The Price Of Darkness (20 page)

Faraday tried to calm her down. He told her that J-J was a man now. She’d seen it. She’d said so herself. He was independent. He’d fled the nest. Did his own thing. A free spirit.

‘
Vraiment
?’ She wanted to believe it. He could see it in her face.

‘
Oui
.’ He gave her a hug, feeling her pressing into him.

‘And you don’t mind?’ Her voice was muffled.

‘What?’

‘Me being here?’

‘I love it.’ He raised her face again and kissed her eyelids. ‘
Vraiment
.’

 

Later, mid-morning, they drove west. Barrie had declared a weekend break for the
Billhook
team and Faraday was determined to make the most of it. As the road swooped down towards Weymouth Bay, Gabrielle caught her first glimpse of the long grey hump that was the Isle of Portland. At the toe of the promontory, Faraday had explained, they’d find a lighthouse, and a perch on the rocky clifftop, and a perfect view of the boiling surf below. There’d be razorbills, and guillemots, and with luck they might even catch a glimpse of a distant gannet or two. Come back here in a month’s time, he said, and the migration would have started, the sky full of meadow pipits and siskins on passage heading south.

They parked within sight of the lighthouse. Gabrielle had prepared a modest picnic and they picked their way along the maze of clifftop paths until they found a sheltered corner. The wind was billowing up the cliff, carrying with it the scent of wild garlic, and Faraday indicated the line of distant breakers stitching across the tidal race that swept around the rocky headland. Gabrielle shielded her eyes against the sun, following his pointing finger, and when Faraday caught sight of a cormorant, low over the water, she laughed.

‘It’s hungry,’ she said. ‘It wants a good meal. It’s going to France.’

She’d made a salad of couscous with raisins and olives and a dice of tomatoes and shallots. She’d bought a fresh baguette from a baker en route and she poured generous mugfuls of a Spanish crianza she knew Faraday adored. Afterwards they lay on the spread of plaid blanket, eyes closed, listening to the grumble of surf on the rocks below.

‘You never tell me about your work,’ she murmured. ‘Never.’

Faraday smiled to himself. It was true.

‘Why would you want to know?’

‘Because work makes people what they are.
Tu n’crois pas?
’

Faraday nodded. Of course he believed it. That was why he enjoyed days like this, turning his back on a world he found more and more incomprehensible.

He tried to put this into words and thought from her silence that she didn’t understand. He was wrong.

‘You’re very …
sensible …
for a policeman.’ Her hand found his. ‘I’ve always thought that.’

Sensible
, in French, meant sensitive. Another woman, long ago, had said something very similar. Except she’d used the word ‘vulnerable’.

‘Maybe you’re right,’ he said. ‘Maybe I should be doing something else with my life.’

‘Not at all.
Sensible
makes you a good policeman.’

‘You think so?’

‘
Absolument.
You take the time to look, to listen. Nobody does that any more. Not policemen. Not anybody. Everyone talks.
Tout le monde
. But nobody listens.’

Faraday nodded. She was right. He lay back, the sun hot on his face, his eyes closed, thinking about the clamour of voices in his working world, the snatched half-conversations, the desperate ongoing struggle to reduce the chaos of a crime scene to a motive and a name.

Lately, for whatever reason, the drumbeat of serious incidents on the Major Crimes beat seemed to have quickened. People were hurting each other more, taking advantage more, and there seemed no end to days when he’d find himself in conference round a table trying to think himself into the heads of total strangers, trying to understand why they inflicted such damage on each other and why they occasionally ended up dead. Mallinder was one example but there were dozens of other individuals whose broken bodies he’d first glimpse on the mortuary slab, and whose broken lives would take weeks to piece together.

In this sense, he thought glumly, he’d become a kind of social pathologist. His real job was gathering evidence and making cases stick. That’s what detectives did. But in the process it was impossible not to peer a little deeper, not to ask yourself exactly why society itself was dying the slowest and ugliest of deaths. The symptoms were everywhere. The selfishness. The greed. The short cuts. The constant trashing of family ties, of responsibility, of anything that smacked of a steady life decently lived.

