He was thankful for owning such a nice place: peaceful yet convenient, and close to all the amenities that Camden was known for. The legacy left by his Mama had been put to good use; Cameron was pretty shrewd and had seen the London property price rises ahead of everyone else.
The centrepiece of the big, open-plan apartment was a makeshift gym: a pull-up bar hung above a stretching zone, a punch bag, and a weights bench with a full selection of dumbbells. In pride of place on the wall was a silk escape map of a desolate part of Iraq, framed above the TV.
He’d bought the place when he was living with Bev in the even more North London area of Colindale but, as they’d split up while it was still being converted, he’d tweaked the plans to make it the ultimate bachelor pad. He sometimes missed Bev but, he had to admit, not a great deal: she’d wanted more that he’d felt able to give. He certainly didn’t miss the constant arguments about how difficult he was to live with ever since he’d joined the CID. He’d left the Forces so they could give the relationship a proper go, but he had just replaced the constant deployments chasing dangerous terrorists with ridiculous hours chasing criminals. Bev had given him an ultimatum and, as much as he had thought he loved her, it wasn’t a hard decision. He had chosen the job.
He went over to the battered oak sideboard and selected a bottle from a row of thirty alphabetised bottles of whisky. His time in Scotland and the influence of his foster father had given him an appreciation of fine, malt whiskies: the perfect tool to help put the world to rights.
He poured a good measure of a sixteen-year-old Lagavulin into a crystal glass and deeply inhaled the evocative, peaty aroma, instantly transporting him back to the Highlands. He added a couple of chilled, granite whisky stones and sat on the large corner sofa, nestling into the rich leather.
He sat for a few minutes, letting the stresses of a busy, frustrating day evaporate from his body. Promotion had seemed the right thing to do, but he was quickly finding the frustrations of man-management, targets, and performance criteria difficult to reconcile. He missed the adrenaline rush of a manhunt, the surveillance follows, collaring a villain. All of that had been replaced with target-driven monotony and performance indicators.
He switched on the TV and turned to the sports channels, selecting Cage Warrior’s Mixed Martial Arts: a middleweight bout between two unnamed fighters. He was a big fan of the sport but quickly found himself getting frustrated. The defending champion was all over the place. ‘For fucks sake, get some side-control, you pillock,’ he muttered at the TV.
His work phone winked at him, indicating that an email had landed in his inbox. He wearily picked up the handset and read the message from his boss, DCI Simon Taylor. Apparently DS Neil Wilkinson from SC&O35, the covert policing command, wanted to speak to him urgently the next morning about a potential deployment. There was a contact number in the email and Taylor signed off with, ‘Don’t think this gets you out of late-turn, Tom, we’re short of manpower already.’
Tom allowed himself a wry grin. He knew Neil Wilkinson from previous operations; he was a good man who wouldn’t take any nonsense from a desk-jockey like Simon Taylor.
He hadn’t deployed undercover since promotion, and his interest picked up at the prospect. After the past few months staring at a computer screen and crime statistics, the prospect of a deployment caused a slow smile of anticipation to creep across his face.
He drained his whisky and headed off to bed.
*
Tom woke early and dressed in clean jeans and a dark polo shirt, selected from a meticulously-organised wardrobe holding a line of five identical polo shirts hanging on the rail next to several pairs of identical jeans. He didn’t like wasting mental energy deciding what to wear. For business-wear, he had three identical blue suits together with five identical white shirts. There was another wardrobe in the bedroom that held a supply of more gaudy casual clothes, used for undercover work.
He ran his hand over his chin, noting the dark stubble pushing through his jaw line. He toyed with the idea of shaving and then shook his head; if deployment was likely, then some sort of beard gave him more options for his appearance.
Using his work phone, he called the number for Neil Wilkinson.
‘Hello?’ came the voice from the other end.
‘Hello, boss, it’s Tom Novak. You wanted to speak?’
‘Tom! How you doing, mate? Not seen you since you jumped on the promotion bandwagon! How you been?’
‘Fine thanks, boss. Up to my neck in petty crime and domestics. Plus for some reason the DCI is holding me personally responsible for the clear-up rate for hate crimes that aren’t actually crimes.’
‘Well I may have something to liven up your working hours, if you’re interested. Can you get to ESB later today?’
