Deadlight (30 page)

‘Boss?’ It was Yates. ‘I’m at the Alhambra. Pritchard seems to have gone missing.’

‘Missing?’ Faraday put his drink down.

‘His sister hasn’t seen him since mid-afternoon. She thinks he might have gone to the Isle of Wight. Apparently he does that sometimes.’

‘Why? Why would he have gone?’

‘She says he was very upset. And she’s right, he was.’

‘Any idea where on the island?’

‘Ryde, probably. He knows somebody who owns a drinking club.’

‘You’re checking it out?’

‘As we speak. If he is over there I can get a local DC or a uniform to walk him on to the hovercraft. He’ll be back here in no time.’

Faraday glanced at his watch. The possibilities of Scottish crossbills, ptarmigan and golden eagles over Speyside would keep them going for at least another half-hour.

‘Keep me briefed,’ he said. ‘I’ll stay here.’

With the light beginning to fade, Pritchard stepped out of the trees and made his way slowly down the path that led to the fence at the bottom of the hill. He’d spent the last hour or so up in the little shadowed glade where they used to picnic. He’d sprawled face down on the warm grass, the scent of leaf mould in his nostrils, looking for a place amongst his memories where he might rest for a while.

They’d spent whole afternoons here, often. They’d made love in the hot sunshine, oblivious to the curiosity of strangers. They’d crawled all over each other, trying it this way, that way, stretching the moment as long as they could. And afterwards, like now, they’d closed their eyes and drifted away, exhausted.

He felt half dead already. Every movement, every breath, every next image that swam back to him was agony. He treasured those moments, of course he did. That was what had given him purpose and the courage to go on. That was what had brightened the darkness that threatened to swamp him. But with Sean gone, with nothing left but the hideously stitched dummy in the mortuary chapel, the candle had flickered and died.

He hurt. Everywhere. And worse than that, he was frightened. What would he become? How could he spend the rest of his life, that worthless currency, without the man he loved?

He shuddered, remembering the chill waxiness of Sean’s dead flesh under his fingers. That wasn’t a memory he wanted to take with him. No way. You had a choice here. The women on daytime television, the armchair pundits, all those self-help magazines, they were right. Time to take charge. Time to establish ownership. Time to tell your life just who was boss.

Would it be hard? Of course not. Because, with a certainty that quickened his footsteps, he knew that Sean would be waiting. His Sean. The old Sean. The Sean from up there in the woods.

At the bottom of the hill, he clambered awkwardly over the wire fence. The railway line was down in a cutting, the grassy bank falling away to the bed of the track below. He looked down at the rails. The one on the far side was the one to avoid. That was no way to die, not if you wanted Sean to be proud of you, to be ready and waiting, with a smile on his face. No, for that you needed something a bit more outrageous.

He steadied himself at the top of the bank, then skidded down on his backside. For a moment, in a heap at the bottom, he thought he’d broken his ankle but upright again he stamped the pain from his foot and set off. The tunnel was barely two hundred metres away. With every limping step, the darkness grew bigger and
bigger. He broke into an awkward half-run. I’m glad, he thought. Glad for Sean. Glad for both of us. His breath was beginning to rasp in his chest. He could feel his heart pumping and pumping. Moments later, the darkness enveloped him. But still he stumbled on.

SATURDAY
, 8
JUNE
, 2002,
21.30

It was late before news of Pritchard filtered back to Major Crimes. A London-bound train had made an emergency stop in the Buriton Tunnel. The driver, traumatised, reported hitting an object at speed. There was blood and tissue on the buffers and the lower surfaces of the front of the cab. The train was inched slowly backwards, revealing a severed leg. Searching the side of the track by torchlight, emergency crews found a clothed upper torso, pulped beyond recognition. Current was switched off and passengers were led out of the tunnel and along the track to buses waiting in a nearby village. All services on the main London–Portsmouth line were cancelled until further notice.

It was a young SOC officer who made the connection to Pritchard. Going through his clothing for ID, he came across a battered colour photograph, six by four. It showed a face he’d seen only days ago, sprawled on a carpet in a ground-floor flat in Southsea. He’d got through to his skipper, Jerry Proctor. Coughlin, he’d said. Definitely the bloke in Niton Road.

