‘This is not up for discussion,’ he says. He opens the front door and leaves the house, the frame shaking as he slams it behind him.
Ryan
Ryan is in his element. Ryan is finally good at something.
He has in front of him, just like in the movies, a bigger corkboard that he ordered from Supplies three days ago. It’s four feet long by three feet tall （he doesn’t yet have authority to put it up）。 It’s resting against the wall and Ryan is sitting, cross-legged, in front of it.
He’s been gathering his surveillance information for two months. He began by wheeling a TV into his cupboard. For hours, through bleary eyes, he reviewed the CCTV of the port. Tape after tape after tape, evenings and weekends. He watched carefully, jotting down anybody who visited more than once, anybody who talked to Ezra, or who disappeared with him. Ryan made notes on Post-its and then pinned them to the board.
By the end of the month, he had a list of regulars.
‘Can you match these faces to any on the system?’ he asked a passing analyst one Friday night. He pointed at the faces he’d freeze-framed and printed.
‘On it,’ the analyst said, just like that.
And now he’s got them: his foot soldiers.
The undercover team have provided him with the names of the drugs suppliers now, too. An undercover officer has infiltrated the gang. He went in as a test purchaser. Dressed up scruffy, as Leo put it, asked for gear. The transaction went ahead, observed by Leo’s team, and he reported back with the name of the dealer, who goes now on to Ryan’s board.
He did it five more times. Five more test purchases. And then he said he’d moved house, he knew a few people who’d buy, wanted to trial supplying a patch. The dealer introduced him to the supplier, whose name also went on to Ryan’s board.
‘Ryan,’ Leo says, striding into his cupboard. ‘You’re a certified genius.’
This is the best job Ryan’s ever had. The most fun. The most satisfying. And the most autonomous, too. He feels a bubble of pride rise up through him, for him and his corkboard.
‘This is just the start,’ he says to Leo. ‘It’s just part of the picture. The top guy has about ten different ops running.’
They look at the corkboard together in silence.
Leo says nothing for a minute, maybe more. One of the other officers walks past the cupboard. ‘Got a sec?’ he says to Leo, poking his head around the door.
‘No,’ Leo barks, closing the door. Life feels good when you’re in Leo’s sunlight, terrible if you’re in his shadow, like so many people in charge.
‘On our last job,’ Leo says thoughtfully, as though this exchange has not taken place, ‘the guy at the top was so unassuming. So normal. Just normal. Stayed under the radar. You know, didn’t have a proper job – was self-employed. Stayed under the tax threshold. Didn’t travel.’
‘Seems impossible,’ Ryan says.
‘Right, anyway, look at this, please,’ he says. ‘We have been creating a legend.’ He sits down creakily on the chair as Ryan unpins the various foot soldiers and moves them across. ‘Maybe we should get you a better office,’ he says through a laugh.
‘That’d be nice …’
‘Okay, so, legends. Ready for a lesson?’
‘Ready.’
‘When officers go undercover, they step into a persona that we have already created, long ago, right?’
‘Okay.’
‘So if someone was buying gear, the crims always suspect the DS. Drugs squad. So we create a legend in advance. He lives here, he drives this car, he works here, he does this. We have history, right? It goes anywhere we can get it – online, wherever. Then he steps into it. And so we are working on one now.’
He rubs at his jowls, then sips Ryan’s tea, which offends Ryan, but he doesn’t say anything. Leo does things like this when he’s thinking. And Leo is brilliant when he’s thinking, so everybody puts up with it.
‘Leo,’ Jamie says, pushing the door open. He looks harassed, his hair standing on end. ‘Got an issue.’
‘What?’ Leo is fiddling with one of Ryan’s pins, which he shoves back into the board. ‘Can people stop fucking interrup—’
‘Last night two of the foot soldiers stole a car on one of the posh estates in Wallasey,’ Jamie says. ‘We’ve had a report in.’
‘Okay …’
‘Rumour has it they thought it was one of the unoccupied houses they targeted, but it wasn’t …’
Ryan swivels his head to look at Jamie.
‘There was a baby in the back of the car. They took it. The car is headed for the port – with the baby in the back.’
Day Minus Twenty-two, 18:30
Jen is in her sanctuary, the office. She wanted to be here, at work, in this calm, organized environment she is fully in control of, or at least can pretend that she is. The knowledge that Kelly is involved keeps repeating on her. She feels like she’s on a boat, the ground underfoot uncertain and slippery. Kelly. Her Kelly. The man she can tell anything to. But, evidently, that doesn’t work both ways. How could he have pretended to work this through with her on that night that he believed her?
The street down below is dotted with people shopping, enjoying the last of the summer warmth. Early October looks different to late. Gingerbread light outside. Honey-coloured leaves. The last gasp of summer. She opens the window. Only the tiniest bite of cold laces the air: like a single drop of dye in water that will soon spread.
She sighs and wanders down the corridor. She renovated the premises after her father died last spring. What was once his office – the plaque said Managing Partner, like he wanted – is now the kitchenette, a decision she made so she didn’t have to look at his old door or, worse, work in there herself.
Her father had been a good lawyer. Incisive, cautious, able to accept and confront bad news without kidding himself. Tough, she’d describe him as, with the hindsight of grief. Stoic, too. At the end of a working week, once, she’d found out that he had slept there two nights, to get the job done, and had never said.
She is now much further back than she anticipated. Jen thinks her biggest fear is that she is going to pass the inception of the crime. She wishes she could ask her father what to do. Kenneth Charles Eagles. He’d gone by the name KC. If Jen and Kelly had had a daughter, they would have called her Kacie. KC. He’d have liked that.
He’d died alone, eighteen months ago. An aneurysm, sometime in the evening. He’d sat in his armchair, a bag of peanuts and a bottle of half-drunk beer by his side. Jen, in the early days, had to turn her mind away from his last moments, like trying to steer a ship with a preference for one way only. She is more able to look at it, now, to stand here in the spot where he once did. But, today more than ever, she misses him. He’d have no sympathy for time-travel theories – she’d have been too afraid to tell him, she thinks, fearing judgement – but she still misses him in the way that children will always miss their parents’ guiding hands, the way they can hold your problems away from you, if only temporarily.
She makes a cup of tea then leaves the kitchenette. Rakesh walks by her office with another lawyer, Sara.