Deadlight (17 page)

‘Yep. Got the last boat out. Bombed stupid for five days then nearly swam back to bloody Egypt. Tell me something, Joe, why do the Brits always fuck it up?’

To Faraday’s shame, he hadn’t known the full story. He’d heard about Crete, of course, known that it hadn’t been the army’s finest hour, but the shaming weight of detail, the sheer scale of the catastrophe, had never dawned on him. Allied commanders who’d lost their nerve. Counter-attacks that were never properly developed. Thousands of men, poorly led, chucking in the towel against a handful of German paratroopers then legging it through the mountains for yet another botched evacuation. Brilliant.

‘What possessed you to make the film?’ he asked.

‘My dad. He died a couple of years ago. It was a kind of tribute if you like.’

‘Has it been seen anywhere? Have you sold it?’

‘Oz, New Zealand.’ She smiled. ‘And Germany.’

‘Not here?’

‘Not yet. The Brits are odd. They like to celebrate their defeats. That treatment might be a bit close to the bone.’

Faraday joined her on the sofa, thinking of the Dunkirk film she was making with J-J. She was right about the Brits. There was nothing they treasured more than a military disaster.

‘Did your dad talk about Crete a lot?’

‘Not until very recently. In fact it was only when he was in a home in Oz and I went back to see him that I realised he’d been in the war at all. He never mentioned it when I was a kid and I was away most of the time after that.’

‘And was he bitter?’

‘Resigned. Maybe even amused. He saw a lot, my dad. I only knew what he chose to tell me.’

‘What about the Brits? Did he like them?’

‘Not much. On a good day he’d say he felt sorry for them.’

‘But you married one.’

‘Yeah.’ She pulled a face. ‘Not my cleverest move.’

‘You’re telling me you regret it?’

‘No, but my dad did, big-time. Me? I never give it a moment’s thought. Looking back’s a waste of time. What’s done is done. Only the Brits bang on about the past. There …’ She grinned at Faraday. ‘How’s that for an insult? Bet you’re really glad you came now.’

Faraday said it didn’t matter. He’d had a great evening, totally unexpected, and one day soon he’d try and repay the hospitality. In the meantime, he’d tell J-J the Dunkirk video was going well.

‘True?’

She didn’t answer him. Instead, she got to her feet and looked him in the eye.

‘We haven’t talked about you at all, have we? Your wars?’

‘No.’ Faraday was trying to find his car keys. ‘And thank Christ for that.’

THURSDAY
, 6
JUNE
, 2002,
08.00

Faraday was at his desk early next morning, the worst of the hangover gone. He’d been out first thing, tramping north on the path that skirted Langstone Harbour, glad of the wind on his face. Clouds were piling up to the west, the promise of rain in the air, but the rich orange spill of dawn had brought him to a pause and he’d lifted his binos for a sweep across the gleaming mud flats.

June was a dead time for birds but he’d caught a glimpse of shelduck, way out on the harbour, and later en route back towards the Bargemaster’s House, he’d taken a brief detour to check out one of the fresh-water ponds that dotted Milton Common. He loved this time of the morning, no one around, the first fat drops of rain on his face, and he’d paused in the cover of a blackberry bush, checking on a family of reed warblers nesting in the bulrushes at the water’s edge.

For days now, mother and chicks had been sharing the nest with a cuckoo. One by one, the cuckoo had expelled the other chicks, hogging the mother’s food for itself, and Faraday asked himself yet again what the shy little warbler made of this huge baby with its ever-open gape. Something deep in her brain made sure that she kept supplying the food but surely – at the very least – she’d be resentful that this greedy stranger had taken over her entire world. Could reed warblers feel resentment? he’d wondered. And, given this ever-diminishing family, were they able to count?

Now, gazing down at the Policy Book still open on his office desk, he heard a knock on the door. It was one of
the management assistants. She held out a big manila envelope.

‘The navy bloke,’ she said. ‘Dropped it off earlier.’

Faraday opened the envelope. Inside was a thick stapled photocopy headed ‘In Confidence’. From the top left-hand corner, a younger, thinner face swam out, staring at the camera, backed by the pleats of a photo-booth curtain. Coughlin, Faraday thought, remembering that same face, swollen and purpled, on the SOC video.

The Divisional Officer’s Report ran to a dozen pages, tracking Coughlin from his days as a sixteen-year-old junior seaman through to his discharge seventeen years later. Faraday flicked through it, skipping from posting to posting, trying to distil the essence of the man from the various handwritten comments.

