Turnstone

by Hurley, Graham

Back inside, he showed the dead man’s debit card to Proctor. By now, Mick Spellar had surrendered his jeans and runners to the SOCO, who was sealing them carefully inside heavy-duty plastic evidence bags. Even in the gloom of the hall, Faraday could see where dark gouts of blood had splashed over the frayed denim.

  At length, Jerry Proctor glanced up. He saw the debit card in Faraday’s hand and nodded. Motivation. Opportunity. And now arrest.

  ‘Subtle, this isn’t,’ he muttered.

  Two

  Paul Winter loved informants. He loved their vulnerability and their bent little ways. He loved the smell of greed and needfulness they brought with them for their periodic meets. He loved the way they stitched each other up, all the time, for nothing more than a drink, a couple of quid and the chance to settle a score or two. And most of all, he loved being the conductor of this extraordinary orchestra of fuck-wits, and whingers, and no-brain low-life. He called them his Chorus of Dwarfs. And he taught them to sing better than any other detective in the city.

  On this particular Saturday, he was due to meet a new prospect. On the phone she’d called herself Juanita and for a change she even sounded foreign. Lately, local girls had taken to using exotic names in a bid to rid themselves of being Tracy or Sharon. Informants were like that. Losers since birth.

  Now, sitting in an Old Portsmouth pub around the corner from the cathedral, Winter watched the tourists flocking in for lunch. The venue for the meet had been her idea. Normally informants liked to choose somewhere closer to their own territory, not too close in case they got clocked by someone they knew, but close enough to avoid the traumas of crossing the class divide. The American Bar was as close as Pompey got to posh, the haunt of lawyers and architects and sharp-suited young entrepreneurs from the glitzy Gunwharf Quays development across the road. Most of the informants Winter ran would die of social exposure the moment they stepped in through the door.

  On the phone this woman Juanita had offered a handful of names for collateral. They were good names, names that Winter recognised from the eighties, young thugs who’d run with the 6.57 crew, packing the first-class carriages of Saturday’s early train out of the city, terrorising rival fans in football grounds all over the country. A decade later, in a development that would have won plaudits from the Harvard Business School, these psychopaths had transferred their considerable talents to the supply of Class A narcotics, calling on that same nationwide network of hardcore football hooligans to underwrite the deal. In the process the best of them had become very rich indeed, but what made this success story so very Portsmouth was the fact that they refused to change their ways. They still wore knock-off Armani suits. They still preferred the Stanley knife to the corporate lawyer. And however gaudily they flaunted their new wealth, they still lived in the backstreets of Buckland and Paulsgrove, a constant taunt for a police force increasingly bound hand and foot by paperwork, legislation and the nervous hand of the headquarters performance management team.

  Take informants. Winter was forty-seven. In the early days, he and his colleagues had enjoyed a virtually free hand with the men and women who wanted to trade information for cash, or revenge, or any of the thousand other reasons they’d pick up the phone or pass the word. Now, though, the handling of informants had become as complicated and bureaucratic as everything else in the force. You had to fill out dozens of forms, get witnessed receipts, pull your poor bloody grass through a receiving line of accountants, and line-managers, and God knows who else before he got a chance to squirt a confidence or two your way. That, in Winter’s opinion, was a criminal waste of a prime CID asset. In Portsmouth, with its on going tribal feuds, informants were often the shortest cut to a result. Without informants, detectives like him were dead in the water. Hence his quiet determination to carry on running them the way he knew best. Meetings in pubs. Lots of pressure. And the promise of a quid or two if things worked out.

  By twenty past two, Juanita hadn’t showed. Halfway through the Daily Telegraph for the second time, winter was on the point of leaving when a small, squat figure in jeans and a leather jacket emerged from the restaurant. He must have had the longest lunch in history. Winter hadn’t seen him go in and there was no other exit from the conservatory area where the food was served. The pub was beginning to empty now and winter was about to fold his paper and head for the door when he realised who the diner was. The man was standing over his table, staring down at him. Money might have bought him a decent leather jacket but it couldn’t do anything for his tiny, lopsided face, or the two long razor scars that bisected his shorn scalp.

