No Lovelier Death

by Hurley, Graham

  ‘No. But that’s not unusual either.’ She gestured at the kitchen. ‘I like to think of this as his home but I think that says more about me than him.’

  ‘So where’s he living?’

  She wouldn’t answer. At length Winter asked her about the relationship with Rachel Ault.

  ‘It’s over. It’s been over for weeks now. That’s why I’m surprised about last night. Matt being there.’

  ‘He never mentioned a party at all?’

  ‘Not to me.’

  ‘So why do you think he went?’

  She shook her head. She said she hadn’t a clue. Breaking up with Rachel had been a big thing in Matt’s life. He’d done his best to play the tough guy, pretending everything was cool, but underneath she knew that it had crucified him. That’s probably why he’d started to come off the rails.

  ‘Like how?’

  ‘Like drinking too much. Like borrowing a friend’s car and driving like a maniac.’

  He’d been done for some lunatic speed on the M27, she said. A big fine and a year’s disqualification.

  ‘And you think that was down to splitting up with Rachel?’

  ‘Has to be. They’d been going together for years. She earthed him.

  She gave him a centre. And no one knew that better than Matt.’

  Winter pushed for more. She made the tea, found some oatcakes, talked about the swimming, the early years, the relentless training, the dawn starts, the growing suspicion in her own mind that she’d somehow mothered a prodigy.

  ‘He just grew into it,’ she said. ‘And the more he did it, the harder he tried, the better he got. I just watched him change. Physically, he started to look amazing, my boy, and it changed him inside too. He started to believe in himself. He’d always been quite cocky, quite mouthy, but this was something different. By the time he started winning serious races he really had something to boast about, and you know what? He didn’t bother. He just let the cups and the medals and all the stuff in the paper at weekends speak for themselves. It was a kind of arrogance really, but it seemed to suit the person he’d become. Awesome.’ She shook her head. ‘Sometimes I couldn’t believe he was the same child.’

  ‘And Rachel was part of all that?’

  ‘Completely. Like I say, she earthed him. She was a totally different character. Sane. Sensible. Patient. Kind. Matt never knew how lucky he was.’

  ‘Until it ended.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘And was it too late? Was it definitely over?’

  ‘You’re asking me?’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘I’m not sure.’ She was frowning now, thinking hard. Eventually her head came up. ‘You’re telling me he was definitely at that party last night?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Then I imagine the answer’s no.’

  Winter left the house minutes later. Matt’s mum was back upstairs again, attending to her other son. Fumbling for his car keys at the kerbside, Winter’s attention was drawn to a white Skoda backing into a tight parking space across the road. The face in the passenger seat was all too familiar, a veteran D/C on Major Crime, and when the driver got out to lock up he too turned out to be CID.

  They’d spotted Winter already. As they crossed the road, he greeted them beside his new Lexus.

  ‘Bit late, aren’t you?’ Winter nodded back towards Berriman’s front door. ‘Tea’s getting cold.’

  Chapter six

  SUNDAY, 12 AUGUST 2007. 18.19

  Mandolin’s second management conference was over. As the inquiry’s principals filed out of Martin Barrie’s office in readiness for the full squad meet, Faraday lingered beside Jerry Proctor at the long table. He had a sequence of crime scene shots pumped back from Sandown Road on his laptop and Faraday wanted a second look. The shots, barely an hour old, covered the downstairs rooms at the party house. Proctor flicked through them, explaining the geography of the house with the aid of a floor plan at his elbow.

  ‘This is the entrance hall. This is what our lads saw when they first walked in.’

  Faraday gazed at the laptop. The carpet in the Aults’ hall was strewn with debris: smashed china, glass, empty crisp packets, DVD boxes, items of clothing, half a dozen bottles, crushed tinnies, even the remains of a bunch of flowers. In one corner, upended, lay a fire extinguisher, a dribble of foam clearly visible from the nozzle. A couple of paintings on the staircase had been tagged in black and then attacked with a knife, and someone had splintered the wood panelling that ran along the hall. Boot height, he thought, looking at the damage.

