The Price Of Darkness (12 page)

A shot of a child reaching for an icicle made Gabrielle laugh again. Faraday recognised the onion domes of the Kremlin in the background. He tiptoed across the study, then paused behind his son. He could smell the tang of cheap tobacco in his hair. Faraday let his hand fall briefly on J-J’s shoulder. J-J glanced up, taken by surprise. For a split second, still absorbed by the photos, he hadn’t a clue what was going on. Then he was on his feet, pushing back his chair, giving Faraday a hug. In moments of high excitement J-J always balled his fists either side of his head, a gesture of triumph, as if he’d just scored a goal. He was doing it now, stepping back, beaming at his father.

Faraday held him at arm’s length, just looking. The boy had grown a beard. It changed his face, his manner, completely. The vulnerabilty he’d always worn, that ever-willing sense of openness that had sometimes made Faraday fear for this son of his, had gone. He looked older, stronger, somehow
bigger
, and Faraday found himself wondering quite what had worked this transformation.

‘Long time,’ he signed. ‘I’ve missed you.’

 

Gabrielle cooked a ratatouille of vegetables from the garden. After Faraday had finished helping J-J in with his bags, the sitting room next door looked like a kasbah, and they demolished the ratatouille around the wooden table in the kitchen. Amongst the heap of presents J-J had brought back was a huge flask of Georgian wine. It was empty by the time J-J was demanding second helpings from the saucepan on the stove and Faraday fetched a bottle of decent Merlot from the rack that served as his cellar.

It was obvious at once that J-J and Gabrielle had become friends. A single day together seemed to have bred an easy intimacy and J-J included her in his bubbling torrent of conversation without a thought for her signing skills. Catching the expression on her face from time to time as J-J described the highlights of his life in Moscow, Faraday marvelled at the speed with which she seemed to have penetrated the blur of hands and fingers. This wasn’t something she’d confected to help the evening along. She actually seemed to understand the boy.

J-J, it transpired, had finally parted company with the video production company who’d flown him out to Russia in the first place. They were making a series about the oil boom and J-J’s job had been largely technical, setting up an editing suite, then logging hours and hours of video rushes as the location work got under way. The job had been really boring, he explained, and in his spare time, with his mother’s treasured Leica, he’d haunted the big spaces of the city, putting together a photo essay on the world he found around him.

A handful of these shots had attracted the attention of a woman from one of the state TV channels who occasionally dropped into the editing suite, and she’d passed them on to a girlfriend who was looking for material for a leading magazine. Within weeks, much to his delight, J-J had found himself with a full-time commission. The people at the magazine, he said, had approved of his take on Moscow street life. They liked his filmy eyes and bony Slav faces. They loved what he’d made of an alley, three dustbins, a priest and an urban fox. Pretty soon he’d signed a deal with an entrepreneur specialising in posters and arty postcards. Then had come the invitation to appear on a TV show devoted to the outer reaches of Russian cultural life.

The fact that J-J was a deaf mute had, it seemed, been an enormous advantage. Not because he’d been an object of curiosity but because the sight of him explaining in sign his passion for the single image had touched something in the Russian soul. For them, real life had always been theatre. These people, he signed expansively, gave you
room
. They were generous. They loved the way he used his hands to shape meaning and nuance. They seemed to understand instinctively what he had to offer. And as a result, as sales of his cards and posters soared, he’d ended up with quite a lot of money.

‘How much?’ Faraday couldn’t resist the question.

‘Seventy thousand.’

‘Roubles?’

‘US dollars.’ J-J grinned at him, nodding. ‘With more to come.’

The money, he said, was still in a bank account in Moscow but under the new regime there’d be no problem transferring it to the UK. He wanted to put down a deposit on a place of his own, maybe in Portsmouth, maybe somewhere else along the coast. He wanted a base to call home, a launching pad for more expeditions to more countries. He wanted to use his Russian contacts and his Russian earnings to build a career in photo art.

