London Falling

NINE

TEN YEARS AGO

Mike the chauffeur would always drop Lisa Toshack home from school. They were friends. He took the responsibility of looking after her seriously. He was always standing by the car at the school gates, glancing around as if trouble might arrive from any direction. He seemed more worried about that possibility every day. He then drove her what would be less than a twenty-minute walk back to her dad Alfred’s house on the corner of a tree-lined street in Bermondsey. On the way, Mike would tell her which, if either, of her parents was at home. Mum was often out socializing with the girls, and Dad’s job as head of the family textile-import business meant he kept varying hours, spending a lot of time at Uncle Rob’s. Uncle Rob was his right-hand man, and his house was where most of the serious work seemed to get done. Lisa had long ago got the idea that there was something different about their business. There would be sudden laughter at family dinners about people doing favours for them, not because they were looking for a favour back but because of who the family were. They were powerful, it seemed: Lisa’s friends didn’t have families like that, she’d started to realize, but she was offhandedly okay with it. Quite proud of it, really. She was the girl with the weird eye, but her friends liked that, and nobody got at her for it, though maybe they would have done if it wasn’t for her family. Its members seemed to do good things. The staff seemed happy to work for them.

Today Mike had told her that her dad was currently at home, but when she went inside the house, there was a weird silence. ‘Dad?’ she called. ‘Astrella?’ No reply. She went upstairs to change, looking forward to afternoon telly.

On the landing she heard a noise. A groan of floorboards and straining rope. There it was again: a noise in her home she’d never heard before. She followed it to the door of Dad’s office.

The door was standing open just a little. Sunshine fell as a square of light across it, from the big green and orange window along the hall. There was a smell of old carpet in the air. She saw, as she approached, an odd shape standing inside the office — a too-tall shape. She got close enough to see through the gap-

— and then she was running into the room, towards her dad, who was hanging from the light fitting, his neck in a noose, his head framed in a halo provided by the ceiling rose. She needed to get up there, to get him down as soon as possible. She had the urge to pull on his body, but she mustn’t. She looked round and round the room for something to stand on, to reach up to him, but there was nothing that didn’t seem a mile away.

There had been no chair under him.

She finally spotted his office chair, tucked in under his desk; she grabbed it, rushed it over, leaped on top of it. There was no expression on his face, but he had a livid bruise on his temple. He was making no sound. His head was tilted to the right. His mouth was a little open.

She ripped her fingers undoing the knot. She ripped them but she got it open. The nearest knife was in the kitchen, and there was no time, no time. . oh God, had she made the right decision, or had she killed him? ‘Dad, I’ll call a doctor. Dad, talk to me, say something. Dad, say something. Dad, I’m getting you down. Dad-!’

His body tumbled to the ground in a way which nothing with life in it could ever fall. Blood pooled around him and she saw, for the first time, that he had a wound in his side.

She fell down beside him and put her hands on his face, with some idea about doing first aid, but he was cold, and she shook him, trying to make him wake up and he wouldn’t, and she started to scream.

‘Suicide,’ said Uncle Rob. ‘I’d never have expected that of Alfred. Leaving a wife and child, too. What sort of a bastard runs away like that?’

In the next few weeks, one of the great surprises for Lisa Toshack, as she was still called then, was the anger directed at her father. Even her mum, amidst her grief, railed against him. Lisa felt shocked, didn’t know where to look when people started on like that. Everybody seemed to join in with it, but she herself couldn’t. Though she was doing the big gestures, though she was dressing in black all the time now, she still felt that she wasn’t grieving properly, because now that seemed to involve getting angry at her dad, and she couldn’t be. She felt angry, yes, but not at him.

She was angry because of what she kept saying, and nobody was listening to.

‘It wasn’t a suicide.’

‘That’s lovely of you to say, but. . he had a couple of goes before he hanged himself.’ There had been a wound between his ribs, a bloody knife found in an office drawer. A knife she could have used on the rope. He also seemed to have slammed his head against the wall, where there was now a dent.

‘It wasn’t a suicide.’

‘Love, please. . don’t.’

‘It wasn’t a suicide.’

Silence as the rest of the family all looked at each other.

She asked to be allowed to say a few words at the funeral. She stood there under the gaze of all those hard-faced friends of the family in their dry-cleaned, big-shouldered suits. Now she dressed in black lace and gloves, just a touch beyond conventional mourning wear. The vicar let her come forward to the coffin while several of the wives, blonde and orange, too many cigarettes, wearing short skirts even here, wailed as if in competition.

