by Bill James
They walked out of the lane and back to the Mercedes. Leo said: ‘Two obvious points got to be considered, haven’t they, Tom?’
‘One, he has to be at home when the call’s made. Two, he must let the lads in via the front door and without any signs of resistance,’ Tom said.
‘Absolutely right, Tom. You got aptitude. I seen it from the very beginning. Also known as intuition.’
‘Thanks, Leo.’
‘I think we can timetable him pretty well. Jamie’s done a survey of his work pattern and it’s regular. In fact, it has to be regular because he’s dealing with repeat customers who turn up at set times and want him to be there. Many are professional personnel and look for the kind of reliability they demand from their staffs, for instance hospital surgeons who’d expect the nurse to be ready with a jar for the gallstones. And the ride over in the Lexus to their private supplier is also regular for time and day of the week. So, we ought to be able to arrive when Norman’s definitely at number twenty-seven. Next – what if he won’t open, or opens and then tries to fight the lads off, struggling to keep them out? If he won’t open, and we’re sure he’s inside, it will be a matter of someone, or maybe more than one, going around the back, climbing the wall if the lane door’s bolted, and breaking in through a window or the kitchen door on to the backyard. Obviously, there’ll be a chance that this kind of entry – the wall and possible kicking in of the kitchen door – will be noticed from other houses. That’s a risk that’s got to be took, though. Jamie has been in the property – Norm being at the time, as it seemed, a kind of mate – and says the kitchen door is of a very flimsy ply nature, easily boot- or shoe-shattered.
‘Likewise, if there’s resistance on the front doorstep we got to be ready for it – finger irons, for instance, or a pistol butt – and Norm must be bundled back into the house, while the one doing this bundling is hidden from the street by another lad or lads standing behind and concealing these swiftly-over, necessary measures. If Norm’s still conscious as the party leaves I’d like somebody to inform him that I certainly have Cornelius in mind, and there should be no very long break in his jail-aid – we having plenty of experience of getting such products through to any of our people inside who forward a request. It would be best that whoever gives him this comfort should get up very close because his hearing might of been affected.’
TWENTY-TWO
AFTER
Maud said she was going to bring a colleague in to run the closing session of the afternoon. There’d be a half hour’s break before she arrived. Maud suggested that Harpur and Iles should return to the lunch room. A waitress would bring tea and biscuits. They could refresh themselves and perhaps discuss in private how things were going. Maud wouldn’t join them there. She had to familiarize the colleague with the projector controls in the cinema.
When the waitress had gone, Iles said in a terrifyingly humane, even tender, tone: ‘I would hate you to think I’d be an encumbrance, Col.’
‘You, sir, an encumbrance? In which respect?’
‘This is a woman searching, hoping, indeed, questing.’
‘Maud?’
‘I’d like you to think of her in this fashion.’ He blanked his face for a moment to suggest he wished to order his ideas very sensitively. Iles could get sensitivity into his face occasionally, but it required willpower. He had plenty of this on call. It took time, though. ‘She’s surrounded here by people like herself, Col. That is, ultra-sharp, polished intellectuals who’ve come into the civil service – Home Office in this case and at the very select Administrative grade – eager to find the golden road to the summit, or near it. Oh, you’ll say the young Edward Heath came top in admin-level entrance exams, so it can’t have been much tougher than the old eleven-plus. That’s a political slur, Harpur, I fear. Maud and the rest of them could have picked careers in academe, the media, the church, salon hairdressing, politics or the City. They all chose functionarydom, however. And now, what we have to consider, Harpur, is whether such sameness, such rampant parity, is what she looks for in life. Does she want her man to be of that kind – a sort of image of herself, a simulacrum, with gender adjustments, which clearly you possess? I have to reply that this is not my notion of the essential Maud. I cannot see her as a stick in the mud.’
‘Right, sir. Your own view of the Home Office might well suggest it must be regarded as the mud side of that saying, but it would be altogether another kettle of fish, as it were, to imagine Maud as a stick in it. Yes, a stick would definitely be quite another kettle of fish.’
