‘Hello, Asif. Are you all right?’ I asked, picking up the phone.
‘Not really, John, no. I don’t like the fact that Robbie O’Brien’s dead before we can get any information out of him. It makes us all look very stupid. You’ve seen the headlines in this morning’s papers.’
‘I haven’t actually. I haven’t had a chance.’
‘Well, they don’t look too clever.’
‘No, I can imagine.’
‘“High Noon at Heathrow”, according to the Sun, and they’re going to get a lot worse than that as more details start coming out. When they hear about O’Brien, they’re going to be thinking that we’re being completely outmanoeuvred, and we can’t have that.’
‘Who’s taking the case?’
‘Joint Serious Crime Group East and SO7. DCS Flanagan’s going to be heading it up.’
I raised an eyebrow at that one. ‘What? After yesterday?’
‘He followed everything to the letter with Surgical Strike, and we’re very short of available SIOs of DCS level, and this is definitely a DCS-level case. At least he knows the background.’
‘If there’s any assistance I can give, I’ll be more than happy to help.’
‘There is,’ he said. ‘We want you seconded to the inquiry. You and DS Boyd. Flanagan’s clearing it with your chief super now. You both know the victim, you’re familiar with the background, and I hate to say it, but you’re also involved in what’s happened.’
‘Only a limited involvement,’ I told him, keen not to get tarred with the wrong sort of brush.
‘But you know all about it. With everything else, that makes you ideal. Plus, you’re a bloody good copper, and I know you rate Tina Boyd as well.’
I didn’t say anything for a moment.
‘Are you still there?’
‘Of course I’m still here. I’m thinking, that’s all.’
‘Well, that’s the end of my flattery. I want you on this case – we all do. And if you refuse, you’re going to have to have one hell of a good reason why.’
But there was no way I was going to refuse. I was busy, yes. Extremely so. But that was never going to change. As long as I remained in the Met I was going to be overworked – it was as good as part of the job description – but opportunities to get involved in something like this don’t come along very often. Especially cases where you know the victim. I might not have liked Slim Robbie O’Brien, but I wanted to see whoever had murdered him and his grandmother punished. It takes a very dangerous, very cold individual to snuff out two lives as efficiently as the perpetrator of this had. An individual who could do that deserves to spend his days behind bars.
‘If you can clear it with the chief super down here then of course I’m interested. I know Tina will be too.’
‘Consider it done. We’re setting up an incident room at your station, so that’s nice and convenient. We’ve got a meeting scheduled for two p.m.’
‘I can’t do two. I’m in court this afternoon, giving evidence. There’s no way I can get out of it.’
‘Fair enough. Tina’ll have to attend, though. You can get the relevant info off her. What are you doing afterwards?’
‘After court? Going home and having a bite to eat probably.’
‘You’re going to need to talk to Stegs Jenner. Preferably today.’ He gave me Stegs’s address in Barnet. ‘We’re going to want details of all his meetings with O’Brien, what was said—’
‘Haven’t we already got that information? A lot of it came out in the questioning yesterday, and presumably there are records.’
‘There are, and it did, but I want you to go over everything with him again. See if you can pick up anything we might have missed. I also want you to check his movements yesterday in the run-up to the operation. From when he left his house in the morning.’
I was surprised at this last part. ‘He’s not a suspect, is he?’
Malik sighed. ‘Not as such, but there’s a concern that he’s not telling us everything.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘O’Brien had a mobile phone in his pocket when he was found this morning. It looks like a pay-as-you-go. Stegs said yesterday that he hadn’t spoken to O’Brien since Sunday, and he might not have done, but in the phone records section of the mobile it clearly states that a total of three of the last ten calls made on that phone were to a number that we’ve just found out is a Met mobile currently issued to Stegs. Now, it might mean nothing. We’ve got no idea yet when these calls were made, or how long they lasted, or even whether they were answered, but it’s worth asking again whether he’s spoken to O’Brien since Sunday. Can you go and see him tonight?’
