Angels Passing

by Hurley, Graham

  ‘Are you sure there’s no one we can phone for you?’

  ‘Please …’ Mrs Bassam nodded towards the stairs ‘… just go on up.’

  Ellis was first into the bedroom, recognising the scene at once. At twenty-nine, you kidded yourself that you were beyond all this but in your heart you knew it wasn’t true: the unmade bed, the floor strewn with discarded bits of clothing, the ripped-out fashion pics Blu-tacked to the wall, the tiny dressing table littered with pots of hair gel and lip gloss. The contrast with downstairs couldn’t have been starker, and Ellis began to suspect that the gaunt, brittle figure in the armchair had simply given up.

  There’d have been confrontation after confrontation about this room of Helen’s; it happened in every household. But there were certain kids who blocked the path to a nice simple life. When the shouting began, they shouted louder. Appeal to their better nature, they’d laugh in your face. Threaten them with punishment, even physical violence, and they’d probably get their revenge in first. She knew this for certain because she’d been that way herself, a total nightmare, and it was only the long years of living alone that had taught her how to be human again. The inside of Ellis’s head had once looked like this room and, even now, she could still taste the intoxicating turmoil of those teenage years. Adolescence could take you to the very edge. The trick was to go no further.

  Yates had found a pocket diary under the girl’s pillow. It had a picture of Nelson Mandela on the front and he flicked quickly through it, page after page of doodles, squirly spiral shapes that occupied most of January. On the 13th, a Saturday, he found a line of exclamation marks, and a couple of weeks later – the 26th – a big fat question mark. At no point had the girl made any kind of written entries, except for a number at the very front of the diary.

  1337? Yates turned to find Ellis.

  Ellis was going through the drawer in the dressing table. So far, she’d found a Walkman, CDs by Destiny’s Child and Lauryn Hill, a Boots receipt for £8.95, two sticks of chewing gum, a pocket French/English dictionary, seven National Lottery tickets, a broken watch, a lighter, two more bracelets, a 27P token from a packet of crisps and a building society bank book. The account offered instant access and the name in the front was Helen Bassam’s. Ellis paged slowly through it. Someone was putting £160 a month into the girl’s name, the whole of it withdrawn in ten and twenty-pound hits through a cash card. At fourteen, money was clearly the least of her problems.

  ‘Forty quid a week,’ Ellis murmured. ‘Can you believe that?’

  ‘Easy. It’s conscience money, from Dad.’

  ‘You think so?’

  ‘Put my life on it. He’s gone off with some bird or other and he wants to make it right with his little girl. It’s shagging money. It makes him feel better about himself.’

  ‘But forty quid? A week?’

  ‘It’s small change, love. The guy’s a lawyer. The money just walks in through the door.’

  Yates had started on a row of books on a shelf beside the wardrobe. A leather-bound copy of the New Testament looked unread but next to it was a much-thumbed paperback collection of poems. Yates opened it. The poems were in French.

  ‘Here …’

  He passed the book to Ellis. As he did so, a photograph fluttered to the floor. Ellis picked it up. The photo was black and white and showed a man in his early twenties sitting at a café table. He had a strong face – curly black hair, dark complexion – and a lovely smile, at once mischievous and wistful. The open copy of Le Monde and the glimpse of a busy concourse behind suggested one of the big Paris railway stations. She turned the photo over, peering at the inscription. It was handwritten in red ink, difficult to follow, but at last she made it out. La premiére entreprise fût, dans le sentier déjà empli de frais et blêmes éclats, une fleur qui me dit son nom.

  She turned to Yates.

  ‘How’s your French?’

  ‘Crap.’

  ‘Me too.’ Her eyes returned to the photograph. ‘What do you think?’

  ‘Seize it. Faraday does French, doesn’t he?’

  Ellis wasn’t convinced. This wasn’t a scene of crime. Nothing bad had happened here, not in the eyes of the law. No, their interest lay in developing a picture of the girl – of the life she’d led, of her friends, her interests, her ambitions, her dreams. Bits and pieces of this jigsaw might help explain her death but with a photograph like this it was all too easy to jump to conclusions. He might be someone she’d met abroad on some school trip or other. God knows, it might even be a photo she’d lifted from someone else, a hook on which to hang a whole winter of fantasies. Girlies could be like that. As Ellis knew.

