Authors: Graham Hurley
Faraday was still looking through the binos, still wondering about the title of Pelly’s paperback, when a
shadow fell over over him. It was Newbery. He was in radio contact with the SOC team on the boat and he had a message to pass on.
‘They’ve found blood, sir. Asked me to let you know.’
Winter was on his third issue of
OK! Magazine
by the time the nurse called his name. He’d always hated hospitals. He resented the way they took charge, the way they seemed to rob you of control, and forty minutes spent trying to interest himself in the sex lives of C-list celebs had left him feeling even more combative than usual.
‘How’s it going?’ The consultant was a small, neat man with heavy-rimmed glasses and perfect nails.
Winter sat down in the chair in front of his desk. He felt like a candidate in an interview, summoned to justify his fitness for the job on offer. Fail this, he thought grimly, and the consequences won’t bear thinking about.
‘Fine,’ he said at once.
The consultant looked surprised. His eyes strayed to notes that must have come from Winter’s GP.
‘Severe headaches?’ he queried. ‘Pains behind the eyes? Problems with your vision?’
‘That’s right.’
‘But not at the moment? Is that what you’re saying?’
‘Exactly.’
‘Good.’ The consultant got up and circled round the desk until he was standing behind Winter. Winter could smell the soap he must have used to wash his hands after the last patient.
‘Does this hurt at all?’
Winter could feel the light touch of fingertips at his
temples. If anything, it was a pleasant sensation. In fact it reminded him of Maddox.
‘No,’ he said.
‘And this?’ The pressure increased, easing slowly across his forehead until the fingers met above his nose.
‘No.’
‘Or this?’
The side of his neck this time, the consultant probing upwards until he was feeling under the ledge of Winter’s jawbone.
‘Afraid not.’ Winter was beginning to feel a fraud.
A series of reflex tests followed. Then the consultant sat down and picked up a pen.
‘Are you allergic to anything that you know of?’
Winter laughed. His list of acute allergies extended from the breed of earnest young infants who toed the constabulary line and dared call themselves detectives to elderly couples who dawdled round Sainsburys on Saturday mornings and ended up buying a trolleyful of pink loo roll. Neither appeared to be an immediate threat to his health so he shook his head again.
‘Nothing in the way of food or drink?’
The mention of drink put Winter on guard. He knew what was coming next and when the consultant asked him about his average weekly alcoholic intake, he had the figures ready. These guys always doubled what you told them so he took the real figure, halved it, then halved it again.
‘Maybe a couple of Scotches a night. Say half a bottle a week.’
‘Beer at all? Lager? Wine?’
‘The odd Stella. I’ve never gone in for wine.’
‘And that’s it?’
‘Yeah.’
If there’d been a window in this airless office, Winter would have been gazing out of it. As it was, he favoured the consultant with a cheerful grin.
‘What d’you think, then? Only I’d hate to be wasting your time.’
‘Not at all, Mr Winter.’ He was frowning at the notes. Then he looked up. ‘Describe the pain.’
The question was so direct it took Winter by surprise. He began to fumble his way towards an answer, then realised that this might be his one chance of coaxing some kind of result from the system.
‘It’s not like a normal headache at all,’ he said carefully. ‘We’re not talking hangover here. It’s really intense, really painful. In fact it’s bloody unbearable. You end up feeling like an animal, banging off the walls, trying to get away from it.’
‘That’s good.’ The consultant seemed pleased. ‘Very good. And your vision?’
‘Goes haywire.’ Winter looked round. ‘Take the floor, there. Or your tabletop. Or the wall. Or the screen over by the bed. Any flat surface.’
‘And?’
‘And it’s like you’re underwater. Stuff bubbles up. I told the GP. It’s the weirdest feeling, like you’re watching a film.’
‘You say you went blind a couple of times.’ The consultant had one finger in the notes. ‘How long did that last?’
‘A minute or so. Really scary. That’s when the pain was beyond belief. I thought the inside of my head was going to burst. I can’t do it justice, can’t describe it. I’d like to say it frightened me but it’s worse than that. It’s not just thinking I’d had it but being glad it might soon be over. Anything to stop it hurting. Know what I mean?’
