Undercover

by Bill James

  Table of Contents

  A Selection of Titles by Bill James

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Footnotes

  A Selection of Titles by Bill James

  DOUBLE JEOPARDY *

  FORGET IT *

  FULL OF MONEY *

  HEAR ME TALKING TO YOU *

  KING’S FRIENDS *

  THE LAST ENEMY *

  LETTERS FROM CARTHAGE *

  MAKING STUFF UP *

  OFF-STREET PARKING *

  TIP TOP *

  WORLD WAR TWO WILL NOT TAKE PLACE *

  THE SIXTH MAN and other stories *

  The Harpur and Iles Series

  YOU’D BETTER BELIEVE IT

  THE LOLITA MAN

  HALO PARADE

  PROTECTION

  COME CLEAN

  TAKE

  CLUB

  ASTRIDE A GRAVE

  GOSPEL

  ROSES, ROSES

  IN GOOD HANDS

  THE DETECTIVE IS DEAD

  TOP BANANA

  PANICKING RALPH

  LOVELY MOVER

  ETON CROP

  KILL ME

  PAY DAYS

  NAKED AT THE WINDOW

  THE GIRL WITH THE LONG BACK

  EASY STREETS

  WOLVES OF MEMORY

  GIRLS

  PIX

  IN THE ABSENCE OF ILES

  HOTBED

  I AM GOLD

  VACUUM *

  UNDERCOVER *

  * available from Severn House

  UNDERCOVER

  A Harpur & Iles Mystery

  Bill James

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  First world edition published 2012

  in Great Britain and the USA by

  Crème de la Crime, an imprint of

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of

  9–15 High Street, Sutton, Surrey, England, SM1 1DF.

  Copyright © 2012 by Bill James.

  All rights reserved.

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  James, Bill, 1929-

  Undercover.

  1. Harpur, Colin (Fictitious character)–Fiction. 2. Iles,

  Desmond (Fictitious character)–Fiction. 3. Police–Great

  Britain–Fiction. 4. Detective and mystery stories.

  I. Title

  823.9'14-dc23

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78010-297-9 (Epub)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78029-028-7 (cased)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78029-531-2 (trade paper)

  Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.

  This ebook produced by

  Palimpsest Book Production Limited,

  Falkirk, Stirlingshire, Scotland.

  ONE

  There was, of course, a before and an after. In the setting down of events, they might have jostled each other and got a bit out of sequence. Never mind: some mucking about with the order of things, and with time itself, could occasionally bring extra understanding and a special clarity. So—

  BEFORE

  If they decided to kill, you had to go along with it. Pack law. Basic. Anyone who worked undercover knew this. He had a nine mm Browning, not a weapon he would normally have picked. He liked Heckler and Koch products better, thank you very much, was trained on them. But the training had been police training. Police famously loved HK. Too famously. Therefore, Tom left his in the armoury and went for the Browning. This model gave no troublesome hints about its owner’s possible past and true career.

  There were four of them in the car, casual gear all round. Crook firms had their fashion rules, present and important, but nobody spelled them out. You intuited. It was a core undercover skill. For instance, people wouldn’t put on a decent suit for today’s type of mission, not because the smartness would seem freakish at a killing and a bit too Kray, but on account of the vulgar, showy bulge of shoulder holsters. That was plainly the thinking. When these lads bought their suits, reach-me-down or custom-made – but especially big-cost, custom-made – they wanted jackets to give a sweetly close and comely fit for normal social life; not tailoring that hung loose, shapeless, because occasionally, on crux outings like today’s, it had to hide a full handgun bra and harness. Pick something less formal. For instance, a suede or leather or denim short coat with chinos didn’t need to pass any strict, bandbox tests – in fact certainly shouldn’t look too neat, sculpted and suave. Tom Parry – as he must think of himself now – had his Browning cradled under an absolutely adequate stretch of very dark blue, black-buttoned denim. Although it didn’t feel like part of him, as an HK Parabellum automatic would have, this Browning nestled very nicely.

  Jamie Meldon-Luce, the distinguished Wheels who drove now, esteemed the Browning, and so did many of the world’s armies, including Britain’s. No question, it had cracking credentials. Jamie was expert in many technical and other areas, not just handguns. He had expensive electronic gear that could neutralize the security on any car, even the most modern, such as this stolen Volvo, and the stolen Ford waiting in Pallindon Lane as a switch vehicle. Jamie, early thirties, father of one, wore a heavy-looking, greenish cardigan. He reckoned cardigans were making a good comeback, and not just as necessary garb in poorly heated rest-homes. The ample wool betrayed no outlines. Tom sat driver’s side back in the Volvo alongside Mart ‘Empathy’ Abidan, who had charge of this jaunt, despite what some regarded as the jittery abandonment of another intended attack not long ago when he had command.