‘All right,’ I said, wondering whether this was all they had on him. I found myself hoping so, and hoping too that there was an innocent explanation for it. I didn’t want to see old Stegs get thrown even deeper into the mire.
‘And take Tina if you can. We’ve got another meeting scheduled for nine a.m. tomorrow. You can let us know how it went then. We should also have the initial results of the post-mortem at that point, so we’ll have a more exact time of death for both victims.’
Malik was a fast mover. But I was pretty sure we were all going to have to be fast movers on a case like this, one where even the politicians were interested in seeing a result.
It made me glad I hadn’t made any plans for the next few days.
9
Stegs was writing a book about his exploits undercover in SO10. It had been done before by former officers of course, several times, but he was certain there was still a market for this kind of material: tales of derring-do amid the violent world of cops, robbers and killers. That last bit was the first sentence of the synopsis for Undercover Cop, the tell-it-all novel he was hoping was going to attract some serious literary attention of the financial kind once he released it into the public realm. He’d decided on the title after much thought, concluding that it was best not to try and be too subtle with the punters. Tell them straight what it was all about, no fannying around. The plan was to finish it, get an offer in from someone big, then retire from the Force and give the bastards a richly deserved two fingers.
Progress, however, had been slow. Stegs had been writing it for more than two years and was still only on page twenty-seven. He’d had a lot of trouble with the first chapter, in which he’d described his schooldays. He couldn’t seem to get the right combination of tough and vulnerable and had found it particularly hard to avoid mentioning the name Monty without making the whole thing sound wrong, and in these sort of things you had to be authentic. He’d finally moved on to chapter two a few months earlier, having given himself the new name of Martin for chapter one, and was now at the training stage in Hendon. A few more pages and he’d be on to the good stuff: football riots, his first case at SO10, the sex, the drugs, the rock and roll. And any other bullshit he could think up.
On the morning after the death of Vokes, Stegs made a vow to turn adversity into opportunity and use his period of suspension to make a concerted push on Undercover Cop. This was at twenty to seven while he sat feeding baby Luke at the breakfast table. The missus, meanwhile, was carrying out a two-pronged pincer attack: on the one hand complaining about the fact that he hadn’t got in until quarter to two the previous night; on the other bemoaning the Jenner family’s lack of money. The latest Visa bill received the previous day, which was being waved like a piece of evidence, showed that they owed £2,311. And sixty-eight pence, if you wanted to be exact. This was on top of the latest bank statement brandished three days earlier, which carried the grim news that the joint account was £240 in the red with a week still to go before Stegs received his pay.
‘We can’t carry on like this,’ she said in a voice that was a mixture of angry and pained, a tone peculiar to her that he always thought would have been better suited to someone who’d been constipated for a week and wanted to blame someone else for it.
Money had been becoming more and more of an issue r
ecently. The missus’s sister was married to an insurance broker in the city called Clive who liked to flash the cash, and it was making the missus jealous. They also had a kid a couple of months older than Luke, a real ugly bruiser called Harry who had a flat, bashed-in face that looked like it had been used as a hammer by Mike Tyson, but who was always dressed up in the latest designer clothes. Clive, the missus’s sister and young Frankenstein were off to a villa in the south of France for three weeks in August, and had invited the Jenner family along. The missus wanted to go but Stegs wasn’t keen on the idea. He’d said it was because they couldn’t afford it, but in reality it was much more to do with the fact that he couldn’t stick Clive, who was about as full of life as the Unknown Soldier. But since then the missus had got it into her head that Stegs was going to have to change jobs in order to solve their financial woes and put them in a position where they could go on fancy holidays and dress Luke up in the manner he deserved. Not that the little bugger appeared too bothered about his sartorial elegance as he sat there drooling lumpy porridge all over his romper suit.
