Borrowed Light

by Hurley, Graham

  Stanley had already confirmed a blank on the accelerants – the dog had found nothing. Now Faraday wanted to know about the state of the place when the fire brigade arrived.

  ‘Was the front door locked?’

  ‘Yes. But not bolted.’

  ‘Key on the inside?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘No key in the property? On a hook? Under a window sill?’

  ‘Not so far. It’s still early days.’

  ‘What about the phone landline?’

  ‘It came out of the house just under the thatch. None of that survived the fire so we don’t know whether there was any interference.’

  ‘Was the place alarmed?’

  ‘Yes. It was an oldish system. No cameras. The suppliers are coming over this afternoon to take a look at the control box.’

  ‘It’s still intact?’

  ‘More or less. Scorch marks. Nothing serious.’

  Faraday nodded. He wanted to know about the POLSA search. According to Stanley, it was still in progress.

  ‘Anything so far?’

  ‘Not much. A couple of cans of Stella out in the fields. The remains of a kite. It’s still early days though, like I say. We live in hope.’ She flicked through the paperwork on the desk and extracted a sheet of paper. ‘You might want to take a look at this. The estate agency that sold them the house faxed it over this morning.’

  Faraday found himself looking at a layout plan of the property. Upstairs there were five bedrooms and a bathroom. Downstairs there’d been a kitchen/diner, a long sitting area that served as a lounge, a lavatory and a largish room at the other end of the building that the previous owners had used as a kind of workshop. Scattered across the ground floor were four pencilled question marks, two in the lounge and two in the kitchen.

  Faraday raised an eyebrow. Stanley was beside him. She had beautiful hands, very pale. No rings.

  ‘This is our best guess as far as the bodies are concerned.’ A perfectly manicured nail tracked from pencil mark to pencil mark. ‘The upstairs floor collapsed under the weight of the fire and the bodies were buried beneath the debris. It’s just possible that the bodies fell vertically but none of them were in or beside the beds. We can’t prove it but this is where they appear to have been ante-mortem.’

  Before death. Faraday nodded. It was a logical supposition, carefully hedged.

  ‘So the balance of probability …?’

  ‘Would put them downstairs.’

  ‘Where they were killed?’

  ‘Impossible to say. They may have been killed downstairs, like you’re suggesting. We might be looking for one perpetrator – two, three, who knows? They may even have been killed off site and brought to the farm for disposal.’

  Disposal. Yet another line of enquiry.

  Suttle asked her about two shotguns registered to the premises. Yesterday’s house-to-house enquiries had turned up a neighbour who used to go rabbiting with Holman. The licence demanded that the shotguns be kept in a locked steel container.

  Stanley shook her head. So far, on site, no one had found any kind of safe. She was looking at Suttle. She wanted to know what kind of lives the victims had led.

  Suttle produced notes he’d made earlier, the intel harvest from the local enquiry teams.

  ‘I’m getting the impression these were party people,’ he said. ‘We know Holman was a drinker, big style. Apparently they had a thing about candles.’ He looked up. ‘Candles?’

  ‘Night lights.’ Stanley nodded. ‘A fire like this, all you get left are the little metal discs in the middle.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Lots of them. Lots and lots.’

  ‘What about mobiles? Laptops? PCs?’ It was Faraday this time.

  ‘One mobile so far. It survived pretty much intact. It’s pink. We think it may have belonged to the older daughter.’ She consulted her notes. ‘We sent it over to Newport this morning. It’s bagged and tagged. You haven’t seen it?’

  Suttle shook his head. With the investigation still in local CID hands, the mobe had probably found its way to their own intel cell. He made himself another note, checked his watch. He had to get Faraday to Ryde within the hour for yet another meeting. He folded his pad and stored it away. By tonight, he said, he might have another couple of blokes to help him pull the intelligence together.

  Faraday said he’d make it happen. The more he looked out of the window at the remains of the farmhouse, the more he sensed that Operation Gosling’s best lines of enquiry probably lay elsewhere.

  ‘So what’s the intelligence telling you?’ Meg Stanley was talking to Suttle.

