In the Absence of Iles Read Online Free PDF Page B

in the firms don’t like fifties. They’re conspicuous when spent, and might, in any case, include forgeries. Twenties OKish, but producing a lot of them in the shop can be noticeable, too. Rubber-band the wad with no doubling over of the notes, repeat, no doubling over of the notes, so the recipient can flip-check at once to see it’s real right through not just a token bit of currency on top and the rest blank paper, sometimes a jolly trick used by villains and us. The speed of the deal could be crucial.’
    A West Country accent? Maybe, but so slight as to be from anywhere between Gloucester and Land’s End. Put on? Definitely not Hull or Liverpool or Cockneydom. Yes, B liked lists and getting things ordered. Esther had that correct. She was surprised, though, by B’s abrupt move from high confidence to a calamity script, and felt disturbed. When B spoke of tragedy, she would almost certainly mean the Iles tale. Did he neglect the exit structure for his implanted detective?
    ‘Somehow, you have to devise emergency support that is always on hand and close but never obvious – the eternal, agonizing undercover quandary, ‘ B said. ‘You are all of Chief Police Officer level, and will no doubt delegate the actual management of any undercover operation to one of your senior staff. But the overall strategy and responsibility has to be yours, which is why the Fieldfare invitations for this conference are confined to ACPO ranks.’
    Certainly, Esther would delegate. As B said, Assistant Chiefs
did
delegate. They’d climbed above the nitty-gritty and into what B called the strategic. Delegation was not a simple game. At that discussion with her two top detectives about the Cormax Turton Guild, a long time before Fieldfare, Esther wondered which of the pair she’d tell to control the undercover job, if she did decide to give it a whirl. She’d failed to make the selection then, and still couldn’t get her brain to settle who’d do it best. Perhaps the Fieldfare contributions from A and/or B, and/or whoever else took part over the couple of days, would eventually help.
    B said: ‘A name. I’m going to talk to you about a name.
My
name. I don’t mean my real name, obviously. I mean the name I might take to go undercover. As you’re all aware, my
real
name is . . . well, is B. That’s to say, B conceals my real name because my
real
real name is a protected species known only to my mother, the armoury and the Pay Office. But, when I’m doing my crooked role in a firm, I need a working name, and I must become totally the person represented by that name. So, let’s say I pick the name Dawn. It’s got to be a name that sounds as though it could be right. I’m among people who have begun to let me in, but they’re still suspicious. They’re suspicious of everyone they haven’t seen around for at least months, and they’re suspicious of them, too. Incidentally, when you select your officer for Out-location it has to be someone with no vivid background of past detective work or he/she is likely to be already familiar to the firms. This proviso can mean that the officer must be young and fairly inexperienced – which may add to risk. And it can mean, too, that he/she is likely to have worked in an outlying police station, not somewhere central and major: distance helps with disguise. Preferably, the officer will have no dependants, though some elasticity might be permitted on that.
    ‘But about names: personally, I wouldn’t pick one that sounds like I’m trying hard to come across as through-and-through naffdom and therefore suited to small jobs, such as being called after her parents’ honeymoon spot, Bude, or a soccer team – Villa. “Dawn” has good, middle-ground credibility. Yes, it’s workable. But then, what I noticed one day was people in the firm started using this name too damn much. Eerie. Chilling. It was, “Dawn, there’s a rave at Colly’s Palace Friday through Saturday, Dawn. We must have