Hunted, page 14
‘Did you know him?’ asked Stella. ‘As a fellow UCO? Had you ever met him before?’
‘No, I’ve never even heard of him,’ said Bailey. ‘But then you know how it is with undercover work. It’s all part-time. You volunteer for a deployment, it’s all kept top-secret and then it finishes and you go back to your regular job. I guess I never got round to encountering him because I was never directly deployed on an operation with him.’
‘That makes sense,’ said Stella.
‘Do you have access to a computer right now?’ asked Bailey. ‘Can you check the details of the job that Carl Freeman was working on when he died?’
‘Sure. Just a minute. I’ll pull up the logs and the DMR.’
The policy/decision logs detailed the operational objectives for an undercover operation, while the DMR, or Deployment Management Record, contained information on the operation’s briefing and debriefing process. Bailey knew that Stella would also be looking at any UCO notes that would have been submitted by Carl Freeman during the course of the deployment; these UCO notes, along with any covert recordings, would have functioned as evidence in subsequent court proceedings.
Bailey paced up and down impatiently outside the pub, her phone clamped to her ear, awaiting Stella’s response. Although it was now late September, it was a muggy evening and there were a fair few people milling around nearby clutching drinks, smoking and chatting to each other. Bailey moved away from them further down the pavement where it was quieter. On the other end of the phone she could faintly hear the sounds of Stella’s fingers skittering over her computer keyboard.
‘Well, well,’ said Stella after what seemed like a long pause. ‘This is very interesting. Very interesting indeed.’
‘What?’ demanded Bailey. ‘Interesting? What do you mean?’
‘The objective of Carl Freeman’s last operation was to charge Jack Wynter with conspiracy to murder.’
Bailey raised her eyebrows in surprise. ‘Jack Wynter?’
‘The one and same individual who you were talking to just last week.’
‘Conspiracy to murder?’ Bailey frowned to herself, trying to work it out in her head. ‘In what capacity was Carl Freeman approaching Jack Wynter?’
There was a disbelieving snort from Stella. ‘You’re going to like this. Carl Freeman was posing as a hitman.’
Bailey’s breath caught in her throat. ‘A hitman?’ she whispered. ‘You’re joking.’
Her mind raced frenetically. Things seemed to be coming together fast now. In his final undercover operation Carl Freeman had been pretending to be a hitman in order to charge Jack Wynter with conspiracy to murder. But then he’d died and somehow come back to life as an actual genuine hitman… the notorious Rex no less.
‘Something very strange is going on here,’ said Bailey.
‘You’re telling me,’ said Stella. ‘But this documentation is pretty thin. There’s not a lot in here. I guess that’s because the operation was aborted when Carl Freeman died. If you want to find out more details about it, I’d advise talking to the COM-UC who was running the operation. Detective Inspector Frank Grinham. I believe you know him well.’
Bailey allowed herself a small ironic smile. She’d been meaning to catch up with Frank for a while. Now she had more reason than ever to see her former undercover covert operations manager.
‘It’s high time I paid Frank a visit,’ she said. ‘I’ll go to his house first thing tomorrow.’
‘Just one thing Bailey,’ added Stella, a note of caution in her voice. ‘If Rex is indeed a former undercover police officer, then you realise that this adds a whole new dimension to everything. We need to be really sure about this before telling senior management. If you think that Rex really is Carl Freeman then you need to build a solid case for it. This is no small thing to be telling top brass, especially given how importantly they’re taking this current operation to apprehend Rex. It could change its entire direction.’
Bailey knew that Stella was covering her own back for if she went out on a limb and dropped a bombshell like this on senior management only for it to turn out to be baseless, then she would look pretty stupid, and it certainly wouldn’t do her career prospects much good.
‘Don’t worry,’ said Bailey, knowing how seriously Stella took her career. ‘I’ll make sure I’m a hundred per cent on it. Or as close as…’
22
Detective Inspector Frank Grinham offered Bailey a pretzel from the bowl in front of him.
