Spider Trap

Snow began to fall over the city late on Thursday night, in mean little flakes at first, but then in plump silent gobbets. By dawn, when the security guard reached the school at the end of Cockpit Lane, the whole of London lay under a muffling blanket of white. As he checked the gates and fences he noticed what looked like a fresh trail leading through the snow beside the empty garage building next door, as if something had been dragged from its rear door. He was very much inclined to ignore it, but the garage was technically part of the school premises, and there had been a spate of fires recently. Investigating, he found the door slightly ajar. Inside, his flashlight picked out two figures curled up together on the bare concrete floor. He took them for children and might have said they were asleep, except that it was far too cold to be lying like that without blankets. They didn’t respond to his challenge, and he noticed a spatter of dark stains all around them on the floor. When he moved closer he made out plastic tape binding their wrists, and then the shocking wounds in the backs of their heads.

The murders in Cockpit Lane might have passed without much public notice except that the victims were two young girls, only sixteen years old, both shot through the head. They had also died in the constituency of Michael Grant, Member of Parliament for Lambeth North and a vigorous campaigner against crime in his inner South London community. The youngest black member of the House of Commons, Grant was a charismatic speaker whose compelling voice and handsome face were soon all over the media, describing the Cockpit Lane girls, Dana and Dee-Ann, as only the latest in a long series of tragic victims of,as he put it,an evil alliance of poverty, drugs, guns and criminal business interests operating in the district.

The press immediately dubbed the shootings a ‘Yardie’ massacre, despite police reservations about the use of the term, which implied the involvement of Jamaican immigrants. To the press it was Yardie because it was violent, guns and drugs were involved (crack cocaine was found in the girls’ pockets), and both the victims and just about everyone else in the neighbourhood were of West Indian origin.

By late afternoon, media interest in the tragedy had risen to such a pitch that Scotland Yard announced the formation of a Major Inquiry Team, led by Detective Chief Inspector David Brock and officers from Homicide Command, together with local detectives. They would be supported by members of the Operation Trident squad,which had been established some years earlier to combat gun crime in London’s black communities.

Beyond the hissing radiators, through the tall windows of the upstairs classroom, Adam Nightingale could see over the back wall of the school playground to the dazzling white wasteland beyond, across which the thin black lines of the railway tracks traced a sweeping curve. On seeing the snow, his mother’s first words that morning had been,‘That’s it, Adam, we’re goin’ back to Jamaica.’ They wouldn’t, of course. She always said that when it snowed, but he thought it was magic.

The class was unsettled, whispering and passing notes. When they’d arrived for school that morning they’d been met by the sight of ambulances and police cars blocking the Lane. They’d stood in huddled groups, lit by the strobing lights, straining to catch the squawk of the police radios. Gradually a little information had rippled through the excited mob, just enough to breed rumours and questions. Were the girls from Camberwell Secondary? Had they been raped? Throughout the morning, classes had been distracted by the sirens and the helicopters. When the bell rang for their lunchbreak, they’d rushed out into the street, hung around the police barrier and pestered the cops asking questions in the Cockpit Lane street market and searching the alleyways and backyards.

There were many empty seats when school started again in the afternoon,and the teachers struggled against the mood of distracted restlessness. Adam felt the horrible excitement more than anyone. It ate away at him and made him feel almost physically ill. He had his own ideas about what had really happened, but as usual no one was interested in what he had to say. It was the guns that fascinated them most and there had been much technical discussion about Uzis and Mach 10s, Brownings and Glocks, but the others only scoffed when he offered his opinions. He felt as if he might literally explode with frustration at the familiar sense of insignificance, of being excluded.

Mr Pemberton was oblivious to it all. He was drawing a graph on the board, a sweeping curve just like that of the rail line. A parabola, he said. Nobody paid any attention.

The train tracks formed one curving side of a triangle of railway land bordered by the school wall and by the back fences of the warehouses along Mafeking Road. The walls and fences were too high to climb, and so this inaccessible little bit of wilderness in the middle of crowded inner London had become an island of mystery to the kids of Camberwell Secondary. There were stories of valuable things buried there, of stolen goods thrown from trains, and of strange animals in hidden lairs. Adam’s mind often turned to these stories when he lay alone in bed at night, imagining himself a hero, penetrating the mysterious triangle and making a stupendous discovery.

Now the coppers were on the railway land, searching with sticks and metal detectors along the border against the school and garage where the girls were found. They must be looking for the killer’s gun, Adam thought, possibly thrown over the back wall. The sight of them filled him with anguish. Suppose those probing sticks, those powerful detectors, found something else, another prize, the great prize-his prize.

A train came rumbling around the bend from the Elephant and Castle direction, giving off vivid flashes of blue light where snow had drifted across the electric rail. In his nightly imaginings Adam had worked out a way of getting onto the triangle, in theory. In theory, because it would mean approaching from the other side of the tracks, and stepping over the high voltage electric rails that powered the trains. Adam shivered at the thought of that, imagining the treasure hunter turned to a cinder in a flash of blue.

Pemberton droned on, writing a formula with his squeaky marker, y=ax²+b, as if he could reduce the curve of the tracks, smooth and dangerous, to a few symbols on a board. From his desk by the window, Adam peered through his glasses at the undulating white landscape and was almost sure that he could make out the faint lines of fox trails converging on a darker patch, far beyond where the coppers were searching. He’d first spotted the foxes during a boring English lesson last year. This morning they’d have woken to find the entrance to their hide covered in snow, and if they’d dug themselves out and gone foraging they’d have left tracks that a hunter could follow back to their den, and to the trophies they might have hidden there, including, perhaps, the great prize. With a little glow he imagined the kudos, the respect, that would come to anyone who retrieved it. In his head he traced each stage of the journey he must make to reach it, replaying the various difficulties and the final triumph. He also imagined the awful possibility that the coppers would find it first.By the time the maths lesson came to an end, Adam had reached a decision. He couldn’t put it off. This was a day of awesome events. This time he would really have to do it.

He considered asking Jerry, his only real friend, to come along as a witness. But Jerry was clumsy, with big awkward feet. If you could picture anyone tripping over the third rail and going up in a ball of blue flame, it would be Jerry. So Adam decided to go alone, that afternoon, as soon as the cops had left.

When school finished Adam ignored the crowd gathering at the police tapes and hurried away down Cockpit Lane towards the footbridge over the railway. From up there he could see the straggling line of coppers leaving for the night, making their way back to the opening they’d made in the back fence to the Mafeking Road warehouses.Worried about the fading light, he ran across the bridge and up the lane on the other side until he found the gap he’d spotted in the fence, hidden now by a drift of snow so deep that he almost had to dig a tunnel to get to the other side. Then he was through, in forbidden territory, at the top of the railway embankment. Plunging down, he was shocked by the depth of the soft snow, up to his hips in places.When he reached the bottom he crouched for a while behind a clump of bushes, out of sight of a group of kids crossing on the footbridge. His heart was pounding, his body steaming inside his parka, his legs and feet soaking.

He waited until the footbridge was deserted and there was no sound of trains, then stood up straight and advanced across the ballast, stepping cleanly over the rails, one after the other. He was across. Exhilarated, he hurried on to the corner of the mysterious triangle, reaching it just in time to crouch at the bottom of the school wall as a train roared past. Ahead of him he could make out the hillock of snow he had seen from Mr Pemberton’s classroom, beyond which lay the fox trails. He made for it, falling flat as the snow collapsed into the mounds of dead bracken beneath. His glasses fell off and he groped blindly in panic until he found them and hauled himself upright and struggled on. There were the trails-paw prints-plain as anything, and the sweep of an animal’s tail across the surface. He reached the dark patch where they converged, and at first he was disappointed, seeing the snow scraped away to reveal a few twigs half-buried in the hard ground. But when he looked more closely he felt a rush of blood to his face. It wasn’t what he’d been looking for, but in its way it was a treasure even more fantastic. He grabbed hold of it, wrenched it from the ground, and stuffed it into his jacket pocket.

He wanted to go on, but the light was fading fast and he was trembling now with the cold. He had his prize, something that none of them could ignore, and it was enough. He turned and laboured back along the furrow he’d made towards the place where he’d crossed the railway tracks. There he paused to listen, his glasses misting up on his nose, then stepped carefully across the first steel rail, then the second. As he was about to cross the third, he was startled by a man’s shout from the footbridge overhead. ‘Oi!’ He froze for a moment, and his foot wavered over the electric rail, raised up on its ceramic insulators. A wet fold of cloth brushed its surface, and a great blow slammed Adam to the ground.

