The Crime Trade

by Simon Kernick

  ‘Where were you when you made the call to Vokes on Tuesday night?’ I asked.

  ‘I was here, at home. In this very room, in fact, and I stayed at home for the rest of the night. You can ask the missus if you want. Or SO11. They’d have a record of the call and where it was made from. I’m not hiding anything, you know.’

  I put up a hand to calm him. ‘Listen, Stegs, we’re not here to interrogate you or pick holes in any of your answers, we’re just trying to find out what, if anything, O’Brien knew which might have acted as a motive for someone killing him. You have to admit, the timing of his death is worryingly coincidental.’

  Stegs sighed loudly. ‘Yeah, all right. Fair enough.’

  He fidgeted in his seat, trying to get comfortable, and I noticed he was still sweating even though the room was cool.

  ‘Can you give us your movements for yesterday morning, Stegs?’ asked Tina, trying to sound as casual as possible. ‘Starting from when you left the house.’

  ‘Hold on, am I a suspect for something?’ he demanded, trying hard to keep his voice calm. ‘Are you making out I murdered him? Because if you are, or you think I might possibly have done it, then I want to stop this right now until I’ve got a federation rep here, or even a lawyer.’

  ‘No-one’s saying any of that,’ Tina reassured him. ‘But you know the score. We wouldn’t be doing our duty if we didn’t eliminate everyone involved from our enquiries. It’s just routine.’

  He didn’t look convinced but gave her a detailed rundown of his movements anyway, including the times. There was nothing untoward or inconsistent in anything he said. While Tina wrote it all down, he stood up, opened the window as wide as it would go, and lit a Marlboro Light, blowing a lungful of smoke into the drizzling dusk.

  ‘Whose idea was it to leave the money behind in the car when you went into the meeting, Stegs?’ asked Tina when she’d finished.

  He took a long drag on the cigarette before he answered, then fixed her with an expression only just this side of contemptuous. ‘Both of ours,’ he answered simply, daring her to disagree.

  He continued smoking while we continued questioning him as carefully and as diplomatically as possible about aspects of his testimony the previous evening, trying our best not to rile him, but I think it was too late for that. He answered the questions without pause and didn’t appear to be lying, but of course you wouldn’t have been able to tell with a man like him anyway. His whole job was one long lie after another, so there weren’t going to be many people out there better at it than him.

  After a further ten minutes, however, we ran out of things to ask, and thanked him for his co-operation and patience. ‘We’re sorry to intrude on you at a time like this,’ I told him. ‘We both know how difficult it is for you, having lost a mate and colleague, but I hope you understand we’ve got to ask.’

  Tina said pretty much the same thing, and he nodded in acknowledgement, replying that he knew it wasn’t our fault but that he’d only done his job and now felt that he was being penalized for it.

  ‘That goes with the territory, Stegs,’ I said. ‘A policeman’s lot is rarely a happy one. Especially these days.’

  He grunted something in reply and showed us down the highly dangerous staircase and to the front door. His wife called out a goodbye from the kitchen where she was feeding the baby, and admonished Stegs for not offering us a drink. ‘I would have done it but I’ve got this one here to deal with,’ she added as we stepped out into the rain and headed back to the car.

  As we were driving back down the Finchley Road in the direction of my place, Tina asked me what I thought of Stegs Jenner’s overall demeanour.

  ‘He was looking stressed. I think he needs to talk to someone.’

  ‘Do you think they think he did it? Flanagan and Malik? I don’t mean pull the trigger, but that he was involved somewhere?’

  ‘In Robbie’s murder?’

  ‘In the whole thing. The robbery at the hotel, Robbie’s death. All of it.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘The thing is, what would he gain by setting up the robbery? Not only did it leave his partner dead, but it could easily have left him dead too. And if he did set it up, what part did O’Brien play in the whole thing, and who then actually had him killed? And why? No, I think the problem is that Stegs rubs people up the wrong way. They don’t like him, and they don’t like the way he doesn’t follow the rules. So when something goes wrong it becomes very easy for them to think that at the very least his big mouth was responsible for the leak. My opinion is they think he might have spoken out of turn, and might have let slip something to O’Brien, but that’s the sum of it. What about you?’

