In the Absence of Iles (6 page)

‘In the normal sense of black hole?’

‘The expense open-ended, not subject to scrutiny or control.’

‘Out-location is generally aimed at identifying a single, major planned episode of villainy,’ A said. ‘This is central to what is labelled, I’m afraid, “the necessarily restrictive methodology of undercover”. Any embedded officer is focused on one crime, one potential crime. Usually, she/he cannot deal in plurals. That’s where “necessarily restrictive” comes in. If he/she passes on good information about other projects and these are ambushed by police, members of the firm will soon sense they have a whispering alien aboard. Every recent addition to the payroll will be watched, and that’s sure to include our officer. His/her background will have already been checked, yes. But now it will get a
real
going over. And she/he might be put under serious interrogation, with no solicitor or tapes present to ensure humane treatment. No first aid present, either. In general, a planted officer will need time to secure his/her position within a firm, and should not be asked to supply tip-offs too early, because such tip-offs might betray and kill her/him, as well as the Out-location project.’

This had brought A back to the grey-area philosophizing he seemed to enjoy most. ‘And so we have the situation already outlined where an undercover officer must do nothing about crimes he/she is aware of, and might even have to take part in, for the sake of preserving his/her role and achieving a big prosecution later. It is a situation that can be exploited by defence lawyers, and one not at all condoned by some judges. The technical name for it when described in confidential Out-location manuals is “Posed Participation as Accessory”, or the “PPA Syndrome”. Naturally, we, the police service, would wish to stress the “posed” – i.e. the display only aspect – the seeming, concocted, rather than true, nature of the behaviour as accessory to crimes. But the courts don’t always go along with this. They want everything honest and clear. They’ll see a crime as a crime.’

‘Perhaps that is understandable.’

‘Perhaps, sir,’ A said. ‘It’s like Oscar Wilde, isn’t it?’

‘It is? The play’s
The Importance of Being Earnest,
not
The Importance of Being Honest.’

‘Wilde gets a note from Lord Alfred Douglas’s father, the Marquess of Queensberry, addressed to “Oscar Wilde posing as a sodomite”.
Posing.
Wilde chooses to take this as meaning he
is
a sodomite, which, in Queensberry’s view, he is, of course, and disastrously sues, the silly sod.’

‘Well, Oscar Wilde is something else. But the procedure you outline means, doesn’t it, that a police officer – the officer about to go undercover – has actually to be ordered by his/her superiors to ignore or even assist in any criminal activities of the firm where she/he is embedded, except for the specific, targeted offence? In turn, this would imply that senior officers of the police service, officers of ACPO rank and above, might be proactive parties to the . . . what do you call the Syndrome?’

‘Posed Participation as Accessory – PPA, sir.’

‘In other words, via this PPA, Assistant Chief level officers themselves become complicit with gang crimes, at one remove. Disturbing?’

‘Posed
complicity and probably at two removes, sir,’ A said.

‘Why two?’

‘ACPO level officers would not normally instruct undercover detectives direct in PPA, sir. The ACPO level officer will instruct, say, the Detective Chief Superintendent, head of CID and handler of the undercover officer, to instruct the undercover officer in PPA, sir.’

‘Are judges likely to accept this distinction, A?’

‘Which, sir?’

‘Posed
accessory as against accessory.’

‘Some wigs do find it hard to see,’ A said. ‘Hard-liners. Brainy simpletons.’

‘Might they feel the Out-located officer has gone over to the criminal firm for personal gain? This could colour a judge’s attitude and, crucially, his/her summing-up to the jury.’

‘That is a danger, yes, sir,’ A said.

‘For myself, speaking entirely personally, I acknowledge as much – and I don’t say it with the least pride – possibly the opposite – perhaps I am even conscious of a certain naivety in myself – but I don’t believe I would ever be able to suspend, virtually obliterate, my, as it were, drift towards maintenance of the lawful, a drift accelerated, of course, by nurture. My resultant mind-set demands, pretty well irresistibly, by instinct and by . . . by habit, I suppose . . . habit and choice . . . my mind-set demands
my
complicity with the good.’

‘You are programmed for virtue, sir, like George Washington, who could not tell a lie.’

‘There are boundaries.’

