She heard Leo’s footsteps approaching on the gravel driveway and felt almost ashamed, as if, sitting alone, having her private mull, she had been not just idiotic but disloyal in her thinking. He came into the drawing room and sat down. She decided now that, if he really had hoped to lift his morale by inspecting the outhouse work, it had failed. He appeared uneasy. He appeared hunted. Now and then during their marriage she’d seen this hunted look on his small face before. It still shocked her. ‘Are they making a good job of things?’ she asked.
For a moment he seemed baffled by the question. Soon, though, he got his mind working properly again and said: ‘Oh, yes, fine, fine.’
She left it at that for a minute and then said: ‘What’s wrong, Leo, love?’
He kept the pause going for a few more seconds. He seemed to be wondering whether he could tell her what troubled him. ‘Your car,’ he said.
‘What about it?’
‘Iles playing about like that - checking the licence.’
‘It was OK, up-to-date.’
‘Of course it was OK. Not the point, Em.’
‘What is the point?’
He went quiet again. But then seemed to decide he had to say what troubled him. She saw that a big change in their relationship might be under way. This pleased her - and scared her. ‘Look, Em, for quite ordinary business reasons I have an arrangement with someone running the national police computer that holds reg numbers,’ he said.
‘An arrangement to get classified information from the police computer?’
‘It can be important to check someone’s ID, or get the history of a used vehicle we might want to buy. We wouldn’t like to become accessories to a theft, would we, not even accidentally?’ He put a sort of jokey spin on this.
Yes, sort of, she thought. ‘You have an arrangement with a police officer running the national computer?’ Emily said.
‘Yes, as a business facility, like I said.’
‘It’s illegal, isn’t it? You pay him or her to give you confidential, stored information. You bribe him or her?’
‘There has to be payment. I’m asking the officer to do extra work on my behalf.’
‘And to risk his or her job on your behalf, and possibly go to jail on your behalf.’
‘There’s a word for this kind of payment, Em, which means it’s not wages, and it’s like there’s no payment at all, just a . . . well, just a simple “thank you”. I expect you know this word, Em.’
‘Backhander?’
‘No, a sweeter word than that; much sweeter.’
‘A sweetener?’
‘No, again.’ He shut his eyes to think better. ‘It got like honour in it. It shows there’s nothing too bad about it.’
‘An honorarium,’ she said.
‘That’s it!’ He grinned, eyes open again. She saw he was delighted with her skill and speed at coming up with the answer, and delighted English had a word that made a bung sound like a medal. He said, ‘It’s a minor thing and doesn’t happen very often.’
‘But you keep paying the retainer, do you?’
‘There’s got to be what is referred to in commercial things as continuity. I never know when I might need this service, you see, Em. It’s like insurance.’
‘Yes, I see. So there’s a sort of non-stop standby fee?’
‘That sort of deal, yes.’
‘Paid how? Brown envelopes in the post?’
He ignored this. ‘The car,’ he replied.
‘What of it?’
‘This lad on the computer - he got a similar sort of arrangement going with Iles,’ Leo said. ‘Well, no, not totally similar. Obviously, a high officer like Iles can ask for info about a reg any time he likes, and he’s entitled. But his arrangement is round the other way, like. Iles wants to be told by the computer lad about any queries he gets that might be useful to the Assistant Chief.’
‘Iles is paying him, too?’
‘It’s an extra facility, isn’t it? This is not just Iles starting something with a request to him, which is, like, positive and part of the normal police use. The computer officer’s got to be what’s known in the business scene as proactive in this special role for Iles. The officer is the one who got to get things going.’
‘So, another honorarium? Extra boodle from all directions. How do you know he operates for Iles like that?’
‘He told me, didn’t he?’
‘Did he? And will he tell Iles he operates for you?’
‘No, never that. He’d be admitting an offence. He knows I’m always interested in any requests he gets from Iles, or from Harpur, while they’re here on the investigation.’