Detective Sergeant Kathy Kolla found herself standing next to a grizzled middle-aged man who looked as if he’d been up all night. He turned and spoke, interrupting himself with a hacking cough. ‘Morning. Bob McCulloch, DS, Lambeth CID.’

‘Hello, Bob. Kathy Kolla, DS, Serious Crime.’

‘Ah, you’re with Brock’s mob, are you?’

‘Yes.Know him?’They both glanced down to the far end of the bare space where Brock was standing with a group, his cropped white hair and beard making him look out of place among the sharp haircuts and suits of the younger men.

‘Not personally. My gaffer mentioned that Brock worked on this patch at one time.’

‘Did he? I didn’t know that.’ There wasn’t really a lot that she did know about Brock’s early career apart from the names of some of his more famous murder cases.

‘Long ago. Got out as soon as he could, I dare say. Three chief inspectors.’ Detective Sergeant McCulloch nodded towards the

group.‘Overkill,wouldn’t you say?’

‘Pressure?’ Kathy replied.

‘Politics. Three wise monkeys. And guess who’ll be left to clear up . . . This is my boss now.’

He fell silent as the local DCI called for their attention and introduced DCI Brock as senior investigating officer, and DCI Keith Savage from the Operation Trident team, a tough-looking character who glowered at them. It was over twenty-four hours since the two girls had been found here-their bodies had long since been removed for post-mortem examination and the scene of crime team finished with their examination of the place.

The DCI went on to describe the layout of the building and what had been discovered so far.

‘They were found lying together just here . . . Cause of death was a single gunshot to the head of each girl, probably nine millimetre. The pathologist says the girls took a beating before they were shot-there was bruising to their bodies and faces. No sign of sexual interference.’

Kathy was thumbing through the crime scene photos that were being passed around. The girls had been wearing almost identical dark jeans and tops, and grey dust was visible on their knees, as if they’d been made to kneel. From some angles they appeared peacefully asleep, from others brutally violated.

‘It looks as if the killers took some precautions to clean up after themselves. Two shots were fired but no cartridges have been found. Door handles were wiped clean and something, possibly a bit of cardboard, has been used to sweep footprints from the floor as well as from the snow outside. Judging by the state of the snow and the pathologist’s estimate we believe the time of death was between one and three on Friday morning.

‘We don’t know how long they’d been squatting in here. None of the neighbours admits to having been aware of them, but from the state of the place we think several days at least. There were empty cans of food and a carton of sour milk in that corner, and they had a kind of nest over there, with a single sleeping bag. There was no heating and, as you can imagine, it was very cold in here.

‘Both girls had extensive records of delinquency and crime- shoplifting, housebreaking, bag-snatching, joy-riding in stolen cars. They worked together, most recently in the robbery of a newsagent in Hendon. Their usual territory was North London, the Harlesden area, and we don’t know what they were doing south of the river. They were known drug users and we found a small quantity of crack cocaine in their pockets, along with a pipe. And that’s about as much as we have at present. We’re currently continuing with house-to-house interviews, of course.’

‘We won’t get anywhere with that,’ McCulloch murmured to Kathy.‘See and blind, hear and deaf-they still stick to the old rule around here. They’re scared witless by the Yardie boys, and who can blame them?’

‘Ballistics?’ Brock asked.

‘One bullet fragmented, the other intact but mangled. They say it’s uncertain they’ll be able to make a match.’

The DCI seemed pleased to be handing the case over to Brock, who talked about the next stages, in which his own and DS McCulloch’s teams would focus on the murders, while the Trident group worked on their intelligence sources and the wider pattern, especially the Harlesden connection.

As they emerged from the garage, a faint morning sun was trying to break through the heavy snow clouds. In one direction Cockpit Lane wound towards the distant spire of a church, the narrow commercial street blocked to traffic for most of its length by market stalls around which activity was beginning to stir.In the other direction, beyond the school and its deserted playground, uni

formed police were standing by a van parked at a bend in the road.

‘Yours?’Kathy asked McCulloch,who was pulling on his gloves.

‘Yes, and transport police most likely. You heard about our other little drama last night? One of the kids from the school took it into his stupid head to cross the railway tracks to get onto the wasteland that lies behind here.We think he saw us searching for the murder weapon and decided to do his own investigation. Trouble was he touched the live rail on his way over. He was lucky there was someone on the railway footbridge who saw him and phoned for help. Rush hour train services out of Blackfriars were disrupted for hours.’

‘Did he survive?’

‘Last I heard he was in a coma. The weird thing was that when they got him to hospital they found something very strange in his pocket.’

‘What was that?’

McCulloch paused-for effect, Kathy thought. ‘A human jawbone,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘Yes.We’ve no idea where it came from.We’re checking where he went down there.Want to take a look?’

They walked over to the group, some of whom were pulling on rubber boots. McCulloch spoke to one of them, and together they set off along the laneway leading to the footbridge. From the middle of the bridge they had a clear view down over the scene of the previous evening’s drama where the snow, lightly dusted by another fall during the night, was churned up all over the area where Adam Nightingale had made his crossing.

‘We think he came down the embankment over there,’ the officer pointed,‘and got part-way onto the wasteland.That’s what we’re looking at now.’

They saw two dark figures stooping over an area of trampled snow. One of them looked up and waved. A moment later the officer’s radio crackled. He listened for a moment then turned to McCulloch. ‘They think they’ve found something, Skip. Maybe you should see for yourself. You’ll need boots.’

They got them from the van, then followed the uniformed man through the hole that the rescue team had cut in the fence and climbed down to the side of the tracks. They tramped along the edge of the ballast, breath steaming in the cold air, then turned into the waste ground along a path trampled in the snow. The two men ahead looked up and moved to make space for them to see what they’d found. At first Kathy thought it was just a piece of smooth grey stone buried among the debris of frozen leaves and earth. Then she made out a pattern of dark lines wriggling across its surface, very like the suture lines on the dome of an old skull. McCulloch squatted down and swept loose material away, then stopped and sat back on his haunches. Two eye sockets stared up at them from the frozen ground.

‘Well,’ he grunted and brushed off another lump of dirt, exposing a small neat hole punched through the forehead.

‘Well, well.’ He looked at Kathy and said,‘Your boss’ll love this.’

Actually it was hard to make out what Brock’s reaction was to the find. He came straight away to see for himself, and dismissed McCulloch’s suggestion that they might hand it over to someone else to deal with. Instead, he arranged for DI Bren Gurney to come down from Queen Anne’s Gate to take charge of the site, and insisted that Dr Mehta, the forensic pathologist working on the two murdered girls, should also deal with this case. ‘Keeps things simple,’he said.‘Don’t want anyone else under our feet.’

Kathy, meanwhile, made her way back along Cockpit Lane to the local police station, where McCulloch had arranged facilities for the investigation.As she came to the area closed off to traffic for the markets,she heard a loud throbbing bass rhythm behind her and turned to see an electric-blue Peugeot convertible approaching. The front window slid down, ragga music booming out, and a beefy brown arm followed, draped with a large assortment of gold jewellery. The hand formed itself into the shape of a pistol, aimed at a young man tending the first of the stalls, who gave a quick flash of bright white teeth before the car roared away down a side street.

The goods on sale in the market were cheap and cheerful, the kind of things that a poor neighbourhood most needed-children’s shoes and clothes, toiletries, parkas, CDs, plastic buckets, cutlery, gloves, small electrical appliances. Almost all the customers were West Indian,the traders too,rubbing their hands and stamping their feet to keep warm as they spruiked their goods. As Kathy threaded through the crowded stalls she felt people looking at her. She wondered if they knew she was police, or if it was just the physical difference, her pale skin and blonde hair, an ashen northerner in a snow-bound Caribbean market.

She took the right fork where Cockpit Lane divided in front of the church of St Barnabas, and after a couple of blocks came to the police station, where she made some phone calls and picked up a car. An hour later she was in North London, at the offices of the Youth Justice Board with whom Dana and Dee-Ann had been registered.

