Blood And Honey

by Hurley, Graham

  There was a long silence, finally broken by Tracy Barber.

  ‘So what did you think was in the parcel?’

  ‘A body. What else could it be?’

  ‘And were you right?’

  ‘Yeah … Turns out I was.’

  Unwin disappeared into Shanklin for a couple of hours. When he came back it was dark. Around seven he helped Pelly bundle the parcel into the back of his Volvo. It was wrapped in black polythene, he said, and roped. It was soft as well as heavy. At one point he felt a knee.

  ‘What about a head?’ It was Michaels.

  ‘Wrong end. He made sure I had the other end.’ He frowned. ‘Why?’

  ‘Nothing.’ Michaels scribbled a note. ‘Go on.’

  They’d driven in convoy down to the water at Bembridge Harbour.

  ‘Whereabouts in Bembridge Harbour?’

  Bent over his notes next door, Faraday nodded in approval. The edges of Bembridge Harbour were littered with boatyards, flats, houses, business premises, even – at the southerly end – a line of houseboats. So just where would you find the privacy to risk something like this?

  Unwin was talking about an area known as the Duver. You got there, he said, down a narrow road. There was a small car park surrounded by bushes. A path led up onto the dunes. A hundred metres or so and you were on a quiet stretch of foreshore, outside the harbour itself. There were beach huts there. The tide was up on the shingle below.

  ‘So what happened?’

  ‘We got the body out of the Volvo, carried it up over the dunes. Bloody thing weighed a ton.’

  Concealing the body in scrub behind one of the beach huts, they’d driven back up the road and round to the harbour. Pelly had a boat of his own, a thing he called a Tidemaster, but he’d already done a deal with some guy about another boat. Pelly was going to be in charge of this other boat. Pelly’s own boat was down to Unwin.

  ‘Did you know anything about boats?’ It was Michaels.

  ‘Not much. I’d been out with Rob a couple of times. Mackerel mainly. I can steer OK. He knew that. He’d let me have a go.’

  ‘So what happened?’

  ‘It was crazy. The tide was up so we had to use another little boat to get out to his, a dinghy thing. We tied the dinghy to his boat and then went out of the harbour. The place where we’d left the body is down to the left. Rob dropped the anchor and we took the dinghy onto the beach.’

  Getting the body into the dinghy, he said, was a nightmare. Rowing back out, he thought the bloody thing was going over.

  ‘Was it rough?’

  ‘No, not really. It wasn’t that. It was still pissing down but it wasn’t rough. It was just the situation. Something like that, it’s just bizarre.’

  When they finally made it alongside the Tidemaster, Pelly climbed on board. Unwin chucked him a line from the parcelled corpse and together they’d started to heave the body out of the dinghy. At this point, to Unwin’s horror, the parcel had begun to leak and as they manhandled it onto the Tidemaster Unwin had found himself covered in various bodily fluids.

  ‘Blood, piss, all sorts. My face, neck, chest, hands – fucking everywhere. I stank for days. I couldn’t get rid of the smell.’

  Next thing he knew, Pelly had pulled too hard on the rope and the whole parcel came undone. The polythene ended up like a tent, all over Unwin. By the time he’d fought the thing off, Pelly had bundled the body into the wheelhouse and then got it down below, into the tiny forrard cabin.

  ‘You got out of the dinghy in the end?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  Unwin clambered aboard and then Pelly started the engine. With the anchor up, he’d motored back into the harbour and hopped across to the boat he’d borrowed from some mate or other.

  ‘What happened to the dinghy?’

  ‘We left it on the mooring.’

  In the darkness the two boats had left the harbour, Pelly in the lead, Unwin at the wheel of the Tidemaster.

  ‘I was shitting myself by this time. Pelly had obviously topped this bloke and here was I cruising along with the fucking body down below. So who holds his hands up if we ever got caught? Eh?’ He looked at the two detectives, seemingly unaware of the irony.

  Barber told him to carry on. Where did they go with the two boats?

  ‘Miles out. Took forever. We went round the corner of the island, then across the bay and just kept going. I wanted to talk to Rob on the radio but he’d said there was no way. He gave me some cobblers about the radios being fucked but really I knew it was about other people listening in. He didn’t want that. Too fucking right he didn’t.’

