Crunch Time

by Nick Oldham

  Henry exhaled shortly, making a noise of disapproval. He peered closely at the photo of Ingram, then held it away, his brow furrowed.

  ‘Henry?’ Andrea enquired.

  ‘Sorry … he just looks vaguely familiar, that’s all.’ Henry was good-to-excellent with faces and names, and Ingram’s image jarred something deep within the filing cabinet at the back of his brain. ‘Having said that, I don’t think I know him, if that’s why you’ve asked me here.’

  ‘No, that’s not why … just pin back your ears and listen, eh?’ Anger said impatiently.

  Henry shrugged and smirked, revelling in the knowledge that he obviously possessed something that Anger wanted and he, for a change, was in a position of power, a position he was eager to abuse, childish though this was. His eyes closed and opened and he looked disdainfully away from Anger, back to Andrea Makin, who seemed puzzled and unsettled by the vibes she was picking up.

  ‘OK, go on,’ he said to her.

  ‘Ingram is a very violent man, suspected of disposing of business rivals and being behind some quite nasty crimes.’ Henry nodded as he listened, now giving her his full attention, suddenly realizing that Ingram was just the sort of individual he should be investigating – not bloody well pushing reams of paper from desk to desk. ‘Now, the thing is,’ Andrea continued, ‘we have been getting closer and closer to him and as we open doors, the heat starts to rise and he’s become increasingly aware that his position is becoming … vulnerable. Some of his lieutenants have been arrested, other people down the line, too. Don’t get me wrong, he’s well insulated and we have a lot more layers to peel away before we slot him, but he knows it’s just a matter of time …’

  ‘Sounds interesting.’

  ‘But the problem is, because he’s getting twitchy, he’s decided on a move.’

  Henry’s eyes narrowed. ‘Ooop north?’ he guessed in broad Lancashire.

  ‘Aye,’ she responded likewise, ‘ooop north. Living in a Travelodge at the moment with his mate, Mitch Percy. Separate rooms, that is.’

  Henry pouted thoughtfully, a charge of excitement surging through him, which he tried to disguise. ‘Which is where I come in … somehow?’ He tried to sound disinterested and hopeful at the same time.

  ‘And which is why, if you agree to our proposition, I can’t really be telling you much more about Ingram for your own safety.’ She raised her finely plucked eyebrows.

  And the penny dropped – with a thud.

  Henry uttered a short laugh, whilst still experiencing the excitement.

  Both senior officers gave him a quiet moment, sitting back, allowing him to cogitate. Anger eyed Makin. Both eyed Henry.

  ‘Whereabouts up north has he come?’ Henry asked.

  ‘Manchester,’ Andrea told him. ‘He’s from the general area anyway.’

  He nodded pensively. ‘I take it that the proposition is not for me to move on to the National Crime Squad, say, and head a team dedicated to investigating Ingram?’

  Both shook their heads. Anger chortled. As if.

  ‘Thought not.’

  ‘There’s already a joint Met/GMP investigation under way,’ Andrea said, ‘but we’re short of a particular angle on this guy.’

  ‘And I think you know what’s being suggested here, Henry,’ Anger said, ‘so stop horsing around.’

  ‘First off, I need to point out that I haven’t worked undercover for over six years,’ Henry said warningly.

  ‘We know that.’

  ‘And I’d need a bit of time to get back into it – if I agreed to the proposition. Working undercover isn’t just something you pick up again, you know. I’ll probably need a psychological evaluation.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ Andrea agreed. Anger tittered at the thought.

  ‘And I think I’ll need to run it past Kate. In fact I know I will.’ Even though Henry said this as though it would be a joint decision, he’d already made up his mind.

  A man called Frank Jagger was going to be resurrected and dusted off.

  One thing did occur to Henry. ‘Why me?’

  The two looked at each other, then Andrea said, ‘Well, I could bullshit you, Henry, it’s just that there was no one else available.’

  ‘Gee, thanks.’

