Then, suddenly, there was a bellowing roar and the sound of footsteps charging down the hall. The gunman began to turn round but never made it as he was hit in the upper body by the office chair Merriweather had been sitting on a few minutes earlier. The gunman stumbled but managed to raise his gun in Merriweather’s direction and fire off a shot before he was rugby-tackled from the front and sent flying backwards into the room.
Malik tried to get out of the way but he was too late, and the gunman and Merriweather crash-landed on top of him, taking his breath away. Within a second they’d rolled off, and Malik saw that their assailant had lost his gun, which had disappeared off somewhere in the darkness, leaving him unarmed as he struggled to fight off a still roaring Merriweather who was raining blows down on his head and body. He managed to get in a punch that connected with Merriweather’s jaw, but the other man, his adrenalin and aggression now at full tempo, hardly seemed to notice it as he launched a flurry of counter blows, rolling round so that he was on top of his opponent. At the same time, Harold had got to his feet, having picked up the Browning in his good arm. He looked in a lot of pain and was moving unsteadily, but it didn’t matter now because flashing blue lights were appearing outside the window as the ARVs came screeching to a halt.
‘You fucking bastard!’ screamed Merriweather as he continued to pummel the third gunman. ‘Think you can fucking kill me, eh? Do ya? Come on, you cunt, fight me now!’
There was a lot more noise as the first armed officers came charging through the front door. ‘Armed police!’ one of them cried out, an MP5 in his hand pointed in the direction of the still fighting Merriweather. ‘On the floor, now!’
For a split second, Malik’s heart went into his mouth as he saw the officer’s finger tensing on the trigger.
‘Don’t shoot! We’re police! Whatever you do, don’t shoot!’
‘Get on the floor now, or I fire!’
‘For God’s sake, Jack, leave him alone!’
Knowing he was risking his own neck now, Malik, still winded, sat up and grabbed Merriweather by the shirt with both hands, pulling him away from the now unconscious gunman.
Merriweather turned round, a ferocious expression on his face, and Malik half thought he was going to lash out at him, but then the expression calmed as he finally came to his senses. He lay down on the floor, hands raised above his head.
It was finally all over.
50
Woodham and the uniforms stopped in front of the two of us.
‘What’s happened, sir?’ I asked, an irrational fear that it might be something to do with Tina – a relapse of some sort – playing havoc with my imagination.
‘There’s just been an attempt on Jack Merriweather’s life.’
Now I just felt a good, hard jolt of shock. ‘What happened?’
‘Three gunmen turned up. Two police officers have been shot – not Malik – but thankfully the attempt failed.’
‘Fucking hell,’ said Stegs evenly.
‘How the hell did they find out where he was?’
‘We don’t know. Only a handful of people knew the location. There’s going to have to be a full and thorough investigation.’
‘Have they caught the gunmen?’ asked Stegs.
Woodham turned to him with a look of suspicion. ‘I think one, or possibly more of them, might have been shot, but, yes, they’ve all been apprehended.’
‘Good.’
I let go of Stegs’s arm, and watched him carefully. He stared back at me, his expression asking me to believe him, but something in it wasn’t right. Something said that he knew much more than he was letting on.
‘I’m telling you the truth, John. I promise.’
I wondered how he’d react when I told him we knew about Trevor Murk. Act surprised, and continue to keep to his story, I thought. Stegs Jenner was a born liar. He’d been doing it for a career for the past ten years, and I reckoned he’d been honing his trade for a lot longer before that. I decided then that it wasn’t worth mentioning Murk just yet. Best to spring it on him in an interview, where any silence or spluttering denials would be recorded.
But something was bothering me. You see, the thing was, parts of his story made sense. Vokes hadn’t been there at the first meeting with O’Brien. He’d also been on the raid from which the murder weapon had almost certainly been lifted. He hadn’t wanted to be left in the room back at the hotel, had tried to insist that it wasn’t him. Vokes Vokerman could answer a lot of questions.
