‘Frequently these last few days I think of the dead man at the wharf.’

  ‘We have an ID for him,’ Harpur said.

  ‘I’m sure, but have you any idea why he got hit?’

  ‘Chief Inspector Francis Garland is working on that – in cooperation with the Met. Your dead man is from London. He’s nobody much,’ Harpur replied.

  ‘Right. He’s nobody much, hardly anything at all. He got in the way of someone much, much bigger.’

  ‘That’s an ID we haven’t got,’ Harpur said.

  ‘The wharf lad had gone buccaneer, as they call it in the trade. Maverick. No discipline. So, Mr Sand and Gravel Wharf had to go: two bullets in the back of the head. It happens in these gangs – someone thinks he or she is not going to get a big enough slice of takings and so sets up a personal business instead – or tries to. That kind of thing can’t be tolerated by the rest of the gang, though. They fear the competition.’

  ‘Two rounds, yes, I thought so,’ Harpur said.

  ‘His girlfriend, Rebecca Something, comes looking for vengeance and there’s probably money involved, of course.’

  ‘I met Rebecca,’ Harpur said.

  ‘I know you did, and it led to the supermarket, didn’t it?’

  ‘A tailing job, and I started there. It was to please my daughters. They want to see if I could survive as a private detective. Hazel doubts it.’

  ‘Yes, I know that, too,’ Jack said. ‘I think they’d heard about you and the ladder and wanted to make you stop fooling around uselessly.’

  ‘Mr Iles was – is – worried about Ralph’s safety. He’d put a couple of our protection people at the entrance to Low Pastures. That doesn’t please everybody. Some suspect a plot. Many are surprised at how caring Mr Iles can be.’ Harpur put a nice helping of ooze into these concluding words.

  ‘Yes? I gather, Colin, a woman arrived in a blue Fiat, a woman in her twenties. Did you know her?’

  ‘No, not at all. Still don’t.’

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘Never seen her before. She did what she had to and then immediately drove off.’

  ‘Where women are concerned I, and possibly others, think of you as a trifle ungovernable, especially women in their twenties and driving a chic car.’

  ‘It wasn’t so very chic,’ Harpur said.

  ‘But she was in her twenties.’

  ‘This was Thursday a.m.?’ Jack said.

  ‘Yes,’ Harpur replied.

  ‘Was the meeting prearranged?’

  ‘Not as far as I was concerned. How could it be?’

  ‘Phone? E-mail?’

  ‘I’ve told you, Jack, I didn’t know her. Still don’t,’ Harpur said.

  ‘No, I can believe that, Col. I was only testing.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘My information is that you seemed surprised, bewildered, to find the Fiat there,’ Jack said.

  ‘Your information? Where does it come from, Jack?’

  ‘A contact who recognized you. Many would. You’re on TV, and your picture in the local press now and then.’

  ‘Someone who knew you’d be interested because of your link with me? It’s worrying, Jack.’

  Lamb put a hand out in front of him, his left hand, then put the right hand on top of it. He dislodged his left hand and put this on top of the right and then dislodged the right and put this on top of the left. It was as though he was building a wall, or a prosecution case, brick by brick, fact by fact, each layer dependent on the one preceding it. He wanted to show Harpur how he reached his conclusions. Gradual. Methodical. Systematic. Reliable.

  ‘Promising?’ Jack said.

  ‘How do you mean, promising?’

  ‘Nice looking, well made, that sort of thing?’

  ‘It wasn’t what this was about,’ Harpur said.

  ‘What was it about?’ Jack asked.

  ‘Not at all clear,’ Harpur replied.

  ‘She didn’t remain in the Fiat, did she?’ Jack said.

  ‘No.’

  ‘I understand she got out of the car and went to the boot, which she opened.’

  ‘Correct.’

  ‘Did she need a key?’

  ‘I think so. I can’t be sure. It wasn’t easy for me to see. There was quite a little crowd gathered around because of an incident involving trolleys. I didn’t have an uninterrupted view of things.’

  ‘Yes, you had two trolleys, didn’t you? Not usual in a supermarket.’

  ‘Intelligent Percy had asked me to look after his.’

  ‘Why couldn’t he look after it himself? This was a trolley full of hooch, wasn’t it?’

  ‘He was doing something for me and wanted to be inconspicuous, unhindered and very mobile,’ Harpur said.

  ‘Doing what?’ Jack said.

