Angels Passing

by Hurley, Graham

  ‘Haven’t a clue. Might be a wanker or a suicide, of course, but I’d say neither.’

  ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘Someone had a go at him first.’

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘Pretty certain. There’s bruising down here …’ He touched his own ribs on the right-hand side. ‘And his face is a mess. Cuts and abrasions around the eyes. You don’t get that from a rope.’

  ‘Hands?’

  ‘Not much. No knuckle damage that I can see. He may have been tied up.’

  Faraday raised an eyebrow. No one in the SOCO’s position, least of all someone as experienced as Proctor, jumped to easy conclusions. The fact that he’d pretty much excluded suicide already was immensely significant.

  ‘Have we got a name?’

  ‘Nothing. Nothing in his pockets, no mobile, no keys, no money even. And by the look of his Reeboks, he was dragged up the bank there. Mud all over the toes. He might have been unconscious. He might even have been dead already. Too early to tell.’

  ‘Vehicle?’

  ‘Has to be. But the guy with the dog walked right along this road before going up on top and says he saw bugger all first thing. The place was empty.’

  ‘What was he doing up top? In pitch darkness?’

  ‘He said the dog did a runner. In fact it was the dog who found the body. Barked like a bastard, he says.’

  ‘Tyre marks?’ Faraday nodded down the road towards the end.

  ‘Everywhere, multiple patterns. This is a great shagging spot, famous for it.’

  Faraday produced his mobile, realising with some relief that his headache had gone. Then he paused, looking across at Proctor.

  ‘He’d need to jump off something …’ he frowned ‘… wouldn’t he?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘There’s an old Schweppes crate up there, the kind you put empties in. If you upended the thing to give yourself the height, and you’d got the rope good and tight …’ He shrugged. ‘The crate’s up there beneath the body, so I suppose it’s possible.’

  Faraday was trying to envisage the way you’d do it, with a plastic crate and a length of rope, half naked in the pouring rain. A moment’s thought and it seemed even more unlikely.

  ‘You’re thinking other people?’

  Proctor shot him a look. There was a protocol here, an unspoken ban on leading questions, and Faraday had just ignored it.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said at length, ‘I am. And something else, too. Whoever strung him up, if he was strung up, was sending a message. Bloke looks pathetic in that thong. Just like he’s meant to. Hang a notice round his neck and you couldn’t make it plainer.’

  Proctor gave Faraday a parting nod and excused himself. There was a ton of stuff to get through and he’d leave Faraday to have a think about calling in the Home Office pathologist. His tone of voice left no doubts about his own opinion in the matter but strictly speaking the decision belonged at headquarters level, the request routed through Willard. Either way, as both men well knew, the Detective Superintendent would expect to be in on the action from the start.

  Another vehicle had just turned up. There came the slam of a car door and Faraday turned to find himself face to face with the Scenes of Crime photographer who’d attended Helen Bassam. Two bodies in two days. He gave Faraday a brisk nod as he began to unpack his gear.

  ‘Can’t keep meeting like this, sir,’ he muttered, screwing a wide-angle lens onto the body of his Canon.

  Faraday walked away, following the tape as it looped in towards the rampart. At a scene like this, he knew that Proctor would be spoiled for evidence. He had the rope for a start, especially the knot. The rope might offer DNA, as well as the chance of establishing ownership, and there were now experts who could interpret all kinds of information from the way a knot was tied. The bough over which the rope had been thrown would be sawn off and the groove marks anaylsed to shed light on the exact sequence of events. Then there was the crate and the clothes to be examined for DNA traces, plus a fingertip search around the site. Proctor’s team would be looking for anything that may have been dropped, as well as significant footprints. Soil and leaf samples would be invaluable if other people later came into the frame, as would bark scrapings from the tree.

  Later, with more bodies at his disposal, Proctor would organise a POLSA search across a wider area while the body itself would be declared a separate scene of crime. At post-mortem, in the hands of a Home Office pathologist, detailed examination would be able to test Proctor’s theory about an earlier assault while various bodily fluids would offer chemical clues to this nameless stranger’s last twenty-four hours. Scenes of Crime procedures were meat and drink to detectives like Faraday and Proctor. Violent death was seldom pretty but the cool, increasingly scientific language of detection – talk of nasal flushings and low copy number, of pollen analysis and spore counts – offered some small consolation.

