Undercover

by Bill James

  ‘Most of these places have big windows on to the arcade. Customers can look out on who’s passing, on who’s approaching. So, searching for someone is dodgy. The target might get a reception ready. I watched for one of Justin’s toughs doing sentry outside the deli and the other locations. I’d be recognized, of course. All of them – Scray, plus his heavies – were still, in theory, part of our firm. But he’d been building his own little outfit – as I said, an outfit within the outfit. And Justin and his people could make a fair guess about why I was there. I reckoned the arcades assignment was the toughest of the three. I took that as a compliment from Empathy. He thought I could manage it.’

  D.H.: ‘You’re a marksman.’

  A: ‘So are some other guys, though. But I saw no guards patrolling any of the nooks. I went into the deli and restaurant and did a quick eye-scan. He wasn’t there, nor in the Alfonso. So, I was on my way to the One-Stop when my mobile rang and Empathy said he’d found Scray in Guild Square. Well, no, he didn’t say that, but it’s what he meant. He said only, “Where I am.” Best not to blurt too much on a mobile phone. You don’t know who might be listening. Remember the Prince of Wales and Camilla. Think of all that newspaper hacking into celebs’ voicemails.

  ‘Abidan hadn’t moved against Scray yet. He wanted me and Tom – Tom Parry, as we thought of him then – to get over there, so we’d have enough firepower to take on Justin and his chums. I say as we thought of him, but I’m still not completely sure who knew by then he was not Tom Parry, not a member of the firm, but a planted cop. Obviously, Leo knew. That’s why things had been organized like this. Who else? Anyway, Abidan’s “where I am” was the coded order to join up with him. It sounded urgent, it sounded hairy, but it was in line with the original scheme. Empathy had foreseen this kind of climax. I felt almost relieved. I wouldn’t have to work my way through the arcades.

  ‘We’d all pre-decided the quickest routes from our search areas to anywhere Justin Scray might be found. I ran out of the town end of the Victoria, across Lavender Street, into Charlton Road, about fifty metres along, then left into the Square. I’d been a bit worried that when I reached there I wouldn’t be able to spot Empathy at once. I thought he’d be in a sort of . . . well, in a sort of hunting, stalking position – watchful, but trying not to be watched. It didn’t turn out like that, though, not at all. He’d got himself into full view, what seemed deliberately into full view, standing in front of the Bonjour caff big window and made very obvious by its lights behind him.

  ‘When I arrived, he said we had to get out of there and back to the Volvo immediately. Scray had been in the Square with some of his people, trading, but had seen Empathy, although he’d tried to stay hidden at the end of a service lane. It was as though they’d been expecting an attack because of Scray’s abuse of the firm. Abidan feared they would return with more of Scray’s outfit – too many for us to take on, too many for us to protect ourselves against. Well, all this seemed to me panicky and woolly, but he was determined. There’d been another fiasco a bit like this, involving a lad called Norman Rice.

  ‘So, now I asked, “What about Tom?” He hadn’t turned up in the Square yet. Of course, I know now he would never show up, but in the Square then, as Empathy spoke, I thought Tom must have had a longer distance to come in response to Abidan’s call. He said it would be madness to wait. He would get on the mobile to cancel his order, tell Tom not to come to the Square, but to return to Mitre Park and Jamie direct, for a quick exit. Empathy seemed to make that call, but I realize now he might have been speaking to voicemail. All this still seemed unhinged to me, but Empathy was the boss, so when he started moving towards the park, I followed.’

  D.H.: ‘The two of you ran to the Volvo rendezvous?’

  A: ‘Yes.’

  D.H.: ‘Jamie was there waiting?’

  A: ‘Yes.

  D.H.: ‘But he wasn’t at the wheel for the accident or the rest of the getaway?’

