He'd first tried smack in Oz. He was staying in a youth hostel in Queensland big place, popular with students. He'd plenty of money but he'd chosen the youth hostel because he was lonely. A backpacker from Dublin had scored some heroin in Brisbane and sold him enough for an introductory smoke.
To Daniel's surprise, it was no big deal. He'd felt pleasantly sleepy, maybe a bit queasy afterwards. He certainly had no great desire to repeat the experience and remembered asking his new Irish friend what all the fuss was about. Given a choice between smack and a good bottle of Hunter Valley Chardonnay there was, he said, no contest.
A couple of years later, give or take, he'd tried it again. By now he was back in the UK and this time it was very different. He'd fallen in love with a dropout student from Godalming, a girl called Jane. She was already developing a sizeable heroin habit and had a real mistrust, almost a hatred, of straights. Just to stay alongside her, talk to her, be with her, meant using smack. To Daniel, it had seemed a price worth paying.
Within a couple of months Jane had dumped him for a failed rock musician. All Daniel was left with was a broken heart and a four-wrap-a-day heroin habit. Oddly enough, the smack helped. It was at this time that he stopped smoking it and began injecting. Injecting was a buzz. All his life he'd been afraid of needles but now, to his great satisfaction, he couldn't wait. There was an art to it, a right and a wrong way. He always used a sterile works. He always washed the spoon in boiling water. It was, he said, almost sacramental.
He turned his head away from the camera, wiping his face with the back of his hand. Eadie had visibly relaxed. For weeks, she'd been hunting for a junkie, any junkie, who was prepared to make a stab at an interview. Finding someone as articulate and self-deceived as this was manna from heaven.
"Sacramental how?"
Daniel seemed surprised by this voice beyond the lights, this sudden intrusion. He shifted in the chair again and began to scratch himself.
"I had respect for it," he said at last. "It held my life together. I could depend on it. It was my friend."
"Smack had become your friend?"
"Yes."
"Your best friend?"
"My only friend." He closed his eyes. "People don't understand about heroin. Treat it right and it looks after you. You can rely on it.
You know what I'm saying?"
"I think so, yes." Eadie was picking her words with care. "Tell me how you feel at the moment."
"Horrible. Cramps. Pains. Everything." His eyes were still closed.
"And heroin?"
"Heroin will take the pains away. That's what it does. It makes it possible to be me again. It gives me peace. A peace he was staring into the far distance now, his face a mask 'so vast it's like waking up in some cathedral. It's huge. It's yours. It belongs to no one else.
If you've never been there, never had this feeling, it's impossible to describe it. Like I said, a sacrament." His chin went down on his chest and his whole body began to shudder.
Eadie glanced up at J-J, who stepped back from the camera, meaning to offer Daniel some kind of privacy, but Eadie caught him by the arm.
She signed, "We haven't finished." She turned back to the student.
"Daniel? You're OK to carry on?"
He nodded slowly. He looked bewildered.
"Is it time yet?"
"Time for what?"
"Time for the guys… You know…" He nodded, pleading, towards the street.
"No, not quite yet. Soon, Daniel, but not quite yet. You really think heroin is a friend? The way you're feeling now?"
"That's not smack. Smack makes that better."
"How much better?"
"That's a stupid question. Feel what I feel and you'd know."
"But I'm not feeling what you feel, Daniel. That's why I want you to talk about it."
He stared at her, his hands crabbing along the arms of the chair.
"This is hard," he mumbled at last. "You can't believe how hard this is."
"I know, Daniel. Just try."
"I don't know what you want."
"I want you to talk about now, about the state you're in, about the way you feel. Can you do that for me?" Eadie was leaning forward.
"Daniel?"
The eyes had strayed towards the window again and J-J suddenly sensed where this interview was going. Heroin really was Daniel's friend. As his life had closed around him, taking him prisoner, it was the one thing, the one sensation, the one constant, on which he could depend.
Take heroin away, and there'd be nothing left.
"I used to think I could stop." The voice was barely a whisper. "But I can't."
"Why not?"