  ‘Holman’s Pompey through and through,’ he said. ‘A lot of his mates go way back and some of them are persons of interest. I’m not sure how much you know about Pompey, but the place is tribal. Blood ties, often literally. We’ve got a lot of ground to cover and not a lot of bodies to do it with. Same old, same old. I’ll bet it was the same where you came from, eh?’

  ‘West Mids?’ At last a smile. ‘They could be quite generous sometimes. Depended really.’

  ‘On what?’

  ‘On the state of the overtime budget. On whether or not the enquiry rang the right bells at headquarters. On racial implications.’ The smile again, warmer. ‘Same old, same old.’

  Suttle got to his feet. He knew that Faraday had already fixed the first squad meet for six o’clock. By then Parsons would have shipped a dozen Major Crime D/Cs across from the mainland, together with the civvy inputters who would staff the Major Incident Room and bring the HOLMES system to life. By early evening, with a fair wind, the Major Crime machine would have hit top gear, with outside enquiry D/Cs dispatched on action after action. At the heart of this operation lay the core management team, of which Meg Stanley was very definitely part. Faraday was about to brief her about this evening’s meet over at the MIR but Stanley got in first.

  ‘One thing I forgot to mention.’ She nodded towards the farmhouse. ‘We found an area of of excavation round the back.’

  ‘A what?’ It was Suttle.

  ‘A hole. Someone had been digging. We’ve no idea when or why but it’s not a small hole. If we’re looking for motive …’ She shrugged, then reached for an umbrella, still dripping into an empty catering tin of coffee beside the desk.

  Faraday and Suttle followed her out of the caravan. The rain had eased a little by now. At the rear of the property, out of sight of the farmyard, was a small garden. Beyond the garden, beside a wooden hut, was the hole.

  It was about two metres across, maybe a metre and a half deep, with an inch or two of muddy water at the bottom. Beside it, mixed with soil from the excavation, were sodden scabs of something that looked like dung. Faraday could smell it. A sweetness that spoke of horse manure.

  ‘You’ve had a dog in here?’ It was Suttle.

  ‘Yes. Not the fire dog. We shipped in an Alsatian from the DHU.’

  Dog Handling Unit. These were animals trained to hunt for drugs.

  ‘You’re thinking narcotics?’

  ‘I’m guessing it’s a possibility. Along with a million other things.’ She shrugged. ‘Money. Weapons. Whatever.’

  ‘What about a septic tank?’ Faraday was still looking down at the hole.

  ‘We checked that out, talked to the water people. You need all kinds of permissions.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘They’d heard nothing.’

  ‘What about the dog?’

  ‘Zilch, I’m afraid.’ She offered Faraday a brief smile. ‘Shame, eh?’

  It was Mackenzie’s idea to go for a late-afternoon Chinese. He’d reached the point where no more alcohol could touch him and announced that nothing in the world would be sweeter than a plate of king prawns in black pepper sauce. Winter, assigned escort duties, had noticed this with Bazza before. Against every reasonable expectation, after half a bottle of vodka and whatever else he’d necked, the man had the ability to suddenly sober up.

  They walked across Gunwharf
to a restaurant called the Water Margin: Winter’s choice. He came here often, with Misty in tow, and the staff knew him well. One of them, a Hong Kong Chinese called Charlie, led them to a table at the back.

  ‘Nice to see you, Mr Winter.’ He flashed a smile at Mackenzie. ‘And you too, sir.’

  Courtesy always made Bazza suspicious. He sat back in his chair, watching Charlie retreat to the bar.

  ‘What’s he want, mush?’

  ‘Nothing, Baz. It’s just a Chinese thing.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Being polite.’

  They ate from the à la carte menu. After an afternoon of abuse from Bazza for sticking to coffee, Winter treated himself to a bottle of Tsingtao. After the waiter had gone, Bazza beckoned Winter closer.

  ‘Listen, mush, you want to know what really upset me?’

  ‘You mean apart from the ten squillion quid we’ve lost?’

  ‘Don’t be an arsehole. I’m serious, son. Just sometimes life gets on top of you, know what I mean?’

  Winter nodded, waited, said nothing.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Well what, Baz?’

  ‘Fucking ask me. Ask me why I got pissed. Ask me what made me shut the door and pour malt down my throat. Ask me what I was doing in Blake fucking House looking for more. You were a detective, weren’t you? Or has that bit of your brain seized up?’

