Ryan is finally about to meet him, the man in charge of the operation. The big guy. He will have hundreds of foot soldiers, of associates, multiple ops. The car thefts, the drugs, the stolen baby – they’re only a tiny part of it.
Ryan doesn’t know how the houses he targets are always empty, and he doesn’t yet know where baby Eve has gone, but he’s working it all out: and look. Here, walking in the cold to a warehouse in Birkenhead, he’s infiltrated all the way to the top.
Angela and Ryan have been instructed by Ezra to meet him here, eight o’clock at night. After you meet the boss, you get given better jobs, more important jobs. And, crucially, better intel. Ryan’s gone in wired, for the first time, on a wing and a prayer that the big boss won’t check him over.
Leo says he won’t, says you don’t meet the boss without trust. ‘If he even
intimates it,’ Leo said last night on the phone, ‘you act so fucking offended he’s quaking.’
‘Too right,’ Ryan had said. Not the sort of sentence he would usually say.
Sometimes, he feels like he is becoming the person he is pretending to be. Darker, more volatile.
Ryan and Angela walk in silence for a few minutes more, watching cars being loaded and unloaded on to ships, people coming and going. As they near the warehouse, their body language changes. Angela becomes Nicola, Ryan watches it happen; her walk becomes a swagger, her mannerisms change.
Ryan doesn’t know how his own body language changes, only that it does.
The warehouse has no sign up above it. It’s closed down, the perfect
place for these sorts of dealings. Ryan hopes it has good acoustics for the team who are listening in, gathering evidence with which to incriminate. Ryan knocks twice on the dark green roller-shuttered door, as directed, then waits. Angela is trembling. She isn’t as together as she first appears.
Ryan thinks she is just as shit scared as he is. Of course, it has occurred to him that this could be it: a sting. They could be rumbled. They could be
done for. Somehow, Ryan doesn’t care. And, when he feels he does, he thinks of her, baby Eve, lost and alone, not at sea, but as good as.
‘In,’ says a voice from around the side. Ryan and Angela move around
the edge of the building and find a door, propped open, allowing the outside security light to illuminate a shaft of the warehouse.
It’s otherwise empty, rows and rows and rows of floor-to-ceiling shelving, containing nothing. In the expanse of the huge room stands a tall man, younger than Ryan expected. He isn’t moving at all, just standing,
arms folded, wearing all black clothes. He has dark hair and a goatee.
‘The two musketeers,’ he says. He tosses the end of a cigarette which embers at his feet for a few seconds before fizzling to nothing. ‘Got a job
for you – need you to collect a list of empty properties. Going to send you an address now.’
Almost instantaneously, Ryan’s burner phone beeps with a single line of text from – yes! – an actual number. It’s an address on a high street in Liverpool.
This is it. This man in charge of it all is going to trust them with how he gets his intel about which cars to steal.
‘You await further instructions,’ he says to them.
‘Cool, thanks, mate,’ Ryan says, altering the cadence of his natural voice. The man tilts his head back. ‘Where you from?’
‘Manchester.’
He makes an impatient gesture. ‘Before that.’
‘Always Manchester, but got a Welsh dad,’ he says. It’s the truth; they decided he should stick to this rather than try out an accent.
‘You?’ the man asks Angela.
‘Yeah, round here,’ she says, in perfect Scouse, even though she is from Leigh. Undercover officers are not often local. Too much chance someone
would know them, blow their cover.
The man crosses the warehouse to them, black boots crunching the grit and grime on the floor. ‘It’s Joseph,’ he says, extending a hand to Ryan, then to Angela.
‘Nicola,’ she says.
Joseph holds his hands up. ‘My standard warning. If you double-cross me. If you dob me in. If you’re DS. If you slip up. I will do the time. And then – I will fucking come and kill you. Okay?’
‘Likewise,’ Ryan says.
‘Let’s shake on it then,’ Joseph says.
‘Kelly,’ Ryan says as he grasps Joseph’s hand. ‘Good to meet you.’
Kelly. The alias Ryan had to choose for himself. ‘Something you’d turn your head to,’ Leo advised. ‘Something familiar. That’s the first test they do to check you’re not coppers. Call your name in a bar, see if your head swivels.’
‘I’d always answer to my brother’s name,’ Ryan had said in a low voice, thinking of the night, the night his brother got in too deep, owed so much money, so many favours. The night his brother tied the noose. They’d found him too late, by about half an hour, the coroner later said. He’d done it in
the loft. He hadn’t wanted to be found.