‘Hmm …’ The consultant studied Winter for a moment or two, then turned to his PC and entered a couple of keystrokes. ‘Diagnosis is never easy, Mr Winter. We’ll need to conduct some tests. Maybe a scan. You’ll have to bear with us, I’m afraid. It may take a week or two.’
‘What would a scan tell you?’
‘It’ll give us a picture of the inside of your head.’
‘And what will you expect to find there?’
‘I’m afraid I can’t answer that question.’
‘Yes, you can. You’re an expert. That’s what we pay you for.’
‘You pay me for trying to get you better, Mr Winter. And if that means getting to the bottom of whatever’s wrong with you, then that’s exactly what we’ll do. Speculation isn’t helpful at this stage.’
‘Yes, it is. From where I’m sitting it is.’
The consultant appeared not to be listening. There was a grid of some sort on his screen. He ran the end of his pencil along a couple of lines, tapped in some more commands, then scribbled a note to himself.
Finally he looked up at Winter again.
‘We have a slot on the CT schedule next Monday at half nine. Could you manage that?’
It was dusk when the DS on the boat put through another call to Newbery. They’d done as much as they could for this afternoon and they needed Pelly to come and get them. Newbery walked across to the Fiesta and tapped on the window. Pelly abandoned his book and pushed the inflatable onto the darkening harbour. On the ebbing tide, the mooring was only an hour or so from drying out and it took only a couple of minutes before Pelly returned with the DS.
Faraday accompanied him up towards the van as Pelly returned to the boat for his colleague.
‘What’s the score, then?’
The DS dumped the holdall at the back of the van and fumbled for his keys.
‘We’ve got blood from the rear decking, and from the cabin forrard.’
‘Lots of blood?’
‘Yeah. Congealed, of course, but definitely blood. It could be fish, of course. The swabs have to go away for analysis. It’ll be days yet.’ He was peering towards the road, watching a pair of headlights slow for the turn into the marina car park. ‘There’s a bit of a galley down below, nothing elaborate but a couple of cupboards and a work surface, and a basin and two-ring stove. We’ll have to have that lot out, and the floorboards up as well. That’s where you find the real evidence. The rest, to be truthful, has been trampled to death. The boat looks pretty new to me but it’s obviously been used recently. We’d have trouble in court with what we’ve got so far.’
Faraday nodded, wondering about the implications. The inflatable was on its way back now, and he could hear the steady
splash-splash
of the oars as Pelly pulled for the shore. Should he arrest him on the basis of the afternoon’s tests? Or was it wiser to wait until the SOC team had stripped the boat to its bare bones?
Undecided, Faraday left the DS to load the van and walked down the beach. Pelly was dragging the inflatable up the pebbles towards the Fiesta. He needed the headlights. The last thing he wanted to do was to deflate the dinghy in the dark.
‘We need to talk,’ Faraday said. He nodded at the car.
‘Can’t it wait?’
‘No.’
Pelly looked at him a moment, then shrugged. They both got in the car, Faraday behind the steering wheel. He read Pelly the formal caution, then produced a pocketbook.
‘That boat out there, it’s yours. Am I right?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Since when?’
‘Since I ordered the fucking thing.’
‘When was that?’
‘Dunno …’ Pelly was staring out at the last of the light, a steely gleam on the water. ‘March, April last year. I can’t remember.’
‘OK.’ Faraday jotted down the dates, then looked across at Pelly. He’d tucked the paperback into the pocket of his leather jacket. The author’s name was Fitzroy Maclean. ‘The SOC team have found traces of blood aboard. Do you have any comment?’
‘SOC?’
‘Scenes of Crime.’
Pelly began to laugh.
‘We catch fish,’ he said softly. ‘What kind of crime’s that?’
‘You’re telling me it’s fish blood?’
‘I’m telling you we’ve been out pretty much every week for the past month or so. Sometimes it’s me on my jack. Sometimes we’re mob-handed. But however many rods we’re carrying we never fail to land fish. And what do we do with these fish? We gut them. And what happens when we gut them? They bleed. You ought to have asked me earlier. Saved yourself a lot of time and money.’ At last he looked across at Faraday. ‘Whose blood did you think it was, as a matter of interest?’
A knock on the window brought the conversation to a halt. It was DC Newbery. He wanted a private word.
Faraday got out, annoyed at the interruption, aware of the shape of another car alongside the SOC van.
