Spider's Web (7 page)

‘Have you heard what’s happened?’

‘Yeah, the Chief Superintendent phoned me. He’s not a happy bunny.’

‘What about you? What do you think?’

Reece puffed his cheeks. ‘To be honest, Jim, right now I’ve got other things on my mind.’

Jim glanced at the bag. ‘You going somewhere?’

‘London. Only for the night. Staci’s got an appointment with an oncologist down there tomorrow morning.’

‘A private consultant?’

Reece nodded. ‘He’s supposed to be the best around.’

‘Sounds expensive.’

‘It’s not cheap. But I’ve got some money left over from the sale of my dad’s house.’ Reece turned at the sound of footsteps. Staci and her young daughter, Amelia, appeared at the door. Amelia looked up at Jim, but she didn’t have her usual cheeky smile for him. There was a kind of bewildered incomprehension in her eyes, as though she didn’t know exactly what was going on, but she sensed it wasn’t anything good.

‘Hi there, gorgeous,’ said Jim, smiling at her.

‘Hi,’ Amelia replied quietly, her gaze dropping away.

Jim turned his attention to Staci. She was wearing a heavy coat, but even so it was immediately apparent how much weight she’d lost in the month or so since he’d last seen her. Her face looked sucked in and there were shadows of pain around her eyes. Her once-thick strawberry-blonde hair was scraped back into a ponytail, through which showed pale glimpses of scalp. Self-consciously reaching up to check her hair, Staci asked the same question Reece had done, ‘What are you doing here, Jim?’

He gave her a small, gentle smile. ‘I came to see Reece about something.’

‘Do you two need a minute to talk?’

‘No. It’s nothing that can’t wait.’ Jim’s gaze returned Reece. ‘Go on, I don’t want to hold you up.’

Reece hurried to put the bag in the boot, before returning to help Staci to the car. With a tenderness that belied his burly frame, he supported her by the hand and elbow. ‘Good luck,’ Jim said as they passed him.

Staci smiled wanly. ‘Thanks.’

Jim flicked them a wave as Reece reversed the car out of the drive. Reece lowered his window. ‘About what you asked me before,’ he said to Jim. ‘It was high fucking time someone did something.’

Jim acknowledged his colleague’s support with a nod of thanks. He drove to the phone box and spent the next hour knocking on the doors of nearby houses, asking their occupants if they’d seen anyone using the pay phone around one o’clock. Unsurprisingly, no one had. Equally unsurprisingly, forensics pulled numerous prints off the phone box. The handset, however, was clean. Too clean. Almost as if someone had wiped it over to make extra sure they left no trace of themselves on it. Jim knew then that his guess was right – the call
was
a warning.

By the time he was done, his body was heavy with fatigue. Since his heart attack, he’d lived clean – except for the odd lapse – eaten well and adhered to the prescribed exercise, but even so his energy levels had never really returned to what they’d been. He stopped at a shop on the way home to buy some water to swallow his medication with. His gaze strayed to the alcohol behind the till. How he would have loved a drink, and a cigarette too.

His phone rang. Garrett’s name flashed up. He reluctantly put the receiver to his ear. Garrett was the last person he felt like talking to, but he knew he had to answer the call. ‘Guess who I’ve been on the phone to,’ snapped the Chief Superintendent.

‘Forensics.’

‘Got it in one.’

‘Anna Young contacted me concerned about a silent phone call.’

Garrett huffed out an incredulous laugh. ‘You’re a brazen bastard, Jim.’

‘I’m just doing my job.’

‘Yes, well, how much longer you’ll be doing your job for remains to be seen.’

The line went dead. Jim’s gaze returned to the alcohol. ‘Can I get you something else?’ asked the woman behind the till. With a quick shake of his head, he paid and left.

4

For the second morning in a row Jim was woken by that certain kind of knock at his front door.
Christ, what does Garrett want now?
he wondered. ‘If he’s just going to give me another earful, he can fuck off,’ he muttered to himself, heading to the door. He glanced through the spyhole to make sure he was right about who was knocking. He wasn’t. On the other side of the door was a broad-shouldered old man wearing a grubby, frayed suit. A thick white beard covered much of his nut-brown, leathery face. Dour brown eyes peered out from beneath equally bushy eyebrows. In contrast, his hair was short and wispy. He had the appearance of someone who’d long since ceased caring what he looked like. Jim guessed him to be somewhere in his mid-seventies. Under one of his arms was tucked a cardboard folder of a type Jim recognised. The sight of the folder sparked Jim’s curiosity as much, if not more so, than the presence of its bearer. He opened the door and waited for the man to speak.