She was met by a male senior manager and a younger woman, who was a Youth Offending Teams caseworker. The man wasn’t familiar with the murdered girls and Kathy suspected he was primarily there to protect his department from fallout. He told her that Dana and Dee-Ann had shared the same designated YOT manager, who was currently on maternity leave. Their deputising manager was also absent, on stress leave. Mandy, by his side, on secondment to the YOT from the National Probation Service, looked barely older than the two victims but had worked with them in the past and was, the man assured Kathy, very conversant with their cases.

The two spoke to each other in a professional private language that Kathy didn’t altogether follow, full of acronyms and special meanings, and she had to ask them to elaborate so that she could take notes. It seemed that between them, Dana and Dee-Ann had pretty well covered the full gamut of custodial and noncustodial sentences, community orders and programs available to the courts. They’d been ASROd and OSAPd, undergone Anger Replacement Training and Personal Reduction in Substance Misuse counselling, been curfewed, locked up and paroled. After the last breach, Mandy explained, the YOT had recommended electronic tagging, but the magistrate had instead put them on the Think First program, from which they’d promptly absconded. They had been missing now for three weeks and an arrest order had been issued.

Satisfied that Kathy seemed sufficiently baffled, the man told her apologetically that he had other business to attend to, but said that Mandy could fill in the details. He made Kathy promise that if there were any residual issues she would email him immediately. After the door closed behind him, Mandy was silent for a moment,then she said,‘I’ve never seen him in here on a Saturday before. Do you fancy a cup of coffee?’

‘I’m dying for one,’ Kathy said.

‘There’s nothing in here, but there’s a decent caf across the street.’

The place was bustling with shoppers taking a break.

‘Nothing worked,’ Mandy said.

‘What was their background?’

‘Oh, you know-abusive families, dysfunctional peer groups, disadvantaged neighbourhoods. They first met when they were fourteen, and they would say it was the first good thing that ever happened to either of them. Apart they were desperate, together they became like two different people,a bonded pair,almost a single personality.I hadn’t come across anything quite like that before.For a while they might be docile, completely absorbed in each other’s company, whispering secrets, but then they’d wind each other up, get into a kind of hysteria, and do crazy, stupid, dangerous things together. So then we decided to separate them, keep them apart. Dana immediately became violent and aggressive, while Dee-Ann went into decline, self-harming and then attempting suicide. So we gave up and put them back together again.

‘They were totally infuriating,destructive apart,manic together, uncontrollable either way. But when they were together they could also be full of fun and life, good with the other kids. They loved music and dancing. I’m really sad at what happened to them.’

‘Yes. Do you have any idea what they were doing south of the river?’

‘That was the first thing I wondered when I heard. I looked through their files. All I could find was the address of a cousin of Dee-Ann’s.I checked it on the map.It’s quite close to Cockpit Lane.’

‘Right.’ Kathy noted the details. ‘Any thoughts about who could have got so mad at them, to kill them like that?’

‘What, apart from the whole of our department? They could get anyone mad without trying. And there were the drugs, of course. They took terrible risks.’

‘Anything specific?’

‘They did get in trouble with the local bad boys around here, I know. One time they came looking for the girls in their hostel, and the police had to be called. I wasn’t involved, but it’ll all be on the police files.’

The woman’s face was young, pretty and fearful, peering around the door.‘What is it you want?’ she whispered, barely audible over the insistent blare of the TV inside the flat. Reluctantly she let Kathy in. A small boy on the sofa barely gave them a glance before returning his attention to the screen. He gave a sudden chuckle at the sound of a cartoon animal shrieking in pain.‘Come through,’ the woman said, and led her into a tiny kitchen barely big enough to contain them. She closed the door against the din.

‘You know why I’m here, don’t you, Rosie?’

The young woman reached for a box of tissues and wiped her eyes. She nodded her head.

‘I can arrange for someone to call, to talk to you, if you like. Were you very fond of Dee-Ann?’

Rosie stopped sniffing at that. She frowned and shook her head abruptly.‘No. I hadn’t seen her since she was little. At first I was glad to see her again. I said they could stay for a while.’

‘Did she say why she wanted to come down here?’

‘I guessed . . .She didn’t spell it out,but I guessed she’d got into trouble in Harlesden and wanted to keep out of somebody’s way.’

‘Any idea who?’

Rosie shook her head.‘I really didn’t want to know.’

‘Okay. So what happened?’

‘She came with her friend, Dana. It was a bit crowded, but we got on all right at first. They were nice to Jaryd, my little boy, and we had a bit of a laugh. I took them down the club and we had a good time.’

‘When was this?’

‘Maybe two weeks ago?’

‘And which club was that?’

‘The JOS.’

‘J-O-S?’

‘The Jamaica Omnibus Service. That’s just its name, in Cove Street.Anyway,they stayed here for a few days.Then one afternoon I came back from work and found them in the room there, all doped up. I knew what it was from the smell, and there was this dirty glass pipe on the floor. My Jaryd was sitting next to them, watching telly like now.I went ballistic.I said,You’re smoking crack in my flat and my little boy is breathing it in! They just giggled. I was really mad. I grabbed their stuff and threw it out the window, then I kicked them both out. I couldn’t have them here after that.’

‘Did you see them again?’

‘The next Saturday night, at the JOS. But I looked away. I didn’t want to have anything to do with them.’

‘Were they with anyone there?’

Rosie blinked. Her mouth opened, then closed again. It was the look of someone who had realised that the path she’d been following had taken her to a place she didn’t want to be.

‘I don’t know.’

‘Come on, Rosie. Just a name.’

‘No, sorry.’

‘You’d best tell me. I don’t want to make things difficult for you, but we’ll have to go to the station and get you to give a proper statement.’

Rosie just looked at her.‘Who’d take care of Jaryd?’

‘We’ll get someone to look after him while we talk.’

‘No, I mean later.Who’ll take care of him when I’m dead?’

Kathy looked at her carefully and saw that she meant it.‘Well, Rosie, the thing is, I won’t go away without a name. There must have been other people there. One of them might talk to us.’

Rosie took a deep breath. ‘I think I saw them talking to one of the band, George Murray.’

‘Where can I find him?’

‘He lives on Cockpit Lane with Winnie Wellington- everyone knows her. But don’t tell him . . .’

‘I won’t say a word. Thank you.’

From the other room there came the sound of something falling over, with the unmistakeable thump of real life, rather than TV babble. Rosie jumped to her feet and Kathy left her to it.

She returned to her car and put a call through to Brock, telling him what she’d learned. She heard him discussing it with someone else, McCulloch perhaps, repeating the names, then he came back on.

‘Come and pick me up, Kathy,’ he said. ‘We’ll visit George Murray together.’

She drove through the winding streets, congested now with Saturday traffic, and spotted Brock waiting at the kerb outside the police station, a big man in a long black coat around whom pedestrians were making a wide detour. ‘Where are we going?’ she asked.

‘The far end of Cockpit Lane. Winnie Wellington, eh? Who would have guessed she’d still be around . . .’ He seemed lost in thought, staring out of the window.

‘You know her?’

‘Oh yes. The Tinker Queen of Cockpit Lane. A character.’

‘Bob McCulloch was telling me that you used to work here once.’

‘Did he? How did he know that, I wonder?’

‘He said his DCI told him.’

‘Really? Well, yes, I did, ages ago. It feels odd coming back. Like meeting an old friend again after a very long time, trying to square what you see with what you remember. The place doesn’t seem to have changed much, though.’

‘Bob thought you must have got out as soon as you could.’

‘No, it wasn’t really like that. I came a sergeant and left an inspector, so I suppose it couldn’t have been that bad.’

Maybe it’ll rub off on me then, Kathy thought.

She turned into the Lane opposite the school. Parking was difficult with so many visitors to the market and she stopped on a double yellow line behind the police van near the railway footbridge.

‘Bren should be here by now,’Brock said,as they went out onto the bridge to watch the activity below. They made him out talking to a group of scene of crime officers,while uniformed men in boots stood waiting nearby, stamping their feet in the snow.

‘What do you think it is?’ Kathy asked.‘If it wasn’t for the hole in the forehead I’d have said it was ancient.’

‘We won’t know until Sundeep Mehta’s had a look.’

‘But in any case, it’s nothing to do with Dana and Dee-Ann, surely?’

‘If their killer did throw the gun onto that land, I want to know about it. The boy’s still in a coma, apparently. I’d like to talk to him, find out what he thought he was doing. Maybe he saw something.’

