The Crime Trade

31

‘You had a girlfriend recently, Mr Panner. One of your bitches, by the name of Fiona Ragdale.’

It was me speaking. On my right was DI Malik. We’d wanted Flanagan to be in on this interview as well, but he’d phoned in sick this morning, saying that he’d had palpitations in the night. The timing was bad, but there wasn’t a lot that could be done about that. The way he’d looked the previous evening, no-one thought he was bullshitting. Across from us sat Robert Panner, along with the duty solicitor, a youngish bloke called Vernon Watson who was often seen skulking round the station and who always appeared to be sweating whatever the weather conditions.

‘What about her?’ demanded Panner.

‘You were arrested in connection with an attack on her at her flat that took place seventeen days ago, on the twenty-seventh of February. You’re currently on bail, awaiting charges in connection with it.’

‘Yeah?’ he answered, seemingly uninterested.

Watson, meanwhile, was staring fascinated at the nails on his pudgy fingers. I felt like telling him to pay attention, but it was probably better for me if he wasn’t interested in the proceedings.

‘A shot was fired into the ceiling during the course of that assault. Fiona Ragdale claimed that it was fired from a gun you were carrying at the time, and that you were the individual who fired it.’

‘I didn’t fire no gun. No-one ever found one, did they?’

I shook my head slowly, allowing a thin smile to show itself on my face. I wanted to disconcert him, to let him know that we had something on him, but not what.

‘That’s right, Mr Panner,’ I said after a pause. ‘No-one ever found one.’

‘Where were you on the afternoon and evening of the eighth of March, that is last Wednesday?’ asked Malik. ‘Specifically between the hours of midday and eight p.m.’

Panner seemed surprised. So too did Watson, who even managed to look up from his fingernails. ‘What’s this all about?’ he said. Panner said more or less the same thing, but his language was more colourful.

‘It was the same day as the Heathrow hotel shooting,’ I continued. ‘You must have heard about that.’

‘Yeah, yeah, I did, but what’s this got to do with anything? I ain’t done nothing, y’unnerstand? Nothing.’

‘Are you refusing to answer the question?’ demanded Malik.

‘No, no, course not,’ said Panner, his demeanour becoming noticeably more nervous. The only thing a criminal likes less than being nicked is being nicked for something he hasn’t done, and Panner was doing a very good impression of someone who couldn’t understand why the hell he was being asked this. ‘I was out and about, y’know. In the day. Seeing some of ma bros. This and that, nuttin’ much.’ He might have been pushing thirty and white, but Panner liked to talk the ghetto slang so beloved of today’s wannabe teenagers, at least when he could remember that that was what he was meant to be doing. He tended to veer in and out of it.

Malik glared at him sceptically. ‘That’s not really a lot of help, is it? Have you got anyone who can vouch for your whereabouts during that time? Individuals — your bros — who can say that you were with them?’

‘I don’t know. Why the fuck you asking me anyway? What I meant to have done?’

‘What you meant to have done,’ said Malik, mimicking Panner’s habit of missing words out of his sentences, ‘is shoot dead one Robert O’Brien, and his grandmother, Mrs Kitty MacNamara.’

Panner jumped out of his seat, gesticulating wildly. ‘No way, man! What the fuck is this? I don’t know nuttin’ about no shooting!’

‘Get back in your seat!’ I snapped.

Panner’s face dropped and his aggression ran off as quickly as it arrived. He sat down slowly, looking across at his lawyer, who seemed perplexed by the whole thing.

‘I thought my client was under arrest for possession of an offensive weapon and resisting arrest,’ he said, referring to Panner’s interception the previous night.

‘And attempted murder of a police officer,’ said Malik.

‘Fuck that, it weren’t my fault he jumped all over my car.’

I smiled. ‘So, you’re admitting it now? That you attempted to run me over?’

‘I didn’t,’ he whined, knowing he was trapped. ‘Fuck this, man. You’re setting me up.’

‘Who paid you to kill Robert O’Brien and Kitty MacNamara?’ demanded Malik coldly, his words designed to shock the pimp. The fear that spread across the other man’s face suggested that they worked.

‘No-one did. Dat’s truth. I swear, man. I didn’t have nuttin’ to do wid it. You gotta believe me. I don’t even know no fucking Robert O’Brien, or the other one. I never heard them. Y’unnerstand?’

‘No, I don’t understand.’

‘Listen, my client is making it clear he doesn’t know anything about this man you keep talking about,’ said Watson testily, breaking his self-imposed silence. ‘Can you therefore move on?’

Panner took this as a hint to shut up. His fingers drummed steadily on the formica table, and he stared down at them without blinking.

‘You’re in a lot of trouble, Mr Panner,’ I told him. ‘At the moment, whether you like it or not, you are our number one suspect in the double murder of Robert O’Brien and Kitty MacNamara, and the evidence against you is irrefutable.’ Watson started to say something else but I talked over him, staring straight at Panner. ‘We know full well that you fired the gun into Fiona Ragdale’s ceiling because not only did she tell us you did, you were also seen by several other witnesses leaving the building directly afterwards.’ This last bit was made up, but he wasn’t to know that. ‘And we also know, without a shadow of a doubt, that it was the same gun that killed two people just over a week later. So, I think it’s best if you stop with the boring and repetitive denials and simply admit to us what happened last Wednesday.’

