Undercover by Bill James Page A

pleasant. I’m manipulative, opportunistic, plausible, temperate, resourceful,’ he said.
    They were having a late breakfast. Iris had taken the children to school. She shifted to a chair nearer him and put her arm around his shoulders. ‘As to that damn country place, when they trained and tested you, I hope they did it well, especially the training. The testing? Well, I know you’d be good at anything you put your mind to. You couldn’t, in fact, flunk.’
    He kissed her on the cheek.
    â€˜You smell of Marmite,’ she said.
    â€˜They seemed very competent. All the tutors had been undercover themselves. It wasn’t just seminar-room old rope. Some were going back to the same kind of work after their stint at Hilston. They’d got hooked on it.’
    â€˜That I don’t like,’ Iris said.
    â€˜No.’ But Tom could understand the pull. It must be quite a treat to shed your usual self for a while – get ‘absolved’ from it, to pick up Iris’s word – and become somebody else, all one’s customary worries, vanities, doubts temporarily ditched; subordinated because so much energy and skill would be required to fool your new mates, and to keep fooling them. Despite what he’d said to Iris, this wasn’t really like being an actor, a game where you tried to mock-up your cast character until the final curtain, then went home on the tube, not, say, as the warrior loudmouth, Coriolanus, but as your real you, with a break on Sundays. Undercover, you took on the alternative identity for every minute, every day, including Sundays.
    Tom remembered from school that, in fact, Coriolanus in the Shakespeare play compared himself at one remorseful point to a ‘dull actor’ who had forgotten his part. The actor playing this dull actor had better not forget
his
part, though. For the show’s three hours or so he mustn’t forget to forget. But the undercover officer was concerned with much more than regular spells of a few hours. He or she must not forget their part for days, weeks, maybe even months or years.
    It must be a great tonic to know you’d successfully penetrated a firm and made monkeys of a clutch of clever, vigilant, distrustful crooks. And, yes, you might get a taste for those kinds of sneaky victories. At Hilston, one of the undercover people giving a talk said only volunteers who survived the intrusive, gruelling psychometric examinations at the Manor could be considered for what he called ‘Out-located’ work: cut adrift from family and colleagues and canteen. He argued that the toughness of these selection methods couldn’t actually guarantee success, but almost. Tom had thought that perhaps it shouldn’t be ‘almost’ but ‘maybe’. He considered ‘maybe’ an acceptable gamble just about, though he knew Iris certainly wouldn’t. She probably did not understand how monotonous and soul-clamping so much policing could be, nor sympathize with the search for excitement, even if that excitement came almost entirely from risk and its abiding partner, fear.
    And, of course, there was the great unspoken between Iris and him: sex – the reason he’d baulked at ‘embedded’. To preserve their credibility as true crooks, undercover people had to create a complete alternative life for themselves, and a complete alternative life might include relationships. Besides that ‘stink’ Iris had mentioned about the officer giving a false identity even in court, there’d been a lot in the Press lately to do with undercover officers who infiltrated those civil disobedience movements and scored with one or more of the protesters. It could be to maintain cover, or get extra information via pillow talk – or, possibly, just because they fancied it. When all this was revealed, women had marched on Scotland Yard to condemn the false cockery, stating they’d never knowingly have