  A: ‘He wouldn’t leave because only two of us had arrived. Tom was missing. Jamie’s a sort of professional Wheels. One of their trade rules is you don’t pull away until everyone has returned. In fact, it’s a major rule, basic, core. Empathy screamed at him to get clear, but he wouldn’t. Empathy was shouting, “He’s not coming. He’s not coming. Never.” He sounded so certain, as if he knew something about Tom. So, eventually, Jamie does the gentlemanly bit. That’s how he could be. Someone who’d wear a cardigan like that – well, it’s the kind of antique, noble behaviour natural for him, and he takes his daughter to Sunday School. That sort. He got out of the car, showed Empathy how to start it without keys, and announced he’d go back on foot and look for Tom between the mall and Guild Square. He said Abidan could take the Volvo if that seemed so important to him. This was calling him yellow without actually saying it. Like I mentioned, Jamie could be a gent. He has politeness built in. He said if he found Tom he’d mobile for a taxi and meet up with us at the firm.

  ‘Empathy started the Volvo. I had only a second to make up my mind which one I’d go with. I think I made a half-guess that when Empathy said Tom would never come, he spoke from info only he possessed – only he of the four of us, that is. Not including Leo, naturally. I had an idea Jamie’s decision was a mistake – as useless and gallant as that step out into the storm by Captain Oates. I wonder if Oates had a cardie on under his other gear. I jumped into the passenger seat. We left.’

  D.H.: ‘Abidan seemed to know Tom was not going to appear, did he?’

  A: ‘I didn’t see how he could. Not logically. But I felt it, sort of sensed it somehow. You know how it can be.’

  D.H.: ‘Anyway, Abidan is not a Wheels, and so the disaster?’

  A: ‘No, he’s not a Wheels, and we were doing big speed.’

  D.H.: ‘Leaving Jamie behind.’

  A: ‘He chose that.’

  D.H.: ‘Abidan didn’t stop, but drove on to the change car you had parked ready at Pallindon Lane?’

  A: ‘He was driving like a loony. Up on to the pavement, knocks into those three girls from behind on their way to some clubbing, then we’re down on to the street again. It seemed to me the kind of . . . sort of, yes, contempt – not spoken, but real all the same from Jamie – this contempt had upset Empathy’s balance. I was yelling at him to slow down. I wouldn’t let him do the next leg, when we got to the replacement car.’

  D.H.: ‘You drove the Ford?’

  A: ‘I had to take over.’

  D.H.: ‘Which makes you an accessory to double manslaughter – woman slaughter – and failing to stop after an accident. Plus stolen vehicles and maybe a few other charges. Even a tie-in to the death of Tom Parry.’

  A: ‘Which is why I’m coughing the lot for you, isn’t it? It wasn’t me driving at the hit. And I don’t want to be fixed up with the Parry death. I’m not involved, you know I’m not involved, but that might not stop you trying to magic a link. I want a note to let the judge know I’ve been helpful and can be rewarded by a cut sentence and some protection.’

  D.H.: ‘I’ll see what can be done.’

  And Harpur knew D.H. did manage something for Wolsey.

  SIX

  AFTER

  Iles had spoken of a Home Office briefing he and Harpur would get before they started nosing into the conduct of those target police colleagues on their alien ground. It turned out to be grim and delicate: grim because the briefing presupposed harsh and intricate difficulties; and delicate because it suggested something totally evil and corrupt had most likely taken place, without actually saying what it was. Their job would be to find what it was and say what it was.

  They went up to London by train for this pre-operation meeting. Naturally, Iles despised the Home Office. This was more than routine, simple, cliché hate for overlords. Although he knew comparatively few of the huge staff, he had a general suspicion of everyone who worked there. He reasoned they would not have worked there if they had taste, integrity and decent parentage. He especially mistrusted those in
the top posts. Iles thought they had probably lurked and simpered around this department for years, and with time had come to consider as normal and even wholesome what he saw as its dirty, grossly and brazenly non-Ilesean, unforgivable ways.

  Harpur himself didn’t mind the Home Office. He’d been on several previous visits, some with Iles, some alone. Harpur found the whole Whitehall thing quite a comfort: civil servants and politicians in their well-ordered offices talked and behaved as if genuinely convinced they could bring at least some of that order to the population outside, quite possibly to the population’s advantage now and then. This positive theme could be felt in the corridors and stairwells and was known among the super-clerks and Ministers as ‘proactive commitment’. Harpur’s spirits would almost always take a boost for a while from such confident optimism. He liked to feel that what often seemed to him the chaos and quandary of day-to-day, night-to-night policing were not really like this at all, but elements in a general scheme fully understood and subtly regulated by sharp administrators and government masterminds and mistressminds in the capital. Naturally, he recognized that this was probably bollocks, but it helped keep him going.