  There was a movement behind them, a stirring of the air. Mrs Bassam was standing at the open door, staring at the photo. She’d found a cardigan from somewhere, a heavy piece of cable-stitching that made her look ten years older.

  ‘Do you know this person?’ It was Yates.

  She nodded, tight-lipped. ‘Take him with you.’ She turned away. ‘I don’t want him in the house.’

  Paul Winter was back at Southsea nick by just gone ten. He found Cathy Lamb juggling two phones in the big first-floor CID office that looked out onto Highland Road. Fourteen detectives worked from here, more than half the city’s total strength, and Winter – more used to the cosier set-up at Fratton – had taken a while to settle in. Now, though, he’d managed to establish squatter’s rights over a desk by the far window, a position that gave him a perfect view of everyone else in the room. In offices like these, as in life, it paid to be the watcher, not the watched.

  With Cathy giving both phones a hard time, Winter made himself a cup of coffee. The modest catering arrangements lay beside a display of custody mugshots pinned to a big wall board, a local rogues’ gallery of domestic burglars, con men, shoplifters and hard-eyed thirty-somethings who’d turned Saturday night violence into an art form.

  Winter knew these faces by heart. He knew their wives, their ex-wives, their mates, and the funny little kinks that occasionally gave him a chance for a quiet chat. Turning informer in this city wasn’t something you’d do lightly, not if you were ever hoping to make retirement, but there were a million reasons why a man might suddenly decide to offer a titbit or two, and Winter was fluent in the language of betrayal.

  Waiting for the kettle to boil, he let his eye drift from face to face. In a minute or two Cathy was going to have another go at him, he knew she was, but the truth was that he was at his happiest in this shadowy no man’s land between the good guys and the bad, between law enforcement and the help-yourself chaos that now passed for society. He knew the geography. He understood the rules. He relished the short cuts. Better Pompey, he thought, than some half-arsed flat in Albufeira.

  Cathy at last came off the phone. She had a solid frame and she’d put a bit of the weight back on since Pete had returned home, and under stress she’d developed a habit of letting her left hand stray up to the tiny fold of flesh beneath her chin. There was nothing there really, nothing to warrant the increasingly manic visits to the gym, but just now she was clearly close to bursting. Asking her why would be pointless. The list would go on forever.

  Winter drew up a chair, carefully balancing his coffee on his knee.

  ‘I checked Brennan’s out,’ he announced cheerfully. ‘A dozen bodies should do it.’

  ‘Are you kidding?’ Cathy was scowling at the phone. ‘I’m trying to get five uniforms out of Bannister and all he can talk about is bloody money. Are we going to fork out for the rest days? And can he have it in writing?’

  Bannister was one of the uniformed Inspectors up at Kingston Crescent. Policing the Southsea nightclubs on a Friday night was becoming a major peacekeeping exercise, and manpower was stretched to the limit. Winter’s mystery caller couldn’t have made life more difficult.

  ‘What about our lot?’ Winter was eyeing the duty roster.

  ‘That’s a pain as well. We’ve got five abstractions already and Rick Stapleton’s
gone down with flu. The guys on leave aren’t back until Monday and I’ve got a stack of jobs as long as your arm.’

  The mention of leave tempted Winter to point out that he was back on the strength, an unforseen bonus, but under the circumstances he left it alone. Better to let Cathy rant for a while. Get it off her chest.

  ‘This bloody job needs a magician, not a copper like me. Something like this comes up and they expect you to conjure bodies out of thin air. Money will solve it, of course, because it always does, but that’s not my conversation.’

  Winter took a sip of coffee. He knew exactly what Cathy was saying. It was Faraday’s job to take the bid to the Ops Superintendent and screw him for the overtime. Seven months as an acting DI had given her an intimate knowledge of that kind of grief and she was buggered if she was going to let him off the hook. In any case, she and Faraday had had a serious run-in over Pete Lamb’s moonlighting, and relationships had never been quite the same since. Far from it.

