There was excitement in his voice as he clawed and picked for the gory details. I had a feeling I was going to get a lot of this over the next few days. Shoot-outs, particularly ones with multiple casualties, seem to engender a mood of morbid curiosity in most people, and coppers are no exception.
‘I’ll tell you all about it later,’ I said. ‘Are there any lights on in O’Brien’s place?’
‘Nothing, and it’s almost dark now. The place is empty. Definitely.’
‘Have you tried the Forked Tail, or the Slug and Lettuce on Upper Street?’ I asked, thinking they’d probably be his most likely haunts for a weekday afternoon’s drinking.
‘We tried the Slug earlier, and Baxter and Lint were sniffing round the Forked Tail, but from what I heard, they didn’t get anywhere.’
‘Well, stay where you are and don’t leave until he turns up. All right?’
‘Of course, no problem, boss.’ The words were delivered in serious tones that were meant to let me know he was fully aware of his responsibility, but he couldn’t resist a final dig for information. ‘It was bad then, was it? Today?’
‘Yes, Dave,’ I said wearily, and with a finality in my tone. ‘It was bad. It’s always bad when an officer gets killed, especially when it’s right under the noses of his colleagues. Now make sure you get hold of O’Brien. I’m off home. I’ll see you in the morning.’
I hung up and sighed, cutting him off mid-goodbye.
Tina turned away from the windscreen and looked at me. ‘He hasn’t put in an appearance, then?’
I shook my head, beginning to get the first pangs of concern. Like a lot of mid-table professional criminals, Slim Robbie O’Brien was fairly predictable in his habits. He was a big drinker who liked to spend his days in the bars and pubs in and around Upper Street, particularly the two I’d mentioned to Berrin. Whenever I’d met up with him, it had always been in Clerkenwell or Euston, well away from his stomping ground, and he never looked very comfortable in different surroundings. He might have had some good contacts, including those with a route into the Colombian mafia, but he was as geographically challenged as a nineteenth-century chambermaid.
I tried Knox’s number again but it was still engaged, and as I sat back in my seat, staring through the windscreen at the orange-tinged darkness of a London evening, my concern about O’Brien grew.
Where was he?
5
Stegs Jenner’s real first name was Montgomery. His dad had been a massive Second World War buff whose hero had been the field marshal of the same name and, according to Stegs’s dad, the man responsible not only for the defeat of Rommel at El Alamein but also, ultimately, the vanquishing of Hitler and Nazism. Forget Stalin, Roosevelt, Eisenhower or even Churchill. Monty was the man, and Stan Jenner immortalized him by bestowing the name on his first and only son.
Monty Jenner. It had been a fucking nightmare at school. At first they’d called him ‘Mont-ay’ in effeminate tones to suggest that anyone bearing such a name was quite obviously queer. When he’d complained to his dad, Jenner senior had invoked ‘the spirit of the Blitz’, telling his son that he had to be prepared to deal with adverse circumstances, that it would make him a better person. And that he had to be prepared to fight. ‘I will give up my gun when they prise my cold, dead fingers from around it,’ he’d said wisely. Stegs was one of the smaller kids in his year and didn’t really understand what his old man was going on about, but even so, the next time someone had called him ‘Mont-ay’ (it had been Barry Growler, the school bully), he’d responded with his fists, launching a full-frontal blitzkrieg-style assault that had caught the Growlster completely by surprise and had cost him a black eye and a bleeding nose. The fight had been broken up by one of the teachers before Growler had had a chance to launch a substantial counter-offensive, and Stegs had ended up the winner on points, earning a grudging respect for his actions. People still laughed at his name, but they were a little bit more careful about it, and preferred to address him as ‘Mental Monty’ rather than the more irritating ‘Mont-ay’. Even Growler had left him alone for a while after that.
About the same time, he’d decided to call himself Stegs. Although he’d never admit it now, it was short for Stegosaurus. He’d been interested in dinosaurs as a kid, and his two favourites had been Triceratops and Stegosaurus (two even-tempered plant-eaters who preferred to be left alone, but who, like Dirty Harry, could hit back hard if attacked). He felt he could identify with that. Since neither Triks nor Trice had a very cool ring to it, he’d gone with Stegs, claiming to those who asked him about it that it was his grandmother’s maiden name. He’d also changed his whole demeanour. He strutted instead of walked, he answered back to the teachers, he became a bit of a joker. For a long time, though, he couldn’t get either the name or the image to stick, but he perservered, did a few detentions for his backchat, got a couple of kickings for the way he didn’t get out of the way for the bigger boys, and eventually even the teachers started addressing him as Stegs. It taught him a valuable lesson: you can be anyone if you try.
Stegs Jenner did not look like a typical police officer. At five foot eight, he only just beat the height restrictions, and his face, even at thirty-two, was chubby and boyish, topped off by a receding mop of fine gingery-blond hair that had the curious effect of making him look both his age and a dozen years younger at the same time, like one of those illusionists’ acts. Blink and he was twenty; blink again and he was back to thirty-two. But Stegs Jenner talked the talk, and he walked the walk, and he wasn’t afraid to put his head into the lion’s mouth, which made him an invaluable asset to SO10, Scotland Yard’s specialist undercover unit.
He’d been a copper since the age of nineteen, and plainclothes since twenty-four. His full-time posting was still in the area where he’d grown up, the north London suburb of Barnet, but he’d been attached to SO10 for the previous six years, and probably half his time was spent seconded to them on undercover assignments, which is the way it works in the Met. No-one’s full-time undercover. You could be meeting Colombian drugs dealers one day to discuss a multi-million-pound deal, and hunting for stolen office equipment the next.
Not that Stegs was going to be doing too much of anything for the next few days, at least not work-wise. He’d been officially suspended (thankfully on full pay) until a preliminary internal investigation could take place to see whether he’d acted improperly or not. They hadn’t let him go until half-nine that night, at which point a very pissed-off, newly arrived assistant commissioner of the Met had formally told him that he was not to report for duty until further notice and not to speak to anyone about what had happened, other than those directly involved. The assistant commissioner (a middle-aged accountant look-alike with silver hair, an immaculately pressed uniform and a very long nose) had then stood there for a few seconds, waiting, it seemed, for Stegs to say something, presumably along the lines of ‘I’m sorry for causing you all this inconvenience’. Stegs hadn’t given him the satisfaction. Instead, he’d given the bastard a look that said, ‘If you think you can do better, you get in there and talk to people who’d flay you alive if they knew your true identity. Then maybe you’d actually be earning your money, instead of waltzing around passing the buck to the junior ranks.’
After they’d finished with him, he reluctantly phoned the missus. She must have seen something about the operation on the news because she’d left three increasingly worried messages on the mobile. She didn’t know what role he’d been playing, of course, or where he’d been playing it, but she knew he did undercover work, and the news that an undercover officer had been killed would probably have seeped out by now, so he felt duty-bound to let her know he was all right.
She answered on about the tenth ring, and in the background he could hear Luke screaming and crying.