He smiled from behind his near-empty pint glass, pleased that he’d riled Murk. It was a small victory, but it still felt good. He had an urge then to tell him to fuck off. To tell him that he could go and peddle his nasty little tales to some other mug, that he didn’t want anything to do with it. He thought it might even be quite a hoot to print up some posters of Murk with that smug fucking grin of his, and plaster them all over Barnet with the message in bold black letters that here was a grass who made money out of putting fellow scumbags behind bars. Then maybe someone would end up wiping that smile off his face for ever.
But if there was one thing Stegs had learnt over the years, it was never to cut off your nose in order to spite the rest of your face, and already an idea was beginning to form itself in his mind. An idea for a nice little piece of payback. He’d always been good at improvising.
‘Tell him I’m interested,’ he said, ‘and let’s set up an initial meet. As soon as possible.’
Murk grinned, Stegs’s alleged defamation of his character forgotten in the desire to make a bit of cash. ‘That won’t be hard. He’s flying in tomorrow.’
‘Good. Like I say, as soon as possible.’
Murk licked his lips. ‘And, er. . how much are we talking for this? Gonna be a nice little collar, innit? Nasty Class A peddler, ex-porn star to boot, foreign. That’d look sweet on your record, wouldn’t it?’
He spoke the words coaxingly, like a lustful adult to a child, and another truly unpleasant smile spread like gangrene across his face. The love of money. It really is the root of evil. And all for five hundred-odd quid, which would be the maximum he’d get for a collar like this, courtesy of the taxpayer. Not that, sadly for him, he was going to be seeing any of it. The germ of Stegs’s idea was growing fast. It had potential, real potential. And best of all, it didn’t involve Murk.
‘You’ll be nicely reimbursed, Trevor, should it end in a result and conviction. As befits a grass of your quality.’ Like fuck you will. ‘Fancy another pint?’
15
There’s a story about Nicholas Tyndall that’s long been doing the rounds. For a while a couple of years back he was running a crack den out of a semi-detached house in Stepney which belonged to a retired panel beater of West Indian descent. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say allegedly, because Tyndall always denied that he had anything to do with that particular house.
The retired panel beater’s name was Tony Lackman, and he was in his early sixties. He had no criminal record, had lived a pretty blameless life, and lived alone, having been married and divorced many years earlier. There were no children. Unfortunately for Mr Lackman, the fact that he was the sole occupant of his property and without close family made him an ideal victim for what’s becoming a fast-growing problem in London: the forced colonization of an individual’s home by a crack gang who then use it as a front for their business. It happens a lot more than people think, but because there’s usually very little publicity (the victims, often elderly, tend to comply under threat of violence), people don’t tend to hear about it. Lackman, however, was different. He wasn’t prepared to give up his home that easily and, though understandably terrified of his unwanted guests, committed the cardinal sin of complaining to the police. A few days later a team of armed officers raided the property, made several arrests and recovered a small quantity of crack cocaine. One of those arrested was a close associate of Nicholas Tyndall, but because he hadn’t been in the same room as the drugs, had later tested negative for being under their influence and had denied all knowledge of them (claiming he’d been round there for a party), he’d been released without charge.
Two days later the dealers were back, and everything carried on like it had done before, only this time Lackman received a severe beating for his troubles and was forced to retreat to his bedroom on a permanent basis while the dealers lorded over the rest.
Finally, Lackman could take no more and complained to the police again. The same story then played out. A few days later armed officers raided the place (although this time they were delayed by a series of deadbolts screwed into the front and back doors, giving the dealers time to get rid of some of the contraband) and further arrests were made. This time, Tyndall’s associate wasn’t in the house, having decided that he would let a guy below him run things there. That guy, way down the criminal food chain, was the only one to face charges relating to the crack cocaine found, and because the quantities recovered were so small he escaped with a fine and a suspended sentence.
Tony Lackman wasn’t so lucky. Three weeks later his naked body was found on wasteground a few hundred yards from his home. His hands and feet were tied and he’d been shot in the back of the head. The police, in an effort to gain public co-operation, stated that he’d been tortured before his death. What was never made public, however, was the fact that he’d also been castrated and that his eyes had been gouged out.
It had been a warning from Nicholas Tyndall to the whole community: do not defy me. And it had worked as well. Nobody was ever convicted of the crime, even though the names of the killers were widely known, and Tyndall continued to control a number of crackhouses in the area (albeit in a hands-off capacity) until he moved on to bigger, more lucrative crimes, safe in the knowledge that his reputation for violence had been suitably enhanced and that no-one would ever be daft enough to testify against him.
I don’t like men like Nicholas Tyndall. Their very existence offends me, and one of the reasons I’m a copper is so that I can do my bit to bring them down.
But for the moment, Tyndall remained scot-free, wealthy and powerful, living in a palatial semi-detached villa on a quiet, leafy Islington avenue just off the Canonbury Road, no more than half a mile from where Slim Robbie O’Brien had been murdered. It had originally been three spacious flats, but when Tyndall moved in he’d decided that he wanted a bit more privacy and had made it known in no uncertain terms to the owners of the other two apartments that it was about time they moved, in the process selling their properties to him. The young couple living on the ground floor did exactly that; the Asian family in the basement needed a bit more persuading, but after having a brick thrown through their window, followed seconds later by the freshly severed head of somebody else’s pet labrador, they’d come to the conclusion that discretion was the better part of valour and had sold at a heavily discounted price.
The problem these days is that gangsters, whether they be small-time drug dealers with guns and attitude or wannabe urban godfathers like Nicholas Tyndall, have no qualms about using serious violence and the threat of it to get what they want, because they know that neither the judicial system nor the police service have the wherewithal or the powers to protect those who speak out against them. It’s something the Met and the government are supposedly trying to address, but sometimes, when you’re operating at the coalface, it’s difficult to get too optimistic. In the meantime, the advantage lies with the bad guys, and they didn’t come much badder than Tyndall.
I was a little nervous about going to see him, and I got the impression Tina was too, although she wasn’t the sort to admit as much. Although neither of us had met him before, we’d heard from reliable sources that he was canny enough not to pick fights with the Law. It’s a lot harder (although not impossible) to intimidate police officers, so I felt reasonably confident that we weren’t walking straight into the lion’s mouth. However, with someone who can order the castration and blinding of an innocent householder for the sin of wanting to be left in peace, you can never be too sure.
It was 11.20 a.m. and cloudy when we walked up the steps to the imposing front door of Tyndall’s house and banged on the knocker. Two separate CCTV cameras stared down on us from either side of the entrance portal and there were steel joins on the door’s hinges that looked like they’d been added recently to reinforce it from attack. There were also bars on all the ground-floor and basement windows, which made me wonder what the neighbours must have thought — not that I could picture any of them complaining. A sign on the door said ‘No Salesmen or Beggars’ in big black writing.