"Because I don't want to. Sarah says I'm crazy. She may be right but that's not the point, is it? Maybe I like being crazy."
"And feeling like shit?"
"Yes, but shit happens, everyone knows that. Shit happens and then everything is OK again. You know why? Because I get to shoot up.
That's all I want to do just now. Go into that kitchen and shoot up."
"And the next time?"
"I'll do it again. And the time after that. I'll do it forever and then I'll die. Hey…" He forced a smile. "Nice thought."
"Dying?"
"Doing it forever."
His hand went to his mouth. He sat absolutely still for a moment or two, then jack-knifed forward in the chair and began to retch.
Instinctively, J-J panned the camera slowly down, following a thin green thread of vomit onto the patterned carpet. Glassy-eyed, Daniel wiped his mouth and tried to apologise. Eadie had spotted a box of tissues. She leaned across, mopping up the vomit, stealing a glance at the camera to make sure J-J was still taping.
From the entry phone on the wall in the hall came a single ring, then two more. Daniel was on his feet, heading out of the room. Seconds later, Eadie heard the door open and the sound of footsteps as he ran for the stairs.
"You got it all?" she signed.
J-J nodded. He knew exactly what was going to happen next and he knew as well that he wanted no part of it. Watching someone in this kind of pain had begun to disgust him.
"Ready?" Eadie signed that she wanted the camera off the tripod.
Shoulder-mounted, J-J could follow the action wherever it led.
J-J shook his head. You do it.
"You're serious?" Eadie stared at him a moment, then abandoned the soiled tissue and began to un clamp the camera. By the time Daniel reappeared, she'd wedged herself in a corner of the room, the shot nicely framed on the open door. J-J retreated to the window. In the street below, a red Cavalier was disappearing in the direction of Southsea. He watched until it rounded a distant corner. For once, he was glad he was deaf.
"Just ignore me, Daniel. Pretend I'm not here."
Eadie had followed Daniel into the kitchen. The student was fumbling with one of the wraps. In the background stood the kettle he'd just plugged in. He tore at the Sellotape and began to empty the contents of the wrap into the waiting spoon. In the viewfinder the heroin was dirty brown, the colour of dried mud. From a plastic Jiffy container came a squirt or two of lemon juice, beginning to dissolve the powder.
Daniel tested the kettle with the back of his hand, then decanted a little of the water into the bowl of the spoon before propping the handle on a box of matches. Next, in close-up, came the belt. He wound it round his upper arm, leaving it loosely secured while he stirred the concoction with the end of a match. Moments later, he uncapped the syringe with his teeth and drew swampy liquid into the barrel. A biro lay beside the spoon. He slipped the biro beneath the belt he'd wrapped round his arm and began to twist. A vein appeared, a tiny blue snake amongst the yellowing bruises below his elbow. Trapping the tourniquet against his ribcage, he prodded the vein with the flat of his thumb, then retrieved the syringe and laid the needle against his flesh before working it slowly in.
A single drop of blood formed. There was a brief moment of absolute silence and then, as Eadie slowly panne
d the camera up to Daniel's face, there came a sound that was to stay with her for days to come. It began as a gasp and expired as a sigh. It spoke of surprise, of delight, of relief, of immense satisfaction, and she caught the clatter of the falling biro as she swung round with the camera, following Daniel out of the kitchen. He still had the syringe in his arm, empty now, and he began to sway and stumble as he made his way to bed.
His bedroom was next to the bathroom. The single bed was unmade, a flower-patterned duvet in a heap on the floor, and Eadie paused in the open doorway, the shot perfectly framed, as Daniel, still fully clothed, climbed into bed. He looked like a drunk, every movement slowed to half speed, a man easing himself through an ocean of sweetness. He struggled briefly upright and leaned out of the bed, plucking at the duvet, missing, plucking again, then finally dragged half of it off the floor. Flat on his back again, his eyes were closed. Eadie's finger found the zoom control and the shot slowly tightened. By the time his face filled the viewfinder, Daniel Kelly was smiling.
