by Bill James
Tom had found it a good experience opening the van’s rear doors and lifting the bike in. He liked its metal geometry. The bike was aluminium and not heavy but would have fine toughness in its frame. He could imagine this Valhalla getting up mountain tracks with total ease, its range of gears conquering near-sheer slopes. Bikes he regarded as strange but satisfying objects. They weren’t like cars or vans which would stand solid on their wheels whether moving or parked. When not being ridden, a bike was simply a collection of tubes, wheels, brake-blocks and other bits and would fall down if not propped or tied like this one, say to a completely stable commode’s arm. Someone on the saddle changed all that. An arse of either gender and without age limit turned the bike into a vehicle, able to stay upright for as long as it kept going forward.
Not long ago, he’d read an old Cold War espionage story, The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, lately reprinted. In it, an agent is trying to get out of East Berlin and into the West on a bike, pedalling fast. And while he was pedalling fast the bike seemed a brilliant, basic escape machine. But then an East German sentry takes aim and shoots the agent. He and the cycle, of course, clatter to the ground and lie there, a spent heap. That word from the book – ‘clatter’ – had got itself fixed in Tom’s memory. It was so right for a bike.
To think Steve would work his magic on the Valhalla and get it performing well delighted Tom. It seemed to him a very fatherly thing to empower a son in that way, while also reminding him how those who did not move ahead might disastrously topple, like the German agent. There weren’t any actual mountains near where they lived, but some hills and hillocks. Steve and the bike must show these could be beaten. Tom wouldn’t spell all the symbolism out to him or he’d think his dad had picked up a bad dose of teacher’s gab. But perhaps Steve would hear the overtones without any prompting, especially from a bike called Valhalla, with its famed heroic links to the major god, Odin. Tom did feel intermittently that in some ways it was off-key to lash such a noble bike to a recently used, unemptied, commode, although this would be only for a while. However, he had to make sure that on the rest of the trip the gift didn’t bang about loose inside the van and get dented and scratched, or Steve might think it second-hand. That could take away some of its splendour, obviously.
EIGHTEEN
AFTER
Maud screened three stills of Tom Mallen dead on the building site, Tom Mallen known as Tom Parry for this job. They were obviously night pictures, unnaturally vivid from the flashlight. Harpur assumed they’d been taken soon after discovery of the body. Tom was on his side, knees bent, as if cwtched down for sleep. Maud said: ‘He seems to have crawled a few yards, then collapsed like that. There was a blood trail, a couple of inches wide at some points.’
She pressed the control button to produce again those white circles on the screen and ringed the leakage. It was on unmade-up, muddy soil at the front of the incomplete house. Harpur could make out the extra wetness, though. That was the thing about flashlight: it might be glaringly bright and unmodulated, but it did make everything clear. The luridness seemed to scream: ‘This is what life is like, and death. A typical moment has been flash-frozen, just for you. Get it? Have a good gaze before you drift back to your dopey smugness and sick evasions.’
Maud said: ‘Why he crawled towards the house I don’t understand. He wouldn’t find cover. There was no cover. No porch. The front door in place and shut. It explains the choice of this spot for the topping, I imagine. A marksman firing down had him in sight non-stop. If he’d wanted to shoot again, Tom made it easier for him by cutting the distance. But, maybe, when you’ve been hit on one bit of ground, anywhere else could seem better. What was that phrase from Vietnam – “the killing fields”? So, get into some other field.’
‘Or perhaps he thought, “If I can just shift myself even a fraction I’ll know I’m still alive, either as Tom Mallen or Tom Parry,”’ Iles replied. ‘That choice wouldn’t have seemed important any longer, would it? Identity a folderol now. Tom or, alternatively, Tom. The bullets had his name on them. Which name? Did it matter? What counted was being able to move. A father of two. He’d feel a duty not to get wasted, particularly not to get wasted with no dignity on some crummy suburban construction project paralysed by funds failure. You can hear him muttering as he dragged his body across the muck, breathing in fragments of himself, wondering how much of his face was left, “God, but what a fucking idiot to come this way.” Some of the best conversations are with one’s self. It’s true, whether you’re Mallen or Parry or both. The repartee can be dazzling.’
