bit of a joker. For a long time, though, he couldn’t get either the name or the image to stick, but he perservered, did a few detentions for his backchat, got a couple of kickings for the way he didn’t get out of the way for the bigger boys, and eventually even the teachers started addressing him as Stegs. It taught him a valuable lesson: you can be anyone if you try.
Stegs Jenner did not look like a typical police officer. At five foot eight, he only just beat the height restrictions, and his face, even at thirty-two, was chubby and boyish, topped off by a receding mop of fine gingery- blond hair that had the curious effect of making him look both his age and a dozen years younger at the same time, like one of those illusionists’ acts. Blink and he was twenty; blink again and he was back to thirty-two. But Stegs Jenner talked the talk, and he walked the walk, and he wasn’t afraid to put his head into the lion’s mouth, which made him an invaluable asset to SO10, Scotland Yard’s specialist undercover unit.
He’d been a copper since the age of nineteen, and plainclothes since twenty-four. His full-time posting was still in the area where he’d grown up, the north London suburb of Barnet, but he’d been attached to SO10 for the previous six years, and probably half his time was spent seconded to them on undercover assignments, which is the way it works in the Met. No-one’s full-time undercover. You could be meeting Colombian drugs dealers one day to discuss a multi-million-pound deal, and hunting for stolen office equipment the next.
Not that Stegs was going to be doing too much of anything for the next few days, at least not work-wise. He’d been officially suspended (thankfully on full pay) until a preliminary internal investigation could take place to see whether he’d acted improperly or not. They hadn’t let him go until half-nine that night, at which point a very pissed-off, newly arrived assistant commissioner of the Met had formally told him that he was not to report for duty until further notice and not to speak to anyone about what had happened, other than those directly involved. The assistant commissioner (a middle-aged accountant look-alike with silver hair, an immaculately pressed uniform and a very long nose) had then stood there for a few seconds, waiting, it seemed, for Stegs to say something, presumably along the lines of ‘I’m sorry for causing you all this inconvenience’. Stegs hadn’t given him the satisfaction. Instead, he’d given the bastard a look that said, ‘If you think you can do better, you get in there and talk to people who’d flay you alive if they knew your true identity. Then maybe you’d actually be earning your money, instead of waltzing around passing the buck to the junior ranks.’
After they’d finished with him, he reluctantly phoned the missus. She must have seen something about the operation on the news because she’d left three increasingly worried messages on the mobile. She didn’t know what role he’d been playing, of course, or where he’d been playing it, but she knew he did undercover work, and the news that an undercover officer had been killed would probably have seeped out by now, so he felt duty-bound to let her know he was all right.
She answered on about the tenth ring, and in the background he could hear Luke screaming and crying.
‘Oh, Mark, thank God you’ve called. I’ve been worried stiff. Are you all right?’
She always called him Mark. She didn’t like the name Stegs, and he sure as fuck wasn’t going to let her call him Monty, so they’d had to come up with something that was acceptable to both of them, and after much discussion it turned out that Mark was it. It was how he was known to all her friends. One day he was sure he was going to end up being diagnosed as a schizophrenic.
He told her he was fine but very busy, and she asked him if he’d heard about the incident at Heathrow. He said he had.
‘It makes me so scared, Mark, thinking of you out there all alone. I don’t want baby Luke growing up without a father.’
Stegs was touched by her concern, in spite of himself. He told her everything would be OK, but neglected to mention that he’d been suspended on full pay. He’d been advised by his superiors that no correspondence would be sent to his home address regarding what had happened, and that all contact would be made on his mobile or his encrypted email address, so there was no point mentioning it, particularly as he had no intention of hanging around the house all day with her and Luke.
‘Are you coming home then?’ she asked him. ‘I know Luke wants to see you.’
That he seriously doubted. Luke was never pleased to see him. He always gave him the evil eye when Stegs tried to pick him up or play with him. At eight months old, he was definitely his mother’s son, and treated his dad like some sort of usurper whenever he came into the room. Stegs loved the kid (of course he did, he was his flesh and blood) but, though he never liked to admit it, he didn’t like him much, and was never in any doubt that the feeling was mutual.
