The Crime Trade

7

Slim Robbie O’Brien lived in a first-floor apartment in an immense Georgian townhouse that stood regally on an upmarket residential street just north of Highbury Corner, and an area he knew well, although he’d actually been born a mile away in the less upmarket Barnsbury, one of six children of Irish immigrants from south of Dublin. His parents had died young — his father of a heart attack, his mother of cancer — and his grandmother had come over from Ireland to look after Robbie and one of his sisters, the two youngest of the brood. Robbie had been fourteen at the time and had lived with his beloved gran for four years, before finally moving out to become a violent and integral member of the Holtz crime family, who were already well established in the area. He’d never forgotten what she’d done for him, though, and when he’d bought his current place five years earlier, he’d bought the apartment opposite for her. He’d never been much interested in women, due in part to his size, and the story went that when he wasn’t out drinking or on business he’d be round at her place watching the box and eating her ample helpings of traditional Irish fare. Some of the braver members of the Holtz fraternity had even taken to calling her his girlfriend, which wasn’t an entirely inaccurate summary.

I’d never met her but had heard that she was a good-hearted woman who, though she’d always refused to see any bad in her undeniably sadistic grandson, had never been in trouble in her life, and was spoken of fondly by those who knew her. It seemed a pity that she’d met such an ignominious end, and I hoped that she hadn’t suffered unduly.

When we pulled into Robbie’s street twenty minutes later, a uniformed officer I didn’t recognize in a fluorescent jacket immediately stopped us. Up ahead, the road was closed in front of the house where the murders had occurred and the houses on either side of it, scene-of-crime tape sealing it off from the public. A number of police vehicles and two ambulances were double-parked on either side, while small groups of residents watched the proceedings with rapt, nervous interest from their doorsteps.

I brought down my window and showed the uniform my warrant card. ‘DI John Gallan, and DS Tina Boyd. Any idea how they died?’

‘Shot, I heard,’ he replied, a tone of boredom in his voice.

People get shot all the time these days, particularly in Greater London. Twenty years ago it would have been front-page news. Today, it barely raises an eyebrow.

We parked up behind one of the ambulances, whose two-man crew were leant against it, smoking cigarettes. Over by the front door of the house, I could see DCI Knox standing talking to one of the white-overalled scene-of-crime officers. Knox was looking pissed off, which wasn’t surprising. When you’re as busy as we were, and after a day in which our original legwork had led to a meeting that had ended in six deaths, a double murder in the heart of our patch was not what you’d call helpful.

We got out of the car and walked over. Knox saw us approach and nodded curtly. ‘Morning, John, Tina. This is Sergeant Andy Davies, SOCO. They’re up there now.’

We shook hands all round and I asked Davies what we’d got so far. ‘Two bodies, both IC1. One female, mid to late seventies. One male, early thirties. Both shot in the head from close range. From the look of the injuries, I’d say it was a smallish-calibre weapon, probably a.38. The bodies are in separate rooms. The male appears to have been killed where he’s fallen in the living room, but, from the position of her body, we think the female was moved to the bedroom after she’d been shot.’ He spoke matter-of-factly, in a curiously high-pitched voice that didn’t fit with the rest of him. He was a big man, late forties, with a thick beard and very brown, intelligent eyes. As far as I was concerned, his voice should have boomed.

‘Were they killed at the same time, do you think?’ I asked.

‘Too early to say. The doctor’s up there now doing tests, so we should know fairly shortly.’

I nodded, knowing we wouldn’t be getting any theories out of Davies. Like a lot of scene-of-crime officers, he only liked to deal in bald facts, and it was still very early days, with the inquiry less than an hour old, so there weren’t even very many of them.

‘We haven’t had a final positive confirmation,’ said Knox, who’d also met O’Brien before. ‘I haven’t been up there yet. But I can’t see it being anyone else, and it would certainly fit, given the events of yesterday.’ Davies looked at him quizzically when he said this, but Knox didn’t elaborate. ‘We’re going to be coming in a few minutes to ID him, if that’s all right.’

