‘Thank you. You say you know little about the enemies Mr O’Connor made during his business dealings. Can you give us that little?’
She thought hard, anxious to give them something, anxious to support her contention that they were on the same side. Then she shook her head glumly. ‘Perhaps I should have said I knew nothing rather than very little. I can give you the name of a man who can tell you more. Steve Tracey. He was at the dinner on Monday night. He should have been protecting Jim.’
Clyde Northcott made a note of the name before he spoke for the first time. ‘You think this man Tracey should have protected the victim. What was his job title, Mrs O’Connor?’
‘You’d have to ask him that. I know he’d been with Jim a long time and that Jim trusted him. He must have done — he didn’t promote people he didn’t trust.’
Northcott looked at her steadily. His face was as dark and as hard as ebony. Sarah had a sudden, disconcerting realisation that this was a man you wanted with you and not against you. He now said, ‘There were business associates at the dinner on Monday night. Were there also business rivals?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t think so. Why would rivals be there?’
Peach came back at her whilst she was watching Northcott and his notebook. ‘That might have been our next question for you, Mrs O’Connor. That’s the normal process, you see. We ask the questions and you provide the answers.’
But he was smiling now, as if he had accepted her assertion that they were on the same side. She said, ‘I’m sorry, but I can’t help here. Jim compiled the guest list for Monday night, not me.’
‘Thank you. That in itself is the kind of information we need from you. Perhaps Mr Tracey will be able to help us there, when we speak to him. The people who were at Claughton Towers on Monday night have gone their separate ways, but our team will need to speak to most of them, in due course. The one indisputable fact from which we start is the shooting of a defenceless man at that function. We’re not ruling out the thought that someone might have come in from outside, not yet. But there is at the very least a strong possibility that the killer is a name on the guest list for Monday night.’
‘I suppose so. I was too stunned to think it through, but I suppose I shall have to face that.’
‘The majority of the people there were family and friends. Or people he thought were his friends. Your thoughts will be treated as confidential. Can you think of anyone who sat at those tables who might conceivably have done this?’
The pale face looked shocked by the question. She shook her head gently from side to side, as if she wished to reject the notion but could not. ‘No. It was a total shock to me at the time. It still is.’
‘I understand that he was killed during an informal break in the proceedings. What he called a comfort break. Where were you at the time of his death?’
‘I don’t know, do I? No one knows exactly when he died.’
‘True. Perhaps you should have been a detective, Mrs O’Connor.’ Peach gave her a tiny smile, as if acknowledging a worthy opponent.
‘I think I went to the ladies’ cloakroom, found it very crowded, and decided not to wait for a cubicle. I was certainly back at the table when someone came and told me. . told me what had happened.’ When neither of them said anything in reaction to this, she added nervously, ‘Perhaps you’d like to know that I’ve never fired a pistol in my life.’
They left her then, with instructions to get in touch with them immediately if any useful thoughts about this death and the people who had been close to it came to her. She sat for a long time after they had gone, wondering what they had made of her. She hadn’t been as calm as she’d intended to be: that man Peach had ruffled her at the outset. But she’d held her own after that.
She didn’t think they’d gone away having learned anything she hadn’t intended them to know.
FOUR
You would never have thought he was a policeman, still less one who carried the rank of sergeant.
But that was exactly as he meant it to be. The most dangerous of all roles in the police service of the twenty-first century is operating undercover. It is in many respects the equivalent of being a spy in wartime. Spies provide vital information, but their whole trade is based upon deceit. If they are caught the Geneva Convention does not apply and their country makes no attempt to save them. More often than not, it does not acknowledge their existence. They disappear without trace, liquidated by the enemy they were trying to deceive.
The rules, in so far as rules are acknowledged at all, are very much the same for police officers working undercover. The vast majority operate in the perilous field of illicit drugs and report to the Drug Squad. They swim in dangerous waters. The small fish with whom they swim to gain information are erratic and unreliable, being in most cases drug-users themselves. The bigger fish they are trying to identify are wary and vicious. The infiltrator in the world of drugs will be eliminated as swiftly and as finally as a wartime spy, if he is discovered. And there will be no chance of bringing his executioners to justice. He will disappear without trace. It is unusual for the body of a liquidated victim ever to be discovered.
Even though the struggle for gender equality was fought and won many years ago in the police service, there are still only a tiny number of female officers working undercover and they scarcely touch the world of drugs. The men who work here are strange creatures. Their bravery is unquestioned. But bravery wraps itself in a variety of different personalities, many of them twisted away from the normal by their previous experience of life. Few undercover men are married, though many have broken relationships behind them. Indeed, not many of them are successful in maintaining serious and enduring relationships of any kind. Most of them are loners, though anyone with experience of undercover men will recognise that there are many sorts of loners.
Jason Crook had never been married. He had never in fact been quite certain of his sexual orientation, though he had chosen to keep that hidden in the notoriously macho world of the police canteen. He was not sure how he had ever become a policeman at all; he put it down to a craving to live dangerously, which he now recognised in himself as he had not done earlier in his life. He was twenty-four, though the work he had done in the last year made him feel much older than that.
He certainly looked much older. His hair had thinned early; he had chosen to accentuate that by letting it grow long and unkempt. He occasionally clipped it himself, but he never visited a barber. His complexion was poor, with spots dotting his forehead and his chin. His eyes were pale blue; he kept them for the most part lifeless and unrevealing above pallid cheeks. It was a long time since he had seen much sunlight.
No one in the squat suspected him. He was just another user to them. They survived from day to day, even from hour to hour, as they awaited their next fix and schemed how to get it. You didn’t pay much attention to your neighbours in the squat. Your whole life centred around yourself and your needs. The others were vaguely accepted as companions, but not friends. Entitled to a roof over their heads, as you were. If they became rivals for the next fix, you treated them as enemies and took whatever steps you needed to take. There was no loyalty here which could survive addiction. The people Crook lived with were dangerous and unpredictable.
Jason knew all of this and lived with it. He was a user himself, now. The police rules said that you mustn’t do anything against the law as you gathered information, but that was impossible. He wasn’t an addict, though he pretended to be and aped the behaviour of those around him who were. But you needed to be a user, if you were to convince the dangerous men who supplied, the ones you were here to find out about. He took a little horse by mouth. And he injected himself with water: he had marks on his arm which he hoped signified he was a regular heroin injector to those he allowed to catch a glimpse of them.