‘Mr W thinks you might be the man to know.’
‘Know what, mate?’
‘Who did him.’
‘You’re telling me he died?’
‘Yeah. There’s a bit of history here but I won’t bore you. The point is someone did a wonderful job. No car ever discovered. No forensic. No witnesses. Just chummy in the road. Dead.’
‘You’re talking a hit, yeah? The kind of blokes I know, they normally take a couple of hundred to give a bloke a hiding, drink most of it, go over the top, kick the bloke to death and then get nicked at the end of it. Your guy’s not like that at all, is he? Sounds a bit subtle for this city.’
‘We’re talking early October. Target was a Nigerian, naval guy. The way we see it, there was serious money involved.’
‘How serious?’
‘We think thousands.’
‘Plural?’
‘Yeah.’
‘That is serious.’ The Bone was looking thoughtful. ‘Anything else to go on?’
‘He was living in Port Solent. Had a rented apartment there.’
‘Ah … housewives’ delight.’ The Bone was beaming. ‘Leave it to me.’
It was dark by the time Faraday took Pelly back to the front office. He opened the door to the street and accompanied him onto the pavement. The rain had stopped by now and a creamy full moon was rising behind the shreds of racing cloud.
Faraday had spent the best part of an hour pressing Pelly on every aspect of his story. Under formal caution, with absolutely no doubt that anything he might say could be used in evidence against him, he’d freely admitted spending a financial windfall on buying the new boat. The money, he said, had come from foreign sources. It would all be declared in his tax return and he was under no legal obligation to explain further. As far as Sean Castle was concerned, he’d certainly chartered his boat but that, too, wasn’t illegal. A mate he trusted had skippered the Tidemaster on its last outing and the boat had gone to a French buyer the following day. No, he hadn’t got the French bloke’s details. Neither did he know the whereabouts of the mate who’d taken the Tidemaster to sea. And yes, the same lack of interest applied to the northerner who’d given him a couple of hundred for his clapped-out old Volvo estate. Faraday, he said, was welcome to chase both buyers, and if he ever found the guy with the Volvo maybe he could return the set of titanium fish hooks Pelly had left under the front passenger seat. On Chris Unwin’s mysterious disappearance he could shed no light. Bloke had done a runner. Happens all the time. End of story.
Watching Pelly cross the road to reclaim his new car, Faraday knew he’d been listening to a tissue of lies. More important still, he’d realised that Pelly himself understood this and wasn’t much bothered. As long as the story held together, both men knew that Pelly would be home safe. His breakfast companion in the Farringford Hotel had funds available to buy the nursing home. Such was the depth of Pelly’s disgust at the state of the nation, he’d agreed a silly price. By Easter, if the lawyers got off their arses, Pelly and his strange little family would be milking their goats on the shores of Lake Jablanica.
At the end of the interview Faraday had switched off the tape machine and sat back in his chair.
‘Clever,’ he’d said. And meant it.
Pelly drove into the night, giving Faraday a derisive farewell wave as he passed the police station. Faraday found Tracy Barber and Dave Michaels at the top of the stairs.
‘Well, boss?’ It was Tracy Barber.
Faraday looked at her a moment, then smiled.
‘I think we’re getting somewhere,’ he said.
Nineteen
Monday, 1 March 2004
Winter drove himself to Portsmouth’s Queen Alexandra Hospital. Maddox sat beside him as they turned off the motorway and climbed towards the distant sprawl of buildings that dominated the lower slopes of the hill.
Back at the cottage, Winter had woken early. He hadn’t felt so cheerful for weeks and had toyed with cancelling the appointment at the hospital. Maybe good sex and a 4 a.m. discussion about Arthur Rimbaud had chased the demons away. Only Maddox’s insistence that he give the medics a look inside his throbbing head had persuaded him to take the road back to Pompey.
The car park full, Winter left Maddox to find somewhere for the Subaru. His appointment card instructed him to report to the X-ray department on C level.
