Undercover by Bill James Page A

sandals probably making a fast, flip-flap clacking on the caff carpet as he headed for the exit stairs. Tom finished eating and picked up the money. And, harvesting those three fifties from among the used crockery, Tom felt real satisfaction. Of course, he examined the notes separately and carefully. Each was new and looked brilliant, untrammelled and full of hearty promise, in splendid contrast to all this low-caste fodder debris. He could see the silver strip running through all, and the darker areas, a bit like piano keys. Near the Queen’s face glinted a rose and a medallion. These notes could not be more genuine. They were exemplary. The Queen would be proud to get her picture on such notes. Shops would take them OK. Pubs maybe not, especially if they’d been caught out by fakes earlier. No matter.
    But it wasn’t so much the money itself that pleased Tom. His attitude to it – this was what delighted him. The amount hugely and plainly exceeded his petrol costs getting here. Evidently, it came from an account subject to only the vaguest kind of auditing, if that. Although he’d bought none of the food and drink, Lambert told him to claim just the same. These fifties, and the unquestioning way Tom accepted them, showed he was seamlessly moving into a new kind of life. This thrilled him. It was on a par with his appreciation of Lambert’s graceful finger-magic with the fifties.
    At Hilston Manor there’d been psychology seminars aimed at helping future undercover people get used to grey-area thinking, authorized criminality, furtiveness, corner-cutting, consciencelessness, in the interests of the greater eventual good. Wasn’t it lovely to be freed from tedious regard for regulations and exactitudes? Collecting the fifties as a routine entitlement proved, didn’t it, that he had sound and slinky undercover potential? Hilston had said the same, but it was heartening to see himself, in an actual situation, automatically applying what he’d learned there. He even began wondering for a couple of seconds why Lambert couldn’t have rounded up the sum by fifties not fives and made it £200. Tom recalled a film,
Wall Street
, and the professional principles of its villain-hero, Gordon Gekko: ‘Greed, for lack of a better word, is good.’ But maybe the lack of a better word could be remedied. How about: ‘Greed is natural?’ ‘Greed is a career-builder?’ ‘Greed is necessary?’
    On the drive home, he decided he’d give the fifties to Iris as a fall-back fund to pay for Steve’s birthday present and celebration, in case Tom were unable to get time off to come home. Maybe the three of them, Steve, Laura and Iris, could go out for a Chinese meal. Putting the money towards a happy family occasion would prove – prove to himself – that nothing smelly and off-colour soiled the hundred and fifty, nothing to taint Steve’s special day. Money was money, nuff said. Tom might have drawn it from the bank. In fact, he wouldn’t have drawn the cash in fifties but in twenties and tens, because they could be more easily managed and didn’t get hassle in shops. But that was a quibble. Tom needed to demonstrate – demonstrate to himself, as before – yes, demonstrate the basic ordinariness of these notes, the normality of piping them positively aboard.
    But as he turned into their road and saw the house, some of its lights shining out from the sitting room bay window, saw also the clipped, boxy outline in the darkness of the front garden privet hedge, the radiantly correct recycle bin for tomorrow’s collection on the pavement, the shallow, cubbyhole porch, he dropped those previous ideas about use of the Howie windfall. This domestic vignette was what ordinary, normal items really looked like, surely. Perhaps something dubious about the cash threesome did exist, something he didn’t want his son linked to, even in the most