‘But you probably won’t have to make this kind of difficult choice, sir, because I wouldn’t think many ACCs go undercover. ‘

‘A complicity of that other, supervisory, kind might be expected of me, though.’

‘Distant.’

‘Frankly, A, I hardly understand how any police officer can make the switch from law enforcer to lawbreaker.’

‘Posed
lawbreaker,’ A replied.

‘Even so, I wouldn’t be able to do it, not the actual undercover role.’

‘Between those who can act and those who can’t there is a great gulf fixed,’ A replied.

‘And then, how do we know which of our officers has this flair? Do we talent-spot at the headquarters panto?’

‘Not headquarters. Detectives stationed there are likely to be known to any vigilant crooked crew, and most of them are very watchful.’

‘Rural station pantos, then?’

A seemed to decide big-heartedly to take these questions as serious, not ACPO-level, feeble wind-ups. ‘Many detectives will have done a bit of impersonation in small cases, or at least disguised their own nature for a while when investigating. In a uniformed service, plain clothes themselves are a kind of masquerade. You have to check around to locate – locate! – these possible Out-location candidates and then try to assess which of them would do the undercover job best on a larger scale and, probably, for a longer period. This is a matter of personnel selection, a skill routinely exercised by ACCs and senior CID officers. Not magic, not a mystery carry-on, sir. Nous.’

‘And then I believe I’ve heard of another Syndrome, beside PPA.’

‘Ah?’

‘Is it to do with Stockholm? Something like that?’

‘The Stockholm Syndrome, yes, sir,’ A said.

‘Where the planted officer or a hostage grows so close to the criminals in mind as well as daily routine that eventually he/she actually, not pretendedly, becomes one of them, in some cases seduced by the prospect of wealth, but sometimes simply won over mentally by the captors. For the undercover officer it becomes no longer a pose.’

‘That is another danger, yes, sir,’ A said. ‘This Syndrome takes its name from a siege situation after a bank raid in Stockholm. And it’s similar to the turn-around by the American heiress, Patty Hearst, abducted by a political gang but who then adopted their cause and became one of them.’

‘Have you seen anything like it happen to an undercover officer, A?’

‘The handling senior officer must always be alert to this possibility, sir,’ A replied.

‘A double treachery.’

A smiled – a smile of sparkling, extensive, sweet,
de bas en haut
contempt, not a face Esther had seen him use previously, but he had a lot. He was on the right side of the great gulf fixed between those who could act and those who couldn’t. ‘No, sir. If I may differ – we do not regard an officer who goes undercover to expose criminality as treacherous. Villain firms deserve no loyalty from us. We exist to wipe them out. Undercover is a means. It is true policing. It is basic detection. It is protection of the community and of the realm. What we are here for, exist for, I think you’ll agree.’

‘The officer, if discovered, is regarded as a rat by the criminals.’

‘Oh, we don’t let their twisted values and language define us, do we, sir?’ A replied with a grand, dismissive chuckle. ‘After all, what’s their term for police in general, including Assistant Chiefs? Pigs. Pigs! Do we go along with that? It would surely be inappropriate to regard an ACC in his/her fine quality dress uniform as a porker. Should we all start grunting and sniffing for truffles? In the corrupted view of villains, some pigs are also rats. It’s a merry animal pageant, but we aren’t compelled to join in.’

The questions abruptly switched topic: ‘You’ve said undercover is not treachery, but tell me, A, is it treachery if the officer succumbs to the Stockholm Syndrome and joins the opposition,
really
joins it?’

‘Certainly.’

‘I see.’

‘No question.’

‘And what should be the police response?’

‘We hunt him/her down, sir, with the rest of the gang, and seek to arrest, charge and convict her/him and the others.’

‘I see.’

‘Oh, yes.’

‘And might we charge him/her then with the offences we would have blindeyed – and would have hoped the court might blindeye – if he/she had not gone over?’

‘Certainly,’ A said. ‘His/her right to unofficial immunity in the interests of a culminating great cause is finished. The court would be with us entirely on this.’

‘You think, then, that sometimes judges, the brainy simpletons, can be right?’

