Cut To Black

by Hurley, Graham

  Chapter 22

  SUNDAY, 23 MARCH 2003, 17.40

  Paul Winter had been trying to raise Harry Wayte for the last couple of days. Early Sunday evening, he finally got through.

  “Been away,” Wayte explained. “To what do I owe this pleasure?”

  “Just wondered whether you’d fancy a pint.”

  “Why?”

  Winter had known Harry Wayte for years and had always admired him. There was a bluntness and impatience about the man that had made him one of the more effective DIs. At one point Winter had almost sorted himself a transfer to Wayte’s Tactical Crime Unit, but Harry had a nose for artists like Winter and the vacancy had finally gone to a younger DC. Winter had been disappointed at the time but Wayte for him was still a light in the darkness. Spend an hour or so with Harry, and you felt you were talking to a real copper.

  “One or two things to discuss,” Winter said lightly.

  “It’s Sunday. Why can’t it wait?”

  “Because next week’s a bastard.” Winter glanced at his watch. “You still living up in Havant?”

  Wayte told him a meet was out of the question. He was off to Fort Nelson this evening for a get-together with some friends. It was a regular thing, happened every month, and even the likes of Paul Winter wouldn’t break the pattern.

  Wayte paused. “What’s it about, then?” he queried.

  “Mike Valentine.”

  There was a long silence. Then Wayte was back on the phone. The meeting at Nelson started at half seven, bunch of guys from the Palmerston Forts Society. First half-hour or so was boring as fuck but this evening they were watching a little play of some kind, an entertainment, and guests were welcome. Why didn’t Winter come up, watch the play, then afterwards they could talk?

  “Delighted. Half seven, then.”

  Faraday had decided to walk to the cathedral. From the Bargemaster’s House to Old Portsmouth was a serious trek with the detour down to the seafront at least five miles but he knew he needed the fresh air. Tumbril had blown up in their faces, an event as violent and unexpected as any car bomb, and his head was still ringing from the explosion.

  Willard had spent most of the afternoon with Terry Alcott, the Assistant Chief Constable in charge of CID and Special Operations. Alcott had a place in the Meon Valley, and had evidently abandoned his day’s fishing to survey the smoking ruins of Tumbril.

  Willard had phoned Faraday just after four with a series of preliminary decisions. He wanted full statements on the lunchtime meet from Wallace, McNaughton and Faraday himself. The offices on Whale Island were to be sealed and guarded, absolutely no one permitted entry. Faraday was to make the arrangements with the MoD police, and further ensure that the Tumbril team Imber, Prebble and Joyce were to be turned away at the guardhouse when they appeared tomorrow morning at Whale Island. Willard wanted all three in his office at Kingston Crescent for half nine.

  On the phone, Willard had been businesslike, almost abrupt. Whatever happened next, the consequences of the lunchtime meet at the Solent Palace were brutally clear. This investigation was no longer about Bazza Mackenzie but about Tumbril itself.

  To his own surprise, Faraday felt almost relieved. From the start, less than a week ago, he’d been bounced into this sealed-off world where nothing was quite what it seemed. Every conversation, Faraday realised, had been governed by an uneasy sense of who knew what. Every phone call became another piece of the jigsaw to be locked away and assessed before anyone else took a look. Most investigations, in Faraday’s experience, relied above all on teamwork. Without the support of the blokes around you, any major inquiry was dead in the water. But Tumbril turned that kind of automatic, instinctive kinship on its head. In the course of four short days, trust had become a currency to be spent with extraordinary care.

  Faraday had hated it. On one level, he’d understood why Willard had fenced Tumbril off, and then built fire walls within the operation itself. “Need to know’ was rule one for every security service in the world, and there were decent coppers, people like Nick Hayder, who thrived on it. Yet to Faraday, this kind of MO tight-fisted, calculating, cold fed a paranoia that ended up tainting everything. You didn’t know who to confide in, who to bounce ideas off. Your hands were shackled by the constant anxiety that a misplaced word or creature misht blow an entire year’s work. These were pressures that it took someone very special to withstand, and Faraday now understood why even Nick Hayder in the weeks before his accident had begun to buckle.

