No Lovelier Death

by Hurley, Graham

  At the back of the garden a hedge separated Bazza’s property from number 15. The house had been empty for some months and the hedge had seen better days. Since the spring Guy had made himself a tunnel through the tangle of dead briar and discovered a sandpit on the other side. One of his prized possessions was a collection of toy soldiers that had once belonged to Bazza, and every Tuesday he liked nothing better than to crawl through the tunnel with handfuls of his granddad’s Nazi storm troopers, and stage elaborate mock battles in the privacy of the hijacked standpit.

  Bazza’s model soldiers had come with a couple of ancient toy field guns. The guns took broken-off matchsticks as ammo. The matchsticks sometimes got buried way under the sand. Which is how young Guy found the mobile.

  The first Marie knew of the boy’s find was a fit of giggles from the direction of the pool. Guy had brought back his trophy find from next door’s sandpit and was showing it off to his sisters. Thanks to Esme all three kids knew their way round mobile phones. What especially fascinated them were the pictures you could watch.

  From the kitchen window Marie could see them crowding round Guy. He’d shaded the mobe from the sun and he was doubled over with laughter. Marie loaded a tray with doughnuts and stepped outside onto the patio. It was Guy who volunteered the phone.

  ‘What’s that?’ he said.

  Marie took the mobile. Without her reading glasses she couldn’t be sure but a second look beneath the shade of the nearby tree confirmed her worst suspicions.

  ‘Where did you find this, Guy darling?’

  ‘There.’ He was pointing at the briar hedge, proud of himself. ‘It was really deep. I really had to dig.’

  ‘You mean next door?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘In the sandpit?’

  ‘Yes.

  ‘Fine. I expect you’re hungry.’

  Ignoring their questions, she handed out the doughnuts and then retreated to the kitchen. Bazza was in his office at the hotel. He picked up on the first ring. Marie still had the mobile. She blew sand off the tiny screen.

  ‘I’m looking at Rachel Ault,’ she said briefly. ‘With a mouthful of someone’s dick.’

  Bazza’s call caught Winter at home in Gunwharf. He’d spent half the morning trying to figure out ways of finding Jax Bonner. Within minutes he was pointing the Lexus towards Craneswater.

  By now Bazza was back at Sandown Road. Guy had returned next door to the sandpit while his sisters watched cartoons on a portable TV Marie had rigged up beside the pool. Bazza sat at the kitchen table. He’d accessed the stored numbers on the phone and noted them down. When Winter stepped in from the patio, he glanced up.

  ‘Bonz? Fearless? Jersey K?’

  ‘Never heard of them.’

  ‘Pete? Dudie? Sprocket?’

  ‘Pass.’

  ‘Rakka? Mum? Nikki?’

  ‘Phone Mum.’

  ‘I just did. No answer.’

  Winter nodded. He asked for the phone and checked one of the numbers before keying it in. He waited a second or two, then a grin spread from ear to ear.

  He returned the phone to Bazza. He hadn’t said a word.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Her name’s Nikki Dunlop. She’s a coach down at the pool. Ten quid says she’s shacked up with Matt Berriman.’

  ‘His mobe then?’

  ‘I’d say so.’

  ‘And his dick?

  ‘Send her the pictures. She might know.’

  Even Marie laughed. When the kids had demanded an explanation she’d said that the girl on the screen had been playing a kind of party game. When they’d asked whether it was a treat or not, she’d said yes.

  Bazza wasn’t interested in party games.

  ‘Marie says this came out of next door’s sandpit. I thought your lot would have done a proper search?’

  ‘Only your garden and the Aults’, Baz. They’d need a separate warrant for number 15.’

  ‘You’re sure about that? You don’t think they planted the fucker?’

  ‘I doubt it. They’re not that bright.’

  ‘Bright, my arse. So where does that leave Mr Berriman? I’ve been telling myself I owe this guy. Now I find his knob halfway down young Rachel’s throat and the evidence in my other neighbour’s garden. To get to that sandpit you’d probably go through the hedge. That puts him on my property, doesn’t it? Or am I missing a trick here?’

  Winter didn’t reply. The spare doughnut looked too good to ignore. After a couple of mouthfuls, he licked the sugar from his fingers.

