Borrowed Light

by Hurley, Graham

  ‘That was you in the car park, right?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘So what do you want?’

  ‘I want you to tell me about Kaija Luik.’

  ‘What do you want to know?’

  ‘I want to know what kind of gear she wears.’

  ‘You mean dresses?’

  ‘I mean whatever she wears.’ He paused. ‘Think of the last time you saw her. What was she wearing?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Just do it. Right?’

  ‘What’s your name again?’

  ‘Winter. Paul Winter.’

  ‘Then listen to me, Paul Winter. I don’t know what the fuck you’re up to, but I didn’t like you from the start and now’s no different. In fact now’s a whole lot fucking worse. Do you want to end this call or shall I?’

  Winter rolled his eyes. Mackenzie was getting visibly twitchy. Even Ezzie was taking an interest.

  ‘Just listen to me, eh? I know what’s in that bin liner and maybe you do too. Otherwise you wouldn’t have gone round to pick it up. But that’s not the point, Lou. The point is this. The old lady you talked to this afternoon doesn’t. She told me she never looked inside and I believe her. So that just makes two of us. You and me.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Pretty soon my ex-colleagues are going to be knocking on my door. I won’t bother you with the small print, Lou, but they’re going to want that bin liner. That bin liner could land you and me in deep, deep shit. So there has to be another bin liner. With something else in it. Am I getting warm here?’

  ‘Kaija’s stuff?’

  ‘You’ve got it.’

  There was a brief silence on the line, then Sadler was back again. She seemed to have made a decision. She seemed to have understood.

  ‘Size ten,’ she said. ‘Kaija loves blue. She’s got excellent taste. Frocks from Whistles. Jeans by Armani. Hobbs blouses. Converse trainers.’ She paused. ‘Have you got all that?’

  Winter made her go through it again. This time he wrote it down. Ezzie had stepped across and was standing behind the sofa.

  ‘The trainers again?’

  ‘Converse.’

  ‘OK.’ He peered at the list. ‘What am I missing here?’

  ‘Height. She’s tall for a woman. I’d say five eight.’

  ‘Waist?’

  ‘Size ten. Slim. Work it out.’

  ‘Up top?’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Her tits, love.’

  ‘Thirty-four C. She was a popular girl.’

  ‘Is that right?’ Winter couldn’t be sure but he thought he heard the whisper of a chuckle.

  ‘Anything else you want to know?’

  ‘Yeah. Where is she now?’

  ‘Fuck knows. And that’s the truth.’

  ‘What about Johnny Holman?’

  ‘Holman?’ The voice had hardened again. ‘Holman was an arse-hole.’

  The line went dead. Mackenzie, greatly relieved, patted Winter on the thigh. Ezzie was still studying the list.

  ‘It’s all upstairs,’ she said. ‘Be my guest.’

  Faraday and Parsons were at Newport police station, conferencing with the Tactical Interview Adviser. D/C Ian Whatmore had made a name for himself force-wide in the dark arts of interview management. How to invite a suspect to divulge more than he ever planned. How to spot the cracks in that first account interview. And how to feed in morsel after morsel of carefully gathered information that would tighten the investigative noose until even the suspect real ised he’d been kippered. Whatmore was good at this stuff, so good Parsons had pulled every string to get him sprung from a training course at Southwick Park and whisked at high speed to the Southsea hovercraft terminal.

  Whatmore was up for this. Faraday could see it in his face. At forty-nine, a little portlier than his former self, he was close to calling it a day, but like every ageing cop he relished the chance to take another scalp or two.

  Already Faraday had outlined what they had to throw at Oobik, but like every good cop Whatmore was more interested in gut feeling.

  ‘You think he did it? Killed Holman?’

  Faraday exchanged glances with Parsons.

  ‘Yeah. Ninety-five per cent that’s exactly what he did.’

  ‘And the girl? Luik?’

  ‘Ditto.’

  Now Whatmore was interested in the disclosure they had to make ahead of the interview to Oobik’s solicitor. He was looking at Parsons.

  ‘Oobik’s asked for the duty brief. To be honest, we haven’t got a great deal. The account he gave Jimmy Suttle is all over the place. We know he’s lying, but we’ve still got to prove it.’

  Whatmore nodded. He wanted to know about the duty brief.

