One Under

by Hurley, Graham

  All his life he’d been a fan of black-and-white World War Two movies. His all-time favourite was The Cruel Sea. Just now, he thought, I’m in mid-Atlantic, it’s blowing a gale, and some clown up on the bridge has just spotted the torpedo tracks off the starboard bow. Send a pipe, Bosun. All hands to action stations.

  Brilliant. But what the fuck could he do? He took a sip of the tea, then pushed it away. Last year the tumour in his brain had - for once - robbed him of the initiative. For months he’d been vulnerable, helpless, his very life in someone else’s hands. It had been an experience he’d never wanted to repeat yet here he was again, equally vulnerable, equally helpless. Not his life, this time, but his living. Could he really survive in the job without his precious self-respect?

  He got up, picked his way amongst the crowded tables, knowing already the answer.

  Faraday sat at his desk, waiting for the number to pick up. A woman’s voice answered on the third ring, a warm Canadian accent. Faraday asked for Barbara Large.

  ‘This is she.’

  ‘I’m looking at a brochure for something called the Annual Writers’ Conference. Am I talking to the right person?’

  ‘You should be. I run it. But I’m afraid you’re a bit late. It’s been and gone.’

  Faraday said he understood that. He was a police officer, CID. He was pursuing an enquiry in relation to a Mr Mark Duley.

  ‘I know that name,’ she said at once. ‘He was here last month, a delegate of ours.’

  ‘You met him?’

  ‘I shook him by the hand.’

  ‘May I ask why?’

  ‘Because he won one of our prizes. The first 500 words of a thriller, I think. I’ll have to check.’

  Faraday felt a faint quickening of his pulse, the merest tremor of excitement; after the door that Mackenzie had slammed in their faces, the faintest scrape of another handle beginning to turn.

  Barbara Large was talking about someone else, a published writer who’d run a workshop at the conference. Her name was Sally.

  ‘Sally Spedding?’ Faraday had the brochure open in front of him, the workshop circled in scarlet biro. ‘Page eight? “Who Do You Think You Are?”’

  ‘That’s her. That’s who you should be talking to. Mark was in her workshop. That’s four hours on a Friday night, and another session on Sunday. They’re pretty intense, these workshops. You can get to find out all kinds of stuff.’ She paused. ‘You mind me asking something?’

  ‘Not at all.’

  ‘Why the call? Is Mr Duley in some kind of trouble?’

  ‘I’m afraid he’s dead.’

  ‘Really?’ There was a long silence. ‘Dead, how?’

  For a moment Faraday hesitated. Then he realised there was no point withholding the information. Duley’s death had been all over the local paper. For days.

  ‘He got hit by a train,’ he said. ‘In a tunnel north of Portsmouth. There’s evidence that he was chained to the line.’

  Another silence, even longer. When she finally came back on the phone, she sounded shocked.

  ‘Maybe you ought to read the piece he wrote,’ she said. ‘I remember it now. Gifted, sure. But kinda spooky, too.’

  Two hours on the phone took Winter no closer to Mickey Kearns. Whoever he talked to, whatever pressure he applied, the answer was always the same. Haven’t seen him for a while. Must be out of town. Even his mother, when she finally answered the phone, still seemed clueless about her boy.

  ‘The last time I saw him was a couple of weeks ago.’ She said cheerfully, ‘He could be anywhere.’

  Invited by Faraday to share this news with the full squad meeting, Winter simply shrugged. There was a possible chain of events, he said, that could put Kearns in the tunnel with Duley. Intelligence indicated a massive drug debt and it would have been in Kearns’ interest to have Duley off the plot. On the other hand, this was speculation rather than hard fact, and guesswork never cut much ice with a jury.

  Faraday, for once, was impatient. ‘What do you think? Has Kearns legged it? Is he on holiday? Or has somebody nobbled him?’

  ‘Dunno, boss,’ Winter had confessed wearily. ‘You tell me.’

  Now, with dusk falling over Gunwharf, Winter decided to draw the curtains on his day. The fact was he’d done his best to trip Mackenzie up, to goad him into the kind of disclosure that might transform Coppice, to settle accounts after the weekend’s abduction, but a couple of stiff Scotches told Winter he was way off the mark. Bazza might well have ordered someone to give Duley a slapping but there’d be no mileage in going any further. Even a nice quiet murder was bad for business. Why risk something as high profile as the job in the tunnel?

