Spider Trap

FIVE

The following morning, Kathy picked up the constable she’d contacted at Peckham. Brock had been very specific in his instructions when he’d briefed her. This was to be an innocuous follow-up visit, the PC was to take the lead, and, above all, Brock’s name was not to be mentioned.

The threatened bad weather hadn’t materialised and sunlight glittered off the snow on Blackheath as they took the Dover road east. The constable was a cheerful young Asian woman called Mahreen, who chatted about her family and friends and seemed delighted by the change of routine. She had attended the original incident and thought Mrs Roach would remember her,although she’d been very shaken up. At least she’d sounded cooperative over the phone.

They turned off the main road at the sign for Shooters Hill and Mahreen map-read them through quiet suburban streets until they came to the entrance to a golf club. Beyond this the street became a private lane leading only to a set of tall wrought-iron gates and a sign announcing The Glebe.

Kathy drew to a stop. She took in the camera mounted on the high perimeter brick wall and the security panel on the buttress beside the gate.

‘I’ll have fries with mine,’ Mahreen said with a laugh. Kathy pressed one of four buttons labelled ‘Roach’, selecting ‘I. Roach’, and said who they were. A tinny voice told them to drive to the second house on the left and the gates swung open.

The houses, in their mellow brick and dark timber, looked old at first glance, but only one, the first on the right, really was, Kathy guessed. It would originally have been the glebe house or parsonage belonging to the church whose spire they could see beyond the trees. The others, with their diamond-pane windows and classically columned porches, had the air of overblown reproductions. They sat around a large garden, brooding over the tennis court and tarpaulin-covered swimming pool laid out in the centre. Kathy followed the encircling drive, tyres crunching on the icy gravel, towards the woman who stood in the doorway of the far house, watching them approach.

‘That’s not her,’Mahreen said,and Kathy saw that it was a much younger woman waiting for them, in her twenties. She had large attractive dark eyes, thick black hair and a golden complexion, as if she’d just stepped off a hot Mediterranean beach.

She shook their hands,unsmiling.‘I’m Magdalen Roach.’She spoke rapidly. ‘My mother’s waiting for you inside. She tries to pretend that she’s all right, but she isn’t. The doctor’s still very worried about her head and she’s taking a lot of painkillers. It would be better if you didn’t bother her.’

‘Oh, we do understand, Magdalen,’ Mahreen said, all calm concern.‘Don’t you worry, we won’t distress your mum. This is Kathy, she’s a detective. A couple of minutes and we’ll be on our way.’

Magdalen reluctantly led them into an expansive living room, dominated by an oversized gold and crystal chandelier, beneath which a fuller, middle-aged version of the daughter sat in a huge leather sofa. Adonia Roach had the thick black hair and dark good looks of her Greek family, and still carried the slightest trace of accent in her voice. She was carefully groomed, dressed in the finest cashmere, against which the heavy bruising on one side of her face and the bandage strapping her left hand and arm struck a discordant note.

‘Please excuse me not getting up to welcome you,’ she said. ‘My hip is still quite painful.Will you have coffee?’ She looked up at her daughter, who nodded and left. ‘You really didn’t need to come all this way just to see how I was.’

‘It’s part of our community outreach policy, Mrs Roach,’ Mahreen explained enthusiastically.‘Support for victims of crime. And of course, there’s always a chance that you might have remembered something else now that you’ve had a little time to recover from the initial shock.’

‘Oh, I’ve done my best to put it out of my mind. Being thrown to the ground like that . . .’ She gave a little start at the sound of a jarring crack of crockery from another room.

‘Terrible.’

‘Yes, the shock . . . It all happened so fast. I suppose they must have been waiting for me to come out to the car, but I didn’t see them until they snatched the keys out of my hand. Then the other one grabbed my bag and it caught on my arm and they just swung me around and I fell …Well,you know.’

‘You were visiting your mother, you said?’

‘Yes, she’s a widow, lived in Camberwell for years.’

‘And do you visit her regularly?’

‘Every week.’

‘At the same time?’