Except he was dead.
I sighed, continuing to fix my gaze on Stegs Jenner. ‘Wherever we go, Stegs, and whatever we uncover, things always seem to keep coming back to you.’
‘You’re getting paranoid, John,’ he said, the beginnings of a smile on his face.
Just that little bit too cocky for my liking.
Which was when all the frustrations and fears of the day got the better of me and I punched him hard in the face. For just one second, it was the most satisfying blow I’d ever landed, and it knocked him spark out.
‘I’ll pretend I didn’t see that,’ said Woodham, a faint smile appearing beneath the big moustache.
Afterwards
Life, it seems, never goes quite the way you want it to go, and what you think might happen often never does. DCS Noel Flanagan, the head of SO7, was uncovered as the leak to Neil Vamen. There’d been some canteen talk in the dim and distant past centring on the fact that he wasn’t quite as straight as he’d have the Brass believe, but no one ever expected him to have been responsible for providing information that led to the death of an officer from his own unit, and that came within seconds of collapsing the case he and SO7 had been working on for years. Not only was it out of character, it was always going to be impossible to do without being found out. It was the police equivalent of a suicide note. Rumours abounded as to why he’d done it, and there was even talk that Vamen’s operatives had kidnapped his daughter and used her to extract the information from him, but no-one ever knew for sure, and neither father nor daughter ever said a word about it. Neither did we find out who the anonymous caller was who’d given Malik those few minutes’ warning that an attack on Jack Merriweather was imminent. Again, rumour suggested it might well have been Flanagan, perhaps suffering a fit of guilt (although it seemed a little strange, him incriminating himself), but no-one ever found out for sure.
Initially, Flanagan was not only suspended but also charged with perverting the course of justice. However, the charges were later quietly dropped due to lack of evidence, and he left the police, having denied any wrongdoing. He now lives in France with his wife, while his daughter continues her studies at university in the UK.
Stegs Jenner also left the Force. He was questioned at length about a number of crimes emanating from the hotel and their aftermath, but he too denied everything and the evidence against him remained weak. When confronted about his relationship with Trevor Murk, who’d been confirmed now as the shooter in the O’Brien/MacNamara killings, Stegs expressed shock. He admitted to having had a long and well-documented relationship with Murk, but claimed to be wholly unaware that his erstwhile informant was also a killer with not only the deaths of O’Brien and MacNamara to his name, but also the earlier murder of the garage owner Paul Bailey, as well as the strange killing of Hans Rieperman, otherwise known as Tino Movali, a small-time Dutch porn actor whose body was found two days later in the same building where Murk had been killed. He’d been shot with the revolver Murk had been carrying when he’d died, and it was surmised that he had been the one responsible. Intriguingly, Stegs admitted to meeting both men in the days leading up to their deaths, but explained that the reason for this was that Murk had introduced him to Rieperman, who was a drug dealer, in order to set him up and claim a financial reward. Stegs said that, even though he’d been suspended at the time, and it went against all the police rules to have unofficial contact with informants, he’d gone along to the meeting out of curiosity. It had, he said, been the last he
’d seen of both men. As for his visit to Vamen’s solicitor, the reason for this, apparently, was to let Carroll know that Stegs was on to him and his client, and that he was going to make them pay for almost getting him killed at Heathrow.
An unlikely story, but somehow it left me thinking, not for the first time, that some parts of this case will forever be shrouded in mystery. Sadly, that’s often the way it goes. Endings in the real world are never usually neat.
One interesting little question that was answered, though, was how Murk had got into the building where he’d murdered O’Brien. We’d assumed that Kitty MacNamara had let him in, but the truth, or the most likely version of it anyway, turned out to be far more interesting. Apparently, he’d had a brief affair in the weeks leading up to the shooting with the married woman living in one of the ground-floor flats. She’d been away on holiday with her husband and young son while the investigation had been going on, but on returning had heard about what had happened, seen Murk’s photograph, and approached us discreetly to say that she thought he might have copied her key and used it to gain entrance. The affair, she’d said, had been ended abruptly by him a week before the killings, and she’d been so nervous that he might break in during her absence that she’d left her jewellery in the hands of her mother. Whatever else you said about Murk, he’d been professional to the end.
