Nowhere To Hide

Halfway down the stairs he’d registered, without even knowing what he’d seen, that the living room door was ajar.

He thought of stepping back, but knew it was already too late. In that moment another, more tangible sensation struck him. The acrid scent of cigarette smoke, instantly recognisable in this ascetic, smoke-free official house.

He thrust the door wide and stepped inside. The small table lamp was burning in the corner of the room, The man was sprawled across the tacky sofa, toying lazily with a revolver.

‘Up early, Steve,’ he commented. He was a large man in a black tracksuit, wearing dark glasses, with a baseball cap pulled low over his eyes. His face was neatly shaven and boyish, but there was nothing soft about him. ‘Guilty conscience?’

‘Not so’s you’d notice,’ Steve said. ‘You?’

‘Sleep of the just, mate,’ the man said. ‘Sleep of the fucking just.’

A moment before, Steve had been contemplating how to get out of this. Whether to try to get back into the kitchen or upstairs. Out of the front door, or through the patio windows.

But there was no point. The man knew his name. Knew who he was. Why he was here. Someone had grassed. Why else had he come? Someone would always grass. He ought to know that better than anyone.

There was no way out. No future. There never had been any future, not to speak of, once he’d taken that step. He’d known it then and there was no escaping it now.

Steve felt oddly calm, detached, observing all this from a distance. He saw the man playing aimlessly with his gun. He saw it all, and he felt untroubled. He had no illusions about what the man would do. Perhaps no more than he deserved.

So he stood there, motionless, waiting for it to start. And in that moment – before the flare and the noise, before the impact, before his blood began to seep into the worn fibres of the cheap grey carpet – Steve felt almost relieved.

He’d almost missed it.

Something caught the corner of his eye, some movement. A twitch. He moved himself to the right to try to gain a better vantage through the spyhole.

It was well after midnight. The dead hours of routine patrols when nothing much ever happens. Maybe just some scrote with insomnia – and, Christ knew, all of this bunch ought to have trouble sleeping – shouting the odds, wanting to share his misery with the rest of the fucking world.

But usually nothing much. A fifteen minute stroll along the dimly lit landing, glance into the cells, check that no one was up to no good. There was never any real trouble.

Sometimes Pete tried to kid people that this was a responsible job, stuck up here all night by himself on the landing. If anything happens, it’s up to me to sort it out. Yeah, he thought, up to me to press the bell and summon backup. He was an OSG. Operational Support Grade. Bottom of the pile, with – at least in theory – minimal prisoner contact. Didn’t always work out that way, of course. But nobody expected much of him. Especially not the Prison Officers.

Like that one earlier, who’d been coming up here just as he was ending his previous patrol. Pete had been running a bit late, had lingered a bit too long over his coffee and copy of The Sun. Nobody really cared at this time of the night, but he didn’t like to let things slide, so he’d been a bit out of breath, dragging his overweight body hurriedly round the landings then down the stairs.

He hadn’t recognised the officer who’d met him on the stairs. He thought he knew most of them, but they kept buggering the shifts about and this one was new to him. Christ knew what he was doing going up to the landings at this hour.

Pete had tried to offer a cheery greeting – they were both stuck on this arse end of a roster, after all – but the guy had just blanked him, hardly seeming to register that Pete was there. Well, fuck you as well, Pete had thought, puffing down the last few stairs. He’d heard the officer unlocking the landing doors above him.

Afterwards, he’d been worried that the officer might report him for being late. It was a stupid concern. The guy probably wouldn’t even have known what time Pete was supposed to carry out the patrol. But there was something about him, something about the way he’d ignored Pete on the stairs, that had seemed unnerving. Just the kind of officious bastard who’d grass you up for the sheer hell of it.

So, just in case the guy was still up there, Pete had kicked off his next patrol a little early so he could get it finished on time without busting a gut. But of course the landing had been deserted. Whatever the officer had been doing, he’d finished it and buggered off.

There was nothing else to do. Pete shuffled with effort round the landing, stopping to check on each cell in turn. Everyone sleeping like a baby.

He’d reached the last cell and was preparing to move on to the next landing, when he stopped and looked again.

