The Take

by Hurley, Graham

  He took a taxi into St Helier. The driver dropped him at Tourist Information where he waited impatiently behind a small queue of Germans before explaining his problem to the girl behind the counter. A friend’s daughter was singing at one of the local hotels, big place, somewhere on the seafront. Her name was Nikki, Nikki McIntyre. Might she appear on a poster or in publicity for the hotel? Might there be a quick way of running her to earth?

  There wasn’t. The girl had never heard of her, but was happy to help in whatever way she could. Minutes later, Winter left with a handful of hotel brochures and a map. The seafront stretched away before him, around the long curve of the bay. The first six enquiries were useless. Most hotels assumed their clientele would be sixty-plus and supplied entertainment to match. Then, as the office blocks and seafood restaurants began to give way to winding drives and shuttered houses, Winter found her.

  The hotel was called L’Abbaye. Tucked away behind thick stone walls and a frieze of silver birches, it had an intimacy and a sense of quiet good taste that suggested serious money. The woman behind the reception desk studied Winter over a pair of pince-nez glasses before confirming that Nikki McIntyre did indeed entertain guests there three nights a week.

  ‘Tonight?’

  ‘Indeed.’

  ‘What kind of time?’

  ‘About nine o’clock.’ She raised an enquiring eyebrow. ‘Will you be requiring a room, Mr …?’

  Winter had been studying the tariff. A couple of nights at L’Abbaye cost more than a season ticket at Fratton Park.

  ‘I’m staying with friends,’ he said. ‘Would you happen to have a number for Nikki?’

  ‘I’m afraid not, sir. We’re not permitted to give out information like that. As I say, nine o’clock. I’d advise you to get here earlier than that, though. High season, we tend to be pretty busy.’

  ‘She attracts a big crowd?’

  ‘Thursdays are certainly popular.’ She offered Winter a quiet smile. ‘Especially with the menfolk.’

  Minutes before Faraday’s tour of the Gunwharf Quays site was due to begin, he took a call on his mobile. He was stuck in traffic at roadworks outside the main dockyard gate, a Strauss waltz on the radio, trying to get in the mood. The voice on the phone took him straight back to bed.

  ‘Marta,’ he said, ‘I’ve been meaning to phone.’

  ‘But you couldn’t?’

  ‘I left the number at home.’

  ‘Really?’

  She sounded slightly reproachful, as if they’d been lovers for months, and Faraday found himself wondering about the question of etiquette. What kinds of obligation lay at the end of a night like that? What on earth happened next?

  Marta was talking about some concert or other at the city’s Guildhall. She had a couple of complimentary tickets and no one to keep her company. The concert was on Saturday night. How did Faraday feel about coming along?

  ‘I’ll take a rain check,’ Faraday said quickly. ‘Saturday might be difficult.’

  ‘You’ll ring me? Tomorrow?’

  ‘Definitely.’

  The traffic began to move at last, and Faraday eased his way through the cones. He was curious to know how Marta had got hold of his number.

  ‘You gave it to me, Joe.’

  ‘Did I?’

  ‘Oui. I thought detectives had fantastic memories.’

  She rang off without bothering to say goodbye, and Faraday was left shaking his head. Just the sound of her laughter was enough to stir him.

  At the Gunwharf site, he left the car beside a muddy encampment of portacabins and joined Hartigan in the headquarters building for a pre-tour brief. A young project manager bounced through a Powerpoint presentation and fielded questions from the couple of dozen invited guests, each of them carefully badged.

  There were envoys here from companies Faraday recognised from the Gunwharf brochures: business development managers from Levi Strauss, Gap and Adidas, an events co-ordinator from the Crew Clothing Company, a pretty executive from Bar 38, as well as a smattering of the more go-ahead councillors and local government officers with whom Hartigan was clearly on first-name terms. These were business-orientated people only too familiar with the bigger numbers, and as the graph lines climbed ever higher on the screen, Faraday began to understand why Hartigan had been so keen to have him along.

