Angels Passing

by Hurley, Graham

  The Brook Centre lay in the heart of Somerstown, an unlovely flat-roofed brick building surrounded by tower blocks, with a fenced-in play area round the back. Years of comings and goings had left their mark on the green swing doors, and someone had recently taken a crack at one of the wired windows.

  The Persistent Young Offender project had found a perch in a suite of rooms on the top floor. The entrance door was locked and Faraday had to knock to attract attention. He’d promised Anghared Davies eleven o’clock. It was already quarter past.

  Anghared was a small, bustling, bespectacled woman with a reputation for getting her own way. At fifty-two she was old for a job as demanding as this but she had a certain mumsiness that some of the kids, before they knew better, mistook for an easy touch. Faraday had known her for years, way before she’d pioneered the PYO project, and had always admired the deftness with which she managed to carve her way through the tangle of local government-speak that went with any youth initiative. Anghared, as anyone who’d ever crossed her knew to their cost, took very few prisoners.

  Just now she was sitting behind a desk, sorting quickly through a towering pile of assessments. From somewhere nearby came the thunder of drums. No rhythm, no shape, just raw noise.

  ‘Doodie, is it?’ She was nearly shouting.

  ‘Prentice.’

  ‘Who, dear?’

  ‘Prentice, Gavin Prentice. That’s his real name.’

  One of the support workers appeared at the open doorway with a youth of about eleven in tow. She had a question about Health and Safety. Did the budget run to earplugs?

  Anghared ignored her. She was getting towards the bottom of the pile now, and Faraday left her to it, his eyes following the youth as he drifted across the room towards a typist’s revolving chair beneath the window. He detoured to kick aimlessly at a waste paper bin, then pulled the chair into the middle of the room and sat down, spinning himself first one way, then the other, his body slumped, his feet dragging listlessly across the battered carpet tiles. Faraday watched him for a full minute, aware of the boy’s eyes beneath the baseball cap, the way they locked with his each time his head came round. His expression was quite blank. Even when Faraday nodded a greeting, the face gave nothing away.

  Anghared got to her feet and bustled away down the corridor. Seconds later, the drumming stopped. Back at her desk, she pulled a file from a drawer. Doodie, it transpired, had been on her books for nearly six months. She turned to the youth on the chair and told him to sort out some crisps for himself from one of the support workers. The youth nodded and wandered away. Anghared shut the door after him.

  Doodie, she said, had been their little Pimpernel, attending only when there was something on offer that really turned him on. One of those activities was drama. All too often he could be as vile and abusive as any of the other kids, but give him another role to play – let him pretend to be someone else for a while – and you’d sense the depth of potential in the child. It was the same in the graffiti workshops. Get the kid to concentrate for more than ten seconds and interesting things started to happen. As far as Anghared could see, Doodie had shown a real talent for colour and design, an opinion she’d been rash enough to share with the ten-year-old. The following afternoon he’d absconded with a bagful of spray cans, the contents of which had ended up on a brand-new Jaguar parked overnight in Old Portsmouth. Detection, in this case, had been simplicity itself. Doodie had signed the biggest of his praying mantis designs with the unmistakable ‘D’ he liked to use to badge practically everything. Lucky it wasn’t in pink, Anghared had told the WPC who’d arrived to track him down.

  ‘Why’s that, then?’

  ‘Pink’s his favourite colour.’ Anghared had hooted with laughter. ‘Doodie and good taste were never friends.’

  Faraday nodded.

  ‘So where is he now, young Doodie?’

  ‘Haven’t a clue. His mum’s over in Raglan House but you needn’t bother. Most days she’s out of it, and when she isn’t, she’s even more of a nightmare.’

  Faraday pulled a face. He could still smell the kitchen, with its spilling refuse sacks.

  ‘Out of it on what?’

  ‘Smack, mostly. The guy she lives with deals a bit but doesn’t use. If her luck’s in, she gets the sweepings. She used to be into vodka big time but the bloke she was living with then, not the smack dealer, tried to bottle her one night after some row or other and after that she wasn’t so keen. Plus I think she’s got a liver problem. Any more abuse and it’ll explode.’ Anghared looked up from the file. ‘Doesn’t help you though, does it?’

