Deep Cover

by Peter Turnbull

  ‘That’s coercion.’ Worth smelled of expensive aftershave.

  ‘It’s the truth.’ Vicary turned to Worth. ‘I am just doing Mr Curtis the favour I said I would do for him if he let me. Now, should he wish to turn Queen’s evidence . . .’

  ‘Use your loaf,’ Yates sneered.

  ‘It depends how much you want to rescue,’ Vicary explained. ‘You see, it’s not just the loss of liberty . . . you’ll be in high security, no soft category D for you . . . Parkhurst, Durham, Peterhead . . . right up there in Scotland, and in the far north of same. Porridge for breakfast and veggies which have had all the goodness boiled out of them for lunch, with a bit of meat. Same for supper. No women – I know how you like the ladies – and nothing to come out to.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘A proceeds of crime order. Get a team of forensic accountants into your books, your computer database, and everything you cannot prove you came by legitimately can be seized: house, contents therein, cars, everything. The lot, the whole works. That’s how it works. You do twenty as a guest of Her Majesty, come out, fit as a fiddle after all those years of prison life and do you go back to your posh house in Virginia Water? No . . . no, you don’t. You come out to a hostel for the homeless and destitute – Salvation Army living. They’re not in the Michelin Guide, but it’s a roof, and they serve meals on time . . . just like in prison, But by then you’ll be used to that, because you’ll be well and truly institutionalized.’

  Curtis Yates’s pallor paled.

  ‘Of course you could avoid that. Jump before you’re pushed.’

  ‘I’ll still end up in the slammer.’

  ‘Yes . . . yes, you will, but the difference is that if you jump, you jump into a safety net. A guilty plea will work towards a parole, but if you’re pushed, that can be messy . . . you fall from a great height on to a hard surface.’

  Yates remained silent.

  ‘So far we’ve chatted to Clive Sherwin and Gail Bowling. You’ve got good friends there, they didn’t tell us anything, but that’s only the first two, and you’ve got a lot of geezers working for you. We still want to talk to Rusher, but really it just needs one to see sense and you’re on your way to the Old Bailey.’ Vicary paused. ‘Go to the pub tonight.’

  ‘The pub?’

  ‘Yes, up the East End, with the villains, or wherever you sup in Virginia Water. Buy a beer and then look around you, and then think that you can’t take this for granted because it’s liberty. Think that it could be the last time you see the inside of an English pub again, and choose what you want to watch on the TV for the last time . . . and retire for the night when you want to . . . also for the last – well, maybe the last – time for twenty years, because tomorrow at seven a.m. I’ll be knocking on your door with a warrant for your arrest.’

  ‘Tomorrow!’

  ‘Or the next day, or the day after that, but stop taking the good life for granted. We’re closing in on you, Curtis. You should think about working for yourself.’

  SEVEN

  The man let the phone ring twice before he picked it up.

  ‘Forensic laboratory, sir.’ The voice on the other end of the phone line was crisp, efficient.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Just to let you know beforehand that the DNA tests on the cigarette butts you sent came back negative. No record at all.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Just thought I’d let you know in advance. We’ll be faxing the report in an hour or two, once it’s been written up.’

  ‘OK,’ the man replied warmly, ‘appreciate the notice.’

  He replaced the phone and returned his attention to his monthly statistical returns.

  Penny Yewdall slept late. She woke and looked about her in the shadows and the gloom of the room in which the Welsh girl had been murdered – the room which was now her room. She felt isolated. Alone. Vulnerable. She said as loudly as she dared, ‘I am a copper. I am a copper. I am a damn good copper, police woman Yewdall of the Murder and Serious Crime Squad, New Scotland Yard.’ She rose and clawed on a few items of clothing – underwear, jeans, a tee shirt – and walked into the kitchen, where she found a nervous looking Billy Kemp, whom she’d met in passing, sitting at the table, occupying the same chair that Josie Pinder had occupied the previous morning, and, like Josie Pinder, he also drank a mug of tea and smoked a hand-rolled cigarette.

  ‘We have to stay in today, you and me.’ He spoke with a trembling voice.

  ‘Have to?’

  ‘Yes. The manager of WLM Rents called round earlier and told me that we have to stay in. You and me.’

