Ahmed was Mackenzie’s local agent, a smooth trilingual twenty-something with tailored white robes, wire-framed glasses and an Australian air hostess girlfriend.
‘I can’t, Baz.’
‘Why not?’
‘He’s gone too.’
‘Legged it?’
‘Probably.’
‘How come?’
‘He went into liquidation last week. Like I said, it’s not something you want to hang about for.’
‘Shit.’
‘Exactly.’
There was a long pause. In the background Winter could hear the opening music to Match of the Day. Saturday night, he thought grimly. And me stranded in fucking Do-Buy.
Mackenzie came back on the line, suddenly businesslike.
‘You’re right, mush, we have to liquidate. Find yourself an attorney, a real-estate agent, any fucking monkey. Get those apartments sold on. Whatever it takes, mush. Whatever you can screw out of these people. You got that?’
‘Yeah. One problem. Did I mention the building itself?’
‘No.’
‘It doesn’t exist, Baz. They never even started it.’
Chapter One
PORTSMOUTH: TUESDAY, 27 JANUARY 2009
Faraday went to his GP the morning after he arrived back in the UK and handed over his medical file from the hospital in El Arish. The GP studied the X-rays, took his blood pressure, shone a light in his eyes and asked a series of questions to establish that he could still add up, still tell the time, still function. Faraday passed each of these tests with flying colours and when the GP offered to refer him to a consultant for a further check-up he declined. He could do with a bit of time off, he said, to get his mental bearings, then he’d be back to work. The doctor returned to the file and muttered something about seat belts before typing an entry into his PC. A sick note would be in the post by close of play. In the meantime Faraday was to go easy on the booze and take painkillers if the shoulder or the ribs got troublesome. Ten days’ rest, the doctor said, would do him the world of good.
And so Faraday retreated to the Bargemaster’s House on the city’s eastern shore, shutting the door against the world and putting another call through to Gabrielle. He’d already talked to her, after he’d got in from the airport yesterday. She’d been vague about the details but it seemed she’d made contact with some Palestinian charity in her home town of Chartres. They had links to Saudi Arabia. There was a definite possibility Gulf money could fund Leila’s casevac flight and medical care in the UK. There might even be enough to pay for a translator to be with her full time. The fighting in Gaza had stopped now, she said, but the ambulances were still arriving from Rafah. More casualties, many of them kids.
‘So how’s Leila?’
‘Still sick. But not so bad as before.’
‘And the burns?’
‘Horrible. Her back, her chest, most of all her hands.’
The doctors, Gabrielle explained, had been studying the few scraps of paperwork that had come with the child. The little girl, it seemed, had been living near the refugee camp at Jabaliya. Blast from an Israeli mortar shell had knocked her over, and after that it had rained white phosphorus. Bits of burning phosphorus had set her T-shirt alight. She’d tried to tear it off. Hence the damage to her torso and hands. This stuff burned and burned, deep, deep wounds. And it was poisonous too, damaging her liver and kidneys.
‘Does she have a family, this little girl?’
‘All killed. Every one.’
‘Every one?’ Faraday didn’t believe it.
‘Personne ne le sait. Gaza was on fire. Just like Leila.’
‘And is that her real name?’
‘Ca personne ne le sait.’
Nobody knows. The conversation had come to an end at this point, Gabrielle breaking off to take an important incoming call. She’d promised to phone back as soon as she could, but so far nothing. Now, nearly a day later, Faraday tried her number again.
No answer.
The following afternoon Winter arrived at Gatwick from Dubai. Bazza Mackenzie’s son-in-law Stuart Norcliffe was in the arrivals hall to meet him. Norcliffe was a big man, prone to comfort eating, and lately the extra weight he carried was beginning to show.
His Mercedes S-Class was in the short-stay car park. Winter settled into the tan leather, adjusted the seat. The interior of the car, brand new, smelled of Dubai.
‘Baz sends his apologies. He’d have come himself but he got nailed for another interview.’
‘With?’
‘Some freelance. Claims to be doing a piece for the Guardian.’