  ‘Did you ever go below? Have a look at the body?’

  ‘No fucking way. I didn’t want to know.’

  ‘Didn’t you ask who this person was? What Pelly was up to?’

  ‘No. I just wanted to get it over with.’

  ‘Get what over with?’

  ‘Whatever was going to happen next.’ He shook his head. ‘Unreal it was. Complete fucking nightmare.’

  A couple of hours out, they stopped. Pelly circled and came up alongside. He said he was going to bin the Tidemaster and then hop onto the one he’d borrowed. After that, they could both go home.

  ‘Bin?’

  ‘Sink. He had an axe with him, big thing. He showed it to me.’

  Pelly made sure he had a couple of lines between the two boats so he could get back on board, then he disappeared below while Unwin got himself onto the other boat. There’d been a couple of minutes of crashing around with the axe, really heavy blows, and then Pelly came out of the wheelhouse again, said the Tidemaster was starting to fill. He’d opened some valve or other as well but the bastard refused to sink.

  ‘In the end he had to go down there again and make a bigger hole. That did the trick. The boat started going down by the bow, really quickly, and he was back out by now, trying to get the door of the wheelhouse locked. The real problem was the ropes that tied us together. The weight of Pelly’s boat was dragging mine over. In the end he had to give up on the door and come back on board. The only way we saved my boat was by using the axe on the ropes. Just released us in time. Shit …’ He shook his head again.

  Listening next door through the speaker feed, Faraday remembered Sean Castle’s indignation at the state of his boat when Pelly had returned it. Fucking great gouges on the starboard gunnels, he’d said. No wonder.

  In the interview room Unwin had finally come to a halt. The story, as far as he was concerned, was over. He’d nothing left to say.

  Tracy Barber wanted to know what he’d done that night, once they’d made it back to Bembridge Harbour. The last ferry back to the mainland would have gone. Had Pelly offered him a bed for the night?

  ‘Are you fucking joking? There’s no way I wanted to be anywhere near that guy again.’

  ‘So what did you do?’

  ‘I waited for him to go. Then I took everything off and washed myself in the harbour. You can’t describe the smell. I just couldn’t stand it. Problem was I hadn’t got any other clothes so in the end I froze my arse off for nothing. Made fuck-all difference. I kipped in the back of the van. Or tried to.’

  Next day he took the ferry back to Pompey. With Pelly’s two hundred pounds and some debts hastily recovered from other sources he bought himself a ticket to Le Havre. From the French coast he drove south for a day, only stopping when it got dark and he discovered he’d blown one of his headlights. For the next week he slept in the back of the van and tried to get work. In the end he found himself working for a farmer in the middle of nowhere. Nice enough bloke but pissed out of his head most of the time.

  ‘Perfect,’ said Barber drily.

  ‘That’s what I thought.’ Unwin nodded. ‘Until Mum phoned.’

  Next door, Faraday had drawn himself a map. Somewhere south of the Isle of Wight a cross represented the spot where Pelly had scuttled the Tidemaster. Faraday tried to imagine it going down, the wheelhouse filling, the unsecured door opening and closing i
n the underwater currents. On the seabed expanding gases would have lifted the swollen corpse. In time, maybe a shift in the current, it had floated free. Months later it must have lodged in rocks at the foot of Tennyson Down and – thanks to a diligent birder – earned itself the attentions of the Major Crimes Team.

  Faraday rubbed his face and sat back. Tracy Barber had appeared at the door.

  ‘Message from Unwin, sir.’ She was smiling. ‘Wants to know when he can see his nan.’

  Twenty-three

  Wednesday, 3 March 2004

  Faraday and Dave Michaels arrived at the nursing home at 08.00. Pelly was in the kitchen, cooking scrambled eggs for eighteen breakfasts. He carried on stirring milk into the big saucepan while Faraday told him he was under arrest on suspicion of murder, only breaking off to ask Michaels to rescue the toast from the grill pan on top of the oven. The old ladies, he said, hated burnt toast. Played havoc with their dentures.