‘Col, this is a woman who looks at me, listens to me, respects me fully, and comes to feel that I am like those colleagues I’ve just spoken of, though in a different profession. She sees in me the same plentiful elite characteristics and the same quality of intellect, at least matching her own. Oh, yes, at least. The same quickness of mind, the same easy, comprehensive mental scope. This is, in my view, a woman who wants to venture, to range. She will not allow herself to be limited to her male equivalents, possibly her male superior. Oh, yes, quite possibly her superior. And so, as a dalliance prospect, I am passed over, to be frank, rejected, and she turns to you, Col. It can be detected at every moment in that other room. The delightful, tangy odour of blatant sex juice manufacture.’ He closed his eyes, put his head back and breathed with ostentatious depth and thoroughness through his nose, rerunning how he had savoured the air in the film room, though without the actual odour itself available now, of course, or until Maud’s return, unless she had cooled down and possibly swabbed herself.
‘I do not resent this focus upon you, Col. You might question that, but I plead with you to accept it as wholly true. She is tired of braininess, except as a work tool, a workaday tool. She has no taste for the brilliantly educated, because she has been brilliantly educated herself. She turns to someone like you, Col – someone who has done quite reasonably well, given your substantial natural drawbacks and incoherent, crippled schooling, a schooling that achieved its glittering zenith with long-division and naming Paris as capital of France. She wants to get fucked, Harpur, of course she wants to get fucked, of course, of course, but not by someone possessing similar gilded attributes to her own. This would be only half a step away from a wank. She requires someone radiating rough-house strangeness and the primitive. I’ve looked her up, as you’d expect, Col – starred First from Cambridge, pleas from her dons there to stay on and enjoy a research fellowship and who knew what thereafter? This bidding for her was probably very largely on account of her grey matter and scholarship, not the cordial tits and fine, unbluestockinged, openable legs, though these might put her a little ahead in a competitive interview, other things being equal. She declined the invitations. Why? These reasons are not set down anywhere. One can speculate, though. One can infer. That enclosed world she regarded as not her natural world. She desired the new, the unfamiliar, the spectacularly under-refined, or absolutely unrefined if possible.
‘But, blow me, in a manner of speaking, she joins the civil service and finds herself in pretty much the same sort of grouping as if she’d stayed at Cambridge. Confusion. Frustration. And then you and I arrive. Or, rather, you arrive. I? I am discarded from the outset as too suave, too acute, too learned, too much like herself and her grossly gifted associates here. To Maud, you represent escape, Col. You, Col, are that fuck from another crude, quaint, yet tolerable milieu, from a region of no social or intellectual standing, yet not to be entirely written off, not to be shunned, but, on the contrary, to be welcomed into her affections with cries of: “Yes, yes, at last, the uncultured pearl!”
‘My proposal, Col, is that we are expected tonight or tomorrow to start our inquiries up there in that suspect outfit. I will go ahead, alone. You can have a couple more days and nights in London, with all that should entail. This arrangement will require a bit of faking, but nothing too difficult. It will prove that, properly managed, even the Home Office can produce a boon. She’ll have a flat somewhere, so you won’t
have to fork out on a hotel. Something very lovely, blessed and lasting can develop from this. I wish to help it along.’
Naturally, Harpur wondered about the motivation for all this. Iles wouldn’t normally use the word “encumbrance” about himself, even to deny he’d be one. He saw others as encumbrances. Did the ACC fear that Harpur and Iles’s wife, Sarah, might restart something, and hope a Harpur–Maud relationship would prevent this? Or did Iles want to prove to Sarah that Harpur was simply a shagger-around and his spell with her lacked any meaning, had been just an episode, a game? Yes, Sarah, I travelled solo to start the investigation. Harpur wanted to loiter in London because he thought he could knock off one of the Home Office pieces. I could have overruled that, of course, but I knew he’d have been no use as an assistant. If he thinks he’s missed a bang he’s incapacitated by annoyance and regret. Best indulge his drab but compulsive tendencies. The ACC would be able to hint that his and Sarah’s relationship was so much more solid and lasting than anything Harpur had offered, or could offer in the future.