‘Well I’m late-turn but I could get to you a bit before then. My DCI is being a bit antsy about manpower.’
‘No bother. Say about twelve? Don’t worry about Simon Taylor, my dad’s bigger than his,’ Wilkinson said with obvious amusement.
Just before 12pm, Tom sat in the canteen on the top floor of the Empress State Building: or ESB, as everyone referred to it. It was a large, twenty-eight-storey tower block near Earls Court, housing many differing Met units and HR functions. It had been gradually absorbing all sorts of staff as the old building at Scotland Yard was run down.
Unusually, it had a very good canteen—or restaurant, as management insisted on calling it—its revolving floor giving fabulous views of the whole of London, making it a popular location for impromptu meetings and pow-wows. Lots of deals, over and under the table, got done on the twenty-eighth floor of the ESB.
Tom sat in one of the booths cradling a coffee as he waited for Neil to arrive. He saw a few familiar faces and exchanged nods that displayed friendliness but didn’t encourage any further approach. Neil Wilkinson only ever dealt in covert conversations.
Tom raised a finger in a subtle greeting as Neil approached his booth, smiling a greeting and clutching a Styrofoam cup. He was a slight, wiry man with neat grey hair and spectacles which seemed too large for his face. As usual, he was immaculately dressed in a well-fitting grey suit, blindingly-white shirt, and sober tie. He offered his hand and Tom shook it warmly.
‘Tom, good to see you. How’s life back in the real world of territorial policing?’
Territorial policing—or TP—was the business of day-to-day law enforcement across London’s thirty-two boroughs.
Tom gave the expected raise of the eyebrows and replied, ‘A little weary, if I’m honest, boss. I miss homicide but, for some reason, promotion seemed a good idea.’
‘Had to be done, fellah, had to be done. Can’t be a DC your whole life. Anyway, down to business. I understand you’re Bosnian by birth?’ Neil Wilkinson was famed for his lack of small talk and tendency to always get straight to the point.
‘Yes, boss. Came over as a refugee as a twelve-year-old and got citizenship at eighteen.’
Neil paused a moment. ‘We’ve received a request from Home Office Immigration Enforcement for an undercover officer to infiltrate a gang of Bosnian traffickers. They’re bringing young girls over from Sarajevo, passing them off as Slovenians, and sham marrying them off for visas and prostituting them out.’ He paused to take a sip of his coffee before continuing.
‘It looks a good job on the face of it. May be a bit of travel. They’re bad bastards and some of these poor girls have come over to the cops. One or two of the girls initially said they had been sexually assaulted but seem far too scared to put pen to paper. A couple of the traffickers have been nicked but the main players are still untouchable, and they have a bent solicitor helping them out as well. It’s high-profile stuff and everyone’s under pressure to stop these girls coming into the UK. Sound up your street?’
Tom pretended to consider for a moment. ‘Sounds very interesting, boss, I’d be happy to have a look. Can you square it with my DCI?’ He didn’t want to appear too keen, but in reality he was
trying not to give the impression of biting Neil’s hand clean off.
‘That’s no problem, Tom. I know Simon well enough. Once he realises the level this is coming from, he’ll have no choice. I understand the Home Secretary is taking a personal interest in the operation, what with trafficking being so current. What we need to do is sort out a meeting with the operational lead at the Home Office. He’s an ex-superintendent from the Met who’s landed himself a senior role setting up this new investigative team. I’ll speak to him and organise a meet. How’s your Bosnian by the way?’
Tom smiled. ‘It’s not too bad. I grew up speaking Serb, but I can get by in most of the languages spoken over there, they’re all very similar.’
‘That’s great, Tom. I’ll be in touch.’ He stood up, draining his cup. ‘Right, I have to run. I have an assistant commissioner about to kick the crap out of me about my ridiculous overtime budget, which I’ve smashed to bits as usual.’
With that, he shot Tom a smile and strode off. It was typical of Neil Wilkinson; he didn’t waste time on the niceties.