Stegs decided to use the nuclear option and nip this broadside in the bud by telling her that Vokes had been the officer killed yesterday, and that he himself had been present only minutes before it had happened. It had the desired effect. Her hand went to her mouth, and her eyes widened. ‘Oh God, Mark. It could have been you. Are you all right, baby?’ She grabbed him in an intense hug, crumpling the Visa bill against his dressing gown, and causing a burst of jealous displeasure from Luke who started screaming and spraying bits of porridge everywhere. The missus was not a big woman – in fact, her mother thought she was too thin (mind you, the mother was pushing fifteen stone) – but on that morning she had a grip of steel, and Stegs felt himself losing breath.
‘It’s all right, love,’ he gasped. ‘I’m fine. It’s going to be OK.’ Not if you don’t fucking let go of me, it won’t.
She sobbed silently into his shoulder, unlike Luke who sobbed loudly into his ear, occasionally hitting it with pieces of half-eaten shrapnel. Stegs felt bad that he’d broken it to her like he had, and not for the first time he cursed himself for being so thoughtless. She didn’t have the most comfortable of lives at the moment and he ought to go a bit easier on her.
She pulled away from him and turned her attention instead to Luke. ‘It’s all right, Lukey, Lukey, Lukey. It’s OK, babe. Mama’s here now.’ Like a wild animal who’d met his match, Luke calmed down and his screams became the occasional hiccoughing sob. The missus took the porridge spoon from Stegs and began refilling her son’s face. He gave Stegs a nasty look out of the corner of his eye, as if to say, ‘Watch it, she’s mine.’ Stegs, to his shame, gave him one in return. That kid was going to have to learn a bit of respect.
The missus turned to him, still feeding Luke. She’d recovered now, but there were still tears in her eyes. She’d only met Vokes twice – once when they’d gone round there for dinner, and another time for a meal in the West End (neither occasion had been very successful, in part due to Gill’s rampant Christianity, which meant you had to be careful what you said) – but she was aware that Stegs had worked with him for a while, and that they were close. ‘Have you spoken to Gill?’ she asked.
‘Not yet. I will do, though.’
‘Poor thing. It’s going to be awful for her.’ She shook her head in disbelief. ‘Imagine losing your husband like that. And with kids as well. You’re going to go round and see her, aren’t you?’
He didn’t feel any better about doing it than he had the previous night, but he knew he didn’t really have much choice. ‘I’ll go and see her later today. She’ll probably have her family and the police round this morning.’
‘It’s just so . . . so awful, Mark. What happened?’
Stegs didn’t like talking about his job with the missus. He never had. To be fair, she’d never been that interested, and on those occasions when she had asked, he’d always cited security reasons for not saying too much. This time, though, he knew he wasn’t going to get away without at least telling her something, not least because she was going to be able to get most of the details from the news and the papers, so he gave her as brief a rundown as possible of what had happened, making no mention of his suspension. In his story, he’d been at the scene in one of the other rooms, but at no time had he been in any danger. Vokes had been the one taking the risks (Stegs explained that he didn’t get directly involved in the more dangerous situations, describing his responsibility as back-up, which she seemed to buy) and, unfortunately, things had gone wrong. ‘He was just unlucky, you know. It’s very, very rare that these jobs go tits-up.’
‘Don’t swear in front of Lukey, Mark.’
‘Why not? He can’t understand what I’m saying.’
‘It’s just not nice, OK? Please.’
Stegs took a slurp from his cup of tea. It was going cold. ‘Yeah, whatever.’
‘Are you sure you’re all right?’
‘I’m fine. Tired, that’s all.’ And hung over, he thought. He’d sunk four in the Admiral, then two cans of Stella when he’d got home. He was amazed he hadn’t been up pissing all night, but then he’d always had a strong bladder.
The missus sighed and gave him her trademark calm-but-serious look. This was always a sign that she was going to nag him about something. And he knew straight away what it was. ‘I want you to think very seriously about changing jobs, Mark. Really. Linda was saying the other day that Clive could get you a job as head of office security at Warner Tomkins and Nash Associates. The current incumbent’s not doing a very good job and they want to make him redundant and replace him.’
Stegs thought that his missus was probably the only person he knew who actually used the word ‘incumbent’ in conversation. ‘Look, can we not talk about this now? It’s a bad time at the moment.’
