The Price Of Darkness

by Hurley, Graham

  ‘Once a copper always a copper?’

  ‘Yeah, I suppose.’

  ‘Must be hard then? Lonely even? Socially?’

  ‘Sure. You’re right. But then it was before. In the job.’

  Winter’s head went down a moment, then he looked up again. Suttle was watching him carefully.

  ‘You know what happened at the end? When they nicked me for DUI? You know what really happened?’

  ‘Yeah. You were three times over the limit.’

  ‘Exactly. But they knew exactly where I was drinking, what time I’d be there, the lot, and they’d got the whole place plotted up. Maybe someone fitted me up. Maybe someone made a phone call. Either way it doesn’t matter. The minute I’d turned the key in the motor, the moment I’d started to pull out from that little cut across the road from the pub, they had me. And you know something else? They were fucking loving it, every minute of it, back of the traffic car, down to the Bridewell, book me in, arrange a sample, the whole nine yards.’

  ‘It had been a long time coming. You’d been winding them up for years.’

  ‘Sure. And maybe that made it all the sweeter. But it doesn’t change anything, does it? Twenty-plus years in the job. More scalps than any other fucker. And they end up pulling a stroke like that.’ He shook his head, reaching for his glass again, then caught Suttle’s eye. ‘Don’t give me that look, son. I’m on foot tonight. Not that I have much choice any more.’

  Faraday was back in his Mondeo, en route home, when his mobile began to trill. He glanced in the mirror then reached for the cradle.

  ‘Yes?’

  It was Barrie. He’d finished the last of his meetings at HQ and wanted an update. Faraday slowed for the next queue of traffic, wondering where to start. The Billhook squad meet, to be frank, had been a disappointment. There comes a moment in most inquiries when the optimism and zip of the first forty-eight hours begins to evaporate, leaving the slow, measured plod towards some kind of result. Not that the team had returned entirely empty-handed.

  ‘CCTV have come up with a hit on the Port Solent car park camera, boss. The black Escort was there from around ten onwards. Two blokes picked it up at half twelve.’

  ‘Where did they go?’

  ‘They didn’t.’

  ‘I’m not with you.’

  ‘They just sat there. Until four minutes past three. Then they drove off.’

  ‘Description?’ Barrie was sounding almost cheerful.

  ‘One guy was much bigger than the other. The smaller bloke is the one wearing the grey hoodie. The guys tried the zoom and everything, but the grain on screen gets horrible.’

  ‘What about the place in the New Forest? The car park?’

  ‘I’m afraid we drew a blank. You were right, boss. Everything was trampled.’

  ‘Shame.’ Barrie was obviously thinking hard. ‘We need bodies back into the marina, any place that was open Monday night, pubs, restaurants, fitness clubs, the lot. These two blokes must have been in there somewhere. The hoodie might ring a bell or two.’

  ‘Done, boss. It’s actioned for tonight.’

  ‘Excellent. This car park in the New Forest. Wasn’t that where the Escort was nicked in the first place?’

  ‘The New Forest, yes. But a different car park.’

  ‘No witnesses in the first car park? Where the car got nicked?’

  ‘Not so far. I’ve arranged for posters at the site but I wouldn’t hold your breath.’

  ‘Where was the owner?’

  ‘Out running. He ended up taking a cab home.’

  Faraday eased forward. The traffic lights a couple of hundred metres ahead had just gone red again. Barrie wanted to know about the development company handling the Tipner site.

  ‘Outside Enquiries put a couple of blokes in this afternoon. They did an interview with the guys who run it.’

  ‘And what did they say?’

  ‘Bit of a mystery, sir. Mallinder’s interest turns out to be a lot more casual than we thought. They’ve had a couple of conversations with him, sure, and I gather Mallinder was up to speed on the latest financial projections. Apparently the scheme’s very tight. Don’t hold me to these figures but I gather they’re looking at around three hundred million pounds overall costs which leaves a nominal profit of around forty million.’

  ‘That’s tight? Forty million quid?’

