The Crime Trade

by Simon Kernick

  This is the London of today, a vast multicultural city of consumers breeding an ever-growing array of gangs from every ethnic background imaginable, all vying for control of the city’s huge and incredibly lucrative crime industry. I’d heard somewhere that London’s organized and semi-organized criminals were responsible for raising ten billion pounds of revenues per year; mainly from drugs, but also from prostitution (now effectively sewn up by the Albanians), people smuggling and occasionally armed robbery. When I’d mentioned that figure, the ten billion, to Malik, he’d told me it was almost certainly a conservative estimate.

  What I couldn’t understand, though, was why Tyndall’s men would be involved in robbing Fellano. I’ve said it before, and I hope I can keep saying it: you should never underestimate the stupidity of criminals, and it’s certainly par for the course for them to rip each other off, especially when it comes to deals involving drugs, but Tyndall was no short-term merchant. He was a man on the up, with business sense as well as ruthlessness, so it made no sense for him to be falling out with a man like Fellano who was likely to be his main supplier in the coke trade. He would be wanting to build bridges with him, not burning them down.

  I told all this to the people sitting round the table, with Malik (who also knew something about the Tyndall gang) filling in some of the gaps. We both agreed that it didn’t seem the typical behaviour of a man who so far had taken his steps from petty to big-money crime carefully and with plenty of thought.

  ‘The three we’ve got in custody over at Paddington Green aren’t talking at the moment,’ said Flanagan, ‘but they’re facing some very long stretches, so they’ve got a lot of incentive to open their mouths and start incriminating each other, and whoever may have organized it. If it is anything to do with Tyndall, we’ll find out.’

  He was about to say something else, but then his mobile rang, the third time it had gone off since the meeting had begun. He opened it up and examined the screen. On the first two occasions, he hadn’t answered it, but this time it was obvious that whoever was calling was worth talking to. It was a short, one-sided conversation, with Flanagan doing most of the listening. He did say ‘Oh fuck’ at one point, then there was a thirty-second pause, then he said ‘Bollocks’. Then, ten seconds later, he mumbled something about being there shortly, and hung up.

  Everyone looked at him expectantly. ‘That was the assistant commissioner,’ he said with an actor’s croak, his eyes focusing on the table in front of him. ‘The lady who had the heart attack, Eileen Murdoch . . . she’s died.’

  ‘Shit,’ said Ferman.

  And that pretty much summed up the predicament, not only of Flanagan, but of all of us involved in the violent and wholly unexpected events of that fateful day. A death toll of six now and a tidal wave of fall-out still to break.

  4

  The meeting broke up five minutes later. I had a quick word with Malik, telling him that I’d take responsibility for tracking down Robbie O’Brien, and let him know as soon as we’d picked him up. I wanted to say a few more words but he was in a hurry. He looked more concerned than I’d ever seen him before, which I could understand. Malik was a career copper, a good man with a keen sense of right and wrong, but still someone with his eyes on promotion to the upper echelons of the Serious Crime Group, and ultimately the Met, and a catastrophe like today’s could set him back years if he was found to be even partly responsible.

  It could set me back years too, but I wasn’t so worried about it. I’d been knocked back from a DI to a DC a couple of years before, when I was stationed south of the river, so I knew not to expect much help from above when things started to go wrong. Admittedly, that time had been my own fault. I’d seen a fellow officer strike a seventeen-year-old mugger he’d arrested and, out of loyalty (misplaced or otherwise, I’ll leave it for you to decide), I and the other two officers who’d witnessed his actions had covered up for him, denying that we’d seen any wrongdoing take place. That would have been the end of it too, but an investigative journalist had picked up the story and blown the whistle. A very public investigation had followed that had culminated not only in me transferring to another station in Islington, but with my marriage breaking up, and my wife taking up residence with the same investigative journalist who’d wrecked things for me in the first place. Now, you don’t often get a run of luck that bad in a lifetime, but once you’ve had it, you learn a valuable lesson: always expect the unexpected. And never get too comfortable when things are going well, because otherwise the fall’ll be a lot harder. I got the feeling that Malik was beginning to realize this now, and the knowledge wouldn’t do him any harm.

