‘I’ve changed my mind,’ he said with his bottom lip pushed out stubbornly. ‘I want to go to Santa and get an exchange, so I’m making a ladder to climb to the North Pole.’
‘What do you want to exchange your present for?’ I asked curiously.
‘I want Santa to make mummy better.’
How strange that that memory is intact and yet has been hidden from me all these years. Remembering those words from his tiny mouth breaks my heart, and tears rush uncontrollably forward. I begin to cry for my baby brother.
Very quietly, I edge to the side of the bed and slip out. Going into the bathroom I climb into the bath and hug my knees to my body as the tears flow. I remember how my dad found us both building the staircase and managed to convince Luke that we could write to Santa. Santa preferred that, anyway.
That is the thing I’ll always remember and miss about Luke, his kind heart and beautiful innocence. He was a gentle dreamer and life should have treated him with care and love, but it didn’t.
‘Oh, Luke,’ I whisper.
I hear a small sound at the door, the whisper of clothes against wood. I look up and Jake is standing there looking at me.
‘What are you doing?’ he asks me. His eyes are full of concern.
‘I want to tell you about my brother,’ I tell him.
‘OK,’ he says and climbs into the bath and sits facing me, his toes nearly touching mine.
‘He was a heroin addict and he died from an overdose.’ My voice catches at that. I have never admitted that to anyone before. ‘I found his body.’
Something flashes in his eyes, but he does not say anything or attempt to hold me.
‘It was truly awful. It destroyed me. I became a little mad after that.’ I laugh, a rasping, desperate sound. He says nothing. Simply looks at me. I clear my throat and I tell him about the spoon, the rubber tube. The needle still embedded in his bloated arm. Then I tell him about my descent.
‘I was barely living. I survived on a mixture of rage and the need for revenge. I was so broken I even tried to kill myself.’
I peer into his eyes, looking for condemnation of my weakness, or pity, but there is nothing, only direct and tenacious focus. At that moment I know I can tell him anything and he will still be there for me. His regard is unshakeable.
I come clean. ‘Everything I told you about my parents so far has been lies, part of my cover story. My dad, he’s not an alcoholic or a wife beater. He’s a good man, a doctor. He put me on anti-psychotic drugs.’
Then I pour out the visit to the pathologist and how it made me so angry with the people who had sold the tainted drugs to Luke that I decided to become a police officer. I tell him about how I joined the secretive undercover outfit called SO10. I tell him about the crack den and how the terrible, terrible smell of it still haunts me. And how I realized very quickly that I didn’t want to go after the small dealers, but the huge drug barons, and how the assignment to trap Crystal Jake had dropped into my lap.
‘So you went undercover. To catch the big bad guys?’ he asks.
I nod.
‘If you come upon a case where a wealthy heiress has died under suspicious circumstances and you are the investigating officer, what is the first line of investigation that you would naturally take?’
I frown. ‘I’d follow the money.’
‘So if you want to catch the big drug barons, why are you not following the money?’
For a second I am confused. ‘I’m a foot soldier. It is not my job to do that. My superiors decide the avenues of investigation and I carry out their commands.’
‘Has it ever occurred to you to wonder why no one at the highest levels of this “drug war” is doing that?’
I frown again, thrown by the turn the conversation has taken. ‘What are you saying?’
‘I’m saying that you, your little secretive undercover unit, and all the other departments that are supposed to be fighting the drugs war are all being manipulated. Drug barons are worth billions. They have to wash their money somewhere. That somewhere is some of the biggest banks in the world. Why are they sending you out to trap me when the most obvious thing would be to punish the banks that hide the money, to freeze the billions that the drug cartels own, and to stop the drugs at the source?’
I stare at him. Feeling stupid. It is an issue that I care about very deeply and yet I have accepted the most shallow of explanations about it.
