In the Absence of Iles

by Bill James

  No, Esther would not be sidling herself into Cormax Turton. Besides, she had a chronically dependent dependant – Gerald, the job-seeking bassoonist, those talented, subsidized lips yearning for a double reed reblow at Mozart. Esther knew not much about music, but years ago she heard Gerald play the Bassoon Concerto and thought it one of the loveliest and wittiest performances ever. Could he get back to that? He’d been in a tuxedo for this show and the fine white shirt and black bow-tie conferred something close to dignity. It was only lately that he’d taken to the appalling coloured and dotted dicky-bows he wore these days. What did they signify, for God’s sake – someone trying to appear jaunty and undesperate? They looked desperate.

  ‘I note bravery commendations,’ Channing told Esther when they discussed the first-stage sieve, ‘but sensible, calculated bravery, no derring-do.’

  ‘Everything about undercover working has to be calculated.’

  ‘On the negative side, I tend to discount anyone who has actually asked to work in Traffic or Licensing.’

  ‘Yes, probably not the right sort of ambitions. How about visuals?’

  ‘Pictures?’

  ‘Are you affected by appearance?’

  ‘By mug-shots on the screen?’

  ‘Do you read anything from their faces?’ Esther said.

  ‘Maybe some of them do look cop and will always look cop. No good at all for Out-loc.’

  ‘They might look cop because you know they’re cop.’

  ‘It’s possible. But many don’t look cop, Chief, although I know they are.’

  ‘How does somebody who looks cop look? Do I look cop? Do you?’

  ‘It’s not a question of their looking cop to me, is it, ma’am?’ Channing replied. ‘I have to consider whether this cop would look cop to people in Cormax Turton.’

  ‘Sure. But how do you judge whether this or that one might look cop to Cormax Turton? How do you get to see things the way Cormax Turton sees them?’

  ‘Might see them. It’s speculative. Obviously, I have to make a leap. A guided leap, but a leap.’

  ‘Guided by what?’

  ‘Call it intuition?’

  ‘Right. But when you make the intuitive leap, what is it in a face that says to you – you acting as Cormax Turton, after your intuitive leap – yes, what says to you, supposedly looking at this prospective recruit to Cormax Turton, what says to you that this is no thoroughbred, wholesome, trustworthy novice villain, but a dirty undercover pig masquerading as a thoroughbred, wholesome, trustworthy novice villain? Eyes? Chin? Smile? Lack of smile? Composure? Lack of composure? Incipient or actual moustache?’

  ‘Many factors.’

  ‘Many? Well, we should do something about that, shouldn’t we, Richard? They might jeopardize an Out-loc project.’

  ‘No, they couldn’t, you see, ma’am, because if I’m aware of any degree of copness I reject them.’

  ‘But you can’t be exact about why?’

  ‘Combined factors.’

  ‘Which?’

  ‘The overall count,’ Channing said.

  ‘Does this go for men and women?’

  ‘Certainly. I must believe in my response. For now, it’s all I have.’

  Yes, she’d agree. If she put him in the job, she also must believe in his response, mustn’t she? That’s certainly what delegating meant, and, yes, delegating was important. She might have responses of her own, though, and in any dispute, she thought she’d prefer these. Knew she’d prefer them.

  ‘The more or less instant and complete belief in each other – that’s the kind of relationship I’m looking for between the Out-loc officer and myself,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t know whether I ever achieved that with the guy running me when I went undercover, on a different patch,’ Esther said. ‘He had big rank, or big to me at the time . . . but as to his judgement . . . I couldn’t rely on it. And then sexual complications. He thought he had an entitlement. All those furtive meetings – dark corners, dark cars. He regarded Out-location as an In-location chance, for his person, as we’ll call it. I was young and, I suppose, reasonably all right to look at, so such things came into serious play.’

  ‘Oh, that must have been a nuisance.’

  ‘Yes, a nuisance. It shoved the whole operation off balance. Exceptionally dangerous.’

