Simon Kernick - The Crime Trade

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.

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.