Deep down in his heart, every Undercover believes that, by and large, Murder are a bunch of big * boys. There are exceptions, but the fact is that the Murder lads are our pro boxers: they fight hard, but when you come right down to it they have gloves and gumshields and a referee ringing his little bell when everyone needs to take a breather and wipe off the blood. Undercovers fight bare-knuckle, we fight backstreet and we fight till someone goes down. If Scorch wants into a suspect’s house, he fills in a square mile of paperwork and waits for the rubber stamps and assembles the appropriate entry team so no one gets hurt; me, I bat the baby-blues, spin a good story and waltz right in, and if the suspect should decide he wants to kick the shit out of me, I’m on my own.
This was about to work for me. Scorch was used to fighting by the rules. He took it for granted that, with the odd minor bad-little-boy breach, I fought the same way. It would take a while to occur to him that my rules had sweet fuck-all in common with his.
I spread out a bunch of files on my desk, in case anyone happened to stop by and needed to see me busyworking towards a handover. Then I phoned my mate in Records and asked him to e-mail me the personnel file of every floater working on the Rose Daly murder. He did a little fussing about confidentiality, but a couple of years back his daughter had got off on possession charges when someone was sloppy enough to misfile three wraps of coke and her statement sheet, so I figured he owed me at least two major or four minor favors. Underneath the fussing, he saw it the same way. His voice sounded like his ulcer was growing by the moment, but the files came through almost before we got off the phone.
Scorcher had himself five floaters, more than I would have expected for a stone-cold case; apparently he and his eighty-whatever percent really did get props with the Murder boys. The fourth floater was the one I needed. Stephen Moran, twenty-six years old, home address in the North Wall, good Leaving Cert results, straight from school into Templemore, string of glowing evaluations, out of uniform just three months. The photo showed a skinny kid with scruffy red hair and alert gray eyes. A working-class Dublin boy, smart and determined and on the fast track, and—thank heaven for little newbies—way too green and too eager to question anything a squad detective might happen to tell him. Young Stephen and I were going to get along just fine.
I tucked Stephen’s details into my pocket, deleted the e-mail very thoroughly, and spent a couple of hours getting my cases good and ready for Yeates; the last thing I wanted was him ringing me at the wrong moment to clarify something or other. We did a nice quick handover—Yeates had too much sense to give me any sympathy, beyond a slap on the shoulder and a promise that he’d take care of everything. Then I packed up my stuff, closed my office door and headed over to Dublin Castle, where the Murder Squad works, to annex Stephen Moran.
If someone else had been running the investigation, Stephen might have been harder to find; he could have finished up at six or seven or eight, and if he was out in the field, he might not have bothered to check back in at the squad and hand in his paperwork before he headed home. But I know Scorcher. Overtime gives the brass palpitations and paper gives them orgasms, so Scorchie’s boys and girls would clock out at five on the dot, and they would fill out all their forms before they did it. I found myself a bench in the Castle gardens with a good view of the door and a nice anti-Scorch screen of bushes, lit a smoke and waited. It wasn’t even raining. This was my lucky day all over.
One thing in particular was slapped straight across the front of my mind: Kevin hadn’t had a torch on him. If he had, Scorcher would have mentioned it, to back up his little suicide theory. And Kevin never did dangerous shit unless he had a damn good reason; he left the because-it’s-there stuff to me and Shay. There wasn’t enough tinned Guinness in all of Dublin to make him think it would be fun to go wandering around Number 16 on his own, in pitch-darkness, just for kicks and giggles. Either he had seen or heard something, on his way past, that made him think he had no choice except to go and investigate—something too urgent to let him go get backup, but discreet enough that no one else on the road had noticed a thing—or someone had called him in there, someone who had magically known that he would be passing the top of Faithful Place right about then; or he had been bullshitting Jackie. He had been heading to that house all along, to meet someone who would come prepared.