  Faraday asked about other places he might look. Doodie, it seemed, had turned ducking and weaving into a way of life, moving constantly from address to address. Some nights, allegedly, he kipped with some relative or other but no one had ever come up with an address. Other nights, he depended on friends, or friends of friends, or people whom – to be frank – she’d prefer not to think about.

  ‘The boy sleeps rough a lot, has done for a while. Get him to concentrate for a minute or so, and he even claims to like it.’

  ‘What does “rough” mean?’

  ‘Houses for letting. Empty garages. Shared squats. Little hidey-holes on the seafront and round the Common during the summer. There’s a whole other city out there. One we never see.’

  ‘But he’s ten, Anghared.’

  I know, and there’s not much to him, either.’

  ‘So how does he get by?’

  ‘Thieving, mostly. Last year he was shoplifting for gangs of older kids. They go in mob-handed, upset stuff, and Doodie nips behind the till while the staff are trying to sort everything out. It’s a trick you can only pull once but there are lots of shops. Doodie was on a percentage. I think the kids screwed him down to bugger all but he was helping himself before they even saw the takings so it worked out OK in the end.’

  ‘You’ve got names for these kids?’

  ‘No, and there’s no point either. Last time I asked, he’d fallen in with some bunch of asylum seekers – Kosovans maybe, or Albanians. The way I heard it, they thought he was wonderful. Lots of guts. Lots of initiative. Funny, isn’t it, how it takes a foreigner to see the worth in a child? This must be the worst country in the world to be a kid in.’

  This was vintage Anghared, kicking against the Establishment line, and Faraday thought again of the youth in the revolving chair – bored, aimless, spinning ever more slowly in circle after circle. At least Doodie wasn’t like that. At least he was making some kind of life for himself.

  ‘The incident I mentioned on the phone …’ he began.

  ‘The girl off the flats?’

  ‘Yes.’ Faraday nodded towards the empty chair. ‘Have the kids been talking at all?’

  ‘Not that I’ve heard. She came from Old Portsmouth, didn’t she?’

  ‘That’s right. But she had lots of friends from round here. Including Doodie.’

  Anghared peered at him over her half-moon spectacles, unconvinced. ‘How does that work, then? Nice middle-class girl like that straying over the border?’

  Faraday shrugged. He wanted to explain about the mother, banged up in a nightmare of her ex-husband’s making, about the daughter’s life spinning out of control, about the fights and violence, but the truth was that Anghared would have heard it all before. Not in Old Portsmouth perhaps, but certainly here in Somerstown.

  The truth was that Pompey was an island, 150,000 people living cheek by jowl, one of the most densely populated cities in the country. There were still social divisions, of course there were. There were still enclaves of tree-lined streets with off-street parking and freshly painted front doors where the middle classes hung on for grim death, believing desperately in all the New Labour tosh about choice and citizenship. But the fact remained that whole areas of the city had become tribal reservations, carpet-bombed by poverty, family breakdown and schools so woebegone and under-funded that even the teachers had given up. The evidence of this was ev
erywhere – street fights, domestic violence, gangs of kids running amok – and in his bleaker moments Faraday had begun to wonder whether the Luftwaffe hadn’t been a blessing in disguise. At least, after the Blitz, you knew you were in trouble. How many people recognised a crisis when all the kids were wearing designer gear and no one would be seen dead in trainers under fifty quid?

  Anghared was asking him whether he knew how Doodie had got his nickname. Faraday shook his head.

  ‘It came from last summer,’ she said. ‘All the kids swim in the sea. It’s free and it gives them a chance to get up lots of people’s noses. Wherever there’s a sign saying “No Diving”, they’ll all have a go.’

