‘Yeah?’
Willard demolished the last of his baguette and changed the subject. He’d heard about the girl coming off the flats last night and he wanted to know what Faraday was doing about it. There might, in the end, be an outside chance of declaring it a Major Crime and the last thing he wanted was surprises.
Faraday laid out the sequence of events. If Willard took over the investigation, his own involvement would cease. He had enough shoplifters, house burglaries and vehicle thefts to fill any working day but Helen Bassam’s death offered a different kind of challenge and there were threads in the girl’s story that he wanted to tease out for himself. Better, therefore, to keep the incident low profile and hang onto the role of SIO. Not that Willard was easily snowed.
‘You’re sure she came off the roof? Not some flat or other?’
‘Ninety-nine per cent.’
‘Any witnesses? Anyone with her?’
‘It’s possible. There’s a kid we’re trying to TIE.’
Trace, Implicate or Eliminate. Willard wanted to know more.
‘He’s young.’
‘How young?’
‘We think around ten.’
‘Ten?’ Willard whistled. ‘What’s wrong with this city?’
It was a good question; Faraday didn’t volunteer an answer. Instead he mapped the routes the inquiry was taking. There was nothing to help them on the Misper list. The CPU at Netley had yet to send anything through. The post-mortem wouldn’t happen until Monday.
‘You think she jumped?’
‘It’s a possibility.’
‘But why would she do that?’
Faraday explained about the Afghan boyfriend. According to the mother, she was wild about him and something seemed to have gone wrong.
‘Wild enough to kill herself?’
‘Wild enough to do something crazy.’
‘How old’s this guy?’
Faraday hesitated, thinking of the face in the photograph. It was a question he’d asked himself, but according to Yates the mother hadn’t been sure.
‘Mid-twenties? Older? We don’t know.’
‘And the girl?’
‘Under age. Fourteen.’
Willard shot Faraday a look then bent forward. There was a low table between them and he moved his plate to one side, an almost unconscious gesture that suggested the conversation was about to move on. For the first time it occurred to Faraday that there was another reason for this casual invitation to pop upstairs. Not just an update after all.
‘There’s a job coming up,’ Willard began, ‘and it might be worth you having a think about it.’
Bev Yates finally raised Niamat Tabibi, the Afghan, on his mobile. The man’s English, though heavily accented, was near perfect. In particular, he seemed to have mastered the art of evasion. He was very busy just now. It would be very hard for him to find the time for a chat. No, he had no idea where the police station might be in Highland Road. And, no, his place was in no state to entertain visitors.
Yates sensed an opening. Asylum seekers needed work permits for paid employment.
‘Busy doing what exactly?’
‘Teaching. I teach.’
‘Teach what?’
‘French. And mathematics.’
‘For the love of it?’
‘Of course. I have a great deal of time. I spend it on other people. Is that a crime?’
‘Depends.’ Yates had the photograph at his elbow. Even on the phone you could sense this man’s charm. He was quick-witted and plausible. No wonder the girl had been suckered.
‘I’m making enquiries in connection with someone you may know,’ Yates began. ‘Helen Christine Bassam.’
‘Helen?’ His manner changed at once.
‘You know her?’
‘Of course.’
‘Then I really think we ought to talk.’
To Yates’s surprise, he said yes. There was a café he sometimes used. It was in Milton, a little place on the main road. It was called Kate’s Kitchen. The woman did cheap vegetarian breakfasts.
‘Round the corner from the police station?’ Yates enquired drily.
‘That’s it.’
It took Yates and Ellis a couple of minutes to walk the quarter mile to the café but the Afghan was already there, sitting at the table in the window. He’d lost a little weight since he’d had the photograph taken and if anything it underscored the hint of wistfulness in his smile. That at least was Ellis’s view. ‘Hunk,’ she muttered as Yates pushed the door open.
Niamat got to his feet at once. He was wearing black jeans and a scruffy leather jacket with an old Manchester United shirt beneath. A copy of the Guardian lay open in front of him and there was a plastic bag full of potatoes beside his chair. Strictly speaking this was Yates’s party but Ellis headed him off before the going got difficult. Despite his slightly Italian good looks, Bev had a definite problem with foreigners.
