Simon Kernick - The Crime Trade

Meanwhile, the internal investigation into what had happened at Heathrow was also gathering pace, and I was contacted by DCS8, Scotland Yard’s successor to the Complaints Investigation Bureau, or CIB, to set up a meeting, which was arranged for Monday. I’d heard from Malik that they’d pretty much exonerated Flanagan already, since it seemed he’d done everything he could to ensure that the op had run smoothly, and it made me wonder whether they were going to end up concluding that somehow O’Brien had found out the venue and had simply sold that information on, which seemed just a little bit convenient for me.

By late Saturday afternoon there was a further breakthrough in the case. The material left behind on the rusty nail had yielded results. It turned out that it contained a tiny portion of the jacket’s inner label, and an eagle-eyed employee had identified it as belonging to Louis Desmarches, a suit manufacturer whose clothing was only sold through a fairly small and supposedly exclusive number of retail outlets. After further tests to determine the dyes and materials used in the manufacture of the suit, the FSS had contacted Desmarches to see if they could identify the batch from which it had come. Although there wasn’t enough evidence to specify the exact batch, it was possible, the company’s representative explained, to state categorically that the material recovered from the crime scene belonged to a Desmarches charcoal-grey suit jacket (it could have been either single- or double-breasted) manufactured between March 2001 and December 2002. A list of outlets that sold such suits in the Greater London area was immediately despatched from Desmarches to the FSS, and then from the FSS to us.

You always need a little luck in any murder investigation, and it seemed we’d got some here. Not a huge amount, granted, but no copper worth his or her salt minds putting in the hours when you’re actually heading in the right direction.

For my part, then, much of the weekend entailed working with a number of other officers from the team contacting those outlets (many of which, being London-based, were open on Sundays) and getting hold of the records of sales made of those particular suits, and the names of the purchasers. At the same time, I was chasing Roy Catherwood, one of the FSS’s senior firearms consultants at Lambeth, for anything he could give me on the bullets found at the scene of the murder. Not surprisingly, given that he was dealing with the use of guns in the commission of crime throughout Greater London, he was extremely busy, plus he liked to have a bit of time off now and again, so progress in that quarter was slower than I would have liked.

By ten o’clock on Monday morning it had been confirmed that 104 suits matching the description given by the Desmarches representative had been sold in Greater London since they’d first gone on sale in March 2001, and now the task of tracking down the purchasers began. Like I said earlier, there’s a lot of legwork, and no shortage of dead-ends either. I was spared getting involved in this last lot, however, by my interview with DCS8, which took place at Scotland Yard that morning, and by what happened immediately afterwards.

It was half-twelve when I got back to the station, and I was hungry. I phoned Tina to see if she was in the vicinity and wanted to meet up for lunch, but she wasn’t answering, so I made my way up to the incident room. It was nearly empty, with only a handful of detectives and support staff in front of their PCs, but I spotted Malik among them and was just about to ask if he fancied popping out for a pie and a pint when my desk extension rang.

‘Good timing,’ I said, striding over and picking it up.

I recognized the voice at the other end straight away. I’d never met Roy Catherwood but could tell from the shortness of breath and the gravel in his voice that he was both a heavy smoker and a big eater, and probably not destined for a hundredth-birthday telegram from the Queen. He was a nice enough guy, though, and engagingly jovial, as is more common than people think among those who work in the science of violent death.

‘Hello, Roy,’ I said, crossing my fingers, though more in hope than in expectation. ‘Have you got anything for me?’

‘Do you know what?’ he rasped in reply. ‘I think I actually do.’

He sounded as surprised as me. He hadn’t been all that hopeful that without the gun itself it would be possible to tell whether it had actually been used before, particularly as all three slugs recovered from the murder scene had been badly damaged by the impact of being fired point-blank through human bone and tissue.

‘Well, go on.’

‘I’ve been checking through our database of.38 bullets fired in the commission of crimes for the past year, and there’s a case — a recent one at that — that stands out.’ I didn’t say anything so he continued. ‘A domestic incident over in Paddington a couple of weeks back. Someone — it says here, a man — fired a shot into the ceiling of a flat while in dispute with its tenant, a woman he’d apparently been having a relationship with. I’ve checked the striation marks between our bullets and the bullet that was recovered from the ceiling and they’re remarkably similar — so similar, in fact, that I’m convinced they came from the same gun.’

The striation marks on a bullet are the microscopic scratches caused by imperfections on the surface of the interior of a gun’s barrel that are unique to each individual firearm, and act as its calling card. The same striation marks will appear on a bullet every time a particular gun is fired.

‘If the incident had been months ago, I don’t know if I’d have spotted it,’ he continued. ‘At least not for a while anyway. It’s because I was working backwards, and it was so recent, that I did.’

‘How sure are you?’ I asked, thinking that this didn’t quite sound right. A hitman using his weapon in a domestic dispute?

‘Very,’ he answered with a wheeze and a huff. ‘All the cartridges involved are badly damaged, but there’s no mistaking it. I’d say that the match is ninety-nine per cent. Not good enough for some courts of law, unfortunately, but it ought to be something to be going along with. I’ve got the name of the DI involved in the case if you want it.’

‘That’d be great. Thanks, Roy.’

He gave me the number and I thanked him again, saying I’d be back in touch shortly.

‘Yeah, I bet,’ he snorted. ‘That’s what they all say.’

I got straight through to DI Seamus Daly at Paddington Green nick and he gave me a rundown of what had happened. ‘The name of the shooter, or alleged shooter as he’ll have you believe, is Robert Panner. He’s a small-time pimp — a bit of an Ali G type, a white man who thinks he’s black — who operates round Paddington station. He’d been in a relationship of sorts with the tenant of the flat, a Miss Fiona Ragdale, and had her on the streets earning for him. Apparently, she’d been trying to quit, there’d been some arguments, and then one night a couple of weeks back he turned up and put a bullet in the ceiling. She called us, but he went AWOL and we didn’t catch up with him until last week. He was nicked, but any sulphur traces from the gun on his fingers had disappeared. He’s on bail at the moment, pending further enquiries.’

‘What about the gun itself?’

‘Couldn’t find it, and Panner denied everything. Said it must have been someone else, and I don’t know how easy it’s going to be to get charges to stick. It’s his word against hers, and she’s been on the pipe and got a few convictions of her own, so she’s not exactly reliable.’

I told Daly the nature of the case we were investigating and asked him if he thought Panner could possibly be the shooter.