  A one-hundred-million-pound investment. A catchment area of 2.72 million people within an hour’s drive. Underground parking for thousands of cars. World-class shopping. Dozens of pubs and restaurants. Malaysian cuisine. Pacific-rim cuisine. A fourteen-screen multiplex. An open-air amphitheatre. A twenty-six-lane bowling alley. Two hotels. In a city addicted to smoky pubs, snatched take aways and a helping or two of recreational on-street violence, this was a radical makeover.

  Back outside, Faraday joined Hartigan to tramp around the site itself, listening to the project manager map out the vision that lay before them. The gigantic hole in the ground that would anchor the shopping and leisure complex. The muddy swamp that would become Millennium Boulevard. The dumper park where Vulcan Square would be. The plans, just finalised, that would transform a dry dock puddled with oily water into City Quay. And, over on the other half of the site, the stubby little forest of deeply sunk piles that would soon support the harbourside apartment blocks.

  Hartigan was standing by the new seawall, gazing out across the water. The sun was beginning to dip towards the rooflines of Gosport. Yachts from one of the upharbour marinas were slipping past on the ebbing tide. A warship, grey and sleek, was ghosting in through the harbourmouth, the whine of her turbines barely audible above the laughter that had greeted a joke about the nearby car ferry terminal. The top floors of Arethusa House, on the southern flank, would be barely a stone’s throw from the top deck of the Isle of Wight ferries. Imagine those long Sunday mornings in bed with your mistress, one guest remarked, with a couple of hundred ferry passengers cheering you on.

  Hartigan hadn’t heard the joke. He took Faraday by the arm, conjuring up in his mind’s eye the apartment blocks from the muddle of cranes, pumps and bright yellow dumper trucks.

  ‘If I had a spare half a million,’ he said, ‘I’d be down here like a shot.’

  Only yesterday, Faraday had caught a rumour that Hartigan was preparing the ground for some kind of private policing deal with Gunwharf, and now he realised that it was probably true. Over in Kent, the Bluewater Centre was paying serious money for the exclusive attentions of a sergeant and half a dozen uniforms. On-site crime was largely plastic – credit-card fraud – but the Kent posse were invaluable as a training resource for the security staff and kept a high profile for the benefit of shoppers. Faraday’s vision of police work had never extended to flogging his services to commercial bidders, but Hartigan was a different kind of animal. He could sense the way the commercial winds were blowing. And he knew that offering headquarters a modest profit on a six-figure policing deal would do him no harm when it came to the next promotions board. Partnership was an elastic concept. As Hartigan kept pointing out.

  Minutes later, the party made its way to the show flats already completed on one corner of the site. The penthouse apartment at the top had its own lift, and Faraday emerged onto waxed parquet flooring to be greeted with champagne and canapés. Now came the softer sell. No more figures, no more graph lines, simply the chance to admire the developers’ taste in soft furnishings and ovenproof tableware, and to fantasise that all this, one day, might just belong to you.

  Faraday was still gazing out at the view when he felt a hand on his arm. It was the deputy editor of the News, a thin, intense thirty-something who never tired of daring life to take him by surprise. He’d been meaning to give Faraday a ring since yesterday. Nicking the Donald Duck flasher sounded like a definite result. Faraday nodded, giving nothing away.

  ‘We’ll see how it goes,’ he said.

  ‘But a bloody academic, eh? Who’d have thought?’

  Faraday hesitated a moment, knowing only too
well where this conversation might lead. The last thing he was going to provide was the filling for one of the News’s feature supplements, and the arrival of the woman who headed the developers’ residential sales team gave him the perfect opportunity to beat a retreat. He allowed her to take him by the arm. She wanted to show him a state-of-the-art kitchen.

  ‘It’s Liz, by the way,’ she added, ‘Liz Tooley.’

  They talked for a while about the way sales were going. The apartments were released in batches. The first release had prompted queues round the block, would-be buyers prepared to camp out all night for the chance to put down their thousand pounds and secure a foothold in this wholly transformed, new-look Portsmouth. Already, she said, the options had become negotiable assets, changing hands at a sizeable premium, proof-positive that communities like these were the shape of things to come.

  ‘Communities?’ Faraday couldn’t keep the smile off his face. ‘Communities?’

  ‘Of course. Why on earth not?’

