** For authors notes, disclaimer etc. see chapter 1
Blonds have more fun 3/?
"So what we have in mind is for you to attended the funeral and hopefully set Marx on edge ma'am." Oh god I'm being briefed by some fast tracked DI who looks like he wasn't even out of nappies when I started doing this.
"Please call me Sandra I can't be doing with the whole "ma'am" thing I'm not the queen. What makes you think that he'll be at all bothered that I'm her sister I mean I've read the file and he doesn't strike me as the fluffy, easily rattled, sentimental type." The more I hear about what they are trying to do here the more convinced I am that they are a pile of idiots. They've been on the case of this psycho and his underworld business dealings for over a year now and suddenly they are going to try to flush him out with some sentimental crap about feeling guilty when he sees the sister of the woman he claimed to love before hacking her into pieces. I'm not buying it, I'm not buying it at all there's more to this sudden upsurge in interest than they are telling me. Something has prompted this sudden need to nail him even though any officer with half a brain knows that trying to force his hand is a big mistake. "DI…..Richards why…."
"Call me Alan like you say given what we are doing here first names are probably more appropriate."
"Ok Alan why are you moving on this now? I spent the whole drive here looking at the files and all the intelligence you've gathered on him from your man on the inside and everything says wait it out, you're gathering a good file of evidence about him another couple of months and you could just walk up to him and bring him in then when you have him you could bring up the murder." Something just flickered across his eyes and I know this is something bigger than just wanting to nail a murder and small time gangster and my gut is telling me Gerry may have been right this might be a huge mistake. "Alan I can't go in there without knowing all the facts, what's changed?"
"Do you smoke? Maybe we should go outside for a cigarette and I'll fill you in."
"I don't but my partner does so I'm used to being around it, why can't we just talk here?" He's looking shiftily around the other officers all busy at their desks and that feeling that something isn't right is getting even stronger by the second.
"Just come outside with me and I'll fill you in but you've got to promise not to tell the rest of the guys I've told you they're worried it'll compromise your ability to act naturally around him." What the hell is it with everyone and their insistence that I can't just do my job properly at the minute? Why would anything I might find out prevent me from being objective? What could be worse than having looked at the crime scene photos and read the pathologist report?
"Alan what's going on? My guvnor briefed me on the sort of man Marx is we know what he did to Annie and I still don't see why that means we should jump the gun it's a big risk if he doesn't take the bait he could start to suspect everything around him then your guy on the inside could be compromised or anything."
"Yeah well your guvnor wasn't exactly given all the facts." Wow back up a second that just doesn't happen. If you want to bring in an officer from another section of the MET it's protocol to fully brief the highest ranking officer involved when asking for the secondment. I told you something about this didn't feel right didn't I? "I didn't agree with the decision not to tell you and your boss everything but no one in there agrees with me. I don't want to put you in danger though and well…..if they find out I've told you, if my guvnor finds out I'll be bounced back to uniform so my feet won't touch the fucking ground."
"What's going on Alan? Look I can't promise not to call my boss in on this if I think it warrants it but I can promise to keep your name out of it if I do." He knows if he tells me something that compromises me or the case I have to tell Strickland but the best I can do for him is not tell anyone where I got the information from if he ever tells me the bloody information!
"Annie Martin….well she wasn't Annie Martin, she was Louise Cathcart, one of us, a WPC brought up out of uniform to go in undercover and try to get close to Marx trouble was she got a little too close." Oh my god! How can they have kept this from us, how can Strickland not have known the MET is like a sieve when it comes to this sort of information it leaks no matter how much people try to keep it under wraps.
"Alan you've got to be kidding, you can't just keep this sort of information from people who are going to be directly involved in the case. How am I supposed to go in there and do my job with only half the facts it's like starting with one hand tied behind my back. You need to fill me in and you need to do it now then I'll decide how much I need to feed back to my guvnor."
"She was supposed to infiltrate a group of girls that hung around Marx like a pack of groupies, the idea was that they were constantly where he was if she saw anything that might help or backed up what we already knew she would report back. Problem was a couple of weeks into the operation she caught his eye before we knew it she was screwing him and insisting it was all for the good of the enquiry. Most of us wanted to pull her in right there and then on the grounds she was compromised but she was bringing us good information from right at the heart of Marx's world so our guvnor pulled rank and decided she should stick it out."
"I hate to say it but it's not the first time an undercover officer has had to get too close for comfort to a suspect." There's more to this I know and I'm already thinking about how quickly I can call Strickland but I need to put him at ease or he'll clam up and when I call in and we decide if I should stay or go I need all the information this time.
"Yeah well before we knew it we're six months in and she's his fucking live in bit of fluff. The information is become patchier and less reliable coming back from her and we can't be sure any more than she objective."
"So you call her in, debrief her and get her out of the area ASAP it's standard protocol Alan this isn't rocket science."
"We did, we called her in two days before she died, she fought it tooth and nail but eventually agreed to tell him it was over and allow us to bring her in. That was the afternoon before we now know he drugged her." Oh shit, this is bad, really bad the whole investigation is compromised and I know now why they didn't want us to know they're hoping to get enough on him that they can paper over the cracks and still get a conviction but his brief is going to feel like all his bloody Christmas's have come at once when he sees this. "When she disappeared for the two days and we hadn't heard from her we assumed she was in the process of breaking it off it wasn't unusual to not hear from her for days at a time we had a weekly briefing time and although we'd told her to break it off immediately we were prepared to sit tight till our next meeting time."
"Then you found the body? Do you reckon he killed her because she was breaking it off or do you think he knew she was undercover at the end."
"Honestly?"
"Yeah of course honestly I mean it's bad enough that you got me here under completely false pretences honesty really is the only way to go now."
"I think she told him. She was convinced at the end that he loved her and even though she told us she'd break it off I don't think she ever intended too. I think she told him that she'd started out undercover and she'd fallen for him thinking that he would just forget about the how it all started because he loved her."
"Men like Marx don't love they do control he'd have gone ape shit if she told him that."
"Yeah and that's exactly what I think happened. That's why my guvnor thinks that sending you in as a "sister" will spook him because he'll worry that she might have told you how she was planning to break it off or even if she was planning on coming clean with him. I don't think it's a possibility though my feeling is that if he thinks you might know anything at all you'll just be next on his hit list." OK well this is all going to hell and now he's looking at me like I should have some deep and meaningful revelation for him. "What are you going to do?"
"I don't know but what I'm going to start by doing is briefing my boss, make my excuses in there tell them I've gone to the hotel to bone up on the case history or something." He's nodded sadly and is walking away and I have absolutely no idea right now what's going to happen next. What I do know is that this investigation is irrevocably compromised and nothing I can do here will make it more likely that they'll get a conviction so I can't see any point on carrying on with it.