Undercover (4 page)

They went up to London by train for this pre-operation meeting. Naturally, Iles despised the Home Office. This was more than routine, simple, cliché hate for overlords. Although he knew comparatively few of the huge staff, he had a general suspicion of everyone who worked there. He reasoned they would
not
have worked there if they had taste, integrity and decent parentage. He especially mistrusted those in the top posts. Iles thought they had probably lurked and simpered around this department for years, and with time had come to consider as normal and even wholesome what he saw as its dirty, grossly and brazenly non-Ilesean, unforgivable ways.

Harpur himself didn't mind the Home Office. He'd been on several previous visits, some with Iles, some alone. Harpur found the whole Whitehall thing quite a comfort: civil servants and politicians in their well-ordered offices talked and behaved as if genuinely convinced they could bring at least some of that order to the population outside, quite possibly to the population's advantage now and then. This positive theme could be felt in the corridors and stairwells and was known among the super-clerks and Ministers as ‘proactive commitment'. Harpur's spirits would almost always take a boost for a while from such confident optimism. He liked to feel that what often seemed to him the chaos and quandary of day-to-day, night-to-night policing were not really like this at all, but elements in a general scheme fully understood and subtly regulated by sharp administrators and government masterminds and mistressminds in the capital. Naturally, he recognized that this was probably bollocks, but it helped keep him going.

‘Fucking Oxford
Literae Humaniores
fucking graduates with Firsts, the fucking lot of them,' Iles said as they passed through security into the building. ‘But don't get scared, Col. I'll see they make allowances for you. I won't have them treating you as negligible, regardless.'

‘Regardless of what, sir?'

‘Well, yes, regardless, Harpur. You deserve quite a bit better than that. Yes, quite a bit.'

A screen. Harpur sat next to Iles halfway back in the little Home Office Projection Room to watch it. Maud, their hostess, had a front-row place. She wanted first-name conditions. Harpur thought she'd be late twenties or less. In another room, she'd introduced herself – Maud Logan Clatworthy, ‘your permanent contact with the department during this project, my mobile ever-on if I'm not here'. She had a round, affable, rustic-sexy, swede-basher's sort of face, but Harpur realized there was no reason why someone with a round, affable, rustic-sexy swede-basher's face shouldn't have one of those fucking
Literae Humaniores
Firsts Iles had spoken of. Maud wore a dark-blue trouser suit with some kind of glinting gold thread in the silky looking material. It produced a sort of will-o'-the-wisp effect when she moved, which Harpur found deeply stimulating. Iles would be intrigued by it. He might love to create a will-o'-the-wisp impression himself. Harpur would watch to see over the next few weeks whether the Assistant Chief ordered the same kind of bright interlay for one of his custom-made blazers. On the other hand, Iles could probably decide he came over as sparkling enough, without help from fancy clobber.

Maud Logan Clatworthy had given them a quick sketch of the case: ‘This being your first official involvement with it, though you probably saw and heard reports in the media at the time, and I've sent you some of the transcripts and so on. OK, it's of this order: four men from the successful drug-dealing firm of Leo Percival Young are told to take out another member of the outfit, Justin Paul Scray, who has apparently been recruiting loaded punters for his own gain. Classic jiggery-pokery, establishing a secret, elite firm within the L.P. Young firm and diverting these gains to himself. Among the four is a camouflaged cop.'

Now, Maude operated a hand-held control able to put white rings around those elements in the film she wanted to call attention to and talk about, the way soccer analysis on television could encircle some players to illustrate sweet tactics in a game, or crap tactics. The film showed arcades, a building site, a square, a shopping mall, streets. Harpur didn't recognize any of it. This was a different police domain. ‘Some are simply situation shots of the area done quite recently,' Maud said, the accent possibly refined Merseyside, out-of-town Merseyside, ‘but we've spliced in CCTV material from the night of the shooting where this seems apropos. Some of it was shown to the trial jury, of course.'

She moved the film on to a new frame and held it. ‘This is where things started, the recessed bus stop and Monthermer Street,' she said. ‘No CCTV here, unfortunately. It's only a geography clip. But, as you'll have probably seen among the statements, a trial witness described three men moving off from a Volvo and into this thoroughfare, cocky like the crook team near the start of
Reservoir Dogs
. Remember them? That Keitel – so fit!'

