Brand New Friend Read online

  ‘He’s wearing a fleece with your logo on it,’ said DC Brayfield.

  Again Mark said nothing. Paolo remembered that for all his energy he could be still, too, like an animal at rest. Or focused on prey.

  ‘We’ll need a list of all the people who had one.’

  ‘That might be hard. If people turn up and they need one, they get one. I don’t keep a note.’

  ‘You just give them away?’

  DS Afzal said, ‘Are the trustees happy with that? What about the treasurer?’

  ‘They trust me to get on with things. Or they did until today,’ he said, as an afterthought. ‘Most people don’t keep them. They borrow them for a session to keep their clothes clean and then give them back. Some of our guys don’t have another coat, so they keep them.’

  DC Brayfield said, ‘Do you have one of them?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You’re not wearing it now, Mr –’ DS Afzal tripped over Mark’s name.

  ‘Just call me Mark.’

  ‘That bit’s real then,’ said DC Brayfield, sticking out her chin.

  ‘I wear it for gardening,’ said Mark. ‘It should be hanging in the shed.’

  ‘It just occurs to me,’ said DS Afzal thoughtfully, ‘that you bear more than a passing resemblance to the dead man.’

  ‘He’s got to be fifteen years older than me,’ said Mark.

  ‘But it’s dark out there. You’re around the same height, short hair, similarly dressed. This could be a case of mistaken identity. If you were the intended victim,’ said DS Afzal, ‘that throws up a whole other range of suspects.’

  ‘Who doesn’t want to kill you?’ said DC Brayfield. ‘Activists you’ve betrayed, victims who didn’t get justice because a conviction would have blown your cover...’

  ‘Of course it could be a police officer,’ said Paolo, then berated himself. Don’t get involved. You’re a journalist. A BBC journalist for fuck’s sake. You stand on the sidelines, impeccably impartial. You don’t do anything.

  ‘And what about your personal life?’ DC Brayfield said, glancing meaningfully at Paolo before focusing her beam on Mark, trying to insinuate tough-cop innuendo.

  ‘I don’t have a personal life,’ said Mark.

  ‘Huh,’ she said. ‘You have plenty to hide, though, don’t you? Maybe the dead man had something on you.’

  ‘I can’t be both the murderer and the intended victim,’ said Mark.

  Paolo was thinking. Mark called him at three but he could have known earlier. The blog article was published at 13.23, he’d checked that when he first read it. When did they contact Mark? Was Mark hoping nothing could come of it? They spoke to the Met too. So there were people in the police who knew the story was coming. Had someone hoped to silence Mark? Or was this all just a tragic coincidence?

  ‘Wouldn’t it make more sense to establish who the actual victim is first?’ asked Paolo.

  ‘Thank you for sharing your expertise,’ said DS Afzal. Three pairs of eyes looked pityingly at Paolo. The civilian.

  4

  ‘You said he’s got to be fifteen years older,’ said Paolo. They were in his hotel room. He’d convinced Mark that going back to his place wasn’t a good idea. There might be journalists – and worse – looking for him.

  ‘Well, he looked older, didn’t he?’ Mark was perched awkwardly on the edge of a twin bed. Here, among all the subtle earth-tone furnishings and chemically bright surfaces, he looked dishevelled and a little grubby. The overhead light seemed to bother him. Back in his own lair, he had just looked to Paolo like he always did, only older. He supposed they were all grubby back then, in the days of immersion heaters and tide-marked baths and lugging your clothes to the laundrette.

  ‘People don’t say that, though. Not off the cuff. They say ten, or twenty. Fifteen is too specific.’ Paolo lay back on the top of his bed.

  ‘I was rounding,’ said Mark quietly. ‘He was thirteen years and seven months older than me. And nine days.’

  I’m not going to ask, thought Paolo. I’m just going to wait for him to tell me.

  ‘He was my handler. Sid.’

  ‘Last name?’

  Mark hesitated. ‘You’re not recording are you?’

  ‘I should be. But no. Not if you don’t want me to.’

  ‘Sid Jenkins,’ said Mark.