  Winter was asleep on the sofa when his entryphone began to buzz. Groggy, he checked his watch: 10.45. The video screen was in the hall. Three floors down, a small, blond figure turned his face towards the security camera. Winter rubbed his eyes, peered at it. Bazza Mackenzie.

  ‘What do you want?’ Winter wasn’t in the mood for more wind-ups.

  ‘A chat.’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘Mickey Kearns.’

  ‘Kearns? Are you by yourself?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  Winter released the lock on the main entrance, opened his own front door, waited for the soft pad of footsteps from the lift along the hall. Mackenzie was wearing jeans and a denim shirt, and carried a bottle of Bacardi loosely wrapped in tissue paper.

  ‘Present from Mist.’ He thrust the bottle at Winter. ‘No hard feelings, eh, mush?’

  He stepped past Winter and sauntered into the lounge. Misty herself had once had a similar apartment, different floor plan but comparable view, a present from Bazza before he realised that Mike Valentine was giving her a regular knobbing.

  ‘Nice.’ Mackenzie was looking round. ‘Better fucking taste than Mist. You remember all them stuffed animals? Place looked like a zoo. You never knew whether to take a bottle of decent wine or a bunch of bananas. Listen … ’ He turned back to Winter. ‘Why don’t we sit down?’

  Mackenzie parked himself on the sofa, body bent forward, elbows on his knees. A business meeting, Winter thought.

  ‘Kearns?’ he queried woodenly.

  ‘That’s right. You’re still trying to find him. I admire that. You don’t fucking give up, do you? Eh?’

  Winter shook his head.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘We don’t.’

  ‘Good. Except you’re wasting your time.’

  ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘Because Kearns had fuck all to do with what happened in that tunnel, and that’s God’s truth. The kid fancies himself as a player, a face - of course he does - but there’s no way he’d go to all that trouble. He ain’t got the imagination, for a start. Plus Duley gave him everything he wanted.’

  ‘He did?’ Winter felt his interest quicken.

  ‘Yeah. This is off the record, right? I’m here to spare you lot a great deal of running around. You’re going to owe me, big time.’

  ‘How’s that then?’

  ‘You’re right about the caravan. Duley had been out of order, upset some important people. The way they saw it, he had a couple of questions to answer. He’d been with young Mickey in Margarita. Mickey said he’d been talking to all sorts over there, in Spanish obviously. One of these blokes must have grassed Mickey up.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘For a lot of money. So Mickey wants a name, doesn’t he? He wants to know where the money went and he wants to know who to go after. It’s down to Duley to give him that name and after a while he’s yelling fit to bust.’

  ‘In the caravan?’

  ‘Yeah. I wasn’t there, mush. It’s got fuck all to do with me, any of this. I’m just marking your card so you lot get off my back.’

  ‘So what was the name?’

  ‘Querida. Micky got him to write it down. Señor Querida. Some smart spick bastard Duley must have run into. Worst mistake he ever made, talking to Duley.’

  ‘Why’s that t
hen?’

  ‘Because Mickey and a couple of mates are out there now, back in Margarita, looking for him. And you know something else? A lot of money says they’ll find him.’

  Winter nodded. Querida was the addressee on the postcard Duley had mailed from Margarita. Winter could see it now, red ink, big letters. Mia Querida. Faraday, who knew a bit of Spanish, had translated this as “my loved one”, though no one had a clue why Duley should have sent it to his own address. There’d been a big fat heart, too, where you normally wrote a message.

  ‘Señor Querida.’ Winter was smiling. ‘You wouldn’t be him for the world, would you, Baz?’

  ‘No, mush, I fucking wouldn’t.’ Mackenzie was eyeing the Bacardi. ‘Are we going to do that bottle or what?’

  Winter looked at him a moment, trying to weigh up the direction that this unexpected conversation was about to take. Mackenzie had an obvious interest in staying well clear of Coppice and had been blunt enough to say so. At the same time, to Winter’s surprise, he hadn’t even tried to play the other cards in his hand. No little digs about builders’ vans. No mention of Chinese meals. Nonetheless, it still rankled.