  What would happen next? Lawyers at the Crown Prosecution Service would clearly have a view, and that would probably govern the immediate days ahead, but beyond the CPS lay deeper family issues that the force itself would have to confront. Willard was right. Tumbril had been comprehensively blown. Someone within the tight inner circle had been feeding Mackenzie information. Maybe for money. Maybe for advantage. Maybe in revenge for some private slight. Whatever the motive, it represented the deepest possible wound to an organisation that relied on at least a measure of mutual trust.

  Some form of internal inquiry, Faraday thought, was the likeliest outcome. A senior officer from the Professional Standards Department would probably be tasked to piece together the debris that was Tumbril, and deduce who, exactly, had lit the fuse. But that exercise, in itself, was fraught with fresh problems. Rumours of Tumbril’s existence had already ruffled feathers, CID especially, and confirmation of this ultra-covert operation would further sour those who already regarded themselves as pariahs, un trusted by senior management.

  Tumbril’s post-mortem would probably last for months. People would start talking. A corporate itch would become an open sore. How come these guys get half a million to squirrel themselves away when we have problems with a night’s overtime? And how come such clever fuckers let everything turn to rat shit? Faraday could imagine the gleeful, embittered exchanges in divisional CID offices across the force. Even fellow DIs, foot soldiers in the war against volume crime, would probably have a dig.

  The prospect, all too likely, filled Faraday with gloom, and as the light drained from the Solent, he paused in the lengthening shadows of the fun fair to take stock. To date, his contribution to Tumbril had been less than distinguished. Maybe now, he thought, was the time for some serious detective work.

  Fort Nelson straddled the crest of Portsdown Hill, one of a series of low, red-brick fortifications that ringed the great Victorian arsenal of Portsmouth dockyard. From up here on top of the hill, the geographical facts that had shaped Pompey’s turbulent past were easy to grasp. The busy spread of the city below was mapped in a thousand street lights and the southward jut of the island was defined by the blackness of the encroaching sea. Getting out of his car and gazing out, Winter could visualise the three offshore forts that had sealed Spithead and the harbour approaches from the threat of French invasion. If you ever needed an explanation for Pompey’s insularity, for the city’s determination to turn its back on the world, then here it was. A place apart, thought Winter. The perfect excuse for a lifetime on the piss and centuries of recreational inbreeding.

  He found Harry Wayte inside the Artillery Hall, a cavernous showcase for hundreds of years of military hardware. The DI was standing beside an impressive-looking field piece, deep in conversation with an elderly man in a Barbour jacket. The hardwood of the cannon and its limber was inlaid with decorative brass. Winter was still reading the accompanying panel when Harry at last stepped over.

  “Souvenir from the Sikh Wars.” He nodded at the gun. “Where would we be without India?”

  “Still eating crap food.” Winter extended a hand. “Why haven’t I been here before?”

  “You tell me. There’s a little tour after the play. I’d take it if I were you.”

  A modest audience was already seated at the far end of the hall. Harry Wayte showed Winter to a reserved row of seats at the front. It was chilly in the hall and Winter was wondering about nipping back to the car park for his coat when a young actor stepped onto the
semicircle of scuffed boards that served as a makeshift stage. Dressed in knee breeches and a collarless shirt, he sank into a solitary chair, gazed round, and then produced a letter.

  “Where’s the rest of them?” Winter had beckoned Harry closer.

  “It’s a monologue. Just him.”

  “He’s talking to himself?”

  “That’s right.” Harry smiled. “Ring any bells?”

  The piece lasted about half an hour. Winter, whose appetite for drama rarely extended beyond repeats of Heartbeat, found himself curiously sucked in. It was 1870. The lad was part of Fort Nelson’s garrison, a clerk at a Southsea bank and a part-time volunteer soldier. Three weeks in high summer found him up here on guard duty, protecting Portsmouth against a French threat that was fast disappearing under the fury of a Prussian invasion.