  Four

  ‘I need to be brutally honest with you, Henry,’ the woman sitting opposite him in the pub said sadly. She was slightly older than him, but extremely well kept, with a lovely complexion, a neat bob of black hair, piercing bright blue eyes which were as hard as steel and seemed to rip away at every barrier he erected around his psyche, and a slim body clothed in a two-piece suit of auburn and gold. She looked spot-on and Henry had never seen her anything less than impeccably turned-out in all the years he’d known her.

  Dr Carole Sanders was the force psychologist based in the Occupational Health Department. It was part of her job to psychologically profile and assess undercover officers for all the North-West police forces, ensuring they were mentally able to carry out such a stressful role where everyday undercover meant living on the edge where one slip could be fatal.

  Henry looked down at his knees, preparing himself for the bad news. Before being allowed back on to the U/C rota, he had to be given a clean bill of mental health and he guessed that, following the previous day’s appointment with Dr Sanders held in a room in a Travelodge near Preston, she was about to scotch his ambition. ‘Go on, Carole, I can take it.’

  She sipped her fizzy mineral water and regarded him warmly, like an old friend. She had crossed paths with him often over the last dozen years.

  Henry braced himself, clasping his hands between his knees.

  ‘You’ve been through a hell of a lot,’ she said. ‘I’ve spent a great deal of time going through your personal record and coupled with the discussion we had yesterday’ – which had felt like wading through treacle, Henry thought on reflection – ‘I have come to a decision.’

  ‘Which is?’ he blurted.

  She held up a finger. ‘Let me summarize first … in the very recent past you’ve had to deal with some major guilt issues regarding the deaths of your two colleagues; you’ve been in constant confrontation with your line management …’ Henry’s whole face twisted with loathing. ‘You’ve dealt with the deaths of young girls—’

  ‘That’s just part of the job,’ he interjected. ‘Part of being an SIO.’

  ‘I know, I know,’ the doctor said gently. ‘I’m just trying to pull together a picture of you personally and professionally, and it’s the conclusions I come to from that that I base my recommendations on. I just want you to know my train of thought, OK?’

  ‘Yeah, sorry for interrupting,’ he said sullenly.

  ‘You’ve told me a lot about your personal life, including recent infidelities and your relationship with Kate and your American friend, Karl.’

  ‘Yeah, Karl,’ he sneered.

  ‘A lot has been going on.’

  ‘Admittedly.’ Henry picked up his Coke and took a nervous sip, his eyes roving around the quiet pub in which they’d decided to meet for this follow-up ‘chat’ after yesterday’s ‘deep and meaningful’, during which Henry had squirmed like a rabbit caught in a mantrap. He had not enjoyed it one little bit.

  ‘And there are other considerations I need to take into account. Although not strictly in my field, your physical well-being has also to be considered.’ Dr Sanders gazed sadly at him. ‘You’re only just on the right side of fifty, your retirement is looming should you choose to take it’ – she held up a hand to cut off Henry’s remonstrations – ‘I know you can go on until you’re sixty if you so wish … but what I’m pointing out is that you’re no longer in the first flush of youth. I know you run three miles a day, but your left knee keeps giving out on you, and you get up feeling like an old bloke sometimes.’ She raised her eyebrows pointedly. ‘Now I have no idea what’s in store for you with this undercover operation, Henry, but I do know some things: it’ll be tough, it’ll be draining, it’ll be dangerous and as
well as your mind and body being spot on, you’ll need the background support at home, too.’

  She inhaled a deep breath, then regarded her patient with a shake of the head. ‘What do you have to say?’

  ‘Feels like the bloody X Factor,’ he moaned. ‘Feels like an audition.’

  ‘Good analogy,’ Dr Sanders nodded. ‘Do you think you have what it takes?’

  Henry steeled himself. ‘Despite my ups and downs, trials and tribulations, guilt trips and infidelities, my answer’s got to be yes.’ He looked into her eyes and thought he saw a smidgen of relief there, respect even. ‘I don’t give up on things and, more often than not, I get results. They need the right profile of U/C officer for this job and my legend fits. I’m the right man for the job. I think it’s going to be a fairly straightforward scam, maybe a month, two months tops to set it up. I’ve done it before and I can do it again … and, yeah, I do have the support from home. Kate and I have discussed it at length and we’re as solid as a rock.’

