Shadow Box (5 page)

Donnie felt embarrassed. He was being told, he felt, that he had cocked up a job. The sense of failure that always lurked close to the surface of Donnie’s shallow depths broke out as a patch of sweat under his armpits.

“So, what can I do to help, Tommy?” Donnie asked.

“Dave will give you the full SP but, long and short of it, I want you to keep a close eye on Eddie Savage.”

“It was a blow-out,” Simon Sharp said.

Sandy Napier sat on the other side of the desk and looked closely again at the report.

“Forensics have been over the vehicle with a fine-tooth comb. The tyre was bald on the inside and the tracking was out, which can’t have helped,” Sharp continued. “There was also debris found on the road near by, which may have contributed. The engineering boys have been given a bollocking.”

Tony rubbed a hand over his stubbled jaw. He hadn’t shaved for a few days; the dressing on the side of his face prevented it. I had got off quite lightly: mild concussion, cuts and bruises and a painful lump on the side of the head. We had been in and out of casualty within a few hours and were driven back to HQ in Beaconsfield.

“It just feels too much like a coincidence,” Tony said. “Me and him on the way here, black car… I’ve been doing this job long enough to know when something feels wrong.”

“We’ve checked every angle, Tony,” Sharp insisted.

Napier nodded. “I know how it looks, but the motorway cameras have been checked. The black BMW was legit, registered to a Mr Khan in Edgbaston. He wasn’t even much over the speed limit. That’s all there is to it. He wasn’t responsible for you crashing, it was a tyre blowing out at speed, pure and simple.”

I could see that Tony was having none of it. Whether it was deliberate or a complete accident, he didn’t like the omen.

“So we need to get you back on track, Mr Savage,” Sandy Napier said. “I hope you don’t mind me saying, but you’ve put on a few pounds.”

It was true. I hadn’t exactly kept up a fitness regime in Spain, and since I’d been back, apart from the odd run round Regent’s Park I’d been a bit of a couch potato.

“We’ll get you back down to fighting weight,” Napier assured me. “Also we want to train you up in a few surveillance techniques. Be handy. Good to have you back, Savage.”

I felt a little swell of pride. Kind words from Napier were as rare as rocking horse manure.

“Thank you, sir,” I said.

Half an hour later, Simon Sharp finished eating and went back to his desk, leaving me and Tony alone. Lunch was canteen spaghetti bolognese. The tomato sauce was too acidic and the dried parmesan smelled a bit vomity. I’d learned to add a pinch of sugar and a splash of milk to tomato sauces to take out the sharpness. And to use fresh parmesan.

Sharp had left half of his, but I was hungry. So was Tony, judging by the slurping noise as he sucked the pasta in and the trickle of orange sauce that stuck to his chin.

“He doesn’t eat much,” I said, nodding at Sharp’s plate.

“Got his figure to think of; you might take a leaf out of his book.” Tony grinned at me and winked, then helped himself to some of Sharp’s leftover spag bol.

I paused for a minute. I wanted to ask Tony about Sharp but wasn’t sure how to approach it.

“So, Simon’s on my case now, full time?”

“Sure,” Tony said. “That OK?” He wiped the last of the sauce from his chin with a paper serviette and belched.

“Yeah,” I said. “Fine. He seems cool.”

“He’s a good agent,” Tony said. “Bright as a whip. Got degrees in rocket science and ancient Serbo-Croat, or something.”

“Yeah, he’s smart. Is he…?”

Tony looked up at me from the bowl of rhubarb crumble that he had swapped for his empty pasta plate.

“Is he what?”

“Is he gay?”

Tony nodded. “Sure. Got a problem with that?”

“No, of course not,” I said. I didn’t. “I just wanted to know.”

“Good,” Tony said, between spoonfuls of crumble. “Because he’s the best man for the job. He was Ian Baylis’s protégé. Baylis took him under his wing, trained him up: languages, surveillance … he’s an all-rounder.”

Baylis had been
my
original case officer. He hadn’t exactly taken me under his wing. We’d disliked each other on sight.

“Sharpie kept an eye on you in Spain from time to time.”

“Really?” My case officer on the Costa had been Anna Moore. I’d got a little too close to Anna, which I suspect is why I’d had a new handler assigned to me.

“You wouldn’t have seen him, though. He disappears like a fleeting shadow. He spirited your girl Juana back to your apartment the night it all kicked off in Benalmádena.”

“I knew someone from our firm must have looked after her, but I never saw anyone.”

“Sharp’s good, I told you.”

“Didn’t save her, though…”

Tony raised his eyebrows to silence me. I felt a hand on my shoulder. I hadn’t seen Simon come back to the canteen or heard him approach.

“We need to get on, Eddie,” he said. Everyone at HQ seemed to have reverted to “Eddie”, my original cover name. Tony dismissed me with a flick of his fingers as he chewed his crumble.

I followed Sharp to the office we were to share while I was here. It was very tidy: everything was stacked in neat piles on the desk. A Mac laptop glowed on Sharp’s desk; a screensaver with a
Wizard of Oz
film poster was the only bit of colour in the room. He rebooted the screen, which opened to Facebook.

