London Falling

by Paul Cornell

  Costain felt his teeth grind at yet another question. Questions broke the flow of the other bloke telling you something. They weren’t part of a normal chat. They just raised more questions. Sefton was Quill’s favourite, but the little shit was acting like a bloody amateur.

  But Rob had suddenly started yelling at Mick, the driver. ‘Right here, quick, down here!’ And they were off down a slip road, the rest of the convoy blaring their horns and making other cars swerve out of their way as the convoy was forced to follow.

  Costain glimpsed a gasometer and rows of neat little houses, some of them still with their Christmas lights up. They were somewhere in the Wembley area, he decided. He used to take his bike up here as a kid: these rows of homes all with their own little gardens, everything in the shadow of the stadium and the dirty great warehouse stores. Little people living here in the shadows of stuff. Rob was meanwhile giving directions to Mick, looking at a map on his phone, but keeping one hand cupped round it. Even now he didn’t want anyone seeing their destination.

  They roared round a corner, past a square-built pub with a crowd of smokers outside who cheered without knowing what they were cheering. It was the first pub in three streets that hadn’t been boarded up. They took a left down a side street.

  ‘That one,’ Rob pointed. ‘Park up nice like. Don’t disturb the garden.’

  The suburban street was fully lined with cars, so ‘nice’ meant double parking. A home owner came out, calling that he’d need to get his car out later, but Rob vaguely waved the gun at him and he went running back inside. That was how they were rolling tonight, then. Costain felt the others were up for it, into it, experiencing some action with the boss at last – not just serving as his drinking buddies now. Rob led his soldiers to the door of a house, and they formed up outside, ready to rock.

  Rob rang the bell. And then twice more. He turned to them. ‘Could someone—?’

  The soldiers came forward to help, the big Russian trying to do it with one kick. The door went down in three, and then they were rushing inside. Costain hung back, Sefton alongside him, ready to let any shooting start ahead of them.

  But, inside, the gang were wheeling about through a bare and freezing lounge and heading into a kitchen with no fittings and with broken windows looking out to the rear. There was thin carpet and a front parlour space with paintwork yellowed from cigarette smoke. ‘Doesn’t look as if anyone lives here,’ said Mick. ‘Not even as a squat.’

  ‘I know what it looks like, Michael,’ said Rob. ‘Just search the place.’

  So they turned out empty drawers lined with newspaper, and peered under what little furniture there was, the soldiers kicking about inside what looked like their nan’s house. Rob himself went upstairs, and Costain and Sefton – always at his shoulder – followed. Empty bedrooms. Nothing. ‘What are we looking for, then, boss?’ asked Sefton. Always the questions.

  ‘We’re making a noise,’ said Rob, raising his voice as if to address the ceiling. ‘Making it clear we’re here. Loads of us to choose from.’ He grabbed a shotgun and slammed the butt up into a trapdoor of what must be a loft, and the big lads helped him up inside it. But a few moments later he was back down again. ‘Get in there,’ he said, pointing, ‘and root around a bit.’ Costain studied Rob’s face as he marched past. He seemed to have come here with hope and then lost it.

  Costain managed to investigate the back room downstairs on his own. Then he turned round to see that Sefton had entered. But nobody else. They could hear the sounds of the search continuing in every other room around them, carried out swiftly and offhand as every soldier wondered when he’d hear sirens approach to cut off their limited exit. Sefton closed the door behind him. ‘How do you want us to proceed, skip?’

  ‘As the tribunal will hear from the tape, I then asked the lead officer in the field to inform me of his plans . . .’

  Costain looked at Quill’s boy for a moment, then silently blew him a kiss. Sefton stared back at him – apparently astonished that Costain had somehow worked out that Sefton was just waiting for him to fail somehow, that he’d probably been already sending in carefully neutral reports that damned the lead UC only in the details. Quill hadn’t actually said that he’d backed up his version of events, had he? Costain was pleased to have finally got under Sefton’s skin. ‘I wouldn’t worry. You’ll be fine.’

  ‘So you don’t have any . . . particular thing you’d like me to try on Toshack . . . Sarge?’

  There came a shout from Rob himself in another part of the house. ‘Right! Next address!’

