AllFreeNovel
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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.
Day Minus Six Thousand Nine Hundred and Ninety-Eight, 08:00
Jen is in a two-up-two-down terrace. She and Kelly rented it for a year. They had no emotional connection to it at all. Jen hardly remembers it. It is only now, looking up at the ceiling marbled with damp, that she recalls living here at all.
Jen is not yet pregnant, and so Todd is not yet born. Which leaves only one person this mystery can be about.
‘Lopez?’ Kelly calls up the stairs. Emotion moves up through her. She’d forgotten he went through a phase of calling her that. Jen became Jenny became Jenny from the Block, after that song, then became Lopez.
‘Kelly?’ she says.
‘You’re up!’
‘I am.’
‘Look,’ he says, in that way that he does, that authoritative, guarded way. ‘I have a thing today.’
‘What’s that?’
‘An all-day conference.’
Something vague is stirring in Jen’s mind. What kind of painter/decorator goes to a last-minute conference? One she trusted, she supposes.
‘Sure,’ she says, but the ground underfoot as she rises from bed feels unstable, like it’s made of quicksand.
‘You’ll be gone all day?’
