Happy Days

by Hurley, Graham

  Winter had phoned Mackenzie earlier, demanding an urgent meet, and when Bazza had enquired why, he’d just laughed. For nearly a year now there’d been only one subject to justify this kind of call: money. The Mackenzie empire, besieged on all sides by the recession, was leaking funds at an alarming rate. The company accountant, a talented refugee from the Inland Revenue with fingers in all kinds of city pies, had long been telling his boss that he had to start selling assets, but Bazza was temperamentally incapable of throwing the corporate gearstick into reverse. Making any kind of retreat simply wasn’t his style. You got richer by taking risks. You survived by holding your nerve. One day, hopefully soon, the market would turn. In the meantime you manned the battlements, laid in stocks of boiling oil and repelled all boarders.

  The big family kitchen was at the back of the house. Winter skirted the swimming pool and stepped in from the rain. Marie was laying the table. The smell of grilling bacon put a smile on Winter’s face.

  ‘Who else are we expecting?’ There were four places at the long wooden table.

  ‘Leo. He’s been with Baz for a while now.’ She nodded towards the door. ‘He wants you to join them.’

  Winter shed his dripping raincoat and made his way through the adjacent living room to Mackenzie’s den. It was still early, barely nine o’clock. It wouldn’t surprise him if Leo Kinder had moved in, sparing himself the near-daily commute from his trophy cottage out in the country. Misty was right. The world of politics had gone to Bazza’s head. Only last week he’d described it as the new cocaine. Only better.

  Kinder was a sleek thirty-something with a passion for designer jeans and crisp white collarless shirts. Most days he affected a hint of designer stubble and just now, to Winter’s alarm, he occupied the leather recliner Mackenzie reserved for special guests. This, as Winter knew only too well, meant that Bazza’s political guru, the company spaniel, had emerged from the long grass with something especially tasty.

  ‘Listen to this, mush.’ Mackenzie waved Winter into the other chair. ‘Leo’s come up with a media strategy for the big one. He’s got the mainstream lot sorted already. Remember the stuff we had in the Guardian? The Telegraph? Lots more of that to come. But here’s the kicker. We go into social media. Big time. We blitz it. We tie the whole fucking city up in knots. We get in their face. We go undercover. We go viral. It’s votes, mush. It’s all about votes. We set up these weirdo sockpuppet accounts and invite all those monkeys out there to join the party. Not any old party. But my party, our party—’ He broke off suddenly and shot a look at Kinder. ‘Sockpuppet accounts? Have I got that right?’

  ‘You have, Baz.’ Kinder granted him a nod of approval, then switched his attention to Winter. ‘It’s a group thing on Facebook. You make up a name and an email address, plant whatever seeds you like, and then step back and let it happen. You have to keep control, of course, but no one has a clue what you’re up to or who you really are. In my game you need to boss the agenda. This is one way of doing it.’

  ‘There are others?’

  ‘Lots. Twitter. Getting stuck into the big aggregators. Digg. Reddit. Targeting specific forums. How much time have you got?’

  Winter shrugged, aware of the blaze of light in Bazza’s eyes. Switching him on had never been a problem, as Leo Kinder had quickly discovered.

  Mackenzie was sitting at his desk. He swivelled towards his PC and reached for the keyboard.

  ‘Take a look at this, mush.’

  Winter found himself staring at a logo. The distinctive silhouette of the Spinnaker Tower reared out of an eye-popping wash of yellows and reds. Put it on a bottle of crap lager, Winter thought, and you might just risk a mouthful or two. Mackenzie bent to the keyboard again. Two words appeared beneath the same image: Pompey First.

  ‘Brilliant or what?’ Bazza shook his head in admiration.

  Winter was still gazing at the screen. He’d heard this phrase before in muttered conversations between Kinder and his boss but had always ignored it.

  ‘This is some kind of political party?’

  ‘An aspiration, Paul.’ It was Kinder. ‘We’ll need to badge the campaign, give it punch and presence. Starting a political party from scratch is a nightmare.’

  ‘Yeah.’ A vigorous nod from Bazza. ‘All kinds of bollocks. Right, Leo?’

