by J M Gregson
Each year, a few of these officers disappear for ever, removed from the face of the earth without even remains to mourn. The surprising thing is that people still volunteer to undertake such work. Those who do are driven by a complex of motives which they do not always understand themselves, the chief of which are a lust for excitement and a need to explore the most secret parts of themselves.
Such personalities are by definition extraordinary. And the extraordinary is also unpredictable, especially when operating under the extremes of stress which undercover work demands. Officers who volunteer to work like this have to be checked as regularly as their perilous work allows. In order to make their cover convincing, they have to take illegal drugs. Usually they do as Jack Clark had done, and pretend to be injecting or swallowing more cocaine or heroin than is actually the case, but there is no way they can be convincing without being users.
Some of them become unpredictable junkies, no longer any use to themselves or to their employers, destined for early death from the drugs themselves or at the hands of the people they set out to expose, unless they can be swiftly pulled out and sent for rehabilitation. Others join the enemy. The sight of thousands of pounds passing between the bigger fish in this dark pool can be a real temptation to swim in it yourself, to drop your police contacts, supply information to the other side and begin your move up the sides of this lucrative criminal pyramid.
As often as it is possible, your mental balance and your continuing loyalty are checked, as Jack Clark’s were now. He understood all that, but he was not interested in the details. He went through the tests as unthinkingly as a beast in the fields where he had worked as a boy, in that existence which seemed now to belong to another being altogether.
When it came to his debriefing and he stood for the first time in front of a man he recognized, his attitude was transformed. He had information to give. He wanted to convey what he had to offer as completely and as accurately as he could, but also to absorb whatever information these people at HQ had gathered and could relay to him, to make his own situation less hazardous. The success of the whole operation might depend on the exchanges of the next few minutes.
More pertinently for him, his own life might depend on any one of the scraps of information he could give, which the chief superintendent in front of him was assimilating and collating with what came in from elsewhere. That sounded melodramatic, but it was absolutely accurate; you grew used to melodrama, once you accepted the role he had adopted.
He gave names, watched the man nodding in front of him, gathered that he was offering confirmation of what had come in from other sources. The thought that there were others working on his side against the big battalions of the enemy was a consolation to him. When you were watching your back and playing out a lie for twenty-four hours a day in that squat and elsewhere, it often felt as if you were working alone against impossible odds.
Jack Clark had grown so used to secrecy that he found it difficult at first to release what he knew, to offer to this man who operated from behind a safe desk the snippets he had gathered at such danger to himself. But the officer was experienced in dealing with men like Jack, and his questions showed that he appreciated the dangers surrounding him. He did not offer praise or approbation, understanding that this mission had passed far beyond such simplicities, that reassurance to this hunted figure would come only with the successful conclusion of this enterprise. The senior man tried by his words and his reactions to convey the impression that success was now inevitable, even though both of them understood that there could be no certainties in this desperate conflict.
Eventually Jack said, ‘There’s a meet on. The big boys are flying in, I think. I don’t know when.’
‘Wednesday night.’
They had other information than his, then. Jack was lifted again by the thought. ‘I’ve been asked to go there. They’re going to put me into a bigger dealership, I think.’ Not offer me one, put me in it. You don’t have choices when you’re playing with the big boys in drugs. These people moved you around like a piece on a chessboard. And sacrificed you in the same way, if it suited their game to do so.
The man questioning Clark understood that he had already been dealing, in a more minor way, but he deliberately avoided any mention of that. Undercover agents were not officially allowed to do anything which broke the laws of the land, which included dealing drugs, or even carrying them for supply. Yet you couldn’t possibly acquire credibility and move closer to the big men in that odious trade without doing such things. In the perilous assignments of undercover work, you were supposed to fight with one hand behind your back.
Jack Clark’s chief said, ‘Play along with that. Get as many names as you can. We’ll need all the evidence we can offer, when we bring this to court. And it will be easier to get you out if you’re at that meeting.’
Jack noted without resentment that his own safety seemed to come almost as an afterthought. ‘All right. I don’t know where the meeting is yet. I don’t think they’ll tell me, until a couple of hours before it.’
If the senior man opposite him knew more about this, he didn’t communicate it. Too much knowledge could be as dangerous as too little to an operative. ‘If it’s as big as we think it is, we’ll move in. Take the lot of them. You could be out of this in a few more days, Jack.’
There was no smile from the grubby, hollow-cheeked man he was trying to encourage. He said dully, ‘I’ll need to get out without my cover being blown. I don’t want some thick plod in uniform letting on to them that I’m playing on the other side.’
Jack Clark was already mentally back in the squat, where the police were the enemy and you snarled an automatic derision of them. The man opposite him understood that, even approved it. ‘You’ll be arrested with the others. Taken in to the nick with the rest of them. We’ll release you later, whenever we know it’s safe.’