‘Don’t mind if I do,’ she said, taking one and popping it into her mouth.
‘They’re sour cream and chives flavour,’ he said. ‘I highly recommend them.’
Bailey munched on the pretzel. It tasted pretty good. She scrutinised her former undercover covert operations manager.
‘I think you might have put on a bit of weight Frank. All this sitting around at home eating snacks.’
Frank, in his late forties with greying red hair, had definitely developed a bit of a paunch since the last time Bailey had seen him. He’d been at home convalescing for the past six months or so, recuperating from gunshot injuries sustained during the course of one of Bailey’s recent undercover operations.
That Saturday morning Bailey had driven up to the small semi-detached house where Frank lived in Enfield in North-East London and they were now sitting in his living room.
‘It’s good to see you Bailey,’ he said. ‘I’m getting a bit stir crazy sitting here at home watching TV and eating crap.’
‘I miss you too Frank,’ she replied, feeling a warm rush of affection for him. ‘It’s not the same without you.’
‘You’re reporting to Detective Inspector Stella Gates now, aren’t you?’ he said, rubbing his chin thoughtfully.
Bailey nodded. ‘I’ve done one operation with her so far. She seems very capable. But I haven’t totally made up my mind about her yet.’
‘I hear she’s the ambitious sort,’ he remarked with a faint tone of disapproval. ‘I imagine she’ll probably end up as Commissioner one day.’
‘How’s Isabel?’ asked Bailey.
Isabel was Frank’s five-year-old daughter, custody of whom he shared with his ex-wife. During the events that had seen Frank seriously wounded, Isabel herself had come perilously close to being killed, and only Bailey’s intervention had prevented that from happening.
‘She’s getting on well,’ nodded Frank. ‘No signs of mental trauma. As yet.’
‘That’s good to hear,’ said Bailey. ‘Let’s hope it stays that way.’
Frank picked up a pretzel, pausing to study Bailey briefly with his watery blue eyes.
‘So what brings you here then Bailey? Job talk? Or is it just a social visit? I sense it’s more than that. You seem… agitated.’
She deliberated for a few moments. ‘There’s a contract out on me Frank.’
His eyes bulged. He dropped the pretzel he’d been holding back into the bowl.
‘Jesus, Bailey,’ he muttered. ‘That’s not good news.’
‘Tell me about it,’ she said. ‘And to make it worse, the hitman out to fulfil the contract is none other than Rex.’
‘Rex? That psycho?!’ Frank’s look of concern grew even more pronounced. ‘Shit. That’s even worse news. Shouldn’t you be in a safe house somewhere?’
Bailey explained the nature of the operation that she was currently deployed on. Frank listened attentively, nodding intermittently as she laid out the progress of the operation so far. By the time she’d finished, he was sitting there looking slightly ashen as he digested what she’d told him.
‘This truly does beggar belief,’ he murmured. ‘…that Rex is actually Detective Sergeant Carl Freeman.’ He paused pensively. ‘But I can see now how it might be possible.’
‘How?’ demanded Bailey. ‘That’s what I don’t understand. Carl Freeman is supposed to be dead, isn’t he?’
‘It wasn’t quite that simple,’ said Frank. ‘Carl Freeman didn’t die exactly. He went missing.’
‘Missing?’ murmured Bailey. ‘Now that changes everything…’
‘Let me explain what happened,’ said Frank. ‘We’d had word from an informant that a gangster called Jack Wynter wanted to kill his business partner, a bloke called Vincent Peck who was himself a villain. As you know, Wynter runs a strip club called Ruby Red. He basically wanted to get rid of Peck so he could take control of the club.
‘We thought we could get Wynter for conspiracy to murder. So with the help of the informant, we introduced Carl Freeman to Wynter as the solution to his problem – a ruthless underworld hitman who would happily dispatch Peck.