Yeah, he’d almost missed it. The cell was in darkness and he’d assumed the occupant was securely in bed. Then he’d caught some movement in the periphery of his vision. He hadn’t even been sure he’d seen it at first. He’d shifted his body to get a better view.

Jesus.

There was something – someone – there, jerking and struggling. Someone pressed against the wall behind the door, almost invisible. And now Pete could hear the sound of choking, the awful sound of a wordless, gasping scream…

He reacted better than he’d have expected, racing across the landing to sound the alarm. Then back to the cell, fumbling with his own set of keys. He was supposed to enter the cells only in the direst of emergencies, but surely this counted as one of those. As he pushed open the door, it occurred to him that he might have been suckered. But the landing was sealed and backup would be there in minutes.

He knew straight away he’d done the right thing. The prisoner was hanging halfway up the wall – Christ knew how he’d managed it – some kind of cord tight around his neck. The man’s head lolled to one side, his waxy face already blue in the dim light from the landing.

Pete threw his arms round the prisoner’s body and tried to drag it down from whatever was holding the rope. He struggled at first, afraid that he was doing more harm than good, but knowing the prisoner would have no chance as long as his own weight continued to tighten the cord. Suddenly, as Pete strained to lift the prisoner’s body, the rope gave way and the body toppled sideways, out of Pete’s grip, on to the hard floor.

A nail. A fucking six inch nail hammered into the wall. Where the fuck had he got that from? And the rope, for that matter? Someone was for the high jump.

Pete crouched down by the body, fumbling to loosen the ligature from the prisoner’s neck. The face was purple now, and the old guy looked like he might be a goner already. Pete fumbled around the plastic cord and finally found the knot. He could feel it beginning to give under his trembling fingers. At the same moment, he heard the sound of the landing gates behind unlocked.

By the time the two officers and the principal had reached the cell door, Pete had managed to loosen the rope. He looked up as the three men crowded the doorway: ‘Trying to top himself.’

Pete moved back as the principal officer crouched over the body and began to administer CPR, thrusting hard and rhythmically on the prisoner’s chest. One of the officers was on his radio calling for an ambulance.

Pete dragged himself to his feet, only now beginning to take in what had happened. What he’d just dealt with. ‘Jesus.’ He glanced down at the supine figure, still bouncing under the pounding arms of the principal officer.

The officer with the radio nodded laconically towards Pete. ‘Good work, son. Let’s hope we’re in time. We all get a bollocking if one of them tops himself.’ He took a step back and glanced at the number of the cell. ‘Mind you,’ he added, ‘won’t be too many saying any prayers for this one.’

Pete looked up. ‘That right?’

‘Don’t reckon so.’ The officer moved to lean against the doorframe. ‘This is Keith Welsby. Just another bent copper. There’s one or two would be glad to help him on his fucking way.’

PART ONE

1

‘So you were lying to me.’

Salter gazed back at her, his mouth working hard at a piece of gum. His expression was that of a bored spectator staring into an aquarium at an unfamiliar species of fish. ‘If it wasn’t the kind of thing that gets me branded as sexist,’ he said, finally, ‘I’d say that sounded a tad hysterical, sis.’

She eased herself back in Salter’s uncomfortable visitor’s chair, wondering how to extricate herself from this conversation. There was no way of combatting Salter in this kind of exchange. The most you could hope for was to slow him momentarily on his path to victory.

‘It was a condition of my joining your team,’ she said. ‘I made that clear.’ Which was true, but there was no way of proving it now.

He shrugged, chewing at the gum. ‘Nobody makes conditions in this business. You know that. We do what we’re told.’

‘I’m not trying to be difficult, Hugh–’

‘Never thought you were, sis. All seems easy enough from where I’m sitting.’

She didn’t doubt that. Life tended to look pretty easy from where Hugh Salter was sitting, if only because he was busy making life hard for everyone else. Like his insistence on calling her ‘sis’. A hangover from that last undercover assignment. Salter had invented a family connection supposedly as cover in their telephone conversations. It was a joke now long past its sell-by date, but he knew she was irritated by the implied intimacy.

