‘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.
11
After they’d gone, Stegs helped put Luke to bed before cooking himself and the missus a pretty bland spaghetti bolognese out of a tin. The label said it was ‘just like Mama used to cook’, but if that was the case then Mama had obviously long since been banned from the kitchen. While they were eating, the missus asked him what the police had wanted to see him about, and he told her that it was just clarifying some issues about what had happened with Vokes. She seemed to buy it and started on again about him switching jobs, but he made it clear that tonight was really not a good night to talk about it, and once again she let it go, although she didn’t look too pleased.
They ate at the kitchen table, then washed up in silence before retiring to the lounge. The missus insisted on watching Scream Team on one of the Sky channels, a weekly programme in which a select team of photogenic young members of the public visit some of Britain’s most haunted places and, as far as Stegs could see, simply run around yelling and screaming, jumping at the slightest noise, and generally making tits of themselves without actually seeing anything vaguely ghostly.
While the missus sat staring raptly at the screen and occasionally making comments like ‘Did you see that, Mark?’ or, more typically, ‘There’s got to be something in it, there was definitely a face there’ — even though if there had actually been a face there it would have been the lead story on the BBC news, not cast adrift on some crappy backwoods satellite channel — Stegs thought about the visit he’d received from Boyd and Gallan. It concerned him. They were definitely suspicious that he’d had something to do with the leak on the op, and maybe even the death of O’Brien, a man he was not too upset to see in the ground. Stegs didn’t consider himself to be that much of a crusading cop, trying to right society’s many wrongs, but he did look down on O’Brien, a man who’d have sold his children to cannibals and even skinned and gutted them himself if the price had been right.
He had the feeling that Boyd, particularly, thought he was the villain in all this — it was the way she’d looked at him as she’d taken her notes, with no attempt to hide the suspicion in her dark eyes. Gallan, he reckoned, was keeping a more open mind, but he knew he’d still have to be careful. He’d heard enough about the other man to appreciate the fact that he was a good copper, with a nose for sniffing out the truth, as well as the sort of perseverance you don’t get so much in the Force these days.
Suspicion. He’d been under suspicion almost since the day he’d started working with SO10. It was the place for mavericks — for people who were prepared to bend the rules, to walk the fine line between infiltration and involvement in the criminal enterprises they were investigating — and mavericks in a police force are always mistrusted. But he also knew how to cover his tracks. He’d had plenty of practice of that, and was prepared for any detailed probing into his affairs.
He wondered briefly whether Boyd and Gallan were sleeping together. There was something about the way they looked at each other, the messages that seemed to pass between them, that made him think they were more than just clued-in partners. They didn’t come across much like an ideal couple. She was good-looking but in a vaguely untouchable way, and with an air of authority that he didn’t much like the look of. Gallan seemed a lot friendlier and more laid-back. They’d had a couple of beers together just after they’d first met, and Stegs remembered that Gallan had been good company. Come to think of it, Boyd had been quite a laugh on that occasion too, and he remembered that he’d quite liked the look of her, as had Vokes. Maybe her attitude had changed as her suspicions had grown. If so, she’d made a mistake. Never let your quarry know you’re on to them.
It was one of the first things he’d learnt in SO10, and it was why he’d survived this long.
12
Joey Cloud lived in a bedsit above a row of shops on the Caledonian Road between King’s Cross and Islington. Access was via a set of metal steps round the back that led up to a cramped walkway where the bedsits were all lined up in a row. Darkness had fallen by the time we arrived and there was a light on in number 3.
‘I thought you said he was strictly small-time,’ I said, dodging a pile of rubbish bags as I started up the steps with her behind me, not entirely happy to be there. I consider myself a pretty dedicated copper, but I’d definitely had my fill for the day. ‘What’s he going to know?’
‘He’s been reliable down the years, and occasionally he gets a gem. I’m hoping he’s got one this time.’
I’d met Joey Cloud once, when we’d been setting up the sting on O’Brien, and I’d taken an instant and very natural dislike to him. He looked exactly like you’d expect someone who informs on people for financial gain to look. Late twenties, with the furtive air of a man who’s always on the hunt for the next fix of cash but who also knows what it might cost him, he was also a long-term pipehead and occasional smack user who suffered from the same ailments that many chronic adddicts do: rapid and premature ageing coupled with an inability to wash properly or look anything other than scruffy and unkempt. I remember having to turn my head away on our first meeting to get out of range of the stench of piss and sweat that seemed to come off him in nauseous waves, and it made me think then that I couldn’t understand how he ever got near enough to other people to hear their secrets. In fact, it still amazed me that he’d somehow heard about O’Brien’s efforts to set up a major coke importation ring with the Colombians. I could only put it down to the sort of sheer luck that in the life of a pipehead, even a cunning one, is rarely, if ever, repeated.