‘Is it true you know his real name now?’

I said nothing, because if I told Zach I might as well announce it on Facebook.

‘Have you checked his gaff?’

I said that not only had we checked his gaff, we’d spun his drum and his crib as well. And that we had his ends so thoroughly staked out that street crime had dropped by twenty percent overnight.

‘I want to know where he goes as a last resort.’

Zach told me.

‘You’re shitting me,’ I said.

‘No lie.’

‘That is the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.’

‘That’s the nature of the beast,’ said Zach. ‘We are what we are.’

14 A Walk in the Park

14

A Walk in the Park

‘The Fox Club,’ said Nightingale when I called him.

‘In Mayfair,’ I said.

‘Well, at least he’s consistent.’

‘He’s brown bread if we don’t get to him first,’ I said.

‘Let’s see if we can avoid that outcome,’ said Nightingale.

Occasionally, when the mood takes us, the police can react very fast to unforeseen events. So we had a surveillance perimeter set up in less than thirty minutes with a pair of PCs in plainclothes inside the club. One of them was PC Omer Kubat from the Mounted Branch whose legendary good looks mean that nobody ever believes he’s police.

‘Is it true he nearly got arrested while in full uniform?’ Guleed asked.

Since Reynard knew me, her and Nightingale, we’d been placed around the corner from the Fox Club. Which was just as well since we were in the silver Astra with the ‘My Other Car’s an IRV’ bumper sticker.

‘That’s what I heard,’ I said. Rumour had it that Kubat plus horse had been deployed as crowd control during the Olympics when a local Inspector had got it into his head that Kubat was an actor involved in an illegal film shoot.

‘Didn’t believe him,’ I said. ‘Not even when he handed over his warrant card.’

It was a quality that meant that Kubat was constantly getting poached for side jobs like ours, although his duty Inspector made it clear that anybody, regardless of the rank, who tried to transfer him out of Mounted Branch was going to wake up with a bed full of horse product.

The Fox Club, for all its aspirations and Mayfair address, was less an exclusive gentleman’s club and more an expensive bar with some posh hotel rooms attached. Kubat was probably a bit too good looking for its usual clientele, but at least if he were mistaken for something it wouldn’t be an undercover police officer.