  ‘What’s that?’ Faraday indicated a yellowing puddle on the carpet.

  ‘Vomit. Apparently it’s everywhere. And this too.’

  Proctor keyed another set of images. This must be the lounge, thought Faraday. He tried to picture what it must have looked like prior to the party: the long crescent of sofa, the low occasional tables, the piles of newspapers and magazines, the modest-sized TV, the carefully placed wall lights, the glint of bottles on the cocktail cabinet, the freshly bought tulips in the fluted vase, the antique-looking dining table in the recess of the big bow window, all of it testament to lives shaped by restraint and good taste. Now, though, the room was laid waste: the furniture upended, the upholstery slashed, the cushions spilling feathers over the wreckage of the carpet. Someone had attacked the TV with what looked like a wooden mallet and most of the far wall had become a blackboard for the tagger with the aerosol. Cunt asked for it. Went one line of graffiti. Cunt got it.

  ‘Cunt?’ Pondered Faraday.

  ‘Rachel, presumably. Though that’s a guess.’

  ‘And what’s that?’ Faraday pointed to something brown smeared on the door round the handle.

  ‘Shit, I’m afraid. I warned you, Joe. This place is a zoo.’

  As Proctor sped through image after image, Faraday sat back, trying to imagine the feel of the property, its smell. Zoo was kind, he thought. No animal would inflict this kind of damage, this kind of insult. Even Gail Parsons, with her talk of train wrecks and bomb incidents, was wide of the mark. There was something evil going on here, something deeply personal he’d never before associated with the city he thought he knew. Not just drugs. Not just coked-up kids with nothing better to do. But the frenzied application of extreme violence, an opening salvo in God knows what kind of war. These people, whoever they were, cared for nothing. The house they’d so casually occupied had spoken of decent lives, decently lived. And they’d trashed it.

  He got to his feet, wondering whether that same indifference to consequences, that same terrifying irrationality, extended as far as the bodies beside the pool. Was it rage that had killed Rachel and Gareth? Had they been two more targets of opportunity in some kind of grotesque class war? The have-nots settling a debt or two? Was it simple anarchy, the work of the fuck-you-and-fuck-the-rest-of-the-world lobby? Or could it have been more personal - more intimate - than that?

  He glanced across at Proctor, wanting to take this debate further, but Proctor shook his head. Parsons was running a tight ship, he muttered. Best not to keep the lady waiting.

  The first Mandolin squad meet took place in the Major Incident Room at the far end of the corridor of first-floor offices. Workstations, each one with its own PC, lined the walls and there was a separate area for the D/S in charge of Outside Enquiries. With the MIR at full throttle, the workstations were largely manned by civilian indexers, feeding in more and more data from the flood of interviews, statements and doorstep enquiries. It was this developing jigsaw, correlated and cross-referenced by the HOLMES software, that should offer the Mandolin management team their first glimpse of pathways forward through the evidential swamp. In theory, one or more of these pathways would lead to court. In practice, as Faraday knew only too well, it was rarely as simple as that.

  He found himself a space beside the door and leaned back against the wall, surveying the faces around the room. The fact that DCI Parsons had managed to lay hands on so many D/Cs was a tribut
e to the closeness of her relationship with Willard, as well as to the spreading ripples of last night’s events in leafy Craneswater.

  Normally, the Major Crime Team relied on a core of detectives serving full time on the squad. Reinforcements, if necessary, would come from other MCTs in the west and north of the force area. On this occasion, though, Parsons had pressed for extra pairs of local hands, Pompey D/Cs with an ear to the ground, and Willard had obviously risked the wrath of their bosses on division to try and bring Mandolin to an early conclusion. With the nation’s gaze riveted by events in leafy Craneswater, now was no time to squabble over manpower.

  The duty Detective Superintendent, still acting as Senior Investigating Officer, made a couple of opening comments. Mandolin, he said, showed every sign of being a runner. His own commitments prevented him from staying with the investigation and so Mr Willard had taken a policy decision to hand the SIO role to DCI Parsons until Martin Barrie returned from leave. Under the circumstances, he was therefore happy to give her the floor.