‘But why are you interested, Leo?’
Of course, she thought she could see why: Leo must know he was a target for Harpur and Iles. That’s why they’d been out here today. Naturally, she’d suspected this, and felt certain of it now. It was part of that changed relationship she’d sensed earlier. Leo seemed to have decided to tell her more or less outright that some of his life was crooked and complicated. Maybe he thought she must be half aware of this already, and so secrecy had become absurd. Whatever he meant about her car might have pushed him a bit further on with his frankness and disclosures. But what was it with her car?
‘Harpur at the beginning,’ Leo said.
‘Harpur what?’
‘Harpur calls in for a check on a registration number he’s got from somewhere. The computer officer knows Iles likes to keep tabs on Harpur as much as he can. He tells Iles of Harpur’s request, and, naturally, gives Iles the number that Harpur had asked him about. A Mini Cooper, yellow and black, road taxed until March, owner, Mrs Emily Young of Midhurst, etcetera.’
‘My God,’ she said.
‘That’s what the bit of fooling over the licence was about when they left. Why are they focused on your car, Em?’ His tone had become sharper. He sounded like someone who ran a firm, and a firm that had seen a lot of trouble, might see more, and needed to be vigilant. The little trip to the outhouse refurbishment hadn’t done much for his mood, but the Mini-Cooper puzzle prodded Leo’s leadership qualities back into play. ‘What I mean, Em, is have you been anywhere unusual in the car?’ he said. ‘Anywhere that would make them curious?’
‘From here to Waitrose and back. From here to the museum committee and back.’
‘Nothing else?’
From here to the Ritson Mall multi-storey when she went to the Elms house. This she didn’t say, though. She’d thought there might be someone in the house, hadn’t she - why she’d retreated in a hurry? Could the someone have tailed her, returning to Ritson and noted the car number as she drove away? Hell, the house was back in her thoughts again as more than a house - a jinx. ‘Let’s eat out, shall we, Leo? I feel like a break, with non-police voices around.’
TWENTY-FIVE
Harpur drove off this police domain, Larkspur, and out to the Mallen house at Wilton Road on Carnation. He’d arranged by phone to call. The visit had been suggested by Maud. She thought it a necessary courtesy to keep Iris Mallen informed face-to-face of developments, now parts of the original investigation were up for review. Harpur agreed. Iles agreed. ‘Go about matters with some gentleness, Col,’ he’d said as Harpur prepared to leave.
‘Well, of course.’ They were in their room at Larkspur HQ.
‘You can be so fucking galumphing, Harpur. Face-to-face is all very well - the human touch - but what we have to remember is that one of the faces will be yours, rather compromising the human aspect. Yet, this is a woman trying to put her life together again.’
‘I realize that, sir.’
‘We don’t want to bring her any further shocks.’ Iles gave a powerful, throaty scream lasting about five seconds. He was standing and rotated his body through 360 degrees. ‘Is there time for you to get a decent haircut? Don’t take flowers.’
‘Right.’
Iles had repeated the scream at the same pitch and with the same spin of himself. Then he said: ‘Flowers equ
al death. She’s had enough of that.’ The screams were an Ilesean tactic. He revolved so all parts of the room got a share. He calculated that, if this nominally private and secure room had been bugged at some point or points, people listening would believe Harpur must be trying to kill him and they’d have to come fast and intervene - so confirming the bugs’ presence. Iles thought they might have noticed the wound in his cheek and, when they got the profound, earphoned screams from whichever hidden spot or spots in the room, would assume it could have been given by Harpur - rightly assume it could have been given by Harpur - and that he was now finishing the job, probably with a fair-sized serrated knife. Nobody arrived, though. Harpur decided this did not necessarily prove the room clean. They might want Iles killed. Now and then Harpur came across folk who obviously did.