  He pulled out a chair and sat down.

  ‘Long time,’ he said, ‘no see.’

  Winter summoned a smile. Marty Harrison was the closest Portsmouth could offer to a big-time drug baron. According to the latest intelligence, he was wholesaling serious quantities of cocaine. He had supply lines of the stuff established from Liverpool, Manchester and London. He had a house in Puerto Banus, another somewhere in Northern Cyprus and a £340,000 motor yacht moored up at Port Solent. Even the Drugs Squad found it hard to get close to him, but narcotics had very definitely become the hottest ticket in town and nicking Marty Harrison was any detective’s wet dream – just one of the reasons winter was determined to win himself a posting to the squad before age and retirement caught up with him.

  ‘Marty.’ Winter gestured at his empty glass. ‘What can I get you?’

  Harrison ignored the offer. Years ago, he and Winter had had protracted dealings over a seizure of cannabis. Not a lot of money had been involved, and for months Harrison had resisted the idea of even talking to CID, but in the end, in return for certain information about a newcomer moving into heroin and cocaine, Winter had destroyed the file. Like most good deals, both parties had walked away happy – though Harrison had made a point of not talking to him since. Winter had occasionally wondered whether Harrison’s subsequent rise to fame and fortune hadn’t somehow dated from that moment. Other people’s success was like that. It made you feel cast off. And it made you feel envious.

  Now, with a chilling theatricality, Harrison put his hands on the table, bunching them into fists. He had huge hands, navy’s hands, and the skin of each finger between the first and second knuckle was tattooed with a single blue letter. The left hand read NOEL. The right, including the thumb, spelled BLAKE. Noel Blake was a legendary Pompey defender in the ’88 promotion-winning side, a towering centre-back who cut off visiting attackers at the knees. Marty, according to word on the street, did the same.

  Harrison studied winter a moment longer, then smiled.

  ‘Message from Juanita,’ he said simply. ‘Sorry to stand you up.’

  Winter did his best to look concerned.

  ‘Nothing serious, I hope.’

  ‘No, mate.’ Harrison shook his head. ‘Nothing a good dentist can’t sort out.’

  Minutes later, through the pub window, winter was watching Harrison climb into a dented BMW when his mobile rang. It was Cathy Lamb, the duty CID sergeant.

  ‘We’ve pulled a bloke in for murder,’ she said briskly. ‘Boss wants you to talk to him.’

  The first interview with Mick Spellar began at seventeen fifty-three. He’d spent the last four hours at the city’s Bridewell police station, sobering up in one of the cells. A police surgeon had given him a full examination, and taken scrapings from under his fingernails. Sealed in plastic containers, these would be readied for despatch with the blood samples from Mick Spellar’s runners and jeans to a forensic laboratory in Chepstow. A match with Sammy’s DNA would help seal the case against Mick Spellar. Son kicks father to death. Another home defeat.

  The interview rooms at the Bridewell had recently been repainted and the tang of white emulsion still hung in the air. An audio feed was relayed through speakers to the room next door, and Faraday settled himself on the edge of the bare table, a pen and scrap of paper beside him. Putting together an interview team had been less than easy. At full strength he had five detecti
ves at his disposal, but a couple had been extracted to join a major inquiry up in Aldershot while another was on leave. That left just two bodies. And one of them, to Faraday’s infinite regret, was Paul Winter.

  Not that winter lacked interviewing skills. On the contrary, he was bloody good at it. He knew how to build relationships, how to lard a conversation with a smile and a wink, how to worm his way into someone’s confidence, and win their trust, and lead them ever so gently towards the series of yawning traps he’d dug in their path. On the edge of that first abyss he’d let them pause, and glance down, and when they reached out to steady themselves – as they inevitably did – it would always be Winter’s hand they found first.

  In the eyes of some of his fellow detectives, winter had turned duplicity and verbal sleight of hand into an art form, scoring a series of amazing results, but as far as Faraday was concerned, the man was an affront, the living proof of how corrupting CID work could be. It wasn’t only that he was dishonest or untrustworthy. It was the way he regarded trust as just another currency – to be accumulated, invested, and then spent. To Faraday, Winter was a man without any shred of morality. Give Winter too much rope and you’d be dangling from the nearest tree by nightfall.