“We’re going to do some very basic surveillance to kick off.”

“FB?” I asked.

“It’s made some of our work very easy. The link-ups you can get through a few Facebook trawls deliver the kind of basic intel you could have only dreamed about a few years ago. We’re working with the Facebook people so we can access all users. You got your laptop?”

I opened my Mac and fired it up. My screen showed the purple swirling pattern that came ready loaded. I didn’t like personalizing my desktop and was surprised that Sharp did; I thought it gave too much away.

“I’m going to send you a new email address to log on to Facebook,” Sharp said. “You will use it only for this case. It will supersede any other addresses you’ve had. You can cache anything else you want to keep on a portable hard drive. Of course, the archives here will always have back-up.”

Sharp typed in an address and pressed send.

A new window opened on my desktop: an internal message from Sharp. I opened it and read my new email address: [email protected]

“Kelly?” I asked, incredulous. “Kieran Kelly? What the…?”

“You’re joking,” I said to Tony. “Kieran Kelly? What are you thinking?”

Tony was tilted back in his office chair, sipping coffee, weaving a ballpoint in and out of his fingers.

“New cover. Sharpie’s idea,” he said, and winked.

Sharp brought up some Photoshop images on his laptop, pictures of me that had been altered. He pointed to one of them. “If you look at the basic shape of your face, it is not a million miles away from the shape of Tommy or Patsy Kelly’s. We’ve run a DNA check and you do share a few of their Celtic genes, probably Irish, so you are roughly within the same food group, so to speak.”

“What are my other genes?” I asked. I was interested, knowing little about my background beyond my mum.

“You’re a mixed bag,” Tony said. He grinned. “A bit of a mongrel, but it’s the Mick bit we’re looking for.”

Sharp laid mugshots of Tommy and Patsy Kelly over the photos of me, stretched and squeezed them in Photoshop until the size and shape roughly matched that of mine. Then he began making the layers of the other faces more translucent until they were just ghosted over my own. I could see a new person emerging. He rubbed out some bits and airbrushed others.

“Your eyes are already grey-blue, which is close enough,” Sharp said. “We can redden up your hair a little without making you a complete ginge, maybe put a bit of wave in it.”

“Steady,” I said. My hair had reverted to its natural dirty blond, straight as an arrow.

The Photoshop picture on the laptop was still recognizably me, but had an unmistakable look of one of the Kelly brothers about it too.

“You’re Kieran Kelly, Patsy’s son from an earlier relationship.”

“I’m Patsy Kelly’s
son
now?” I shook my head in disbelief. “How does that work?”

“It all stacks up pretty well. I’ve put a watertight cover together for you,” Sharp explained. “Patsy’s no longer around to disclaim you, and because Tommy wants doors opened for you, he’ll back the story up if necessary.”

“It’s really another layer of protection,” Tony continued. “No villain’s going to question you if you’re family.”

“So not content with having me infiltrate the most dangerous family of villains you could hope to meet, you now want me to actually
be
a Kelly?”

Tony looked at Simon Sharp, who nodded.

“Yup. ’Bout the size of it,” Tony said.

“Hello, handsome.”

I opened my eyes and looked in the mirror to see Anna Moore standing behind me. It had been a while. She’d got me out of Spain the day the car bomb killed Juana. I hadn’t been in any kind of mood to talk at the time.

I wasn’t in the mood right now, either, but it was a distraction from the scratching pain on my arm.

“I thought I’d come and see how your makeover’s going.” She cocked her head to one side and studied me in the mirror. “Nice job, Sharpie,” she said. She and Simon Sharp stood back and admired the work that had been done so far. It was fairly subtle, I have to say. My hair had been dyed a little darker and redder and cut into a choppy crop. Some wax had been rubbed in and tousled about, making me look a bit rougher and borderline chavvy. A few freckles had been henna-dyed across my nose and cheeks, breaking up my normally clear skin. My eyebrows had been reshaped and dyed and, sitting there, bare-chested with a gold chain round my neck, I could have mistaken myself for one of the Kelly family, a boyish amalgam of Tommy and Patsy.

The pain in my arm got momentarily worse and I winced as the buzzing went to a higher pitch. Anna leant in to look as the tattooist stretched the skin taut across my bicep with a latex-gloved hand.

“Don’t be a wuss,” Anna joked. “You’ve been through worse.”

I
had
felt worse pain, admittedly, but although the insistent scratching of the tattooist’s needle burned, what hurt more was submitting voluntarily to being permanently marked as a member of a crime family. Tony had said it could be lasered off at a later date, but in the meantime, the image that was emerging from the bloody mess on my arm identified me as one of theirs. I remembered seeing the same on Jason Kelly’s arm among the Celtic bands and Ninja flashes: a green shamrock and a harp, fake membership of a club to which I didn’t want to belong.

Half an hour later, with my bare arm wrapped in cling film to protect my fresh tat, I went through my new identity on paper. The birth certificate looked genuine enough: