The Crime Trade

by Simon Kernick

  Stegs walked over to the desk, had a quick check through the neat stack of papers in his former colleague’s in-tray, then opened the top drawer as quietly as he could. There was a transparent box containing floppy disks in there, plus a dog-eared Len Deighton novel (SS-GB, one of Stegs’s childhood favourites) and a black address book. He pocketed the address book straight away, then went to open the box of disks, but it was locked. The lock didn’t look too strong so he took it out and tried to force it open, but it wouldn’t go. He scanned about inside the drawer for a key but there wasn’t one in there. He tried again, pulling harder this time, amazed that a piece of plastic could be so stubborn.

  Just then, he heard footsteps coming through the kitchen. His teeth clenched reflexively and he chucked the box back in the drawer, shutting it at the same time.

  ‘What are you doing, Mark?’

  It was Gill’s voice. He turned round from his position staring out of the window into the Vokerman back garden and organic vegetable patch, and gave her a whimsical smile. ‘I was just thinking about Paul. I miss him, Gill. Already. I wish I could have done something, anything . . .’ He picked up a photo of Vokes in a ridiculous Hawaiian shirt from the desk and stared at it for a moment, shaking his head as slowly as he could, but with close to a gram of uncut amphetamines soaring through his bloodstream it was never going to be slowly enough.

  His words and actions seemed to have the desired effect, however, and the beginnings of a smile appeared on Gill’s face. ‘It’s going to be hard for all of us,’ she said. ‘Paul was a good Christian husband and father.’

  ‘He was,’ said Stegs, putting the photo back down and walking slowly towards the door. He suddenly had an urge to take a leak for real. ‘It all just seems so . . . so permanent.’ She gave his arm a supportive squeeze and he shot her a grim smile. ‘And do you know what? I’ve been thinking about him so much, I haven’t even been to the toilet yet.’

  ‘Would you like a cup of tea, Mark?’

  ‘No, thanks,’ he sighed. He couldn’t think of anything worse than another twenty minutes in that lounge. ‘I’d better be going.’ He started to move past her but, like the worst kind of doorman, she blocked his way.

  She smiled her grim, worthy smile that Stegs presumed was meant to make him feel part of the flock but came out more like the expression a movie killer pulls just before he knifes his victim. ‘You’ve come a long way to see me,’ she said. ‘Stay for a quick cup. It’ll do you good to talk about things.’

  There was something in her voice that said she really didn’t want him to argue, and would take it badly if he did. He knew then that she could smell the drink, and he wondered whether they were going to make an attempt to convert him. For the life of him he couldn’t work out what Vokes had ever seen in her. She was only a small woman, but there was no doubt she had the ability to frighten even the most hardy of men.

  ‘OK, I’ll stop for a quick cup, but it really will have to be quick. I’ve got a number of important things I have to do this afternoon. I only came to pay my respects.’

  ‘That’s very kind of you. We all appreciate it. Paul always found you a very capable colleague.’

  Damned with faint praise, thought Stegs. Briefly, she looked past him towards the desk and he wondered whether she had any suspicions about what he’d been doing. She then looked back at him, gave him that smile again, and turned away. ‘He was a good man,’ she said, going back into the kitchen, and then repeated it. ‘A very good man.’ He decided she hadn’t.

  After he’d finished in the toilet, he went back into the lounge where he was handed a cup of watery tea and then spent a very long fifteen minutes talking about and listening to all the good things Paul Vokerman had done in his life, and how much he was going to be missed. The problem with tragedies is that all the conversations relating to them go round in circles, so not a lot was actually said, but it was said in a different way many, many times. Stegs lost count of the number of occasions he heard the phrases ‘good man’, ‘committed Christian’, ‘sense of justice’ and ‘sadly missed’, but one thing was for sure, it would be a long time before he wanted to hear any of them again. Vokes had definitely been a good bloke, no question, but Stegs didn’t want to share his views on him with a bunch of people like this, so it was with a sense of real satisfaction that he finished his tea and got up to leave, with goodbyes all round.

  The vicar stood up, shook hands firmly, and told him that if he ever needed to talk to anyone to please feel free to give him a call or drop him an email. ‘My name’s Brian and I’m always available.’ He handed Stegs a card. It seemed even the servants of the Lord had gone twenty-first century.