  News of this sudden conflagration had reached Fort Nelson through the pages of the Illustrated London News, and young Trooper Press had read the battlefield dispatches with immense envy. The French, he wrote to his fiancee, were defending the motherland with their usual vim, pressing home counter-attack after counter-attack with cavalry, the sabre and the bayonet. The Prussians, it had to be said, were doing rather well in their grey, methodical way but the whole world applauded the fearless French cuirassiers with their dash and their madcap courage. Better this style of warfare, he concluded, than living like a mole for weeks on end, poking your nose out occasionally to check whether any spare Froggies had made it over the Channel.

  Twice during the performance, Winter stole a look at Harry Wayte. The DI seemed entranced by this little drama, nodding his head from time to time as if in agreement. A lengthy aside about the relentless advance of the Prussian Guard at St-Privat brought a particular smile to his ravaged face. “The Prussian is trained to be a little shoo ted as he goes forward,” mused Trooper Press. “He develops a keen appreciation for bullet music.”

  “Bullet music?” The performance was over and Winter was on his feet, stamping the warmth back into his legs.

  “Contemporary reference,” Harry explained, ‘lifted straight from dispatches. St-Privat was curtains for the French. The Krauts were in Paris within weeks.”

  Winter, surprised, admitted his ignorance. As far as he was aware, the Germans had stayed put until 1914.

  “Wrong, mate. 1870 was the dress rehearsal. The French got a seeing-to, and forty-odd years later the pickle heads were on the march again. Trooper Press was lucky to be on the right side of the Channel. His kind of attitude, he’d have been a sitting duck for the Prussians. Times change, Paul.” He gestured towards a nearby World War One howitzer. “The technology moved on and we all dug in. You want to have a look at the rest of the fort?” He indicated a group of guests mustering by the door. “Only I could do with a couple of minutes with my mates before we find a pub.”

  With some reluctance, Winter agreed to join the tour. A couple of dozen members of the audience trooped after a guide, crisscrossing the fort, filing through narrow subterranean tunnels, pausing to step into a magazine while the guide explained the importance of guarding against accidental explosions. A single stray spark, he said, and the whole place could go up. With tons and tons of gunpowder in these roomy, brick-lined vaults, there’d be bits of Trooper Press all over the city.

  Thoughtful now, Winter followed the tour upwards until they emerged into the cold night air. Minutes later, they paused on the ramparts. The guide wanted to know whether anyone had any questions.

  Winter raised his hand. He could see the bulky shapes of cannon nearby.

  “Why do all these guns point north?” he enquired.

  “Because that’s where the threat might come from. You have to guard against landings further up the coast. A couple of days’ march and the city’s there for the taking.” The guide smiled, tapping his nose.

  “That’s the funny thing about Pompey. It’s threats from the mainland we have to worry about.”

  Winter was staring into the windy darkness, at last beginning to understand.

  “Too fucking right,” he murmured.

  Faraday sat at the back of the cathedral, letting the bare, unaccompanied plainchant wash over him. Sung in Estonian, he hadn’t got a clue about the liturgical significance of what he was hearing, whether the world was heading for heaven or hell, but just now it didn’t seem to matter. Better, he thought grimly, to keep his options wide open and discount absolutely nothing.

  Earlier, in conversation with Willard, he’d drawn a ring around the five names that were privy to Tumbril’s inner secret. Four of them were coppers Willard, Wallace, McNaughton and Faraday himself and it was an index of just how sloppy he’d become that his attention had automatically been drawn to the outsider.

  Gisela Mendel, it was true, had every reason for cementing a relationship with Mackenzie. The latter’s eagerness to buy the fort was, Faraday assumed, genuine, and if Gisela had realised that Wallace was simply a plant, there to entrap her one and only buyer, then she’d have been sorely tempted to mark Mackenzie’s card. Willard, on the other hand, would have been mad not to have anticipated and countered -this development. So what, exactly, was the real nature of his relationship with the woman? Was he as dotty about her as Faraday’s first glimpse of them together had suggested? Had Willard, indeed, been the cue for her marriage to collapse?