He made his way down the long corridors and followed the overhead signs until he found himself in a big reception area dominated by a framed photograph of a lighthouse under attack by the elements. The photo was a wild swirl of towering breakers and drifting spume, the sturdy granite thumb of the lighthouse dwarfed by the fury of the storm. Beneath the photo a line of text read Avis de coup de vent. Winter studied the photo for a moment or two. Me, he thought.
The woman behind the desk consulted the morning appointment list and told him to take a seat. Winter wanted to know what Avis de coup de vent meant. She glanced up at him.
‘Someone else asked that.’
‘And?’
‘Something about a gale warning. Heavy weather. It’s French.’
‘Yeah?’ Winter looked back at the photo, then asked how long the scan would take.
‘An hour or so. Depends.’
‘On what?’
‘How it goes.’
‘Really?’
Winter gave her a look and then went through to the waiting area and found himself a seat before ringing Maddox. She’d found a parking spot round the back of the hospital and was watching a steady stream of patients labouring up the hill towards the A & E department. Why was everyone so fat in this city?
Winter smiled. She’d raised the same question last night, blaming his headaches on too much beer and too many burgers. He needed to lose a couple of stone at least and just then she’d been in an excellent position to judge.
‘This lot’s going to take a while,’ he told her. ‘I’ll get a cab home.’
‘OK.’
‘You’ll be there?’
‘Probably not. I’ve got some stuff to do back at the flat. Hey …’ her voice softened ‘… take care.’
‘You too.’ Winter ducked his head, overwhelmed yet again. How come this woman could breach his defences with such ease? How on earth would you put a life back together after something like this? Gale warning, he thought. Avis de whatever.
‘Your name, sir?’
Winter glanced up. The nurse’s face was a blur.
‘Winter,’ he said numbly.
She took him into the imaging area. The room with the CT machine was bigger than he’d thought, with radiation warnings on the door and a long glass panel offering a view from the control suite next door. Through the glass he could see two figures bent over monitor screens. Curiosity made him ask who they were.
‘Radiographers, Mr Winter.’ The nurse had a nice smile. ‘Would you mind lying down here, please?’
She indicated a long couch at knee level. At the head of the couch was a big doughnut-shaped machine that dominated the room. Everything looked new.
Winter slipped off his jacket and lay full length on the couch. The nurse propped his head on some kind of support. He felt the clammy crinkle of polythene cupping the base of his skull. The nurse explained the procedure – a quick scouting shot, then another series of pictures, each requiring a tiny adjustment in the couch. At the most it would take a couple of minutes. She smiled again, and then disappeared.
Winter gazed up at the ceiling. He hated this. He hated the feeling that he was in some kind of queue. He hated the waiting, the anticipation, the lack of control, the knowledge that there were people next door, barely metres away, who were about to peer into the very middle of his brain. Life, for reasons he couldn’t fathom, had turned the tables on him. Getting inside other people’s heads was his job, his privilege. How come he was so suddenly on the receiving end?
His headache had got worse, throbbing and throbbing, and he began to wonder whether it might be connected
with stress, and whether it would affect the images these quiet, efficient medics were bent on capturing. There was a smoke detector on the ceiling, directly in his eyeline, and he tried to concentrate on the tiny red light that winked and winked, on/off, on/off. Drive you mad, he thought. Looking at that.
Without warning the couch began to rise. Instinctively, like a kid on the Cresta Run, his hands tightened on the folds of blanket beneath him. Moments later he was going backwards, into the heart of the doughnut, a movie without a soundtrack, total silence.
Then came a voice – disembodied, firm.
‘Nice and still in there, Mr Winter.’
He wondered whether to shut his eyes, decided against it. The couch had stopped. Immediately above him, inset into the inner surface of the doughnut, was a clear glass panel. There were red lights inside the panel and there came a soft whirring noise as the lights spun round and the couch eased his body out again. Then the couch stopped before sliding him into the doughnut again. More shots. Then it was over.
The waiting seemed to go on forever. Up on one elbow, Winter gazed at the figures on the other side of the glass panel. Two radiographers were studying an image on a monitor screen. One of them frowned, pointed at something, then nodded. Moments later the door opened and the nurse appeared. She had a syringe in one hand and a tissue in the other. She perched herself on the side of the couch. Another smile.