Harpur thought he had this name – Monthermer – and a few others somewhere in his memory, either from official documentation he and Iles had been sent as introductory material, or from the media. Because of the big significance of the killing, the events of that night, and the accident trial when it took place eight months later, had earned major space in national newspapers and on television and radio. Harpur had followed some of this journalism, although he didn't know then, of course, that Iles and he would be sent to investigate the events and their aftermath. He imagined most police officers would have kept an eye on the Press and broadcast accounts, and especially those involved in any way with undercover work. They – he – might have absorbed some location details unaware.

The images changed again. Maud stopped the film and put one of her celebrity circles around a man walking past a charity shop, his face away from the camera. ‘We think this is Martin Abidan, hunt-party leader and on the board of the L.P. Young outfit,' she said. ‘The spot is the edge of Guild Square. Scray would sometimes appear in this area meeting clients, as he would, too, in the arcades and elsewhere locally.' She restarted the footage. The man walked on. ‘Now watch this,' she said. He seemed to slow his pace suddenly and to stare at something over on his right. He halted and continued to gaze in that direction. ‘It looks as if he's seen Scray, doesn't it?' she said.

‘Yes,' Harpur said. ‘Has he?'

‘You'll remember that moment in
The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo
, by Stieg Larsson,' she replied.

‘Oh?' Harpur said.

‘Where the investigative reporter, searching for clues about a missing girl, finds a group photograph of her glancing off-picture at somebody or something that shocks and/or fascinates her,' Iles said. ‘It's a kind of revelation. Actually, the reporter comes over as thick as shit, so he needs revelations.'

‘Yes, a kind of revelation here, too,' she said.

They watched the man she'd called Abidan step into the shallow entrance porch of a computer store. For a moment he was lost to the street camera. But another one – presumably the store's own – picked him up in the porch, and Maud's technicians had tacked this new sighting on to the previous frames. He was talking into a mobile. Maud kept him and his phone in another bright noose.

Although she must have often seen this picture before, she gave it some special, priority mull now and, still seated, spoke over her left shoulder to Harpur and the Assistant Chief, not bothering to look their way because, at this moment, only the screen counted for her. Harpur knew the seeming casualness of this would infuriate Iles. During some city hall function, Harpur had once heard the ACC yell, at a police committee member who must have addressed him a bit aslant, ‘Shoulders are undoubtedly fine and crucial to the skeleton and tailoring. I've no quarrel with shoulders whatsoever, but conversation flung at me over them – i. fucking e., the shoulders – is quite another commodity, twat.' He'd consider avoidance of face-to-face as insubordinate.

But Harpur had the feeling Maud wouldn't give a fish's tit
how
he considered it. That cheery, greenfield face hid ironclad wilfulness, as well as the kind of possible brainpower Iles had mentioned. When she told them her mobile phone would be always open, she didn't mean for chit-chat: it was to give updated advice, and Harpur felt the advice would actually be dogmatic orders. Perhaps it wasn't a hick face but a centurion's: ‘I say do this and he/they doeth it.'

Maud told them now: ‘Abidan made two calls. Each contained the same words – “Where I am” – a prearranged rendezvous signal. In theory, any of the three might have used it, depending on who found Scray first. A sort of “rally round the flag” summons.'

‘Like in
The Red Badge of Courage
,' Iles said.

‘True,' Harpur said.

‘It looks a very credible, clever scheme, doesn't it?' Maud said.

‘Looks?' Harpur replied.

‘Supposedly, they knew the approximate area where Scray functions, but this is, in fact, quite a spread. They need to pinpoint. So they split up, and each focuses on an allegedly likely spot – the arcades, the square, the mall.'

‘Allegedly?' Harpur asked.

‘The lucky one summons the other two, and we're required to believe here that Abidan was the lucky one,' she said.