  ‘Despite your infidelities?’

  Henry blanched at that upper cut. ‘I’m trying to curb that sort of behaviour. Like I told you, I even got one woman so drunk that she couldn’t sleep with me. Pretty chivalrous and loyal, if you ask me.’

  ‘But then you slept with the next one that came along.’

  ‘Touché – but we are strong at home, honestly. Remarriage is on the cards – if I could just blurt out the proposal. Kinda sticks in my throat,’ he admitted, and reached for his Coke, taking a long swig of it. He wiped his mouth with a pincer movement of thumb and forefinger. ‘So come on, Doc, don’t keep me in suspenders any longer. Am I fit, or am I fucked?’

  ‘Do you definitely want to do this, Henry?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Very well, I’ll recommend you.’

  He blinked with disbelief, which morphed into a huge Cheshire pussycat grin. ‘Seriously?’

  ‘Why – do you think I shouldn’t?’

  ‘No, no, no,’ he babbled hurriedly. ‘I just thought …’

  ‘That you were an old, emotionally wrecked, physically burnt-out has-been?’

  ‘Don’t push it.’

  ‘No … you’ll be OK and it’ll probably do you a bit of good to get out of the environs of Lancashire Constabulary for a while, concentrating on something that’ll take up all your energies and skills … but the one thing I would warn is to keep an eye on the home front. It’s the most important thing and it’s the thing that trips up most U/C officers.’

  ‘I will,’ he promised sincerely.

  In fact, Henry had played just a little fast and loose with the good psychologist in that he had lied about the reaction from Kate. The reason for that was because he hadn’t had any sort of reaction at all as he hadn’t quite got around to telling her about the possibility of working undercover again.

  To Henry it had been a chicken and egg situation.

  He figured that if he broached the subject with Kate and was then subsequently told he was not psychologically fit for undercover work, then the angst he would have gone through with Kate would have just been pain without gain. Instead he went though the process with Dr Sanders, telling a whopping white lie or two about his home life as he went along, so that when he went to Kate to tell her about the job, he would know he could do it. If the doctor turned him down, then he wouldn’t even bother telling Kate about any of it.

  When he revealed his intentions to Kate, her face said a thousand words, followed by her mouth, which said, ‘You must be joking!’ – at which a heavy sinking sensation dropped through his intestines. ‘You’re forty-nine years old, completely out of it in terms of working undercover and – big “and” here – it will not be good for us.’ She made a circular, all-encompassing gesture with her hands.

  Kate was only small framed. Not petite, but well proportioned, yet when her ‘mad’ was up she had the ferocity of a charging Pamplona bull at full tilt. Her eyes blazed and Henry almost expected her to paw the ground and blow steam through her nostrils. He would have liked to say how magnificent she was when roused, but in truth she scared the hell out of him.

  He had raised the matter when he believed she was at her most approachable, just after a triple dose of soap operas and with a glass of Merlot in her hand, the second of the night.

  ‘I can’t even believe you’re considering this. Do you think you’re fit for it? Have you seen the shrink yet? Because you’ll have to, y’know.’

  He gulped, swallowing the contents of a very dry mouth. He was now caught in a quandary brought about by not being entirely truthful. If he told Kate he’d already been for a psychological evaluation, she would hit the Artexed ceiling because she would see it as him having gone behind her back, not telling her what was going on.

  ‘I know I will,’ he said, deciding to lie, wincing dreadfully inside. ‘I just wanted us to talk about it first, then go and see the shrink once – if – you thought it was OK. There’s every chance they’ll think I’m pots for rags and tell me to get lost.’

  ‘Mm.’ Her pretty mouth screwed itself into the knot of disapproval he’d seen too many times for comfort. But then her lips unfastened and she turned to him, eyes a-glisten. She sighed and gave him a look of resignation. ‘I know you’ll do it anyway if you pass the scrutiny,’ she said, ‘so it’s best if I just give you my blessing, isn’t it?’

  Henry’s throat constricted as he looked at her and thought about the hell he’d put her through over the years, in spite of which, she was still here.