‘Just a tiny injection, Mr Winter. Do you mind?’
Winter gazed up at her. He knew he’d had it. He knew with a terrible certainty that this was the figure of death. Not the Grim Reaper. Not the skull-faced guarantee that you were inches away from the grave. But a pretty girl with bobbed hair who was having trouble finding a vein in his forearm.
‘What’s this about, then?’ Winter managed.
‘Nothing really.’ She’d practised the line a thousand times. ‘Just a tiny definition problem with the machine. We’re taking a couple more shots just to be on the safe side. There –’ she beamed down at him ‘– didn’t feel a thing, did you?’
An early lunch was Faraday’s idea. He collected Brian Imber from the office that housed the Intelligence Cell and made his way downstairs. A pub round the corner on the High Street started serving at half eleven. Imber stood at the door, watching the barmaid wiping down the tables ahead of the lunchtime rush. Faraday was starving.
Away from the constant clamour of the Major Crimes machine, he needed time and space to review events. After the initial burst of energy, the Congress team was beginning to flag. Scenes of Crime and the house-to-house teams had produced very little. However hard they rattled Pelly’s cage, nothing seemed to fall out.
‘And Willard?’ Imber was eyeing the menu chalked on the blackboard beside the bar.
‘He’s losing faith. There was a double murder in Waterlooville last night. Looks like a three-day event to me but I’ve lost seven DCs. The New Forest job was done and dusted in a week.’ Faraday mimicked Willard’s growl: ‘And you lot haven’t even got a bloody name for the body.’
‘Unwin,’ Imber said. ‘Has to be.’
‘Sure. But he wants it in writing. Like we all do.’
Faraday had just spent the best part of an hour on the phone to Willard, who wanted to scale down Congress. SOC had wasted a small fortune for absolutely no forensic return and the accommodation bills for the inquiry team were mounting by the day. The prime suspect had volunteered himself for interview but without solid evidence Faraday hadn’t been able to lay a finger on him. In short, Willard was beginning to wish the bloody woman with the binoculars had done her birdwatching somewhere else. Another good blow and the headless body might have ended up on someone else’s patch.
‘He wants the HSU off the job, too. Doesn’t see the point anymore.’
The surveillance teams had been shadowing Pelly since Friday night. Not once had anything remotely interesting appeared on their log.
‘You fought him off?’
‘Short term, yes. I told him that Pelly thinks he’s got us shafted. In that kind of mood he might drop a stitch or two.’
‘You think that’s true?’
‘Yes. The guy’s strange. Yesterday I almost got to like him.’
‘Great.’ Imber looked less than impressed. ‘So where does that take us?’
It was a good question. Faraday eased his chair away from the table. The pub was still empty.
‘Bosnia’s the key,’ he said at last. ‘I’m sure of it. Pelly still makes regular trips, brings blokes back, makes no secret of it. He’s obviously got connections out there. In fact he likes it so much he’s going to bloody live there.’
‘You believe him?’
‘Yes, I do. All that stuff we seized from his room – the photos, the flags, the little souvenirs – it’s got under his skin. If you’re someone like Pelly, you need a good war. In fact you need more than that. You need a cause.’
‘We’re talking ten years ago. Different century.’
‘I know, Brian, but mentally he’s still out there, still in the trenches. Some blokes never let go and for my money he’s one of them.’
‘And Unwin?’ Imber still wasn’t convinced.
‘I’ve no idea. Maybe he set up some kind of freelance operation. Maybe he got in Pelly’s face. Maybe he became a threat of some kind, fancied Lajla, overplayed his hand. You know the way these things work. Someone like Pelly, it wouldn’t take much.’
‘No …’
The waitress arrived. Faraday ordered ham and eggs. Imber settled for pasta with salad. After promising himself he’d never run another marathon, he was back in training. The waitress gone, he turned back to Faraday.
‘What about the PM on the old girl?’
