A thought occurred to Tyler. “Is there a secret agenda going on here that I need to know about, Deano?” he asked, narrowing his eyes suspiciously.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, guv,” Fletcher said, shrugging nonchalantly. “But, if it was secret, I could hardly tell you, could I?”
Smartarse! Jack thought. But he had a point.
“You know, a more suspicious man than myself might wonder if there was some skulduggery going on to make sure that our team arrest Winston and his associates before Mr Quinlan’s people can lay their hands on him, just to make a point that we should have been given the job in the first place.”
Fletcher’s visage remained as enigmatic as ever. “As if any of us would do that.”
Tyler raised a cynical eyebrow. “As if,” he echoed, thinking that Fletcher must be a superb poker player because his face was impossible to read. “But, if you did, I don’t think it would be too hard to work out who the ringleader was.”
There was no doubt in his mind that, if they were up to anything, Tony Dillon would be the one orchestrating it, but he would have had no trouble roping in the likes of Bull, Fletcher, and Parker.
Fletcher fidgeted impatiently. “Don’t mean to be pushy, but I’ve got still a shed load of research to get through, so do you want to hear the update or not?”
“Come on then,” Jack said, unable to resist. “Tell me everything.”
Fletcher came in and pulled up a chair. He had printed out a couple of A3 sized maps and he gave one copy to Tyler and kept the other for himself. “Right, guv,” he said, pointing to a house he had circled with a red felt tip pen. “This is a squat in Vicarage Lane, E15. The rear garden backs onto a similar house in Evesham Road.”
Jack looked up. “So?”
“So, I’ve found several reports linking Angela Marley to this address over the past few months. She gave it as her home address the last time she was arrested, back in December, and a bail enquiry was carried out to confirm that she did actually reside there. Also, there’s a CRIMINT entry from the local beat bobby, dated January second, when he spotted her entering the address at sixteen-hundred hours with an unknown IC3 male he believed to be a punter.”
CRIMINT is the Met’s searchable intelligence database, where all information reports relating to criminal intelligence are stored.
“I don’t suppose the address has been searched recently?” Tyler asked.
Fletcher nodded. “Yep. A Section 18 was carried out there by the TSG in late November when another prostitute called…” he paused to check his notes, “…Lolaksi Agarwal – aka Lola – was arrested for possession of half-a-dozen wraps of cocaine. Nothing was found, but the TSG skipper had the brains to complete a floor plan of the address in case it was ever spun again.”
Tyler nodded, impressed.
“Oh, and I forgot to mention,” Dean said. “The name Angela Marley sounded vaguely familiar. I couldn’t think why at first, but then it came flooding back to me so I ran her details through the Operation Crawley account on HOLMES and...” He paused for dramatic effect.
“And…?”
“And, as I thought, she’s a hooker from Claude Winston’s stable, and she was with Fat Sandra Dawson and Tracey Phillips on the night that the Phillips girl was murdered.” Tracey Philips had been slaughtered on Halloween of the previous year. Operation Crawley, the randomly generated name that HOLMES had allotted for the ensuing investigation, had proved to be somewhat challenging, and it was a period in his career that Tyler would never forget.
“Well done, Deano, that really is very interesting. Tell me, do you have any information about any of the other occupants of this squat yet? I don’t suppose anyone called Roddy or Rodent lives there?”
“Not that I can see, but I’ve only just started my research. There was an interesting CRIMINT from last June where the body of a working girl was found in an upstairs room by a new arrival. Everyone thought the deceased had moved out the previous week, but it turned out she hadn’t; she’d overdosed and then crawled into a corner to die.”
“Sounds like a charming place,” Tyler said, screwing his face up in disgust.
“It’s not the Hilton, that’s for sure.”
“Have you got anything else?”
“Nope. I’ve only had time for a quick look so far, but I’m gonna delve through the system properly once I let Mr Q know.”
“What about this Rodent character? Who’s researching him?”
“Wendy’s been working on that, guv. Don’t think she’s getting very far though, at least not yet.”
As soon as Dean had left, Jack picked up his mobile and dialled Kelly Flower’s number to see if she could shed any light on what the team – or at least a clique within it – were up to. Maybe, he conceded, they weren’t up to anything and he was just being paranoid.
“Are you free to speak?” he asked when she picked up.
“Yeah, go on. Me and Colin are on our way to put the squeeze on another one of Winston’s mates, not that it’s got us anywhere so far.”
“Ah, I wanted to ask you something, but in private.”
There was a pregnant pause. “Okay…” she eventually said, and he could hear the cogs turning as she tried to work out what it was. “In that case, I’ll have to ring you back a bit later.”
“It’s nothing important,” he reassured her. “I’ll speak to you later.”
◆◆◆
They had broken from interview in order to let Gifford Mullings eat his lunch at a