The ACC had taken two twenties from his back pocket. ‘There are a couple of kids, aren’t there? Give only when you’re leaving. We’re not buying anything - not friendship, information, gratitude. We’re seeking to make the best of an awful job. There is no best, really, but let them have one each. If they refuse, respect that. Some children have a lot of pride. But, Col, you’re aware of this. Your own, for instance. I trust this will not sound vain, but I think they take pride in knowing me.’
‘Your trust is barmy then, sir. Of course it sounds vain,’ Harpur replied.
‘I’d go to Carnation myself, but I want to look into a few things said at Midhurst.’
‘Which?’
‘Make my apologies to Mrs Mallen.’
‘Most probably you’ll have heard of this, sir, but lately I came across a different way of looking at words, by getting behind what they seem to say and discovering other stuff. It could be applied to extracts from the Midhurst session.’
‘Deconstruction.’
‘I was sure this would be your sort of thing, sir! In fact, I’ve heard people say, “That Mr Iles, he’s well into deconstruction, although an Assistant Chief.Whenever I hear the word ‘deconstruction’, I think of Mr Iles.”’
‘Which people?’
‘Oh, yes. Perception was their long suit.’
‘That undergraduate Denise you’re shacked up with for most of her time has been giving you some literary theory coaching, has she, in exchange for what you’ve been giving her?’
‘She told me one of her professors is writing a book on negative capability.’
‘Some of them have a lot of that.’ Iles must have read things differently from Harpur and, because no rescue party had come to deliver him, he decided the room was bugless and began to talk more openly. ‘We don’t need deconstruction to tell us that Mrs Young’s beginning to get a horrifyingly clear idea of what her hubby’s business is, and what it requires to stay healthy - murders,’ he’d replied. ‘It’s in the droop of her jaw, Col. It’s in the frailty of her voice, the despair of her questions, the pitifulness of her little spurts of anger. Possibly Leo has come to suspect this. Hence the halt and lame claptrap to fill the time. Hence, also, that sudden, violent switch of subject to museums and Emily’s outstanding, chairperson’s flair with Ice Age pencil sharpeners, and other antiquities.’
‘But what you’re doing now - this survey is a kind of deconstruction, isn’t it, sir?’
‘Just sense.’
Mrs Mallen and her children lived in a wide, suburban road of between-the-wars, semi-detached villas facing one another across an island of well-tended, litter-free grass. The houses and front gardens were well-tended, too. Harpur liked the look of the area. The people here set themselves standards. He considered them good standards, although Harpur himself lived in a less spruce district back in Cowslip. Iles was continually at him to make a change - possibly to somewhere like this. But his daughters liked Arthur Street. They could walk to their school, John Locke comprehensive, and to the bus station caff, a social hub for them and their friends. The Arthur Street house had off-street parking on hardstanding at the side of the front garden, ideal for Denise in her Fiat. The fact that the car could be seen there, very obvious and very often, pleased the girls. It proved there was nothing furtive about Harpur’s relationship with Denise: no leaving the car somewhere discreet and sneaking into the house on foot. Altogether, Harpur found the ties with Arthur Street too many to think about a move. ‘Get amongst the jumped-up and jump higher, Col,’ Iles had said. ‘Switch to aspirational from stick-in-the-mud.’ Harpur had promised to consider it, and did, but stayed put.
He’d met Mrs Mallen several times before, during the original inquiry into her husband’s death. He’d found her bright, brave, forthright. She opened the door at 11 Wilton Road now and took him into a sitting room. She was tall - about 5' 8'' - very pale skinned, her face long, aquiline, expressive, not hostile but showing some tension, some suspicion, some toughness. He would have expected all those: the police had put her husband into danger and to that extent had caused his death, and Harpur was police. She probably wouldn’t differentiate between one cop and another, nor make much of the fact that he and Iles were trying to get the people who’d ordered her husband’s slaughter. Yes, police were police. She’d prepared some cheese sandwiches set out on a Pembroke table with a couple of cans of Bass beer. She opened these now and filled two glasses. They ate and drank and talked about the journey for a while. She was sitting opposite him, both in beige moquette arm chairs.
