Authors: Graham Hurley
‘What’s this about, then?’ Winter managed.
‘Nothing really.’ She’d practised the line a thousand times. ‘Just a tiny definition problem with the machine. We’re taking a couple more shots just to be on the safe side. There –’ she beamed down at him ‘– didn’t feel a thing, did you?’
An early lunch was Faraday’s idea. He collected Brian Imber from the office that housed the Intelligence Cell and made his way downstairs. A pub round the corner on the High Street started serving at half eleven. Imber stood at the door, watching the barmaid wiping down the tables ahead of the lunchtime rush. Faraday was starving.
Away from the constant clamour of the Major Crimes machine, he needed time and space to review events. After the initial burst of energy, the
Congress
team was beginning to flag. Scenes of Crime and the house-to-house teams had produced very little. However hard they rattled Pelly’s cage, nothing seemed to fall out.
‘And Willard?’ Imber was eyeing the menu chalked on the blackboard beside the bar.
‘He’s losing faith. There was a double murder in Waterlooville last night. Looks like a three-day event to me but I’ve lost seven DCs. The New Forest job was done and dusted in a week.’ Faraday mimicked Willard’s growl: ‘And you lot haven’t even got a bloody name for the body.’
‘Unwin,’ Imber said. ‘Has to be.’
‘Sure. But he wants it in writing. Like we all do.’
Faraday had just spent the best part of an hour on the phone to Willard, who wanted to scale down
Congress
. SOC had wasted a small fortune for absolutely no forensic return and the accommodation bills for the inquiry team were mounting by the day. The prime suspect had volunteered himself for interview but without solid evidence Faraday hadn’t been able to lay a finger on him. In short, Willard was beginning to wish the bloody woman with the binoculars had done her birdwatching somewhere else. Another good blow and the headless body might have ended up on someone else’s patch.
‘He wants the HSU off the job, too. Doesn’t see the point anymore.’
The surveillance teams had been shadowing Pelly since Friday night. Not once had anything remotely interesting appeared on their log.
‘You fought him off?’
‘Short term, yes. I told him that Pelly thinks he’s got us shafted. In that kind of mood he might drop a stitch or two.’
‘You think that’s true?’
‘Yes. The guy’s strange. Yesterday I almost got to like him.’
‘Great.’ Imber looked less than impressed. ‘So where does that take us?’
It was a good question. Faraday eased his chair away from the table. The pub was still empty.
‘Bosnia’s the key,’ he said at last. ‘I’m sure of it. Pelly still makes regular trips, brings blokes back, makes no secret of it. He’s obviously got connections out there. In fact he likes it so much he’s going to bloody live there.’
‘You believe him?’
‘Yes, I do. All that stuff we seized from his room –
the photos, the flags, the little souvenirs – it’s got under his skin. If you’re someone like Pelly, you need a good war. In fact you need more than that. You need a cause.’
‘We’re talking ten years ago. Different century.’
‘I know, Brian, but mentally he’s still out there, still in the trenches. Some blokes never let go and for my money he’s one of them.’
‘And Unwin?’ Imber still wasn’t convinced.
‘I’ve no idea. Maybe he set up some kind of freelance operation. Maybe he got in Pelly’s face. Maybe he became a threat of some kind, fancied Lajla, overplayed his hand. You know the way these things work. Someone like Pelly, it wouldn’t take much.’
‘No …’
The waitress arrived. Faraday ordered ham and eggs. Imber settled for pasta with salad. After promising himself he’d never run another marathon, he was back in training. The waitress gone, he turned back to Faraday.
‘What about the PM on the old girl?’
‘Pembury was duty call-out. He phoned me just before we left. Says he’s going to buy a house over here, save himself the travelling.’
‘And?’
‘Nothing. He’s putting it down to heart failure. Bit of arterial disease, bit of ischaemia, nothing you wouldn’t expect in an eighty-seven-year-old.’
‘No haemorrhages?’ Imber touched his eye.
‘Not a trace. And he looked bloody hard.’
Imber shook his head, as disappointed as Faraday. Given the possibility of yet another interview, they’d agreed that Pelly might have smothered Mary Unwin with a pillow. Had she put up a struggle, blood pressure would have burst some of the tiny vessels in
her eyeballs, a telltale sign of suffocation. As it was, Pembury had attributed her death to natural causes, ending the Coroner’s interest in the case.