‘Jim Monahan?’ The voice had a gravelly Mancunian accent.

‘Who’s asking?’

‘Lance Brennan.’ The man pulled out a battered leather wallet and flipped it open, displaying the silver star logo of the Greater Manchester Police and a detective inspector’s ID, which Jim noted had expired over twenty years ago. ‘I want to talk to you about Thomas Villiers and
that
list of names he’s on.’

His eyes pinching at the corners, Jim glanced over the ex-detective’s shoulder at the quiet Sunday morning street. ‘I’m alone,’ said Lance, and something about the way he said it suggested he was talking in the broader as well as the narrower context.

Jim’s gaze returned to Lance’s grizzled face. He looked genuine. Still, you never knew. Villiers and his scumbag pals would no doubt be looking for ways to discredit or disgrace their accusers. And there were plenty of hacks around who would stoop to dirty tricks to get a story. ‘Lift your arms.’

Lance did so. ‘I’m not wearing a wire.’

Jim patted him down and checked his pockets for recording devices. He was telling the truth. There was a lock-blade knife in one of his pockets. Jim eyed him narrowly. ‘What’s this for?’

‘Protection.’

‘From who?’

‘You know who.’

The two men stared at each other a moment. Jim got the feeling that Lance was checking him out as much as he was checking the ex-policeman out. ‘You’d better come in.’

‘What about my knife?’

‘I’ll hold onto it for now.’

Jim led Lance to the spartanly furnished living room. He gestured to the older man to sit on a faded floral patterned sofa – one of the few pieces of furniture he’d brought with him from the house. ‘Do you want a cup of tea?’

‘That’d be good, thanks. I’m parched. I’ve been travelling since six this morning.’

‘From Manchester?’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘Who gave you my address?’

Lance gave him a look as if to say,
C’mon, you know I can’t tell you that.
It was the response Jim had been looking for. No good cop – and as the cliché went, once a cop always a cop – ever revealed their sources. Somewhat reassured, he went into the kitchen, picked up a notebook from beside a phone and flipped through it until he came to the name ‘Don Hunter’. Don was a Manchester DI he’d worked in conjunction with on several cases over the years. He dialled the number next to the name. ‘It’s Jim Monahan,’ he said, when Don picked up. ‘Sorry to bother you on a Sunday, Don, but I need a favour. What can you tell me about an ex-DI from your neck of the woods named Lance Brennan?’

‘The name doesn’t ring any bells. I’ll see what I can find out.’

Jim thanked Don and turned his attention to the kettle. He made two mugs of tea and took them to the living room. Lance pulled out a hip flask and poured a generous slug of something into his mug. He proffered the flask to Jim.

Shaking his head, Jim sank onto an armchair. Lance took a swig of tea, then raised his wily old detective’s eyes to Jim. ‘You hate Villiers, don’t you?’

Jim made no reply. Yes, he hated Villiers. He hated everyone in Herbert’s book, savagely, uncompromisingly. But he wasn’t ready to admit that to a stranger.

Lance nodded as though he’d read all he needed to know in Jim’s eyes. ‘I do too.’ His voice was thick with bitterness. ‘I hate that bastard worse than anything, and I don’t care who knows it. That’s one of the benefits of growing old – not having to lie about how you feel any more. And I’ll tell you something else, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about using that knife of mine on Villiers.’

Jim frowned. ‘You should be careful what you say to me, Mr Brennan. Regardless of my personal feelings, I’m still a copper.’

Lance dismissed his words with a disdainful grunt. ‘It’s not a crime to think about something. Not yet. And anyway, what you’ve done is almost as good as sticking a knife in Villiers.’

‘If you’re implying what I think you are, Mr Brennan—’

‘Please, let’s dispense with the Mr Brennan crap. And all the rest of the horseshit too. I’m not here to put one over on you. I’m here to shake your hand. You’ve done what I didn’t have the balls to do twenty-odd years ago.’

Jim’s voice quickened as curiosity overcame his caginess. ‘Are you saying you knew about the names on the list back then?’

