Brock And Kolla - 09 - Spider Trap (30 page)

twenty

O
n Saturday morning Brock sat at his desk surrounded by columns of stacked files that looked as if they’d been unearthed from some ancient crypt. Dot had attempted to rearrange them, he saw, perhaps to make an easier route to the door, but she hadn’t made much impression.From her withering looks the previous day he understood that she no longer considered the situation tenable. He sympathised, of course, but he couldn’t stop now, not having come this far. The problem was that the material evoked so many memories, so many side trails, that it was easy to get distracted. To focus his researches he had pinned a large sheet of detail paper over the top of the Brown Bread wall, and it was now covered with a hand-drawn timeline and incident record chart decipherable only to himself. Maybe today, maybe tomorrow, something would emerge out of the mist. He knew he couldn’t go on much longer. Then the phone rang, his mobile not the office one.‘Hello?’

The caller said nothing for a moment. He heard an intake of

breath, and repeated,‘Hello? Brock here.’ ‘Hello, David.’ It was his turn to be silent, giving the buzzing in his ears a

chance to subside.‘Suzanne,’ he said at last. ‘Was that you at the airport on Tuesday?’ ‘Yes . . . yes it was. I got cold feet when I saw the children.’ ‘I’m coming up to town this morning. Do you want to meet?’ ‘Yes,’ he said.‘I’d like that.’

Kathy also had a surprise in store that Saturday morning. Tom picked her up at nine for what he described as a mystery trip. He was wearing a warm jacket, and she noticed the strap of a camera hanging from its pocket. They headed north and east on roads she didn’t know, and after a while she began to see signs for the Lee Valley Regional Park, Waltham Abbey and Epping Forest. They drove through woodland on narrow lanes over rising ground, and eventually emerged on a hilltop, where Tom pulled over in front of a panoramic view back across the city. It was a fresh, blustery morning, with sunlight piercing the gaps in high cloud to pick out parts of the Thames basin in pools of brightness. Suddenly the sound of birdsong and the hum of distant traffic were punctuated by the sharp staccato rattle of gunfire.

‘Now do you know where we are?’

Kathy shook her head.

‘Lippitts Hill? You haven’t been to the firing range here?’

‘Oh, yes, but I must have come a different way. Have you brought me for a morning’s shooting then?’

‘Not quite. Something more fun, I think.’ He pointed up at the sky, and after squinting at the cloud for a moment Kathy was able to make out a tiny object dropping fast towards them. A little later and the growing dot was accompanied by a thumping noise that became a deafening clatter as the helicopter passed overhead and dropped behind a copse of trees. Tom restarted the car and drove after it to a set of gates beside a notice for the Metropolitan Police Air Support Unit.

‘I thought we might hitch a ride,’ Tom said.‘Okay?’

He was friends with the inspector who ran the police staff on the base, a former Special Branch man, who introduced them to the pilot. They had a cup of coffee together while the Twin Squirrel was being refuelled, and he pointed out the aircraft’s special features: the Nitesun searchlight, the Skyshout loudspeaker system, and the gyro-stabilised, thermal-imaging video camera.

Tom was trying to impress her, Kathy realised, and doing quite a good job, though she’d have been more impressed if he’d volunteered what he’d been doing the night before.

They climbed in, fastened seatbelts, and rose into the blustery air. Below them the canopy of Epping Forest spread away to the north. Spiralling higher, the full extent of the city became clearer, sprawling away to the distant horizons, east, south and west. They headed down the Lee Valley, following the chain of reservoirs, marshes and waterways towards the great silver snake of the Thames, crossing it near the Isle of Dogs and losing altitude over the ant-line of cars on the Dover road across Blackheath.

Now Kathy realised what Tom had in mind.Soon she could see the pattern of tees,greens and bunkers on the golf course like a neat abstract painting, and recognised the belt of trees from where she had looked across the eighteenth fairway to The Glebe.Then it was laid out below them, an irregular octagon of roofs around the central space in which she could make out someone washing a car and two others on the tennis court. The tennis players paused in their game as the shadow of the chopper passed over them.

Tom was taking pictures and gestured for her to look at something to do with the stream across the golf course, but she couldn’t work out what he was saying. The helicopter banked into a wide sweep to the south before returning across Shooters Hill and heading back over the river towards base.

‘It was a great trip,’ she said to the pilot as they stepped out onto solid ground again, and she meant it, for the noise, the buffeting wind, the vibration, the exhilaration of height had energised her and she felt her face tingling with life. They thanked Tom’s friend, who said he couldn’t join them for lunch, but recommended a nearby pub, the Owl, which had its own pet owl in a cage in the garden.

Over pies and beer, Tom said,‘Did you get the point about the stream?’ He, too, seemed charged by their flight.

She said she hadn’t, so he got out his camera and replayed his pictures on the monitor screen.

‘You can see the route of it back here, beyond the old church, where there’s a winding line of willows. It curls around the church towards the original glebe house, then disappears.’ He clicked on through the frames. ‘Then we come to the Roaches’ compound,and on the other side the stream emerges again to form that hazard across the golf course, becomes the small lake near the clubhouse,and continues north to run into the Thames somewhere around Woolwich.’ He sat back with a quizzical smile, waiting for her conclusions.