  ‘Why?’ Penny Yewdall sank into a vacant chair at the table.

  ‘Dunno, but I think someone’s going to get a kicking.’

  ‘Oh . . .’

  ‘And we’re going to watch.’

  ‘We . . .?’ Yewdall’s voice failed her.

  ‘We. I’m in the same boat as you. I’m a gofer being trained up. Trained and tested. I’ve delivered a few packages, three in all.’

  ‘I delivered one – to an address in East Ham.’

  ‘Chaucer Road?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Same as me. I don’t reckon it’s some big important address, they’re just testing us. They won’t let us go to really important addresses until we’re further in.’

  ‘I thought you were established. It was just an impression I had.’

  ‘Yes, I have been here a while . . . just not getting anywhere with Yates. He’s still not certain of me. Have you had a slap yet?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I have, Yates slapped me round the head and punched me on the nose . . . just enough to make it bleed and said, “No one leaves me, remember that”.’ Billy Kemp paused and gulped some tea. ‘Then he sent a couple of guys to check on my home address in Norwich.’

  ‘Think they did the same to my old dad in Stoke.’

  ‘Yes, I think that he’s not checking on you so much as letting you know he can get to your kin if you do a moonlight.’

  Yewdall gasped.

  ‘Well . . . maybe he’s doing both. Checking on you and also letting you know he can hurt your family if you allow yourself to drop off his radar. I’m in too deep.’

  ‘Me too.’

  ‘What do I do? What do we do? That bitch upstairs, the butch lesbian, Sonya Clements, she told me that you only get to be a proper gofer, get paid and all that, once you’ve seen someone get a kicking. Then you’re in the firm. Bottom rung of the ladder, but you’re in. But you need to see what happens to someone who gets out of order.’

  ‘I don’t want to watch,’ Yewdall pleaded.

  ‘You think I do? But keep your voice down, Clements tells Yates everything. You can’t cough in this house without her telling Yates. She’ll have been through your room.’

  ‘I thought someone had been in.’

  ‘It will have been her, poking round while you were out begging.’

  Yewdall paused, then asked, ‘What about the Welsh girl?’

  ‘Gaynor? What about her?’

  ‘Well . . . Josie told me she was murdered in that front room.’

  ‘Yes, one night. Yates doesn’t kill in daylight, it’s just his thing.’

  ‘So why do you also have to watch a kicking?’

  ‘Different story, I think. Don’t know but I think she was just . . . used . . . she hadn’t gone left field. Curtis Yates needed a body to frame the guy who had the room before you, Mickey Dalkeith by name . . . nice geezer, but if Josie said “we” witnessed it, she must have meant her and Sonya Clements. I wasn’t there.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘So how much money have you got?’

  ‘About six or seven pounds.’

  ‘I’ve got about ten.’

  ‘So what are you thinking?’

  ‘The pub.’ He glanced at the clock on the wall – it read ten minutes to eleven. ‘Get dressed. . . . walk slowly – they’ll just have opened by the time we get there.’

&
nbsp; ‘I thought we had to stay in?’

  ‘They’re coming for us at one thirty, and like I said, we can’t hide anywhere. I think I’d rather wait in the pub and have a stiff one or two. I’ll need it if I am going to watch someone get kicked to death.’

  ‘To death!’

  ‘Well it could go that far, whether they intend it or not. I mean they kicked J.J. Dunwoodie to death.’

  ‘So I heard. He wasn’t even in the firm . . .’

  ‘Of course he was.’ Billy Kemp smiled. ‘He was well in, just played the wide-eyed innocent.’

  ‘I never knew him.’

  ‘It happened just before you moved here. He was battered to death in an alley close to the office where he worked.’

  ‘This is one hell of a mess.’

  ‘Where to go?’ Billy Kemp sighed. ‘What to do? Wonder how long it took to batter him to death?’

  Yewdall and Billy Kemp sat in the pub. Yewdall thought that they must have made a strange couple – she so much larger than he, and clearly older – sitting together, side by side, yet saying little. It was early in the day and the landlord scowled at them, but they were paying, and the licensed retail trade is struggling. It was, Yewdall noticed, a clean pub, with a deep carpet, a highly polished wooden bar and wall panels containing sepia prints of Kilburn in a different era – an era of horse-drawn trams and drays, men in bowler hats and women in ankle-length skirts and dresses, and of solid, medium-rise buildings, many of which, she had noticed, still remained.