  Faraday smiled. This had been going on for years and one of J-J’s favourite summer pastimes had involved sitting on the pebbles by South Parade Pier, watching the braver kids take a header off the end. At high tide you were relatively safe. A couple of hours either side and you were on your way to hospital. One year, no less than three kids had been seriously injured – one paralysed – in this Pompey rite of passage.

  ‘And Doodie?’

  ‘Round Tower. The kids here say he was the youngest ever off the top. Serious respect, my love. Believe me.’

  The Round Tower lay beside the harbour mouth, a Tudor relic that had grown over the centuries. Now it was a favourite tourist spot, with a marvellous view up the harbour, and Faraday himself often climbed the long flight of stone steps, dizzied by the drop, after a pint or two in one of the nearby pubs. There were rocks heaped against the foot of the tower and anyone jumping had to clear them by at least a couple of metres to survive.

  ‘So how did he manage that, then?’

  ‘He didn’t. He had to be thrown.’

  ‘Other kids threw him in?’

  ‘Exactly. But the point is, it was his idea. One took his hands, one took his ankles, gave him a couple of swings, heigh-ho, and in he went. Made a big splash. Believe me.’

  ‘You were there?’

  ‘God, no, but I’ve listened to the kids. That’s why he’s called Doodie.’ She grinned. ‘One cool dude.’

  Fourteen

  MONDAY, 12 FEBRUARY, late afternoon

  By the time the tray of stickies appeared, four in the afternoon, Winter knew he was never going to find CCTV traces of the white Fiat within the parameters Dave Michaels had laid down. Of course it made perfect sense to concentrate on the cameras closest to Hilsea Lines, but those cameras only covered the exits from the island onto the mainland. Drive north, and the Fiat would have turned up on one camera or the other. Head south, back into the city, and there was mile after mile of streets without any coverage at all. Thousands of front doors. Hundreds of garages. And any one of them could still be home to a rusting K-reg Uno.

  Winter helped himself to a doughnut and a custard tart. He’d been through the twelve-hour period four times – twice on the mainland cameras and twice, for luck, on a couple of cameras monitoring the major north-south roads down the western side of the island. As the traffic thinned during the evening and then became a trickle after midnight, he’d forced himself to concentrate harder and harder, examining the shape and the colour of the vehicle behind every pair of headlights, but all he’d got for his troubles was a headache. How the guys behind the control desks put up with this every working day was beyond him. Given the choice, he’d have been back in an unmarked Escort, tucked up some darkened side road, working his way through an entire bag of Werther’s Originals.

  Recorded tapes were kept for a month before being wiped and recirculated. The boxed cassettes were stored in a locked cabinet inside the control room, accessed only by the staff, and he checked the big camera location map pinned to the wall before requesting specific recordings. The Southsea branch of Thresher’s, where Bradley Finch had bought the champagne, was in Clarendon Road, barely twenty metres from Camera 20. He located the tape for Friday, 9 February and slipped it into the play machine. Pictures from CCTV cameras were recorded in multiplex – a grid of four pictures to each tape – and Camera 20 occupied the top right-hand corner. The time-of-day readout was down on the bottom left of frame. Tapes were always changed at four in the afternoon and he began to spool through, watching as a wet, grey afternoon quickly darkened. According to the note in his pocketbook, the Thresher’s receipt was timed at 18.56. Give Finch ten minutes to sort himself out, and the action should kick off around quarter to seven.

  At 18.48, a white Fiat appeared at the bottom of the picture. The camera was pointing east, down the road towards Thresher’s, and Winter watched as the car halted at a pedestrian crossing beside a big department store. A woman pushing a wheelchair gave the driver a little wave and then the Fiat was on the move again, not bothering to signal left before pulling abruptly into the kerb and stopping on double yellow lines opposite the off-licence. Old habits die hard, Winter thought, watching a thin, slightly stooped figure emerge from the driver’s side and limp across the road.