‘You know my circumstances. There must be someone else.’

He waved his hand around as if the other potential candidates were gathered in the office with them. ‘Believe me, sis, I’ve looked. There’s no one else with your talents.’ He made the last word sound like a double entendre. ‘No one with half your experience.’

That wasn’t entirely bullshit, she knew. Apart from herself, Salter’s team was pretty wet behind the ears. That was how Salter picked them. Bright young things smart enough to do a decent job, but without the confidence to answer back. She tried another tack. ‘Anyway, it’s too risky. It’s against procedures.’

Salter’s smile was unwavering. ‘“Procedures”? Who gives a fuck about procedures? The other side don’t follow procedures.’

And that’s why they’re on the other side, she thought. Out loud, she said, ‘It’s not about bureaucracy, Hugh. It’s about not jeopardising the work. Or me, for that matter.’

‘Look, sis, if there was an alternative, I’d jump at it. I don’t want to do this any more than you do.’

Like hell, she thought. That’s what this came down to. Another of Hugh Salter’s games. She sometimes thought it was what really motivated him. Not career. Not money. Just the opportunity to screw other people around. None of this was a surprise. It was what she’d expected, one way or another, from the moment she’d finally agreed to join Salter’s team.

It had taken him longer than she’d expected, though that was probably just another part of the game. It was six months since the business with Keith Welsby, their former boss and mentor. She’d been here in HQ all that time, working largely on backroom intelligence. Page after page of data on mobile phone numbers, banking transactions, email correspondence. It was important work and she was good at it, but that didn’t make it any less boring. She’d learned to treat the boredom as part of the challenge. You ploughed your way through endless documentation, jotting a note here, a comment there, knowing that most of it was telling you nothing. But you had to keep your head engaged, waiting for the rare moment when something jumped out at you. Some trend, some pattern, some significant link with another piece of data, pages before.

It wasn’t quite that basic, of course. The databases did a lot of the work, highlighting links and trends. Even so, when it came to the detail of a specific case, there was still a heavy dependency on the individual analyst. The most important links were often the least obvious. An odd piece of data – a name, a number – that had snagged in the back of your mind from another file. Sometimes it was little more than intuition, a feeling that there was a link you’d missed or a pattern you’d overlooked. She knew she was good at it. She could cope with the tedium, and she had a gift for finding information that others had missed.

In any case, after everything that had happened, she’d needed a break. She’d nearly been killed, for Christ’s sake. But then so had Salter, and he showed no obvious signs of mental trauma. And it was Salter, in the end, who’d killed Jeff Kerridge and exposed Welsby as corrupt. He’d been acclaimed as a hero and become the new rising star. Marie had watched uneasily from the sidelines, suspicious of Salter and his motives, convinced that, beneath that clean-cut ambition, he was as corrupt as their former boss. But Salter had sailed serenely on, enjoying the fruits of promotion, apparently untroubled by anything that had happened.

So she’d been happy to step back from the front line and lose herself in the rhythm of facts and figures. For the last six months, every day had been the same. The semi-comatose journey up the Northern Line, the short walk along the Embankment, takeaway latte from the staff restaurant. Settle at her desk and boot up the computer. Check emails, then access the database or pull out the files. The same every day. A sandwich at her desk, or lunch with a couple of the other analysts. More data-crunching till it was time to get the Tube home. Despite herself, she’d begun to enjoy the routine, the predictability.

Maybe Salter had hoped she’d be climbing the walls by now. She might have predicted it herself. She’d done this kind of work before and been happy with it, but that was a long time ago. She had been a different person then, she thought, with different expectations. But perhaps she’d changed less than she imagined.

In fairness, she’d always intended to return to the front line eventually. After they’d brought her in from the field, they’d had her formally assessed by Winsor, their pet psych. In his inimitable style, Winsor had stated the blindingly obvious in language that no one fully understood. The upshot was that she’d suffered a major psychological trauma. Well, thanks for that, she’d thought. If you hadn’t brought it up, I might not have noticed.