‘DC Webster, sir. Says it’s urgent.’
Faraday hesitated a moment, then told Newbery to get in the car with Pelly.
‘Keep an eye on him,’ he said. ‘I’ll be back.’
Faraday walked up to the car park. Darren Webster was deep in conversation with the DC from Scenes of Crime. At Faraday’s approach he broke off. Faraday studied him for a moment.
‘This had better be good,’ he said.
‘It is, sir. Or at least I think it is.’
‘How did you know we were out here?’
‘I’m using the same net.’ He nodded towards his car. ‘Have been all day. I put two and two together, had a word with the assistant at Scenes of Crime.’ He broke off to peer into the darkness of the harbour. ‘That’s Pelly’s boat you’ve been sorting out, right, sir?’
‘Yes.’
‘That’s what I thought. Problem is, he’s only had it on the water since the end of last month.’
‘Really? So how come he’s just told me it’s been his since March?’
‘That’s when he must have ordered it. It’s brand new. He got it off a firm in Ventnor, Cheetah Marine. They started to fit it out against a five-hundred-pound deposit, then he dicked them around on the progress payments so the build got delayed and delayed. They delivered three and a half weeks ago.’
‘You’re sure about this?’
‘Positive, sir.’
Faraday was doing the sums. Unwin seemed to have gone missing in early October. The gap between then
and the moment when Pelly finally laid hands on his new boat was at least four months. No one hung on to a body for that long.
‘How come you know all this?’
‘Because one of the laminator guys is a mate of mine. He’d mentioned it before because Pelly pulled every stroke to get it earlier and apparently it started to get nasty. I belled my mate again at the weekend. He confirmed the dates.’
‘So Pelly never had a boat before this one? Is that what you’re telling me?’
‘Not at all, sir. I checked that out, too. He had a beaten-up old Tidemaster – GRP thing, same mooring. Had it for years.’
‘And what happened to that?’
‘Good question.’ Faraday caught the gleam of a smile in the darkness. ‘Sir.’
Wednesday, 25 February 2004
Faraday finally got hold of Willard on the third attempt. He could hear laughter and the chink of glasses in the background. His irritation at the afternoon’s developments, already acute, began to harden into anger.
Willard was asking whether he was anywhere near a television. Nick Hayder had tipped off the BBC ahead of the arrest he’d ordered and the pictures were all over the early evening news. The TV presenter had been taken to Alton nick to meet his brief and early reports from the interview room suggested he wanted to get the thing over and done with. Forensic evidence from the scene would bind him hand and foot. A decent amount of cocaine seized from his bathroom offered a clue to his state of mind. The only remaining puzzle was motive. Do you really batter someone to death because they’ve decided to replace you on the series with someone younger? And, even more bizarre, do you have to do it
twice
? Helping yourself was one thing, greed on this scale quite another.
Faraday waited for Willard to finish. From the darkened car he could see the bulk of the Boniface Nursing Home across the road beyond a thick laurel hedge. There were lights on upstairs. A couple of minutes ago a young carer had hurried away down the road, her shift evidently over.
‘So how did the boat go?’ Willard had returned to planet Earth.
‘It didn’t.’
Faraday briefly took him through the events at Bembridge Harbour. The SOC swabs had already gone off for analysis but even the DS in charge admitted that Pelly might well be right. The tests simply registered the presence of certain proteins. It would be days before they knew whether they were human or not.
‘And you’re thinking … ?’ Willard must have stepped out of the celebrations. The laughter in the background had gone.
‘I’m thinking it’s fish. Pelly didn’t turn a hair all afternoon. No man has blood pressure that low. Not if he’d had a body on board.’
‘So what now?’
Faraday itemised the steps he wanted to take. Number one, a second post-mortem. Number two, more hands to the pump.
‘How many?’
‘Half a dozen at least. We’ve started a number of LOEs but we need to nail them down. Take Unwin for starters. We haven’t a clue where the guy might be and the only sensible thing to do is blitz it.’
‘You want to use the MIR at Ryde?’ LOEs meant Lines Of Enquiry.
‘Yes.’
‘Full HOLMES?’
‘I’ll let you know tomorrow, sir.’
HOLMES was the computer software that had freed complex investigations from a mountain of paperwork.
‘So what makes you so sure you’re on to something?’