  ‘Right. This way we get round all the nonsense from the Electoral Commission. Baz will be campaigning as an independent. That’s exactly what it’ll say on the polling slip. But as far as the rest of it’s concerned, Baz is Pompey First. That’s the way it works. That’s the retail offer on all the stuff we’re going to be putting out. That’s what we’re selling here.’

  ‘Pompey First?’

  ‘Exactly. And seventy thousand voters is a nice place to start.’

  Winter nodded. His knowledge of the local political scene was rudimentary. The city was divided into two constituencies, Portsmouth North and Portsmouth South.

  ‘So what are you going for, Baz? Where does all this stuff of yours end up?’

  ‘Pompey North.’ He gestured towards the window. ‘I’m a Copnor boy, remember. It’s home turf, my patch, and Leo thinks it’s winnable. You know what MP stands for?’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘Mr Pompey.’ He grinned. ‘That’s me, mush.’

  Next year’s general election dominated breakfast at Sandown Road. Winter, busying himself with scrambled eggs and four rashers of bacon, half-listened to the conversation, swapping looks with Marie when Kinder pushed her husband to the very edge of the known political universe. In this little game Bazza was a deeply willing accomplice, but Winter could only admire Kinder’s skill in playing to his candidate’s need to make the biggest possible splash in the claustrophobic little provincial backwater that was Portsmouth.

  Watching him play Bazza, appealing to his vanity and his impatience and his raw appetite for mischief, Winter realised that Kinder had an almost feline talent for making the inconceivable – Mr Bazza Mackenzie, MP – seem a real possibility. How the city’s favourite son could play Robin Hood to thousands of kids just old enough to vote. How he could turn his days with the 6.57 crew, a mobbed-up bunch of football hooligans, into evidence that he’d put his very life on the line for the city he loved. How Bazza’s legendary business skills involved the kind of down-home aspiration that people on the hustings would readily understand. Bazza, Kinder kept saying, was real. He understood Pompey. He was passionate about the place. He was fluent in mush-speak. He smartened up failing businesses. He created jobs. He made the city a nicer place. Plus he wasn’t afraid to voice an opinion or two. The voters of Portsmouth North, according to Kinder, were in for a treat.

  On his second cup of coffee, Winter finally managed to bring the conversation back to earth. By now Mackenzie appeared to have signed up to a largish staff of talented young guys, mainly students, who would take the city by the throat and – in the name of Pompey First – set the place alight. Winter had lost track of what these people would actually be doing, but even in Bazza’s world he knew that nothing came for free.

  ‘So who’s paying for all this?’

  ‘Me, mush.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘I’ll bung them a few quid. Make it worth their while. Students live on fuck all. Enough for a curry and a couple of pints? Easy.’

  He seemed to think this settled the argument. Kinder disagreed.

  ‘Why the fuck not, Leo?’

  Kinder spelled out the big-ticket items: printing costs, premises, clerical salaries, a decent whack for someone with the right IT skills to get on top of the social media campaign, his own fee, plus another ten or twenty grand for something he called the ‘stunt budget’.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘It’s a contingency, Baz. A lot of this stuff we can action any time. That gives us a head start on pretty much everyone else. But when next year comes round and the thing gets going properly, you’re in a different game.’

  ‘I’m not with you, mush
.’

  ‘Anything can happen. Campaigns have to adapt. All the time. And to do that you have to make the weather.’

  ‘Yeah?’ Baz loved this. Winter could see it.

  Kinder began to go into detail, calling on examples from previous campaigns: how to throttle another party’s bright idea at birth, how to take a slip of the tongue and turn it into a major vote loser, how to find the skeleton in a rival’s cupboard and give it a good rattle. In every case, he said, you needed to be quick on your feet, inventive and not afraid of spending a bob or two. To make that happen, you needed a war chest.

  Bazza was grinning again. This was exactly the MO that had taken him from the backstreets of Copnor to up-market Craneswater.

  ‘No problem,’ he said. ‘You want moolah, it’ll be there for you.’

  ‘How?’ Winter again.

  ‘Fuck knows.’

