Gerald Seymour - The Untouchable

He waited in the toilet, left his wife and three colleagues, and their wives, at the table.

He was a detective chief inspector, on attachment to the National Crime Squad. A recent paper that he had read, 'Police Corruption Vulnerability Profiling', had offered a solid description of him, but he went unidentified and trusted because it was not the nature of the squad actively to search for culprits. He had known Mister since 1973 when he had been a probationer beat constable out of Caledonian Road and had taken the first small 'donation'. Now he was three years from retirement and had a record, with commendations, of distinguished service and a high detection rate. He was well regarded by colleagues and had successfully served in drugs, serious crime and robbery teams; he seemed to have a nose for guilt.

He was regarded by those alongside him as arrogant and brash, with justification. The woman at the table, waiting for his return, represented his third venture into marriage; his income from the Crime Squad, paid monthly, was divided between what he kept and what he paid to the two women from the failed relationships. He was secretive about his policing methods, seldom shared, rejoiced in the title of 'a copper's copper'. It was whispered of him that he bent regulations, but that had never been proven. He should have been made detective superintendent but promotion had been denied him for no articulated reason. It was likely that it had been blocked because he seldom hid an overweening contempt of his superiors and their dogma of political, sexual, ethnic and legal correctness; he was a 'thief-taker' and what the bosses wanted was a 'socialist pedagogue who was black and had a law degree in criminal sociology' – this was his familiar refrain when he bought the big drinks rounds for the juniors. Without the money Mister paid him he would have been as impoverished as a stray dog.

He had no fear of being unmasked. His seasoned experience meant that he knew the system of internal investigation and covered his tracks with care. Most recently for Mister he had identified the location of a prison's Protected Witness Unit, and the PWU number given to a prisoner, and had named a technician at a Home Office Forensic Laboratory to which incriminating fingerprints had been sent.

For a quarter of a century, his arrangement with Mister had been mutually beneficial; he had received information on Mister's rivals and lifted them, always with evidence to convict. He had earned the right to promotion by his successes. Its denial had added a hatred of the system he served, he had no qualms about what he did – and the money kept coming.

His telephone bleeped, tickling the palm of his hand. He listened and wrote down what he was told, for the sake of accuracy.

He made his third call. He heard the distant traffic.

'Joey Cann works at NIS, the Church – he's abroad right now. The subscriber on that number is Jennifer Martin, address is Ground Floor Flat, 219A Lavenham Road, London SW18. Got it?' The connection cut in his ear.

The piece of paper, torn into many pieces, was flushed down the pan. He returned to the table to resume as its life and soul.

He looked around, saw nobody who he thought watched him, and lightly rapped the door at the back of the van. 'Me,' Joey said.

He was let in. He scrambled into her territory. There was a dull light inside, like a photographer's dark room. Maggie was squatting on her stool in front of her console. He avoided the bucket, saw that it was a quarter full. Beside it were her sandwich wrappings, two apple cores and an empty Pepsi tin. He looked at the screen. The camera, trained on the hotel main door, was bolted on to the dashboard top and was covered in yesterday's newspapers.

She grimaced. 'God, you smell nice – going somewhere I don't know about?'

'Got soaked, had a shower, changed.'

'Bloody marvellous – I'd give an arm right now for a shower and clean tights.'

The log, written in her neat copperplate hand, recorded that Target Two and Target Three had returned one hundred and eighty-five minutes earlier, that seventy minutes earlier Target Three had exited and driven away in the Toyota, that sixty-six minutes earlier the beacon signal had been lost, that fourteen minutes earlier Target Three had been dropped back at the hotel by a taxi.

'Is he back?'

'I thought you were supposed to know.'

'What I'm asking – is he back?'

'Steady down – yes, he's back. Didn't I log it? His door was unlocked eighty-four minutes ago.'

'Do I have to ask twice every time? Make something complicated where it should be bloody simple.

"Is he back?" "Yes, he's back." Thank you. Now we've established he's back, please tell me what he's doing.'

'Who bit you this evening?'

'Second time – what's he doing?'

'Don't know – so you don't have to ask twice, I don't know what he's doing.'

'God… What do you think he's doing?'

'I'm never a pessimist – if you were to ask me to tell you, not on oath, I'd say he's moving the furniture round. Before that he was tapping the walls and the ceiling.'

'Shit.' Joey mouthed it.

'Take a listen for yourself…'

She passed him the earphones. It might have been a chair dragged across the carpet, or drawers pulled out from the chest and dropped, or wood being torn from its holding glue.

Maggie wrenched the earphones off his head. 'You lost him, didn't you?'

He said, tried to summon defiance, 'Contact was broken, yes.'

'You bloody showed out, didn't you?'

After a little more than an hour and a half of searching, Mister found the bug. He had gently tapped his way round the walls of the room, and stood on a chair to tap the ceiling. It had been a methodical, close search. He had taken all the pictures off the wall and had unscrewed the ventilation grilles and the power points. He had satisfied himself that the walls, ceilings, grilles and electric fittings were clear, then he had taken the back off the TV set, stripped down the bedside radio, prised the cover off the telephone and had unplugged it at the wall socket to break the link of an infinity transmitter using the receiver's microphone.

He had turfed the sheets, blankets, pillows and coverlet off the bed, then heaved off the mattress and minutely examined the legs, headboard and base.

He had taken the drawers out of the desk supports, stripped his clothes from them. He had gone through the bathroom with the same precision, looked under the bath, looked at the shaving and hair-dryer plug points, had removed the bath's side cover, stretched his hand into the space and lit it with his pencil torch.

He had turned his attention to the wardrobe. His suits and best shirts were on the floor, and his shoes. He worked from the bottom of the wardrobe to the top.

In the east of London, at Romford, was a three-man business with whom Mister had an association.

Thoughtfully, and with an eye for the future, he had provided start-up funds for their business, but Mister's connection with them was well buried and did not appear on their company paperwork. His small initial investment had paid handsomely, but he had never called in the debt. The business, run from a shabby and unprepossessing industrial park, supplied state-of-the-art bugs, cameras, homing beacons, scanners and recording equipment to a smartly appointed shop in the West End's Bond Street.

It sold its goods mainly on the Middle Eastern Gulf market; the best money-spinner was the lightweight beacons attached by princes, sheikhs and emirs to the ankles of their hunting falcons. The shop gathered in the money, and the three men in the industrial park each worked seventy-hour weeks to satisfy demand.

Mister had never asked to be repaid his investment: what he demanded was to be kept up to date on the latest, most sophisticated devices that could be used against him. From his continuing contact he knew of most of the equipment available to the Secret Intelligence Service, the Security Service, GCHQ, the National Crime Squad, the National Criminal Intelligence Service and the Church… what was on offer, and where it could be hidden.