  Parsons nodded, stepping forward. Without consulting her notes, she quickly summarised progress to date. For the time being, she said, they were treating the riot and the double murder as linked crimes. This would give them a mountain to climb in terms of evidential footwork but the sheer scale of the vandalism and damage at 11 Sandown Road posed a challenge that might one day put Mandolin in the investigative textbooks. Every last detail, she insisted, had to be nailed down. She wanted no excuses, no short cuts. With a huge audience watching their every move, this job had to be faultless.

  She called on Jerry Proctor for an update on the various scenes of crime. Proctor, Faraday knew, hated these presentations. He was a gruff man, interested only in results, and had no time for showboating or unnecessary drama. The scene by the pool, he confirmed, had yielded blood and other forensic evidence. The stamp mark on Gareth Hughes’s cheek was being matched to sole patterns through a private forensic databank and details on make and trainer type should be available by noon tomorrow. The hunt for the knife used on Rachel Ault was ongoing.

  ‘What about CCTV?’ It was Willard. He’d slipped into the meeting while attention was fixed on Proctor. ‘Has Mackenzie got cameras?’

  ‘No, sir. I understand he’s thought about installing a system but decided against it. If anyone’s ever silly enough to try anything there’ll be cheaper ways to sort it out.’

  There was a ripple of laughter around the room.

  ‘Shame.’ Willard grunted. ‘Go on.’

  Proctor turned his attention to Mackenzie’s house. He’d had a couple of investigators inside the property all day but so far they’d found nothing to challenge Mackenzie’s version of what had happened: no incidental damage, no sign of any kind of struggle. In all probability they’d be releasing the scene at some point tomorrow.

  Next door, meanwhile, another forensic team was moving through the party house, room by room. They’d started on the ground floor and so far they’d cleared four rooms. The place, he said, had been comprehensively wrecked, and in terms of potential evidence they were overwhelmed with samples. Blood, semen, shit, vomit, DNA traces from glasses and fag ends, multiple fingerprints, all the chaotic leavings you’d associate with a hundred or so partying youth. Teasing any kind of pattern out of all this was going to require hundreds of man-hours of analysis and discussion but for the time being, in the absence of anything as unlikely as a confession, he had no choice but to work slowly upwards through the house until the job was complete.

  ‘Do you have an estimate on that, Jerry?’ It was DCI Parsons this time.

  ‘Hard to say. Thursday at the earliest. Depends, really.’

  She nodded and scribbled herself a note. Then she turned to Willard.

  ‘The Aults are booked onto a Qantas flight leaving Sydney on Wednesday afternoon, sir. They arrive at Heathrow at six in the morning next day. I’m arranging a FLO to be on hand. They’re going to need a lot of support.’

  Willard nodded. Although Judge Ault was no stranger to serious crime the Family Liaison Officer would try and buffer them from the worst of the shocks to come.

  Proctor resumed. Mobiles and digital cameras, he said, were going to be key to the investigation. The mobes seized in Sandown Road were now awaiting analysis. He was anticipating hundreds of still images and possibly hours of video footage. A POLSA search in the grounds of the Aults’ house, he added, had recovered a further nine mobiles. More grist for the evidential mill.

  ‘What about PCs? Laptops?’ Willard again.

  ‘As far as we know, there were two in the house but they were both upstairs so we’ve yet to get there. Ault’s got a PC. The girl, Rachel, had a laptop.’

  ‘And you think they’re still there?’

  ‘No idea, sir. The laptop’s probably gone. Along with a load of other stuff. It’s impossible to say until the Aults get back.’

  The meet went on. When Parsons asked Faraday for a summary of progress on the interviews, he did his best to simplify the worst of the complications.

  The partygoers, by and large, were extremely reluctant to offer any kind of worthwhile account of exactly what had happened. Some of them, he suspected, had been so bombed that they simply couldn’t remember. Others, especially friends of Rachel, were clearly frightened. They’d seen what some of the more violent kids could do and the last thing they intended to offer was themselves as a target for reprisals.