Winsor’s conclusion was that she was a resilient character, and that there would be no long-term effects as long as they didn’t push her too hard. She had no idea what evidence he had to support this assertion, but she felt no need to challenge it. If they wanted to stick her in a quiet office for a few months, that was fine by her. She had plenty of other problems on her plate, after all.

She looked up at Salter’s blankly smiling face, wondering how to play this. There was no point in trying to match Salter at the gamesmanship. All she could do was play it straight down the line. ‘I take it you’ve cleared this idea, Hugh?’

For a moment he shifted in his seat, his body-language suggesting that he couldn’t fully answer her question. But she knew Salter well enough to recognise that he wouldn’t go into something like this half-cocked. He’d always make sure his backside was covered. ‘I’ve been through the procedures, if that’s what you mean. What do you think this is?’

Well, that was the question. But, as Salter well knew, it was a question she couldn’t begin to answer. ‘It all just seems a bit irregular, Hugh. I mean, the protocols–’

‘The protocols are there as guidance. We’re professionals, Marie. We have to exercise judgement.’ It was the first time he’d used her name. A sign that he was shifting things up a gear.

‘And your judgement is that this is safe?’ she asked.

‘As safe as these things ever are. Christ, Marie, it’s my neck on the block if things go wrong.’

She doubted that. If things went wrong, she would be the one at immediate risk. And she was willing to bet that Salter had made sure he wasn’t in line for any professional blame. One way or another, he’d have everything covered. ‘But it’s the same area. And it’s only been six months. That must be a risk.’

‘There’s always a risk,’ he said. ‘But it’s not the same area. Not the same network at all. We’ve looked at it very carefully.’

‘It’s the north west. There are bound to be overlaps. It just takes one person–’

‘We’ll take care of it. You’ll look different. You’ll be a different person. Even if you should happen to stumble across somebody from before, there’ll be no link. Nobody will have any reason to make the connection.‘

It didn’t sound convincing, she thought. They reason they had protocols was because, whatever the odds, shit still tended to happen. She’d experienced it herself. Some past contact eyeballing her suspiciously because she’d turned up somewhere she wasn’t supposed to be. She could change her hair, her clothes, her lifestyle; but it wouldn’t cut any ice if the wrong people became suspicious. ‘But what if they do, Hugh? What if someone looks at me and thinks, wait a minute, that looks like old Marie who used to run the print shop in Trafford Park?’

‘Christ, Marie. It’s not going to happen, right. You’re the best person for the job, that’s what it comes down to. You can do it.’

Jesus, he was trying to flatter her now. Flattery wasn’t one of Salter’s strong points. His compliments always sounded insincere, she assumed because he didn’t really believe that any other person could match the towering talent that was Hugh Salter. ‘Don’t bullshit me, Hugh,’ she said. ‘You’ve just come to me because I’m convenient. If you tried to give this to one of your youngsters, you might actually have to put some effort into training them.’ She paused, conscious that she was coming close to saying something that she really might regret. ‘Do I actually have any choice in this?’

‘There’s always a choice, sis. But I really want you to give it a go.’

‘I’ll think about it.’ She knew that she might as well have saved both their time and just said yes there and then, but at least she could string out his discomfort for a day or so. ‘Chester?’

‘Chester,’ he agreed. ‘It’s a different world. Jesus, it’s nearly Wales. Safe as houses. No contact with the Manchester bunch at all, so far as we know.’

So far as we know. Hardly the ring of bloody confidence. How much did they know? Three-fifths of fuck all, if past experience was anything to go by. ‘Drug trafficking?’

‘Mainly.’ There was a look of relief on Salter’s face, even though he was trying hard to hard to keep it hidden. He knew he had her hooked now. Once you started talking about the detail, there was no going back. ‘One of those who’ll bring in anything if the price is right. Some cigarettes and booze, but mainly the hard stuff. Comes across from the east coast ports, and then they distribute it around Chester and North Wales.’

‘But not Manchester or Liverpool?’

‘There are bigger fish operating up there. No point in this one trying to compete. He’s got a nice little niche of his own, without antagonising the competition.’

