I nodded. I understood perfectly. I had a record of being reckless, and while Ross might trust my investigative abilities, she didn’t trust me not to throw myself headlong into a dangerous situation. I hated that her concern wasn’t entirely unfounded.
“As long as we understand each other,” she said.
“Yes, ma’am.”
She dismissed me with an order to keep her in the loop, her stern look telling me that I’d be in her bad books if I didn’t. I released a deep breath once I’d left her office, my shoulders feeling tight with tension. I rolled them, trying to get the stiffness out, as I headed over to mine and Stephen’s desks to break the new update to him. I knew I could trust him absolutely to keep a lid on the information if I asked him to and had felt rather insulted on his behalf when Rashford had hesitated to give me permission to tell him. Rationally, I knew that she was only looking out for the best interests of all those involved and wanted to keep the intel on a need-to-know basis.
Stephen absorbed the information quickly once I told him, and whilst he wasn’t as eager as I was to make a move, he was frustrated that LACS didn’t want us getting involved any further.
“Why even tell us if we’re not allowed to at least sit in with them?” he grumbled.
“Don’t let Ross or Rashford hear you say that. I’d rather be banned from action than completely cut out of the loop,” I warned.
“I know, I know,” he conceded.
It turned out that even if we had been invited to contribute, there wasn’t much that could be done for the upcoming days. The fight wasn’t scheduled to happen until mid next week, and LACS focused on planning in the meantime.
Going to the gym for my self-defence class on Tuesday night was a welcome distraction, giving me the feeling of doing something useful for at least a short while. Brian and I got drinks and crisps from the gym’s nearly empty vending machines and sat in the lobby for a while, chatting. It was good to talk about something other than work for once, and I relaxed into it. I rarely talked to anyone who wasn’t Stephen or Sam for a prolonged period of time these days, and whilst we talked about everything under the sun, both of them were in the know, and we often ended up discussing work. It was nice to have an excuse to talk about nothing more dangerous than football for a while.
I kept up my running and occasional gym trips in the week, but I was still restless and keen to get to work, and I knew that Stephen was too. I gave Stephen a call on Thursday night, fed up with the inaction and dying to do something useful.
“Are you free?”
“You’re lucky I just finished wrangling the kids, aka the spawns of evil,” he said dryly, sounding both tired and amused.
“What’ve the troublemakers done now?” I said with a faint smile.
“What haven’t they done? Tonight we’ve had spaghetti all over the floor, and bath time was a nightmare, Livi decided to run around the garden until she nearly had an asthma attack, and Annie went to the dentist today, so it was down to poor ol’ me to sort them out.”
“Ouch. Livi’s okay then?”
His little girl had a nasty brush with pneumonia not long after I’d joined Hewford and had since been diagnosed with asthma. She did much better now it was controlled, but I knew that Stephen and his wife, Annie, still worried about her.
“Right as rain,” he chuckled.
“Good, good. Annie’s dentist trip went okay?”
Stephen sounded a touch exasperated when he said, “Yeah, she’ll be fine. Get to the point, Darren. Why’re you calling me at ten on a Thursday? You’re lucky I’m still awake, mate.”
“You’re such an old man,” I teased before becoming serious. “Okay, so I’m planning to meet up with Phil again. I don’t know if I’ll be able to get anything new out of him, but I can’t stand this waiting. Whether or not LACS succeeds with whatever the hell they’re planning for next week, we can’t do anything about it.”
“Especially since they won’t even fill us in on the plan,” Stephen added, and I grunted my agreement.
I knew LACS was doubly careful after the mess with Snell, but it still felt like a kick in the teeth to have no idea whether or not LACS even intended to make a move on the dog fight. For all we knew, their ‘plan’ consisted of sitting on their butts and monitoring the situation for the indefinite future. Or they might be planning a huge sting attack. I had no idea. They were coordinating with Rashford, of course, so she could well have contacted Leeds police’s armed unit without my knowing. The whole thing left a sour feeling in my stomach, but I was doing my best to be professional and ignore it. Still, the dull, endless research with little to no reward was getting old.