  Yewdall’s mind worked feverishly . . . what to do . . . what to do . . . to rescue the quaking Billy Kemp and walk with him into the police station? Would that prevent what was going to happen to some wretched soul in ‘the garage’? No, she thought, no, it probably wouldn’t and what had she got to offer? An address in East Ham which was clearly used only as a practice drop – the police would find nothing there if they raided. The intelligence that kickings took place in a lock-up called ‘the garage’, that Michael Dalkeith did not murder Gaynor Davies, that he was in fact rescuing her and was going to be fitted up for the murder, that . . . that might be worth blowing her cover for if Michael Dalkeith was still alive and under suspicion. In the end, she decided to remain silent and keep her cover. She wanted something to offer for her time. It was early days yet and she still had nothing to connect Yates with anything.

  ‘We’d better be getting back,’ Billy Kemp said when the large clock above the bar read one o’clock. ‘We’ll have to fill our mouths with toothpaste to cover the smell of booze. Mind, we can say it was from last night.’

  ‘I’ll be back.’ Yewdall rose and walked into the ladies’ toilet. Ensuring that all the cubicles were empty she stood in front of a large frosted mirror, mounted within an elaborate plaster surround, and fixed herself in the eye, and said, ‘I . . . am . . . a . . . police . . . officer . . .’ She then returned to where Billy was, by then, standing; waiting obediently, Labrador-like, she thought.

  Yewdall and Kemp returned to the house and sat in the kitchen after putting large quantities of toothpaste into their mouths as they had planned. They waited in silence. At twenty-five past the hour a key was heard turning in the lock of the front door; heavy footfall tramped down the hallway and the kitchen door was pushed open. A tall, well-built, muscular man stood in the doorway. He looked at Yewdall and then at Kemp and said, ‘Come on.’

  They rose and followed him out of the house. In the road, double-parked, was a black Mercedes with the rear door opened. Without a word being said, Kemp and Yewdall slid into the back seat. The door was closed behind them. Yewdall tried to open her door but couldn’t. The child locks had been put on; a useful piece of kit for parents and felons alike. The man who had collected them sat in the front passenger seat, and the driver started the car and pulled away.

  Yewdall sat in silence but took careful note of the route. They drove north-west out of London, past the wealthy, well-set suburbs, out to Hemel Hempstead, and then to a village Yewdall noticed was called Water End.

  Water End.

  Water End.

  Water End.

  She committed the name to memory.

  The phone on Harry Vicary’s desk warbled twice. He picked it up leisurely. ‘Vicary,’ he said.

  ‘We have a problem . . .’ the voice on the other end of the line said.

  ‘Who’s we?’

  ‘I’m Penny Yewdall’s handler.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘We got the DNA results from the cigarette butts – just been delivered.’

  ‘Sorry, you have lost me . . . calm down . . .’

  ‘Sorry, we fixed Penny up with a false ID – a home in Hanley in the Potteries; a retired officer from the Staffordshire force occupied the home address posing as her father.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘She was checked out by a couple of heavies who sat outside her “father’s” house in a car . . . then they emptied the ashtray in the road.’

  ‘Ah . . . hence the DNA results,’ Vicary observed, ‘I see now.’

  ‘Yes, they came back no trace, which was unusual, but not only that, the DNA is from four people not two . . . and two of those four are female . . .’

  ‘Oh no!’

  ‘Yes . . . oh yes . . . those two geezers must have picked up the cigarette ends from the ground, knowing we’d pick them up for DNA sampling. She’s been rumbled. From day one, she was rumbled as being a cop.’

  ‘Now they’re playing us . . . taunting us. Where is she?’

  ‘Don’t know.’

  ‘You don’t know!’

  ‘Either down Piccadilly panhandling, or at the house in Kilburn. I’ll go to Piccadilly.’

  ‘OK, I’ll take a team to the house. I hope we’re in time.’

  ‘Praying might be better than hoping,’ the handler said, but by this time Vicary had slammed the handset down and was reaching for his hat and coat, and calling for assistance.

