Simon Kernick - The Crime Trade

Gill saw him to the door and thanked him once again for coming round.

‘It’s no trouble at all,’ he told her. ‘I only wish the circumstances could be happier.’

‘How well did you know Paul?’ she asked.

He already had one foot outside the door but stopped and looked at her, taken aback by this sudden question. She was staring at him intently as if trying to hunt down lies. It wasn’t the sort of expression he’d seen on her face before.

‘Well enough, I think,’ he said cautiously. ‘Why do you ask?’

She continued to stare intently and he felt himself sweating under her gaze. ‘I don’t know,’ she said, choosing her words carefully. ‘He didn’t seem his usual self recently. I felt that he was concerned about something. That there was a weight on his shoulders of some sort.’

‘He never said anything to me about it, Gill. It’s a very difficult job that he did. Perhaps it was the pressure of that.’

Her expression relaxed and she managed a surprisingly pleasant smile. ‘Perhaps it was,’ she said. ‘It’s a very difficult job that you both do.’

‘Someone’s got to do it,’ said Stegs, trying hard not to sound too much like Clint Eastwood.

She pursed her lips, the conversation at an end. ‘I hope I see you again soon, Mark. I don’t know when the funeral will be. It could be a while.’

‘I’m sure they’ll do their best to wrap everything up as soon as they can,’ he said, before turning away and walking down the footpath in the direction of the street.

It had started to rain again and the sky was an iron grey. He was still speeding but the urge to drink had gone. He needed to walk. To walk and to think. What exactly had Gill meant back there? How well had he known Vokes? Very well, he’d always thought. But like anything in life, you can never quite tell. People you know always have the ability to shock you. But Vokes? No, he’d always had the run of Vokes. I knew him well enough, Gill.

Definitely well enough.

It was four o’clock when he eventually got back to the car. The rain had stopped but the clouds remained, thick and foreboding. He’d walked for a while, but his thoughts had been a jumble: mainly memories of old Vokes interspersed with concerns about his own future now that he was suspended, until finally he’d found himself with a strong desire to go home and have a cup of tea. He hoped the missus wasn’t in nagging mode, and that Luke was either asleep or in good cheer.

But he’d picked a bad time to drive back and he got caught in an almighty jam on the North Circular. He tuned into Capital and found that there’d been an accident further up at Staples Corner (according to the Flying Eye, it was a four-car pile-up), so he was stuck in it, wondering how on earth four cars could have actually got up to the sort of speeds necessary for a collision like that. Usually, you never got to more than thirty miles an hour tops on either of the circulars during the day.

At five to five, when he was stationary again, with the beginnings of a headache and the flashlights of the emergency services visible a few hundred yards ahead, he got a call on the private mobile. He picked it up off the front passenger seat and for the second time that day didn’t recognize the number.

‘Jenner.’

‘Stegs, it’s John Gallan. There’s a few things I need to speak to you about, and I need to do it sooner rather than later.’

‘Do you want to meet somewhere?’

‘It’s official business. Can you come down here?’

‘Where? Islington? To be honest, I’ve been out all day and I’m on my way home. Can we do it tomorrow?’

He heard Gallan sigh down the other end of the phone, but he was in no mood to be helpful. A black Mercedes in the next lane tried to nudge in front of him and Stegs inched forward, blocking his way.

‘Tomorrow’s a bit late.’

‘Is it urgent?’

Gallan paused. ‘It’s important,’ he said eventually.

Now it was Stegs’s turn to sigh. He was tired, but he knew from experience he wasn’t going to get out of it. ‘Listen, if it’s that important, come up to my house. I’m nearly there now.’ He gave Gallan the address.

‘We’ll try to make it as quick and painless as possible.’

‘We?’

‘WDS Boyd and me. We’ll be with you in an hour or so, traffic permitting.’

‘The traffic in this town never permits,’ said Stegs, and hung up.

At the same time, the driver of the Mercedes — a stressed young commuter who appeared to have gone prematurely bald, probably in this traffic jam — snarled at him, actually baring teeth. Stegs pulled out his warrant card and pushed it against the window, at the same time mouthing ‘fuck off’ and inching forward still more. The Mercedes driver backed off.

He wondered if he was going to make it home in an hour himself.

Stegs Jenner lived on an estate consisting mainly of 1950s and 1960s semi-detached houses off Cat Hill in east Barnet. Some were quite substantial, and attractive for post-war housing, but Stegs’s semi was one of the smaller and newer ones and looked a little forlorn opposite its bigger neighbours.

A thick, oppressive layer of cloud hung over Barnet that evening, and a light rain spat weakly as Tina Boyd and I got out of the car. I looked at my watch. It was quarter past six, and I was getting hungry. It had been a long day and a draining one. I’d been on the stand for more than two hours in court that afternoon tesifying in the rape trial, much of it under detailed and laborious cross-examination from the defence barrister, who was doing his utmost to get his client off on a technicality now that it was becoming patently obvious to all concerned that he was guilty. I think I did OK, but sometimes it’s difficult to tell. Particularly when you’re tired, and I was as tired as hell.

Tina had filled me in on the details of the earlier murder squad meeting — not that there were many of them. So far there’d been no sightings of O’Brien on the day of his murder, and we were still waiting for further tests on the bodies to determine more specific times of death. SOCO hadn’t reported any obvious clues left by the killer, and no-one among those interviewed in the surrounding area had seen anything suspicious. Perfect. As for the three phone calls made on the mobile in O’Brien’s possession to Stegs’s mobile, all had been made since Sunday, the last on the previous morning, but none had lasted more than a minute, so it was possible he was simply leaving messages. Either way, it was inconclusive.

Stegs’s wife, Julie, answered the door, a very miserable-looking baby under one arm. The baby eyed me belligerently. Julie, meanwhile, tried to appear welcoming, but it was clear the day was getting on top of her. She was an attractive woman, taller I think than Stegs, with big brown eyes and full lips, but exhaustion and stress had given her a tense, almost haunted look.

Tina spoke first. ‘Good evening, Mrs Jenner,’ she said with a smile, ‘we’re here to see your husband.’

‘Oh yes, he said something about that. Come in, come in. He’s in his study.’ She opened the door and we followed her inside into a tiny entrance hall. ‘It’s opposite you at the top of the stairs. You’ll have to excuse me, I’m feeding Luke.’

I told her that was fine and followed as Tina led the way up the almost unfeasibly steep staircase which was about as child-friendly as an unattended pond.

Stegs was waiting for us at the top, wearing a cautious grin, as if he was letting us know that he wanted to be friendly but it was up to us whether we allowed him to be. ‘Evening all,’ he said. ‘Come on through.’

He led us into a tiny room, half of which was taken up by a single bed. A PC running a screen-saver featuring brightly coloured fish swimming around was perched on a desk at the end by the window. The desk took up about another quarter of the room, which didn’t leave room for much else.