  ‘I can see that. “Nuisance” – a feeble definition. Sorry, ma’am. Yes, dangerous.’

  ‘Dangerous in the sense that he wanted to keep the undercover going even though I’d started to see bad signs in the firm where I’d been placed. I mean, signs people there thought I might not be what I was supposed to be – the thoroughbred, wholesome, trustworthy, novice villain. He liked the situation, didn’t he – me on a string to him because of the job? He needed more time to get where he hoped to get. He wasn’t going to, but wouldn’t give up. So, he thought I only imagined the peril signs, because he wanted to think it. It’s true that the continuous stress can sometimes make undercover officers imagine they’re about to be exposed. I knew that, and naturally wondered whether my manager – so much more experienced than myself – had it right. Was I panicking? Eventually, though, I had to ignore him and come out, anyway. I don’t say he knowingly kept me under big risk, only that he’d let his mind get clouded.’

  Channing said: ‘Rotten for you.’

  ‘There was an inquiry, and it didn’t endorse him one hundred per cent – unusual when he, manager of the show, had been defied by a nobody like myself. He took early retirement and ran a stall in the Town Market. I bought chestnuts from him one Christmas. He’d forgotten me, or pretended he had. I hoped he really had. Undercover people should try to be forgettable. It’s a flair.’

  ‘I’m looking to set up a link with my chosen officer where she – I’ll say she, because I’m thinking of the experience you’ve just described, ma’am – where she knows I’ll accept without question her estimate of how she’s regarded inside the firm at any time, and not act too late in ordering her out,’ Channing replied. ‘And where I will know that she is telling me the whole tale of what she has seen, heard, with nothing left out or exaggerated, so I can make my recommendations on the basis of totally accurate briefings. Things could still go wrong, I realize that. It’s why I’ve always shared your worries about undercover, Chief. But, if it’s got to be done, I’ll want it done to foolproof standard, or better. More than an alliance or a mere working arrangement between her and me. Let’s call it a fusion.’

  She did not much like this word, any more than she had liked ‘nuisance’, but undercover work would often involve strain on vocabulary. For instance, ‘Out-location’, itself, an ugly title meant to hide more than it told, if it told anything. After all, the homeless sleeping in London shop doorways could be called Out-located; and an Old Testament leper sent into the wilderness. Undercover reversed and even trampled on so many principles of policing, yet somehow had to be acceptably described, because undercover was also a valid and often invaluable type of detection. As Officer A had told them at Fieldfare, for the sake of disguise and ultimate success, Out-location might – probably would – require a detective to blind-eye or even take part in exactly the kind of criminality that police forces were set up to stop. Jargon phrases had been concocted to explain away this kind of deep contradiction, but they always sounded hazy, far-fetched and two-timing: ‘conditional permitted complicity’; ‘necessary temporary suspension of law-keeping’; and then the one mentioned by Officer A, and given the weird Oscar Wilde reference by him, PPA – ‘Posed Participation as Accessory’. Oh, God.

  Undercover also ran against one of the fundamentals of police training – corporate responsibility. Normally, you acted ‘as one’, showed absolute loyalty to the team and knew the team would show absolute loyalty to you: ‘canteen culture’ as critics curtly dubbed it. But an undercover officer worked solo. Goodbye, team and team talk. True, there was a rescue party if things went very bad, but routinely the Out-located detective operated alone, or a
lone except for the senior officer managing her/him. Perhaps the description by Channing of this powerful, one-to-one intimacy as a ‘fusion’ did have some truth, although the idea made Esther uneasy. But, then, so did her own name for it – intimacy. She recalled that old joke about the prostitute talking to her lawyer in a rape case: ‘So this fucking tom turns out to have no money, so I say “No fucking way, mate,” but he pushes me into the fucking bushes, tears my fucking clothes off, and it was there that intimacy took place.’

  ‘Are you near a shortlist yet, Richard?’ Esther said.

  ‘Down to three or four.’

  ‘So, you’ll have to start talking to them soon.’

