Play Dead Read Free Page B

through a reconstruction; standard police procedure when a case grew uncrackably difficult. Iles didn’t always fancy standard police procedures. He must be feeling daunted. His remedy was this atmospheric,
in situ
mock-ambush, a sketch: Iles to ambush, Harpur to
get
ambushed, as the undercover officer had also been ambushed from what might eventually be a front bedroom of one of the well-placed, detached property shells.
    â€˜Symbolism here, Col?’ Iles said.
    â€˜In which respect, sir?’
    â€˜A society in accelerating decline, Harpur. No funds to build shanties for its people. Contrast this, would you, with heaven, Col?’
    â€˜Heaven?’
    â€˜â€œIn my father’s house are many mansions. If it were not so I would have told you.” Notice that, Col: “I would have told you.” In other words, high-grade accommodation for one-and-all is so much the norm there that any shortfall would trigger a warning. Impossible for us to match that. We lag and may lag more. Then, as if to add extra misery, extra grief, to this deplorable scene, the slaughter of a law officer among the blighted properties. Are we into breakdown, Col? Are we witnessing a slide towards chaos?’
    It was night, to match conditions when Carnation man had been shot in that limited, focused, dead-on-arrival way. As part of the dramatization, Harpur would convulse, stagger, fall, get up somehow, then collapse again and finally, as if hit first in the face and secondly in the chest by successive, excellently delivered bullets from the upstairs. He would dread to tumble before that, though, by tripping over rubble and dumped litter. Following nightmares, Harpur had a long-time horror of lying among reeking, torn black plastic rubbish bags like some giant maggot in its chomping element. And up till now in real, waking life he’d been able to avoid that. If he saw a full, mysteriously bulging black plastic bag in the street, possibly fallen from a cleansing lorry, he would skirt it, but with no lapse into trembling or hysteria.
    Although some light came from an adjoining street and a half moon, it was not much. Harpur stepped carefully. This would be pretty well exactly the way Tom Parry came on the night he got it: Thomas Derek Parry being his Larkspur undercover label. His true name, when home in Wilton Road, Carnation, was Detective Sergeant Thomas Rodney Mallen, married to Iris, father of two, Steve and Laura. And the funeral had been for Tom Mallen, of course, married, father of two. As Tom Parry, he’d managed to infiltrate the main and massive Leo P. Young Larkspur drugs firm, establishing himself as a valuable new recruit: a huge achievement, by any reckoning, and glorious if it had lasted. Disastrously, though, while Tom Mallen was still, on the face of it, totally and effectively Tom Parry, people at the top of the L.P. Young company had discovered his actual name and background: the Carnation detective sergeant; married to Iris; father of two, Steve and Laura; seconded, as someone not likely to be recognized in Larkspur, for undercover duties monitoring Leo Young’s business; the aim eventual charges and elimination of the firm.
    Consequently, as Tom Parry he had been tricked on to the building site that night and, as Detective Sergeant Thomas Rodney Mallen, executed with two 9mm rounds from a marksman cop in a potentially prestige setting, one or more of the bathrooms possibly
en suite.
    Undercover people tended to keep their first name, as long as this wasn’t something freakish like Treasure or Breastfed. They’d had decades of automatically responding to it when called, so to stick with this handle made the identity-switch a fraction easier. Fractions mattered. ‘Tom’ was commonplace enough to suit a cop or a gangster. Tom, aka Tom.
    Harpur felt thankful the funeral took place months before Iles and he had any involvement with Larkspur. Iles could get very emotional, violent and