It made sense. The north west was carved up pretty thoroughly by the big boys. That elite bunch had included the infamous Jeff Kerridge, until Salter had blown off the side of Kerridge’s head, supposedly in self defence. They’d had intelligence that Kerridge’s widow, the very redoubtable Helen, was continuing her late husband’s good work. And now Pete Boyle, Kerridge’s former protégé turned competitor, was out of prison and, by all accounts, also rebuilding his influence around Manchester.

That was the real source of her unease, even now. There’d been a point, six months before, when she was convinced that Salter was on Boyle’s payroll. Salter had claimed that, with no one to trust, he’d been forced to go freelance to gather definitive evidence against Kerridge and their corrupt former boss, Keith Welsby. Welsby had ended up behind bars, and was still awaiting trial after a botched suicide attempt. Salter had emerged smelling of roses. But Marie had suspected that the scent concealed a more noxious stink. If Boyle had been looking to depose Kerridge, maybe Salter’s intervention hadn’t been so public-spirited after all. And that in turn raised questions about the manner of Kerridge’s death.

She’d agreed to join Salter’s team because she wanted some closure on all that. She wanted to find out the truth. But the last six months had proved nothing. As far as she could tell, Salter had played everything by the book. He was still tasked with rebuilding the case against Pete Boyle that had collapsed with Welsby’s exposure and Kerridge’s death. They’d arrested Boyle with the expectation of a successful prosecution, but the evidence had been irredeemably tainted by Welsby’s corruption. In Marie’s eyes, the whole affair had ended just too well for Boyle and she suspected that Salter had been part of that.

But she could prove nothing. He’d asked to take on the Boyle case, supposedly as unfinished business, but perhaps simply to ensure that it remained under his control. Whatever his motives, he’d appeared to make some progress. They’d gathered more intercept evidence against Boyle, they’d pinned down one or two more witnesses. A few more tiny pieces of the jigsaw had fallen into place. They were still a long way from having anything they could be confident would stand up in court. But, given that the Prosecution Service had already ended up with egg on its collective face once before, building a new case was always going to be a slow process.

It might be that Salter was simply going through the motions, recognising that he had to be seen to be doing something about Boyle. But Marie had seen and heard nothing that might confirm her suspicions.

And now this. Sending her back to the edge of Boyle’s stamping ground. Pushing protocol to its limit by assigning her to an area where she might be recognised. It wasn’t against the rules exactly, but it wasn’t standard practice.

The generous explanation was that Salter was, in his inimitable style, just jerking her around. He knew the situation with Liam. He knew how difficult things were getting. His initial promise had been that, even when it was time for her to go back into the front line, he’d find some operational role that kept her reasonably close to home. She’d accepted that, at least for the time being, it wouldn’t be possible for her to continue in an undercover position. She assumed they’d find her some investigation or enforcement job in London. It wasn’t exactly the career move she was looking for, but it would do till, one way or another, things became easier on the domestic front.

So maybe this was just Salter pulling the rug from under her, handing her a whole new set of problems to contend with. The less benign interpretation was that he was using her. If her suspicions were correct, and Salter really was on Boyle’s payroll, then maybe she’d been selected to do some of Boyle’s dirty work. As Salter had implied, any drug dealers in Chester were operating on the edge of Boyle’s territory. Perhaps Boyle was looking to expand his empire and her role was to help take out the competition.

Salter was leaning back in his chair, his relaxed manner suggesting that he was confident he’d achieved his objective, even though his words remained tentative. ‘Just give it some thought, sis. That’s all I want. Sleep on it overnight. We can chat about it again tomorrow.’

You smooth bastard, she thought. Whatever other qualities you might or might not have, you’re good at this. You know how to play people. You know I want to be back in the field really; you know the kind of work I want to be doing. You may even know that I’m just looking for a way to trip you up, to prove some link between you and Boyle. You’ve pitched this just right, going out on a limb yourself so you can lure me out after you.

And maybe, her mind continued before she could control her thoughts, he knows what you want at home, too. Maybe he realises that all your talk of wanting to stay near home, of needing to be there for Liam, is so much bullshit. Maybe he knows that you’re looking for a reason to get away.