‘I’ve still got some paperwork to clear up here,’ he told her. ‘I’ll be back later on but don’t wait up for me, I don’t know what time it’ll be.’
She sighed loudly down the other end of the phone. ‘I can’t do this all on my own, you know. Bringing up a baby’s hard enough when there’s two of you, let alone one.’ As if to confirm quite how hard, Luke’s crying went up a couple of decibels as she brought him nearer the phone. ‘Tell Daddy to come home, Lukey,’ she cooed at the infant. Fat chance of that, Stegs thought. If he could speak, he’d be telling him to fuck off, no doubt about it. ‘Tell him he’s making Mummy miserable.’ Luke had clearly been brought right up to the mouthpiece now because Stegs was forced to hold the phone away from his ear as the howling increased still further. ‘Seriously, though, Mark,’ she continued, coming back on the line. ‘It can’t carry on like this. It’s too much for me.’
‘I know, I know,’ he said, and made his excuses, citing the usual: workload, lack of staff, etc. But it didn’t sound convincing, and he knew it. She told him she understood all that but that maybe he ought to think about changing careers so that he could help a bit more, and he said he had to go, that his boss needed to see him. ‘We’ll talk in the morning,’ he said.
She sounded down as she hung up the phone with Luke’s wailing continuing in the background, and it made him wonder why she’d wanted to have kids. He’d tried his hardest to convince her that they were better off continuing as they were, childless but reasonably well off, with her nurse’s and his copper’s wage, but she’d been adamant, and he knew that part of the reason for her desire probably stemmed from the need for some companionship, given the fact that he was hardly ever there. You reap what you sow, and he was reaping.
He drove back to Barnet on the M25, but instead of turning off on to the East Barnet road and heading home, he carried on going until he reached a pub just off the Whetstone High Road. He found a parking spot about fifty yards away and walked through the driving rain to the battered front door. It was ten to eleven.
The One-Eyed Admiral had a one o’clock weekly licence but was one of those places that was never going to be that popular because (a) it never looked very clean, and (b) it had never been able to rid itself of its low-life clientele, probably because they were the only people who’d frequent it. It wasn’t a rough place, but one look through the smoky haze at the middle-aged petty criminals clustered round the tables and the fruit machines told any self-respecting punter that it wasn’t a pub he wanted to be seen in. Which was one of the reasons Stegs liked it. Because he knew he’d always get a seat at the bar, and people wouldn’t pay him too much attention.
He’d been going in there for years, ever since he’d been introduced to it by a small-time gun dealer who’d been a regular. Stegs had been undercover at the time, investigating the dealer, whose name was Pete, and the One-Eyed Admiral had been their main meeting place. After Pete had got nicked, along with several of the other customers, Stegs had continued to drink there now and again (no-one had ever suspected that he’d been the one who’d put them behind bars), and it was always the place he adjourned to when he needed time to think. They knew him as Tam in here, and thought he was the son of Irish immigrants hailing from County Cork.
The pub was busier than usual and all the tables were full, although there were still seats at the bar. Stegs nodded to a couple of blokes he recognized, then took a seat at one end — his usual spot, if it was free — and waited for Patrick, the barman, to come and take his order.
‘All right, Tam. Long time no see,’ grunted Patrick in that less-than-charming manner of his. He’d been here for years and Stegs had never seen him smile once. ‘What’ll it be?’
‘Pint of Stella,’ said Stegs, thinking that he should be thankful for men like Patrick. A lot of barmen’ll take it as an invitation to talk if you sit at their bar, and talking was something Stegs had done enough of for one day. At least he knew Patrick would leave him alone.
He took the pint when it came to him, and handed over the exact money. He gulped down at least a third of it, savouring the much-needed taste of alcohol, before putting the glass down on the bar and sparking up a Marlboro Light. The missus was always on at him to give up the fags, even though she continued to smoke three Silk Cut Ultras religiously every evening (giving her teeth a ferocious clean after each one). Stegs never smoked in the house any more; apparently the residue on his breath could potentially be harmful to an infant (hence the missus’s tooth cleaning). It was the same with the booze. Next she’d be telling him not to eat curries.