‘OK,’ said Davies, ‘but you’ll need to get kitted up.’

Knox nodded, then led us over to a police van with its rear door open. A young uniform handed all three of us sterilized overalls, hats, overshoes and hoods to put on so we didn’t contaminate the scene in any way. Fully togged up, we headed back in the direction of the house.

‘This is looking bad,’ said the DCI, turning to us both. ‘Very bad. Operation Surgical Strike, and I can’t think of a more inapt name, was badly compromised, and there’s going to be a huge amount of pressure to get a result. If the body in there is O’Brien, and I’d bet my mortgage that it is, then we’re in a lot of trouble.’

I didn’t say anything. Neither did Tina. There wasn’t a lot to say. He was right. Not only did it suggest that O’Brien — our informant — was the source of the leak, but also that we’d been powerless to prevent him being eliminated from under our very noses.

Which was the crux of Knox’s concern. Our station had had its fair share of negative attention over the years, most famously (or infamously) when one of Knox’s men in CID, a DS Dennis Milne, was unmasked as a contract killer with at least five, and probably many more, corpses to his credit. That nasty little affair was two and a half years old now and finally sinking into the past. The last thing Knox needed was something like this to throw it back into the limelight.

An attractive blonde woman in her late twenties stood in the doorway of her apartment as we stepped inside the building. She was dressed in a smart business suit and looked worried. ‘Can you tell me what’s going on? I’ve got an important meeting in the City at half-nine, and I’ve been told by someone that I’ve got to stay here.’

Knox smiled at her, unable to stop himself from sliding his eyes down to her shapely, nylon-clad legs, and not even being very subtle about it. ‘I understand you live here, is that right, miss?’

‘Williams,’ she answered. ‘Dana Williams.’

‘I’m afraid there’s been a serious incident in one of the other apartments.’

‘Whose?’

‘I can’t tell you at the moment.’

‘It’s Robbie O’Brien, isn’t it?’

‘As I say, Miss Williams, we can’t tell you at the moment. If you go back into your flat, someone will be down to take a statement as soon as possible. But it might be wise to make your meeting for this afternoon. This may take some time.’

‘I’m afraid time is what I haven’t got a lot of. This meeting’s extremely important.’

‘This is also very important. So, if you’d go back inside.’ Knox’s tone was firm and only just the right side of annoyed, and she relented, giving him a dirty look and mumbling something less than complimentary.

The wide, thickly carpeted hallway on the next floor was busy, with a number of SOCO coming in and out of one of the doors, some carrying plastic sample bags that they placed carefully in cases lined up against the wall. We stepped gingerly through this activity and into the apartment’s living room where we were immediately confronted by the ample corpse of Slim Robbie (and it was him, there was no mistake) lying on its side in an approximate fetal position, with one arm outstretched, his jowly face in profile, the thick ginger hair just touching the wall. The tell-tale thin white scar that ran for two inches along his jawline, just below his left ear, was easily visible, confirming what I already knew. It was the result, he’d told me once, of a teenage knife fight years before. ‘You should have seen the other bloke,’ he’d said, with his trademark leer. ‘He was in hospital for a month.’ And I could believe it too.

There was a lot of blood on the carpet round the head where he’d fallen, now thick and partially dried, and a few drops had splashed onto the many family photographs lining the wall, presumably resulting from the moment he’d been shot. A murder victim never really fits in with the decor of someone’s front room, particularly when he’s bled a lot, but Robbie’s corpse looked more out of place than most in the midst of this spacious, neatly furnished and very chintzy lounge, which, with its porcelain animals and commemorative plates, could only have belonged to an old lady. On a large, comfortable-looking armchair in the corner of the room near the entrance to the kitchen was a cream-coloured lacy cushion with an unsightly black burn on it. It too looked as out of place as Robbie. Barely visible spots of red dotted the chair.