As I spoke, I mentally crossed my fingers. Both Malik and I were almost a hundred per cent certain he wasn’t our man, so now it was a matter of hoping that he knew who was, that Catherwood hadn’t made a mistake about the bullets, and that Panner felt he was in sufficient trouble that it was worth giving us the information.

Watson leant over and whispered something in his client’s ear. After a few seconds, Panner told the lawyer that it was all right. ‘I didn’t do it, man. I swear,’ he said, sounding annoyed that no-one appeared to believe him. Then he turned to me. ‘That time with Fi, yeah, I did pull a piece and put bullet in da ceiling, but it wasn’t my piece, man.’

‘Who did it belong to then, if it wasn’t yours? And where is it now?’

‘If I help you, will you drop the charges? You know, attempted murder of po-leece man, and all that.’

‘If you help us, your case’ll be reviewed favourably,’ I told him, giving the standard police spiel. ‘We’ll see what we can do.’

He nodded, seemingly satisfied. ‘I got it off a guy a few weeks back. He hires them out, y’know. There was man after me because he said I owed him, and I had to get hold of a piece fast, you know what I’m saying? There’s a guy over Acton who rents them out, so I got one off him for a week, just in case this man who said I owed him came calling. Then the bitch, Fi, started giving me grief about something, so I went over there and pulled the piece, just to scare her, y’know? Put bullet in the ceiling, just so she knows the Pretty Boy means business, but she starts screaming, the neighbours start shouting, and I’m outta there. Next day, I got bit worried that po-leece would come a-knocking, so I gave the gun back to man in Acton. I told him I hadn’t fired it; y’see I didn’t want to lose deposit on piece. If it gets used, then the rule is I have to get rid of it, and I lose the two hundred I had to put down. I needed the money, so I lied.’

‘Why didn’t he check the gun, this guy from Acton?’ I asked. ‘He could easily have told if you’d fired it.’

‘I borrowed a spare bullet from a friend of mine, put it in there, and he never knew.’

‘A spare bullet?’ said Malik disbelievingly. ‘You borrowed a spare bullet?’

‘I swear!’ he shouted. ‘It’s da truth, man. I swear it is. I know it don’t sound true, but that’s the way it is.’

We all gave him sceptical looks, even Watson. It wasn’t that it was outlandish for someone like Panner to go to an armourer if he wanted a gun, particularly if he only wanted it for a matter of days. Because of the UK’s relatively draconian gun laws, it wasn’t always easy for a criminal to get hold of firearms, and since plenty of the bad guys wanted them, a rental trade in guns had developed, run by individual armourers who typically hired them out to criminals for one-off crimes, or occasionally, as in Panner’s alleged case, longer periods of time. The usual way it worked was that a rental price was agreed, and on top of that a deposit put down by the customer as security. If the gun got fired while in the customer’s care, he or she not only had to get rid of it themselves, they also forfeited the deposit. That way the supplier didn’t lose out. What made Panner’s story a lot less believable, of course, was that he was claiming to have given the gun back even though it had been fired. If this was the case, then the supplier clearly wasn’t very good at his job, as he should have been able to see that it had been used. And, if Panner didn’t have easy access to firearms (and he presumably didn’t if he had to use the services of an armourer), then where did he find a spare.38 bullet?

We both glared at him. ‘That story’s horseshit,’ said Malik, with a dismissive snort.

‘I’m telling the truth, serious. You can fucking check.’

‘All right. What’s this guy’s name?’

‘It won’t come from me, right? If I tell you, want it kept quiet I co-operated. I got a rep, y’know.’

‘Sure you have,’ said Malik sarcastically. ‘Now, what’s his name?’

‘Tony.’

‘Tony what?’

‘I don’t know his last name, man.’

‘Then you’re going to be spending a long time in prison.’

‘He lives in a flat on a place called Haymarket Road over in Acton. Number ten or twelve. If we go over there, I can show you which one it is.’

Malik wrote down the address but didn’t let up on the questioning. Neither did I. There was no point. This was a story that reeked of convenience. An armourer owned the gun, so although Panner had been in possession of it once, it was now no longer anything to do with him. Sure.

So we carried on.

What we were trying to do was find inconsistencies in his story and then hit him with them in the hope that he’d tie himself in knots, realize the error of his ways and spill the beans on who the shooter was. Then we could start getting to the bottom of who’d actually organized the hit on O’Brien, and from there bring this whole sorry case to something akin to a satisfactory conclusion.

But Panner wasn’t playing ball, and for the next twenty minutes he insisted that the gun he’d fired had belonged to the armourer, and that he’d never seen it since he’d given it back more than a fortnight ago. We tried coming at him from different angles, but nothing seemed to budge him from his story, and eventually we brought the interview to a close. Watson demanded that his client be given bail, but we both laughed at that one, and Panner was taken back to the cells. We had another nine hours before the initial twenty-four were up, so there was no need to worry about letting him go just yet, but it was a concern that he was sending us up what looked like another blind alley, even with a whole host of charges hanging over his head.