They turned back to Cockpit Lane and made their way past the school towards the market, in full swing now, people cramming into the narrow aisle between the stalls. Brock pointed to an elderly woman at the first stall, her brown face crowned by a halo of fine grey crinkled hair.

‘That’s Winnie. She’s been selling pots and pans here for years. She seemed old when I was here. I’m amazed she’s still at it-and firing on all cylinders, too, by the look of her.’

They watched as she called to passers-by in a high, piercing voice, then turned to scold the same young man Kathy had seen at the stall earlier, who stood with head bowed, unhappily kicking at the metal frame.When Brock stopped in front of them the old lady abruptly cut off the angry flow and smiled sweetly at him.

‘What can I do for you, sir? A nice set of stainless steel pots for dat wife of yours?’ She snatched up a frying pan and brandished it at him.‘You won’t see prices like this in Woolworths,I can tell you.’

‘I’m sure you’re right.Winnie Wellington,isn’t it?’

She lowered the pan and squinted first at Brock, then at Kathy, with fierce probing eyes.‘Are you Witnesses? Because we’re good Catholics here . . .’

Brock shook his head and showed her his warrant card.

‘Coppers? I wouldn’t have thought dat-it’s the beard, I s’pose. Coppers don’t usually have beards.Well, there was one I remember, long ago. I used to tell him, if you want to get on you’d best cut off the beard.Dey don’want no Rastas in Scotland Yard.’Her face split in a laugh.

‘I think that was me,Winnie.Twenty-odd years ago.’

‘Is dat right? Oh my! But your beard is white now, like my hair. Are you taking this young lady down memory lane? Maybe she’s your daughter?’

‘We work together.’

‘Another copper? Well, there’s been some improvements in twenty years, at least.’ She winked at Kathy, then her face became serious. ‘I don’t suppose I need to ask what brings you back to Cockpit Lane. Those poor girls?’

‘That’s right.We’d like to talk to both of you,Winnie.’

The lad at her side frowned and eased back, and for a moment Kathy thought he might bolt.

‘It’s Saturday market!’Winnie complained.‘My busiest day.’

‘And this is murder. Let’s go into the shop. It won’t take long.’

She shrugged and had a word to the stallholder next to her, then led them towards the door of the shop behind her stall. The sign over the front window read WELLINGTON’S UTENSILS EST. 1930. Seeing Kathy look up at it Winnie said, ‘I’m not that old. My daddy started the business in Trench Town, in Kingston, and then brought it here, and I took it over from him.’

‘You’ve been here a long time, have you,Winnie?’

‘We came over in 1948 on the Empire Windrush, the first boatload from Jamaica.’

The front shop had every imaginable metal container stacked on the bare wooden floorboards, shelves and counter-shiny saucepans, galvanised laundry tubs, zinc washboards, colanders, hip baths, watering cans. They stood surrounded by them, like grey ghosts,as Winnie closed the door and said,‘Well,how can we help you?’

Brock handed them photographs of the two murdered girls, taken from their police records. Kathy saw George’s sulky indifference falter for a second.

‘This is dem, is it?’ Winnie said. ‘So young. Ah haven’t seen dem before.You, George?’

‘Dunno. I may have seen ’em around.’

‘Where exactly?’

‘I can’t remember.’

‘You play in a group at the JOS, don’t you, George?’ Kathy asked.

He blinked.‘Yeah, so what?’

‘George?’ Winnie was peering at his face suspiciously. ‘What do you know about this?’

‘Nothin’. I don’t know nothin’.’

Brock turned to Winnie.‘Are you two related?’

‘No, George works for me on the stall, and rents a room upstairs. He’s a good boy, Mr Brock.’ She put out a hand to touch George’s arm but he flinched and pulled away.

‘Are you from around here, George?’

‘Kensal Green.’

‘Not far from Harlesden, where these two girls came from. You do know them, don’t you?’

‘I’ve seen ’em down the club, that’s all,’ he protested, ‘but I don’t know nothin’ about them.’

‘They liked your music, didn’t they?’ Kathy said.

‘Yeah, they liked good music.’

‘So who else did they meet there? Who bought their drinks?’

‘I don’t know. I’ve no idea.’

‘George, you tell the truth now!’Winnie sounded alarmed.

‘It is the truth!’

‘Oh no it’s not. I know when you tell me lies. I can read it on your face.’

Still George refused to say any more, so Brock said, ‘I’d like to have a look at your room, George. Would that be all right with you?’

‘No!’George yelped.‘It’s not all right with me.’

‘We can sit here and wait for a search warrant, but it would be a lot better if you did it voluntarily.’

‘George!’ Winnie admonished, and his shoulders sagged. He shook his head resignedly and said,‘You do what you want.’

‘Thanks,’Brock said.‘Will you lead the way,Winnie? I’d like you to be present too.’

‘Don’t you worry,’ the little woman said fiercely, heading around the end of the counter towards a flight of stairs at the back of the shop.

They climbed past the next floor and up to the attic, where George led the way into his room beneath the slope of the roof. A dormer window was cracked open, despite the cold. Winnie switched on an overhead light and Kathy looked around, surprised at the neatness. She thought that anyone conducting a sudden search of her flat would find it a good deal more untidy than this. There was a keyboard and some CDs and sound equipment on a table near the window, and posters and notices stuck to the walls. Some were printed and others handmade with felt pens on coloured paper, like mock-ups for the printer. On one of these she read:

War amongs’ the rebels,

Madness, madness, war.

George saw her studying it and, when she caught his eye, he said truculently,‘Linton Kwesi Johnson,yeah?’

She turned her attention to other posters with various versions of the name Black Troika.‘Is that your group?’

He nodded.‘Yeah.’

Brock, meanwhile, had slipped on latex gloves and was making a rapid search of the corners of the room. At one point he pulled a small pouch of marijuana from behind a pile of CDs, glanced over at George, then put it back again.

‘All right,’ he said at last.‘We’ll be on our way.’

Winnie said,‘You see? He’s not a bad boy.’ She seemed to have collected her thoughts as she went up to Brock.‘You let him go, Mr Brock. It’s Saturday, I need him to run my stall. I’ll tell you who’s behind any trouble around here. Everybody knows.’ She formed a contemptuous curl of her lip. ‘It’s Mister Teddy Vexx, dat’s who it is.’

‘Winnie!’ George said sharply. ‘She don’t know what she’s talkin’ about.’

‘What’s Mr Vexx up to,Winnie?’ Brock asked.

‘Anythin’ and everythin’ crooked. You want to know about drugs?’

‘Winnie!’ George cried again, sounding in pain.

‘You want to know about guns?’

‘I didn’t mention his name, okay?’ George said desperately. ‘You can’t say I did.’

‘Dat’s all I’m goin’to say.’Winnie folded her arms.‘You’ve got the wrong boy here, Mr Brock. Mr Teddy Vexx is the one you want to speak to.’

They made their way back out to the street, and Brock thanked them for their cooperation, which Winnie, at least, graciously acknowledged.

As they tramped back to the car, Kathy’s phone rang. She put it to her ear and heard a familiar voice. ‘Kathy? It’s Tom, Tom Reeves.’

She was startled to hear from him again, and stopped and turned quickly away from Brock, who carried on walking.

‘Tom?’

‘Hi.’ She sensed him registering the caution in her voice. ‘Bad time?’

‘I’m at work.You’re back?’ The banal words seemed absurd.

‘Yes. I’d like to catch up.’

She couldn’t think what to say. Or rather she could think of too many things to say and so said nothing.

‘Can I buy you dinner tonight?’

‘Sorry,’ she said.‘Not tonight.’

‘Ah . . . Another time?’

She saw Brock reach their car up ahead. ‘All right. Give me your number and I’ll call you.’ She didn’t think she would, but she wrote it down anyway.‘Got to go now.’ She hung up and took a deep breath before hurrying on to let Brock into the car, feeling the burn in her cheeks, though he seemed oblivious.

As they drove slowly back through the crowded streets, Kathy gazed out at the drab little brick terraces sliding past and tried to decide how she felt about DI Tom Reeves. How long had it been? Seven weeks, she calculated, since he had disappeared. They had met the previous October when she and Brock were working on the abduction of a child from Northcote Square in an artists’ quarter of the East End. Tom had been on protection duties at that time, escorting a judge whose life had been threatened and who came regularly to a studio in the square to have his portrait painted. Their paths had crossed, and when the case was over Kathy and Tom had gone out a few times together. He knew the detective boyfriend of Kathy’s friend Nicole Palmer, and they had made a foursome to a concert, and gone to Nicole’s birthday party together. Tom was good company, widely read and witty, but Kathy was also aware of how skilled he was at avoiding giving away information about himself,something she put down to his being in Special Branch. She knew he was thirty-six, and divorced, and assumed from his accent that he was a Londoner-and that was almost all.

