Ashley Grant allegedly got the nickname Strangleman years back in the Tivoli Gardens ghetto of Kingston, Jamaica, where he'd grown up. The story went that as a drug dealer and gunman loosely affiliated to the Jamaican Labour Party, or JLP, which ran that particular area, his very individual method of disposing of rivals was to have them impaled on meathooks before disembowelling them with a large butcher's knife. He would then, it was claimed, strangle the unfortunate victims with their own entrails while they choked out their last breaths.
Nobody knew how many people he'd killed this way. Nobody even knew if the story was true or not. My feeling was that there was probably something in it, but if he'd ever murdered someone in such a messy fashion I suspected that he'd only done it the once, and the victim would probably have been long dead before his colon had been wrapped round his neck. I hoped so anyway.
But what was not in doubt was that Strangleman Grant was a dangerous man. He'd been residing in the UK for about ten
years, having come over in his early twenties looking to make his fortune, and had married a local girl, thereby giving him the right to remain, even though it quickly became clear that his respect for the laws of his adopted land was near enough non-existent. Of those ten years, something like half had been spent in prison, mainly for drugs and weapons offences, but he'd been out for a while now and was settled on mine and Tina's south Islington manor, which was how I knew his background. What concerned me immediately, however, was the fact that he was "hooked up with the crime organization of one Nicholas Tyndall--a new and potentially very violent player in the north London cocaine trade. A little bit of history here. Up until a few months earlier, cocaine importation and distribution in north London, particularly Islington, had been primarily the work of the Holtzes, an extended family of gangsters who'd had a stranglehold on the area's organized crime since the late 1970s, and one of whose members had been Slim Robbie O'Brien. But the Holtzes had fallen from power in spectacular fashion, their leader and one of his sons killed, and now many of their senior associates, including the leader's deputy, Neil Vamen, were in custody, awaiting trial for a variety of offences.
I'd been involved in their downfall, as had DI Malik, which was how we knew each other, but our victory had been something of a hollow one. With the Holtzes out of the picture, a vacuum had developed, and everyone knows what they say about nature and vacuums. Plenty of other outfits, some of them distinctly amateur, had tried to grab a piece of the wealth that was there to be had in the distribution of coke to the evergrowing customer base, but one of the more organized, and by all accounts more violent of them, was the Tyndall gang.
Tyndall himself was a thirty-something, locally born thug with an entrepreneurial streak who'd started out surrounding himself with men from his own estate, but who over the last couple of years had developed relations with Jamaican and Albanian criminals operating locally, and was, as a result, one of the bigger players coming through. Strangleman Grant was one of his top enforcers and was believed to have murdered another Jamaican who'd tried to rip Tyndall off two months earlier, blowing the back of his head off in an illegal drinking den in Dalston. There'd been at least fifty witnesses to the shooting but, as is almost always the way in these sort of violent in-your-face crimes within the black community, no-one was talking, particularly as it was well known that Nicholas Tyndall was behind it. Already he was getting a reputation for being untouchable.
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 once, 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. The
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?'
There was excitement in his voice as he clawed and picked for the gory details. I had a feeling I was going to get a lot of this over the next few days. Shoot-outs, particularly ones with multiple casualties, seem to engender a mood of morbid curiosity in most people, and coppers are no exception.
'I'll tell you all about it later,' I said. 'Are there any lights on in O'Brien's place?'
'Nothing, and it's almost dark now. The place is empty. Definitely.'
'Have you tried the Forked Tail, or the Slug and Lettuce on Upper Street?' I asked, thinking they'd probably be his most likely haunts for a weekday afternoon's drinking.
'We tried the Slug earlier, and Baxter and Lint were sniffing round the Forked Tail, but from what I heard, they didn't get anywhere.'
'Well, stay where you are and don't leave until he turns up. All right?'
'Of course, no problem, boss.' The words were delivered in serious tones that were meant to let me know he was fully aware of his responsibility, but he couldn't resist a final dig for information. 'It was bad then, was it? Today?'
'Yes, Dave,' I said wearily, and with a finality in my tone. 'It was bad. It's always bad when an officer gets killed, especially when it's right under the noses of his colleagues. Now make sure you get hold of O'Brien. I'm off home. I'll see you in the morning.'
I hung up and sighed, cutting him off mid-goodbye. Tina turned away from the windscreen and looked at me. 'He hasn't put in an appearance, then?'
I shook my head, beginning to get the first pangs of concern. Like a lot of mid-table professional criminals, Slim Robbie O'Brien was fairly predictable in his habits. He was a big drinker who liked to spend his days in the bars and pubs in and around Upper Street, particularly the two I'd mentioned to Berrin. Whenever I'd met up with him, it had always been in Clerkenwell or Huston, well away from his stomping ground, and he never looked very comfortable in different surroundings. He might have had some good contacts, including those with a route into the Colombian mafia, but he was as geographically challenged as a nineteenth-century chambermaid.
I tried Knox's number again but it was still engaged, and as I sat back in my seat, staring through the windscreen at the orange-tinged darkness of a London evening, my concern about O'Brien grew.
Where was he?
Stegs Jenner's real first name was Montgomery. His dad had been a massive Second World War buff whose hero had been the field marshal of the same name and, according to Stegs's dad, the man responsible not only for the defeat of Rommel at El Alamein but also, ultimately, the vanquishing of Hitler and Nazism. Forget Stalin, Roosevelt, Eisenhower or even Churchill. Monty was the man, and Stan Jenner immortalized him by bestowing the name on his first and only son.
Monty Jenner. It had been a fucking nightmare at school. At first they'd called him 'Mont-ay' in effeminate tones to suggest that anyone bearing such a name was quite obviously queer. When he'd complained to his dad, Jenner senior had invoked 'the spirit of the Blitz', telling his son that he had to be prepared to deal with adverse circumstances, that it would make him a better person. And that he had to be prepared to fight. 'I will give up my gun when they prise my cold, dead fingers from around it,' he'd said wisely. Stegs was one of the smaller kids in his year and didn't really understand what his old man was going on about, but even so, the next time someone had called him 'Mont-ay' (it had been Barry Growler, the school bully), he'd responded with his fists, launching a full-frontal blitzkrieg-style assault that had caught the Growlster completely by surprise and had cost him a black eye and a bleeding nose. The fight had been broken up by one of the teachers before Growler had had a chance to launch a substantial counter-offensive, and Stegs had ended up the winner on points, earning a grudging respect for his actions. People still laughed at his name, but they were a little bit more careful about it, and preferred to address him as 'Mental Monty' rather than the more irritating 'Mont-ay'. Even Growler had left him alone for a while after that.