The Crime Trade

11

After they’d gone, Stegs helped put Luke to bed before cooking himself and the missus a pretty bland spaghetti bolognese out of a tin. The label said it was ‘just like Mama used to cook’, but if that was the case then Mama had obviously long since been banned from the kitchen. While they were eating, the missus asked him what the police had wanted to see him about, and he told her that it was just clarifying some issues about what had happened with Vokes. She seemed to buy it and started on again about him switching jobs, but he made it clear that tonight was really not a good night to talk about it, and once again she let it go, although she didn’t look too pleased.

They ate at the kitchen table, then washed up in silence before retiring to the lounge. The missus insisted on watching Scream Team on one of the Sky channels, a weekly programme in which a select team of photogenic young members of the public visit some of Britain’s most haunted places and, as far as Stegs could see, simply run around yelling and screaming, jumping at the slightest noise, and generally making tits of themselves without actually seeing anything vaguely ghostly.

While the missus sat staring raptly at the screen and occasionally making comments like ‘Did you see that, Mark?’ or, more typically, ‘There’s got to be something in it, there was definitely a face there’ — even though if there had actually been a face there it would have been the lead story on the BBC news, not cast adrift on some crappy backwoods satellite channel — Stegs thought about the visit he’d received from Boyd and Gallan. It concerned him. They were definitely suspicious that he’d had something to do with the leak on the op, and maybe even the death of O’Brien, a man he was not too upset to see in the ground. Stegs didn’t consider himself to be that much of a crusading cop, trying to right society’s many wrongs, but he did look down on O’Brien, a man who’d have sold his children to cannibals and even skinned and gutted them himself if the price had been right.

He had the feeling that Boyd, particularly, thought he was the villain in all this — it was the way she’d looked at him as she’d taken her notes, with no attempt to hide the suspicion in her dark eyes. Gallan, he reckoned, was keeping a more open mind, but he knew he’d still have to be careful. He’d heard enough about the other man to appreciate the fact that he was a good copper, with a nose for sniffing out the truth, as well as the sort of perseverance you don’t get so much in the Force these days.

Suspicion. He’d been under suspicion almost since the day he’d started working with SO10. It was the place for mavericks — for people who were prepared to bend the rules, to walk the fine line between infiltration and involvement in the criminal enterprises they were investigating — and mavericks in a police force are always mistrusted. But he also knew how to cover his tracks. He’d had plenty of practice of that, and was prepared for any detailed probing into his affairs.

He wondered briefly whether Boyd and Gallan were sleeping together. There was something about the way they looked at each other, the messages that seemed to pass between them, that made him think they were more than just clued-in partners. They didn’t come across much like an ideal couple. She was good-looking but in a vaguely untouchable way, and with an air of authority that he didn’t much like the look of. Gallan seemed a lot friendlier and more laid-back. They’d had a couple of beers together just after they’d first met, and Stegs remembered that Gallan had been good company. Come to think of it, Boyd had been quite a laugh on that occasion too, and he remembered that he’d quite liked the look of her, as had Vokes. Maybe her attitude had changed as her suspicions had grown. If so, she’d made a mistake. Never let your quarry know you’re on to them.

It was one of the first things he’d learnt in SO10, and it was why he’d survived this long.