  ‘Was that his real name or –’

  ‘Normally we kept our real first name because it’s really hard not to react when you hear it. Isn’t it, Paul?’

  Paolo tensed but didn’t respond.

  Mark continued. ‘But Sid was an unusual name, even for his generation. So he didn’t take on the identity of a “Sid”. When he went undercover, he told people Sid was a nickname that his family gave him when he was a kid. By the time I knew him he was no longer undercover. He was training people like me.’

  ‘Why was he here?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Mark.

  ‘Something to do with the breaking news would seem a reasonable assumption.’

  ‘I suppose.’

  ‘The fancy dress seems a bit excessive. And why was he wearing that fleece?’

  ‘Like I said to the police –’

  ‘That explains how but not why,’ said Paolo.

  Mark didn’t answer. He seemed lost in thought.

  ‘Shit,’ said Paolo. ‘You were close to this guy. I’m sorry. I just thought – it was another time, another life –’

  ‘My life,’ said Mark.

  ‘One of them, anyway,’ said Paolo. ‘You haven’t been in touch with him?’

  ‘Not since I left. That was part of the deal. I couldn’t ever go back.’

  Mark paused as if to think before speaking. Paolo remembered that he had often done that. ‘Sid always took good care of me. When I decided that I didn’t want to be PC Swift any more, he made it all work. Of course, they didn’t have much choice.’

  ‘If they exposed you, you’d expose them?’

  Mark nodded.

  ‘Would all this, you being outed, affect him?’

  Mark sighed. ‘I don’t know. Perhaps. People will start digging, won’t they? But I’m not sure anyone would know about Sid, outside a small bunch of us. And I don’t think they’d tell. I wouldn’t.’

  Paolo thought of Bob Lambert, perhaps the most notorious of the former undercover officers. He had fathered a child with an activist while undercover, although he was already married, and later disappeared from her life.

  He had ignored his own advice which was to keep a low profile when returning from undercover life. He had become a prominent academic and public speaker and that had led to his real identity being discovered by a group of activists who had known him when he was undercover.

  Paolo thought for a moment. ‘How would Sid know about the story if it only broke today?’

  ‘I guess he must be retired now. But maybe he still has contacts at the Met.’

  ‘He had to get into his comedy street-drinker garb, find out where you worked, and travel from who knows where to come and see you. Unless he was the one who outed you.’

  Mark looked doubtful.

  ‘What did Sid want from you?’ asked Paolo. ‘Is there something else that hasn’t come out yet? Something that could have harmed him personally?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘So why didn’t you just tell the police who he was?’

  ‘Because that would make me a suspect and they might arrest me.’

  ‘But –’

  ‘You’re not going to say I shouldn’t be worried if I’ve got nothing to hide.’

  ‘They’ll find out soon enough.’

  Mark didn’t respond. Paolo sighed and put his head back on the pillow. It had been a long day. Too much had happened, too much to process. Mark was already stretched out on the other bed.

  ‘So how do I know you didn’t kill him?’

  Silence. A silence that to Paolo felt fraught with significance. He waited. Then glanced across at Mark. He w
as asleep! After all that had happened he had just dropped off, while Paolo’s head was spinning. He had so many questions, but Mark was in no hurry to answer them.

  All Paolo’s memories were now unreliable. And it somehow heightened the indignity that while he had seen nothing in Mark, Mark had been closely observing him back then, had spotted his secret, like a proper spy.

  5

  Paul had first pretended to be Italian one Saturday in Bristol. He and his mate from school had gone there from Swindon to hang around with the punks outside HMV, talking gigs and blue vinyl. He hadn’t tried it on the punks. They made a point of being unimpressed by everything. But they’d met a couple of girls later, at the bus station. He’d spouted the few Italian phrases he knew, supplemented with some school French, to convince them he was an exchange student. He immediately became more interesting to them than his better-looking friend.

  Later he’d changed his name by deed poll. Eighteen with a swagger, he’d walked into a local law firm in town, fully expecting to be thrown out, but it was easily done, just a matter of signing a form and handing over a fee. He paid it out of the money he’d earned working Saturdays in a supermarket.