‘Usually Monday. It doesn’t clash with her other activities. She keeps herself very busy.’

‘And you said the two who attacked you were slightly built?’

‘Yes, thin. One was a bit taller than me, the other about my height, but that was only an impression . . . I could be wrong, with the scarves over their faces and their hoods and baggy jeans, I don’t know.’

‘But definitely West Indian?’

‘Yes,yes.Not . . .’she glanced cautiously at Mahreen,‘. . .Asian.’

‘We’ve got some photos for you to look at, Mrs Roach,’ Mahreen purred, and Kathy handed her the sheaf of pictures she’d brought.

‘Too thick-set . . . too . . . oh, I don’t know.’

‘Try covering the lower part of their faces.’

‘Yes, but . . . This one’s a girl, and this one. It wasn’t a girl.’

‘You’re sure about that?’

‘Well, I assumed . . .’ She put her hand over the lower part of Dee-Ann’s face.‘I just don’t know. It could have been any of them.’

Magdalen came in with the coffee tray, which she placed on the table at her mother’s side.While Adonia poured, her daughter picked up the photos and thumbed through them. She paused over the two girls, Kathy noticed. ‘You recognise any of them, Magdalen?’ she asked.

‘Me? Why should I?’

‘Maybe visiting your grandmother? If they come from around there.’

‘No.’ She tossed the photos back and took a pack of cigarettes from the mantelpiece.

‘Not in here, darling.You know your father . . .’

Magdalen bit her lip and put them back.‘Yes, sorry.’

‘It was the violence that really upset me. I mean they found the car the next day, undamaged. The other detective said that’s often the case with joy-riders. And I didn’t care about the money and credit cards. So why did they have to be so violent?’

Her daughter sat down beside her and put a protective arm around her shoulders.

‘Oh . . .’ Adonia put a tissue to her eyes.‘I’m sorry, I’ve gone soft in my old age.’

‘I think you’ve been incredibly brave, Mrs Roach,’ Mahreen said, and glanced at Kathy, who added, ‘Yes. That sort of thing is always very hard to come to terms with, for you, and for your family.Your husband must have been very upset.’

‘Yes …’She hesitated.‘Yes,of course.’

Kathy noticed that she was fingering a gold chain with a golden heart pendant at her throat.‘You said that they pulled the pendant from your throat. That must have been frightening too.’

‘Oh yes!’ Adonia looked wide-eyed, and her fingers froze.

‘But you got it back?’

‘Thank goodness. It was very personal-my husband gave it to me when Magdalen was born. I found it later under the floor mat in the car. They must have dropped it when they drove away.’ Adonia took her daughter’s hand.‘And the doctors say I’ll make a full recovery. So really, I was lucky. But suppose it had been my mother instead of me. It could so easily have been. She wouldn’t have survived.’

The press liked Brock, Kathy could see that. They liked the slightly rumpled look, the way he scratched his white cropped beard meditatively as he considered a question, and the edge of dry humour that was never far away, even on such a case as this. It made a change from the close-shaved, close-mouthed men who usually briefed them.

With growing interest in the mysterious finds on the waste ground, Brock had invited them and their telephoto lenses down from their helicopters and their observation posts on the footbridge and the far embankment, down to the crime scene itself, now almost entirely stripped of snow and vegetation, gridded with bright pink tapes and dotted with three large tents.

‘A third area was located this morning by Marlowe,’ Brock said,and a black labrador was led forward by its handler.‘Marlowe is a cadaver dog, with specialist training in HHRD-Historical Human Remains Detection.’ Brock waited while they wrote it down.‘He works with archaeologists as well as us.You could say he’s got a PhD in old bones. He detected this morning’s finds through two feet of frozen ground.’

The photographers formed a scrum around the dog,lights flash-ing.Marlowe accepted their interest with philosophical detachment, live humans apparently exciting him far less than dead ones.

‘So far we’ve recovered a human fibula, a tibia, a pelvic bone and a bone from either a hand or a foot from that site.’

‘Are you saying three separate corpses?’

