by Bill James
Tom watched the mirror in case the Lexus showed, but still negative. He heard a bit of a swish and gurgle from behind when he made some ninety degree turns, but knew things would be all right there because the bowl was deep, the hefty wooden lid down, and the whole thing securely fixed to the van wall. Leo was someone who would obviously hate skimping – such as providing only a bucket or bottle.
SIXTEEN
AFTER
In the Home Office cinema now, the screen temporarily blank, Maud held up a sheaf of papers and waved them gently at Harpur and Iles. ‘We should talk about this report. You have a copy each. It’s among the stuff I gave you to look over in the lunch break. The item’s titled—’ she bent her head to read – ‘“Debrief of outsourced officer T5 by H7, February 3 2011, 1800 hours to 1901 hours, Location, Trombone.” What did you make of it? Were you OK with the coding? But that sounds condescending. Sorry! Of course you saw through the coding. Are you dim, for heaven’s sake?’ She chuckled.
Harpur wanted to assume this was one of those questions that had its answer built-in – a big ‘no’, so big that the preposterousness of the question brought on her warm chuckle.
Just the same, though, Maud went on to explain. Maybe she thought most people were dim compared to herself. That cordial, beckoning wave with the documents might mean: ‘These things in my hand are papers. OK? Got that? You have? Splendid! Now, next step: there is writing on the papers. OK? Got that? Sensational! Finally: I should like to discuss these papers and the writing on them with you. OK? Got that? Splendid! Truly splendid!’ It reminded Harpur of one of the earliest, uncomplicated French lessons in school, when the teacher held up a pencil for all the class to see and said, ‘Un crayon.’
‘T5 is Tom, plus a five letter surname, Parry,’ Maud explained. ‘H7 is Howard, the handler, with a seven letter follow-up, Lambert. Trombone is to be translated as The Field pub car park, two hours for a quid. Another location they used sometimes was disguise-labelled Viola. Neither had any obvious link to music, but H7 might have been feeling orchestral when he picked the ciphers. “Outsourced”, of course, means undercover: he’s out there secretly in gangland so as to provide a source of information about Leo Young’s firm. And, because he’s out there secretly in gangland, he’s away from any source of police help.’ Maud gave each of the emphasized words a really terrific whack, so that even the thickest thicko would cotton on.
Iles went sniffily through his handful of papers and found a copy of the one needed. He skipped the heading but began to read aloud the opening sentences, in a mock-prim, mock-clipped, mock-bureaucratic voice: ‘“T5 arrived on time (eighteen hundred hours) at Trombone and observed all the established procedures for this type of sensitive meet-up. That is, parking some distance from my vehicle, waiting for a short while before walking to it, continuing briskly past my vehicle as if uninterested in it when two other people came out into the car park, then returning when the two had left. He had a carrier bag in one hand containing various food purchases, as if he had been shopping. His manner throughout our conversation was confident and positive.” Oh, great,’ the ACC said, resuming the normal Iles half-snarl.
‘What?’ Maud asked.
‘He knows how to disguise himself with fruit and veg,’ the ACC said. ‘I can imagine him shouting words full of mad gladness at being such a nobody: “Look at me, folk. I’m just a healthy eater.”’ Iles went for a booming, vacuous intonation now. ‘Or, rather, “Don’t look at me, because all I am is just an ordinary healthy eater. I have measured out my life with carrier bags.”’
‘That’s brilliant,’ Harpur said.
‘What?’ Iles replied.
‘The last bit,’ Harpur said.
‘Which last bit?’ Iles asked.
‘“Measured out my life with carrier bags,”’ Harpur said. ‘That seems to go beyond just the case of T5. It sounds like a comment on a wider scene, a universal scene, sort of poetic. Is the phrase original, sir?’
‘Carrier bags have been around for a long while and are subject to comment by some, Col,’ Iles replied.
‘Well, yes,’ Harpur said.
‘It’s a recognised ploy in undercover,’ Maud said.
‘What is?’ Iles asked.
‘For an officer to kit himself out with something very innocent and run-of-the-mill,’ Maud said. ‘It helps him or her look as though he or she has some purpose – some purpose other than the clandestine get-together, that is. To sort of prepare a face to meet the faces that he or she will meet. A social background.’
‘A couple of cabbages and four Jaffas give him or her a social background?’ Iles asked.