  He exhaled. ‘Tell you what – if I’m judged fit enough up here’ – he tapped his skull – ‘then I’ll do the job for six weeks, tops. How about that?’

  ‘Only if you promise to keep in touch … I know it’s impossible sometimes, but I also know you; you get so embroiled in it that you forget everything else. You must call every day and you must come home when you can … that’s all I ask. Keep me in the loop, OK?’

  His head made exaggerated nods.

  ‘Those are my conditions,’ she finished sternly. She reached out and touched his face. ‘You’re still just a little boy, aren’t you? Excited by dangerous things. Still playing cops and robbers.’

  ‘You know me so well.’

  ‘Which makes me so surprised that I’m still here.’

  There is a fine balance with the amount of information and intelligence an undercover cop can be given prior to going into an operation, and Henry was adamant about how much he should be told on the subject of Ryan Ingram.

  ‘I want to know as little as possible,’ he said to Andrea Makin two days later as she briefed him. ‘I don’t want to know anything about any police operation, nor do I really want to know very much about Ingram himself, other than what he looks like.’

  ‘Won’t that be a disadvantage?’ she asked. They had convened in a meeting room at Lancashire Police Headquarters to map out the way forward. She had set up a laptop computer and linked it to the ceiling-mounted data projector, ready and waiting for Henry’s arrival. She also had a huge file with her which she had been leafing through.

  On his arrival, Henry had purposely seated himself so he couldn’t see any of the documents. He had been a trained undercover officer since the early Nineties, and was familiar with the lack of knowledge displayed by senior officers about the role and undercover policing in general, although to be fair to Andrea she did seem to have some idea, but not much.

  ‘No,’ he said in answer to her question.

  ‘But surely knowledge is power?’ she said naively.

  ‘Only if you’re supposed to have that knowledge in the first place. It can trip you up if you’re not careful,’ he explained. ‘One innocent slip and suddenly the target is wary and suspicious. Next step means a gun in the face, maybe. What I need to know is my own story, not his, so that when I’ve made contact and when – if – he takes the bait, my background stands up to scrutiny. All I really need from you is his name, a look at his photo and some idea about how we’re going to
scam him, if that’s what we intend to do.’

  ‘So all this is a waste of time?’ She flicked the pages of her fat file and tapped the laptop.

  Henry nodded. ‘It’s the first contact that needs to be right – that’s the important step. How do we meet? How does it come about? Do we get introduced? How does the ball get smashed into his court so he makes the moves, he’s in the driving seat and I’m not suggesting anything that’ll lead to screams of entrapment. That’s the fun bit.’

  Henry Christie’s undercover legend – the person he became when working undercover – was Frank Jagger. He had chosen the name himself. Frank came from his dear departed father and Jagger from his favourite rock star.

  Frank Jagger was a wheeler dealer, a bits ’n’ bats guy who operated on the fringes of criminality, dealing with the disposal of goods, usually stolen, from which he skimmed his profit.

  Up until about six years before, Henry had known Jagger very well because throughout the Nineties he’d slid in and out of that persona for various operations, some of which had been very hairy indeed.

  But his intimate knowledge of Jagger had lapsed, although the legend lived on, sustained by a small office situated within the monster that was now the National Criminal Intelligence Service, formerly the Regional Crime Squad, whose task it was to keep all legends alive and kicking even when they were dormant.

  Henry and Andrea spent a while tossing around a few ideas about how to approach Ingram, and getting nowhere fast, when there was a knock on the door of the meeting room and a man, a detective known as ‘the Keeper’ came in, nodding at Henry and giving Andrea a muted, ‘Afternoon, ma’am.’

  Henry had met the Keeper many times over the years, never actually getting to know his name (nor wanting to), or where he operated from, because the Keeper, of ‘Keeps’, as he was referred to in conversation, was the man ultimately responsible for all the undercover legends in existence in the country, some sixty in total. He put together and maintained all the legends with the assistance of a very select group of people who, should they ever have been identified and targeted by crims, could divulge the identity and whereabouts of every undercover cop in England and Wales.