‘It’s not possible to be sure at the moment. The remains have been extensively disturbed, most probably by animals.’

‘Or schoolboys,’ someone quipped. It was a notion that had been absorbing a lot of police attention, the possibility that Adam was only one of many visitors removing trophies from the place. Yet all of the interviews in the neighbourhood had met with the same response, that no one had ever heard of anyone getting onto the waste ground before, or known of the possibility of human remains being buried there.

‘Could there be more? That Marlowe hasn’t found yet?’

‘It’s possible.We’ll be digging up the whole site,all one and a half acres of it, grid square by grid square, but that will take time.’

He waved an arm across the breadth of the area and, at the windows of the upper classrooms of Camberwell Secondary, dozens of grinning schoolkids waved back at him.

‘What about the age of the remains? Any more information there?’

This was the crucial question; until they had some fix on that it was impossible to focus the investigation, and so far the pathologist had been frustratingly reluctant to commit himself.

‘We’ve definitely ruled out an old burial ground or Blitz victims, as has been suggested. They are modern, probably between ten and forty years old. That’s as close as we can get at present.’

‘So you can confirm that they are murder victims?’

‘That would seem to be the likely conclusion. We have evidence of what appear to be gunshot wounds.’

And two spent cartridge cases, Kathy knew. Just then she felt a hand touch her arm, and turned to see Tom Reeves at her side. She smiled and they moved away from the others so that they could talk.

‘How’s it going?’ he asked.

‘Fine. Aren’t you guarding your mass-murderer?’

‘I got an hour off and decided to come over. They told me you were here. I was worried about you.You were pretty stressed yesterday.’

‘A good night’s sleep helped. But thanks.’

‘Maybe you should talk to somebody.’

‘I did, over lunch yesterday.’ She smiled at him and he grinned back.

‘Look, if you’re going to work around here you need to get some background. How do you fancy some Jamaican food tonight? I know an excellent chef.’

‘That sounds interesting. All right.’

‘Good. This is where I live . . .’ He gave her a handwritten card.‘Can you come there? About seven?’

‘Fine. I’ll phone if I’m delayed.’

‘I’d better get back. See you.’

She watched him stride away, amazed that he’d now divulged both his mobile number and his home address. Maybe he really was giving up the undercover life.

The press conference was breaking up and she waited until Brock was able to get away. They had heard that Adam Nightingale had recovered consciousness and might be fit enough to be interviewed. As she drove him up to Waterloo she described her visit to the Roach compound.

‘Definitely promising. Adonia couldn’t rule out the two girls as her attackers. She was badly shaken up by the attack, and the family has rallied around her,especially the daughter,Magdalen.She seemed very protective of her mother, but I got the impression that she doesn’t get on so well with her father.He stops her smoking around the house and so on. Do we know why she’s still living with them?’

‘Pretty common these days, isn’t it?’

‘Yes. It’s just that I had the impression she was used to her own space. She had to be reminded about the smoking, for instance. I might do some digging. Anyway, there was one definite flaw in their story. Adonia said they were particularly upset that the thieves snatched her necklace, a very personal gift from Ivor when Magdalen was born, but that she found it again under the floor mat of the car when it was returned. I checked with the forensic team that dealt with it, and they say that’s impossible, they would have found it first.’

‘Can we believe them?’Brock asked.‘People are under pressure, sometimes they cut corners.’

‘He sounded pretty convincing to me. Apparently, at the stage they went over the car there was still doubt about how serious Adonia’s injuries would turn out to be, and they treated it as a potential murder scene.’

‘So you’re thinking that Vexx recovered the necklace for Ivor, who slipped it into the car for Adonia to find later?’

‘Something like that. It’s plausible.’

‘Ivor would have to have been pretty crazy to get involved personally in the murders. The Roaches are so-called respectable businessmen now, although they always did take personal affronts very hard.’

‘We could look for indirect contact, then,’ Kathy said.‘Phone records. If Ivor asked Vexx to track down the people who stole his wife’s car, there’d be a phone call when he succeeded.’

