‘Oh, Mark, thank God you’ve called. I’ve been worried stiff. Are you all right?’
She always called him Mark. She didn’t like the name Stegs, and he sure as fuck wasn’t going to let her call him Monty, so they’d had to come up with something that was acceptable to both of them, and after much discussion it turned out that Mark was it. It was how he was known to all her friends. One day he was sure he was going to end up being diagnosed as a schizophrenic.
He told her he was fine but very busy, and she asked him if he’d heard about the incident at Heathrow. He said he had.
‘It makes me so scared, Mark, thinking of you out there all alone. I don’t want baby Luke growing up without a father.’
Stegs was touched by her concern, in spite of himself. He told her everything would be OK, but neglected to mention that he’d been suspended on full pay. He’d been advised by his superiors that no correspondence would be sent to his home address regarding what had happened, and that all contact would be made on his mobile or his encrypted email address, so there was no point mentioning it, particularly as he had no intention of hanging around the house all day with her and Luke.
‘Are you coming home then?’ she asked him. ‘I know Luke wants to see you.’
That he seriously doubted. Luke was never pleased to see him. He always gave him the evil eye when Stegs tried to pick him up or play with him. At eight months old, he was definitely his mother’s son, and treated his dad like some sort of usurper whenever he came into the room. Stegs loved the kid (of course he did, he was his flesh and blood) but, though he never liked to admit it, he didn’t like him much, and was never in any doubt that the feeling was mutual.
‘I’ve still got some paperwork to clear up here,’ he told her. ‘I’ll be back later on but don’t wait up for me, I don’t know what time it’ll be.’
She sighed loudly down the other end of the phone. ‘I can’t do this all on my own, you know. Bringing up a baby’s hard enough when there’s two of you, let alone one.’ As if to confirm quite how hard, Luke’s crying went up a couple of decibels as she brought him nearer the phone. ‘Tell Daddy to come home, Lukey,’ she cooed at the infant. Fat chance of that, Stegs thought. If he could speak, he’d be telling him to fuck off, no doubt about it. ‘Tell him he’s making Mummy miserable.’ Luke had clearly been brought right up to the mouthpiece now because Stegs was forced to hold the phone away from his ear as the howling increased still further. ‘Seriously, though, Mark,’ she continued, coming back on the line. ‘It can’t carry on like this. It’s too much for me.’
‘I know, I know,’ he said, and made his excuses, citing the usuaclass="underline" workload, lack of staff, etc. But it didn’t sound convincing, and he knew it. She told him she understood all that but that maybe he ought to think about changing careers so that he could help a bit more, and he said he had to go, that his boss needed to see him. ‘We’ll talk in the morning,’ he said.
She sounded down as she hung up the phone with Luke’s wailing continuing in the background, and it made him wonder why she’d wanted to have kids. He’d tried his hardest to convince her that they were better off continuing as they were, childless but reasonably well off, with her nurse’s and his copper’s wage, but she’d been adamant, and he knew that part of the reason for her desire probably stemmed from the need for some companionship, given the fact that he was hardly ever there. You reap what you sow, and he was reaping.
He drove back to Barnet on the M25, but instead of turning off on to the East Barnet road and heading home, he carried on going until he reached a pub just off the Whetstone High Road. He found a parking spot about fifty yards away and walked through the driving rain to the battered front door. It was ten to eleven.
The One-Eyed Admiral had a one o’clock weekly licence but was one of those places that was never going to be that popular because (a) it never looked very clean, and (b) it had never been able to rid itself of its low-life clientele, probably because they were the only people who’d frequent it. It wasn’t a rough place, but one look through the smoky haze at the middle-aged petty criminals clustered round the tables and the fruit machines told any self-respecting punter that it wasn’t a pub he wanted to be seen in. Which was one of the reasons Stegs liked it. Because he knew he’d always get a seat at the bar, and people wouldn’t pay him too much attention.
He’d been going in there for years, ever since he’d been introduced to it by a small-time gun dealer who’d been a regular. Stegs had been undercover at the time, investigating the dealer, whose name was Pete, and the One-Eyed Admiral had been their main meeting place. After Pete had got nicked, along with several of the other customers, Stegs had continued to drink there now and again (no-one had ever suspected that he’d been the one who’d put them behind bars), and it was always the place he adjourned to when he needed time to think. They knew him as Tam in here, and thought he was the son of Irish immigrants hailing from County Cork.
The pub was busier than usual and all the tables were full, although there were still seats at the bar. Stegs nodded to a couple of blokes he recognized, then took a seat at one end — his usual spot, if it was free — and waited for Patrick, the barman, to come and take his order.
‘All right, Tam. Long time no see,’ grunted Patrick in that less-than-charming manner of his. He’d been here for years and Stegs had never seen him smile once. ‘What’ll it be?’
‘Pint of Stella,’ said Stegs, thinking that he should be thankful for men like Patrick. A lot of barmen’ll take it as an invitation to talk if you sit at their bar, and talking was something Stegs had done enough of for one day. At least he knew Patrick would leave him alone.
He took the pint when it came to him, and handed over the exact money. He gulped down at least a third of it, savouring the much-needed taste of alcohol, before putting the glass down on the bar and sparking up a Marlboro Light. The missus was always on at him to give up the fags, even though she continued to smoke three Silk Cut Ultras religiously every evening (giving her teeth a ferocious clean after each one). Stegs never smoked in the house any more; apparently the residue on his breath could potentially be harmful to an infant (hence the missus’s tooth cleaning). It was the same with the booze. Next she’d be telling him not to eat curries.
He dragged on the Marlboro and looked at the clock on the wall. Two minutes to eleven. Gill Vokerman would have been told by now what had happened to her husband, and Stegs wondered how she’d be coping. Badly probably. They had two kids: Jacob and Honey (not a name Stegs would have chosen — too gooey). Jacob was six and Honey either two or three, he couldn’t remember which. Gill was a committed Christian, so maybe her beliefs would help get her through it. He hoped so. She’d always struck him as a stoic sort, one who could call upon the old ‘spirit of the Blitz’ to help her through adversity, but losing a husband suddenly, violently and unexpectedly was as adverse as you were likely to get. He was going to have to go and see her, offer his condolences. It wasn’t going to be easy, especially as she didn’t like him anyway. Vokes had told him once that she looked upon him as a bad influence, although quite how he’d deserved that accolade, he didn’t know. Perhaps Vokes had blamed him for the occasional night the two of them had stayed out late. That was the problem with their job. You spent so much time living on the edge, acting out roles in environments where things were always on a knife-edge, that you had to be able to unwind. That meant sinking a few beers, coming in late, sometimes not making it in at all. Whatever Gill Vokerman might have thought, there was no way round it. If you couldn’t unwind with your mates, you’d go mental.
He was going to miss Vokes, who’d been a good mate to him. They’d known each other for about three years, ever since they’d been thrown together on an assignment to trap a team of luxury-car thieves. That particular case, in which the two of them had posed as potential buyers with heavyweight contacts in the Middle East, had lasted close to two months, and with its successful conclusion (four members of the team had ended up with prison time totalling twenty-three years), so their partnership had been cemented. They’d worked together wherever possible since and each had learnt to cover the other’s back in even the most dangerous situations. When you’re an undercover copper, everything’s based on trust. If you’re working with another SO10 operative you’ve got to know that they won’t crack whatever the provocation, that they’ll continue to hold on to their identity even with a gun against their head, and it takes a special kind of person to be able to handle that sort of pressure. Vokes was one of them, so was Stegs.