  Ivor Wolsey was in the front passenger spot. There’d been a stage, apparently, when Wolsey suffered from a deep dread of firearms: couldn’t even handle a piece, loaded or not, without massive tremors setting in, a recognized sickness known in the game as corditus allergius. He’d fought it and fought it, and eventually turned himself into the company’s finest handgun liegeman. Wolsey never boasted about his shooting, though. He seemed to fear that, if he crowed, the magic he’d achieved on his psyche could suddenly fall apart as punishment and drop him back where he used to be, paralytically weapon-shy. As Jamie Meldon-Luce had stated, there was no Samaritans counselling service for personnel who lost their trigger knack.

  Naturally, Tom had his worries. Wh
en he said – obviously, said only and exclusively to himself – that if they decided to kill, you had to go along with it, that was as much as he meant. You ‘went along’. You didn’t try to stop it, but you didn’t actually help, didn’t assist in it. And this was where the big difficulties started. An officer who infiltrated a gang aiming to get enough inside stuff to convict its chief or chiefs could not be, must not be, a murderer, not even to preserve his cover. On some excursions, he would probably have to shoot, but he’d shoot only close; shoot to miss. No big purpose was big enough to excuse active responsibility for a killing; that is, none of the undercover officer’s bullets should be found in the target, whether Browning or HK.

  True, in some aspects of undercover, that dodgy doctrine ‘the end justifies the means’ did operate. If your spy penetrated an outfit, he, or she, had to behave like a member of the outfit – most probably behave criminally like a member of the outfit. But there had to be a stop point. No end could justify slaughterous behaviour as a disguise tactic. A police phrase had been concocted that tried to cope with and sweeten those episodes where an officer might for a while have to dispense with legality and morality. Its wording avoided the rough Stalinite bluntness of ‘the end justifies the means’. Instead, it labelled such ploys as ‘noble-cause corruption’ – the purpose admirable and gloriously in the public interest, nobly in the public interest; the methods foul, though. And not even that clever jiggery-pokery with terms could allow the corruption to go as far as homicide.

  This was one reason Tom felt glad Ivor Wolsey figured in their party. He would probably wrap up this execution before the others had even attempted a shot. And that’s what counted – the execution. The objective. Tom’s wayward blast on the Browning wouldn’t be noticed, except as useless, frantic noise, he hoped. But he knew these were not dumbo people with him in the Volvo. They’d be alert to trickery, might spot it when someone was not aiming at the target, only at its safe surroundings. And possibly worse: they might be wondering about Tom already, and would be focused on watching how he behaved in a warm set-to. Yes, Tom had worries.

  TWO

  AFTER

  Or so Detective Chief Superintendent Colin Harpur imagined months later.

  Parts of it he had to imagine. He wasn’t present at the shooting, of course. Court transcripts, witness statements, detectives’ notes, and newspaper clippings gave him some undisputed and indisputable facts. But there were gaps. He tried to fill them. Detectives habitually did this – guessed at the thoughts and the likely talk and undisclosed behaviour of those involved in a case. It could show the various possible ways inquiries should go; and he and one of his bosses, Assistant Chief Constable Desmond Iles, had a special kind of exceptionally tough inquiry ahead.

  They had been ordered on to another Force’s ground, their task – yes, an exceptionally tough one – to investigate what had been going on there, or, more correctly, what had not been going on, when something ought to have been going on. Major people at the Home Office seemed to think there were spectacular failings in the way that Force had dealt with the shooting and its aftermath. And when major people at the Home Office felt such elite uneasiness, the procedure was to send senior officers from another outfit to look dispassionately, unsparingly, extremely unchummily at the way things had been done; or not done, when something ought to have been done. Iles and Harpur and their staff would be playing away from home, their task to examine and report on how their equivalents in this other communion had behaved. Already, Harpur sensed very dark areas ahead, and possibly very hazardous areas. He and Iles and the rest of the team would not be popular. Careers of some of their hosts might be torched. Jail would possibly loom for them. Perhaps dangerous, secret alliances existed between some officers and some villains. They’d try to look after one another, wouldn’t they? On this kind of job you watched your back and your front and used the I-spy-with-my-little-eye machine under your car.

  Case documents gave the exact timing, the exact street geography, the exact number of rounds fired, the specific type of gun used, the injuries, the death, the witnesses, the police resources involved, their tactics, the combatants. Maybe all this should have been enough. But Harpur added a slice of make-believe here and there – very reasonable make-believe, but make-believe all the same. He wanted a full impression of the run-up to the shooting and the shooting itself. In the search for this completeness he wondered how Tom would regard and get on with a Browning, having almost certainly been trained on Heckler and Koch. He still had the Browning in its holster, fully loaded, when his body was found on the building site.