  She sighed. ‘There’s something about him, you know?’

  ‘That’s what I mean. People don’t like him. They think he’s a rule-breaker, someone you can’t trust.’

  ‘He is a rule-breaker. If he’d taken the money with him into the hotel room like he was meant to have done then he wouldn’t have split with Vokes, the robbery wouldn’t have occurred and six people wouldn’t have died.’

  ‘A fair point, but it doesn’t mean he was involved in setting the whole thing up.’

  ‘True, but I didn’t like the way he suddenly changed his story about when he last spoke to O’Brien. I got the impression he realized we were aware the call had been made to his mobile, and that’s why he suddenly conveniently remembered it.’ She shook her head. ‘Either way, I think he knows more than he’s letting on. That’s my gut feeling. Call it female instinct. I’d like to dig into his background a little bit. See what comes up. What’s the time?’

  ‘It’s just gone seven. Why?’

  ‘I want to go and see Joey Cloud,’ she answered, referring to the man who, more than anyone else, had started all this.

  It had been small-time informer Joey Cloud who’d come to Tina three months earlier, telling her that Robbie O’Brien was trying to set up a coke importation deal with a group of Colombians and was looking for partners to help him finance it. Using that information we’d got two SO10 operatives (one of whom was Stegs Jenner) to set him up, and having been caught bang-to-rights he’d turned informer and had then been used by SO7 to set up the meeting at Heathrow. Cloud’s involvement, however, had ended right at the beginning of everything, making him irrelevant to what had gone on since, and I told Tina as much.

  ‘I just want to find out if he’s heard anything,’ she answered.

  ‘About what?’

  ‘About anything. About O’Brien.’

  ‘Now?’

  ‘It’s as good a time as any. He’ll probably be in at the moment.’

  ‘And this is the woman who just over twelve hours ago was announcing she’d had enough of her job.’

  ‘A day’s a long time in police work,’ she told me.

  ‘Does that mean you’re staying?’

  ‘The jury’s still out,’ she said, weaving through the last of the rush-hour traffic.

  I was tired, but I knew from the tone of her voice that she wasn’t going to be swayed. There was therefore no point arguing. Instead, I closed my eyes and tried to get a few minutes’ shut-eye before our next port of call.

  11

  After they’d gone, Stegs helped put Luke to bed before cooking himself and the missus a pretty bland spaghetti bolognese out of a tin. The label said it was ‘just like Mama used to cook’, but if that was the case then Mama had obviously long since been banned from the kitchen. While they were eating, the missus asked him what the police had wanted to see him about, and he told her that it was just clarifying some issues about what had happened with Vokes. She seemed to buy it and started on again about him switching jobs, but he made it clear that tonight was really not a good night to talk about it, and once again she let it go, although she didn’t look too pleased.

  They ate at the kitchen table, then washed up in silence before retiring to the lounge. The missus insisted on watching Scream Team on one of the Sky channels, a weekly
programme in which a select team of photogenic young members of the public visit some of Britain’s most haunted places and, as far as Stegs could see, simply run around yelling and screaming, jumping at the slightest noise, and generally making tits of themselves without actually seeing anything vaguely ghostly.

  While the missus sat staring raptly at the screen and occasionally making comments like ‘Did you see that, Mark?’ or, more typically, ‘There’s got to be something in it, there was definitely a face there’ – even though if there had actually been a face there it would have been the lead story on the BBC news, not cast adrift on some crappy backwoods satellite channel – Stegs thought about the visit he’d received from Boyd and Gallan. It concerned him. They were definitely suspicious that he’d had something to do with the leak on the op, and maybe even the death of O’Brien, a man he was not too upset to see in the ground. Stegs didn’t consider himself to be that much of a crusading cop, trying to right society’s many wrongs, but he did look down on O’Brien, a man who’d have sold his children to cannibals and even skinned and gutted them himself if the price had been right.

