Turnstone

by Hurley, Graham

  Next door, in his own office, was a note for Faraday from Jerry Proctor, the SOCO. A preliminary trawl through Charlie Oomes’s Port Solent house had produced nothing of any interest – certainly no signs of a struggle. He was quite prepared to give the premises a thorough turning-over but there were cost implications and he would need an overtime code before proceeding. Faraday thought about it for a moment or two and then scribbled a note in reply. He hadn’t got the code Proctor needed and in any case he sensed that Neville Bevan had been right all along. Anyone prepared to surrender their house keys had little to fear from the forensic boys.

  Faraday looked up to find Cathy at the door. She was about to go home but he called her back.

  ‘We need to check out the radio traffic,’ he said. ‘Messages from Oomes’s boat during the race. I don’t know how it works but you need to cover all the bases. VHF. Mobiles. Whatever. Then I need a look round a Sigma 33.’ He smiled. ‘I was wondering whether you could organise that, too?’

  ‘Like how?’

  ‘Like talking to Pete. He’s bound to know someone.’

  Cathy stared at him for a long moment, then rummaged in her bag for an address book. Taking the pen from his hand, she checked for a number and scribbled it on a pad by Faraday’s elbow.

  ‘What’s that?’ he said blankly.

  ‘That’s Pete’s mum. I gather he’s in most nights. Do you mind phoning yourself?’

  Winter knew the geography of Port Solent by heart. From the terrace of a pub called the Mermaid, you could look across the water into the middle of the horseshoe formed by the apartment block. The balconies were all on the inside of the horseshoe and Juanita’s place was up on the fifth floor.

  The Friday night crowd were already three deep at the bar and after elbowing his way to a pint of Kronenburg, Winter settled himself on the terrace, abandoning his copy of the News for an occasional check on Juanita’s flat. He had an intense respect for big Dave Pope. If anything, Elaine’s brother was even more volatile, even more dangerous, than Marty. Quite why last night’s events in the car park hadn’t gone further was still beyond him.

  It took another pint and a half before Winter had his answer. First on to the balcony was Juanita. Tonight she was wearing a flame-coloured halter and she spent several minutes studying the view before glancing up at the darkening sky and disappearing inside. Fifteen minutes later, Winter was engrossed in a preview of Pompey’s prospects for the coming season when his mobile began to chirp.

  He answered it at once, still deep in the paper.

  ‘I don’t know why you read that crap,’ said a voice.

  Quicker than he should have done, Winter looked up at the apartment block. Dave Pope was standing on Juanita’s balcony, one hand raised in a derisive wave.

  At home by mid-evening, Faraday found a typed A4 envelope with a London postmark amongst his mail. Ripping it open, he emptied the contents on to the kitchen table. With the big colour photograph was a letter of congratulations. Mr J. Faraday had won second prize in a competition organised by a leading wildlife magazine. Enclosed was a cheque for three hundred pounds.

  Faraday picked up the photograph. It showed a gannet that J-J had snapped on one of their birding expeditions to North Yorkshire. They’d joined a party of birders on a boat trip out of Bridlington. They’d spent most of the day at sea and towards the end of the afternoon they’d found themselves amongst a group of diving gannets in pursuit of a shoal of fish. It was only J-J’s second outing with the 300mm lens that Faraday had bought him for Christmas, but as the birds began to feed he’d got lucky with the focus, catching a plunging gannet a split second before it hit the water.

  Faraday looked at the photograph now, as amazed as ever at its power and impact. The gannet’s long wings arrowed back from its body. Its neck was outstretched, its eyes were open, and J-J had captured perfectly the soft blush of apricot on its head. The wave at the foot of the frame was thrusting upwards, laced with spume, and half-closing his eyes Faraday was afloat again, gazing out as bird after bird plunged down, pocking the grey sea with little explosions of white. Janna would have been proud of a shot like this, and prouder still of the cheque. Three hundred pounds could have got J-J safely to France. Three hundred pounds would have kept The Birds of the Western Palearctic intact.