  Faraday named a Newport-based solicitor. Whatmore knew him well.

  ‘He’ll tell this guy to go No Comment. Bet your life.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because he’s good, sharp, shrewd. He’ll be thinking what you’re thinking. And if we give him the impression we’ve got fuck all, there’s no way he’s gonna let Oobik open his mouth.’

  ‘So what do we do?’

  ‘We give him short rations. Just enough for him to advise his client. That way he might think we’re playing the incremental disclosure game, that we know more than we really do. It’s a bit of a punt but it might work.’

  Faraday had spotted another problem. This first interview was open account. That meant it was largely down to Oobik. If he chose not to say anything at all, they’d pretty soon run out of questions. And once that happened, the brief would have grounds for drawing the whole thing to a close. ‘Diligent and expeditious’ was a phrase that had come to haunt every interview room. If the thing wasn’t moving on, then stumps would be drawn.

  ‘Not a problem.’ Whatmore had a plan. ‘The guys we’re putting in with him have worked this trick before. Patsy Lowe is brilliant at the touchy-feely. She’s the one to find the sweet spot, what turns him on, what he’s been proud of in his life. Angus can save the charm for later. I’ll tell him to keep his mouth shut.’

  ‘Until the challenge phase.’

  ‘Of course, boss. We want the truth or provable lies, right?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Then we spend tonight getting the lad onside.’

  Faraday had no problem with Patsy Lowe. Her long years as a Family Liaison Officer had taught her how to build a bridge to pretty much anybody. Angus McEwan too had the knack of looking a man in the eye and winning his trust. He was a big man, physically imposing, with five kids and a wife who was a genius in the kitchen, and his soft Scots accent masked a great deal of guile.

  Whatmore looked from Faraday to Parsons.

  ‘Are we through here? You want to policy this thing up?’

  ‘Sure.’ Faraday reached for his notes. More typing. More layers of armour plate.

  Whatmore got to his feet and put his jacket on. Then came a knock at the door. It was Suttle. His mop of curls was plastered to his skull. It must have started raining again.

  He looked first at Faraday.

  ‘You’re not going to believe this, boss.’

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  MONDAY, 16 FEBRUARY 2009. 18.37

  It wasn’t in Mackenzie’s nature to wait. He sat on the sofa, still at Ezzie’s, still in the big front lounge, aware of the murmur of conversation upstairs. Winter was with him, buried in Stu’s copy of the Financial Times. The credit squeeze was tightening by the day. More bad news from Dubai.

  A peal of laughter caught Winter’s attention. Marie, definitely. Summoned by phone, she’d come round to give her daughter a hand. There was more laughter, louder as a door opened, then came the patter of footsteps on the stairs and the two women were back in the lounge.

  Ezzie was carrying a black plastic sack. She looked pleased with herself.

  ‘You want a peek? Make sure we’ve got it right?’

  She emptied the contents of the bag on the carpet and Winter found himse
lf looking at a jumble of clothes: a patterned blue skirt, a couple of halter tops in pinks and yellows, a pair of denim shorts with a rose embroidered on the arse, two pairs of rope sandals. Ezzie knelt on the carpet and dug around, extracting a thong in black mesh. She held it up, suspended on one finger.

  ‘What do you think, Dad? Does this fit the bill?’

  Mackenzie had the grace to muster a grin, all too aware that Winter was in charge now. He understood the rules of this strange new game. He seemed to know the moves they had to make to head off disaster.

  ‘That’s great,’ Winter said. ‘Have you got a torch?’

  Marie stuffed the clothes back in the bin liner while Ezzie fetched a torch. The back garden was surrounded by a high brick wall and there was an area at the far end shielded from the neighbours. It was pouring with rain again and the square of newly turfed lawn was soggy underfoot. Perfect, thought Winter, following the beam of the torch towards the rear wall.

  Here, at the back end of last year, Stu had begun a compost heap with piles of raked leaves. Since then he and Ezzie had added hedge cuttings, rose trimmings and sundry garden waste. Winter stirred the edges of the compost with his foot, then stooped down for a handful of the soil underneath and smeared it all over the bin liner. The soil was wet from the rain, and bits of fibre from the compost stuck to the black plastic. He gave it another coating then headed back indoors.

