The Crime Trade

4

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, 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. ‘Me 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 Euston, 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?