‘When can we talk about it, then?’
‘Not today,’ he said, getting up from the kitchen chair and looking around for his cigarettes. ‘Please not today.’
‘The pay’s good,’ she called after him as he found the pack and retreated out the back door and into the cold for his first smoke of the day.
He locked himself in his study with the PC for most of the morning, explaining to the missus that he was doing some work from home. Instead he made a valiant effort to get Undercover Cop flowing, and after much scratching of head, he managed to get it to midway down page thirty. To spice up the otherwise boring details of his training, he put in the bit on his graduation night when he’d slept with a Scottish prostitute with a prosthetic leg. Stegs remembered how shocked he’d been when he’d bumped into it during sex and jarred his knee (it had been covered with a black stocking at the time, so wasn’t that obvious), but he didn’t mention how he’d got her to remove it for the remainder of their bout to see what it would be like, not wanting to come across like some sort of pervert. Having wound up Hendon, he was now on to chapter three where he was a probationer pounding the beat of Barnet (or driving round in a squad car, anyway). Soon he’d be getting on to the good stuff, having already decided to slap in a fictitious murder for him to help solve in chapter four. Then it would really start to flow.
But even the most hardy of scribes needs a rest, so at 11.30 Stegs emerged from the cramped little room which was the only one in the house he could truly call his own (no-one else could fit in it while he was in there) and told his missus that he had to go to a debriefing session at Scotland Yard.
‘Are you sure you’re OK to go?’ she asked him. ‘Maybe it’d be better if you stayed here for the afternoon. They really ought to give you a couple of days off after something as traumatic as what’s happened.’
‘I’ve got a duty to the people who need me,’ he told her piously. ‘And I’m fine, honestly.’
‘Are you going to call in on Gill and the kids?’
He nodded. ‘Afterwards.’
‘Give them my love. And my condolences. Maybe you should pick up some flowers on the
way.’
‘Course I will.’ He gave her a quick kiss on the cheek, then picked up Luke who was playing at her feet. The boy gave him a hostile look at first, then slowly his face broke into a smile. Stegs smiled back, suddenly feeling all soppy. ‘Hey, my little man, I’m going to miss you today. Kiss for Dada, eh?’
As he leant forward to give him a big slobbery one on the lips, he was suddenly assailed by a ferocious smell, so powerful that it could probably have stripped paint off walls. He swallowed hard, trying not to gag. An old man couldn’t have produced worse. No wonder the little bugger had been smiling. That one must have been brewing up for hours.
Swiftly he handed him back to the missus, having given him only a cursory lip-scrape across the cheek. ‘I think he needs changing, babes. I’d love to stop and help but the meeting starts in an hour. I’ve got to run.’
He was out of there like lightning, the smell fair chasing him out of the door, a noxious cloud warning him not to return. No chance of that, he thought. Not for a few hours anyway.
For a while he just drove around, not really sure what to do with himself. He knew he had to go and visit Gill but was desperate to put off the inevitable. Seeing her was going to be a nightmare. It was bad enough on a normal day. God knows what she was going to say to him. He couldn’t help thinking that he was going to get the blame for what had happened, even though there was nothing he could have done. He hoped Vokes hadn’t been too scared in the last few seconds before he died, and he hoped too that death had come quickly. It felt strange knowing he was never going to see his colleague again, that this was it: the end of their relationship. Vokes had always claimed to have believed in God, but Stegs was never a hundred per cent sure whether he really did or not. More likely he was trying to keep the missus happy and hedge his bets at the same time. In a job like theirs you never knew when your card might be marked. Better to be on the right side of the Good Lord if he did exist. Maybe it had given him some comfort in those last frantic moments. Stegs hoped so, and wished at the same time that he’d had a chance to say goodbye, so that he could have let him know that he’d always been a good mate. It upset him that his last words had been to tell him not to worry, that he’d be back in a few minutes, but that of course was the injustice of sudden death. It deprived you of the opportunity to tie up all the loose ends and finally close the book.
The Crime Trade Page 9
