Stegs took a slurp from his cup of tea. It was going cold. 'Yeah, whatever.' 'Are you sure you're all right?'
'I'm fine. Tired, that's all.' And hung over, he thought. He'd sunk four in the Admiral, then two cans of Stella when he'd got home. He was amazed he hadn't been up pissing all night, but then he'd always had a strong bladder.
The missus sighed and gave him her trademark calm-but-serious look. This was always a sign that she was going to nag him about something. And he knew straight away what it was. 'I want you to think very seriously about changing jobs, Mark. Really. Linda was saying the other day that Clive could get you a job as head of office security at Warner Tomkins and Nash Associates. The current incumbent's not doing a very good job and they want to make him redundant and replace him.'
Stegs thought that his missus was probably the only person he knew who actually used the word 'incumbent' in conversation. 'Look, can we not talk about this now? It's a bad time at the moment.'
'When can we talk about it, then?'
'Not today,' he said, getting up from the kitchen chair and looking around for his cigarettes. 'Please not today.'
The pay's good,' she called after him as he found the pack and retreated out the back door and into the cold for his first smoke of the day.
He locked himself in his study with the PC for most of the morning, explaining to the missus that he was doing some work from home. Instead he made a valiant effort to get Undercover Cop
I flowing, and after much scratching of head, he managed to get it to midway down page thirty. To spice up the otherwise boring details of his training, he put in the bit on his graduation night when he'd slept with a Scottish prostitute with a prosthetic leg. Stegs remembered how shocked he'd been when he'd bumped into it during sex and jarred his knee (it had been covered with a black stocking at the time, so wasn't that obvious), but he didn't mention how he'd got her to remove it for the remainder of their bout to see what it would be like, not wanting to come across like some sort of pervert. Having wound up Hendon, he was now on to chapter three where he was a probationer pounding the beat of Barnet (or driving round in a squad car, anyway). Soon he'd be getting on to the good stuff, having already decided to slap in a fictitious murder for him to help solve in chapter four. Then it would really start to flow.
But even the most hardy of scribes needs a rest, so at 11.30 Stegs emerged from the cramped little room which was the only one in the house he could truly call his own (no-one else could
fit in it while he was in there) and told his missus that he had to go to a debriefing session at Scotland Yard.
'Are you sure you're OK to go?' she asked him. 'Maybe it'd be better if you stayed here for the afternoon. They really ought to give you a couple of days off after something as traumatic as what's happened.'
'I've got a duty to the people who need me,' he told her piously. 'And I'm fine, honestly.'
'Are you going to call in on Gill and the kids?'
He nodded. 'Afterwards.'
'Give them my love. And my condolences. Maybe you should pick up some flowers on the way.'
'Course I will.' He gave her a quick kiss on the cheek, then picked up Luke who was playing at her feet. The boy gave him a hostile look at first, then slowly his face broke into a smile. Stegs smiled back, suddenly feeling all soppy. 'Hey, my little man, I'm going to miss you today. Kiss for Dada, eh?'
As he leant forward to give him a big slobbery one on the lips, he was suddenly assailed by a ferocious smell, so powerful that it could probably have stripped paint off walls. He swallowed hard, trying not to gag. An old man couldn't have produced worse. No wonder the little bugger had been smiling. That one must have been brewing up for hours.
Swiftly he handed him back to the missus, having given him only a cursory lip-scrape across the cheek. 'I think he needs changing, babes. I'd love to stop and help but the meeting starts in an hour. I've got to run.'
He was out of there like lightning, the smell fair chasing him out of the door, a noxious cloud warning him not to return. No chance of that, he thought. Not for a few hours anyway.