  Winter let the storm subside. Charlie turned up again. Fizzy water for Mr W’s guest.

  ‘Well?’ Mackenzie didn’t bother with a glass.

  ‘It has to be Johnny Holman.’

  ‘Brilliant. You’ve still got it. It’s still in there. I didn’t spend all that moolah for nothing. Little Johnny Holman.’ He shook his head, looked away. ‘Gone.’

  For the next half-hour, all Winter had to do was listen. How Holman had been one of the earliest faces to sign up with the 6.57. How game he’d been, how up for everything, how crazy, how totally off his head. The day the 6.57 shipped over to France and laid waste to the Café Southampton in Le Havre, it had been Johnny H with a beret on his head prancing up and down, pelting the locals with their own fucking onions. Later that afternoon, at some poxy stadium up the road, it was Johnny again, giving it plenty, wading in, doing his rape and pillage number. On the boat home he’d done his best to empty the last barrel of Stella, and when there was obvious grief waiting at Customs at the Pompey end, it was Johnny who was one of the first to hurl himself overboard into the harbour. Jumping from a height like that took serious bottle, and the thing was Johnny only remembered he couldn’t swim when he was halfway down. Daft cunt, the daftest of cunts, sorely fucking missed.

  ‘So what happened, Baz?’

  ‘He died. Died in that fire. They said so on the news. Four bodies.’

  ‘I meant in the harbour.’

  ‘They fished him out. Dried him off. Stuffed him in a taxi. He was always lucky that way.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Yeah. Until his fucking luck ran out, eh?’

  Winter wanted to know more. He’d come across Johnny Holman on a couple of occasions in his CID days, but by that time the booze had turned him into a Southsea character, tucked into the corner of one bar or another, telling war stories from his 6.57 days. Winter had tapped him up on one occasion, hoping for a whisper on this or that. Holman took a few drinks off him then told him to fuck off.

  ‘Had some kind of accident, didn’t he?’

  ‘Yeah. Big time.’

  Bazza explained about the crash on the Isle of Man. Insurance money had bought him the spread on the Isle of Wight. Lovely place. Great views. Enough land to hire out to off-road trials bikers. Used to drive the locals mad. Johnny, he said, had been lucky in his choice of company too. Julie Crocker, bless her, was salt of the earth, real Pompey, do anything for you, even an old toerag like Johnny. Them two girls of hers too. Lookers, just like their mum.

  ‘You’re telling me you know this place?’

  ‘Yeah. Johnny invited me over a couple of times. I took Mist once. Midsummer, it was. She spent all night shagging me senseless in one of them barns he had. Always loved the smell of horse shit, Mist. Must explain a thing or two.’ He looked darkly at Winter but got no response.

  Winter was picking at his sweet and sour pork. Half past four was a bit early for dinner.

  ‘So what did he do for money, Holman?’

  ‘Nothing. That was the problem. Johnny was never work-shy but he lost the plot a bit after the accident. In the end, the way I hear it, Julie had to find herself a job to make ends meet. Care home? Teaching fucking assistant? Fuck knows.’

  ‘What about the insurance money?’

  ‘Down his throat.’ Bazza waggled one hand under his chin. ‘You know what I hope? You know what I really hope?’

  ‘What do you hope, Baz?’

  ‘I hope the other night, whenever it fucking was, I hope he was totally out of it, slaughtered, bladdered, rinsed. I hope he never woke up. I hope he turned over in bed and thought this is nice and warm and – ping – his lights go out.’ He looked up at Winter. ‘You think it might have happened that way?’

  ‘I doubt it.’

  Mackenzie fell silent. The restaurant was empty. A lone waiter patrolled the spaces by the door, a black silhouette against the last of the daylight.

  Winter gave up on his food. Bazza’s plate of king prawns was untouched. He wouldn’t look Winter in the eye.

  ‘Sad old fucking life, eh?’

  ‘Yeah, for Holman.’

  ‘And what about Julie? Them kids?’

  ‘Sure. No one enjoys getting burned to death.’

  ‘There’ll be a funeral, mush.’

  ‘I’d say so.’

  ‘You want to come over with me? Pay our respects?’

