‘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
‘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