Faraday was at home when Jerry Proctor phoned with the news. It was late by now, gone eleven, and Faraday was thinking of going to bed. Since there’d been no sign of Pritchard in Ryde, he’d told Bev Yates to pack it in for the night. They’d start again tomorrow. Pritchard should be back by then.

Evidently not.

‘Is there any point me giving you a physical description?’

Proctor, who hadn’t seen the body, could only go on reports from the scene. Bitten nails. No rings. Black trousers. Plaid shirt with button-down pockets. Cheap runners.

Faraday, who’d sensed already that it had to be Pritchard, gave Proctor the number of the Alhambra Hotel.

‘His sister’s name’s Jackie. She’ll be able to ID the clothing.’ He turned to look out at the darkness of the harbour. ‘Was there a note or anything?’

Proctor said he didn’t know. His blokes at the scene hadn’t mentioned a note but he’d be organising a POLSA search first thing tomorrow, working outwards from the mouth of the tunnel, and it was possible they might turn something up. Suicides were often obsessively neat, leaving a little cairn of treasured belongings.

‘Pritchard wasn’t like that,’ Faraday muttered. ‘Pritchard was chaos on legs.’

He brought the conversation to an end and put the phone down. Outside, down by the harbour, the night air was still warm and Faraday turned his back on the house, walking slowly north. The tide was high, lapping softly at the crust of seaweed heaped at the foot of the sea wall, and from way out across the water came the distant cry of a curlew. It had long been Faraday’s favourite call – plangent, haunting – and tonight it seemed especially apt.

Pritchard’s final moments didn’t bear contemplation. To walk into a tunnel, to hear the faraway rumble of a train, to feel the ground beneath your feet beginning to shake, and then to summon the courage to stand there, feet planted between the rails as the light on the cab lurched into view. There’d come a moment, thought Faraday, when your every instinct was to move, to step sideways, to throw yourself flat, to turn and run, but by that time the monster would be on top of you and it would be far, far too late. Would you feel the impact? The smack of steel against bone? Would you be aware of
the wheels slicing through sinew and flesh before your body – your heart – surrendered?

Faraday paused above a tiny crescent of pebble beach. He could see shapes out on the water in the moonlight, mallard and shelduck, and he watched for a moment until they disappeared into the darkness. He could think of a million reasons why Pritchard might have given up on life – the loss of his lover, the ravages of alcoholism, the depressing treadmill of trying to run the world’s worst hotel – but what really troubled him was his own part in Pritchard’s death. Was he somehow complicit in this decision of Pritchard’s? Had the sight of his dead partner driven him into the Buriton Tunnel? Should Faraday, in short, have found someone else to ID Sean Coughlin?

The knowledge that there’d never be an answer to these questions was deeply troubling. Faraday, in the end, was a copper. His job description imposed certain duties and he’d always done his level best to discharge them. To that degree he was simply one party to a contract. He’d signed up to enforce the law, to detect wrong-doing, and to put away the bad guys. But lurking in the spaces between the small print were numberless other responsibilities, stuff that no training sergeant ever mentioned, and one of them was a kinship – a sympathy – for your fellow man.

Evil was a big word, and the older he got the less Faraday understood it. All the evidence they’d gathered to date – hearsay from the prison, accusations from Davidson, hints from the naval files – suggested that Coughlin was a bad, bad man. But somehow or other, God knows why, he’d brought comfort to this lover of his, a little pool of warmth that had kept Pritchard just this side of total collapse. Had Coughlin manipulated him? Taken advantage? Bullied him? Stolen his body as well as his heart? The answer to all those questions was probably yes. But there remained a greater question,
overshadowing everything else. If Coughlin made Pritchard happy, did any of this other shit matter?

Eadie Sykes was still up when Faraday buzzed her on the speakerphone. She recognised his voice at once.

‘Sure,’ she said. ‘Come up.’

Barefoot, she was wearing an old paisley-patterned dressing gown when Faraday walked into the flat, and there was a pile of papers scattered around the laptop on the sofa. She offered him wine from an opened bottle of Chablis from the fridge, but he settled for coffee. Exhausted to the point where sleep was no longer an option, he needed to talk.

‘Go ahead.’ She tidied the papers on the sofa, making room for him. ‘You want anything to eat? I haven’t got much, I’m afraid, but you’re more than welcome.’

