Simon Kernick - The Crime Trade

This is the London of today, a vast multicultural city of consumers breeding an ever-growing array of gangs from every ethnic background imaginable, all vying for control of the city’s huge and incredibly lucrative crime industry. I’d heard somewhere that London’s organized and semi-organized criminals were responsible for raising ten billion pounds of revenues per year; mainly from drugs, but also from prostitution (now effectively sewn up by the Albanians), people smuggling and occasionally armed robbery. When I’d mentioned that figure, the ten billion, to Malik, he’d told me it was almost certainly a conservative estimate.

What I couldn’t understand, though, was why Tyndall’s men would be involved in robbing Fellano. I’ve said it before, and I hope I can keep saying it: you should never underestimate the stupidity of criminals, and it’s certainly par for the course for them to rip each other off, especially when it comes to deals involving drugs, but Tyndall was no short-term merchant. He was a man on the up, with business sense as well as ruthlessness, so it made no sense for him to be falling out with a man like Fellano who was likely to be his main supplier in the coke trade. He would be wanting to build bridges with him, not burning them down.

I told all this to the people sitting round the table, with Malik (who also knew something about the Tyndall gang) filling in some of the gaps. We both agreed that it didn’t seem the typical behaviour of a man who so far had taken his steps from petty to big-money crime carefully and with plenty of thought.

‘The three we’ve got in custody over at Paddington Green aren’t talking at the moment,’ said Flanagan, ‘but they’re facing some very long stretches, so they’ve got a lot of incentive to open their mouths and start incriminating each other, and whoever may have organized it. If it is anything to do with Tyndall, we’ll find out.’

He was about to say something else, but then his mobile rang, the third time it had gone off since the meeting had begun. He opened it up and examined the screen. On the first two occasions, he hadn’t answered it, but this time it was obvious that whoever was calling was worth talking to. It was a short, one-sided conversation, with Flanagan doing most of the listening. He did say ‘Oh fuck’ at one point, then there was a thirty-second pause, then he said ‘Bollocks’. Then, ten seconds later, he mumbled something about being there shortly, and hung up.

Everyone looked at him expectantly. ‘That was the assistant commissioner,’ he said with an actor’s croak, his eyes focusing on the table in front of him. ‘The lady who had the heart attack, Eileen Murdoch. . she’s died.’

‘Shit,’ said Ferman.

And that pretty much summed up the predicament, not only of Flanagan, but of all of us involved in the violent and wholly unexpected events of that fateful day. A death toll of six now and a tidal wave of fall-out still to break.

The meeting broke up five minutes later. I had a quick word with Malik, telling him that I’d take responsibility for tracking down Robbie O’Brien, and let him know as soon as we’d picked him up. I wanted to say a few more words but he was in a hurry. He looked more concerned than I’d ever seen him before, which I could understand. Malik was a career copper, a good man with a keen sense of right and wrong, but still someone with his eyes on promotion to the upper echelons of the Serious Crime Group, and ultimately the Met, and a catastrophe like today’s could set him back years if he was found to be even partly responsible.

It could set me back years too, but I wasn’t so worried about it. I’d been knocked back from a DI to a DC a couple of years before, when I was stationed south of the river, so I knew not to expect much help from above when things started to go wrong. Admittedly, that time had been my own fault. I’d seen a fellow officer strike a seventeen-year-old mugger he’d arrested and, out of loyalty (misplaced or otherwise, I’ll leave it for you to decide), I and the other two officers who’d witnessed his actions had covered up for him, denying that we’d seen any wrongdoing take place. That would have been the end of it too, but an investigative journalist had picked up the story and blown the whistle. A very public investigation had followed that had culminated not only in me transferring to another station in Islington, but with my marriage breaking up, and my wife taking up residence with the same investigative journalist who’d wrecked things for me in the first place. Now, you don’t often get a run of luck that bad in a lifetime, but once you’ve had it, you learn a valuable lesson: always expect the unexpected. And never get too comfortable when things are going well, because otherwise the fall’ll be a lot harder. I got the feeling that Malik was beginning to realize this now, and the knowledge wouldn’t do him any harm.

Tina and I were parked a mile or so away from the hotel in the Compass Centre, British Airways’ Heathrow offices on the A4. We got a lift there in the back of a squad car whose driver, a local uniform with a big false-looking moustache and glasses, was desperate for information as to what had gone down that afternoon. It seemed he was just as ill informed as the members of the public who’d stood gawking over the police tape at the entrance to the car park as we’d left. I told him there’d been a series of shootings, and an officer had been killed.

‘When are they going to start arming us, eh?’ he asked, turning round in his seat, taxi driver style.

‘I’ve got a feeling it’s not going to be long,’ I answered, hoping that the day never came when I patrolled with a gun, but knowing that it was pretty much inevitable, and that today’s events were just one more nail in the coffin of an unarmed force.

When we were back in the car, with Tina driving, she shook her head and cursed. ‘That O’Brien, I’m going to kill him when I catch hold of the bastard. He must have been the source of the leak.’

‘I don’t know what the hell he was thinking about if he was responsible,’ I said. ‘Why set it up when it’s always going to come back to him? If he tipped Tyndall’s people off, then what would he gain from it? He’d know that they’d end up getting caught, and that suspicion would automatically fall on him.’

‘But it’s got to be a process of deduction, hasn’t it? Who else knew?’

She had a point there. It had been a secretive operation, but it’s always possible for someone to talk, and I told her as much.

‘O’Brien’s got to be the most likely, though,’ she persisted. ‘He’s stupid enough to think he can get away with it. And greedy enough too. We all know the sort. Always after one more big payday.’

‘But the thing is, there wouldn’t have been a payday, would there?’ I told her. ‘And O’Brien would have known that. The robbers would never have paid him in advance for selling them the information, they’d have split the proceeds afterwards, and since he knew the robbery was always going to end in failure, it would have been pointless.’

Tina sighed, still not convinced. ‘Maybe he had another reason for setting it up.’

‘Maybe. Either way, he needs talking to.’

I removed the mobile from my pocket and phoned my boss, DCI Knox, who’d now been given the task of organizing O’Brien’s arrest. His extension was busy so I tried my colleague and occasional partner, DC Dave Berrin.

Berrin answered on the second ring with a hushed hello.

I wasn’t sure whether it was the reception on the phone or not, so I spoke loudly. ‘Hello, Dave? Where are you?’

‘Outside O’Brien’s place,’ he whispered loudly back at me. ‘Me and Hunsdon are across the street from it now. He wasn’t in when we called round earlier so we’re staying put. Knox’s orders. So what happened out there today, then?’