  ‘I talked to him yesterday,’ he said at last. ‘He’s got some quaint ideas, that lad.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Like not wanting to grass his mates up.’

  ‘Grassing? To us? How does that work?’

  ‘It doesn’t, Baz. And that’s what I told him. I got the impression he wants to freelance this thing, handle it himself.’

  ‘That’s stupid.’

  ‘I agree.’

  ‘Shall I give Westie a call?’

  ‘The boy may have saved your life, Baz.’ Winter was looking pained. ‘He certainly spared you a good slapping.’

  ‘That’s not an answer, mush. It’s Tuesday. The Aults are back the day after tomorrow. Like I told you yesterday, we need a result, a name, maybe a couple of names, something that says I haven’t totally screwed up. We had a great meeting last night. The MP bloke’s gonna give the Filth a kicking. But Aultie’s going to want more than that. He’ll want to know who did his daughter. I can’t shake the bloke’s hand with fuck all to tell him, can I?’

  ‘No, Baz.’

  ‘I’m serious.’

  ‘I know you are.’

  ‘What about the girl Danny mentioned? Jix?’

  ‘It’s Jax, Baz. And she’s a bit of a problem too.’

  ‘Well fucking solve it, mush. That’s what I pay you for. Comprende?’

  It was late morning before Faraday began to surface from the hangover. A couple of Ibuprofen first thing had failed to still his thumping head and two more when he arrived at the office had been equally useless. Three cups of tea plus a bacon sandwich fetched from a nearby café by one of the management assistants had put something solid in his stomach, and by the time Suttle knocked at his office door the worst of the nausea had passed.

  ‘You look shit, boss.’

  ‘Thanks. Never try to outdrink the French. They’ve got livers of iron.’

  It was true. By the time he’d stumbled off to bed, Gabrielle must have sunk at least a bottle of her own. Then she’d gone back to her laptop.

  ‘What have we got?’ The thickness of Suttle’s file looked promising.

  ‘Just an update, boss, really. Jerry Proctor rang me from Netley. His lads at the Aults’ place are going through the rooms at the top of the house. According to the girl Samantha, Rachel had a laptop. They can’t find it.’

  ‘Nicked, you think?’

  ‘That’s Jerry’s view. They’ve done the full monty on her bedroom, taken a look at all the other rooms. Sam says she kept everything on it. Emails. Stuff for her Facebook page. Poems. Photos. A bit of a diary. The lot.’

  ‘Shit.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘What about the other computer?’

  ‘That’s the PC in Ault’s study. The screen got trashed but the computer itself was OK. My guess is it was too old to get nicked. It’s at Netley now. They’re going to bump it up the queue for hard-disk analysis just in case she’d been using it.’

  ‘What else have they got?’

  ‘Multiple specimens. Jerry says we’re talking lots of spillage. I think he means semen.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘The upstairs bathroom, which we knew about already. The upstairs landing. The Aults’ bedroom - that’s the bed, bits and pieces on the carpet, stuff on a little armchair. There’s shit up there too. Smeared across one pillow.’

  ‘Nice.’ Faraday was beginning to regret the bacon sandwich. Suttle hadn’t finished.<
br />
  ‘So he’s asking for a steer, really. Whether or not you want to send the lot away or wait.’

  ‘That’s down to DCI Parsons. They’re all bagged up?’

  ‘Of course. They’re in the fridge at Netley. Ready and waiting.’

  Faraday nodded. He’d seen the big samples fridge at Netley. Jerry kept the milk in there as well. He looked up at Suttle, trying to get his thoughts in order.

  ‘We’ve got semen in Rachel’s throat from the PM. Am I right?’

  ‘Yes, boss. Jenny took smears from her body at the scene too. They tested positive for semen from her throat and her vagina.’

  ‘Results?’

  ‘Friday. Tops.’ He paused. ‘So what about the other samples?’

  ‘Ask the DCI.’

  ‘I just did. She’s after your advice.’

  Faraday winced. The last thing he needed just now was a face-to-face with Gail Parsons. Seconds later he heard her footsteps hurrying along the corridor. She didn’t bother knocking.

  ‘Joe? You’ve got a moment?’