‘It’s him,’ I said. ‘No question.’

‘I think it’s fair to say he had it coming,’ said Tina, with only the barest hint of regret.

The two of them had never really got on, thanks to the dirty-old-man-style leers Robbie had insisted on giving her every time they were in the same room together, something he knew she didn’t like. As if anyone would when they were coming from an obese thug with a sweat and attitude problem. It’s never nice to speak ill of the dead, but it has to be said: Slim Robbie O’Brien was the sort of bloke only a doting granny with her blinkers fully on could have loved. And look what it had cost her.

We stopped where we were for a few seconds, each pair of eyes hunting for clues. I’m no Sherlock Holmes, but I’ve been in this game long enough, and seen enough corpses who’ve met a sticky end, to know what I’m looking for and to be confident enough to express my opinions when I’ve found it.

‘What do you reckon, John?’ asked Knox.

‘I think what Tina told me earlier’s right,’ I said eventually. ‘This was a pro job. There’s no sign of struggle, no damaged ornaments, no other obvious signs of injury to the body. Robbie died quickly, and I bet he didn’t even know what had hit him. Or who.’ I looked around again. The corpse was about six feet from the front door, lying parallel to and directly facing it. ‘I don’t think he died after opening the door either, not with his body in that position, which means the killer was in here already.’

‘Someone they knew,’ said Tina.

‘Possibly. Shall we take a look at the other victim?’

Knox nodded, and we followed him through to the bedroom in silence. It was spacious and, like the living room, traditionally furnished and immaculately tidy, the dominating feature being a kingsize bed with purple satin sheets that didn’t quite fit the colour scheme. A perfectly ordinary scene, except for the powerful smell of decay. There were three more SOCO in there, inspecting every nook and cranny with patient, focused eyes, studiously ignoring the corpse of Slim Robbie’s grandmother which lay face-down on the carpet like a prop in a cheap whodunnit, fully clothed in a violet sweater and check skirt, between the bed and the walk-in wardrobe near the door. The police pathologist, a youngish guy with thick-rimmed glasses whose name was Jackson, was crouched down beside her, writing something in a notebook. As we stepped inside, I checked the carpet and noticed that it was scuffed where it seemed the killer had dragged her corpse. As Davies had pointed out, she’d almost certainly died elsewhere.

We stopped in front of her body, and Jackson finished writing and looked up. ‘I know what you’re going to ask,’ he said.

‘Are you going to answer it, then?’ replied Knox, with the beginnings of a smile.

‘They’ve both been here a while, I can tell you that,’ he said, sounding like he was thinking very carefully about what he was saying. ‘Rigor mortis is well advanced, and the body temperatures are low enough that it’s at least twelve hours, possibly as long as twenty-four. I’ll be able to get a more exact time when I’ve conducted more tests and made the necessary calculations, but that’s my first estimate.’

‘Is there any significant difference between the two body temperatures?’ I asked. ‘That might suggest they were killed at different times?’

‘This victim’s is slightly lower, but I wouldn’t read too much into that. Not on its own. There are a number of factors that could have contributed to it. Their size difference for a start.’

‘Do you think they were killed separately then, John?’ asked Knox.

‘I’m not sure, but if they were killed together, I would have thought there would have been more of an obvious struggle. Robbie doted on his grandma. He would have tried to protect her, and with his size there would have been one hell of a mess.’

‘The killer could have tidied up after himself,’ pointed out Tina.

I nodded. ‘True, but then why did he move her body, which he must have done?’ I pointed out the scuffing on the carpet. ‘What would have been the point? If he killed them together, why not simply leave them where they fell? And why move one without the other? On the other hand, if he killed her first, then moved the body so it was out of sight, before taking out O’Brien when he arrived, that would suit the scene we’ve got here.’