  Liz Tooley swept on. Demand for the top-end properties, she said, was overwhelming. At half a million a pop, she was beginning to wonder whether they might even have underpriced them. And why? Because people were buying more than the view, more than the latest in designer chic. They wanted gated entry systems, exclusive access, electronically controlled gates on the undercroft parking areas. They wanted security locks and smoke alarms and centrally monitored intruder detection. Their investment was in peace of mind. They wanted, above all, to feel safe.

  ‘You mean protected.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘And you think that’s realistic? Or even possible?’

  ‘Of course it is. That’s why you’re here, Mr Faraday.’

  The challenge was blunt, a reminder that nothing came for free, and Faraday turned away, swamped by a sudden anger, staring out at the lights mirrored on the blackness of the harbour. The city, with all its rough imperfections, lapped at the walls of this new development. So far, Gunwharf’s security headaches had been limited to the theft of materials from the building site, but there’d soon come a point when they’d have to sort out exactly who this gleaming lifestyle vision was for. Would closed-circuit TV and smart doorlocks really keep the inner city where it belonged? Or were they prepared to face the social consequences of building paradise next door to one of the most deprived urban areas in the country?

  ‘Call for me and it’s probably too late,’ he murmured. ‘We’re the guys who clear up afterwards.’

  ‘Not true.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  Liz shook her head, as vehement as ever. Faraday’s guys had already been more than helpful. In fact, they were priceless.

  ‘Like who, exactly?’

  ‘Like Pete. Pete Lamb.’

  Pete, she said, had been helping them out on the sales side, running checks on potential buyers, tidying up one or two of the dodgier applications, making sure that the punters could deliver what they’d promised. She’d passed his name on to her colleagues in the commercial operation. Access to someone with Pete’s experience was a big, big bonus.

  ‘Nice guy, too.’ She spotted someone else, and began to move away, flashing the last of her smile at Faraday. ‘Don’t you agree?’

  Nikki McIntyre was already at the piano by the time Winter got back to the hotel. A solitary meal at a Chinese restaurant in the maze of streets behind the seafront had gone on much longer than he’d anticipated, chiefly because the bloody waiters couldn’t tear themselves away from serving the bigger tables. He’d have walked out had he not been so hungry, though in the end the food had been as crap as the service.

  Now, in the hotel’s cavernous basement-bar, he leaned against a pillar studded with tiny mirror tiles, transfixed by the figure at the keyboard. She was smaller and slighter than Winter had imagined. She wore black jeans, beautifully cut, and a simple black T-shirt. The cap of black hair had grown to shoulder length and the whiteness of her face was offset by a slash of crimson lipstick. Everything about her spoke of harshness, and hurt. If you’d spent seven years in the hands of a man like Hennessey, Winter thought, this is exactly what you’d look like.

  He ordered a double Scotch from the tiny bar and took up another vantage point on the other side of the room. From here, she was in profile, her upper body moving slowly in time with the chords of the song, back and forth, utterly mesmeric. She sang wistful, bluesy ballads, perfectly scored for a slightly breathy voice that occasionally surged for a particular lyric or chord, and the longer she played, the warmer grew the ripples of applause that greeted each new song. Oddly enough, she appeared not to care about the audience. On the contrary, she seemed totally apart, totally oblivious, occupying a small private space she’d made her own, and as each song developed she seemed physically to grow, raising her eyes from time to time with a look so distant, so unnerving, that Winter could sense the stirrings around him. This is what you do when life lets you down, he thought. This is the bid you make for sanity.

  None of the songs was announced, but towards the end of her one-hour set, she bent forward, her lips brushing the microphone.

  ‘This is for a friend of mine,’ she murmured, ‘who died.’

  Winter watched, following every movement of her hands, every dip of her head, remembering the little march of photos across her father’s grand piano. The plump baby in the apple orchard. The shy ten-year-old aboard her pony. And now this, the chalk-faced survivor with a lifelong debt to call in.

  The song came to an end, to more applause. Nikki got to her feet and closed the lid on the keyboard. Winter managed to intercept her as she hurried towards the stairs.

  ‘That was incredible,’ he said.

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘The name’s Winter.’

  She seemed unsurprised.

  ‘You’re a policeman.’