  A third category - the majority, to be frank - were saying absolutely nothing. They’d stolen into Craneswater under cover of the gathering darkness, necked or nicked everything they could lay their hands on, and generally had a fine old time. When challenged about invitations they’d simply mumbled about a general invite, a form of words that seemed to have more to do with Facebook than trespass. The whole fucking city knew about the rave in Sandown Road, they seemed to be saying. So we just turned up.

  Faraday glanced down at his notes. His suspects’ list now numbered seventeen. These youths, mainly male, mainly white, would be subject to further interview this evening. In the absence of forensic evidence or incrimination from another source, they’d be released on police bail by midnight. Tomorrow, he anticipated a start on comparing ninety-four witness statements, no matter how brief. In conjunction with the emerging picture from Scenes of Crime, plus developments on the intelligence front, he’d hope for some kind of solid timeline within a few days.

  ‘One other thing, boss.’ He was looking at Gail Parsons. ‘We re-interviewed Rachel’s best friend this afternoon. If we’re looking for motive, the lad Berriman definitely has some questions to answer.’

  Briefly, he outlined the relationship that Rachel had so recently broken off. Gareth Hughes had taken Matt Berriman’s place. And Berriman had been less than pleased.

  A hand went up at the back of the room. It was one of the D/Cs who’d seized Berriman’s laptop at Margate Road. He was looking at Faraday.

  ‘One thing I forgot to mention, boss. Guess who we met coming out of Berriman’s place?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Paul Winter.’

  It took a while for Winter to pin down an address for the dead boyfriend. The Pompey phone book had dozens of entries under ‘Hughes’ so he put a call in to a contact on the News. Lizzie Hodson was a mate of Jimmy Suttle’s. Winter had met her himself on a couple of occasions and he knew she was intrigued by what had taken an ageing cop to a new career on the Dark Side. In return for the promise of a drink and a chat later in the week, she agreed to make a few enquiries and call him back.

  His phone was ringing within minutes. Hughes, it turned out, had lived with his family on Hayling Island. Winter, impressed with this speedy bit of research, asked how she knew.

  ‘Jimmy told me,’ she said.

  ‘Did you mention my name at all?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  Hayling Island was on the other side of Langstone Harbour, an area of land the size of Portsmouth. Flat, featureless and ribboned with rows
of neat little retirement bungalows, it had always struck Winter as an invitation to an early death, but towards the south of the island there were avenues of more substantial properties, expensively alarmed against predators from across the water.

  Orchard Lodge, Sinah Lane, lay behind a thick laurel hedge. From the Lexus, with the window down, Winter could hear the tick-tick of a water sprinkler. More faintly came a surge of applause from some kind of crowd.

  Pushing in through the big double gates, he braced himself against the attentions of a black Labrador. The dog was young, still a puppy, and it danced round Winter’s feet as he made his way to the front door. The house looked pre-war, solidly built, with half an acre of so of encircling garden. Most of the garden was lawn, newly mown. Winter knocked again, watching the arching throw of water as the sprinkler ticked round.

  ‘Can I help you?’

  The voice came from an upstairs window. Winter shaded his eyes against the last of the sunshine. The woman seemed in no hurry to open the door.

  ‘It’s about Gareth …’ he began.

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘My name’s Winter. Paul Winter.’

  ‘Are you a journalist’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then why are you here?’

  It was a good question. Winter was still coming up with the answer when the front door opened. A man this time, overweight, middle-aged, in jeans and a faded pink T-shirt.

  ‘What the hell do you want?’ Winter caught the scent of alcohol on his breath. His eyes were filmy. ‘Don’t think we’ve had enough for one day?’

  ‘I’m sorry. Bad time.’

  ‘It bloody well is. So what do you want?’

  Winter produced an iPod and held it out. The man stared at it a moment. When nothing registered, Winter turned it over. On the back, two smiley cartoon faces carefully drawn in blue pentel.

  ‘That belongs to Gareth. Where on earth did you get it?’

  ‘It came from a good friend of mine. Marie Mackenzie. She gave Gareth and Rachel a lift to the station a couple of days ago. Gareth left it in her car.’