Then she said: ‘Do you know, Mr Harpur, I used to resent - really resent - the way Tom had to become someone else, had to ditch his authentic self. But, of course, when it all ended like that I wished he’d managed to become that someone else even more thoroughly and efficiently than he had. He was tugged two ways, wasn’t he? He had to make himself the real, gangster article. And he was also still a husband and dad. Maybe he sensed my hostility to this new job of his, and didn’t give the undercover side maximum effort. If he had, he might have still been doing it. I was stupidly possessive and impatient. After all, the new identity wouldn’t have been permanent. The other is.’
The other being death. But Harpur understood why she couldn’t say that direct, even now, months after.
‘Shall I tell you what I don’t understand, Mr Harpur?’
‘There’s quite a bit I don’t understand.’
‘Tom ceases to be Mallen and becomes whatever it was he became and gets a place in a drugs firm. He apparently settles in well, but is then found out and it’s all over bar the shooting. There would seem to me a link between the firm he infiltrated and . . . what happened to him. Yet nobody from that firm was convicted. Another police officer was. The firm presumably is still operating.’
‘We failed there,’ Harpur said. ‘Mr Iles blames himself. I blame myself.’
‘But they stick with you - the Home Office sticks with you, although you failed?’
‘We were answering other urgencies then,’ Harpur said. Christ, what verbiage, what shit.
‘Which other urgency?’
‘A successful arrest and trial for the crime.’
‘But surely the crime should have been seen as part of something . . . something complex and carefully, ruthlessly, organized.’
‘It was seen like that. We’d been brought in because the Home Office believed that what happened to your husband - tragic in itself - also indicated a wider disorder. But we couldn’t get close.’ He realized suddenly that she might think he and Iles had become part of the plot not to investigate properly, instead of exposing it: police were police; police took care of police. They didn’t always stick together, or Jaminel wouldn’t have been nailed. But generally they did. It was central to their training. How would anyone outside know when those mystical bonds of absolute loyalty might be suspended?
Harpur could sympathize with her distrust, but, of course, longed to correct it. He was unsure how to manage that. He recalled Iles’s instruction to take things gently with a woman who had to rebuild her life. Iles could turn very tender. It confused people. It could still confuse Harpur. Tenderness was not Iles’s most obvious qu
ality.
In his pocket now Harpur carried the expired Biro which had made that very timely pit in the ACC and quietened some of his more usual characteristics: mad ferocity, merciless contempt, malicious scheming. Harpur had brought the Biro as a gift for Mrs Mallen, in the hope it might provide some comfort and solace. She had been searching for it at the Elms house - an item to commemorate her husband.
Harpur would not mention to her the honest, bloodletting jab it gave to Iles, of course. Sensitive omissions were required. Although Harpur had thoroughly cleaned away any fragments of Iles from the Biro, it would diminish its value as poignant keepsake if she knew the pen had been part of a brutal, muddy encounter on that sad slice of ground in front of the Elms house, when Iles had seemed likely to strangle him, on account of Harpur’s affair with Sarah, Iles’s wife. Despite episodes of tenderness, Iles was brilliantly accomplished at bearing grudges. He devotedly, expertly, refurbished his hates.
Harpur wondered now about the Biro. Had he been simple-minded in thinking she would be delighted to receive it from him? She had obviously wanted it badly, and had driven all that distance to search the Elms soil. But what would she make of the sudden disclosure by Harpur that he knew of the journey and her unsuccessful scour?
Emily Young had met her there by accident. Although she had refused to give her name, might that very refusal point to her identity? Iris Mallen was sharp. She’d notice the expensive clothes and expensive shoes. Why would a prosperous, middle-aged woman come out at night to this cursed estate unless she had some connection to the Mallen-Parry case? Iris might guess that the only person to fit this bill was the wife of the chief of the firm where, as it came out at the trial, Tom had done his undercover work?