‘Two hits,’ Maud said, ‘one to the left side of his nose, one in the chest. That order we think, the bulk of the blood from his chest wound.’
‘How chests are,’ Iles said.
‘We believe the two shots must have been more or less together. They’re both front-of-body wounds, and it looks as though they came from the same sniper station upstairs in the half-done house,’ Maud said. ‘It’s not a case of knocking him over with the first and then coming down to make sure with another shot. So, cheek for openers, and as he’s falling his chest broken into. Either could have killed him. His trousers, socks and shoes were blood-drenched and muddy. In one sense he did well to crawl at all.’
‘Which sense would that be?’ Iles said.
‘This is very high-class shooting,’ Maud replied. ‘Two pops, two strikes. It’s true the range was short, but there’s maximum coolness and system.’ She put the second photo on to the screen. For this one, the camera had gone down to head and shoulders level. Tom was thin-bodied and thin-faced. To Harpur, the wound looked neat: not much flesh for the bullet to dig out and spatter. The bone of his lower left eye socket and left side of his nose bridge was visible where the tight skin had been split and furled minimally back by the impact. The sight of these flimsy, sample snippets of skeleton seemed to hint that Tom’s whole physical structure might be dodgy. His mouth hung ajar, maybe to pull more air into his lungs, damaged by the smack in the chest; maybe to cry out at the pain; maybe to yell a curse at the gunman or a more general curse at Fate for letting him ever get into this whole doomed, shitty, act-a-part carry-on.
Maud said: ‘I wondered whether the face shot was meant for an eye and just missed it – an I spy eye; an I am a spy eye. Possible. A good moon at the time, I gather, for accuracy. Punishment made-to-measure. A deterrent to others thinking about undercover.’
‘It’s something nobody should think about,’ Iles said. ‘These are thoughts leading to muck-up and regret. But, look, they’re not thoughts. They’re spasms. That’s the message here. It’s always the message.’
The third picture came from an even lower angle and showed a big bloodstain on the front of the white ‘I love Torremolinos’ T-shirt he’d been wearing under an unbuttoned denim jacket, ‘love’ not given as a word but represented by a red heart, with stubs of artery and/or vein sticking out, ready to get circulation going, as well as love. The heart was of a slightly darker red than the general red around it now, and therefore its shape still possible to make out. The jacket had kept mud off his T-shirt.
Maud said: ‘As you’ll have seen in the notes, the bullets were from a Smith and Wesson SW99, a very choice piece and well-liked here and overseas. Torremolinos and its package tour naffness were part of the faked Parry persona. We don’t believe Tom Mallen ever went there. You’ll remember Prick Up Your Ears, the playwright Joe Orton’s autobiography. He tells one of his working-class pick-ups that his tan comes from sunbathing at Torremolinos. It doesn’t, but Orton thinks it’s the kind of flashy Spanish resort where his companion for the night might himself have holidayed. Same sort of prole role play from Tom.’
‘I adore Torremolinos,’ Iles said. ‘Oh, but that San Miguel fiesta in September! Even an inveterate Prot like me can share the spiritual zing. I am rather a fiesta person, you know – arcing the wine into one’s mouth without too much disaster from a flask held high above in that fine old Iberian tradition. You’ll
hardly ever see a Spaniard drink from a glass. Deemed chichi and wimpish. One follows a country’s customs. My mother used to cry out gleefully to me, even as a child, “Desmond, you’re such an internationalist!” And then there’s the bullfighting, of course. How else to commemorate old St Mig but with beast torture?’
Harpur thought Iles had probably never been near Torremolinos, either, but he’d want to wrong-foot Maud whenever possible, because she was the Home Office: make her feel snooty and insular and heathen, disrespectfully out of touch with the saints’-day calendar, and ignorant of wine straight on to the back teeth from a raised-arm altitude.
