London Falling (8 page)

‘Sam Booney,’ interjected Quill, ‘out of Kensal Rise, shot in the knee in the course of his duties. Could burst an apple with his hand, goes the story.’

‘—knew what the tag meant,’ she continued. ‘It’s a legend that was purely associated with West Ham Football Club, before it became a more general threat.’

‘Is this,’ asked Sefton, ‘that same urban myth about anyone who scores a hat-trick against West Ham dying?’

Quill saw Costain glance sidelong at the other UC. ‘Didn’t think you’d be into football.’

Sefton gave him a dangerous look, but his tone remained neutral. ‘Why?’

Costain just shook his head, with a smile on his lips.

‘Right,’ said Ross, ‘Toshack always was a West Ham fan. That myth of dying after scoring a hat-trick was the myth that he, or rather someone working for him, was using to try to scare these footballers into cooperating with him. This tag was also associated with some of those deaths.’

‘There really were some deaths,’ nodded Sefton.

‘Who do you support?’ asked Costain.

‘Chelsea,’ said Sefton, again in that oh-so-reasonable tone.

‘I sometimes get . . . feelings about sidelines, so I do stuff like this on my own time,’ Ross persisted. ‘Last night, I ran the numbers. Footballers who score hat-tricks against West Ham do
not
always die in suspicious circumstances, but—’

She clicked to the next image, which showed a series of graphs.

‘—they
often
do. More often, statistically, than they should. The shape of the graph here, the extent that it deviates from the norm, is very close to what you get if you look back through records of previously unlinked deaths while looking for serial-killer traits after it’s been proved there has been a serial killer operating.’

‘Bloody hell,’ murmured Quill, aware of Sefton and Costain also leaning forward.

‘So,’ Costain pointed to the image, ‘that’s saying that there’s probably a genuine effect? That someone
was
killing players that scored hat-tricks against West Ham?’

‘Thanks for providing subtitles,’ said Quill.

‘Yeah,’ confirmed Ross, ‘and if we match players who died after having scored hat-tricks against West Ham with people who have had the spiral tag show up in their garden . . .’

Two circles came together on the screen, one representing the unfortunate scorers, and one for the people with the tag appearing in their garden, and a number whirled in the space where they intersected. It settled at 78%.

‘
Fuck
,’ chorused all three members of Ross’ audience, simultaneously.

‘So,’ said Quill, when he’d got his breath back. ‘That means a seventy-eight per cent success rate on the part of a very specific serial killer. Which would just be a brilliant new cold-case lead . . .’

‘Apart from the fact that the tag showed up when Toshack died, too. Presumably a statement on the killer’s part, rather than a warning, this time. And, erm . . . thanks,’ she looked awkwardly away, ‘but there’s more. Most, though not all, of these murders were committed with what was assumed at the time to have been poison. Investigators were obviously a lot more comfortable with the idea of unknown toxins back in the day. Also – and this is the big one – the data that doesn’t overlap here is uneven. One of those circles on that diagram contains more items than the other. Eighteen per cent of the other cases are hat-trick scorers, over the years, who probably died of natural causes. The four per cent in the other circle represent people who got the tag planted in their gardens, but hadn’t scored hat-tricks against West Ham. Indeed, none of those people is a footballer. They’re a range of organized crime network bosses, bankers and made men – many of them with connections to Toshack. I’ve prepared a list. And how many of those also died?’

She clicked on to another image. This time, the two circles slid together and the numbers gradually spun . . . to reach 100%.

Quill couldn’t help it, he started to applaud. To his delight, Costain and Sefton joined in. Ross nodded, looked away again, unable to deal with this reaction. ‘Shut up,’ she said, finally. ‘Let me finish. What we see here, then, is strongly indicative of Toshack hiring a serial killer who specialized in football-related poisonings, using a still unknown delivery system, a killer who also presumably has a love for West Ham—’

‘You could see how that would mess you up,’ said Quill.

‘—who, after Toshack abandoned his plans for fixing matches, was kept on, and remained an enforcer, killing on Toshack’s orders. The number of deaths slows down across the decade, perhaps as the reputation of Toshack by itself starts to do the job without the threat having to be carried through. And when Toshack is killed, subject to what we’re going to see on the CCTV footage to establish a time frame, that killer – or someone who knows of them – plants their usual marker near the scene of the crime.’

‘I didn’t see any of this,’ said Costain. ‘No, I mean, I do believe it, this really is the first sight we’ve had of one of Toshack’s freelancers, but this was kept from his ordinary soldiers.’

