Neil White - Beyond Evil

Sheldon noted the sir . As he considered them, he saw nervousness, not disrespect. Sheldon reached into his pocket and pulled out the bill that had been in John Abbott’s file.

‘Why were the police paying the legal bills for a petty criminal?’ he said, and he passed Horne the bill. ‘Abbott lived here, except that he didn’t really, not for long.’

Horne looked at the bill, but Sheldon could tell he knew what was on it, that he didn’t need it shoving under his nose. Horne handed it back. ‘Can’t you guess?’ he said.

‘I’m starting to get an idea,’ Sheldon said.

‘Well, you tell us what you think, and I’ll tell you if you get close.’

Sheldon stood up and started to pace, tugging at his lip. He looked at the men in suits. ‘Okay, this is how I see it,’ he said. ‘John Abbott wanted to get noticed. He adopted a strategy that would put him in a courtroom. He sprayed some graffiti and was caught by an anonymous call. He kept his mouth shut, to make sure he was taken to court, and then told a story that was untrue, but interesting enough to get in the local paper. Then we, the police, paid for his legal bills.’ Sheldon smiled. ‘There is only one answer.’

Horne held out his hands. ‘Tell me then.’

‘John Abbott is undercover.’

The two officers exchanged glances. Murch exhaled heavily and shook his head. Horne nodded and said, ‘Carry on.’

‘There is a group near here who are into the protest thing. You put John Abbott in there. You spun some yarn that he had ideas of rejecting society but had an inheritance to spend that he didn’t know what to do with. Quite clever. So they went to him, because they wanted his money, and so they didn’t suspect him. And he fed you information on their protests, and perhaps links with other groups.’

Horne held out his hands. ‘Nearly right, sir.’

‘How near?’

‘Near enough so that I might as well tell you,’ Horne said, and then he sighed. ‘We’re from the National Public Order Intelligence Unit. We monitor environmental and protest groups, anarchists, people like that.’

‘And you use undercover officers.’

Horne nodded. ‘We’ve got operatives in a few of the groups. They feed information back, just so that we can cut down on the disruption.’

‘So what’s the thing with this group near here?’

‘The leader of this group is Henry Mason,’ Horne said. ‘When he first started to pop up in intelligence briefings, we thought he was just some petty crook and occasional pervert with an ego problem.’

‘Pervert?’

‘Always had a thing for children, boys and girls, and became a bit of a Pied Piper figure, with a lot of young teenagers following him around. It was the usual story; he would get them drunk and things would get seedy. He didn’t always take part, but sometimes he did, until someone broke ranks and reported him. He went to prison for three years, and when he came out, he started drifting around. He’s an attention seeker, thinks that he is some kind of undiscovered genius and that people need to hear what he’s got to say. That was the attraction with the young teenagers I think, because they would listen to him. Most people older would just see him for what he is, some small town crook with delusions of grandeur.’

‘So what changed?’

‘Because an undiscovered genius who stays undiscovered becomes bitter, and sometimes can become dangerous.’ Horne glanced at Murch, as if to query whether he should continue, who just nodded.

‘We got diverted for a while by the Islamic groups,’ Horne continued, ‘and so a lot of other groups grew without us knowing what they were doing. Before we knew it, there was a whole protest scene, and so the student marches and the riots took us by surprise. We didn’t know who any of them were. So we’ve turned our attention back to them, and as we started looking, Henry Mason’s name started to come up.’

‘In what way?’

‘Just whispers, but it was enough to make us listen. The thing with a lot of these protest groups is that they are well-meaning, decent people whose emotions sometimes get the better of them. On the whole, they want to make their point and have some fun, and that’s it. They like the excitement, the kicking against things, but don’t want to hurt anyone. Direct action is one thing, like cutting down fences or breaking into power stations, but the operatives were all reporting the same thing: that Mason was planning something bigger.’

‘What like?’

‘We don’t know, and that was the problem. We can follow mobile phones, get into voicemails, spy on social networking sites. The point for most of them is that protest has to be seen and heard, or else what’s the point? And most of the protest groups can’t keep off internet forums, and so we used to just tune in. It was harder with Henry, because although people were talking about him, we never heard from Mason himself, or any of his followers. His group went off the grid. No computers, no phones, and you have to be more worried about what you don’t know.’

‘So what’s his thing?’

‘It’s hard to pin down,’ Horne said. ‘As far as we can work out, he pinches the interesting bits from other groups. There’s some who have wild ideas that if they refuse to obey the laws, they somehow don’t apply, and it’s all to do with the Magna Carta or something. They might even be right, what the hell do I know, but even they were getting worried that Mason was going to wreck everything by doing things in their name.’

‘And that’s why you put John Abbott in there?’

Horne nodded. ‘We had to move quickly. Normally, an operative may take months to integrate and build up trust. They have to take part, be seen at the right places. Most importantly, the operative has to be trusted. We didn’t have that time with Henry, because the hints we were getting were that he was planning something soon.’

‘So you had to make Henry come to you,’ Sheldon said, nodding.

‘That’s right,’ Horne said. ‘We had tried it once before. The operative had an old bus, a coach with the seats ripped out, but he was too obvious. He was older than Henry’s usual crowd and he just imposed himself on the group. Henry spotted him straight away and so they burnt out his bus and told him to leave. We tried to get cuter this time. We set up the story, made Abbott sound like someone gullible and with money, and receptive to all that conspiracy rubbish that Henry liked. It worked great at first. We paid Amelia to represent him and make it look legitimate. The group started to follow Abbott around, and eventually took him in.’

‘So what went wrong?’

Horne sighed. ‘We chose the wrong officer.’

‘Don’t these people have thorough training?’

‘Oh, it’s thorough all right, except that the life of an operative can be attractive for all the wrong reasons.’

‘How do you mean?’ Sheldon was pacing now.

‘You know how it is for undercover cops. They have to live the life. They can’t have nights off, clock off at five on Friday and go back at nine on Monday. They have to leave everything behind. Wife, children, family. They have to make do with occasional visits, and the more they do the work, the more they become the person they are pretending to be – but that doesn’t mean that they leave their home life behind completely. The undercover life becomes all about getting home, because he doesn’t know what is going on there. Who’s keeping his wife company, or tucking his kids in.’

‘So why was John Abbott the wrong officer?’

Horne let out a long breath. ‘We needed the right sort of person, someone who could project that vulnerability that would make Henry see him as a victim, as a follower, not a threat. We found the officer, and he projected vulnerability perfectly, except for the wrong reason; he was vulnerable.’