Stegs shook his head. 'He rang me up and volunteered the information. He makes money out of betraying people. We pay him when his information secures us a conviction.'
'The bastard! I show him kindness and this is how he pays me. By being a, what is it you call it?'
'A grass.'
A grass, yes. It doesn't seem right.'
'And it isn't right. And I think you might get the opportunity to pay him back in kind.'
For the first time, Tino eyed Stegs with something akin to suspicion. 'What do you get out of all this, Mark? You are a policeman, no? So why help me?'
'Because you're going to do something for me, Tino.'
'What am I going to do?'
Stegs pulled a photograph of a girl of about twenty from the pocket of his jacket. In the photo, she was standing in what looked like a central London street with high buildings on either side, dressed in winter clothing and smiling at the camera. Judy Flanagan wasn't particularly pretty, but there was something natural in her expression that gave her a certain attractiveness. Her cheeks were rosy, her smile genuine, and her whole demeanour that of a young, well-educated, middle-class girl who was almost certainly kind to animals and fellow human beings in equal measure, and who probably bought the Big Issue from one of the homeless with a smile and a thank you. Her hooter was a bit of a let-down, though. Wide and flattened, with splayed nostrils, just like her old man's.
'Who is this chick?' asked Tino, inspecting the photo carefully like he was searching for the hidden prize. 'She has a strange nose.'
'She's someone I want you to get to know. And when you get to know her, which is going to happen very quickly, I want you to take her away for a couple of days.'
Tino gave him a confused look. 'Why, my man?'
There was silence for a few moments as Stegs finished his pint. Then, taking his time, he lit a cigarette and explained.
18
Saturday began just like any other working day for those of us on the O'Brien case.
The Met's detection rate for murders has come under a lot of criticism in recent years, with clear-up rates of a little over seventy per cent lagging far behind those of the rest of the country, mainly because there are too many murders and, given the trend among CID for early retirement, not enough senior detectives. So when you had an increasingly high-profile double-killing (the papers that morning had finally picked up on the fact that Robbie O'Brien was linked to the botched operation at Heathrow), those officers involved were expected to pull out all the stops.
At the murder squad meeting that morning, Flanagan informed us that he had another news conference set for eleven a.m. to try to, as he said, play down the connection between Slim Robbie and the events of Wednesday. On the one hand, such a connection raised the profile of the case and therefore made it
easier to appeal to potential witnesses, but this was outweighed by the fear that those witnesses might well end up keeping quiet if they thought there was some strong 'organized crime' element to what had been going on. No-one wants to make themselves a target or end up lost in a witness protection programme, and Flanagan was as aware of this as anyone, and was acting accordingly. I also don't suppose he was vastly keen on the idea of an intrepid reporter finding out that the man who'd led and planned Operation Surgical Strike was also the one leading the O'Brien murder inquiry, but his demeanour (tenser and more strained than it had been the previous day) suggested that he didn't discount it as a possibility.
However, he was also excited about our new and potentially ground-breaking lead: the first description of the killer. At last we had something to go on. 'We're going to bring the witness in this morning to see if we can get some sort of e-fit together,' he explained. 'I don't know how good a likeness we're going to get, she didn't see him for long, but you never know. As soon as we've got something, we'll knock on every door within a quarter-mile radius and see if the face rings any bells. I've been promised the use of thirty uniforms, but even so it's going to take a while. There's a lot of houses in that part of Islington.'
Next, Flanagan moved on to the material I'd spotted hanging from the rusty nail. Apparently, there wasn't much of it, but tests at the Forensic Science Laboratory in Lambeth were still continuing to see if there was any way of identifying the make, and therefore where it might have been sold. They haven't been able to pinpoint it yet,' he told us, 'and even the forensics guys aren't miracle workers. It was only about an inch of cloth, and that's not a lot to go on, but it is top priority down there.'
Flanagan was right, it wasn't a lot to go on, but at least on this case the resources were going to be there.
The meeting continued with members of the squad bandying about ideas for widening the search and trying to see if there was any angle we hadn't covered yet. I mentioned the weapon used. 'Is it possible it was used before? Has anyone checked HOLMES to see if it might have been?'