Faraday sat on a bollard on the quay side overlooking the harbour, waiting for Willard's Jaguar to appear. The rain had stopped now and the sky was beginning to clear from the west. Evenings like this, mid March, the sunsets could be spectacular, shafts of livid sunshine slanting across the city, and he thought of Eadie Sykes out on the balconette, toasting the view with her first glass of Cotes du Rhone.
Recently, watching her with J-J, he'd concluded that she'd become the mother his son had never had. She'd built a real kinship with the boy.
She'd become his mentor, his pathfinder, his guide. She was teaching him all she knew. She stuck by him in difficult situations. And all of that, in Faraday's view, probably added up to motherhood. Janna had died when J-J was barely a couple of months old. Only now, twenty-three years later, had he discovered a woman he could rely on.
Rely on? Faraday shook his head. Relationships, as he knew to his own cost, could be brutal. A woman called Marta had made him happier than he'd ever been in his life. Losing her had taken him to places so dark he shuddered to remember them.
J-J, too, had tasted this kind of despair. His guileless passion for life, the unconditional trust he put in virtual strangers, exposed him to all kinds of risks and a year-long relationship with a French social worker had nearly broken his heart. But his son had somehow emerged from this encounter more or less intact and was still hungry for the next of life's little tests whereas Faraday was increasingly aware of his own vulnerability.
Eadie Sykes had blown into his life with the force of a gale. He loved her gutsiness, her candour, her absolute refusal to compromise. She surprised him constantly, and he loved that as well. But, unlike J-J, he was always alert for the unforeseen twist. In ways he was ashamed to admit, he almost expected betrayal.
Willard had left his Jaguar outside the dockyard. He was wearing a heavy-duty sailing anorak and a pair of yellow waterproofs to match. He stole up on Faraday, standing over him as he stared out across the harbour.
"The rib should be here any minute. I belled them just now."
Faraday looked up at him, faintly surprised at the interruption.
"Rib?"
"Big inflatable. They use it to ferry stuff back and forth. Wallace tell you about the fort?"
"Yes'
"Neat, eh?"
"Let's hope so."
"And the chats with Mackenzie? All that?"
"He told me they'd spoken a couple of times on the phone." Faraday got to his feet. "Mackenzie wants him out of the running. No surprises there."
Willard was beginning to look irritated, and Faraday forced himself back into the world of Operation Tumbril. According to Wallace, the idea for the original sting had come from Nick Hayder but Willard would have been quick to spot the potential. Scalps were important to Det-Supts and Mackenzie's would be a serious battle honour. There were rumours on Major Crimes that Willard had his eyes on promotion maybe even head of CID and putting a full flag level three away would do him no harm at all.
Willard was watching the harbour entrance, his eyes narrowed against the flaring sun. When Faraday asked him how much the fort's owner, the German woman, knew about the sting, he smiled. Spit Bank, he said, had been offered for sale by the Ministry of Defence in the '80s. The buyer, an ex-boatyard owner, had spent a fortune getting it into some kind of shape. Fifteen years later, he'd sold it on to a wealthy businessman, eager to find a project for his wife.
"This is the German woman?"
"Gisela Mendel. You'll meet her in a minute. Peter Mendel's an arms broker, covers the gaps between the defence salespeople in the MOD and the dodgier foreign governments. It's a semi-Whitehall job. He's security-cleared, full PV."
The positive vetting, Willard said, made him a perfect partner in the sting against Mackenzie. Given his relationship with the MOD, there was no way he'd hazard the operation.
"And the wife?"
"She runs a series of language modules for Fort Monkton. Four-week total immersion courses out on Spit Bank, any language of your choice.
She charges the earth."
"Monkton's MI6."
"That's right. That's why she's PV'd as well. Hayder couldn't believe his luck. All he had to do was write the script."
Faraday could imagine Nick Hayder's glee. Fort Monkton was a government-run training establishment across the harbour in leafy Alverstoke. Screened by trees and an eight-foot wire fence, it turned out spies for MI6. Posted abroad, languages were a must. Hence, Faraday assumed, the success of Gisela Mendel's little enterprise.
"So how did you play it?"
"Gisela put the word round a couple of local estate agencies, pretending the fort was up for sale, just the way we asked her.
