Undercover

by Bill James

  ‘Stimulating because it’s dangerous?’ she asked.

  ‘Because it requires non-stop skill and alertness. And the undercover officer will be solo, of course. So, it’s one against a horde.’

  ‘“Facing fearful odds”, as old fashioned yarns used to say? More glory – if you win.’

  ‘People will take on a challenge, yes.’

  ‘If there are so many available, why can’t they get someone from closer – geographically closer, I mean?’

  ‘The distance is important,’ he said.

  ‘Important how?’

  ‘There’s a . . . there’s what could be called a confidential element.’

  ‘Is that true of all secondments?’

  ‘Not all.’

  ‘You need to come from some way off so you won’t be recognized by anyone – revealed, by an awkward fluke, as a cop?’ Iris asked.

  ‘And other factors.’

  ‘Which?’

  ‘Background – that kind of thing,’ he said.

  ‘The children and me?’

  ‘It wouldn’t be watertight if my home and family could be traced.’

  ‘What wouldn’t be watertight?’ she replied.

  ‘The confidential side of it all.’

  ‘There’s only one side of it all, isn’t there, Tom – the confidential side? You have to construct a brand-new bloke, somebody with a make-believe past and no findable family or chums or career or education. Wasn’t there a stink recently about undercover people with protest groups who actually gave their false name in court when prosecuted for their supposed protest activities?’

  ‘Now and then police work is like that, whether it’s here or there.’

  ‘But this will be there, won’t it? The distance factor – that important distance.’

  ‘I’ll be entitled to some travel allowances, if the work drags on. Home breaks are guaranteed.’

  ‘Steve’s birthday?’ As well as her fondness for system, Iris knew how to play very dirty. She’d been at an expensive boarding school.

  ‘Quite possibly I could get home for something like that,’ Tom said. ‘It would depend on how the project was going at the time. Clearly.’

  ‘Clearly.’

  ‘It’s nearly two months away. Difficult to forecast.’

  ‘An important anniversary. He goes into teens.’

  ‘Anyway, I’d make sure there was a card and a pressie. I won’t forget.’

  ‘Long-distance daddy.’

  ‘Work takes many dads – and mums – away for spells, doesn’t it, Iris?’

  ‘Which name would you put on the card?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The new bloke’s?’

  ‘Please, Iris. “Dad” – as ever.’

  ‘I heard that some people who go on undercover duties get sort of taken over by the new identity. It’s as if they become somebody else. There’s an all-purpose actor in a novel I picked up from the bookshop’s bargain box who’s described as “absolved for ever from being himself”. And wasn’t there a kind of doppelgänger for Field Marshall Montgomery in the war, who kept reverting to the role long after, although he wanted to escape it? Are we going to lose you that way, Tom?’

  He disliked how she phrased this. It sounded as if he was sure to be lost: it could be a toss-up between (a) death by discovery, and (b) irreversible morph – transformation of himself into a stranger, a villain stranger: that ‘Who the fuck am I?’ confusion. ‘I’ll still be me,’ he said. ‘Tests by shrinks on the course showed I have a strong, well-disciplined self-image, one I would always want to retain and return to after sojourns as someone else. I should be able to do impersonation all right, but that’s all it would ever be – me pretending to be someone else, and all the time aware I’m trying to be someone else, maybe a bit like an actor, as you say, but nothing permanent.’

  ‘This is an undercover operation, yes?’ she replied.

  ‘I spoke of a confidential side.’

  ‘I don’t remember the word “undercover”, though.’

  ‘So much police work is confidential. I thought it didn’t need labelling.’

  ‘I asked if it was undercover, not if it was confidential,’ Iris said. ‘What else can it be, for God’s sake – the wipe-out of home and family, the absence of details, the woolly, go-nowhere replies, the daft optimism? How do I get in touch when you’re at the other end of that important distance?’

  Just ask for Thomas Derek Parry. But Thomas Rodney Mallen didn’t say this, of course. Iris couldn’t be given his alias name, nor any means to contact him, from the minute he moved into his new character. It would have to be one-way transmission, from him to her, when he could manage it, unobserved. He’d try to manage it often.

