Authors: Graham Hurley
Happy Days (47 page)
‘Baz …’ he managed.
‘Don’t Baz me, you cunt. You know what this is? You know what happens next?’
Winter tried to focus. Instead of a snake, he found himself looking at a tube. He squeezed his eyes hard, shook his head, took another look. It was a tube of expanding foam, the kind you use for insulation. The last time he’d seen it was here in this very shop.
‘You know what this stuff does, cunt? It expands like fuck then it sets rock hard. And once that’s happened, there’s fuck all you can do. You know about this stuff? Just nod.’
Winter nodded. He could remember the stickiness on his palm when he’d shaken Sanouk’s tiny hand the first time they’d met. And he remembered how hard it had been to scrape the stuff off afterwards.
‘So listen, cunt …’ Mackenzie was back in his face. ‘What happens is this. We forget the snake. We open your mouth. And then I fill it full of this stuff.
Comprende?
It’s something really special we use for grasses in this city. It gets bigger and bigger inside. It tastes fucking horrible, and after not very long you can’t breathe. Not through your mouth. So by now you’re choking to death, so if we’re kind, and that’s a big if, we squirt a little more up each nostril. And after that, mush, you’re well dead. Yeah? All that make sense? You fucking grass?’
He stepped back. Sanouk had found the injector that went with the tube of foam. Mackenzie slipped the tube into the barrel, withdrew the nail that capped the nozzle and applied a little pressure. A tiny dribble of foam appeared, getting bigger and bigger on contact with the air. Mackenzie waved it under
Winter’s nose. It smelled chemical. It smelled of death.
‘One more chance, you fucking grass. Just get it off that fucking chest of yours.’
‘What, Baz?’
‘Marie, you cunt.’
In the Command Post the TFU liaison D/S signalled to Willard. The guys had finally arrived. They were ready.
‘Where are they exactly?’
‘Parked up round the corner, sir. Thirty seconds, max.’
Willard nodded, taking his time. Suttle checked his watch again. Winter had been inside for more than fifteen minutes. How much time did
Gehenna
need?
‘For fuck’s sake, sir …’ he began.
Willard ignored him. He told the TFU liaison to go ahead. The D/S was already on the radio.
‘Pompey Reptiles,’ he said softly. ‘Number 49.’
There was a long silence. Suttle tried to imagine the guys piling out of the van and spilling round the corner of the street. On an operation like this there’d be half a dozen of them. One would be carrying the ram to put the door in. They called it the Big Key. On most occasions that would draw a smile from Suttle but not tonight. Winter, he thought. Poor bloody Winter.
‘They’re outside the property, sir.’ The TFU liaison again.
Another pause. Another silence. On the TV the face of David Cameron appeared in close-up – sleek, pink, almost cherubic. Parsons had turned the sound down. Suttle hadn’t a clue what he was saying.
‘They’ve done the door, sir. There’s a guy tied to a chair.’ The TFU liaison was looking at Willard. ‘Mackenzie’s got something pointing at his mouth.’
Willard wanted to know what the something was.
‘Hard to say, sir.’
‘Who’s the guy in the chair?’
‘We think Winter.’
‘Is he under threat?’
‘Yes, sir, definitely.’
‘And is Mackenzie backing off?’
‘No, sir. We’ve warned him twice. He’s not having it.’
Willard was leaning forward in his chair, his body tense. In these situations, operational responsibility lay with the TFU commander on the spot. Only he could take the decision to open fire. Willard told the liaison D/S to wind up the volume on the comms. Then he sat back and closed his eyes. He was smiling.
A single shot. Then silence.
The Portsmouth North election was won by Penny Mordaunt, the Conservative Party candidate, with a 44 per cent share of the vote. She beat the incumbent MP, Labour’s Sarah McCarthy-Fry, by 7,289 votes. Bazza Mackenzie, had he been alive, would have lost his deposit.
Bazza Mackenzie’s death at the hands of the Tactical Firearms Unit was lead story in the Portsmouth
News
for a couple of days. The killing sparked remarkably few protests within the city, but the Chief Constable, after consultations with Det Chief Supt Geoff Willard, felt obliged to call in a team of officers from a neighbouring force to conduct an independent inquiry. The results of that inquiry are still pending, but inside sources report no cause for concern on the part of Hampshire Police.
Marie Mackenzie had nothing to say about her husband’s death in response to enquiries from the
News
and a variety of other media outlets. She also declined to speak to reporter Gill Reynolds in connection with a special post-election
News
supplement. Neither would she take calls from Andy Makins, who appeared to be writing a book about her husband’s rise and fall.
Marie and her immediate family headed the sizeable crowd of mourners who filled the city’s Anglican cathedral for her husband’s funeral. She resisted suggestions that Bazza’s coffin should be paraded through the city in a horse-drawn hearse
but consented to decorate it with a single Pompey scarf when half a dozen 6.57 shouldered the coffin on its arrival at the cathedral. More 6.57 formed an honour guard to line Bazza’s path to the south door, and there was an impressive turnout of accountants, solicitors, city councillors and sundry other officials waiting inside. Bazza’s grandson Guy read a poem he’d composed specially for the occasion, and Marie voiced a simple, elegant tribute to the man she said she’d always loved. In good times and bad Bazza had always been her rock. No one could ever replace him.