Quill got to his feet. ‘Lisa, can you take us back to that first Venn diagram?’ She did so. ‘Ta.’ He went to the wall and used the shadow of his hand to point at the intersection between the two circles. ‘That’s a
person
there on that screen. That’s bloody fantastic police work, that is.’

Ross was shaking her head, as if she didn’t deserve all this praise. ‘But the trouble is,’ she said, ‘apart from the non-footballers, the people on that list . . .’

‘What?’

‘The data goes . . . back a long way,’ she said. ‘To when West Ham first played under that name, in 1900.’

Quill paused only for a moment. ‘Then it’s a gang tradition. We’ve got an angle now – so let’s not look it in the mouth.’

SIX

When it was examined, the soil from the spiral was indeed revealed as being different to that of the Hill’s gardens, and the same in consistency as any that had been used for the other spiral tags, similar to soils from areas along the river Thames, and extending north of it around underground rivers. Weirdly, it seemed to have been specially conveyed to the site. The CCTV tape, when it finally arrived, had to be taken back into Gipsy Hill so that Quill could find a machine to play it on, but Quill managed to get an IT spod to copy it to a disc that the ancient PC in the Portakabin could then read.

The four of them stood round the monitor and watched. ‘Oh,’ said Ross, ‘so that delay in getting us the footage wasn’t just the Goodfellow team sulking.’

On what the time code confirmed was the morning of New Year’s Day, two and a half minutes before Toshack’s death, the video showed the pile of soil not to be there one second . . . and to be there the next. Ross got the IT staff on the line, and they sounded as if they’d been expecting her call. With their help, she narrowed it down to two individual frames. ‘No soil . . . then soil. It just appeared. And the time code hasn’t been messed with. To do this so seamlessly would need serious expertise.’

‘Then we’re dealing with someone who’s got it,’ said Quill. ‘It’s Occam’s thingamabob, innit?’

Sefton spent a fun afternoon that Saturday in the Boleyn pub on the corner of Green Street, close to the West Ham ground. It wasn’t quite UC work – all he was pretending to be was a West Ham fan – but it was close enough for him to feel more comfortable than he had been lately. It got him away from Costain and that bloody Portakabin, where Sefton found himself swallowing more and more frustration every day. The pub contained a vast display of Irons memorabilia, and a reputation for being peaceful, but committed enough to ask away fans to refrain from coming in on match days. Ideal.

‘The curse?’ said a bloke with the castle and crossed hammers tattooed on his neck. ‘Sometimes I think that’s all we’ve got left to make the opposition fear us.’

‘That’s why Ryan Scotley put two in against us – this is twenty years back – and then got himself taken off the field,’ agreed his mate. Sefton bought a few pints and heard lots of names that tallied with his mental list of those Ross had already discovered. The most recent, a decade ago, right at the start of Rob Toshack’s reign, was a Liverpool player called Matt Howarth.

‘It’s a long time for them to have remembered this stuff,’ he said, on his return to the Portakabin, ‘but that means it was always a big deal. There’s a few anecdotes worth checking out, and a specific threat of a surreal nature directed at Howarth by a West Ham season-ticket holder. The bloke who told me remembers it ’cos it was on the same day that Howarth died.’

‘Who made this threat?’ asked Quill.

‘She’s commemorated in the following terrace chant.’ He cleared his throat, then spread his hands theatrically. ‘We went one up for Mor-a! She’s going to shag the scor-er! Come on you Irons, come on you Irons!’

He waited for the applause. None was forthcoming.

‘Her name’s Mora Losley,’ he said. ‘Bit of a terrace legend.’

‘Description?’ said Ross, already scribbling in one of her notebooks.

‘Little old lady . . . but nobody agrees on the details.’

‘How long ago was she a season-ticket holder?’

‘She’s still attending.’

Ross ran the name ‘Mora Losley’ – as well as all the others – through CRIMINT, the Police National Computer, the Police National Database and the Met’s own systems. She found that the same name, Mora Losley, kept popping up regarding quite a few formal warnings but nothing beyond that: no arrests. This was what made something inside Ross relax, that feeling of uncovering something hidden, and of showing it to the world. It was all that could make her feel okay these days. It was as if she was feeling a message forming out of noise.