‘Certainly worth a look. And how has time dealt with Adonia? She was very attractive, I remember.’

‘Not too bad, she’s still very handsome, but pretty jittery underneath. I think the car-jacking shook her up more than she’s realised.’

‘Or maybe just being married to Ivor has.’

‘Well, her daughter Magdalen’s the glamorous one now.’

‘I don’t remember a daughter.Do you know what Adonia did?’

‘No?’

‘She was a beautician-for the dead. Her father Cyrus ran a funeral parlour, next to the Ship pub on Cockpit Lane. Young Adonia could make the most ravaged corpse look beautiful.’

They had reached the Albert Embankment. Across the river the finials of the Houses of Parliament bristled dark against the heavy sky, like a long rank of bayonets.

Kathy pondered.‘All the same, it’s hard to believe the Roaches would have had two kids killed like that because they roughed up Adonia and stole her car.’

‘Nothing would surprise me about the Roaches, Kathy.’

‘Are you going to tell Keith Savage?’

‘DCI Savage wants to shift the focus of his team’s efforts to Harlesden. I think I’ll leave him to it until we have something more definite. Were there any witnesses to the car-jacking, or fingerprints on the recovered car?’

‘It seems not.’

Mrs Nightingale was at Adam’s bedside, looking like a permanent fixture, and scowled at the arrival of the two detectives, as if they could only have come to make further trouble for her son.The boy seemed remarkably unscathed, peering through his thick glasses at an electronics magazine, trying to avoid eye contact with the visitors while his mother fussed.

They chatted for a while, about the burn on Adam’s leg and his memory of what had happened. He told them that he had noticed fox tracks in the snow on the waste ground from the classroom window, and wanted to follow them to their hide before the snow melted and he lost the chance. His mother harangued him for his foolishness, but neither Brock nor Kathy was quite convinced by his explanation.

Finally Brock abandoned his questions and took a leather wallet out of the pocket of his coat. He offered it to Adam and said,‘I’m told you’re a chess player, Adam. Have you seen one of these before?’

The boy opened it cautiously. Inside, the leather had been formed into a grid of tiny pockets, eight by eight, into which fitted slivers of black and white plastic, printed with the symbols of chess pieces.

‘It’s a travelling chess set,’ Brock said.‘Have you got one?’

The boy shook his head, raising a sceptical eyebrow as he examined the little pieces.

‘It’s yours,if you want it,’Brock said.‘I haven’t used it in ages.’

Adam looked at him dubiously, then at his mother.

‘You can give me a game, if you like,’ Brock added.

Mrs Nightingale’s nose screwed up with suspicion. ‘I expect you’ve got more important things to do with your time, sir.’

‘I was up half the night,’ Brock sighed, stretching his back. ‘I don’t mind a break for five minutes.’

‘Good idea,’Kathy said.‘Why don’t you and I get a cup of tea, Mrs Nightingale?’ She took the woman’s arm before she could refuse. Brock reached over to the little chessboard and took a black and a white piece, one in each hand, shuffled them behind his back and asked Adam to pick one. The boy pointed at the hand holding the white, and made the first move. The game developed routinely, Adam carefully studying each move, trying to work out how good his opponent was, until the detective suddenly pushed a bishop forward to attack. Adam moved a knight to counter-attack, and after considering this for a moment Brock seemed to lose interest in his attack and moved a pawn on the other side of the board. Adam saw a major mistake. He poked his glasses back on his nose and kept his face expressionless as he made sure.Yes,the copper had definitely screwed up. He moved his knight forward to take the bishop. Brock frowned briefly, then abruptly moved one of his own knights, right into the path of Adam’s queen. Adam swiftly took that too, elated at what he would tell Jerry. This guy was supposed to be smart, he’d just seen him live on telly, and Adam was wiping the floor with him.

When Brock moved a third piece,his other bishop,into the line of fire, Adam took it with a small jag of regret; either Brock was humouring him or he’d forgotten everything he’d ever known about chess. But the sacrifice of three major pieces had cleared the board in front of Brock’s queen, while shifting Adam’s pieces to the sides. Brock now moved his queen straight up to Adam’s back row, attacking his king.