Listening to J-J’s description of the world waiting for his viewfinder, Faraday could think only of Janna, his long-dead wife. She, too, had been a photographer, carving out the beginnings of a reputation for herself in Seattle galleries. She, too, had the eye, the talent, the inner conviction that would stop a passing browser in mid-step and bring them back to a certain shot, to the play of light on the bones of an old shipwreck, to the boil of summer thunderheads caught in stark black and white over the northern Rockies. She’d never had her son’s taste for the surreal, for composing bizarre metaphors from the most unlikely ingredients, but the vision was there, and the appetite to share it with anyone who’d spare her the time.

He’d barely mentioned Janna to Gabrielle, but now, at J-J’s suggestion, she demanded to see some of her work. Faraday had lived with these photos for the best part of two decades, hanging personal favourites around the house, but J-J’s departure for Russia had prompted a rethink in his life, and he’d carefully wrapped and boxed the shots before storing them up in the attic.

J-J helped him to retrieve them. They carried armfuls back downstairs, spread them amongst the Kazakh rugs and painted wooden icons that still littered the floor. Then J-J took Gabrielle by the elbow, nudging her on from shot to shot, signing his admiration for his mother’s composition, or the way she’d taken a risk with the exposure in a particular shot, or her happy knack of teasing a mood from the play of shadows on various surfaces, and watching him Faraday became aware of a sense of mystery as well as pride in the way that this expressive gift had so seamlessly passed from mother to son.

Later, once J-J had finished the last of the wine and abandoned the living room for a bed upstairs, Gabrielle lay full length on the sofa, her head on Faraday’s lap. Any sense that he might have burdened her with this boy of his had long gone, and when he tried to put this thought into words she reached up and sealed his lips with a single moistened fingertip.

‘Not a boy at all,’ she murmured. ‘A man.’

THURSDAY, 7 SEPTEMBER 2006.
09.22

 

The news about the Mercedes came first to Jimmy Suttle. He’d taken a call from Sally Mallinder. She was back in London at the family home, waiting for the Mercedes garage to return her husband’s car. As a favour to a valued client, in these difficult circumstances they’d volunteered to send a couple of members of staff down with a replacement set of keys. The guys had set off early. By half eight they were parked outside the Port Solent house. Only one problem. The car had gone.

‘Gone?’ Faraday was trying to make sense of a sheaf of overtime figures.

‘Disappeared, boss. Borrowed. Vaporised. Maybe even nicked. The blokes are still up there. They’re not quite sure what to do.’

‘We’ve got the vehicle’s details?’

‘Of course.’

‘Then circulate them.’ He looked up at last. The implications of this latest bit of news were beginning to sink in. Scenes of Crime had released the Port Solent house late yesterday afternoon. The overnight uniformed watch had been withdrawn. ‘The Mercedes’ keys were missing?’

‘That’s right, boss.’

‘So you’re telling me this guy’s come back? For the
car
?’

 

The city’s CCTV control room lay in the basement of the Civic Centre. Over the last couple of days search shifts had been divided between two sets of D/Cs. D/C Dawn Ellis had been part of the team that had scored a hit on the black Ford Escort. Now Faraday told her to meet him in the control room.

Ellis had driven up from Southsea. She was a slim, attractive vegetarian with a fall of jet-black hair who lived alone in a Portchester semi. Faraday had always had a soft spot for her, not least because she was one of the few detectives who could cope with Paul Winter, but lately he’d become aware that two years on Major Crimes had blunted her appetite for the job. Too many interviews with hysterical fourteen-year-olds who couldn’t make up their minds whether they’d been raped or not. Too many late-night calls to Southsea nightclubs, interviewing a line-up of pissed Somerstown boys about a slapping that had got seriously out of hand. She’d confided to a close friend that she’d had enough of slag adolescents and homicidal kids, and when rumours began to circulate that she was considering a new career in alternative therapy, Faraday was inclined to believe them.

Now, in the control room, she knew exactly which camera tapes to list for review.

‘This one on the approach road to Port Solent, the same camera we scored a hit with on Monday. What time do you fancy starting?’

Faraday said midnight. It seemed a fair enough guess. Any earlier, and the neighbours might still have been up.