  Quill sat in the back of an unmarked BMW, heading back to Gipsy Hill at speed, with his detective sergeant, Harry Dobson, in the seat beside him, talking into his Airwave radio. ‘The helicopter used the opportunity of Toshack’s stop-off at that address in Wembley to refuel,’ he told Quill. ‘He’s now moving to resume surveillance by tracking the bug concealed on Sefton.’

  ‘Tell him, if he loses them, he’ll be flying Fisher Price.’

  Harry raised an eyebrow. ‘He’s about to, anyway, Jimmy. This is the last op, the service is getting cut and the crew are taking early retirement. Like with that Nagra you managed to get hold of when there was nothing else; we’re riding third-class here. So I’ll call him back with your message, shall I?’

  ‘Oh, piss off,’ said Quill. Harry had been with him since they’d been in uniform together. Quill liked having someone he could yell at but not have it matter.

  ‘You really giving Costain another chance?’

  ‘Nah, I was just trying to motivate the fucker. When this is over, he’s done. I’ll have him up on a charge, if I can. I do a bit of the necessary paperwork every lunchtime – gives me something to look forward to. If we’d had a better lead in there, or if Sefton had gone in first—’

  ‘Sefton’s a DC, Costain’s a DS, and Sefton has backed up every single thing that shifty bugger’s said about the Toshack firm. You just don’t like him ’cos you’ve got your own lines drawn in the sand—’

  ‘Laws, I like to call them. And where would we be without them? Where we are now, but a bit worse. He had eyes like frigging dinner plates, Harry. He knew I could see that, and all. When this lot falls apart, we’ll find there was info going the other way, knowingly or not, stuff that he’s been contributing to Toshack’s bloody twilight zone that we can’t get into. Bet you a fiver.’

  ‘Blimey, you are serious.’

  ‘Operation Goodfellow’s falling apart, and we’ve got this last shindig on triple time. It’s the last night of the Proms. When this goes under, Lofthouse won’t be able to fend them off no more. The axe’ll then come down, and undercover ops in London will end up being about some old dear telling a DCI what she heard down the bingo. It’s like Toshack threw us a few coins. There you go, lads, tip for being sodding useless. Now sling your hook.’

  ‘Bet Sarah’s enjoying it.’

  ‘Oh, yeah, Harry, she’s ecstatic. I think she’s visiting some distant cousin tonight. Maybe she’ll stay there.’

  Harry laughed. ‘You’re never that lucky.’

  Quill looked at him a bit sharply, then realized that he had done so and cuffed the DS across the shoulder before he could apologize. Do as I say, not as I do; they should have that written over the door at Hendon. He banged on the back of the driver’s seat, and saw her raising an eyebrow at him in the rear-view mirror. ‘Faster, love. We want to be back at the Ops Room for “Auld Lang Syne”, don’t we?’

  Shit, shit, shit!

  Kev Sefton was his actual name, and right now he was carefully making himself look out of the window of the SUV because he couldn’t look at that bastard sitting beside him. The convoy had gone to two more houses, both within ten minutes’ distance of the first. They’d been empty, too. Both times Toshack had headed up into the loft while he got the soldiers to ‘bang about’. Sefton had tried to keep his mind on the job, but . . .

  The bastard knew. He’d been on his back since he’d joined Goodfellow, and that
was the reason Sefton didn’t know how Costain came to know about his ‘protected characteristic’, as the blunt jargon put it. He’d always stayed away from the Gay Police Association, the Black Police Association . . . He hadn’t thought much about why he should have joined them, or why he shouldn’t. He’d been out, sort of, at his last nick. A few of the lads had asked, so he’d told them. And then his DI, Pete Grieves, had, too, over a pint – deliberately nothing official. ‘I should think you qualify us for some sort of grant, lad, representing two minorities for the price of one,’ he’d said. Sefton had laughed along, only realizing later how the conversation had left him feeling . . . he still didn’t know how he felt about it.

  But there was meant to be a firewall between his present UC life and the nick where he’d first worked.

