Undercover (16 page)

‘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.”'

BEFORE

T
om 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 might 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 b
rought 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.

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.

AFTER

M
aud 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.'