  This line of inquiry, Faraday knew, led to some very deep waters indeed. At best, Willard was guilty of letting Gisela get too close to the bid to entrap Mackenzie. That would argue for naivety on his part and calculating self-interest on hers. At worst, unthinkably, Willard might himself be tied into Mackenzie through Gisela Mendel. Mackenzie would presumably pay a sizeable premium not only to secure the fort but also buy his own escape from the attentions of Operation Tumbril. What sweeter bung than, say, 100,000 into the back pocket of his chief tormentor?

  Faraday smiled at the thought, easing his position on the hard cathedral seating, sensing already that this piece of investigative speculation was a non-starter. Willard was the all-time control freak. He couldn’t make a cup of tea without taking sole charge of the kitchen. Accept money from the likes of Mackenzie, and he’d hand the man a loaded gun. Why would Willard surrender the rest of his life to the man he’d sworn to put behind bars?

  Dismissing the thought, Faraday returned to yesterday’s crucial meet at the Solent Palace Hotel. At Willard’s insistence, he’d listened again to the recording, concentrating on the moment when the conversation across the table in the window had so suddenly taken a turn for the worse. Buried in what followed could be a clue, a tiny smudge of chalk on a tree, something that might flag the investigative path forward. He’d listened to the recording three times in all, hearing the anger in Mackenzie’s voice, the resentment bred by his knowledge of the trap closing around him, his belief all too real that his hands-on days of wheeling and dealing in cocaine were history and that he deserved a little credit for the transformation he’d wrought in his own and Pompey’s fortunes. It was, in the end, a question of status. The butterfly had emerged from the chrysalis, a maggot no longer. King of the City, indeed.

  Faraday felt a tiny jolt of recognition. He straightened on the chair, forcing himself back through his memory of the recording, trying to identify that one phrase that Mackenzie had let slip. It was there. He knew it was. He could sense its rhythm in his head, the tell-tale metre, the ripple of incandescent anger that gave Mackenzie away. Something chippy. Something about his roots. Something about Copnor. Then, as the final passage of plainsong began to fade, Faraday had it. Punchy little mush front the backstreets of Copnor. That’s what he’d said.

  As the audience began to applaud and the singers took a bow, Faraday sat back, astonished at the implications of his discovery. Punchy little mush from the backstreets of Copnor. Just so.

  Moments later came the lightest of taps on his shoulder. Faraday twisted round in his chair. Nigel Phillimore was standing behind him. There was to be a modest reception for the Estonians i
n the Sally Port Hotel tomorrow evening. The choir was off back to Tallinn and the cathedral was saying thank you. If Faraday wanted to be part of that farewell, he was more than welcome to come along. Seven o’clock would be fine.

  Faraday gazed up at him, aware that the details had barely registered.

  “Of course.” He smiled. “I’ll do my very best.”

  A couple of miles east of Fort Nelson, commanding an even better view of the city, was a hilltop pub called The Churchillian. Winter and Harry Wayte had driven there in convoy. Now they sat together at a table by the window, nearly a pint down, still discussing Pompey’s role in the defence of the realm.

  “Blood and treasure,” Wayte grunted. “When the trumpets sounded and the drums beat, you couldn’t find a richer city in the kingdom. The minute the war was over, they were all back on the turnpike, riding hard for London. That’s why Pompey blokes grab it while they can. That’s why the kids are off their heads most of the time. It’s in the genes, mate.” He nodded. “Blood and treasure.”

  “Whose blood?”

  “Ours.”

  “And the treasure?”

  “The King’s.” Wayte raised his glass. “Here’s to September.”

  September was the month Wayte was due to retire. Listening to him now, watching him amongst his civvy mates at Fort Nelson, Winter felt the faintest stirrings of envy. Speaking for himself, Winter was happy to admit that he dreaded the prospect of leaving the job. He wouldn’t have a clue what to do with the empty days that yawned before him. Harry, on the other hand, couldn’t wait for it to happen.

  Winter watched him drain his glass, then went to the bar for refills. By the time he got back, Wayte was deep in an abandoned copy of the Sunday Telegraph.

  “So what are you going to do?”

  “When?” Wayte looked up, folding the paper.

  “After September.”