Trust No One Page 8

  ‘Come on, lads. Bit of teamwork. We’re all pulling in the same direction.’ It was the third figure who’d remained silent up to this point. Kerridge himself, she realized. He gently interposed himself between the two younger men with the air of a boxing referee who can see the bout slipping out of control. ‘You’ve both got a point.’

  There was nothing in what he was saying, she thought, but he had a natural, easy-going authority that had immediately reduced the other two men to silence. His own voice was unexpectedly soft, so that Marie had to strain to make out his words.

  ‘Way I see it,’ Kerridge went on, ‘we’ve got some big deals coming up. Drugs, especially. That Rotterdam consignment’s the biggest we’ve done to date. Can’t afford for that one to go tits up.’

  Marie made a mental note of the reference to Rotterdam. It was quite possible that her relevant colleagues were already on to it, but if not it would be another piece in the jigsaw.

  ‘Too fucking right—’ Boyle began. But Kerridge was continuing to speak, halting Boyle without raising his voice.

  ‘But that’s Jake’s point. If we go stirring up trouble now, without knowing what we’re about, that might be misinterpreted. We’re moving into a different league with some of this new stuff. We don’t want our suppliers to think we’re a bunch of amateurs.’

  ‘I don’t—’

  ‘I know you’ve got the best interests of the business at heart, Pete. And I’m not saying you’re wrong.’ He paused, in a way that seemed theatrical, though Marie could see that he was lighting a cigarette. ‘But we need to get our ducks in a row. Do a bit of digging. If there is a grass, then, yeah, we dispose of him. Quick and clean. Take him out.’ Another pause. ‘I’ve no problem with that.’

  Marie suddenly realized that she was wearing only her thin evening gown and its silly, largely decorative jacket to protect her from the cold. Even so, it wasn’t the temperature that sent a chill down her spine. It was the clinical language. Dispose. Take him out. She was finally beginning to recognize the reality that she was dealing with.

  She pulled her useless jacket more closely around her shoulders and moved another step or two, watching the three men. She was reminded, grotesquely, of a bunch of middle managers discussing a redundancy. Except that in this world, termination had a more literal meaning.

  Up to now, though she hadn’t realized it, this had felt like a game. Like another of Winsor’s exercises. It was hard. It was a challenge. But there were no real consequences. If she failed, it might set her career back a notch or two. Maybe cause her a bit of feminist embarrassment.

  But of course it was much more than that. She was dealing with people who, if they thought she was a threat, wouldn’t hesitate to deal with her. Take her out. Dispose of her.

  Jesus. For the first time, she began to wonder whether she was really up to this.

  ‘What do you think, Jake?’ she heard Kerridge say. ‘You OK with that?’

  Morton had taken a step or two backwards, she thought, as if he were trying to disassociate himself from the other two. Or maybe that was just wishful thinking on her part. She’d liked Jake, maybe even been attracted by him. She didn’t want to think that he was really part of all this.

  ‘It’s the sensible way,’ he said. ‘We don’t want any more screw-ups.’

  And that was it. That was all he said, leaving her in the air. Not knowing whether he was really on board or just going through the motions. She knew what she wanted to believe, but she wasn’t sure what she really did.

  She heard no more of what the men said, because there was a sudden sweep of headlights from beyond the car park entrance. She glanced at the luminous face of her watch. Nearly midnight. This would be the first of the taxis arriving to ferry guests home.

  She was about to slip back along the edge of the cars when the taxi pulled into the car park, turning to the left to arc round towards the hotel entrance. She was caught momentarily in the full blaze of its headlights, dazzled by the glare. She stopped, breathless, feeling like an unprepared actor gripped centre-stage by a spotlight. She was sure, in that moment, that everyone could see her. Kerridge and his cronies. The taxi driver. The clustered smokers.

  Then the lights swept by and she was back in darkness. Kerridge, Boyle and Morton were tracking back towards the hotel now, apparently oblivious to her presence. Beyond the car park, lower on the hill, she could see the flicker of more cars arriving.