Maud said: ‘He had a shoulder-holstered Browning automatic, as you’ll have seen in the reports. It’s a nine mm item, like the SW that killed him. His Browning hadn’t been fired, or even drawn. Although he thought he would be part of a hunt for Scray, he had a few hundred yards to go before meeting the others and getting to full readiness. We know now, don’t we, that he was part of a hunt, but as the quarry, not one of the hounds.’
‘And did he know it, in those last minutes, the crawling, half-nose minutes?’ Iles asked.
Harpur picked at the question. Had Tom realized he was stupid to have come this way? Iles could be remarkably intuitive. Although his mind sometimes lurched and plummeted or blanked itself off, it would turn astonishingly perceptive now and then. Yes, it would. But probably not about undercover work. He hated these operations so passionately that he’d bring to any discussion of them only hostility, doubt, darkness, thoroughgoing bias. He would never have admitted there was any route for Tom to take that might have been less foolish. In the ACC’s view the foolishness began with accepting an undercover role at all. He’d argue that because the whole project started from a catastrophic error of intent, every decision afterwards was inevitably wrong – diseased attempts to justify the unjustifiable. No, not argue. Iles didn’t argue. He announced. Occasionally, he had to be ignored. Occasionally, his announcements had to be switched off.
Harpur tried to get at what Tom’s thinking might have been, once he’d received the call to join Abidan and the others. Tom would know he mustn’t seem dubious or reluctant about the operation against Scray – the supposed operation, that is; Tom couldn’t be aware of its real purpose: he was its real purpose. He had to seem obedient, responsive, committed, eager to protect Leo’s firm from Scray’s sly programme of comradely fraud. Anything less could make Abidan and the rest start sniffing. If Tom seemed to delay, he might appear scared to be in on a killing. Of course, he was scared to be in on a killing. That should be concealed, though. And so, he needed the quickest path from the mall to the square where Abidan waited for the rest of the killing party to clock in. Or should have waited for the rest of the killing party to clock in. The quickest path meant the building site. No question, that was the shortest, the recommended route, the obligatory route. As he set out on it, progressed some way on it, did he have doubts about his safety? Did he suspect, half suspect, that he might have been allocated the mall to scour because the swiftest way from there to the square was via the building site? ‘God, but what a fucking idiot to come this way,’ as Iles had imagined Tom slagging himself off. Did Tom wonder whether he’d given any cause for them to doubt he was what he said he was? The photos didn’t show his fingers crossed for luck.
Harpur wanted to visualize the sequence of things. Every detective did that whatever the case. Suppose Maud were wrong and Iles right. That is, suppose Maud’s theory of the two shots coming virtually on top of each other were not correct. And suppose Iles’s hunch that Tom would have done almost anything to prove himself alive were right. Longing to show – show himself – his body still functioned OK, might Tom have managed to get to his feet somehow after the face bullet? Could he have walked, stumbled, a few paces towards the house and towards the gunman? The T-shirt and its heart would have looked totally clean and intact for a moment: would have looked like an invitation to fire again, the white garment perilously luminous in the dark. And that pictured heart offered guidance towards the real, fleshly one behind: did it seem to call for a follow-up nine mm round, a coup de grâce nine mm round? The illustrated heart had not been hit direct, in fact, but close. Then Tom could have staggered on again briefly, blood cascading over his muddied trousers, socks, shoes and the ground, until he went down and remained down on his side, as in the photos. The message: ‘I (heart sketch) Torremolinos, but won’t be going there any more, if, in fact, I ever went there before.’
