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Soho, London

Saturday, April 3, 1993: 19.00

The Coach and Horses in Soho felt like stepping into a faded 1970s Polaroid photo, all nicotine yellow and cancerous tan. Especially the cadaverous regulars. They were the worst kind of pissheads – arrogant drunks with an image of themselves as rakish intellectual mavericks. Beware the self-proclaimed ‘local character’, or anyone who works so hard to appear eccentric. The Coach was full of them – clinging to the bar and their own high opinions of themselves, an exclusive club validating each other’s kamikaze drinking habits and boorish wit.

I resented these Peter O’Toole wannabes in their tweed jackets and cravats, wafting their imported Gauloises cigarettes, affecting the louche deportment of drunken professors.

They seemed to be either overpaid voiceover artists (failed actors who’d peddle any product for money), overpaid columnists (failed writers who’d peddle any opinion for money) or people who ‘work in TV’ (whatever that meant).

Of course, Fintan loved it. The Coach plugged him into the glorious Fleet Street of yore, when charlatan hacks drank, whored and rabble-roused while occasionally bashing out award-winning nuggets of copy.

He arrived in customary style: inexcusably late, mac on, fag on, game face on. Buzzing with mischief.

The pint I’d bought him three rounds ago now looked like stale piss, but he downed two thirds in one go, sleeved his mouth and said: ‘I hope you’ve got plenty of paper cash with you.’

‘Why would I need paper cash?’

‘Because, last time I checked, G-strings don’t hold pound coins.’

I cringed. Taking me to a strip club felt akin to tying up a starving hound outside a butcher’s shop window. There was a very real chance I’d lick the glass and howl ravenously at the carcasses.

Of course, I came up with a more mundane objection. ‘And why would I want to tuck the best part of a week’s salary into the knickers of a girl who isn’t even interested in me.’

‘Because, my bold, intrepid, swordsman of truth and justice, you can find out all about Ms Elizabeth Little. Same again?’

He skipped to the bar, schoolgirl-giddy and beaming. Tonight he had a scoop rocketing through the printing presses and a series of juicy follow-ups baking in the oven. For once, he could relax. He returned with three pints – two for himself to catch up – and a chipped bowl of gnarly pork scratchings.

‘Come on, Fintan, don’t make me beg.’

‘Well, if begging’s your thing, lover boy, I’m sure we can find a lady to cater for your wanton, unmanly needs at the Florentine Gardens hostess and erotic dance club, just off Regent’s Street. Of course, we’re going there purely on business, you understand?’

‘How did you find out she worked there?’

‘She filed a tax return. Invoices, the lot. Though I suspect she declared about a tenth of what she actually earned blowing fat Arabs and the like, certainly judging by her flashy pad.’

‘What, so hookers are paying tax now?’

‘Well, Donal, funnily enough she didn’t describe herself as a hooker on her tax return. Jesus, can you imagine? Annual turnover: 300 men …’

‘Current assets: pert tits and arse.’

‘Fixed assets: horny old men. No, as far as the taxman’s concerned, Elizabeth Little is a professional dancer who invoiced the Florentine for 24k in the last tax year.’

‘I still don’t understand why someone in the black economy would declare themselves to the taxman.’

‘Well, they got Al Capone for tax evasion.’

‘What?’

‘Maybe the owner of the Florentine wants to make sure it’s legit, at least on paper. Think about it, Donal, it’s the perfect business for laundering money. It’s all cash, isn’t it? No man’s going to risk having a payment to a glorified whore house on his credit card bill. And because it’s officially legit, the owner can rinse his dirty money through the club’s accounts.’

‘And that owner is?’

Fintan didn’t speak for a moment. Behind me, the ancient cash register dinged and spat out its clunking metal drawer. A knot of people to my right laughed way too hard.

Fintan’s words were as dry as chalk, as if they’d sucked all the moisture from the air.

‘The club is owned by Jimmy Reilly.’

It felt strange hearing the name spoken aloud. Hardened gangsters melted at the mere mention of it, refusing to talk about him even in hushed or reverential terms. Newspapers, including Fintan’s, refrained from printing his name for fear of reprisals.

Unlike cartoon 1960s villains the Krays, Reilly eschewed fame and limelight. But amongst criminals, police and the media, his reputation for creative violence – which he preferred to carry out personally – made him an almost mythical bogeyman figure.

I learned all about him a few months’ back when our Cold Case Unit had been struggling to cope with a mounting number of unsolved gangland hits. DS Barrett hauled in Scotland Yard Intelligence to supply us with a ‘who’s who’ of London’s criminal underworld. Reilly won that particular beauty pageant hands down.

They described him as one of a new breed of ruthless and sophisticated ‘godfathers’ who’d completely overhauled the way criminal gangs worked – so that bringing bosses like him to justice proved all but impossible. They listed on a whiteboard the differences between this ‘new wave’ of crime lords and the ‘pavement-crossing, sawn-off shotgun merchants’ of yore. Some stuck in my mind.