‘Undercover needs its methodology, Desmond,’ Maud said.
‘Its methodology couldn’t keep him alive,’ Iles said. ‘The methodology is a farce, a placebo, a pretence that the danger can be countered and seen off.’
Maud lowered her papers for a moment, like dipping a flag in sympathy and respect. ‘I think you must have had a tough experience with undercover at some time,’ she said. ‘It’s gone deep.’
Iles slumped a degree or two in his seat and suddenly lost all aggression and jokiness. He shrank. His skin seemed too big for him, like a handed down overcoat. ‘Yes, a tough experience,’ he replied. ‘You could call it that.’
Harpur said: ‘A while ago the ACC agreed for a detective to infiltrate a gang on our territory. The officer was rumbled and killed.4 Mr Iles has been immovably opposed to undercover ever since.’
‘Touching,’ she said.
Iles nodded. So his muscular system must still be all right.
‘But absurd,’ Maud said, as though she’d spotted a weakness in Iles and instinctively grabbed the chance to put the boot in while he was down. ‘Yes, absurd, surely?’ she said. ‘Sentimentalizing one past event, allowing it to control the present and the future. Irrational, half-baked, death-obsessed.’
Iles didn’t answer. He disliked talking about this episode. It was one topic – maybe one of only two or three – that he couldn’t treat with his usual brassy disdain and steely detachment. His wife’s relationship with Harpur was another, naturally.
Iles reread aloud H7’s appraisal of T5’s manner at their meeting. ‘“He was confident and positive.”’ The Assistant Chief recovered and gave that a big, clanging, sneering delivery. ‘Grand words for his gravestone. He’s going to be killed as a spy only a few months after this wonderfully confident and positive start.’
‘H7 writes as it struck him then,’ Maud replied. ‘It has honesty.’
‘Perhaps,’ Iles said. ‘Harpur can be as hard as gunmetal, but when we read the documents together in the other room even he was shaken by the daft hope and underestimate of danger.’
This was about two-thirds true. Sometimes, when Iles had got himself into a high-level, flimflam argument about theory, he would call on Harpur to back him up, because he thought of Harpur as wonderfully sane, frank, clear-sighted and extremely limited. If Harpur supported him, it would be in convincing, unsubtle, anti-intellectual, concrete style. Iles considered Harpur could deal competently – formidably – with the basics of a situation, but was not too good on any larger stuff about themes and abstractions: what Harpur would regard as wool. And Harpur knew Iles wasn’t completely wrong. For instance, Harpur would avoid getting pulled into a debate about the merits or not of undercover: the kind of wide, airy-fairy, policy dispute Maud and Iles were on the edge of now, with words like ‘placebo’, for fuck’s sake. It could become not much more than an ego clash. She might want to squash him because of his rank, gender and general snottiness. He might want to diminish her because she was young, female, not turned on by him sexually, and a thing of the Home Office.
And so, nitty-grittying, Harpur said: ‘Look, forget the drool, what are we trying to get at here?’
‘Well, yes,’ Maud said.
‘Exactly,’ Iles said.
‘We want to know, don’t we, when suspicion about T5’s real identity began.’
‘Exactly,’ Iles said.
Harpur looked at his collection of papers. ‘H7 says that, at their interview, T5 made three or four major points. T5 told him he had some grounds for believing he might have now been accepted in the designated firm and was trusted. H7 stressed that T5 said “some grounds” and was careful not to overstate this apparent progress. Obviously, we’re going to have difficulty swallowing the accuracy of T5’s opinion – tentative or not – in view of what happened to him eventually. But, as Maud points out, this is to apply knowledge to the state of things then which could not be available at the time.’
‘You wouldn’t expect Harpur to come on with this kind of forcefulness, would you, Maud?’
Harpur resumed his summarizing: ‘One of the so-called “grounds” was that the head of the firm congratulated himself on being a gifted judge of potential recruits and thought his choice of T5 showed inspiration. Which could be an act – something to dupe him, put him off guard,’ Harpur said.
‘Certainly,’ Maud said.