As yet, no-one had, though Flanagan wasn't especially confident that it was going to turn up anything, particularly as we'd yet to recover the gun itself. 'He was a pro, the man who did this, as much as anyone who kills people is a pro. But the point is, he's been careful all the way down the line so I can't see him using a dirty weapon. It will need to be checked out, though, just in case the bullets used can be matched with any that have been fired in separate incidents. I know that the Forensic Science Service did ballistics tests at the crime scene. Speak to Roy Catherwood down at Lambeth, can you? He's the one who'll be in charge of documenting all the results.'
I said I would.
'Also, sir,' said Tina, 'if he is a pro, then he's going to have done something like this before, isn't he?'
Flanagan nodded severely, not even looking at her. 'Good thinking,' he said, which, with him, was about the best compliment you were going to get. Take a look through HOLMES, see if there's any other killings with the same MO in London in the past three years, and if any of them throw up a description of the killer.'
Tina said she would, then brought up what she'd found out about Stegs Jenner's partnership with Jeff Benson, his former colleague in SO10, and how it had ended with the latter's cover being blown. 'It's possible he betrayed a colleague once, so he could easily have done it again. Which means he's got be worth considering as a suspect for leaking the details of Operation Surgical Strike.'
Flanagan nodded, not looking too displeased with what Tina had said, which wasn't surprising. 'Mr Jenner still has some questions to answer, but at the moment we haven't got an adequate motive for him, or any real evidence. Keep digging, though, and something might come up. And that goes for all of you. Keep digging. We're unearthing clues. They might be few and far between, but the harder we work at it, the more we'll turn up.'
So dig we did. I didn't see much of Tina that weekend. We were like ships passing in the night. When she wasn't on HOLMES, the police major inquiries database, going through old cases, she was involved in tracking down local Islington-based informants to see if they could throw any light on a possible relationship between Robbie O'Brien and Nicholas Tyndall and his associates not
that she had a great deal of success.
Meanwhile, the internal investigation into what had happened at Heathrow was also gathering pace, and I was contacted by DCS8, Scotland Yard's successor to the Complaints Investigation Bureau, or CIB, to set up a meeting, which was arranged for Monday. I'd heard from Malik that they'd pretty much exonerated Flanagan already, since it seemed he'd done everything he could to ensure that the op had run smoothly, and it made me wonder whether they were going to end up concluding that somehow O'Brien had found out the venue and had simply sold that information on, which seemed just a little bit convenient for me.
By late Saturday afternoon there was a further breakthrough in the case. The material left behind on the rusty nail had yielded results. It turned out that it contained a tiny portion of the jacket's inner label, and an eagle-eyed employee had identified it as belonging to Louis Desmarches, a suit manufacturer whose
clothing was only sold through a fairly small and supposedly exclusive number of retail outlets. After further tests to determine the dyes and materials used in the manufacture of the suit, the FSS had contacted Desmarches to see if they could identify the batch from which it had come. Although there wasn't enough evidence to specify the exact batch, it was possible, the company's representative explained, to state categorically that the material recovered from the crime scene belonged to a Desmarches charcoal-grey suit jacket (it could have been either single-or
double-breasted) manufactured between March 2001 and December 2002. A list of outlets that sold such suits in the Greater London area was immediately despatched from Desmarches to the FSS, and then from the FSS to us.
You always need a little luck in any murder investigation, and it seemed we'd got some here. Not a huge amount, granted, but no copper worth his or her salt minds putting in the hours when you're actually heading in the right direction.
For my part, then, much of the weekend entailed working with a number of other officers from the team contacting those outlets (many of which, being London-based, were open on Sundays) and getting hold of the records of sales made of those particular suits, and the names of the purchasers. At the same time, I was chasing Roy Catherwood, one of the FSS's senior firearms consultants at Lambeth, for anything he could give me on the bullets found at the scene of the murder. Not surprisingly, given that he was dealing with the use of guns in the commission of crime throughout Greater London, he was extremely busy, plus he liked to have a bit of time off now and again, so progress in that quarter was slower than I would have liked.
By ten o'clock on Monday morning it had been confirmed that 104 suits matching the description given by the Desmarches representative had been sold in Greater London since they'd first
gone on sale in March 2001, and now the task of tracking down the purchasers began. Like I said earlier, there's a lot of legwork, and no shortage of dead-ends either. I was spared getting involved in this last lot, however, by my interview with DCS8, which took place at Scotland Yard that morning, and by what happened immediately afterwards.