For a while he just drove around, not really sure what to do with himself. He knew he had to go and visit Gill but was desperate to put off the inevitable. Seeing her was going to be a nightmare. It was bad enough on a normal day. God knows what she was going to say to him. He couldn't help thinking that he was going to get the blame for what had happened, even though there was nothing he could have done. He hoped Yokes hadn't been too scared in the last few seconds before he died, and he hoped too that death had come quickly. It felt strange knowing he was never going to see his colleague again, that this was it: the end of their relationship. Yokes had always claimed to have believed in God, but Stegs was never a hundred per cent sure whether he really did or not. More likely he was trying to keep the missus happy and hedge his bets at the same time. In a job like theirs you never knew when your card might be marked. Better to be on the right side of the Good Lord if he did exist. Maybe it had given him some comfort in those last frantic moments. Stegs hoped so, and wished at the same time that he'd had a chance to say goodbye, so that he could have let him know that he'd always been a good mate. It upset him that his last words had been to tell him not to worry, that he'd be back in a few minutes, but that of course was the injustice of sudden death. It deprived you of the opportunity to tie up all the loose ends and finally close the book.
Vokes's family lived in Baling, a few miles down the road from the station in Acton where he'd been based for the past ten years. By the time Stegs had meandered his way down there, it was one o'clock and time to eat. Hungry, tired and still vaguely hung over, he had a rank taste of old beer in his mouth and the best way to get rid of it was to sup a bit of hair of the dog. The pub beckoned.
He parked on a backstreet near Baling Common and made his way on to the Broadway, keeping an eye out for a decent
boozer as he strolled along the crowded shopping street. He and Yokes had never really drunk round here so he didn't know the watering holes and wanted to make sure he found a good one. Stegs was a traditionalist where pubs were concerned. He didn't want a wine bar serving tapas or somewhere where they only flogged bottled beer at £2.50 a pop. He wanted carpets with fag burns on them, the smell of beer and smoke; the noise of loud, rasping, unhealthy laughter. Pork scratchings; a dartboard; food with big chips on the side; barmen who look like barmen, not fucking students.
He eventually found a place near Baling Broadway Tube that at least had some of what he was looking for. It was a bit big, and there were a few too many businessmen and estate agent types, but they did do steak and kidney pie and chips and they had a good variety of beers on tap. He asked the barman, who unfortunately did look like a student, whether the chips were chunky or those little thin ones like you got in McDonald's. The barman, who said he was new, had to go and check with the kitchen, and when he came back he said that they did bakers' chips, which were apparently in between.
That's not a bad marketing idea,' said Stegs, and ordered a pint of Stella and steak and kidney pie with bakers' chips, before taking a seat at the bar.
The grub, when it came, was good and he finished the lot. There are very few men in the world who can have just one pint and leave it at that, and in Stegs's opinion those who can have something wrong with them. He wasn't going to be driving for an hour or two so he ordered another Stella and drank it swiftly with two smokes. That was the point when he should have stopped he
could usually last just about on two but
the knowledge that stopping meant heading round to Gill's place made him think that perhaps one more would be in order.
He shouted for another pint, paid for it, then made his way to the toilets, taking the drink with him. They were clean enough for pub bogs, but they still had that stale, pissy smell you always get in such places, and the sight of a cockroach floundering on its back in a pool of water by the sinks did little to add to the ambience. There was no-one else in there so he went to the nearest cubicle, stepped inside and locked the door. He then fished a small, transparent packet filled with white powder from the inside of his jacket, opened it, and chucked half of its contents into the new pint. The beer fizzed up angrily, then settled again as the speed began to dissolve, the chunkier bits sinking towards the bottom. Stegs didn't consider himself an addict by any means, but more and more these days he needed the speed as a pick-me-up for when he was feeling knackered or hung over or
in this case both. He'd been introduced to it by Pete the gun dealer, had liked it (particularly the fact that it was cheap) and, given his excellent and varied contacts within the criminal classes, had never had a problem getting hold of it. He never took it more than two or three times a week though, and considered his usage firmly under control.
With one hand, he flipped himself out of his jeans and opened fire directly into the bowl, while using the other hand to guzzle the drug-fuelled lager in a classic example of recycling. One minute later he'd given his dick and the half-full glass a good shake, and was feeling better already. He went back out, his heart thumping and teeth grinding, a grin already erupting on his face, knowing that now he was ready for anything. A vision of Yokes marched unwelcome into his mind, and he pushed it aside with a survivor's laugh that had a group of businessmen standing near the door to the gents giving him the resigned, moderately contemptuous look that so many Londoners aim at the mentally unstable. Stegs ignored them.