‘What’s he after?’
‘She. The usual, I imagine. Baz thinks it’s a laugh. Checked the woman out on Facebook. I gather he liked what he saw.’
Winter returned the smile. His employer’s taste in newspapers seldom extended beyond the sports pages of the Sun, though lately Winter had noticed copies of the Financial Times lying on the kitchen table in Sandown Road.
‘Shouldn’t someone be holding his hand? Keeping him out of trouble? Some of these people are brighter than they look.’
‘My thoughts entirely. Marie’s worried sick. I don’t think she’s got over Christmas yet.’
‘Yeah? You’re telling me all that came as a surprise?’
‘So she says.’
‘She’s playing games, Stu. She sussed him from the start. She knew he was serious all along. She told me so back in May.’
Winter remembered the conversation word for word, a lunchtime meal in a Southsea brasserie the day Pompey returned from Wembley with the FA Cup. The news that her husband had political ambitions came hand in hand with Marie’s realisation that Ezzie, her daughter, was having an affair. The events that followed, in Stu’s phrase, had stretched the family to breaking point, and even now the cracks still showed.
‘So he’s going ahead with this interview?’ Winter wanted to know more.
‘Big time. He’s invited this woman down for lunch at the hotel. Full look-at-me treatment. You know how subtle he can be.’
Winter laughed. Bazza’s pride and joy was a hotel on the seafront, the Royal Trafalgar. Its recent elevation to four-star status had prompted a celebratory knees-up that had lasted until dawn. For Baz, the fourth star was the clinching evidence that ten busy years in the cocaine trade could buy you anything – even the launch of a campaign to install himself as the city’s first elected mayor, announced at a gleeful press conference two days before Christmas.
‘The Guardian eat people like Baz for breakfast. Someone should have told him that.’
‘I did.’
‘And?’
‘He says he can handle it, told me to fuck off. So …’ Stu flashed the car ahead and accelerated onto the M23 ‘… here I am.’
Winter settled down for the journey south. When Stu wanted the full debrief on Dubai, he obliged. As far as he was concerned, the family business was three quarters of a million quid in the hole. As Stu, above all, would know.
Norcliffe winced. ‘It gets worse,’ he said. ‘I’ve just done an audit on the rest of the portfolio. France is horrible, the UK’s collapsing, those new places in Montenegro are still half built, and Spain’s a basket case. Rely on the Arabs to make the thing come good, as Baz seems to have done, and you’re looking at meltdown.’
Until recently Stu had been running a successful hedge fund. Premises in Mayfair, multi-billion-dollar turnover, black Porsche Carrera, the lot. The fact that he’d sold out for a decent price only weeks before Lehman went bust told Winter he knew a thing or two about the workings of big business. Putting your trust in the markets, like putting your trust in marriage, could take you to a very ugly place.
‘So how bad is it?’
‘You want the truth?’
‘That’s a silly fucking question.’
‘OK, here’s the way it is …’
At moments of stress, or high excitement, Stu affected an American accent. Winter had often wondered whe
ther it was a defence mechanism, a form of temporary disguise, trying to kid himself he was someone else.
‘Number one, most of the properties abroad are secured on loans of various kinds, mainly fixed-rate mortgages. As long as the earnings service the mortgages, no problema. When they don’t, huge fucking problema.’
‘And they don’t?’
‘No way. People are skint. They’re not going on holiday. They can’t stretch to a couple of grand a week for that nice hacienda by the beach. So the likes of my father-in-law have to start thinking long lets, semi-permanent tenancies, but that’s no answer either because the hot money, the vacation premium, that’s all gone. Rents just don’t cut it, not the way Baz has structured the property holdings.’
This was news to Winter. He’d always assumed Bazza had simply swapped hookey cocaine dosh for all those bricks and mortar, part of the laundering process that had turned him into one of the city’s top businessmen.
