A young man, yawning and scratching his crotch, answered the third door. Kathy showed her identification and said she was investigating reports of a prowler in the street. The man shrugged and said he’d heard nothing, but she was welcome to look around the yard. There, in a corner hidden from sight of the house by a small shed, she found an area of ground cleared of snow, in front of a section of fencing in which the nails had been removed to allow the boards to be slid apart. From this sheltered hide she had a perfect panorama of the whole of the crime scene site. She searched the place thoroughly but could find no traces that might interest the SOCOs-no footprints, no cigarette butts or sweet wrappers, no threads caught on the rough wooden boards, which would probably yield no fingerprints. Whoever it was had been careful. She was turning to leave when her eye caught a tiny flake of white in the trampled ground. Using a key she flicked away dirt until she could see more of a scrap of paper, which eventually revealed itself as the remains of a hand-rolled cigarette end, crumpled, shrivelled and stamped into the earth.
Brock, too, was prowling-in his case at Queen Anne’s Gate, restlessly roaming the empty offices. From long experience he sensed that both murder inquiries in Cockpit Lane might be approaching some sort of turning point, in which, for good or ill, evidence would begin to swing their random searches into more deliberate directions. For his own reasons he had been more preoccupied with the older murders, but in the other case they had now accumulated a considerable list of people who had seen the two girls during their stay in the area, and the interviews were beginning to reveal distinctive patterns.
He came to Bren’s desk and noticed an unopened priority delivery pouch from Forensic Services. Opening it, he discovered the report of the review that he had ordered of the available ballistics evidence from the Brown Bread shootings. All of the surviving bullets and cartridge cases had been re-examined in the laboratories to confirm their common source. In one case, the murder of Johnny Mulroy, both cartridges and viable bullets had been recovered from the crime scene,and it was this that made it possible to tie all of the others, in which one or the other was missing, to a single source, Brown Bread.
Brock read the report carefully until he came to an addendum sheet at the end, which stopped him short. He scanned it again, unable to believe what he was reading, and when he reached for a phone he realised that he had been holding his breath. According to the report,the single intact bullet found at the scene of Dana and Dee-Ann’s murder had also been fired by Brown Bread.
He got through to Forensic Services, but the person he wanted wasn’t at work this Saturday morning, and it took some insistence to get a contact number for the author of the report. When he eventually reached him, the man confirmed the result. Both of the multiple murders in Cockpit Lane, committed twenty-four years apart, had been carried out using the same weapon. The scientist who had made the connection had recently worked on the Dee-Ann case and had recognised the markings straight away on the Johnny Mulroy bullet. The result had been confirmed by a second examiner.
Brock sat back, stunned.Was it really possible that one of the Roaches, after all this time, should return to the same old haunt and repeat his actions in almost the same place with the same gun? And if it were true, how must he now be feeling, reading the newspaper reports, realising that his latest handiwork had led, through the misadventures of a schoolboy, to the discovery of his old crimes?
He tucked the report back into its pouch and picked up the phone again.
He wanted a link, he told them after they’d broken off their weekend shopping, sport and family excursions and reassembled at Queen Anne’s Gate, a link between Shooters Hill and Cockpit Lane in the early morning hours of Friday the fourth of February.
More specifically, between Mark, Ivor or Ricky Roach on the one hand, and Teddy Vexx, Dana and Dee-Ann on the other, at
that critical period of time.
Failing eyewitnesses and forensic traces they turned their attention to telephones and Rainbow. There had already been an attempt to trace Vexx’s phone calls on that night, frustrated by the discovery that he appeared to have access to a number of stolen phones and SIM cards. A check of phones registered to the Roach brothers yielded nothing promising. That left Rainbow.
The London metropolitan area, the largest in Europe, sprawls blindly across some six thousand square miles of south-east England-blind,but not unseen.Its fourteen million inhabitants are observed as they move about its streets by tens of thousands of camera eyes. The eyes cluster along its major highways, its rail and underground stations, around the perimeter of the Central London congestion zone, the City of London’s ‘Ring of Steel’, the Docklands and the airports, and they spread out in a fine pattern wherever people transact business, cross each other’s paths and commit crimes. They are not uniformly intelligent, these eyes; some merely record what they see, others can read vehicle number plates, and some, the smartest of all, are said to recognise faces. Together they comprise the creature known as ‘Rainbow’,watched over by police Rainbow Coordinators in the borough commands.
The team began contacting the coordinators, armed with numbers and descriptions of all the vehicles registered to the occupants of The Glebe.
By Sunday evening Brock was forced to accept that they had found nothing.
Kerrie, with her fashionable shoes and hair pulled severely back, was a very efficient organiser, and when Kathy arrived at Cockpit Lane on Monday morning the first of her appointments was already waiting, sitting chatting to the women volunteers who always seemed to be present in Michael Grant’s office. Kerrie introduced Kathy to Mrs Parker and showed them to a quiet table at the back of the shop.
‘I remember when this was the pawnshop,’ the woman laughed.‘I had to use it once or twice,I’ve got to admit.’
Middle-aged and smartly dressed, it didn’t look as if she had much need of pawnshops now. She must have caught Kathy looking at her large and expensive rings, because she fingered them and said, ‘I had cold feet about coming back to the old neighbourhood.You read these stories in the papers. But then I was curious, too. It’s years since I was here.’
‘Have you come far?’
‘Croydon. But I keep in touch with Michael, Christmas cards and that.Wonderful man.’
‘Well, I do appreciate you coming in.’
‘Oh, I was fascinated. Is it really Joseph you’ve found?’
‘Looks like it.’ Kathy showed her the three pictures.
‘That’s Joseph all right, and that’s Walter. But I don’t know who that is.’
‘How did you know them?’
‘We all used to go to Studio One, up on Maxfield Street. Oh, it was a terrible dive, a hellhole really.’ She smiled at the memory. ‘A dance and drinking club, a shebeen, down in the basement, always packed out on a Saturday night.We knew the DJs. And that music! The Pioneers, The Roots Radics, Rankin’ Dread-you remember “Hey Fatty Boom Boom”?’ She laughed. ‘No, course you don’t.Anyway,for a time there Joseph and me were,well,close.’
‘You went out with him?’
‘Yeah. I was really soft on him, but it was no use. All the girls went for Joseph, and he loved us all, young and old, black and white, but especially white, so I didn’t have much chance.’
Kathy saw the wistful look in her eyes. ‘You still think of him, eh?’
‘Sometimes, I must admit.’
‘When did you go out?’
‘I was trying to remember that. He hadn’t been here long and he spoke with a really broad Jamaican accent. The weather was cool, not as cold as now, but I remember him complaining about how grey and cold it was.’
‘He came over towards the end of September.’
‘Yes, that would be right. I saw him around a few times, like in the market, then we got together one night at Studio One and bang, that was that. His mate Walter had a room in this squat and we hardly left it for a week. My mum and dad went spare. It was before Christmas, I think-yes, definitely before Christmas, because by then he’d moved on to other girls and I was sobbing into the mince pies.’
‘He was a bastard, was he?’
