Intermission

by Graham Hurley

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Graham Hurley

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prelude

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Afterwards

  Also by Graham Hurley

  The Faraday and Winter series

  TURNSTONE

  THE TAKE

  ANGELS PASSING

  DEADLIGHT

  CUT TO BLACK

  BLOOD AND HONEY

  ONE UNDER

  THE PRICE OF DARKNESS

  NO LOVELIER DEATH

  BEYOND REACH

  BORROWED LIGHT

  HAPPY DAYS

  BACKSTORY

  The Jimmy Suttle series

  WESTERN APPROACHES

  TOUCHING DISTANCE

  SINS OF THE FATHER

  THE ORDER OF THINGS

  The Spoils of War series

  FINISTERRE

  AURORE

  ESTOCADA

  RAID 42

  LAST FLIGHT TO STALINGRAD

  KYIV

  The Enora Andressen series

  CURTAIN CALL *

  SIGHT UNSEEN *

  OFF SCRIPT *

  LIMELIGHT *

  * available from Severn House

  INTERMISSION

  Graham Hurley

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  First world edition published in Great Britain and the USA in 2021

  by Severn House, an imprint of Canongate Books Ltd,

  14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE.

  Trade paperback edition first published in Great Britain and the USA in 2022

  by Severn House, an imprint of Canongate Books Ltd.

  This eBook edition first published in 2021 by Severn House,

  an imprint of Canongate Books Ltd.

  severnhouse.com

  Copyright © Graham Hurley, 2021

  All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. The right of Graham Hurley to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-5002-7 (cased)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78029-796-5 (trade paper)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4483-0535-3 (e-book)

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is purely coincidental.

  This eBook produced by

  Palimpsest Book Production Limited,

  Falkirk, Stirlingshire, Scotland

  For HBC

  a Pompey legend

  ‘Covid-19 is the portal between one world and the next.’

  —Arundhati Roy

  PRELUDE

  Back in 2019, way before the madness began, I ran into an old friend. His name is Tim, and he lives in Portsmouth. Like me, he’s a thesp, though in his case the business of being an actor – of building an entire career on pretending to be someone else – is sensibly diluted with other talents. He still plays in a band. He still coaches tennis to a very decent standard. He’s maybe a decade or so older than me but he works out daily, and he has the looks and the nerve to busk his way through. Lately he’s been appearing in TV commercials, which is why he found himself taking the train to London for an audition.

  We met in a bar afterwards. Just now, as I write this, the notion of so many people in an enclosed space seems like an act of collective suicide, but what I remember most clearly was the expression on Tim’s face. He does rueful very well. Plainly, the audition had been a disaster.

  When I asked why, he shrugged. ‘My fault,’ he said. ‘I should have listened to the casting director. All the clues were there but they passed me by.’

  The commercial was for a hunky brand of off-road 4x4. Tim, a little late as usual, joined the other prospects at the production company. They were all male, and they all looked authentically outdoors: beards, lumberjack shirts, Karrimor boots. The assembled talent were to buddy up, and the thirty-second audition called for each twosome to play-act their way along a tiny ledge overhanging an enormous drop, their bodies pressed against the sheerness of the imaginary rock. Dialogue was optional. These guys, with their years of experience, were expert climbers. They knew the moves. They trusted the gear, but most of all they trusted themselves. What the casting director wanted most of all was confidence, salted by an awareness of the consequences of that single mistake.

  Tim’s buddy, he said, was brilliant, totally authentic, and led the traverse from the start. Tim, aware that his presence on the rock face shouldn’t go unremarked, felt obliged to say something as the clock ticked down. With a couple of seconds left he glanced at the office floor, winced, shivered, and said, ‘God, no wonder I can’t stand heights.’

  The casting director brought the audition to a brisk end. ‘The script says you have years of climbing experience,’ he pointed out. ‘So how come you’re dizzy all of a sudden?’

  Tim, Pompey to his fingertips, had been in tight corners before. ‘Ironic,’ he murmured. ‘The punters will love it.’

  Now, in the bar, I mimed applause. Nice line, I said, but did it work?

  ‘Bang on.’ He was grinning now. ‘We nailed the job.’

  At the time, that story of Tim’s made me laugh and we celebrated with a bottle of Rioja. The commercial has aired since, and the pair of them were great, but what really matters, nearly a full year later, was something he told me only a couple of days ago. We were yakking on the phone, and I told him how good I thought the commercial had been.

  He asked me first whether I was taking the piss. When I said I wasn’t, he went very quiet for a second or two. Then he told me about the shoot itself, on a real ro
ck face, roped to his actor buddy. The production crew had taken every conceivable precaution against any kind of accident, and a fall, if it were to happen, measured no more than twenty feet on to a giant airbed. But that, Tim confessed quietly, wasn’t the point. He really was terrified of heights, of the unexpected, of that split second when gravity, or some other force beyond your control takes charge and you know you’re in a very, very bad place.