Stu shook his head. ‘Not true. I thought exactly what you’ve been thinking, but it turns out the guy’s way over-leveraged. The money he was making, he could have stayed virtually debt-free. Instead he decided to pile in. Why buy ten properties and make a decent return when you can borrow someone else’s money and buy a hundred and score yourself a fortune? Works a treat. Until the bubble goes pop.’
Winter was thinking about the waterside plot of land in Dubai: 750K for thirty apartments that didn’t even exist.
‘So he’s got to start selling? Is that what we’re saying?’
‘It’s way worse than that. Start offloading now and you’re talking fire-sale prices. That won’t begin to repay the loans. You happen to know the Spanish for “negative equity”? Only it might be wise to learn.’
Winter lapsed into silence. These last few years, after binning the Job and turning his back on CID, he realised that he’d come to rely on the cocoon that Mackenzie’s many businesses had spun around him. Club-class travel. Decent hotels. A three-week jaunt through Polynesia as a thank you for sorting out last year’s marital crisis. Only now did he realise that most of these castles were built on sand.
‘So what do we need?’
‘Working capital.’
‘How much?’
‘A couple of million. And that’s just for starters.’
‘And Baz knows that?’
‘Yes. Which I guess is the worst news of all.’
‘Why?’
‘Because he’s still telling himself it’s not a problem. And you know why?’ He shot Winter a glance.
‘Because the man has a plan.’
‘You’ve asked?’
‘Of course I’ve asked.’
‘And?’
‘Nothing. Nada. He won’t tell me.’
At the Bargemaster’s House, perched on the edge of the greyness that was Langstone Harbour, Faraday was becoming aware that his life was slowly slipping out of focus. He was developing an obsession with doors. He needed to close them quietly, deftly, measuring the exact effort that went into the push, savouring the soft kiss as the door seated into the frame. He tiptoed from room to room, longing for the coming of dusk, embracing the gathering darkness like a long-lost friend. On wet nights he cherished the whisper of rain against the French windows and lay for hours on the sofa, listening to the wind, his mind a total blank.
One morning, with a jolt of surprise, he realised that he was knotting and unknotting his hands in the most unlikely places – the bathroom, for instance, while he stared uncomprehendingly at the tiny array of waiting toothbrushes. He also started to talk to himself, recognising the low mumble that dogged him from room to room as his own voice. In his more rational moments he put most of this down to the accident, inevitable aftershocks from Sinai, but what was more unexpected was a growing sense of helplessness, of his mind playing tricks beyond his comprehension.
As the days and nights went by, he didn’t seem to be able to rid himself of the same thought, the same memory. It came back time and time again: a man on a horse he’d glimpsed briefly, in the middle of the night, from the window of the hotel where he and Gabrielle had been staying in Aqaba, days before the accident. The horse and rider had appeared from nowhere, the clatter of hooves waking him up. He’d gone to the window and watched the man on the horse careering back and forth across the dusty parking lot, tugging hard on the reins. The man had looked angry. He’d carried a stick, slashing left and right at the empty night air. And then he’d disappeared. The breeze from the sea on Faraday’s face had been warm, a kind of balm. But what remained was the sense of bewilderment. Why the horse? At that time of night? And what was the man doing there, riding from nowhere to nowhere? So violent? So manic?
This was bizarre enough, a tug on his wrist from which he couldn’t shake himself free. But then, towards the end of his brief convalescence, he came across notes to himself that he must have left around the house, all of them recent. He couldn’t remember writing them, nor work out what function they served, but the fact that they were there, that they existed at all, was frankly weird. They read like the jottings of a stranger passing by, a voice he couldn’t recognise, and as his grip on reality slackened he sensed that he was becoming a spectator at the feast of his own undoing. Stuff was happening – puzzling stuff, troubling stuff – and he hadn’t the first idea what to do about it. Should he return to the doctor and ask for medication, some magic pill that would bring his world back into focus? Or should he drive over to Major Crime, knock on DCI Parsons’ door and plead insanity? He simply didn’t know.
Then came the morning when he woke to find blood all over the pillow, Hanif’s blood, still warm from the accident. Propped on one elbow, aghast, he tried to reach for Gabrielle to tell her what had happened, but Gabrielle wasn’t there. Worse still, when his gaze returned to the pillow, the blood had gone.
