Authors: Graham Hurley
‘Ah, Madge …’ The vaguest of smiles creased the old man’s face. ‘Harry’s girl.’
6
TH JUNE
1984,
PORTSMOUTH
More than twenty years later they were still with her, shards of memory, broken by terror and by time.
She’d been partying that night, an end-of-year celebration. She’d had a lot to drink earlier in the evening, toasting her mates and the sunset with bottles of cheap red on the beach beside the pier. She remembered lying on her back, her eyes closed, enjoying the warmth of the pebbles through the thinness of her T-shirt. A first in Social Studies was more than she’d really deserved. As ever, she’d been lucky.
After the beach came a disjointed series of parties, moving from address to address, following the trail of pissheads and celebrants. On a balcony overlooking the harbour mouth, she’d fended off a drunken lecturer from the art college. Later, in a basement bedsit on the seafront, she’d buried herself in a corner with a guy she’d been fond of in the first year. The relationship had come to nothing but they were still friends and that was nice. Later still, with a girfriend called Beth, she’d ended up at the Student Union dancing to Bon Jovi and Starship. Beth had pulled a 2i in French and German, and was already looking at a couple of job offers.
Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now
seemed a pretty good way of kissing goodbye to three mad years at the poly.
The way back to her own place was a mystery. By now, she was drunk enough to insist on walking home alone. It was less than a mile, for Christ’s sake. Her balance might be dodgy but her feet knew the way. She was a homing pigeon. She was a strong girl. She’d scored a First. She’d be just fine.
Key in the door. Don’t bother with the hall light. Try to follow the worn strip of carpet. Bounce softly from wall to wall. Finally make it to the last door on the right, the door before the steps down into the shared kitchen, the door to the room with the big window. The window opened on to the tiny square of garden. On hot nights she always lowered the sash, pulled back the curtain, let the air in. Habit, like innocence, dies hard.
TWENTY-FOUR YEARS LATER
:
SUNDAY
18
TH MAY
, 2008. 09.26
Steph Callan was a uniformed sergeant on the Road Death Investigation Team. After the delights of last night, using a torch to help retrieve lumps of flesh scattered across the B2177, she now found herself looking at the tiled emptiness of the post-mortem room at Winchester’s Royal Hampshire County Hospital.
One of the technicians emerged from the cubbyhole they used as a kitchen. Instead of his usual scrubs he was wearing jeans and a blue Pompey top. Steph could smell toast. The post-mortem was clearly hours away.
‘Where’s Jenny?’ Jenny Cutler was the on-call pathologist.
‘Sick. We’re expecting a bloke called Dodman. He’s just rung. Shit traffic getting out of Bristol.’ The technician stifled a yawn. ‘You want coffee or tea?’
Steph had never heard of Dodman. She settled for coffee, producing her mobile, glad of the chance to make a call or two of her own. P/C Walters was still in bed.
‘Skipper?’ He grunted.
‘Hit and run in Portsmouth, Sean. Southwick Hill Road. Happened last night. Bloke called Munday. No witnesses at this stage. That’s all we know.’
‘And this bloke’s dead?’
‘Very.’
The first officer on the scene had described the injuries as ‘horrible’. Steph had arrived after the body had been taken away but six years on the Roads Policing Unit told her that traffic cops were no friends of overstatement. Another guy, the driver of the Crash Incident Tender, had been blunter. ‘Roadkill,’ he’d muttered.
Now, on the phone, Steph told Walters to organise a couple of P/Cs for door-to-door inquiries. A web of residential streets lay to the south of the B2177 and there was a chance that someone might have heard or seen something. Examination of the road surface had revealed nothing as helpful as tyre marks but vehicle debris had been recovered and bagged. Munday’s clothing would be submitted for forensic examination and the post-mortem, once it got under way, might also tease out the beginnings of some kind of narrative. Walters grunted and said he was on the case. Steph brought the conversation to an end.
From the kitchen came the roar of a football crowd. One of the technicians had installed a portable TV. Steph pocketed her mobile and stepped across. There was interference on the picture but she recognised the brimming terraces of the new Wembley Stadium. These were news pictures. Less than twenty-four hours ago, a single goal had won the FA Cup for Pompey.