‘And the cervical bone from the corpse?’
‘A result.’ Faraday visibly brightened. ‘He pulled in a skeletal specialist, guy from London. He’s done a preliminary report and Pembury talked me through it.’
Microscopic cut-analysis, he said, had established that a handsaw had been used to decapitate the body at the foot of the cliffs. Each cut mark leaves a characteristic imprint in the bone, and from this evidence the specialist had concluded that Faraday should be looking for a handsaw with alternating offset teeth, probably a TPI of ten.
‘Teeth per inch. I had to ask too. In plain English, we’re after a Stanley Hardpoint or something similar. B and Q sell them by the thousand.’
‘Scenes of Crime?’
‘They found a brand new one on Sunday morning out in the back of the garage where Pelly has a workbench. There was even a receipt. You want to take a guess at the date?’
‘October last year.’
‘Dead right. The ninth. Pelly says there was a sale on. Binned his old saw because it was worn out and treated himself to a replacement.’
‘Binned it where?’
‘He says the dustmen took it with the rest of the rubbish. I’ve got a couple of guys working on where it might have got to but don’t hold your breath.’
‘Not looking good then, eh?’
‘Afraid not. There’s one possible, though. The computer analysis people were on this morning. Seems they’re starting to get somewhere with deleted emails on Pelly’s laptop. They haven’t got the full story, not
yet, but if Willard pulls the plug that’s maybe all we’ll have to go on. The outfit’s based in Southsea. I said I’d come over.’ Faraday, hungrier by the minute, was looking for the waitress. ‘Fancy it?’
Winter had a key to Maddox’s seafront flat. He paid off the cab and made his way across the road, glad he had someone to be with. Still numbed, he could only remember the face of the radiographer who’d intercepted him as he left the X-ray department. She must have known too. Why else would she check his phone numbers?
Upstairs, on the tenth floor, he knocked lightly at the door before letting himself in. To his surprise the flat was empty. Maddox’s leather coat lay where she’d left it, draped over the sofa, and the kettle was still warm in the kitchen. He returned to the big living room and wandered across to the window. He felt utterly detached, completely alone, an audience of one queuing for a film he’d never wanted to see.
Brain tumour, had to be. In the cab he’d tried to visualise what it might look like, this stranger in his head. Was it dense? Hard? Spongy? Was it growing, day by day, hour by hour? Would the neurologist be assessing it even now, the contrast turned up on his monitor, a healthy lunchtime snack at his elbow? Winter didn’t know, and the more he thought about it the less he was able to grasp what the next few weeks might bring. He’d never had much time for introspection and now he understood why. All this bollocks, he told himself, happened to other people.
He opened the tall glass door and stepped onto the balcony. Below, in the sunshine, a couple of girls were sprawled on the grass, enjoying the first thin warmth of early spring. Ladies Mile, the path across Southsea
Common, was bright with crocuses, and he fought hard to resist the thought that this might be the last time he’d ever see them. Was this the way it had been with Joannie? Had a five-minute diagnosis robbed her of everything she’d taken for granted?
He reached for the handrail that topped the glass screen and peered over the edge. The sheerness of the drop dizzied him. He could see cracks in the paving stones that stretched towards the kerb. He could feel the chill of the breeze on his face as it hit the front of the flats and eddied upwards. A couple of seconds at the most, he thought. Then oblivion.
For a second or two he toyed with the proposition. The ghouls at the mortuary would have a poke at his broken remains. The blokes on the squad might sink a commemorative jar or two and trade war stories. The
News
would doubtless run some wank feature on the stresses of modern police work. And then there’d come another day and he, like Joannie, would be history.
Winter shook his head, slipped out his mobile, stepped back into the living room. Suttle answered at once.
‘How did you get on with the Bone?’ Winter was eyeing Maddox’s coat. ‘We need to talk.’
Number 79 St Edward’s Road lay on the margins of Thomas Ellis Owen’s Southsea, an early Victorian development which offered naval officers a pleasing alternative to the teeming chaos of life within the garrison walls. This was as genteel as Portsmouth got, an area of sinuous tree-lined crescents and finely detailed terraces, though chaos of a different kind was now lapping at the edges of Southsea’s pride and joy. Some of the gaunt Victorian villas in St Edward’s Road had become residential homes for the elderly. Others
housed single men in various stages of mental impairment, consigned to the tender mercies of community care. Number 79 had surrendered to multi-occupation.