 * They acquire legitimate businesses and use them as a front for their illegal activities.

 * They employ top accountants, lawyers, barristers, financial advisers to make this happen.

 * They are willing to deal with any group globally, including terror organisations.

 * They are surveillance aware, tech savvy and shun fame. Photographs of these people do not exist in the public domain.

 * They are willing to kill or punish people personally rather than employ others to do their dirty work, to eliminate the risk of blackmail or betrayal.

Officially, Reilly made his money in security, recycled metal and waste management – the classic gangster’s holy trinity of Slap, Scrap and Crap. But as the Scotland Yard spooks explained, his rise from nowhere came about through the far more dubious trio of gold, protection rackets and E.

The youngest of 12 kids, he’d been brought up on London’s meanest streets in Canning Town – an irredeemably drab and pitiless slum near the Royal Docks on the river Thames. The East End of his childhood pre-dated Canary Wharf, City Airport, Docklands Light Rail and fancy apartment blocks, performing instead as London’s coke-caked arsehole, the watery outlet for miles of ironworks, chemical factories and filthy gasworks.

By the time Reilly left school in 1975, aged 15, any docks that hadn’t been shut down were closing. Rampant unemployment led to a thriving black market and the emergence of local gangs like the Snipers and the Inter-City Firm (ICF), soccer hooligans who’d attached themselves to local club West Ham United, aka the Hammers.

Like five of his brothers before him, he was recruited by the Snipers and got involved in lorry hijacks, armed robbery, protection rackets and muscle for established local criminals.

By 21, he reputedly headed the Snipers and ran his operations out of the Duke of York pub on Freemason’s Road, at the edge of Canning Town. He’d terrorised the landlady into giving over the lease even though her name was still above the door.

That same year, 1981, after a shooting at an illegal drinking den in Homerton, detectives raided the Reilly family scaffolding business and seized stolen goods, a sawn-off shotgun and ammunition. Reilly was convicted of handling stolen goods but escaped prison, receiving a nine-month suspended sentence – his only conviction.

This brush with justice spurred Reilly to identify less risky, more profitable criminal enterprises in which he didn’t have to get his hands dirty. He muscled in on local massage parlours, taking a cut of the profits. He invested in an amphetamine sulphate factory ran by major league East End criminals with distribution networks all over the country. He set up a security firm supplying bouncers to clubs and pubs, employing his old pals from the ICF and the Snipers. This proved an ingenious ruse as he could ‘charge’ drug dealers to work inside, barring anyone who refused to pay the going rate.

Then, in November 1983, a robbery near Heathrow airport set Reilly and his ‘new wave’ criminal contemporaries on a whole new trajectory. The five-man gang who pulled off the ‘Brink’s Mat robbery’ expected to get away with £3 million in cash. Instead, their overloaded getaway blue Transit van trundled up the A4 weighed down with 6,800 bars of gold in 76 cardboard boxes, a three-tonne booty worth £26 million.

This jackpot altered the British criminal landscape forever.

Police nabbed the robbers and put tabs on any major criminals with the clout/contacts to move/melt such a large amount of precious metal. So the major criminals divided the gold and delegated the moving/melting to trusted fledgling gangsters or specialists on the rise. Men like John ‘Goldfinger’ Palmer, Kenneth Noye, the Evans brothers from Islington and to James Declan Reilly from Canning Town.

These criminals became masters in a new art – laundering or cleaning dirty money so that it couldn’t be traced back to criminal activity. Reilly hired dodgy expertise to rinse his filthy lucre through property, clubs, bars, restaurants and a waste recycling plant. He shifted yet more into untraceable offshore accounts.

By the late 1980s, he’d become something of a criminal venture capitalist, investing in the importation of ecstasy from Holland while his ‘muscle’ forcibly took over nightclubs where it could be distributed. He also set up chemical companies to develop ‘designer drugs’, substances that could replicate the effects of E and cocaine while avoiding the illegal classification.

But he still wasn’t afraid to get his hands dirty, especially when it came to dealing with people who crossed him.

Reilly’s flair for innovative savagery underpinned his fearsome reputation.

First, they quoted a statement made by criminal Paul Clarke who’d borrowed a car from a dealership controlled by Reilly in Barking – only to have the vehicle seized by creditors. When Clarke returned to the showroom and broke the news, Reilly explained how he ‘couldn’t be seen to let something like this go’ and produced a four-inch knife. Clarke thought he was about to be stabbed. Instead Reilly pushed the knife up through Clarke’s chin then pulled it all the way to his left ear. Clarke described ‘this terrible scraping noise’ and ‘feeling as though the skin on my face was flapping’. He made the statement after receiving 45 stitches and life-saving treatment at the local accident and emergency ward, then promptly withdrew it the next day.