It was half-twelve when I got back to the station, and I was hungry. I phoned Tina to see if she was in the vicinity and wanted to meet up for lunch, but she wasn't answering, so I made my way up to the incident room. It was nearly empty, with only a handful of detectives and support staff in front of their PCs, but I spotted Malik among them and was just about to ask if he fancied popping out for a pie and a pint when my desk extension rang.
'Good timing,' I said, striding over and picking it up.
I recognized the voice at the other end straight away. I'd never met Roy Catherwood but could tell from the shortness of breath and the gravel in his voice that he was both a heavy smoker and a big eater, and probably not destined for a hundredth-birthday telegram from the Queen. He was a nice enough guy, though, and engagingly jovial, as is more common than people think among those who work in the science of violent death.
'Hello, Roy,' I said, crossing my fingers, though more in hope than in expectation. 'Have you got anything for me?'
'Do you know what?' he rasped in reply. 'I think I actually do.'
He sounded as surprised as me. He hadn't been all that hopeful that without the gun itself it would be possible to tell whether it had actually been used before, particularly as all three slugs recovered from the murder scene had been badly damaged by the impact of being fired point-blank through human bone and tissue.
'Well, go on.'
'I've been checking through our database of .38 bullets fired in the commission of crimes for the past year, and there's a case -a recent one at that that
stands out.' I didn't say anything so he continued. 'A domestic incident over in Paddington a couple of weeks back. Someone it
says here, a man fired a shot into the ceiling of a flat while in dispute with its tenant, a woman he'd apparently been having a relationship with. I've checked the striation marks between our bullets and the bullet that was recovered from the ceiling and they're remarkably similar so similar, in fact, that I'm convinced they came from the same gun.'
The striation marks on a bullet are the microscopic scratches caused by imperfections on the surface of the interior of a gun's barrel that are unique to each individual firearm, and act as its calling card. The same striation marks will appear on a bullet every time a particular gun is fired.
'If the incident had been months ago, I don't know if I'd have spotted it,' he continued. 'At least not for a while anyway. It's because I was working backwards, and it was so recent, that I did.'
'How sure are you?' I asked, thinking that this didn't quite sound right. A hitman using his weapon in a domestic dispute?
'Very,' he answered with a wheeze and a huff. 'All the cartridges involved are badly damaged, but there's no mistaking it. I'd say that the match is ninety-nine per cent. Not good enough for some courts of law, unfortunately, but it ought to be something to be going along with. I've got the name of the DI involved in the case if you want it.'
'That'd be great. Thanks, Roy.'
He gave me the number and I thanked him again, saying I'd be back in touch shortly.
'Yeah, I bet,' he snorted. That's what they all say.'
I got straight through to DI Seamus Daly at Paddington Green nick and he gave me a rundown of what had happened. 'The name of the shooter, or alleged shooter as he'll have you believe, is Robert Fanner. He's a small-time pimp a
bit of an All G type, a white man who thinks he's black who
operates round Paddington station. He'd been in a relationship of sorts with the tenant of the flat, a Miss Fiona Ragdale, and had her on the streets earning for him. Apparently, she'd been trying to quit, there'd been some arguments, and then one night a couple of weeks back he turned up and put a bullet in the ceiling. She called us, but he went AWOL and we didn't catch up with him until last week. He was nicked, but any sulphur traces from the gun on his fingers had disappeared. He's on bail at the moment, pending further enquiries.'
'What about the gun itself?'
'Couldn't find it, and Fanner denied everything. Said it must have been someone else, and I don't know how easy it's going to be to get charges to stick. It's his word against hers, and she's been on the pipe and got a few convictions of her own, so she's not exactly reliable.'
I told Daly the nature of the case we were investigating and asked him if he thought Fanner could possibly be the shooter.
'Well, the description fits roughly. He's about the right age, he's got black hair and he's definitely a nasty bit of work. He's got a record for theft, drugs, and ABH and GBH, so he's definitely capable of some serious violence.'
'But?'
'But he's small-time, and a bit of a dopehead to boot. In the end, I can't see anyone hiring him for an important murder. He might have the right temperament, but I can't see him shooting dead two people, then being savvy enough to tidy up for himself