‘The most developed form of puppetry in the world is the traditional Japanese puppet theater called Bunraku. The Japanese are very proud of it because it is considered a very highly skilled art form. And it is rather special because unlike other puppet shows the manipulators of the Bunraku puppets appear openly, in full view of the audience. However, the audience pretends not to be able to see them because the puppet masters are cloaked in black robes and sometimes black hoods.
‘The war on drugs is the same. The real manipulators of the puppets are not invisible, but we pretend we can’t see them. The system has trained us to see only the small-time criminals, the powerless puppets. So they train people like you to go after small fry and to be happy you have shut down a drug den knowing full well that as long as supply is safe another den will pop up even before the arresting officers have written their reports.’
He pauses.
‘But as far as I am concerned I’m not even that small-time drug dealer, Lily. You have to believe me.’
‘So why do they want you?’
‘You tell me.’
I press my fingertips against my temples. ‘I have seen the file on you.’
‘I haven’t touched drugs since I was nineteen years old. Whatever you saw in that file is not me. You see, I’ve been in a crack den a few times. I’ve seen clawing addiction first-hand. That intolerable smell you talk about, that’s feces, the ammonia of stale urine, sweat, and layers of accumulated dirt. And those blankets that they put up to cover every little gap of light that would otherwise come through? They do that because of their paranoia. They have the unshakable impression that people are watching them.’
‘Were you a crack addict?’ I whisper in shock.
He smiles. ‘No, but I know because I was once that slightly bigger fish drug dealer that all those little drug dealers went to, to get their stock from. I went to a crack house so I could see the bottom of my chain. It made me so sick I started a charity to help them. I don’t have a lot of time so I don’t do as much as I should, but if you want to help them you can take over. We both know you are bored sick of your job.’
‘How did you know I was bored?’
He flattens his mouth. ‘Lily, that job was designed to bore the shit out of you.’
‘What?’
‘Of course. What, did you think I was going to put you into some position where you could get any kind of information that could be twisted and used against me?’
‘Right. What does your charity do?’
‘We send the addicts to South America to be purged out with ayahuasca assisted treatments. It may seem off the wall but it has been shockingly effective and the reoffend rate is better than anything else I have seen.’
‘Doesn’t that have a psychedelic chemical, DMT, a Schedule 1 controlled substance?’
‘Ayahuasca is a psychoactive brew of vine and plants that has been used in traditional medicine and shaman practices for centuries in the Amazon region. It is perfectly legal in South America.’
‘Right,’ I say carefully, since I know nothing about this stuff, but my first thought is that if it works that well, why isn’t it on mainstream media?
‘International research suggests that when administered in therapeutic settings, ayahuasca can reduce problematic substance use by helping promote personal or spiritual insights and self-knowledge. That’s the spiel we give our detractors. This is my experience of it. It’s fucking brilliant. These kids go there like walking corpses, they projectile vomit, shit like crazy, experience strong audio and visual hallucinations, and come out a few weeks later
healed and whole. It is a form of psychic detoxification where they discover the root cause—unpleasant memories, fears, anxieties—of their addictive and harmful behavior. Sometimes that sense of deficient emptiness and inchoate distress that they have felt all their life is gone. It gives them their first taste of victory after being constantly defeated by life. They come to the understanding that they are already the perfect human beings they were born as.’
I experience a stab of pain. Poor Luke. It’s too late for him.
‘Have you tried it?’
‘Of course. I wasn’t about to let the kids go through something I wasn’t going to try first.’
‘What was it like?’
He smiles. ‘Ayahuasca shows you the baggage you have carried all your life. You see clearly that all that pain is not part of you. You can put it down. I cried tears of pure joy when I took it. If you want I’ll take you one day.’
I look into his eyes and I know instantly that I would like to do that. I’d like to heal, too. I’d like to put my baggage down and live like everybody else.
‘Why don’t you go around to the center tomorrow and see how you feel about it?’
‘I will.’ I pause for a second. There is something more important for me to tackle before I get involved in his charity. ‘Do you have enemies, Jake?’
