The Crime Trade

23

Tina Boyd watched from the other side of the road as Stegs Jenner came out of the PCA offices in Great George Street. He looked both ways, but didn’t see her. She was well hidden in the entrance to one of the imposing buildings that were commonplace this close to the seat of government. She stepped backwards out of sight, ignoring the strange look of a middle-aged woman coming out of the revolving doors, then peered round to watch as Stegs started off in the direction of Parliament Square. When he was about forty yards away, she saw him cross the road and turn and hail a black cab. The cab came to a halt and Stegs leant in the window to talk to the driver.

Breaking cover, Tina came down the steps of the building and hailed a cab of her own, heading in the same direction.

‘Where are you going, luv?’ asked the driver through the open window.

She bent down quickly. ‘Police,’ she said, flashing her warrant card before uttering a variation of something she’d wanted to say ever since she’d first seen films on the telly as a kid. ‘Follow that cab.’ She motioned towards the vehicle carrying Stegs as it indicated and pulled away from the kerb, and jumped in the back. The driver took a quick look over his shoulder and moved off, one car between him and the taxi carrying Stegs.

‘I’ve always wondered whether anyone’d say that to me,’ he said, leaning back and inclining his head towards her. He was about fifty-five, with a deeply lined, stubble-covered face and a baseball cap perched on his head that had seen better days. ‘To be honest, I never thought anyone would. Especially a bird.’ He guffawed throatily, scanning her in the rearview mirror. ‘You are going to pay us for this, I hope.’ He guffawed again. The archetypal cheeky chappie. Tina guessed that he was convinced he was a real comedian.

‘I’ll tell you what,’ she said, ‘I’ll do you a deal. You keep your eyes on the cab and your opinions to yourself, and you’ll get paid. Lose it because you’re gawking at me and I’ll nick you. Understand?’

‘All right, all right. I was only joking.’ He gave an exaggerated sigh and fixed his eyes straight ahead.

Tina sat back in the seat as the cab moved down Bridge Street and on to the Embankment, following Stegs to wherever it was he was going. She was convinced of his guilt, as she had been right from the beginning. They taught you, of course, to be very careful in forming your opinions and to follow the evidence rather than your gut instincts, but in this she knew she was right, and slowly but surely the evidence was building up to back her judgement. There’d been something wrong with Operation Surgical Strike from the beginning. Someone had set the whole thing up, and in her mind there could only be one possibility. Now she was determined to prove it, particularly as John had remained sitting on the fence over the last few days, sympathetic to her viewpoint but never quite making the step needed to agree with it. Not that she’d condemn him for that. John liked to take his time over things, mull the possibilities. But even he would have to agree that what she’d already discovered that morning had pushed Stegs Jenner even further into the frame.

She’d got into the incident room early, before eight, coming straight from her flat, eager to continue developing the lead she’d been working on the previous day, despite the fact that (a) it had initially looked like a dead-end, and (b) she was carrying a sore head from the leaving do the previous evening. There might not have been anyone on the Megane list whose name also appeared on the Desmarches suit one, but she hadn’t been prepared at that point to throw in the towel. In the past twelve months, there’d been four purchases of the suit made where the list didn’t provide the name of the purchaser. Three had been cash buys, and there was nothing that could be done about them. If the killer had paid cash, there was no way the purchase could be traced back to him. The fourth purchase, however, had been made using a stolen credit card in the name of a Mr Bernard Stanbury. It was a long shot to expect that whoever had stolen the card and had subsequently used it would turn out to be their killer, but Tina had decided to follow up on it anyway. She’d called the credit card company, explained who she was, and got the address and telephone number of Stanbury. The address was Barnet. Stegs Jenner’s manor. She’d taken a look in the A to Z and seen that Stanbury lived less than a mile from her suspect. Another coincidence? She didn’t think so.

Bernard Stanbury hadn’t been answering his phone, so she’d left a message for him before heading up to Harrow to show the e-fit of the O’Brien suspect to the witnesses in the pub car park shooting. Unfortunately, a long time had passed and none of them could say one way or another whether the picture was of the man they’d seen leaving the scene of the earlier murder. Another dead-end, and a time-consuming one too, and still Stanbury hadn’t called back. She’d thought about phoning John and finding out what he thought of this new cloud of suspicion circling round Stegs, but decided to leave it until she had something more. He was busy enough as it was, chasing after Robert Panner, and he’d said he’d phone her when he had a chance. She didn’t even bother wondering whether Panner could have been the shooter. At the moment, all she was interested in was the pursuit of the leads she was generating. And the man who appeared to be in the middle of them all.

And this had been what had brought her to the PCA offices that afternoon, knowing that Stegs would be there for his interview. She wasn’t meant to be tailing him, and would almost certainly have got her arse kicked if her superiors had known about it, but sometimes you had no choice but to follow your instincts.