  ‘Fucked,’ he said. ‘I thought I was fucked.’

  ‘You mean on the rock face?’

  ‘Yeah. But afterwards, too. With the virus. And not just me. All of us.’

  I nodded, said nothing. He was more right than he can possibly have known.

  ONE

  Monday, 23 March 2020

  My cue to switch on the TV comes in a brief call from H. He’s evidently down in Dorset, Lord of the Manor, owner of all he beholds. Hayden Prentice, aka H, owes his three hundred prime acres to adventures in the cocaine trade. This evening, unusually, he takes a moment to enquire about my state of health.

  ‘You OK?’

  ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘No temperature? Cough? Nothing like that?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Good,’ he grunts. ‘Do us a favour?’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Turn on the telly. BBC One. I’ll call you back.’

  I’m about to ask why, but H has already hung up. On BBC One, I have time to catch the credits for EastEnders before we get to half past eight. I’ve been out most of the day, briefing my agent and afterwards a couple of girlfriends about last month’s drama shoot in Paris, and the news that the prime minister is to address the nation has passed me by. Now, I’m staring at Boris Johnson. He’s sitting at a desk and looks both grave and slightly regal. Nicely cut blue suit, red patterned tie, hair unusually well-behaved.

  To be frank, I’m not a Johnson fan. I’ve never bought the mad hair schtick, and friends of mine in a position to know tell me he’s ruthless, calculating, dishonest, and congenitally lazy. One of them confided that he mislays briefing files with the same careless abandon he loses track of his numberless children. All of this I can well believe, but tonight our prime minister has something else on his mind. This evening, as he eyeballs the nation, it’s very obvious that he has bad tidings to announce.

  The coronavirus, he says, is having a devastating effect across country after country. It has no respect for frontiers and is with us as he speaks. This invisible killer must be brought to heel, something that will require an enormous national effort. We’re all in this together, and we must all do our best to protect our amazing National Health Service.

  There follows a stern list of dos and don’ts. Do stay at home. Don’t go out unless it’s absolutely necessary. Use food delivery systems wherever possible. All non-essential shops, he says, will be closed. As will pubs, hotels, restaurants, and public buildings like libraries and art galleries. Churches will only be open for one reason: funerals.

  I’m sitting on the sofa. All of this is deeply sensible, but I can’t fight the feeling that I’m back at school. This, in a way, is a tribute to Johnson’s acting skills. He’s playing the concerned headmaster, spelling out a series of proscriptions for our own benefit, and the performance lifts him a little in my estimation. But what rivets me to the sofa are his hands, fleshy, fat-fingered, hyperactive. At the start, they’re interlinked on the flatness of the desk, but as he accelerates towards the next line on the autocue, and the line after that, each hand develops a life of its own, becomes a fist, tightly clenched – a symbol, no doubt, of resolution and furious intent. We’ll nail this bastard. Believe me, we will.

  Seconds after he’s done, H is back on the phone.

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘I think I’ll check the freezer.’

  ‘I’m serious.’

  ‘Then I don’t understand. You want me to score him out of ten? Give him performance notes for next time?’

  ‘That’s not what I meant. I had Cynthia on earlier. You remember Cynth?’

  ‘Remind me.’

  ‘Fat Dave’s lady.’ A brief pause. ‘Dave Munroe?’

  The name unlocks the face. Dave Munroe was a bent cop back in Portsmouth when H was a key player in the cocaine biz. According to H, Dave had his ear to every door, every conversation as Major Crimes tried to stem the city’s raging thirst for cocaine. For quite a lot of money, and one or two other favours, Dave passed on a great deal of information that H regarded as priceless before sensibly cashing in his chips and electing for early retirement.

  The only time I met this legend was the weekend of H’s fiftieth birthday. The Pompey tribe assembled at H’s Flixcombe Manor for a weekend of recreational mayhem, and one of them was Fat Dave. By now, thanks to years of committed self-abuse, he was in a wheelchair. On the Sunday, away from the wreckage of the all-nighter, we had a proper conversation. He was a balloon of a man, tiny head perched on a huge body, but he had a winning smile, and patted my hand a lot, and in truth I rather liked him.

  ‘So, what’s happened?’ I ask H.

  ‘He’s only fucking got it.’

  ‘Got what?’

  ‘The virus. Dead man walking. That’s Cynth’s take, not mine.’

  Cynthia, I remember, ran a boarding house in Ventnor on the Isle of Wight. Since then, according to H, she’s sold up and now lives in Portsmouth.

