Simon Kernick - The Crime Trade

‘But at least they’re keeping quiet about it at the moment. If we come right out with it, then people are going to be asking all sorts of questions. Let’s leave it a few weeks, eh? See how it goes.’ She put her hand on mine. ‘I don’t want it to sound like I don’t want to — I do — but I want to play things slowly where work colleagues are concerned. You understand what I’m saying, don’t you?’

I wasn’t going to push things, thinking that gentle persuasion would be far more effective, so I told her that, yes, I did understand. ‘But if you ever did decide to go, where would you fancy?’

She thought about it for a few moments. ‘I think I’d like a week on safari, and then maybe a week somewhere in the Indian Ocean. The Seychelles, or Mauritius. That way you get a good combination.’

‘A good combination and a bad bank balance.’

She lit another cigarette and poured the last few drops of the wine fairly evenly into our two glasses. ‘Don’t be boring, Mr Gallan. You can’t take it with you when you go, and you can’t put a price on memories. You know, the days when I travelled after uni are still the best of my life, even though all I have to show for them are boxloads of photos and a massive overdraft that I’m still paying off now, seven years on. But so what? I wouldn’t have changed those days for anything. That’s the attitude you’ve got to take, John. We’ve only got the one life.’

I didn’t like it when Tina mentioned her travelling days because, if I’m honest, it made me jealous. I often look back — too often — and wish that I’d gone off and seen something of the world and experienced what it had to offer while I was still young and free enough to be able to do it. Instead, I’d left school and joined the Force straight away; got engaged at twenty; was married at twenty-two; and became a dad at twenty-four, rendering such thoughts utterly redundant. But now and again I still imagined myself stretched out on a far-off palm-fringed beach, drinking a rum punch while some gorgeous local girl rubbed suncream on my back. I’d just got used to the fact that it wasn’t going to happen.

Maybe now was the time to live a little and stop feeling sorry for myself, something I’d been doing far too much these past couple of years. ‘You’re dead right,’ I told her. ‘You can’t take it with you. Safari and the Seychelles it is. If, of course, you change your mind.’

She smiled at me through the smoke, and I got the impression that she was tempted. ‘Let’s see how we go, eh?’

I took a gulp of the wine. ‘Sure.’

At that moment, her mobile rang. I’d switched mine off, having done more than enough work on the taxpayers’ behalf that day. She stood up, saying she’d better take the call, and picked the phone up off the kitchen sideboard. The conversation was short, with her doing most of the listening, but I could tell that whatever she was hearing was significant. I could read it in her animated expression. Something, it seemed, had happened on the case.

When she put the phone down she turned to me, smiling. ‘That was Flanagan. It seems our killer wasn’t so clever after all.’

I felt an immediate surge of excitement. ‘Go on.’

‘A witness approached the officers manning the Portakabin down at the scene a couple of hours ago, while the meeting was still in progress. Apparently, she saw someone come through her garden and then climb over her wall and into someone else’s at about half-five on Wednesday afternoon. Her garden backs on to the one next door to Slim Robbie’s building. She thought it was odd because the guy was dressed in a suit and didn’t look much like your typical burglar. He’d disappeared before she could challenge him, but she did manage to give a description. White, twenty-five to thirty, with dark, curly hair. Looking agitated. It’s got to be our man. No-one else is going to be clambering over back gardens at that time in the afternoon. It’s too much of a coincidence.’

I grinned. What we had didn’t sound like much, but it was a start. Now we could concentrate on asking potential witnesses who lived in the surrounding streets if they’d seen the same guy. From there, we might get a better physical description, or even a description of a car he got into. I remember a case I worked on once south of the river where a rapist had gained entry into a house through an open back window in broad daylight and violently sexually assaulted a nineteen-year-old student who’d been in there on her own. The student, who’d been made to wear a blindfold for most of the ordeal, had only managed to give the most basic of descriptions: skin colour and a rough age (twenty-five to forty if memory serves me correctly), but a retired lady who lived three streets away always made it a habit to write down the registrations of cars she didn’t recognize, and to note down the descriptions of any suspicious-looking strangers. Obviously the rapist fitted that last criterion, and he’d also made the unfortunate mistake of parking his car in her street. She saw him get into it, tagged the number, and when we publicized what had happened shortly afterwards she supplied us with the details we’d needed. The rapist had been driving his brother-in-law’s motor but he had a couple of prior convictions and was quickly apprehended as a result of her information.

There might not be many people around like our amateur detective, but there were enough to make me hopeful that from this first step on the trail of our killer we could take some larger ones.

And I couldn’t help wondering whether the trail would eventually lead all the way back to Stegs Jenner.

The first time Stegs Jenner ever clapped eyes on Tino ‘Ten Inch’ Movali was on the porn film Ass Lovers in London . Stegs hadn’t wanted to admit it to Murk when they’d spoken, but nowadays he was something of a porn aficionado, particularly since the missus had concluded, some five years into their relationship, that sex (at least with Stegs) was only really satisfactory if the end result was pregnancy, thereby relegating it to a couple of times a month, with him on top doing all the work, whenever the moon or whatever was in the right position, and rendering it completely redundant when she’d finally got up the duff. As a result, porn films had become an integral part of Stegs’s solo sex life, to be watched whenever those rare moments occurred when the missus and Luke decamped from the house.

One such occasion had been a couple of months earlier when she’d gone off to see her parents in Colchester for the weekend, taking Luke with her. On the Saturday night Stegs had settled down to watch Ass Lovers , a purchase from a porn shop on the Charing Cross Road, with a takeaway ruby and a hefty supply of canned Stella. What passed for the plot was as follows. An individual, known only as ‘Ass Lover’, appeared to be walking round London with a video camera, filming passers-by, especially attractive women, and their arses in particular, with Tino in tow. Tino, Stegs had to grudgingly admit, was a good-looking, if slightly vacant, young bloke but his dress sense wasn’t up to much. He was wearing a checked sports jacket with brown leather patches on the elbows which would have fitted in perfectly in an early 1980s Essex golf club, but which wasn’t exactly going to pull the punters in turn-of-the-century supposedly swinging London. He also had a rather unpleasant blue jeans and sandy-coloured cowboy boots combo a la Bon Jovi, which at least provided Stegs with a few laughs, as did Tino’s English — fluent enough, but delivered in a comedy Continental accent that veered between French, German, Italian and back again, complete with hackneyed medallion-man chat-up lines such as ‘You’re looking good, baby’ and ‘Man, nice tits.’ Still, this didn’t appear to put off the two local girls Tino and ‘Ass Lover’ got talking to in Hyde Park by the Serpentine. Both were young and pretty, and none too bright either, and when Ass Lover asked them to come back to his hotel room with him and Tino to do some modelling, both accepted eagerly, giving Tino admiring glances that looked worryingly genuine.