Stegs Jenner lived on an estate consisting mainly of 1950s and 1960s semi-detached houses off Cat Hill in east Barnet. Some were quite substantial, and attractive for post-war housing, but Stegs’s semi was one of the smaller and newer ones and looked a little forlorn opposite its bigger neighbours.
A thick, oppressive layer of cloud hung over Barnet that evening, and a light rain spat weakly as Tina Boyd and I got out of the car. I looked at my watch. It was quarter past six, and I was getting hungry. It had been a long day and a draining one. I’d been on the stand for more than two hours in court that afternoon tesifying in the rape trial, much of it under detailed and laborious cross-examination from the defence barrister, who was doing his utmost to get his client off on a technicality now that it was becoming patently obvious to all concerned that he was guilty. I think I did OK, but sometimes it’s difficult to tell. Particularly when you’re tired, and I was as tired as hell.
Tina had filled me in on the details of the earlier murder squad meeting — not that there were many of them. So far there’d been no sightings of O’Brien on the day of his murder, and we were still waiting for further tests on the bodies to determine more specific times of death. SOCO hadn’t reported any obvious clues left by the killer, and no-one among those interviewed in the surrounding area had seen anything suspicious. Perfect. As for the three phone calls made on the mobile in O’Brien’s possession to Stegs’s mobile, all had been made since Sunday, the last on the previous morning, but none had lasted more than a minute, so it was possible he was simply leaving messages. Either way, it was inconclusive.
Stegs’s wife, Julie, answered the door, a very miserable-looking baby under one arm. The baby eyed me belligerently. Julie, meanwhile, tried to appear welcoming, but it was clear the day was getting on top of her. She was an attractive woman, taller I think than Stegs, with big brown eyes and full lips, but exhaustion and stress had given her a tense, almost haunted look.
Tina spoke first. ‘Good evening, Mrs Jenner,’ she said with a smile, ‘we’re here to see your husband.’
‘Oh yes, he said something about that. Come in, come in. He’s in his study.’ She opened the door and we followed her inside into a tiny entrance hall. ‘It’s opposite you at the top of the stairs. You’ll have to excuse me, I’m feeding Luke.’
I told her that was fine and followed as Tina led the way up the almost unfeasibly steep staircase which was about as child-friendly as an unattended pond.
Stegs was waiting for us at the top, wearing a cautious grin, as if he was letting us know that he wanted to be friendly but it was up to us whether we allowed him to be. ‘Evening all,’ he said. ‘Come on through.’
He led us into a tiny room, half of which was taken up by a single bed. A PC running a screen-saver featuring brightly coloured fish swimming around was perched on a desk at the end by the window. The desk took up about another quarter of the room, which didn’t leave room for much else.
‘You’ll have to sit on the bed, I’m afraid,’ said Stegs, taking the seat at the desk and manoeuvring himself round so he was just about facing the spot where he wanted us to sit. ‘I don’t really want the missus hearing any of this. Can you shut the door please, John?’
I did as he asked and then the two of us sat down side by side on the bed facing him. It was all very cosy.
‘What can I do for you then?’ he asked.
‘We’ve got some bad news, Stegs,’ said Tina.
He raised his eyebrows. ‘Oh yeah? What’s that?’
‘Slim Robbie O’Brien’s dead.’
He looked shocked. ‘How did that happen, then? And when?’
‘He was shot. We don’t have a time of death yet.’
We let it sink in for a few moments, watching him. He rubbed a hand across his brow, the other hand drumming a rapid tattoo on the side of the chair. I thought he looked stressed. His face had taken on a reddish tinge and he appeared pumped up, making me think that he might be suffering from some sort of delayed shock. I wondered briefly whether he’d been offered counselling. If not, he should have been.
‘Christ,’ he muttered, wiping the hand back across his forehead. ‘That’s not going to make things any easier.’
‘No,’ I agreed. ‘Quite the reverse.’
‘Who do you think could have done it?’ he asked.
‘Slim Robbie O’Brien? I imagine the list of suspects is going to be pretty long. When did you last see him?’
‘I said all this yesterday evening.’
‘Humour us, Stegs. We wouldn’t ask unless we had to.’
‘Last Sunday night at a pub called the Shakespeare near Barbican Tube. Me and Vokes met up with him.’
‘You said yesterday O’Brien was involved in setting up the final meeting,’ said Tina in formal tones, looking up from her note-taking. Stegs eyed her suspiciously as she continued. ‘What part did he play exactly?’
