by Bill James
Those TV crime and spy plays often demonstrated not just surveillance skills, but tricks the tracked person could use to deal with those skills, dodge out of them, confound them, counter them, negate them. The aim then was to reverse the situation. By this I mean suddenly, somehow, change pace and direction and find some cover that takes the quarry out of the stalker’s sight. Disappear. This is stage one of the ploy. The next, more important and difficult manoeuvre is to get craftily behind the tail and become one yourself, transform him/her into the quarry her or him self: find where she/he comes from and who sent him/her.
This I managed to do. I found I had a flair for tag-along, street-level stealth. It thrilled me. It killed me.
EIGHT
‘Despite the damage to his face, Col, you’re confident about your identification of him?’
‘Oh, certainly, sir,’ Harpur said. ‘He belongs, belonged to the …’
But why always Harpur and Iles?
NINE
Consider supermarkets. There was one on the route between Judith’s flat and my parents’ house. I had a thought: weren’t they the nearest thing to a maze possible in the middle of a city? The comparison nudged me one day as I was walking to Judy’s flat with the tail at a varying twenty-five metres behind, but not varying very much from that twenty-five metres. Later on, when I had moved fully into private investigating as my career, preferred to feet, I discovered that in this profession the use of supermarkets for ditching a tail was widely acknowledged and practised; pretty well a trade cliché. Some argued that Tesco was a reverse acronym meaning ‘Out-class Subtly Every Tail,’ and Asda a straight acronym for ‘Act Swiftly to Ditch any Accompaniment’. Supermarkets, in fact, come a very respectable second to tube stations as most convenient for shedding a pest; remember that crook in one of the French Connection films evading the cop by some clever antics at a tube train door and waving an infuriating goodbye as it moves off with him safely aboard and the pursuit helpless on the platform?
Yes, the supermarket tactic is a good, basic stand-by. And although it’s not always and totally a success, I couldn’t see any faults with it when I made my off-the-top-of-the-head decision that day to try a shake-off in this big store. I’d learn about the potential snags later. I’d learn a lot of things later, but a lot wouldn’t be enough, or I wouldn’t now be the late Thomas Wells Hart.
One dangerous point about a supermarket not obvious to a novice is that CCTV will almost certainly fix on you, scuttling about between sections, clearly very alert and watchful, but not alert and watchful about things to buy. Supermarkets offer things to buy – it’s why they exist. So, if someone doesn’t buy, questions will be asked. Those monitoring the screens somewhere will wonder why she/he is there and they’ll keep the focus on him/her to find out. Of course, it would be mad for someone trying to escape surveillance to make a purchase or purchases, requiring next a very public display at the checkout; perhaps a very long public display in a queue. The supermarket is supposed to offer obscurity, not a static, blatant presentation. If the hunter had lost you because you skipped about cleverly between the various aisles, she/he will definitely find you now.
And if, in order to look like a normal shopper, you did choose some items and then try to escape without paying, security at the door would most probably stop you; more unwanted public display. Security would have been earpiece-warned by the CCTV crew to look out for this dubious customer. And you might be just as likely to get stopped if you’d selected nothing. Why were you in the shop at all, in that case?
With supermarkets, it’s the multiplicity of separate aisles blanked off from one another which can be so splendidly helpful, isn’t it – the maze element I mentioned? If you’re in, say, ‘Frozen Meats’ you can’t tell who’s over there with the ‘Cereals, Biscuits and Dips’ even though the two parallel shelf systems might be immediately adjacent, only a couple of feet apart.
A wise and experienced tail will know the problems certain to face him/her if she/he follows the target into the store and its aisles between shelved walls. Accordingly, he/she might choose to remain outside; there’s only one exit and the operation can be resumed when she/he reappears. But not all tails are so flexible. They’ve been rigorously trained to keep the twenty-five metre rule and can’t free themselves from it, can’t adapt, can’t face the risk. They have to try to stick robotically with the objective. They wouldn’t know the meaning of that Latin phrase, ad hoc – action exclusively for one particular occasion.