“So we start being proactive on our own terms. I’ll keep Rashford in the loop, obviously, but I don’t think she’ll object too much. I’ve met with Phil before, and it went smoothly then.”
“It’d be better to see him in a public place, just to be sure,” Stephen said. I hesitated briefly.
“Aye, there're pluses and minuses, but I think seeing him at a pub would be good. The noise level on a busy Friday night will give us some privacy, and I know a place that has booths.”
“Friday night as in tomorrow?”
“No reason why not? It’s just a friendly meeting between old mates as far as he’s concerned, and it doesn’t need any special planning.”
“What about a wire?” Stephen asked.
I heard a sofa groan on his end as he sat down, and I settled back on my own, somewhat lumpy settee. Sam had been pushing for a new one before she left, but she wasn’t here to mind right now. I pushed thoughts of her aside and made myself concentrate.
“I don’t know how useful a wire would be in a noisy pub, but we could try. He’s not going to search me, I’m sure.” I shrugged even though Stephen couldn’t see me. “I’ll ply him with alcohol a bit, maybe watch a footie game and get him relaxed, then we’ll see what he’ll tell me.”
“You’ve got to be careful-”
“I know, I know, you’ve told me before.”
“Just trying to make sure my words of wisdom got through your thick head, mate,” he said with fond exasperation. “I’m guessing you don’t want me there?”
“No, sorry, Steph. He doesn’t know you, and you’re a bulky bloke. He’ll be thrown off if I turn up with you, and I want him feeling unthreatened and at ease.”
“What I’m hearing is that Phil is a wimp, and you don’t want him peeing his pants when he sees my biceps.”
I snorted out a laugh. “Aye, that’s about the sum of it.”
“Damn it. I miss intimidating arseholes.” He said it with such fondness that I had to chuckle.
“I’m sure we could get you squeezed onto drunk students duty. You can teach the rookies how to make themselves big and scary,” I teased.
“Don’t you dare,” he laughed. “The drunk ones have no common sense.”
“If we’re talking about students, I don’t think the sober ones have that much sense, either,” I joked.
“Sober students? I think they’re an extinct species.”
I huffed a laugh at that and shook my head. “You were one of them once. Shouldn’t you be defending them?”
I’d gone straight into the police as a young’un and skipped uni, so I’d missed all of that fun. As Stephen pointed out, I’d also missed out on the student debt that was still plaguing him now.
“Psh, mate, you forget that I was a rugby lad. There’s never been a sober rugby student in all of history.”
“That would explain a lot about rugby,” I laughed.
We’d gotten distracted from talking about the case, but it was nice to just chat and laugh for a while. Stephen started yawning not long later, and I let him go. Wrangling kids was apparently exhausting because Stephen hadn’t been joking about usually being asleep by ten. He went to bed earlier than I did, and I was the one who sometimes got up at five to go to the gym or for a run. This time of year, the lack of daylight could make it difficult, bu
t I definitely wanted to fit a run in tomorrow before I went to see Phil. It would keep me steady and collected.
As Stephen liked to say, going for a run relaxed me like a good glass of wine worked for him. I wasn’t too concerned about meeting Phil tomorrow, but that didn’t stop me from wanting to be at my sharpest.
It didn’t hugely surprise me when Phil enthusiastically agreed to see me at the pub on Friday night, clearly pleased that I’d got in touch with him. I felt a worm of guilt at how genuinely happy he seemed to be reconnecting with me, but I didn’t let myself forget that he wanted something from me. Hopefully, he wouldn’t want to talk in detail about the garage’s accounts at the pub because Lee, the actual accountant, wouldn’t be there to field his questions this time.
Come Friday night, I was feeling confident and calm. I’d got a run in before work, and Rashford hadn’t been too disapproving of my plan. I had a tiny microphone tucked close to my chest and out of sight, and I forced myself to stop fiddling with it. I was parked up outside the pub we’d agreed to meet at, a place called the Red Lion that I’d not been to before, and spent a few more moments trying to tame my hair before I gave up and got out.
