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?’
‘Michael mentioned it to me. A rubbish tip, yes?’
‘The biggest filthiest rubbish tip you ever saw. Imagine the putrid stench under the hot sun, the smoke of fires, the seagulls wheeling overhead, the rats, the skinny dogs, the flies. And then imagine the garbage trucks roaring in and the bigger boys jumping on board so they can have the first pick of the rubbish before it gets tipped out and the smaller children and the women get to work, looking for cans and bottles, bits of material, anything you can sell or eat or make a shelter and clothes from.’
Abigail could clearly see it as she spoke, and when she paused to take breath she blinked and looked around her at the spotless little flat as if still not quite able to believe that she’d escaped.
‘And then, as if bein’ poor wasn’t bad enough, there was what people did to each other in that dreadful place, the guns, the beatin’s, and what they did to the girls . . . It was bad enough then, when I was there, but it got worse, year by year, until by the time Billy left it had all got completely out of hand. The bad boys took handouts from the big politicians, Manley and Seaga’s people, to terrorise the folk on the other side. They didn’t stop at killing the men-little children and old women were murdered in their beds to teach the others what to expect. In May of that year they set fire to the Evening Tide Home for the elderly disabled, on Slipe Pen Road. A sister of my mother was living there, my Auntie May, who wasn’t well in the head. It was a PNP area, but there was a rumour goin’ round that over a hundred of the residents had voted for the JLP in the last election, so one night the PNP boys cut the phone lines and started fires. It was a big old wooden building, with seven hundred old folks inside, and it went up in an inferno. One hundred and fifty-three of the old people died that night, Auntie May among them. No one was ever arrested for that terrible deed, but the men who did it will surely face the Judgement of His Wrath.Will you have another slice of my cream sponge, Chief Inspector?’
‘It is very good,’ Brock conceded, handing her his empty plate with only a token show of resistance.
‘You haven’t been eatin’ well lately, have you? I can see you’re lookin’ peaky. Another cuppa to go with it?’
‘Thank you.’
‘Anyway, what chance did a poor boy have of growing up straight in such a place? Some ran away to Bull Bay to become Rastas, reading the Scriptures and praising Jah and Selassie with the older dreads. Some were rescued by the likes of Father Guzowski or Monsignor Albert. Some joined the police force or the army. Some escaped overseas. But most joined the gangs and posses and got themselves a gun.’
‘Which did Billy do?’
‘Oh, he was one of Father Guzowski’s boys, no mistake about that. That’s what made it so unfair, what happened.’
There had been a spate of particularly violent murders in Jones Town during that August, Abigail said, and on this particular night the police had finally been prodded into action, sending patrols out looking for the perpetrators. They were nervous, the police, grabbing anyone they didn’t like the look of until they had a full quota to take back to the station.Billy was unlucky to be in the area that hot night, coming back from a visit to a relative in Kingston Public Hospital. He was arrested and taken in for questioning. It was chaotic at the police station, with young men being bundled into crowded cells to await their turn. Billy got talking to another prisoner, called Earl, a bit older than himself, who seemed to know the ropes and took Billy under his wing.
The police officers who questioned Billy seemed uninterested in his story of visiting the hospital, and kept trying to get him to admit that he had been in Jones Town the previous night,which he had not.Their interrogation techniques were rough,and he was returned to his cell with two thick ears and a bloody nose.There Earl went over with him what had happened and explained where he’d gonewrong,arguingwithhisquestioners.Whentheytookhim away for a second time he followed Earl’s advice and came back without much further damage. Earl, on the other hand, returned from his session badly beaten,with a missing tooth and what later turned out to be two cracked ribs. He explained that someone in their cell had recognised him as a Shower Posse soldier and therefore a JLP supporter and had told the police, who were in the PNP camp.
It was late in the night when Billy and Earl were finally released. By way of a final insult, the cops drove the two of them and a third prisoner into the heart of a Spangler-controlled area and kicked them out, confident that they would be identified as the enemy and treated accordingly. They were saved by an old woman, who, in an extraordinary act of charity, realised their danger and took them into her home.
The next morning they set off together for the relative safety of Tivoli Gardens, where Earl lived, but on the way a car overtook them and stopped in the street ahead. Two men got out holding guns and began firing at them. Their companion was hit immediately in the head, clearly a fatal wound, while Billy and Earl jumped over a fence and ran, pursued by the gunmen. Trapped in a small yard, they grabbed whatever lay to hand and waited for the men to pass by. They heard one run past, but then the second stopped and came into their hiding place. Earl hit him with the stick he’d picked up, but it was rotten and snapped across the man’s shoulder without doing any damage. The man turned to shoot and Billy, behind him, hit him on the head with the brick he’d found. The man fell,