  ‘I’m serious, Baz. The way things are going just now, we’ll be lucky to make Christmas intact. Next year it’s going to be even tougher. Unless you tell me where the money’s coming from, this stuff’s for the fairies.’

  Mackenzie toyed with a corner of toast. For once he appeared to have been listening. Then his head came up.

  ‘The guy who nicked my toot …’ he began ‘… that Skelley guy.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Get in touch. Tell him it’s time he settled.’

  Kinder caught the colder edge in Mackenzie’s voice. He also saw the expression on Winter’s face, the tiny turn of the head, the glance across the table towards Marie. Kinder wanted to know more about Skelley. Who was this guy?

  ‘Forget it, Leo.’ The grin was back on Bazza’s face. ‘Tell me more about that manga idea.’

  Suttle had found a corner of the post-mortem room that was partly shielded by the pathologist and the mortuary technician who were bent over Faraday’s corpse. The pathologist had just made a big Y-shaped incision, cutting twin lines from Faraday’s shoulders to a point above his chest bone. From here, the scalpel sliced through the waxy yellowing flesh, stopping below the swell of belly that seemed to Suttle to have grown over the past couple of months. He heard the snap of bone as the front of the rib cage was removed and then turned away as the pathologist helped himself to the glistening jigsaw of organs that lay inside. In the grim parlance of autopsy procedure, this was termed the Pluck, a brimming double handful of windpipe, throat, lungs and heart carefully lifted and put to one side for later examination.

  Suttle had been a witness at this procedure a number of times before. If you worked on Major Crime, it came with the turf. Yet never had he seen it happen to someone he liked to think he knew well. In one sense, it was difficult to associate the overweight body on the stainless-steel slab with Faraday. The essence of the man – his watchfulness, his humanity, the way he constantly worried about the real meanings of the word justice – had gone. Death robbed everyone of the person they’d been, and Faraday was no exception. What was hard, though, was trying to associate the pathologist’s careful exploration with any real notion of what he might find.

  Every post-mortem began with a complete external examination. In Faraday’s case there’d been no visible signs of violence. No bruising, no abrasions, no ligature marks, nothing. Now, the pathologist was slowly emptying the rest of Faraday’s body cavity. Each of the abdominal organs would be subject to careful inspection. There might be signs of damage from long-standing disease. Given Faraday’s affection for a decent bottle of wine, his liver might come in for special attention. Tissue and other samples would doubtless confirm the chemical battering he’d probably given himself in the hours before he’d died. But that wasn’t it.

  Suttle’s eyes returned again and again to Faraday’s heart. It nestled beside his lungs in a big stainless-steel bowl, a knot of shiny muscle laced with arteries. Suttle doubted whether technology would ever be able to test for disappointment in a man’s heart, but deep down he suspected that this, more than any other factor, had killed his ex-boss. Faraday was dead because, in the end, life hadn’t measured up.

  The Job, over two decades, had worn away his sense of belief in a society he’d once believed in. Not because he’d grown any less adept at proving guilt. On the contrary, some of his recent investigations had won quiet applause at every level. But because his belief in innocence had taken such a battering. In a moment of rare candour he’d recently confessed to Suttle that people, more and more, disgusted him. They seldom looked further than their own needs. They dug holes for themselves and others without the faintest regard for the likely consequences. And when the shit hit the fan, which it inevitably did, there was always someone else to blame.

  This sense of disillusion, increasingly acute, had finally seeped into his private life. Suttle sensed that long-term relationships had never been easy for Faraday. A number of women had come and gone. But the abrupt departure of Gabrielle, his partner of three years, had been – for Faraday – the end of the line. He thought he’d known her. He knew he’d loved her. Yet, come the finish, neither had been enough.

  Suttle watched the pathologist removing the last coil of intestine, aware of a choking sensation in his own chest. Barely twelve hours ago, back home after leaving the Bargemaster’s House, it had been the same. He’d tried without success to explain it to Lizzie. Preoccupied with the baby, he sensed she’d barely listened. A bottle of red, followed by a couple of stiff vodkas, hadn’t helped. Now, faced with the cold facts of Faraday’s demise, he was completely lost. What did any of this have to do with the man he’d known? How could anyone’s life be reduced to a set of clinical observations folded into a post-mortem report?