  ‘So they say. Forty million is around twelve per cent. Most developers won’t get out of bed unless they’re looking at fifteen per cent plus. The real money’s in residential. At the moment the council are holding out for thirty per cent affordable housing. If they can get that down to fifteen per cent, it starts looking more attractive.’

  ‘What about the Tipner ranges?’

  ‘They say the MoD won’t budge. And they swear blind they’ll be the first to know if they ever do. This lot are the council’s preferred developers. They’ve got the thing pretty much stitched up.’

  ‘So what’s Mallinder been up to?’

  ‘Pass, sir. The more we know about Tipner, the less it fits his MO. Mallinder, Benskin have never done anything this complicated. It’s full of aggravation and to make things worse there are rumours of a new football stadium on the site. No wonder Benskin didn’t fancy it.’

  ‘You’re going to talk to him again?’

  ‘In the end, yes. And there’s another line of enquiry he might be able to help us with.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  Faraday described the interview with Aliyah Begum. In his view, they were looking at a possible motive.

  ‘Revenge, you mean?’ Barrie got there first. ‘Teaching our friend a lesson?’

  ‘Something like that.’

  There was silence on the line. Barrie was thinking. Then he came back.

  ‘A single bullet? No clues? No forensic? Don’t get me wrong, Joe, but our Asian friends wouldn’t bother with a hit man, would they? Supposing you’re on the right lines? Odds on they’d use a knife, blood up the walls, real horror show. It’s a nice idea of yours but I can’t see it somehow.’

  ‘I’ve still asked Outside Enquiries to action it, sir.’ Faraday said. ‘They’re doing a couple of visits tomorrow. The grocery store and the restaurant. Can’t do any harm.’

  ‘Of course not. Anything else?’

  ‘’Afraid not.’

  ‘How about that vagrant son of yours?’

  ‘Ah …’ Faraday smiled ‘… now you’re talking.’

  The Bargemaster’s House lay beside Langstone Harbour, on the city’s eastern shore. Thanks to a large cheque from Janna’s American parents weeks after her death, the sturdy Victorian red-brick dwelling had become home for Faraday and his infant son. And over the intervening years, as the implications of J-J’s deafness became more and more obvious, Faraday’s love for the place had deepened to the point where he couldn’t imagine life without it.

  He had a love-hate relationship with gardening and never quite managed to keep up with repairs to the timber cladding on the upper storey, but the view in the early morning from his first-floor study - the rich yellow spill of dawn sunlight over the water, the incessant comings and goings of Langstone birdlife - never failed to put a smile on his face. In an often troubled world, he knew he owed the Bargemaster’s House a great deal. It served, above all, as a kind of sanctuary.

  Gabrielle’s camper was parked in the road outside. J-J hadn’t bothered to unload the mountain of bags in the back. Plus ça change.

  Faraday eased the Mondeo onto the hardstanding at the rear of the house, realising with something of a shock that he hadn’t seen his son for nearly two years. After a grounding in video production in Portsmouth and London, J-J had somehow organised himself an attachment to an editing outfit in Moscow. Faraday had never quite grasped exactly what he was doing out there but his occasional e-mails were bursting with even more enthusiasm than usual and the gaunt young face in the handful of photos he’d sent had even put on a little weight.

  Faraday push
ed in through the front door. Already he could hear laughter from upstairs. Gabrielle, he thought. He made his way up to the top landing. His study door was half open. J-J and Gabrielle were sitting in front of Faraday’s PC, sorting through a sequence of photos. Most of the faces looked Russian - badly shaved old men huddled in threadbare anoraks, sleek middle-aged women laden with shopping bags - and the photos must have been taken in winter because the streets and rooftops behind were crusted with snow.

  A shot of a child reaching for an icicle made Gabrielle laugh again. Faraday recognised the onion domes of the Kremlin in the background. He tiptoed across the study, then paused behind his son. He could smell the tang of cheap tobacco in his hair. Faraday let his hand fall briefly on J-J’s shoulder. J-J glanced up, taken by surprise. For a split second, still absorbed by the photos, he hadn’t a clue what was going on. Then he was on his feet, pushing back his chair, giving Faraday a hug. In moments of high excitement J-J always balled his fists either side of his head, a gesture of triumph, as if he’d just scored a goal. He was doing it now, stepping back, beaming at his father.