Stegs’s cab continued along the Embankment, but as the traffic became heavier and more black cabs appeared out of the side streets, Tina was forced to concentrate on his vehicle in particular, not trusting the driver to do the job for her. She could see him sneaking peeks at the pretty young tourists walking along the banks of the Thames, enjoying the first of the spring sunshine.

As they came up to Blackfriars Bridge, Stegs’s cab swung sharply into the left-hand lane heading up towards the Farringdon Road. They were three or four vehicles behind it, but the driver was more on the ball than Tina had given him credit for, and he glided smoothly across without breaking pace. The lights were green and the cabs went straight through, turning north in the direction of Holborn.

‘Let him get a couple of cars ahead,’ she said, leaning forward and wondering why she was speaking so quietly. ‘I don’t want to make it too obvious we’re following him.’

The driver grunted an acknowledgement and fell back a few yards, letting another cab get between them. Traffic on the Farringdon Road was heavy, but still moving. After about five minutes, Stegs’s cab turned left into Cross Street, and by the time they’d made the turning themselves it had come to a halt outside an office block. Stegs was already outside, paying the driver.

‘Go straight past,’ she hissed. ‘Quickly.’

‘I want to get my money for this, you know,’ he moaned, but did as he was told, driving on without changing speed. ‘I want to help out the police, course I do, but I ain’t a charity. If I was I wouldn’t be working here, I can tell you.’ He guffawed again.

Tina ignored him and turned round in her seat, watching as Stegs turned away from the cab and started up a side street, moving at a jog.

‘All right, stop,’ she demanded.

He did a deliberate emergency stop, taking advantage of the lack of traffic to teach her what he hoped was a lesson. It didn’t work. Expecting it, she grabbed the handle by the seat and held on tightly, before thrusting a tenner through the hatch.

‘Change and receipt, please,’ she said, thinking that London’s black cabs were as far from a charity as you could possibly get. Much closer to unarmed robbers. He dawdled, so she told him to hurry up or she’d take his number and report him, and he got the message.

She jumped out of the cab and walked quickly down to the spot where Stegs had got out of the cab. She was intrigued. They were a long way from his patch. It could be something completely innocent that explained his presence here — a girlfriend, or a mate he was seeing — but she still felt a flush of excitement.

When she reached the street he’d turned into a good minute and a half earlier, it was empty. Completely. It was narrow and cobbled, made up of oldish grey-brick buildings that looked to be the offices of small businesses. She hung back and waited a few moments, just to make sure he didn’t suddenly reappear, then started to walk up on the left-hand side, checking the nameplates on the doors of the buildings. They were mainly run-of-the-mill companies: graphic designers, specialist printers, photographers, that sort of thing. Halfway up there was an olde-worlde-style wine bar of the kind you get in the financial district, with stone floors, sawdust, bangers and mash, and a wine list to die for. Everything traditional except the astronomical prices. The windows were tinted but the interior was just about visible if you looked hard enough. She did. It was empty, but then again it was close to three o’clock, a dead time of day round these parts.

When she came to the T-junction at the top of the street, she stopped, lit a cigarette, then turned left and started along it, just in case he’d come this far up. Again, nothing stood out. She crossed the street and came back the other way, still not uncovering anything out of the ordinary in any of the signs. By the time she’d got back to the top of the street she’d first come up, Tina was beginning to feel disheartened. Was she reading too much into his movements?

She walked back down on the other side in the direction of the main road, trying to remain as casual as possible, but knowing that she stood out. She might have been in the middle of a city of ten million people but these backstreets were as eerily quiet as they always were, and she was the only person on this particular one.

She stopped. Suddenly. Her eyes fixed on the plate outside a modern tinted-glass door that looked like it was an inch thick. Carroll, Reed and Foster Solicitors. Melvyn Carroll. It had to be him. A smile spread across her face. Bingo.

Then, through the door, she spotted someone’s legs coming down the stairs just inside. They were clad in khaki chinos and brogues, and she knew immediately it was Stegs.

‘Shit!’

Cursing, she turned and sprinted ten yards before slowing to a casual walk as she heard the door open and close again, hoping he didn’t recognize her from the back. She kept walking, and turned into the main road, heading in the direction the taxi had dropped her. She couldn’t hear any footsteps behind but kept going for another minute, before finally risking a look over her shoulder.

He was nowhere to be seen.

She breathed a sigh of relief, then broke a long-standing habit by lighting a cigarette less than five minutes after she’d put out her last one.

This was very interesting. Melvyn Carroll was one of the most crooked lawyers in London, which was saying one hell of a lot. More importantly, he acted as counsel for a number of organized crime figures, and for a long time had been the Holtz family brief. As far as Tina was aware, he was also involved in the defence of senior Holtz crimelord Neil Vamen in his upcoming trial. That Stegs was corrupt, she knew. That he’d fed information to the Holtzes in the past, she was sure. And now it seemed he was working for Neil Vamen.

‘I’m on to you, Mr Jenner,’ she whispered, pleased with her day’s work. ‘And this time you’re not getting out of it.’