‘I didn’t see any of this,’ said Costain. ‘No, I mean, I do believe it, this really is the first sight we’ve had of one of Toshack’s freelancers, but this was kept from his ordinary soldiers.’
Quill got to his feet. ‘Lisa, can you take us back to that first Venn diagram?’ She did so. ‘Ta.’ He went to the wall and used the shadow of his hand to point at the intersection between the two circles. ‘That’s a person there on that screen. That’s bloody fantastic police work, that is.’
Ross was shaking her head, as if she didn’t deserve all this praise. ‘But the trouble is,’ she said, ‘apart from the non-footballers, the people on that list. .’
‘What?’
‘The data goes. . back a long way,’ she said. ‘To when West Ham first played under that name, in 1900.’
Quill paused only for a moment. ‘Then it’s a gang tradition. We’ve got an angle now — so let’s not look it in the mouth.’
SIX
When it was examined, the soil from the spiral was indeed revealed as being different to that of the Hill’s gardens, and the same in consistency as any that had been used for the other spiral tags, similar to soils from areas along the river Thames, and extending north of it around underground rivers. Weirdly, it seemed to have been specially conveyed to the site. The CCTV tape, when it finally arrived, had to be taken back into Gipsy Hill so that Quill could find a machine to play it on, but Quill managed to get an IT spod to copy it to a disc that the ancient PC in the Portakabin could then read.
The four of them stood round the monitor and watched. ‘Oh,’ said Ross, ‘so that delay in getting us the footage wasn’t just the Goodfellow team sulking.’
On what the time code confirmed was the morning of New Year’s Day, two and a half minutes before Toshack’s death, the video showed the pile of soil not to be there one second. . and to be there the next. Ross got the IT staff on the line, and they sounded as if they’d been expecting her call. With their help, she narrowed it down to two individual frames. ‘No soil. . then soil. It just appeared. And the time code hasn’t been messed with. To do this so seamlessly would need serious expertise.’
‘Then we’re dealing with someone who’s got it,’ said Quill. ‘It’s Occam’s thingamabob, innit?’
Sefton spent a fun afternoon that Saturday in the Boleyn pub on the corner of Green Street, close to the West Ham ground. It wasn’t quite UC work — all he was pretending to be was a West Ham fan — but it was close enough for him to feel more comfortable than he had been lately. It got him away from Costain and that bloody Portakabin, where Sefton found himself swallowing more and more frustration every day. The pub contained a vast display of Irons memorabilia, and a reputation for being peaceful, but committed enough to ask away fans to refrain from coming in on match days. Ideal.
‘The curse?’ said a bloke with the castle and crossed hammers tattooed on his neck. ‘Sometimes I think that’s all we’ve got left to make the opposition fear us.’
‘That’s why Ryan Scotley put two in against us — this is twenty years back — and then got himself taken off the field,’ agreed his mate. Sefton bought a few pints and heard lots of names that tallied with his mental list of those Ross had already discovered. The most recent, a decade ago, right at the start of Rob Toshack’s reign, was a Liverpool player called Matt Howarth.
‘It’s a long time for them to have remembered this stuff,’ he said, on his return to the Portakabin, ‘but that means it was always a big deal. There’s a few anecdotes worth checking out, and a specific threat of a surreal nature directed at Howarth by a West Ham season-ticket holder. The bloke who told me remembers it ’cos it was on the same day that Howarth died.’
‘Who made this threat?’ asked Quill.
‘She’s commemorated in the following terrace chant.’ He cleared his throat, then spread his hands theatrically. ‘We went one up for Mor-a! She’s going to shag the scor-er! Come on you Irons, come on you Irons!’
He waited for the applause. None was forthcoming.
‘Her name’s Mora Losley,’ he said. ‘Bit of a terrace legend.’
‘Description?’ said Ross, already scribbling in one of her notebooks.
‘Little old lady. . but nobody agrees on the details.’
‘How long ago was she a season-ticket holder?’
‘She’s still attending.’
Ross ran the name ‘Mora Losley’ — as well as all the others — through CRIMINT, the Police National Computer, the Police National Database and the Met’s own systems. She found that the same name, Mora Losley, kept popping up regarding quite a few formal warnings but nothing beyond that: no arrests. This was what made something inside Ross relax, that feeling of uncovering something hidden, and of showing it to the world. It was all that could make her feel okay these days. It was as if she was feeling a message forming out of noise.
‘She’s got a history of abusive behaviour,’ she told Quill, ‘a lot of complaints against her by fellow fans. But what I’m getting from the West Ham fan chatter online is that, as she’s a terrace icon, a lot of them are willing to forgive her anything.’
‘That’s the feeling I got from the lads,’ agreed Sefton. ‘She’s everyone’s barmy auntie.’
Costain looked uneasy. ‘Who heaves the soil about, then? Maybe she’s got some big nephews?’
Ross was surprised to hear Costain express a useful thought. ‘Maybe she’s got a son, some relatives, some followers. She’s been a West Ham season-ticket holder since 1955.’ Ross handed Quill the ticket records and the only image she had discovered: a copy of a passport photo, the latest of those submitted every year to get the season ticket renewed. A little old lady who indeed appeared bland enough to be described in many different ways. Ross had found herself looking back to it several times, trying to fix the non-existent details in her mind and failing.
Quill pinned the photo to the Ops Board that was slowly developing. ‘List of complaints is interesting,’ he said. ‘Abuse of fellow fans, a lot of her upsetting children. And even small instances of violence. .’
‘Against animals,’ said Ross. ‘She kicks dogs. That’s a serial-killer marker.’
‘Moves around a bit, too,’ said Quill. ‘You need an address for the season ticket, and those tally with the ones given at her formal warnings. Loads of different places in the Wembley and Neasden area.’
‘Where?’ said Costain. He got to his feet and took the sheet of paper from Quill. Then a smile spread all over his face. ‘I know these houses,’ he said. ‘In fact, I’ve been to a lot of them.’
Sefton looked over his shoulder, and started to laugh.
‘These,’ said Costain, ‘are the houses Toshack went to search on New Year’s Eve! All except this one in Willesden. That could be the one he went to on his own, before he called us out. Toshack was looking for Mora Losley!’
Quill leaped up, and Ross thought he was about to hug her but, seeing the look on her face, he awkwardly turned it into a high-five that became a hearty handshake. Then he grabbed his phone. ‘That,’ he said, ‘is enough to merit a search warrant!’
Costain looked around him, as he waited in the unmarked car. The house Toshack had visited on his own had turned out to be situated on a suburban T-junction, with an Irish pub at one end and a West Indian pub at the other, in a row of houses running along a curved street near the park. At lunchtime, in winter sunshine, Quill’s tiny team had parked just around the corner from it, where they could hear the sounds of the school playing field. The unmarked van sat at a decent interval along the curve of the road itself. At Quill’s request, approved through Lofthouse’s office, personnel from the local nick had been folded into an operation that was registered as still being called ‘name to follow’.