  ‘That damn country place,’ she said.

  ‘Which damn country place?’

  ‘Where they trained and tested you.’

  ‘They were very choosy. Only a few got picked for the course.’

  ‘So, why couldn’t you have fucking flunked it?’

  ‘It’s good for the career, Iris, good for the CV.’

  ‘Curriculum vitae,’ she replied. ‘Translation, I believe: “Course of life.” I hope so. Life. But your life’s well on, Tom, isn’t it? I’d have thought for this kind of work they’d go for younger volunteers and without a dependent family.’

  ‘The opposite. They prefer someone mature, steady and in a good, solid relationship. It’s like selection for space travel crews. Personal stability is crucial.’ He wanted to get off this topic. ‘The tests also showed I had most of the other basic qualities needed, some not sounding too pleasant. I’m manipulative, opportunistic, plausible, temperate, resourceful,’ he said.

  They were having a late breakfast. Iris had taken the children to school. She shifted to a chair nearer him and put her arm around his shoulders. ‘As to that damn country place, when they trained and tested you, I hope they did it well, especially the training. The testing? Well, I know you’d be good at anything you put your mind to. You couldn’t, in fact, flunk.’

  He kissed her on the cheek.

  ‘You smell of Marmite,’ she said.

  ‘They seemed very competent. All the tutors had been undercover themselves. It wasn’t just seminar-room old rope. Some were going back to the same kind of work after their stint at Hilston. They’d got hooked on it.’

  ‘That I don’t like,’ Iris said.

  ‘No.’ But Tom could understand the pull. It must be quite a treat to shed your usual self for a while – get ‘absolved’ from it, to pick up Iris’s word – and become somebody else, all one’s customary worries, vanities, doubts temporarily ditched; subordinated because so much energy and skill would be required to fool your new mates, and to keep fooling them. Despite what he’d said to Iris, this wasn’t really like being an actor, a game where you tried to mock-up your cast character until the final curtain, then went home on the tube, not, say, as the warrior loudmouth, Coriolanus, but as your real you, with a break on Sundays. Undercover, you took on the alternative identity for every minute, every day, including Sundays.

  Tom remembered from school that, in fact, Coriolanus in the Shakespeare play compared himself at one remorseful point to a ‘dull actor’ who had forgotten his part. The actor playing this dull actor had better not forget his part, though. For the show’s three hours or so he mustn’t forget to forget. But the undercover officer was concerned with much more than regular spells of a few hours. He or she must not forget their part for days, weeks, maybe even months or years.

  It must be a great tonic to know you’d successfully penetrated a firm and made monkeys of a clutch of clever, vigilant, distrustful crooks. And, yes, you might get a taste for those kinds of sneaky victories. At Hilston, one of the undercover people giving a talk said only volunteers who survived the intrusive, gruelling psychometric examinations at the Manor could be considered for what he called ‘Out-located’ work: cut adrift from family and colleagues and canteen. He argued th
at the toughness of these selection methods couldn’t actually guarantee success, but almost. Tom had thought that perhaps it shouldn’t be ‘almost’ but ‘maybe’. He considered ‘maybe’ an acceptable gamble just about, though he knew Iris certainly wouldn’t. She probably did not understand how monotonous and soul-clamping so much policing could be, nor sympathize with the search for excitement, even if that excitement came almost entirely from risk and its abiding partner, fear.

  And, of course, there was the great unspoken between Iris and him: sex – the reason he’d baulked at ‘embedded’. To preserve their credibility as true crooks, undercover people had to create a complete alternative life for themselves, and a complete alternative life might include relationships. Besides that ‘stink’ Iris had mentioned about the officer giving a false identity even in court, there’d been a lot in the Press lately to do with undercover officers who infiltrated those civil disobedience movements and scored with one or more of the protesters. It could be to maintain cover, or get extra information via pillow talk – or, possibly, just because they fancied it. When all this was revealed, women had marched on Scotland Yard to condemn the false cockery, stating they’d never knowingly have shagged the fuzz.

