London Falling

FOUR

Lisa Ross sat in the dark in her tiny anonymous office at the trading estate in Norwood, listening to the Nagra tape for the third time. She didn’t want to think about what they’d just called to tell her, about what had just happened. It was too big to comprehend. She had ready in front of her, on the ancient laptop the Met let her have the use of, her report forms where she’d been annotating the background and any possible follow-ups to everything Toshack had said. She invariably found new elements to add on every listen. She’d always felt privileged that DI Quill wanted her to listen to these tapes before he did, that he’d recognized her specialist knowledge in that way. She liked to work straight from the tape, and only look afterwards at the transcripts prepared by SCD 10’s blind audio typist, Stacey, who was presumably up as late as she was.

But that would be in preparation for a trial. And now there wasn’t going to be a trial. Not of Toshack, at least. Someone might have got to him, they were saying, but it wasn’t clear how, since he’d been kept well isolated and hadn’t eaten anything since his arrest.

She wanted to hit something. She wanted to rip the throat from something. But the only thing she really wanted to do that to was Toshack himself.

The universe had made her the butt of an enormous joke, and she could hear it laughing.

They’d said he’d started to confess. Maybe that was something, at least. For the longest time now, as intelligence on the Toshack organization had always failed, as every avenue of inquiry had shut down, as jury after jury had failed to convict, she’d felt that nothing she had been trying to do would ever work.

Now she knew it certainly never would.

But Toshack was dead. Wasn’t that revenge on him of a kind? So why didn’t she feel anything? God, she hoped she eventually would, or what was left to her?

Detective Superintendent Lofthouse herself, to Ross’ astonishment, had brought over the tape and transcripts in the early hours. ‘I’m up anyway,’ she’d said, ‘so I thought let’s cut out one more courier.’ Ross had felt weird, receiving them from this smart woman at the door of her office unit, with herself dressed in sweatshirt and leggings. Ross had been told her appearance could put the fear of God into people at the best of times. Her right eye was blue, but her left one was grey, and her nose was askew, like a boxer’s. For a boxer’s reason, too. But Lofthouse, who amazingly had seemed to know who she was, had turned out to be all right. She’d said she hoped someday Ross could come into the Ops Room, get to meet the team. Like other intelligence analysts did, was what she hadn’t added.

Ross had yelled out loud when she listened to the tape for the first time, and heard Toshack talk about Alf — insulting his own brother, belittling him. She didn’t know the name of the first UC, other than that Toshack referred to him as ‘Blakey’, but she’d grown to recognize his voice and had, for years now, ground her teeth at his gleeful laughter, and how he seemed to appreciate every shitty little thing Toshack said.

Then, towards the end of the tape, when the sod seemed to get some idea of urgency and had started to get some good stuff, but then ended up telling Toshack he was a UC. . she’d leaped out of her chair. She’d taken the knife she always kept in her pocket, and she’d slammed it into her desk, and then had hated the sight of it there, the idea that now there’d always be a mark.

And now they’d just told her. . she was never going to read those court transcripts while her news — her intel — was presented to Toshack, and hammered at him back and forth, and all those revelations brought him down. Now the truth would never out.

It was too big to think about. She felt like crying. But she couldn’t.

Quill had changed into a spare shirt and trousers as fast as he could, the forensics people taking his own clothes off him and bagging them, right down to his Y-fronts, which he’d tossed over to them from inside a toilet cubicle. The incredible loss of Toshack, the copper mourning for such a huge, juicy target which had been the centre of all their lives — he could feel it all within the station. Their prey had been taken from them. From right in the heart of their place.

Lofthouse met him as soon as he was looking decent, and they walked away together quickly to find some privacy. She immediately put a hand on his shoulder. She did that occasionally, not like any other female copper Quill knew. It wasn’t just a willingness to touch other human beings: she would run her hands along walls, tapping them as a builder would, as if it was the only way she could ground herself in those horrible places where she ended up standing around at five in the morning. She was one of those higher-rank types from academia, with a slew of letters to her name, but that had never bothered Quill. Her tendency was to cut through things, to make use of the bureaucracy she had on her side. They’d been good comrades these last four years, himself and this always-tired-looking middle-aged woman. She’d saved his operation from all manner of deleterious penny-pinching Met shit.

‘It’s not your fault, James,’ she said now.

‘Was he poisoned? If so, some of our lot will be wondering if it was me who did it, ’cos I’d think it was if-’

‘We’re running toxicology, but the doctor gave an opinion back in the room itself that it was some sort of seizure.’ She was plucking at a charm bracelet she wore, something she often did when she was thinking hard. On it were attached a tiny horse, an anchor and a worn-down key. ‘Having pumped himself full of drugs tonight for the very first time, then picked a fight with a roomful of uniforms, I’m not that surprised. This is you we’re talking about and, unless the bloods come up saying you used an Amazonian dart toxin, I’ll do my best to get everyone to piss up another tree.’