Early on, the training officer at HMS
Raleigh
had talked of ‘disappointment’ and warned that Coughlin ‘must temper his undoubted energies with a degree of self-discipline if he is to realise his full potential’. A couple of years later, at sea aboard HMS
Edinburgh Castle
, another officer had written guardedly of ‘competence’ and ‘occasional flair’, a judgement heavily qualified by a Lieutenant Commander reviewing his progress on his next posting. ‘CK Coughlin,’ he’d scrawled, ‘still requires a significant degree of supervision, disappointing after nearly five years in the service.’

Faraday eased back in his chair, gazing out as the first drops of rain smeared the view. He’d need a translator to properly understand a document like this – what did ‘CK’ mean? – but twenty-two years in the police force had left him fluent in the stilted bureaucratic prose reserved for career assessment.

Coughlin, without doubt, had been a handful, a judgement amply confirmed by more or less every officer who’d crossed his path. He seemed to have survived, just. He’d obviously been canny enough to avoid a major disciplinary drama. But nowhere was there any evidence
that he’d happily submitted to the demands of teamwork. ‘Coughlin can be a solitary individual,’ another Lieutenant Commander had written in 1976, ‘and sometimes he appears unaware of the needs of others. Confronted with his shortcomings, he finds it difficult to accept or even acknowledge blame.’

Solitary individual? Faraday leafed on through the report, pausing a page or two before the end. By 1982, Coughlin had become a ‘LCK’ aboard HMS
Accolade
. The ship had obviously been part of the Falklands Task Force because the posting had come to an abrupt halt in the middle of the hostilities. ‘The loss of a ship can be profoundly traumatic,’ a Commander Wylie had written, ‘and it is to LCK Coughlin’s credit that he seems to have been less affected by the sinking than many of the ship’s crew. This strength of resolve should stand him in good stead in future drafts.’

Faraday put the report to one side, suddenly swamped by memories of the Falklands Task Force. For the moment, HMS
Accolade
rang no bells – so many ships had gone down – but April 1982 had found him on leave from the CID training school in Lancashire, and back in Portsmouth he’d taken J-J down to the harbourmouth to watch
Hermes
and
Invincible
leaving for the long passage south.

The crowds had been ten deep on top of the Round Tower overlooking the harbour narrows, but with his three-year-old son perched on his shoulders Faraday had found the perfect spot, wedged against a big retaining wall. The ships had seemed enormous –
Hermes
in particular – and Faraday remembered the choke in his throat as he watched the battered old aircraft carrier slip slowly seawards. The flight deck, crammed with helicopters, had been lined with sailors – feet spread, heads held high – and it was impossible not to wonder how many of these men wouldn’t be coming home. The crowd, mainly women and kids, had been strangely muted, not a hint of
the brash tabloid jingoism that had gripped the rest of the nation, and watching the television news that night, Faraday had tried to explain something of this puzzle to his infant son. The country, he’d signed, seemed only too glad to go to war. Only cities like Portsmouth were anticipating the bill.

‘Sir?’

It was Dave Michaels’ head around the door. He was looking unusually cheerful. He’d just had a call from Dave Stockley at the Computer Crime Unit. They’d been working flat out on the analysis of Coughlin’s hard disk and had come up with what Stockley termed ‘good news’.

‘Like what?’

‘Like a name.’

Stockley himself appeared forty minutes later. He’d driven over from the CCU at Netley and brought yet more print-outs. Faraday borrowed Willard’s office again, spreading the paperwork across the conference table. Brian Imber had abandoned the Intelligence Cell up the corridor to join them. Dave Michaels made the coffees.

Since the last meet, Stockley’s analysts had isolated a number of more recent newsgroup conversations involving Coughlin. Still using the nickname ‘Freckler’, he’d thrown his weight about, doing his best to antagonise whoever might have dropped in. None of this had been the least bit surprising, not after his earlier performances, but another factor had entered the equation, something new.

Faraday looked at him, waiting.

‘Well?’

‘Coughlin was being stalked. There’s another guy, follows him around from site to site, logs on, gets stuck in. Here.’