  Tina and I were parked a mile or so away from the hotel in the Compass Centre, British Airways’ Heathrow offices on the A4. We got a lift there in the back of a squad car whose driver, a local uniform with a big false-looking moustache and glasses, was desperate for information as to what had gone down that afternoon. It seemed he was just as ill informed as the members of the public who’d stood gawking over the police tape at the entrance to the car park as we’d left. I told him there’d been a series of shootings, and an officer had been killed.

  ‘When are they going to start arming us, eh?’ he asked, turning round in his seat, taxi driver style.

  ‘I’ve got a feeling it’s not going to be long,’ I answered, hoping that the day never came when I patrolled with a gun, but knowing that it was pretty much inevitable, and that today’s events were just one more nail in the coffin of an unarmed force.

  When we were back in the car, with Tina driving, she shook her head and cursed. ‘That O’Brien, I’m going to kill him when I catch hold of the bastard. He must have been the source of the leak.’

  ‘I don’t know what the hell he was thinking about if he was responsible,’ I said. ‘Why set it up when it’s always going to come back to him? If he tipped Tyndall’s people off, then what would he gain from it? He’d know that they’d end up getting caught, and that suspicion would automatically fall on him.’

  ‘But it’s got to be a process of deduction, hasn’t it? Who else knew?’

  She had a point there. It had been a secretive operation, but it’s always possible for someone to talk, and I told her as much.

  ‘O’Brien’s got to be the most likely, though,’ she persisted. ‘He’s stupid enough to think he can get away with it. And greedy enough too. We all know the sort. Always after one more big payday.’

  ‘But the thing is, there wouldn’t have been a payday, would there?’ I told her. ‘And O’Brien would have known that. The robbers would never have paid him in advance for selling them the information, they’d have split the proceeds afterwards, and since he knew the robbery was always going to end in failure, it would have been pointless.’

  Tina sighed, still not convinced. ‘Maybe he had another reason for setting it up.’

  ‘Maybe. Either way, he needs talking to.’

  I removed the mobile from my pocket and phoned my boss, DCI Knox, who’d now been given the task of organizing O’Brien’s arrest. His extension was busy so I tried my colleague and occasional partner, DC Dave Berrin.

  Berrin answered on the second ring with a hushed hello.

  I wasn’t sure whether it was the reception on the phone or not, so I spoke loudly. ‘Hello, Dave? Where are you?’

  ‘Outside O’Brien’s place,’ he whispered loudly back at me. ‘Me and Hunsdon are across the street from it now. He wasn’t in when we called round earlier so we’re staying put. Knox’s orders. So what happened out there today, then?’

  There was excitement in his voice as he clawed and picked for the gory details. I had a feeling I was going to get a lot of this over the next few days. Shoot-outs, particularly ones with multiple casualties, seem to engender a mood of morbid curiosity in most people, and coppers are no exception.

  ‘I’ll tell you all about it later,’ I said. ‘Are there any lights on in O’Brien’s place?’

  ‘Nothing, and it’s almost dark
now. The place is empty. Definitely.’

  ‘Have you tried the Forked Tail, or the Slug and Lettuce on Upper Street?’ I asked, thinking they’d probably be his most likely haunts for a weekday afternoon’s drinking.

  ‘We tried the Slug earlier, and Baxter and Lint were sniffing round the Forked Tail, but from what I heard, they didn’t get anywhere.’

  ‘Well, stay where you are and don’t leave until he turns up. All right?’

  ‘Of course, no problem, boss.’ The words were delivered in serious tones that were meant to let me know he was fully aware of his responsibility, but he couldn’t resist a final dig for information. ‘It was bad then, was it? Today?’

  ‘Yes, Dave,’ I said wearily, and with a finality in my tone. ‘It was bad. It’s always bad when an officer gets killed, especially when it’s right under the noses of his colleagues. Now make sure you get hold of O’Brien. I’m off home. I’ll see you in the morning.’

  I hung up and sighed, cutting him off mid-goodbye.