  He hadn’t told his parents before he left for university to study Arabic and French. They waved off Paul at the National Express station in Swindon, little knowing he’d arrive in Leeds as Paolo.

  He’d loaded up the rucksack he’d bought for Glastonbury and an old suitcase he found in the attic. He’d planned to take his record collection in his suitcase till he tried to lift it. He’d selected his six favourite albums and put the rest on cassettes. He had a little cassette-radio which he also packed. He didn’t have a record player but someone in halls would. Besides, those albums weren’t for listening to. They were for display. People would see them. The right people would understand. The rest didn’t matter.

  As he packed he practised thinking of himself as Paolo. If he could sing he would have been in a band, writing lyrics decrying the emptiness of his existence, but instead he thought Paolo would be an aid worker, if he wasn’t a novelist, an idea fuelled by reading Orwell and Graham Greene and New Internationalist. Drinking alone in a bar somewhere sun-baked and remote. He’d be worldly and despairing, sleeping with a local woman who was beautiful and melancholic but would never truly understand him, even after he became fluent in the local language.

  Paul would have taken his ‘A’ Levels and started work in an office as his mother wanted. His disappointingly unexotic Italian mother. She hid it well. A slight accent, an olive complexion which she toned down with face powder, although other people’s mums were sporting sunbed tans long after they’d forgotten their two weeks in Corfu. She’d been working as a waitress when she met his dad, they’d got married, had him and his brother, proceeded to be like everyone else. His dad worked at the car factory, had somehow survived the successive waves of redundancies, and she had a part-time job in the offices there. They were what his second-hand copy of Sociology for Beginners called affluent workers.

  She couldn’t even cook. They didn’t have pizza, apart from the cardboard-like frozen discs that people had with chips, they only had spaghetti bolognese made with a sauce from a sachet. Mostly they got burger and chips or faggots and mash.

  When he got to Leeds his name marked him out as he’d known it would. Public-school girls in Doc Marten shoes asked if he spent much time in Italy. He wove a reasonably plausible account of huge family dinners and home-made ice-cream. Sometimes they talked about their time in Tuscany (he didn’t even know where that was, his mother was from a village outside Naples) and asked if they had a house back home.

  He would put on a look of repressed courage and say that his mother’s family had lost everything in the war. That may have been true, he didn’t know. His mother never talked about her background and expressed no interest in going back. It had made him angry, back then, as if she were determined to never be interesting in any way at all.

  He never even learnt Italian from his mother. Some idea that it would hold him back if she didn’t speak English to him. She had cost him the chance to be bilingual! It was only later it occurred to him that his facility with French, with the rhythms and structure of a Romance language, might owe something to the secret words of a lonely mother to her baby. Would she not have comforted herself and him with words from home in a foreign land?

  Paolo got up and hung up his suit. He undressed in the bathroom and cleaned his teeth. When he came back Mark was under the covers, apparently fully clothed. So he could make a quick escape if he had to?

  Paolo laid down and turned out the light but his mind was still busy with the endlessly fascinating subject of himself.

  Of course when he wrote his memoirs he’d be expected to say that deep down he still had that insecurity, that he was still Paul from Swindon, beneath the swagger and the good tailoring. But it wasn’t true. He’d got out. He’d proved that the world was a bigger, more brilliant, darker, more complex and fascinating place than he’d been allowed to imagine. He’d never looked back.

  Besides, he may have elaborated on his biography but he didn’t create a whole new identity. Unlike the person – the stranger – snoring in the bed next to him.

  He didn’t even know why Mark had called him. Did he need something from Paolo? Did he want to tell his story or to suppress it? Good luck with that now. Or was there something else? He thought that instead of counting sheep he would make a mental list of all the questions he had to ask Mark in the morning.

  If he made it that far, he thought wryly, but his gut feeling was that Mark would not murder him in his bed. He’d spent many years interviewing politicians and diplomats and their spokespeople. He’d had a lot of practice at spotting lies and he wasn’t often wrong.