  He had the feeling that Boyd, particularly, thought he was the villain in all this – it was the way she’d looked at him as she’d taken her notes, with no attempt to hide the suspicion in her dark eyes. Gallan, he reckoned, was keeping a more open mind, but he knew he’d still have to be careful. He’d heard enough about the other man to appreciate the fact that he was a good copper, with a nose for sniffing out the truth, as well as the sort of perseverance you don’t get so much in the Force these days.

  Suspicion. He’d been under suspicion almost since the day he’d started working with SO10. It was the place for mavericks – for people who were prepared to bend the rules, to walk the fine line between infiltration and involvement in the criminal enterprises they were investigating – and mavericks in a police force are always mistrusted. But he also knew how to cover his tracks. He’d had plenty of practice of that, and was prepared for any detailed probing into his affairs.

  He wondered briefly whether Boyd and Gallan were sleeping together. There was something about the way they looked at each other, the messages that seemed to pass between them, that made him think they were more than just clued-in partners. They didn’t come across much like an ideal couple. She was good-looking but in a vaguely untouchable way, and with an air of authority that he didn’t much like the look of. Gallan seemed a lot friendlier and more laid-back. They’d had a couple of beers together just after they’d first met, and Stegs remembered that Gallan had been good company. Come to think of it, Boyd had been quite a laugh on that occasion too, and he remembered that he’d quite liked the look of her, as had Vokes. Maybe her attitude had changed as her suspicions had grown. If so, she’d made a mistake. Never let your quarry know you’re on to them.

  It was one of the first things he’d learnt in SO10, and it was why he’d survived this long.

  12

  Joey Cloud lived in a bedsit above a row of shops on the Caledonian Road between King’s Cross and Islington. Access was via a set of metal steps round the back that led up to a cramped walkway where the bedsits were all lined up in a row. Darkness had fallen by the time we arrived and there was a light on in number 3.

  ‘I thought you said he was strictly small-time,’ I said, dodging a pile of rubbish bags as I started up the steps with her behind me, not entirely happy to be there. I consider myself a pretty dedicated copper, but I’d definitely had my fill for the day. ‘What’s he going to know?’

  ‘He’s been reliable down the years, and occasionally he gets a gem. I’m hoping he’s got one this time.’

  I’d met Joey Cloud once, when we’d been setting up the sting on O’Brien, and I’d taken an instant and very natural dislike to him. He looked exactly like you’d expect someone who informs on people for financial gain to look. Late twenties, with the furtive air of a man who’s always on the hunt for the next fix of cash but who also knows what it might cost him, he was also a long-term pipehead and occasional smack user who suffered from the same ailments that many chronic adddicts do: rapid and premature ageing coupled with an inability to wash properly or look anything other than scruffy and unkempt. I remember having to turn my head away on our first meeting to get out of range of the stench of piss and sweat that seemed to come off him in nauseous waves, and it made me think then that I couldn’t understand how he ever got near enough to other people to hear their secrets. In fact, it still amazed me that he’d somehow heard about O’Brien’s efforts to set up a major coke importation ring with the Colombians. I could only put it down to the sort of sheer luck that in the life of a pipehead, even a cunning one, is rarely, if ever, repeated.

  ‘When was the last time you spoke to him?’ I asked Tina, as I climbed the steps.

  ‘Months back. Not since the O’Brien sting. He hasn’t had anything for us.’

  Which, I thought, went some way to proving my point, although I didn’t say anything.

  We walked along the balcony until we got to his front door. It had been painted navy blue, probably when the block was first built, but was now peeling badly to reveal the wood beneath. The outline of a 3 could be made out, but the sign itself had long since fallen off. I could already smell the interior, even from here. It wasn’t pleasant.

