‘She was a leading light in it,’ Beardmore grunted. ‘They couldn’t have done it without her.’
Blake chewed on her pen. ‘Have you ever thought about coming to work for me in Robbery Squad?’
Beardmore pointedly harrumphed – a message Lucy received loud and clear.
‘It’s certainly something I’d be interested in, ma’am,’ she said. ‘But well, I’ve got quite a bit of work on in CID at the mo.’
Blake shrugged. ‘We haven’t got any vacancies at present, anyway. But if something comes up, I’ll get Danny here to give you a shout, so you can get your application in early.’
‘I will, ma’am. Thank you.’
‘Okay.’ Blake shuffled the paperwork. ‘Leave this lot with me. I’ll keep you informed.’
Lucy nodded and smiled, and as she left the office, walking side by side with Beardmore, felt completely re-energised. It was always a thrill to think you’d made an impact on someone who counted.
But they were only halfway down the stairs, when Beardmore said: ‘Don’t get any ideas about that. Robbery Squad are an effective unit, but you know what things are like. One day the money’s there, the next it isn’t. Friday night, they lock up a load of blaggers. Saturday night, they celebrate it. Monday morning, they’ve all been shunted back to Division.’
Lucy wasn’t sure how to respond, but she knew that he was right.
‘Hey, Lucy!’ someone called down from the top of the stairs.
They turned and saw Danny Tucker descending.
‘Sarge?’ she replied.
‘Quick word?’ he asked.
Taking the hint, Beardmore turned and continued down. ‘Just remember, the jobs are piling up,’ he said over his shoulder.
Lucy turned back to Tucker, who grinned, displaying a neat row of pearly whites.
‘This is good stuff you’ve brought us,’ he said. ‘Thanks very much.’
Unsure how to reply, she nodded.
‘We’re actually working a big case at present,’ he said.
‘Yeah, I saw the pics. That’s the Saturday Street Gang, isn’t it?’
‘Oh, you heard about that?’
‘How could I not? Seven cash-in-transit robberies in two months. But I didn’t know Saturday Street had done any jobs on the N.’
‘Well … they haven’t,’ Tucker admitted. ‘But when we were still the Manchester Robbery Squad, our unit was getting very close to them. It only seemed reasonable we should continue the enquiry after they broke us up. It’d be a feather in our cap if we could pull those bastards in. But it’s the same with this case you’ve brought us. I mean, we’re busy … but we can never be too busy at present, if you know what I mean. Got to justify our existence somehow. Anyway …’ Fleetingly, he seemed awkward, as if he wasn’t quite sure what to say next. ‘You’ve done a lot of groundwork for us here. This is great, so thanks very much for that. I’ll keep you clued in, let you know how we get on.’
‘Thanks, sarge.’ Lucy couldn’t help wondering why he’d come downstairs to repeat DI Blake’s promise.
‘Hey, listen …’ He smiled again, which he seemed to do a lot – and why not, it was far from unattractive. ‘This is Robbery Squad. We don’t do titles. Call me “Danny”.’
‘I will … thanks.’
He headed back upstairs. Lucy watched him go for a teensy bit longer than she perhaps normally would, before turning and walking on down to CID.
Ordinary Joe Lazenby didn’t particularly want to go home that evening.
Immediately after the incident in Hogarth’s Cocktail Lounge, he drove aimlessly around the town for perhaps an hour. All along of course, he’d known that there were higher powers in this world he’d infiltrated. Yet, things had gone so smoothly for so long that he’d begun to feel, perhaps not invincible, but certainly a master of his own destiny. During the working day, he headed up a relatively lowly admin department at Crowley Technical College. He earned a reasonable wage from it, and he was treated with civility and taken fairly seriously by the academics on campus, even if in truth he suspected that they thought him a jumped-up little jobsworth who was no more than a glorified paper-pusher. But he made an okay living. He owned a large detached house on Coxcombe Avenue, which was on the Cotely Barn estate on the edge of Crowley golf course, an affluent part of town; he drove a decent enough motor – a metallic beige Ford Galaxy; and he and his family went on a nice holiday once a year – cruising was the in-thing currently, and they’d so far done the Western Med, the Eastern Med, the Caribbean and next August they were looking forward to doing the Norwegian fjords. On the surface, everything was hunky-dory.
But in actual fact, this commonplaceness was the problem.
For quite some time, Joe Lazenby had been deeply frustrated by his none too awe-inspiring status. Throughout his adulthood, he’d felt that, unless he was to diversify into something much more lucrative, and dare he say it, dangerous, he was never going to fulfil his lifetime’s ambition, which was to be a man of substance, of ingenuity, of latent but undeniable power.
And so he had diversified, and it had been a rocky road – he’d taken chances, both financial and actual, first getting into the drugs-importation market through former school-friends who’d long ago taken to crime and shipped their produce in through the Liverpool docks. But having earned the trust of his Colombian suppliers by providing all the cash required upfront and on time, and wowing them with tales of his previously untapped middle-class market, he had completely divested himself of those awkward, insolent middlemen. Lazenby got a huge kick from this alone, convinced that his forward-planning was second-to-none, and that his nose for a deal and an innate working knowledge of the real world made those elitist, muddle-headed book-dwellers at the college shrink to childlike insignificance. He’d been running his low-key op for three years now, the money had poured in, and the respect he’d so long yearned for had finally arrived; perhaps not up there in the surface world, but certainly among those who mattered.
And then today had come along.
When Lazenby got home that night, he couldn’t settle. His wife, Geraldine, had already made dinner. He was late and so it had gone cold, but she didn’t comment about this because she knew he was putting in such enormously long hours at the college these days – at least, that was what he told her – which meant they were far better off financially than they’d ever been before.
After dinner, Lazenby kissed his two children, Maggie and Joseph junior, and Geraldine put them to bed. The normal process now would be for Lazenby and his wife to shower, change into their pyjamas, slippers and dressing gowns, and snuggle up on the sofa in front of the real-flame gas fire and mid-evening TV, sipping mugs of cocoa and commenting casually on the events of their respective days;