‘Admittedly, it’s a tough one, but this we
have
to believe, sir, don’t we, or chaos has come? A judicial system, preprogrammed to muck up? Pandemonium. Although it does look like this sometimes, we try not to despair, I think. After all, there is a rigorous selection process for judges. Several of them may well have
some
little aptitudes. I’ve been told that the sorting-out tests are even more rigorous than for Chief and Assistant Chief, and we all know that few bad choices are made in those areas. Few.’

Esther liked A, liked the whole spectacle of someone of middling or low rank teaching and outmanoeuvring the brass. She loved the way he used the word ‘we’ – ‘We don’t let their twisted language define us.’ ‘Should we all start grunting?’ ‘We exist to wipe them out.’ – as if A felt he had to coach this magnifico of the police service into a correct view of what essentially ‘we’, the police service, should be. Esther was a magnifico herself, part of the brass. That did not stop her siding with A, though, in the search for triumph rather than pure purity. Esther thought it would be around about the time of this exchange from the floor with A that she decided she’d try undercover against the Guild. Immediately ahead of her in the Simpkins Suite a chair stood empty and she let herself imagine Iles might have been sitting there, had he come. No question, that did give Esther a message, but A and B, and especially A, gave a message, too, and for now she liked it better.

What Esther learned at Fieldfare, from the platform, from the questions, from the absence of Iles, was that a very genuine and chilling case against all Out-location work existed, but that it could be more or less defeated. More? Or less? She did waver even now. But it must be significant that one didn’t say ‘less or more’. ‘More or less’ surely gave ‘more’ the precedent, didn’t it – more or less? She decided to ask Richard Channing, deputy head of CID, to run the undercover operation. His first job would be to build a shortlist and select from it a detective who might have a reasonable chance of (a) penetrating the Guild; (b) then remaining alive; and (c) being able to bring out information which in some form or another would stand up as evidence.

Esther herself meant to stay close and influential at this selection stage and apply what she had absorbed at Fieldfare. She chose Channing to manage the Out-location because he had the most qualms about it – wise, persistent, treatable qualms. She didn’t want someone over-positive and glib, like Channing’s CID boss, Simon Tesler. Channing saw the dangers and the drawbacks big and clear and, when landed with the handling job, would struggle and struggle hard to counter them. Esther needed sharp objections so she could answer these with what she had picked up in the Simpkins Suite and other rooms at Fieldfare; and to find whether he could come back at her and show that what she had picked up in the Simpkins Suite and other rooms at Fieldfare did not necessarily wash. As to what she had picked up in the Simpkins Suite, her feeling was that Mullins, the ACC who had quizzed A so hard and long, would, in fact, adopt Out-location, most of his objections having been dismissed by A. Mullins had tested his doubts and seen them torched. He had come to Fieldfare for the same sort of reasons as Esther. They wanted their caution dismantled. It had happened.

Richard Channing said: ‘Do you know, ma’am, I find I hate the notion of asking some young, novice detective to turn himself/herself into a rat.’

‘If you’re going to collapse into the language and standpoint of villains, she/he has already opted to become a pig, hasn’t he/she? That’s how we’re known to them,’ Esther said. ‘Should we start grunting and sniffing for truffles? Pig, rat, it’s all much of a muchness, isn’t it? In the corrupted view of crooks, some pigs are also rats. It’s a merry animal pageant, but we needn’t join.’

‘Maybe, maybe. I’ve never thought of it like that.’

‘I’ve always kept this at the front of my mind, Richard.’

‘But some very senior people will not countenance undercover in any circumstances, I gather,’ Channing said. ‘There’s an ACC Iles who, as I hear it, forbids Out-location, after the murder of an undercover man there. He’s a very experienced officer. Has he decided that the possible advantages of Out-location on his ground can’t justify the risk to the undercover detective? I would find that disturbing. There appears to be little quantifying data available on the effectiveness or not of Out-location.’

‘I can’t answer for him,’ Esther said. ‘I won’t pretend to know the mind of another ACC, and particularly Desmond Iles’s mind, rarely easy to read. I’m not slandering him behind his back. I don’t think Iles would ever claim to be unduly predictable. You ask for quantifiable returns on undercover operations. I don’t see how that would be possible. This is not the kind of work that can be measured in a profit and loss account book.’