Stegs sighed. ‘Quite a few of SO10 got involved in setting up yesterday, but Fellano was suspicious of blokes he didn’t know so he wanted to keep O’Brien in the loop because he trusted him. That meant O’Brien was the main man who kept in contact with him between the test-buy we did at the end of Feb and the final meeting. Me and Vokes also had a couple of conversations with Fellano as well — you know, just to show that we were keen — and I know that he was using contacts in this country to check the two of us out. But he still liked to talk to O’Brien, which is what me and Vokes were meeting him about in the pub. O’Brien was getting worried that when the op went down and Fellano got nicked it was going to be pretty bloody obvious who was behind it. In fact, he wasn’t just worried, he was scared shitless. He was talking about pulling out.’
‘But you managed to reassure him?’ said Tina.
He nodded. ‘Well, yeah, obviously. But he still wasn’t very happy about it. He started harping on about us having to get him a new identity with all the trimmings if it all went wrong. I told him we’d see what we could do, but we weren’t going to promise anything.’
I cleared my throat, thinking that I was very thirsty and could do with a cup of tea. Somehow, though, I didn’t think one would be forthcoming. I got the distinct impression Stegs didn’t like our presence in his house, though I suppose you could hardly blame him. No-one likes being questioned by the police, particularly the police. ‘But you said last night he didn’t know the actual location of the meet itself.’
‘He didn’t. He knew roughly when Fellano was going to be flying in. .’
‘And that was?’
‘I think he came in Tuesday night. Late.’
‘So who set up the actual location for the rendezvous?’
‘Fellano did. He spoke to me on Tuesday night. I phoned Vokes afterwards.’
‘And Fellano said that the meeting was going to be at the Donmar Hotel?’
Stegs shook his head. ‘No. He told me that the meeting was going to go ahead on the Wednesday, yesterday, but he didn’t say where, because they like to leave that sort of thing until the last minute. It’s safer that way. But SO11 had a tap on my phone and they used it to trace his call to the vicinity of the Donmar, so we concluded it was almost certainly going to be there. And at that point it became common knowledge among everyone on the op, which was what? Ten o’clock Tuesday night. That gave it eighteen hours to leak.’
‘Well, not really,’ I said. ‘You and Vokes knew because the information on the location of Fellano’s mobile was relayed to you by DCS Flanagan. He knew, obviously, as did the operator who actually pinpointed the call, and Malik, I believe, because he was with Flanagan at the time. But they were the only ones. We weren’t made aware of it’ — I pointed to myself and to Tina — ‘until we arrived at New Scotland Yard yesterday morning for the briefing. Neither was anyone else on the team. It was a very secretive operation, as you for one ought to appreciate.’
‘So you didn’t speak to O’Brien at all at any point after you found out the location of the meeting?’ asked Tina.
The big question.
‘No.’ There was the first sign of annoyance in his voice. Then his expression changed. ‘Hold on, tell a lie, I had a quick twenty-second conversation with him on the way into work yesterday morning. He rang me on my private mobile, the one I give to people who know my real identity. He was hassling me about what we were going to do to protect him when everything was over. I told him it was out of my hands, but that he’d definitely get protection. I hung up on him. That was it. As far as I know, Vokes didn’t speak to him either. There’d have been no point.’
‘Where were you when you made the call to Vokes on Tuesday night?’ I asked.
‘I was here, at home. In this very room, in fact, and I stayed at home for the rest of the night. You can ask the missus if you want. Or SO11. They’d have a record of the call and where it was made from. I’m not hiding anything, you know.’
I put up a hand to calm him. ‘Listen, Stegs, we’re not here to interrogate you or pick holes in any of your answers, we’re just trying to find out what, if anything, O’Brien knew which might have acted as a motive for someone killing him. You have to admit, the timing of his death is worryingly coincidental.’
Stegs sighed loudly. ‘Yeah, all right. Fair enough.’
He fidgeted in his seat, trying to get comfortable, and I noticed he was still sweating even though the room was cool.
‘Can you give us your movements for yesterday morning, Stegs?’ asked Tina, trying to sound as casual as possible. ‘Starting from when you left the house.’
‘Hold on, am I a suspect for something?’ he demanded, trying hard to keep his voice calm. ‘Are you making out I murdered him? Because if you are, or you think I might possibly have done it, then I want to stop this right now until I’ve got a federation rep here, or even a lawyer.’
‘No-one’s saying any of that,’ Tina reassured him. ‘But you know the score. We wouldn’t be doing our duty if we didn’t eliminate everyone involved from our enquiries. It’s just routine.’
He didn’t look convinced but gave her a detailed rundown of his movements anyway, including the times. There was nothing untoward or inconsistent in anything he said. While Tina wrote it all down, he stood up, opened the window as wide as it would go, and lit a Marlboro Light, blowing a lungful of smoke into the drizzling dusk.