  His voice came through the speakers at Faraday’s elbow, warm, intimate, the kind of guy you’d open up to in a pub. He was inviting everyone to grab a seat. There followed the scraping sound of chairs and then another voice Faraday recognised as the duty solicitor. Fenwick was new to the city, an ambitious young northerner who’d already badged himself with a V-reg BMW, and it was obvious to Faraday that he regarded the case as a windfall challenge. Keep Mick Spellar out of prison, and Fenwick would be the toast of the legal community within hours.

  ‘My client would like to make a statement,’ he began.

  They took the first break at seven o’clock, standing around the table in the room next door while Winter sorted a tray of coffees from the machine down the corridor. The other interviewer was a young female detective, Dawn Ellis, a slight, pretty twenty-six-year-old with a cap of auburn hair and the clearest eyes Faraday had ever seen. She’d only been on the division since Christmas, but already she’d earned herself a reputation for shrewdness and a certain tenacity. In her previous life, Dawn had been a hairdresser. Anyone who could survive eight months of jokes about blow jobs in the CID room would have few problems with the likes of Mick Spellar.

  ‘He’s making it up as he goes along,’ she said to Faraday, ‘and Fenwick knows it.’

  According to Mick Spellar, his son Scott was responsible for the old man’s death. He’d found the pair of them scrapping in the front room. He’d pulled the lad off and given him a good talking to, but he’d no idea how bad the damage had been. Of course the blood on his shoes had been Sammy’s. The stuff had sprayed everywhere.

  Winter returned with the coffees. He’d tuned in to the conversation on his way back down the corridor.

  ‘Early days, boss.’ He handed Faraday a brimming polystyrene cup. ‘Might help to find the lad, though.’

  Faraday grunted agreement. The neighbours next door were positive that they hadn’t seen Scott leave but, as Fenwick had whispered to Mick Spellar, the rear access would have been an obvious escape route. The suggestion had drawn a sharp rebuke from Dawn Ellis but already it was obvious that getting a confession out of Spellar was going to be tougher than anyone had anticipated.

  Winter was still looking at Faraday. Both men were aware of the gulf between them, but to Faraday’s intense irritation Winter handled it far more effectively than he did. Indeed, the older man often seemed to take an active delight in the thinness of the DI’s skin.

  ‘Where are we looking, then? For little Scottie?’

  ‘Cathy’s circulated a photo. Jerry Proctor found it in the boy’s bedroom.’

  ‘Good one, is it? Recent?’

  ‘Last week. Since you ask.’

  It was true. Jerry had come across a strip of passport photographs, each dated on the back. A couple of them showed a cheerful, crop-haired youth in his late teens. He had a crooked grin and the suggestion of a bruise under one eye. In the other two photos, he’d been joined by a girl of the same age. She had long black hair, three nose-rings and a smile even wider than Scott’s. In one of the shots, her tongue was in his ear.

  ‘We’ll find him,’ Faraday muttered. ‘But it would be nice to put Spellar away first.’

  Once the interview began again, Ellis and Winter started to make progress. For one thing, Spellar was exhausted. He had the attention span of a gnat and keeping track of all the lies he was obliged to tell was obviously beyond him. Time and again, Winter encouraged him to go over the events of the morning, gently-gently, the way you might ask someone about their holidays, slowly widening the focus until Spellar began to trip himself up. As the sequence of events became more and more chaotic, Spellar’s voice got lower and lower until Faraday had trouble making out exactly what he was saying. No, he couldn’t explain why he hadn’t called an ambulance for his father. And no, he should never have left him lying there while he went down the offie for a bottle or two. Even Fenwick’s murmured protests started to lack conviction.

  The interview had degenerated into near-silence when Faraday’s mobile began to trill. He fetched it out of his pocket, listening hard as Dawn Ellis tried to concentrate what was left of Spellar’s mind.

  ‘Joe? Harry Wayte.’