‘Many.’
‘Someone is out for you. Someone is giving untrue information about you.’
‘And you think it is Tommy?’
I look up at him, surprised by how quickly he has surmised the situation. ‘Yes.’
‘Why?’
‘Because when I came to pick you up at the barn after the fight he looked at me as if he knew me, but I have never seen him before in my life.’
‘And BJ? You think he’s involved too?’
‘If you were out, he could move in and claim your territory, right?’
He nods slowly. I open my mouth to say something else, but he puts a finger against my lips. ‘Don’t say anything for a while.’
We sit staring at each other, trying to insert some normality into the scene we find ourselves playing.
Finally, he says, ‘Don’t tell anyone what you just told me.’
I nod.
‘Promise me, Lily. You are making some very dangerous accusations. These people are lethal. You don’t know the way they think. The question of honor is not taken lightly in our community. You have to promise to stay out of this. You’ve told me and you must trust me to sort it out, OK?’
‘OK, I promise,’ and that should have been the perfect time to tell him that I am still an undercover agent—not trying to trap him, but trying to help him. But I don’t because I know he will try to stop me and I don’t want to be stopped. I want to get to the bottom of the truth. I have been led by the nose too long.
Later I will regret my silence.
TWELVE
Lily
‘I am bored with all the restaurants I know. Take me somewhere authentic, but Chinese obviously,’ Melanie says after we do our nails.
The only restaurant that immediately comes to mind is the one that Robin once took me to. Even though the service was just shy of surly, the food was surprisingly good. We take a taxi to Soho and go into the restaurant. Like most Chinese restaurants the air conditioning is turned up too high. We are met at the till by an unsmiling waitress and briskly shown to our seats. A laminated, slightly sticky menu is thrust into our hands.
‘You want drink?’ she asks while noisily clearing away the extra table settings.
We order Chinese tea.
Melanie raises her eyebrows. ‘Already I am impressed,’ she says sarcastically.
‘We Chinese, we tend to be a bit abrupt, but don’t worry—the speed and taste of our food will make up for it,’ I say in a heavily accented voice.
Melanie laughs but true to form the food arrives with impressive speed. The crispy Peking duck is so delicious Melanie eats more than I have ever seen her eat. Afterwards the egg fried rice, sea bass steamed with ginger and onions, cashew nut prawns, and a mixed vegetable dish arrive piping hot and go down quickly, too. We are nearly finished with our meal when Melanie suddenly chuckles quietly.
‘What?’ I ask her.
‘This is what I love about dancing. You meet all kinds of people without their masks. Don’t look now but the guy that has just come in used to come into Miss Moneypenny.’
I know that name. It is another gentlemen’s club and if I am not mistaken it belongs to the Pilkingtons.
‘Oh yeah?’ I say casually. ‘What’s so special about him?’
‘Well. He’s arrived here with a policeman and they look really chummy so it’s obvious he must be some kind of undercover cop too, but you should have seen him at the club. He has a taste for cruelty. He went for the dancers who were turning tricks on the sly. Once he took a girl home, and she never turned up for work the next day. We never saw her again while I was there. There was something fishy going on too. All the girls were talking about it. We all knew it was not right.’
My eyes widen with shock. ‘What do you mean?’
‘She was Romanian. No family. No relatives. Just disappeared. One moment she says, “Bye, see you tomorrow,” and next minute she’s gone without a trace. Management should have called the police. He was the last one to see her. But nothing happened. And now I know why. He is the police. Another time he beat a girl real bad. I heard that she was asked to leave! I didn’t stay after that. Bad vibes, man.’
I feel a ripple of disgust go through me. There is a dirty cop behind me. ‘Who runs that club?’
‘You were talking to him yesterday. That slime ball, Tommy.’
I sit frozen. ‘Right,’ I say slowly. ‘Can he see us, Melanie?’
