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Hah—I don’t know why I bother making plans, I really don’t.
Whatever the initial plans had been, it had been buried under stacks of box files, papers, copies of Forbes, The Economist and other glossy financial porn mags.
Money laundering classically has three stages called placement, layering and integration. Traditional crime—drug smuggling, protection rackets, illegal gambling—generates wodges of cash. If a known face starts shelling out readies for the good things in life, people get suspicious. Which can result in arrest, conviction, jail and—worst of all—forfeiture of funds. So the money has to be “placed,” usually through cash intensive businesses like hairdressers, kebab shops and retail banks.
They were green government-issue jobs from the 1930s with heavy-duty locks and I used them to store my daybooks, notepads, duplicate copies of arrest files, lists of good takeaway places and anything else I deemed professionally useful.
Only one of Beverley’s sisters had had kids of her own and they’d turned out mostly ordinary. Well, ordinary posh, anyway.
“He’s fine,” said Guleed. “Superficial cut. Your fake boss paid for a private room, flowers, hot and cold running nurses but weirdly no grapes.”
Americans, who intellectually knew the rest of the world existed but didn’t really believe it.
I looked up. The ceiling was a bog-standard suspended tile affair useful for covering up ducts, cables and xenomorph infiltrations.
ASSUME NOTHING, believe nothing, check everything—the ABC of policing.
Always assume somebody is watching you, Silver had said. For one thing, it’s good practice. And, for another, it might even be true.
“The timing might not be significant,” I said. “Just because two things happen at the same time doesn’t mean they’re related.”
everyone assumes causation when they should be thinking coincidence, and correlation when they should be asking whether Twitter is really a reliable source of information.
That’s us police—born optimists.
The problem with troubleshooting is that trouble shoots back.
when any booze was a luxury and that I wouldn’t be wasting the good stuff on poisoning the faux bonsai pot plant that had unwisely chosen to sit beside the sofa.
God, I thought, Mum’s going to be upset if the rapture arrives and Jesus looks like Robin Williams.
“The only time I’m not planning to play,” said Dad, “is when I’m playing.”
My mum couldn’t walk down Oxford Street without it spontaneously becoming a parade—that’s why she has to send us out for her shoes.”
I think they’re hoping that if they don’t talk about Falcon, then Falcon will hardly ever happen. Ironically, this is known as magic thinking.
“There’s too many things going on we don’t know about.”
and I headed for Kingston as fast as Transport for London could take me.
Police don’t like knives—getting shot is a remote possibility, whatever the tabloids say. But getting stabbed? When you’re a response officer, that can happen ten minutes into your shift while you were still wondering where you were going to stop for refs. One minute you’re thinking coffee and bacon sandwich, and the next you’re lying in casualty with the word “perforated” being written down on the clipboard at the end of the bed.
“There’s a whole world down there,” she said. “Subways, sewers, steam tunnels, the old rivers. A whole population that went underground during the winter—vagrants, criminals on the run . . .” “Mutant turtles?” I asked, and Stephen sniggered.
This was where things could have taken on the definite contours of a popular edible fruit
Still magic, like policing, has always been much more about the practice than the theory.
Been there, I thought, done that, read The Silmarillion.
I flopped down on the bed and went out like a light.
You can always get on the right side of legal aid lawyers by having a mutual moan about austerity.
lit from the inside by the shade of blue light that is now compulsory for all high-tech equipment from the Sonic Screwdriver on down.
They, along with the plastic garden furniture, sofa bed and the neat pile of pizza boxes, eliminated what was left of the James Bond villain vibe.