  Tina turned away from the windscreen and looked at me. ‘He hasn’t put in an appearance, then?’

  I shook my head, beginning to get the first pangs of concern. Like a lot of mid-table professional criminals, Slim Robbie O’Brien was fairly predictable in his habits. He was a big drinker who liked to spend his days in the bars and pubs in and around Upper Street, particularly the two I’d mentioned to Berrin. Whenever I’d met up with him, it had always been in Clerkenwell or Euston, well away from his stomping ground, and he never looked very comfortable in different surroundings. He might have had some good contacts, including those with a route into the Colombian mafia, but he was as geographically challenged as a nineteenth-century chambermaid.

  I tried Knox’s number again but it was still engaged, and as I sat back in my seat, staring through the windscreen at the orange-tinged darkness of a London evening, my concern about O’Brien grew.

  Where was he?

  5

  Stegs Jenner’s real first name was Montgomery. His dad had been a massive Second World War buff whose hero had been the field marshal of the same name and, according to Stegs’s dad, the man responsible not only for the defeat of Rommel at El Alamein but also, ultimately, the vanquishing of Hitler and Nazism. Forget Stalin, Roosevelt, Eisenhower or even Churchill. Monty was the man, and Stan Jenner immortalized him by bestowing the name on his first and only son.

  Monty Jenner. It had been a fucking nightmare at school. At first they’d called him ‘Mont-ay’ in effeminate tones to suggest that anyone bearing such a name was quite obviously queer. When he’d complained to his dad, Jenner senior had invoked ‘the spirit of the Blitz’, telling his son that he had to be prepared to deal with adverse circumstances, that it would make him a better person. And that he had to be prepared to fight. ‘I will give up my gun when they prise my cold, dead fingers from around it,’ he’d said wisely. Stegs was one of the smaller kids in his year and didn’t really understand what his old man was going on about, but even so, the next time someone had called him ‘Mont-ay’ (it had been Barry Growler, the school bully), he’d responded with his fists, launching a full-frontal blitzkrieg-style assault that had caught the Growlster completely by surprise and had cost him a black eye and a bleeding nose. The fight had been broken up by one of the teachers before Growler had had a chance to launch a substantial counter-offensive, and Stegs had ended up the winner on points, earning a grudging respect for his actions. People still laughed at his name, but they were a little bit more careful about it, and preferred to address him as ‘Mental Monty’ rather than the more irritating ‘Mont-ay’. Even Growler had left him alone for a while after that.

  About the same time, he’d decided to call himself Stegs. Although he’d never admit it now, it was short for Stegosaurus. He’d been interested in dinosaurs as a kid, and his two favourites had been Triceratops and Stegosaurus (two even-tempered plant-eaters who preferred to be left alone, but who, like Dirty Harry, could hit back hard if attacked). He felt he could identify with that. Since neither Triks nor Trice had a very cool ring to it, he’d gone with Stegs, claiming to those who asked him about it that it was his grandmother’s maiden name. He’d also changed his whole demeanour. He strutted instead of walked, he answered back to the teachers, he became a bit of a joker. For a long time, though, he couldn’t get either the name or the image to stick, but he perservered, did a few detentions for his backchat, got a couple of kickings for the way he didn’t get out of the way for the bigger boys, and eventually even the teachers started addressing him as Stegs. It taught him a valuable lesson: you can be anyone if you try.

  Stegs Jenner did not look like a typical police officer. At five foot eight, he only just beat the height restrictions, and his face, even at thirty-two, was chubby and boyish, topped off by a receding mop of fine gingery-blond hair that had the curious effect of making him look both his age and a dozen years younger at the same time, like one of those illusionists’ acts. Blink and he was twenty; blink again and he was back to thirty-two. But Stegs Jenner talked the talk, and he walked the walk, and he wasn’t afraid to put his head into the lion’s mouth, which made him an invaluable asset to SO10, Scotland Yard’s specialist undercover unit.