‘Thank you, ma’am.’

‘Besides, Toshack, rather brilliantly, said he was “guilty of everything”, which could certainly be said to include the charges in front of him. With that, and what is on the Nagra tape, we get everyone else — and can start digging hard for more. Whatever it was that happened to matey, the firm still goes down.’

‘But not the mysterious freelancers? And now we won’t get anything out of him about. . issues inside this nick.’

It was getting dark when Quill finally left the Hill. The lights were on at the Black Sheep along the road, but that was a copper pub, and he didn’t want to be among his fellows right now. Not with all the failure and futility that they’d already be starting to make jokes about. They’d lost Toshack. Quill had lost him. He now headed for the back gate, intending to go down to the Postal Order, where nobody knew who he was. He’d called Sarah but found that, when he started to talk to her, he couldn’t find much to tell her about what had happened, either. ‘I’m okay,’ he’d said finally. ‘Despite the fountain of blood.’

He passed a roughed-up pile of soil in one of the flowerbeds, a circular mass; apparently someone had decided to plant something and then just abandoned it. Even the surrounding garden was falling apart now. He had no idea who had employed the gardeners here, but they’d probably gone the way of everyone else.

Quill found Harry already standing at the bar in the Postal Order. He sighed and slumped up beside him. ‘Fucking detective,’ he said. ‘You knew I’d be here.’

‘I had one in the Sheep first.’

‘As the bishop said to the bishop.’

Harry got them in, and they sat at a table way back in the corner, where the bloody music drowned out any eavesdroppers. ‘Nothing you could have done, Jimmy. You’ll be fine after counselling.’

‘You what?’

‘Six or seven pints of counselling. At least now you’ve got a story to match your dad’s.’ Quill’s dad, Marty, had been a great and terrible rozzer, a Flying Squad detective in the days of lunchtime drinking. ‘Suspect misplaced all of his blood in custody? He’d have appreciated that. You always were a chip off the old block.’

‘Yeah?’ Quill wasn’t keen on the idea of his own pet death in custody being associated with his dad’s theatrical punch-ups and dangling suspects off Waterloo Bridge by their socks. ‘I know people like to think of me as old guard, Harry, but to be this rule-breaker cop I’d need to break some bloody rules. You can’t get away with that these days. I put an end to that rough stuff between Toshack and the uniforms as soon as I could. We could’ve lost everything with that.’

‘Well, at least you talk the talk. . usually.’

‘’Blige! You’re trying hard to make me feel better, aren’t you? I tell you what — I’ll bet that’s how the first UC thinks of himself, and all. Only he doesn’t know where the line is, while I do.’

‘You just nudge that line along a few feet sometimes.’

Quill put his pint down solidly and looked at Harry challengingly. Nudging Quill to be more like his father Marty was one of Harry’s favourite pastimes, while he himself remained the most anonymous bloody copper in existence. But tonight it was all getting a bit much for Quill. ‘I am this bloke you see, Harry. I don’t really know who that is, and I don’t know how much is under the bonnet sometimes, but I’m not my dad and I don’t do requests.’

‘Fair enough.’

‘Great, sorted. My round, then, is it?’

And that became, as predicted, another six pints of therapy.

Quill was surprised by the next thing he really paid attention to, which was his wife Sarah standing beside him. A welcome sight, obviously. He realized he was sitting in the back garden of his house, and this was the geographical location from which he had been examining a completely blank neon-tinged London sky. His arse was getting wet because of the frost. She had a look on her face that said he might have woken her up while coming out here.

‘What,’ he asked her, ‘should I be like?’

‘Oh God, Quill, funny you should ask. I’ve been up all night worrying about that, too.’

She always called him by his surname; it was a fond little habit of hers. ‘I can’t seem to find any meaning in anything, not now.’ She was a member of the press, he reminded himself, so he couldn’t tell her all the details. ‘Goodfellow, it’s done and. . I don’t think we did any good. Someone else’ll just move in on Toshack’s territory, and the new guy’ll amp up the violence again.’ He spun his finger in illustration. ‘It’s just getting worse and worse, round and round. What am I for? What can I find to do that’s. .?’ He was sure it was to have been a really profound question, but he couldn’t find the end of that sentence. ‘That’s. .?’

She took his hand and managed to haul him to his feet. ‘Your meaning is right here,’ she said, and Quill got the feeling she was probably angry. At any rate, between them they managed to get him into bed.