It might soon be over, then. He might soon be back in this world of central heating and regular meals and frivolous talk of women and football and television. He wasn’t sure he’d be able to cope with the banality of it, after the life on the edge he had lived for the last four months. He gave his first smile at the other man in this small and suddenly claustrophobic room, uttered his first attempt at rejoining the world of police bureaucracy. ‘Don’t let the bastards grind you down, eh?’
The chief superintendent gave him a grin, then reached out and put his hand on top of the grimy paw of his junior. ‘See you soon, Jack.’
The four words and the simple gesture were an attempt to convey a wealth of understanding, of appreciation of the unspeakable dangers this man had lived with and was about to return to. The man who had placed him there had more sense than to suggest there might be a promotion for Clark in the work he had done. In that twilight world Clark was going back to now, such incentives had no meaning at all.
Clark lay prone on the back seat of a different car for his return, but slipped from it within half a mile of the spot where he had been picked up. He did not go directly back to his cellar, but shuffled instead to the edge of the park, so that if anyone met him he would be coming from the direction he had indicated. By the time he reached the squat, he was securely back in the persona he needed for the next fifty hours. It had dropped easily on to his stooping shoulders, feeling more natural than that stranger he had invented at the National Crime Squad centre.
‘You sell your horse and your coke?’ a voice asked him from the deep shadows at the far end of the basement.
He peered into the darkness, his eyes not yet accustomed to the gloom. He didn’t recognize the voice, couldn’t be certain whether the speaker had a high rating or no rating at all in this dangerous world he had infiltrated. ‘Couldn’t deal a single rock,’ Jack Clark said bitterly. ‘The place was alive with fucking pigs!’
At that moment, he felt genuinely resentful.
It didn’t take DCI Peach long to select his team for the Wednesday night operation. One of the advantages of Tu
cker’s inefficiency was that Percy had been able to hand-pick the men and women who worked with him in CID. Over the last few years, he had built up a group of officers whom he trusted and who trusted him.
You got a fair deal, if you worked for Percy Peach, they said. You didn’t get an easy ride, but you didn’t expect one. You’d get the occasional fierce bollocking, but only if you didn’t stick to Percy’s strict rules. If you did, he’d support you, even when things went wrong. His loyalty and affection for his team were never expressed – DCI Peach would have considered that a weakness – but they were unswerving.
As his reputation as a thief-taker had grown over the years, it had become a mark of efficiency in CID work to be selected for Percy’s team. You had a busy and occasionally a hazardous life, but an interesting one. The inevitably dull periods of boring routine which the police machine demands were reduced to a minimum under Percy Peach. Other people, usually uniformed officers and civilians, could do the computer trawls and the house-to-house enquiries, whilst Percy and his team got on with the business of detection.
There would be an Armed Response Unit involved in Wednesday’s operation, ready to move in immediately when the order was shouted. Like most policemen, Peach did not want to carry arms himself and was uneasy whenever armed police were brought in, but he recognized that on this occasion their presence was necessary. The snatch would take place in darkness. That was always an advantage, if you knew exactly what you were doing, if every man and woman knew their own parts in the operation and didn’t lose their discipline when the villains reacted like cornered tigers. If things went wrong, darkness could change sides in a flash and become the enemy.
Villains’ reactions were never predictable, and from what Tommy Bloody Tucker had told him, Peach divined that these were to be very big villains indeed. There’d be some hard men in this house, wherever it was, all of them with a lot to lose if they were arrested and charged. Some of them would certainly have killed already and would have no hesitation in doing so again if they saw it as the only option. Unless everything went exactly as planned, there’d be bloodshed: Percy’s only concern was to ensure that it was not on his side of the exchanges.
He had a discreet word with each of the officers he selected for this job, apprising them that they should be ready for a briefing on Wednesday morning, when he would know more. He would not know everything, even as they went out on the operation: the nature of missions like this ensured that you could never know everything about the strength of the enemy and the disposition of his forces. Despite the air of confidence he brought to everything he did, the men he spoke to understood that this was a big one, that there would be danger as well as kudos on Wednesday night.
But each of Percy Peach’s team knew that he had been selected for this, by the man who carried universal respect in the Brunton nick, and each of them was lifted by the thought of that selection. Peach himself was pleased by their reactions; he was delighted and secretly proud to see in each of his selections that strange combination of composure and eagerness which marked the good villain-taker.
There was only one omission from his team which gave him pause for thought as he fell asleep that night.
In the squat at the other end of the town, Jack Clark was almost asleep when he sensed rather than heard a movement at the foot of his mattress.
He was instantly awake and alert. You were even more vulnerable when you slept on the floor than when you were in a bed. You could get a good kicking and worse before you could make a move to protect yourself. He closed his fingers on the blade he had slipped beneath his cushion-pillow as he settled down for the night.
Someone was muttering an incomprehensible and seemingly unending litany of prayer in the other half of the basement, moving back in a drug-induced haze to some forgotten period of his life when religion had been important. Perhaps it was this ruined creature who had lit the candle which flickered on the other side of the dividing wall, perhaps twenty feet away, giving him a ghostly, vestigial illumination.