‘No. But I knew about Villiers and…’ Lance’s voice faltered. A spasm of self-disgust passed over his face. ‘And I did nothing. Well, not quite nothing, but that’s what it amounted to.’ He looked at Jim with a kind of haunted appeal in his eyes. ‘You see, they gave me a choice: keep my gob shut or lose my pension. I couldn’t lose my pension. It was all I had left. They’d already taken the job away from me. I had a wife and kids to support. And I couldn’t even get work as a security guard because of all the lies they spouted to cover their arses. I tell you, for years I used to wake up every day thinking about suicide. Only one thing stopped me from doing it. Do you know what that thing was? It wasn’t my wife, God rest her soul, or even my kids. It was my allotment. That was my escape. The one place I could get away from thinking about how I let Villiers off the hook. There’s something about planting and growing that—’

‘So what exactly do you know about Villiers?’ interrupted Jim, eager to keep Lance on topic, but also uncomfortable with the talk of suicide – he’d entertained many dark thoughts of his own since Margaret’s death.

Slowly, as though arranging his thoughts, the ex-detective began, ‘Back in 1989 we arrested a sixteen-year-old boy named Dave Ward for—’

Lance broke off as a phone rang. Jim went into the kitchen to answer it. Don Hunter came on the line. ‘Lance Brennan served with the Greater Manchester Police from ’71 to ’90. He spent ten years in CID before taking release on health grounds. Is that enough for you, Jim? Or do you need me to do some more digging?’

‘No, that’s great, Don. I owe you one.’

When Jim returned to the living room, Lance eyed him knowingly. ‘Well, are you satisfied that I am what I say I am?’

Jim nodded. He’d already made up his mind that Lance was for real; the phone call just confirmed it. He motioned for him to continue his story.

‘Now, where was I?’ Lance took a swallow of his alcohol-laced tea. ‘Ah yes, Dave Ward. We arrested him for soliciting sex in a men’s toilet. Whilst in custody Ward started on about how he was the way he was because he’d been sexually abused. So I was called in to assist from the Sexual Crimes Unit. Ward came from a bad background. He’d spent most of his life in care. From the age of thirteen to sixteen he’d lived at the Hopeland children’s home in Manchester. It was there he claimed the abuse had taken place. I’ll bet you can guess who ran the place?’

‘Thomas Villiers.’

‘Got it in one. According to Ward, the abuse began with small acts that might have simply been interpreted as friendliness. And it wasn’t initiated by Villiers. There was a live-in caretaker at the home. A man who by all accounts was only a year or three older than the eldest children there.’

Lance withdrew a sheet of paper from the cardboard file and passed it to Jim. On it was a composite police picture of a man’s face. The man was white with short brown hair, brown eyes and black-rimmed glasses. He had a broad blunt nose and thick lips. His face too was broad, the cheeks smooth and round with puppy fat. He looked little more than a boy himself. But that didn’t mean he wasn’t dangerous. Older paedophiles often used younger accomplices – who many times had been victims of abuse themselves – to entice and ensnare children.

‘Supposedly his name was William Keyes,’ said Lance.

‘What do you mean “supposedly”?’

‘I’ll get to that in a bit. And besides, the children at Hopeland didn’t call Keyes by his name. They called him Spider because he had a spider’s web tattoo on his chest. So that’s what I call him too. Spider started working at Hopeland in October ’87. He had a mixed relationship with the children. Some couldn’t stand him. Others got on well with him. Ward fell into the latter group. He used to go to Spider with his problems. And when they were talking, Spider would put a hand on Ward’s knee or an arm around his shoulder. The touching gradually became more inappropriate, until one day Spider groped Ward’s genitals through his trousers. When Ward pushed him away, Spider claimed it was an accident. Ward didn’t want to get him in trouble, so he didn’t tell anyone what had happened. Spider bought him some clothes as a thank you. A few weeks went by. Then there was another incident. And this wasn’t an accident by any definition of the word. One evening Spider invited Ward to his room to smoke cannabis and watch what turned out to be a pornographic movie. During the movie, he began to fondle Ward. When Ward asked him to stop, Spider pinned him down and forcibly masturbated him. Once again, Ward told no one what had happened. Do you know why?’

‘Because Spider threatened him.’

Lance shook his head. ‘He didn’t need to. Ward was ashamed because he’d ejaculated. He thought the other kids would call him a puff if they found out. Can you believe that?’

Jim could believe it only too well. He’d encountered similar stories across the whole spectrum of abuse – victims who kept silent through fear of ridicule or not being believed; victims who’d been manipulated into blaming themselves; victims whose shame irrationally led them to believe silence was their best defence against a world that had betrayed them.