  They claimed promiscuity became part of the police job, blind-eyed, or even openly tolerated, by senior officers. One of the march banners Tom saw on television news read: ‘Why detectives are called dicks.’ Former undercover officers quoted by a tabloid said if you didn’t have it away here and there you’d be a freak – and therefore noticed and suspected. The reporter commented that this sounded like ‘noble-cause concupiscence’ and gave ‘penetration’ a second meaning. A headline boomed: ‘Undercover leg-over.’

  Iris had probably read some of these articles, but he knew she wouldn’t bring up that category of worry. She’d see it as an insult to suggest he might have to multi-fuck his way to full fellowship and acceptance by the tribe. Perhaps she’d like him unprompted to mention these newspaper stories and dismiss such behaviour as gross and sleazy. He didn’t though. Silence might be wiser, he decided. In any case, he wasn’t concerned with a pro bono publico protest group, where there’d most likely be an equal number of youngish men and women made hot and horny by enthusiasm for the cause, and therefore very much up for it: a kind of solidarity. Tom had to find a place in a professional, crooked firm. There wouldn’t be many women, perhaps none. Sex shouldn’t figure, surely.

  EIGHT

  AFTER

  Maud stopped the film for a while and turned in her front-row seat to talk to Iles and Harpur behind. Maybe she’d decided, after all, to show some politeness and avoid pissing Iles off. She didn’t put the Projection Room overhead light on, and they remained in three-quarters darkness. Harpur found this soothing. He recalled happy popcorn sessions in the stalls while watching movies as a youngster, though these shouldn’t have happened because his Plymouth Brethren Sunday School condemned cinema as worldly. He’d strayed now and then. Popcorn would probably have been all right, but not in a cinema. The trouble was, people went to the cinema and St Paul had told the Corinthians to come out from among people and be ‘separate’.

  Maud said: ‘It’s simpler if we continue using Mallen’s cover name, Parry, in our discourse here. I think it would be apropos for me to give you some notion of his character and personality. Very limited parts of this you’ll find in the trial transcript, but, regrettably, the trial was not about Parry or his murder. There’s been no trial about Parry’s murder yet, has there? Which is why I want this investigation, re-investigation, by you two eminently thorough, impartial and committed detectives.’

  Iles gave a bit of a groan. He did not usually mind flattery, and, in fact, would generally fail to find flattery flattery at all, simply a justifiably awed stocktaking of his assets. But he’d suspect praise now because they were in Home Office precincts, listening to someone doing well here, and who must, consequently, be a conspiring, egomaniac two-timer: conspiring very specifically against him. In any case, the Assistant Chief would hate having his abilities referred to as equal to Harpur’s, or even comparable to. The ACC could just about swallow blandishments, but not if he knew Harpur was getting them, too. Suckholing to Iles had to be carried out with discrimination, a discrimination which should naturally exclude Harpur, or it would be suckholing with no special distinction for the hole being sucked.

  ‘I meant it – about your famed doggedness, your dedication to a task,’ Maud stated with a very genuine-seeming smile.

  ‘Thanks,’ Iles said. ‘It is a big help if you tell us when we can rely on what you’re saying because you mean it, as against all your other chit-chat when you don’t.’

  ‘Selection methods for undercover people utilize research done here in GB and in the USA,’ Maud replied. ‘On the face of it – yes, on the face of it – Parry looked ideally suited. Most police chiefs prefer their undercover officers to have had at least four or five years of ordinary detective experience. And ideally they should be in settled domestic relationships: this is taken as proof of a balanced, businesslike, well-rooted nature.’

  Iles said in a quibbling, fussy, unnaturally quiet tone, sort of decorous seminar mode: ‘Harpur tended to get himself well-rooted outside the home environment. Very well rooted. That is, of course, outside his own home environment. Other people’s home environments were quite another consideration, and could be shamelessly—’

  ‘Parry had done six years as a general duties detective,’ Maud explained, ‘and was in what appeared to be a classic, two-child family situation. He fitted the approved age range – early thirties to early forties.’

  ‘Fucking lunacy,’ Iles said.

