Something close to a smile ghosted across Jeanette’s face. Then she turned her attention to Faraday.
‘We first met in November,’ she said softly. ‘I don’t know whether you remember.’
Faraday nodded. Contrary to his first impression, Jeanette Morrissey had perfect recall. He’d driven up to Paulsgrove with the Family Liaison Officer the morning after her son’s murder. There’d been journalists waiting in the street outside. Later, a TV crew.
‘You had a friend with you,’ he said.
‘Katie. The one who’s just come back from Greece. She’s never let me down. Not once. Have you ever been in that situation, Mr Faraday? Depending on one individual, one human being, because you know that no one else really cares?’
‘I’m afraid I’m not with you.’
‘You’re not? Why do I find that unsurprising?’
‘I’ve no idea.’
‘My son had died. He’d been killed. He’d been stabbed to death. Everyone on that estate knew who’d done it, knew who was responsible. You knew too. You all knew. And yet nothing happened. Nothing was done. And next day he was out there again, parading past my house with that horrible dog of his, stopping outside the gate, laughing at me, laughing, Mr Faraday. Have you any idea what that can do to you? Then? And ever since?’
‘It was a question of evidence, Mrs Morrissey. We can’t put people away without demonstrating why.’
‘Then maybe you didn’t look hard enough.’
‘I think you’ll find that’s not true. If you have reason to make a formal complaint by all means go ahead.’
Faraday sat back, trying to steady the thunder in his head, aware of how wooden he must sound. The woman was right. They’d failed her.
‘Another thing.’ She hadn’t finished. ‘Before Tim died, before they stabbed him, they beat him up and broke his fingers. We gave you names, even addresses. Tim told you exactly what had happened, how they’d done it, everything you could possibly need. Yet still nothing happened. I know it wasn’t your lot. I know it wasn’t Major Crimes. But it makes no difference. You’re all policemen as far as I’m concerned. Yet, like I said, nothing happened.’
‘As I understand it, your son withdrew his evidence.’
‘That’s true. And you know why? Because they threatened to kill him. I said to Tim at the time that they were bluffing. I said it was his duty to go to court but he was simply too frightened. Looking back, I should have forced him because in the end it made no difference. He did what they wanted but they killed him anyway. You’ve lost it, Mr Faraday. My generation, we trusted people like you. We had some faith that you would put things right. We believed in justice. That’s gone. It’s gone totally. Today, we’re at the mercy of people like Kyle Munday. They can make our lives a misery. They even have the power of life and death. How do I know? Because he killed my son.’
Faraday held her gaze. It was tempting to enquire whether she could prove it, but he knew there was no point. Interviews like these were meant to establish matters of guilt and innocence. Hers, not his.
‘We made sure you had access to a Family Liaison Officer, Mrs Morrissey. You chose to turn that offer down.’
‘I didn’t want a Family Liaison Officer, Mr Faraday. I wanted to see Kyle Munday in court. I wanted to know someone cared enough about Tim to make sure he was punished.’
‘Punished how, Mrs Morrissey?’ It was Callan.
The question took Jeanette by surprise. Michelle Brinton muttered something in her ear but Jeanette shook her head. Then, to Callan’s irritation, she turned back to Faraday.
‘You want the truth? I wanted that man dead.’
‘That would never have been an option. You know that.’
‘Of course I do. Life imprisonment would have been acceptable. Not perfect but better than the way it turned out. It wasn’t just the next day, Mr Faraday. It wasn’t just standing in my front room watching that horrible man leering at me. It was all the other times I’d bump into him and those pitiful kids he dragged around. It went on for months. It was still happening last week. Little comments. Little digs. They’d won, Mr Faraday. They’d driven me insane.’
Faraday nodded. He understood. The next question was only too obvious.
‘So let’s talk about last Saturday,’ he began. ‘What really happened? ’
DCI Gail Parsons was still at her desk, bent over her PC, when Faraday and Callan returned to the Major Crime suite at Fratton. Faraday had talked to her earlier, prior to the start of the interview. She’d told him she’d be working late on a report for headquarters. She wanted an update before she packed it in for the night.
