London Falling (8 page)

‘’Course you did: you knowing which side your bread is buttered. But Lofthouse said no, didn’t she?’

‘Harry—’

‘No no, it’s not your fault. But, I tell you what: you have not seen the depth of ill feeling here.’ He leaned closer and locked that sleepless gaze of his on Quill. ‘You
have no idea.’

Costain and Sefton had arrived by the time he got back to the Portakabin, and had obviously been told by Ross that something was finally happening. She looked up from a huge
pile of what looked like school exercise books that she’d brought in. ‘Okay,’ she said, ‘where can I display some images?’

Quill had to use a biro to mark a new square of best focus on the wall.

‘The spiral tag.’ Ross’ first image, from a PC projector she’d brought in herself, was a photo of the design that had been etched in the soil, the real thing now having
been covered in plastic and fenced off – if Quill’s orders had been complied with. ‘A pile of soil, bit wet for London average, in a spiral pattern that seems to have been formed
with some sort of vacuum tool. Nobody’s ever come up with any more than that, concerning its formation. One of the first things that Rob Toshack got into, when he took over the family firm,
was fixing football matches. He needed to make and launder cash very quickly, and a series of big certs would have done that for him.’

She clicked the mouse and the next image appeared: a picture of another such symbol, this one slightly different. ‘The reason we know about this is because this approach immediately
clashed with how clean football had become at the time. Players didn’t automatically cave in when threatened, so a number of them started to have the spiral tag appear in their gardens. Some
of their managers, and a DI called Sam Booney—’

‘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.’

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’.