Undercover (11 page)

Maud turned very quickly and changed the screen picture. ‘This is Rice's place,' she replied. It's a semi in what looks like a quiet, ordinary, petit-bourgeois street.

Iles leaned forward to get a closer view. He smiled with true, gratified warmth. ‘I love Victorian-style coloured glass patterns in a front door, don't you, Maud: the dark, slumbering reds, the pale green tendrils, the turquoises and ochres?' he said at normal pitch; at droolingly affectionate pitch. Harpur reckoned that if mood swings hadn't existed before Iles he would have invented them. ‘Thank heaven the door pane wasn't damaged on their visit,' he said.

‘The beating wasn't scheduled to take place here, of course. They'd meant to motor him into the country. He lived alone at present while his partner, Cornelius, finished a jail sentence at Long Lartin, so there'd be no nuisance third-party present. But his next doors might have heard the sudden evening boisterousness and yelps through a shared wall. We think this foray wasn't just about Rice himself, a ranker only. He worked to Justin Scray, his appointed line manager, and became, also, part of the firm within a firm. This would be a warning to Justin Scray, sort of: “You're next for something even rougher, Justin, dear, unless you stop pissing about with an elite private customer list.” Scray was still an eminence in the firm, not much below Leo Percival Young himself, we believe. Leo might not have wanted to get extreme with Scray at that stage and make him an all-out enemy. In contrast, Rice didn't matter much. He could be used as a frightener, his wounds red badges of punishment, and very visible and pithy, as badges always are. But, of course, as you'll have read, nothing about this operation went as it should have.'

Harpur said: ‘I've been hearing a lot about red badges lately.'

BEFORE

I
f they decided to kill
,
you had to go along with it
.

And even more so when it was only a beating up, definitely not quite a murder despite the possible thoroughness and force of the hammering. Tom saw that from the law aspect this must be a fair bit less serious than an outright death, and involvement in it – either actually helping, or as passive spectator – not so morally disturbing for him, surely.

Willingness to take part in some hefty crime could be used as a test by gang members if they suspected they had a spy in their outfit. The ethics of this type of situation had been talked about and talked about and talked about at Hilston, without producing much clarity, though. Impossible. The underlying, immovable problem remained: much undercover work required a law officer – a disguised law officer – to behave as though he/she operated
above
the law and could ignore and flout it. Identities were split. Years of behaving one way, and of being intensively trained one way, must be chucked, forgotten. Villain values took over. They had to be applied with full commitment and obvious – very obvious, very concocted, very convincing – enthusiasm.

No wonder undercover gave some officers long-lasting psychological trouble, took them down the road that might even lead ultimately to schizophrenia. Tom felt a bit dodgy himself, occasionally. There had been cases where ex-undercover detectives sued their police authority for not warning them about the permanent personality damage that might come from this work. Some officers with bad reactions were pensioned off as sick – ‘hurt on duty'. This didn't mean physically injured in some gang war. It meant mind stress. It meant deep confusion at a switch to career crookedness. Yes, Tom did feel a bit dodgy himself occasionally, or oftener.

Yet this episode had begun almost comically – quaintly, at any rate . . .

BEFORE

‘I
'll be wanting you to use a van for this, Tom – a special van, a van with unnatural talents, you could say. This
seems
a very ordinary van but it's got brilliant observation items in the rear. Oh, yes. In red paint on each side is ACME LAWN AND GARDEN SERVICES, and at the top joining point of each pair of open legs of them eight capital As is a very useful hole. Pardon me, Tom, if that sounds fucking crude and anatomical, and altogether too much of a good thing. It's a trick to make them little windows not noticeable because they're at what is referred to as the apex of the As – just lurking there, for observing through without being observed. You heard of a judas hole in a door so you can see who's out there before you open? Like that, only there's eight of them.