  It seemed absurd to Harpur to be explaining these footling details on a site where the defence of the realm had been fought out, full scale, eighty-odd years ago. ‘I wanted him to make a search.’

  ‘A search who for?’ Jack said.

  ‘Well, the man who must have had a rendezvous with the Fiat woman,’ Harpur replied. ‘I know more about him now.’

  ‘There was a parcel, wasn’t there?’ Jack said.

  ‘She received it,’ Harpur said. ‘That would seem to be why she was there.’

  ‘How did you know that would happen?’

  ‘I didn’t. It was Intelligent who’d found the searcher, and the searcher who met up with the Fiat woman.’

  ‘The parcel?’ Jack said.

  ‘I didn’t know what it was and don’t know now.’

  ‘What shape? What size?’ Jack asked.

  ‘A box, brown-paper-covered, sealed with sticky tape.’

  ‘What kind of box?’ Jack asked.

  ‘Like a shoebox.’

  ‘An adult shoebox?’ Jack asked.

  ‘I don’t swear to a shoebox. It wasn’t that sort of situation,’ Harpur said.

  ‘Which sort?’ Jack asked.

  ‘Not the kind of situation where I would have expected to find a shoebox being handed over – this was a supermarket. It’s the wrong sort of setting for that. But if it was a shoebox, yes, an adult’s shoebox.’

  Of course, Harpur could see which way the questions were going. He had asked himself the same sort, though not taking things as far as the adult/child difference.

  ‘This is where the key, or no key, becomes important,’ Jack said. ‘Doesn’t it?’

  ‘Right,’ Harpur replied.

  ‘This is not a big parcel, is it, Colin, whether adult or child shoe size? It’s the kind of parcel that most of us would probably leave in the car, not bother with a probably lockable boot for it. That would suggest, wouldn’t it, Colin, that this parcel has some special unique quality that needs to be out of sight and adequately looked after: for instance, put in a locked car boot and conveyed immediately to a specific recipient. I’m talking about a gun, aren’t I, Col? Something valuable, rare, dangerous, possibly incriminating, for potentially deathly use, and up to now untraceable and therefore worth all the precautions requiring, as an essential, a key.’

  Harpur felt their roles had been reversed from the usual: Jack was supplying the questions and Harpur the answers, the information, except that there wasn’t much of that.

  ‘Was anything spoken between the two when searcher handed over the parcel?’ Jack asked. ‘This was a resounding, culminating moment, after all. We might expect it to be marked by some strong greeting, perhaps even an identity password.’

  ‘For part of that time she had her back to me,’ Harpur said. ‘I couldn’t tell whether either of them said anything during those few minutes. And then when she closed and locked the boot, nothing was said. I’d certainly have remembered if there had been.’

  ‘A smile, a nod, by either party?’ Jack said.

  ‘Not that I recall.’

  ‘That would suggest an agreed prearrangement, wouldn’t it, Colin, even rehearsed?’

  ‘Possibly.’

  ‘These two might be simply carriers, briefed to do this fairly basic job, not knowing its significance or context,’ Jack said.

  ‘Could be. But do you think its purpose was supply of a pistol?’

  ‘I can’t imagine what else,’ Jack replied.

  ‘Wads of money? Sensitive documents, rare brandy, a brilliant, fragile ornament, a pair of specially crafted adult shoes? Those two, probably in a hired car for this particular task and ordered to carry it out by their boss,’ Harpur said. ‘Gangland boss?’ He made it sound melodramatic.

  ‘Mock not, Col. I don’t think you know what murk is around us now. What would you, for your part, say was in the parcel? Aren’t you interested? By the way, are you still comforting his wife, Col?’

  ‘As to the ladder, I wanted to take a look at where the Embers might be vulnerable,’ Harpur sort of replied, ‘At the extension join I mean. Just routine safeguarding, Jack.’

  ‘I hear Ralph’s wife had a pistol under the bowler hat she was wearing,’ Jack replied.

  ‘I wanted a chat about prospects,’ Harpur said.

  ‘I don’t suppose I’m the first to ask why that had to be done then and there. The rumours are plentiful,’ Jack said. ‘All of them added together, “amassed”, makes this situation look weak, unhinged, precarious. Perhaps out of the mishmash comes the decision by the superleader type in London that now’s the time to take advantage of the weaknesses here and move on the sweet, quiet, cash-juicy patch – the Iles, Harpur patch. Our decent, wholesome, un-blood-soaked streets. Is it the due moment? That’s why I said I’ve brought something, Col.’