It was dark and I had built up a nice little pile of cigarette butts by my feet before, sure enough, at five on the dot Scorcher and his sidekick came out of that door and headed for the car park. Scorcher had his head up and a spring in his step, and he was swinging his briefcase and telling some story that made the ferret-faced kid laugh dutifully. Almost before they were gone, out came my boy Stephen, trying to wrangle a mobile and a knapsack and a bicycle helmet and a long scarf. He was taller than I had expected, and his voice was deeper, with a rough edge that made him sound younger than he was. He was wearing a gray overcoat that was very good quality and very, very new: he had blown his savings to make sure he would fit in with the Murder boys.
The nice thing was that I had a free hand here. Stephen might have his doubts about getting chatty with a victim’s brother, but I was willing to bet that he hadn’t actually been warned off me; Cooper was one thing, but Scorch would never in a million years have told an itty-bitty floater that he was feeling threatened by little old me. Scorcher’s overdeveloped sense of hierarchy was, in fact, about to come in useful all round. In his personal world, uniforms are scut-monkeys, floaters are droids, only squad detectives and up get any respect. That attitude is always a very bad idea, not only because of how much you might be wasting, but because of how many weak spots you’re creating for yourself. Like I said before, I’ve always had a lovely eye for a weak spot.
Stephen hung up and stashed his mobile in a pocket, and I threw my smoke away and stepped out of the gardens into his path. “Stephen.”
“Yeah?”
“Frank Mackey,” I said, putting out a hand. “Undercover.”
I saw his eyes widen, just a touch, with what could have been awe or fear or anything in between. Over the years I’ve planted and watered a number of interesting legends about myself, some of them true, some of them not, all of them useful, so I get that a lot. Stephen at least made a decent stab at keeping it under wraps, which I approved of. “Stephen Moran, General Unit,” he said, shaking my hand just a little too firmly and holding the eye contact just a little too long; the kid was working hard to impress me. “It’s good to meet you, sir.”
“Call me Frank. We don’t ‘sir’ in Undercover. I’ve been keeping an eye on you for a while now, Stephen. We’ve been hearing a lot of very nice things.”
He managed to hold back both the blush and the curiosity. “That’s always good to know.” I was starting to like this kid.
I said, “Walk with me,” and headed back into the gardens—there were going to be more floaters and more Murder boys coming out of that building. “Tell me something, Stephen. You made detective three months ago, am I right?”
He walked like a teenager, that long springy stride when you have too much energy to fit in your body. “That’s right.”
“Well done. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t see you as the type to spend the rest of your career in the General Unit, tagging along after whatever squad detective snaps his fingers this week. You’ve got too much potential for that. You’ll want to run investigations of your own, eventually. Am I right?”
“That’s the plan.”
“Which squad are you aiming for?”
This time a little bit of the blush made it through. “Murder or Undercover.”
“You’ve got good taste,” I said, grinning. “So working a murder case must be a dream come true, yeah? Having fun?”
Stephen said, cautiously, “I’m learning a lot.”
I laughed out loud. “You are in your arse. That means Scorcher Kennedy’s been treating you like his very own trained chimpanzee. What’s he got you doing, making coffee? Picking up his dry cleaning? Mending his socks?”
One corner of Stephen’s mouth twitched reluctantly. “Typing up witness statements.”
“Oh, lovely. How many words per minute can you do?”
“I don’t mind. I mean, I’m the newest, you know? All the others have a few years under their belts. And someone has to do the—”
He was struggling valiantly to get it right. “Stephen,” I said. “Breathe. This isn’t a test. You’re wasted on secretarial work. You know that, I know that, and if Scorch had bothered to take ten minutes to read your file, he’d know it too.” I pointed to a bench, under a lamppost so I could watch his face and out of view of any of the main exits. “Have a seat.”