‘Pembury was duty call-out. He phoned me just before we left. Says he’s going to buy a house over here, save himself the travelling.’
‘And?’
‘Nothing. He’s putting it down to heart failure. Bit of arterial disease, bit of ischaemia, nothing you wouldn’t expect in an eighty-seven-year-old.’
‘No haemorrhages?’ Imber touched his eye.
‘Not a trace. And he looked bloody hard.’
Imber shook his head, as disappointed as Faraday. Given the possibility of yet another interview, they’d agreed that Pelly might have smothered Mary Unwin with a pillow. Had she put up a struggle, blood pressure would have burst some of the tiny vessels in her eyeballs, a telltale sign of suffocation. As it was, Pembury had attributed her death to natural causes, ending the Coroner’s interest in the case.
‘And the cervical bone from the corpse?’
‘A result.’ Faraday visibly brightened. ‘He pulled in a skeletal specialist, guy from London. He’s done a preliminary report and Pembury talked me through it.’
Microscopic cut-analysis, he said, had established that a handsaw had been used to decapitate the body at the foot of the cliffs. Each cut mark leaves a characteristic imprint in the bone, and from this evidence the specialist had concluded that Faraday should be looking for a handsaw with alternating offset teeth, probably a TPI of ten.
‘Teeth per inch. I had to ask too. In plain English, we’re after a Stanley Hardpoint or something similar. B and Q sell them by the thousand.’
‘Scenes of Crime?’
‘They found a brand new one on Sunday morning out in the back of the garage where Pelly has a workbench. There was even a receipt. You want to take a guess at the date?’
‘October last year.’
‘Dead right. The ninth. Pelly says there was a sale on. Binned his old saw because it was worn out and treated himself to a replacement.’
‘Binned it where?’
‘He says the dustmen took it with the rest of the rubbish. I’ve got a couple of guys working on where it might have got to but don’t hold your breath.’
‘Not looking good then, eh?’
‘Afraid not. There’s one possible, though. The computer analysis people were on this morning. Seems they’re starting to get
somewhere with deleted emails on Pelly’s laptop. They haven’t got the full story, not yet, but if Willard pulls the plug that’s maybe all we’ll have to go on. The outfit’s based in Southsea. I said I’d come over.’ Faraday, hungrier by the minute, was looking for the waitress. ‘Fancy it?’
Winter had a key to Maddox’s seafront flat. He paid off the cab and made his way across the road, glad he had someone to be with. Still numbed, he could only remember the face of the radiographer who’d intercepted him as he left the X-ray department. She must have known too. Why else would she check his phone numbers?
Upstairs, on the tenth floor, he knocked lightly at the door before letting himself in. To his surprise the flat was empty. Maddox’s leather coat lay where she’d left it, draped over the sofa, and the kettle was still warm in the kitchen. He returned to the big living room and wandered across to the window. He felt utterly detached, completely alone, an audience of one queuing for a film he’d never wanted to see.
Brain tumour, had to be. In the cab he’d tried to visualise what it might look like, this stranger in his head. Was it dense? Hard? Spongy? Was it growing, day by day, hour by hour? Would the neurologist be assessing it even now, the contrast turned up on his monitor, a healthy lunchtime snack at his elbow? Winter didn’t know, and the more he thought about it the less he was able to grasp what the next few weeks might bring. He’d never had much time for introspection and now he understood why. All this bollocks, he told himself, happened to other people.
He opened the tall glass door and stepped onto the balcony. Below, in the sunshine, a couple of girls were sprawled on the grass, enjoying the first thin warmth of early spring. Ladies Mile, the path across Southsea Common, was bright with crocuses, and he fought hard to resist the thought that this might be the last time he’d ever see them. Was this the way it had been with Joannie? Had a five-minute diagnosis robbed her of everything she’d taken for granted?
He reached for the handrail that topped the glass screen and peered over the edge. The sheerness of the drop dizzied him. He could see cracks in the paving stones that stretched towards the kerb. He could feel the chill of the breeze on his face as it hit the front of the flats and eddied upwards. A couple of seconds at the most, he thought. Then oblivion.
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