Simon Kernick - The Crime Trade

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.’

Tina shook her head, staring into the evening drizzle. ‘There are too many coincidences, John. He was the one who put us on to O’Brien, and I think someone’s got to him to make sure he keeps his mouth shut. What’s worrying me, though, is the fact that hardly anyone was aware of his existence, let alone his role in setting up Robbie.’

I thought about this for a moment, because I knew what she was going to say next.

‘But one of those people was Stegs Jenner.’

We stood in silence for a few moments, contemplating that particular thought.

‘Come on,’ I said eventually, taking her by the arm. ‘Let’s go get a drink. I think we’ve earned one.’

I awoke the next morning with a dry mouth and a desire to get going on the case. Tina and I had driven back to my place in Tufnell Park, then gone to the pub round the corner for a bite to eat and a few much-needed drinks. We’d talked about the case a little and I’d encouraged Tina not to read too much into Joey Cloud’s missing fingers. Violence among addicts and dealers, even violence that extreme, was endemic. Back when I’d been south of the river, there’d been a small-time thief and coke addict called Fredo Wanari who’d had a habit of not paying his suppliers and running up huge debts. One time, he’d gotten on the wrong side of the wrong person, a bigshot dealer who didn’t like to be messed around, and when Fredo couldn’t pay what he owed him he was given an ultimatum: find the money in forty-eight hours or, as the dealer allegedly put it, pay the interest in pain. Fredo had more chance of sprouting a second head than finding the cash, so when the forty-eight hours was up the dealer paid him a personal visit and removed the little finger of his left hand with a meat cleaver, while his men held him down. He then promised to remove another finger for every day he wasn’t paid. Sadly, Wanari never did find the money and these days he goes by the name of Fingerless Freddie, but it shows you that criminals can do some pretty gruesome things to each other in the name of cash.

I’d told Tina this story as we sat drinking, but again, I don’t think she was convinced. Eventually, though, tired of clawing about in the dark with theories and half theories that weren’t really leading us anywhere, we’d moved on to other, easier subjects. Sometimes you’ve just got to let go, although maybe we’d let go a little bit too much the previous night. At least that was what my hangover was now telling me.

But I was still feeling ready for the fray as I came into the O’Brien/MacNamara incident room on the third floor of the station at quarter to nine that Friday morning, Tina following a gossip-quelling two or three minutes behind. The room was crowded with getting close to two dozen mainly unfamiliar faces, some of whom were already working at computer terminals, while in the middle of the room stood DCS Flanagan, talking animatedly to Malik and one of the other detectives. He still looked tense, but less so than he had when I’d last seen him, the natural confidence he’d exuded in our earlier meetings already beginning to make a reappearance. He’d done extremely well to land this high-profile role so soon after his involvement in the disaster of Operation Surgical Strike, and I think he knew that. The Met might have been very short of senior officers capable of running a major inquiry, but that on its own didn’t explain why he was in charge of the O’Brien/MacNamara murder squad. A cynic might have said he was there because he knew the right sort of people, and that he was almost certainly a freemason, so had plenty of senior colleagues watching his back and making sure that the mud never stuck to him.

And you know what? I think the cynic might have had a point.

From what I knew about Flanagan (and it wasn’t a lot, I admit), he was something of a Teflon man. He’d made mistakes in the upward trajectory of his career — there’d even been the faint rumour of corruption, though no direct accusation was ever made — and he wasn’t so talented that you’d make excuses for him. He wasn’t even that popular, his manner considered too haughty and self-important by many of those who worked for him, myself included. I didn’t like him because he didn’t strike me as being a true copper, more an aspiring technocrat with his eye firmly fixed on building a power-base, and he always seemed pissed off about something, which is a trait I’ve never associated with success. But he’d made it all the way up to being the head of SO7, and it was possible that he was looking even higher. Assistant Commissioner Flanagan. Six people might have just been killed on his watch, eight if you include O’Brien and his grandmother, but he wasn’t going to be the scapegoat for Operation Surgical Strike. They already had Stegs for that, and I was pretty damn certain that the SO10 man wasn’t a regular down at the local Masonic Lodge.

Seeing me, Flanagan excused himself from his conversation and strode over, a small smile forming like a crease at the corners of his mouth. It wasn’t replicated in the thin blue eyes that remained as serious and businesslike as ever. ‘Hello, John,’ he said, putting out a hand. ‘Glad you could join us for this one.’

‘Glad to be here, sir,’ I replied, shaking it. ‘Any new developments?’

‘Some interesting ones,’ he said, the half-smile melting back into lines on his face. ‘Very interesting. But nothing that’s a real case-breaker. I’ve got a news conference at Scotland Yard at eleven o’clock, and I wouldn’t have minded a bit more to give them. Still, this one was never going to be easy. How did it go with Jenner last night? Did you get to speak to him?’

‘We did, but he didn’t tell us anything we don’t already know.’

‘What about the calls to his mobile from O’Brien?’

‘He says he remembers getting one on Wednesday morning. He claimed O’Brien was just demanding protection again.’

‘Did you believe him?’

Flanagan, who must have been six feet three, and a good four inches taller than me, leant his long head forward like a praying mantis as he asked the question, his beady eyes locking into mine. I had the feeling it was a pose he’d learnt to strike in interrogations, and I could see that it would be disconcerting if you were a criminal, but I thought it was a bit much for nine o’clock in the morning. Especially as I hadn’t done anything wrong.

I told him I didn’t see why Stegs would bother lying.

‘I worked with him once,’ he said thoughtfully, moving his head back out of my field of vision. ‘He’s a slippery character.’

I think he was about to add something more, but he saw Tina coming into the room. ‘All right, we’re all here. Let’s get this meeting started. Right, everyone,’ he announced loudly, his thinly veiled attack on Stegs’s reputation forgotten as he clapped his hands together like an impatient headmaster, ‘let’s get underway.’

He went over to a whiteboard with a table next to it on the far side of the room, facing the door, and those people not at their desks went back to them. Malik nodded at me and I gave him a wink as I took a seat next to Tina.

‘Not present at the meeting yesterday for reasons outside of his control but joining us for the duration of this inquiry will be DI John Gallan, who, like his colleague from this station Tina Boyd, was acquainted with the victim, and who also had some involvement with the op on Wednesday that we all keep reading about and seeing on telly.’