‘There’s no sign of forced entry on the door to this apartment,’ said Knox, ‘or the door of the building, so it’s possible that he was let in. Most likely by her. Then he finishes her off, and waits for O’Brien. Yes, I quite like the sound of that one.’ I had no doubt that he’d take the credit for it as well, but that was Knox for you. He hadn’t got to the position of DCI on the back of his laid-back, generous approach to the job.

‘Who says he was let in?’ said Tina, pointing at the bedroom window, which was slightly open at one end. We hadn’t spotted this before since the view had been obscured by one of the SOCO, who’d now moved. ‘He could have come in through there.’

We approached the window, not touching it, and peered down into the small, neatly trimmed communal garden some fifteen feet below. There didn’t appear to be any obvious means of climbing up from the garden to the window, and it would have taken a very agile killer indeed to have made it without a step ladder, and there wasn’t one of those in evidence either. Nor would it have been very easy to take it away with him afterwards. Because the house we were in was terraced and its garden backed directly on to the gardens of the houses on the next street, the killer would have had to cross through a number of properties to reach its rear, a task that would have been very noisy and time-consuming if he’d been carrying a ladder with him.

Knox made exactly that point, and it was hard to argue with him. ‘No,’ he said, turning away. ‘I think we can assume he came through the front door.’

I leant forward to take one more look outside, which was when I noticed something sticking out of the wall several feet below the window. I pushed the glass with my gloved hand and it opened further.

‘What is it?’ asked Tina, who was still beside me.

I craned my neck to get a better view.

It was a rusty nail. Not only that, but a rag, or piece of cloth of some kind, barely a couple of inches across, was hanging from it, drifting idly in the early-morning breeze. It could have been nothing, but it didn’t look like it had been there that long, and I doubted that Robbie’s grandma would have caught her clothes on it while hanging out the window.

‘Take a look at that,’ I said, motioning towards my find.

Tina and Knox both squeezed in beside me and looked down.

‘Well, well, well,’ said Tina.

‘Hmm,’ said Knox.

‘Maybe he came out this way,’ I ventured. ‘And caught his clothing.’

‘Maybe,’ said Knox. ‘We’ll bag it up anyway. You never know.’ He turned away for a second time and informed the nearest SOCO of my discovery, then walked towards the bedroom door. ‘Good work, John,’ he added as an aside.

Personally, I thought that it merited a bit more than that, but I could understand him not getting too excited. Even if it was connected to what had happened, it was hardly a ‘smoking gun’. Still, from small seeds and all that.

We both followed Knox out of the room. ‘Who alerted us this morning, then?’ I asked him.

‘Robbie’s sister, Neve. The female victim, Mrs MacNamara, looks after her two-year-old every Tuesday and Thursday. She came round to drop him off, then, when there was no answer from inside, or from Robbie’s place, she let herself in.’

‘God, poor thing,’ said Tina. ‘Where’s she now?’

‘DC Hunsdon and one of the WPCs have taken her down the station. They’ll get a statement from her. Luckily, she called in straight away, as soon as she saw her brother’s body. She didn’t take the child inside or touch anything.’ He paused, then moved on swiftly, which was a long-standing habit of his. ‘We need to find out who was here yesterday afternoon and evening. See if anyone let the killer in, or at least saw or heard anything. You two can take a statement from Miss Williams downstairs. As soon as we’ve got some more numbers down here, we’ll get statements from everyone else. There’s another apartment on the ground floor but I think the occupants may be away. We haven’t heard anything from them this morning. There’s also someone on the top floor as well. A retired widower named Carlson. I’ve told him to stay inside and we’ll get someone up to him as soon as we can. We’d better deal with Miss Williams first, though,’ he added. ‘You know what these high-flyers are like.’

Tina and I spent half an hour with Dana Williams, who, it turned out, was a financial recruitment consultant for Barnes and Penney (apparently, the largest and most profitable such consultancy in the City of London), but didn’t get a huge amount out of her, other than an idea of her company’s balance sheet. She hadn’t been that shocked to learn that Robbie had been murdered, having heard enough rumours of his involvement in organized crime to know that he was always going to have enemies, and had freely admitted to not liking him much anyway; but when we’d told her about his grandma, her tough exterior had cracked a little.