  Before he accompanied the two detectives out to the waiting car, Pelly climbed the stairs for a change of T-shirt. Faraday went with him. Outside the door to his apartment Pelly paused. If anything, he seemed amused.

  ‘I see you had the sentries back last night.’ He nodded out towards the road. ‘Shame. I wasn’t going anywhere. You should have given me a ring, saved yourself the expense.’

  Faraday was back at Ryde police station by 08.45. The Custody Sergeant booked Pelly in and organised a phone call to his solicitor in Newport. Under the Police and Criminal Evidence Act an early-morning arrest effectively gave Faraday two days in the interview suite. PACE permitted him to detain a suspect for twenty-four hours. With a twelve-hour extension from the local Superintendent, there’d be no need to release Pelly until tomorrow evening.

  Willard, still in Portsmouth, wanted to know about the interview strategy. Faraday proposed to ask Pelly for a full account of events around the end of September and beginning of October last year. This was ground they’d already covered the night that Pelly had turned up drunk, but this time Faraday wanted a great deal more evidence about the buyers Pelly had allegedly found for both the Tidemaster and the Volvo. Only as the interview moved into the challenge phase would DS Michaels and DC Barber begin to feed in last night’s allegations from Unwin.

  Willard had seen the problem at once.

  ‘The stuff from Unwin is uncorroborated, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘Or have you got something else?’

  ‘Only Sean Castle. He’s got something called an Aquabel. Chartering the boat to Pelly checks out with Unwin’s story, and we’ll certainly put Scenes of Crime aboard, just in case he brought DNA over when he shipped back from the Tidemaster. But it’s nearly five months now, so I’m not holding my breath.’

  ‘What did Pelly have to say about Castle when you talked to him last?’

  ‘He admitted hiring the boat, no problem. Just said he fancied it.’

  ‘No other explanation?’

  ‘None.’

  ‘Doesn’t care, does he?’

  ‘Not in the slightest.’

  ‘And you think he’s lying?’

  ‘Without a doubt.’ Faraday told Willard about a conversation he’d had with the Crime Scene Manager. After three days’ solid work at the nursing home Pelly was still bringing them tea, still pretending he couldn’t remember who took sugar, still taking the piss. Given Unwin’s story about the body at the back of the garage, Pelly must have spent weeks removing every last trace of DNA.

  ‘And the body? The victim? Any thoughts on ID?’

  ‘None. Unwin says he never saw it, just felt it through the bin liner. We can’t even evidence it was a bloke.’

  ‘Great.’ Willard was sounding gloomier by the minute. ‘So what’s your feeling?’

  ‘About Pelly?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He’s still not bothered. I don’t think he’s even surprised. Irritated would be closer to the mark. We gather he’s got lots to do today. I’d say that was optimistic, wouldn’t you, sir?’

  Winter returned to the neurologist alone. Maddox had offered to drive him up to the hospital and wait in the car park, just like last time, but Winter said it wasn’t necessary. He’d slept fitfully, aware of Maddox awake beside him, and on the one occasion when he’d managed to fool his battered brain into closing down, he’d woken minutes later, drenched in sweat, convinced that something grey and shapeless was lying in wait for him, indescribably horrible.

  He paid the taxi fare and found his way to the neurologist’s consulting room. Since he was last here, someone had nicked the most recent copy of Homes and Gardens.

  The wait went on and on. A series of patients disappeared through the door at the end of the waiting room. One of them emerged with a small, shy smile, consulted his watch and hurried away. Another, with her husband waiting by the water cooler, broke down in tears. Winter watched these people come and go much in the way that he might cast a casual eye over a TV programme in which he had little interest. The fact that the man behind the door seemed to have acquired the power of life and death Winter viewed as a personal affront. Faced with the certain knowledge of what was to come, he’d decided to bluff it out.

  ‘Mr Winter?’

  Winter answered the summons. For once, all too typically, his head didn’t hurt. No bubbles. No pressure behind the eyes. Just the faintest curiosity about what the next few minutes might hold.

  Mr Frazer got to his feet to shake his hand. Evidently he’d already called up the CT scans from the hospital’s intranet. He swivelled the PC monitor in Winter’s direction. No messing, thought Winter.