  On that almost comforting thought he finally drifted into sleep.

  6

  Paolo woke to see Mark sitting on the room’s one chair at the foot of his bed, scrolling through his phone.

  Paolo looked for his own phone by the bed but it wasn’t there.

  ‘I’ve got it,’ said Mark, holding up the phone in his hand.

  ‘You’ve hacked it?’

  ‘Hardly. I watched you put your code in last night. You should have two-step verification, especially with your job.’

  ‘Thanks for the advice. Why can’t you use your own?’

  ‘I don’t have one. You don’t know who’s monitoring it.’

  ‘I do. I can see him.’

  ‘I’m just checking the internet. I want to see what they’re saying about me.’

  ‘And Sid?’

  He didn’t answer, just continued reading.

  ‘So what are they saying?’

  ‘You can have a look when I’ve finished. Here, have this.’

  He threw something at Paolo. Paolo caught it. It was an old-school Nokia.

  ‘It doesn’t have a touchscreen,’ said Paolo.

  ‘It’s a pay-as-you-go. I’ll call you on it when I need to.’

  ‘How do I call you?

  ‘Memorise this number.’ He handed him a slip of paper.

  ‘I’ll just put it in this phone.’

  ‘No! It’ll be traceable then.’

  ‘I’ve got better things to do than memorise phone numbers.’

  ‘One. You only have to memorise one. You passed exams didn’t you? By learning stuff?’

  Paolo grunted and put the TV on, flicked through the channels to see if Mark’s name was mentioned. It wasn’t. Paolo scanned the news ticker on Sky (BBC’s Breakfast didn’t have one, because no one in the morning was ever in a hurry, were they?) and turned it off.

  ‘You’re on that programme?’ said Mark.

  ‘Not today.’ He’d got a text just before midnight to say they were passing on the cholera story in favour of a report on talking bins in seaside resorts.

  ‘But sometimes? That’s what it says on your BBC bio.’

  Paolo nodded and waited for Mark to take the piss. But the l
ook in Mark’s eyes was not condescension. It was pity.

  Mark’s eyes returned to the screen. Paolo resented not having his phone, like having to share toys when you were a kid.

  ‘It says here the police are holding a press conference this morning about last night’s murder. Does that mean they know something?’

  ‘Probably just an appeal for witnesses. They might be asking for an ID of Sid if they don’t know who he is yet. I guess it depends on how far he was taking his method acting. Do you think he would be carrying his own wallet or driving licence?’

  Mark didn’t answer. He got to his feet.

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘To work.’

  ‘You can’t go!’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Are you saying last night was just a one-time thing?’

  Student humour. Mark looked at him blankly. It occurred to Paolo that back in the day he had always thought that Mark had a gravitas, a maturity that the rest of them lacked. Now he wondered if he just had no sense of humour.

  Paolo sighed. ‘It will still be a crime scene. You won’t be able to get in. The media will be all over you. Unless you plan to go in disguise.’

  More blankness. Then he said, ‘Some of the guys who use the garden are vulnerable. If they turn up and see a crime scene and no familiar faces it will freak them out. I can at least talk to them.’ He put on his coat. ‘So have a good trip home.’

  ‘I’m not going anywhere.’

  ‘You should.’

  ‘You’re the one who asked me to come up here. Presumably you thought I could help manage the media, or was it just a sudden wish to catch up –’

  ‘Things have changed, haven’t they?’ said Mark. ‘Sid’s dead. Being around me isn’t a good idea. I don’t want to put you in danger.’

  ‘Mark, I’ve covered terrorism in the Sinai. Mubarak’s crackdown on the Arab Spring. I can deal with the mean streets of Leeds.’

  Mark headed for the door then stopped. ‘Oh. There’s a message from Salma. She wants to know if you can take the girls to Brownies.’

  ‘Your consideration for my welfare is very moving, but think about it. You’re outed, Sid’s dead. We don’t know whether you or Sid was the intended victim. Either way, it seems to be connected to your time spying on us. This could threaten me as well.’