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘Christ knows, you tell me.’ Cathy rolled her eyes. ‘They called him out on the jumper this morning, young kid in Somerstown. No one’s seen him since.’

  ‘Leading from the front. Like the book says.’

  ‘Oh really? Which book’s that?’

  Winter let the question hang in the air. He loved Cathy in these moods – reckless, angry – not least because it confirmed a conclusion he’d come to himself.

  ‘He’s losing it, isn’t he?’ He was leaning back in his chair, a big smile on his face.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Faraday. Something’s got to him. God knows what, but you can see it in his face. He’s not at home any more. The place is up for sale.’

  ‘Really? That makes you the lucky one. I hardly see him at all.’

  ‘That bad?’

  ‘Yeah, if you really want to know.’ Cathy glanced round. There were other detectives in the room but not many. She frowned. She knew there were conversations she shouldn’t have, and this was very definitely one of them, but in truth she was way past caring. Faraday should be back in his office by now, shackled to the duty roster and the overtime budget, trying to corner enough resources to spring tonight’s little trap and scoop up some worthwhile villains. Instead, he’d simply disappeared. Again. ‘I put it down to his sex life,’ she muttered. ‘I think he’s shagging a married woman. In fact I know he is.’

  ‘Really?’ Winter looked delighted. ‘And is that a problem?’

  Cathy gazed at him a moment, then offered a tired smile.

  ‘Yeah,’ she said, ‘but only if you’re Faraday.’

  It was the warden at the flats who told Faraday about the resident on the top floor. She’d mentioned the name earlier to one of the PCs, and he’d made a note, but the resident had somehow been forgotten in all the commotion. The woman Faraday needed to talk to was Grace Randall. She lived in 131. Kids popped up to see her from time to time and she’d certainly know all about the dead girl.

  ‘How come?’

  ‘Because she was always nipping up to Grace’s.’

  ‘But I thought kids weren’t allowed here?’

  ‘They’re not, unless they’ve got good reason. That’s why you should have a chat. Mrs Randall’s old, mind, but you might be lucky.’

  Lucky?

  There were 136 flats in the block and the door-to-doors had so far only reached as far as the seventeenth floor, concentrating first on residents living directly above the point of impact. It was highly likely that the girl had come off the roof but it was just possible to squeeze through the windows within the flats themselves. So far, to no one’s surprise, enquiries had drawn a blank, but it was still important to eliminate some prank or other that might have gone horribly wrong.

  Faraday rode alone in the lift to the very top of the building, watching the numbers climb in the digital readout above the sliding doors. He’d managed to secure a POLSA search team, four specially trained PCs from Central, in addition to a couple of extra DCs from Fratton. He’d set up a temporary incident room in the day centre on the ground floor, and the POLSA team had conducted a fingertip search on the roof. The latter had produced nothing except wet knees, and a similar search around all four corners of the block looked just as unpromising. The Crime Scene Manager, though, had finally released the body to the undertaker and alerted the senior technician at the mortuary. After a long phone conversation, his Detective Chief Inspector had decided against calling in one of the Home Office pathologists to do the post-mortem. There were no indications of foul play and a Death by Misadventure verdict at the Coroner’s inquest wouldn’t justify the added expense.

  The lift juddered to a halt on the twenty-third floor. There were flowers on occasional tables along the corridor and the place had just had a fresh coat of paint. Faraday paused to get his bearings, then retraced his path to the double flight of concrete steps that led to the roof. Access was normally barred by a locked door but first thing this morning, to the warden’s bewilderment, the door had been wide open. Thanks to the Nokia, and the efforts of Yates and Ellis in Old Portsmouth, they at last had a name. In all probability, subject to formal ID, Helen Christine Bassam had been up these steps only hours ago. But why?

  It took a while for Grace Randall to get to her front door. She peered out at Faraday, a thin figure bent over a Zimmer frame. She was wearing an embroidered white nightdress and a pair of pink slippers with tiny bells on the toes. A twist of ribbon, also pink, hung from her snow-white hair.

