Authors: Graham Hurley
‘Best not to look, madam. This wind. Don’t want two of you down there, do we?’
Chastened, the woman stepped away from the edge. But, try as she might, she couldn’t rid herself of that first glimpse of the body now on the stretcher, the image that had registered for a split second in her binoculars and triggered this extraordinary operation. The mottled naked greyness of the flesh. The huge distended belly. The floppy limbs flailing in the tide. And how strange a body looked without a head.
Friday, 20 February 2004
Faraday stood at the window in the Southsea hovercraft terminal, staring out. The gale anticipated on last night’s TV weather forecast had arrived at last, low ragged skirts of cloud and a hard, driving rain that had soaked him in the brief dash across the road from the seafront car park. Now, half-expecting the service to be suspended, he peered through the blurry, salt-caked glass.
The low, dark swell of the Isle of Wight had long disappeared. Beyond the angry lunge of the waves and a glimpse of the heaving buoy that marked the deep-water channel, he could see nothing. Even the seaweed, long brown ribbons of the stuff, was blowing like litter across the glistening concrete ramp that plunged down towards the boiling tideline.
The woman at the ticket office, to his faint disappointment, met his enquiry about cancellation with a shake of her head. Conditions weren’t perfect, she admitted, but the weather was still within operating limits. If the inbound service was a minute or two later than scheduled, she counselled patience.
Faraday returned to his sodden briefcase and extracted a thin manila envelope. Settling damply in the moulded plastic chair, he reread the file that had been sent back to Major Crimes a couple of days ago.
The details were sparse. A twenty-five-year-old
white male, name of Aaron Tolly, had been found dead at the back of a block of flats off Ryde seafront. The body had been discovered before dawn by a local runner in early training for the London marathon. His 999 call had brought both an ambulance and a patrol car to the scene and by mid-morning Detective Superintendent Willard had dispatched Detective Inspector Nick Hayder plus two DCs from Major Crimes to spearhead what the local DI was already calling a murder investigation.
Faraday flipped quickly through the file. Same-day inquiries had established that Tolly was an alcoholic and occasional heroin user with a long record of convictions for shoplifting and benefit fraud. He’d shipped over to the island from Pompey and now lived in a heavily secured squat on the third floor of the premises. On the night of his death, according to a witness who knew him by sight, he’d been drinking alone in a shelter on the seafront. Later that evening he’d evidently tried to cadge money for more drinks in a local pub. His keys had been found inside the squalid flat he called home. To someone with a head for heights and plenty of nerve, a fire escape to a locked door at the rear of the flat offered access to an adjacent bedroom window. One of the other vagrants who dossed there thought he might have heard a bang or two at the door and then a brief scraping noise at the window. At the post-mortem the pathologist identified injuries consistent with a fall. Recorded body temperatures put the time of death at around midnight. In Nick Hayder’s judgement Tolly had got pissed again, found his way up the fire escape, tried for the half-open bedroom window, and missed.
At the back of the file Faraday found a sheaf of colour stills from the Scenes of Crime photographer.
He lingered for a moment on the last of the shots. Tolly lay sprawled beside a line of brimming dustbins, his arms outstretched, one leg buckled beneath the other. There was a glimpse of white flesh through a tear in his jeans and Faraday noticed that one of his battered runners was unlaced. Faraday gazed at the thin, gaunt face, the eyes wide open, the mouth shaping the beginnings of a scream. Tolly hadn’t shaved for a day or two and a brown trickle of congealed blood tracked through the stubble below his left ear. The post-mortem report had spoken of multiple skull fractures with haemorrhages in the underlying brain tissue. With injuries like these, according to the pathologist, Tolly would have been killed on impact.
Faraday leafed back through the file, checking every link in the sequence of events Hayder and his team had put together. The stretch of unswept concrete where Tolly had met his death lay directly beneath the bedroom window. With his keys inside a locked flat, there was every possibility he’d tried to find an alternative way in. No witnesses had spoken of any kind of altercation earlier in the evening. Drunk and alone, Tolly had tumbled into oblivion.
