Play Dead (3 page)

Harpur and Iles had come to look at the site previously, of course, on their earlier trip to Larkspur for Maud and the Home Office. Now, Iles wanted to sort of start from scratch -
re
start from scratch. They'd seek extra insights through a reconstruction; standard police procedure when a case grew uncrackably difficult. Iles didn't always fancy standard police procedures. He must be feeling daunted. His remedy was this atmospheric,
in situ
mock-ambush, a sketch: Iles to ambush, Harpur to
get
ambushed, as the undercover officer had also been ambushed from what might eventually be a front bedroom of one of the well-placed, detached property shells.

‘Symbolism here, Col?' Iles said.

‘In which respect, sir?'

‘A society in accelerating decline, Harpur. No funds to build shanties for its people. Contrast this, would you, with heaven, Col?'

‘Heaven?'

‘“In my father's house are many mansions. If it were not so I would have told you.” Notice that, Col: “I would have told you.” In other words, high-grade accommodation for one-and-all is so much the norm there that any shortfall would trigger a warning. Impossible for us to match that. We lag and may lag more. Then, as if to add extra misery, extra grief, to this deplorable scene, the slaughter of a law officer among the blighted properties. Are we into breakdown, Col? Are we witnessing a slide towards chaos?'

It was night, to match conditions when Carnation man had been shot in that limited, focused, dead-on-arrival way. As part of the dramatization, Harpur would convulse, stagger, fall, get up somehow, then collapse again and finally, as if hit first in the face and secondly in the chest by successive, excellently delivered bullets from the upstairs. He would dread to tumble before that, though, by tripping over rubble and dumped litter. Following nightmares, Harpur had a long-time horror of lying among reeking, torn black plastic rubbish bags like some giant maggot in its chomping element. And up till now in real, waking life he'd been able to avoid that. If he saw a full, mysteriously bulging black plastic bag in the street, possibly fallen from a cleansing lorry, he would skirt it, but with no lapse into trembling or hysteria.

Although some light came from an adjoining street and a half moon, it was not much. Harpur stepped carefully. This would be pretty well exactly the way Tom Parry came on the night he got it: Thomas Derek Parry being his Larkspur undercover label. His true name, when home in Wilton Road, Carnation, was Detective Sergeant Thomas Rodney Mallen, married to Iris, father of two, Steve and Laura. And the funeral had been for Tom Mallen, of course, married, father of two. As Tom Parry, he'd managed to infiltrate the main and massive Leo P. Young Larkspur drugs firm, establishing himself as a valuable new recruit: a huge achievement, by any reckoning, and glorious if it had lasted. Disastrously, though, while Tom Mallen was still, on the face of it, totally and effectively Tom Parry, people at the top of the L.P. Young company had discovered his actual name and background: the Carnation detective sergeant; married to Iris; father of two, Steve and Laura; seconded, as someone not likely to be recognized in Larkspur, for undercover duties monitoring Leo Young's business; the aim eventual charges and elimination of the firm.

Consequently, as Tom Parry he had been tricked on to the building site that night and, as Detective Sergeant Thomas Rodney Mallen, executed with two 9mm rounds from a marksman cop in a potentially prestige setting, one or more of the bathrooms possibly
en suite.

Undercover people tended to keep their first name, as long as this wasn't something freakish like Treasure or Breastfed. They'd had decades of automatically responding to it when called, so to stick with this handle made the identity-switch a fraction easier. Fractions mattered. ‘Tom' was commonplace enough to suit a cop or a gangster. Tom, aka Tom.

Harpur felt thankful the funeral took place months before Iles and he had any involvement with Larkspur. Iles could get very emotional, violent and boomingly claptrapish at funerals, sometimes hijacking the proceedings from a vicar or minister by force, scrapping religiously for the pulpit like an example in miniature of all holy wars, yelling and blubbing his complex personal views, covering quite a range. The Assistant Chief would have been very upset and therefore dangerously bolshy at the service for Mallen. Iles disapproved absolutely of all undercover work because it brought terrible risks, and he would regard the death of Mallen as a flagrantly tragic and predictable instance. The ACC had once put an undercover officer into a gang, where he was rumbled and garrotted. Although some believed Iles subsequently garrotted the garrotters, he never properly recovered from the loss of his man.
²

Harpur regarded such enslavement to one past incident, however grave, as sentimental and close to nonsensical. There would always be occasions when undercover was last-resort necessary. Iles refused to acknowledge that. Part of his splendid, tearaway brain had been shut down, like some mothballed frigate: a sloppy, posturing indulgence, Harpur thought, but would never say - or would never say to Iles, at least: garrotting was a painful death.

