Brock And Kolla - 09 - Spider Trap (42 page)

Brock dropped her at the A&E entrance to the hospital on Lambeth Palace Road. The entrance to the hospital car park was jammed with a long queue, and he continued on to join Westminster Bridge Road and cross the Thames. Ahead of him Parliament brooded darkly.

Kathy found McCulloch sitting on a bench in a corridor talking to the stooped figure of a small dark woman, whom she recognised as Winnie Wellington when she turned her tear-streaked face towards her. Embarrassed,Winnie wiped the tears away with the back of her hand and sat a little straighter. Kathy sat beside her and put a hand on her arm.‘I’m sorry,Winnie.’

‘I knew he’d get into trouble, dat boy. But he didn’t deserve anything like this.’

McCulloch, impassive, raised an eyebrow at Kathy and nodded his head to one side. She got to her feet and followed him a little way away.

‘What happened?’ she murmured.

‘Kids coming out of school for lunchbreak saw him stagger out of the side street opposite, clutching his head. He collapsed and they went and had a look. He had blood all over his face and someone called triple nine.When the ambulance men got there they discovered he had a six-inch nail rammed in his ear.’

Kathy screwed up her face in disgust.

‘Yeah. Extremely lucky it didn’t kill him. Punctured the eardrum of course. Very painful, apparently. They’re trying to find out what other damage it’s done inside his head. He hasn’t spoken. Any ideas?’

‘I visited him again at the girl’s flat in Cove Street. Could it be punishment for talking to me?’

‘That’s what I wondered.“See and blind,hear and deaf ”,that’s the Yardie code.’

Another horrible thought came to Kathy. ‘Yes, that, and the fact that he’s a musician.’

McCulloch grimaced. ‘Some punishment. When did you visit him?’

Kathy checked her notebook. ‘The eighth, over a week ago. The girl caught me in the flat talking to him. She could have told Vexx.’

‘Long time to wait to teach him a lesson. Maybe it was something else.’

Kathy shook her head.‘No.You’ve been reading the papers? They waited till that was all over, then they cleaned up their own backyard.’

‘Well, he certainly upset somebody.’

‘It’s Vexx.We should talk to him, and Carole, the girl.’

McCulloch raised an eyebrow.

‘Sorry,’ Kathy said.‘It’s your case. Just a suggestion. Can I sit in?’

‘Be my guest.We’ll be waiting here for a while.Talk to Winnie while I fetch us all a cup of tea.’

One of nature’s great mysteries, Brock thought, along with migrating butterflies and holes in the ozone layer, was exactly what happened to fish and chips on the way home. Recalling the delicious package of hot crisp food he’d bought in the shop, he contemplated sadly the congealed mess that now lay before him on his plate. It seemed oddly personal, this transformation, like a deliberate insult. He also thought of the last plate of fish and chips he’d eaten, with Michael Grant in the Strangers’ Dining Room, and imagined how he must be feeling now, the impostor, the boy from the Dungle, summarily crushed.

The Grant affair no longer made the six o’clock news. Brock poured himself a glass of the Dragon Stout he’d picked up at his local Paramounts. There had been a big run on it, he’d been told, and they had hardly any left. He poked around morosely in the ruined meal for the least soggy chips.

Kathy had rung him from the hospital to say that the doctors were cautiously optimistic about George’s condition. The eardrum would probably be repairable, though the nail had penetrated the inner ear, damaging the cochlea. Time would tell whether a cochlear implant might be necessary, but things could have been a lot worse. George himself was sedated and saying nothing. Kathy was frustrated, both by the wait at the hospital and by McCulloch’s cautious approach. She had the feeling that her possible involvement worried him and that he was dragging his feet.

Brock switched off the TV and tried to take the fish seriously. A slice of lemon might help. Or another beer.

He rang Suzanne. She sounded pleased to hear from him, but cautious, too. She had been to see Amber that afternoon and he gathered that the visit hadn’t gone well.

‘She gets things so out of proportion, deliberately misinterpreting everything I say to put it in the worst possible light.Anyway,

one day at a time . . . How are you?’

He gave her a summary of his day and heard her sigh.

‘It just gets worse, doesn’t it?’ she said. ‘What they did to Michael Grant, and now this boy . . . I think you should let this go, David.Have a talk to your boss and then wash your hands of it.The past is over.You can’t put it all to rights.’

He thought about that. Long after they hung up he pondered if that was really what he was trying to do. He remembered the Saturday lunchtime long ago,returning home to his abandoned flat, tweaking at that old wound, and of the conversations he had had that day with Joseph Kidd, whose remains had surfaced like an old nightmare so long after the event. But he wasn’t convinced. It wasn’t restitution he wanted so much as understanding. As startling as Hadden-Vane’s disclosures had been, they hadn’t explained what had happened on the eleventh of April 1981. In fact, thinking of the MP’s performance now, it had the mesmerising quality of an illusionist show. He closed his eyes as he recalled each stage in the performance,and tried to rekindle a half-suppressed sense of something inconclusive, unexplained, behind the dazzling revelations.

