Doug looked relieved. “Okay. Fine. I’m fine with that.” Suddenly he squinted at her. “What on earth have you done to your hair?”
Melody started to laugh. She couldn’t help herself. When the patrons at the next table gave her disapproving looks, she clamped a hand over her mouth until she managed to get control. “Some detective you are,” she sputtered.
“I knew something was different,” Doug protested, turning red again. “It looks . . . nice.”
“God preserve me from fulsome compliments,” she said, rolling her eyes.
“I didn’t mean—”
“Of course you didn’t. Just stuff it, okay?” She crossed her arms and leaned back in her chair. “So you wanted to talk to me?”
Now Doug had to lean towards her and lower his voice. “I want to know how you knew about the chief. And what you know.”
“My father told me. He said it came across the news desk.”
But Doug was sharp, and he’d picked up on her hesitation. “You think your dad got it from someplace else?”
“He has a lot of . . . contacts. For all I know he heard it from the commissioner himself. But . . .”
“But what?”
Melody wrapped her hands around her cup. This was what she’d decided not to tell Gemma. But surely she could tell Doug. Maybe he’d tell her she was crazy and then she could forget the whole thing. “He—my dad—came to see me this morning. He was—well, you know what Ivan is like when he knows things—”
“I don’t, actually,” interrupted Doug. “Since you never see fit to introduce your lowly friends.”
“It’s not that at all,” Melody said, stung. “Do you want me to go on or not?”
“Yeah. Sorry.” Doug did not look suitably abashed. Or convinced by her excuse.
“About Den—the chief.” She leaned in, elbows on the table. “My dad was hinting that he had a checkered history. And that maybe his past had caught up with him.”
Doug just stared at her. “I don’t believe it,” he finally said. “Not the chief super. But . . .” He sipped at his cooling coffee as he thought. “Things have been really weird the last few months. Gemma’s transfer. Duncan’s transfer, without a word. And mine—although I think I was just collateral damage. The chief disappearing for months. And then this. It’s hard to believe he turns up back to work at the Yard and just randomly gets mugged and nearly killed. Or—” Doug blinked.
“What do we know about him, the chief super, really?” Melody said slowly.
Doug shook his head. “I can’t—I don’t believe he would do something—”
“Just because you don’t believe doesn’t mean you can’t look.”
They stared at each other. Then, Doug took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. The lenses had protected the skin around his eyes from the sun, leaving it oddly pale against his red face. Putting his glasses back, he said, reluctantly, “Yeah. Okay. I can look. If only to prove your dad wrong. But you can, too.”
“I suppose I can,” Melody said slowly. She knew she could access the newspaper’s files—she’d done it before. What the hell were they getting themselves into, if the attack on Denis Childs had not been random?
She looked at her friend across the table and he seemed suddenly very vulnerable. “Doug?”
“What?” he said, sounding startled by her tone.
“Just don’t get caught.”
June 1994
He kissed his wife goodbye and walked the three blocks to the more commercial street where he’d left his Ford Transit overnight. Every week, he tried to see that ordinary walk as the transition between his real life and his other life, but he found it was getting harder to make the distinction.
The day was already warm when he climbed into the van. It reeked of sweat and old food wrappers left behind by the load of protesters he’d driven to last weekend’s demonstration. He wrinkled his nose in disgust and wound down the windows.
The Transit was almost ten years old but its unglamorous exterior disguised a 3.0 liter V6 engine. It was powerful and reliable, both essential for a cover vehicle. Useful transport meant you were much more likely to be accepted into the hierarchy of a protest group. Of course, then it was necessary to have a cover that explained his need for the van. His was that of an odd-job gardener and landscaper. He was big enough, and fit enough, for the job to be credible, but he’d had to learn enough to be able to talk plants, and to help out members of the group who needed work done. The job also explained his easy availability for those things in which he wished to be involved, and gave him a good excuse to bow out of those he wanted to avoid.
Turning on Radio 2, he drove north through central London. When the remake of “Love Is All Around” came on, he switched the radio off with a grimace and went back to thinking about what he’d say when he met up with his group that night.
All the undercover officers had elaborate cover stories to explain their weekly absences from their groups. His was a father dying of cancer in Norwich, an old man with no one else to look after him.
In reality, those who were married—and most of them were—went home to spend one day a week with their families. He was sure that Special Branch recruited married officers deliberately, considering they were at less risk of “going native.” In spite of which, although it was not officially condoned, cops on long-term undercover assignments were encouraged to “cultivate useful relationships.” In other words, to sleep with the enemy. For many, he knew, their initial access to a group came through forming a sexual liaison with a female member.
So far, he’d managed to avoid that sort of entanglement. It had taken patience to insinuate himself into his little group, but he had no shortage of that. For months, he’d hung around the community center in Notting Hill where his targets assembled, casually joining in conversations, then displaying a wary interest. Eventually, over bottles of cheap wine in the flat he’d taken just across the canal in Paddington, he told them that he was widowed, his young wife lost tragically in a motor crash. The story made him cringe, and in his lowest moments he wondered if he was somehow jinxing his wife as well as his hale and hearty father who was living happily in Hertfordshire.
But it seemed he’d told the tale convincingly. He was fussed over by the women and clapped on the back by the men. After that, he’d begun to be included in the distribution of leaflets and the planning of a few demonstrations.
His campaigners were a loosely knit collection of antidiscrimination protesters, some white and some black, brought together and galvanized by the brutal murder of a young black man named Stephen Lawrence in south London the previous spring. On the twenty-second of April 1993, eighteen-year-old Lawrence, an athlete and a good student who had hoped to become an architect, was walking home from his uncle’s house in Plumstead with a friend, Duwayne Brooks.