Jack saw the dim outline of feet standing astride the corner of his mattress, the vague shape of a figure magnified into a Colossus by the gloom and his own position of vulnerability on the flagged floor beneath it. The voice said, ‘You’re a user, Clark.’
‘So what? I keep myself to myself, don’t I? I don’t—’
‘You need to watch that habit, if you’re going to be any use to us.’ The speaker moved his boot, caressing the sole of Jack’s foot under the blankets, letting the prone man know how helpless he was. Jack sensed with that movement that this was a man who enjoyed the feeling of physical domination, the knowledge that he had it in his power to cause serious injury.
Jack struggled into a sitting position, making sure that none of his movements was swift enough to cause any alarm to the man who stood over him in the darkness. The light from the flickering candle was pitifully small: he could still see nothing of the man’s torso and head, could not even be certain whether he was black or white. Jack fancied he might be West Indian, from some tiny inflection in his words, but he could not concern himself with that now. He said, ‘I’m not an addict. I use a bit of coke, to give myself a lift, but I’m not a junkie.’
‘I know that. We know it.’ The man couldn’t refrain from asserting his position of trust in something larger. That vanity could be a weakness in him, thought Jack Clark. ‘I wouldn’t be here now if we thought you were anything more than a user.’
‘I’m not. I could stop tomorrow, if I had to.’ The old user’s refrain, which Jack had heard so often from others, and seen to prove a delusion almost equally often. He thought he knew now why the man was here, but he wouldn’t voice it. Men like this liked to feel that they were calling the shots.
‘You’re a lucky boy, Jack Clark. You’ve been picked out for bigger things. You’re a very lucky boy indeed. You could be making real money, in a year or two, if you kick the habit and build up your trade.’
‘You want me to deal.’ It was safe enough to say that much, now. Jack knew that the man had been sent here by someone much more powerful, that this bruiser couldn’t afford to damage him, unless he proved uncooperative. But he kept his hand on the blade beneath the cushion. Men like this, heavies who dealt in violence, could be unpredictable.
‘We might do. Might want you to do more than you do now. Might even want you to take charge of a section, if you prove yourself and things work out. Might get you out of this shithouse for a start, if you are found to be suitable for promotion.’ The voice dwelt on each syllable of the last word; this was a man to whom sarcasm was an unfamiliar luxury.
‘I’d like that.’ Jack leant forward, nodding eagerly in the dim light, almost fawning. A gratitude which was almost pathetic was what this man expected, was what might be the best thing to make him abandon any suspicions. ‘What do I have to do?’
‘There’s a meeting on Wednesday. They’ll want to run the rule over you. See whether you come up to standard.’ The big man made no attempt to conceal his contempt for the filthy figure huddling forward under the blankets.
‘I’ll be there. What time on Wednesday? And where should I go?’
‘Not so fast, scumbag!’ The messenger took a gentle kick at the feet beneath the blankets, just for the pleasure of it. ‘You keep yourself out of trouble and off the sauce until Wednesday, and then we’ll see about it.’ He turned and made for the steps and the way out of this foetid place. He was on the third step and completely invisible when he delivered his final words. ‘No need for you to know the when and the where, Jack Clark. You’ll be taken there under escort, if they decide to use you.’
Jack slid back beneath the blankets, but it was a long time before he could address himself again to sleep. It was on. The end to this part of his life, which he had thought sometimes would never come, would be on Wednesday. If he could preserve his cover until then, all might yet be well.
Four
Lucy Blake had that odd feeling that one somet
imes experiences in those three or four seconds between sleep and consciousness.
It was a delicious moment, for she realized after that moment of alarm that she was not only safe but where she wanted to be. There were thick curtains at the long low window, but enough light was seeping in to tell her that a new day was beginning. She reached out and picked up her watch from the bedside table. 7.01. Five, maybe ten, minutes before she needed to slide from beneath the duvet and begin her working day.
She snuggled back beneath her cover, rolling on her back to gaze at the ceiling she knew so well. She decided that there was something infinitely reassuring about waking from a deep and untroubled sleep and finding yourself in the room where you had spent your childhood. Returning to the womb, the psychologists would probably call it. But Lucy Blake had the police officer’s habitual distrust of psychologists: they were people who complicated simple issues and protected vicious people from the consequences of their crimes. She preferred to call this feeling a pleasant nostalgia.
She could hear familiar sounds beyond the wall of her bedroom. Her mother was already up and in the kitchen downstairs. Lucy tried to picture Agnes Blake now, but found that instead she saw her twenty years ago, brisk and businesslike and infinitely knowledgeable, her mission for half an hour in the morning to get a lively eight-year-old off to the village primary school, with a good breakfast inside her and everything she needed for a busy and productive day there.
But at that moment all musings were rudely dispelled, as the door to the low-ceilinged room opened suddenly, pushed back by the knee of a woman who needed both hands to steady the china cup and saucer she carried before her like a votive offering, until she could set it down on the table beside her daughter’s bed. ‘Thought you’d like a cup of tea to start your day, our Lucy,’ said Agnes Blake.