  Faraday was halfway up the rampart, a couple of hundred metres west of the scene of crime, when he finally got through to Willard. It was still only ten past eight. The Detective Superintendent seemed to be on the loo.

  ‘Morning, sir.’

  At first Willard assumed the call was about Helen Bassam, an update on enquiries, but Faraday said there’d been nothing really solid and then explained what had happened up at Hilsea Lines. He needed a decision on calling in the Home Office pathologist and a steer on the direction the inquiry might take. Just now, by virtue of his presence on site, Faraday was Senior Investigating Officer, but he couldn’t see that situation surviving very much longer. Already, from the conversation with Jerry Proctor, this would-be suicide had the makings of a major crime. Willard’s team had been set up to deal with exactly these kinds of incidents and Faraday knew how Willard relished the challenges of ambuiguity. The guy might or might not have gone for the ultimate wank and got it wrong. He might or might not have topped himself. If not, then who killed him? And why did they go to such lengths to dress it up as something else?

  ‘A thong, you say?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘And no idea who he might be?’

  ‘None at all.’

  ‘Excellent.’ Faraday could hear the cistern emptying. ‘Give me half an hour.’

  It was Cathy Lamb who roused Winter. By half nine, he’d been asleep just over three hours. Was sleep deprivation part of the job now? Weren’t there Health and Safety rules about this kind of thing?

  ‘You’re lucky to get any kip at all. The Custody Officer at Central was on at half seven.’

  ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘Hartigan had just phoned him about the Brennan’s job. Wanted to know how many bodies we’d locked up.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘The Custody Officer told him none. Hartigan wasn’t best pleased, as you might imagine. Apparently he thinks you’ve been taking the piss.’

  Winter struggled upright in bed. This conversation was beginning to upset him.

  ‘What the fuck does he expect?’ he grunted. ‘When he goes fishing, does he ask the bloody trout for a schedule?’

  ‘Hartigan doesn’t go fishing. He goes to the supermarket like anyone else would. It’s means and ends, Paul. He put in the means and we came up with fuck all.’

  ‘That’s because they chose not to turn up.’

  ‘Brilliant. It’s going to be a short conversation then.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘When he holds the post-mortem.’ She began to laugh. ‘Don’t you wish you were in Portugal?’

  At Willard’s insistence, he and Faraday returned to the top of the ramparts, careful to stay outside Proctor’s jealously guarded inner cordon. On Faraday’s advice, Willard had turned up with a pair of Wellington boots. They were blue, with yellow tops, and they sat oddly with his sleek grey pinstriped three-piece suit.

  A muddy path ran along the top of the ramparts, much used by walkers and kids on mountain bikes, and Willard and Faraday had a good view
of the crime scene from a distance of perhaps twenty metres. The tree, a gnarled old oak, lay in a bowl immediately below the path. The bowl was full of sodden leaf mould and the near-naked body hung on a tatty old length of what looked like nylon rope, strung from an overhanging bough.

  The photographer had finished with his first set of pictures and was checking the digital images while Jerry Proctor taped plastic bags over the hands, feet and head of the corpse. From a distance, this pitiful figure could have been even younger than early twenties and Faraday saw at once what Proctor had meant by ‘humiliation’. He was thin to the point of emaciation. Blood had pooled in the lower half of his body, giving it a reddish tinge, while his face, a bluish purple, was twisted at an angle to his torso as if he was still trying to slip the noose. His long, thin arms hung stiff with rigor mortis and even from twenty metres the bruising around his ribs was plainly visible. The thong was scarlet, fringed with lace around the top, and barely covered his groin.