‘There’s something you ought to know about Helen,’ Ellis said at once, ‘unless someone’s told you already.’
The news that the girl was dead visibly shook the Afghan. That she’d fallen to her death from a block of flats seemed to make the news even worse. He sat down very slowly. Under different circumstances, Ellis would have offered him a stiff brandy.
‘You didn’t know?’
‘Of course not.’
‘Of course not?’ It was Yates this time. ‘You’re telling me you’re surprised?’
Niamat didn’t seem to understand the question. He was looking at Ellis with an expression close to panic.
Help me, he seemed to be saying. Give me a moment or two to get to grips with this thing.
Yates again, leaning forward across the table. Already this could have been the interview room.
‘We understand you were close.’
‘We were friends, yes.’
‘You and a fourteen-year-old girl?’
‘Of course.’
‘Why of course?’
‘Because I taught her.’
‘At school?’
‘No, at home.’
‘Whose home?’
‘Hers.’
‘You went round to her own house to teach her?’ Yates was losing his bearings. ‘Did her mother know?’
‘It was her mother’s idea, her mother’s invitation. That’s how we met. She was doing so badly at school that her mother wanted extra teaching. I have a card in the window of her local shop. French and mathematics. I’m very cheap. She rang me.’
Yates exchanged glances with Ellis. No wonder Mrs Bassam had been so bitter about her daughter’s infatuation. Not only had Helen Bassam lost her heart to this man but her mother – with the best of intentions – had been responsible for bringing them together in the first place.
Ellis asked Yates to organise some teas. While he was at the counter, she pressed the Afghan further. How often did he and Helen meet? When had he last seen her?
Niamat was still trying to remember when Yates returned with the teas. He put Ellis’s question a little more bluntly: ‘What were you doing last night?’
‘I was with friends.’
‘We’ll need their names. We’ll want to talk to them.’
‘Of course.’
‘Where did you go?’
‘Nowhere. We have no money. We stayed at home.’
‘And watched television?’
‘The television was on, yes.’
‘So what did you watch?’
The shock and the helplessness had gone now, replaced by something much closer to anger. Yates, with his usual tact, had sparked this man, and nothing gave him greater pleasure than listing the previous night’s programmes one after the other.
‘You think I’m lying? You want to know what they were about? I’ll tell you.’
He began to lay out the plot of last night’s ITV drama, and Ellis sensed the gift he so obviously had for one-to-one contact. He used his hands a lot, explaining a particularly crass narrative twist, a
nd after a while Ellis started to wonder whether even a drama as crap as At Home with the Braithwaites might have some merit.
Yates seemed to have lost interest. He reached for the sugar bowl, stony-faced, and it fell to Ellis to produce the photograph. She turned it over, showing Niamat the inscription on the back.
‘Is this your writing?’
Niamat barely looked at it.
‘Yes, I wrote it for my wife.’
‘Wife?’ Yates was back in the loop. ‘You’re telling me you’re married?’
Niamat nodded. Seconds later, Ellis was looking at another photograph he’d produced, colour this time. The shot had been taken indoors. His wife, unveiled, was raven-haired with full lips and a melting smile. Her name, he said, was Elif. One day, should Allah will it, she’d be able to join him here in England.
‘You’re seeking asylum?’
‘Yes.’ He nodded. ‘My father was in the army. He never liked the Taliban and in the end they shot him. After that, they came looking for me.’
There was something so simple and matter-of-fact in the way Niamat put this that Ellis knew at once it must be true. He’d fled with three others. His mother had sold the family’s land and $9000 had bought Niamat’s passage to London. He’d come through Iran and Turkey, avoiding soldiers and wolves on the border. A sand dredger had taken him from Istanbul to an Italian beach near Bari and from there he’d ridden north on a series of lorries. The last one, thanks to Eurotunnel, had landed him in Dover. It was night-time and it had been raining. The security man, to his surprise, hadn’t touched him.