  He followed her into Martin Barrie’s office. To his surprise he found himself looking at a bunch of flowers on the window sill behind the desk. They were neatly arranged in a tall glass vase and for a moment he wondered whether they’d come from Willard.

  ‘A woman’s touch, Joe.’ She’d been watching him. ‘Something to brighten our days.’

  She settled behind the desk and scrolled briefly through a list of waiting emails. One in particular caught her attention. She reached for the screen, turning it towards Faraday. The message had come from Jimmy Suttle. Parsons must have tasked him to take a look at Saturday night’s CCTV footage and Suttle had responded with a barbed query about exactly where she wanted him to start.

  ‘Hardly helpful, Joe, wouldn’t you say?’

  Faraday, oddly cheered by the defiant good sense in the message, found himself defending Suttle.

  ‘He’s got a point, boss. There are no cameras in Craneswater. The city network doesn’t extend that far. A party on one of the estates and we’d have footage coming out of our ears. Nice people don’t riot.’

  ‘I was anticipating he might be looking elsewhere.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Gangs of youths. Kids who might have left the party early. Faces we wouldn’t have seen so far.’

  Faraday was trying to grapple with the implications of this search. Pompey on a Saturday night was awash with youths. There were hundreds of kids, thousands of kids. Where, exactly, would you look first?

  ‘You sound like Suttle, Joe.’

  ‘Only because he’s right.’

  She gave him a look, tight-lipped, disapproving, then enquired about the mobile phone footage retrieved by Netley. She understood they were waiting on a visit from Rachel Ault’s best friend. When did she propose to turn up?

  ‘She’s coming in at half eleven. Her name’s Samantha Muirhead.’

  ‘And what do we think she might be able to tell us?’

  ‘We’re after putting names to faces.’

  ‘You’re telling me that hasn’t happened yet?’

  ‘We’ve got ID shots from the custody suites but they’re just the kids we could lay hands on. We need to start thinking about who we haven’t met yet. The girl Sam might be able to help.’

  Parsons looked Faraday in the eye. He sensed she relished confrontation.

  ‘We aren’t doing well, are we, Joe? No one thought this thing would ever be easy, least of all me, but we’re losing momentum.’ She nodded at the telephone. ‘I had Mr Alcott on first thing. He’d just had a call from Mike Hancock. As you can imagine, he’s eager for good news, any news. The word he’s using is underperformance.’

  Mike Hancock was MP for Portsmouth South. Terry Alcott was the Assistant Chief Constable in charge of CID and Special Operations. Mandolin’s buck stopped at his desk.

  ‘Underperformance?’ Faraday felt the blood flooding into his aching head. Twenty-four hours without sleep over the weekend. The constant drumbeat of phone calls and meetings thereafter. The raised hopes, the false leads, the sheer mountain of evidence, most of it worthless.

  And now this: a Senior Investigating Officer who seemed to be paying far too much attention to the noises off. Maybe performance was right. Maybe the press, and TV, and Facebook, and all the rest of the chatter, had taken them into new territory. Maybe this wasn’t an investigation at all. Maybe Mandolin had become a piece of theatre.

  Parsons was still looking at him, still waiting for some kind of explanation. Faraday, irked beyond measure, didn’t bother to rise to the challenge. In his view the squad was working flat out. Parsons, like everyone else in the world, wanted instant results but already it was clear that this would never be a three-day event. There’d be no short cuts here, no magic wand, no sudden arrests at dawn with the snappers in attendance and a morning press conference to follow. In the end he sensed they were looking at a tight little knot of circumstance, of motivation, of payback. Untying that knot would take time. If Parsons couldn’t see that, if her finger had slipped on the steadying pulse of the investigation, then too bad.

  ‘We need to be patient,’ he murmured. ‘I’m afraid that’s the best I can do.’

  Parsons nodded. It wasn’t the response she wanted. She returned her PC screen to its previous position and bent to the keyboard. She was never less than direct.

  ‘Martin Barrie comes back on Monday, Joe. My guess is he’ll be taking over as SIO. I’d like something substantial in the bank before then.’

  Jerry Proctor was waiting in Faraday’s office when he returned, minutes later. Two glasses of cold water had made him feel a little better.