  Faraday reached for a pen. Harry Wayte always wanted a favour. He was the DI in charge of the area Drugs Squad, a big, bluff career detective who hid his determination to smash the local drug supply networks behind a robust sense of humour and a bottomless thirst.

  ‘What can I do for you?’

  Harry had just seen the details on Scott Spellar. He wanted to know more. Faraday bent to the phone, explaining that the lad was a potential suspect in a murder case. He was alleged to have kicked his grandad to death. Picking him up had become a priority.

  ‘When did all this happen?’

  ‘This morning. Around half nine.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Up in Paulsgrove.’

  ‘No chance.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘The lad was in Whitechapel by then, scoring half a kilo of coke. We tailed him up the A3. He left Paulsgrove around six this morning.’

  Scott Spellar, according to Wayte, was working as a courier for Marty Harrison. He’d started a couple of years ago, nicking mobile phones to order, but now he’d graduated to drugs mule. The going rate for an excursion to London was around a hundred and fifty pounds. Some weeks Scott was making the round trip twice.

  Faraday permitted himself a smile. As well as the passport photographs, Proctor had found nearly eight hundred pounds in cash and a couple of airline tickets for Ibiza in the boy’s bedroom. This afternoon, Faraday had wondered where Scott had got the money from. Now he knew.

  ‘You tailed him back as well?’

  ‘No. We lost him in Walton-on-Thames.’

  ‘But he still came back?’

  ‘He was carrying, Joe. He had to. Harrison gets funny about late deliveries.’

  ‘So where was he taking the stuff?’

  ‘That’s exactly it. That’s what we don’t know. That’s why we were on him in the first place.’

  There was a long silence. Next door, Paul Winter was telling Spellar that his story was a load of old bollocks. At length, Faraday cleared his throat.

  ‘You want me to sweat the lad? Assuming we pick him up?’

  ‘I’m just saying he’ll need an alibi.’

  ‘You’re suggesting he’d give me chapter and verse on the likes of Harrison?’

  ‘I’m suggesting the prospect of a murder charge might concentrate his tiny mind. Grassing Harrison wouldn’t be the cleverest thing he ever did, but the alternative might be worse.’

  ‘But he didn’t do it, Harry.’

  ‘Of course he didn’t. We know that. He knows that. But he can’t be certain we’re
not playing games. Who else is in the frame?’

  ‘His father.’

  ‘And what’s the strength?’

  ‘One hundred per cent. We’re talking to him now – and the way things are going we may not bother waiting for the forensic.’

  ‘How much time have you got? Can you get an extension?’

  Faraday glanced at his watch. Getting an extension meant keeping Spellar longer than the permitted twenty-four hours. And that, in turn, meant going to the superintendent with some bullshit story about needing to test the man’s alibi.

  ‘I can’t do that, Harry. If he coughs, I’ll have to charge him.’

  ‘And you think he will?’

  ‘Yes.’

  There was a long silence. Then Harry Wayte suggested delaying a formal charge until tomorrow morning. Just in case.

  ‘Just in case what?’

  ‘Young Scottie turns up.’

  Twenty minutes later, with Mick Spellar ever closer to confessing, word came from Paulsgrove that Scott Spellar had appeared at the house in Anson Avenue. Recognising his face from the circulated photo, the young PC guarding the place had arrested him. As soon as transport was available, he’d be taken down to the city. Where would Faraday like him delivered?

  ‘The Bridewell,’ Faraday grunted, listening to the exchanges next door as Winter dismantled the last of Spellar’s fairy tale about defending his poor old dad. The truth, suggested Winter, was much simpler. He’d gone to bed pissed. He’d woken up pissed. And when the old boy wouldn’t part with his debit card to buy more booze, Spellar had lost his rag. No?

  The silence that followed was broken by yet another call. This time it was Faraday’s CID boss, Detective Superintendent Arnold Pollock, a thin, intense highflyer with a Cambridge degree and little time for moral nuances. He was obviously at some party or other because Faraday could hear laughter and the clink of glasses in the background.

  ‘How far have you got with Spellar?’

  ‘Nearly through, sir. I’d give it another half hour at the most.’