Against his better judgement, he found himself telling her about Pritchard, about the tunnel, about Coughlin. He tried to put it all in perspective, to touch on the wider context of
Merriott
, to tease some payback, some investigatory advantage from the human remains heaped by the side of the track. But try as he might, it made no sense. All he was left with was a thickening residue of guilt. He should have been more aware, more sensitive. Amongst the million decisions demanding the deputy SIO’s attention on a major inquiry, he’d got this one badly wrong.

‘You want sympathy?’

The curtness of the question brought his head up.

‘No,’ he said at once.

‘You want something else? Comfort?’

‘No.’

‘You think we ought to go to bed? See whether that works?’

‘No.’

‘Then why are you here?’

It was a question Faraday had been dreading. To have
to ask it was confirmation enough. He’d thought she might understand and she didn’t. She was as hardened by life as everyone else.

‘I just …’ He shrugged, then shook his head and made to get up. He was wasting her time. He should never have bothered her. It was far too late for all this nonsense.

‘Don’t.’ Her hand was firm on his shoulder. ‘Just tell me what’s the matter.’

He looked at her a moment, feeling the evening beginning to slip out of focus. Maybe she did understand, after all. Not one misjudgement, but two.

‘You really want to hear?’

‘Yes, please.’

‘OK.’ He fingered the hem of her dressing gown where the stitching had begun to go. ‘It’s just that sometimes … it makes no sense. You look for patterns, you look for justice—’

‘And there isn’t any?’

‘No. None. We go through the motions. We clear up the mess. We attend to the walking wounded and sometimes we bang them up. But no matter how clever we are, how ruthless, how kind, it never makes any difference.’

‘You want to make a difference?’

‘Yes.’ He nodded. ‘I suppose I do.’

‘And you think you ever will?’

‘No. Never.’

‘Because … ?’

‘Because there’s too much of it. People don’t know who they are any more.’

‘That’s a strange thing to say.’

‘Not really, not if you look. It used to be simpler. People belonged. They belonged to families, to jobs, to a local church, to their own sense of decency, to whatever gave them solace, and direction. That’s all gone. There is no solace. There is no direction. And people find that …’ He frowned, hunting for the word.

‘Bothersome?’

‘Yes. That, certainly, but bewildering, too. We’re on a mountain here. We climb and climb and climb. It’s relentless. It never ends. And don’t think I’m talking about the job. It’s not just that. It’s everything, all of it. The journey used to have a purpose.’

‘And you think we’ve lost it? You think we don’t know where we’re headed?’

‘Yes.’

Sykes looked at him a moment, then got up and took a packet of cigarettes from a drawer. It was news to Faraday that she smoked.

‘You know what my dad used to say? Back in Oz?’ She found a lighter for the cigarette. ‘He used to say it was down to the weather. One of the reasons he went to New Caledonia was the sun. He loved it. He said it was like treacle. He said it sweetened his life. The Brits, he used to tell me, are fucked. They think too hard. They worry too much. They get wound up in themselves. And you know why? Because it rains all the bloody time.’

Faraday gazed up at her. Maybe she had a point. May excursions to the Spanish Pyrenees, you’d find the sky full of red kites and columns of Griffon vultures. With the meadows full of wild orchids, and the sun hot on his face, he was close to heaven.

‘Maybe I should move,’ he said. ‘Would that do the trick?’

‘It might. If you were really serious.’

‘You think I’m not? You think I’m making this stuff up?’

‘Not at all. I think you’re in a muddle. But I think that matters, too.’

‘I’m not with you.’

‘Yes, you are. You’re in a muddle because you like being in a muddle. You question yourself all the time. That’s what makes you you. It probably makes you a fucking good detective, too, though I wouldn’t be the
judge of that. The principle’s simple, though. No muddle, no you.’

‘Is it bad, then? Being in a muddle?’

‘That’s a kid’s question. This is a grown-up conversation. You should be ashamed of yourself.’

She sat down beside him and kissed him on the nose. Faraday was thinking suddenly about his son.

‘You know what J-J did today? He came into the office to talk to a colleague of mine. It’s another job, another murder. They think J-J probably knows about a particular kid and they’re probably right. But you know what happened?’