  Faraday held him at arm’s length, just looking. The boy had grown a beard. It changed his face, his manner, completely. The vulnerabilty he’d always worn, that ever-willing sense of openness that had sometimes made Faraday fear for this son of his, had gone. He looked older, stronger, somehow bigger, and Faraday found himself wondering quite what had worked this transformation.

  ‘Long time,’ he signed. ‘I’ve missed you.’

  Gabrielle cooked a ratatouille of vegetables from the garden. After Faraday had finished helping J-J in with his bags, the sitting room next door looked like a kasbah, and they demolished the ratatouille around the wooden table in the kitchen. Amongst the heap of presents J-J had brought back was a huge flask of Georgian wine. It was empty by the time J-J was demanding second helpings from the saucepan on the stove and Faraday fetched a bottle of decent Merlot from the rack that served as his cellar.

  It was obvious at once that J-J and Gabrielle had become friends. A single day together seemed to have bred an easy intimacy and J-J included her in his bubbling torrent of conversation without a thought for her signing skills. Catching the expression on her face from time to time as J-J described the highlights of his life in Moscow, Faraday marvelled at the speed with which she seemed to have penetrated the blur of hands and fingers. This wasn’t something she’d confected to help the evening along. She actually seemed to understand the boy.

  J-J, it transpired, had finally parted company with the video production company who’d flown him out to Russia in the first place. They were making a series about the oil boom and J-J’s job had been largely technical, setting up an editing suite, then logging hours and hours of video rushes as the location work got under way. The job had been really boring, he explained, and in his spare time, with his mother’s treasured Leica, he’d haunted the big spaces of the city, putting together a photo essay on the world he found around him.

  A handful of these shots had attracted the attention of a woman from one of the state TV channels who occasionally dropped into the editing suite, and she’d passed them on to a girlfriend who was looking for material for a leading magazine. Within weeks, much to his delight, J-J had found himself with a full-time commission. The people at the magazine, he said, had approved of his take on Moscow street life. They liked his filmy eyes and bony Slav faces. They loved what he’d made of an alley, three dustbins, a priest and an urban fox. Pretty soon he’d signed a deal with an entrepreneur specialising in posters and arty postcards. Then had come the invitation to appear on a TV show devoted to the outer reaches of Russian cultural life.

  The fact that J-J was a deaf mute had, it seemed, been an enormous advantage. Not because he’d been an object of curiosity but because the sight of him explaining in sign his passion for the single image had touched something in the Russian soul. For them, real life had always been theatre. These people, he signed expansively, gave you room. They were generous. They loved the way he used his hands to shape meaning and nuance. They seemed to understand instinctively what he had to offer. And as a result, as sales of his cards and posters soared, he’d ended up with quite a lot of money.

  ‘How much?’ Faraday couldn’t resist the question.

  ‘Seventy thousand.’

  ‘Roubles?’

  ‘US dollars.’ J-J grinned at him, nodding. ‘With more to come.’

  The money, he said, was still in a bank account in Moscow but under the new regime there’d be no problem transferring it to the UK. He wanted to put down a deposit on a place of his own, maybe in Portsmouth, maybe somewhere else along the coast. He wanted a base to call home, a launching pad for more expeditions to more countries. He wanted to use his Russian contacts and his Russian earnings to build a career in photo art.

  Listening to J-J’s description of the world waiting for his viewfinder, Faraday could think only of Janna, his long-dead wife. She, too, had been a photographer, carving out the beginnings of a reputation for herself in Seattle galleries. She, too, had the eye, the talent, the inner conviction that would stop a passing browser in mid-step and bring them back to a certain shot, to the play of light on the bones of an old shipwreck, to the boil of summer thunderheads caught in stark black and white over the northern Rockies. She’d never had her son’s taste for the surreal, for composing bizarre metaphors from the most unlikely ingredients, but the vision was there, and the appetite to share it with anyone who’d spare her the time.