  Winter toggled the picture to a halt and peered at the screen. You were supposed to be cautious in these circumstances. You were supposed to perform a little private risk assessment, weighing all the various rogue factors that could conceivably make this someone else – a chance shopper, an impulse buyer, a stranger from way out of the city who just happened to drive a white Fiat and just happened to fancy three bottles of Moët – but Winter knew at once that this was Bradley Finch. The black leather jacket. The black jeans. The lank hair just brushing his collar. The fact – after his appearance in the café – that he was still limping. In six hours this skinny little runt will be having the shit kicked out of him, he thought. And half an hour after that, if he’s lucky, he’ll be dead.

  He toggled forward, keeping an eye on the time readout, trying to imagine the scene inside the offie: the women behind the counter, the scruffy bloke in the leather jacket eyeing the display of champagnes, the detour to the counter to collect the Bristol Cream, and then the ‘kerchunk’ of the cash till as he swopped £50.47 for a neatly printed receipt. Where had he laid hands on money like that? How come someone who was perpetually skint was suddenly so flush?

  Winter was still pondering this mystery when the passenger door abruptly opened on the Fiat. He slowed the pictures back to normal speed, watching a tall, striking-looking woman in a dumpy black puffa jacket emerge from the car. Closing the door behind her, she walked back towards the camera and stood beside the corner window of the department store, gazing at a display of ethnic rugs. She was there for a good minute – one minute fourteen seconds to be precise – and she must have been yelled at because she only turned round when Bradley Finch was back beside the car, holding up a weighty Thresher’s carrier bag.

  Winter toggled the pictures into reverse, sending Finch back into the off-licence. As she gazed at the rugs in the store window, the camera offered a perfect quarter profile of the passenger in the Fiat. Louise Abeka hadn’t been on the seafront at all. She was here, in full colour, with a man she claimed not to have seen in days.

  Prompted by Finch, she ran back to the car. The lights came on, and Finch pulled the Fiat into a tight U-turn ahead of an oncoming bus. Ignoring a couple of pedestrians venturing onto the crossing, he accelerated away, leaving – as he’d arrived – at the bottom of the screen. Winter stopped the tape and made a note of the time readout. There were facilities for dubbing sequences like these onto a fresh tape he could remove from the control room but he’d leave that until later. For now, he wanted to know where Finch was headed. Camera 49 lay at the end of Osborne Road, the continuation of Clarendon Road in a westerly direction. Winter found the tape and spooled through. The Fiat had left camera 20 at 18.59. At 19.00, exactly on cue, it sped into Camera 49’s frame. Winter grinned. This was fun, a video game for real. He watched as the car stopped at the T-junction. Turn right, and Finch would be on his way back to Margate Road, where the girl lived. Turn left, and he’d be driving east, beside the big expanse of Common which stretched towards the seafront. He turned right.


  Winter sat back a moment, trying to calculate the driving time to Margate Road. Friday night, in light traffic like that, it would be a couple of minutes at the very most before he’d be parking outside Louise Abeka’s house. He swung round to the map. Camera 26 policed the traffic junction which offered access to Somerstown, the most direct route. He found the tape and loaded it but, to his disappointment, the white Fiat didn’t appear. Not at 19.02. Not at 19.05. And not, as a last resort, at 19.10. They must have gone somewhere else, he thought. Maybe a quick pint or two in a pub somewhere, just to get them in the mood for the Moët. On the point of abandoning Camera 26, Winter stiffened. There it was, the white Fiat, coming to an untidy halt in the very middle of the picture. Winter froze the picture, trying to explain the time lag. 19.12. Too brief a delay for a pint, but far too long if they’d simply driven the half mile.

  Aware of a movement behind him, Winter looked round. The shift leader wanted to know whether he fancied another cuppa. Winter nodded. He needed a phone, too. There was a handset built into the main control desk. Consulting his pocketbook again, Winter dialled a local number. He’d tried twice already today but on both occasions there’d been no answer. This time he was in luck.

  ‘Mr Naylor? DC Winter. We met on Saturday. About your lad, Bradley.’

  There was a muffled noise at the other end and Winter thought for a moment that Naylor had hung up, but then he was back. He wanted to know what the state of play was. About the gear Winter had seized.