And even if they did know it they would be unable and/or unwilling to apply it. As a result, the in-store tail can be considerably less than twenty-five metres from the quarry but, without a bird’s-eye view, can’t see her/him because of, say, the ‘Boil In The Bag Kippers And Smoked Mackerel’ shelves or ‘Domestic Hygiene’.
On that day, I seemed to be lucky. I didn’t buy anything, but put on a bit of frustrated head-shaking in front of the DVD shelf, as though angry they didn’t have what I wanted. I was able to walk out unchallenged into the car park while the tail was still in ‘Soft Drinks and Mixers’. To the immediate left of the entrance was a ‘While You Shop’ car wash, an open square area of ground where the vehicles could be hosed and polished. At the back and on one side of this square stood ten-feet-high brick walls. I found I could stand outside the cleaning area, behind the corner they formed, and watch the store’s entrance while more or less hidden. Walls had become a bit of a theme in that day’s events.
After about ten minutes, the tail appeared. He stood in the doorway systematically eyeballing the whole car park. I pulled back a few more inches but could still keep observation. Although totally new to this game I realized that the next phase would be the most difficult, and potentially the most revealing. I had to hope he’d give up, admit to himself that he’d lost me, and go back to wherever he’d come from. I’d try to follow him then. But the failure would make him very tense and very aware of the people around him and sticking with him. Me. I’d have to risk this, though. If there were a plot against Judy, we needed to get the details of it. I had to act with a slice of responsibility, prove myself adult, not a kid who could be scared off; or who was too lazy and indecisive to go on with this chance.
A blue Twingo Renault saloon entered the car park, flashed its headlights and found a space near Darkclad. At once a squat, middle-aged man in jeans and an unduly long beige lightweight jacket left the car and waddled fast towards the tail. They talked briefly. Twingo-man seemed ratty, flinging his short arms about, maybe to signal astonishment; not good astonishment, probably amazement that Darkclad could lose me. I guessed he must have mobiled Twingo to tell him the situation and perhaps to ask for help. Twingo might be his boss. They turned and went back into the store, Twingo presumably convinced I must still be in there.
The arrival of this car seriously changed prospects. Eventually those two would have to concede that I’d somehow sneaked out of the store. Darkclad probably believed it already. How else could he go on missing me inside – that’s how he would think. Then, they would almost certainly leave in the car. I couldn’t follow. If I’d had an expense account I might have been able to call a taxi and ask the driver to wait and then dog the Twingo. But taxi drivers probably wouldn’t care for that kind of possibly hazardous caper. And, I didn’t have an expense account, nor a pocket full of cash.
I wondered whether the Twingo might be important in another way, though. It was about 50 metres from me, so I thought that, while they were still in the store, I’d slip over and hope there was something on view through the windows that might give useful information – documents or packages with an office address on them, for instance. I think I knew this was unlikely but what else could I try? I might be able to get an identification from the registration number, but that required illegal, bribed cooperation by someone at the Driver and Vehicle Licensing authority or the police computer. Not in my range.
I left my spot at the washery and walked at an unremarkable, ordinary pace
to the Twingo. I did a swift gaze in at the dashboard shelf and the front and rear seats. There was nothing but a CD box of Henry James’s The Bostonians.
‘Do you like James, Thomas?’ a gentle voice said behind me, possibly a West Country burred accent. ‘Too wordy and convoluted for you, perhaps.’ I turned and found both of them there, the older, podgier one smiling with extreme matiness.
The shock made me speechless for a second or two and then I said, ‘I wanted to have a look at the fittings of a Twingo. I haven’t seen many of them about.’