  She paused by the car park fence, safe now in the night, waiting for her heart to stop pounding.

  Shit, she thought. I’m really not cut out for this.

  ‘Have you any real grounds to think so?’ Salter had asked a few days later when she’d first brought up her thoughts about Morton. She remembered Salter slumped back in the hotel armchair, his feet propped up on the coffee table. It was impressive, she thought, the way he managed to sound simultaneously both scathing and uninterested. As if he couldn’t quite be bothered to tell her what a stupid suggest ion it was.

  She shrugged, then made a show of pouring herself another cup of coffee, ignoring Salter’s empty cup. ‘Not really,’ she said. ‘Just a hunch.’

  ‘Ah. A hunch.’ Salter rolled the word round in his mouth, his expression suggesting that he might be about to spit it out physically. ‘One of those.’

  ‘Woman’s intuition, Hugh. You know how it is. We’re just better at that kind of stuff.’ She smiled. ‘You lot have parallel parking instead.’

  ‘Well, I’ll bear your suggestion in mind, sis.’

  ‘That’s all I’m asking, Hugh. Just keep him on your radar. There’s something about him.’

  ‘Good looking, is he?’

  ‘Why? You jealous, Hugh? Don’t worry, he’s not in your league.’ She shook her head, wondering why they had to go through all this crap. Just a bit of banter. Show that she was one of the lads. Or as close to being one of the lads as she was ever likely to get.

  That had been her third liaison meeting with Salter. She made a point of using the word ‘liaison’, which was how it was described in the formal procedures they were both supposed to follow. Hugh preferred the more old-fashioned term, ‘supervision’, presumably because it made him feel more important. He might have been designated as her ‘buddy’ up here, but they were the same pay grade. She had every intention of reminding him of that if he showed signs of getting uppity.

  The venue had been yet another anonymous business hotel, this one just off the M56 near the airport. The small meeting room was, as always, nothing more than a semi-converted bedroom. Not her ideal choice of location for a meeting with Hugh Salter, though so far he’d always been on what presumably passed for his best behaviour.

  She didn’t know quite why she’d mentioned Morton at all. It was partly because, at least to her own ears, her achievements to date had sounded pretty thin. OK, she’d got the business up and running, which was no mean feat for someone of her inexperience. And it had been a tough few weeks. She’d arrived at the print shop on her first day to find that Gordon, the supposedly ultra-reliable, long-serving, ever-willing assistant she’d inherited with the business, had decided that he was happy to turn his hand to anything except working for a woman. Her first task on her first day, therefore, had been to accept Gordon’s resignation. Her second had been to call the Job Centre.

  For the last couple of weeks, as well as the endless phone calls to drum up business, she’d found herself interviewing a steady stream of no-hopers, most of whom couldn’t be bothered even to pretend they had an interest in printing. Fortunately, Gordon had grudgingly agreed to hang around for a couple of weeks to keep the show on the road through a stream of mildly sexist grumbling. And, a couple of days before, she’d finally managed to find a suitable candidate to succeed him, Joe Maybury, an experienced printer who’d just been made redundant from some print shop in Stockport. She was just waiting for the Agency to run the criminal records checks – even with the day-to-day stuff, as Salter kept reminding her, you couldn’t
be too careful– before she offered him the job. So, as she told Salter, things were looking up.

  But she was acutely conscious that all this was mundane stuff. Just laying the foundations. Getting her legend up to scratch. It was all necessary. You couldn’t afford to cut corners at this stage. But by itself it was nothing. She had made only minimal progress in starting to build the relationships that would really matter – with the key players in the local underworld. Sure, she’d followed up all the introductions that had been provided to her, with some initial success. Some, like Kerridge, had agreed to see her. Some had made appropriately polite noises, and would probably be in touch if and when they needed her services. One or two had, to date, ignored her.

  That was actually a decent strike rate, she told herself. She was particularly pleased to have made real progress with Kerridge, who was, after all, the biggest fish in this northern pond. Even there, though, a small voice whispered in her ear that all she had was the trial order for some legit business and the opportunity to hand over some money at a charity do.