  Mackenzie was in the kitchen, helping himself to Stu’s malt. Winter left the soiled bag beside the door and went to find Ezzie. He was back in moments, drying himself with a towel. Then Ezzie came in.

  ‘This OK?’

  She offered Winter the hairdryer. Winter plugged it in, hauled the bin liner onto the breakfast bar and began to hose the black plastic with hot air. Slowly, the pebbles of rain disappeared, leaving brown smears of soil.

  Marie had joined them in the kitchen. She’d seen the bin liner Winter had brought back from the Isle of Wight. She understood exactly what was going on.

  ‘You’re an artist, Paul.’ She reached out for the towel. ‘You think they’ll come looking?’

  ‘I know they will.’

  ‘But what about the other one? The one I picked up from the police station? I told them Baz had been giving a friend a hand in the garden. I said they’d done a bonfire together.’

  ‘Perfect.’

  ‘We stick to that?’

  ‘Absolutely.’

  ‘But what if they want to check? What if they want to see all that stuff?’

  ‘You threw it out. It was disgusting. You’re a woman with standards. A rare breed these days.’

  ‘And the friend?’ It was Mackenzie. He was getting the hang of this.

  Winter gave the question some thought.

  ‘Misty,’ he said. ‘Leave it to me.’

  Lou Sadler was arrested at 20.17 by two D/Cs from the Outside Enquiry team on suspicion of murder. Suttle was parked on the Cowes promenade in front of the apartment block, waiting for one of the off-duty Crime Scene Investigators to arrive from Shanklin. The decision to scoop up Sadler had been Parsons’, with heavy backing from Faraday.

  Suttle’s own inclination had been to let her run and see what developed. The obs team were still sitting on her every move and her visit to Nancy Percival had already produced a breakthrough. She must have known exactly where Kaija Luik had been living, and her eagerness to lay her hands on the bin liner opened a line of enquiry that was deeply promising. What had the bin liner contained? And was it pushing supposition too far to agree that the overweight charmer at Mrs Percival’s door must have been Paul Winter?

  That, he knew, was Parsons’ assumption. It was now an article of faith that a quantity of narcotics had been removed from Monkswell Farm. Johnny Holman was a close associate of Bazza Mackenzie. A remote property on the Isle of Wight was exactly the place you might choose for a stash. Winter had already been sniffing around the investigation. With his nose in Gosling’s trough and his mastery of the dark arts of detection, would it be a surprise if he wasn’t, in some respects, ahead of their game?

  Suttle smiled, amazed as ever by Winter’s MO, a mix of guile, low cunning and sheer bravado. Removing vital evidence that might turn out to be a crime scene could earn him a hefty prison sentence, but Suttle knew Winter far too well not to understand that this decision would have been carefully weighed. In the Job, Winter had always tried to lay hands on the single clue that would unlock an entire investigation, and in the shape of the bin liner, thought Suttle, he might have found exactly that.

  The big door in the front of the apartment block swung open and Suttle peered out through the teeming rain as the two arresting D/Cs hurried Lou Sadler into the waiting car. He got out of the Fiesta and stepped across. One of the D/Cs handed him the key to Sadler’s apartment.

  ‘Fourth floor,’ he said. ‘Number 8. Help yourself.’

  Suttle nodded, said nothing. Lou Sadler was sitting in the back of the squad car, looking up at him. Her face was impassive, not a flicker of emotion. Parsons was right, Suttle thought. She’s been sitting up there waiting for us.

  It was Faraday’s idea to summon reinforcements from the mainland to give the investigation a fighting chance. Parsons was now sharing his borrowed office at Newport police station, squeezing herself behind the spare desk and demanding flowers to brighten the place up. One of the civvy inputters in the Ryde MIR, underimpressed by Parsons’ slightly regal air, had quietly coined a nickname that was threatening to catch on: Her Bustiness. Or, more simply, HB.

  Faraday, bent over the Policy Book, was mentally reviewing developments over the last couple of hours. The Outside Enquiry team was fully stretched on action after action, racing against the clock to find fresh bullets for Gosling’s gun. A trawl of Mrs Percival’s neighbours to establish whether anyone had information about visitors in the small hours of Sunday morning. Flat-to-flat calls in Sadler’s apartment block. Marina enquiries to try and establish whether or not she owned a boat of any description. A wider intel trawl to build a picture of Martin Skelley. Already the PNC had yielded a number of convictions, two – in his youth – for GBH. Since then he appeared to have built a substantial business empire but the details were still imprecise. More Googling. More Facebook. More calls.