The technician in the blue top turned to find Steph at the door. He’d been up at the final and hadn’t slept since.
‘Magic, eh? Who’d have thought?’
Steph was still gazing at the screen.
‘So where’s Dodman?’ She said.
The pathologist arrived an hour and a half later, a tall, lanky figure in his mid-thirties. Steph talked him through last night’s sequence of events.
‘The body was called in by a passing motorist,’ she said. ‘His wife’s still in shock.’
Dodman was tucking the bottom of his scrubs into the tops of his wellies.
‘You’ve seen the body?’
‘Not yet.’
He glanced at his watch. ‘Better get on, then.’
The technicians retrieved the corpse from one of the big fridges. Munday’s body was still bagged from the scene of the accident. Steph followed the trolley into the chill of the post-mortem room.
The body was transferred onto the slab and one of the technicians scissored through the attached ID tag before unzipping the bag. Two years on the Road Death team had armoured Steph against moments like these, but what lay inside amongst the puddle of bodily fluids belonged in an abattoir. The guy on the crash tender had been right. Roadkill.
The technicians tugged the bag free. Munday’s body was still clothed but the paramedics at the scene must have removed one leg of the soiled jeans. Steph could see the roughness of the cut, way up near the crutch, and the whiteness of the flesh below the knee, peeled neatly back from the bone beneath. The exposed calf muscles glistened under the lights, a plump, shiny redness veined with purple that reminded Steph of prime beef. Tenderloin, maybe. Or rump.
The Scenes of Crime photographer was circling the body, taking shot after shot as Dodman dictated notes into the overhead microphone. Flaying injuries to the lower right leg. Oblique fracture of the tibia. Lacerations to the upper right thigh. Abrasions and bruises on both arms.
Steph was staring at the head. One or more wheels must have run this man over. Not just his right leg, stripping
the flesh from the bone, but his chest and his head as well. His face was no more than a smear – a suggestion of a nose, a glimpse of yellowing teeth where his mouth should have been – and the head itself had been flattened.
Dodman’s murmured commentary faltered, then picked up again. Crushed cranial vault. Visible extrusions of brain tissue through multiple scalp lacerations. Steph tried to keep up, tried to focus on the fat grey threads of jelly that laced what remained of this man’s head. Memories, she told herself. Intelligence. The very stuff of what we are, of what we do. Billions of nerve cells that should have warned him to take care when crossing the road. She closed her eyes and took a tiny step backwards, secretly glad that something like this could still shock her.
Three hours later, the post-mortem complete, she looked up from her notes. The technician had discovered that the photographer was also a Pompey fan. Better still, he lived in Portsmouth and was happy to offer a lift back to the city. The technician, who’d been planning on taking the train, peeled off his bloodied gloves and washed his hands. A mate had told him the team would be parading the cup for the benefit of the fans. Open-top bus. Civic reception. Then a monster crowd on Southsea Common. Harry Redknapp, he said, was a fucking genius.
Steph got to her feet. The investigator from Scenes of Crime was deep in conversation with the pathologist. Dodman was confirming the exact configuration of the wedge-shaped fracture in the tibia. The base of the wedge was at the front of the bone, which meant that Munday had been facing the vehicle when it knocked him over. A near-identical fracture in the other leg – same configuration, same height – offered another clue. In all probability, he’d simply stood there, not moving.
‘Do we think he was pissed?’ Steph asked.
She didn’t know Dodman. A blood sample would be sent for laboratory analysis. In the absence of lawyer-proof results, some pathologists refused to speculate.
‘Of course he was pissed.’ Dodman gestured vaguely back towards the post-mortem room. ‘You could smell it from here.’
Whenever he ate out on Sundays, Winter always went for the roast. Normally it would be one of a handful of Pompey pubs. Today it was Sur-la-Mer, a Southsea bistro with a reputation for good food and an interesting clientele. Marie’s choice.
She sat across from him at the table near the window. Blonde, leggy, beautifully dressed, she’d survived nearly twenty years of marriage to Bazza Mackenzie and still turned heads wherever she went. Winter had always been fascinated by the relationship but since he’d become part of Mackenzie’s entourage, he’d found himself getting closer and closer to this wife of his. He liked her strength of mind, her cultured little ways, and he was flattered by the confidences she occasionally shared. He also knew that she valued his advice. Bazza, all too often, was a firework, bursting with brilliant ideas but easily bored. Up like a rocket, thought Winter. Down like a stick.
