Java Spider by Geoffrey Archer Read Free Book Online

centre of the room was a low mahogany table. She picked up the silver photo frame that stood on it. She and Stephen on their wedding day eighteen years ago, a couple of months after he was elected to the seat. He was terribly good looking then. Still was.
    And now someone else was getting her kicks from him. Sally flopped on to the cream, damask sofa, straightened her long, navy-blue cotton skirt and laid the photo face down on the table.
    Good luck to her, whoever she was. And she would need luck. Because it would end in tears. With Stephen everything always did.
    Northwest London
    15.25 hrs
    For Detective Sergeant Nick Randall this Sunday was special. A guaranteed day off. No interruptions, no demands to do an extra shift on overtime. All so he could see his daughter.
    He’d not often put family first in his life – one reason he was now divorced. But Sandra was fifteen years old and very special to him. She lived with her mother. Lindy had rung last night to check he was coming, and to tell him there was trouble brewing. She’d found pills in Sandra’s room. Contraceptives and something else she thought was Ecstasy.
    Randall turned the car into the grid of rundown suburban streets where they lived – red-brick semis with dead Vauxhalls in the paved front gardens. Not the sort of neighbourhood he wanted his daughter brought up in, but there was no choice.
    He stamped on the brake. A football had rolled between parked cars. A small, brown face peeked out to check it was safe. Nick beckoned the boy on and waited until he was clear. Every other family here was Asian.
    He’d been wet behind the ears when he married. A dropout from the comfortable middle-class home of his adoptive parents, he’d ended up in the army. At twenty-one as a lance-corporal in the Redcaps, Lindy had swum into his field of vision, a nubile tease of a girl, a squaddie’s wet dream. She was just seventeen, with a company sergeant major for a father who had the charm of a puff-adder.
    Randall had been smitten. Blinded. All he knew was that he had to have her. Not easy with the CSM on the prowl. But he’d found a way. Four months later she’d announced she was pregnant. The CSM had told him to marry her or get his neck broken.
    It was eight years after that when he bought the little house in Wembley. He’d just left the army after two years unaccompanied in Hong Kong. The marriage was in trouble and he’d signed with the police in the half-witted belief he would spend more time at home. He and Lindy had stuck it for another year.
    Sandra had been eight when he moved out, her face a tight button of bewilderment. And now she was fifteen, on the pill and doing drugs like every other teenager in the nineteen nineties. On the back seat he’d brought a horror pack. Police photos to show her. Morgue shots of dead junkies.
    He turned into the crescent and found a parking space two doors from the house, recognisable by its peeling front door and the old bath left in the garden by a lodger who’d done Lindy a plumbing job in lieu of rent.
    He switched off the engine, then his mobile phone rang.
    ‘Fuck!’ He reached into his briefcase. ‘Yes?’
    ‘Nick? Chris here. In the Ops Room. Where are you?’
    ‘Wembley.’
    ‘Right …’ Hesitation in the voice. ‘Summat’s come up. We need you in.’
    ‘Chris I can’t. Not today. I told you why on Friday. In the pub.’
    ‘Sorry. Boss’s orders. He needs someone and you’re it.’
    ‘Look, at least give me a couple of hours.’
    ‘Can’t.’
    ‘Fuck you, Chris!’
    ‘It’s tough at the top, chum. Here in half an hour?’
    ‘You’ll be lucky.’
    The Security Group Operations Room on the sixteenth floor of Scotland Yard’s Westminster headquarters was the combined nerve centre for Special Branch and the Anti-Terrorist Branch, a long, narrow room full of VDUs, with a panoramic view across northwest London.
    On the back wall behind the duty sergeant’s desk hung the roster list known as the