  Faraday showed her his warrant card and stepped inside. The flat had a strangely sweet smell, almonds tainted with bleach, and he could hear familiar music from an open door at the end of the tiny hall.

  ‘Puccini?’ he queried.

  The old woman was locking the door behind him. She moved very slowly and when she spoke Faraday could hear a deep bubbling in her lungs.

  ‘La Bobème,’ she whispered. ‘Would you care for a sherry?’

  Faraday flattened himself against the wall as the bells shuffled past. The room at the end was the lounge. After the gloom of the hall, it was flooded with light.

  While Grace bent to a glass-fronted cabinet in the corner, Faraday stood in the window, staring out. The weather was beginning to clear at last, livid shafts of sunlight spearing through the tumble of clouds over the distant swell of the Isle of Wight. The view was extraordinary and Faraday could see the city mapped beneath him, 150,000 souls jigsawed into acre after acre of terraced streets. To the west lay the forest of grey cranes in the naval dockyard and the muddle of buildings around the cathedral in Old Portsmouth; to the south the long sweep of Southsea seafront with the Solent beyond; while out to the east he could see a chilly gleam of light on the gunmetal waters of Langstone Harbour. He stood there for a moment longer, remembering the view from his bedroom window only hours earlier: at seven o’clock, dawn had been no more than a promise in the rain-lashed darkness and the puddles were inch-deep on the track outside his garage.

  He shook his head, trying to pick out the contours of his harbourside house. He’d lived and worked in this city for more than two decades and it never ceased to take him by surprise. There were always new perspectives, sudden changes of view, and this was undoubtedly one of them.

  He turned to find a brimming glass of sherry at his elbow. The old woman’s hand was shaking and he rescued the glass before any more spilled.

  Grace licked the sherry from her fingers.

  I have binoculars,’ she wheezed. ‘You can see Osborne House on the better days.’

  Osborne House was on the Isle of Wight, way out beyond the navy’s parade ground at Spithead. Faraday had been there once with J-J, depressed by the relentless gloom of the Gothic interiors.

  Grace sank into an armchair by the window. Biscuit crumbs and the odd crisp lapped at the semicircle of stained carpet at her feet. She gestured Faraday towards the cluttered sofa and then reached for the rubber mask on the low table beside her chair. The mask was connected to
a tall metal cylinder and she sucked at the oxygen while Faraday finally tore himself away from the view. The sofa, like Grace Randall herself, had seen better days.

  Faraday made a space for himself amongst a week’s worth of Daily Telegraphs, wondering quite where to start. Listening to Grace Randall fighting for breath, he recognised the symptoms. His grandfather, a lifelong smoker, had also suffered from emphysema. This could be one of the longer conversations.

  ‘There’s been a fatality,’ he began. ‘A young girl.’

  He outlined what had happened overnight. He understood that no children were allowed to live in the block but the warden seemed to think that Mrs Randall might have kids as visitors from time to time, one young girl in particular. True?

  The old woman offered an emphatic nod. The oxygen had pinked her face. She stared at Faraday for a while as if weighing her next move.

  ‘Describe this girl.’ It was no more than a whisper.

  Faraday mentioned jeans and a green top. Sprawled on the paving stones, it was hard to be precise about height but five five, five six would be a reasonable guess.

  ‘Hair?’

  ‘Dark. Curly.’

  ‘And here?’ She touched her wrist.

  ‘A bracelet. Silver, with charms.’

  Grace nodded and turned her gaze towards the window. There was a long silence. Fat drops of rain were splashing against the glass again.

  ‘I used to be a singer on the boats,’ she managed at last, ‘before the war. Funny life.’

  She lifted one thin arm and Faraday realised she was pointing towards the Solent. The big transatlantic liners used to come this way, outward bound for New York.

  ‘This girl, Mrs Randall,’ he prompted. ‘You may be able to help us.’

  ‘I can, Mr Faraday.’ She took another gulp of air. I can.’

  She wanted him to see her photographs this time. They were on the drinks cabinet, in a big album. She waited for Faraday to fetch them. Standing at the cabinet, he heard the quiet hiss of gas. More oxygen.