‘Checkmate, I’m afraid.’

Adam’s mouth opened and closed.‘Oh . . .’

Brock picked up his three sacrificed pieces and laid them out, one by one. ‘Did you know they were there, Adam?’ he asked quietly.‘The bodies?’

‘No, I swear.’

Brock pointed at the outline of the boy’s leg in its frame beneath the blanket.‘Seven hundred and fifty volts direct current, enough power to push a train.You took an awful big risk blundering through the snow just to find a foxhole.’

The boy shrugged and pushed the chess set back to Brock. ‘Thanks, I don’t want this.’

‘Suit yourself,’ Brock said. ‘You can give me another game, though.’

At the sandwich counter, Kathy and Mrs Nightingale picked up their cups of tea and took them to a table.

‘He’s got an electronic thing he plays chess with,’ Adam’s mother said. ‘I don’t know what he’d want with that old wallet. What’s your boss up to then?’

‘Just trying to be friendly,’Kathy said.‘Do you believe Adam’s story about the foxes?’

‘I’ve brought him up to tell the truth.’

‘But if it was something he thought you’d be angry about?’

Adam’s mother looked uneasy. She stirred her tea, round and round.

‘We need some help on this, Mrs Nightingale.’

The woman shot her a hostile glance and spoke in a low rush, not wanting anyone else to hear.‘That’s easy for you to say.Who knows what you’re diggin’ up on that waste ground? And whoever put them there sure didn’t want them disturbed, that’s plain. And now my son’s name and picture is in every newspaper. Yes, it’s easy for you to say.’

‘But surely he’s in no danger if he didn’t know the bodies were there, if he was looking for something else?’

Mrs Nightingale thought about that.‘Maybe,maybe not.’She concentrated on her tea for a moment and then, as if changing the subject,said,‘Do you know what “brown bread”is?’

Kathy was puzzled.‘Well,yes.Bread made with wholemeal-’

‘No, no, no, not that kind of brown bread. I mean, is it a name for something, a slang name? Like . . . drugs, maybe?’

Kathy saw the worry in Mrs Nightingale’s eyes. ‘You think Adam was looking for drugs?’

‘No! I’m not saying that at all! You’re putting words into my mouth.’

‘Please.’ Kathy gently put her hand over the other woman’s. ‘Tell me.’

‘Oh . . . How do I know what’s for the best? Just now, before you came, Adam’s friend Jerry came to see him. I left them for a minute to go to the bathroom. When I came back they were talking. I stood on the outside of the curtain and listened to them. Jerry said like,“But why did you go over there?” and Adam said, “I was lookin’ for brown bread”.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘I thought I was mistaken the first time, but Jerry repeated it, see.“You were lookin’for brown bread? In the snow? You’re crazy, Adam.”And Adam said,“I thought the foxes had found it.”When Jerry left I asked Adam what he was talkin’ about, and he denied it, said I’d heard it all wrong, but I hadn’t. He’s a stubborn boy, but he’s not big, and some of the other boys pick on him at school because he’s good at his sums. I think he wanted to prove something, get some respect.’ She shook her head angrily.

Kathy said,‘I’ll ask around,see if I can find out what it means.’

‘Yes, and you let me know, won’t you? I mean, it couldn’t be somethin’ sexual, could it? Not in all that snow?’

Kathy saw that in her mind she had been going through all the possible ways in which a thirteen-year-old boy might transgress.‘I’ll let you know.’

Later, in the car with Brock, she told him about the conversation.

He pondered.‘Brown bread? Well,it’s cockney rhyming slang, meaning “dead”. Could that be it? “The dead”. Did they know all along that the bodies were there? I quizzed Adam again, but he denied it.’

‘We could try Jerry.’

‘Yes, let’s do that.’

She drove straight to the school, where the afternoon classes had begun. The headmistress arranged for Jerry to be brought to her office, and Brock asked her to stay for the interview.When the boy was seated in front of them, Brock said sternly,‘I have just one question, Jerry: what do you know about brown bread?’

