Authors: Graham Hurley
‘And?’
‘I found eight hundred quid stashed in his bedroom and I seized it. It’s been in the nick safe all weekend, but I gave him six hundred back yesterday morning. Guvnor’s orders.’
‘Where did the money come from?’
‘Harrison. Must have.’
‘In person?’
‘Probably. He doesn’t trust anyone else.’
‘Then it’s evidence, isn’t it, the money?’ Dawn frowned. ‘Didn’t anyone mention this to forensic? Shouldn’t we be looking for prints here?’
‘I told you, love. I had to give it back.’
‘
Had
to?’
‘Yeah, guvnor’s orders.’ He spread his hands wide. ‘You tell me.’
‘What about the rest?’
‘He gets that now. I just need a witness.’
‘Why?’
‘Because Mr Faraday thinks I need watching.’ He leaned across the table and patted her arm. ‘This job used to be fun once. Remember?’
He drove her to Anson Avenue in his car. Someone had been at work with the spray can again, turning ‘Scum’ into ‘Scummer’. Scummer was a local term of abuse for anyone born in Southampton. Round here, genuine Scummers had a life expectancy measured in minutes.
Winter knocked a couple of times and then stepped back, looking up at the top windows. ‘Someone’s in,’ he said. ‘I can hear them.’
He tried again, harder this time, and a moment later the door was pulled open by a thin, pale-faced man in his mid-twenties. He was wearing jeans and a leather waistcoat, and his throat was necklaced with a daisy-chain tattoo.
‘Scott around?’
The man shook his head and flicked the remains of a roach past Winter’s left shoulder. Then he looked at Dawn.
‘You that desperate for company, missis?’
‘No, unless you’re offering.’
He laughed, exposing a mouthful of blackened teeth. Winter ignored him. He wanted to know about Scott. Where was he? When was he expected back?
‘Why’s that then? You got something for him?’
Dawn Ellis glanced at Winter. This was a conversation they shouldn’t be having. Not in front of a total stranger. Winter had his hand in his coat pocket. He began to pull out an envelope and then had second thoughts. The man on the doorstep was watching his every move.
‘Wanna leave it, do you?’ He nodded at Winter’s pocket and then leered at Dawn again. ‘Only I’m bound to see him later. Me and a few mates.’
All the way to Port Solent, next morning, Faraday was trying to forget that J-J was due back on the evening ferry but even Dawn Ellis, who regarded her boss as seriously remote, noticed how fretful and preoccupied he seemed.
‘Is anything the matter, sir?’ she inquired, as they turned into the big car park at the marina complex.
‘Nothing, love.’ He gestured at the line of bars and restaurants that fronted on to The Boardwalk, keen to change the subject. ‘Amazing, isn’t it?’
Walking across the car park, Faraday mused about the brutality of the social contrasts. Millions of pounds’ worth of yachts tied up beside one of the UK’s most deprived council estates. Knick-knack shops selling pot-pourri at six pounds a throw when kids half a mile away couldn’t afford new shoes.
Dawn let him get it off his chest, then nodded across at the big UCI cinema complex.
‘Ever tried it, sir?’
Faraday gazed at her, wrong-footed.
‘No,’ he said, ‘I haven’t.’
‘Then maybe you should.’ Dawn risked a smile. ‘They sell great popcorn and the sound system’s brilliant.’
Nelly Tseng was a slight, intense, exquisitely dressed Hong Kong Chinese in her mid-forties with a big desk, lots of gold jewellery, and perfect English dusted with just the trace of an American accent. Her eyes were as cold as her handshake and she had absolutely no time for small talk. Faraday had scarcely sat down before she was telling him how successful Port Solent had become. The place was an absolute smash. The bars and restaurants were packed every night and she had a queue of heavyweight merchandisers itching to get into the retail outlets. The last thing she needed now was pondlife.
‘Pondlife?’ Faraday inquired mildly.
‘Kids from across the tracks. As far as food and beverage is concerned, we’re covered. They can’t afford the prices, not in the bars, and certainly not in the restaurants. But they still come. God knows why, but they do. Have you checked with that superintendent of yours?’
‘Of course.’
‘Then you’ll know about the cars. My security guys keep a log. Here.’
Faraday took the proffered sheet of paper. Talking to Nelly Tseng was like trying to survive in a gale-force wind. Unless you gave a little, you were doomed.
‘Terrible.’ Faraday knew the list of vandalised cars by heart. ‘Must be a real pain.’
‘Too right. And you see that last one? The top-of-the-range Mercedes? Guy over from Monaco, big investor, looking to fund the next major expansion. And you know what happens to his car? He leaves it outside the multiplex for an hour and when he comes back it’s scored from end to end.’
‘I expect it was hired, wasn’t it?’
‘That’s hardly the point, Mr Faraday. He’s thinking clientele. He’s thinking Joe Public. A family spending eighty pounds in a restaurant or the evening in the cinema doesn’t expect to find their car trashed.’ She tapped a perfect nail on the desk. ‘So my Mr Mercedes wants to know why. And so do I.’