  Stegs thanked him and told Mother that it was nice to meet her. She nodded severely and said that the Lord always welcomed sinners back into the flock. It wasn’t quite the same as a goodbye but, under the circumstances, it would do. She added that she hoped she might see him again. Not if I catch sight of you first, he thought.

  Gill saw him to the door and thanked him once again for coming round.

  ‘It’s no trouble at all,’ he told her. ‘I only wish the circumstances could be happier.’

  ‘How well did you know Paul?’ she asked.

  He already had one foot outside the door but stopped and looked at her, taken aback by this sudden question. She was staring at him intently as if trying to hunt down lies. It wasn’t the sort of expression he’d seen on her face before.

  ‘Well enough, I think,’ he said cautiously. ‘Why do you ask?’

  She continued to stare intently and he felt himself sweating under her gaze. ‘I don’t know,’ she said, choosing her words carefully. ‘He didn’t seem his usual self recently. I felt that he was concerned about something. That there was a weight on his shoulders of some sort.’

  ‘He never said anything to me about it, Gill. It’s a very difficult job that he did. Perhaps it was the pressure of that.’

  Her expression relaxed and she managed a surprisingly pleasant smile. ‘Perhaps it was,’ she said. ‘It’s a very difficult job that you both do.’

  ‘Someone’s got to do it,’ said Stegs, trying hard not to sound too much like Clint Eastwood.

  She pursed her lips, the conversation at an end. ‘I hope I see you again soon, Mark. I don’t know when the funeral will be. It could be a while.’

  ‘I’m sure they’ll do their best to wrap everything up as soon as they can,’ he said, before turning away and walking down the footpath in the direction of the street.

  It had started to rain again and the sky was an iron grey. He was still speeding but the urge to drink had gone. He needed to walk. To walk and to think. What exactly had Gill meant back there? How well had he known Vokes? Very well, he’d always thought. But like anything in life, you can never quite tell. People you know always have the ability to shock you. But Vokes? No, he’d always had the run of Vokes. I knew him well enough, Gill.

  Definitely well enough.

  It was four o’clock when he eventually got back to the car. The rain had stopped but the clouds remained, thick and foreboding. He’d walked for a while, but his thoughts had been a jumble: mainly memories of old Vokes interspersed with concerns about his own future now that he was suspended, until finally he’d found himself with a strong desire to go home and have a cup of tea. He hoped the missus wasn’t in nagging mode, and that Luke was either asleep or in good cheer.

  But he’d picked a bad time to drive back and he got caught in an almighty jam on the North Circular. He tuned into Capital and found that there’d been an accident further up at Staples Corner (according to the Flying Eye, it was a four-car pile-up), so he was stuck in it, wondering how on earth four cars could have actually got up to the sort of speeds necessary for a collision like that. Usually, you never got to more than thirty miles an hour tops on either of the circulars during the day.

  At five to five, when he was stationary again, with the beginnings of a headache and the flashlights of the em
ergency services visible a few hundred yards ahead, he got a call on the private mobile. He picked it up off the front passenger seat and for the second time that day didn’t recognize the number.

  ‘Jenner.’

  ‘Stegs, it’s John Gallan. There’s a few things I need to speak to you about, and I need to do it sooner rather than later.’

  ‘Do you want to meet somewhere?’

  ‘It’s official business. Can you come down here?’

  ‘Where? Islington? To be honest, I’ve been out all day and I’m on my way home. Can we do it tomorrow?’

  He heard Gallan sigh down the other end of the phone, but he was in no mood to be helpful. A black Mercedes in the next lane tried to nudge in front of him and Stegs inched forward, blocking his way.

  ‘Tomorrow’s a bit late.’

  ‘Is it urgent?’

  Gallan paused. ‘It’s important,’ he said eventually.

  Now it was Stegs’s turn to sigh. He was tired, but he knew from experience he wasn’t going to get out of it. ‘Listen, if it’s that important, come up to my house. I’m nearly there now.’ He gave Gallan the address.

  ‘We’ll try to make it as quick and painless as possible.’

  ‘We?’