‘I’d cover for you, Col,’ Iles said. ‘I’d start on the preliminaries and then we could really get going when you arrived, rejuvenated, strengthened and enlivened by sweet experiences with Maud. I see you as doubly entitled to her treats: you’re a single man, and you have this extremely underprivileged, indeed, non-privileged, background. Who knows whether that connection with Denise, the beautiful and very popular, undergrad will continue? She’ll want to look about, won’t she, Col? It’s natural in someone of her age and abilities.’
Harpur had thought about Maud, certainly. As Iles said, anyone could have picked up the signals from her to him. She had actually described her feelings. And, if it wasn’t for Iles’s gracious spiel just now, Harpur might have given her more thought. As Iles had also said, the link with Denise was a little on-off, a little fragile. She was a student, lived a good part of her time among students, and would have friends among other students, some male. For students away from home, friendships could get very close.
But, in his devious, unfathomable way, Iles had made anything with Maud impossible for Harpur. He drew back from giving Iles the power to demean Sarah by telling her she’d been something on the side for Harpur, among several somethings on the side. He couldn’t allow that cruelty. He would avoid sounding pious, though. ‘It’s kind of you, sir, and so much in character, if I may say, but I don’t find Maud attractive in that way.’
‘You what?’
‘No. And I’m extremely keen to be in on the inquiry from the very start.’
‘You’re what? We’re talking here, Harpur, of an extremely well-made, youngish woman, beautiful, bright, who is eager to put out for you.’
‘These days I go for young, not youngish, ones, sir. It’s probably a failing, but I have to put up with it.’
‘A woman, Col, whose salary probably already matches yours, and with a fine pension in the offing, despite the fucking Coalition.’
‘I’m very much in favour of equality of pay and conditions in the public service, sir.’ Harpur thought: kick this conversation into the worthy, safe realm of political theory, batter Iles with smarmy OKness. It slightly pissed Harpur off, though, that the ACC should have clumsily made any response to Maud’s hints, and more than hints, out of the question. At approaching forty, Harpur fretted about lost chances, but this one was definitely lost. Damned decency and regard for Sarah Iles had struck him a dirty rabbit punch. Those words from Iles to Sarah that Harpur had imagined about his disabling rage at missing an opportunity had a quota of truth.
Iles said: ‘Here we have a woman searching for something other than glamour, charm, wit in a man. You’re not going to meet many with such modest demands, combined with pale green hungering eyes, non-tombstone teeth, ready thighs.’
‘I’m proud that our country was probably one of the first to insist on proper conditions for women in State jobs, and perhaps private companies are now catching up, though not fast enough, most impartial commentators would agree,’ Harpur replied.
‘Fuck me, I’m tuned into Radio Four’s Woman’s Hour,’ Iles stated.
TWENTY-THREE
AFTER
In the film room, Maud introduced her colleague Belinda Pitman, from the Customs end of Her Majesty’s Inland Revenue And Customs. Maud said: ‘Because Customs handled this part of the case independently, the material they have is separate from our own and you won’t have copies of it.’
‘We like to sit on our doings, so to speak,’ Belinda said. Harpur thought she’d be about Maud’s age, dumpy, cheerful looking, mixed race, blue-trimmed white training shoes, jeans, oatmeal coloured sweater, deadpan tone.
‘Belinda heads their “Identification, Tracking And Retrieval” section,’ Maud said. ‘ITAR’s work will often run parallel to police operations and sometimes intersect, usually to the advantage of both.’