  There was no doorbell, so I rapped hard on the door. There were the faint strains of music coming from inside so he was probably at home, although what state he was in was another matter.

  I gave it ten seconds, then knocked again, harder this time. We hadn’t come all this way on a shitty wet evening for nothing.

  I was just about to knock for a third time when I heard the shuffling of feet coming towards the door.

  ‘Who is it?’ The voice was slurred a little and I wondered if he’d been on the smack, or had just woken up.

  ‘Police,’ I called through the letterbox. ‘Can you let us in, please.’

  ‘I’ve got nothing to say to the police, and I ain’t done nothing wrong, so fuck off.’

  Tina leant forward so her lips were almost touching the door. ‘This is very important, Mr Cloud,’ she said, hoping that he’d recognize her voice, but not letting on that she knew him, in case anyone else was listening. ‘Can you please let us in? Otherwise we’ll come back with a warrant.’

  ‘I ain’t done nothing,’ he whined, sounding like a snot-nosed kid. ‘Leave me alone.’

  ‘Mr Cloud,’ I told him, again speaking through the letterbox. ‘We need to speak to you and we’re not going to go away until we do.’

  I heard him curse and then the door was opened a few inches. There was a chain on the latch preventing us from entering. Joey Cloud’s gaunt, unshaven features appeared in the gap looking like the ‘before’ picture in an Alka Seltzer advert. The smell arrived at exactly the same time. Maybe it was a good thing he didn’t want to speak to us after all.

  ‘This is fucking harassment. I told you, I ain’t done nothing. I can’t say fairer than that, can I?’ His eyes were slightly glazed but he appeared reasonably compos mentis. For him, anyway. He stared hard at Tina. ‘I got nothing to say to you. Nothing. You understand? Now, get the fuck out of here or I’ll call my brief.’

  ‘You haven’t got a brief,’ I told him. ‘With your funds and habits, you wouldn’t be able to retain one for more than ten minutes.’

  He turned to me, his face still squeezed in the gap, but this time his defiance had evaporated and been replaced by a pleading expression. ‘Listen,’ he said, his voice dropping to a whisper. ‘Leave me alone, please. I’m not in the info game any more. I just want to be left alone. Please.’

  I tried to give him a reassuring smile but, amid the BO, I think it must have come out more like a grimace. ‘This won’t take long, I promise.’

  His face cracked into a hideous broken-toothed grin, utterly devoid of any humour. ‘Yeah,’ he said, the grin twisting into a sneer, ‘that’s exactly what they told me when they come round bef
ore.’

  Tina pulled a face. ‘They? Who’s they?’

  ‘They,’ he answered, the sneer now transforming into a look of anger. ‘They are the people who did this.’

  He shifted his weight, moving his head back from the door, then slowly raised his right arm so that it was level with his face.

  Straight away, I saw the bandage wrapped round the hand.

  ‘God almighty,’ hissed Tina, her eyes fixed on the blood-flecked dressing where Cloud’s little and index fingers used to be. ‘Who did that to you?’

  For two, maybe three, seconds, he didn’t speak, simply kept the mutilated hand in front of his face for us to see. Finally, he let it drop to his side and out of sight. When he spoke, the words were slow and addressed to both of us.

  ‘People who told me I shouldn’t be speaking to you,’ he said simply.

  Then, with his good hand, he shut the door on us.

  When we were back down on the street, standing in the glow of the street lamps and watching the cars drift past in both directions, Tina let out a deep sigh. ‘It feels like someone’s always one step ahead of us.’

  I stopped beside her and put an arm on her shoulder. ‘It could be anything, Tina. He might have just upset one of his dealers, or maybe someone found out he was a grass.’

  ‘Then why did he say the people who’d done it didn’t want him speaking to us?’

  ‘Because I expect they don’t. If he knows who they are, which he almost certainly does, then they don’t want him going to the police, do they? It doesn’t mean it’s got anything to do with O’Brien and Heathrow.’