  Willard studied him for a long moment as Proctor, with the help of two colleagues, prepared to cut the rope above his head. Lowered to the ground, he would be photographed again before the waiting plastic sheet was wrapped around his body. Parcelled with gaffer tape at both ends, the corpse would then be shipped to the morgue at St Mary’s Hospital to await the afternoon’s post-mortem. Willard, after the briefest call to the Head of CID at headquarters, had OK’d a Home Office pathologist. Proctor had made the necessary arrangements and expected the PM to start around three.

  ‘Mispers?’ Willard muttered.

  Faraday was watching the line of uniformed PCs combing the road below them. They advanced in a line, step by careful step, like slow-motion guardsmen on parade.

  ‘Nothing that fits.’

  Willard was looking beyond the cluster of figures beneath the tree. The ramparts fell away steeply towards the road.

  ‘It wouldn’t have been easy, dragging matey up here.’ He paused. ‘If that’s what happened.’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Any ideas on time?’

  Faraday shook his head. Rigor set in four hours or so after death. The body had been discovered at half five and Scenes of Crime had confirmed rigor at around seven. That put the time of death at three at the latest. Willard was already busy figuring out various scenarios. Friday nights, for one thing, were indivisible from violence.

  ‘Bunch of guys on the piss? Things get out of hand?’ He glanced across at Faraday. ‘Would you buy that?’

  ‘What about the thong?’

  ‘Practical joke? Some kind of celebration that goes pear-shaped?’

  ‘Unlikely.’

  ‘I agree. What else then?’

  Faraday didn’t answer. Speculation at this point was, in his view, a waste of time. The stiff little parcel inside the double-wrapped plastic could have come from anywhere. It didn’t have to be Portsmouth. It could be Southampton, Brighton, London even. The shortest cut to any kind of lead would be a firm ID and, until that happened, all bets were off. Rule one in situations like these was very simple: investigate every death as if it was a murder until you can prove otherwise.

  ‘We’ve started the house-to-house, sir.’ He nodded towards the nearby housing estate. ‘It was pissing down last night and this is a respectable area so I shouldn’t hold your breath but you never know, someone might have seen a vehicle.’

  ‘Go to bed early, do they?’

  ‘So the beat man says.’

  Willard was watching the men from the undertaker’s standing in a huddle beyond the tape, waiting for the body to be delivered by the SOCO team. Their van was parked beside them, the rear doors open, and Faraday let the image settle in his brain. Not paradise, he thought, or even hell. But the back of an S-reg Transit, smelling faintly of bleach.

  ‘It was a no-no last night,’ Faraday said.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘At Brennan’s. We had eight bodies there, booted and spurred, but no one turned up.’

  ‘And Hartigan?’

  ‘Gone ballistic, according to Cathy. He’s holding a post-mortem first thing Monday. Major grief for Mr Winter.’

  Mention of Winter’s name brought a glint of interest to Willard’s eyes. Like anyone with a stake in the CID’s reputation, he had definite views on Winter’s more reckless adventures, but reputation wasn’t necessarily the same as performance and he had a softish spot for certain aspects of old-style detection. The problem with people like Winter was reining them in. Off the leash, they could do you serious damage.

  ‘Someone told me he had leave booked.’

  ‘He did. He was going to Portugal. He called it off.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘God knows. Cathy Lamb thinks he can’t do without the job.’

  ‘Really?’

  Willard let the question hang in the air, taking Faraday by the elbow and walking him away from the activity below. He was declaring the investigation a major inquiry. He’d be running it personally from the Major Crimes suite at Fratton and hoped to have a squad together by nightfall. He’d be getting onto Operational Support at headquarters and pushing for at least ten bodies, DCs abstracted from CID offices across the Eastern Area. It was very early days but the inquiry already had the feeling of something more complex than usual, and if the right kind of progress warranted it, you could bet your life he’d be back on the phone, banging the drum for more resources.

  Faraday permitted himself the faintest smile. Willard had arrived from the Met with a reputation for impatience as well as painstaking detective work. At his level ambition came with the grade, something you’d take for granted, but it had never ceased to amuse Faraday the way that youngish guys on the move like Willard always associated career advancement with resources. Lay hands on a decent-sized squad, extend your reach into every pocket of the city, and you’d already made the kind of statement that would find its way into every CID office across the county. That’s the way reputations were made. By fielding a bigger army than the next guy.