Faraday looked up, hearing the approaching roar of the hovercraft. Hayder and his team had stayed on the island for another couple of days. Unearthing no evidence to convince him otherwise, he’d returned the file to the local DI with a note confirming an absence of suspicious circumstances. By now the Coroner should have held an inquest and returned a verdict. Yet here was Faraday, en route to CID headquarters in Newport. The DI was insisting on a full review. And Willard, whose responsibility for Major Crimes extended to the Isle of Wight, wanted to know why.
Faraday got to his feet, slipping the file into his briefcase. The hovercraft was a dark shadow fifty metres offshore. Emerging through the grey curtain of rain, it yawed violently from side to side, clawed its way out of the waves, climbed the weed-strewn ramp, and then settled unsteadily on the wet concrete.
The departures hall had mysteriously emptied. The youth on the exit door inspected Faraday’s ticket.
‘You ready for this, sir?’ he muttered.
The trip across was mercifully brief. Never had he been closer to losing his breakfast. On landfall at Ryde, half-expecting a waiting CID car, Faraday was obliged to take a taxi. Half an hour to Newport with the heater on full blast was enough to dry out, and by the time he’d settled himself in the DI’s office he felt a good deal better.
Detective Inspector Colin Irving had been in charge of the island’s CID for longer than anyone could remember. A tall, bespectacled, slightly bookish figure, he guarded his independence with the kind of fierce pride that went with an Aldershot youth and three years in uniform patrolling the badlands of Basingstoke. As someone who himself had once lived on the island, Faraday was the first to acknowledge that the most passionate islanders were always the ones who’d blown in from somewhere else.
‘Busy?’
Irving took the question at face value. He was still describing a recent series of encounters with the Animal Liberation Front when a kindly-looking management assistant appeared with coffee. Faraday took his chance to change the subject.
‘Tolly …’ he began. ‘What else do we know about him?’
‘Not a lot. He’s Pompey born and bred. Shame he didn’t stay, really. Saved us all a lot of bother.’
‘Is that what this is about?’
Irving shook his head but said nothing. Both men understood the reality of divisional CID work only too well. Successful detections on dwelling burglaries or thefts from vehicles won lots of brownie points from the Home Office but serious offences – stranger rape, homicide – brought you nothing but grief and a heavy overtime bill. Hence the bid to offload onto Major Crimes.
‘So why isn’t he done and dusted?’ Faraday tapped the file. ‘What’s happened?’
‘We’ve picked up good intelligence. Stuff we can’t ignore.’
‘About Tolly?’
‘Of course. That’s why I phoned Mr Willard.’
An informant, he said, had come forward with information about a prisoner on the island, a Scouse drug dealer serving seven years for supply. The Scouser had a girlfriend who made regular prison visits and it seemed she’d run into Tolly. After a couple of meetings they’d started some kind of relationship.
‘Which prison?’
‘Albany.’
Faraday nodded. HMP Albany was one of a complex of three prisons on the road to Cowes. The Isle of Wight had long become a temporary home for relatives of convicts, especially those banged up for years on end. Wives and mothers liked the island so much they often stayed forever.
‘So what happened?’ Faraday asked again.
‘We think the Scouser may have put the word out. There’d be no shortage of takers if he was talking decent money. Maybe he only paid for a beating but
these things get out of hand.’ Irving offered a bleak smile. ‘Know what I mean?’
Faraday nodded. On the face of it Irving’s theory sounded plausible enough but the total absence of supporting evidence argued for caution. According to Hayder’s investigation, no one had seen Tolly in company. Neither were there any physical signs of assault prior to Tolly’s death. Not that Irving cared. The recent intelligence had become part of the file and that meant he had to cover his arse.
‘How good is this intelligence?’
‘It exists.’
‘That’s not my question. I’m asking you where it came from.’
‘You’ll have to talk to his handler. You know the score.’
‘Of course I know the score. I’m simply asking what else you’ve done before you lifted the phone. Have you checked this guy out? Is he a regular? Has he got debts of his own to settle? You know Willard’s views on crap intelligence.’
Mention of Willard brought colour to Irving’s face.
‘You’re telling me I’m jumping the gun?’
‘I’m suggesting you might need to do a little more footwork.’
‘Like how?’
‘Like getting one of your blokes to poke around a bit, find out what this informant of yours is really up to. There’ll be a story in there somewhere, you know there will.’
‘And you think I’ve got the bodies to waste on something like that?’