‘There being four As on each side of the van, you can move about for your squints and watch a truly wide stretch. A panorama? Would that be the term? You're in there casting an eye through them capital A facilities, left, right, distant, close, up, down, and nobody knows. Think of one of them German U-boat submarines in the last war, concealed under the ocean, its periscope up but part hidden by waves and the captain watching a convoy and deciding which ship to hit. Same for us. To people outside it's just a van with a name starting with one of them As so as to be high in the phone book list and get noticed due to the alphabet. They think the driver and maybe passengers are at work in one of the backyards nearby tidying up a rockery or spreading beneficial mulch.

‘Leave your BMW with us, Tom, and we'll give it a top-class service while you're absent on this important jaunt. When the spy job in the van is finished I might want you for something else, but then using your own car, so it got to be just right and prime. Ariadne, our motors lady, will get it up to super-perfect, plugs, points, suspension, the lot! She lives under bonnets, hair bunned tight at the back so it don't dangle into brake fluid etcetera, which would be of no advantage to anyone.

‘The thing is, Tom, Jamie and the Volvo might not be available for this future trundle. He got some churchy thing on. He's like that, not all the time but intermittent,' Leo Percival Young said. ‘If it was one of the others in the firm I'd tell him, “The church can go stuff itself. Your stipend here is bigger than the archbishop's so I want you on call, not idling in some holy pew trying to look mild and godly.” But this is Jamie, and Jamie I got to offer max respect to, haven't I, Tom?'

Leo gave a shrug, but not a shrug meaning casualness, a shrug and slight hunching up and lip bite that meant he blamed himself for being stupid and shouldn't have said what he'd just said. ‘But you wouldn't know about Jamie's role, would you? You're new. You haven't caught up on the firm's history yet. I'll explain: Jamie and me – well we've seen off a lot of trouble together. It could be described as “a mutuality” if you're familiar with that word. It's like support both ways – me to him and him to me. That's mutuality – taking, giving. Very much so. I mean years. I mean the long, hard march towards present comfiness via good profitability. Things like that don't happen without a lot of work, Tom – it's not just luck. Difficult bastards have to be smashed and walked over and on, the bastards. They got to learn they're fucking blockages and have to be cleared. Jamie was always there as reinforcement. He seems quiet and a piety fan sometimes, but just put a Browning in his hand and you'll note a difference. This sort of completes his wardrobe.

‘All right, he buys them sodding rest-home cardigans and sometimes – you got to believe this – sometimes he'll wear moccasin style brown shoes, bold as you like, as if it was normal. Well, moccasins
was
normal – for Red Indians. But he don't come to work on a mustang. We got to put up with kinks of Jamie's sort for the sake of what he can do, though – the driving mainly, yes, but other aspects such as laundering our cash intake with no filthy, nosy, intelligent awkwardnesses from the law or the Revenue, and steaming his way around an accounts book. Jiggery-pokery – he can spot it in just a glance at a cash column. Instant, like a holy revelation. Figures talk to him. They got their own lingo and Jamie knows it fluent.

‘You can see him have a little smile or a pout at what they're telling him – saying that things are going super-great, or that someone's not playing right, someone's doing a shameless percentage of rotten skimming and personal pocketing. Me and you, if we looked at them figures, they'd be just figures. We can count OK, yes, and do the multiplication tables up to sevens or eights, but we don't hear the tune them figures are playing – their deep message, that holiness of communication I just referred to. They might tell us a tale eventual, but it would be very eventual, maybe too late eventual, the damage having been done. We'd have to ponder, maybe spend an hour with the calculator. Jamie? It's like what's known as an “instinct” with him. Precious, Tom. Consider a hare in a field and he sees a greyhound coming. That hare knows from instincts he better get sprinting off. This is built in with the hare. It's an instinct. Jamie's like that with numbers. All right, he can get a bit independent at times, which might be a fucking full-scale pain, but that's another of them factors we got to accept on account of his knacks.

