Simon Kernick - The Crime Trade

‘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.

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 recently. 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.