‘Mad,’ he whispered to himself, slipping deeper under the duvet.
The dreams, if dreams they were, got worse. He was back in the hospital in El Arish, trying to explain to an old man with no head that everything would be OK. Then, inexplicably, he was crouched in a hide beside the Dead Sea, his binos steadied on the body of a child. A pair of crows stalked around, occasionally pecking at the child’s eyes. Images like these awaited him night after night. And the best part of a bottle of Côtes-du-Rhône simply made them worse.
Finally, the morning he was due to return to work, his mobile rang. He was groggy, exhausted, wiped out by another night with his demons. Gabrielle, he thought at once.
‘Boss? Is that you?’ It was D/S Jimmy Suttle. Something horrible had kicked off on the Isle of Wight.
Chapter Two
MONDAY, 9 FEBRUARY 2009. 07.53
Faraday got himself to the Southsea Hovercraft Terminal in time to catch the 08.00 crossing to Ryde. He sat beside the window, readying himself for the brief trip, his hands tightly knitted in his lap, vaguely surprised to find the world around him so little changed. Here he was, listening to the pre-recorded safety announcement, his thumping head still full of families squatting among the wreckage of undone lives, the sky still plaited with shellbursts of white phosphorus. On the websites he’d consulted they sometimes called it Willy Pete. When surgeons cut deep into flesh to extract a fragment, it burst into flame again on contact with the air. Faraday shut his eyes. His lifejacket was under his seat. He ought to remember that.
Arriving at Ryde minutes later, he took a taxi to Newport, the island’s biggest town. On the phone Jimmy Suttle had asked him to go straight to St Mary’s Hospital, where the Home Office pathologist was due to start a series of post-mortems at half past nine. Suttle, obviously pressed for time, had been sparing with the details but made it clear that pre-autopsy X-rays would have a critical bearing on the course of the inquiry. Four bodies had been recovered from a major fire. There were already strong indications that they may have been killed beforehand. The presence of bullets or gunshot or other pre-existing wounds would be enough to trigger a Major Crime investigation.
>
Faraday sat in the back of the taxi, trapped in a long queue of traffic, gazing out at a bunch of schoolkids sheltering from the rain. Most of them were crouched over their mobiles, a blur of tiny fingers texting their mates. Four bodies, he told himself. House fire. Gunshot wounds. Must get the details right. Must retain them. Must – somehow – surface from this darkness that seemed to have engulfed him.
The mortuary was towards the back of St Mary’s Hospital, beside one of the staff car parks. Faraday stood in the rain, waiting for a voice on the entryphone to buzz him in. He hadn’t been to the island for a while and wondered whether there’d be anyone here that he’d know. In a way he hoped not. Just now there was safety in the company of strangers. They’d have nothing to measure him by, no reason to look twice at the vagueness in his eyes.
The door unlocked and he stepped inside. The first face he recognised belonged to the pathologist. He’d last seen Simon Pembury five years ago, here in this very same mortuary. He’d already changed into green scrubs and his handshake was wet and slightly soapy.
‘Long time.’ He grinned, gesturing at the rain still dripping from Faraday’s tangle of grey curls. ‘Same bloody weather, though.’
‘Great, isn’t it?’ Faraday was trying to remember Pembury’s daughter’s name. He’d seen a photo once. Pretty girl. Durham University. ‘How’s the family?’
‘Thriving, thank God. Susie’s up in town now, registrar at Guy’s, and the wife’s badgering me to retire.’ He grinned. ‘You?’
Faraday was aware of giving the question more thought than it deserved. In the background, deep in conversation with the Scenes of Crime image specialist, was another face he knew.
‘J-J’s fine,’ he managed at last. ‘I think.’
Pembury stepped aside to find a pair of wellington boots that fit properly. Faraday, with a small jolt of pleasure, realised that he could put a name to the face across the anteroom.
‘Darren …’ he said. ‘Darren Webster.’
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