Not for the first time, Tom was pleased that his foster parents had insisted he kept some link to his country of birth. While growing up in the Highlands he would often visit a very small resource centre in Inverness that offered support to refugees. There he’d met a kind, old Serbian man called Filip, who’d talked with him in Serbian about the old country once or twice a month. It had kept his grasp of the language intact, meaning that he could still converse well in Serbo-Croat even after all those years. Many of the adjacent countries’ languages were based on the same Slav rules, which had proved useful in his career when investigating crimes among his countrymen.
Tom finished his coffee and left the building deep in thought. An undercover deployment? He’d done a few, mostly on drug buy/busts, but not for a while. He felt a slight prickle of excitement. It sounded like a tricky assignment, but he would’ve tried anything to get away from the mundane quest for clear-up rates and detections, even if it did piss his boss off. Especially if it pissed his boss off.
Anyway, there was every chance it would not come off. There were so many hoops to jump through to get assignments like those authorised, that they often got cancelled at the last minute. He put it out of his mind and made his way to Kilburn, ready for another weary late-turn, sat in front of a computer terminal, juggling too much crime with insufficient resources.
Like most undercover-trained officers, Tom had a day job: in his case, running a small team of detectives on a volume crime team dealing with day-to-day minor crimes. He could, however, be called on to fulfil an undercover role if one came up that suited his profile and legend, or back story. He hadn’t had many deployments since completing his undercover course a couple of years before, and the prospect of a more involved spell undercover was appealing. It would certainly be a break from the deathly boring and frustrating crime-report-shuffling he was forced to do every day. Once again, he questioned his decision to get promoted. His skills and experience were wasted stuck behind a desk when he should be out there, nicking big villains.
He got to Kilburn just before 2pm. As he passed DCI Taylor’s office his superior called, ‘Tom, a minute please.’
Tom wandered in, trying to look innocent and hide his pleasure at his boss looking none-too-pleased. Taylor was quite young for a DCI: skinny-fat with sandy, thinning hair, a permanent air of panicky stress hanging round him like a cloud. Taylor was renowned for being ambitious and would do anything to get the next rank up, no matter who he had to trample on.
‘Tom, I’ve been called by Detective Superintendent Wilkinson; you will be assisting his team on some deployment. I’ve told him it’s not good at all, that we’re strapped, and my clear-up rate will suffer. It seems, however, that you may be the only person with the requisite skills, despite the fact he won’t tell me what it’s about.’
It would have upset Taylor more than anything to not be cleared to know what his staff member was going to be doing. He didn’t look happy at all. Tom tried hard to keep a straight face.
‘So, it looks like you’re going,’ Taylor continued, ‘but don’t think this excuses you from your day job right now, so get cracking. There’s been another raft of domestic assaults that all need supervising. I want a progress report by close-of-play.’ The DCI turned back to his computer screen, indicating that the meeting was over. Tom walked out, unable to keep the smile spreading across his face.
He walked to his desk, offering greetings to colleagues as he passed them. He received a few nods and greetings in return; everything professional and distant, just the way he preferred things. In any case, they were all too busy to engage in much more than simple pleasantries as they beavered away on phones and tapped away at computers, trying their best to stay on top of the constant merry-go-round of territorial policing.
His phone buzzed in his pocket and he checked the screen to see a message from Neil Wilkinson. ‘1100hrs tomorrow, Becket House, St Thomas Street, EC1 for meeting with Home Office, I’ve told your boss, rgds, Neil.’
Becket House! The memories from all those years ago swarmed into his head: his mother attending that very same immigration reporting centre, stood in the queue for hours, waiting to see if their application for asylum had been granted.
Game on, he thought with a smile.
5
Tom woke early, as normal, and launched straight into his morning routine: a forty-five minute hard run around the Kentish Town streets. He followed this with a high-intensity circuit in his indoor gym: a minute on the punch bag, a minute’s skipping, a minute of push-ups, sit-ups, and burpees, with no rest between each set. And then repeat.
Fifteen minutes later he allowed himself to rest, breathing deeply as his pulse dropped back to normal before jumping into the shower. Pulling on clean jeans, a light shirt and a bomber jacket, he wolfed down a breakfast of scrambled eggs on toast with plenty of black coffee as he checked his phone for messages.
The screen lit up with a message from Neil Wilkinson.
‘Still on for eleven?’ Brief as ever.
Tom replied just as briefly.
‘Yes.’