  Harpur considered, too, the chewy, hellishly deep and complicated dilemma of being undercover when you and your supposed colleagues went on a killing spree. Tom must have had an intense fear of getting rumbled at the shooting and conceivably of having been half rumbled well before it. He’d see the need to participate – but without, in fact, participating. ‘In fact’, here, meant actually putting bullets into the target, the designated enemy, the intended victim.

  Harpur tried to tune into Tom’s thinking as he’d travelled in the Volvo, even trivial thinking. For instance, would Tom have chatted to himself – silently, secretly – about his companions’ fashion tastes and their relation to shoulder holsters and jackets’ fit? Harpur needed to get to know these people thoroughly, and one way of doing it was to create some of their notions and actions, keeping these little embellishments as near to believable as he could.

  Harpur’s fantasizing always had a foundation in the real. Imagination wasn’t his main flair. A green cardigan worn by the Wheels, Jamie Meldon-Luce, had been described in a witness statement, its greenness pale, apparently, and edging towards turquoise. Did Meldon-Luce believe that cardigans had come back into fashion, and not just for the elderly? But Harpur realized that a heavy, generously cut cardigan of whatever colour or tint would be useful in hiding a holster and armament beneath its thick folds. And those thick folds would be easy to pull aside if the gun were required fast.

  As to weaponry, papers studied by Harpur mentioned that Ivor Wolsey, one of the Volvo crew, was a gifted marksman who had emerged from a period when firearms turned him off completely. Harpur had come across people like that on previous cases. There was a jokey, mock-Latin description of the ailment: corditus allergius. Perhaps Wolsey mirrored some of those other converts to shoot-bang-fire and never trumpeted his pistol talent, in case this vanity got up Fate’s nose and brought incapacity back.

  Harpur longed to confer individuality and quirks on the main people featured in this post-event inquiry by Iles and him. Generally speaking, it was usually Iles who did the imagined and imaginary stuff. He would occasionally tell Harpur – no, oftener than that – he’d tell Harpur about ‘my soaring mind, Col, disencumbering me from the banal and workaday’.

  OK. But Harpur had grown fed up with being regarded as merely the nitty-gritty and plod element in the partnership. He might not be able to soar yet, and get himself disencumbered from the banal and workaday, but he could intelligently and constructively speculate.

  THREE

  AFTER

  But some witness statements were so vivid and detailed that they made Harpur’s attempts at intelligent and constructive speculation unnecessary. After all, intelligent and constructive speculation was only a puffed-up phrase for guesswork. Guesswork couldn’t compete with the real and actual:

  WITNESS ONE (Mrs Nora Clement):

  On October twenty-fifth at about nine thirty in the evening I saw a red Volvo saloon drive into Monthermer Street and park on a double-yellow-lined bus stop where the pavement had been recessed, making a kind of lay-by. It was this blatant, possibly contemptuous disregard for road discipline that made me notice the Volvo and continue watching it for some minutes. There appeared to be four men in the car. Three of them left the vehicle. The driver remained, so some of my resentment about the parking shrank, since he could move the Volvo if the bus wanted to draw in. Nonetheless, a clearly des
ignated bus stop should not be used for parking, no matter the circumstances, I believe. Disregard for such rules is symptomatic of a wider antisocial attitude, increasingly prevalent today, I fear.

  At first I thought the driver to be a man between thirty and thirty-five. There was a street light above the bus stop which enabled me to see quite clearly the car and the four men at this stage. The driver had on a pale green, almost turquoise, cardigan. He was broad shouldered, wide-necked, with dark hair ridge-cut, which made me wonder whether he could, in fact, be as old as thirty-five, since this style of crude haircut is favoured by younger men. I cannot imagine why they should espouse this ugly style. But, then, so many of youth’s tastes are incomprehensible to me, and to many of my generation. I consider the initial damage was done by a quite famous American singer-shouter, Elvis Presley, and things have got continuously worse since then.

  The three men who had left the car walked away in a group together. They wore casual clothes. They seemed to me purposeful, as if they had some particular task ahead. Although they were fewer and not so well dressed, they reminded me of the group of robbers walking towards their next criminal operation at the beginning of that appallingly violent film, Riverside Dogs, which my son, Gregory, used to watch repeatedly on DVD.

  {Correction: the witness probably means Reservoir Dogs.}

  I think that when they reached the end of Monthermer Street the three separated from one another. That was my impression, though I could not be sure, owing to the distance and the evening darkness. I did not give the three very much attention because I had no idea they might be significant. But I’d say that two were somewhat older than the driver and one was around the same age. He and one of the other two had on denim blousons, I recall, with light-coloured trousers. The other man wore a dark leather jacket and jeans. The one I thought the youngest of the three who left the car was also the tallest – probably just over six feet – and thin. He had short fair hair. The other two were of middle height and strong build. One wore a baseball-style peaked cap. The other was dark-haired and possibly balding. The Volvo moved off the bus stop soon afterwards and drove slowly up towards Mitre Park. It went out of my sight.’