Harpur referred to his papers again. ‘T5 tells H7 the head of the firm had invited him – only him – to his farmhouse to get familiar with the “sinews” and “ligaments” of the firm. This includes an educational visit to Leo’s prized Acme van and mention of immediate and possibly future assignments, with or without it. This could reasonably be interpreted as insider privilege, yes? And Young gives him details of the tripartite division of the firm’s turf and the alleged abuse of their position in Arabella by J5 and C4. As to the territorial divisions and Young’s mother, this might be information already known. It could be something, it could be nothing. The debriefing account doesn’t help us with that. It’s a standard bit of trickery to seem to dish out secrets as a way of fooling someone and building their confidence, though the secrets are not secrets at all.’
‘Certainly,’ Maud said. ‘Was Tom on guard against such a gambit? We can’t tell.’
Harpur said: ‘He’s instructed to take the observation van to do surveillance, via the A-tops, of a wholesaler who might be supplying J5. In fact, at the handler meeting, T5 tells H7 that it was C4 who turned up and apparently left with a commodity load. H7 recorded the name and address of the wholesaler.’ Harpur paused to measure how these facts – supposed facts – looked when taken all together. Then he went on: ‘I consider T5 could be excused for thinking he’s accepted as OK in the firm. He has apparently been handed a stack of confidential insights and given an important mission. Yes, it might all be show and bullshit. It might not. And if not, it would mean that a mistake by Tom, or mistakes, later than this made Young or others in the firm see through his cover.’
‘Well, yes,’ Maud said.
‘Don’t despise Harpur’s way of simplifying a problem, Maud,’ Iles said. ‘It has definitely been known to work now and then. Yes, now and then. I don’t think that’s an exaggeration. Think of Churchill, who insisted on having problems described on one half sheet of notepaper. That’s Col’s style. He’ll piss on nuances. It’s noted in his Personnel Assessment papers at headquarters: “Pisses on nuances.”’
SEVENTEEN
BEFORE
Tom ditched his plan to put the surveillance van in a multi-storey and do the rest of the trip by taxi. The idea came to seem cowardly – cowardly and an insult to Iris and the children. A sudden thought had jumped him as he drove: fuck the multi-storey. It was only a thought at first, but clear and definite. Then, after another couple of miles, he said it aloud to himself, his tone matter-of-fact, brisk yet conversational, inviting a mildly argumentative response, if there’d been anyone with him to respond. The cab windows were closed and the statement resounded well: that great, comradely rhyme between the Us in ‘Fuck’ and ‘multi’. He reckoned this was how a man ought to talk, and especially a man who now and then lately had almost lost track of his genuine self. His genuine self was the one who’d think ‘fuck the multi-storey’, wasn’t it? Wasn’t it?
When Tom upgraded from thought to speech he stuck a defiant additional word in front: ‘Yes! Fuck the multi-storey.’ The, ‘Yes!’ seemed to him necessary. It showed he wasn’t going to back off from that earlier inner blurt: ‘Fuck the multi-storey.’ Instead, he confirmed it. He might have turned cautious: surely it would be wiser to hide the van away and arrive in his street without the pray-look-at-me-do ACME LAWN AND GARDEN SERVICES display; wiser because who knew how far gossip might reach? He negatived this good sense, though, and relabelled it cowardice. He hated the notion of such furtiveness, particularly when it would be mainly to do with hoodwinking Iris and the kids.
He recognized this as an almost totally dickhead attitude. After all, hadn’t he volunteered for a job where furtiveness was not just OK but the very guts of it? You couldn’t be undercover and not furtive. At Hilston they’d decided he would be brilliantly suitable – that ‘fluidity of persona’, as it was sweetly jargonized, meaning a set of characteristics here today and also gone today, if the situation needed it. He’d admit, ‘furtive’ might be the wrong word – too creepy and base. How about ‘deceptive’ or ‘stealthy’? But whatever it was called, he didn’t want this grossly unwholesome two-timing practised on his family. With them, he would like his identity to stand solid and true, four-square and honest, as a husband and dad.
This aim he knew to be insane, too. There must always be concealment. The children would regard the van as a disguised police vehicle, and therefore quaint and jokey but essentially good. He couldn’t explain that it was in fact a van lovingly devised by an inspired, eminent drugs baron for various company duties, such as keeping a secret, furtive, eye on other greedy, maverick and disloyal drugs dealers, sometimes for very long stretches, commode and flasks facilitated. If they heard this, they’d understand then that he must be playing at villainy himself. How else could he be in charge of the van? This might worry Steve and Laura. They’d see the hazards. There’d be questions after questions, youngsters’ questions, which meant plain and ruthlessly to the point. And Iris? She would most likely guess at once the van’s significance. He had to gamble that when she saw the supposed greenery name on it and heard about the top A observation holes and the commode she’d come to regard Tom’s new work as slightly comical and footling. And woman-free.