And there might be other possible accounts of how the murder took place. So? Did they matter much? Tom had been killed. Was it necessary to know anything more than this? Well, yes, perhaps. Well, yes, of course. Police existed to know more, and continued to exist by knowing more, and scheming to know more still. Harpur thought his version of what happened could tell something about the executioner. Against Maud’s theory of two almost simultaneous SW shots, Harpur set the possibility of a delay – perhaps a minute or two or even three or four – between. During that gap, the gunman stayed cool, didn’t he? He hadn’t scarpered fast, afraid the noise when he first fired would bring an audience; would bring potential witnesses. He didn’t panic as the flattened, face-fucked victim somehow got on to his knees in the muck, then winched and scrabbled himself on to his feet and possibly seemed to come after the sniper – apparently meaning to fight back, even though his legs must have been nearly goners.
The attacker had stayed calm enough to decide that because a mug shot failed to do the terminal trick he’d go for the heart now, that anatomical, rather crucial heart, under the nicely visible shirt and its useful artwork. This steadiness could suggest the gunman had some experience of small arms and their effective use; had perhaps gone through training in small arms and their effective use; had been taught that a small-arms hit didn’t always mean a small-arms death: you hung about, checking. And, if necessary, you offered a subsequent, tidying-up shot or volley. Police training with small arms was very thorough and always provided a Plan B and even Plans C, D, E and F.
Incidentally, Harpur realized that all of them – he, Maud and Iles – spoke and thought as if the marksman were certain to be a marksman. But quite a lot of female police got that thorough small-arms training. Some female police would be cool and tactical and appreciative of a white shirt, plus vivid ticker pic, to focus their sights on in the poor light. They’d be capable of finding their way into an unoccupied property and creating a sharpshooter’s nest. This was an equal opportunities career. Any cop could be a self-saving cop, gender regardless, if a nice, established racket seemed in danger of getting blown. Women as well as men knew how to look after their investments.
The screen now showed a couple of photographs of the house used by the gunman (gunwoman). There were front and back views. Maud said: ‘Entrance and exit by a rear door. No evidence of forced break-in, so we assume a bit of magic on the lock. That might mean more than one person – a burglary expert, a handguns and deaths expert. Nothing meaningful found in the sniper’s selected bedroom we’re told. The rear yard – not yet a garden – gives on to a broad service lane, no CCTV. A car might have been waiting there. The house and the houses next to it were boarded up after this episode. Gorgeously late foresight!’
The papers Harpur and Iles had been given to read during the lunch break were official inquiry documents. But Maud also had slides giving reports from the local Press and all the nationals. The murder of a police detective in these unexplainable, no-man’s-land circumstances had been a major media story. Harpur could remember coverage in the Daily Mail and on television news. That was a good while before he came to have this personal connection with the case, of course. Maud said: ‘One can tell they sensed something very clandestine and veiled behind the killing. Naturally, they all refer to him by his real name, Detective Sergeant Thomas Rodney Mallen.’
She had one of the national’s account of things on the screen now and ringed a sentence: ‘He is believed to have been on secondment
from another force with undisclosed duties, but possibly connected to drugs trafficking.’
Maud did a summarizing session from other cuttings: ‘Various terms,’ she said. ‘Some call it “secondment”, others “attachment”. One national wrote he had been “drafted in with a special remit outside the normal command structure”. She switched slides to the front-page piece in a local and singled out sentences near the top. ‘The police investigation continues, its priority to discover why he was on the partially completed Elms private housing estate of four- and five-bedroomed executive style properties at the time of his murder. The site is used as a short-cut, despite prominent “Keep Out” warning notices.’
Maud said: ‘And as we all know from recorded interviews and so on, Tom’s body was found by a couple coming back from evening shopping at the Rinton mall, the man qualified in first aid. You’ll remember he tries some on Tom, including kiss of life, but no response. Meanwhile the woman mobiles nine nine nine. The man must have got in a bit of a mess through contact. These were good people. One of the police interviews makes it clear, doesn’t it, that when tending to Tom and getting him into position for the kiss of life they find the shoulder holster and Browning pistol under his jacket and on the jolly but sopping Torremolinos T-shirt? It must have told the pair they were into something serious and possibly very rough – if they didn’t already realize it. That didn’t stop them doing what they could for him, though. Yes, good people.’