Faraday and Imber paused at the gate. Instructions from DS Michaels had told Faraday to ring the second bell from the left. Faraday glanced at Imber.
Wowser
Productions?
The bell brought the clatter of footsteps up from the basement. The big front door was evidently double-bolted. Moments later Faraday found himself face to face with a pale thin-faced youth in jeans and a washed-out Ripcurl sweatshirt.
‘And you are?’
‘Meredith.’ The youth gave Faraday’s warrant card a cursory glance. ‘I thought you’d be here earlier. Lucky to catch me in.’
The entrance hall was dark and smelled of cats. A newish-looking mountain bike was chained to the radiator, its fat tyres caked with mud. Faraday followed Meredith down a narrow flight of steps and through another door. The biggest of the basement rooms doubled as a workshop and bedroom. A sturdy bench ran the length of one wall with a shelf above it. Half a dozen PCs were networked together with a tangle of cables, while other uncased computers were strewn across the bare boards on the floor, their delicate electronic innards exposed in various states of undress. Imber was looking at the big double bed. The duvet was littered with invoices, magazines and sundry paperwork while a blizzard of yellow stickies covered the lower half of Miss July, the naked poster girl on the wall above.
‘Why
Wowser?
’ Faraday was looking at a pile of laundry in the corner.
‘My dad’s old dog. Cocker spaniel. He was really
cluey, fetch anything.’ Meredith was squatting on the floor beside one of the computers. ‘I’m in the retrieval business.’ He grinned up at Faraday. ‘Wowser Productions. Cool or what?’
Faraday fought the temptation to ask about security. There were bars on the tiny window at the front of the room and the front door had seemed sturdy enough, but he’d somehow expected something altogether more businesslike. Not this student doss.
Meredith had found a couple of stools. He perched on one and offered Faraday the other. The hard disk from Pelly’s laptop lay on the workbench. Scribbled notes on the attached label recorded its progress from Pelly’s desk in the Shanklin nursing home. Seized on the 27th. Logged in on the 28th. DBX files backed up and downloaded the same day. A cable snaked up from the hard disk to the nearest of the PCs.
‘We dump everything onto this baby.’ Meredith patted the PC. ‘All the retrieval is downstream. That way we preserve the original evidence.’
Faraday was beginning to relax. Never be deceived by appearances, he told himself. The world belongs to the young.
Meredith switched on the monitor attached to the PC. He’d been briefed to explore the contents of Outlook Express. On the assumption that emails may have been deleted, he’d concentrated on the contents of the DBX file to which they would have been sent. He’d used specialist software to scan the file, slowly retrieving fragments of the original information. The process, he warned Faraday, was by no means perfect. At best, only fifty per cent of the recovered data would be coherent. But it might, with luck, offer
Congress
a clue or two.
‘Who mentioned
Congress
?’ Imber was looking alarmed.
‘It was on the paperwork.’ Meredith waved a thin arm at the enveloping chaos. ‘Helps me to keep each operation separate.’
‘You do lots of police work?’
‘More and more. I’ve been vetted, if that’s bothering you.’
‘Good lad,’ Faraday said drily. ‘So what have you got for us?’
Meredith tapped at the keyboard. Lines of text appeared on the monitor screen. The detectives bent forward, mystified.
‘It’s Serbo-Croat,’ Meredith explained. ‘I was like you guys at first – thought I’d fucked up.’
‘You know what it means?’
‘Yeah, more or less. There’s a Czech au pair down the road. Looks after a little girl, really sweet. She spent some time in Belgrade, speaks the language.’
‘You
showed
her all this?’ Imber again.
‘I showed her hard copy. Told her it came from the friend of a friend. Got mangled en route. Social thing. She’s cool about it.’
‘And this is all you’ve got?’ Faraday had so far counted what looked like five separate messages, islands of words in an ocean of white space.
‘Yes. They’re not complete, either. It’s like one of those games. The trick is to fill in the gaps but I guess that’s what you guys do for a living so …’ he laughed ‘… over to you.’
He left the workbench and went across to the bed. Under a pile of invoices he found a battered-looking blue file. Inside, stapled to the covering note from SOC, was the au pair’s translation.