YESTERDAY
Three
All my life I wanted to be a police officer. To protect the weak and the vulnerable and take on the bad guys. As far back as I can remember, I had this burning desire for justice. At school I confronted bullies if I saw them picking on smaller kids. If they didn’t back down, I’d fight them. In the early days I lost more times than I won, so I took up boxing, and the ratio quickly changed. My dad always said I should join the army, which is what my brother John ended up doing. He said I was too aggressive for the police, and maybe I was, because my first three years in uniform were an exercise in boredom and gradual disillusionment. I could never quite get over the fact that the public could abuse and assault me at will, with little fear of prosecution, whereas I couldn’t do the same back to them. So I decided to become a detective, only to find that life in CID is ninety per cent paperwork, nine per cent detective work, and one per cent excitement, and that’s if you’re lucky. Not exactly Dirty Harry.
My boss at the time, and the man who, with the possible exception of my dad, I’ve always respected most in the world, saw my frustration, and told me that maybe I should try undercover work.
DCI Dougie MacLeod — he taught me one hell of a lot, including the art of patience, which was something I thought I’d never pick up. Right up until yesterday, I always thought his greatest service to me was that particular suggestion, because for the past nine years of my life I’ve been working with CO10, Scotland Yard’s elite (their word, not mine) undercover unit. Working undercover, I’ve finally found the excitement I was looking for, and I’ve also put away some extremely nasty characters, many of whom still want me dead. And as I stood in the windowless back room of a grimy Soho nightclub that morning, I had the feeling that there weren’t many much nastier than the two men sitting across the table opposite me.
‘I hear you’re looking for work,’ said the one on the right. He was in his mid-forties, with closely cropped silver hair, a noticeable squint in one eye, and features that were long, sharp and unforgiving, as if they’d been hand-carved from hardwood, and dominated by a nose skewed by a long-ago breakage and missing a lump at the bridge. He was wearing a faded Lonsdale T-shirt that showed off wiry, muscular arms peppered with faded tattoos, and his good eye homed in on me now, hunting for weaknesses. His name was Tyrone Wolfe, and he was suspected of involvement in at least five murders.
The man sitting next to him was called Clarence Haddock. It was, speaking frankly, a ridiculous name, and one that simply didn’t do justice to the huge, terrifying-looking thug with the beard and dreadlocks who for the past five years had been Tyrone Wolfe’s closest associate. More than a dozen gold labret studs peppered his face, including one that went horizontally straight through his fat, splayed nose, giving him the appearance of an angry bull preparing to charge. He sat with his trunk-like forearms on the table, glaring up at me in silence, the barely suppressed rage he’d become legendary for seeming to emanate from him in short, brutal waves. It was said that Clarence Haddock had once cut a man’s throat with such force that he’d decapitated him with a single pull of the knife, and looking at him now I could picture him feeding on the still-twitching corpse afterwards. I knew all about him, of course, but even so, standing a few feet away from him in a claustrophobic room reminded me of the first time I’d seen a great white shark in real life while on a cage-diving trip off Gansbaii in South Africa. A mixture of primeval fear and sheer awe.
I held both their gazes, ignoring the drop of sweat running down my temple. ‘Yeah, I could be. What have you got?’
Wolfe turned to the third man in the room, a big middle-aged guy with long, greying blond hair and a face with more lines than the Bible, who was leaning against the wall. This was Tommy Allen, another of Wolfe’s close associates, and the man I’d spent the last three months getting to know. He was the one who’d brought me to this nightclub at ten thirty in the morning to make the introductions.
‘Yeah, he’s clean,’ said Tommy confidently, his voice a cockney, cigarette-fuelled growl. ‘I had the RF detector on in the car and it didn’t pick up anything. I’ve searched him too.’ He winked at me. ‘I think he enjoyed that part.’
Wolfe didn’t smile. ‘Watch?’
‘I’ve taken his watch, his mobile, everything. Even his shoes. It’s all outside.’
These guys were very thorough, and totally surveillance aware, knowing all the tricks of the trade. Never using the same phones for too long, regularly sweeping their meeting places for bugs, always checking for tails. I’d been hoping to record this meeting using the microscopic recording device in my watch, but now they’d scuppered that, which was going to make my job even harder than it was already. But then, when you were armed robbers turned drug smugglers, running nightclubs staffed by illegal immigrants who were little more than sex slaves, it paid to be careful, which was why I was here.
Because conventional methods for putting these guys away weren’t working.
‘I once heard of an undercover copper who wore a listening device up his arse,’ said Wolfe, speaking slowly, almost languidly, enunciating every word in a strong east London accent. ‘It was on a smack deal. Apparently, it picked up every word. Two people went down for twelve years apiece.’
I didn’t like the sound of this. One, because not surprisingly I didn’t much fancy the idea of a detailed rectal examination, and two, and more importantly, because the undercover copper in question had been me. And yes, it had been bloody uncomfortable, although, as Wolfe pointed out, it had also been successful, which had pleased the bosses no end. There was no way Wolfe could have known my identity since he’d had nothing to do with the dealers I’d put down, but I still felt a twinge of anxiety.
Criminals are just like hyenas, or the playground bullies I used to fight: they sniff out fear immediately, and go straight for whoever’s exhibiting it. I’d been in the game long enough to stand my ground, so I glared contemptuously at Wolfe. ‘I’m not a copper,’ I told him firmly, ‘and no one’s feeling my arsehole from the inside, either. Understand that? If you’ve got something for me, tell me now. I haven’t got all day.’
‘He sat down pretty easily in the car, boss,’ Tommy chuckled throatily, ‘so I don’t think he’s wearing anything up there.’
‘Don’t worry, no one’s going to search your arsehole,’ said Wolfe as if he was doing me some massive favour. ‘But I need to be sure about you.’
‘And I need to be sure about you, too,’ I said, knowing I couldn’t take these kinds of liberties lying down. ‘I mean, how do I know you’re not coppers?’
‘I’m no fucking copper,’ growled Haddock, speaking for the first time, fixing me with his big dark eyes. His voice was higher-pitched than I’d been expecting, with the faintest sign of a lisp. It was, however, no less menacing for that, and I could feel the atmosphere in this shitty little room darkening.
At this point, Tommy peeled himself off the wall and came over to the table. ‘Listen, Sean,’ he said, addressing me, ‘I can vouch for these two men. I’ve known them years, and you know I’m kosher, so I wouldn’t be messing you about.’
This was true enough. In the three months since I’d met Tommy in a well-known villains’ pub in Stepney, we’d not only spent a lot of time together shooting the breeze in various drinking holes, I’d also done work for him on his sideline operations. This had involved delivering quantities of coke to some of his wholesale customers, as well as going with him to collect a debt from a dealer who owed him money. I’d had to hold the guy’s legs while Tommy lifted him off the floor and repeatedly dunked his head down the toilet. I hadn’t wanted to do it but knew I had to prove myself to my new boss, and thankfully the dealer had coughed up the money before any real pain was inflicted on him.