‘When was the last time you spoke to him?’ I asked Tina, as I climbed the steps.
‘Months back. Not since the O’Brien sting. He hasn’t had anything for us.’
Which, I thought, went some way to proving my point, although I didn’t say anything.
We walked along the balcony until we got to his front door. It had been painted navy blue, probably when the block was first built, but was now peeling badly to reveal the wood beneath. The outline of a 3 could be made out, but the sign itself had long since fallen off. I could already smell the interior, even from here. It wasn’t pleasant.
There was no doorbell, so I rapped hard on the door. There were the faint strains of music coming from inside so he was probably at home, although what state he was in was another matter.
I gave it ten seconds, then knocked again, harder this time. We hadn’t come all this way on a shitty wet evening for nothing.
I was just about to knock for a third time when I heard the shuffling of feet coming towards the door.
‘Who is it?’ The voice was slurred a little and I wondered if he’d been on the smack, or had just woken up.
‘Police,’ I called through the letterbox. ‘Can you let us in, please.’
‘I’ve got nothing to say to the police, and I ain’t done nothing wrong, so fuck off.’
Tina leant forward so her lips were almost touching the door. ‘This is very important, Mr Cloud,’ she said, hoping that he’d recognize her voice, but not letting on that she knew him, in case anyone else was listening. ‘Can you please let us in? Otherwise we’ll come back with a warrant.’
‘I ain’t done nothing,’ he whined, sounding like a snot-nosed kid. ‘Leave me alone.’
‘Mr Cloud,’ I told him, again speaking through the letterbox. ‘We need to speak to you and we’re not going to go away until we do.’
I heard him curse and then the door was opened a few inches. There was a chain on the latch preventing us from entering. Joey Cloud’s gaunt, unshaven features appeared in the gap looking like the ‘before’ picture in an Alka Seltzer advert. The smell arrived at exactly the same time. Maybe it was a good thing he didn’t want to speak to us after all.
‘This is fucking harassment. I told you, I ain’t done nothing. I can’t say fairer than that, can I?’ His eyes were slightly glazed but he appeared reasonably compos mentis. For him, anyway. He stared hard at Tina. ‘I got nothing to say to you. Nothing. You understand? Now, get the fuck out of here or I’ll call my brief.’
‘You haven’t got a brief,’ I told him. ‘With your funds and habits, you wouldn’t be able to retain one for more than ten minutes.’
He turned to me, his face still squeezed in the gap, but this time his defiance had evaporated and been replaced by a pleading expression. ‘Listen,’ he said, his voice dropping to a whisper. ‘Leave me alone, please. I’m not in the info game any more. I just want to be left alone. Please.’
I tried to give him a reassuring smile but, amid the BO, I think it must have come out more like a grimace. ‘This won’t take long, I promise.’
His face cracked into a hideous broken-toothed grin, utterly devoid of any humour. ‘Yeah,’ he said, the grin twisting into a sneer, ‘that’s exactly what they told me when they come round before.’
Tina pulled a face. ‘They? Who’s they?’
‘They,’ he answered, the sneer now transforming into a look of anger. ‘They are the people who did this.’
He shifted his weight, moving his head back from the door, then slowly raised his right arm so that it was level with his face.
Straight away, I saw the bandage wrapped round the hand.
‘God almighty,’ hissed Tina, her eyes fixed on the blood-flecked dressing where Cloud’s little and index fingers used to be. ‘Who did that to you?’
For two, maybe three, seconds, he didn’t speak, simply kept the mutilated hand in front of his face for us to see. Finally, he let it drop to his side and out of sight. When he spoke, the words were slow and addressed to both of us.
‘People who told me I shouldn’t be speaking to you,’ he said simply.
Then, with his good hand, he shut the door on us.
When we were back down on the street, standing in the glow of the street lamps and watching the cars drift past in both directions, Tina let out a deep sigh. ‘It feels like someone’s always one step ahead of us.’
I stopped beside her and put an arm on her shoulder. ‘It could be anything, Tina. He might have just upset one of his dealers, or maybe someone found out he was a grass.’
‘Then why did he say the people who’d done it didn’t want him speaking to us?’
‘Because I expect they don’t. If he knows who they are, which he almost certainly does, then they don’t want him going to the police, do they? It doesn’t mean it’s got anything to do with O’Brien and Heathrow.’
Tina shook her head, staring into the evening drizzle. ‘There are too many coincidences, John. He was the one who put us on to O’Brien, and I think someone’s got to him to make sure he keeps his mouth shut. What’s worrying me, though, is the fact that hardly anyone was aware of his existence, let alone his role in setting up Robbie.’
I thought about this for a moment, because I knew what she was going to say next.
‘But one of those people was Stegs Jenner.’
We stood in silence for a few moments, contemplating that particular thought.
‘Come on,’ I said eventually, taking her by the arm. ‘Let’s go get a drink. I think we’ve earned one.’
13
I awoke the next morning with a dry mouth and a desire to get going on the case. Tina and I had driven back to my place in Tufnell Park, then gone to the pub round the corner for a bite to eat and a few much-needed drinks. We’d talked about the case a little and I’d encouraged Tina not to read too much into Joey Cloud’s missing fingers. Violence among addicts and dealers, even violence that extreme, was endemic. Back when I’d been south of the river, there’d been a small-time thief and coke addict called Fredo Wanari who’d had a habit of not paying his suppliers and running up huge debts. One time, he’d gotten on the wrong side of the wrong person, a bigshot dealer who didn’t like to be messed around, and when Fredo couldn’t pay what he owed him he was given an ultimatum: find the money in forty-eight hours or, as the dealer allegedly put it, pay the interest in pain. Fredo had more chance of sprouting a second head than finding the cash, so when the forty-eight hours was up the dealer paid him a personal visit and removed the little finger of his left hand with a meat cleaver, while his men held him down. He then promised to remove another finger for every day he wasn’t paid. Sadly, Wanari never did find the money and these days he goes by the name of Fingerless Freddie, but it shows you that criminals can do some pretty gruesome things to each other in the name of cash.
I’d told Tina this story as we sat drinking, but again, I don’t think she was convinced. Eventually, though, tired of clawing about in the dark with theories and half theories that weren’t really leading us anywhere, we’d moved on to other, easier subjects. Sometimes you’ve just got to let go, although maybe we’d let go a little bit too much the previous night. At least that was what my hangover was now telling me.
But I was still feeling ready for the fray as I came into the O’Brien/MacNamara incident room on the third floor of the station at quarter to nine that Friday morning, Tina following a gossip-quelling two or three minutes behind. The room was crowded with getting close to two dozen mainly unfamiliar faces, some of whom were already working at computer terminals, while in the middle of the room stood DCS Flanagan, talking animatedly to Malik and one of the other detectives. He still looked tense, but less so than he had when I’d last seen him, the natural confidence he’d exuded in our earlier meetings already beginning to make a reappearance. He’d done extremely well to land this high-profile role so soon after his involvement in the disaster of Operation Surgical Strike, and I think he knew that. The Met might have been very short of senior officers capable of running a major inquiry, but that on its own didn’t explain why he was in charge of the O’Brien/MacNamara murder squad. A cynic might have said he was there because he knew the right sort of people, and that he was almost certainly a freemason, so had plenty of senior colleagues watching his back and making sure that the mud never stuck to him.