‘So it’s been culverted where it runs around the Roaches’ place?’

‘Not around, under. To put together a big enough site for his family compound on the edge of the golf course, Spider had to build The Glebe across the stream. It runs in a culvert right under the development. And for maintenance purposes, there are two manhole access points into the central courtyard.’

As he made this revelation,Tom had a look of breezy elation on his face that made Kathy think of Biggles or the Famous Five, and she wondered if their aerial adventure had made him slightly drunk.

‘How do you know this?’

‘Because I’ve seen the plans lodged with the local authority. Planning approval was conditional on providing adequate means of access for council engineers.’

‘Andrea?’

He gave a smug little smile.‘Actually,no.I dug this up myself.’

‘You’re not seriously suggesting . . .’

Tom’s eyes lit up with mischief as he followed what was going through her mind, daring her to say it.

‘. . . posing as a council engineer?’

‘Not exactly that, perhaps. But let’s face it, the only conclusive evidence we’re likely to get against Roach will be inside The Glebe, yes?’

‘You want to break and enter?’

‘ “Covert entry” sounds so much better than “break and enter”, don’t you think? Sounds almost legitimate. Like nobody need know a thing about it.’

‘Tom ...’

‘A moonless night,’ he mused, turning away to contemplate the owl in its cage outside the window. ‘The new moon is next Thursday . . .’

Kathy began to protest at how ridiculous the idea was, how impractical and potentially disastrous, until she saw his shoulders shake and realised he was having her on.

‘Tom!’ She punched his arm.

He turned back, laughing, and she joined in.

‘All right, you got me going.’

And yet, the reason she had fallen for it was that she had seen a quality in him that made it seem all too plausible.You might call it impatience with due process, or reckless courage, or the Nelson touch. She admired it, but also mistrusted it. Maybe she recognised a shade of it in herself.

‘I called in on Brock yesterday,’ Tom said later, as they were finishing their lunch.‘Have you seen his office lately? Like a paper recycling dump.We have to do something, Kathy, bring him back to the real world.’

They had arranged to meet at a small restaurant in Chelsea, a favourite haunt from years ago when Suzanne had lived in nearby Belgravia before she had moved down to the coast to open her antiques shop in Battle. Brock wasn’t sure what to make of her choice of venue, whether it was meant to resurrect the feelings they had shared when they first met, or to demonstrate how different things were now. He felt both sensations tugging at him as he stepped across the familiar threshold. Nothing had changed, not the decor, the layout of tables, or even the management. He was the first to arrive, and took his seat at a secluded table at the rear, ordered a dry martini because that was what they had done in those days, and sat watching the door with a trepidation he hadn’t felt in a long time.

She’d had her hair cut he realised as he rose to his feet, remembering the travel-worn figure he’d seen at Heathrow. The thick, shoulder-length dark hair had been trimmed back to her jawline in a new style he liked. He smiled to himself, for he too had visited the barber on his way over here. For a moment, as she approached, he wasn’t sure what to expect. Then her face broke into that warm generous smile of hers and she was holding out her hands to him.

‘David!’

He took the offered hands, then pulled her closer and wrapped his arms around her. ‘Suzanne,’ he murmured, with enormous relief. The maître d’ beamed approvingly and eased out her chair and they sat.

‘Oh, dry martini! Yes, please.’

For a moment they said nothing, hands laid on the white tablecloth with fingertips just touching in mute contact.She looked reinvigorated, he thought, charged with new life.

‘Thank you for ringing,’ he said,‘for suggesting this.’

‘I wasn’t sure if it was a mistake, until I saw you just now. How have you been?’

‘The same.You look marvellous.The trip has done you good.’

‘Yes, I feel refreshed . . . in different ways.’

But he detected a shadow behind her words, and had the sudden awful suspicion that the purpose of this meeting was to make a final break.

‘A new perspective?’

‘Yes ...’

He sensed some hard thing about to emerge, but then she veered away and spoke about the things she had done: riding horses on a cattle station, scuba diving on a reef, hiking through a rainforest.

Her martini arrived and he raised his glass to hers.‘Welcome home.’

She lowered her eyes.‘Did you miss me?’

‘Every day. Three months is a long time.’

She was about to reply to that when the waiter came for their order, and when he left she instead turned the conversation to the restaurant and its memories. Did he remember the old couple that always sat at that table over there, and how they’d invented their story from small clues—his taste in shoes, her silver-tipped walking stick, the tiny appointment diaries they would compare?

And how they would get tired of that, or discover a new clue, and invent a completely new story for them?

‘I had this idea that I could change our story too,’ she went on. ‘I used to think you were suffering from a malignant condition that I called Brock’s Paradox, a belief that you could only keep a relationship alive by not allowing it to reach its full potential.’ She gave a little smile.‘I thought if I could get you away for long enough I could show you that it needn’t apply, so I planned a long trip for us, overseas, but at the last minute you backed out.Work, you said.’