  ‘There’s something that’s bothering me, Baz.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘The other night, in the van.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Why did they park up by the railway line?’

  ‘Because they were pissed off, mush. Because you were out of order with Donna and her mum. Because you took advantage.’

  ‘But why the railway line? If they’d got nothing to do with the job in the tunnel?’

  ‘Because they were trying to put the shits up you. It wasn’t just a laugh, they were angry. Everyone in this city knows about that tunnel and they wanted to teach you a bit of a lesson. Worked too, didn’t it?’ He leaned across and slapped Winter on the knee. ‘Listen, mush, that’s history now. Like I said, no hard feelings.’ He nodded at the Bacardi again. ‘Ever tried it with Coke and lemon? Only there are a couple of other things I’d like to discuss.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Like how much this place cost, for starters.’

  ‘Six hundred.’ Winter plucked the figure out of nowhere.

  ‘Six hundred?’ Mackenzie was already on his feet, hunting for glasses. ‘Shit, mate, someone was taking the piss. Listen, you need serious financial advice, someone to sort out your affairs.’ He grinned, uncapping the bottle. ‘Know what I mean?’

  Thirteen

  Tuesday, 19 July 2005, 10.34

  Barbara Large lived in a rambling bungalow in a village south of Winchester. Faraday parked his Mondeo and checked the address. Chinook, as far as he knew, was the name of an Arctic wind that scoured the Canadian prairies, melting the snow in winter.

  She must have been waiting for him because the front door opened to reveal a tall, thin, elegant figure as soon as he pushed in through the gate. Her handshake was soft, barely a touch. She seemed excited to see him.

  ‘I’ve got the pot on. Do you drink coffee?’

  She led him through to the back of the bungalow. This, she announced, was where she lived, a big sunny room, every working surface littered with opened mail. Faraday stood at the window a moment, glad of the warmth on his face. The square of lawn that ran down to a trellis of roses was begging for a trim. She dismissed it with a regretful shake of her head.

  ‘It’s a mess, I’m afraid. This time of year I simply don’t have the time.’

  The Writers’ Conference, she said, was going from strength to strength. Years back, she’d mothered an ailing infant. Now, twenty-five years on, her pride and joy was in the rudest of health.

  ‘Three hundred-plus delegates.’ She’d stepped next door into the kitchen. ‘Every one of them a potential Tolstoy. Do you take sugar?’

  Faraday said no. In less than an hour he was due at headquarters for a session with Willard. She returned with the coffees on a tray, asked him whether he preferred custard creams or ginger snaps. Faraday declined both. He wanted to talk about Mark Duley.

  ‘Strange man,’ she said at once. ‘I’ve been thinking a lot about what you said on the phone.’

  ‘Strange how?’

  ‘Intense. Non-stop. Total commitment. Don’t get me wrong, Mr Faraday. We love total commitment. And we do strange too, and we do intense, plus whatever else it takes to expose yourself on paper. But with Mark there was something else, something that didn’t quite fit. Sally has a theory, of course, because that’s the way novelists work. She said his glue was falling out. She said he was coming unstuck.’

  Sally Spedding was the novelist who’d run the workshop Duley had attended. Barbara had taken the liberty of mentioning Faraday’s interest on the phone.

  ‘She’s expecting your call, Mr Faraday. I’ve written down her number. Here.’ She pushed a compliments slip towards him, the number scribbled in pencil, then passed him a coffee. ‘I’ve got his prize piece too, the one I mentioned on the phone. You should take it away with you. Give it a good read. The man wrote like an angel. To be frank, he didn’t really need us.’

  The competition, she said, required entrants to pen the first 500 words of a short story or a novel with a murder theme. Most of the submissions had been all too predictable, wildly violent opening scenes that ticked every box in the How To manual. Duley, on the other hand, had opted for something entirely different.

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Read it, Mr Faraday. I can’t possibly do it justice. The man’s just got such a vivid imagination. Either that, or he’s been there. He was just so lyrical.’

  ‘In person?’

  ‘On the page. In person he could be charming. In fact the night he won the prize he was quite the pin-up. We use the student bar after the awards ceremony. We all lost count of the number of drinks he bought.’