Off the record, in response to an enquiry from the 6.57, Marie emphatically denied that she’d ever had a relationship with Paul Winter. Neither did she know where he was. Nor did she ever want to see him again. When Cesar Dobroslaw seized her house, she moved in with her daughter and son-in-law.
Paul Winter left the country the day after Mackenzie’s death. Thanks to a generous, if discreet, settlement from Hampshire Police, Misty and Trude joined him shortly afterwards. To date, they still occupy a roomy rented house in pinewoods across the bay from Porec. Winter is mulling over whether to make an offer for the freehold but is still struggling with Serbo-Croat. To Misty’s astonishment, he’s also developed an interest in fishing. Trude’s mobility is slowly improving. On good days she accompanies Winter to his favourite cove and helps sort out his lures. Misty, though she won’t admit it, is beginning to miss home.
Det Chief Supt Geoff Willard is now an Assistant Chief Constable with West Midlands Police. He recently acquired the firearms portfolio on behalf of the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO).
Pompey went to Wembley on Saturday, 15 May and gave a spirited account of themselves. Had they not missed a penalty
early in the second half they might even have got a result. As it was, they lost to Chelsea 1–0. No shame.
Two months after the conclusion of Operation
Gehenna
, with the new coalition government in place, Jimmy Suttle got a phone call from Ulyana, J-J’s partner. She said that J-J still had his father’s ashes and wanted to scatter them from the top of Tennyson Down, Faraday’s favourite walk. Would Suttle and Lizzie be prepared to be part of this last farewell? Suttle said yes.
They met on a blustery day in mid-July. Tennyson Down is on the Isle of Wight. They took the FastCat to Ryde and caught a bus across the island to Freshwater Bay. From there a stiff walk took them a couple of miles to the very top of the down, marked by a huge granite cross. J-J was carrying his father’s ashes in a plastic container. The wind was blowing in from the sea. They all stood at the top of the cliff, peering down at the churn of the waves below.
Suttle had brought the eagle poem, but J-J didn’t want him to read it. Instead, he knelt briefly on the springy turf and bowed his head. Then he got to his feet, unscrewed the lid of the container and scattered his father’s ashes. The wind, billowing up from the cliff face, carried most of the thin grey cloud away, but J-J was still finding tiny particles of grainy ash in his pullover on the bus ride back to Ryde.
Six weeks later Jimmy Suttle got a letter from the Personnel Department at Devon and Cornwall Constabulary. They were happy to inform him that his application for a post with one of the force’s Major Crime Investigation Teams had been successful. Suttle carried the letter back upstairs with a cup of tea for Lizzie and a warmed-up bottle for Grace. Lizzie read the letter and returned it to the envelope.
‘Happy days,’ she said.
This is the twelfth and last book in the Faraday series and is, in so many ways, a personal farewell to Pompey. Over the last decade, I’ve name-checked the army of cops, pathologists, nurses, social workers, immigration officials, priests, naval officers, accountants, coroners, yachtspeople, train drivers, local government officers, journalists and politicians plus assorted adventurers, friends and family who have given me priceless help – and in this respect
Happy Days
owes yet another debt to these folk, too numerous to list here. You know who you are, and you have my deepest gratitude.
Hugh Davis has copy-edited most of the series and has disentangled my punctuation with forensic skill and enormous patience. Diana F ranklin has been through the proofs with a magnifying glass and nailed a thousand typos. My editor, Simon Spanton, has remained on board to the last and has played an absolutely key role since Joe Faraday made his debut in 2000.
My agent at Blake Friedmann, Oli Munson, has been a tower of strength, especially with respect to D/S Jimmy Suttle’s imminent transfer to the Devon and Cornwall force.
But my biggest thank you must go to Lin, my wife. She’s weathered the Faraday years with immense good humour, an acute feel for character, and a huge appetite for shedding light on some of life’s nastier secrets. She’s also been the best possible friend and travelling companion when the ever-widening plots took us into some of the darker corners of Europe and the Middle East. I treasure those journeys that Joe Faraday made possible.
Fiction
RULES OF ENGAGEMENT
REAPER
THE DEVIL’S BREATH
THUNDER IN THE BLOOD
SABBATHMAN
THE PERFECT SOLDIER
HEAVEN’S LIGHT
NOCTURNE
PERMISSIBLE LIMITS
Detective Inspector Joe Faraday Investigations
TURNSTONE
THE TAKE
ANGELS PASSING
DEADLIGHT
CUT TO BLACK
BLOOD AND HONEY
ONE UNDER
THE PRICE OF DARKNESS
NO LOVELIER DEATH
BEYOND REACH
BORROWED LIGHT
Non-Fiction
AIRSHOW
AN ORION EBOOK
First published in Great Britain in 2012 by Orion Books
This ebook first published in 2012 by Orion Books
Copyright © Graham Hurley 2012
The right of Graham Hurley to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
All the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: 978 1 4091 0792 7
The Orion Publishing Group Ltd
Orion House
5 Upper Saint Martin’s Lane
London, WC2H 9EA
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