‘Some have a notice on the back window, “My other car is an identical Twingo”. I gather you did very well at agile slipperiness in the store, Tom,’ he said. ‘Good evasivenesss. It seemed to me that someone with those kinds of abilities wouldn’t give up – wouldn’t be satisfied with mere dodging. You’d hang about, recognizing an opportunity. Car contents might be part of that opportunity. It’s why I shammed re-entry to the store. We needed to watch the car, didn’t we? Rory here had bungled things, they had to be corrected. He’s naturally ashamed of his uselessness. We could do with a lad like you on our staff. I know there are attractions at the school – or one major attraction, possibly – but isn’t it time to enter the grown-up work world?’
‘I’m due to try for Cambridge.’
‘Rory went to Cambridge. Came away with a first in anthropology. Did it do anything for him in a fucking supermarket crisis, though?’
I wondered if Twingo wore that over-long jacket to make himself appear quaint and out of touch. He wasn’t.
TEN
Of course, Harpur remembered …
But why sometimes Harpur?
Why? Because in certain ways this Ford Focus death echoed two previous killings. There might be handy pointers in the resemblances – and in the non-resemblances. This is a tale that will skip about a little as far as time is concerned. It was the sight of Iles staring into the Ford through the smashed driver’s-side window that sent Harpur’s mind back to those earlier deaths: a Jaguar, then, though,1 and Iles had been at its near-side window.
Images from those days had stuck with Harpur: Iles, uniformed, though capless, had been standing on the opposite side of the Jag from him, the assistant chief’s head and face framed in the window space as he examined the interior of that car. Iles had seen, as Harpur also had, a woman and her young stepson dead from bullet wounds, her stepdaughter blood-drenched but alive alongside her dead brother in the back.
Now, Harpur and Iles, uniformed but capless, stood on each side of the Focus looking in almost as they had with the Jaguar, but at a man shot dead behind the wheel, his visible wounds wide and messy, maybe dumdum done from very close in the close. No passengers.
Such an appalling mistake, those Jaguar murders. As revealed later, a contract specialist had been hired to knock off Manse Shale, one of the city’s two most celebrated, blue-chip drugs dealers, who would normally have been driving the children to their private school. On that morning though, he was at a business meeting elsewhere and his wife, his second wife, took over the duty, and she and the children were ambushed at a road junction. The gunman had obviously panicked. He’d been commissioned to hit a Jaguar at this spot and at a predictable time, so he had hit a Jaguar at this spot and at a predictable time, without bothering to identify the driver, or even get the gender right; and without, either, guarding against collateral damage to the boy.
What Harpur saw now, and what he knew Iles would see, was the basic similarity – car murders by gun shots – but also basic differences. The attack on the Jaguar had been a nicely planned but dismally executed daylight operation: a badly picked, possibly junkie and/or alco, hitman not properly master of himself or his handgun; a named location where at that a.m. time there could be all sorts of traffic complications, delays and obstructions, possibly causing rushed, blaze a-fucking-way action from the visitor; an apparent failure by those who sent him to foresee a possible change in the school-run driver and to order postponement or cancellation of the gunnery in that case.
But for the Cairn Close night operation Harpur had the feeling that there had probably been no planning, only brilliant, ruthless adaptability. He would not have been able to say why he believed this, though: an instinct, and occasionally his instincts were sound. When the shooting started the Control Room took three 999 alarm calls from people living in the close, and they’d all mentioned a Mazda behind a Focus and a black estate car placed across the entrance/exit, trapping the Focus in the cul-de-sac, blocked front by the dead end and back by two vehicles. Harpur’s impression was that the whole incident lasted only a couple of minutes, and then a fast withdrawal of the estate car allowing the Mazda to reverse out. Both vehicles vamoosed.
Iles, speaking across the body from the driver’s-side wrecked window to Harpur at the passenger-side wrecked window, said, ‘Hart. Do I get that right, Col?’
‘Thomas Wells Hart.’
‘Working for the Righton Private Inquiries firm under Bainbridge Williamson?’
‘Promoted to a partnership lately. He was doing well. He’d be still under thirty.’
‘Doing too well?’
‘We come across him occasionally – the Stave operation and Lodestar.’
