Tango One (5 page)

The man made Tina give him a blow job in the middle of the room, and he stood there wheezing as she went down on her knees in front of him, her eyes shut tight as she tried to blot out the image of the watching snakes.

Afterwards, after she'd wrapped the used condom in a tissue and tossed it under one of the tanks, he'd taken out a large python and made her stroke it. At first she'd refused, but then he promised to give her an extra twenty quid so she touched it, gingerly at first. When she realised it wasn't going to hurt her she became more confident and ran her hands down its back. She'd thought it might be wet and slimy but it was cool and dry and she could feel how strong it was, how easily it could crush the life out of her if it should ever coil itself around her. The punter had got all excited at the sight of Tina caressing the snake and had offered her money for some really weird stuff, stuff that Tina didn't like to think about, and she'd rushed out of the house without the twenty pounds he'd promised. Tina shivered at the memory and groped for her cigarettes.

Assistant Commissioner Latham paced up and down in front of the window.

“I'm still not convinced that we're doing the right thing here,” he said.

Gregg Hathaway unhooked the clock from the wall and placed it on the table.

“Morally, you mean?” Hathaway was wearing a dark brown leather jacket, blue jeans and scuffed brown Timberland boots. He had a slight limp, favouring his left leg when he walked.

Latham gave Hathaway a cold look.

“I was referring to their training and handling,” he said.

Hathaway shrugged carelessly.

“It's not really my place to query operational decisions,” he said.

“I leave that up to my masters.” He was a short man, thought Latham: even if he didn't have the limp, he wouldn't have been allowed to join the Met. He was well below the Met's height requirements, even though they'd been drastically lowered so as not to exclude Asians. The intelligence services clearly had different criteria when it came to recruiting, and there was no doubting Hathaway's intelligence.

“They applied to join the police, not MI6,” said Latham.

Hathaway went back to the wall and pulled out a length of wire that had been connected to the small camera in the centre of the clock. The wire led through the wall and up into the ceiling to the video monitor on the floor above, from where Hathaway had watched all three interviews. Latham had been upstairs to check that there was no video recording equipment. Under no circumstances was there to be any record of what had gone on in the office, either on tape or on paper. Officially, the three interviews hadn't taken place. Latham's diary would show that he was in a private meeting with the Commissioner.

“I suppose you do get a different sort of applicant than we do at Six,” said Hathaway, coiling up the wire and placing it on top of the clock.

“They've been trying to widen the intake, but it's still mainly Oxbridge graduates that get in. Wouldn't get the likes of Cliff Warren applying. Fullerton maybe.”

“I suppose so. How do you think they'll do?”

Hathaway ran a hand through his thinning sandy hair.

“You can never tell. Not until they go undercover. Fullerton's a bit cocky, but that's no bad thing. Warren's probably the most stable of the three, but he's not been put under pressure yet. The girl's interesting.”

“Interesting?”

“She worked hard to get away from the life she had. Now we're going to send her back. I'm not sure how she'll cope with that. I was surprised that she agreed.”

“I'm not sure that she had much choice.” Latham looked at his watch. His driver was already waiting in the car park downstairs and there was no reason for the Assistant Commissioner still to be in the office. No reason other than the fact that he still had misgivings about what he was doing.

Hathaway put the clock and the wire into an aluminum briefcase and snapped shut the lid.

“Right, that's me, then.” He swung the briefcase off the table.

“Take care of them,” said Latham.

“I haven't lost an agent yet,” said Hathaway.

“I mean it,” said Latham.

“I know they're not my responsibility, but that doesn't mean I'm washing my hands of them.”

Hathaway looked as if he might say something, but then he nodded curtly and limped out of the room.

Latham turned and looked out of the window. He had a nagging feeling that he'd done something wrong, that in some way he'd betrayed the three individuals who'd been brought to see him. He'd lied to them, there was no doubt about that, but had he betrayed them? And if he had, did it matter in the grand scheme of things? Or did the ends justify the means? He looked at his watch again. It was time to go.