This sense of disintegration, of things falling to pieces, had begun to preoccupy him, and as the jobs piled up he found himself more and more alarmed at the wider implications. Life, in his view, was becoming unreasoningly brutal. Much of it revolved around violence, and violence was like a hot wind, scorching everything in its path. People seemed to be tearing themselves and each other apart for no good reason. Often not for money. Often not for gain. But because the sheer act of violence had become as good an answer as any. But to what question? And for what purpose? For someone like himself, someone wedded to the comforting laws of cause and effect, to analysis, to the sweetness of reason, this was the stuff of madness. Look at life too hard through the prism of Major Crimes, he’d concluded, and you’d probably end up on the psychiatrist’s couch.

He gave Gabrielle’s hand a squeeze. She’d given him back his sanity. With her cheerfulness and her sheer energy, she’d made him aware of another presence in the deeply shadowed recess that was his life. She was a fellow traveller. And like him, thank God, she had more than a passing interest in the view.

‘
Chéri?’
She was bent over him. She was looking worried again. ‘Are you OK?’

‘I’m fine.’

‘You were dreaming?’

‘Yes.’

‘
Un cauchemar?’ Cauchemar
meant nightmare.

‘No.’ He found her hand again.

 

The invitation came in the early afternoon. Winter, returning from his weekend expedition to the supermarket, was standing in the sunshine outside Blake House watching the female cabbie unload his shopping from the boot. The mobile to his ear, he knew at once who it was. Add gravel to honey and you ended up with a voice like Misty Gallagher’s.

‘Mist, how are you?’

She said she’d been better but she’d spare him the details. It was a lovely day. From what she’d been hearing, Winter had at last decided to do something sensible with his life.

‘We ought to celebrate,’ she growled. ‘Come over.’

Winter skipped lunch, sorted himself out a brand new short-sleeved shirt to go with his Debenhams chinos and phoned for another cab. Pompey were playing at home and the queues of cars inbound on the motorway extended for mile after mile. They left the city and headed east. Within half an hour they’d crossed the bridge onto neighbouring Hayling Island and Winter was directing the cabbie into North Shore Road, a leafy avenue on the south-west corner of Hayling that featured regularly in the windows of the classier estate agents. This was where you settled if you had half a million quid to spare and fancied a bit of peace and quiet. Misty’s spread, a gift from Bazza, was last on the left.

The last time Winter had been here, the property was at the mercy of a crew of Pompey builders Bazza kept on his books. At Misty’s direction they were turning up from time to time to rip out most of the original features, swap wooden windows for UPVC and dig an enormous hole in the back garden for a twenty-metre pool. Another of Misty’s projects had been an outdoor disco. The plans, which Winter had seen, called for banks of strobe lighting visible from the moon and a 75-kilowatt sound system, and at the time Winter remembered fearing for the neighbours’ peace and quiet. Misty had never much liked silence.

She was waiting for him on the terrace at the back of the house. She was wearing a turquoise Prada T-shirt over a black bikini bottom and her face was largely hidden behind a pair of enormous FCUK shades. On the table beside her lounger was a radio tuned to Virgin AM. She’d made a promising start on a bottle of Bacardi and said she felt a great deal better. Last night had been a bummer. She hadn’t drunk that much malt since Bazza pushed the boat out at her warming party.

Winter bent to give her a peck on the cheek and helped himself to a chair at the table. Somebody must have been using the pool because there was a trail of wet footprints into the house.

‘Yours, Mist?’

‘You’re joking. I’ve got company for the weekend. One of Baz’s nephews.’

‘Where is he?’

‘Getting changed. You know something about kids these days? They have absolutely no idea of time. His game kicks off at three. It’s now ten to.’

A blond youth in his late teens appeared from the depths of the house. He was wearing shorts and an Umbro top and borrowed Misty’s vanity mirror to poke at the gel on his hair. Misty told him he was late.

‘Got the keys, have you?’

‘They’re still in the Porsche.’

‘Cheers.’ He gave Winter a nod. ‘Be good.’

He danced down the steps beside the pool without a backward glance. Misty watched him with obvious affection.

‘He’s gay,’ she said fondly. ‘Though he doesn’t know it yet.’