  It was that, probably, that made her mention Jake Morton. But what she’d said was true enough. She did have a feeling about him. And she knew from experience that her feelings in such matters were often right.

  ‘I’m not saying we should approach him now,’ she said. ‘I’m just saying keep tabs on him.’

  She suspected that Salter was more interested than he was letting on. If there was anything in what she was saying, it could turn out to be a big deal. And if there were any big deals in the offing, Salter wanted to be the one doing the dealing. He’d be careful to ensure his backside was covered, but he’d want to grab more than his fair share of any credit that was going.

  Salter picked up the coffee jug, weighed it briefly in his hand, and then looked disapprovingly at Marie’s recently filled cup.

  ‘You really think he might be interested?’

  ‘I really don’t know, Hugh. Like I say, it’s no more than a hunch. It was just something in the way he spoke—’

  ‘What did he actually say?’

  She thought back to her brief, inconsequential, mildly flirtatious conversation with Morton at the charity dinner. What had he actually said? Not much that she could put her finger on. Not much beyond polite small talk.

  ‘It wasn’t anything he said, Hugh. He’s not an idiot. He’s not going to start blethering on about Kerridge and Boyle and the whole shooting match to someone he’s never met before, is he?’

  ‘I wouldn’t have thought so,’ Salter agreed. ‘So what makes you think he’s pissed off?’

  ‘Oh, God, Hugh. You know how it is. He makes a joke or two that sound like they’re not quite jokes. His tone of voice. Things he doesn’t say. I don’t know.’

  Salter was still toying with the coffee jug, as if he were hoping that it might magically refill itself or, more likely, that Marie might take the hint and order another round.

  ‘It’s always delicate, you know. If we get it wrong – if we even time it wrong – we’ve blown it for good.’

  ‘I know that, Hugh. I’m not an idiot either.’ She knew it very well, although unlike Salter she’d never worked as a front-line handler. Her intelligence role had involved collating data on potential intelligence sources – informants, grasses, whatever you wanted to call them. She knew how difficult it was to get the good ones on board, and how sensitive the seduction process had to be. Not the small fry – the ones who’d slip you some usually worthless titbit of information in exchange for fifty quid in untraceable fivers. But the ones who really mattered. The ones who could offer you real access to the people at the top.

  There weren’t many of them, but they were critical. In the end, these people were often the lynchpins of the Agency’s painstaking efforts to build a watertight case against some target villain. They’d be major sources of evidence, maybe even key witnesses in the prosecution case. Success or failure might depend on what they were prepared to say or do, whether they were able to hold their nerve. They all knew the risks they were taking. Whatever steps the Agency might take to protect them – new faces, new identities, new lives – in the end they’d be left turning in the wind. Without friends. Without a past. Maybe without a future.

  Christ knew why they did it. Sometimes it was for the money, which could be substantial, but rarely sufficient to justify the risk. More often, it was an insurance policy for those who thought their criminal days might be numbered. They seized on the promise that, when the proverbial did eventually hit the fan, they’d be looked after. If you already suspected that the ship might be heading for the rocks, then becoming a rat became a more attractive career option. Most often, though, from everything that Marie had seen, it was personal. Villains were remarkably persistent in holding a grudge, often for reasons that might be imperceptible or incomprehensible to the civilian world. Grassing someone up could be a highly satisfying form of revenge, at least for the few moments before you recognized the full consequences of what you’d done.

  Occasionally, though, the reasons were more honourable. From time to time, a villain might genuinely see the light or get religion or simply realize that life didn’t have to be that way. That was the hunch she’d had about Jake Morton. That, in his heart, this wasn’t the life he’d chosen. That somehow, somewhere, he’d been suckered into it, drawn by the rewards it offered, and that now he was trapped because, quite simply, there was no way out. Once you’d stepped over that line, there was no easy way back. But, even on the basis of one half-flirtatious encounter, something had told her that that was what Morton had wanted. To be done with it all, to be normal, to rediscover the person he’d been before he’d sold his soul to Jeff Kerridge. Something told her that, if the time were right, if the approach were right, Morton could be persuaded to come over.