‘It started off promisingly enough. Carl attended a preliminary meeting, set up by the informant, where he was introduced to Wynter. He was wired up and recording everything. At that stage though, Wynter didn’t say anything incriminating enough for us to be able to charge him. I think at that point he just wanted to get the measure of Carl and to establish Carl’s fees. And it seemed that Carl impressed him, as Wynter subsequently contacted him and told him to come to a second meeting where he would lay out the exact details of the hit, the name of the target, the location and so on, and that was also where he’d pay him. A professional hitman would insist on being paid upfront, which was how Carl played it in the first meeting. The details of the target along with the payment for the hit were exactly what we needed in order to nab Wynter.’
‘So what went wrong?’ asked Bailey.
Frank sighed. ‘Well that’s it. We don’t really know. Carl went off to this second meeting by himself and never came back. He literally disappeared right off the face of the earth. They never found his body. Nothing. We presumed he’d made some kind of slip-up, or his cover had somehow got blown, and he’d been murdered by Wynter, or associates of his. Gangland being what it is, if someone disappears suddenly like that, you tend not to hold out much hope of ever seeing them alive again. Body secretly disposed of. Dissolved in acid. Fed to pigs. Thrown down a well. Encased in concrete.
‘We did our best to try and find out what happened to him. But there wasn’t much to go on. We found his car abandoned in a side street in Wapping in the vicinity of Tower Bridge, close to St Katharine Docks. We checked CCTV but there wasn’t any coverage on those particular streets, but we did make sure to scour footage from cameras all across the area… and we couldn’t see any sign of him. But then it was night-time and on that particular evening it was raining quite hard which didn’t help with visibility. Plus there was a good chance he could have changed his appearance for the purposes of his cover role, which meant we could quite easily have missed him.’
‘How about his phone?’ asked Bailey.
‘He was using some pay-as-you-go disposable burner for the job, as was his habit. We didn’t know what the number was so we couldn’t track it or access the call logs. The phone itself was never recovered. As is normal practice, he’d left his regular phone at home along with his wallet, warrant card and anything else relating to his real identity.’
‘So what happened next?’ she asked.
‘Well, much as we tried, we weren’t able to pin it on Wynter. To all intents and purposes we thought he’d got away with killing Carl. Then, later, when we subsequently heard that Peck had been murdered, we assumed that Wynter had found some other hitman to do the job. But at no point did we consider the possibility that Carl might have gone rogue, faked his death and actually gone ahead and done the hit on Peck.’
‘Well, that’s what it looks like,’ said Bailey. ‘Rex first appears on the scene at exactly the point that Carl Freeman goes missing. It looks like Rex killed Peck and it looks like Carl Freeman is Rex.’
‘Now you mention it,’ murmured Frank, his eyes widening in realisation, ‘it’s kind of been staring us in the face all this time.’
‘What do you mean?’ asked Bailey with a puzzled frown.
‘For this operation, Carl Freeman was using the cover name of Carl King. For this particular job we didn’t deem it necessary to run up any supporting identity documents. For a job like this with only one or two meetings, it wouldn’t have been worth it, plus hitmen are supposed to remain relatively anonymous anyhow. I mean, I can’t imagine he would have even used his full cover name. He would have used a nickname. And it just so happens that—’
Bailey snapped her fingers. ‘“Rex” is Latin for “king”, isn’t it? Carl King. King. Rex. The nickname is a play on his cover name.’
Frank nodded slowly with a smile. ‘You were always good at word games Bailey. Must be all those cryptic crosswords you do. I guess Carl liked to play with words as well.’
Frank pensively stroked his greying red moustache, an expression of disquiet on his face.
‘What is it?’ asked Bailey.
‘I simply can’t believe that Carl Freeman just caved in for the money and actually did the hit.’
‘How much was Carl supposed to get paid for the hit on Peck?’ asked Bailey.
‘I think he was planning to charge Wynter around fifty grand or so. From Wynter’s perspective, that would have been a bargain considering how much he was going to make from taking control of the strip club business.’ He paused and frowned. ‘But would that really have been enough for Carl to fake his death and leave a family behind?’
‘He’s got a family?’