  ‘She and Dave moved a couple of years back. Her mum’s in Pompey, proper old, and she wanted to be closer.’

  ‘And Dave?’

  ‘Started coughing a week and a half ago. Cynth put it down to the fags but then he got sicker and sicker, really ill, fever, the sweats, you name it. She talked to their GP and he was in QA that same afternoon.’

  ‘And now?’

  ‘Intensive care. Ventilator. The lot. Nightmare, darling. Cynth’s in bits.’

  ‘She’s seen him?’

  ‘No. And that’s the worst of it. They won’t let her anywhere near him. The closest she gets is a Skype call on her tablet and what she saw yesterday scared her shitless.’

  I nod, listening to H tallying the state of the man, flat on his belly most of the time, hooked up to countless machines. The last time they had anything approaching a conversation, Dave could barely manage a couple of words between gasps for breath, and since then he’s been in an induced coma.

  H very rarely calls me ‘darling’, and this clue alone tells me he’s as unmoored and adrift as poor Cynthia. Back in the day, calls from Fat Dave kept H out of the hands of the Major Crimes Team and he’s never forgotten how much he owes the man. H has many failings but loyalty to a handful of Pompey mates isn’t one of them, and this conversation is the living proof.

  ‘So what happens next?’ I ask.

  ‘We go to Pompey. Give Cynth a hand.’

  ‘We?’

  ‘Me, darling. And you.’

  ‘Why me?’

  ‘Because I could do … you know …’

  ‘With a little support?’

  ‘Yeah. None of this is fucking easy. Believe me.’

  I nod. I understand the logic, the ageless, near-magnetic tug of Pompey for ex-hooligans like H. The city itself, what little I’ve seen of it, has done nothing for me, but that’s not the point.

  The TV is still on, the sound muted. H, too, has gone quiet.

  ‘But what about Johnson? All these new rules?’ I ask.

  ‘Fuck ’em. The man’s a twat. Just tell me you’re in …’ A moment of silence. ‘Please?’

  In the end, after the briefest discussion, I say yes. H gives me Cynthia’s address and postcode to tap into my sat-nav and tells me to look out for signs to an area called Baffins. He’ll be setting off first thing tomorrow. Should be in Pompey by mid-morning.

  ‘You’ll be coming back afterwards?’ I ask.

  ‘I doubt it. I need to see Dave.’

  ‘They won’t let you.’

  ‘No?’ He lets the question hang in the air. He wants me to think there’l
l be a way, that no closed door in Pompey ever resisted Hayden Prentice, but somehow I can’t see it happening. Hospitals have ways and means of keeping the public at arm’s length. Especially now.

  ‘So you’re staying with her? Cynthia?’

  ‘No way. She’s offered, but I thought you might fancy somewhere of our own.’

  ‘Our own?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Is this some kind of date?’

  Once again, H doesn’t answer. The only night we’ve ever slept together was a very long time ago and H knows nothing’s going to change.

  ‘Tony Morse,’ he says at length. ‘I’ve made the call. He’ll sort something.’ A bark of laughter. ‘This date of ours. Baffins, yeah? Around midday? Cynth’s offering a spot of lunch. Be rude to disappoint her.’

  I go to bed early, wondering what I’ve let myself in for. I first met H down in Antibes, more than twenty years ago. I was killing time on location waiting for the French scenarist to come up with a couple of rewrites. H had a lavish multi-mirrored cabin aboard a superyacht moored in the marina. The yacht, Agincourt, was gross in every respect. It belonged to a well-known Pompey face and he threw a party for us thesps. H, who had a serious talent for mixing killer margaritas, knew how to make a girl laugh, and – to my shame – I let the evening get the better of me.

  The following day, nominated for a major award, I moved along the coast to the Cannes Film Festival, where I met the Scandi scriptwriter who was to become my husband. Berndt, alas, turned out to be a monster, but by then – over a decade and a half later – I was in all kinds of trouble. The marriage had turned both ugly and violent. Malo, whom Berndt had always supposed to be his natural son, was off the rails. Berndt elected to move in with a Swedish starlet with an enticing penthouse overlooking Stockholm harbour. All this was bad enough but Berndt, spiteful to the last, took Malo with him, leaving yours truly with a plague of persistent headaches which, after an MRI scan, turned out to be the fingerprints of a brain tumour.

  It was at this point that H stepped back into my life, thanks to the tireless work of an investigative journalist who later became a friend. After a major accident on a cross-country trials bike, H was hospitalized with medical problems of his own, but when DNA tests proved that Malo was his son, and not Berndt’s, he perked up immeasurably. Given what was happening to Malo, this turned out to be a blessing.