Tina wound down the window and flicked ash out. Some of it blew back into the car and she brushed it off the seat.

“Sorry,” she said to the driver.

He flashed her a grin in the rear-view mirror.

“Doesn't matter to me, miss,” he said.

“First of all, I'm a forty-a-day man myself. Second of all, it's not my car.”

“You work for the police, right?”

“Contract,” said the driver.

“Former army, me. Did my twenty years and then they said my services were no longer required.”

Tina took another long pull on her cigarette.

“Do you want one?” she asked, proffering the pack.

The driver shook his head.

“Not while I'm driving, miss. You know what the cops are like. They did that sales rep a while back for driving with a sandwich on his seat.”

“Yeah. It was in all the papers, wasn't it? You'd think they'd have better things to do with their time, right?”

The driver nodded.

“You'd think so. Mind you, army's pretty much the same. It'd all go a lot more smoothly if there was no bloody officers, pardon my language.”

Tina smiled and settled back in the seat.

“You know what that was about, back there?” she asked.

“No, miss. We're mushrooms. Keep us in the dark .. .”

“And feed you bullshit. Yeah, you said.”

“It's got to be important if they're using us, that much I can tell you. Our company isn't cheap.”

Tina closed her eyes and let the breeze from the open window play over her face. She wondered who would contact her. Her handler, Assistant Commissioner Latham had said. No name. No description. Her handler. It had the same echoes as pimp, and Tina had always refused to have anything to do with pimps. When she'd worked the streets, she'd worked them alone, even though a pimp offered protection. So far as Tina was concerned, pimps were leeches, and she'd despised the girls she'd seen handing over their hard-earned money to smooth black guys in big cars with deafening stereo systems. Now Tina was getting her own handler. The more she thought about it, the less comfortable she was with the idea, but when doubts did threaten to overwhelm her, she thought back to Assistant Commissioner Latham, with his ramrod straight back and his firm handshake and his immaculate uniform. He was a man she could trust, of that much she was sure. And he was right: there was no way she could have expected to serve as a regular police officer, not with her past. Try as she might to conceal what she'd once been, it was bound to come back to haunt her one day. At least this way she was being up front about her past, using it as an asset rather than fearing it as the dirty secret that would one day destroy her career. But could she really do what Latham had asked? Go back into the world she'd escaped from and work against it? She shivered and opened her eyes. Maybe that was exactly what she had been working towards her whole life. Maybe that was the way of vindicating herself. If she could use her past, use it constructively, then maybe it had all been worth it. Her cigarette had burned down to the filter and she flicked it out of the open window.

The Vectra turned into the road where Tina lived and the driver pulled up in front of the three-storey terraced house.

“Here we are, miss,” he said, twisting around in his seat.

Tina jerked out of her reverie.

“Oh, right. Cheers, thanks.” She put her hand into her handbag.

“I suppose I should .. .”

He waved her offer of a tip away with a shovel-sized hand.

“It's all taken care of, miss. You take care, hear?”

Tina nodded and got out of the car. She stared up at the house as the Vectra drove away. The paint on the door and windows was weathered and peeling and the roof was missing several slates. One of the windows on the top floor was covered with yellowing newspapers. An old woman lived there, so Tina had been told, but she'd never seen anyone going in or out.

She unlocked the front door and pushed it closed behind her. The door was warped and the lock didn't click shut unless it was given a hard push. The area had more than its fair share of opportunistic thieves wandering around looking for an opportunity to pay for their next fix. The hallway smelt of damp and the flowery wallpaper was peeling away from the corner over the door. Tina's flat was on the ground floor, tucked away at the back. It had originally been the kitchen and scullery of the house, but the developer had managed to cram a small bedroom, a poky sitting room and a kitchenette and bathroom into the space. There was barely enough room to swing a cat, but as Tina would joke with the few friends she'd had around, she was allergic to cats anyway.

