  Dr Prior gazed calmly back at him and said,‘That’s nonsense, Dr Mehta. You’ve completely ignored my evidence in your summary. The morphological arguments are compelling and well established. Race is a biological fact, and the three victims were as black as I am. I think the police need to know that.’

  ‘Nonsense!’ Mehta almost shouted. ‘I quote Sauer, I quote Brace:“There are no races, there are only clines.” If we can’t dispel this wicked misconception, who can?’

  The odontologist, Dr Lyons, was peering over his glasses at his forensic colleagues. From what Kathy could make of his part of the report, the dental evidence had been disappointingly inconclusive, and throughout he’d had the air of someone rather bored and impatient to get back to his laboratory. But now he, the only white member of the trio,seemed intrigued by his colleagues’increasingly irate debate about race.

  It was interrupted by the arrival of Morris Munns, who bustled in with a cheerful ‘Morning all’ and an ancient leather doctor’s bag. The lenses in his glasses were so thick that Kathy was always worried that he would barge into something, which was ironic since he was perhaps the most skilful photographic specialist and enhancer of latent images available to the Met. Dr Mehta, somewhat tightlipped,invited him to speak,and from the bag he produced a plastic evidence pouch containing an irregular lump of material.

  ‘This is the remains of the shoe Sundeep gave me,’ Morris said in his broad cockney.‘It was found with Bravo’s body. And hidden beneath what was left of his leather instep, Sundeep was smart enough to notice something odd.’

  Mehta’s sulk relaxed a little, mollified by this compliment.

  ‘Under examination, I found a fragment of what turned out to be rag paper.We ’ad a go with it on our new image detector equipment, digitally enhanced, and eventually came up with this.’ He passed out copies of a photographic enlargement, twenty times life size, of an irregular area of grey. Across its surface was a blur of darker grey smudges. Kathy held the picture at arm’s length, screwing up her eyes, until finally a pattern emerged.

  ‘Kathy’s got the idea,’ Morris said, and handed round another image, in which the first had been overlaid by red symbols, corresponding roughly to the shapes beneath. The smudges now read:

  Celia’s Dream

  8.22, 7/2, T4

  ‘Brilliant, Morris,’ Brock said,‘as always.What does it mean?’

  ‘I reckon it’s a betting slip, don’t you? An old-fashioned one, hand-written. The horse is Celia’s Dream, running at odds of seven to two.’

  Horseracing was another acknowledged area of Morris’s expertise, and Brock was impressed. ‘What about the other numbers?’

  ‘Dunno for sure. 8.22 can’t be the time of the race-too early or too late and too odd. It could be the date, American style, month first-August twenty-second. Maybe Bravo was a Yank.’

  ‘Or the bookie was,’ Mehta suggested.

  ‘All right, we’ll see what we can find out,’ Brock said. ‘Many thanks. And
thanks also to you and your colleagues for your report, Sundeep.Worth every penny, I’m sure. I realise what a rush it’s been. Is there anything else?’

  ‘Will you be wanting facial reconstructions?’ Dr Prior asked.

  ‘Definitely. Are the skulls in good enough condition?’

  ‘Oh yes. Of course, there are big differences in the thicknesses of facial tissues for different races.’ She paused with a slight smile on her lips, and Kathy realised she was needling Sundeep. ‘But we have pretty accurate tables for both pure Negroid and mixed-race subjects. The South Africans have done a lot of work in this area.’

  Dr Mehta winced at that, but he had obviously decided on a more dignified, patronising approach. ‘Yes, well, as we know, the results of facial modelling are open to conjecture. But Dr Prior is a very artistic practitioner.’

  Kathy gathered that ‘artistic’ was probably the most damning compliment that Mehta could find. As they got to their feet, Kathy made a point of speaking to the anthropologist. She introduced herself and they shook hands.

  ‘What was that all about, with Dr Mehta?’ she asked.

  ‘Oh,it’s an ongoing thing with us.Sundeep is a soft-tissue man, and they tend to see the way the responses of races to climate are evenly graded across populations, without clear breaks-the clines he mentioned. But deep inside you, in your bones, the opposite is true. There are sharp divisions between the races, and I can tell much more clearly what you are from your skull than from your skin. But of course, the reason Sundeep gets so heated isn’t scientific. He thinks that exposing biological differences between the races encourages racism, so he wants to suppress them. I, on the other hand, believe the opposite. I think that if we don’t explain exactly what science tells us, we encourage myths and stereotypes. When I was a student and my lecturer first explained the evolutionary basis of race I felt liberated.For the first time I understood why I was black.’