She looked at the massed ranks of the family, and saw the hierarchical web of responsibility and fear that had placed everyone in every pew exactly where they should be, involving no work for the ushers. The weight of that web led directly to Rob Toshack, sitting there at the innermost end of the front right-hand pew, with now no awkward counterweight of a senior brother positioned beside him. He certainly looked as if he had something extra on his mind now, but she was sure it was the extra power he had assumed.

She looked him in the eye. ‘It wasn’t a suicide,’ she said again.

She left it at that and walked back to sit beside her terrified mother.

Rob caught her on the landing, during the wake. It was an expensive affair, with an Irish folk band, and everyone from Bermondsey and beyond coming in to pay their respects. It was an all-day drinking binge, and Lisa had intended to spend most of it in what had become her room now that Rob had insisted her mother move into what had become the new home and headquarters of the firm. Her dad’s house had been sold.

His outstretched palm slapped onto the wallpaper just by her face. There was the continuous roar of the party below, but here they were alone. He carried a glass of whisky, but hadn’t drunk from it.

She looked carefully back at him.

‘Alfred,’ he said, ‘wouldn’t have wanted you doing this.’

‘Yes, he-’

‘Shut up. Just for once. . Oh, no!’ He grabbed her as she shifted, swung her against the wall, and stuck his knuckles into her throat. He put the glass down on the top rail of the stairs. ‘Alf and Maureen always kept you apart from the details. Even though, by the end, there wasn’t fucking much to keep you from. Apart maybe from any one of the big bastards who might have come after us. But now we’re safe. Now we have a chance to make this better. Now we’re going to grow. And you’re part of this family, so you’re part of that, too.’

She shook her head, pulled herself away from him.

He punched her in the stomach.

He hauled her upright while she was still coughing.

‘From now on you will be silent, and you will be polite, and you will do what you’re told. And you will shut up about my brother’s suicide.’

She slid down the wall as he retrieved his whisky. She couldn’t remain silent, looking at his face, because she knew for certain now. She was brave in the way only a teenager could be. Brave and stupid and immortal: she knew all those things about herself. And still she said it, ‘What if I don’t?’

He looked hard at her, and she was ready for him to attack her again. But then that hard look became calculating, as if a new idea had occurred to him. ‘Then you’ll see,’ he said. ‘You’ll be the first to see.’

She’d half expected him to come back that night — to come back later, when he was drunk. So she built a mountain of furniture against her bedroom door. Stupid teenage reaction. She felt a terrible weight attached to that word now. She had to behave older now. For Dad. To make things right about Dad. Her lace gloves and shawls and the make-up had become her special thing, her way of protesting within the family, so that the very sight of her would remind them.

She stepped back from the mountain she’d built, wondering what sort of ‘older’ she had to be now, asking herself what she could actually do.

She went to bed thinking about it. She fell asleep. And then, sometime in the early hours, she was awake again. Or she thought she was. An extraordinary smell had suffused the room. It smelt like some kind of memory. Like old books and spilled beer and dead flowers left in churches.

Someone was standing at the end of the bed. ‘There she is,’ said a high, strange voice, ‘the disobedient child.’

She tried to react, tried to cry out or slam herself back against the wall, but the woman made a simple gesture, and she found she couldn’t. She could only look at what was in front of her. The woman looked as if she’d been cut out of the picture Lisa was seeing through her eyes, then stuck back awkwardly into the same space again. There seemed to be special effects around her. The room behind her looked oddly unreal, as if it was just a photograph.

The woman remained in shadow. But she had in her hands held in front of her. . a copy of a London telephone directory.

Lisa tried to move but she couldn’t. If she tried really hard. . her hand moved really slowly. . and the woman was coming towards her in a blur.

She smacked Lisa across the face with the telephone directory — so fast it was like a bat on a ball. The back of Lisa’s head hit the wall.

She collapsed, oh so slowly, forward, the blood bursting from her newly broken nose. Her head was ringing, slowly; she was feeling different to any way she’d ever felt before. To be hit that hard; it felt it could change her. She didn’t know if she was going to be able to even suck in a breath-

The woman hit her again, as her head was sagging, and the blow was just as hard.

Lisa fell in and out of consciousness during the next half-hour, but her body never fell and she never managed to make a sound.

She woke again, her vision a blur, to find the woman standing at a distance again. ‘This is your master’s mercy,’ she said, ‘so be thankful.’

And then she left. Right through the wall.

Lisa found that she could make noises now. So she did. But nobody came. She’d locked herself in her room. So that couldn’t have happened. She finally fell over on one side.

The bruises had almost faded by the next morning. It hurt her to move, but there wasn’t a lot to show anyone. Her nose was at an angle, and it hurt to touch it, but somehow it had already set.