  ‘WDS Boyd and me. We’ll be with you in an hour or so, traffic permitting.’

  ‘The traffic in this town never permits,’ said Stegs, and hung up.

  At the same time, the driver of the Mercedes – a stressed young commuter who appeared to have gone prematurely bald, probably in this traffic jam – snarled at him, actually baring teeth. Stegs pulled out his warrant card and pushed it against the window, at the same time mouthing ‘fuck off’ and inching forward still more. The Mercedes driver backed off.

  He wondered if he was going to make it home in an hour himself.

  10

  Stegs Jenner lived on an estate consisting mainly of 1950s and 1960s semi-detached houses off Cat Hill in east Barnet. Some were quite substantial, and attractive for post-war housing, but Stegs’s semi was one of the smaller and newer ones and looked a little forlorn opposite its bigger neighbours.

  A thick, oppressive layer of cloud hung over Barnet that evening, and a light rain spat weakly as Tina Boyd and I got out of the car. I looked at my watch. It was quarter past six, and I was getting hungry. It had been a long day and a draining one. I’d been on the stand for more than two hours in court that afternoon tesifying in the rape trial, much of it under detailed and laborious cross-examination from the defence barrister, who was doing his utmost to get his client off on a technicality now that it was becoming patently obvious to all concerned that he was guilty. I think I did OK, but sometimes it’s difficult to tell. Particularly when you’re tired, and I was as tired as hell.

  Tina had filled me in on the details of the earlier murder squad meeting – not that there were many of them. So far there’d been no sightings of O’Brien on the day of his murder, and we were still waiting for further tests on the bodies to determine more specific times of death. SOCO hadn’t reported any obvious clues left by the killer, and no-one among those interviewed in the surrounding area had seen anything suspicious. Perfect. As for the three phone calls made on the mobile in O’Brien’s possession to Stegs’s mobile, all had been made since Sunday, the last on the previous morning, but none had lasted more than a minute, so it was possible he was simply leaving messages. Either way, it was inconclusive.

  Stegs’s wife, Julie, answered the door, a very miserable-looking baby under one arm. The baby eyed me belligerently. Julie, meanwhile, tried to appear welcoming, but it was clear the day was getting on top of her. She was an attractive woman, taller I think than Stegs, with big brown eyes and full lips, but exhaustion and stress had given her a tense, almost haunted look.

  Tina spoke first. ‘Good evening, Mrs Jenner,’ she said with a smile, ‘we’re here to see your husband.’

  ‘Oh yes, he said something about that. Come in, come in. He’s in his study.’ She opened the door and we followed her inside into a tiny entrance hall. ‘It’s opposite you at the top of the stairs. You’ll have to excuse me, I’m feeding Luke.’

  I told her that was fine and followed as Tina led the way up the almost unfeasibly steep staircase which was about as child-friendly as an unattended pond.

  Stegs was waiting for us at the top, wearing a cautious grin, as if he was letting us know that he wanted to be friendly but it was up to us whether we allowed him to be. ‘Evening all,’ he said. ‘Come on through.’

  He led us into a tiny room, half of which was taken up by a single bed. A PC running a screen-saver featuring brightly coloured fish swimming around was perched on a desk at the end by the window. The desk took up about another quarter of the room, which didn’t leave room for much else.

  ‘You’ll have to sit on the bed, I’m afraid,’ said Stegs, taking the seat at the desk and manoeuvring himself round so he was just about facing the spot where he wanted us to sit. ‘I don’t really want the missus hearing any of this. Can you shut the door please, John?’

  I did as he asked and then the two of us sat down side by side on the bed facing him. It was all very cosy.

  ‘What can I do for you then?’ he asked.

  ‘We’ve got some bad news, Stegs,’ said Tina.

  He raised his eyebrows. ‘Oh yeah? What’s that?’

  ‘Slim Robbie O’Brien’s dead.’

  He looked shocked. ‘How did that happen, then? And when?’

  ‘He was shot. We don’t have a time of death yet.’

  We let it sink in for a few moments, watching him. He rubbed a hand across his brow, the other hand drumming a rapid tattoo on the side of the chair. I thought he looked stressed. His face had taken on a reddish tinge and he appeared pumped up, making me think that he might be suffering from some sort of delayed shock. I wondered briefly whether he’d been offered counselling. If not, he should have been.

