notice of the US Drug Enforcement Administration's office in Chiang Mai. He left the country just days before the DEA and the Thai police swooped on a major heroin consortium. A dozen Thais and two American expats received long prison sentences, but two months later the street price of heroin dropped ten per cent in south London with the arrival of a huge shipment from the Golden Triangle. Carpenter had acquired a large mews house in Hampstead and a Porsche, and was red-flagged by Drugs Squad surveillance teams after he was seen in the company of known drug-importers.
The DEA bust was interesting, thought Shepherd. Undercover operations in the UK, even for Hargrove's special Home Office unit, were tightly monitored and controlled. Every facet of an operation had to be approved and signed for at a high level, but the Americans were often allowed to play fast and loose. He wondered if they'd cut a deal with Carpenter and allowed him to keep his shipment in exchange for information on the Chiang Mai Americans. It wouldn't be the first time that a drug-dealer had prospered under DEA protection.
After the first heroin shipment Carpenter hadn't looked back. He'd moved straight into the premier division of drug-importing and had stayed there. According to Drugs Squad intelligence he was responsible for as much as fifteen per cent of the heroin and cocaine coming into Britain. He had contacts across South America and the Far East, and a daisy-chain network of bank accounts that stretched round the world. He was as adept at money- laundering as he was at shipping drugs, and the National Criminal Intelligence Service could only estimate his wealth. They put a figure of two hundred and fifty million dollars on his net worth, but less than a fifth of that was in the banking system.
According to the file Shepherd had read, Elliott and Roper had spent months getting close to Carpenter, working their way through his organisation, proving themselves, until they were finally admitted to the inner circle. Their evidence would be crucial in putting him away. The recordings Elliott had made, plus the statements he had given to the CPS, would still be admissible, but they were no substitute for a police officer standing in the witness box and swearing on the Bible that he'd tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
According to the intelligence reports, the police and Customs should have expected Carpenter to move against the undercover officers. Over the previous decade three agents had disappeared while investigating his organisation. Two had been Drugs Squad officers; the third was a DEA agent investigating his links with a Colombian cocaine cartel. There was no evidence that Carpenter had had the men killed, but he was as careful to distance himself from violence as he was to keep away from drugs. Jonathon Elliott shouldn't have been out and about, not with the trial so close. Shepherd hoped that the Church was doing a better job of protecting its agent than the Drugs Squad had done with Elliott.
Sandy Roper swung his feet on to the sofa as his wife ran the vacuum cleaner in front of the television. 'Haven't you got anything to do?' she shouted, above the noise.
'I'm fine,' he said.
'You can go down the pub if you want,' she said.
'Alice, I'm fine,' Roper repeated.
Alice switched off the Hoover and faced him. 'Sandy, we've got to talk,' she said.
Roper grimaced and sat up straight. 'I know,' he said. 'This isn't easy for either of us.'
'You're moping around like a wet weekend,' she said. 'If this is what retirement's going to be like then God help us.'
'This isn't retirement,' he said. 'This is gardening leave. Until Carpenter's trial.'
'So go and garden,' said Alice. She looked at the lawn outside the sitting-room window. 'Why don't you get the mower out or clip the hedges? Do something.'
'I will,' said Roper.
'You've been off work for two weeks and you've barely left the house.'
'Orders,' said Roper.
'If the office is so keen on running your life, they should find you something to do.'
'It's not as easy as that,' said Roper. 'Carpenter's going to be hunting high and low for me. Until he's sent down I've got to keep a low profile.'
'But you're a Customs officer. You work for the government. What can he do?'
Roper knew exactly what Carpenter was capable of doing, but he didn't want to worry his wife. Carpenter only knew Roper's cover name and, provided he didn't go anywhere near Custom House, he should be as safe as houses. The head of Drugs Operations, Raymond Mackie, had gone to great pains to reassure Roper that HM Customs would do everything within its power to ensure that no outsiders, not even the CPS, would know his true identity.
'He might try to intimidate me,' said Roper. He hadn't told his wife about Jonathon Elliott's murder, and he didn't intend to. Roper shared little about his work with his wife. She knew that he'd switched to undercover operations about five years earlier but he'd never gone into detail, letting her believe that most of the time he was working on VAT fraud. She regarded his job as worthy but mundane, and told acquaintances that he was a civil servant.
Roper had barely known Elliott. He hadn't even been told the policeman's real name until after his death. They'd met on the Carpenter operation and had come at it from different angles so they'd only ever been in character. If Roper hadn't been tipped off that Elliott was a cop, he'd never have guessed he wasn't an out-and-out villain. He'd played the part to perfection. That made his murder all the more surprising. Elliott hadn't seemed the type to blow his cover, which meant that someone on the inside must have tipped off Carpenter's people. There was probably a bad apple within SO10, the Met's undercover unit, but as no one in the unit knew who Roper was, he should be safe. That was the gospel according to Mackie, anyway, and Roper saw no reason to doubt his logic. But Roper also knew that a man with Carpenter's resources could just as easily corrupt a Customs officer as he could a policeman. He wouldn't truly be safe until the trial was over.
'If he did, he'd be in even more trouble than he is already,' said Alice.
Roper smiled but didn't say anything. He'd been married to Alice for a little over sixteen years and was used to her naive view of the world. She'd had a sheltered middle-class upbringing and had been a primary-school teacher until she had given birth to their first boy. Then she'd become a full-time wife and mother, and her perception of the world was based on the evening news and the
'You're retiring next year anyway,' said Alice, sitting down on the sofa next to him. 'Why can't they let you go now?'
'My pension doesn't kick in until I'm fifty-five,' said Roper.
'They could make an exception for you, surely.'
Roper smiled at the thought of the Church making exceptions for anyone.
'You
'Of course I am. That's what we've planned, right?'
Alice took his hand in hers. 'It's what I want,' she said. 'We've earned some time to ourselves, Sandy. You can spend more time with the boys, we can take holidays. Join the bridge club, like you promised.'
Roper patted her hand. 'We will, love. Once the trial's over.'
Alice leaned forward and gave him a peck on the cheek. 'Cup of tea?'
'Lovely,' said Roper.
Alice went off to the kitchen and Roper stared out of the window at the grass. He didn't want to get out the lawnmower. He didn't want to cut the hedges. He didn't want to join the bridge club. What he wanted more than anything was to continue working for HM Customs and Excise, keep on hunting down men like Gerald Carpenter and putting them away. Roper didn't do the job for money, or his pension: he did it for the thrill of the chase, the excitement of pitting his wits and skills against villains. Sometimes the Church won and sometimes they lost but, no matter what the result, there was always the adrenaline rush and Roper was scared to death of losing it for ever. He sat forward and put his head in his hands. There was no way he would ever be able to explain to Alice that he feared retirement more than he feared a hardened criminal like Carpenter.
Gerald Carpenter leaned on the guard-rail and looked down through the suicide mesh at the ground floor where prisoners were milling around. Association, they called it, but there was no one on the spur with whom Carpenter wanted to associate. He could tolerate the bad food, the smell from his in-cell toilet, even the near