During the course of this tale, more than one person has alluded to the cunning of Mr Stegs Jenner and whether or not what he was telling us was true (and most of us thought it was far too coincidental to be the truth), but he was sticking to his version of events and, as a result, he was eventually released from police custody without charge. Since then, his wife has sued for divorce, and the last I heard he was dividing his time between London and Spain.
Neil Vamen suffered badly as a result of his attempt to tip the scales of justice in his favour. The Law Society began an investigation into claims that his solicitor, Melvyn Carroll, was acting as his mouthpiece and had had a part in setting up the safe-house attack on Merriweather, and the investigation is still going on. Merriweather himself was moved to another safe house, reputed to be within the British naval base in Gibraltar, where he is guarded round the clock by armed marines and where the chances of anything happening to him range from somewhere between slim and none, but veering towards the latter. As for Vamen himself, such was the public outcry at news that a supposed crime lord could strike so blatantly at those ranged against him that the prime minister himself made a statement claiming that such lawlessness could not, and would not, be tolerated. He sounded like he meant it as well.
Vamen’s trial has been put back yet again and he faces new charges as a result of the testimony of twenty-one-year-old Francis Taylor, the only survivor of the three-man assassination team. It’s believed that Taylor is going to implicate Melvyn Carroll and Vamen directly. Perhaps this time Vamen might finally get the comeuppance he so richly deserves.
Tina recovered from her injuries quickly and was out of hospital within the week, and back at work within the month. Two weeks after that, we went on safari to Kenya, spending five days in the Masai Mara before flying on to Mahe in the Seychelles where we stayed for another week, soaking up the equatorial sunshine in surroundings that seemed to melt away all the stress and pressures of the daily grind. I even got to take my advanced diving course. The whole trip broke the bank, of course, and for a long time afterwards we were both paying off the debts accrued, but it was worth it. Sometimes you’ve just got to let go.
In late July, a few weeks after we’d got back from the trip, the two of us (now officially an item at the station) went for a barbecue at the Malik household on a fine, sunny Sunday. Malik’s two daughters were eight and five, and Tina played with them like a natural. I even got the idea that she might be getting broody, and funnily enough, it wasn’t such a bad thought. An expensive one, perhaps, but not a bad one. We toasted our combined successes on the O’Brien case, and the fact that we were all still here to talk about it, and in the evening, when the kids had gone to bed, Malik raised his glass, and said, ‘To the future.’ Tina and I, and Malik’s wife Kaz, repeated the toast, and I remember that, at that precise moment, I was the happiest I’d been in a long, long time.
To the future. When we left that night, I felt a renewed sense of optimism. Which was ironic really, because I’d never see Asif Malik alive again.
But that’s another story. For this one at least, the book was closed.
Afterwards, part two
The sea front at the resort of Fuengirola on Spain’s Costa del Sol is filled with English pubs, and restaurants that offer all-day full English breakfasts. If you want Spanish culture, or even Spanish people, you’ve come to the wrong place. If you want to blend into a crowd of fellow pasty Englishmen, then it’s definitely the right one.
Stegs Jenner took a seat at one of the tables outside a particularly shabby-looking English-style pub, an establishment he remembered being there and with roughly the same décor, including the tattered San Miguel canopy, when he’d come to Fuengirola on his first lads’ holiday in 1990. Other than him, the seating area was empty, which was one of the reasons he’d chosen the place. The food there was apparently renowned for being appalling.
A waiter covered in tattoos who looked like he’d just got out of Wormwood Scrubs, and probably had done, came over with his pen and paper.
‘Two pints of San Miguel,’ Stegs told him from behind his sunglasses, and the waiter skulked off again, without writing it down.