  ‘Fucking Oxford Literae Humaniores fucking graduates with Firsts, the fucking lot of them,’ Iles said as they passed through security into the building. ‘But don’t get scared, Col. I’ll see they make allowances for you. I won’t have them treating you as negligible, regardless.’

  ‘Regardless of what, sir?’

  ‘Well, yes, regardless, Harpur. You deserve quite a bit better than that. Yes, quite a bit.’

  A screen. Harpur sat next to Iles halfway back in the little Home Office Projection Room to watch it. Maud, their hostess, had a front-row place. She wanted first-name conditions. Harpur thought she’d be late twenties or less. In another room, she’d introduced herself – Maud Logan Clatworthy, ‘your permanent contact with the department during this project, my mobile ever-on if I’m not here’. She had a round, affable, rustic-sexy, swede-basher’s sort of face, but Harpur realized there was no reason why someone with a round, affable, rustic-sexy swede-basher’s face shouldn’t have one of those fucking Literae Humaniores Firsts Iles had spoken of. Maud wore a dark-blue trouser suit with some kind of glinting gold thread in the silky looking material. It produced a sort of will-o’-the-wisp effect when she moved, which Harpur found deeply stimulating. Iles would be intrigued by it. He might love to create a will-o’-the-wisp impression himself. Harpur would watch to see over the next few weeks whether the Assistant Chief ordered the same kind of bright interlay for one of his custom-made blazers. On the other hand, Iles could probably decide he came over as sparkling enough, without help from fancy clobber.

  Maud Logan Clatworthy had given them a quick sketch of the case: ‘This being your first official involvement with it, though you probably saw and heard reports in the media at the time, and I’ve sent you some of the transcripts and so on. OK, it’s of this order: four men from the successful drug-dealing firm of Leo Percival Young are told to take out another member of the outfit, Justin Paul Scray, who has apparently been recruiting loaded punters for his own gain. Classic jiggery-pokery, establishing a secret, elite firm within the L.P. Young firm and diverting these gains to himself. Among the four is a camouflaged cop.’

  Now, Maude operated a hand-held control able to put white rings around those elements in the film she wanted to call attention to and talk about, the way soccer analysis on television could encircle some players to illustrate sweet tactics in a game, or crap tactics. The film showed arcades, a building site, a square, a shopping mall, streets. Harpur didn’t recognize any of it. This was a different police domain. ‘Some are simply situation shots of the area done quite recently,’ Maud said, the accent possibly refined Merseyside, out-of-town Merseyside, ‘but we’ve spliced in CCTV material from the night of the shooting where this seems apropos. Some of it was shown to the trial jury, of course.’

  She moved the film on to a new frame and held it. ‘This is where things started, the recessed bus stop and Monthermer Street,’ she said. ‘No CCTV here, unfortunately. It’s only a geography clip. But, as you’ll have probably seen among the statements, a trial witness described three men moving off from a Volvo and into this thoroughfare, cocky like the crook team near the start of Reservoir Dogs. Remember them? That Keitel – so fit!’

  Harpur thought he had this name – Monthermer – and a few others somewhere in his memory, either from official documentation he and Iles had been sent as introductory material, or from the media. Because of the big significance of the killing, the events of that night, and the accident trial when it took place eight months later, had earned major space in national newspapers and on television and radio. Harpur had followed some of this journalism, although he didn’t know then, of course, that Iles and he would be sent to investigate the events and their aftermath. He imagined most police officers would have kept an eye on the Press and broadcast accounts, and especially those involved in any way with undercover work. They – he – might have absorbed some location details unaware.

  The images changed again. Maud stopped the film and put one of her celebrity circles around a man walking past a charity shop, his face away from the camera. ‘We think this is Martin Abidan, hunt-party leader and on the board of the L.P. Young outfit,’ she said. ‘The spot is the edge of Guild Square. Scray would sometimes appear in this area meeting clients, as he would, too, in the arcades and elsewhere locally.’ She restarted the footage. The man walked on. ‘Now watch this,’ she said. He seemed to slow his pace suddenly and to stare at something over on his right. He halted and continued to gaze in that direction. ‘It looks as if he’s seen Scray, doesn’t it?’ she said.