An inspired piece of plotting had been used for the wipe-out of police spy, Parry/Mallen, the object to make it seem Tom was shot in a routine pushers' dispute, and so make unnecessary any deeper speculation about the death. Drug dealers did regularly slaughter one another in the pressing interests of commerce. It came out after the murder that Tom had been conned into believing he was on an armed stalking trip with three fellow members of the Leo Young company, their supposed job to kill another member, Justin Scray, suspected to have turned rogue. The unforgiving word was that he secretly, persistently, operated his own profitable, self-contained business on the side, by siphoning off the best punters for himself - ‘best' meaning hooked on the highest-grade substance, and easily able to pay for it from their stout profits, salaries and/or bonuses as stockbrokers, hospital managers, hair dressers, undertakers, cosmetic surgeons, plumbers, airline pilots, bankers, chiropodists, media chiefs, bishops, soccer stars, dentists. He apparently had a firm inside the firm, a classic drugs trade heist. Scray was still around, but apparently no longer maverick, his renegade outfit finished, and accepted back into the main outfit by Leo.

This imagined mission against Scray must have caused Tom sharp conscience worries. After all, he was still a cop, although seemingly something deeply different, and couldn't be party to a killing, not even to keep his disguise intact. Some criminality might be necessary and acceptable to give him cred, but not murder. He needn't have fretted about fine moral points, though. In fact,
he
had been the target, the quarry, without knowing it. As part of the concocted phoney trawl for Scray, the two-timing dealer, Parry was asked to take a course across this building site, where the gun waited behind what might one day be a glazed upstairs window on a comely housing estate. The south-facing house was famous and should have a special macabre interest when it came to selling. Television and newspapers had shown pictures of it during the trial.

Harpur, approaching the death spot now in the re-run - or, actually, re-walk - wondered whether, as Tom Parry began gingerly to negotiate this piece of supremely dodgy ground, he'd suddenly noticed how wide open he was here, and how convenient the place would be for anyone wanting to get shot of him. Yes, get
shot.
Undercover people lived non-stop with the fear of detection. They had to act relaxed while being anything but. Training told them to watch constantly for signs that their cover no longer covered. Did Tom ask himself whether being ordered by the firm's management to take a route through this secluded, half-dark slice of landscape might be one of those chill signs?

If he did ask himself, he got the wrong answer, and he hadn't behaved as the training said an undercover officer must behave in such circumstances: chuck the assignment at once - AT ONCE - and get out fast and back to base; put the undercover identity into meltdown. Instead, Tom had continued on this path. Did he tell himself he had no clinching evidence his game was known, and therefore to run would be panicky, unprofessional, yellow? Or had he reasoned that the spy role brought endless risk, anyway, so a little extra could be tolerated;
had
to be tolerated? Why get in a tizz about building works? Dim, Tom. You were in denial, Tom. The compulsion should have been to get home OK to your family and job in Carnation - detective sergeant, married, father of two - not to present yourself here as a blown, dumbo sacrifice.

Did he glance up worriedly at the window spaces of these would-be houses, trying to spot stealthy human movement or the glint of a weapon in the poor light? Harpur, on his choreographed version of the kill now, knew Iles lurked, with two fingers primed ready to simulate a handgun, and at which loophole-window. Harpur didn't gaze there, though. Wouldn't that have smashed the realism of the performance by giving Harpur as Parry/Mallen too much knowledge of the attack and where it must come from? Ambushes surprised their victims or they didn't rate as ambushes. And, for this present mimicking of the occasion, Harpur wasn't Harpur but Tom Parry, who'd actually been Tom Mallen. Harpur needed to stay in character while starring in this playlet, that character being Tom Parry,
en
sad
route
to becoming Tom Mallen; dead Tom Mallen. Iles had said he would give two popping sounds, to suggest a silenced piece as Harpur reached the right patch of un-made-up road in front of the house, embryo 14 Davant Road. Harpur listened.