  They’d paused in a clearing with a view north through the trees. Away to the west Faraday could see clouds of gulls over the landfill site beside the motorway, while there were a couple of brownish specks pecking at the mud beside the nearby creek. Dunlin, Faraday thought, or maybe redshanks. Beyond the creek, on the mainland, more fortifications topped the fold of chalk that was Portsdown Hill. If you were looking for evidence that Portsmouth was an island within an island, a little bubble of its own suspended in place and time, then here it was. Geography and the long saga of imperial conquest had created this extraordinary place and Faraday had long come to the conclusion that there was nowhere else remotely like it. Did Willard understand that? With his Met background and his canny, painstaking, impatient ways? Did anyone?

  Willard was checking his watch. Time was marching on. He had a million things to attend to. Together the two men scrambled down from the ramparts and Faraday realised that this was the moment of handover, the moment when leadership of the inquiry passed to Willard. Willard, who could read a face better than most, was watching a couple of white-suited Scenes of Crime officers carrying the body away on a stretcher. Sensibly, they’d decided to use a longer route that led along the top of the ramparts rather than risk the slope.

  As the impromptu cortège disappeared behind a line of trees, Faraday felt Willard’s hand on his arm. He was smiling, an expression he reserved for special occasions.

  ‘I’ll be SIO but one of my DIs will be at the sharp end.’ He gave Faraday’s arm a little squeeze. ‘Could be you in a couple of months, eh, Joe?’

  Seven

  SATURDAY, 10 FEBRUARY, 10.00

  The sun was out by the time Faraday got back home from Hilsea Lines. He stepped into the garden and circled the house, feeling the sodden turf squish-squishing beneath his feet, and then stood by the rusting iron gate beyond the front lawn that opened onto the path beside the harbour. The low winter light lanced off the water, throwing the little flotilla of moored boats into dramatic
silhouette, and he watched a turnstone for a moment or two, entranced by the way it was relentlessly drawn to shreds of bladderwrack or a cluster of pebbles. He must have seen this little drama a thousand times, often from this very same spot, but this bright, cold, suddenly glorious morning seemed to gift-wrap everything, offering the possibility of an early spring. There was even a little warmth in the sun, and Faraday tilted his face and closed his eyes, wondering vaguely about breakfast.

  Inside the house, J-J was still in bed, his long body humped under the duvet. The duvet was on the small side and Faraday gazed at his son’s huge feet poking out of the bottom. He’d offered few clues last night about the reason for this sudden visit but already Faraday had the feeling that he might be staying a while. His enormous rucksack had been stuffed to bursting point and there was a big cardboard box as well, secured with string.

  Back downstairs, Faraday took a kitchen knife to the box, cutting the string. He’d been in these situations before, playing mum, and it was no surprise to find the box full of dirty laundry: socks, shirts, underwear, towels. J-J must have left in a hurry because the stuff was just thrown in but then, at the bottom, he found an envelope with his son’s name on it. The envelope was blue and there was a little seagull shape on one corner. Faraday lifted the envelope to his nose. It smelled of perfume, a hint of lemons that took him straight back to last summer when J-J had arrived to celebrate Faraday’s birthday, with Valerie in tow. He could see her now, perched in a stool in the kitchen, nursing a glass of pastis. He propped the envelope on the mantelpiece and gathered up the laundry before heading for the washing machine. She must have packed the box herself, he thought, wondering why J-J had to cart his laundry across the Channel to get it washed.

  J-J descended about an hour later, appearing at the kitchen door in jeans and an old T-shirt. He looked terrible – unshaven, red-eyed – and stumbled around trying to find the kettle, sparing Faraday barely a glance. In the end it was Faraday who made the tea, settling his son in a chair at the long table and getting no response when he signed a query about breakfast. He might have been blind as well as deaf, Faraday thought, glancing at his watch. As duty DI, he had to be available for call-out all weekend. Bad news normally went in threes and he’d begun to wonder who’d be next for the heavy-duty plastic and the roll of gaffer tape.