Simon Kernick: The Crime Trade

‘The op was stretched,’ said Ferman. ‘If you hadn’t decided to go walkabout with the target, then we’d have had a lot better coverage. We had to pull men from all over the place to get them into that car park.’

‘You know, you’re all looking at everything the wrong way.’

‘What do you mean?’ demanded Flanagan.

‘Those blokes who turned up out of the blue were the ones who fucked this job. How did they know about the operation? That’s the question.’

Which was the moment when Flanagan, Ferman and Stegs all turned and looked straight at Tina and me.

‘Hold on,’ said Tina, making a pre-emptive strike. ‘Wait a minute here. We gave you guys a lead, and we’ve had nothing further to do with it, so don’t start setting us up for fall-guys.’

‘It’s a good question, though,’ said Malik. ‘How did they know about the deal? Could your informant have talked?’

Our informant — the one who’d helped organize this meeting — was Robert O’Brien, better known as Slim Robbie on account of the fact that he was as fat as a house. A thirty-year-old thug and career criminal who’d only agreed to set up the Colombians to save himself from a long prison sentence, after being set up in a similar sting by undercover police. It was fair to say that Robbie O’Brien lived and breathed the illegal. Asking if he could have talked, particularly if talking resulted in a profit for him, was like asking if whores have sex or Christians believe. It was pretty much a rhetorical question. Except for one thing.

‘We never told him the details of the op,’ I said. ‘I didn’t even know them myself until a few hours ago. I set up the introductions between the informant and Stegs, and I’ve spoken to him since then, but only about other matters, so if he knew anything about this meeting, he didn’t hear it from us. And anyway, how would he have known that Stegs and the Colombians were going to end up in the car park with the money and the drugs?’

Eyes now returned to Stegs, who shrugged. ‘Robbie O’Brien was involved in setting up today’s meeting. He had to be: the Colombians were his contacts, not ours. And he was involved all along as well, at least up until a few days back. But I never told him the location, and I’m sure Vokes didn’t either. Like you, John’ — he nodded towards me — ‘we didn’t know it ourselves until a few hours back. Fellano likes to leave those sort of things to the last minute, for obvious reasons. O’Brien might have guessed, I suppose, because he knew Fellano had met people at this hotel before. And he would have been aware that Fellano was flying in in the last few days, but I haven’t spoken to him since Sunday, so I can’t see how he’d have known the timing.’

‘We’re going to have to bring O’Brien in for questioning,’ said Flanagan, also looking at me.

‘We’re on the case, sir,’ said Tina firmly, making doubly sure that Flanagan knew she was there too. ‘We’ve already called the station and they’re searching for him.’

‘No joy yet?’

‘Not yet, but we’ll get him,’ she said confidently, a tone in her voice suggesting that you wouldn’t want to be Slim Robbie when she got her hands on him. Tina Boyd might have looked like the pretty, college-educated girl from a good, middle-class family that she was, but you know what they say about appearances. She was a far tougher cookie than most people gave her credit for, and I would have almost felt sorry for Robbie if he hadn’t been such a scumbag.

At that moment, a mobile rang shrilly. It was Malik’s. He removed it from his pocket, and I noticed with some amusement that it was a new and predictably flash little number that probably doubled as a pocket PC and digital camera. Typical. With Malik, appearances weren’t deceptive. He looked like the smart, young, gadget-carrying go-getter that he was. He spoke into the minuscule mouthpiece of the phone briefly, then listened for about twenty seconds, writing something in his notebook as he did so. Finally he hung up with a curt goodbye.

‘Ashley Eric Grant,’ he said, reading out what he’d just written. ‘Also known as — and I’m not sure if he took this as a compliment or not — “Strangleman”. Fingerprints have just identified him as the dead robber.’

Flanagan, now standing, looked round the table. ‘Anyone know that name?’ he asked hopefully. ‘Ring any bells with anyone?’

‘I never saw any of those blokes before in my life,’ said Stegs, lighting another cigarette.

Flanagan’s gaze got round to me, and I sighed loudly, wondering how much worse this day could possibly get, then told him and the room that, yes, I knew exactly who Ashley ‘Strangleman’ Grant was.

Ashley Grant allegedly got the nickname Strangleman years back in the Tivoli Gardens ghetto of Kingston, Jamaica, where he’d grown up. The story went that as a drug dealer and gunman loosely affiliated to the Jamaican Labour Party, or JLP, which ran that particular area, his very individual method of disposing of rivals was to have them impaled on meathooks before disembowelling them with a large butcher’s knife. He would then, it was claimed, strangle the unfortunate victims with their own entrails while they choked out their last breaths.

Nobody knew how many people he’d killed this way. Nobody even knew if the story was true or not. My feeling was that there was probably something in it, but if he’d ever murdered someone in such a messy fashion I suspected that he’d only done it the once, and the victim would probably have been long dead before his colon had been wrapped round his neck. I hoped so anyway.

But what was not in doubt was that Strangleman Grant was a dangerous man. He’d been residing in the UK for about ten years, having come over in his early twenties looking to make his fortune, and had married a local girl, thereby giving him the right to remain, even though it quickly became clear that his respect for the laws of his adopted land was near enough non-existent. Of those ten years, something like half had been spent in prison, mainly for drugs and weapons offences, but he’d been out for a while now and was settled on mine and Tina’s south Islington manor, which was how I knew his background. What concerned me immediately, however, was the fact that he was hooked up with the crime organization of one Nicholas Tyndall, a new and potentially very violent player in the north London cocaine trade.

A little bit of history here. Up until a few months earlier, cocaine importation and distribution in north London, particularly Islington, had been primarily the work of the Holtzes, an extended family of gangsters who’d had a stranglehold on the area’s organized crime since the late 1970s, and one of whose members had been Slim Robbie O’Brien. But the Holtzes had fallen from power in spectacular fashion, their leader and one of his sons killed, and now many of their senior associates, including the leader’s deputy, Neil Vamen, were in custody, awaiting trial for a variety of offences.

I’d been involved in their downfall, as had DI Malik, which was how we knew each other, but our victory had been something of a hollow one. With the Holtzes out of the picture, a vacuum had developed, and everyone knows what they say about nature and vacuums. Plenty of other outfits, some of them distinctly amateur, had tried to grab a piece of the wealth that was there to be had in the distribution of coke to the ever-growing customer base, but one of the more organized, and by all accounts more violent of them, was the Tyndall gang.

Tyndall himself was a thirtysomething, locally born thug with an entrepreneurial streak who’d started out surrounding himself with men from his own estate, but who over the last couple of years had developed relations with Jamaican and Albanian criminals operating locally, and was, as a result, one of the bigger players coming through. Strangleman Grant was one of his top enforcers and was believed to have murdered another Jamaican who’d tried to rip Tyndall off two months earlier, blowing the back of his head off in an illegal drinking den in Dalston. There’d been at least fifty witnesses to the shooting but, as is almost always the way in these sort of violent in-your-face crimes within the black community, no-one was talking, particularly as it was well known that Nicholas Tyndall was behind it. Already he was getting a reputation for being untouchable.