  ‘Now, clearly, there can be, and are, objections to this pattern of recruitment,’ she said. ‘Should officers with dependants be favoured for what is undoubtedly exceptionally risky work? If something goes wrong it isn’t only the officer who suffers.’

  ‘I don’t allow undercover on my ground,’ Iles said. ‘Not married or single or civil partnership. Not young, not not-so young. We had a death there, too, you see.’2

  Iles had never completely recovered from his distress at the murder of Ray Street, an undercover man put into terminal danger with the ACC’s agreement. Now and again, Harpur would see him slide back into almost disabling grief and self-condemnation. This sensitivity seemed to clash with his usual bland flintiness and snarling poise; though, yes, quite often he could fall into the screaming abdabs, lip-froth included, about his wife, Sarah, and Harpur, a liaison long over. Iles had become obsessed about the safety of his people. Maybe the indecisiveness and hesitance that resulted had killed his chance of a Chiefdom somewhere. He did believe there was a conspiracy against him, Home Office-based, but conceivably wider than that, taking in the European Parliament, the Church of England, St Andrew’s golf club and the BBC. Perhaps his paranoia had some cause. Perhaps it didn’t: he might be a natural second-in-command; eternally second.

  ‘Both GB and the US recommend mature, father or mother figures for undercover,’ Maud replied. Obviously, she had very quickly worked out a procedure for coping with Iles: ignore him, or use waffly generalities to swamp his bleats. Perhaps this speed and ruthlessness was natural to graduates with fucking Firsts from fucking Oxford in Latin, Greek and the side dishes.

  Maud said: ‘Occasionally, it’s true, the police brass opts for a comparatively new recruit to infiltrate a villain outfit: they pick someone who hasn’t had time to develop a standard police mindset and attitudes which might automatically take over suddenly in a crisis undercover and betray him or her. Also, the officer will be unknown to local criminals. He or she might have gone straight into plain clothes and be free from any lawman, law-woman, history. A possible boon. However, as we know, an alternative way to guard against recognition exists: choose a mature officer but from a different Force. This brings us to Parry.’

  ‘But it doesn’t, of course, bring Parry back to his family,’ Iles said.

  ‘Naturally
, neither safeguard can be totally efficient, and we certainly have to wonder whether the distance tactic worked for him,’ Maud said. ‘Members of crooked firms move about the country looking for better business, or to be near a girlfriend or boy friend, or to escape a spell of police heat on their usual ground, or to look at second homes to invest their smart gains in. And one of them could have run across Parry before he took on his undercover role, and remembered him.’

  ‘You said, “On the face of it,” Maud,’ Harpur replied. ‘Said it twice. “On the face of it” Parry looked OK for the undercover operation. Why only “on the face of it”?’

  ‘Harpur will fix on a phrase,’ Iles said. ‘It’s a valid flair.’ He had quit the sombre tone, for now. ‘Don’t write Col off as just my sweeper-up.’

  ‘Parry got killed,’ Maud said. ‘“On the face of it”, he shouldn’t have got killed because he was near-perfect for undercover, according to US experts and our own. His entry to the firm seems to have been brilliantly carried out – patient and in slow stages. He did some buying, as if for personal use, with officially provided funds. Then he increased the purchase, said he had friends who’d enjoyed some of his stuff and wanted their own supply. He became a sort of courier and could graduate from there. Classic. It’s an expensive way of working because, obviously, he had to be supplied with repeat money, and more repeat money. That can’t be avoided. The outfit was alert to attempted penetration, of course, but very gradually they apparently got to trust him – as much as any of them trust any of them, which is never totally, but say fifty-eight point seven three per cent. So, he’s in and seemingly secure, yet then gets wiped out.’

  ‘He was ambushed,’ Harpur said. ‘No blame on him for that, surely. Who could have dodged it?’

  Maud said: ‘Well, who? Yes. And who could have laid it on?’

  ‘The Home Office loves blame – blaming, that is, not getting blamed,’ Iles said.

  ‘Parry was a solid, four-square officer. Those are considerable assets. But perhaps they preclude some other essentials which a different officer might possess,’ Maud said.