Stephen slung his knapsack and helmet on the ground and sat down. In spite of the flattery, his eyes were wary, which was good. “We’re both busy men,” I said, joining him on the bench, “so I’ll cut to the chase. I’d be interested in hearing how you get on in this investigation. From your perspective, not from Detective Kennedy’s, since we both know just how much use his would be. No need to be diplomatic: we’re talking strictly confidential, just between the two of us.”
I could see his mind moving fast, but he had a decent poker face and I couldn’t pick out which way it was taking him. He said, “Hearing how I get on. What d’you mean by that, exactly?”
“We meet up now and then. Maybe I buy you a nice pint or two. You tell me what you’ve been at the last few days, what you think about it, how you’d be handling the case differently if you were the boss man. I see what I think of how you work. How does that strike you?”
Stephen picked a stray dead leaf off the bench and started folding it carefully along the veins. “Can I talk to you straight? Like we were off duty. Man to man.”
I spread my hands. “We are off duty, Stephen my friend. Hadn’t you noticed?”
“I mean—”
“I know what you mean. At ease, mate. Say whatever springs to mind. No repercussions.”
His eyes came up from the leaf to meet mine, level and gray and intelligent. “Word is you’ve got a personal interest in this case. A double interest, now.”
“That’s hardly a state secret. And?”
“What it sounds like to me,” Stephen said, “is you want me to spy on this murder investigation and report back to you.”
I said cheerfully, “If that’s how you want to look at it.”
“I’m not mad about the sound of that.”
“Interesting.” I found my cigarettes. “Smoke?”
“No, thanks.”
Not as green as he had looked on paper. No matter how badly the kid wanted to be in my good books, he was nobody’s bitch. Normally I would have approved of this, but right that minute I wasn’t in the mood for doing dainty footwork around his stubborn side. I lit up and blew smoke rings up into the smudgy yellow light of the lamp. “Stephen,” I said. “You need to think this through. I presume you’re worried about three aspects of this: the level of commitment involved, the ethics, and the potential consequences, not necessarily in that order. Am I right?”
“More or less, yeah.”
“Let’s start with the commitment. I won’t be asking you for in-depth daily reports on everything that goes on in that squad room. I’ll be asking you very specific questions that you’ll be able to answer with a minimum expenditure of time and effort. We’re talking two or three meetings a week, none of which need to last more than fifteen minutes if you’ve got something better to do, plus maybe another half hour’s worth of research before each meeting. Does that sound like something you could manage, just hypothetically speaking?”
After a moment Stephen nodded. “It’s not about having better things to do—”
“Good man. Next, possible consequences. Yes, Detective Kennedy would quite probably have the mother of all hissy fits if he found out you and I were talking, but there’s no reason why he should. It ought to be obvious to you that I’m very, very good at keeping my mouth shut. How about you?”
“I’m not a squealer.”
“I didn’t think so. In other words, the risk of Detective Kennedy catching you and sending you to the naughty corner is minimal. And, Stephen? Keep in mind that’s not the only possible consequence here. Plenty of other things could come out of this.”
I waited till he asked, “Like what?”
“When I said you had potential, I wasn’t just blowing smoke up your arse. Remember, this case won’t last forever, and as soon as it ends, you go back to the floater pool. Looking forward to that?”
He shrugged. “It’s the only way onto a squad. It needs doing.”
“Following up on stolen cars and broken windows, and waiting for someone like Scorcher Kennedy to whistle for you so you can fetch his sandwiches for a few weeks. Sure, it needs doing, but some people do it for a year and some people do it for twenty. Given the choice, when would you, personally, want to get out of there for good?”
“The sooner the better. Obviously.”
“That’s what I thought. I guarantee you, I will in fact be noticing exactly how you work, just like I said I would. And every time a place opens up on my squad, I remember people who’ve done good work for me. I can’t guarantee the same for my friend Scorcher. Tell me something, just between the two of us: does he even know your first name?”
Stephen didn’t answer. “So,” I said, “I think that takes care of potential consequences, don’t you? Which leaves us with the ethics of the situation. Am I asking you to do anything that might compromise your work on the murder case?”