Lisa stared into the bathroom mirror. It was as if she’d done this damage to herself.

She started to sob, leaning on the sink and giving way to it, but then she remembered her dad’s face again, and how it looked as if he’d done it to himself too, and she made this about him again, and she heaved herself upright, though it hurt like hell, and through her loosened teeth she turned the sobs into a roar.

Mum never saw anything that could have convinced her. So Lisa didn’t even try. Mum remained silent at all meals where Lisa was around. Rob kept his distance for a few days, but when he finally looked at her, he looked interrogatively. Lesson learned?

Lisa put away her very particular type of fashions and make-up and music.

For the next three years, she was silent but she was polite. She wore very clean jeans; a crisp shirt; the hair that the hairdresser suggested, every time. She looked just like ‘a teenager’ in a soap opera.

When she started to think about that terrible night, she thought about Dad instead. To the point where she wasn’t sure how it could ever have happened. How something impossible could have happened. It wasn’t supported by anything in her everyday world. Sometimes she wondered if it was a story she’d written, or if she’d dreamed it. But what had happened to Dad was real. At least she hung on to that.

She made sure her mother never got worried. She hid the allergies she now developed to everything existing in the family home, her eyes streaming at the smell of that carpet, at the polish, even at the air in her own bedroom. She threw back one-a-day antihistamines six times a day.

She had her mantra.

It wasn’t a suicide.

Nine GCSEs: seven As and two Bs. She met older blokes through the family, and lost her virginity to one of Rob’s soldiers after a party. Afterwards, sore and curled up into a little ball, she goaded him with what her mum could make Rob do to him, if she found out. He was having a punt, wasn’t he? Thought she was a bit of a tart, didn’t he? She got him out of there in five minutes.

They planned a big party for her sixteenth birthday. Lisa Toshack let them.

Now Rob would ruffle her hair whenever he passed. His organization had grown at high speed since Alf’s death. In consequence everyone was dressing better. From the distance of history, it now looked as if a weak man had been holding them all back. Mum found a new man, one of Rob’s lieutenants, and he was decent enough, neutral to Lisa. She could feel the prohibitions issued about her, the threats said in her name, the anticipation of her future somewhere in the bookkeeping of the organization. They had even decided on her A levels: statistics, computers, finance.

But she was kept out of the heart of it, even though she tried to get closer. Her mum was kept out too. A lot of people were. Now, more than ever, even more than under her dad, there was the firm and there was whatever made it work, and between those things there were locked doors and Rob taking himself off, away from any of the lieutenants Lisa knew.

Three months before her birthday, she made contact with the Crown Prosecution Service in Bethnal Green. In the weeks leading up to her party, she put several large packages in the post. On the night before her birthday, she kissed her mum goodnight, then she went to the cupboard under the stairs. The knife that Dad had supposedly used to stab himself in the ribs had been returned to the family with the rest of the evidence, years ago. Rob had actually kept it, put it back in the toolkit it had come from. That was typical of him. Lisa had made sure, every week since, that she knew where it was. It was clean, free of incrimination, but she wanted it. She put it in her pocket.

She left the house at midnight, a legal adult now, carrying only a small suitcase and a wad of cash, the loss of which could never be reported to the police.

Her lawyer got in touch with the Toshack family at ten the next morning, before, as it turned out, anyone had even realized she was gone. He indicated that all communication in future would be solely between him and the family. He also told them that Lisa intended to change her name.

She made sure she could not be found. She knew exactly what that would take, and how far the Toshack soldiers would go. Then she thought of what had happened in her room that night, and went many steps beyond. She chose the name Ross, which she’d seen on the side of a refrigerated lorry lying overturned in a ditch. Lisa Ross subsequently worked in a supermarket in Durham, where she was happy and helpful. She was promoted twice. She studied sociology of crime, sports science and criminology part-time at college. She’d been meaning to become a police officer, but the more she read, the more she realized how difficult it would be, if she did so, to carry out what she needed to do.

She walked into a police recruitment van at the careers fair, talked for ten minutes about what her ambitions were, and in response they suggested exactly what she’d already started training herself for. She therefore applied, and was asked to attend an interview a few weeks later and, on the same day, to make a presentation, with half an hour’s preparation, about an organizational system she was familiar with.

Dressed properly and efficiently, she stood up in front of the panel, and began her presentation with a chart she’d drawn from memory during that half-hour. ‘This,’ she said, ‘shows the flow of money within the Toshack crime family.’

The exclamations of astonishment from the panel didn’t manage to make her smile, though she’d thought they might.