Irving had abandoned any pretence of indignation. He was angry now, the anger of a hard-pressed divisional DI, but Faraday could cope with that.
‘I know there’s no brownie points in homicide,’ he said gently. ‘But I’ve got a boss you wouldn’t believe and he thinks you’re cuffing it.’
‘Willard said that?’
‘Good as.’
‘And you’re the messenger?’
‘Not at all. But I know the way he works, what he thinks, and on the evidence of this –’ Faraday tapped the file ‘– he’ll tell you you’re taking the piss. What are your PIs looking like?’
‘Bloody good. Best on the force. Plus a clear-up rate most DIs would die for.’
‘And you want to keep it that way.’
‘Of course we bloody do.’
‘But you’re stretched, like we’re all stretched.’
‘Too right.’
‘So the more running around we do on your behalf …’
Irving began to shake his head, then abandoned his seat at the little conference table and stepped across to the window. Home Office Performance Indicators had become the bane of divisional life. Devoting precious CID resources to Aaron Tolly would do absolutely nothing when it came to ranking Irving’s PIs against other Basic Command Units, a merciless comparison tool that was driving good coppers insane.
‘It’s barmy, isn’t it?’ Irving might have been talking to himself. ‘No fucking way to run a whelk stall.’
‘I agree.’ Faraday drained his coffee. ‘Does your canteen still do toast?’
The canteen was virtually empty, just a single figure bent over a magazine at the table beside the microwave. Faraday found himself a jar of coffee and refilled the electric kettle. The remains of a loaf of sliced white
lay in an open cake tin and Faraday was still looking for something to put on it when a voice prompted him to try in the cupboard beside the fridge.
‘There’s peanut butter and some of those sachets of jam. Uniform finished the marmalade first thing. Animals.’
Faraday turned round. The figure at the table hadn’t stirred. The mail beside the hang-gliding magazine was addressed to DC Darren Webster.
‘DI Faraday. Major Crimes.’ Faraday extended a hand. ‘Any butter?’
‘In the fridge.’ Webster at last looked up. ‘Sir.’
His handshake was firm and the smile came as a slight surprise. Webster had a stubble-cheeked, outdoor face. There were hints of strength in the set of the jaw, and the newness of his suit was offset by the loosened tie. Here was a young detective, thought Faraday, who knows exactly who he is.
‘Over from Pompey?’ Webster enquired.
‘Yes.’
‘Anything else you need?’ His eyes had returned to the magazine.
Faraday shook his head. He made himself a couple of slices of toast, then decanted boiling water onto a spoonful of Happy Shopper instant.
‘Mind if I join you?’
Faraday sat down without waiting for an answer. Webster was deep in a feature article about hang-gliding in New Zealand. With some reluctance he finally closed the magazine and put it to one side.
‘These guys fly over glaciers.’ He sounded wistful. ‘Can you imagine what that must be like?’
Faraday thought about the question over a mouthful of toast. He hadn’t tasted peanut butter in years.
‘You do it yourself?’ He wiped his mouth. ‘Hang-gliding?’
‘Yep.’
‘Here? On the island?’
‘Yep. Last weekend we were down at St Catherine’s.’
‘Good?’
‘Crap. They were giving a steady force four, south-south-west, but the wind was all over the place. Bloody cold, too. We never got off the cliff.’ He hesitated, uncertain about the real strength of Faraday’s interest.
‘I watch birds,’ Faraday said simply. ‘I’ve been at it for years. Fascinates me.’
‘The flying or the birds?’
‘Both.’
Webster hesitated for a moment longer, then plunged into what the last couple of months had yielded for him and his mates. They’d flown most of the cliffs along the south coast of the island, and spent a dodgy weekend trying to stay airborne from a new launch site on Culver Down, the looming chalk shoulder that fell into Sandown Bay. Winter flying wasn’t to everybody’s taste but you could normally rely on a good blow, and if you had the right kit, and the bottle to go with it, the views could be awesome.
‘You’ve got a favourite?’
‘Needles, without a doubt. We kick off from a little bowl above the emplacements. There’s a bay below it, a cove really, and you can’t see it from the landward side which I suppose makes it even more special. The colours can be incredible, especially those times when a front’s on the way and the wind’s spot on the nose and the vis is so good you just know it’s going to piss down before very long.’