‘Well?’ Her fingers were still gliding over the keyboard.
‘Full confession, boss. She hadn’t lied about being at home on Saturday evening but she got a phone call from her mother-in-law way after midnight. The old lady was in a real state. At that kind of hour there was no way Jeanette would phone the neighbour so she had to get out of bed and drive up there herself. She said she’d done it before. In fact it was becoming a bit of a habit.’
‘So what happened?’
‘She got in the camper, drove off the estate. The route she takes goes up the hill past the hospital. That time of night there wasn’t much on the road. She says she was driving along, thirty-five, forty miles an hour, and saw someone crossing the road in front of her.’
‘Which direction?’
‘Right to left. Jimmy Suttle’s spot on. That would put Munday up near the kids’ home, sniffing around Hayley Burridge.’
‘And she recognised Munday?’
‘As she got closer, yes. She says he must have recognised her too, because he just stood in the middle of the road, swaying, obviously pissed, giving her the finger.’
Faraday paused, remembering Jeanette Morrissey in the interview room. At this stage her voice had hardened. At first Faraday had put this down to anger but quickly realised that it was something else. Excitement. After months of torment and frustration, she’d realised she finally had a chance to get even.
‘So what happened?’ Parsons was frowning, her fingers still anchored to the keyboard.
‘She drove at him.’
‘She said that?’
‘Exactly those words. She said she put her foot down and drove straight at him. That’s why there were no skid marks on the road. It wasn’t an accident at all. It was an execution.’
‘She said that too?’ Parsons had finally abandoned the PC.
‘No. But that’s what it amounts to. She was convinced Munday had killed Tim. As we all know, she was probably right. Because we couldn’t do anything about it, she’d decided to sort him out herself.’
‘You’re telling me she’d done something like this before?’
‘She told us afterwards she’d thought about it. She knew where Munday lived. She’d driven past there a couple of times wondering how easy it might be to burn the place down but in the end she’d done nothing about it. On Saturday night it was much simpler. Munday was standing there asking for it. She could see him, see the smile on his face. So she obliged.’
Jeanette had described the moment of impact in minute detail. How, in the last second or so, it had begun to dawn on Munday that she wasn’t going to stop. How his face had hung there in the lights, the frozen leer, the raised finger. And how, in an instant, inches from the windscreen, that same face had gone, swallowed up by the surrounding darkness. After the initial impact, she said, there’d been two big bumps, front wheel and back wheel, and then nothing but the empty road ahead.
‘She didn’t stop?’
‘No. She said she checked the mirror but couldn’t really see anything. Just a bundle of clothes in the road.’
‘But why didn’t she report it? She could have claimed it was an accident. We might have believed her.’
‘No way, boss. She’s a bitter woman. She’s got no faith in us. She thinks we’ve let her down. Badly.’
Parsons said nothing. Callan was perched on the edge of t
he conference table.
‘I think the woman’s slightly unhinged,’ she said. ‘There was a definite pleasure in killing Munday. You could see it in her eyes. Once she’d taken that decision there was no turning back. She did it for her son and for herself and once she’d done it she wanted to be shot of the whole nightmare. Reporting it would mean months of hassle with the possibility of a court appearance. Another little victory for Mr Munday. What kind of closure would that be?’
Jeanette Morrissey had driven on to the bungalow in Newtown, Steph explained. Her job at the health clinic had made her forensically aware. She knew the front and underside of the van would be covered in Munday’s DNA. So she decided to get rid of the van somehow and give herself an alibi.
‘Yet she accepted a lift from the neighbour? Next day?’ Parsons was frowning.
‘Like I say, she was unhinged. She hadn’t thought this thing through at all. But under those circumstances I guess you probably don’t. It’s a kind of madness. You think you’ve got the thing sorted but in reality you’re stuffed. There’s no way we’re not going to nail her.’
