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believe undercover might help, and (b) another yes, the risk to the spy you chose to commit was possibly justified; chosen from volunteers only, of course. And if your Out-located officer did have to take part in a crime, she’d heard one could seek on his/her behalf what was lumpily termed ‘participation authority’ from the Crown Prosecution Service. She wondered how often the CPS said OK, though.

     
    * See
Halo Parade

Chapter Three
    Back on her own ground after Fieldfare, Esther found it was Officer B’s talk she remembered best. That might be because B dealt
only
with the practical: no theorizing, no theology, no hearty kicking around of bouncy moral questions. Instead, B was good on organizations and their structure, a subject Esther liked more than ethical jigsaw puzzles. For instance, months before she went to Fieldfare, Esther and a couple of her most senior CID people had tried to draw a structure plan of the so-called Cormax Turton Guild, the most successful, long-lasting, rich and ruthless crime corpus on their patch. Yes, they had the plan and thought it eighty-five per cent accurate, with Cornelius Max Turton still influential and so far untouchable at the top, despite his retina trouble and arthritic knees and knuckles. Immediately beneath him, and actually responsible for the running of the firm, including all waterfront activities since, at the latest, the famous carnage on 17 November 2004, came Ambrose Tutte Turton, aged forty-one, a nephew, and thirty-seven-year-old Nathan Garnet Ivan Crabtree, nicknamed Palliative, one of Cornelius Max’s grandchildren, second son of his daughter, Annette Veronica Crabtree, and her first husband, Brent Holywell Crabtree.
    Brent, of course, became better known after death than when alive and busy, because his obituary in
The Times
caused noisy protests, not on account of what was said but because it appeared at all, though down the page with a very small photograph, beneath an American woman jazz singer’s and a Classics professor’s. Some readers, MPs, other papers and bishops thought
The Times
should not allow even this limited publicity to a renowned ex-crook. But, in a hit-back article by one of the editors later,
The Times
argued that it was actually the scale of Brent Crabtree’s dark renown that made his obituary necessary, in the same way as Hitler’s, Stalin’s and Pol Pot’s deaths had been registered in the paper’s graveyard. The test was not the virtue of the deceased but his/her influence on, and her/his fame or notoriety in, society locally, nationally and possibly abroad. By this standard, Brent Holywell Crabtree had probably earned his broadsheet obit. And the
way
he died, of course, as well as that Moroccan episode, added the sort of fizz journalists liked. Below Cornelius, Ambrose and Palliative in the Guild structure diagram prepared for Esther, there were occasional uncertainties and alterations, as there might be in any company’s chart, but the general picture remained pretty well correct.
    Yes. Yet, although they had the shape of the Guild reasonably right, they still couldn’t stop it operating and winning and growing. And it was this agonizing, humiliating failure that ultimately sent Esther to Fieldfare. She had decided Cormax Turton would have to be quietly, very quietly, intruded upon. Given large luck, resolution and professionalism, in that order, the Guild might be picked to pieces from within.
    At Fieldfare, Officer B spoke for about half her time on crooked hierarchies and their systems. As B said, undercover presumed a powerful, aggressive villain empire. Undercover was no use in freelance, private lawlessness. There had to be some complicated, thriving outfit to enter, stay with, get approved of by, trusted by, promoted in, depended on. And to observe, document and parcel up for jail.
Officer B: Meet Ms Vamoose
    She was what Esther thought of at first as a ‘hearty piece’ – open-faced, cheery-looking, hair