He had mentioned that he had no plans for Christmas, and Kathy had caught herself actually looking forward to the break for a change. Then one December day she’d found a message on her answering machine. Something had come up and he had to go away for a while. After a couple of attempts to reach him she’d stopped trying, because she’d been down this road before, with another Special Branch officer who had vanished in the same way. In that case she’d discovered later that they’d changed his name, his address and his phone number, and she’d assumed something similar had happened to Tom. She’d told herself that she should have known better, and got on with her life.

She swung the car through the security gates at the back of the police station and switched off the engine.

‘Teddy Vexx is known to us,’ DCI Savage said.‘He and another local, Jay Crocker, have been in Trident’s sights for some time. I was going to mention him as a possibility.’

They were seated at tables arranged in a square in the centre of the large room they’d been given in the local police station. A couple of computers and phone lines had been rigged on a bench along one wall, and on the opposite side a borough street map and crime scene photographs had been pinned up.

‘You know them, Bob?’ Brock turned to DS McCulloch.

‘Oh yes, we know them,’ McCulloch nodded. ‘They’re both bad boys with plenty of form. Vexx is the big shot. He’s connected with the JOS club in some way-part owner, I think. He owns other businesses, too.’

Savage was interested.‘What sort of businesses?’

‘A laundrette on Cove Street that his mother runs, and a tyre yard and repair shop in the lane behind.We’ve long suspected him of selling drugs through the laundrette and recycling stolen cars through the repair shop, maybe a crack laboratory somewhere too, but never been able to get the evidence. He scares people. Nobody wants to talk about Teddy Vexx.’

‘Hm.’ Savage tapped his pen on the table in front of him, thinking.‘Sounds like he needs stirring up.Of course,we could be barking up the wrong tree. It looks as if the girls were on the run from people back in Harlesden,and the odds are those people finally caught up with them down here.Maybe they got Vexx’s help,maybe not.Funny thing is,it doesn’t have the feel of a Yardie killing.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Your classic Yardie murder has a spontaneous feel, all sudden violence in the heat of the moment, even when it’s been preplanned.A drive-by shooting,a shotgun blast through a car window, a burst of fire in a crowded nightclub . . . This seems more drawn out and deliberate.’

‘Hell,’ McCulloch protested,‘the crack, the guns . . .’

‘Yeah, I know. Maybe they were trying to get something from the girls before they killed them. Anyway, people are upset, they want to see some response and soon, and if we can use the opportunity to put pressure on some local bad lads, so much the better.’

They were making an effort at team building, Brock knew, getting to know each other, but their interests were very different. McCulloch would be under pressure to put a blanket over the spotlight of publicity that had been turned on their patch, while Savage was more concerned with broader things, networks and connections beyond the borough. And what was his own interest? To get out of here as soon as possible? He had been less than open with Kathy about his feelings for this place. Cockpit Lane. He had been startled by the intensity of the memories it evoked, powerful feelings he’d long ago locked up tight.

The phone rang and McCulloch reached for it.‘What,now?’ He grimaced and covered the mouthpiece as he turned to Brock. ‘Chief, Michael Grant, local Member of Parliament; he’s downstairs, wants to say hello.’

Savage groaned.

‘All right,’ Brock said.‘I’ll be interested to meet him. Can they bring him up?’

‘Time for a sermon,’ Savage said.

‘You know him, Keith?’

‘Only too well. He’s a member of our Independent Advisory Group. He tells us how to do our jobs.’

McCulloch hurriedly tidied away the remains of their sandwiches. There was a knock at the door and a woman officer showed in the MP. Kathy recognised him from TV, his face lively and intelligent, dressed casually in jeans and a padded jacket.

‘Keith!’ he cried, advancing on Savage with outstretched hand.

‘Michael, great to see you. Let me introduce you to some of the key people in our team. DCI Brock from Special Operations is our SIO, and his colleague DS Kathy Kolla.You may have met Bob McCulloch from local area command, and some of my colleagues from Trident.’

Grant shook their hands warmly.

‘I was just telling them that you’re an invaluable member of our Trident IAG.’

‘He means I’m a pain in the bum,’ Grant said with a smile. He looked around the room and said,‘So, where are the battle plans? I expected great charts with arrows and pincer movements, like the Battle of Stalingrad.’

‘Ah, it’s all done on computers now, Michael. Anyway, this is just our local outpost.’

‘But this is a local problem, Keith. This is where the people are dying.’ He turned to Brock, the bantering tone gone from his voice.‘Not always in as dramatic a fashion as Dana and Dee-Ann, perhaps. Usually it’s an overdose among the dustbins in the back lane, choking on their own vomit, but they’re dying all the same, more quietly, more anonymously, without attracting the attention of Special Operations.’

Kathy wasn’t sure if he was being hostile or just challenging.

Grant went on.‘That’s why we have to strike while people are focused on this local problem.’

‘We shall strike,’ Brock assured him, ‘when we have the evidence. That’s what we’re concentrating on at present, Mr Grant. Don’t worry, we’ll find it.’

‘I admire your confidence.’ Grant held his gaze for a moment, assessing him.

‘We’ve been discussing that very point,’Savage broke in.‘Seizing the moment. And we’re also mindful that the central problem here is the same, whether it’s these two girls or the anonymous body in the alley. It’s drugs.’

‘Actually the central problem isn’t drugs,’ Grant said. ‘The central problem is greed. The drugs are only the means to an end. This is about the exploitation of the weak by the strong, of the poor by the greedy. Don’t you forget that, Keith.’ He held up an admonishing finger.‘Don’t you come to me at the end of the day with a few miserable black junkies locked up in gaol and tell me you’ve done your job.’

‘Point taken, Michael.’

‘Well, I won’t hold you up. Maybe next time I’ll get to see the battle plans. Glad to meet you all. Good hunting.’

After the door closed behind him, Savage let out a deep sigh and murmured,‘That’s what I meant about the sermon.We get it all the time.’

McCulloch snorted.

‘Could you interpret for us, Keith?’ Brock asked.

‘Michael Grant believes that the drug trade in this area is controlled not by the Yardies or the home-grown black gangs,but by white organised criminals who use the black locals as cannon fodder. It makes him feel better. It isn’t blacks shamefully fouling their own nest, it’s the old story of whites brutally exploiting helpless blacks for economic gain.’

‘And he’s wrong?’

‘We have found absolutely no basis for his belief.’

‘Does he say who these whites are?’

‘He has made allegations, yes.’

‘Mind telling me?’

‘Principally a family called Roach. They used to operate out of Cockpit Lane in the old days, had a bit of a reputation for hard dealing and long firm fraud. They moved out a long time ago and became respectable, but Grant is convinced they’ve still got their grip on the place. Right, Bob? He must have bent your DCI’s ear.’

‘So I’m told.’

‘It makes no sense,’ Savage went on.‘What would be in it for the Jamaicans? They’ve got their own network of mules bringing the cocaine in, their own crack factories to process it, and their own dealers. That’s how it works.’

‘I know of the Roach family,’ Brock said. ‘They were very active around here years ago, but I haven’t heard anything recently. You, Bob?’

McCulloch shook his head.

‘All right,’ Brock went on, ‘let’s deal with immediate things. What were those girls doing around here for the past two or three weeks? They must have left tracks.’

‘The JOS club?’

‘Yes. And if they were there on two consecutive Saturdays then tonight is the best time to talk to its patrons.’

‘And that’s in Cove Street too?’ Savage said.

McCulloch nodded.‘Just up the street from the laundrette.’

‘Why don’t Bob and I go and take a look?’ Savage suggested. ‘You can give me a tour of the neighbourhood, Bob.’

Brock nodded and watched them go, rubbing the side of his beard thoughtfully,and said to Kathy,‘Too many speculations,too few facts.’ Then, as if in response, his mobile rang. It was Dr Mehta, the forensic pathologist. Brock listened, then got to his feet.‘Come on, Sundeep wants to see us.’

