scumbag.
At that moment, a mobile rang shrilly. It was Malik’s. He removed it from his pocket, and I noticed with some amusement that it was a new and predictably flash little number that probably doubled as a pocket PC and digital camera. Typical. With Malik, appearances weren’t deceptive. He looked like the smart, young, gadget-carrying go- getter that he was. He spoke into the minuscule mouthpiece of the phone briefly, then listened for about twenty seconds, writing something in his notebook as he did so. Finally he hung up with a curt goodbye.
‘Ashley Eric Grant,’ he said, reading out what he’d just written. ‘Also known as — and I’m not sure if he took this as a compliment or not — “Strangleman”. Fingerprints have just identified him as the dead robber.’
Flanagan, now standing, looked round the table. ‘Anyone know that name?’ he asked hopefully. ‘Ring any bells with anyone?’
‘I never saw any of those blokes before in my life,’ said Stegs, lighting another cigarette.
Flanagan’s gaze got round to me, and I sighed loudly, wondering how much worse this day could possibly get, then told him and the room that, yes, I knew exactly who Ashley ‘Strangleman’ Grant was.
3
Ashley Grant allegedly got the nickname Strangleman years back in the Tivoli Gardens ghetto of Kingston, Jamaica, where he’d grown up. The story went that as a drug dealer and gunman loosely affiliated to the Jamaican Labour Party, or JLP, which ran that particular area, his very individual method of disposing of rivals was to have them impaled on meathooks before disembowelling them with a large butcher’s knife. He would then, it was claimed, strangle the unfortunate victims with their own entrails while they choked out their last breaths.
Nobody knew how many people he’d killed this way. Nobody even knew if the story was true or not. My feeling was that there was probably something in it, but if he’d ever murdered someone in such a messy fashion I suspected that he’d only done it the once, and the victim would probably have been long dead before his colon had been wrapped round his neck. I hoped so anyway.
But what was not in doubt was that Strangleman Grant was a dangerous man. He’d been residing in the UK for about ten years, having come over in his early twenties looking to make his fortune, and had married a local girl, thereby giving him the right to remain, even though it quickly became clear that his respect for the laws of his adopted land was near enough non-existent. Of those ten years, something like half had been spent in prison, mainly for drugs and weapons offences, but he’d been out for a while now and was settled on mine and Tina’s south Islington manor, which was how I knew his background. What concerned me immediately, however, was the fact that he was hooked up with the crime organization of one Nicholas Tyndall, a new and potentially very violent player in the north London cocaine trade.
A little bit of history here. Up until a few months earlier, cocaine importation and distribution in north London, particularly Islington, had been primarily the work of the Holtzes, an extended family of gangsters who’d had a stranglehold on the area’s organized crime since the late 1970s, and one of whose members had been Slim Robbie O’Brien. But the Holtzes had fallen from power in spectacular fashion, their leader and one of his sons killed, and now many of their senior associates, including the leader’s deputy, Neil Vamen, were in custody, awaiting trial for a variety of offences.
I’d been involved in their downfall, as had DI Malik, which was how we knew each other, but our victory had been something of a hollow one. With the Holtzes out of the picture, a vacuum had developed, and everyone knows what they say about nature and vacuums. Plenty of other outfits, some of them distinctly amateur, had tried to grab a piece of the wealth that was there to be had in the distribution of coke to the ever-growing customer base, but one of the more organized, and by all accounts more violent of them, was the Tyndall gang.
Tyndall himself was a thirtysomething, locally born thug with an entrepreneurial streak who’d started out surrounding himself with men from his own estate, but who over the last couple of years had developed relations with Jamaican and Albanian criminals operating locally, and was, as a result, one of the bigger players coming through. Strangleman Grant was one of his top enforcers and was believed to have murdered another Jamaican who’d tried to rip Tyndall off two months earlier, blowing the back of his head off in an illegal drinking den in Dalston. There’d been at least fifty witnesses to the shooting but, as is almost always the way in these sort of violent in-your-face crimes within the black community, no-one was talking, particularly as it was well known that Nicholas Tyndall was behind it. Already he was getting a reputation for being untouchable.
This is the London of today, a vast multicultural city of consumers breeding an ever-growing array of gangs from every ethnic background imaginable, all vying for control of the city’s huge and incredibly lucrative crime industry. I’d heard somewhere that London’s organized and semi-organized criminals were responsible for raising ten billion pounds of revenues per year; mainly from drugs, but also from prostitution (now effectively sewn up by the Albanians), people smuggling and occasionally armed robbery. When I’d mentioned that figure, the ten billion, to Malik, he’d told me it was almost certainly a conservative estimate.
What I couldn’t understand, though, was why Tyndall’s men would be involved in robbing Fellano. I’ve said it before, and I hope I can keep saying it: you should never underestimate the stupidity of criminals, and it’s certainly par for the course for them to rip each other off, especially when it comes to deals involving drugs, but Tyndall was no short-term merchant. He was a man on the up, with business sense as well as ruthlessness, so it made no sense for him to be falling out with a man like Fellano who was likely to be his main supplier in the coke trade. He would be wanting to build bridges with him, not burning them down.
I told all this to the people sitting round the table, with Malik (who also knew something about the Tyndall gang) filling in some of the gaps. We both agreed that it didn’t seem the typical behaviour of a man who so far had taken his steps from petty to big-money crime carefully and with plenty of thought.
‘The three we’ve got in custody over at Paddington Green aren’t talking at the moment,’ said Flanagan, ‘but they’re facing some very long stretches, so they’ve got a lot of incentive to open their mouths and start incriminating each other, and whoever may have organized it. If it is anything to do with Tyndall, we’ll find out.’
He was about to say something else, but then his mobile rang, the third time it had gone off since the meeting had begun. He opened it up and examined the screen. On the first two occasions, he hadn’t answered it, but this time it was obvious that whoever was calling was worth talking to. It was a short, one-sided conversation, with Flanagan doing most of the listening. He did say ‘Oh fuck’ at one point, then there was a thirty-second pause, then he said ‘Bollocks’. Then, ten seconds later, he mumbled something about being there shortly, and hung up.
Everyone looked at him expectantly. ‘That was the assistant commissioner,’ he said with an actor’s croak, his eyes focusing on the table in front of him. ‘The lady who had the heart attack, Eileen Murdoch. . she’s died.’
‘Shit,’ said Ferman.
And that pretty much summed up the predicament, not only of Flanagan, but of all of us involved in the violent and wholly unexpected events of that fateful day. A death toll of six now and a tidal wave of fall-out still to break.
4
The meeting broke up five minutes later. I had a quick word with Malik, telling him that I’d take responsibility for tracking down Robbie O’Brien, and let him know as soon as we’d picked him up. I wanted to say a few more words but he was in a hurry. He looked more concerned than I’d ever seen him before, which I could understand. Malik was a career copper, a good man with a keen sense of right and wrong, but still someone with his eyes on promotion to the upper echelons of the Serious Crime Group, and ultimately the Met, and a catastrophe like today’s could set him back years if he was found to be even partly responsible.
It could set me back years too, but I wasn’t so worried about it. I’d been knocked back from a DI to a DC a couple of years before, when I was stationed south of the river, so I knew not to expect much help from above when things started to go wrong. Admittedly, that time had been my own fault. I’d seen a fellow officer strike a