It was drizzling lightly but persistently, and I strode over to the pub door. It was busy inside, and a hearty fire was roaring in the hearth, keeping the place hot enough that I stripped out of my coat and jacket as soon as I was through the door. I got a couple of glares for letting in a draft, but no one paid much attention to me as I made my way through the crowd. I hadn’t quite anticipated how busy it would be, and I could only cross my fingers and hope that there wasn’t anyone here who knew me as a police officer.
I didn’t think that Phil would want me put in hospital or worse if he found out that I had lied and betrayed him, but I honestly wasn’t sure. Whilst Phil seemed every inch of my old friend on the surface, he wasn’t twenty years old and naïve anymore. I knew some of what he was capable of these days, or at least the people he wanted to mix with, and I didn’t want to risk calling his anger down on myself until I could be certain he was heading towards a prison cell.
With an effort of will, I pushed the thoughts from my head and tried to return to the feeling of calm I had before I stepped inside. I’d mostly managed it by the time I reached the front of the queue at the bar, ordering a pale ale and thanking the bartender with a nod. It was too busy to linger at the bar when others were trying to be served, so I moved over towards the fireplace where it was a little quieter and searched the crowd for Phil’s familiar face. I was tall enough to see over the heads of most people, but I couldn’t spot him and pulled out my phone to text him. The condensation from my drink dripped down my hand in the heat from the log fire, which spat and crackled merrily.
“Darren!”
My heart jumped when a hand grasped my shoulder without warning, and I only barely stopped myself from startling. Phil patted my arm in a friendly manner and gave me a wide grin.
“Didn’t you hear me calling?” he said, his voice raised over the noise.
“Nah, I was about to text you.”
He shook his head with a laugh. “You’ve gone deaf in your old age, mate.”
He led me over to a corner of the pub, further away from the fire’s intense heat and marginally quieter. A group of men were sitting around a too-small pub table laden with empty beer glasses, and I realised that we were heading over to their table when they looked up and greeted Phil brightly. My stomach squeezed tight in a flash of nerves; I’d been expecting to deal with Phil alone, not him plus a group of strangers that might very well be criminals. But I calmed myself down almost immediately and forced a friendly expression onto my face. Phil introducing me to people was a good thing, I reminded myself firmly, as word would get around that I was one of them and I might make some useful contacts.
Phil introduced me to the guys, and my smile turned more genuine when I recognised Martin, the mechanic from Phil’s garage who’d shown me the four-by-four the other day. I picked up a conversation with Martin easily enough as we sat down, making a conscious effort to relax my shoulders so that I’d look as at ease as I was aiming to. If I seemed to have no concerns about hanging out with these men, they’d hopefully reflect that same energy back at me. Nerves only beget nerves, and the last thing you wanted to do was to make a criminal nervous.
As the night wore on, however, it became increasingly clear that Phil had no intention of talking business with these guys or me, with the conversation instead revolving mostly around footie, women and cars. I found Martin decent to talk to, but the others weren’t anything like the people I liked to spend time with, considering that I had little knowledge of football or cars, and I was entirely committed to Sam.
There were some inevitable personal questions, and I told them truthfully about having a long-distance girlfriend, though I said that her name was Megan. None of them seemed to understand why I’d be willing to wait around for a woman like that, as they put it, but I just smiled and sipped my ale.
Phil got increasingly drunk as the night went on, and I bided my time. My eyes were growing heavy as the clock crawled past midnight, and I had to force myself to laugh and join in with the other guys, who were all much drunker than I was. I’d only had a couple of pale ales before I moved to ordering non-alcoholic beers instead so that I could seem to be drinking as much as they were. As long as I was offering to pay for the rounds, the guys seemed more than happy to let me go up and order at the bar alone, which is what I’d wanted. I had every intention of driving myself home at the end of the night, which is why I’d been keeping such careful tabs on how much I drank. I’d seen the consequences of other officers in the force being caught driving while over the limit, and I wasn’t doing anything that would ruin my career, not to mention the danger to myself and the public.
