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custody sergeant. Getting that part sorted might have been hellish had Quill not played snooker with said sergeant on a regular basis. Thank God they’d now moved on from Nagras, as a rule. Unless the current cuts meant they were now stuck with them again on a regular basis.
    Quill hoped they had something more to work with here than possession of firearms and a few class-A drugs found at Rob’s house. The gun should be enough to put Toshack away, but Quill wouldn’t bet on it, given the prisoner’s way with juries. There was nothing found so far that said that the house itself was an OCN drug-distribution centre. Neither was there anything that might let them get their hands on Toshack’s freelancers. The situation in the house had confirmed his suspicion of a certain desperation on Toshack’s part but, so far, nothing had fallen out as a result of that desperation. Quill had only the sketchiest picture of what had been going on from the uniforms that had arrested Costain upstairs. He wouldn’t know more until they extracted the pair of UCs and listened to that tape.
    There went Costain and Sefton now, both in handcuffs but apart: one yelling too theatrically and the other acting stoic. The corrupt egotist and the professional: the latter having seemingly called in the cavalry to save the former. Having watched those two go past, he made sure to watch all the others equally. Toshack came out last. As Quill made eye contact with him, the gang leader dropped his gaze to the ground. Quill perked up at that: maybe something was going to fall out of this after all.
    Quill waited until they were all brought inside, and then followed, heading towards the Ops Room. Uniforms coming off the night shift stopped to offer him congratulations as he passed. ‘Fucking Toshack! Kick arse!’
    Quill acknowledged the praise, then pushed his way through the double doors that led into the Ops Room. The Operation Goodfellow coppers who hadn’t been out in the field that morning applauded him too. He waved this attention aside, getting irritated with it now. Instead he looked at the room beyond them. For the last four years he’d been living with that familiar smell of soup and aftershave. The room was the usual mess: ancient desktop computers, their drives wheezing; family photos; cut-out headlines and dark copper jokes. A sink that was never cleaned because the first thing Quill had done when he’d got here was to lock out the cleaners, whether vetted or not. The wall was used as a screen for the PowerPoint projector, and had biro marks on it to indicate the picture size for best focus. The Operations Board, covered in Toshack photos and organizational diagrams, with ‘Goodfellow’ written across the top, now had a big black X taped over Rob Toshack’s face. Quill went and gazed at it, and felt distantly annoyed that they hadn’t left that privilege to him. But would he even have bothered to do it? The X still felt like more of a vague possibility than a fact. In the past, Toshack had got out of worse.
    Quill located Mark Salter, the DS who ran the room, who looked, deliberately, only appropriately happy. ‘Congratulations, Jimmy.’
    ‘Yeah, yeah. Tell Ben I want a blood test done on Toshack, and in case he’s flying over Moscow right now, I want half-hourly tests until he’s at a point where the Force medical examiner will agree he’s sober again. We’ll strike while the iron is hot, and won’t wait for the analyst’s report on the tape. Though, knowing her, she’ll get it done in time. I want the brief in now , so call their night desk, get them to wake someone up. And make sure said brief gets a cup of tea and a biscuit. I want every single detail of this,’ he raised his voice so the room shut up and paid attention, ‘done by the book, so at the very least we once again get that king of shit hauled into a courtroom for something .’
    ‘Yes, Jimmy,’ responded the room in a mix of tired voices.
    He gave a nod back