  ‘Very roundabout, at first. They don’t know what the job is. I’ll mention some general, prestige role we want to fill and make up my mind as we go along.’

  ‘Make up your mind how, if the actual prestige role hasn’t been specified?’

  ‘Intuition. What else is there, ma’am?’

  ‘Intuition again?’

  ‘What else is there, ma’am?’

  ‘Not much.’

  Chapter Eleven

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, it is not in dispute that Detective Sergeant Dean Martlew worked for the Cormax Turton companies, or Guild as it was – and is – familiarly called by the police and media. What is in dispute is whether members of Cormax Turton knew – came to know – that Dean Martlew was not an ordinary employee but an undercover police officer. Also in dispute and important is the period or periods of time that Martlew remained with Cormax Turton. I will consider first, then, the view, the appraisal, of Martlew while he was with the group, taken by the main figures of Cormax Turton, his ostensible employers.

  ‘You have heard from the witness, Mr Nathan Garnet Ivan Crabtree, a director of Cormax Turton, and a grandson of the chairman, Mr Cornelius Max Turton, that the companies routinely recruited what he called “freelance labour” as and when necessary. That is, such engagements were for specific tasks and of limited duration. They were not what might be denominated “staff appointments”, which carried a longer-term, more established, status within Cormax Turton. A “freelancer” might be hired, for instance, during exceptionally busy spells to help with, say, delivery matters arising from the courier business or the dockside interests of Cormax Turton. Mr Crabtree said it was for these kinds of duties that Dean Martlew had been taken on in a casual appointment. One thinks of strawberry pickers, hired for that short spell when the fruit is ready for harvesting; and of students helping gather grapes in the limited period of the French vendange.

  ‘Mr Crabtree told the court that at no time did he, or, to his knowledge, anyone else in Cormax Turton, suspect Dean Martlew might be a police detective. They, of course, knew Martlew as Terence Marshall-Perkins, his assumed name for these duties. I’ll read Mr Crabtree’s words: “We would regard any locally recruited temporary employees as simply that. We do not need an elaborate checking procedure for such labour, though there has lately been more emphasis on security at the docks, because of possible use by terrorists. That apart, we would have no reason to suspect the companies had been targeted by the police and infiltrated, since Cormax Turton always acted legally and should not have been of concern to the police.” Mr Crabtree said that even if he and colleagues had thought Terence Marshall-Perkins to be other than an ordinary casual employee, it would not have affected their attitude to him, as the Cormax Turton companies had nothing to hide. Had they discovered he was a police officer, he said, they might have thought he entered the firm concealed to make sure its anti-terrorist precautions had been brought up to date.

  ‘This was contradicted by police witnesses. They said that Dean Martlew posed as someone available for freelance work so he could penetrate the companies and collect confidential information on the finances, structure and trading of Cormax Turton. It’s clear that the police believed the companies to operate outside the law in at least some of their activities. As I have said, no evidence has been adduced as to the nature of any criminal behaviour, but you may think, based on media reports of possibly similar cases, that police suspected the courier business to be what is known as “a front” for dealing in illegal drugs; and believed the dockside interests centred on organized theft of cargo. As police witnesses have told the court, this explains the role of Dean Martlew: clearly he was not simply someone from a pool of day-by-day labour, temporarily useful to Cormax Turton, but an undercover officer charged with the secret collection of evidence possibly to be used against Cormax Turton. According to Mr Crabtree’s evidence, he and others in the group entirely mistook Martlew’s (Marshall-Perkins’) real identity and were deceived by him.

  ‘What we do not know, and what must be a matter for your judgement, is whether the reason for assigning such work as a spy to Dean Martlew by the police had any basis in fact. Mr Crabtree has said it did not, and that he and Cormax Turton had no cause to expect infiltration. Superintendent Channing and other police witnesses have represented such infiltration as not only justified but inevitable. In so far as this difference is relevant to the charges against the accused, you must decide whom you believe.’