Mackenzie was onto her within a day."
"She knows who Mackenzie is? His background?"
"No, he's just a punter as far as she's concerned, someone who's made a pile of money and now wants somewhere really high-profile."
"And you think she believes that?"
"She's never told me otherwise." Willard permitted himself a rare smile. "You hear about the football club?"
"No."
"Mackenzie tried to buy in. He was after an eleven per cent stake.
With that kind of holding, he'd be looking to take Pompey over."
"And?"
"They saw him coming and knocked the deal on the head. After that, he made a play for the pier."
"South Parade?"
"Yeah. Problem there was he put in a silly bid and tried to snow them with all kinds of pressure. They got so pissed off in the end, they pulled the plug, and you can hardly blame them. Mackenzie's so used to dealing with low life that he forgets his manners. Quote the guy an asking price, and he instantly divides by ten. Ten. That's not negotiation, that's robbery. The pier people walked, big time, and then one of them found himself talking to Nick."
This conversation, according to Willard, sowed a seed in Nick Hayder's ever-fertile mind. By this time, Tumbril had abandoned any thought of baiting the usual investigative traps. There was no way Mackenzie allowed himself anywhere near the distribution system and therefore no prospect of scooping him up with half a kilo of uncut Peruvian. The other strategy following the money might, in the end, achieve the same result via a money-laundering conviction but Tumbril's hotshot accountant was talking another three months minimum with the calculator and the spreadsheets and both Hayder and Willard himself were nervous that headquarters' patience might not stretch that far. Somehow or other, there had to be another way.
"So?" Faraday was beginning to warm to this conversation. At last, he thought, the pieces are beginning to fit.
"So Hayder took a good look at what happened with Mackenzie over the pier. Number one, the guy's determined to get his name up there in lights. He owes it to himself, to his mates. He wants the world to know there's nothing he can't buy. Number two, he's after a casino."
"A casino?"
"Sure. Make Mackenzie's kind of money and the big p
roblem is washing it all. You can carry it out of the country and stuff it in foreign accounts. You can treat yourself to a couple of Picassos. You can buy into legit businesses, bricks and mortar, whatever. If you've got the patience, you can even launder it through bureaux de change. Brian Imber will be giving you the full brief tomorrow but the truth is we're knocking all these options on the head. Believe me, it's getting hard to wash dodgy money. A casinos solves a lot of that. Plus he smiled 'there was still the question of profile."
A casino on the pier would have been the answer to Mackenzie's dreams.
Punters would flood in, the tables would magic dirty money into legitimate winnings, and everyone in Pompey would know that Bazza Mackenzie had finally made it.
"So Nick started looking for another property, another proposition. You know he used to go running?"
"Still will, when he's better."
"Sure. So he was out there one weekend, hammering along the se afront when bosh he's staring out to sea and he suddenly realises the answer.
Spit Bank Fort. This is him talking, not me."
Faraday knew it was true. He could hear Nick Hayder's voice, picture him leaning into the conversation, his head lowered, his hands chopping the air. This was the way the man had always operated, total conviction, turning a gleam in the eye into a string of successful prosecutions. The latter happened way down the line, but without the wit and the balls to pull some truly original stroke, the bad guys were home free.
"Mackenzie put a bid in?"
"At once. 200,000. Said it had to be rock bottom because sorting the place out would cost a fortune. Gisela wouldn't drop a penny under the asking price. One and a quarter million."
Slowly, week by week, Mackenzie had gone to 550,000, each new trip to the fort confirming the vision that had begun to obsess him. A glass dome, he'd told Gisela, would seal the interior from wind and rain.
Punters could look down on the gaming floor from the upper deck.
Croupiers would be dressed in period blue artillery tunics. Girlies in naughty Parisian gear would serve drinks and canapes. And every night, with the gaming over, there'd be yet more boodle stashed away in the thick-walled cartridge magazines deep in the bowels of the fort. Spit Bank, to Hayder's delight, had become Mackenzie's dream fantasy, the clinching evidence that the Copnor boy had well and truly made it.
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