John Harvey - Good Bait

‘Not yours, I assume?’

‘Joking, right? Know what these fuckers cost?’

‘Fifty thousand?’

‘And the rest.’

A smile crossed Karen’s face.

‘What?’

‘Oh, nothing.’ She had been remembering, back when she was seven or eight, Bible class. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s goods.

‘So,’ Ramsden said, ‘celebrations over?’

‘Just getting started.’

‘Not inclined to join in?’

‘No. You?’

Ramsden scowled. ‘Chance to get bevvied up, shag someone else’s wife. Quick poke up against the wall. Who needs it?’

Not me, Karen thought.

‘Getting old, Mike,’ she said.

‘Too bloody right. Pension, five years off. Can’t bloody wait.’

‘Go on. They’ll have to drag you out, kicking and screaming.’

‘Don’t you believe it.’

He lit a fresh cigarette from the butt end of the other. Offered the pack to Karen, who shook her head. There was a silver flask in his inside pocket. Brandy. They passed it between them, ignoring the occasional bursts of music and laughter that sallied out from the main building.

It used to be that officers like Ramsden did their thirty years and, much like the soccer players of yesteryear, took over a newsagent’s or managed a pub. Now it was security, parading around an Arndale Centre somewhere, taking grief from kids for stopping them skateboarding up and down the aisles, and keeping a weather eye out for professional shoplifters who routinely got away with several thousands’ worth of goods a day. Either that or wearing a peaked cap and ersatz uniform behind some gated community stockade.

Poor Mike!

She looked at him with care as she passed the flask for the last time. The lines etched into his face were real, the shadows around his eyes.

‘Got to go,’ Karen said, stepping away. ‘Someone tomorrow needs a clear head. Early start.’

‘Drop you anywhere?’

‘No, it’s fine.’

Fine for some. Right now, Karen was all but wiped out. As early a night as was still possible and then bed.

Sod’s law, her mobile. Not a number she recognised.

Charlie Frost.

‘A few minutes of your time?’

Back at the celebration, Charlie Frost had looked hangdog, even in a life-changing Jackson Pollock tie. Forewarned, his principal target, Anton Kosach, had evaded capture, leaving the country via a private airfield close to the Sussex coast. He was believed to have joined his twin brothers, Parlo and Symon, in Sofia. Or another brother, Bogdah, in the Ukraine. Taras, the only one left in England, was helping with inquiries, as was his wife: both were expected to be released eventually without charge.

On the plus side, SOCA had taken away evidence enough from Kosach’s house — computers, portable hard drives, bank statements, address books, diaries — to see him behind bars for thirty years if he were ever foolish enough to set foot in the country again, or try and settle anywhere with whom the UK had a valid treaty of extradition. One way and another, Kosach, Frost had calculated, had been responsible for laundering as much as?1 million sterling a day.

The interior of Charlie Frost’s car smelt faintly of polish, a distant waft of pine. There was plastic still covering the rear seats. Not a crumpled crisp packet, a discarded tissue anywhere.

‘You remember I raised the possibility before,’ Frost said, ‘some connection between Kosach and Paul Milescu?’

Karen nodded.

‘Nothing yet I’d care to swear to, nothing I’d want repeated beyond the confines of this car, but we may have found a link. Money being filtered through one of Milescu’s companies, fetching up first in Luxembourg, then the United Arab Emirates, then Singapore. From there, as of now, we’re not too sure, but if it’s not into a numbered account, the details of which are tattooed somewhere safe inside Anton Kosach’s brain, I’d be surprised.’

He treated Karen to a rare, thin-lipped smile.

‘The thing is this. Details have come to me of a possible relationship between Paul Milescu and Detective Chief Superintendent Burcher. Now were this the case — and I am treading very carefully here, you realise, nothing has been proven — but were that so, then one would want to ask whether any information passed from Superintendent Burcher to Milescu about the operation recently undertaken could have found its way to Kosach in time for him to flee the country. And whether, in exchange for such information, any, em, favours were returned.’

Jesus, Karen thought. She wasn’t sure what was expected of her, what she was meant to say.

‘I believe there was an instance,’ Frost said, ‘in which the Superintendent attempted to intervene in an investigation you were running on behalf of Milescu’s son?’

Karen was stopped in her tracks again. ‘Alex Williams, she told you this?’

‘All I’m asking is for you to accept or deny.’

‘That the Superintendent intervened?’

‘Yes.’

‘That’s not the word I’d use.’

‘What then?’

‘He asked that if anything serious came out of the inquiries we were making about Ion Milescu, we let him know.’

‘And did you?’

Karen shook her head. ‘There was nothing. Nothing crucial. Nothing to say.’

‘But you inferred from this, this off-the-record — it was off-the-record …?’

Karen nodded.

‘… from this off-the-record conversation, that Superintendent Burcher and Paul Milescu were close in some way? Friends?’

‘Not necessarily, no.’

‘But, surely, approaching you in that way, unorthodox at the very least?’

‘Yes, I suppose so.’

‘Yes?’

‘All right, yes.’

Karen took a breath. How she had got herself in the position of seeming to defend Burcher, she didn’t understand.

‘Am I to take it, then,’ she asked, ‘that the Detective Chief Superintendent is under investigation?’

Frost smiled. A second time in almost as many minutes, something of a record. ‘It’s more than possible a few more questions may be asked; unofficially, I imagine, at first. Some perusal of bank statements, financial affairs, something of that accord. A little later, if necessary, the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act could be invoked. But all this, in the future if at all.’

Karen knew her place in this. Were she to say anything to Burcher — to warn him, but why should she? — if she were to say anything to anyone it would eventually be known. Her card marked. Accomplice at worst. Untrustworthy, certainly. Any further promotion denied.

‘Is that it, then?’ she asked.

‘Certainly,’ Frost replied. ‘For now. And thank you, Detective Chief Inspector, for your time.’

‘Good Bait’. Dexter Gordon on tenor saxophone, stooping and slurping through the tune like a man sidestepping mud; the piano, distant behind him, sounding the notes like someone in a school hall more used to accompanying morning assembly, the morning hymn.

Cordon drank coffee as he listened, polished his shoes.

After two more days in London, when Jack Kiley’s hospitality was stretched almost to breaking point, he felt, by his lugubrious presence, Cordon had returned to Cornwall and the confines of his sail loft, the expanse of views across the bay. Returned to his post, his job, the small team of neighbourhood officers greeting him as if he’d barely been away.

‘Nice trip?’

‘Safari, was it? See the world?’

Cordon had seen the world, all right. Part of it, blinkers removed.

After a week of doing precious little but check back through the files, reading over what he’d missed, he was summoned first to Penzance, then to the Cornwall and Isles of Scilly Commander in Truro. Polished buttons, gold braid. The Commander, not Cordon.