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  Detective Chief Inspector Peach apologised for disturbing her at a time like this, but assured her it was essential. He said she must surely know about Mr O’Connor’s enemies and would thus be a vital source of information for them.

  Sarah O’Connor felt an immediate need to distance herself from the death. ‘I’m sure he had business enemies. I know very little about his business dealings. We both preferred it that way.’

  ‘Did you, indeed? That’s a pity, from our point of view. But I’m sure you’re as anxious as we are to find out who fired that bullet.’ Peach made it almost a question, as if there were some doubt about her feelings. He looked at her evenly, studying her closely, despite his initial apology for intruding upon her grief. He saw a striking woman in a high-necked, dark blue dress, with glossy black hair in a ponytail style which made her look younger than her years. She was forty-four and her husband had been forty-six; it was a first marriage for both of them and they had been married for nineteen years. Northcott had provided him with this basic information as soon as he returned from his leave.

  Peach left his words hanging in the air, knowing that nervous people felt a compulsion to break silences and sometimes offered things they had meant to conceal. Mrs O’Connor eventually said acerbically, ‘Of course I want you to find who killed Jim. We’d been married for almost twenty years, for God’s sake. My daughter’s devastated by this.’

  ‘Understandably so. But you seem to have complete self-control. An admirable quality, in these circumstances.’ Peach was nervous himself, conscious of the late start on what might be a difficult crime. It made him willing to push a widow harder than he would normally have done, once he had noted her composure.

  ‘Are you trying to be offensive, DCI Peach?’

  He noted that she had remembered his rank, which a woman desolated by woe would not normally have done. ‘I’m sorry if you find my attitude offensive. I wish to accelerate an investigation which has so far moved sluggishly. What sort of man was your husband, Mrs O’Connor?’

  This was not at all what she had expected. The man was direct and abrupt, where she had anticipated sympathy. ‘Jim was a good husband. He was kind and considerate. He was an even better father.’

  ‘In what way better?’

  How sharp the man was! ‘We have only one child. I suppose what I’m saying is that he was an indulgent father. I had to stop him spoiling Clare at times.’

  ‘But he didn’t try to spoil you?’

  ‘He was a good husband to me. Don’t try to make out that he wasn’t.’

  ‘I’m not trying to make out anything, Mrs O’Connor. I’m trying to establish the truth. Your husband has been brutally murdered. He isn’t here to tell us who might have done it, or even whom we might suspect and thus investigate. We have to find out as much about him as we can, if we are to discover who killed him. You are the most obvious source of information for us.’

  She had been matching aggression with aggression, determined not to be browbeaten by this stocky, combative opponent. She looked at him now with her head a little on one side, like a boxer eyeing an opponent from his stool between rounds. Then she made a deliberate effort to relax. ‘All right, I see that. We’re on the same side. Ask away.’

  ‘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 g
ain 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.

  He tried not to move when he’d had the horse. You were in danger when you were high; you felt that dangerous overconfidence which led you to take chances. It was now the middle of the day in the squat. It was the only one of a terrace of derelict houses awaiting demolition which still had a door and most of its windows. In the world outside, there was patchy sun and no immediate prospect of rain. Yet all but two of the squatters were in the house. Fresh air and life in the open had no appeal for them. They were addicts, with nowhere to go between fixes.

  When the five men and three women who lived here went out at all, it was usually in the evenings. Darkness seemed a natural environment for them, but that was not the only reason. All eight of them were small-time dealers. Their supplies were tightly controlled and they made little profit — the rich pickings of this sinister four-billion-pound industry went to men much higher up the chain than they were. The wretched denizens of the squat dealt merely to support their habit; they were allocated and sold just enough to provide the drugs they needed for themselves.

  Jason Crook emerged cautiously at the rear of the house and stood blinking for a moment against the brightness of the light. His head switched from right to left, like that of a rodent checking that it was unobserved. Then he set off to fulfil his assignment, passing through streets where few vehicles ventured and litter accumulated steadily in the gutters. His battered trainers were serviceable still; he moved with the rapid, shuffling gait of someone older than he was. His head was low and his eyes flicked rapidly to right and left as he went, to make sure he was not being followed.