‘This stuff about the flowers.’ Yates was examining the back of the photo. ‘What was Helen supposed to make of that?’
‘I’ve no idea. It comes from a Rimbaud poem, “Aube”. It’s a beautiful poem. It’s about dawn. It’s about the beginning of the world. I told you, the quotation was for my wife.’
‘It’s a love poem then?’
‘Of course, if you read it that way.’
‘So why give it to Helen?’
‘I didn’t,’ he said stonily. ‘She stole it.’
Back at Southsea nick, half an hour later, Yates and Ellis found Faraday working through a mass of emails in his office. He’d started a Policy Book on Helen Bassam’s death, a running log listing every new decision on the inquiry together with a brief rationale, and it lay open on the desk beside the computer. Half an hour earlier, according to Faraday’s scrawl, Scenes of Crime had phoned to confirm that the blood patterning on the pavement around the dead girl’s body was consistent with a fall from height.
‘Rocket science,’ Faraday murmured, aware of Yates’s interest. ‘What about our Afghan friend?’
Yates described the conversation in the café. In his view, Niamat Tabibi was talking a load of bollocks. Odds-on he was shagging the girl though he appeared to have a solid alibi for last night. Ellis said nothing. The open email on the screen had come from the Superintendent in charge of Community Safety at force headquarters in Winchester. He wanted Faraday’s thoughts on a rumoured sighting of a pied billed grebe in the bird reserve at Farlington Marshes, and so far Faraday’s reply had stretched to three paragraphs.
‘I’ve had the headmaster on from St Peter’s,’ Faraday was saying. ‘The girl was at school there. Her grades have been going from bad to worse and lately she hasn’t been turning up at all. They’re setting up a case conference with the welfare but there’s obviously no point any more. The head’s got a stack of pupils wanting to attend the funeral. It seems she had lots of friends.’
Ellis turned away. This morning’s developments were now public knowledge. Helen’s name had been released to the media, featuring in news reports on local radio. Whether Helen Bassam was popular or not was beside the point. Nothing caught the adolescent imagination more than the prospect of a good funeral, preferably in the rain.
‘I don’t see it the way Bev does,’ she said quietly. ‘I think the Afghan guy’s kosher.’
‘Meaning?’
‘Meaning they were just friends. That wasn’t what she wanted but that’s all she got. The rest was fantasy. She made him up.’
‘Wasn’t the mother convinced they were screwing?’ Yates enquired. ‘Or am I imagining things?’
‘The mother’s loonier than her daughter. The husband’s gone, that’s the clue. Break a marriage like that and you’re left with a bloody great hole. Niamat filled it, don’t ask me how, but he did. That’s not breaking the law, not so far anyway.’
Faraday smiled and turned back to his computer, putting the finishing touches to his email. It turned out he’d seen the grebe himself, only a couple of days ago. The bird had blown in from America, an orphan borne east on the ever-deepening frontal troughs.
Yates read the email over Faraday’s shoulder, rolling his eyes when he realised what it was about. He’d never understood Faraday’s passion for birdwatching, least of all when the jobs were piling up like this. Finally, he took Dawn Ellis’s elbow and steered her towards the open door. Only when they were in the corridor outside did Faraday call after them.
‘There’s an overtime job on tonight,’ he said, ‘Brennan’s.’
Winter had the details in the CID office. Hartigan was authorising a scaled-down stake-out at the DIY superstore, five uniforms and three CID. Cathy Lamb was working out the details and the briefing would be over at Fratton at six sharp. Winter’s money was on a bust around midnight. Allow a couple of hours afterwards for the paperwork and they’d all be in bed by three at the latest.
He sat back in his chair, hands clasped behind his neck, beaming up at Bev Yates. Dawn Ellis, who was mates with Cathy Lamb, wanted to know what had swung it with Hartigan. According to Cathy, the Ops Supt wouldn’t go beyond a dare-you squad car, the cheapo option. Now he was spending serious money. How come?