‘You’ve got CCTV?’
‘Of course we have. You’ll have seen the cameras.’
‘Then maybe you should upgrade the system.’
‘We’re looking at it, Mr Faraday, but you’re talking serious money. My commercial tenants already pay a fortune in rates. So do the residents. So do we. To put it crudely, Inspector, that buys them you.’
Faraday stole a glance at Dawn Ellis. She looked spellbound.
‘I’ll need more than this.’ Faraday gestured at the list of cars. ‘I’ll need times, locations. We look for patterns in cases like this. DC Ellis will be your point of contact.’
Dawn Ellis mustered a smile. Nelly Tseng didn’t take her eyes off Faraday. She wanted the organ grinder, not the monkey.
‘Let’s understand each other, Inspector. We talk the language of results here. That’s why we’re so successful. That’s why we’re setting the tone. Your city needs a future, Mr Faraday, and we’re happy to oblige. No one wants to go back to the swamp, do they?’
‘Swamp?’
‘Portsmouth. You’ve been thinking small-time too long, Inspector. Things have to change around here.’
She gestured vaguely towards the window, dismissing the cranes and the tower blocks beyond the low sweep of the motorway, and Faraday gazed at her, masking a hot surge of anger behind a puzzled smile. At length, he got to his feet.
‘Swamps can be interesting,’ he murmured, ‘if you’re into birdlife.’
Before returning to Kingston Crescent, Faraday drove to Paulsgrove. He’d phoned Bevan from Port Solent, asking for an update on Marty Harrison, and when the superintendent had told him that the surgeons had done a second operation and that Harrison would definitely pull through, he felt obliged to pass on the news. The least he owed Scott Spellar was a nudge on the elbow. Get out now. While you still can.
Outside Spellar’s house, Faraday gestured at the scrawled message on the front door.
‘Nice area,’ he grunted. ‘No wonder the kids go off the rails.’
Dawn Ellis nodded, but said nothing. This was her second trip to Anson Avenue in less than twelve hours, but one of the many lessons that CID work had taught her was the need for discretion. Never say more than you have to. No matter what kind of company you keep.
There was no response to Faraday’s knock at the front door. Round the back, he peered in through the kitchen window but there was no sign of life. Someone had left a copy of the
News
on the window sill and Faraday wondered whether it might have been Scott. Over a grainy photograph of five handcuffed men being bundled into the back of a police van, the headline read ‘Drugs Bust – More Arrests’, and Faraday was still wondering what young Scottie must have made of the story when he returned to the car.
‘You interviewed the lad,’ he said to Ellis. ‘What’s the verdict?’
Dawn Ellis took time to frame her answer.
‘Straight,’ she said at last. ‘I just thought he was dead honest.’
‘But bent as well?’
‘As far as the coke and stuff was concerned, of course. But it was a job for him. It paid well. It was pretty exciting. And round here that’s a definite result. He hated us getting at him, hated it. Poor little sod didn’t know what to do.’
‘He grassed Marty Harrison,’ Faraday pointed out. ‘Did that surprise you?’
‘Not really.’
‘Why not?’
They were waiting at traffic lights at the entrance to the estate. The conversation was going further than Dawn Ellis had intended.
‘Paul can be very persuasive,’ she said carefully. ‘He’s clever in situations like that.’
‘That’s what he’s there for. That’s why we get results.’
‘Of course, sir. I know that. It’s just’ – she shrugged – ‘the kid was really upset about his grandad, you could tell. When he saw those photos …’ She shook her head, and looked quickly out of the window.
The lights changed to green and Faraday turned on to the dual carriageway. Minutes later, speeding into the city on the spur motorway, he glanced across at Dawn again.
‘Harrison’s place was clean,’ he told her.
‘I know.’
‘So why was that, d’you think? Did young Scottie tip him off?’
Dawn frowned. She’d been asking herself exactly the same question, ever since she’d accompanied Winter to the house last night. Had Scott put two and two together about the imminence of a drugs bust, then he might well have passed the message on to Marty Harrison. But if that was the case, how come Paul Winter was handing him an envelope stuffed with cash, albeit his own? None of it made any sense, and in the end she thought it best to be honest.
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘He may well have done, but I simply don’t know.’
‘Do you think we frightened him?’
‘Definitely.’
‘And do you think he’d relish a meet with the likes of Harrison? Given the fact we’d pulled him in?’
‘Obviously not.’
Faraday nodded in mute agreement. The conversation died while he swooped past a big continental lorry and tucked into the slow lane again.
‘Winter knew Harrison personally, didn’t he? Way back? Before my time?’
‘I think he’d had dealings with him, yes.’ Dawn was frowning. ‘But they were never mates, not so far as I know.’
‘I don’t mean mates. I mean acquaintances. He got a favour or two out of Harrison, the way I heard it.’
‘Is that right, sir?’
‘Yes.’ Faraday seemed oblivious to the sudden caution in her voice. ‘And I understand it helped our clear-up rate no end.’
Dawn stared at him for a moment, then looked away. They were nearly back in the city before she broke the silence.
