Thorne shook his head. He had no idea at all.
'There's not so much panic,' Holland explained. 'I mean, it's still bloody scary, and we're knackered all the time, but we know more or less what we're doing.' He paused, glanced across at Thorne. 'Well, Sophie always did, but now I know, more or less what I'm doing. You should come round and see her.'
'So, you're fine with it all, then? The dad bit. I know you had some worries.' Thorne remembered a conversation they'd had the previous summer. Bizarrely, it had been on the very day he'd bought the BMW. Holland had been drunk, had confessed to feeling terrified. He'd told Thorne he was worried that he might resent the baby when it came, that Sophie might make him choose between the baby and the job.
'I was being stupid,' Holland said. He turned to Thorne, grinning.
'Chloe's brilliant. She's into everything, but she's fucking brilliant.'
'I'm glad it's working out,' Thorne said.
'Tell you the truth, the last couple of weeks have been great. A chance to recharge the batteries, you know? The only problem is that Sophie's starting to get used to having me around again.' The officers on the investigation had all been spending more time with loved ones in the fortnight or so since the Ryan murder. The job had recently involved a lot of paperwork, much of it from other cases, and a good deal of time sitting on arses waiting for somebody -Stephen Ryan in particular to get off theirs. To make a move. The investigation had wound itself down, or spiraled into chaos, depending on your point of view.
'D'you reckon Stephen Ryan is going to do anything?' Holland asked. Thorne grunted, but only with pleasure as the Transit van finally indicated and moved inside. Thorne swerved back into the fast lane and powered past it, gaining a pointless thirty feet but enjoying it nonetheless.
He had no idea that, twenty miles ahead of him, uniformed officers were taping off the area around a minicab office on Green Lanes. Others were gathering witnesses and starting to take statements. Phil Hendricks was already on his way to the crime scene, while an ambulance was moving in the opposite direction, its services clearly not required.
Stephen Ryan had made a move.
TWENTY-FIVE
Wednesday morning in the Major Incident Room. Two days after the fatal shooting at the Zarifs' minicab office. A team back on its feet, but yet to get the feeling back in its arse.
'We've had word from Immigration,' Brigstocke said. 'They think a few more from the lorry might have turned up. I say 'think' because the individuals concerned aren't telling anybody very much.'
'Where?' Thorne asked.
Brigstocke glanced at the sheet of paper he was holding. 'A car wash in Hackney. One of those places where there's half a dozen of them on your car at once, you know? With sponges and chamois leathers, inside with vacuums.'
Stone nodded. 'There's one near me. Inside and out for a tenner. Plus a tip.'
'The owner's being questioned,' Brigstocke said. 'So far, surprise, surprise, he's pleading ignorance. There'll be a connection to the Ryans somewhere down the line, but I don't think it'll be much different from the others.'
A man and a woman, suspected of being from the hijacked lorry, had been detained the previous week in Tottenham, having been discovered working in a restaurant kitchen. Two men had been seized a few days before that from a shop fitting wholesalers in Manor House. In both cases an astonishing bout of amnesia seemed to have struck all concerned. Arrests had been made, but none would lead to anything other than deportation orders for the illegals and fines for their employers. There would be enough red tape to stretch back to where the people in the lorry had originated and nothing to incriminate those who mattered in the Ryan or the Zarif organisations. Tughan took over from Brigstocke. 'Let's move on to the shooting in Green Lanes. What about the witnesses, Sam? Any luck?' Karim shook his head. 'Hard to believe, I know, but we still can't find anybody who saw anything that contradicts Memet Zarif's story. We've even got a couple who conveniently noticed a man in a balaclava carrying a gun and running away after the gunshots had finished.'
'Yeah, right,' Thorne said.
Holland let out a grunt of laughter. 'That's one couple who won't go short at Christmas, then.'
According to Memet Zarif and the others in the minicab office at the time, the man in the leathers who had shot and wounded Hassan Zarif had himself been shot dead by a mysterious second gunman who'd followed him inside and fled once he'd killed him. The police knew it was cock and bull. They guessed that the 'second' gunman was Memet or Tan Zarif, but with no murder weapon or corroborating witness, there was little anyone could do to prove it.
'We are sure about one thing, though,' Tughan said. There was a certain amount of laughter, which he acknowledged with uncharacteristic good humour. 'I know, I've already alerted the media. We have a name for the victim: the dead one, that is. He was Donal Jackson, thirty-three. A known associate of Stephen Ryan.' This last fact came as no surprise to anyone.
'Is he the bloke who did the Izzigils, do we think?' Stone asked.
'Same gun?'
Tughan opened his mouth but Thorne was quicker. 'No chance,' he said.
'It's the same type of gun, that's all. Whoever was hired to kill the Izzigils was good. Clinical, you know? This idiot got himself killed and didn't even manage to take anybody with him.' He trailed off, his mind focusing suddenly on the failed attempt to kill an innocent fourteen-year-old girl. Now, twenty years later, the son of the man behind that had fucked up a hit of his own.
'DI Thorne's probably right,' Tughan said. 'Word is that Jackson was pretty new to contract stuff. Picked up the job because he was Stephen Ryan's mate, because Ryan wanted to go a different way from his old man. Also, according to the people we've spoken to, Jackson was pretty cheap.'
Stone snorted. 'Pay peanuts, you get monkeys.'
'You'd've thought shelling out for a decent hit man was pretty basic,' Kitson said.
Others picked up on her sarcasm, mumbled their agreement.
'Haven't these people heard of a false economy?'
'You just can't get the staff.'
'He'll pay for it in the end,' Thorne said. 'What he did, what he failed to do, is going to cost him.'
'Think it's all going to kick off?' Holland asked.
'I think Ryan should have dug into his pocket and hired a trio of hitmen.' Thorne was only half joking. 'One for each brother. He should have done it properly and killed all three of them.'
'This might be a good time to announce that in terms of the joint operation, we're going to be scaling things down a bit,' Tughan said. Thorne stared at him. Surely he was joking. 'You what?'
'We've had results, some good ones, but the fact is that the Job can't see us getting too much more out of this. We're wrapping it up.' Thorne looked across at Brigstocke, eyes wide. The look he got back told him that there was nothing worth arguing about. This was for information, not discussion.
'Billy Ryan, one of our main targets, is no longer a worry, even if, sadly, we can't claim credit for that. In point of fact, from now on, there's not going to be much in the way of results that we won't have to share with Immigration or the Customs and Excise mob. There are one or two loose ends that we've yet to tie up and there'll be a few more arrests, but the pro-active end of it just isn't justified in terms of resources.'
'How can we pull out of this now?' Thorne asked. 'After what just happened?'
Tughan was already putting papers into a briefcase. 'It was Stephen Ryan's last hurrah. He messed it up. It's a war he's going to lose, and then hopefully things will settle down again.'
'Hopefully?'
'Things will settle down again.'
'Meanwhile, we just look the other way. We do some paperwork and nick a few nobodies and let them kill each other?' Tughan turned to Brigstocke. 'I want to thank Russell and his team for their cooperation and for their hospitality. We've done some good things together. We've achieved a lot, really, we have, and I think I'll be borne
