And you know what? I think the cynic might have had a point.
From what I knew about Flanagan (and it wasn’t a lot, I admit), he was something of a Teflon man. He’d made mistakes in the upward trajectory of his career — there’d even been the faint rumour of corruption, though no direct accusation was ever made — and he wasn’t so talented that you’d make excuses for him. He wasn’t even that popular, his manner considered too haughty and self-important by many of those who worked for him, myself included. I didn’t like him because he didn’t strike me as being a true copper, more an aspiring technocrat with his eye firmly fixed on building a power-base, and he always seemed pissed off about something, which is a trait I’ve never associated with success. But he’d made it all the way up to being the head of SO7, and it was possible that he was looking even higher. Assistant Commissioner Flanagan. Six people might have just been killed on his watch, eight if you include O’Brien and his grandmother, but he wasn’t going to be the scapegoat for Operation Surgical Strike. They already had Stegs for that, and I was pretty damn certain that the SO10 man wasn’t a regular down at the local Masonic Lodge.
Seeing me, Flanagan excused himself from his conversation and strode over, a small smile forming like a crease at the corners of his mouth. It wasn’t replicated in the thin blue eyes that remained as serious and businesslike as ever. ‘Hello, John,’ he said, putting out a hand. ‘Glad you could join us for this one.’
‘Glad to be here, sir,’ I replied, shaking it. ‘Any new developments?’
‘Some interesting ones,’ he said, the half-smile melting back into lines on his face. ‘Very interesting. But nothing that’s a real case-breaker. I’ve got a news conference at Scotland Yard at eleven o’clock, and I wouldn’t have minded a bit more to give them. Still, this one was never going to be easy. How did it go with Jenner last night? Did you get to speak to him?’
‘We did, but he didn’t tell us anything we don’t already know.’
‘What about the calls to his mobile from O’Brien?’
‘He says he remembers getting one on Wednesday morning. He claimed O’Brien was just demanding protection again.’
‘Did you believe him?’
Flanagan, who must have been six feet three, and a good four inches taller than me, leant his long head forward like a praying mantis as he asked the question, his beady eyes locking into mine. I had the feeling it was a pose he’d learnt to strike in interrogations, and I could see that it would be disconcerting if you were a criminal, but I thought it was a bit much for nine o’clock in the morning. Especially as I hadn’t done anything wrong.
I told him I didn’t see why Stegs would bother lying.
‘I worked with him once,’ he said thoughtfully, moving his head back out of my field of vision. ‘He’s a slippery character.’
I think he was about to add something more, but he saw Tina coming into the room. ‘All right, we’re all here. Let’s get this meeting started. Right, everyone,’ he announced loudly, his thinly veiled attack on Stegs’s reputation forgotten as he clapped his hands together like an impatient headmaster, ‘let’s get underway.’
He went over to a whiteboard with a table next to it on the far side of the room, facing the door, and those people not at their desks went back to them. Malik nodded at me and I gave him a wink as I took a seat next to Tina.
‘Not present at the meeting yesterday for reasons outside of his control but joining us for the duration of this inquiry will be DI John Gallan, who, like his colleague from this station Tina Boyd, was acquainted with the victim, and who also had some involvement with the op on Wednesday that we all keep reading about and seeing on telly.’
Everyone turned round, making various grunts and casual gestures of welcome, and I gave a slightly embarrassed smile in return, keen to get on with things. I thought that Flanagan would give some justification as to why it wasn’t his fault that Surgical Strike had gone wrong, but he didn’t. Maybe he’d already done that yesterday.
‘Right,’ he continued, ‘so where are we so far? Let’s recap. Robert O’Brien and Katherine, or Kitty, MacNamara were shot dead two days ago in what appears to be a highly professional hit. I have the preliminary autopsy reports here, hot off the press this morning’ — he tapped a thin pile of A4 sheets on the table — ‘and they tell us that the two of them died at different times, possibly as long as six hours apart, with Kitty the first to go.’ At least I was right so far. ‘She was killed with a single shot from a.38 calibre weapon, possibly an old Smith and Wesson, delivered at point-blank range to the side of her head, half an inch above the right ear. A cushion was used to muffle the sound of the bullet, and it happened at some point between nine o’clock in the morning and three o’clock in the afternoon, but given that a neighbour heard a sound that could have been a shot during Neighbours, which runs from one-forty to two o’clock, it’s quite possible that it was then.’
He then explained his theory (or Knox’s theory, or even my theory, depending which way you wanted to look at it) that MacNamara’s murder had been opportunistic in so far as the killer had disposed of her purely so that he could use her apartment to ambush Robbie. According to Flanagan, the killer had almost certainly been let into the building and the apartment by Mrs MacNamara, since there were no signs of forced entry and no-one else in the building had let anyone in. That meant she’d either known him or he’d somehow tricked his way into her confidence. Flanagan said that we were going to need to interview all of Robbie’s known criminal associates who were still on the outside in case it had been one of them, and he assigned several of those present to the task, before revealing his first useful lead of the day.
‘The killer was in that apartment for three or four hours at least, and he was extremely careful not to touch anything or contaminate the scene in any way. Very professional, as you’d expect from someone who could execute two human beings, including a hardened killer, with the minimum of fuss. But he did, we think, make one mistake.’
There was a pregnant pause as those who weren’t in the know waited to hear what that mistake was. I already had a good idea.
‘We don’t think he went out the same way he came in, instead opting to go out the back way through a window in Mrs MacNamara’s bedroom. We think this firstly because the window was slightly open whereas Mrs MacNamara, who according to her granddaughter hated the cold, always tended to keep hers locked in the winter, and secondly because of the timing. From what we’ve built up so far on Robbie’s movements on the day of his death, we think he arrived home at some point between five and five forty-five that afternoon, if witness reports are correct.’ He turned and addressed a middle-aged detective in the front row. ‘Isn’t that right, Joe?’
Joe, who was wearing a frighteningly retro purple shirt with black tie, cleared his throat and picked up his notebook. ‘That’s right, guv. We’ve been down to every known haunt O’Brien used in the Islington area. He had lunch on his own in the Sacre Coeur in Theberton Street. They reckon he left about two-fifteen, and was acting normally. We don’t know where he went after that, but he did turn up in the Half Moon on Essex Road later on that afternoon. The barman said Robbie told him he was on his way home. He was in there for about fifteen minutes and just had a pint and a couple of packs of crisps. He left approximately five o’clock, give or take fifteen minutes, according to the barman, and from there it’s about a ten-minute walk to the murder scene, probably fifteen or twenty when you’re his size. So it would have been some time around five-thirty.’