Dawn began to spool through last night’s footage. Between midnight and half past one they counted maybe three dozen cars leaving the marina complex. After that, for a longish period, nothing happened. Then, in the distance, the flare of a pair of headlights. Dawn toggled the fast forward control, slowing the oncoming blur. Finally it resolved itself into the low, elegant shape of a Mercedes sports coupé. It was white. Right colour.

‘Can you read the plate?’

Dawn shook her head, inching forward a frame at a time. The camera was old, the resolution poor.

‘We had this same problem with the Escort,’ she said. ‘Crap lens. You think they’d do something about that, wouldn’t you?’

She used another control to zoom in on the figure behind the wheel, but the bigger the image the grainier the detail.

‘Has to be,’ Faraday said softly. ‘Has to be.’

Dawn returned the image to full frame, inched forward again. Sitting beside her at the tiny review console, Faraday was aware of how physically tense she’d become. This hunt for a tiny particle of evidence, a shape behind the wheel, even a face, had begun to matter.

‘There,’ she said at last. ‘He’s the small one from the Escort, I’d swear it. Might even be a kid.’

Faraday peered at the screen. All he could make out was the grey outline of the driver, the pale disc of his face shadowed by a hoodie.

‘You think so?’ Faraday was trying to remember the detail on the photo she’d printed off in this same room last night. Dawn spared him the effort; she had a copy in her briefcase.

‘Look.’ She laid it on the desk in front of Faraday. ‘See for yourself.’

Faraday compared the two images. There was nothing to disprove the similarity but equally he could see no clinching evidence that would survive the attentions of defence counsel in court.

‘People wear hoodies all the time,’ he pointed out.

‘Yeah, boss.’ Dawn began to spool forward again. ‘Especially kids.’

‘But we’re not looking for a kid. We’re looking for a contract killer, someone who knew exactly what they were doing.’ He nodded at the screen. ‘And if this guy was so careful at the house, what’s he doing coming back for the car?’

‘You tell me, boss.’ The Mercedes was slipping out of frame. ‘I’m just here to sort the pictures.’

She chose another tape, gambling that the Mercedes had headed west on the motorway. Sure enough, eight minutes later a camera on a gantry beneath the Paulsgrove estate recorded the same car. This time the resolution was better, good enough to read the number plate. Faraday consulted the Mercedes’ registration details in his file. Bingo.

Dawn had frozen the sequence again. This stretch of motorway was lit throughout the hours of darkness and it was possible to make out the driver’s hands on the wheel.

‘He’s wearing gloves,’ she said. ‘And he’s pulled down the visor again so we won’t get a clear shot of his face. What does that tell you?’

‘He’s aware. Obviously.’

‘Exactly.’

Dawn explained that Pompey coverage on the motorway ended at Junction 9. After that, cameras fed pictures to the control room in Southampton. She made a note of the time readout on the tape and glanced at her watch. She could be in Southampton within forty minutes or so. Did Faraday want to come?

Faraday shook his head. He had a thousand things to do.

‘Give me a ring.’ He got to his feet. ‘I’ll be back in the office.’

 

Winter got up late. Part of him that resented Mackenzie’s call on his time was determined to make this small private point. My life is still my own.

He wandered through to the bathroom and splashed his face with cold water, all too aware that Mackenzie wouldn’t have the slightest interest in the hours he kept. The only currency that mattered in Bazza’s busy life was results.

He struggled into the silk dressing gown he’d inherited from Maddox and fired up the kettle in the kitchen. For a brief moment he toyed with making proper coffee but then he caught sight of the percolator, still full of yesterday’s grounds, and he settled for instant instead. Next door were the notes he’d brought back from Gosport. Andrew McCall had been more than helpful.

He began to leaf through them, trying to imagine the conversations he’d be obliged to have over the next couple of days. Key to the Mackenzie Trophy, in McCall’s view, was the support of the council. This chimed exactly with what Bazza had been saying but McCall had a couple of names to add to Mackenzie’s must-do list. One of them was a key player in the directorate responsible for tourism, leisure and sports. He’d dealt with her a number of times and promised she’d jump at a proposal like this.