Harpur had another of his pernickety, echo queries ready – ‘Required to believe?' Or, perhaps: ‘
Required
to believe?' – but he held back. He wondered why Iles hadn't picked up on any of these doubt-tinged words and phrases, the way the glitteringly well-read sod had responded to the tattooed dragon, or whatever it was, and flourished that red badge. Despite his possible annoyance at the way she delivered her observations, did the Assistant Chief sense what prompted the quibbles in Maud's commentary? Had he detected traces of some other narrative paralleling, running alongside, the obvious one and disputing its accuracy? Hell, what was happening here?

Seated next to Iles, Harpur saw only his profile as the ACC watched and listened to Maud. Harpur couldn't tell whether Iles full-phiz looked relaxed and understanding as Maud repeatedly inserted these strange riffs of scepticism. Did he intuit what the fucking First in fucking
Literae
fucking
Humaniores
, whatever
they
might be, was fucking hinting at? Harpur felt his own plodding series of spoken carps and pleas for clarity might show him to be dull, naive, cumbersomely unsuave. Occasionally, he fancied becoming suave. He thought the children would like it. But he realized he had quite a way to go yet. Hazel had said one of his two suits looked as if he'd worn it when crawling through the Libyan drain pipe where they found Gaddafi.

‘Here comes Ivor Wolsey, the reluctant marksman,' Maud said as the film showed a slight man of around thirty to thirty-five entering the Square from a side street. ‘He coughed the whole project under interrogation, as far as he knew it.' Wolsey wore a denim blouson, light trousers and blue baseball cap. He moved quickly up towards the computer store, though was obviously all-round vigilant, an arm folded across his midriff, right hand probably closed ready on the butt of a waist-holstered pistol. The camera followed Wolsey for a while, but Maud didn't bother to install a loop around him.

He was still crossing the Square when the film left Wolsey and came up with a picture of the opening to another minor street. ‘Tom Parry, as we must call him, should have arrived in the Square at this junction, short-cutting from the Rinton mall via a building site,' Maud said. ‘Of course, he never did. It's why you're here and are going there. No CCTV at the building site, naturally. It's going to be an extension for one of the mall businesses, plus a lot of housing, but on pause then because of a money-trouble freeze on development.'

Harpur said: ‘And talking of CCTV, is there any from that night showing Scray?'

‘If you've read the transcripts, you'll know there isn't,' Maud said.

‘But I haven't read all the transcripts. I don't know whether the ACC has,' Harpur said. ‘We're at a fairly far-back start. Until now, we didn't know what the job was. Still don't fully know.' Harpur felt he had to show he wasn't just workmanlike and unsubtle. His mind could jump ahead, couldn't it. Couldn't it? ‘Maud, are you telling us, without telling us, that our lad was set up?'

She stood facing them, her back to the screen for the moment. She blinked. ‘You're quick,' she said.

‘Col
is
quick,' Iles replied with a fond, admiring chuckle, as if praising his rescued greyhound which could still show some creaking pace if a tennis ball were thrown to play the course rabbit. ‘Or quick
ish
. I wanted you to know that, Maud. His interpretation of your hints is a very obvious one, of course. But I stayed silent, so he could have his little say-so first. Good for his morale and general selfhood. It's sad, but this is the only self he has, and I'd like him to make the best of it. I've told Col I would take care he wasn't made to look moronic by you and your lot.'

Iles began to semi-scream. Acoustics in this little theatre were excellent and gave even only a semi-scream fine penetration and depth, plus a hint of considerable reserves and the possibility that Iles would move into a full, all-out, gloriously unmodulated scream before very long. ‘You might well think, Maud, that this is foolishly kind of me after he had been banging my wife in fourth-rate rooming joints, under evergreen hedgerows, in marly fields, on river banks, in cars – including police vehicles – and, most probably, my own bed, despite the quiet distinction of the area where I live and the indisputable fact that properties standing in Rougemont Place include among their occupants a retired rear-admiral, from the days when the Royal Navy really was a navy, the proprietor of a workshop making vital shoe-wideners, a manufacturer of state-of-the-art double-glazed and centrally heated caravans, a lottery winner, and a paid-off football manager from somewhere up north. There would be occasions when work took me away, and Harpur did not demur. Harpur and demurring don't mix.