Now, Faraday stepped back into the big living room, closing the glass door behind him. His previous experience of undercover operations had given him none of Nick Hayder’s confidence and he’d heard enough about Bazza Mackenzie to suggest he’d be an exceptionally difficult target to sting. The problem with jobs like Tumbril was their very isolation. Walled off from real life, it would be all too easy to talk yourself into a result.
Faraday helped himself to a banana from the fruit bowl in the kitchen. The TV zapper lay beside the bowl and he pointed it across the room towards the wide screen television.
The TV was tuned to BBC News 24. In Paris, according to the presenter, President Chirac was expressing shock and dismay at the American build-up on the Iraqi border. UN Resolution 1441 was not an authorisation to go to war and even at this late stage he found it inconceivable that President Bush would put the framework of international order at risk. Thank God for the French, Faraday thought. He slipped out his mobile and dialled Eadie’s number, watching yet more footage of British tanks on the move. To his surprise, she didn’t answer.
To J-J’s relief, getting back into the Old Portsmouth apartment block was no problem. Daniel Kelly was standing in his first-floor window, visibly anxious, and the street door yielded at once to Eadie Sykes’s touch. She led the way upstairs, carrying the camera box and a lightweight tripod. J-J followed with two lights on stands and an armful of cabling.
Daniel met them halfway down the hall. Pale and sweating, he blocked the path to his flat, ignoring Eadie. J-J looked down at his outstretched hand.
“What’s going on?” It was Eadie. “Someone like to tell me?”
J-J edged past Daniel, fending him off with the light stands. When the student pursued him down the hall, he made an awkward bolt for the open door at the end. The flat smelled of burning toast and the air was blue with smoke. J-J dumped the light stands and the cabling in the lounge, reaching the kitchen in time to rescue the grill pan. Two slices of Mighty White were on fire and he smothered them with a washing-up cloth. Daniel stood in the door, oblivious to this small domestic drama.
“Where is it?” he kept saying. “Where’s the gear?”
J-J had tipped the remains of the toast into the sink. The grill pan hissed beneath the cold-water tap. He turned back to Daniel and began to sign, tapping his watch. Maybe an hour, maybe two, but soon, I promise. Then came a movement in the lounge next door and Eadie appeared behind Daniel. She was staring at a plastic syringe and a battered old spoon readied on one of the work surfaces. Daniel was still demanding an answer. It wasn’t hard to connect the two.
“You scored for him?”
J-J shook his head.
“Then how come…?” She’d spotted the belt Daniel would need to raise a vein. “Are you out of your mind?”
The student turned on her, angry now. He hadn’t a clue who she was but this was his flat, his property. She had absolutely no right to barge in or pass judgement. He’d thought J-J was interested in realities, in what it meant to make certain decisions, certain choices. If that was still the case, no problem. If it wasn’t, he could go and poke his camera into someone else’s life.
Eadie blinked. Few people ever talked to her like this.
“We came because I understood we were invited,” she said. “And it’s my camera. Just for the record.”
She looked witheringly at J-J, then stepped back into the living room. Through the open door, J-J watched her beginning to unpack the Sony Digicam. Daniel ignored her. He demanded to know what the guys at Pennington Road had said. He asked whether there was any point trying them on their mobile number. Curiously, thought J-J, he never once mentioned the money.
“You ready, guys…?”
It was Eadie again. Calmer now, she wanted to know where Daniel would like to sit, the spot where he felt most comfortable.
“Comfortable?” The word raised a bitter smile. “You really don’t have a clue, do you?”
“You’re right. That’s why we’re here. Chair by the TV be OK?”
Daniel shrugged and turned away, shaking his head. Then he began to hug himself, rocking backwards and forwards, his body hunched, his eyes shut, a man caught naked in a bitter wind.
“They drop it off by car,” he muttered. “They ring the bell three times and I just go down.” Daniel looked up at J-J, those big moist yellow eyes. “You’ll stay with me? Help me?”
J-J nodded, easing Daniel gently out of the kitchen. Maybe an hour or two in bed might help.
Back in the living room, Eadie had set up the tripod and the camera. Lights ringed the armchair beside the TV and now she was arranging a line of books on the shelf behind.
“Daniel,” she said brightly, “I think we’re about ready. That OK with you?”
The student paused, looking blankly at the waiting film set
“Anything.” He began to shiver again. “I don’t care.”
The interview, according to the time code generated by the digital camera, started at 17.34. Eadie Sykes, after the earlier bump in the road, was determined to smooth out any differences between them. She was grateful for Daniel’s trust. What they were about to do was enormously important in all kinds of ways and she wanted to repeat what J-J had doubtless already established: that this was Daniel’s video, Daniel’s views, Daniel’s life, and no one else’s.
“You understand me, Daniel?”
In the camera’s viewfinder, J-J watched her big freckled hand reach out. The student shuddered under her touch. The way he kept moving in the chair meant holding the shot wider than J-J would have liked, though it felt a mercy to be able to spare him the usual close-up.
“You want to start by telling me how it all began?” Eadie might have been talking to a child.
Daniel stared at her, uncomprehending. It was hot under the lights, and his big waxy face was bathed in sweat. Eadie prompted him again, an edge to her voice this time, and slowly he began to claw his way backwards through his life, picking up fragments here and there, trying to tease some sense, some logic, from the decisions he appeared to have made. Strangely enough, thought J-J, the very effort this involved seemed to ease some of his pain.
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?”<
br />
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 panned 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. Jan
na 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.
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