Faraday nodded in agreement. Unlike Munday, Jeanette Morrissey was a sitting target. On Wednesday evening, after Faraday and Callan had paid her a visit at home, she’d gone to Newtown. In the small hours she’d retrieved the camper van from her mum-in-law’s garage, driven it up to the car park on Hundred Acres, and used a container of petrol to set it on fire. Returning to the bungalow on foot, she’d driven back to Paulsgrove in the hire car. Within hours, thanks to Steph Callan, the next-door neighbour had demolished her carefully constructed alibi. The rest, in Callan’s phrase, had been a breeze.
Faraday’s last glimpse of Jeanette, less than an hour ago, had stayed with him. Formally charged with murder, she’d been fingerprinted and subjected to a DNA mouth swab. Afterwards, her solicitor had fetched her a coffee from the machine. Ahead, over the months to come, lay the prospect of remand, trial and conviction. Doubtless there’d be many who would sympathise deeply with what she’d done. Her case might even spark an editorial or two in the national press. But her days of freedom were very definitely over. So how come, nursing her coffee, she seemed so suddenly relaxed?
Faraday had paused beside her. He’d wanted to wish her good luck but somehow the phrase had stuck in his throat. She’d looked up at him, ignoring the briefly comforting hand on her shoulder.
‘Got what you wanted?’ she’d asked.
The question, Faraday knew, would haunt him. Now Parsons was offering her congratulations. The pair of them, she said, had worked as a team, bringing complementary investigative skills to an inquiry that might easily have dragged on. As a template for future collabo-rations, Operation Highfield might offer some useful lessons. She’d certainly be saying something of the kind to Mr Willard and she was certain that he’d share her own satisfaction that Munday’s death had been so speedily resolved. Well done to both of you.
Neither Callan nor Faraday said a word. Both knew that Jeanette Morrissey’s story could never have survived an in-depth investigation. The neighbour’s lift on Sunday morning had been a windfall, but one way or another she’d have ended up in the Bridewell, DNA swabbed and fingerprinted, just another crime statistic.
Minutes later, pausing outside Faraday’s office, Callan had said her goodbyes. Both of them knew that the relationship had been far from ideal but neither was in the mood to talk about it. Dutifully Faraday suggested a drink, but his heart wasn’t in it. Maybe some other time. Maybe when they met again to finalise the file. Callan nodded, then laid her hand on Faraday’s arm.
‘You want a tip, boss?’ The smile seemed genuine. ‘Don’t let it get to you.’
Back home, late, Faraday knew that wasn’t an option. He went upstairs and settled at the desk in the window of his bedroom. For several minutes he did nothing except stare into the darkness beyond. The moon was full and torn shreds of cloud threw ragged shadows across the silvered brilliance of the harbour. The top sash of the window was open, and beyond the chatter of ducks along the foreshore Faraday could hear the haunting call of a distant curlew. The curlew, especially at night, had always spoken to the very depths of his soul. It summed up a hollowness, even a vacuum, that he suspected lay at the heart of modern life. In this mood he knew he was treading the very edges of the abyss.
At length he began to scroll through his emails. A message from a birder caught his eye and he followed the prompts to an article from an environmental agency in Scotland. The article was brief, but by the time he got to the end the accompanying photo was a blur. A box of tissues lay on the floor beside his chair. He blew his nose, still gazing at the screen, wondering who to talk to. No Gabrielle. No soulmate. Personne. Not for the first time in his life, he was totally alone.
He opened the Create Mail box and typed in the first three letters of Gabrielle’s name. Then he began to write. In the Firth of Forth there’s a colony of guillemots. They’re tough birds. They nest on cliffs and get together in vast huddles to protect themselves from gulls which prey on their eggs and chicks. Mating pairs rear one chick a year and take it in turns to stand guard on the nest while the other hunts at sea. Lately, food has become so scarce that both parents have to go hunting otherwise the whole family will starve, but that leaves the chick on its own. It would be nice to think that neighbouring guillemots take care of these temporary orphans but that’s far from the case. In reality, if the undefended chicks come looking for food, they find themselves under attack. These attacks can be savage. Sometimes they’re even pushed off the cliff ledge to certain death on the rocks below.
