‘Already done. What would you do without me? But, yeah, this sort of thing is why Lofthouse has been so hands-on. And it’s worked, because Toshack didn’t know about the first UC. Which means, by the way, that Costain’s clean — in terms of working for Toshack, anyway.’
‘I doubt they’ll hold a parade in his honour, after he’s provided a tape on which he actually tells Toshack he’s a copper. Crown Prosecution Service might not even go for a trial now.’
‘He only told him at the very last moment, and it’s all there on the tape, start to finish, alongside a good dollop of testimony in which he mentions issues pertaining to a prosecution.’
‘Yeah, yeah.’
Harry let Quill calm down for a moment, as he always did. ‘First and second UCs have been vanished from custody into safe houses, told to stay handy for debriefing. Again, Lofthouse sorted that.’
Quill frowned. ‘I’d have kept first UC in custody.’
‘Take it up with her.’
‘How’s Toshack by now?’
‘Sober, says the FME.’
‘Right, let’s be having him.’ As Harry departed to organize that, Quill went over to a cupboard, where he found and then opened a box of ancient cassette tapes wrapped in cellophane. ‘We,’ he addressed the room, a room he no longer trusted and was now playing a bloody role to, ‘are the last people in the world still using cassettes. They stick, they jam and, whenever they do, we have to bloody seal them up like they’re radioactive and start the interview all over again.’
‘Your point being, Jimmy?’ said Salter, a questioning look on his face. Quill wondered at the extent to which the tension level in this room had increased now that a handful of people in Gipsy Hill knew they had a bad apple in their midst.
‘I like the smell of this stationery cupboard.’ He slammed open the doors on his way out, before bellowing at them from the safety of the corridor. ‘I feel my new career may be in stationery.’
Quill took along a uniform on shift, PC Watterson, who looked about twelve, and had him sit in with him in the interview room, where two other uniforms led Toshack in, his brief beside him, and then left them to it. The brief had a look in his eye that Quill hadn’t seen before in any case associated with Toshack. He looked as if he was on the losing side and didn’t like it. It was a promising expression, he reckoned, but it didn’t add up to much against what was on the other side of the scales. Quill adopted a poker face as he proceeded through the usual lengthy introductions and cautions.
Costain had been placed in a West Indian gang called the Toil just as it and Toshack’s gang had started competing for street corners where they could sell smack. He’d spent months in the shebeens of Peckham, those illegal drinking dens where Pa Toil’s guys hung out, socializing, becoming part of the furniture, inviting guys back to his place on a regular basis, helping out on the particular night when one of the shebeens got raided by the police and was shut down. As Quill had predicted, Toshack had eventually made an approach to Pa, and had subsequently taken over the much smaller Toil in that miraculous way of his. Those of Pa’s soldiers who liked the prospect — Costain included — had thus become part of the Toshack gang. In the two years following that, Costain had risen to a position where Toshack trusted him enough to let him bring Sefton into the gang.
After today’s raid, Costain was meant to have been left with his cover intact, letting him maintain a relationship with Toshack. They could subsequently meet ‘coincidentally’ in the back of a prison van, during some transfer between facilities. Costain would tell Toshack who he thought the informer who had brought down the gang had been, naming Sefton as the culprit (because Toshack might have a genuine reason for trusting another gang member), and then apologize for his own bad judgement in bringing Sefton into the gang, and thus get loads of extra juice in return. Quill had played that one often in order to get access to the sort of intelligence that remained locked in prisoners’ heads after their gangs had exploded. It had always worked. His UCs still had useful ‘correspondences’ going on with loads of those behind bars, the letters all written and sent from the right postcodes by the staff of SCD 10, who received the replies too.
But Costain had now put an end to the possibility of any of that, having blown his own cover with what was, at the very least, a stupid piece of grandstanding. Having put this unreliable UC into that situation could look pretty bad on Quill’s CV — maybe bad enough to create real trouble for him if there were elements inside the operation who might try to get him chucked out before they themselves got fingered.
But that expression on the brief’s face had suggested that the gang leader hadn’t just been happily telling him about the undercover cop who’d given them some leverage. Toshack looked like a man who’d made his mind up. Very sober now, in fact.
Quill didn’t bother greeting Toshack. His old dad had been friends with some of the gangsters he’d nicked, but Quill didn’t feel the modern world gave him space for such romantic illusions. He used his house key to unwrap the cellophane slowly and carefully from the fresh cassettes, in clear view of the prisoner. He placed both tapes in the double-deck recorder and pressed the Record button. ‘This interview is being recorded,’ he said into the machine. ‘I am Detective Inspector James Quill, and also present is Constable Joseph Watterson. Will the suspect and his solicitor please identify themselves?’
‘Robert Toshack.’ He sounded very precise this morning.
‘Philip Jones, from Austell Probert Mackinley,’ said the brief.
‘This interview takes place at eleven-oh-eight hours on 1 January in Interview Room 2 of Gipsy Hill police station. Mr Toshack will be given a notice as to the circumstances in which these tapes are used, and the master tape will be sealed in his presence at the end of the interview. Mr Toshack, your right to free and independent legal advice is ongoing. Although your solicitor is with you, you may ask for the tape to be stopped and have a private consultation with him at any time. Mr Toshack, I warn you that you do not have to say anything, but it may harm your defence if you do not mention, when questioned, something which you later rely on in court, and that anything you do say may be given in evidence.’ He could see the brief hoping he’d slip up. Juries only ever pursued that route if they really liked the bloke in the dock, and defendants’ briefs only went for it out of desperation. Quill knew one old lag who’d been successfully cautioned with ‘Get in the fucking van, you’re nicked,’ but that one had heard the full standard caution on forty-three previous occasions, and was thus claimed to have got the idea by now. And Toshack had enjoyed a charmed life with juries. ‘You are now under caution. Allow me to explain that further-’
Toshack spoke up. ‘I understand the caution. I’ve heard enough of them, so let’s get this over with.’
‘Look at you, the good man in the hands of the barbarians.’ Quill said it deliberately, to see how much lip the brief was willing to take. And there was his second good sign: not a glimmer of a reaction. ‘Mr Toshack, the two tapes that are running will record everything we say here today, and that recording can also be used as evidence. If you’re charged with any offences, a copy of the interview tape will be provided to your chosen legal adviser. We’re about to ask you your whereabouts at the time of a series of major crimes, including but not limited to the armed raid on the Barclays Bank security van on the Fulham Road, during which the guard, Mr Carl Lassiter, was murdered; about leases actually in your name on a number of houses of ill repute; about the operation of a number of car-theft rings-’
‘I did it all,’ said Toshack.
Quill forced himself not to swear in sheer astonishment. ‘Would you. . repeat that, please, Mr Toshack?’
The brief spoke before Toshack could reply, clearly not having been prewarned about this. ‘My client is suffering from-’