She let herself into her flat and kicked off her clunky black shoes, tossing her handbag on to the sagging sofa by the window. Latham hadn't told her when her handler would get in touch, or how. Did that mean she was to wait in until he called? They had her mobile number so maybe he'd phone. Tina realised that she was already thinking of her handler as a 'he', but it could just as easily be a woman.

She went through to her cramped bathroom and ran herself a bath as she wiped off her make-up. She poured in a good slug of bath salts, lit a perfumed candle, and soaked for the best part of half an hour. After she'd towelled herself dry she dressed carelessly, throwing on an old pair of jeans and a baggy sweater, and tied her hair back with an elastic band.

She padded into the kitchenette and switched on the electric kettle, then swore out loud as she remembered that she'd intended to buy milk on the way home. She opened the fridge in the vain hope that there might be a splash of milk left in the carton, then jumped as her doorbell rang.

She rushed out into the hallway and opened the front door. A short man in a brown leather jacket was standing on the doorstep. He ran a hand across his thinning hair. In his other hand was a black laptop computer case.

“Christina Leigh,” he said, a statement of fact rather than a question.

“Yes?” she said, frowning.

“Gregg Hathaway. You're expecting me, right?” he asked.

Warren heard the wail of an ambulance siren as he got out of the Vectra and headed down Craven Park Road towards his house. He didn't want his neighbours to see the car or the driver. The noise barely registered with Warren as he walked through the crowds of shoppers. Sirens be they police, ambulance or fire engines were an all too regular occurrence in Harlesden. He turned left and saw that his street had been closed off midway with lines of blue and white tape. Three police cars had been parked haphazardly, their doors open and blue lights flashing.

In the middle of the road a man and a woman dressed in white overalls were studying a red smear and what looked like a pool of vomit, and a man in a sheepskin jacket was drawing chalk circles around several cartridge cases.

There was a gap in the police tape along the pavement, so Warren went over to the overweight uniformed constable who was guarding it. He nodded down the road.

“Okay if I go on through?” he asked.

“I live in number sixty-eight.”

“Sorry, sir, this is a crime scene. You'll have to go back to the main road and cut through Charlton Road.” The officer was in his forties with chubby face and a drinker's nose.

Warren pointed down the road.

“But that's my house there.”

“Nothing I can do, sir. This is a crime scene.”

Warren nodded at the two SOCO officers.

“No, that's the crime scene over there. This is the pavement, and that's my house. All I'm asking is that you let me walk along the pavement to my house.”

The constable folded his arms across his chest and tilted his head back.

“I'm not arguing with you, sir,” he said, stretching out the 'sir' to leave Warren in no doubt that civility was the last thing on the officer's mind.

“You'll have to go back the way you came. You must be used to shootings by now, living here. You should know the procedure.”

Warren stared at the officer, who slowly reached for the radio receiver that was clipped to his jacket.

“Not going to give me a problem are you, sir?” he said, the officer, his eyes hardening.

“Obstructing a police officer, disorderly conduct, threatening behaviour, there's a million and one reasons why I could have you taken back to the station right now. So why don't you be a good lad and head off back to the main road like I said.”

Warren exhaled slowly. Two uniformed officers were walking towards one of the cars, deep in conversation. One was an inspector. Warren looked at the inspector and then back to the constable. He considered registering a complaint but dismissed the idea. There was no point. The constable continued to stare at Warren contemptuously. Warren forced a grin and winked.

“You have a nice day, yeah?” he said and walked away.

Warren's heart was pounding, but the only visible sign of his anger was the clenching and unclenching of his hands. He would have liked to have confronted the officer, at the very least to have hit back verbally, but he'd long ago learned that such confrontations with authority were pointless. There was nothing he could say or do that would change the way the man behaved. It was best just to smile and walk away, although knowing that didn't make it any easier to swallow.

Three Jamaican teenagers were huddled outside a news agent wrapped up in gunmetal-grey Puffa jackets with gleaming new Nikes on their feet. Warren nodded at the tallest of the youths.