All eyes turned to Winter. Part of his legendary reputation for getting results rested on the fact that no one in the office really knew him. He was loud and boastful, and gloried in a congratulatory lager or two when his latest punt came good, but he rarely shared his trade secrets, preferring to hide behind the word ‘hunch’. The fact that there were no forms for hunches never bothered him in the least. On the contrary, he revelled in his contempt for paperwork, believing that a good detective spent as little time at the keyboard as possible.
‘Well?’ It was Ellis again.
Winter glanced at his watch then shrugged.
‘Some bloke belled Crimestoppers,’ he murmured. ‘Never fails.’
Five
FRIDAY, 9 FEBRUARY, early evening
Faraday was still at his desk when the file arrived from the Child Protection Unit. They were currently fielding twenty referrals a day from every corner of the county and this morning’s request hadn’t been actioned until after lunch. More to the point, the keyword ‘Doodie’ had found no echoes in the database, and only a PC with a good memory had recognised the nickname from inputting additional details a month or two back.
The fax stretched to two pages, a digest of information from every agency in the city touched by Doodie’s young life. His real name was Gavin Prentice and his date of birth put him at ten years old. He’d first appeared on the police radar screen nearly nine months earlier after an incident in Somerstown. A neighbour had watched him setting fire to a wheelie bin, something at which Doodie evidently excelled, and she’d called the police. In the dry, spare prose of the local beat man, Gavin Prentice had a history of nuisance, and a number of other householders had confirmed similar incidents. Several days later, his mother was invited to attend Central police station where her son was given an informal warning by the duty Inspector.
Faraday reached for a pen. Doodie’s mother went by the name of Denise Prentice and lived in one of the busier Somerstown blocks, five minutes’ walk from Chuzzlewit House. There was a mobile number entered beside her name but a later note suggested the phone was no longer operational.
After this first brush with the law, Doodie’
s young life went rapidly out of control. Entries from the Educational Welfare Officer established that he was no longer attending school. Automatic notifications to Social Services and the Youth Offending Team had followed the visit to Central, but letters to Mum from both organisations had gone unacknowledged. Two months later, Doodie had been detained again, this time in Woolies where he’d been caught nicking Pokémon cards. A second informal warning had followed but Doodie plainly hadn’t been listening because – within three weeks – he was back in front of the Inspector after breaking into an empty property in Southsea and – once again – getting busy with the matches. There’d been no element of gain in this escapade but the Inspector had nevertheless issued a Final Warning.
Doodie was still a child, of course, but the age of ten marks the start of legal responsibility, and when he started taking a hammer to parked cars, reaching through the shattered glass to lift whatever he could, he found himself before the magistrates in the Juvenile Court. On 17 November last year, he’d been given a two-year Supervision Order. That meant reporting for regular sessions with a supervising officer at the Youth Offending Team, a woman called Betsy, but she’d quickly recognised that parts of Doodie lay way beyond her reach, and he’d been referred on to the city’s Persistent Young Offender project. In a parting shot, Betsy had described her brief relationship with young Gavin as ‘particularly challenging’, a form of words which clearly did Doodie scant justice. The kid was a nightmare.
Faraday quickly scanned the rest of the fax. He had regular dealings with the PYO project and admired the woman who ran it, a combative fifty-three-year-old, Anghared Davies. Dealing with tearaways as young as Doodie required a great deal of patience as well as a preparedness to take substantial risks, and he scribbled himself a reminder to give their office a ring first thing Monday. Doodie would have been assigned an individual support worker, maybe even two, and in theory they’d been seeing him on a near-daily basis. In the meantime it was important to get hold of the kid, and the best place to start was his home address.
He reached for the phone. The CPU fax had been right about Denise Prentice’s mobile: the number was no longer available. Faraday checked his watch. Half past five. Dawn Ellis, to his certain knowledge, was out on another inquiry, while Bev Yates would be driving over to Fratton for the Brennan’s briefing. Tonight, he was due to meet Marta for a drink before going on to a concert in the Guildhall. That still gave him an hour or so to pay a visit to Doodie’s mum.
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