Backstory

by Hurley, Graham

So were his guys coping? They were. His uniformed blokes were on top of their patch and did the biz. They knew how to answer aggression with aggression and kept the lid on most situations. About the younger breed of detectives, though, he wasn’t so certain. “They tend to be technocrats,” he said. “They don’t go into pubs enough. It’s all process, all procedure. They need to get out there, have a few conversations.”

  This was interesting. In my game, you’re always alert for that half-sentence, that throw-away remark, that might open a whole new fictional line of enquiry. This was a guy for whom Pompey low life would hold few secrets. How did he see things going over the next year or three?

  “In this city, you mean?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Or in society in general?”

  “Both.”

  “That’s hard. And it isn’t good. The nuclear family’s gone. It’s history. We get kids in here who’ve never had a man in their lives, never eaten at a table. They don’t fear us, they don’t fear anyone. The girls are the same. If anything they’re worse. Yet the only way these people are gonna be able to live is by having kids of their own. So where does that take us?”

  Good question. Gary Cable was next on my list. This was a D/S on the Priority Crime Team who came highly recommended. He worked out of the CID offices in Highland Road and ran a bunch of pro-active detectives who responded to the ever-changing patterns of crime in the city. Most of this stuff is drugs-related and just now Gary was doing his best to disrupt a bunch of black dealers who were making the ninety minute hop down from south London. We went out in his unmarked Fiesta to find them. Names like Black Marcus, Diamond Leon, Bobby Harvey.

  “These are guys making a grand’s worth of profit in a day,” he told me. “They arrive in a hire car with some paid numptie at the wheel and do the tour. We know all the hot spots and we nick them from time to time when we know we can cause maximum damage, but they get grief from the locals, too. Pompey boys see one of these black guys serving up so they give him a slap or two towards the end of the day when he’s carrying, then rob him blind. You see their point, don’t you? Who’s the black guy gonna run to? Us?”

  He laughed. Gary was small and punchy with a lean frame. You sensed a great deal of anger, the kind of rage born from frustration, and it was no surprise to learn that he ran the four miles to and from work every day. “Helps no end,” he admitted. “Turns me into a human being again after a rough shift.”

  We drove around the crappier areas of Southsea and Fratton, ticking off the junkies waiting for their next fix. Then he spotted a dealer, two-up in a hire car. We slipped into the traffic three cars behind him. Black Marcus. Down from London. Just now he was running a buy-5-wraps-get-3-free deal and the street couldn’t get enough of the stuff. Like Andy Harrington, the King of Intel, Gary had the maths imprinted on his soul. We were talking toot at the time. A couple of grand for 90% pure at source. £80K retail once it hits the street. Why work for anything less?

  We tailed Black Marcus for a while. He was on the phone most of the time. Then he stopped on a double yellow and dived into a corner store. Carried downstream with the rest of the traffic, we lost him. At this point we were close to the seafront but Gary wanted to show me something else and so we headed back into the city’s badlands.

  On the estates, the shops are grouped together side by side and as we drove slowly past a heavily protected Londis Gary pointed out the guys he regularly nicked for shoplifting. These were junkies, too, and fed their habit by stealing to order. There was a ready door-to-door market for hookey cheese and bacon on the estates but lately the shopkeepers had wised up and started putting padlocks on their freezer cabinets. This had been a problem for a couple of days but now those same shopkeepers were reporting volume thefts of Nescafe, sugar, batteries, DVDs, razor blades…anything that would find a market.

  I made a note. Worth a line or two.

  But Gary hadn’t finished. We were in the very middle of the island by now, in the maze of streets where Fratton spills into Copner. We stopped at the head of long terrace of houses, most of them subdivided. Blue and white Pompey scarves hanging in the windows. Trashed sofas, sagging mattresses and rusty washing machines abandoned in the tiny oblongs of front garden. Security grills over some of the front doors.

  “See that one?” Gary was pointing at a boarded-up property across the road. “Used to be a skunk factory. We bust it a week ago. Top job.”