  Salter had been watching her in silence for some seconds. ‘If it’s true,’ he said, finally, ‘he’d be one hell of a catch.’ He gently placed the coffee jug back on the table and picked up a custard cream from the unappetizing bowl that had accompanied the coffee. ‘I don’t know quite where he sits in Kerridge’s inner cabinet, but he’s not small fry. I’m willing to bet he’s got his financial thumbprints on most of the big deals that Kerridge is involved in.’

  ‘I might be wrong,’ she said.

  ‘Yeah, of course you might. In fact, you probably are. But there’s just a chance that you’re not.’

  It was funny, she thought. To succeed in this job, you needed to be able to conceal your emotions, maintain that poker face. And Salter, by all accounts, had been very successful. But just at this moment she could read his thoughts as easily as if he were articulating them out loud. This might be the chance they’d been looking for. This might be a chance to spear some of the big fish – Boyle, maybe even Kerridge himself. More to the point, this might be a chance to boost Salter’s career.

  ‘We can’t rush it,’ she said, suddenly nervous about what Salter might do with what she’d told him. Jump right in there with his size elevens. ‘Like you say, we only get one chance.’

  He nodded, looking distracted, his mind already somewhere else. Planning his next upward move probably. ‘Did you hit it off?’ he said finally. ‘With Morton, I mean.’

  She blinked, surprised by the direct question. ‘I suppose so. I mean, I only talked to him for an hour or so at this bloody dinner—’

  ‘But you got on with him? Well enough to get a bit closer?’

  ‘Well . . .’

  ‘We need to keep on him,’ he said. ‘See if your instincts are right. Work out what might be the best way to get him on board. Do you reckon you might be able to do that?’

  She shook her head and swallowed the last mouthful of tepid coffee. ‘Christ, Hugh, I don’t know. I’ve only met him once. I mean, we seemed to get on OK, but . . .’

  ‘Give it a go, then. Even if you’re not right about this, he’s likely to be one of our best routes into Kerridge and his mob.’

  She gazed at him
for a moment as if she were about to refuse. Then she nodded. ‘OK, Hugh. I’ll give it a go.’

  ‘Good girl,’ he said, in a tone that made her want to punch him hard in the face. ‘It could be a big one, this.’

  Yes, I know, Hugh, she’d said to herself at the time. That was why I brought it to you. In reality, though, she had known that this was the best she could have hoped for. Of course, Salter would be able to shift, without missing a beat, from his initial sneering scepticism to snaffling the idea as his own. He was destined for the top, scrambling his way up on the backs of more scrupulous colleagues.

  It didn’t matter. As always, he’d got what he wanted. But as they finished the meeting, she’d been left with a feeling that, almost without recognizing it, she’d achieved an objective of her own. She’d been given a reason to see Jake Morton again. Up to that point, she hadn’t even known that she’d wanted to.

  Chapter 7

  After her debrief with Salter and Welsby, Marie arrived back at the print shop to find the place in a familiar mild chaos. Joe was berating Darren about some new technical faux pas. Darren was giving every sign of paying full attention short of actually listening. She thought Joe was warming to Darren. It wasn’t that Darren’s performance had improved to any significant – or, for that matter, insignificant – extent. It was more that Joe, recognizing that Marie wasn’t planning to dismiss Darren in the immediate future, had adjusted his expectations. Probably to somewhere below ground level.

  There were times when Marie suspected that Joe Maybury – a tall, genial, undemonstrative man in his early thirties – might have a crush on her. There were other times when she was convinced that he was gay. Both, she supposed, might possibly be true. Or neither. Joe seemed disinclined to give anything away. She got on with him well, trusted him implicitly in deputizing for her on business matters, even went for a pint with him from time to time, but she had discovered nothing of any significance about his private life. Not that she had particularly tried. She was keen to protect her own privacy, and Joe’s taciturnity suited them both fine.