The Crime Trade by Simon Kernick Read Free Book Online Page A

neglected to mention that he'd been suspended on full pay. He'd been advised by his superiors that no correspondence would be sent to his home address
regarding what had happened, and that all contact would be made on his mobile or his encrypted email address, so there was no point mentioning it, particularly as he had no intention of hanging around the house all day with her and Luke.
'Are you coming home then?' she asked him. 'I know Luke wants to see you.'
That he seriously doubted. Luke was never pleased to see him. He always gave him the evil eye when Stegs tried to pick him up or play with him. At eight months old, he was definitely his mother's son, and treated his dad like some sort of usurper whenever he came into the room. Stegs loved the kid (of course he did, he was his flesh and blood) but, though he never liked to admit it, he didn't like him much, and was never in any doubt that the feeling was mutual.
'I've still got some paperwork to clear up here,' he told her. 'I'll be back later on but don't wait up for me, I don't know what time it'll be.'
She sighed loudly down the other end of the phone. 'I can't do this all on my own, you know. Bringing up a baby's hard enough when there's two of you, let alone one.' As if to confirm quite how hard, Luke's crying went up a couple of decibels as she brought him nearer the phone. Tell Daddy to come home, Lukey,' she cooed at the infant. Fat chance of that, Stegs thought. If he could speak, he'd be 'telling him to fuck off, no doubt about it. 'Tell him he's making Mummy miserable.' Luke had clearly been brought right up to the mouthpiece now because Stegs was forced to hold the phone away from his ear as the howling increased still further. 'Seriously, though, Mark,' she continued, coming back on the line. 'It can't carry on like this. It's too much for me.'
'I know, I know,' he said, and made his excuses, citing the usual: workload, lack of staff, etc. But it didn't sound convincing, and he knew it. She told him she understood all that but that maybe he ought to think about changing careers so that he could help a bit more, and he said he had to go, that his boss needed to see him. 'We'll talk in the morning,' he said.
She sounded down as she hung up the phone with Luke's wailing continuing in the background, and it made him wonder why she'd wanted to have kids. He'd tried his hardest to convince her that they were better off continuing as they were, childless but reasonably well off, with her nurse's and his copper's wage, but she'd been adamant, and he knew that part of the reason for her desire probably stemmed from the need for some companionship, given the fact that he was hardly ever there. You reap what you sow, and he was reaping.
He drove back to Barnet on the M25, but instead of turning off on to the East Barnet road and heading home, he carried on going until he reached a pub just off the Whetstone High Road. He found a parking spot about fifty yards away and walked through the driving rain to the battered front door. It was ten to eleven.
The One-Eyed Admiral had a one o'clock weekly licence but was one of those places that was never going to be that popular because (a) it never looked very clean, and (b) it had never been able to rid itself of its low-life clientele, probably because they were the only people who'd frequent it. It wasn't a rough place, but one look through the smoky haze at the middle-aged petty criminals clustered round the tables and the fruit machines told any self-respecting punter that it wasn't a pub he wanted to be seen in. Which was one of the reasons Stegs liked it. Because he knew he'd always get a seat at the bar, and people wouldn't pay him too much attention.
He'd been going in there for years, ever since he'd been introduced to it by a small-time gun dealer who'd been a regular. Stegs had been undercover at the time, investigating the dealer,
whose name was Pete, and the One-Eyed Admiral had" been their main meeting place. After