Dr Mehta was standing beside the stainless-steel table on which his assistant was working on Dee-Ann’s corpse, swiftly sewing the flaps of skin together again. Behind him, Dana lay on another table.

‘You don’t look happy, Sundeep,’ Brock said.

‘I’ll tell you, Brock, I have a bad feeling about this one.’ He looked down at the girl’s face as the technician eased it back into position over her skull.‘There are bruises all over her,and look at her knees . . .’

They looked, the skin grazed and torn.

‘I noticed that the knees of their jeans were caked with dust,’ Kathy said.

‘That’s right. It looks as if they were made to crawl around.’

Kathy had never seen Dr Mehta so agitated about one of his ‘clients’, as he sometimes called them. She had never previously seen him show any distress at all.

‘I noticed traces of adhesive around their mouths, and two balled-up pieces of tape were found near them,the same tape as was used to tie their wrists, so I assume they were gagged at first, then at some point the gags were ripped off.’He went over to a side bench.

‘Adhering to one of the pieces of tape I found this . . .’

He held up a test tube in which lay a single coiled black hair.

‘It’s not theirs. I also found traces of semen on the tape. I’ve taken swabs of both of their mouths and faces, but I think only one of them was assaulted. This one . . .’ He pointed at Dee-Ann. ‘He forced her to perform oral sex on him before he killed her, Brock. That’s what I’m concluding.’

There was silence for a moment,then Brock said,‘Make sure, Sundeep. I want his DNA. As soon as you can.’

‘Is there someone we should be looking to match it to?’

‘Possibly.We should have his profile on record. I’ll get it sent to you.’

‘Oh,’Mehta called after them as they made to leave.‘I’m told you’re interested in this.’ He pointed to another table on which lay an assortment of grubby bones.

‘The schoolboy’s find?’

‘That’s it. The jaw belongs with the skull, all right.’

‘Can you tell us anything?’

‘Adult victim, single shot to the head, probably nine millimetre too, like the girls, but long, long ago. Lots of tests to do, but I’d guess it’s been there at least ten years. They’re finding bits all the time. Maybe tell you more on Monday.’

‘Many thanks.’

They returned to Lambeth police station to find Savage and McCulloch sticking photographs on the wall. Others had been pinning up maps and aerial photographs of the area around Cockpit Lane and Cove Street.When Savage spoke he seemed enthusiastic.

‘The tyre yard looks abandoned-’, he pointed to photos of an archway formed from old truck tyres and a faded sign, PART WORN TYRES, ‘but the building behind has had a lot of recent work: razor ribbon along the eaves . . . security cameras . . . heavy steel doors.Whatever they’re doing in there is obviously worth a heap of protection. This is the laundrette, a unit in a row of shops with flats above. And this is the house, two streets away, where Vexx lives with his mother.’

McCulloch pointed to a photo of Vexx himself. ‘A mean-looking bastard, six-two, eighteen stone, a serious bodybuilder with a taste for violence.’

The picture reminded Kathy of the thick brown arm at the window of the blue Peugeot she’d seen cruising past Winnie Wellington’s stall.

‘What I’m thinking,’ Savage came in,‘is that we could use an information-gathering exercise at the JOS club, as Brock suggested, as a cover to put people in position for a raid on Vexx’s properties in the early hours tonight.’

There was a surprised silence, then several people began speaking at once. The difficulties of mounting an effective operation at such short notice bothered some, especially Savage’s own Trident team, who were accustomed to working with detailed intelligence and painstaking planning.

‘Will we get a warrant?’ one asked, and Savage replied grimly, ‘Leave that to me.’

‘We need to place Vexx in the vicinity of the murders on that night,’ someone else suggested.‘We need to find witnesses.’

‘And by the time we’ve done that he’ll know we’re onto him,’ Savage countered.‘We’ve got to move fast, hit hard.’

Brock spoke. ‘There is another possibility,’ he said, and told them what the pathologist had discovered. ‘Dr Mehta should be able to tell us if we have a match by Monday,’ Brock said. ‘We should wait till we have that before we move on Vexx.’

‘You heard Michael Grant, Brock,’ Savage snapped back. ‘People want action and Saturday night is the best time. As you said yourself, that’s when the girls visited the JOS.’

He read the doubt on Brock’s face and added, ‘If you prefer, we can mount this as a separate Trident operation.’

Kathy caught a small smile on McCulloch’s mouth and remembered his comment when she first met him, about politics.

Brock said firmly, ‘No, we won’t split our forces. If we do it, we do it together. Let’s take a closer look.’

They gathered round and began to see how it might be done, and gradually it did begin to seem not only possible but even necessary, to break the silence surrounding Vexx’s activities and the deaths of the two girls. Then McCulloch took a call from one of his detectives. There were no CCTV cameras in Cockpit Lane itself, but a traffic camera on the main road two hundred yards away had recorded a Peugeot registered to Vexx at twelve forty-eight a.m. on Friday morning.

‘Gotcha,’ said Savage.

Once the decision was taken, things happened quickly and comparatively smoothly. More people were drafted in, the team broken down into task groups, detailed maps and photos assembled and observers sent out to watch and report on the various locations. By evening, enough had been achieved for most people to be sent home for a few hours’ break. Kathy caught the tube to Finchley Central and walked back through the cold streets to her flat, where she ran a bath and defrosted a lasagne from the freezer. Later, she looked out from her twelfth-floor window at the headlights on the streets below, people heading for a Saturday night out, and remembered Tom Reeves. She didn’t call, but watched TV for a while, then pulled on her coat, feeling the knot of anticipation in her stomach.

She joined the others arriving at the station just before midnight, greeting each other with croaky murmurs and wintry coughs.After she’d changed into overalls and boots and a protective vest, she took her place in the queue to be issued with her Glock pistol.With mugs of tea and chocolate bars they assembled for their final briefing from Brock and Savage, both of them precise, confident and apparently relaxed. There had been no sign of activity at the tyre yard or repair shop,the laundrette had now closed for the night,and Vexx’s mother was said to have watched TV alone in the living room of her house until ten, when she’d gone to bed. Vexx had been seen at the JOS club, where he usually spent his Saturday nights, but had just been reported as having left and gone home, unaccompanied.

Then they were making their way down to the transport, clustering into their groups-the rooftop snipers, the dog-handlers, the paramedics, the cameramen, the heavy squads laden with battering rams and bolt-cutters.

Kathy had been assigned to the house. The van drove down Cove Street, past the club booming with sound and activity, then the darkened laundrette, and turned into the back streets. It drew to a halt at the end of a narrow lane and two of the men got out. There was a large dog in the backyard, they knew, as in most of the yards around here and Kathy was glad she was going in through the front. As the van continued around the corner into the street they saw Vexx’s Peugeot 307 standing at the kerb.

A sharp crack and the front door slammed inward. Kathy and two others ran upstairs. They found Vexx’s mother asleep in bed in the front room, the other two bedrooms empty. The two men continued up to the attic floor while Kathy waited, tense, on the landing, pistol gripped in both hands, straining for telltale sounds. But she didn’t hear the bathroom door open behind her, and gave a spasmic jump when a deep voice at her ear murmured,‘Lookin’ for me, darlin’?’

She turned to see Mr Teddy Vexx, all 252 naked pounds of him, towering inches away, wearing nothing but an assortment

of gold chains around his neck.

‘Christ!’ She hopped back, bringing up the gun.

‘Yeah,’he said softly.‘The little girls were impressed too.’

As they led him downstairs to the van, now dressed, the first reports started coming in over the radio from the other sites, of empty rooms and deserted buildings. Even the dogs had disappeared.

The returning teams made no attempt to hide their frustration, banging their equipment and kicking their boots. The adrenaline was still fizzing and it had nowhere to go. Tools and weapons were locked away again with a niggling sense of anticlimax. Vexx, too, was locked away, the sole arrest of the night. Only the drug sniffer dogs, snuffling in the corners of the deserted repair shop behind the tyre yard, gave grounds for hope, and forensic teams had moved in.

There was nothing for the rest of them to do and they began to drift away. Kathy finished her paperwork for Vexx’s arrest and handed it in to the duty inspector, feeling raw and edgy. She returned home and went to bed, but found it impossible to sleep.