  He put his hand under his lapel. The movement – its slow, determined pace – set up in Harpur strong memories of something very similar, but for a moment he couldn’t recall what it was. He found he was quizzing himself, the way he just now had been quizzing Jack for clarity.

  Then his recollection became plain, obvious: he had made this kind of reaching out when he searched the dead man at the wharf, feeling for a pistol in his shoulder holster. Forewarned by this recollection, he speeded up the movement and put his hand over Jack’s, stopping any progress. In some ways it looked like a comradely gesture, even a loving gesture, but no, a barrier.

  ‘I can’t take a gun from you, Jack.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘If I needed one, there’s the police armoury.’

  ‘You do need one,’ Jack replied. He spoke as though the long gap since their last meeting had made Harpur naïve and ignorant.

  ‘You’re involved in a dicey situation without realizing it, Col. It’s not official business, so no HQ entitlement to use of a gun.’ He paused, grew sombre. ‘Tell me, do you think we can win?’

  ‘We? Which we? Win what?’ Harpur said.

  ‘Am I wrong to say “we”, like you and I are … are, well, a unit. You, a braided cap top cop if you ever chose to wear it, me … well, something hugely different.’

  ‘Detectives don’t wear braided caps,’ Harpur said. ‘You and I simply look after each other.’

  ‘In its way it’s noble, isn’t it?’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘The Iles notion,’ Jack said.

  ‘Which? Mr Iles has quite a few of those.’

  And then the self-questioning that had badgered Harpur a little while ago came back and started on him again. Might they be right about his dodgy, unworldly ‘behaviour’ and disorderliness? Harpur asked – asked himself; had he lost some of his vision, a vision that had often enabled him to see through, grapple with, think out, the problems that life, the job and his children flung at him, and instead, had seen him drafted into a handful of farcical episodes: up a night-time ladder or starting a supermarket security clanging crisis.

  Never mind about imitation Nazi plane engines decades ago. How about now? That was the sort of thing Jack and Hazel and Jill required him to deal with, and, presumably, the Apsley Farm maternity assistant, and Intelligent Percy. Harpur decided that in case they were correct and he’d drifted into slackness, he’d better try some changes. He relaxed his hand on top of Lamb’s. Jack nodded, as if aware of the crucial new Harpur thinking, and resumed the approach towards what Harpur saw now was a Smith & Wesson .38 pistol.

  ‘Here,’ Jack said, smiling benignly as though in congratulation. Harpur thought a gift tag, ‘Best wishes from Jack, Col,’ wouldn’t have been totally mad.

  Jack passed the gun to Harpur. ‘Untraceable,’ Jack said. ‘I’ve seen to that. If there’s difficulty at any time, just discard. It won’t come back to me.’

  ‘What sort of difficulty were you thinking of, Jack?’

  ‘Incursors.’

  ‘Which?’ Harpur said.

  ‘There are people looking for new territory, aren’t there, Col? This city is new territory for them. They would destroy what they hope to gain – idiots. But they would also destroy our happiness and sweet stability. They have to be negatived.’

  Harpur put the pistol into his pocket. ‘Yes, that could be called a difficulty.’

  THIRTEEN

  It shook Harpur to find that the gun did what Jack had obviously expected it to do. No – that wasn’t quite it, not so simple. It wasn’t just a matter of gun as gun but gun hard against his body in his pocket, the two sensations linked, of course. They seemed to reciprocate, and bring support for each other.

  So far the gun hadn’t actually done anything he knew of, though: anything notable, such as shooting somebody. In fact, Jack had more or less said it was unused, so far. The lines of the gun were certainly beautiful They bucked up his morale, made him feel substantial, bold, unfragile, definitely not the kind of operator who’d fall into the massive stupidities of that small-hours ladder incident; or the vast clumsiness of the supermarket fuck-up.

  Of course, this wasn’t the first time he’d suffered regrets for those daft episodes, but today, apparently because of the gun, he could dismiss them from his conscience, at least temporarily. Was this the kind of thing the famous actor, Charlton Heston, felt when he spoke so powerfully in favour of a gun for every family? Harpur longed to find something good and helpful in those wonky adventures.

