Deep Cover by Peter Turnbull Read Free Book Online Page A

observed Shaftoe, already crowded for an early midweek evening. ‘No, visiting me sister, she’s been taken badly . . . but she’ll be alright. Just came in for a wander, to have a look at London,’ pronouncing have as ‘av’ and London as ‘Lundun’.
    â€˜Alright,’ the wide-boy replied, pronouncing it as ‘or-white’. He then walked back to his mates and said loudly. ‘He’s alright, down from the north,’ and then added pointedly, ‘He won’t be staying long.’ And John Shaftoe, taking the hint, finished his drink and left the pub. Sometimes it was like that. He felt he had to avoid becoming a regular in one particular pub near the London Hospital, because if he did so, his occupation would eventually be discovered and he would no longer be allowed to blend with the other patrons, which was all he wanted to do. He and his wife sometimes just needed to be ‘working class’. So it was that sometimes he walked into a welcoming pub and sometimes he stumbled into a thieves’ den, which was hostile to anyone they did not know. That night he had clearly entered the latter type of pub. He would take note and avoid it in future.
    By the time he left the bar of the not so jolly Jolly Boatman, dark had fallen and the rush hour, while still on, had also begun to ease. He took the Metropolitan line from Whitechapel tube station to King’s Cross, and then took an overground train bound for Welwyn. He left the train at Brookmans Park, exited the station via the footbridge and, with his hands thrust into the pockets of his donkey jacket, looking like a coal miner returning home from a shift at the pit, he walked into the leafy suburbs and up Brookmans Lane, which was softly illuminated by street lamps. Large, fully detached houses were situated on either side of the road, many with U-shaped driveways; thus the homeowners avoided having to reverse their cars into the lane. The houses all had generous back gardens, and those to his left backed on to the golf course and thereby afforded even more open space to survey when standing at the rear windows of said houses. He felt himself thinking, aren’t we smug, as he walked. But the smug occupants of these houses were also his neighbours, because although he and his wife liked to drink in working-class pubs ‘to touch base’, they were both disinclined to live on a sink estate and had bought what property they could manage to afford on his salary as a learned Home Office pathologist, and so, working class or not, they had eventually fetched up in ‘smug, self-satisfied’ Brookmans Park, Hertfordshire.
    He turned right into one such large house, which had all the front room lights turned on, with a U-shaped drive – though the car by the door was only a modest Volkswagen – and unlocked the front door. He peeled off his jacket as Linda Shaftoe, tall and slender, and, he always thought, holding back the years with admirable success, greeted him warmly. ‘Good day, pet?’ She took his jacket from him as he sat on the bench beside the front door and began to tug at his shoelaces.
    â€˜Busy,’ he said, easing his right foot out of a tightly fitting shoe, ‘busy enough to make me glad to be home.’
    â€˜Well . . . good, hot stew in the pot for you.’
    â€˜Champion, pet.’ He eased the other shoe off his foot and reached for his slippers. ‘Champion.’
    Harry Vicary surveyed the room. It was, he felt, the room of a lowlife murderer; there was a tangible cheapness of life about the four walls and the space within which reached him, deeply so. He sensed that here, in this room, humanity had little value. The contents, too, were cheap, inexpensive; they seemed to have a careworn, overused, second-hand quality about them. The cluttered room also had a sense of age, as though the contents had been allowed to accumulate over time.