  He’d been a copper since the age of nineteen, and plainclothes since twenty-four. His full-time posting was still in the area where he’d grown up, the north London suburb of Barnet, but he’d been attached to SO10 for the previous six years, and probably half his time was spent seconded to them on undercover assignments, which is the way it works in the Met. No-one’s full-time undercover. You could be meeting Colombian drugs dealers one day to discuss a multi-million-pound deal, and hunting for stolen office equipment the next.

  Not that Stegs was going to be doing too much of anything for the next few days, at least not work-wise. He’d been officially suspended (thankfully on full pay) until a preliminary internal investigation could take place to see whether he’d acted improperly or not. They hadn’t let him go until half-nine that night, at which point a very pissed-off, newly arrived assistant commissioner of the Met had formally told him that he was not to report for duty until further notice and not to speak to anyone about what had happened, other than those directly involved. The assistant commissioner (a middle-aged accountant look-alike with silver hair, an immaculately pressed uniform and a very long nose) had then stood there for a few seconds, waiting, it seemed, for Stegs to say something, presumably along the lines of ‘I’m sorry for causing you all this inconvenience’. Stegs hadn’t given him the satisfaction. Instead, he’d given the bastard a look that said, ‘If you think you can do better, you get in there and talk to people who’d flay you alive if they knew your true identity. Then maybe you’d actually be earning your money, instead of waltzing around passing the buck to the junior ranks.’

  After they’d finished with him, he reluctantly phoned the missus. She must have seen something about the operation on the news because she’d left three increasingly worried messages on the mobile. She didn’t know what role he’d been playing, of course, or where he’d been playing it, but she knew he did undercover work, and the news that an undercover officer had been killed would probably have seeped out by now, so he felt duty-bound to let her know he was all right.

  She answered on about the tenth ring, and in the background he could hear Luke screaming and crying.

  ‘Oh, Mark, thank God you’ve called. I’ve been worried stiff. Are you all right?’

  She always called him Mark. She didn’t like the name Stegs, and he sure as fuck wasn’t going to let her call him Monty, so they’d had to come up with something that was acceptable to both of them, and after much discussion it turned out that Mark was it. It was how he was known to all her friends. One day he was sure he was going to end up being diagnosed as a schizophrenic.

  He told her he was fine but very busy, and she asked him if he’d heard about the incident at Heathrow. He said he had.

  ‘It makes me so scared, Mark, th
inking of you out there all alone. I don’t want baby Luke growing up without a father.’

  Stegs was touched by her concern, in spite of himself. He told her everything would be OK, but neglected to mention that he’d been suspended on full pay. He’d been advised by his superiors that no correspondence would be sent to his home address regarding what had happened, and that all contact would be made on his mobile or his encrypted email address, so there was no point mentioning it, particularly as he had no intention of hanging around the house all day with her and Luke.

  ‘Are you coming home then?’ she asked him. ‘I know Luke wants to see you.’

  That he seriously doubted. Luke was never pleased to see him. He always gave him the evil eye when Stegs tried to pick him up or play with him. At eight months old, he was definitely his mother’s son, and treated his dad like some sort of usurper whenever he came into the room. Stegs loved the kid (of course he did, he was his flesh and blood) but, though he never liked to admit it, he didn’t like him much, and was never in any doubt that the feeling was mutual.

  ‘I’ve still got some paperwork to clear up here,’ he told her. ‘I’ll be back later on but don’t wait up for me, I don’t know what time it’ll be.’

  She sighed loudly down the other end of the phone. ‘I can’t do this all on my own, you know. Bringing up a baby’s hard enough when there’s two of you, let alone one.’ As if to confirm quite how hard, Luke’s crying went up a couple of decibels as she brought him nearer the phone. ‘Tell Daddy to come home, Lukey,’ she cooed at the infant. Fat chance of that, Stegs thought. If he could speak, he’d be telling him to fuck off, no doubt about it. ‘Tell him he’s making Mummy miserable.’ Luke had clearly been brought right up to the mouthpiece now because Stegs was forced to hold the phone away from his ear as the howling increased still further. ‘Seriously, though, Mark,’ she continued, coming back on the line. ‘It can’t carry on like this. It’s too much for me.’