  ‘Christ,’ he muttered, wiping the hand back across his forehead. ‘That’s not going to make things any easier.’

  ‘No,’ I agreed. ‘Quite the reverse.’

  ‘Who do you think could have done it?’ he asked.

  ‘Slim Robbie O’Brien? I imagine the list of suspects is going to be pretty long. When did you last see him?’

  ‘I said all this yesterday evening.’

  ‘Humour us, Stegs. We wouldn’t ask unless we had to.’

  ‘Last Sunday night at a pub called the Shakespeare near Barbican Tube. Me and Vokes met up with him.’

  ‘You said yesterday O’Brien was involved in setting up the final meeting,’ said Tina in formal tones, looking up from her note-taking. Stegs eyed her suspiciously as she continued. ‘What part did he play exactly?’

  Stegs sighed. ‘Quite a few of SO10 got involved in setting up yesterday, but Fellano was suspicious of blokes he didn’t know so he wanted to keep O’Brien in the loop because he trusted him. That meant O’Brien was the main man who kept in contact with him between the test-buy we did at the end of Feb and the final meeting. Me and Vokes also had a couple of conversations with Fellano as well – you know, just to show that we were keen – and I know that he was using contacts in this country to check the two of us out. But he still liked to talk to O’Brien, which is what me and Vokes were meeting him about in the pub. O’Brien was getting worried that when the op went down and Fellano got nicked it was going to be pretty bloody obvious who was behind it. In fact, he wasn’t just worried, he was scared shitless. He was talking about pulling out.’

  ‘But you managed to reassure him?’ said Tina.

  He nodded. ‘Well, yeah, obviously. But he still wasn’t very happy about it. He started harping on about us having to get him a new identity with all the trimmings if it all went wrong. I told him we’d see what we could do, but we weren’t going to promise anything.’

  I cleared my throat, thinking that I was very thirsty and could do with a cup of tea. Somehow, though, I didn’t think one would be forthcoming. I
got the distinct impression Stegs didn’t like our presence in his house, though I suppose you could hardly blame him. No-one likes being questioned by the police, particularly the police. ‘But you said last night he didn’t know the actual location of the meet itself.’

  ‘He didn’t. He knew roughly when Fellano was going to be flying in . . .’

  ‘And that was?’

  ‘I think he came in Tuesday night. Late.’

  ‘So who set up the actual location for the rendezvous?’

  ‘Fellano did. He spoke to me on Tuesday night. I phoned Vokes afterwards.’

  ‘And Fellano said that the meeting was going to be at the Donmar Hotel?’

  Stegs shook his head. ‘No. He told me that the meeting was going to go ahead on the Wednesday, yesterday, but he didn’t say where, because they like to leave that sort of thing until the last minute. It’s safer that way. But SO11 had a tap on my phone and they used it to trace his call to the vicinity of the Donmar, so we concluded it was almost certainly going to be there. And at that point it became common knowledge among everyone on the op, which was what? Ten o’clock Tuesday night. That gave it eighteen hours to leak.’

  ‘Well, not really,’ I said. ‘You and Vokes knew because the information on the location of Fellano’s mobile was relayed to you by DCS Flanagan. He knew, obviously, as did the operator who actually pinpointed the call, and Malik, I believe, because he was with Flanagan at the time. But they were the only ones. We weren’t made aware of it’ – I pointed to myself and to Tina – ‘until we arrived at New Scotland Yard yesterday morning for the briefing. Neither was anyone else on the team. It was a very secretive operation, as you for one ought to appreciate.’

  ‘So you didn’t speak to O’Brien at all at any point after you found out the location of the meeting?’ asked Tina.

  The big question.

  ‘No.’ There was the first sign of annoyance in his voice. Then his expression changed. ‘Hold on, tell a lie, I had a quick twenty-second conversation with him on the way into work yesterday morning. He rang me on my private mobile, the one I give to people who know my real identity. He was hassling me about what we were going to do to protect him when everything was over. I told him it was out of my hands, but that he’d definitely get protection. I hung up on him. That was it. As far as I know, Vokes didn’t speak to him either. There’d have been no point.’