  According to Gary there were cannabis factories all over the city. As soon as you nailed one, the investors would find another address. It was money, once again, that did the talking. £4K rent in advance would buy a six month lease. The house would be stripped. Heaters, hydroponics, and a filtration system would be installed, along with a farmer from the Mekong Delta who was flown in to take care of the plants themselves. These were the little guys in the rubber flip-flops who didn’t speak a word of English. Under threat of a beating, they’d never leave the house. The guy they’d nicked last week was convinced he was in London.

  “The growing cycle’s three months,” Gary explained. “At the end of the quarter you’re looking at two hundred grand, cash. Money for nothing.”

  These enterprises weren’t risk-free. Neighbours complained about a funny smell. The electricity and water companies reported huge spikes in consumption. And Boxer One, the force spy plane, regularly flew patrols over the city, searching for hot spots with an infra red camera. Growing cannabis generated serious heat and the red blobs were mapped for later investigation.

  On the way back to Southsea, Gary began to talk about the frustrations of the job. One of them, it seemed, were the guys at the Crown Prosecution Service.

  “We’ll nick a dealer. He’s carrying 36 wraps. There’s no way that’s for personal use. He’s cuffed and stuffed. He goes no comment in interview but it doesn’t matter. Then we take the file along to the CPS and they take one look at it and then laugh. They tell me they haven’t got enough. They need a 90% chance of conviction before they’ll take it to court. We need more evidence. More evidence? To me 36 wraps is a stone bonker. To them it’s just pissing in the wind.”

  Gary hadn’t finished. Only a couple of week’s back he’d got sight of a typical seven-day cycle in the training school over at Netley. This particular course is supposed to teach young probationers about proper coppering. Gary shot me a look and then tallied each day’s subjects on his fingers. Day One: Proportionality, Necessity and Integrity. Day Two: Human Rights. Day Three: Social Care. Day Four: Victim Care. Day Five: Pensions Advice. Day Six: Vehicle Theft. Day Seven: Legal Liability with reference to Camera Phones.

  “Human rights?” he braked to avoid a cyclist. “You can’t just grab people any more. If I do, I’m the one who’ll get arrested and probably go off to prison on top of it. The days of Paul Winter are over. The mind set’s changed completely. To be a good policeman I always believed you had to be a bit of a criminal but that’s all gone. You ever heard of the LAMA principle? No? It means Look Out For My Arse.”

  It got worse (or better, depending on your point of view). Back at Kingston Crescent, I was sitting in Rich John’s office. We were talking about POs (Persistent Offenders), the nightmare low-lifes who blag all the resources. A local example was a guy in his late twenties with umpteen convictions to his name. He made a living by serving up drugs from his mum’s Buckland flat. He’d recently assaulted his partner’s mother by punching her in the face. He’d also tried to burn her flat down and was currently on police bail, suspected of arson. This was bad enough but a couple of days ago he’d threatened to stab his partner, pour petrol all over her, light a match, and then add her ten month old baby to the bonfire.

  “That was his baby, too?”

  “No one knows. Including him.” Rich’s eyes rolled. “Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?”

  I carried all this research back to Devon. As yet I had no firm plan for the next book but
a picture of society in freefall, evident in most of the previous books, was clearer than ever. The police, I have to admit, get to see a great deal more than the rest of us but I was beginning to realise that a lot of this stuff was starting to bleed into everyday life. Society was getting cruder. People were interested in nothing but their own needs. Everyone seemed to have a right to everything. Where were the good guys? Where were the causes worth fighting for? What on earth was happening to us all?

  Questions like these were to stitch through Book Ten. By now I had a working title, Bad Stuff Coming. It wasn’t to survive the edit but I knew there had to be space in the narrative for Faraday to voice a little of what I was picking up. Here he is with his French anthropologist, the new love of his life.