  ‘CID.’

  ‘Whatever. My father rang. Have you got a pen?’

  She gave Winter a mobile number and suggested he ring if he wanted to talk. Not tonight. Tomorrow maybe.

  ‘Lunch?’ Winter suggested.

  She shrugged, ignoring the sea of watching faces.

  ‘Ring me,’ she repeated. ‘And we’ll see.’

  Kids from the neighbouring estate, out late on the patch of wilderness by the beachside fort, were the first on the scene. They circled the burning car in the darkness, shrieking with excitement at each new yellow spurt of flame, fascinated by the way the fire seemed to strip the thing of flesh, licking at the seats inside, reducing the body to nothing but a shell, black against the dancing reds and yellows. Excitement smelled of spilled petrol and melting rubber. One of them legged it back to the flats to dial 999. All they needed now was the fire engine and ambulance and a couple of police cars. Then it would be just like the telly.

  Fifteen

  Friday, 23 June, 1000

  Pete Lamb was still at home in his new flat in Whitwell Road when the doorbell went. Looking down from the bay window, he recognised the car at the kerbside and the greying cap of tightly curled hair at the door. Faraday. How did he find me? he thought. How did he know where to come looking?

  ‘You get this address from Cathy?’

  ‘Your mum. Her number’s on file. I said I was a friend. She was nice enough to believe me.’

  They were upstairs now, standing uncomfortably in the big sunny lounge. Faraday didn’t want coffee. Didn’t want anything. He knew about the moonlighting job and the cosy little channel Lamb had opened up for himself on the Gunwharf job. He knew where it led and who else it involved. And he knew, above all, that his first call should have gone to headquarters.

  A breach of regulations this wide was meat and drink to the Professional Standards Department, but formal notification would mean curtains for more than Pete Lamb. Cathy, too, would lose her job. Not only that, but if she’d been silly enough to run a name or a vehicle registration through PNC on Pete’s behalf, she could land herself a prison sentence.

  ‘
Cath’s doing a great job,’ he grunted, ‘in case you were wondering.’

  Pete was still trying to work out what Faraday was doing here. Social calls just weren’t his style.

  ‘Glad to hear it,’ he said.

  ‘It isn’t easy, believe me, especially when you haven’t done it before.’

  ‘I bet.’

  ‘Stressful.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘And sometimes tricky to get the balance right. Conflicting interests. All the time.’

  Faraday was inspecting a row of paperbacks in a bookcase by the window. Most of them were nautical, a mix of well-thumbed yachting thrillers and colourful accounts of round-the-world voyages.

  ‘Keeping yourself busy?’ he enquired lightly.

  ‘So so.’

  ‘Never bored?’

  Faraday turned to face him. One glance confirmed that Pete Lamb had begun to catch the drift of what he was really saying, but he knew he had to be careful here. The moment Pete realised for certain that he’d sussed the jobs he was picking up from Gunwharf, then Faraday himself would be implicated. DI on division might be the job from hell, but there were days when Faraday rather liked it, and the last person he intended to hazard his own career for was Pete bloody Lamb.

  Pete was explaining the way he spent his time. Bimbling around mostly, plus the odd excursion afloat. Faraday stepped very close. He wasn’t interested in this thin tissue of lies. Neither had he very much time for a man who’d put his wife’s future on the line. What concerned him more was hauling Pete back from the brink, before he lost his balance and took Cathy with him.

  ‘Policing’s changed,’ Faraday said softly. ‘Do you know that? It’s just PR now, a lot of it, PR and all kinds of other bullshit. The right paperwork, the right connections, the right outcomes. You know how I spent last night? Banged up in some poxy penthouse being nice to a bunch of developers. And you know why? Because some ambitious prat wants to fast-track himself upstairs. I can eat a plateful of oysters with the best of them, my friend, but you know what really sticks in my throat? Finding out from other people, estate agents for fuck’s sake, what’s really going on.’ He paused, his face inches from Pete’s. ‘We kiss these people’s arses because they smell of money. And just look where it gets us.’ He turned away for a moment, a touch on the brakes, then he was facing Pete again. ‘Cath tells me you’re training for Cowes Week. Is that right?’