  He had chosen the meeting place himself. The van had been there for five days now, at the end of a street where the houses had already been felled and the bulldozer had levelled the site ready for the builders. It had probably been dumped there by joyriders, or an owner whom it had finally failed. The one wheel with a newish tyre had already disappeared from it, so that the van slumped crazily sideways. But Crook had already checked that the driver’s door opened.

  His contact was waiting for him as he’d demanded. The man sat low in the passenger seat on the nearside, his face almost invisible beneath the cap pulled forward over his eyes. He was almost as unkempt as Crook, but his dirt was less ingrained. He was adopting a disguise, whereas the man who had come from the squat had been living his part for months.

  The officer who sat in the passenger seat glanced at Crook as he slipped into place and shut the driver’s door. ‘You’ve done a good job on yourself. You look like a junkie.’

  Jason didn’t reply, didn’t even smile. This man who had spoken didn’t feel like a colleague any more. Those wretched creatures in the squat weren’t colleagues, but he felt nearer to them than to this being from the real world. This was one of the hazards of working undercover. The people who volunteered for the work were almost by definition unbalanced. Some of them took on the lifestyle of the user so thoroughly that they became genuine addicts rather than undercover agents. They disappeared into the anonymous underclass which peopled the lower reaches of the drug world and were lost permanently to the police. The officer who was slumped anonymously in the driver seat of this stinking vehicle wondered if Crook was in danger of this.

  As if he read that thought, Jason said while still gazing straight ahead at the filthy windscreen, ‘I got the name of one of the big men for you. This man’s taking control of the dealers round here. He’s taking over Strangeways.’

  The big jail in Manchester was a hotbed of drug use, as are most of the major prisons in the brave new world of Britain. Controlling the supply of drugs and the network of dealers involved was lucrative in itself. It was also far more important among the barons of this sinister trade for its prestige value. The man who supplied Strangeways controlled much else as well. The men and women who worked for him as well as his rivals recognised that.

  The inspector beside Crook said, ‘Give us the name. We’ll see if it tallies with the information we’re getting from other-’

  ‘O’Connor. James O’Connor.’ Jason wasn’t interested in the man’s garbage about other sources: he knew what he knew. ‘He’s taken over from Read. He’s planning to get bigger still.’

  ‘Right.’ The man in the passenger seat nodded. Jason Crook was out of the vehicle immediately, departing down the street with the same rapid shuffle with which he had arrived. The Drug Squad inspector watched him to the end of the road, waited another two minutes. That poor sod couldn’t know that O’Connor was dead, couldn’t know that the information he’d risked his life for was almost valueless now. Crook was sunk so deep into his role in the squat that he probably hadn’t read a newspaper or heard a radio for weeks.

  James O’Connor wouldn’t be extending his empire any further. But the fact that he’d been spreading his wings in dangerous skies had brought some big criminal names into the possibilities for his murderer.

  Dominic O’
Connor was slimmer and shorter than his brother. More flying winger than flanker, a rugby man might have said. DCI Peach was not a rugby man. Soccer was his winter game; he’d supported Brunton Rovers through thick and thin — and there’d been plenty of thin lately.

  He studied his man unhurriedly, after he’d introduced himself and Clyde Northcott. Nervous, he reckoned, trying to look as if he wasn’t on edge but not succeeding. He liked that: people who were nervous gave more of themselves away. But you couldn’t read too much into it. Bereavement affected people in all sorts of ways and it was possible that this man had never been questioned by police before. That would make him different from his dead brother; James had had many exchanges with the police, but had been always been too wily to end up in court. He had even been helpful to them at times, when it suited his own agenda.

  ‘You never worked with your brother, Mr O’Connor?’

  ‘No. I’m six years younger than him. That meant we were never particularly close. We had different talents and different interests. He was already the great rugby player back in Ireland when I was still a schoolboy.’

  ‘I see. But James made a successful business career. He was quickly in charge of his own business and it rapidly diversified.’ Peach paused for a second on the word, allowing it an ironic ring, studying the man’s reaction. ‘You didn’t feel inclined to join him and make it a family business? Or perhaps James didn’t want you working with him?’

  ‘I could have had work with Jim if I’d wanted it. I decided I didn’t.’

  The younger man had almost no trace of an Irish accent, whereas the dead man had seemed almost to cultivate it, both in his rugby days and in his later business dealings. ‘And why did you decide that?’