He thought about the task at hand as he nursed his coffee at the kitchen island, enjoying the feel of the cool granite against his arms.
Sham marriages were a big problem: female EU citizens trafficked to Britain and forced into marriages with non-EU men who were typically from India, Pakistan or parts of Africa. The marriages were simply for the purpose of keeping those foreign nationals in the UK for as long as possible. Once the ceremony was done, the girls were either forced to work as prostitutes, or just shipped back home. The sums involved were eye-watering, with as much as £10,000 a time paid by the grooms to secure their place in the UK. It was a trade in misery, with many of the women treated dreadfully and paid very little, if anything.
Tom thought of his previous undercover legend, which had been remarkably similar to his own story, as a Balkan orphan, living in the UK since age twelve. That and previous deployments so far had generally been in supporting roles: a bit of muscle, a drug courier and, on one occasion, buying £100,000 of moody—or more accurately, counterfeit—bank notes from a Kosovan dealer. This new assignment, though, sounded meaty: an infiltration. The thought caused a flicker of excitement to flush through his body.
He’d left the military to lead a more normal existence, to try to be a normal guy in a normal home with a normal relationship. He had failed on all accounts. Being a cop had gone from being a job to almost an obsession. On the homicide team, ninety-hour weeks were commonplace, and he had been too wrapped up in the job to realise that his relationship was failing.
He had simply failed to notice how dissatisfied Bev had been with his constant absences. He had obsessed about work even when he was at home, constantly researching on the internet, trying to understand every aspect of crime and criminals.
When Bev left him, he wondered whether he would always be on his own, and whe
ther he was capable of maintaining a normal relationship or even leading a normal life, whatever that meant. It was confusing.
He did miss the adrenaline rush of his military days with the SRR, though. He certainly didn’t get it shuffling virtual papers on computerised crime-recording databases, searching for extra clear-ups and detections. This new assignment could be just the ticket. He laced up his trainers, picked up his jacket, and left the apartment with a distinct spring in his step and a smile forming on his face.
*
Tom walked along St Thomas Street from London Bridge station in the shadow of the thousand-foot-tall Shard tower, the bright morning sun reflecting off its brilliant, polished glass. He approached Becket House, a long queue full of so many different races and nationalities already snaking out of the door, all of them waiting to sign-on or for appointments to learn their fate. Frustration and desperation hung palpably over the line, hopes and dreams hanging in the balance. A few stared sullenly at him as he walked straight past them to the main entrance, where he showed his pass to the security guard on duty, who ushered him through and into a lift which ascended to the top of the drab, grey building.
He was shown to a secure office at the end of the corridor, inside of which was Neil Wilkinson with two colleagues.
Neil jumped to his feet, a bundle of energy as usual. ‘Tom, this is Assistant Director Pete De-Glanville, who runs the North Area Crime Team, and this is HM Inspector Jean MacDonald, Senior Investigator on the job we’re hoping you can help on.’ Handshakes were proffered and accepted all round.
‘Perhaps Jean can give you a little of the background, and we can go from there.’
Jean clicked a remote control, turning as a PowerPoint presentation sprang to life on a screen in front of them.
She was of slender build, with collar-length dark hair and a subtle air of confidence about her. She gave the impression of knowing her stuff, thought Tom: probably an ex-Customs investigator. When Customs and Immigration had merged into the UK Borders Agency a few years back, a lot of good investigators got spread all over the place into all sorts of roles. Tom had worked with a few ‘Cuzzies’ in the past and found them to be a mixed bag. They were red-hot with phone intercepts, though, and he wondered if one was being used on this job. He wouldn’t ask as he knew he wouldn’t be told. When the Government wrote the law on intercepts, they put strict secrecy rules in place; you weren’t allowed to ask, and no one was allowed to tell. Everyone knew the score, however, and you could normally tell when a line was on: intelligence of that quality doesn’t just come from thin air. When there was an informant about then you knew about it; but when a line was being used, all you would get told was something like, ‘Reliable intelligence suggests that Mr X is on his way now to pick up a great big bag of drugs.’ It didn’t take a genius to work it out. It often led to a bit of dancing around the issue at court, though, when defence barristers suspected the truth. They weren’t allowed to ask, and it couldn’t be used as evidence in any case: it could sometimes be quite amusing.
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