  Faraday put the photograph and the cheque to one side, and sank into a chair. Making any kind of peace with J-J’s absence was less than easy. Most of the time he was able to take Cathy’s advice and push the boy to the very back of his mind. Other times he was just angry – angry with his son and angry with himself. But tonight, remembering the gannets, it was altogether more simple. He missed J-J. He missed his company, and his laughter, and his flailing arms. Without him, the house felt suddenly chill and empty, a tomb-like reminder that he was well and truly on his own.

  Outside, it had begun to rain. On Friday nights, the traffic was streaming into the city but Faraday drove in a trance, oblivious to the blur of headlights around him. Ruth Potterne lived in Southsea. He had the address. He even knew the road, one of those sinuous tree-lined Thomas Owen streets that were the city’s sole concession to gentility and good taste. When he found the house, a light in a first-floor window offered a glimpse of bookshelves and a corner of plaster coving picked out in buttermilk and soft reds. Janna’s colours he thought, getting slowly out of the car.

  Ruth Potterne answered his second knock. Barefoot, she was wearing a pair of jeans and a baggy old sweatshirt with ‘Navy Gun Crew’ across the front. She had a glass of wine in her hand.

  It took her several seconds to recognise him. The rain had flattened his hair against his skull and drips from the lime tree were patterning his shirt. He began to apologise for calling so late, surprised at how tongue-tied he’d suddenly become, but when she stepped aside and invited him in, he felt unaccountably glad. The house smelled of joss sticks. The colours of the oriental rugs, and wall hangings, spoke yet again of a world he hadn’t seen for twenty years. Janna’s taste. Janna’s daring. Janna’s home.

  Faraday heard himself talking about Stewart Maloney. Inquiries had reached the point where he had to be sure about events in his private life.

  ‘Sure how, exactly?’

  ‘Sure that you two weren’t’ – Faraday risked a smile – ‘together.’

  ‘You don’t believe me?’

  ‘It’s not a question of belief, Mrs Potterne. It’s a question of evidence.’

  Something in that sentence made her flinch. Faraday could see it in her eyes. Was it the mention of belief? Was it the need for evidence?

  ‘Call me Ruth.’ She returned his smile. ‘Would you like a glass of wine?’

  Upstairs, in the living room, he accepted a glass of Chilean red. Her photos were everywhere, hung in random patterns against the deep, plum-coloured wallpaper. The contrast with the bleak white spaces of Maloney’s seafront apartment couldn’t have been more obvious.

  ‘So how do you propose to acquire this evidence?’

  Faraday blinked at the question. He hadn’t thought this conversation through. For once in his life, he was completely lost.

  ‘We’ll need some DNA …’ he began.

  ‘Some what?’

  ‘DNA. A mouthswab will do. Or hair, if it’s easier.’

  ‘But I thought Stewart had disappeared?’

  ‘He has. It’s your DNA we’re talking about.’

  Faraday tried to pull himself together, explaining how he’d look for a match on items from Maloney’s flat. Something like a pillowcase from his bed. It was nothing more than a formality, a closing-down of a certain line of inquiry.

  Ruth had settled into a chair beside the open fireplace.

  ‘You want to do it now? Here?’

  ‘We can do it whenever it’s convenient. The kit’s back at the station. I’ll arrange for a policewoman to give you a ring.’

  ‘Should I have a lawyer with me?’

  ‘If you want to, of course you can. It’s your c
hoice.’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘You don’t mind?’

  ‘Not at all. Why on earth should I?’

  Faraday tried to think of an answer but couldn’t. Ruth took a sip of her wine, then put it carefully to one side.

  ‘So why are you really here?’ she asked him.

  Startled, he returned her gaze for a moment or two and then told her that he didn’t know. It was a moment of absolute candour, and he felt all the more foolish because he couldn’t account for the fact that he’d said it, for the fact that he’d even knocked on the door. Was it something to do with J-J? With memories of Janna? With working eighteen-hour days to no great effect? It was true. It was shameful. He just didn’t know.

  ‘My son left home a couple of days ago …’ he began.