  ‘We’ve got a result on the stamp mark.’ Proctor surrendered the chair at the desk. ‘I thought I’d run you through it.’

  Photos of the pattern on Gareth Hughes’s cheek had been sent through to Napier Associates, a private database in York. They carried details of hundreds of sole patterns. Later, if required, they could match a specific pair of trainers against the Hughes imprint.

  ‘And?’

  ‘We’re looking for a pair of Reebok Classics.’

  ‘You make it sound like bad news.’

  ‘It is, Joe. This is the Ford Mondeo of trainers, no offence. Everyone’s got a pair.’

  ‘Size?’

  ‘Nine to eleven.’

  Faraday nodded. Sole lifts only came in three basic sizes. It was the uppers that changed from box size to box size.

  ‘How many did we seize at the house? Have you checked?’

  ‘A couple of dozen. More than half of those were within the size range.’

  ‘Including Berriman’s?’

  ‘No. He was wearing Nike Air Max 95s.’

  ‘Shit.’ Faraday turned away and gazed out the window.

  ‘You’re sure they were Nikes?’

  ‘Positive. I double-checked.’

  Proctor wanted a decision on the seized Reeboks. Should he send them all away for full forensic examination? At £600 a shot for the thirty-day turnaround, they’d be looking at a sizeable bill. The premium service, with a speedier result, would cost another £1400 per item.

  ‘Ask Parsons.’ Faraday was still thinking about Berriman. ‘It’s her pay grade not mine.’

  A knock on the door revealed Suttle in the corridor. Samantha Muirhead had arrived. He wanted to know whether Faraday wanted to sit in on the viewing session. Faraday said yes.

  Suttle fetched Muirhead from downstairs. She’d been waiting a while in the front reception area and was fretting about an impending job interview at a café-bar in Southsea. Suttle promised to run her down there as soon as they’d finished.

  Faraday joined them in the Intelligence Cell. Suttle had readied the DVD at the start of the Rachel footage. Sam bent towards the screen, watching intently, and Faraday realised she may never have seen any images from the party. Her own phone hadn’t featured on the DVD playlist. Maybe hers didn’t have a camera.

>   Rachel was at the foot of the stairs, fighting off the attentions of a youth in what looked like a striped rugby shirt. The pictures cut to the living room, Rachel sprawled on the sofa with her head in another boy’s lap. Then she was in the kitchen with Gareth, winking at the camera over his shoulder as he steered her towards the fridge. Faces came and went in the background.

  ‘That’s me.’

  Sam was right. She was leaning against the kitchen table, eating a slice of pizza. Suttle hit the pause button.

  ‘Those first two guys with Rachel. You know who they are?’

  ‘Of course. One’s called Slaphead. He’s in the first fifteen. The other one’s really sweet, talented too. He wants to be an actor.’

  ‘Should we be interested in either of them?’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Was Rachel interested in either of them? Or vice versa?’

  ‘No. They’re mates, that’s all. And Slaphead’s always pissed.’

  Suttle nodded, crossing the sequences off a list at his elbow. He played more footage, all of it featuring Rachel with various groups of friends. More names, more dead ends. Then followed an edited sequence showing kids busy destroying everything they could get their hands on. In a court of law this would be prima facie evidence for a criminal damage charge but in every case Samantha was unable to help with names.

  After a while she glanced at her watch. Time was moving on.

  ‘There’s one other thing …’ It was Faraday. ‘People have been telling us about a girl at the party. The way we hear it, she was hard to miss.’

  He described the shaved head, the nose rings, the tongue stud, the gallery of tattoos down her arms. Oddly enough she hadn’t appeared on any of the images they’d seen so far.

  Sam nodded. She knew exactly who they meant.

  ‘Scary woman,’ she said. ‘You can see for yourself.’

  ‘We can?’

  ‘Sure.’ She looked surprised. ‘It’s on the Facebook page. “Rachelsbash”. ’

  ‘Since when?’

  ‘Since this morning. You guys ought to check it out.’

  Suttle and Faraday exchanged glances. Suttle turned back to the desk. A couple of keystrokes took him into Facebook. Entry to Rachel’s memorial page was by open invitation. No password.