'Actually, he thinks it's the Ryans.'
'Eh?'
'He seems to think that this is a message from Billy Ryan to who-ever's been knocking his boys off. A 'declaration', he reckons.'
'That's a bit of a leap, isn't it?' Thorne said. 'What's he base that on?'
'No idea. He seems pretty convinced, though.' Thorne closed his eyes as smoke from Holland's cigarette drifted across his face. 'It makes sense on one level, I suppose.'
'What?'
'The Ryans were always going to work out who was after them long before we did.'
Thorne watched as two officers carrying body-bags moved towards the front door. Hendricks had obviously finished his preliminary examination. Thorne moved to follow the officers back inside, murmuring to Holland as he passed: 'Listen, the fact that Hendricks is staying at my place. Are people making cracks about it?' Holland was enjoying a long drag. He laughed so much that he began to choke.
Thorne had spent the last three years based at the Peel Centre in Hendon, and his familiarity with it, with Becke House in particular, had bred a good deal of contempt. The building a dun-coloured, three-storey blot on an already drab landscape had once housed dormitories for recruits. The beds had given way to open-plan incident rooms and suites of poky offices, but there were still plenty of fresh faces to be spotted around the place, with the Metropolitan Police cadets now housed in another building within the same compound. It always struck Thorne as strange that the Serious Crime Group should be based where it was, hand in glove with a cadet-training centre. He remembered arriving back late one afternoon, a year or so earlier, and bumping into a uniformed cadet as he turned from locking his car. He'd spent the previous few hours trying to explain to an old woman why her son-in-law had taken an axe to her daughter and grandchildren. The look on Thorne's face that day had stopped the cadet dead in his tracks, hacking off his cheery greeting mid-sentence and sending the blood rushing from his smooth cheeks.
The meeting was taking place in the office that Russell Brigstocke was reluctantly sharing with Nick Tughan. The SO7 Projects Team was based in a collection of Portakabins at Barkingside, where Tughan and his team still spent a fair amount of time, but since the joint operation had begun, there'd been something of a shake-up on the third floor of Becke House. Holland and DC Andrew Stone now shared their office part time with two DCs from Serious and Organised Crime, leaving the third office to Thorne and DI Yvonne Kitson. The latter spent most of her time in the Incident Room, collating information alongside office manager DS Samir Karim and their opposite numbers from SO7. So, more often than not, Thorne had his office, such as it was, to himself.
'Right,' said Tughan. 'Game on. I think we've got ourselves a war.'
Tughan's Irish accent could switch between syrupy and strident. Today, it went right through Thorne. He remembered the scrape of Gordon Rooker's chair across the floor of the visiting room at the Royal. Tughan leaned against the desk in a vain effort to make his superiority appear casual. He held up a piece of paper inside a transparent plastic jacket. 'This was found among the dead man's paperwork. There are photocopies for each of you.'
Brigstocke and Kitson already had their copies. Holland, Stone and Thorne moved forward and took theirs from the desk.
'This letter isn't dated,' continued Tughan, 'but, according to the son, it was delivered by hand five or six weeks ago.'
'Late Christmas present…' Stone said, looking for the laugh, a little too full of himself, as usual.
Tughan ignored him, pressed on. 'It's nothing we haven't seen before. Subtler than some I've come across lots of stuff about the dangers facing new businesses. But basically it's a simple protection scheme. Only problem is they were moving in on someone who was already protected.'
''They'', Thorne said, 'being Billy Ryan.'
'To the best of my knowledge, yes.'
'The 'best of your knowledge'?' Tughan smiled thinly and turned away from Thorne. 'We're moving forward on the basis that this letter originated from the Ryan family, or from criminals closely associated with them.' Thorne let it go, but it still bothered him. It wasn't like threatening letters were sent out on headed notepaper. How could Tughan be so sure that this one came from the Ryan family?
Thorne caught Brigstocke's eye, but the DCI did not allow him to hold it for very long. Brigstocke's attitude to the entire SO7 operation basically involved keeping his head down until they disappeared. Thorne had a lot of time for the man he was hard and principled, caught far too often between those above and below him but he still had an irritating predilection for hedging his bets. At the same time, of course, Thorne was well aware that his own refusal to do the same thing had often landed him in plenty of trouble.
Yvonne Kitson was less afraid than some to speak her mind. 'It doesn't make a lot of sense,' she said. 'They send a threatening letter. They send the bully boys round to chuck a bin through the window. Then they have the owners killed.'
Holland looked up from the letter. 'Right, that's quite an escalation, sir.'
'It's not complicated,' Tughan said. His smile took him way over the line that separated informative from patronising. 'This was a straightforward campaign of intimidation. It might well have got nasty eventually, but it wouldn't have gone as far as killing. Then the Ryans discovered that the video shop was protected by the same people responsible for the murder of Mickey Clayton and the others. The same people that are paying the X- Man.'
'A bit coincidental, isn't it?' Holland asked.
Tughan had been waiting for this. 'I don't think so.'
'It was the letter,' Thorne said. 'That's what started everything.'
'It was probably the letter.' Tughan couldn't keep the irritation off his face at having his thunder stolen. 'It doesn't really matter now how it started.'
Thorne took Tughan's expression as his cue to get stuck in. 'Whoever was protecting Izzigil's business took major offence at the Ryans trying to move in.'
'Major offence?' Holland said. 'That's putting it bloody mildly. They've had four of Billy Ryan's top men killed.' Brigstocke agreed: 'Whatever happened to breaking somebody's legs?'
'It's about a lot more than territory now,' Thorne said. 'It probably always was. We're presuming they're Turks, right? Whoever's been hitting the Ryans.'
'We can't presume anything,' Tughan said. 'The fact that the video business was Turkish needn't be significant.'
'It needn't be, no. But I still think it is.'
'We've heard nothing from the NCIS.'
'They're not infallible. We're probably talking about somebody relatively new here. Maybe an offshoot of an existing gang.'
'Granted, it's a Turkish area, but other groups might still try their luck.'
'They'd be idiots if they did.'
'The Ryans did.'
'Right,' Thorne said. 'And look what they got for their trouble.' Tughan seemed to decide suddenly that a physical barrier between himself and Thorne might be a good idea. He moved behind the desk and slid into the chair. He looked at his computer, affecting an air of thoughtfulness, but, to Thorne, it seemed more like regrouping.
'We're assuming that on one side we've got the Ryans, right?' Thorne continued quickly before Tughan had a chance to pull him up: 'If we assume that on the other side we've got an as yet unknown Turkish operation, it all starts to add up. If you're a ne wish gang, looking to establish yourself, you don't go up against the big Turkish gangs that have already got the area sewn up. Not if you want to be around in six months' time. You so much as start sniffing around one of those big heroin operations and they'll wipe you out, right?' If anybody disagreed, they were keeping quiet about it.
'What makes more sense, if you're looking to make a splash, is to go up against somebody else completely. Somebody unconnected with local business or local territory. When that letter dropped on to the doormat in that video shop, somebody saw an opportunity to expand in a different direction altogether; to send out a message to the gangs around them without getting anybody's back up. This lot, whoever the hell they are, probably see the
