Free London Falling by Paul Cornell Page A

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