In the end, he couldn’t help thinking how clever he’d been. He’d been at it for years, of course, providing the odd piece of information to the Holtz crime family, ever since he’d crossed paths with one of their operatives on an op back in the late nineties, and had even told them about his SO7 partner, Jeff Benson, infiltrating their ranks. He’d always liked old Jeff as well, and almost certainly wouldn’t have grassed him up if it hadn’t been for the fact that he couldn’t risk him finding out from someone in the organization about Stegs’s own involvement with them. The problem, though, the one which had led to all this, was that Vamen and co. had treated him shabbily. He’d saved their skins by giving them Benson and they’d paid him a pittance: five measly grand for rescuing a multimillion-pound business empire. He’d tried to get more but Vamen had told him that it was all the info was worth, and that had been the end of it. There’d been nothing that Stegs could do, but he hadn’t forgotten either, and the bitterness had festered in him for a long, long time.
However, with the break-up of the Holtzes and the arrest of Vamen he’d been able to let it go, comforting himself with the knowledge that they’d finally all got what they deserved.
Until, that was, he’d been called upon by Islington CID to set up Slim Robbie O’Brien, which was when it had become clear that maybe Vamen wasn’t quite as bolloxed as Stegs had believed. The O’Brien set-up had been successful (the former Holtz man having never met him before and therefore unable to pinpoint him as a copper), but then one evening, at a meeting with Stegs and Vokes, Slim Robbie had told them, laughing, after one drink too many that there was no way Vamen was ever going to get convicted. ‘He’ll get to Merriweather,’ he’d said. ‘You wait and see. He’s got contacts everywhere. He’ll even take out that bastard Tyndall, too. Don’t ever underestimate Neil Vamen.’
From that moment on, the die had been cast. Stegs had started getting the germ of an idea, an idea for some serious and permanent payback for the man with the contacts everywhere. All his life, people had thought they could put one over on Stegs Jenner. All his life, they’d underestimated him. The missus, his old man, the bosses. And, of course, Neil Vamen. It was time for the tables to be turned.
First of all, he’d approached Slim Robbie and told him that he’d done business himself with the Holtzes before and that perhaps they could work together to help get Vamen free and at the same time use the Colombian bust to set up Tyndall. Slim Robbie had been cautious at first (after all, he’d already been stung once) but, like all true criminals, he couldn’t resist the chance to get back in the game.
So Stegs had got him to approach Strangleman Grant – a man Slim Robbie knew from the past – to tell him about a deal he knew going down between a group of Colombians with coke, and local buyers with large sums of cash. For a share of the booty, Robbie offered to give him the time and place of the transaction so that Strangleman could rob the participants, and the Jamaican had gone for it, just like they both knew he would.
The next stage had been to get Vamen involved. Using his solicitor, Melvyn Carroll, as a go-between, Stegs had told the former crime boss that he was in a position to set up Tyndall, and had given him the basic details, quickly gaining his support as well as a fee of ten grand for his troubles, to be paid when the robbery and subsequent arrests had taken place. To whet Vamen’s appetite still further, Stegs had told him that he might, with some effort, be able to get hold of the location of Jack Merriweather, if he was removed from prison to a safe house. He felt sure that the new boss of SO11, Noel Flanagan, would have that sort of information and might be susceptible to some sort of blackmail.
And then there’d been the coup de grâce.
As the date for Operation Surgical Strike neared, and things fell into place, Stegs had made an approach to Nicholas Tyndall, telling him that Strangleman Grant was planning to rob a drugs deal along with several of his men behind his boss’s back, and that the deal was a police set-up. Stegs had again been careful how much detail he’d given out but had told Tyndall he knew roughly when it was going to take place, and had explained that Slim Robbie O’Brien and Neil Vamen were also behind it, hoping to use Strangleman to set up their boss.