The boy gawped, swallowed, then shook his head. ‘Nudin’. I don’t know nudin’ about that.’ He kicked one foot awkwardly against the other.

The headmistress looked puzzled as Brock pressed him. Kathy thought he looked scared, refusing even to repeat the phrase, but he wouldn’t change his story and in the end they let him go.

‘What was that all about?’ the teacher asked, and Brock explained. She said brown bread meant nothing special to her, and Brock asked her to keep it to herself.

They returned to Mafeking Road, and as they turned into it from Cockpit Lane they passed a crowded corner cafe called Stamp and Go, and for a brief moment they caught the rich smells of Jamaican food. Brock growled, ‘Cheese sandwiches and a tea bag for us, I suppose.’

When they got back to the warehouse they found everyone crowded around one of the tables. Another set of arm and hand bones had been dug up, and one of the SOCOs was carefully scraping at the mud in which they were caked while another stood by with a camera. The reason for the excitement was a dark band around the wrist. As the spatula teased away at the dirt they caught a glint of glass and someone said,‘Yes, it’s a watch, all right.’

That evening Kathy took the tube from her place in Finchley down the Northern line to Kentish Town, then walked, guided by her A-Z, to the address Tom had given her. It turned out to be a basement flat halfway along a terrace, and she wondered if it was significant that he, the undercover officer, lived below ground level, while she perched on the twelfth floor of a tower block.

The door was opened by Tom, wearing a Hawaiian shirt, cream trousers, a striped apron and oven gloves. His face seemed slightly flushed but very cheerful, and he was backed up by a rich smell of cooking coming from somewhere inside. He drew her in, kissed her on the cheek and took her coat.

‘Look, I hope this is all right, but on my way to see you today I came across this cafe in Cockpit Lane called Stamp and Go. Have you seen it? Have you smelled it?’ He laughed. ‘And next door there was this grocer with Caribbean spices and vegetables and bottles of sauce. And it took me back to Jamaica-only this was Jamaica in the snow, so crazy. And I thought well, you should be getting into this. I mean if you want to understand the people you’ve got to understand what they eat.’

‘You’re right.’ She sniffed.‘And you’re the excellent chef you mentioned?’

He beamed.‘Absolutely.I love cooking,when there’s a point.’

‘Well, after all this snow, a tropical evening sounds great.’

‘That’s what I thought, and I have the perfect thing to set the scene. One moment.’ He raised a magician’s finger and hurried away. The whole basement flat had been knocked into a single space from front to back, with a kitchen bay at the side, from which she heard the clink of ice cubes. She took in the cupboard of a fold-down bed against one wall, some new-looking leather furniture, and a flat screen TV and a laptop. Everything looked efficient and impersonal. But no books. That was what was wrong -no books.

Tom appeared with two tall glasses of what looked like a murky fruit salad, embellished with straws and little umbrellas.

‘Cheers.’

‘Mmm.’ Kathy licked her lips, trying to identify the flavours, then felt the rum burn through.‘Wow.’

‘Jamaican rum punch. One part sour, two parts sweet, three parts strong, four parts weak.’

‘The rum being the strong, I suppose. I get the pineapple, but what else?’

‘Guava juice, and limes.’

She sat down, feeling herself begin to defrost. The heating in the flat seemed to be on the highest setting, and she relaxed, letting the warmth seep through her from outside and in.

‘Where are all your books, Tom? I expected masses of books.’

‘In storage.’ He shrugged.‘They take up so much room.’

‘I know.’ And they’re heavy, she thought. Not good for a quick getaway. She had said the wrong thing, flattening his exuberant mood, but not for long. ‘So you’ve been to Jamaica, have you?’ she asked.

‘Yes, great place.’

He began to tell her about the blinding white beaches of Negril, the hiking trails through the Blue Mountains, scuba diving in Montego Bay. Then some of the characters he’d met, ending up with a tale about a stay in a beach house and going to the toilet one morning with a hangover and hearing scratching noises from the bowl below and looking down to see the claws of a large crab waving up at him.It was a good story,well told,and by the end they were both laughing helplessly. Kathy guessed he’d been trying out the rum punch recipe before she arrived. It was certainly working on her.