  She nodded and gestured for him to carry on, and moments later he found himself telling her about J-J, about his new French girlfriend, and about the boy’s absolute conviction that his future lay with a virtual stranger in a foreign land. She was clever, this woman Valerie, much cleverer than J-J. She’d twist him this way and that, use him, take advantage of his innocence.

  ‘I know she will,’ Faraday said. ‘I’ve met her. I’ve seen them together.’ Ruth looked at him for a long moment, then shook her head.

  ‘You’re talking about loss, not innocence.’

  ‘You’re right.’

  ‘Your loss.’

  ‘Right again.’

  ‘And it hurts. Of course it hurts. I lost my own son five days ago. It hurts a great deal.’

  Faraday closed his eyes. He’d met this woman only yesterday. He’d met her in the gallery. He’d sympathised about the loss of her husband. Yet he hadn’t said a word about her son. Sam had drowned at sea. And clever old Faraday had said bugger all.

  ‘So what does that make me?’ he said aloud. ‘Apart from stupid?’

  Ruth waved his apology away.

  ‘It doesn’t matter. There’s nothing you can say anyway. Here’ – she passed him the bottle – ‘help yourself.’

  Faraday hesitated for only a second. He liked the smell of this place, its warmth, the feeling that someone else in the world might understand him. He wasn’t here to cross-question her, to push his working day still deeper into the evening, but as the wine slipped down he realised that it was happening anyway. He wanted to find out about Ruth Potterne. He wanted to know about her marriage, and her efforts to broker a peace between her son and her new husband. He wanted to understand where she’d come from and what it was that had first attracted her to Henry Potterne. Not because he was a detective, hunting for bits of the jigsaw, but because he felt old, and abandoned, and suddenly needful. Friendship would be good. He’d settle for that.

  She was talking about the summer she’d first met Henry. She’d been living on a semi-derelict houseboat on the Isle of Wight with her ten-year-old son, trying to make a living for herself as a photographer. She did portrait work for friends, and friends of friends, and she even stooped to doing the odd wedding, but her real love was for art photography and to make a success of that she had to find an outlet.

  ‘Henry had a gallery in Southsea,’ she said, ‘a tiny place in the back streets, totally chaotic. I’d heard of it from a painter friend so I just took an armful of stuff over.’

  She’d been thirty-three years old. She remembered the date because it happened to be her birthday. She’d let the fact slip and Henry had taken her to lunch in a pub in Old Portsmouth. He’d liked her work a great deal. The word he’d used was ‘compelling’.

  ‘He was right.’

  Faraday was looking at one of the shots on the wall. Unusually for Ruth, it was in colour. A low sun spilled shadows across an eternity of gleaming sand. In the far distance, a tiny row of beach huts.

  Ruth laughed.

  ‘That was Bembridge Harbour, just down from the houseboat. Imagine waking up to that every morning. It was a photographer’s dream.’

  ‘You’ve got more?’

  ‘Hundreds. You’ll regret this.’

  She left the room and returned with a big fabric-bound album. Faraday began to leaf through them, pausing from time to time to study a particular shot. The younger Ruth had a thing about skies and the reflection of light in water. Time after time, Faraday found himself looking at a dizzying tumble of cloud, often framed by mud flats or sand, occasionally anchored by a thin strip of horizon. The album spoke of sunshine and space. Not one photograph contained a human being.

  ‘Where’s Sam, then?’

  ‘He got snapped. Snaps are different.’

  ‘And the houseboat?’

  ‘Coming right up.’

  She disappeared again. The next album was even thicker: page after page of tiny details from the houseboat, carefully lit and photographed through a variety of lenses. The pattern from the corner of a lace curtain, with a smudge of sand dune in the background. The eye of Sam’s pet goldfish, later lost in a muddle over a change of water. The tip of an icicle, coldly blue against the rough nap of a hanging towel. Once again, there were no concessions to the obvious, no shots that might show the whole of the boat, that might help the casual observer get a fix on where this woman had once parked her life.

  Was it deliberate, this lack of clues? Or had Ruth been deliberately reluctant to reveal anything as ordinary as an address?

  The questions made her smile. She took the album and turned to a page near the back. It was an exterior shot this time, a close-up of the boat’s name, either the bow or the stern, the grain of the wood clearly visible beneath the layers of carefully applied paint, but once again Faraday was denied the whole picture.