The big guys didn’t express an interest in her at first, not even an awareness. She was told many times that she had to do what anyone else would do, that her heritage actually made it harder for her. She agreed, she nodded, she knew, but she didn’t waver. She went through psychometric testing and, to her surprise, everyone seemed to think she was sane. She didn’t mention anything which would convince them otherwise.

She took the three-week basic training course, learning about the intelligence cycle, the national intelligence model, handling five by fives and assigning codes. She was told she was lucky the training centre had moved up north, since she’d thus missed a particular grim building in Putney. She hadn’t mentioned that, if the course had been located there, she wouldn’t have gone. At the same time, she started studying for her criminology degree in the evenings.

Her first assignment as an intelligence analyst was in Bishop Auckland. She watched the patterns of small-scale drug sales, learned how to use I2 link charts to get to know who knew who, where they met, where the money went. She learned how the best intelligence was predictive intelligence, and that it only became intel once an analyst had processed it. How only the phone call logs of criminal organizations formed a closed circuit, without any random calls made to 118 or pizza delivery or girlfriends.

Patterns like that started saying things to her. It was like discerning the hidden contours in a map. She loved it so much, it was nearly enough in itself.

But it wasn’t.

Her boss was a senior analyst called Andrea Stretfield, a ferociously calm lady in her sixties, the last, she said, of some previous generation who possessed wisdom that had since been lost. ‘Don’t just crunch the numbers,’ she advised. ‘Don’t ever be afraid of the responsibility of offering an opinion. There is an art to report-writing, young lady, and it’s not about cutting and pasting. This is how we find the naughty men, by applying the craft.’ At the time, Ross had wondered if this was genuine wisdom, or just the past attempting to claim that it had been better, that the new boys and girls were naive fools. Andrea seemed so sure of everything, but was obviously now a bit out of touch. Gradually, though, Ross came to see how she could pick and choose from the tension between past and present, that having the old guard assert themselves let her take the best from what they knew and then she could apply it to going forward.

She’d imagined that that phone call from her lawyer, a few years ago, would have caused the gravity to shift in Bermondsey, made the drugs and the prostitutes and the gambling and the chop shops vanish. For a while, at least. Maybe for a year. That only then would they start to poke their heads out again, and finally not be able to resist continuing as usual. But, during her time up north, she learned that nothing of the kind had actually happened, and that Toshack had continued business as usual.

That had been a bad night. That night she had again heavy objects up against the door of the bedroom of her flat — and then taken them away again because of how doing that had scared her.

But again she’d thought of her dad, and had kept going.

She had waited, learning her skills in operations that were nothing to do with her. She learned devil’s advocacy, brainstorming and analysis of competing hypotheses. She went on a course with the army Intelligence Corps, and loved what she saw of that way of life. Some part of her wanted to be a real soldier, not in the way that Toshack used the word. She made the rank of higher analyst, which was supposed to put her on equal terms with a DI — though she’d never met a copper who saw it that way — and she started to get roped in by senior detectives on completely different operations, to help them with presentations when the money stuff got difficult. She got the reputation she was after: direct and straightforward and thorough.

And finally, finally, they came to see her.

A Met detective superintendent called Rebecca Lofthouse showed up at her nick. She looked as if she had no time for any bullshit from Ross, which was good, because Ross had none to give her. She spent a good long time looking at her before she even said a word. She toyed with her charm bracelet instead, then finally she seemed to decide. ‘Your uncle,’ she declared, ‘is a thoroughgoing bastard.’

‘Yes, ma’am,’ said Ross.

‘If you’re working undercover for him, it’s the deepest I’ve seen. And he doesn’t need it, not these days. So. . We’ve currently got nothing and you might give us something. There are also factors involved about which you may never hear. At any rate, I’ve decided to take you up on the generous offer which you haven’t yet made to us.’ It transpired that she had an operation in mind, down in the smoke, which would require Ross to be transferred, a request which had already been granted in principle. Lofthouse had already pulled a DI from SCD 7(2), the special projects team, to lead it, and Lambeth Operational Command Unit were letting them use a station that was a significant distance from the subjects, and would keep the op out of the organized crime mainstream, in case Toshack’s intelligence-gathering was all it was cracked up to be. Ross, with the possibility of name and face recognition, would even be kept out of that. They were going to play a long game, putting in some UCs using her knowledge. It was to be called Operation Goodfellow.

‘Have you got anything else to tell me?’ Lofthouse asked, at the end of the final briefing. ‘Anything you haven’t put on the record?’ She seemed genuinely interested, eager to hear, even. ‘Anything you. . couldn’t?’

Ross had thought about it for a moment. ‘No, ma’am,’ she said.