  Faraday remembered Winter’s analysis of Duley’s earnings. A thousand pounds a month didn’t leave much leeway for heavy rounds at the bar.

  ‘How much do you pay to attend?’

  ‘For the weekend package? The one that Mark bought? Two hundred and twenty-five pounds.’ She paused, frowning. ‘That was something else. He paid very late. In fact he paid when he turned up on the Friday. And it was in cash. Most unusual.’

  Faraday produced his pocketbook and scribbled himself a note. Duley had returned from Margarita, presumably with plenty of money, on 17 May. Over a month later he’d swapped some of it for three busy days with a bunch of fellow scribes.

  ‘You think he might have made any -’ Faraday shrugged. ‘- Special friends?’

  ‘You know what?’ Barbara’s eyes were shining. ‘I asked Sally exactly that same question. She said she thought yes. An older woman in the workshop, very talented, just like Mark. You’d do well to have a conversation, Mr Faraday. Writing can be such a passionate business.’

  Willard was ten minutes away from leaving for the station when Faraday appeared at his office door. A day at sea had given him the beginnings of a decent tan.

  ‘Summons to the Home Office.’ Willard glanced at his watch. ‘Another half-day down the khazi.’

  He wanted to know the latest on DC Suttle. Faraday told him that the lad was off the ventilator.

  ‘Getting better then?’

  ‘We think so.’

  ‘Thank Christ for that. Now … Coppice. I talked to Martin Barrie this morning but I’m still not clear where the Scenes of Crime operation at North Shore Road is going to take us.’

  ‘We’ll get matches on the stuff recovered from the tunnel, sir. I’m sure of it.’

  ‘And you really think that’s down to Mackenzie?’

  ‘I doubt it.’

  ‘Who then?’

  ‘It could well be the lad, Kearns, but even then I’m not convinced he’s down for the tunnel. The deeper we dig, the more I’m looking at Duley himself. He got himself involved with Kearns. That we can evidence. I think he may well have helped himself to some of the stake money over in Margarita. That would explai
n a lot. But what we don’t yet know is why.’

  ‘Why he took the money?’

  ‘Why he needed it. Duley was getting by. Winter’s done the analysis. He was having a run-in with the utility people but he settled most of his bills and had enough left over for some kind of social life. Crossing Kearns meant crossing a lot of other people, stakeholders who’d put money in Kearns’ pot, and he’d probably have known that. So why run the risk?’

  ‘You told me he was crazy the other day.’

  ‘Volatile, sir. There’s a difference.’

  ‘Volatile, then. Short fuse. Goes off like a firework. These people make poor judgements. That’s why they’re all bloody lefties. Listen.’ He checked his watch again. ‘There’s something else.’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘Winter.’ Willard had returned to his desk. ‘How’s he getting on?’

  ‘Fine. He’s disappointed we can’t nick Mackenzie, but fine. Why do you ask?’

  ‘This.’ Willard slipped a photo from a Manila envelope and passed it to Faraday.

  Winter was sitting at a restaurant table, the bulk of his body unmistakable. Opposite, facing the camera, was Bazza Mackenzie. The two men appeared to be sharing a joke.

  Faraday turned the shot over, recognising the stamp on the back.

  ‘This is a surveillance photo. Covert Ops.’

  ‘You’re right.’

  ‘Who commissioned it?’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘Is it recent?’

  ‘Yes. Very.’ Willard paused. ‘You let Winter off the leash on Saturday. You remember? That was my decision. I told Martin Barrie to action it. Why? Because I was keen to find out what Winter would do with this new-found freedom of his. Turns out the first person he meets is our old friend.’

  ‘Thanks for telling me. Does Mr Barrie know?’

  ‘No, Joe, he doesn’t. But that’s hardly the point, is it? Why don’t you try being a detective? Why don’t you ask me exactly when this shot was taken?’ Faraday just looked at him. Cheap, he thought. And insulting. Willard tapped the photo. ‘Saturday, Joe. Just an hour after you were talking to Winter at that apartment of his.’ Willard got to his feet, reached for his briefcase. ‘You were going to let me have some figures. Be nice to know how much he paid for it, eh?’