‘She’s got a history of abusive behaviour,’ she told Quill, ‘a lot of complaints against her by fellow fans. But what I’m getting from the West Ham fan chatter online is that, as she’s a terrace icon, a lot of them are willing to forgive her anything.’

‘That’s the feeling I got from the lads,’ agreed Sefton. ‘She’s everyone’s barmy auntie.’

Costain looked uneasy. ‘Who heaves the soil about, then? Maybe she’s got some big nephews?’

Ross was surprised to hear Costain express a useful thought. ‘Maybe she’s got a son, some relatives, some followers. She’s been a West Ham season-ticket holder since 1955.’ Ross handed Quill the ticket records and the only image she had discovered: a copy of a passport photo, the latest of those submitted every year to get the season ticket renewed. A little old lady who indeed appeared bland enough to be described in many different ways. Ross had found herself looking back to it several times, trying to fix the non-existent details in her mind and failing.

Quill pinned the photo to the Ops Board that was slowly developing. ‘List of complaints is interesting,’ he said. ‘Abuse of fellow fans, a lot of her upsetting children. And even small instances of violence . . .’

‘Against
animals
,’ said Ross. ‘She kicks dogs. That’s a serial-killer marker.’

‘Moves around a bit, too,’ said Quill. ‘You need an address for the season ticket, and those tally with the ones given at her formal warnings. Loads of different places in the Wembley and Neasden area.’

‘Where?’ said Costain. He got to his feet and took the sheet of paper from Quill. Then a smile spread all over his face. ‘I know these houses,’ he said. ‘In fact, I’ve been to a lot of them.’

Sefton looked over his shoulder, and started to laugh.

‘These,’ said Costain, ‘are the houses Toshack went to search on New Year’s Eve! All except this one in Willesden. That could be the one he went to on his own, before he called us out. Toshack was looking for Mora Losley!’

Quill leaped up, and Ross thought he was about to hug her but, seeing the look on her face, he awkwardly turned it into a high-five that became a hearty handshake. Then he grabbed his phone. ‘That,’ he said, ‘is enough to merit a search warrant!’

Costain looked around him, as he waited in the unmarked car. The house Toshack had visited on his own had turned out to be situated on a suburban T-junction, with an Irish pub at one end and a West Indian pub at the other, in a row of houses running along a curved street near the park. At lunchtime, in winter sunshine, Quill’s tiny team had parked just around the corner from it, where they could hear the sounds of the school playing field. The unmarked van sat at a decent interval along the curve of the road itself. At Quill’s request, approved through Lofthouse’s office, personnel from the local nick had been folded into an operation that was registered as still being called ‘name to follow’.

That indicated a certain lack of confidence, as if Quill still thought this might be about something other than the obvious. Like catching out Costain? Costain himself didn’t really think this could still be about that situation in reverse. This wasn’t about Lofthouse suspecting Quill. He’d been wondering if she would pop up again, reassure him again, give him something else to go on as to why she wanted him involved in this. There was one particular thing which could still have him – have him badly. It was what he’d thought of as his exit strategy. But here he was, hanging on, even getting interested in how the pieces were coming together.

Costain had grown up in Willesden, and it hadn’t bloody changed much. There were a lot of For Sale signs, a lot of boarded-up shopfronts, chain stores that now hid behind sheets of wood instead of bullet-damaged windows. All these neat little houses with individual gardens were from when this had been a posh suburb, decades before he was born. They’d also driven past one of those marooned churches, with a big sunny graveyard, from when this had been a separate village. At one point there had actually been pilgrimages that led people here. Costain remembered deciphering the shopping street at the end of this very road when he’d first walked along it as a copper, his new training considered sufficiently in place. It included honest greengrocer with West Indian produce outside, paying protection; a furtive newsagent with something that looked like a pillbox on his roof . . . That remained there from when that same corner shop had been the entrance hall to an art-deco club where the Charleston was played, back when it took an adventurous train ride to get you to this fashionable suburb. There had been kids on mountain bikes riding up to catch the baggies of coke as they were thrown from that vantage point above. The only difference now would be that they’d ride scooters, and the set of guys chucking the bags would have changed about twenty times in the meantime. Back then he’d actually wondered if there was anything he could do there on his own, and reported this activity when he got back to his nick. There had been posters up for black comedy nights, representing traces of community. There had been black grannies who kept those sociable gardens nice, and owned their own houses. A few doorsteps where people sat outside in the evening. There had been life in the ruins then, green shoots that were signs that the place might resist the creeping gentrification of nearby Hampstead.