She felt lousy the next morning. Thinking fresh air might help, she tramped out through the snow to buy a paper, then ordered toast and coffee in an empty cafe. Her mind flicked back to Vexx, stark naked, and his jibe about the girls. He’d been trying to rile her, of course, and he’d succeeded, though he wouldn’t be smiling if they made the DNA match.

On impulse she dug out the cheque stub on which she’d written Tom Reeves’s number and dialled it.

His voice was a mumble, as if he’d just woken up, and for a horrible moment she thought she must have caught him in bed with someone. Then he apologised and said he’d had a mouthful of muesli.

‘I just wondered if you were free for lunch?’ she said.

He seemed keen, and they arranged to meet at a pub they’d visited together once before, in Camden Town.

Her doubts eased a little when she saw him come through the door,tall,confident,the dark hair swept back,the warm smile in his eyes as he spotted her.He came over and kissed her cheek and asked how she was. She’d already finished one glass of wine and he went to the bar to fetch a bottle,then sat opposite her and began to make small talk in that easy voice of his. The wine helped a little, but she still felt edgy and out of kilter. Eventually he asked her what was wrong and she told him about the previous night. He listened intently,then nodded and said,‘Oh,Kathy,I understand.’She looked up from the beer mat she’d been scouring with her nail and saw that he really did-he’d been through similar things so many times him-self-and a weight lifted from her. He asked some questions and they talked it through some more and when he went to pick up the food she did feel much better. She told herself it was the wine.

When he returned he said, ‘Interesting, the Jamaican thing. Have you ever been there?’

‘To Jamaica? No.You?’

He nodded.‘Yeah,with the Branch.In fact,I had thought about trying to get onto the Trident team. I’ve met one or two of them.’

‘You still want to get out of Special Branch?’

‘Yeah. This last thing was the end. And I’m really sorry about how it must have seemed to you,disappearing without notice,without explanation. I don’t want to live like that, Kathy. I want out.’

‘Was it bad?’

‘Actually it was fairly routine. I think I was being tested, to see if I could go back to undercover duties, but it didn’t work, not for me anyway.’

He had referred before to some problem he’d had on undercover operations, and how he’d been transferred to the Branch’s A Squad, providing protection for VIPs. He’d also spoken of being at odds with his immediate superiors, who seemed to be blocking his requests to move elsewhere.

‘Are you back at work now?’ Kathy asked.

He rolled his eyes.‘I’m protecting a colonel and his wife,a mass-murderer by all accounts, attending a peace conference in London for a couple of weeks.’

The conversation returned to the things that were troubling Kathy, to her doubts about the case against Vexx, and to all the things she didn’t understand about the two teenage girls. ‘They were children, Tom.What had they done to provoke such cold-blooded violence?’ she asked.

‘As to the violence, Kathy,’ Tom replied,‘you know how it is with the Yardies. All about territory and respect.You step on the wrong guy’s foot in the wrong dance hall and you’re dead. It sounds like someone was making an example of those two.Where are you holding Vexx?’

When she told him he pulled the newspaper out of his jacket pocket and said,‘I was reading something else about Cockpit Lane . . .Yes, here you go.’

Kathy scanned the brief report on the discovery of human remains near the site of the railway accident involving schoolboy Adam Nightingale,reported to be still in a medically induced coma.

‘You seem to be in the thick of the action,’ Tom said. ‘I’m envious.’

Just then Kathy’s phone beeped with a message from Brock, asking if she could come in. She checked her watch.‘I have to get back, Tom. Thanks for lunch. It was good to catch up again.’ It sounded as if she was saying goodbye, and she saw him hesitate, then smile and say,‘Yes, great.’ He kissed her on the cheek and added, ‘We didn’t have much time together. Shall we do it again?’

‘Fine,’ she said, and made for the door. The words ‘time together’ stuck in her mind. She thought they sounded quite good.

She bumped into Brock pacing down the corridor of the station.

‘Kathy, right. We’ve got him. Sundeep’s made the match to Vexx’s DNA.’ He looked reinvigorated, and relieved perhaps, as if a gamble he didn’t really expect to win had paid off.

‘That was quick.’

‘Yes. Sundeep’s pulled out all the stops on this one. He has a daughter Dee-Ann’s age, did you know?’

‘Ah. No, I didn’t.’

‘Yes. We’ve been doing extra tests and Savage is about to interview Vexx now. So far he’s said nothing, just talked to his brief. That’s another story.’

Kathy found it hard to read his expression. ‘Oh? What’s the problem?’

‘Come and see.’

She followed him to the video monitoring room where they took seats in front of a screen.When she focused on the picture she felt a small jolt as she recognised Vexx’s lawyer.‘Martin Connell,’she said.‘I see what you mean.’

In a way,she owed the fact that she worked for Brock to Martin Connell, with whom she was having an affair when Brock had first taken an interest in her. It was the reason he had. Connell represented the wealthiest, the most celebrated, the most notorious of criminal clients.With Martin Connell on your side you knew that no defence weapon, however dubious or unscrupulous, would be overlooked.You also knew that when you were found not guilty, few would believe it was true, although they would wonder who your friends were.

He had put on a few pounds, she thought, due no doubt to many excellent meals with his beautiful wife Lynne, and her father, retired Judge Willoughby, and their four talented children, now at university she supposed. The sheer foolishness of the affair pressed in on Kathy as she studied him, but also the emotional force of it, even after all this time-because for her, at least, it had been very serious indeed. She wondered if he still made use of his friend’s flat, the one with the sleazy bedroom with the mirror on the ceiling.

He was engaging in some initial skirmishing with Savage, points of clarification and procedure. Vexx sat beside him, massive arms crossed, eyes hooded, gold cargo glinting beneath the lights. Finally Savage began the questions.

‘Do you know this girl?’ he asked, showing Vexx a picture of Dee-Ann. Vexx barely dipped his eyes to look at it. He gave a grunt.

‘Please answer the question, Mr Vexx.’

‘Chief Inspector, a point of accuracy, if you please,’ Connell intervened.‘My client’s correct name is Mr Teddy Vexx, as a single appellation. To call him Mr Vexx is a bit like me referring to you as Inspector Savage, rather than Chief Inspector Savage.’

Savage stared at him for a moment with a look of loathing that registered vividly even on the small screen. ‘Thank you, Mr Connell.’ He turned back to Vexx.‘Do you know this girl?’

Vexx shrugged.‘I don’ know. I don’ remember.’

‘I’m talking about within the last seventy-two hours, Mr Teddy Vexx. Have you seen this girl within the past seventy-two hours?’

‘No, I don’ think so.’

‘Please think very carefully. She was found dead early on Friday morning. Did you see her during Thursday night or Friday morning?’

Vexx shrugged and shook his head.

‘Is that a no?’

‘Yes, it’s a no.’

‘Then I wonder if you can explain how your semen was found in her mouth.’

Martin Connell, who had been pretending an interest in his paperwork, looked up at that, a quizzical arch to one eyebrow. Vexx remained impassive.

‘How can you explain that, Mr Teddy Vexx?’ Savage repeated.

There was silence, then Connell began to say something, but Vexx held up a massive hand and he fell silent. They waited a moment,then Vexx said,‘Maybe I did see her-’

Connell broke in, ‘Don’t answer, Teddy. I’d like a break to consult with my client.’

But Vexx went on,‘I picked up a woman, maybe one or two o’clock on Friday morning. But I don’ remember her face.’

‘Teddy,’ Connell tried to insist, but Vexx ignored him.

‘Where was this?’

‘Camberwell, I don’ know exactly.’

‘What happened?’

‘She waved down my car. She wanted money for sex. I gave her a few quid an’ she gave me a blow job. I didn’t look at her face. She got out an’ I drove away.’ He turned to Martin Connell and shrugged, as if to say,What else can one do?

Savage stared at him for a moment.Then he said,‘Were there any witnesses?’

‘Yes, my business associate, Mr Jay Crocker.’

‘Mr Jay Crocker witnessed this?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Where was he?’

‘Why, in the car. He’ll tell you.’

‘We’ll want to examine your car.’

‘What’s to examine? She was in the car, man, for maybe two minutes.’

They saw Savage take a deep breath.‘I want a complete account of your recent movements. Let’s start with the night of Thursday last, the third of February . . .’ But they heard the fading confidence in his voice.

Ten minutes later Brock shook his head with disgust and got to his feet. Kathy followed him out the door. As they walked silently back to the incident room, Brock’s phone rang. He listened for a while then turned to Kathy. ‘It’s Bren. They’ve found the remains of a second body on the railway land. Let’s take a look.’