  Last year, for months on end, Gabrielle had been researching gang culture on the city’s estates. She’d done countless interviews with kids of all ages, trying to map the web of loyalties which so often replaced family structures that – for one reason or another – had simply disintegrated. Some of her findings had taken her by surprise. She was an anthropologist by training and she recognised that membership of a gang was a godsend for kids who had simply run out of people who might love them. In the absence of functioning mums or dads, belonging to a gang offered very welcome shelter from what Gabrielle had come to refer to as “la tempête qui vient.”

  Quite what this gathering storm might bring she’d never made clear but day by day, week by week, Faraday was beginning to recognise the symptoms. The nineteen-year-old smack head who’d had her third miscarriage on the steps of the magistrates’ court. The estate mums with no previous record who regularly shoplifted from the corner store to feed their kids. The boyfriend with an anger management problem who punched his girlfriend’s granny in the face over a ten-pound debt and then set her on fire. And now the dead Kyle Munday, whose party piece was training his pit bull to kill swans on Great Salterns lake. Some of these horror stories were down to simple inadequacy. Others were the product of hard times. But some, including Munday, spoke of a deep well of something else. Evil was a word that Faraday had always tried to avoid but some days, like now, it was staring him in the face.

  By now it was late summer and I was coming ever-closer to the point where I had to make a few decisions. Then, out of the blue, came an e-mail from a dentist-friend in Old Portsmouth who had a very interesting patient list. Ever curious about Pompey’s other life, he was picking up gossip that suggested that what he termed “the Pompey property ramping circle “ was coming seriously unstuck. These were the solicitors, surveyors, estate agents, council planners, politicians and various other luminaries who’d stuck their noses into Bazza’s trough and made themselves rich on the ever bigger feast that was the Southsea property bubble. That bubble had now burst, leaving lots of people mired in negative equity and there were rumours that even Bazza was feeling the pinch.

  From other sources I’d heard that the Men in Blue had pretty much given up on Bazza and decided to concentrate their resources on other players in the supply chain, chiefly the wholesalers who dished out the wraps to the dealers on the street. I put this proposition to a contact in a position to know. As far as he was aware, Bazza was still under active investigation, and the clever use of certain bits of legislation, especially connected to money laundering, were showing distinct promise. No transaction, said my contact, ever happened in a vacuum. Guys like Bazza knew exactly how to take care of business at the sharp end but washing all that money was never going to be easy. If you knew where to look, there was always an audit trail.

  This I knew already but the collapse in the property market, coupled with ominous signs that the banking system would be next for the chop, sparked a thought or two about Bazza’s fictional future. What if his commercial empire – largely secured on bricks and mortar – was beginning to fall apart? What if he spotted some kind of bargain abroad – say a hotel in Spain – and decided to buy it? And what if he was careless about the source of the money?

  I worked on this notion for a couple of days, then cranked up the pressure on Bazza. His daughter, Esme, would be having an affair outside her marriage. Not just any affair but a liaison with a serving copper, a nightmare DCI called Perry Madison. Worse still, in mid book, Bazza’s beloved grandson – Esme’s oldest boy – would be kidnapped against a sizeable ransom. It would naturally fall to Winter, Bazza’s trusty lieutenant, to sort out these two hiccoughs, a task which would take him to a very bad place indeed.

  Prior to the excerpt below, Bazza has accepted a hefty loan to buy the Spanish hotel from a major London cocaine dealer called Alan Garfield. This money, heavily tainted, would be a gift for any investigator with a working knowledge of the Proceeds of Crime Act. Andy Harrington, for one, would be reaching for the Moet.

  Winter, despairing, took himself off for a walk. The danger, he knew, was acute. Ever since he’d started work for Bazza Mackenzie he’d recognised the sheer scale of the challenge that lay ahead. The very things that so often made the man a joy to be with – his instinct for the killer move, his delight in running rings round the competition, his contempt for the boring and the ordinary – were equally a handicap when it came to taking advice. He never listened. He always assumed – knew – that he was in the right. Winter, with a lifetime of manipulation behind him, had quickly sussed how to channel Bazza’s wild energy, how to torpedo some of his crazier schemes, but he’d always been aware that something enormous might suddenly turn up and swamp them both. That something had arrived and yet Bazza still couldn’t see it.