  ‘This is a lateral slice through your head. And so is this. And so is this. As you can see, we’ve used a dye to sharpen the image.’

  Winter found himself looking down on the contents of his head. The bony white egg cup of the skull was clearly visible. Inside, one area of grey was clearly darker than the rest. Frazer fingered the mouse again. The perspective changed abruptly and Winter cocked his head, trying to adjust.

  ‘These are vertical scans. Here’s the top of your spinal column, and that bit there’s your nose. Now then, just here is what troubles me. It’s a tumour, I’m afraid. It has absolutely no business to be there.’

  This time the darker mass was much more clearly defined. Winter stared at it, fascinated. It lacked the coils and fissures that badged the rest of his brain. It looked dense, evil, an intruder that did nothing but grow. When Frazer reached forward and helpfully adjusted the contrast, it even acquired a slight sheen. The cuckoo in the nest, thought Winter.

  ‘How big’s that, then?’

  ‘Size of a golf ball, maybe a fraction smaller. To be frank, I’m amazed you haven’t had the symptoms earlier. Our real problem is here.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Here.’

  Frazer had produced a pencil. He pointed at an area immediately adjoining the tumour.

  ‘This is the main vein that drains blood from the brain. It runs through the sinus. The tumour appears to be pressing on the vein, which may be why you’re experiencing so much pain. Tumours growing inside the sinus are mercifully rare.’

  Winter didn’t like the word ‘inside’. He took a closer look at the image on the monitor.

  ‘So what are you going to do about it?’

  ‘We have to get rid of it. It’s very probably what we call a benign meningioma. It won’t be growing very fast but if we don’t do something about it, it’ll kill you.’

  Winter nodded. It all seemed perfectly logical.

  ‘So what happens next?’

  ‘We find you a surgeon. I have to warn you, Mr Winter, this isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. Blood flows through the sinus at the rate of a litre a minute. Surgery will be …’ he frowned at the screen ‘… tricky.’

  ‘How tricky?’

  ‘Very. You’ll need a vascular neurosurgeon, chap who knows his way round the plumbing. There aren’t too many around. In fact there are very few. I’ve already had a word with one of them. I’m afraid he
declined.’

  ‘And the others?’

  ‘I’ve yet to talk to them.’ He swapped the pencil for a pen. ‘We’ll need to know your movements over the next couple of weeks. There’ll be a consultation first, of course, probably in London. The surgeon may elect for a course of radiation before he goes in. That should shrink the tumour. So …’ He smiled. ‘We can get you on the mobile number?’

  Winter took his time. He gazed at the tumour, tried to imagine it chopped out, wondered what would happen to the hole it left behind. Then his hand went up to his forehead, tracking slowly across, trying to match the cranial bumps beneath his fingertips to the image on the screen. Finally he closed his eyes, squeezed hard, tried to trick the pain into returning, failed.

  ‘Mr Winter?’

  ‘Sorry, yes. You mentioned surgery.’

  ‘I did. I just need to know where to find you.’

  ‘Of course.’ Winter smiled at him. ‘We’re here for a week or so. I’ve got some tidying up to do, then I think my girlfriend’s got some other plans. She thinks Africa might be good.’ The smile widened. ‘What do you think?’

  The first interview session with Rob Pelly started at 10.56. DS Michaels and DC Tracy Barber had been through their notes from last night’s interview with Chris Unwin and had timetabled the exact sequence of events he’d described. First, though, they wanted Pelly’s version of the night he’d chartered Castle’s fishing boat and set off in convoy with the Tidemaster.

  Monitoring the conversation from the adjoining room, Faraday knew at once that Pelly wasn’t interested. Sober this time, he simply repeated what he’d already told Faraday. A mate had wanted a trip out, skippering the Tidemaster. Pelly himself had always had a fancy for helming Castle’s Aquabel. A night’s fishing had been the perfect excuse. They’d caught sod all, but who cared?

  Michaels treated this account with derision. Pelly couldn’t offer the name of this mate of his, didn’t know where he lived, hadn’t a clue where to get hold of him. Was he big? Small? Fat? Thin? White? Brown? Black? Green?

  ‘Yeah, all of that.’ Pelly was enjoying himself. ‘Whatever you fancy.’