He woke abruptly, two hours later, with the realisation of what had troubled him. In his presentation to the committee, Hadden-Vane had questioned whether Michael Grant had a personal reason for his campaign against Roach, a suggestion that Brock had found entirely plausible. This had been the basis on which he had called Father Maguire as a witness, yet the priest had thrown no light on that idea, and instead the MP had used him to expose Grant’s past in Jamaica. Hadden-Vane hadn’t answered his own question. Perhaps he didn’t know the answer,or didn’t want to know.Perhaps it lay in the relationship between Grant and his fellow immigrant, Joseph Kidd. Brock wondered who might know, and his thoughts returned as they had once before, to Abigail Lavender, who had taken Grant in when he first arrived in the UK, and whose influence had been so formative on his subsequent career.It seemed all the stranger now, after what Hadden-Vane had uncovered, that Grant hadn’t put her on his list of people Kathy should speak to,nor invited her to his daughter’s concert. And she was still alive, for he remembered her name cropping up in Kathy’s last report, with an address in Roehampton.

He got stiffly to his feet, picked up the empty glass and the remnants of his fish supper and headed for the kitchen. As he reached the door the phone rang.

‘Brock, my dear chap! Not woken you up, I hope?’

‘Sundeep, you’re working late.’

‘Well, not exactly, but the lab is, and I asked them to phone me at home with their result. Bingo! You win the lottery.’

‘Really?’ Brock felt a tightening in his chest, of relief really, and excitement at an idea well-formed against all the odds. ‘You’ve got a match?’

‘That’s right. Care to take a punt on which of the three was Daddy?’

‘Number two, Bravo? Joseph Kidd?’

‘Wrong! It was the mysterious number three, the man without a head. He was the father of the lady whose handkerchief you gave us.’

‘Really?’ The killers had worked through the other two to get to him. Robbie, surname unknown.

‘Does the lady know?’

‘That’s a good question, Sundeep. A very good question.’

twenty-nine

K
athy took her morning coffee into the monitor room and watched McCulloch on the screen. On the other side of the table Mr Teddy Vexx sat with his arms folded, motionless, eyes hooded as if in meditation. Martin Connell, next to him, seemed almost diminutive alongside his bulk.

‘Resuming then, Mr Vexx, you insist that you haven’t seen Mr Murray for the last two days?’

‘We’ve been over this several times,’ Martin objected smoothly.

‘I have a witness who saw your car in the vicinity of Cockpit Lane shortly before Mr Murray was found.’

‘What witness?’ Martin asked sharply.

‘A police officer,’ McCulloch snapped back.

They both turned to look at Vexx, who slowly uncrossed his arms, put his right hand into his jacket pocket, then withdrew it
and reached forward with his big fist across the table towards the detective, who, despite himself, drew back. For several seconds Vexx kept his hand cupped in front of McCulloch on the table, staring into his eyes. Then he lifted his hand away and leaned back. His chair creaked. A packet of chewing gum lay where his fist had been. He said,‘I went out to buy gum.’

Kathy sighed. This wasn’t going well.

The Alton Estate at Roehampton was one of the most heroic attempts by the London County Council architects to build the New Jerusalem in the 1950s. Overlooking the rolling green of Richmond Park, its towers and slabs ranged from Scandinavian modernism on the east to the tougher concrete Brutalism of Le Corbusier on the west. Between the two sides of this stylistic argument lay a convent and a Jesuit college, and Brock wondered, as he sat in Abigail Lavender’s living room, eyeing the brightly decorated Virgins, crucifixes and papal photographs, whether this had been an attraction for her.

‘Wonderful view,’ he said.

‘Oh yes.’ She’d put on a lot of weight since he’d seen her in 1981, and she wobbled gently as she pointed out some of the sights in the park—the Royal Ballet School, the polo field, Prince Charles’ Spinney—that he would have been able to see if it weren’t for the mist.

‘I’m so glad you came to see me, sir,’ she said. She had a quiet, gentle voice that might, he imagined, turn into a powerful soprano given a decent hymn. ‘I have been so distressed about what they been doin’ to that poor boy. They lynched him, no two ways about it, as surely as if they’d hung him from a tree. I wanted to speak out, tell people what I know, but I waited to hear from Michael first. I s’pose he didn’t need my help. Maybe it would

make no difference anyway, since everybody thinks he’s guilty.’

‘What is it that you wanted to tell people, Abigail?’

‘Why, the truth!’

‘I’m very interested in that. Maybe I could help Michael if you told it to me.’

‘I’ll do that, on one condition, that you try my home-made cream sponge and chocolate macaroons.’

‘I thought you’d never ask,’ he said, and she went off chuckling to her little kitchen to prepare the feast.

‘I grew up in Riverton City, same as Michael,’ she said, when she finally settled herself in the armchair facing Brock, cups of tea balanced on their right chair arms and plates of confectionery on their left.

‘My mother and his grandmother, Mrs Forrest, were close friends.’

‘That was his name then, wasn’t it?’

‘That’s right. He was called Billy Forrest. I remember when his mother brought him to live with his grandmother, the sweetest little pickney I ever saw,and I watched him grow up until I married Mr Lavender and came away to England. Billy was seven then, and already I could see that he was different.Well, he could read for a start, and he was quiet and you could tell from looking at him that there were things going on in his head that he wasn’t telling you about. To tell the truth, I didn’t know how long he’d survive in the Dungle. Do you know about the Dungle?’