  In her office, Esther read the transcript of this later slice of the judge’s summing-up a long time after its actual delivery in court. By now, the transcript amounted to . . . amounted to a transcript . . . to not much more than an historical document. It had its controversial sections, but nothing of any present importance; nothing that would warrant an appeal for misdirection. True, after the trial, queries had been raised in the Press about the judge’s invitation to the jury to speculate on the cause of police suspicions before placing Dean Martlew in Cormax Turton: the courier business as a ‘front’ for drugs dealing; and a waterfront theft industry. Law experts quoted in these articles asked whether a judge should put unsubstantiated notions into jury members’ heads like that, or suggest they might assume something because of apparently similar previous cases. But Esther didn’t think a protest worthwhile, and not in police interest. For God’s sake, didn’t the judge have it spot on? Those were the precise suspicions about Cormax Turton that led Esther to decide on undercover intervention.

  Whether the judge should have spoken them, rather than just silently chewing them over in her forensic brain, was a technical, legalistic point only, and, in Esther’s view, best ignored. She thought that, if she had been present on the day for this portion of the summing-up, she might not even have noticed the blunder by the judge, suppose it was a blunder. Esther had certainly planned to attend all the closing sessions of the trial. But then, suddenly, and utterly unpredictably, came that terrible business at East Stead, near the boundary line of their patch, and she’d felt compelled to get over there immediately. To have idled again on the court’s public seats in the Ambrose Tutte Turton trial became impossible. It would have seemed like a lapse of duty: or, at least, it would have seemed like that to her, personally. Some might argue she needn’t have become so directly involved at East Stead. After all, she did not really know the girl destroyed in this tragedy, and in fact had deliberately opted a while ago not to know her: had very carefully and categorically excluded her. Yet Esther realized that this negative link exercised its own strange, irresistible power, and had somehow tugged her away from one of the concluding sessions of the Ambrose Tutte Turton trial, and perhaps one of the most significant.

  ‘Negative link.’ ‘Strange irresistible power.’ ‘Somehow tugged her away.’ Jesus, she thought, what fucking, slap-happy verbiage – am I ready for a Rest Home, or even a seat in Parliament? She hadn’t been tugged ‘somehow’. She knew exactly how. The power was not ‘strange’, though possibly, yes, negative, and definitely irresistible. Look at it like this, Esther, dear, you barmy prat, she’d told herself: she, or she and Channing, had finally settled for a shortlist of two officers from which to choose their undercover man/woman. And now, of these two, two were dead: Martlew while Out-located; Amy Patterson, neé Dill, while not Out-located, because u
ltimately refused Out-location by Esther overruling Richard Channing. So, one hundred per cent wipe-out. The conjunction of deaths did undeniably and entirely unstrangely create a powerful link, and, OK, maybe it was hard to see such destruction as other than negative. Yet did it also have a positive bit: didn’t it make Esther get to East Stead regardless, and hang around East Stead regardless, where Amy Patterson, neé Dill, was killed?

  ‘Now, members of the jury, I will turn to the matter of the spell, or spells, of time that Sergeant Dean Martlew worked as an apparent casual employee of Cormax Turton.’ Esther read on in the transcript. ‘You have heard deeply conflicting statements. The differences can be simply put. The Prosecution maintain that Martlew remained in the Cormax Turton group until two days before his body was washed ashore on the beach below Pastel Head on 10 June. It is the police case that his real identity had been discovered, following which he was murdered on 8 June by the accused somewhere on Cormax Turton property, and his body dumped in the sea, probably from a docks jetty. This is denied by the accused and by Mr Crabtree, whose responsibilities as a director included Personnel. They say Dean Martlew left the group after two months’ work on 27 May and that his whereabouts from then on were unknown to Cormax Turton, and of no concern to Cormax Turton. This would be a standard situation: witnesses for the firm described two months as a typical stint for a casual worker. Mr Crabtree produced employment records apparently showing that Martlew was paid off and left on 27 May. You saw these as exhibits. Medical evidence puts the death of Dean Martlew at around 8 June. This means that establishing the latest date of his employment at Cormax Turton becomes highly relevant.