The Crime Trade by Simon Kernick Read Free Book Online

detentions for his backchat, got a couple of kickings for the way he didn't get out of the way for the bigger boys, and eventually even the teachers started addressing him as Stegs. It taught him a valuable lesson: you can be anyone if you try.
Stegs Jenner did not look like a typical police officer. At five foot eight, he only just beat the height restrictions, and his face,
even at thirty-two, was chubby and boyish, topped tiff by a receding mop of fine gingery-blond hair that had the curious effect of making him look both his age and a dozen years younger at the same time, like one of those illusionists' acts. Blink and he was twenty; blink again and he was back to thirty-two. But Stegs Jenner talked the talk, and he walked the walk, and he wasn't afraid to put his head into the lion's mouth, which made him an invaluable asset to SO10, Scotland Yard's specialist undercover unit.
He'd been a copper since the age of nineteen, and plainclothes since twenty-four. His full-time posting was still in the area where he'd grown up, the north London suburb of Barnet, but he'd been attached to SO10 for the previous six years, and probably half his time was spent seconded to them on undercover assignments, which is the way it works in the Met. No-one's full-time undercover. You could be meeting Colombian drugs dealers one day to discuss a multi-million-pound deal, and hunting for stolen office equipment the next.
Not that Stegs was going to be doing too much of anything for the next few days, at least not work-wise. He'd been officially suspended (thankfully on full pay) until a preliminary internal investigation could take place to see whether he'd acted improperly or not. They hadn't let him go until half-nine that night, at which point a very pissed-off, newly arrived assistant commissioner of the Met had formally told him that he was not to report for duty until further notice and not to speak to anyone about what had happened, other than those directly involved. The assistant commissioner (a middle-aged accountant look-alike with silver hair, an immaculately pressed uniform and a very long nose) had then stood there for a few seconds, waiting, it seemed, for Stegs to say something, presumably along the lines of 'I'm sorry for causing you all this inconvenience'. Stegs hadn't given him the satisfaction. Instead, he'd given the bastard a look that said, 'If you think you can do better, you get in there and talk to people who'd flay you alive if they knew your true identity. Then maybe you'd actually be earning your money, instead of waltzing around passing the buck to the junior ranks.'
After they'd finished with him, he reluctantly phoned the missus. She must have seen something about the operation on the news because she'd left three increasingly worried messages on the mobile. She didn't know what role he'd been playing, of course, or where he'd been playing it, but she knew he did undercover work, and the news that an undercover officer had been killed would probably .have seeped out by now, so he felt duty-bound to let her know he was all right.
She answered on about the tenth ring, and in the background he could hear Luke screaming and crying.
'Oh, Mark, thank God you've called. I've been worried stiff. Are you all right?'
She always called him Mark. She didn't like the name Stegs, and he sure as fuck wasn't going to let her call him Monty, so they'd had to come up with something that was acceptable to both of them, and after much discussion it turned out that Mark was it. It was how he was known to all her friends. One day he was sure he was going to end up being diagnosed as a schizophrenic.
He told her he was fine but very busy, and she asked him if he'd heard about the incident at Heathrow. He said he had.
'It makes me so scared, Mark, thinking of you out there all alone. I don't want baby Luke growing up without a father.'
Stegs was touched by her concern, in spite of himself. He told her everything would be OK, but