‘Yes, now I recognize him. Do either of those explain why he drives into a dead-end?’
‘We’ll have to do some door knocking, sir.’
‘Wake Thomas Wells Hart with thy knocking. I would thou coulds’t, Col.’
‘That I cant’st, sir, but we’ll do the knocking anyway.’
‘In his game he should know the perils, shouldn’t he, and ought to live by that supreme piece of wisdom: “cherish your exit”.’
‘Maybe he thought he was OK. But then the Mazda turns up.’
‘That’s what I mean, Harpur.’
‘What, sir?’
‘He’s not a novice is he?’
‘Been at it for years. He started young. Straight from school.’
‘So, he should have catered for the Mazda or something like it to turn up.’
‘He must have thought nobody knew he’d go to Cairn Close. Confidential business.’
‘That’s the second rule in our and his trade, isn’t it, Col?’
‘What, sir?’
‘If you have extremely secret and confidential material, always assume that someone else has it, too, in this case the Mazda gun party.’ Iles didn’t move away from the ex-window but continued inspecting Thomas Hart, the body tilted forward slightly to the right of the wheel. ‘Luckily, I’m at the driver’s side of the Ford, Harpur.’
‘Luckily in which sense, sir?’
‘In the sense that I can reach him quite easily. True, there are some glass shards and splinters sticking up in the bottom part of the window space but I don’t want you to worry about me, Col, I’ll go very gingerly when reaching in. Be sure I won’t slash my wrists. You have that big, caring disposition and I would hate to give you unnecessary fret.’
‘Thank you, sir.’
‘I suppose you’ll say that I shouldn’t be reaching in at all, whether or not I can avoid the shards and splinters, because this will amount to interfering with evidence.’
‘You shouldn’t be reaching in at all, whether or not you can avoid the shards and splinters, because this will amount to interfering with evidence.’
‘I prefer to see it as possibly acquiring evidence, Col. The garments of someone like Hart could be extremely fruitful.’
‘In what sense, sir?’
‘You wouldn’t do it, would you, Col?’
‘What?’
‘Search him.’
‘Obviously, he will have to be searched, sir, but probably these are not the correct circumstances. It requires Scenes of Crime people.’
‘Fuck “correct circumstances”, Harpur. I make my own circumstances. Who’s going to correct me?’
‘That’s one of those questions we’ve spoken about before, isn’t it, sir?’
‘Which questi
ons?’
‘Rhetorical. They don’t require an answer, because the answer is built in, usually negative. I think of Cain and Abel.’
‘What do you think?’
‘“Am I my brother’s keeper?” Cain says when he’s asked by God what’s happened to Abel. Answer: “No”, but unspoken, unnecessary.’
‘I love the privacy of this kind of conversation, Col,’ Iles replied.
‘Which kind, sir?’
‘Across the width of the Focus, you in your small aperture, I in mine. You’re like a close-up on TV. This doesn’t mean it offers any improvement on your appearance – the general shiftiness and signs of depravity are still evident – but it would need magic and a metric tonne of make-up to bring about even the most fragmentary change there, and the world in its kindly, tolerant way has grown used to you as you are. I agree.’
‘Thank you, sir.’
‘Our words remain enclosed, in camera, as it were, just you, me and a body. Of course, there are people about, some of them ours, some householders. But we are cordoned off, isolated, protected. Did you ever see Fargo, Col?’
‘I’d bet that’s a film, sir. There are a hell of a lot of films come out these days.’
‘A snowy, cold setting. Two men standing very near each other in anoraks with their hoods up talk about the weather and it’s almost as if the hoods are joined, so that they are holding the conversation from opposite ends of a short tunnel. That’s how I see our well-ordered chat from frontal right to frontal left in this car, though, of course, we do have an additional item, Hart.’ He shook his head, angrily but with restraint because of the shards and splinters. He’d be thinking of his jugular. ‘Additional item. That’s a disrespectful, patronizing phrase and I apologize, Col.’