  The driver threaded the Mercedes-Benz through the village of Water End and continued for a mile, Yewdall guessed, and then turned right, directly opposite a thatch-roofed, white-painted cottage with the date 1610 AD above the door, which caused Yewdall to smile inwardly – a four-hundred-year-old cottage, what better landmark? The metalled surface of the road eventually gave out to an unsurfaced road, liberally covered with gravel to provide some grip for car tyres, Yewdall assumed, and possibly to give warning of approaching vehicles. The track led shortly to a collection of farm buildings – a house, a barn, outbuildings – which formed an L-shape around the courtyard. Parked on the courtyard was a collection of vehicles. Yewdall noted a Rolls-Royce, mud bespattered, a Ford Granada, a Land Rover and a transit van. The driver halted the Mercedes beside the van and the occupant of the passenger seat got out and opened the rear door. He knelt down, and quickly and efficiently pulled Yewdall’s shoes from her feet. Then he addressed Billy Kemp, saying brusquely, ‘Your shoes too, matey.’ Kemp obediently leaned forward and began to tug at his laces. Once the hard-faced man was in possession of both pairs of shoes he said, ‘You’ll get these back when you need them. Right, out . . .’

  Yewdall and Billy Kemp slid one by one out of the car and stepped gingerly on to the cold, rough surface of the courtyard. The man then tossed their shoes into the rear of the Mercedes and shut the door. ‘OK,’ he said, ‘this way.’ He led them across the courtyard, walking comfortably in heavy working shoes, accompanied by the man who had driven the Mercedes. Yewdall and Kemp followed, walking with difficulty. Yewdall had not realized until then how disabling it can be to be relieved of one’s footwear.

  Upon reaching the barn, the driver of the car opened a small wooden door set in the larger barn door and entered. The second man stood to one side and indicated for Yewdall and Kemp to go through the entrance. Then he followed them and shut the door behind him. The interior of the barn was illuminated by a single bulb set on the wall by the door, which left the greater part of the interior of the barn in darkness, but what it did illuminat
e was a man and a woman standing together, a youth on the floor dressed only in his underpants and whimpering with fear, a domestic bath filled with water, and various items of machinery.

  ‘Nice one, Rusher.’ The man smiled at the driver’s companion who had occupied the passenger seat during the journey from Kilburn to the farm. ‘Any trouble?’

  ‘No, boss, they was as good as gold, they was.’

  ‘Let’s hope they stay like that.’ The man addressed Yewdall, ‘You know who I am?’

  ‘No . . .’ Yewdall whispered. ‘Not your name, sir . . . but I was in your house . . .’

  The man smiled. ‘Course you do, you’re just being cagey. You know, don’t you lad?’

  ‘Mr Yates.’

  ‘And the lady . . .’

  ‘Miss Bowling.’

  ‘Yes . . . course, we’ve all met before, ain’t we?’

  ‘Y–yes . . .’

  ‘Yes, course we have. We want you to watch this . . . this . . . this little toerag –’ Yates pointed to the whimpering youth – ‘this thing. He couldn’t pull a bird he couldn’t, so what does he do? He half-inches off me to buy himself a brass for the night. Went down King’s Cross with bundles of smackers – nothing wrong with that you might say – but the problem is those smackers were not his, were they?’

  ‘I was going to put it back,’ the youth wailed.

  ‘Course you were . . . course you were . . . but that’s not the point. Now I don’t mind a thief, not until he half-inches from me . . . then that is like well out of order . . . it is really well out of order, and the bottle it must have taken to believe he could get away with it.’ Yates took a running kick at the youth who doubled up under the impact to his stomach. ‘That is just so out of order . . . so out of order . . . it ain’t exactly what you’d call polite . . . not polite at all . . . not respectful like, not to a man who took him off the street and gave him a drum and a job. Alright, Rusher, make this one quick . . . you too Henry.’

  Rusher and Henry – who had driven Yewdall and Kemp to the farm – advanced on the helpless youth and proceeded to kick him about the head and body, but particularly about the head. The youth very quickly became lifeless but continued to emit gurgling sounds, which after a period of less then five minutes, Yewdall estimated, ceased.