  With Sadler en route to Newport from Cowes, the task now was to prepare for another set of interviews. Because Gosling’s D/Cs were fully occupied, Faraday was suggesting a couple of names from the Major Crime team back at Fratton. Both he knew well. D/C Bev Yates was a career detective, a veteran forty-something. His private life was never less than chaotic, but his sleepy eyes and Italian good looks had won him a series of victories in the interview room, often against women. D/C Dawn Ellis was younger but no less shrewd. Pale, slight, passionately vegan, she carried an air of boyishness which she used to great advantage. Pre-Christmas there’d been rumours that she’d begun to lose the plot – talk of man trouble – but Faraday mistrusted canteen gossip and was glad to have her on the team. Some serious criminals had made the mistake of underestimating Ellis and had regretted the consequences.

  Faraday was worrying about the PACE clock. It was already gone half eight. Sadler had yet to arrive. The booking-in process would take at least half an hour. If she wanted the services of her own lawyer, it might be midnight before all the consultations with the brief were complete. By that time Sadler would be due the stipulated eight-hour rest period, pushing the first interview into the following day.

  Parsons dismissed Faraday’s reservations. Making a fresh start tomorrow morning, she said, had lots of advantages. For one thing they’d have time to agree a proper strategy with Ian Whatmore and the interview team. For another, the overnight enquiries, plus forensic developments at the caravan and Sadler’s apartment, might well affect the whole thrust of the investigation. At last, she said, Gosling appeared to be in the driving seat.

  ‘Yates and Ellis then?’ Faraday had them on standby.

  ‘Yep. Get them over now.’
/>   ‘And Winter?’

  To Faraday’s surprise, Parsons hesitated. Thinking she couldn’t resist this golden chance to at last get even, he’d assumed she’d want detectives knocking on his door as soon as possible. On the contrary, she appeared to favour caution. She was wary of Winter. She wanted to make sure they weren’t walking into yet another cleverly baited trap.

  ‘Who knows him best, Joe?’

  ‘Suttle, without question. Winter trained him. He knows exactly the way the guy ticks.’

  ‘And we trust Suttle?’

  ‘Completely.’

  ‘Then send him over.’

  ‘To do what?’

  ‘Have a chat.’

  ‘And if Winter admits removing the bin liner?’

  ‘Then we arrest him.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘Perverting the course of justice. This is page one, Joe. The man’s trying to make things hard for us.’

  Faraday nodded. She was right. Winter was definitely on a nicking.

  ‘So when do you suggest we action this?’

  ‘Tonight.’ She glanced at her watch. ‘As soon as.’

  Jimmy Suttle stepped into Sadler’s apartment, leaving the door open for the Crime Scene Investigator, who’d just arrived from Shanklin. The lights were on and he waited for the CSI to join him. He was an older man, overweight, and he came puffing up the stairs complaining about the supper he’d had to abandon. Steak and kidney pudding. His wife’s own recipe. Criminal.

  They started in the kitchen, a brief scan of the shelves, a cursory poke through the drawers, looking for anything obvious that might help the interview teams over the next twenty-four hours. According to items pinned to the corkboard on the back of the door, Lou Sadler owed two weeks’ worth of milk and fancied a recipe for prawns in a coconut and chilli sauce. The contents of her fridge betrayed a weakness for crème fraiche and eclairs, and she was manic about hanging on to Sainsbury’s bags.

  The bedroom looked more promising. There were two dressing gowns folded over the foot of the big double bed and a whole drawerful of men’s clothing, chiefly jeans and T-shirts. The T-shirts were large; the jeans thirty-six in the leg. On the table beside the bed was a framed photo. Sadler sat at the wheel of a biggish rigid inflatable, grinning at the camera. It was a glorious day, not a cloud in the sky, and the background matched the view across the Medina from West Cowes. Riding pillion in the RIB was a bigger figure, Max Oobik – blue anorak, knee-length olive-green shorts. He too was enjoying himself. Suttle gazed at the photo, knowing that this was probably the boat that belonged to the trailer at Upcourt Farm. He put the photo to one side and had started going through the twin drawers in the dressing table when he got a call from next door.