Simon Kernick - The Crime Trade

Stegs couldn’t see Tino’s face because it was buried in the wheel arch, but it sounded like he was crying.

‘My God, what sort of a police officer are you?’ he sobbed.

It was a good question, and one that Stegs couldn’t readily answer, so he didn’t bother trying. Instead, he turned away and got in the driver’s side of the car before reversing out of the space. As he did so, he saw a red-faced businessman come out of the lift not more than twenty yards away. Stegs resisted the urge to give him a wave, put the car into first and headed for the exit, ignoring the banging coming from the boot. It was 6.15 a.m., and things were just about going to plan.

At 8.20 a.m. that morning, Paul Richards — a small-time, north London-based career thug with links to organized crime whose claim to fame was that he’d once bitten another man’s ear off in a fight — received the confirmation he was looking for. He’d been standing just inside the tree line for the last three hours, facing a large, modern, white brick bungalow set well back from the road south of the village of Blindley Heath, and he was cold and tired, the early-morning sun having done little to warm his creaking bones. He’d already seen a man in his thirties, dressed in a white rollneck jumper and black leather jacket, come into the kitchen and make a cup of tea an hour earlier, before disappearing again; and then, just as he’d been thinking about going off to find a roadside caff for a much-needed cup of his own, he’d watched, smiling, as Jack Merriweather appeared in the kitchen window wearing a white dressing gown, his shiny bald head still wet from the shower. He too began to make himself a cup of tea.

Bingo. Richards reached into his pocket, pulled out his mobile and made the call his boss had been waiting for.

‘Make the most of it, Jackie,’ he whispered when he’d finished, watching Merriweather sip his tea and share a joke with the copper in the rollneck who’d come in behind him. ‘This is the last morning you’re ever going to see.’

‘You had a girlfriend recently, Mr Panner. One of your bitches , by the name of Fiona Ragdale.’

It was me speaking. On my right was DI Malik. We’d wanted Flanagan to be in on this interview as well, but he’d phoned in sick this morning, saying that he’d had palpitations in the night. The timing was bad, but there wasn’t a lot that could be done about that. The way he’d looked the previous evening, no-one thought he was bullshitting. Across from us sat Robert Panner, along with the duty solicitor, a youngish bloke called Vernon Watson who was often seen skulking round the station and who always appeared to be sweating whatever the weather conditions.

‘What about her?’ demanded Panner.

‘You were arrested in connection with an attack on her at her flat that took place seventeen days ago, on the twenty-seventh of February. You’re currently on bail, awaiting charges in connection with it.’

‘Yeah?’ he answered, seemingly uninterested.

Watson, meanwhile, was staring fascinated at the nails on his pudgy fingers. I felt like telling him to pay attention, but it was probably better for me if he wasn’t interested in the proceedings.

‘A shot was fired into the ceiling during the course of that assault. Fiona Ragdale claimed that it was fired from a gun you were carrying at the time, and that you were the individual who fired it.’

‘I didn’t fire no gun. No-one ever found one, did they?’

I shook my head slowly, allowing a thin smile to show itself on my face. I wanted to disconcert him, to let him know that we had something on him, but not what.

‘That’s right, Mr Panner,’ I said after a pause. ‘No-one ever found one.’

‘Where were you on the afternoon and evening of the eighth of March, that is last Wednesday?’ asked Malik. ‘Specifically between the hours of midday and eight p.m.’

Panner seemed surprised. So too did Watson, who even managed to look up from his fingernails. ‘What’s this all about?’ he said. Panner said more or less the same thing, but his language was more colourful.

‘It was the same day as the Heathrow hotel shooting,’ I continued. ‘You must have heard about that.’

‘Yeah, yeah, I did, but what’s this got to do with anything? I ain’t done nothing, y’unnerstand? Nothing.’

‘Are you refusing to answer the question?’ demanded Malik.

‘No, no, course not,’ said Panner, his demeanour becoming noticeably more nervous. The only thing a criminal likes less than being nicked is being nicked for something he hasn’t done, and Panner was doing a very good impression of someone who couldn’t understand why the hell he was being asked this. ‘I was out and about, y’know. In the day. Seeing some of ma bros. This and that, nuttin’ much.’ He might have been pushing thirty and white, but Panner liked to talk the ghetto slang so beloved of today’s wannabe teenagers, at least when he could remember that that was what he was meant to be doing. He tended to veer in and out of it.

Malik glared at him sceptically. ‘That’s not really a lot of help, is it? Have you got anyone who can vouch for your whereabouts during that time? Individuals — your bros — who can say that you were with them?’

‘I don’t know. Why the fuck you asking me anyway? What I meant to have done?’

‘What you meant to have done,’ said Malik, mimicking Panner’s habit of missing words out of his sentences, ‘is shoot dead one Robert O’Brien, and his grandmother, Mrs Kitty MacNamara.’

Panner jumped out of his seat, gesticulating wildly. ‘No way, man! What the fuck is this? I don’t know nuttin’ about no shooting!’

‘Get back in your seat!’ I snapped.

Panner’s face dropped and his aggression ran off as quickly as it arrived. He sat down slowly, looking across at his lawyer, who seemed perplexed by the whole thing.

‘I thought my client was under arrest for possession of an offensive weapon and resisting arrest,’ he said, referring to Panner’s interception the previous night.

‘And attempted murder of a police officer,’ said Malik.

‘Fuck that, it weren’t my fault he jumped all over my car.’

I smiled. ‘So, you’re admitting it now? That you attempted to run me over?’

‘I didn’t,’ he whined, knowing he was trapped. ‘Fuck this, man. You’re setting me up.’

‘Who paid you to kill Robert O’Brien and Kitty MacNamara?’ demanded Malik coldly, his words designed to shock the pimp. The fear that spread across the other man’s face suggested that they worked.

‘No-one did. Dat’s truth. I swear, man. I didn’t have nuttin’ to do wid it. You gotta believe me. I don’t even know no fucking Robert O’Brien, or the other one. I never heard them. Y’unnerstand?’

‘No, I don’t understand.’

‘Listen, my client is making it clear he doesn’t know anything about this man you keep talking about,’ said Watson testily, breaking his self-imposed silence. ‘Can you therefore move on?’

Panner took this as a hint to shut up. His fingers drummed steadily on the formica table, and he stared down at them without blinking.

‘You’re in a lot of trouble, Mr Panner,’ I told him. ‘At the moment, whether you like it or not, you are our number one suspect in the double murder of Robert O’Brien and Kitty MacNamara, and the evidence against you is irrefutable.’ Watson started to say something else but I talked over him, staring straight at Panner. ‘We know full well that you fired the gun into Fiona Ragdale’s ceiling because not only did she tell us you did, you were also seen by several other witnesses leaving the building directly afterwards.’ This last bit was made up, but he wasn’t to know that. ‘And we also know, without a shadow of a doubt, that it was the same gun that killed two people just over a week later. So, I think it’s best if you stop with the boring and repetitive denials and simply admit to us what happened last Wednesday.’