Stockley selected a print-out and slid it along the table.
Faraday noted the time and date: 23.12, 17.11.01. Seven months ago. He peered at the lines of text beneath. Coughlin had embarked on one of his more violent riffs, slagging off a subscriber from Heidelberg who’d evidently been making enquiries about a Led Zeppelin album. In Coughlin’s view, the guy was a total wanker. Only cretins and Nazis liked that kind of crap. This diatribe, increasingly explicit, had been interrupted by a new voice, even more savage than Coughlin’s. ‘Freckler’ deserved a bomb up his arse. And if he didn’t watch his manners, the new arrival would be only too happy to oblige. This threat naturally sparked a reaction from Coughlin and over the next half an hour or so this corner of the newsgroup was wrecked by a full-scale brawl. Even on paper, the violence felt all too real.

Faraday looked up.

‘And there’s lots of this?’

‘Loads.’ Stockley gestured at the print-outs at his elbow. ‘We haven’t had a chance to go through absolutely everything but it seems to have started last year. The new guy obviously checks in through DejaVu, runs “Freckler” as the prompt, and tracks Coughlin from newsgroup to newsgroup.’

‘Is that easy?’

‘Time-consuming. You have to want to do it. It has to matter to you.’

‘And the stuff is all like this?’ Faraday lifted the print-out he’d just read.

‘Worse.’ Stockley was trying to find another example. ‘The last couple of weeks it’s virtual death threats.’

Dave Michaels’ grin flagged the pun. Virtual indeed. Until you knocked on a door in Niton Road and found an overweight fifty-three-year-old dead on the floor.

Faraday was still looking at Stockley.

‘So who is he?’

‘He calls himself Guzza.’

‘Guzza?’

‘That’s his nickname, his handle. That’s what we start with.’

It was Stockley’s turn to smile. He opened his briefcase again and took out a file. Tracking down a subscriber name and number could often take weeks. With foreign-registered ISPs it would often be even longer. On this occasion, though, they’d struck lucky. The duty inspector had signed the RIPA and data protection forms and the ISP had come up with a subscriber number.

‘In the UK?’

‘In Pompey.’

Faraday blinked. Dave Michaels had been right. Good news at last.

‘And they gave you a name?’

‘No, but BT did.’

The duty inspector had obliged by signing another DP2 and the form had gone to BT’s Police Liaison department. Thirty minutes later, Stockley was looking at their response. He passed the fax to Faraday. Kevin Pritchard. Alhambra Hotel. Granada Road. Southsea.

Faraday stared at it. Granada Road ran from the Strand down to Canoe Lake, an expanse of brackish water reserved for mute swans, pedalos and model yachts. There were lots of hotels down Granada Road, thirty pounds a night B and B, the kind of place you wouldn’t take anyone you wanted to impress.

Faraday looked up.

‘Niton Road’s five minutes away.’

‘Exactly.’ Dave Michaels was already on his feet, collecting the mugs. ‘I took the liberty of phoning Scenes of Crime.’

Paul Winter had been waiting nearly half an hour before Dawn Ellis turned up. The CID office was virtually empty. Cathy Lamb had organised massive house-to-house checks in the vicinity of Rooke’s beating, the squad bulked out with uniforms poached from every corner of
the city. Chief Superintendent Hartigan, who had an appetite for Wild West metaphors, had decided that this was high noon. One way or another, he was going to re-establish the rule of law in Somerstown.

Dawn Ellis looked awful. She normally had a flawless complexion, a tribute to her diet and her arm’s-length relationship with tobacco and booze. She went weeks without touching a proper drink, never smoked, and regularly worked out at a Port Solent gym. But this morning, for reasons that Winter could only guess at, her normal sparkiness had gone. She went straight to the electric kettle and then spooned Nescafé into an empty cup. Her face was drawn, the skin beneath her eyes smudged black with exhaustion.

Winter looked pointedly at his watch.

‘Traffic bad, was it?’

Ellis ignored him. She wanted to know what Scenes of Crime had sussed last night.

‘They finished late, round ten, closed off the whole street. Jerry Proctor was in here first thing with Cathy.’

‘And?’

‘Nothing much. The blood’s got to be Rookie’s.’

‘All of it?’

‘Yeah.’ Winter reached for the last of the biscuits. ‘This wasn’t a fight. Just a bunch of kids handing it out.’

‘Bunch? Who says?’

Winter explained about the mobile phone SOC had retrieved from the pocket of Rooke’s denim jacket. The last stored message to come in had invited him to a meet on the street where the beating had taken place. The presumption was that Rookie had gone along in the expectation of a drug deal. At Proctor’s request, Winter had listened to the voice and confirmed it wasn’t Darren Geech. Not that Geech wasn’t squarely in the frame.