  And, however he knew, Costain had decided that now, on the night the op was going to crash and burn, was the time to really have a go. He’d been at Sefton ever since he was brought in. That superior look in his eye, ’cos he was the real thing and Sefton was the fraud, the posh boy with the put-on accent. There were so many things Costain had stopped him from mentioning in his reports: so many little infringements that added up to a damning picture. ‘Let’s not mention how long I was alone in there, mate. I might have been a bit rough with him there, mate. Not worth mentioning the toms, is it, mate?’ He was always so friendly during that thirty seconds, and Sefton always kept silent, and then the smile dropped away and the mask was back. He had rank on him, but that was no excuse. He’s put a gag on you, and you let him! You keep letting him!

  It was obvious the man was using. Sefton suppressed his fury yet again. You did undercover one of two ways: you either stayed yourself, playing a part all the way; or you became something else, something that suited your undercover situation. I’m still me. But you’ve lost yourself. Undercover was a big deal for black coppers, because so many of the OCNs were of African ethnicity. Maybe you didn’t get to do all the management courses, maybe your experience became too narrow to attract promotion, maybe you were just a tool like a phone tap or a surveillance team, but it felt like the most meaningful contribution you could make. And that in a culture where, no matter what anyone said, your opportunities felt narrow anyway. But, when Sefton saw that glazed-eye coldness in Costain’s face tonight, he knew: This bastard’s going to bring me down with him.

  Sefton’s mum had taught him something, from his earliest days of getting kicked about. ‘Wish good things at them,’ she’d said. ‘Wish good things at them hard.’ Then she’d make a serious, ridiculous face. He had kept that as a habit of mind, like not walking under ladders. He glanced at Costain now and wished paydays and promotion for the sod, contorting his face with the effort of wishing it.

  ‘You all right, Kev?’ asked Toshack. Which made Costain look round quickly, and satisfyingly. There, Mum, wherever you are now, it worked – sort of.

  He instantly dropped the expression. ‘Come on, boss,’ he said, in that West London accent he’d sold to Quill as a black kid trying too hard. The voice he hated, if he was being completely honest, because it reminded him of all the kids around him when he was growing up, but not of himself. It was a voice he’d learned to adopt. ‘We’ll move heaven and Earth for you, you know that?’ Yes, sir, master – Toshack liked that, so Costain gave it to him. ‘But tell us who we’re after. We all want a drink at midnight, don’t we?’

  There, the look on Costain’s face! Fabulous, darlings. ’Cos second UC Sefton kept daring to show initiative, and that was recorded on that bloody tape of his. Assuming Quill had actually passed it to him. And assuming he’d switched it on.

  ‘You’ll get to toast the New Year at midnight,’ Toshack reassured him. ‘Back at the house. If we don’t find it this time . . . it’s last orders for me, ’cos I’ll be gone soon after.’

  Sefton looked just a bit worried and puzzled, but inside now he was yelling.

  As the soldiers strode up the path of their last suburban semi, Sefton finally made eye contact with Costain. They hung back until everyone else had gone inside.

  ‘Your call, skip,’ he said to Costain, as the familiar crashing noises began inside.

  Costain looked splendidly uncertain. His lovely criminal lifestyle was coming to an end, and he was going to have to either call it now or add to the pile of disciplinary charges. ‘Go on, then,’ he said.

  Sefton looked towards the house, then carefully took his mobile, with the tracer in it, from out of his other pocket. He texted one word to a number which, if called, would connect to a bloke who called himself Ricky, who would ask, ‘What’s up, Kev?’

  The single word: Midnight.

  Costain had placed himself between Sefton and the window, and now he pointed to himself. ‘I’m going to get him,’ he said, ‘before it goes down.’

  Sefton watched the lead UC, as he marched towards the house, and once again he sent all his bloody good wishes after him.

  TWO

  Gipsy Hill was indeed a hill, and the nick was situated near the top of it; at the highest point above sea level that any police station in London occupied. Quill had just stepped out of his vehicle in the Hill’s car park which was, as usual, lit up like a stadium. Well, a stadium where a few of the lights were broken. It was just past 11 p.m., at the very end of the old year.

  ‘Midnight!’ he was saying into his Airwave radio, while Harry marched beside him, talking equally urgently into his phone. ‘So we’re assembling at a quarter to, round the corner from the house in Bermondsey, which means we have to be out of here—’ He paused when he heard the sound of engines behind him, and turned to see a line of unmarked cars rolling in, followed by an Armed Response Vehicle out of Old Street. ‘—right now!’ He then exclaimed, ‘You beauty!’ before correcting himself, ‘Sorry, ma’am.’