‘She was a nice person, she didn’t deserve to go like that,’ she’d told us solemnly, and then, after a three-second pause for reflection, she’d launched into a diatribe about the extortionate cost of the brand-new double-lock they’d had put on the front door and how ineffective it had been, until we’d told her that the killer had been let in by someone. ‘I wasn’t here,’ she’d told us quickly, as if we were about to accuse her of being the one. ‘I didn’t get back until eight o’clock last night. We’re very busy at work at the moment.’ She’d then taken a none-too-subtle look at her watch and begun fidgeting noisily, the shock of finding out that two of her neighbours had been murdered obviously not getting in the way of Barnes and Penney business.

It was quarter past nine by the time we finished with Dana Williams, and she hurried out of the room after us, already jabbering into her mobile.

Knox was back out in the hallway talking to DC Berrin, who’d now arrived, and we told them what we’d found out from Miss Williams, including the time she’d returned. ‘She was there all evening after that,’ I said, ‘and she didn’t hear anything. My feeling is it must have happened before eight.’

Knox turned to Berrin. ‘What time did you get here last night, Dave?’

‘Ten to six, bang on. I checked my watch. And we didn’t leave until midnight. Nobody came in or out in that time.’

‘I’ve just talked to Carlson, the widower on the top floor,’ said Knox. ‘He was here all day yesterday, except between two and four when he went out for a walk up in Highbury Fields, which he does most days. He thought he heard a bang coming from Mrs MacNamara’s apartment at some time between half-one and two. He was watching TV at the time, Neighbours. He said he didn’t take much notice because it wasn’t very loud, and could easily have been just something breaking. When he came down the stairs to go out, he said that he heard the sound of the TV coming from her apartment, so assumed everything was OK.’

‘It could have been the shot that killed her, though?’ said Tina.

‘Davies says that, as far as he can tell, she was only shot the once, so it sounds logical. That was the killer taking her out, and then it was a matter of waiting for O’Brien to arrive. Perhaps he lured O’Brien into his grandmother’s place, then surprised him, which would explain the lack of evidence of a struggle.’ Having effortlessly assimilated my theory, he was now embellishing it like a true pro.

‘So now we need to get an idea of what time O’Brien returned, if we’re assuming they weren’t killed at the same time,’ I said, muscling back in. ‘You went looking for him in the Slug and Lettuce yesterday, didn’t you, Dave?’

Berrin nodded. ‘That’s right.’

‘Did they say whether he’d been in or not?’

‘We didn’t ask, guv, to be honest. Just poked our noses round, looking for him. He wasn’t there, so we left.’

Which was typical Berrin. He was a good kid, very pleasant and presentable, with a nice line in polite patter with the public, and a grad too, like Tina; but unlike her, he hadn’t been blessed with much in the way of know-how or work ethic, which made the life of his superiors harder than it should have been. But this is the Met, and these days it’s a case of beggars can’t be choosers.

‘We’ll need to have a thorough check of O’Brien’s movements,’ said Knox. ‘It’s essential we find out what time he died.’

‘Are we going to be taking this case then, sir?’ asked Tina, and I was sure I heard a hint of enthusiasm in her voice. We had a lot on at the moment, and the events of the previous day and the subsequent investigations were only going to add to the workload, but there was a challenge here. Someone had killed two people and evidently thought he could get away with it. Most coppers worth their salt would be interested in proving him or her wrong. Whatever Tina had said about leaving, I knew she was one of them.

‘I very much doubt it,’ answered Knox. ‘With the potential connections with yesterday, I think it’s definitely going to be a Serious Crime Group investigation, but we need to do our bit, and do it well, while it’s still in our jurisdiction.’

The rest of us nodded soberly, knowing that our involvement might soon be at an end. But, like Tina, I was already hoping it wouldn’t be.