His seat at the bar had been taken by a young woman with a pudgy face and a big arse who was sitting talking to a spotty teenager in a cheap suit. The teenager was making a pretty lame attempt to appear interested in what the girl was saying, but he perked up noticeably when she put a flabby arm on his and leant forward, giggling, to tell him something. Stegs imagined the two of them naked and on the job, and it made him feel a bit sick, so he turned away and found some space by a pillar in the middle of the floor. He leant against it and took another huge swig of his pint, wondering whether he had time for just one more.
At that moment, his private mobile rang. He instantly recognized the tone: Mission Impossible. This was the phone used by family, friends, work and informants who knew his real identity. He had another purely for undercover work. The ringtone on that one was The Magnificent Seven.
He removed it from the pocket of his jacket and checked the number, not immediately recognizing it. 'Hello,' he said, putting it to his ear. The bar was crowded now with office workers on their lunchbreak, and he had to speak up.
'All right, Stegsy?'
Only one man called Stegs 'Stegsy', and that was Trevor Murk, a petty criminal and informant whose activities matched his name, and who occasionally provided him with tidbits of information about the activities of small-time crims operating out of his Barnet locale. Stegs hadn't heard from Murk for a while, which was why he hadn't recognized the number.
'Hello, Trevor. What can I do for you today?'
'I think it's more a matter of what I can do for you, me old mate. Got a little bit of info that might be of great use. Great use indeed.'
Murk spoke like Michael Caine did in Get Carter. Loud enough to stop a conversation, yet taking care to enunciate every
word individually with an air of cheery cockney menace. It was all an act, though. He'd actually been brought up in St Albans.
'Oh yeah?' said Stegs, not sure whether it was worth mentioning that he was suspended. 'What's that, then?'
'Behave, sweetboy. Not over the blower. This sort of thing requires some alcoholic lubrication. Are you in the boozer at the moment?'
'I am, but nowhere local. I'm in Haling.'
'What the fuck are you doing there?' asked Murk in a tone that suggested he might as well have been in Kathmandu.
'I'm having a drink,' said Stegs, who was-already
beginning to get tired of this conversation. Murk wasn't bad company as informants go, but he did rate himself highly and could therefore become severely irritating on occasion.
'Well, I can give it to someone else, Stegsy, but I reckon you'll regret it if I do. This'll be a nice little collar, and I reckon you'll have a laugh doing it as well.'
'What do you mean?'
'Exactly what I said. I'll tell you more if we meet up. And I'm going to need a nice little drink for my troubles.'
In spite of himself, Stegs was intrigued. He took another gulp from his pint, leaving nothing but a powdery mouthful in the bottom. He could hear his heart pounding but knew it was the gear. 'There'll be no money until I hear what you've got to say, all right?'
'Fair do's, but you'll like it, I promise you that.'
'We'll see. I can meet you tomorrow lunch time. Soon enough.'
That'll do. Usual place?'
'I'll be there at one o'clock.'
'Are you pissed?'
'Eh?'
'You sound a bit pissed down there. How many have you had?'
'What are you? My fucking mother? I'm fine See you tomorrow.'
He hung up, hoping he didn't sound too inebriated He'd been thinking about having another, but decided he'd better knock it on the head for now.
He didn't know why he'd agreed to meet up with Murk. Even if it was an easy collar, in the end it was none of his business now that he was suspended, his future in the Force looking shaky to say the least. No-one likes a copper involved in controversy, least of all the politically sensitive Brass. But regardless of all that, that's what Stegs Jenner still was. A copper. And a copper likes getting collars. Plus, it would give him something to do tomorrow. If Murk wasn't being too cocky, it might even be quite a good afternoon.
He finished the last bit of his drink and put the glass on a shelf on the pillar he'd been leaning against, then headed out the door, trying to compose a few fitting sentences of commiseration for the recently bereaved widow.
It took Stegs close to half an hour to find the Vokerman household. He'd only ever been there once before, and this time had forgotten to bring the address or the directions with him. Or the flowers, come to that. He knew the number, and the rough location, but couldn't think of the street name, so he'd had to tramp around the whole area until he'd come across it, quite by chance. A quiet residential road made up of bland but spacious 1940s semis in view of the Thames Valley University campus.