  At the kitchen table Winter had done his best. They were up against classy opposition. Faraday and Suttle knew what they were about. The Met were definitely crawling all over Garfield. He and Bazza, had precious little time to block the holes in their little stockade and keep the Apaches at bay. Bazza didn’t begin to see this, partly because it wasn’t in his nature to do the Filth any kind of favour, but mostly because he couldn’t stop thinking about his kidnapped grandson. He’d always been especially proud of Guy. The boy was gutsy, a bit of a scrapper. He was bright too, and funny. If it was true that the better genes jumped a whole generation then there was no one prouder than Bazza Mackenzie.

  Winter looked back at the house before he stepped out onto the pavement. Marie, he knew, had introduced Mo Sturrock to the kids, and as far as he was aware Mo was still up with them. Half nine was late for five-year-olds but just now time seemed to have lost any meaning. He thought of Stu in the kitchen, nursing yet another can of Stella, of Esme still sulking in the spare room upstairs, of Bazza drinking himself insensible in his den, and wondered whether every family enterprise was doomed to end this way, in a car wreck of blame and recrimination, any hope of rescue slipping remorselessly away.

  He wandered down the road and headed for the seafront. The last embers of a decent sunset were dying in the west and a thin grey mist hung over the Solent. There were strings of coloured lights on the promenade and the warmth of the evening had drawn couples out for an evening stroll. Winter paused for a moment at the seawall, smelling the heat still rising from the pebbles, knowing how much this city meant to him. He’d spent most of his working life policing the battlefield. Lately, he’d had a lot of fun on the other side of no-man’s-land. He understood the place. He spoke its many languages. He was totally fluent in Pompey. And, perhaps for that reason, he had absolutely no illusions about what lay ahead. Unless someone took the initiative, he was fucked.

  Mo Sturrock, who figures in the above excerpt, turned out to be the pivotal figure in this book. He’s a gifted social worker who lives on the Isle of Wight. He has a wife he adores and three kids: Temple, Poppy and Fleur. The plot demands that he takes a stand against the madness of local authority social work and somehow accepts an offer to head Bazza’s Tide Turn Trust, a charity dedicated to turning round some of the city’s wayward youth.

  Using Mo Sturrock, I could very effectively marry two separate storylin
es in the book while – at the same time – taking an informed look at the social chaos that was threatening to engulf us all. The only problem was that I knew zilch about social work.

  Andy Harrington, yet again, came to the rescue. He knew a woman called Rosie Rae who’d once been a D/C in Pompey. As far as he knew she now worked on the Isle of Wight in the field of child protection. He gave me a number and wished me luck.

  I rang Rosie the same afternoon. We agreed to talk when I was next down in Pompey. A week or two later, I took the hovercraft across to Ryde on a Sunday and we met in a café on Union Street.

  Rosie arrived with her daughter, who was near-university age and nearly as striking as her mother. Rosie talked engagingly about the Island mind-set which, as far as I could work out, was a law unto itself. It was, she said, like living in a big village. Everyone knew everyone. The idea of privacy was a joke. She was equally candid about Social Services. Coping with wayward kids was nobody’s idea of an easy ask but there were real challenges making sure that kids didn’t get lost in the system because they didn’t quite meet the criteria for social care.

  I started to sense a yawning gap between local authority services and the charitable or voluntary sector, with kids in trouble in some danger of vanishing in the spaces in between. This suggested a world of turf issues and knee-jerk reactions, often sparked by the latest Daily Mail headline, and the longer Rosie talked, the more convinced I became that Mo Sturrock, my fictional social worker, would be exactly the kind of maverick guy to lose patience with all this in-fighting.

  By now I’d outlined the role I had in mind for Mo. He would, I explained, have been working for the local authority but there had to be a plausible reason for him to bale out of the Isle of Wight and join Bazza’s Tide Turn Trust over in Pompey. A simple resignation would be too obvious, too boring. I needed to make more of this opportunity. What might this guy do to bring his glorious career with Isle of Wight Social Services to a spectacular end?