  ‘Yes,’ Harpur said. ‘Has he?’

  ‘You’ll remember that moment in The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, by Stieg Larsson,’ she replied.

  ‘Oh?’ Harpur said.

  ‘Where the investigative reporter, searching for clues about a missing girl, finds a group photograph of her glancing off-picture at somebody or something that shocks and/or fascinates her,’ Iles said. ‘It’s a kind of revelation. Actually, the reporter comes over as thick as shit, so he needs revelations.’

  ‘Yes, a kind of revelation here, too,’ she said.

  They watched the man she’d called Abidan step into the shallow entrance porch of a computer store. For a moment he was lost to the street camera. But another one – presumably the store’s own – picked him up in the porch, and Maud’s technicians had tacked this new sighting on to the previous frames. He was talking into a mobile. Maud kept him and his phone in another bright noose.

  Although she must have often seen this picture before, she gave it some special, priority mull now and, still seated, spoke over her left shoulder to Harpur and the Assistant Chief, not bothering to look their way because, at this moment, only the screen counted for her. Harpur knew the seeming casualness of this would infuriate Iles. During some city hall function, Harpur had once heard the ACC yell, at a police committee member who must have addressed him a bit aslant, ‘Shoulders are undoubtedly fine and crucial to the skeleton and tailoring. I’ve no quarrel with shoulders whatsoever, but conversation flung at me over them – i. fucking e., the shoulders – is quite another commodity, twat.’ He’d consider avoidance of face-to-face as insubordinate.

  But Harpur had the feeling Maud wouldn’t give a fish’s tit how he considered it. That cheery, greenfield face hid ironclad wilfulness, as well as the kind of possible brainpower Iles had mentioned. When she told them her mobile phone would be always open, she didn’t mean for chit-chat: it was to give updated advice, and Harpur felt the advice would actually be dogmatic orders. Perhaps it wasn’t a hick face but a centurion’s: ‘I say do this and he/they doeth it.’

  Maud told them now: ‘Abidan made two calls. Each contained the same words – “Where I am” – a prearranged rendezvous signal. In theory, any of the three might have used it, depending on who found Scra
y first. A sort of “rally round the flag” summons.’

  ‘Like in The Red Badge of Courage,’ Iles said.

  ‘True,’ Harpur said.

  ‘It looks a very credible, clever scheme, doesn’t it?’ Maud said.

  ‘Looks?’ Harpur replied.

  ‘Supposedly, they knew the approximate area where Scray functions, but this is, in fact, quite a spread. They need to pinpoint. So they split up, and each focuses on an allegedly likely spot – the arcades, the square, the mall.’

  ‘Allegedly?’ Harpur asked.

  ‘The lucky one summons the other two, and we’re required to believe here that Abidan was the lucky one,’ she said.

  Harpur had another of his pernickety, echo queries ready – ‘Required to believe?’ Or, perhaps: ‘Required to believe?’ – but he held back. He wondered why Iles hadn’t picked up on any of these doubt-tinged words and phrases, the way the glitteringly well-read sod had responded to the tattooed dragon, or whatever it was, and flourished that red badge. Despite his possible annoyance at the way she delivered her observations, did the Assistant Chief sense what prompted the quibbles in Maud’s commentary? Had he detected traces of some other narrative paralleling, running alongside, the obvious one and disputing its accuracy? Hell, what was happening here?

  Seated next to Iles, Harpur saw only his profile as the ACC watched and listened to Maud. Harpur couldn’t tell whether Iles full-phiz looked relaxed and understanding as Maud repeatedly inserted these strange riffs of scepticism. Did he intuit what the fucking First in fucking Literae fucking Humaniores, whatever they might be, was fucking hinting at? Harpur felt his own plodding series of spoken carps and pleas for clarity might show him to be dull, naive, cumbersomely unsuave. Occasionally, he fancied becoming suave. He thought the children would like it. But he realized he had quite a way to go yet. Hazel had said one of his two suits looked as if he’d worn it when crawling through the Libyan drain pipe where they found Gaddafi.