He stopped at a bank hole-in-the-wall and drew some funds. En route a bit later, he found a cycle shop and paid cash for a Viking Valhalla twenty-four-speed Shimano Altus mountain bike for Steve. This struck him as the kind of thing dads did, with delivery on exactly the right day worth an extra merit mark. Steve might think it weird that dad should turn up with the Valhalla in a strange, bogus van, but he’d agree this didn’t take anything away from the terrific pressie, and the van must be how detectives had to behave sometimes to surprise and catch crooks. Steve would be correct about this: his father was a policeman in what looked like a non-police van. That failed hopelessly as a full account of things, though, and Tom had to make sure this failure lasted.
But, in any case, he had to ask: should he care what Iris and – or – the kids might think? Hilston would disown him, despise him for this domestic tremor. How come he’d suddenly lost that glorious ability to move so slickly in and out of different life roles? Only momentarily lost, he hoped. Could you be a natural undercover prospect and yet so feebly and dangerously scared of some of the game’s basic cons? He doubted it. Naturally, he doubted it. And, because he did, he had to comfort himself, buttress himself, with that noisy, hollow yell: ‘Yes! Fuck the multi-storey.’ After driving another four or five miles he shouted even more heartily, ‘Yes! Yes! Yes! Fuck the multi-storey.’ Anyone glancing in through a van window and seeing his mouth contortions and general facial excitement would think him duetting with some crap rap CD on the audio player.
He still kept a steady watch on the rear-view mirror. He felt he’d been sloppy to look only for the Lexus. Norman Rice had inspected the street thoroughly before entering the apartment building and migh
t have alerted Mr Wholesaler: ‘We’ve got some eyes outside. You’ve heard of a triple-A to do with credit rating, have you? Well, this is a quadruple-A, probably twice, and to do with something else, such as hideaway nosing. When I leave I’ll act nonchalant, as if the van’s invisible or is just a van. Maybe you should get on his tail for a charting trip when he leaves. No good me doing it. He’d spot the Lexus.’
So, it could be any model or marque tracking Tom, if there was someone at all. Although he concentrated non-stop, he couldn’t pick out constant slipstream company. For a while he wondered about a dark blue Astra which seemed to be in the mirror too often. But he knew himself to be on edge and perhaps over-wary.
Luckily, a couple of coils of spare rope hung on the walls in the back of the van and he’d been able to secure the bike to the commode with one of them. He bound the machine by its crossbar to an arm of the commode chair so that the hinged wooden seat at the front could still be lifted and the bowl used, unaffected by the rope and three half hitches. The tethered Viking Valhalla would be close alongside, whether you were standing or sitting there, but without obstructing.
After the stop at the bike shop he no longer saw the Astra. Quite possibly, Rice wouldn’t have risked mentioning the van back there, in case this wholesaler decided Norm and his trade associates had brought potentially hostile attention on him and his vocation. That might anger Cochrane, the wholesaler. And, of course, Norm and his associates had brought hostile attention. Tom was it, Tom leading back to L.P. Young. Cochrane was selling to a firm within a firm. The firm he was selling to was the Justin Scray rogue firm. And the other firm – not the one he was dealing with, but the one the firm he was dealing with was within – this firm did not care for the firm he was dealing with very much at all and feared that the Scray firm, which, for the moment, was within the other firm, would eventually grow to a point where it nabbed the position of the firm it was now within and become the container firm itself, or even the only firm on this patch. Leo Young greatly respected Justin Scray’s abilities and regarded him as his Number Three. Tom would be taking Leo the hard evidence – already much rumoured – that those abilities were only part devoted to the concerns of his firm, but functioned also, and perhaps mainly, for another firm, where Scray would be Number One. He had deputed his assistant, Claud Norman Rice, to pick up a load of commodities for their own separate, satellite, hole-in-the-corner, very selective, undoubtedly thriving trade. Leo would detest Cochrane, this rival supplier, for helping Scray smash the status quo. Leo cherished the status quo because he got his grand status from it, plus Midhurst, the horses, the swimming bath and a wife who could chair a museum committee and knew about halberds, as well as retrieving coins from the deep end.