‘Whose idea was it to leave the money behind in the car when you went into the meeting, Stegs?’ asked Tina when she’d finished.
He took a long drag on the cigarette before he answered, then fixed her with an expression only just this side of contemptuous. ‘Both of ours,’ he answered simply, daring her to disagree.
He continued smoking while we continued questioning him as carefully and as diplomatically as possible about aspects of his testimony the previous evening, trying our best not to rile him, but I think it was too late for that. He answered the questions without pause and didn’t appear to be lying, but of course you wouldn’t have been able to tell with a man like him anyway. His whole job was one long lie after another, so there weren’t going to be many people out there better at it than him.
After a further ten minutes, however, we ran out of things to ask, and thanked him for his co-operation and patience. ‘We’re sorry to intrude on you at a time like this,’ I told him. ‘We both know how difficult it is for you, having lost a mate and colleague, but I hope you understand we’ve got to ask.’
Tina said pretty much the same thing, and he nodded in acknowledgement, replying that he knew it wasn’t our fault but that he’d only done his job and now felt that he was being penalized for it.
‘That goes with the territory, Stegs,’ I said. ‘A policeman’s lot is rarely a happy one. Especially these days.’
He grunted something in reply and showed us down the highly dangerous staircase and to the front door. His wife called out a goodbye from the kitchen where she was feeding the baby, and admonished Stegs for not offering us a drink. ‘I would have done it but I’ve got this one here to deal with,’ she added as we stepped out into the rain and headed back to the car.
As we were driving back down the Finchley Road in the direction of my place, Tina asked me what I thought of Stegs Jenner’s overall demeanour.
‘He was looking stressed. I think he needs to talk to someone.’
‘Do you think they think he did it? Flanagan and Malik? I don’t mean pull the trigger, but that he was involved somewhere?’
‘In Robbie’s murder?’
‘In the whole thing. The robbery at the hotel, Robbie’s death. All of it.’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘The thing is, what would he gain by setting up the robbery? Not only did it leave his partner dead, but it could easily have left him dead too. And if he did set it up, what part did O’Brien play in the whole thing, and who then actually had him killed? And why? No, I think the problem is that Stegs rubs people up the wrong way. They don’t like him, and they don’t like the way he doesn’t follow the rules. So when something goes wrong it becomes very easy for them to think that at the very least his big mouth was responsible for the leak. My opinion is they think he might have spoken out of turn, and might have let slip something to O’Brien, but that’s the sum of it. What about you?’
She sighed. ‘There’s something about him, you know?’
‘That’s what I mean. People don’t like him. They think he’s a rule-breaker, someone you can’t trust.’
‘He is a rule-breaker. If he’d taken the money with him into the hotel room like he was meant to have done then he wouldn’t have split with Vokes, the robbery wouldn’t have occurred and six people wouldn’t have died.’
‘A fair point, but it doesn’t mean he was involved in setting the whole thing up.’
‘True, but I didn’t like the way he suddenly changed his story about when he last spoke to O’Brien. I got the impression he realized we were aware the call had been made to his mobile, and that’s why he suddenly conveniently remembered it.’ She shook her head. ‘Either way, I think he knows more than he’s letting on. That’s my gut feeling. Call it female instinct. I’d like to dig into his background a little bit. See what comes up. What’s the time?’
‘It’s just gone seven. Why?’
‘I want to go and see Joey Cloud,’ she answered, referring to the man who, more than anyone else, had started all this.
It had been small-time informer Joey Cloud who’d come to Tina three months earlier, telling her that Robbie O’Brien was trying to set up a coke importation deal with a group of Colombians and was looking for partners to help him finance it. Using that information we’d got two SO10 operatives (one of whom was Stegs Jenner) to set him up, and having been caught bang-to-rights he’d turned informer and had then been used by SO7 to set up the meeting at Heathrow. Cloud’s involvement, however, had ended right at the beginning of everything, making him irrelevant to what had gone on since, and I told Tina as much.
‘I just want to find out if he’s heard anything,’ she answered.
‘About what?’
‘About anything. About O’Brien.’
‘Now?’
‘It’s as good a time as any. He’ll probably be in at the moment.’
‘And this is the woman who just over twelve hours ago was announcing she’d had enough of her job.’
‘A day’s a long time in police work,’ she told me.
‘Does that mean you’re staying?’
‘The jury’s still out,’ she said, weaving through the last of the rush-hour traffic.
I was tired, but I knew from the tone of her voice that she wasn’t going to be swayed. There was therefore no point arguing. Instead, I closed my eyes and tried to get a few minutes’ shut-eye before our next port of call.