She told Winter to fetch more Coke from the kitchen. She also wanted the tanning oil and a fresh packet of Marlboro Lights. Winter returned with all three.

‘What do you think, then?’ She lit a cigarette and gestured at the garden. Half an acre of lawn rolled down to a low stone wall. A gate in the wall led to a wooden pier. Beyond, shimmering in the heat, lay Langstone Harbour. On a windless day like this the water was mirror-smooth.

‘Lovely, Mist.’

Winter narrowed his eyes against the glare of the sun. The Harbour was Hayling’s moat against the encroachments of Pompey. Viewed from this distance, the high-rise blocks of Somerstown and Portsea were a soft blue-grey in the haze. They looked like battlements, Winter thought, or the kind of cut-out frieze a kid might paste onto a picture. Rearing above them, plainly visible, was the sleek whiteness of the Spinnaker Tower.

‘There …’

Mist struggled upright on the lounger, following Winter’s pointing finger.

‘Where?’

‘The one by itself, Mist. That’s Faraday’s place. Funny you should end up neighbours.’

The Bargemaster’s House was no more than a speck across the water. Misty sank back then reached up for her glass. She wanted to know the gossip.

Winter tried to sort something out but knew he was struggling. One of the penalties of this new life of his was a social diary that rarely extended beyond appointments with the telly. Finally he remembered Suttle.

‘Jimmy? How is he?’

‘Fine. I saw him the other night. He’s putting a deposit down on a place in Copnor. He got a bit of money after that job in Ashburton Road but he won’t say how much. What’s the going rate for a stabbing these days? Ten grand? A million?’

Misty laughed, then raised her glass. In general she had no time for the Filth but she’d always had a soft spot for Suttle.

‘Good luck to him. Shame it never worked out with Trude.’

Trudy Gallagher was Misty’s daughter, a looker in her late teens with her mother’s appetite for a good time. She’d enjoyed a brief fling with Suttle some time ago, an act of trespass for which the young D/C had been duly punished. Bazza had always believed that he was Trudy’s father. As it turned out he was wrong, but Bazza wasn’t someone to let a paternity test get in the way of his family responsibilities and, thanks to Brett West, Suttle had ended up in hospital.

‘You’re telling me you had a drink with Jimmy?’ Misty wanted to know more.

‘I did, Mist. I did.’

‘Isn’t that crossing the line?’

‘What line’s that?’

‘Us and them. There’s rules, you know, not that you were ever fucking interested. Still, you want to be careful. Baz gets old-fashioned about the wrong kind of company.’

Winter shrugged, all too aware where the conversation was going to lead. Odds on, it was Bazza who’d engineered this invitation of Misty’s. Get the old bastard over. Find out where he’s really at.

Winter smothered a yawn. Very faintly, across the water, came the roar of the crowd at Fratton Park. The game must have just kicked off, he thought. He gave his ample stomach a pat, then looked down at the lounger.

‘Are we eating, Mist? Or what?’

She’d readied a couple of Waitrose takeaways in the fridge. Winter did the honours, sorting out the plates and the cutlery, then waiting for the
ding-ding
of the microwave. Misty had already laid claim to the king prawn masala. The shepherd’s pie, Winter thought glumly, was obviously his.

Back out in the sunshine Misty had shed her T-shirt and was straddling the lounger. Her tan was as flawless as the famous chest that had drawn Bazza in the first place, and she was about to coat herself with more coconut oil. She had her glass in one hand and the bottle of oil in the other. Always the optimist, Winter thought his moment had come.

‘You OK there, Mist?’ He put the plates on the table. ‘Need any help?’

Misty ignored the offer. She abandoned her glass and began to oil her breasts. She wanted to know why Winter had finally said yes to Bazza. The word she used was ‘surprised’.

‘You know already, Mist. You don’t need me to tell you.’

‘Those pictures?’

‘Yeah.’

‘You’re joking. You’ve got nothing to be ashamed of, love. I’ve seen one even smaller than that.’

‘Thanks.’

‘So why the decision? Nobody does what you’ve done for a bunch of bloody snaps. Not in a grown-up town like this.’

‘I fancied it.’

‘Yeah, I can see that. But
why
?’