A minute later, Nicholas Tyndall slipped under the canopy, looking very suave indeed in a canary-yellow short-sleeved shirt and linen trousers, and took a seat opposite Stegs. He was carrying a black Adidas sports bag, which he placed on the seat between them.
Tyndall smiled, showing gleaming white teeth. ‘Lovely day for it again,’ he said, relaxing in his seat. Stegs noticed that he was wearing Armani sunglasses. Very nice. You had to give Tyndall top marks for style.
‘Always is down here,’ said Stegs.
‘You need a suntan, my man. You look too . . . English.’
Stegs smiled back. ‘I’ve ordered you a pint of San Miguel. Hope you don’t mind.’
‘Not at all. It’s the only drink to drink down here.’
‘To be honest, I didn’t expect to see you here. I thought one of your minions would have delivered the goods.’
The beers arrived, and Stegs went for his wallet. Tyndall, however, put a hand up to stop him, and swiftly produced a twenty-euro note that he gave to the waiter. ‘Keep the change.’
The waiter grinned. ‘Cheers, mate. Just shout when you want another.’
‘I wanted to thank you personally,’ Tyndall said when he’d gone. ‘You’ve done a lot for me these past few months, and I appreciate it.’
‘That’s what the money’s for.’
‘Yeah, but let’s just say you went above and beyond the call of duty. You risked your neck on that hotel thing, and I don’t forget a thing like that. Know what I mean?’
‘It’s nice to be appreciated. Thanks.’
‘No, thank you. Your efforts have put two of my biggest rivals out of business. Vamen’s not going to be out now until he’s pushing a hundred, and that headcase Strangleman’s well out of my hair. You’ve done well. There’s even a little bonus in there for you.’
‘You’re too kind.’
‘I hope we can work together in the future.’
‘I don’t know how much use I’ll be to you now I’ve left the Force.’
‘You’ve got guts, Stegs. That’s always of use to me.’
‘We’ll see.’
‘What’s happening with the missus? Back with her yet?’
Stegs shook his head, and took a sip from his pint. ‘Nah, I’m enjoying the single life for the moment, and very nice it is too. I can sleep through the nights now.’
‘Off the speed?’
‘Just about.’
‘You should be. Very nasty stuff. Cigaret
te?’ He pulled out a pack of Marlboro Lights.
Stegs took one and let Tyndall light it for him.
‘Tell me something,’ Stegs said, after he’d taken a drag. ‘What the fuck were you doing using Trevor Murk for the O’Brien job? Didn’t you know he was a snout of mine?’
‘Course I didn’t. And anyway, I didn’t think he’d get caught.’
‘I’m amazed you trusted someone as slack as him to carry it off.’
Tyndall smiled again, this time not showing his teeth. ‘Appearances can be deceptive, my friend. Mr Murk was one of the best hitters in south-east England. Very reliable and competitively priced. He must have done ten people down the years, and that’s just the ones I’ve heard about. Look how quickly he took out the Dutch bloke after you phoned me. I get a call from you, I put in a call to him, and that’s it – an hour later, the target’s dead. Very professional.’
‘Except he got tagged.’
Tyndall shrugged. ‘That just saved me paying him. Anyway, it’s not been a problem to you, has it?’
Stegs shook his head. ‘No, I’ve sorted it. I’m in the clear now.’
‘Good. So, what are you going to do with yourself now, then?’
‘This and that. I’m thinking of becoming a private eye.’ He’d ditched the idea of a security consultancy now. Too boring.
‘Well, if ever I want somebody found, I’ll give you a call.’
‘You do that.’
They finished their beers without saying much else. There wasn’t really a lot to say. Finally, Tyndall stood up, winked at Stegs and said he’d see him soon. Stegs nodded, picked up the black holdall and started walking in the other direction, a richer man now than he had been five minutes before, and thinking that he really ought to be feeling guilty for all the crimes he’d committed but not quite being able to make himself. It was the story of his life.
The Crime Trade Page 32