The construction area had been fenced off when work was suspended as the economy dwindled, and ‘Keep Out' notices posted. Naturally, these were treated as an invitation
not
to keep out, and the fencing had been vandalized. There were gaps - probably more gaps now than when Tom began his recommended attempt to cross; or than when Iles and Harpur first visited on their earlier Larkspur mission. The territory offered a short-cut from the Rinton shopping mall to Guild Square. Trial evidence had shown that Tom got Rinton as his area of search for Scray, but was summoned by mobile phone to the Square, where there'd supposedly been a sighting. But the only sighting that mattered was of Parry/Mallen displayed as an offering on the spooked Elms estate.

Harpur used one of the gaps now and made for the chosen house. It had originally been boarded up, but the vandals or firewood seekers had jemmied off most of this protection.

And, smack on cue, Harpur heard a muted, high-point explosion from Iles's mouth. It was not like real gunfire, but a theatrical version of real gunfire. The Assistant Chief made his skilfully formed, lippy popping sound and, after it, the whistle of a speeding bullet. The pop wasn't really loud enough for even the most efficiently silenced pistol, and bullets over such a short distance didn't whistle. But the general effect suggested menace, clear purpose and team hate and fear of a fink. These were what counted.

Harpur thanked God his ears usually functioned OK. If he'd failed to get into death mode - into a fold-down-into-the-mud mode - when Iles fired his cod rounds the ACC might assume Harpur found the whole exercise juvenile or even insane, and meant in his disrespectful, malicious way to fuck it up at the key denouement moment. Harpur could imagine the ACC muttering to himself, ‘Col won't croak, the mean, selfish sod.' Suppose Harpur didn't respond as though hit, the Assistant Chief would have been sending his brilliantly fashioned fake bullets of good-grade compressed air out into nowhere. Dispiriting. Humiliating. To wait crouched and vigilant in that cold, token bedroom and then, eventually, get pissed about by Harpur would really antagonize Iles and lead to very rough reprisals. Cooperative work on the current Larkspur investigation together into police racketeering might become more or less impossible.

Luckily, Harpur had brought two suits. The one he wore now would have to go to the cleaners after he tumbled to the filthy ground, theoretically struck twice by the 9mm Magnum lead. The first hit was scheduled for Harpur's face around the nose area, carrying through into the mouth and throat, probably fatal. He had never actually been hit in the face by a bullet of any calibre, so didn't know in full from experience how the victim would react in those moments before sinking. Would he lift a hand to check whether the layout of his features was still as it had been, sort of inventorying? Harpur couldn't be certain on this, but he did put his right up towards his nose, as a means of indicating to Iles in the property via an unspoken signal that he knew perfectly the script for this evening's interlude, loved it to bits, and would unswervingly follow it - face/head first, then chest. To butter the ACC occasionally seemed only humane because his mother was no longer around to extol and encourage him with comments. Harpur considered it strange that, despite her loyalty, Iles didn't like her.

Harpur keeled and went down, stood again and heard from above another terrific pop and whistle. This would be the later shot, ripping into his upper body before he reached the ground on a second visit, the old one-two. He lowered himself slowly, not a headlong plunge to the ground, which Iles might have preferred for dramatic impact, but which could have caused Harpur actual injury. Brick and wood fragments lay part-buried in the soil, liable to give an unpleasant jab. Harpur lay without movement for a couple of seconds on his stomach. He kept his eyes open and could have done a thorough itemizing account of the ground's make-up near his face - the brick and wood fragments, shreds of newspaper, an expired green ink Biro, a small cluster of defiant weeds, a metal ring-pull from a drinks can, what looked like small patches of spilled cement. Harpur reckoned the word for most of it - not the weeds - would be detritus. Had Tom noticed this array? Harpur felt a kind of detritus bond with him.

Then Harpur forced himself to crawl a few metres towards the front of the house, as Tom Parry/Mallen had forced himself to crawl, leaving a blood trail in the dirt. Harpur duly re-collapsed before he reached it though, as Tom had re-collapsed. Harpur tried to guess what Tom thought about as he lay there helpless and dying - if he
could
still think. Would he have gone over in his mind how he'd behaved and spoken lately, striving to spot what gave him away? But would there be any point to that? It had happened, and here was the plain, catastrophic result. Would he have spotted the larger aspect - the symbolism diagnosed by Iles?