Brock And Kolla - 09 - Spider Trap Read Free Page B

they spruiked their goods. As Kathy threaded through the crowded stalls she felt people looking at her. She wondered if they knew she was police, or if it was just the physical difference, her pale skin and blonde hair, an ashen northerner in a snow-bound Caribbean market.
    She took the right fork where Cockpit Lane divided in front of the church of St Barnabas, and after a couple of blocks came to the police station, where she made some phone calls and picked up a car. An hour later she was in North London, at the offices of the Youth Justice Board with whom Dana and Dee-Ann had been registered.
    She was met by a male senior manager and a younger woman, who was a Youth Offending Teams caseworker. The man wasn’t familiar with the murdered girls and Kathy suspected he was primarily there to protect his department from fallout. He told her that Dana and Dee-Ann had shared the same designated YOT manager, who was currently on maternity leave. Their deputising manager was also absent, on stress leave. Mandy, by his side, on secondment to the YOT from the National Probation Service, looked barely older than the two victims but had worked with them in the past and was, the man assured Kathy, very conversant with their cases.
    The two spoke to each other in a professional private language that Kathy didn’t altogether follow, full of acronyms and special meanings, and she had to ask them to elaborate so that she could take notes. It seemed that between them, Dana and Dee-Ann had pretty well covered the full gamut of custodial and noncustodial sentences, community orders and programs available to the courts. They’d been ASROd and OSAPd, undergone Anger Replacement Training and Personal Reduction in Substance Misuse counselling, been curfewed, locked up and paroled. After the last breach, Mandy explained, the YOT had recommended electronic tagging, but the magistrate had instead put them on the Think First program, from which they’d promptly absconded. They had been missing now for three weeks and an arrest order had been issued.
    Satisfied that Kathy seemed sufficiently baffled, the man told her apologetically that he had other business to attend to, but said that Mandy could fill in the details. He made Kathy promise that if there were any residual issues she would email him immediately. After the door closed behind him, Mandy was silent for a moment,then she said,‘I’ve never seen him in here on a Saturday before. Do you fancy a cup of coffee?’
    ‘I’m dying for one,’ Kathy said.
    ‘There’s nothing in here, but there’s a decent caf across the street.’
    The place was bustling with shoppers taking a break.
‘Nothing worked,’ Mandy said.
‘What was their background?’
    ‘Oh, you know—abusive families, dysfunctional peer groups, disadvantaged neighbourhoods. They first met when they were fourteen, and they would say it was the first good thing that ever happened to either of them. Apart they were desperate, together they became like two different people,a bonded pair,almost a single personality.I hadn’t come across anything quite like that before.For a while they might be docile, completely absorbed in each other’s company, whispering secrets, but then they’d wind each other up, get into a kind of hysteria, and do crazy, stupid, dangerous things together. So then we decided to separate them, keep them apart. Dana immediately became violent and aggressive, while Dee-Ann went into decline, self-harming and then attempting suicide. So we gave up and put them back together again.
    ‘They were totally infuriating,destructive apart,manic together, uncontrollable either way. But when they were together they could also be full of fun and life, good with the other kids. They loved music and dancing. I’m really sad at what happened to them.’
    ‘Yes. Do you have any idea what they were doing south of the river?’
    ‘That was the first thing I wondered when I heard. I looked through their files. All I