Bren Gurney, dressed in a thick coat and green boots and a beanie pulled down over his ears, was waiting on Mafeking Road to show them the way. The scene of crime people had taken over one of the empty warehouses behind the railway waste ground and had dismantled the rear fence to provide access onto the site. There were half a dozen vehicles parked in front of the building and as they tramped down its side they had to step back against the wall to let a truck, laden with snow, drive out.

‘One and a half acres,’ Bren said as they emerged onto the waste ground.‘Biggest crime scene I’ve ever been involved with. They’re trying to get more people.’

The area that Kathy and McCulloch had reached from the other direction was now unrecognisable, scraped clear of snow and bracken and gridded with tapes. Two tents had been erected, and across the rest of the site figures were bent shovelling snow and working with survey instruments.

Bren, a big, soft-spoken Cornishman who had been a part of Brock’s team from the beginning, led them towards one of the tents.‘They found it around lunchtime, about five yards from the first. Similar situation, shallow grave formed in a natural hollow. We’re calling them Alpha and Bravo for the time being.’

He lifted the flap and they stepped inside. Two people were working beneath lights in a pit in the ground, a third watching from the edge. This man came over and Bren introduced him as the Crime Scene Manager from Forensic Services.

‘This one’s in very much the same condition as the first,’ he said. ‘The remains have been disturbed, possibly by animals, and we weren’t sure initially if this was part of the same corpse, until we found the skull.’

Brock raised an eyebrow and the man nodded,pointing a finger at his own forehead.‘Yes,exactly the same,like an execution.Back of the skull fractured by the exit. No bullets found as yet. Most of the clothing has rotted away, but we’re finding bits-a belt buckle, buttons,remains of a shoe.’He squinted out through the door of the tent.‘It’ll be dark soon, and more snow is forecast, but we’ll keep going as long as we can. The press have been sniffing around, of course.’

‘No more indication of age, gender, race?’

The man shook his head. ‘You’ll have to talk to the pathologist.We certainly haven’t found any kind of identification.’

Brock thanked him and they returned to the warehouse, where material brought in from the site was being processed through wire-mesh sieve trays set up on trestle legs, then recorded and stored in labelled plastic boxes. A large map of the site was pinned to the wall, with a numbered grid drawn over it.

‘Sundeep’s going to have his work cut out,’Bren said.‘He was here earlier, with two of his assistants.’

‘What do we know about the schoolboy?’

‘Adam Nightingale? Only child, lives with his mother, no father. A bit of a nerd, we’re told. Chess and computer geek, hopeless at sports, just one friend we could find.’

Brock said, ‘Weren’t you supposed to be taking your girls somewhere today, Bren?’

‘Tobogganing.We did a bit this morning, then I got the call about the second body. It’s okay.’

‘Well, go back to them now. I’d better see if I can arrange a press conference here for noon tomorrow. Meanwhile, you can put your feet up.You too, Kathy.’

Bren offered Kathy a lift to the tube station, and along the way she told him about the raid on Teddy Vexx and his interview. Bren swore softly.‘There’s got to be some forensic evidence to put Vexx in the building with the girls, surely?’

‘That’s what we’re banking on now,’ she said. Suddenly she felt overwhelmingly tired. Bren’s car was warm, and there was an indefinable smell of something she associated with childhood.What was it? Some kind of soap? Shampoo? With a sigh she closed her eyes and allowed herself to imagine, for just one self-indulgent moment,that she was a little girl again,like one of Bren’s,in a warm safe world free of guns, drugs, oral rapists and Mr Teddy Vexx.

She woke with a start and saw a familiar row of shops rush past the window.‘Hang on,’ she said.‘This is Finchley.’

‘You were out for the count,’ Bren said. ‘Couldn’t very well turf you out in the snow.You’ll be home soon.’

‘You didn’t need to do that.’ ‘You looked all-in.’ ‘Christ, Bren, I’m not one of your little girls.’ He smiled. ‘No, but we all need a ride home from time to

time, Kathy. Even you.’ He pulled into the forecourt of her block.‘See you tomorrow.’ ‘Yeah, thanks. Give the girls my love. Tell them they’re lucky

to have such a nice dad.’ Bren waved her away, embarrassed, and put the car into gear.

Everyone at the station seemed fraught,Brock thought.He desperately wanted to soak in a bath with a big glass of whisky, but there were things to do first. Keith Savage was at his desk, and he didn’t need to say anything for Brock to see that it had gone badly.‘No luck?’ he asked.

‘Forensics haven’t come up with anything. I had to let him go.’ Savage cupped his hands to his face and rubbed. ‘Maybe the bastard’s telling the truth.’

‘I don’t think so. He murdered those girls, all right.’

‘Maybe.You think I pushed for the raids too soon?’

Brock shrugged.‘Wouldn’t have made any difference.It could have been a brilliant success.’

‘But it wasn’t. I let our glamour Member of Parliament push me into it.We should have staked out Vexx and found out everything about him before we moved.’

‘There’s still plenty we can do-his associates, phone records, financial dealings . . .’

‘Yeah, but you know, I think I was right the first time. I think the girls were killed because of something that happened back in Harlesden. Vexx may have lent a hand, some local muscle. And you

know what? I think he knew we were coming for him last night.’

‘You think so?’

‘Sure of it. I think he and his poncy lawyer put on a performance for us. They had it all worked out between them beforehand.’

‘Any idea how?’

‘This place …’Savage spread his hands.‘No security.Anyway, what’s this I hear about another old corpse on the railway land?’

Brock told him about the discovery of the second body. Savage eased back in his chair and said,‘McCulloch told me you were interested in that, but I don’t understand why. I mean, Mr Teddy Vexx would have been in nappies when those bodies were buried, yes?’

‘Probably. I’m just curious. Anyway, I thought it would be better if we handled it ourselves rather than have another crew tripping over us.’

Savage studied him thoughtfully.‘McCulloch also told me you were in CID here some time ago. These wouldn’t be skeletons in your closet, would they?’

Brock gave him an enigmatic smile.‘You never know.I thought I’d arrange a press conference on the site at noon tomorrow.’

‘To be honest, I’m not interested. Last year we investigated over fifty shooting murders.The discovery of a couple of ancient skeletons with holes in their heads doesn’t rate. But you go ahead. I’m going home for a drink and a hot meal.You want a lift anywhere?’

Brock thanked him but declined the offer. Instead, he phoned for a cab to take him across the river to his office in the Scotland Yard annexe in Queen Anne’s Gate. The place was deserted and in darkness as he tapped in his security code at the door and made his way up to his room. He settled at his desk and switched on his computer, checked his emails, sent several of his own, then keyed in access to the Police National Computer database.

He’d had one of McCulloch’s detectives checking incidents reported in Lambeth Borough during the previous three weeks for any that might have involved the two girls. He’d come up with a couple of housebreakings and a bag-snatch that were possibles, but they didn’t suggest a motive for murder. He went through the Lambeth listings once again, finding nothing else. Then it occurred to him that Cockpit Lane wasn’t far from the boundary with the neighbouring Borough of Southwark, and he tried that. It wasn’t long before a name leapt off the screen at him. He stared at it, feeling a tightness in his chest, then tapped a key and read the report.

On the previous Monday, January the thirty-first, just four days before the girls died, a woman had had her car hijacked by a pair of black youths outside a house she was visiting in Camberwell. She had been thrown to the ground in the struggle and her injuries were sufficient for her to be taken to Maudsley Hospital, from which she was discharged later the same day. The woman’s name was Adonia Roach.

Brock reached into the bottom drawer of his desk and took out a bottle of Scotch, from which he poured himself a sizeable measure, and read the entry again. Adonia, he thought, placing her: wife of Ivor Roach, accountant and Spider’s second son.

He returned to the menu and entered the name Roach, selecting four names in turn: Edward, nickname ‘Spider’, now aged seventy-eight, and his three sons: Mark, fifty-four; Ivor, fifty-two; and Richard, fifty.

‘So old,’ he murmured to himself, remembering their youthful selves. Their criminal convictions were almost all familiar to him, petering out sixteen years ago with a substantial fine for tax fraud. Their old addresses near Cockpit Lane were listed, as well as new ones. They were still living close together it seemed, some eight miles to the east, in the suburb of Shooters Hill.