It had started to rain again and the sky was an iron grey. He was still speeding but the urge to drink had gone. He needed to walk. To walk and to think. What exactly had Gill meant back there? How well had he known Vokes? Very well, he’d always thought. But like anything in life, you can never quite tell. People you know always have the ability to shock you. But Vokes? No, he’d always had the run of Vokes. I knew him well enough, Gill.
Definitely well enough.
It was four o’clock when he eventually got back to the car. The rain had stopped but the clouds remained, thick and foreboding. He’d walked for a while, but his thoughts had been a jumble: mainly memories of old Vokes interspersed with concerns about his own future now that he was suspended, until finally he’d found himself with a strong desire to go home and have a cup of tea. He hoped the missus wasn’t in nagging mode, and that Luke was either asleep or in good cheer.
But he’d picked a bad time to drive back and he got caught in an almighty jam on the North Circular. He tuned into Capital and found that there’d been an accident further up at Staples Corner (according to the Flying Eye, it was a four-car pile-up), so he was stuck in it, wondering how on earth four cars could have actually got up to the sort of speeds necessary for a collision like that. Usually, you never got to more than thirty miles an hour tops on either of the circulars during the day.
At five to five, when he was stationary again, with the beginnings of a headache and the flashlights of the emergency services visible a few hundred yards ahead, he got a call on the private mobile. He picked it up off the front passenger seat and for the second time that day didn’t recognize the number.
‘Jenner.’
‘Stegs, it’s John Gallan. There’s a few things I need to speak to you about, and I need to do it sooner rather than later.’
‘Do you want to meet somewhere?’
‘It’s official business. Can you come down here?’
‘Where? Islington? To be honest, I’ve been out all day and I’m on my way home. Can we do it tomorrow?’
He heard Gallan sigh down the other end of the phone, but he was in no mood to be helpful. A black Mercedes in the next lane tried to nudge in front of him and Stegs inched forward, blocking his way.
‘Tomorrow’s a bit late.’
‘Is it urgent?’
Gallan paused. ‘It’s important,’ he said eventually.
Now it was Stegs’s turn to sigh. He was tired, but he knew from experience he wasn’t going to get out of it. ‘Listen, if it’s that important, come up to my house. I’m nearly there now.’ He gave Gallan the address.
‘We’ll try to make it as quick and painless as possible.’
‘We?’
‘WDS Boyd and me. We’ll be with you in an hour or so, traffic permitting.’
‘The traffic in this town never permits,’ said Stegs, and hung up.
At the same time, the driver of the Mercedes — a stressed young commuter who appeared to have gone prematurely bald, probably in this traffic jam — snarled at him, actually baring teeth. Stegs pulled out his warrant card and pushed it against the window, at the same time mouthing ‘fuck off’ and inching forward still more. The Mercedes driver backed off.
He wondered if he was going to make it home in an hour himself.
10
Stegs Jenner lived on an estate consisting mainly of 1950s and 1960s semi-detached houses off Cat Hill in east Barnet. Some were quite substantial, and attractive for post-war housing, but Stegs’s semi was one of the smaller and newer ones and looked a little forlorn opposite its bigger neighbours.
A thick, oppressive layer of cloud hung over Barnet that evening, and a light rain spat weakly as Tina Boyd and I got out of the car. I looked at my watch. It was quarter past six, and I was getting hungry. It had been a long day and a draining one. I’d been on the stand for more than two hours in court that afternoon tesifying in the rape trial, much of it under detailed and laborious cross-examination from the defence barrister, who was doing his utmost to get his client off on a technicality now that it was becoming patently obvious to all concerned that he was guilty. I think I did OK, but sometimes it’s difficult to tell. Particularly when you’re tired, and I was as tired as hell.
Tina had filled me in on the details of the earlier murder squad meeting — not that there were many of them. So far there’d been no sightings of O’Brien on the day of his murder, and we were still waiting for further tests on the bodies to determine more specific times of death. SOCO hadn’t reported any obvious clues left by the killer, and no-one among those interviewed in the surrounding area had seen anything suspicious. Perfect. As for the three phone calls made on the mobile in O’Brien’s possession to Stegs’s mobile, all had been made since Sunday, the last on the previous morning, but none had lasted more than a minute, so it was possible he was simply leaving messages. Either way, it was inconclusive.
Stegs’s wife, Julie, answered the door, a very miserable-looking baby under one arm. The baby eyed me belligerently. Julie, meanwhile, tried to appear welcoming, but it was clear the day was getting on top of her. She was an attractive woman, taller I think than Stegs, with big brown eyes and full lips, but exhaustion and stress had given her a tense, almost haunted look.
Tina spoke first. ‘Good evening, Mrs Jenner,’ she said with a smile, ‘we’re here to see your husband.’
‘Oh yes, he said something about that. Come in, come in. He’s in his study.’ She opened the door and we followed her inside into a tiny entrance hall. ‘It’s opposite you at the top of the stairs. You’ll have to excuse me, I’m feeding Luke.’
I told her that was fine and followed as Tina led the way up the almost unfeasibly steep staircase which was about as child-friendly as an unattended pond.
Stegs was waiting for us at the top, wearing a cautious grin, as if he was letting us know that he wanted to be friendly but it was up to us whether we allowed him to be. ‘Evening all,’ he said. ‘Come on through.’
He led us into a tiny room, half of which was taken up by a single bed. A PC running a screen-saver featuring brightly coloured fish swimming around was perched on a desk at the end by the window. The desk took up about another quarter of the room, which didn’t leave room for much else.
‘You’ll have to sit on the bed, I’m afraid,’ said Stegs, taking the seat at the desk and manoeuvring himself round so he was just about facing the spot where he wanted us to sit. ‘I don’t really want the missus hearing any of this. Can you shut the door please, John?’
I did as he asked and then the two of us sat down side by side on the bed facing him. It was all very cosy.
‘What can I do for you then?’ he asked.
‘We’ve got some bad news, Stegs,’ said Tina.
He raised his eyebrows. ‘Oh yeah? What’s that?’
‘Slim Robbie O’Brien’s dead.’
He looked shocked. ‘How did that happen, then? And when?’
‘He was shot. We don’t have a time of death yet.’
We let it sink in for a few moments, watching him. He rubbed a hand across his brow, the other hand drumming a rapid tattoo on the side of the chair. I thought he looked stressed. His face had taken on a reddish tinge and he appeared pumped up, making me think that he might be suffering from some sort of delayed shock. I wondered briefly whether he’d been offered counselling. If not, he should have been.
‘Christ,’ he muttered, wiping the hand back across his forehead. ‘That’s not going to make things any easier.’
‘No,’ I agreed. ‘Quite the reverse.’
‘Who do you think could have done it?’ he asked.
‘Slim Robbie O’Brien? I imagine the list of suspects is going to be pretty long. When did you last see him?’