  For instance, what exactly happened at the supermarket? Was there anything he could learn from it? Was there anything a would-be private detective might learn from it? Among all the explanatory and probing words that erupted when Security arrived at the pair of trolleys, were there any that might help Harpur find out more about the tailee? He’d never managed to get a full picture of that ghastly, quaint sequence. Perhaps he’d shut his eyes and mind to it because these facts were so uncomfortable. But, detectives – very senior detectives – didn’t shut their eyes and minds to avoid uncongenial facts. Their job was to expose uncongenial facts.

  So, what were these facts? He knew from things a couple of the Security people had said that the alarm had been set off by him and his little wheeled convoy when they crossed an anti-thieving spot or line; and he thought he recalled a burst of loud shouting, which would be from one of the Security unit. They had a uniform, didn’t they? Tan-coloured with a blue and red stripe? He remembered that much. There were four or five in the posse, he reckoned, possibly three women, two men, one of the men in charge of the shouting – perhaps experienced in that skill after previous crises. He was a small distance behind the others, eking out the big, necessary breaths needed for his yells.

  ‘Stop, stop, Tia Maria looters. Stop, I say.’ He obviously had splendid eyesight: he could identify the stacked bottles and wanted to specify exactly which looters he had in mind today, Tia Maria lucidly and correctly nominated. Maybe he’d needed on a previous chase to bellow the name of a different expensive drink – say, brandy, Pernod, whisky.

  Harpur’s memory gave him many tiny glimpses of what had occurred, but they didn’t join to make an understandable, graphic picture. He saw in recollection Intelligent Percy’s hand move his – Harpur’s – gently off the laden Tia Maria trolley and replace it warm-heartedly with his, Percy’s own, so that Harpur wouldn’t seem to be criminally in charge of the alcohol. Gallant. Tactical. But it was OK for Percy, because in another of his flashbacks Harpur heard and saw him produce with his free hand from his back pocket a hefty roll of fifty-pound notes. ‘Naturally, I’ve brought this adequate wedge of currency to pay at the check-out for the drink,’ Intelligent said. ‘I was having a wander pre this. I think wandering in a supermarket is permissible, isn’t it?’ he had asked one of the Security team in a slab of banter.

  Harpur remembered that a small, curious, excited crowd of shoppers had trickled out through the delivery doors to spectate this confrontation between the Security squad, Intelligent and the target figure. Percy had done some earnest, cooling talk. His spiel had gone something like this: ‘But, surely, some of you Security recognize Mr Harpur, a very major detective. Ask yourselves, do, is he the kind of lawless bozo who would try to get away free with an Everest of after-dinner plonk? Can you imagine what his boss, Assistant Chief Constable Desmond Iles, would think of that, how he would react to that? No, you assuredly cannot because it would never, could never happen.’

  At some point during this forceful appeal to reason by Intelligent, Harpur had realized that he had lost sight of his target among the security folk and the nosy swarm of onlookers. Harpur had taken a lot of harsh questioning from Security, but gradually the tone of it had lightened, mainly because of Intelligent Percy’s strongly respectful words about Harpur’s identity. Two of the security force seemed to recognize him after this testimonial, most likely from those TV appearances by Harpur in crime news reports.

  Eventually, there had been outright laughter as details of the situation became plainer and absurd. ‘A detective chief super with a cart-load of swag!’ ‘Oh dear, dear, piles of Tia Maria.’ But when Harpur tried to spot his target in the chuckling crowd and beyond, he failed. The target obviously knew how to dodge out of this kind of very convenient buffoonery. He’d let Harpur find him in the car park eventually.

  Harpur thought now that he could somehow keep his mind in reminiscence function, clear and poised, to make sense of the whole situation. This was quite an achievement after recalling the disastrous culmination of events in the supermarket. Harpur sensed that Rebecca must have travelled to this city to check what was happening in the case of her murdered friend, Lawrence, at the wharf. Perhaps the target had come from London on a similar mission, but also to size up the Harpur and Iles realm. Harpur guessed he must have had a whisper about where she was staying – there’d been plenty of gossip in pubs and restaurants following the local murder. He could get in behind to tail her. It might have turned out absolutely neatly, but it had turned out anything but. Harpur felt he had learned quite a bit, though: there were going to be recurring episodes like this recent one as criminal firms jostled for control of this vastly profitable new space – a lot of criminals, a lot of the dangerous jostling. Where Mansel Shale, the target’s former London colleague, fitted into this was anyone’s guess. The target had implied they were friends, that he cared about Shale’s well-being, but how long for?