‘Where is he?’ Winter wanted to know.
‘Out there somewhere.’ Marie nodded at the army of Pompey fans swamping the street outside, making their way to the nearby Common. ‘He tried to get the team to the hotel for a big reception but the club said no. He’d never admit it but that definitely pissed Baz off. Sometimes it’s like he invented the bloody club.’
Winter laughed. The Royal Trafalgar was the jewel in Bazza’s crown, a handsome meticulously refurbished
sea-front hotel with views across the Solent towards the Isle of Wight. In the absence of a team reception, Baz would doubtless be renaming one of the function rooms in honour of Pompey’s sainted manager. The Harry Red-knapp Suite. By Invitation Only.
‘Did you see the game?’
‘I was out riding with Ezzie. Did you?’
‘Yeah. Crap.’ Ezzie was Marie’s daughter.
‘So why did you bother?’
‘I’ve no idea.’ Winter picked at his bread roll. ‘Maybe it comes with the territory.’
‘Bazza or the city?’
‘Both. Tell you the truth, I’ve never seen the difference.’
It was true. Bazza Mackenzie had always been indivisible from the city of his birth, and as a working detective Winter had quickly recognised just how tight the tribal bonds of loyalty could be. The guys Mackenzie used to fight alongside during the glory days of the 6.57, exporting football violence to terraces across the country, were – a generation later – exactly the same faces he relied on to turn fat bundles of cocaine money into a prospering business empire. Now part of that empire, Winter could only admire the strength of the glue that stuck these guys together. The police, he knew, could never match it. Not then. Not now.
‘You think he’s on the Common? With his rattle and his scarf?’
‘Of course he is. He had a ring round this morning. They took a chopper to Wembley yesterday. God knows how much it cost.’
Winter had seen the quote on Bazza’s desk only last week. Skywise Helicoptor Charters. £2875, plus endless sundries. At the time, he’d dismissed it as some kind of fantasy. Now he knew different.
‘It’s a game, my love. Pompey got lucky. Most pub sides would beat Cardiff.’
Winter reached for the menu, keen to change the subject. The lunch, like the venue, had been Marie’s idea. Before they got down to business, he had something of his own to get off his chest.
‘That email of mine …,’ he began.
‘Which one?’
‘About the Trust. I’ve made contact with the bloke now, scoped him out. Everyone I’ve talked to says he’s the business. Lateral thinker, big reputation where it matters, plus he can’t wait to get away from London. The way I read it, he wouldn’t be after a fortune either. Just in case you were wondering.’
Marie had the grace to smile. As chair of the Tide Turn Trust, she’d worried constantly about money, yet another reason why Winter was desperate to surrender what little authority he really had. Back last summer, when the Trust was a gleam in Bazza’s eye, the title of chief executive had sounded promising. Months later, a great deal wiser about the realities of coping with problem youth, Winter wanted out.
‘To be fair, Marie, it was never my bag. You know that. There are some things I do well and some things I don’t. Playing Mr Nice to a bunch of twat kids isn’t one of them.’
‘Mr Nice isn’t what we had in mind.’
‘Mr Nasty, then. Whatever. The fact is you need special gifts. You need experience. You need patience. And you need to be on top of all the bullshit that goes with it. You know how many forms you have to fill in to stand any kind of chance of raising grant money? Hundreds. Thousands. These guys want every last piece of you. You know anything about CRB checks? Prolific offender
protocols? Youth Offending Teams? List 99? The Independent Safeguarding Authority? The Bichard Vetting Scheme? Public liability insurance? I thought I’d left all this bollocks in the CID office. Turns out I was wrong.’
The smile on Marie’s face was fading but Winter wasn’t about to stop.
‘Something else …,’ he said. ‘Tell Baz I’ve sussed him. I know what he’s up to. And to be frank, my love, it’s not my job to help.’
‘Help how?’
‘Help him get his knighthood … or whatever else he fucking wants. The guy’s creaming it. The business is making you a fortune. And this is
legit
money. So why on earth do you need the Tide Turn Trust?’