Peter Turnbull - Deep Cover

The man let the phone ring twice before he picked it up.

‘Forensic laboratory, sir.’ The voice on the other end of the phone line was crisp, efficient.

‘Yes?’

‘Just to let you know beforehand that the DNA tests on the cigarette butts you sent came back negative. No record at all.’

‘I see.’

‘Just thought I’d let you know in advance. We’ll be faxing the report in an hour or two, once it’s been written up.’

‘OK,’ the man replied warmly, ‘appreciate the notice.’

He replaced the phone and returned his attention to his monthly statistical returns.

Penny Yewdall slept late. She woke and looked about her in the shadows and the gloom of the room in which the Welsh girl had been murdered — the room which was now her room. She felt isolated. Alone. Vulnerable. She said as loudly as she dared, ‘I am a copper. I am a copper. I am a damn good copper, police woman Yewdall of the Murder and Serious Crime Squad, New Scotland Yard.’ She rose and clawed on a few items of clothing — underwear, jeans, a tee shirt — and walked into the kitchen, where she found a nervous looking Billy Kemp, whom she’d met in passing, sitting at the table, occupying the same chair that Josie Pinder had occupied the previous morning, and, like Josie Pinder, he also drank a mug of tea and smoked a hand-rolled cigarette.

‘We have to stay in today, you and me.’ He spoke with a trembling voice.

‘Have to?’

‘Yes. The manager of WLM Rents called round earlier and told me that we have to stay in. You and me.’

‘Why?’ Penny Yewdall sank into a vacant chair at the table.

‘Dunno, but I think someone’s going to get a kicking.’

‘Oh. .’

‘And we’re going to watch.’

‘We. .?’ Yewdall’s voice failed her.

‘We. I’m in the same boat as you. I’m a gofer being trained up. Trained and tested. I’ve delivered a few packages, three in all.’

‘I delivered one — to an address in East Ham.’

‘Chaucer Road?’

‘Yes.’

‘Same as me. I don’t reckon it’s some big important address, they’re just testing us. They won’t let us go to really important addresses until we’re further in.’

‘I thought you were established. It was just an impression I had.’

‘Yes, I have been here a while. . just not getting anywhere with Yates. He’s still not certain of me. Have you had a slap yet?’

‘No.’

‘I have, Yates slapped me round the head and punched me on the nose. . just enough to make it bleed and said, “No one leaves me, remember that”.’ Billy Kemp paused and gulped some tea. ‘Then he sent a couple of guys to check on my home address in Norwich.’

‘Think they did the same to my old dad in Stoke.’

‘Yes, I think that he’s not checking on you so much as letting you know he can get to your kin if you do a moonlight.’

Yewdall gasped.

‘Well. . maybe he’s doing both. Checking on you and also letting you know he can hurt your family if you allow yourself to drop off his radar. I’m in too deep.’

‘Me too.’

‘What do I do? What do we do? That bitch upstairs, the butch lesbian, Sonya Clements, she told me that you only get to be a proper gofer, get paid and all that, once you’ve seen someone get a kicking. Then you’re in the firm. Bottom rung of the ladder, but you’re in. But you need to see what happens to someone who gets out of order.’

‘I don’t want to watch,’ Yewdall pleaded.

‘You think I do? But keep your voice down, Clements tells Yates everything. You can’t cough in this house without her telling Yates. She’ll have been through your room.’

‘I thought someone had been in.’

‘It will have been her, poking round while you were out begging.’

Yewdall paused, then asked, ‘What about the Welsh girl?’

‘Gaynor? What about her?’

‘Well. . Josie told me she was murdered in that front room.’

‘Yes, one night. Yates doesn’t kill in daylight, it’s just his thing.’

‘So why do you also have to watch a kicking?’

‘Different story, I think. Don’t know but I think she was just. . used. . she hadn’t gone left field. Curtis Yates needed a body to frame the guy who had the room before you, Mickey Dalkeith by name. . nice geezer, but if Josie said “we” witnessed it, she must have meant her and Sonya Clements. I wasn’t there.’

‘I see.’

‘So how much money have you got?’

‘About six or seven pounds.’

‘I’ve got about ten.’

‘So what are you thinking?’

‘The pub.’ He glanced at the clock on the wall — it read ten minutes to eleven. ‘Get dressed. . walk slowly — they’ll just have opened by the time we get there.’

‘I thought we had to stay in?’

‘They’re coming for us at one thirty, and like I said, we can’t hide anywhere. I think I’d rather wait in the pub and have a stiff one or two. I’ll need it if I am going to watch someone get kicked to death.’

‘To death!’

‘Well it could go that far, whether they intend it or not. I mean they kicked J.J. Dunwoodie to death.’

‘So I heard. He wasn’t even in the firm. .’

‘Of course he was.’ Billy Kemp smiled. ‘He was well in, just played the wide-eyed innocent.’

‘I never knew him.’

‘It happened just before you moved here. He was battered to death in an alley close to the office where he worked.’

‘This is one hell of a mess.’

‘Where to go?’ Billy Kemp sighed. ‘What to do? Wonder how long it took to batter him to death?’

Yewdall and Billy Kemp sat in the pub. Yewdall thought that they must have made a strange couple — she so much larger than he, and clearly older — sitting together, side by side, yet saying little. It was early in the day and the landlord scowled at them, but they were paying, and the licensed retail trade is struggling. It was, Yewdall noticed, a clean pub, with a deep carpet, a highly polished wooden bar and wall panels containing sepia prints of Kilburn in a different era — an era of horse-drawn trams and drays, men in bowler hats and women in ankle-length skirts and dresses, and of solid, medium-rise buildings, many of which, she had noticed, still remained.

Yewdall’s mind worked feverishly. . what to do. . what to do. . to rescue the quaking Billy Kemp and walk with him into the police station? Would that prevent what was going to happen to some wretched soul in ‘the garage’? No, she thought, no, it probably wouldn’t and what had she got to offer? An address in East Ham which was clearly used only as a practice drop — the police would find nothing there if they raided. The intelligence that kickings took place in a lock-up called ‘the garage’, that Michael Dalkeith did not murder Gaynor Davies, that he was in fact rescuing her and was going to be fitted up for the murder, that. . that might be worth blowing her cover for if Michael Dalkeith was still alive and under suspicion. In the end, she decided to remain silent and keep her cover. She wanted something to offer for her time. It was early days yet and she still had nothing to connect Yates with anything.

‘We’d better be getting back,’ Billy Kemp said when the large clock above the bar read one o’clock. ‘We’ll have to fill our mouths with toothpaste to cover the smell of booze. Mind, we can say it was from last night.’

‘I’ll be back.’ Yewdall rose and walked into the ladies’ toilet. Ensuring that all the cubicles were empty she stood in front of a large frosted mirror, mounted within an elaborate plaster surround, and fixed herself in the eye, and said, ‘I. . am. . a. . police. . officer. .’ She then returned to where Billy was, by then, standing; waiting obediently, Labrador-like, she thought.