‘We haven’t got crab tonight, have we?’

He shook his head and raised the magic finger again as he made off to the kitchen. After a while there was the ping of a microwave and he returned with a plate.

‘I didn’t make these. It’s their signature dish,“stamp and go”, the name for codfish fritters. Try one. I did make the sauce.’

They were crisp and spicy, the sauce sweet and sour.

‘Really good!’ She took another.

‘You need more jungle juice.’

She followed him and watched as he put ice in their glasses and took a jug from the fridge.

‘How are your bodies going?’

‘Oh, we just keep finding more.’

‘It’s getting to you, isn’t it? Taking your mind off Teddy Vexx and those two kids.’

Put that way it made her feel as if they were betraying Dana and Dee-Ann by letting this old case distract them.Yet something equally terrible had happened there, and nobody had known. The idea that those bodies had been waiting all this time for someone to find them and uncover their story had got to her. It had got to Brock, too, right from the beginning.

‘Are they male or female?’

‘Looks like three young adult males, in their twenties, probably. Just to be original, we call them Alpha, Bravo and Charlie. At least two were shot in the head. But we have no idea who they were.We have no missing persons that seem to fit. No dentist in London has matched the dental records we’ve sent out.Yes,maybe I am getting a bit obsessed.Who were they, and why has no one missed them?’

‘And you can’t narrow the time frame?’

‘Not on the forensic evidence of the remains, apparently. But we found a wristwatch on one of them today. It was digital.’

Tom spooned some chopped fruit into the punch. ‘That would make it, what, post-1970 or so?’

‘The first mass-produced digital watches came out in 1975.You had to press a button on the side to view the display. That’s what this one looked like. They’re checking now.’

Tom turned on the hotplate beneath a saucepan and gave it a stir,pondering.‘Were the victims black or white?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Wouldn’t the DNA tell you?’

Kathy dipped another fritter in the sauce. ‘Our forensic pathologist, Dr Mehta, gave us a little lecture on how race is only an adaptation to climate and we all have the same DNA.’

‘Is that true? I mean, wouldn’t those adapta . . .’ His rumanaesthetised tongue fumbled the word and Kathy chuckled, a little louder than she’d intended. He had another go. ‘. . . adaptations be there in the DNA, to determine skin colour, hair type, etcetera?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘If they’re black I’d bet after October 1980.’

‘Why?’

‘You wanna bet? A fiver.’

‘Okay. But you have to tell me why.’

‘That’s when the Yardies came.’ He handed her the glass, splashing in an extra hit of dark rum for good measure.

Sitting together companionably on the sofa, the few remaining fritters between them,Tom went on,‘Jamaica’s the sort of place that makes you despair at how good people are at taking paradise and turning it into hell.We stuffed it, the English. Do you know how our high street banks got started? From the fortunes Mr Lloyd and Mr Barclay made from making Jamaica into a concentration camp for slaves to grow sugar. Then the world sugar price collapsed and we gave them independence and pissed off. Like walking out on this totally traumatised family you’ve been bashing up for several hundred years.’

It was the first time Kathy had heard Tom express anything like a political opinion, and it seemed to her that something personal lay beneath the surface.

‘So,what did the Jamaicans do? Two cousins looked at their old masters and said,Yeah, we’ll have two political parties like them- you have one, the JLP, and I’ll have the other, the PNP. Now the people are starving and living in slums and their kids have to join gangs and steal to make a living, so what shall we do about that? Well, we’ll give them jobs.We’ll pay them to kick the supporters of the other party,and make sure they vote for us next time.And soon all the Rude Boys in the slums have got guns with the money we give them,and every neighbourhood and district is divided between our two sides, and the fields that used to grow sugar are now growing marijuana, at least until the Americans get fed up with us and come to burn the fields. So then the Rude Boys turn their hand to smuggling Colombian cocaine, which is more profitable still.’

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.