‘A wife and young son.’ Frank paused. ‘He never struck me as the type to go rogue. He was a real straight arrow. Highly decorated. Very experienced.’ He sighed. ‘But then who knows? Sometimes you think you know someone, and there’s a whole other side to their personality. A dark side they’ve been concealing for years.’
Bailey chewed her lip. ‘Do you think maybe he’d been harbouring long-term resentments, been planning to jump ship for a while? After all, we know that working for the police isn’t a perfect job. And there are many temptations the underworld can offer. And like they say, everyone has their price.’
Bailey knew all too well that working undercover exposed you directly to the lure of the criminal lifestyle – the wads of money, the fancy restaurants, the designer clothes, the flash cars. It was easy to be seduced by it, particularly when you hung round all day with criminals, letting their twisted morality leach into your own psyche until your standards came to resemble theirs. In some ways you had to let them into your head for how else could you survive and be authentic in that environment without some kind of empathy towards their way of thinking. It was a corrosive world to work in and one that could very well have eaten away at Carl Freeman on the inside without him realising until it was too late.
Well,’ said Frank. ‘With the skillset that he had, Carl Freeman was very well placed to pivot into working as a high-level hitman. Did you know that he was a top marksman? He won a whole load of shooting trophies. And what with his knowledge of how the police operate, he would have been in a very advantageous position to commit murders and evade detection. And as an experienced undercover cop, he would have been expert in concealing his existence.’ He raised one eyebrow. ‘And what’s more, police officers are not required to submit their DNA so his DNA isn’t going to be on the Police National Database, so there was never any way of matching him to all those unsolved hits.’
Bailey was finding herself increasingly intrigued by Carl Freeman. At the beginning Rex had been nothing more than a prolific, shadowy killer, but now she was starting to get an idea of the man lurking behind the notorious reputation. She knew that the more she understood him as an individual, the better her chances of tracking him down… and the better her overall chances of survival.
‘What was your experience of him as a person?’ she asked. ‘You probably knew him better than most people. I never met him myself. Up until yesterday, I’d never even heard of him.’
‘It’s a shame you never met him,’ said Frank. ‘You probably could have learnt a few things from him. He was very good at his job. Extremely conscientious. Very serious. Intense to the point that you sometimes felt uncomfortable round him. He was very fastidious about his cover story and would go to great lengths to build up his “legend”. He would make a huge effort to get into character just like those method actors who really get into their roles. You know, like Robert De Niro in Raging Bull where he put on an extra sixty pounds for the role and got really good at boxing.’
‘Haven’t seen it,’ said Bailey.
‘You’ve never seen Raging Bull?’ said Frank, looking a bit shocked.
‘I’m more of a Rocky fan myself.’
Frank shrugged. ‘Well, anyway, Carl once told me he used to read books by Stanislavski, the guru of method acting. He would get into the mind-set where he would literally become the role. I actually found it quite unnerving when I encountered him like that. It was like he’d totally transformed into his cover identity.’
Bailey knew how crucial it was to project total belief when it came to your cover story. Crooks had a nasty habit of being able to smell if anything was off in even the slightest way. The tiniest chink of self-doubt could spell doom for an operation and pose a very real risk to the physical well-being of the undercover operative.
Frank continued. ‘For the Wynter job, Carl was posing as a ruthless hitman. A stone-cold psychopath. He was developing him as a really nasty character, the kind of individual who would stop at nothing to achieve his ends. I mean, after all, that’s what he’d have to be if he was to be authentic in that deployment. Knowing Carl, he would have really immersed himself in that way of thinking.’ Frank sighed grimly. ‘But in this case, it looks like rather than acting a role, Carl was rehearsing for the real thing.’
23
Charlie Benvenuto closed the kitchen door behind him and walked out into the large back garden which lay behind his sumptuous mock Tudor house. It was autumn now, right at the end of September, and the leaves on the trees were turning red and brown, but Charlie wasn’t able to appreciate the picturesque scenery because his head was too full of anxious thoughts about his upcoming trial.
