I saw his eyes widen, just a touch, with what could have been awe or fear or anything in between. Over the years I’ve planted and watered a number of interesting legends about myself, some of them true, some of them not, all of them useful, so I get that a lot. Stephen at least made a decent stab at keeping it under wraps, which I approved of. “Stephen Moran, General Unit,” he said, shaking my hand just a little too firmly and holding the eye contact just a little too long; the kid was working hard to impress me. “It’s good to meet you, sir.”
“Call me Frank. We don’t ‘sir’ in Undercover. I’ve been keeping an eye on you for a while now, Stephen. We’ve been hearing a lot of very nice things.”
He managed to hold back both the blush and the curiosity. “That’s always good to know.” I was starting to like this kid.
I said, “Walk with me,” and headed back into the gardens-there were going to be more floaters and more Murder boys coming out of that building. “Tell me something, Stephen. You made detective three months ago, am I right?”
He walked like a teenager, that long springy stride when you have too much energy to fit in your body. “That’s right.”
“Well done. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t see you as the type to spend the rest of your career in the General Unit, tagging along after whatever squad detective snaps his fingers this week. You’ve got too much potential for that. You’ll want to run investigations of your own, eventually. Am I right?”
“That’s the plan.”
“Which squad are you aiming for?”
This time a little bit of the blush made it through. “Murder or Under-cover.”
“You’ve got good taste,” I said, grinning. “So working a murder case must be a dream come true, yeah? Having fun?”
Stephen said, cautiously, “I’m learning a lot.”
I laughed out loud. “You are in your arse. That means Scorcher Kennedy’s been treating you like his very own trained chimpanzee. What’s he got you doing, making coffee? Picking up his dry cleaning? Mending his socks?”
One corner of Stephen’s mouth twitched reluctantly. “Typing up witness statements.”
“Oh, lovely. How many words per minute can you do?”
“I don’t mind. I mean, I’m the newest, you know? All the others have a few years under their belts. And someone has to do the-”
He was struggling valiantly to get it right. “Stephen,” I said. “Breathe. This isn’t a test. You’re wasted on secretarial work. You know that, I know that, and if Scorch had bothered to take ten minutes to read your file, he’d know it too.” I pointed to a bench, under a lamppost so I could watch his face and out of view of any of the main exits. “Have a seat.”
Stephen slung his knapsack and helmet on the ground and sat down. In spite of the flattery, his eyes were wary, which was good. “We’re both busy men,” I said, joining him on the bench, “so I’ll cut to the chase. I’d be interested in hearing how you get on in this investigation. From your perspective, not from Detective Kennedy’s, since we both know just how much use his would be. No need to be diplomatic: we’re talking strictly confidential, just between the two of us.”
I could see his mind moving fast, but he had a decent poker face and I couldn’t pick out which way it was taking him. He said, “Hearing how I get on. What d’you mean by that, exactly?”
“We meet up now and then. Maybe I buy you a nice pint or two. You tell me what you’ve been at the last few days, what you think about it, how you’d be handling the case differently if you were the boss man. I see what I think of how you work. How does that strike you?”
Stephen picked a stray dead leaf off the bench and started folding it carefully along the veins. “Can I talk to you straight? Like we were off duty. Man to man.”
I spread my hands. “We are off duty, Stephen my friend. Hadn’t you noticed?”
“I mean-”
“I know what you mean. At ease, mate. Say whatever springs to mind. No repercussions.”
His eyes came up from the leaf to meet mine, level and gray and intelligent. “Word is you’ve got a personal interest in this case. A double interest, now.”
“That’s hardly a state secret. And?”
“What it sounds like to me,” Stephen said, “is you want me to spy on this murder investigation and report back to you.”
I said cheerfully, “If that’s how you want to look at it.”
“I’m not mad about the sound of that.”
“Interesting.” I found my cigarettes. “Smoke?”
“No, thanks.”
Not as green as he had looked on paper. No matter how badly the kid wanted to be in my good books, he was nobody’s bitch. Normally I would have approved of this, but right that minute I wasn’t in the mood for doing dainty footwork around his stubborn side. I lit up and blew smoke rings up into the smudgy yellow light of the lamp. “Stephen,” I said. “You need to think this through. I presume you’re worried about three aspects of this: the level of commitment involved, the ethics, and the potential consequences, not necessarily in that order. Am I right?”
“More or less, yeah.”