  By lunchtime, mercifully, the pathologist had finished. Suttle left a message on Parsons’ answering machine and set off for London. Twice he swapped stations on the radio, hunting for something, anything, that would take his mind off the body on the shininess of the post-mortem table, but nothing worked. Only an hour or so later, in a traffic jam on the M3, did he realise the full irony of the situation. Faraday, faced with something similar, would have probably felt exactly the same.

  Chapter four

  CHISWICK: FRIDAY, 14 AUGUST 2009

  J-J lived in a terrace of houses three streets south of Chiswick High Road. The area, as far as Suttle could tell, had become a magnet for young professional couples with growing families. Mums pushing state-of-the-art buggies were everywhere, and it was hard to pass a parked 4 × 4 without noticing the baby seat anchored in the back.

  Suttle found the address he’d copied from Faraday’s book and slipped into a gap across the road from J-J’s place. Yet another young mum was out in her modest patch of front garden, filling her recycling box with newspapers. From the car, Suttle could see her tiny daughter in the front bay window, jiggling away to unheard music, and he thought instantly of Grace, back at home in Southsea. His hangover was beginning to ease and he knew he owed Lizzie a call. He’d be crap at apologising for this morning’s little episode but he dreaded the thought of returning to any kind of atmosphere. Parenthood wasn’t quite as simple a proposition as he’d once imagined, as the woman with an armful of Daily Mails doubtless understood.

  He locked the Subaru and crossed the road. After the morning’s rain, he enjoyed the sudden warmth of the sunshine on his upturned face. There was a single bell push on J-J’s front door, and as he pressed it he wondered how on earth the man would hear him. Early on, Faraday had discovered that his infant son was deaf, a condition that seemed to have shaped the long years to come. In Suttle’s book the fact that Faraday had coped so well told you everything you needed to know. J-J’s mum had died with the kid barely six months old. How on earth would you set about being a single parent after a trauma like that?

  The door opened, and Suttle recognised the tall skinny figure from a photo beside Faraday’s bed. J-J was wearing a pair of patched jeans, no belt and a scarlet T-shirt several sizes too small. The message across the chest looked Russian – Cyrillic script, totally incomprehensible. He
stared at Suttle blankly. He had a long bony face, utterly unlike Faraday’s, and it was several days since he’d last had a shave.

  Suttle, who’d sent a text earlier, wondered if it had got through. Evidently not. He produced his warrant card. When J-J looked even blanker, he pointed at the Hantspol logo, hoping he might make a connection or two. Nothing.

  The two men looked at each other for a long moment, then Suttle nodded at the shadowed hall behind J-J and invited himself in. The back of the house faced south. A small conservatory was splashed with more sunshine, and Suttle could smell fresh coffee. He turned to find J-J standing uncertainly behind him.

  In situations like these it was normal to alert the local police to deliver the death message. They usually sent around one of the uniforms on shift and offered the services of a Family Liaison Officer if circumstances justified it. Last night, before leaving the Bargemaster’s House, Nick Hayder had asked the Met to do just this, but an email had been waiting for him this morning when he got back from the post-mortem, reporting that J-J didn’t appear to be at home. Hayder had phoned Suttle barely an hour ago, knowing he was en route up to London to offer J-J help over the funeral arrangements. Would he mind doing a brief interview with the man as well?

  Suttle had been happy to say yes. Now, looking at J-J, he was trying to work out exactly how to break the news. Sign language was beyond him. Lip-reading opened the door to countless ambiguities. The letter was his only option. Last night the Crime Scene Investigator had taken a copy on Faraday’s printer before bagging the original as evidence. Suttle had tucked the copy in an envelope and brought it up. Now he gave it to J-J.

  In conversation Faraday had always referred to him as a boy. In real life he was anything but. Doing the sums, Suttle calculated he must be in his early thirties, though his pallor and gauntness made him look older. He studied the letter, then read it again. When he looked up, he was visibly shocked, his eyes shiny with tears. He sniffed a couple of times and then wiped his nose on the back of his hand. Maybe Faraday was right, Suttle thought. A boy, after all.