‘We’ve all had a bit of a traumatic few minutes,’ said DCI MacLeod, ‘so let’s just concentrate on the most important task, which is keeping the evidence safe and secure. Download all the relevant files to a memory stick, Dan, then get the laptop bagged up and sent over to the lab. I want it tested for Kent’s DNA, fingerprints, the lot. I don’t want him trying to deny it belongs to him.’
Grier looked surprised. ‘He won’t do that, will he, sir?’
‘He’s denied everything so far. We need to keep building up the case until it doesn’t make a blind bit of difference how good an actor he is, because the jury’ll have no choice but to find him guilty.’
When Grier had gone with the laptop, MacLeod turned to Tina. ‘All right, are you ready to finish this bastard off?’
She nodded firmly. ‘Never readier.’
‘Let’s see how he responds to the fact that we’ve found all his home videos.’ He put a hand on her arm. ‘You had a big part in bringing him in, Tina. When we’re ready, do you want to be the one who charges him?’
But had it all been too easy? Andrew Kent had been delivered to them on a plate with the murder weapon in his bedroom and his laptop full of hugely incriminating video evidence. But even as this nagged at her, Tina pushed it aside, knowing that she was just ignoring the obvious explanation, which was that Kent was like all the other cold-blooded killers who’d begun to believe the hype of their invincibility and had become too complacent.
‘Definitely,’ she said. ‘I want to watch him squirm.’
Six
The job Tyrone Wolfe wanted me to carry out was to buy some guns from an underworld dealer based in Canning Town. Although he’d told Tommy to drive me to the destination, he’d made it clear that I was to go in and make the purchase alone. His rationale was simple: if I bought the guns, I was committing a serious crime and therefore couldn’t be a copper. But the rationale was flawed, because by sending me on my way with Tommy driving they’d put me in a position where I had no choice but to commit it, since failure to do so would have blown my cover. I wasn’t sure whether my handler at CO10 would see it quite like that, of course. DI Robin Samuel-Smith, or Captain Bob as he was universally known behind his back, liked to play things by the book. But I’d worry about that one later.
Wolfe had given me an envelope containing five grand in cash — payment for two automatic shotguns and a handgun — handed me back the rest of my possessions, including my recording watch, and told me that I was expected at the dealer’s place half an hour ago, and that he’d see me with the goods later.
We were now in Tommy’s car en route. In the back seat, sitting up with his tongue lolling out, was Tommy’s dog, Tommy Junior, an unhealthy-looking mongrel with a mangled ear who always smelled of old raincoats. The story went that Tommy had rescued him from a gang of teenage thugs who’d tied his front and back paws together and were about to dump him in the murky waters of Regent’s Canal. Tommy had thrown in one of the thugs instead, and when a second pulled a knife on him, he’d produced an extendable baton and broken his nose with it before sending him in with his mate. The others had done the sensible thing and fled.
Tommy Junior loved his master and, perhaps unsurprisingly, distrusted everyone else. He seemed to have taken a particular dislike to me because in the last three months I’d become something of a regular in the front seat, which was the one he liked to occupy.
It had taken me a month of hanging round the periphery of the north London underworld, drinking in grimy little backstreet pubs with small-time crims and putting my name about as Sean Tatelli, an ex-con on the lookout for decent work, before I got introduced to Tommy. That was three months ago now, and we’d spent a lot of time together since. For a while that had involved nothing more than going out drinking and shooting the breeze. Like a lot of criminals, Tommy was good company, with a wealth of amusing stories to tell. Slowly, though, he’d begun to take me into his confidence, giving me bits and pieces of work to do, always suggesting that something bigger would come along, until finally, today, he’d pulled up outside the flat I used for my undercover ops and told me that he had work for me. Real work this time.
‘Who’s it we’re meant to be snatching?’ I asked Tommy, keen to have something to go back to Captain Bob with.
‘I don’t know,’ he said, fixing me with deep-set eyes that always had a melancholy expression in them, even when he was telling a good story. ‘I don’t work with Wolfe as much as I used to these days. But you said he offered you a hundred grand. Well, he’s offered me one fifty, so I’m thinking him and Haddock must be making at least two apiece, maybe more, which means whoever it is we’re after’s worth a lot of money to someone. All I know is it’s one man, and his escort’s not going to be armed. That’s it. I don’t even know the location.’
‘Do you know how Wolfe got to hear of the job?’
He shook his head. ‘He’s keeping everything close to his chest, and he’s even more jumpy than usual about it. That’s why he’s being all cloak and dagger with you. He doesn’t like using people from outside the crew for work, but he needed a fourth man, and seeing as you and me are mates, and you need the work. .’
‘Thanks for thinking of me,’ I said, feeling an unusual twinge of guilt that I was going to betray him. Tommy Allen was a violent criminal, but I’d grown closer to him than I’d have liked. At forty-five, he was only twelve years older than me, but sometimes he acted as if I was the son he’d never had.
The car fell silent, and he lit a cigarette.
I looked at it longingly. I only allow myself two cigarettes per day, one after lunch, one after supper. It’s my routine, and I stick to it. But I was sorely tempted to make an exception now, knowing that I was heading out of the frying pan and possibly straight into the fire.
I stared out of the car window, trying hard to ignore the pounding of my heart as the hotels, theatres and pavement cafes of the West End gave way to the grand Victorian buildings of Lincoln’s Inn Fields and the legal quarter, and then the steel-and-glass high-rises of the City. Finally, the wealth slipped away and we were into the poorer tenements and terraced housing that was the sprawling East End. This area of London had suffered most under the bombardment of the Luftwaffe in the Second World War, and it showed in the slapdash nature of much of the architecture: Victorian tenements, 1950s terraces, 1960s tower blocks, all running into one another to the cheerful beats of Tommy’s
Tommy, I’d found out in the time I’d known him, was a big fan of 1980s music, and particularly Level 42. He’d been singing along pretty much non-stop to the tracks throughout the journey, occasionally accompanied by Tommy Junior howling from the back seat, creating an out-of-tune cacophony that would have made me gouge out my own eyes if I hadn’t been so preoccupied. Finally, as one of the band’s lesser hits, ‘Microkid’, came on, Tommy seemed to notice for the first time that I wasn’t saying much.
He turned down the music. ‘Listen, Sean, you’re not scared, are you?’
‘No, I’ve just been struck dumb by the quality of your and Tommy Junior’s singing.’
He chuckled. ‘“Lessons in Love” is Tommy Junior’s favourite. He really catches the high notes on that one.’ He turned to me, his face growing serious again. ‘I can vouch for these blokes, you know. The ones you’re buying off. I’ve done stuff with them myself before. They’re reliable.’
Which was a refrain I’d heard plenty of times before about criminals.
But in spite of all that, I knew I could never give up the job. I was too much of a believer in the old adage: evil triumphs when good men do nothing. Evil was doing pretty well as it was these days, and there was no shortage of those doing nothing. When I was a young kid, I went to sleep at night thinking that there was a copper standing guard on the street outside my window, there to protect me from all the creatures who haunt the nightmares of children, and it always comforted me to believe he was there. Now I was that copper, and there were plenty of people out there relying on me.
It was just after one p.m. when Tommy pulled into a decrepit-looking street of pre-war terraced housing