‘You want me to tell Paul that? Pass a message?’
Faraday permitted himself the beginnings of a smile.
‘You’ll do it anyway,’ he said softly, ‘whatever I say.’
Back at the station, the inspectors’ office was empty. Faraday draped his jacket on the back of the chair and gazed at his desk, struck yet again by the way that command seemed to guarantee such total isolation. He’d been a DI for four years now, winning the promotion after a long stint as a DS in neighbouring Waterlooville. The move back on to Portsea Island had brought him much closer to home, and he’d treasured the freedom of being his own boss in a division as busy and varied as Portsmouth North, but he’d never anticipated the distance he’d have to keep between himself and the rest of the squad.
In part, he’d learned to recognise this gulf as inevitable. It was true what his old guvnors had told him – that the investigative buck well and truly stopped with the DI – but there was something else, too, and the older he got, the more difficult it was to define. It had to do with laughter and a degree of irresponsibility. It had to do with the knowledge that each working day was finite and that a limit existed to what one man could reasonably achieve. Get yourself promoted to detective inspector, and those comforts disappeared. Faraday’s responsibility was no longer one part of the jigsaw, or even two, but the whole bloody puzzle. It was his job to piece it together, his job to conjure administrative order out of chaos, and the longer he did it the harder it was to resist the conclusion that the job was impossible. Being a successful DI meant learning how to survive under a state of constant siege – not just from the criminal fraternity but from his own bosses as well. And in war, as Faraday was beginning to understand, no plan survives contact with the enemy.
Enemy? Faraday sat back at his desk, visualising his squad next door, the fellow campaigners on whom he had to depend. The fact that most of them had either been poached by other divisions, or were sunning themselves on foreign beaches, was yet another irritation, but Faraday had long since stopped believing that the CID room would ever be up to full strength, and simply counted himself lucky to have acquired such an extraordinary bunch of individuals.
Big Cathy Lamb with her bursting heart and limitless, headstrong loyalties. Little Dawn Ellis with her trophy rugby shirts and chaotic love life. Then the older guys like Rick McGivern and Bev Yates. Bev had swapped dreams of football stardom for a brace of jet-skis and marriage to a woman half his age. Invited to the reception, Faraday had marvelled at Bev’s sheer nerve. Melanie, his new wife, was beautiful, and educated, and came from a solid naval family in the Meon Valley – at least three reasons for giving Bev a very wide berth indeed.
Faraday smiled at the memories. They’d all clubbed together to buy the happy couple a jumbo-sized fridge. They’d filled it with champagne,
foie gras
, truffles, Belgian chocolate – plus a year’s subscription to
Loaded
– and after Rick McGivern’s best-man speech in the big reception tent behind the family spread, they’d all got drunk together. Even Faraday had succumbed and for one glorious afternoon he was able to shed the job title and most of the rest of his life, and simply marvel at the daftness of it all. Bev Yates. In the bosom of a family like this.
Even Paul Winter had made an effort. Bumping into him in the hired de luxe Portaloos behind the stables, Faraday had mumbled something about Bev not being able to believe his luck. Winter had grinned his evil grin, unzipped his fly, and then laughed.
‘Neither can we, boss. Neither can fucking we. Good, though, innit?’
And it was.
That night, Faraday drove down to the ferryport to meet the incoming boat from Caen. A final check on the PC at home had revealed no further e-mails and Faraday could only assume that J-J hadn’t – after all – decided to flog his return ticket. Now he stood in the window of the arrivals’ hall, watching the towering, slab-sided hull nudge alongside.
Already, it seemed like months since he’d seen the boy. Twenty-two years together had imposed a certain pattern on the way they’d lived, measuring out the beginnings and ends of each day with the small courtesies of a shared life. An early-morning cup of tea for J-J before he struggled upright from the wreckage of his bed. An exchange of signs on the state of the shopping list. A couple of early-evening beers and a chat before tackling the supper. With J-J so suddenly gone, these routines had lapsed, and with the boy due back again Faraday had become aware of a fluttering in his stomach that he’d at first put down to indigestion. Only towards the end of the afternoon, with his in-tray down to manageable proportions, had he realised the truth. That he was nervous.
A couple of pints in the pub round the corner from the ferryport had helped. He’d settled in a corner of the bar, trying to read the evening paper, telling himself that this was absurd. J-J was his son, not his lover. But even the second Guinness, normally so reliable, had failed to achieve the right degree of numbness. Six days ago, J-J’s departure had thrown him into confusion. Now, with the ferry moored alongside, Faraday was even further from any kind of peace.
Cars from the crossing began to whine past. Faraday left the window and walked towards the mouth of the arrivals’ tunnel. Back-packers appeared in twos and threes, then came a big group of French schoolkids, chattering away to each other. A couple of families followed in their wake, and a moment or two later a small, plump priest arrived, gazing across the concourse through thick pebble glasses. Faraday watched him for a moment, wondering if his son had, after all, sold his ticket, when he felt a tiny pressure on his arm. He spun round to find himself looking at J-J’s lopsided grin.