  He’d barely mentioned Janna to Gabrielle, but now, at J-J’s suggestion, she demanded to see some of her work. Faraday had lived with these photos for the best part of two decades, hanging personal favourites around the house, but J-J’s departure for Russia had prompted a rethink in his life, and he’d carefully wrapped and boxed the shots before storing them up in the attic.

  J-J helped him to retrieve them. They carried armfuls back downstairs, spread them amongst the Kazakh rugs and painted wooden icons that still littered the floor. Then J-J took Gabrielle by the elbow, nudging her on from shot to shot, signing his admiration for his mother’s composition, or the way she’d taken a risk with the exposure in a particular shot, or her happy knack of teasing a mood from the play of shadows on various surfaces, and watching him Faraday became aware of a sense of mystery as well as pride in the way that this expressive gift had so seamlessly passed from mother to son.

  Later, once J-J had finished the last of the wine and abandoned the living room for a bed upstairs, Gabrielle lay full length on the sofa, her head on Faraday’s lap. Any sense that he might have burdened her with this boy of his had long gone, and when he tried to put this thought into words she reached up and sealed his lips with a single moistened fingertip.

  ‘Not a boy at all,’ she murmured. ‘A man.’

  Six

  THURSDAY, 7 SEPTEMBER 2006. 09.22

  The news about the Mercedes came first to Jimmy Suttle. He’d taken a call from Sally Mallinder. She was back in London at the family home, waiting for the Mercedes garage to return her husband’s car. As a favour to a valued client, in these difficult circumstances they’d volunteered to send a couple of members of staff down with a replacement set of keys. The guys had set off early. By half eight they were parked outside the Port Solent house. Only one problem. The car had gone.

  ‘Gone?’ Faraday was trying to make sense of a sheaf of overtime figures.

  ‘Disappeared, boss. Borrowed. Vaporised. Maybe even nicked. The blokes are still up there. They’re not quite sure what to do.’

  ‘We’ve got the vehicle’s details?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Then circulate them.’ He looked up at last. The implications of this latest bit of news were beginning to sink in. Scenes of Crime had released the Port Solent house late yesterday afternoon. The overnight uniformed watch had been withdrawn. ‘The Mercedes’ keys were missing?’

  ‘That’s right, boss.’

  ‘So you
’re telling me this guy’s come back? For the car?’

  The city’s CCTV control room lay in the basement of the Civic Centre. Over the last couple of days search shifts had been divided between two sets of D/Cs. D/C Dawn Ellis had been part of the team that had scored a hit on the black Ford Escort. Now Faraday told her to meet him in the control room.

  Ellis had driven up from Southsea. She was a slim, attractive vegetarian with a fall of jet-black hair who lived alone in a Portchester semi. Faraday had always had a soft spot for her, not least because she was one of the few detectives who could cope with Paul Winter, but lately he’d become aware that two years on Major Crimes had blunted her appetite for the job. Too many interviews with hysterical fourteen-year-olds who couldn’t make up their minds whether they’d been raped or not. Too many late-night calls to Southsea nightclubs, interviewing a line-up of pissed Somerstown boys about a slapping that had got seriously out of hand. She’d confided to a close friend that she’d had enough of slag adolescents and homicidal kids, and when rumours began to circulate that she was considering a new career in alternative therapy, Faraday was inclined to believe them.

  Now, in the control room, she knew exactly which camera tapes to list for review.

  ‘This one on the approach road to Port Solent, the same camera we scored a hit with on Monday. What time do you fancy starting?’

  Faraday said midnight. It seemed a fair enough guess. Any earlier, and the neighbours might still have been up.

  Dawn began to spool through last night’s footage. Between midnight and half past one they counted maybe three dozen cars leaving the marina complex. After that, for a longish period, nothing happened. Then, in the distance, the flare of a pair of headlights. Dawn toggled the fast forward control, slowing the oncoming blur. Finally it resolved itself into the low, elegant shape of a Mercedes sports coupé. It was white. Right colour.