‘Of course, it was Jamie who gave me the pointer that leads to this – leads to you in the ACME van doing a peep session on our behalf. The van's got a commode for extended duty. This is important. Didn't that wrong shooting of the Brazilian boy up in London happen because one of the surveillance went for at least a piss? When God planned the human body and its ways, he didn't give all that much thought to excretory problems during a big stretch of surveillance. You won't get any of that in the book of Genesis. People in them early days was mostly in the desert where such difficulties never cropped up owing to plenty of sand dunes where it was possible at all times to have a crouch or just a stand-up.

‘This commode is bolted to the side of the van, so it won't go sliding about and tipping over, slopping over, when you're cornering, say, creating unpleasantness. Ariadne, plus a power hose, would clean it up, yes, but fortunately that won't ever be necessary. Also, Thermos flasks in a little rack. You should fill them with tea or coffee or soup before you start in case it's a long stretch watching. This has got to be run like military. The flasks are super-flasks and will keep stuff warm, or cold, for at least twenty hours.'

‘Detailed planning is always important,' Tom said.

‘Detailed planning
is
,' Leo replied. He sounded joyful. ‘It's because I knew you would share the thought that I picked you for this task.'

‘Thanks.'

‘You're new, as I've said, but I got that impression of you. Instant. This ability is referred to as “man management flair”. Many would say I possess it, so I'm not just being boastful. I get a sort of
feeling
when someone seems so right – and when someone seems so wrong, naturally. The
flair
is the valuable bit of the feeling, but it's the
management
bit that tells me how to make the difference between yes and no, isn't it, between right and wrong? Think of a great piano player, Tom. It's his or her flair that provides all the emotion when he or she's into an Albert Hall gig, but it's the management side of him or her that makes sure he or she don't keep banging the wrong notes and fucking it all up, with booing and fruit from the audience. I get this feeling re you Tom – the
right
feeling, but not just feeling, management judgement, too.'

‘Thanks.' Tom wondered whether it all meant he was accepted now as one of the firm. Parts of what Leo said delighted him. It sounded as if Tom would land a mission to handle solo – the ACME project. This was trust. This was integration. And then another assignment later because Jamie might not be around, but bunking off to church. Equality with Jamie in Leo's opinion – definitely a plus. So, Leo and the rest of the leadership had faith in him to cope OK with whatever these operations were, did they? So – to go more basic than that – they believed in him altogether now, as the latest entrant to the firm, did they? ‘You're new,' Leo had said. That meant Tom was in, didn't it – all right, newly in, but in. “New” suggested a context for him to be new in, a setting, and this context and the setting was the firm, wasn't it? That programme of buy, buy more, then buy more still, had worked, had convinced all round.

However, ‘Leave your BMW, Tom.' This piece of the briefing he didn't care for so much. It was spoken by Leo as offhand, routine, of no great significance. But that could be a ploy. Was Tom being sent off somewhere in this commodious van so they could give the BMW a total frisk, hunting a trace bug and/or eavesdropping bug, and anything else that might hint where Tom came from, who he was, besides Tom Parry?

‘Yes, you're new, Tom, so I got to explain the structure of the firm, its sinews and ligaments, we might say, comparing it to the human frame. We've just been discussing the body as to excretion, but now I'm using it as what's known as a metaphor – but probably I don't have to tell you that. A metaphor for comparing the way the body's put together with the way a firm is, or this firm, anyway. Such as we speak of the “head” of a firm, being myself, but it's also got other resemblances.'

L.P. Young lived in a converted and extended Victorian farmhouse, Midhurst, on a hillside overlooking the city and beyond to the sea. He had invited Tom there. They sat in brown leather easy chairs facing each other drinking tea in what Young referred to as the drawing room. It looked out on to a gravelled yard in front of the house and, to its right, several outbuildings in stone. Young had made the tea himself. He said his wife had gone into town for a meeting of the museum committee, which she was chair of for a two-year stint. ‘Really ancient things, she loves them, Tom, understands them.'

‘Known as heritage,' Tom said.

‘She's familiar with all aspects of it. Mention the word “time” to her or “centuries” and she'll immediately see ramifications and can discuss them straight off.'