  ‘Kaburangi?’ he queried.

  ‘It’s a Maori word. It means something you really treasure. Sam was born in New Zealand. We didn’t leave until he was nearly eight. He loved it there.’

  She explained that his father had been a charter skipper, delivering yachts all over the world. He and Ruth had met in Australia and moved to New Zealand when she found out that she was pregnant.

  ‘You divorced?’

  ‘We never married. We just ran out of steam. He came back here and took a job in Cowes and in the end we followed.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because Sam missed him so much. It wasn’t fair to stay out there. Here was much better from his point of view.’

  Sam had seen lots of his father, staying over in Cowes with him and his new partner. That was where he’d learned to handle a dinghy. By the time he went to secondary school, he was regularly winning cups at local regattas.

  The memories made her eyes swim and she looked down for a moment, embarrassed. They were on the second bottle of wine by now and Faraday’s awkwardness had gone. This time he made a much better job of saying he was sorry. Losing a twenty-two-year-old to a French social worker was bad enough. Having your only son die was unimaginable.

  ‘Where’s Chris now?’

  ‘In the Caribbean somewhere. He took a chartering job. I’ve been trying to get hold of him about Sam.’

  Abruptly, she left the room again. He heard her blowing her nose, then came a series of kitchen noises. She was putting the kettle on. They’d have coffee. And then he would have to go.

  He reached for the first album again. A section near the back was reserved for wildlife shots. Leafing through, he was trying to imagine her ten years younger when his eye fell on a bird. It filled the frame. It was on a pebbly beach at half-tide or less. There were growths of seaweed on the rocks and the mud flats behind still glistened in the low sun. The bird was a dark, mottled colour, perfectly camouflaged against predators, and Ruth had caught it exactly at the moment its head had turned. Most bird photographers judged the eye to be the test of a good shot. The eye was all-important. The eye was what you went for when you hunted for focus and resolution. Yet here was Ruth, breaking every rule, and coming up with a photograph that – to Faraday – exactly captured the essence of the bird. The sturdy little body bent forward, the tail tilted
in the air, and a blur where the head should be. Like J-J, she should have put it in for a competition. And like J-J, she would doubtless have won a prize.

  A movement at the door broke his concentration. Ruth was holding a tray and doing her best to peer over his shoulder.

  ‘It’s a turnstone,’ Faraday said. ‘I wake up to these little fellas every morning of my life.’

  It was true. They lived on the mud flats below his bedroom window, dislodging stone after stone in the hunt for the food beneath. Watching them through his binoculars never failed to cheer him up. Their dedication. Their persistence. The joy he sensed in their brief moments of stillness after a particularly juicy beakful of lugworm. For his fortieth birthday, J-J had drawn him a turnstone and hand-coloured it in nuptial plumage before mounting it in a handsome frame. Four years later, it still occupied pride of place in Faraday’s study.

  He told her about it now, J-J’s picture, and she knelt on the carpet before the hearth, easing down the plunger on the cafetière. Sam had been keen on them too. That first summer, in the evenings, he’d squelch across the mud flats, waving his arms, trying to catch them. He never did, of course, but he’d come back filthy, mud everywhere, trying to copy their call. She could see him now, back on the houseboat, sitting in the big wash tub, making his turnstone noise. It was loud and rattly. Trik-tuk-tuk-tuk, it went. Trik-tuk-tuk-tuk.

  She poured the coffee, then turned her head away again, angry that she couldn’t hide her grief.

  ‘I’ve got turnstones,’ Faraday murmured. ‘You must come over to the house some time.’

  Twenty

  A call from Dawn Ellis awoke Faraday shortly after seven in the morning. He’d taken to sleeping with the mobile under his pillow and he rolled over with it clamped to his ear, trying to check the time. Saturday mornings used to be sacrosanct. Once.

  ‘We had a serious wounding last night. I thought you ought to know.’

  Faraday felt a deep chill, a coldness that reached way down inside. For some reason he wanted to defer the name. The name would be the worst news. He knew it would.