  Winter didn’t answer. Things were slowly getting clearer in his head. He knew Mackenzie well by now. Well enough to understand that Bazza’s every conversation had a subtext, not immediately obvious, not even perhaps to himself.

  Charlie was approaching. Winter waved him away.

  ‘What do you really want, Baz?’

  ‘I just told you, mush. I want you to sort out your best suit, put a few quid in your pocket, come over with me, buy some flowers, make a night of it afterwards.’

  ‘Sure. And what else?’

  At last Mackenzie’s head came round. His eyes were dry now.

  ‘The Filth’ll be all over that place, am I right?’

  ‘Yeah. Any fire these days is automatically suspicious. And you know what? My lot are usually right.’

  ‘I’m your lot, mush.’

  ‘You are, Baz. You asked me my opinion. As an ex-copper I’m telling you they’ll have the place squared away. You saw it on the telly, the guys in the funny suits. Scenes of Crime. Fire dogs. Arson experts. The works.’

  Mackenzie ducked his head and reached for his chopsticks. He stabbed at a prawn and then had second thoughts.

  ‘So what will they do?’

  ‘They’ll take a nose around. You know all this, Baz. It’s what they do on the movies. Real life’s no different.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘And something else …’

  ‘What’s that, mush?’

  ‘People just don’t die in fires. Not the way they seemed to have died. People wake up. They get up. They yell. They escape. They do anything they can not to end up dead.’

  ‘Smoke?’

  ‘The place was probably alarmed.’

  ‘Something else, then?’

  ‘Yeah. Which brings us back to my original question.’

  Mackenzie nodded, picked up the chopsticks again, changed his mind, emptied his second bottle of fizzy water, shouted for the waiter, demanded the bill.

  Charlie gone, they were cocooned in total silence again. Darkness on the harbour by now, the lights of a ferry slipping past the window.

  Winter leaned forward.

  ‘So?’ he said. ‘What do you want me to do?’

  Chapter Four

 
; MONDAY, 9 FEBRUARY 2009. 18.05

  Faraday was on automatic pilot by now. A muttered excuse to duck into the hotel down the road from Ryde police station, block-booked for squad overnights. Another long moment in front of the mirror in the tiny bathroom, staring at a face he’d once recognised. Another shower. Another fruitless attempt to raise Gabrielle, wherever she might be. Should he declare his partner a Misper? Or should he simply consign the relationship, along with pretty much everything else in his life, to the lost property office?

  Back at the Major Incident Room, his hair still wet, he found Suttle in the SIO’s office. There was a hint of impatience in his voice.

  ‘Time’s getting on, boss. Everyone’s waiting for you.’

  Faraday followed him into the MIR. The room was cramped compared to the facilities at Fratton and there was barely space for the dozen or so detectives who’d made their way across to the island.

  The D/S in charge of Outside Enquiries stilled the buzz of conversation. Faces turned towards Faraday. He found a perch on the edge of a desk, glad of the small comfort of physical support.

  With a briskness that surprised him, he summarised developments to date. As everyone pretty much knew, four bodies had been recovered from a major fire. One male, three females. All four bodies had gunshot wounds and the post-mortem confirmed that they’d all been dead before the fire started. Dental records would confirm all four IDs but in the meantime Gosling was working on the assumption that the bodies belonged to Johnny Holman, his partner Julie Crocker, and her two daughters, Kim and Jess.

  Timeline? He turned to Jimmy Suttle.

  ‘The fire was phoned in at 03.25 on Sunday morning. We’re talking quite a remote rural area and this couple lived in a bungalow half a mile downwind. The old guy smelled smoke and got up to check. He could see flames coming from the farmhouse roof and knew the place was thatched.’

  Appliances, he said, arrived within half an hour, by which time the property was well alight. There were two vehicles in the farmyard. On the assumption that there were people inside, the Watch Commander declared ‘Persons Reported’ and radioed for back-up. An area car was on site by just gone four and the uniformed sergeant at Newport deployed two P/Cs to start hot enquiries locally. QuickAddress had confirmed four persons in residence and a Records Management System search in the name of Holman raised a report of a recent domestic between him and the elder girl. This RMS report included phone numbers: a landline and two mobiles. None of the numbers answered.