Faraday sat back a moment, wondering how far to take the parallels. Tim Morrissey, in some respects, had been an undefended chick, but the likes of Munday and his little gang had sensed weakness and had come looking for him. That wouldn’t have happened on the cliffs beside the Firth of Forth - and there lay the essential difference. The attacking guillemots were simply defending their territory. Munday was a predator.
He bent to the keyboard again. You know Paulsgrove. As estates go, it’s better than most. Decent people struggling through. Plus a hard core of delinquents, sadists and assorted psychos who do nothing to make life easy. Just now, society being the way it is, these guys (and women) have the whip hand. Violence speaks louder than small (or large) acts of kindness. People frighten easily. And when that happens on a large enough scale, people like me have a problem.
Faraday gazed at the final sentence. He’d spent the last hour or so mentally reviewing his role in Operation Melody. Given the lack of clinching forensic evidence - no murder weapon, no clothing, nothing of any value recovered from the scene or the body - he and the rest of the squad had relied on witness statements, hearsay and phone billings. In every respect, Munday had the estate bound and gagged. As far as Tim Morrissey was concerned, people were simply too scared to talk.
Last year, for months on end, Gabrielle had researched gang culture on the city’s estates. She’d done countless interviews with kids of all ages, trying to map the web of loyalties which so often replaced family structures that - for one reason or another - had simply disintegrated. Some of her findings had taken her by surprise. She was an anthropologist by training and she recognised that membership of a gang was a godsend for kids who had simply run out of people who might love them. In the absence of functioning mums or dads, belonging to a gang offered very welcome shelter from what Gabrielle had come to refer to as la tempête qui vient.
Quite what this gathering storm might bring she’d never made clear but day by day, week by week, Faraday was beginning to recognise the symptoms. The nineteen-year-old smackhead who’d had her third miscarriage on the steps of the magistrates’ court. The estate mums with no previous record who regularly shoplifted from the corner store to feed their kids. The boyfriend with an anger management problem who punched his girlfriend’s granny in the face over a ten-pound debt and then set her on fire. And now the dead Kyle Munday, whose party piece was train
ing his pit bull to kill swans on Great Salterns lake. Some of these horror stories were down to simple inadequacy. Others were the product of hard times. But some, including Munday, spoke of a deep well of something else. Evil was a word that Faraday had always tried to avoid but some days, like now, it was staring him in the face.
Your name is Jeanette. Someone has killed your only child. Months later, you haven’t touched anything in his bedroom. He’s still with you, in your head, in your heart. And his killer is still out there, gloating, goading you, knowing all the time that he’s put himself beyond the law. We do nothing because our hands are tied. With all our cleverness, all our budget, all those man-hours in overtime, we still can’t prove the case against him. We haven’t given up, and we never would, but none of that matters any more because Jeanette has done it for us. By sheer luck, nothing more, the chance came and she took it. She ran her tormentor over and killed him. When we challenged her after she’d confessed she said she was glad. Glad to have got it off her chest. And glad to have done it in the first place. The world, she told me, was a better place without Kyle Munday. Do you blame her? Wouldn’t you have done the same thing?
Faraday wondered what Gabrielle would make of a message like this then decided that it didn’t matter. Better, like Jeanette Morrissey, to get it off his chest. Better to ping it into that other vacuum, the emptiness that had once been a relationship he’d cherished. As ever, he thought, he was talking to himself. The mouse arrow lingered briefly over the Send command. His forefinger left-clicked.
Gone.
Chapter ten
FRIDAY, 23 MAY 2008. 12.33
Winter had been in the pub less than ten minutes when Mo Sturrock walked in through the door. The photo in the Guardian hadn’t done him justice. He was tall and carried himself with an air of easy command. The tangle of greying hair was secured at the back by a twist of green ribbon and there was a whiff of roll-ups as he folded himself onto the stool at the bar. Scuffed cowboy boots. Frayed 501s. Faded Levi jacket. At first glance, Winter knew he’d be perfect. Looked right. Dressed right. Even smelled right.
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