Belinda had the control pad and put on to the screen a picture of what seemed to Harpur a block of flats, a block of non-council, very pricey flats. She said: ‘In line with our identification and tracking roles we’ve been watching for a while a substantial importer/wholesaler of the commodities, Robert Hillcrest Cochrane, aged thirty-three, also known as Rudy Griffith Laidlaw Spence. He lives here at sixteen Emblem Court, a first floor flat with his wife, Fern, also thirty-three. The flat has four bedrooms, three bathrooms, two receptions. The front door’s equipped with double mortise locks, a Yale, judas hole and chain. Furniture: John Lewis superior. Rent: three thousand nine hundred and fifty pounds a month on a year’s lease paid by direct debit from the Cochrane joint current account, which is fed from a Cochrane reserve fund to keep the current balance at never less than ten thousand pounds. This is Fern’s second marriage. No kids from either. We identified Robert/Rudy two months ago and have watched him continuously since.’
She fiddled with the controls. ‘We’ll go over to film now, your actual moving pictures.’ And they moved. Belinda said: ‘We’re now looking at the rear of the building and Fern emerging from Emblem Court’s private underground car park.’ She’s in a Land Rover.’ The clip was too distant and too brief to get much idea of her looks, except that she wore thin-framed glasses, at least for driving, and had her mousy-to-blonde hair to shoulder length. Belinda said: ‘We think a shopping expedition. We’re not really interested in that.’
No, but she wanted to boast of ITAR’s thoroughness and concealed camera expertise. Was that it? Not exactly. Another piece of film followed, this time at the front of the block again. A red Lexus drew up not far from the entrance and the driver put a prepaid card into the pavement meter. He was about twenty-seven, slightly built, his dark hair close-cut. He might have been a jockey on his day off. He took a trolleyed suitcase from the car and pushed it ahead of him towards the entrance of the apartment block. Belinda said: ‘At this stage, of course, we didn’t know who he was or whether he had arrived to trade with Cochrane/Spence and would go to number sixteen. But we thought it might be significant that he showed very shortly after Fern had gone. Timetabled? Get her out of the flat while a deal was done? Actually, there had been a mobile phone call to say OK to come now, but this was something else we didn’t know at the time.’
Now, another still shot, once more the front of the building, but taking in a more extensive area of the road. A white van with a company name and a phone number on the side to camera stood next to another meter: ACME LAWN AND GARDEN SERVICES. Near it were a Twingo and a Focus. Belinda said: ‘We were watching front and back from hired office rooms opposite. Not a totally desirable method because of possible leaks. But continuous surveillance from a vehicle could become noticeable, even if the vehicles were constantly swapped. Hogging a meter will get on someone’s radar. We routinely called in for a check on anything that parked within fifty metres of the front entrance and stayed more than half an hour. On this day we got names, addresses and occupations for a curtain-maker and fitter as owner of the Twingo, and a maths coach as owner of the Focus. We
took these to be genuine and OK.
‘The Lexus registration gave us Claud Norman Rice of twenty-seven Delbert Avenue, businessman. The van registration did not exist, apparently, nor the phone number. This seemed interesting, though we still had no proven link between the Lexus, the van and sixteen Emblem Court and Rob/Rudy. It occurred to me, of course, that the van might be a disguised police surveillance job. Perhaps we weren’t the only people who’d targeted Cochrane/Spence.
‘We asked for a voters’ list confirmation on the Rice name and address and got a positive. We had two cars on standby, an Astra and a Citroën. I needed to decide whether to concentrate on the Lexus or the van or both. I picked the van only. Sure, if it turned out to be a police unit, I’d look a thicko – an interfering thicko, possibly messing up an operation by allies, nominal allies. But I think I sensed somehow that it probably wasn’t a police vehicle. The registration would have been given a proper, concocted, fake, official record at the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency in Swansea if so, and a woman officer with an attractive voice would have answered to the phone number as Acme Lawn and Garden Services. These would be routine parts of the deception.
‘Anyway, I settled in my head that if the van moved off very soon after the departure of the Lexus this would, in fact, establish a link and I’d commit both standbys to following it – relay tactics. There appeared to be no need to shadow the Lexus because we knew where it would probably be going and could fix a peep duty there without any of-the-moment urgency. The Astra could take the first stint behind the van, with the Citroën lying further back, well out of mirror reach, ready to change positions with the Astra at some point to be agreed by the drivers on mobiles, hands-free mobiles, need I say?’