Tyndall had been furious, but grateful to Stegs for his help. Knowing that there wasn’t much he could do to stop the robbery taking place and, keen to be rid of a loose cannon like Strangleman who’d evidently long-outlived his usefulness, he’d arranged to be out of the country in the week in which it was to happen. He’d also been keen for revenge on Slim Robbie and, on Stegs’s helpful suggestion, had agreed to have him murdered on the day of the robbery. As far as Stegs had been concerned, Slim Robbie was going to have to die anyway, since he was the obvious source of the leak and was the only person who could testify to his own involvement. It had been a pity about the granny having to buy it as well, but that was Trevor Murk for you – a callous hound to the last.
Only one cloud had threatened the success of the operation from Stegs’s viewpoint, and that had been Vokes Vokerman. As the weeks had gone by, his colleague had started doing a bit of an Obi Wan Kenobi and had taken to lecturing Stegs about the temptations and dangers of the dark side (a bit late for that, Vokesy old son), and Stegs had become convinced that he knew something about what was going on. Which, unfortunately, meant that he’d now become a dangerous liability.
Stegs had always liked old Vokes, same as he’d always liked Jeff Benson, but he was also aware that sometimes you’ve got to make sacrifices – even major ones – in pursuit of the greater good, i.e. the enrichment of Stegs Jenner. Plus he was getting something of a taste for skulduggery. So he’d set up Vokes by making sure he was the one left behind in the hotel room when the deal went down, and, just to make sure he actually got dealt with, he’d got Slim Robbie to phone through to the hotel room and tell whoever answered the blower that they were being set up. Slim Robbie’s instructions had been simple: Stegs would send him a pre-written text message on a pay-as-you-go mobile he was carrying with him, which would act as the signal to make the call. Robbie had been told to stay away from home while he phoned the hotel room in case technology traced it back to his property, and to get rid of the mobile afterwards. He’d done everything bar the last bit, which might have presented a problem to lesser men, but, since Stegs had already got rid of the mobile he’d used to contact Slim Robbie, nothing was ever traced back to him.
Stegs had always been a lucky sod, particularly where survival was concerned, but that wasn’t the whole story. He was also a planner, organizing for every eventuality. Which was why he’d decided to try to incriminate Vokes as well – a particularly naughty thing to do, when you think about it, killing him and then besmirching his Christian memory – but nevertheless something that acted as another useful layer of protection.
Having found out that Vokes and his colleagues from Acton CID were going to raid a local gun dealer, he’d asked Tyndall for help, and had got him to persuade, through threat of serious violence, a small-time pimp who owed him a lot of money to fire the gun that was going to be used in the Slim Robbie hit. The pimp would be let off the money he owed, but should the police ever come calling he was to tell them that he’d rented the gun from the Acton dealer and had given it back before the raid. It might cost him a couple of years inside but, as Tyndall himself had pointed out, the alternative didn’t bear thinking about.
And, aside from the odd complication such as the use of Trevor Murk for the Slim Robbie hit, plus Tino’s fatal bout of foolishness, the whole thing had worked like a dream. Stegs had made plenty of money and, thanks to his unique ability to double-cross pretty much everyone he dealt with, had completely fucked things up for Vamen, and that bastard Flanagan as well, by phoning Malik to warn him of the impending assassination attempt on Merriweather.
Stegs couldn’t deny it; he’d always been a bit of a bad lot. Back at school, he’d even managed to get Barry Growler expelled by setting fire to the chemistry block one night and leaving Growler’s sca
rf (which he’d stolen that day) at the scene, before phoning the police anonymously and posing, surprisingly successfully, as a householder to report the sighting of a youth matching the Growlster’s description running away from the fire.
Treacherous to the last, that was old Stegs. But he was still the one left standing when the rest of them had fallen by the wayside.
To his left, the sea shimmered invitingly; above him, the sky was a deep, unbroken azure; attractive, scantily clad women strolled this way and that. You would have had to say, whatever your views on the world, that it was a good day to be alive.
Vokes, in one of his more crusading moments while posing as Obi Wan, had told Stegs that those with good in their hearts always win through in the end. And that those who harbour evil thoughts and commit evil deeds will always pay the price for their sins.
But then Vokes Vokerman had always been full of shit. It’s nothing to do with good or evil, never has been.
When you work the crime trade, it all boils down to how well you play the game.
The Crime Trade Page 33