  Harry waited until his superior had switched off the radio. ‘You still reckon Toshack’s going to run for it?’

  ‘Not so much now. I’ve been talking to the uniforms who’re moving in on every place he’s been to, and he’s been making a fuckload of noise at every one of them. That’s hardly sneaking out of the country. That’s more like desperation. He’s looking for someone important to him: an old flame, or a kid he lost track of. If he’s cashing in, it’ll be with a shotgun to his own forehead on the stroke of midnight. Only, instead, we’ll be there to hear his confession.’

  Harry coughed a laugh. ‘At least then we’ll get him for possession of a firearm.’

  They got into one of the waiting cars. As police officers in Metvests came running out of Gipsy Hill police station to start filling up the other vehicles, Quill waved for his driver to join the convoy.

  Costain watched as Rob Toshack stepped slowly down from the cab of the SUV. His last hope had gone with that final house. ‘What would you do if you were me, son?’ the boss asked.

  The question you could never answer. You started making suggestions, saying hit them here and here, and a jury would start to wonder if these fine gentlemen would have done any of that without you egging them on. Run for the airport, Rob. Take me with you. The fuckers who’re after you, you’re worth ten of them. ‘I don’t know what the problem is, boss.’

  ‘I’m just going upstairs for a minute.’

  Rob went inside, and Costain walked quickly after him, aware of Sefton catching up, but he didn’t look back to check on him. Upstairs meant Rob was going to lock himself into his den. They’d searched that room in the past, and Rob only kept it locked when he himself was inside. He’d spend hours up there, and come down looking elated, telling some new story of how a certain someone either wouldn’t be getting in their way much longer, or had been persuaded over to their point of view. Or that would be the moment he’d choose for sorting and then sending out the supply. As if having the supply in his own home wasn’t a risk at all; it had proved not to be. Costain followed him upstairs, and heard the other boys switching the telly on down below, their laughter rising; crisis over, they thought. Sefton ha
d stayed down there, too, thank Christ.

  ‘Rob,’ Costain said, ‘what’s wrong?’

  But Rob just shook his head and went on into his den. He locked the door behind him.

  Costain waited a few moments, then put his ear to the door.

  He didn’t hear Rob talking to anyone. Instead he was fumbling with something. The den was actually quite a big space, obviously a spare bedroom from the days when that meant showing off some square feet. Rob had lined it with shelves stacked with cardboard boxes, most of which – as the two UCs had discovered on that day of blissful hope when they’d made a search in there – were empty. Nor, Costain was sure, having had a look at the plans and done some tapping on walls, was there enough room in the house for a hidden den or passage.

  There was a sudden noise, and for a moment Costain thought something must have fallen. But then there was silence again. Very aware of time rushing past, Costain kept listening. It was twenty to midnight when he heard another sound from inside, and he had to stand up quickly and get away as Rob’s footsteps approached the door. What had the man been doing in there? What did he ever do in there?

  Rob emerged from the den looking as if he’d had the last tiny bit of hope shaken out of him, but his dignity seemed to have returned as a result. ‘Having earlier sampled a bit of what we sell, Blakey,’ he said, ‘I find I don’t like it very much. So, in the next ten minutes, I’d like to get as pissed as humanly possible.’

  The pair of them sat in an empty bedroom, London cloud glowing dull-orange through the window. From downstairs Costain could hear the sounds of the party getting raucous. Sefton would be sweating now, aware that, just for once, he had to let his colleague make the play.

  ‘When Dad died,’ said Rob, ‘my brother Alf was left in charge. He was older than me, and he was shagging the proverbial deer with no eyes – literally had no fucking idea. All these vicious kids, with their crack and their guns, were sprouting up around us. We had no resources to match that. We had community, yes, but community don’t mean a thing when it gets in the way of money. Nothing to stop a jeep mowing down the gnomes in the front garden and then some twat from Jamaica chucking a grenade through your window. Here’s the secret, Tony: London’s always about what’s moving underneath, about what’s pushing what. It was understanding that which let me get past what Alf left me with.’ He raised his can of lager, managing a smile as if at some private joke. ‘To Alf.’