The bar shooed us out at half-past one, much to my relief, and I helped a staggering Phil to the door and out into the icy winter air. By that time, I could hardly tell that I’d drank anything at all, but if there was any remaining fuzziness from the alcohol, the cold air woke me right up. As the other guys ordered an Uber to share, I volunteered to take Phil home. Even though they were all drunk and then some, I was still careful to sound casual as I pointed over to my car.
“I’ll ferry this one home. He’s near me, and I’m good to drive.”
“You sure you’re good?” Martin asked. He was slurring his words a bit but was still the most coherent of the bunch.
“Aye, mate. I can walk in a straight line if y’want me to prove it.” I gave him a cocky grin, and he bought it, giving a laugh and an uncoordinated wave as he moved off to join the other guys. The Uber had shown up quickly, and he stumbled over towards the open door.
“A’right, then, see ya,” he said vaguely in my direction. “Ta for the drinks.”
“No worries,” I said, slightly amused by his antics despite myself.
The Uber drove off once Martin had managed to get the back door shut, and I turned my head towards Phil, who was leaning heavily against my shoulder. I’d been watching how many drinks he had, and I reckoned that he was probably twenty minutes from passing out cold.
“C’mon, Phil. Wakey wakey, mate. Think you can walk?” I said.
“Yeah, m’good,” he slurred.
We headed over towards my car in a slow, weaving fashion as Phil staggered and lurched about, pulling me with him. He bumped into someone else’s car despite my best efforts, and I winced, but the alarm luckily didn’t go off. I hurried him along towards my inexpensive Nissan at the end of the car park and bundled him into the front seat. I’d come prepared for tonight and already had a packet of sick bags I’d grabbed at Poundland in the glovebox. I opened one up and pushed it into Phil’s hands along with a bottle of water. Once I was sure that he had his seatbelt on and wasn’t going to vomit all over my car, I got us on the road.
Tonight hadn’t gone exactly as I’d envisioned, not least because I’d been expecting to meet Phil along at the p
ub, but it had all worked out in the end. I’d always planned to get him somewhat drunk at the pub, which he’d been happily to go along with, and then offer to drink him home. I hadn’t been able to get anything out of him in the pub itself because of the other blokes, but on the plus side, they’d taken the focus off me, and no one had seemed to notice that I wasn’t anywhere near drunk despite how much I’d seemed to drink.
This was my chance to get some information out of him when his guard was down and his tongue loosened. Maybe this wasn’t a technique they’d be teaching in the academy, but I needed evidence, a solid lead and answers, and that was what I was here for.
Now I just needed Phil to stay awake and talking long enough for him to tell me.
Nineteen
We’d barely gone five miles from the pub before Phil started to slump against the door, falling asleep.
“Talk to me about the garage, Phil,” I prompted him. He mumbled something I couldn’t make out, and I tried again. “I want to help with the accounts, mate. Tell me what business you’re doing. I want in.”
I didn’t bother with subtlety with the state he was in, aiming for direct enough that my questions would hopefully get through his alcohol-pickled brain. Still, it was never certain how much someone would remember the morning after, so I made sure to stay in my persona of being a guy like him, someone who didn’t blink at dirty business and who wanted more; more money, more contacts, more respect, more business.
When Phil only replied with grumbling complaints, I pulled the car over in a quiet lane and gave his shoulder a light shake to wake him up.
“What? Are we there?” he mumbled.
“Not yet. Drink your water, okay? Here.”
I coaxed him into downing half the bottle, hoping that it’d wake him up. Considering how much he’d drank, it was honestly impressive that he wasn’t unconscious right now. I felt a flash of annoyance at both his drinking habits and the fact that he hadn’t told me about the other blokes joining us at the pub. If it had been just me and him meeting, I would’ve been able to better coax him into drinking enough to get him talking but not so much that he ended up in the state he was in right now. I released a sigh and patted him on the shoulder.
Tooth and Claw Page 21