Just before Christmas, Reilly carried out a ruthless double hit on a couple in Epping Forest, Essex. Terry Golden, 39, and his girlfriend Marlene Anderson, 28, were found slumped in the front seat of a black F-reg Mercedes on an isolated forest track, blasted to death by a sawn-off shotgun. Police could prove that Golden, an accountant, had been managing the accounts of a string of clubs and pubs connected to Reilly. But they couldn’t prove much else.

Golden had been siphoning off funds when Reilly invited him to an emergency meeting at the Good Intent pub in Upshire. Golden brought Marlene along, believing this would protect him from any extreme censure, at least for now.

Reilly waited for the couple in the pub car park, climbed into the back seat and directed them to the spot on a lover’s lane where they were later found riddled with lead. Apparently, Golden had protested: ‘You can’t shoot me in front of my girlfriend.’ So Reilly shot her first and said, ‘Well, you’re not going to die in front of her now.’

But the most infamous example of his pitiless streak took place three years ago when he learned that an old associate, Bobby Atkins, had been a police informer.

Reilly instructed his son and daughter, aged 11 and 15, to invite Bobby’s unwitting nine-year-old girl Amy over for a party at their outdoor swimming pool. Later that sunny afternoon, medics found Amy on the second step down to the wading pool, arse clamped to an uncovered suction drain so powerful that it had already caused a two-inch full rectal tear and drawn out a foot-long section of small intestine. Trans-anal intestinal evisceration is the technical term. Loss of blood caused her to go into hypovolemic shock. Paramedics performed a blood transfusion at the scene.

Over the following weeks, she underwent small bowel, liver and pancreas transplants. Her body rejected one of these imposters and she died.

When questioned by police, Jimmy blamed the ‘accident’ on a Portugese pool attendant who’d removed the drain cover to carry out general maintenance and had failed to replace it. Officers didn’t get a chance to quiz 19-year-old Christiano before he vanished. Most suspected he ended up at Jimmy’s waste recycling plant in Dagenham, incinerated with the rest of his rubbish.

Reilly topped it with a typically twisted touch. He had the drain cover turned into a wreath and delivered to Amy’s funeral.

‘He has an especially psychotic hatred for two types of people,’ one of the spooks had explained, ‘grasses and sex offenders, and has no qualms about killing anyone he even suspects of being either.’

Fintan returned with pints and whiskey chasers. I downed my Jameson in one.

‘So let me get this straight,’ I said, still reeling, ‘we’re going to a strip joint owned by London’s most notorious gangland psychopath to ask questions about a girl he’s probably just whacked.’

‘Jesus, don’t make it sound so formal.’ Fintan laughed, a little nervously, gnashing away on his scratchings. ‘We’re just a couple of punters asking after our favourite dancer. You never know what one of the girls might let slip, especially after a few cheap champagnes. I’ve looked at every facet of Liz’s life today. Her death has to be connected to that club.’

‘But what if one of the girls cottons on and tells Jimmy’s apes? Jesus, imagine what they’d do to a prying cop?’

‘Knowing Jimmy, he’d put you on the payroll with all the others. Look, the girls don’t even know she’s dead yet, do they? Why would they find it suspicious? But this is our only window. Once our first edition drops then everything changes. There’ll be journos swarming all over the story. But it isn’t even news yet …’

‘Journos swarming all over a dead hooker? Why will Liz’s murder be such a big deal?’

‘Let’s just say I’ve uncovered a few juicy angles …’

‘Don’t tell me, you managed to get a clip of her from The Bill?’

He nodded.

‘Much of a role?’

‘Blink and you’d miss it. Well, that would be my advice anyway.’

‘Not very convincing?’

‘Let me put it this way, Donal, you won’t see more wood in the Florentine tonight. But this makes her a celeb, so that makes the story upmarket sleaze and the advertisers get a real stiffie over that, not to mention our porn-mag reading, woman-hating demographic. The Daily Mail will go crazy for it Monday, their lower-middle class readership loves a good hate. This one could run and run.’

As Fintan devoured his third pint, my eyes seized upon the last few pork scratchings in the bottom of the bowl. I’d never noticed before how these leathery, wrinkled circular snacks look like mummified arseholes. I couldn’t stop myself imagining my insides being sucked through one of them and shuddered.

‘Jesus, Fint, I don’t know. It feels like we’re walking right into trouble. What if we’re rumbled …’

‘Oh, for Christ’s sake Donal, you’ve been banging on at me for months about having no excitement in your life and not being “a proper detective”. I’m telling you now, this is going to be a massive case. It might be the best chance the cops ever have of taking down a major league villain like Reilly. You didn’t choose this job to act like a fucking politician. You need to take risks. One break tonight – a lead, a potential informant – and you’re in the box seat, indispensable to the murder squad. They’ll be practically begging you to join.’

He scooped up the last scratchings, shovelled them into his mouth and crunched: ‘I mean really, what have you got to lose?’