‘OK, he’s looking at the menu. Quick, turn around and look now. He’s the one in trendy yellow designer gear.’
I glance around as casually as I can and my limbs turn to water. I turn back quickly and look at her in shock. ‘Are you sure, Melanie?’
‘Of course I’m sure. I could never forget that bastard. All the girls were scared of him. It was as if he was the boss.’
‘Does he know you?’
‘I wouldn’t have thought so. I’m not his flavor. He likes Eastern European girls, blondes.’
Her eyes narrow. ‘You look like you’ve seen a ghost. Do you know him?’
I meet her gaze with a frown. ‘Yes, I do, but I can’t explain just yet.’ I take a deep breath.
‘Bejesus. You’re mixed up with him.’
‘Not in the way you think. Look, do you mind if we slip out through the back way? I don’t want him to see me.’
She shrugs. ‘OK.’
I call for the bill. While my credit card is being processed by the machine I look up at our unsmiling waitress. ‘My ex-boyfriend has just turned up and it could be trouble for me, can I please leave by the back way?’
‘Cannot. Regulations,’ she says shortly.
I take a ten pound note out of my purse and put it into the tray. Her eyes slide down to it.
‘I show you the way.’
At a dirty black door she turns to me. ‘You come again,’ she says with a smile and shuts the door in our faces.
‘Come on, Mel,’ I say pulling her away. As we hurry away my mind is whirling like crazy. The truth is I am actually frightened. I have the sensation that the ground I thought I was standing so securely upon has turned into quicksand that is sucking me up. Two streets away we hail a cab and I say goodbye to Melanie.
You know what kind of people become undercover officers? People who want to hide under a different skin, unhappy people, people with low self-esteem. On one hand I hate the people that I am supposed to be trapping; in another sense I become them and secretly envy them and their glamorous lifestyles.
I can hardly bring myself to believe that the man Melanie is talking about is Robin. That… That Robin is a bent cop.
Instead of getting another cab for myself I walk aimless
ly along the street. I need to think. I know I need to arrange a meeting with Mills in the safe house, but I also know that whistleblowers in the force are not lauded and promoted but disappeared. Anyone who raises issues and problems becomes the problem. And it is doubly dangerous to be the problem of such an ambitious man as Mills. He wants Jake’s head on a platter, not Robin’s. So I need to protect myself.
I look at my watch. Jake isn’t expecting me for a while yet. By leaving the restaurant via the back entrance we would have lost the tail Jake has on me. I disappear into the Tube and get out at Green Park. I exit and hailing a cab ask him to take me to Lea Bridge Road.
Ten minutes after I walk into Lorraine Electronic Surveillance I leave with their smallest audio recorder, a nifty device no bigger than a USB stick, but one that is powerful enough to clearly pick up sound at up to twenty-five feet. It also has a twelve hour record time and is sound activated, so will only begin recording when it hears something.
Then I call the number Mills gave me. To my surprise it is not a telephone operator who will pass on the message but Mills who answers. Our conversation is brief and to the point.
Tomorrow at noon.
Then I catch a cab back to Jake’s home. Before Jake comes home that evening I book a rental car and have them park it in a car park that I specify. I pay for a courier to pick up the keys and drop it off to me inside the hour.
Then I sit down and plan my meeting with Mills. When Jake comes home he finds me cooking, a bottle of wine open, me on my second glass, the music so loud I don’t hear him come in.
He leans against the doorway watching me.
I grin and point to his glass of whiskey. He picks it up and comes toward me. ‘I didn’t know we were having a party.’
‘I have an Irish joke for you.’
He groans.
‘No, no, it’s really good.’
‘Go on.’
‘There’s an Englishman, a Scotsman and an Irishman all talking about their teenage daughters. The Englishman says, “I was cleaning my daughter’s room the other day and I found a packet of cigarettes. I was really shocked as I didn’t even know she smoked.”
Crystal Jake: The Complete EDEN Series Box Set Page 26
