The Price Of Darkness (37 page)

They stood together for a long moment. Miles above, in the thin moonlight, the whine of a passing jet.

‘I didn’t tell you,
chéri…’
She gave him a squeeze.

‘
Quoi?’

‘J-J sent me a text. He’s buying a house. In London.’

FRIDAY, 15 SEPTEMBER 2006.
05.43

 

Robbed of sleep, Faraday finally slipped out of bed, groped for his dressing gown, and tiptoed out onto the landing. J-J’s bedroom was at the far end. He switched on the light and closed the door behind him. His son, as usual, had left the room in chaos. The bed was unmade and a cup of cold tea lay beside the brimming ashtray on the window sill. There was a heap of dirty laundry behind the door and the contents of his rucksack spilled across the carpet. Days after J-J’s departure, Faraday could still detect the bitter-sweet scent of marijuana.

Faraday surveyed the wreckage for a moment or two, uncertain where to begin. He hated having to do this, hated even the thought of prying into J-J’s private life, but last night’s news left him no option. If his son was sharing something as momentous as the purchase of a house with Gabrielle rather than his father, then there had to be something seriously awry.

He made a start on two pairs of jeans. From the pockets of one he disinterred a book of Russian matches, a couple of metro tickets, a handful of coins and the stump of a pencil. From the other came a ball of tissue, more coins, a scrap of paper with a scribbled name and phone number and a neat little fold-up map of central Moscow. He put the phone number to one side and sorted quickly through the rest of the clothes. Socks, T-shirts, vests yielded nothing. Likewise two pairs of trainers and a sturdy pair of boots.

Faraday eyed the scatter of paperbacks beside the rucksack. The
Lonely Planet Guide to Russia
. A battered copy of a Martin Cruz Smith thriller. A brand new edition of
Crime and Punishment
that looked untouched. Three books of Manga. He flicked through each of these, holding them upside down, hoping for a letter, a note, maybe even a receipt - anything that might shed light on his son’s sudden wealth. In one of the Manga books he found a couple of the postcards to which J-J had attributed his windfall. They both featured shots taken in a cemetery and Faraday studied them a moment. The images were stark, arresting, deeply unusual, but how many of these would you need to sell to earn yourself $70,000? He shook his head, knowing that J-J had been lying. But why?

He began to dig around in the rucksack. At the bottom was a litter of miscellaneous rubbish - more scraps of paper, a box of toothpicks, four packs of Russian condoms, two wafers of chewing gum, a single crusty sock. He emptied the contents onto the carpet, wondering why J-J could possibly need a dozen hairclips, when something else fell out of one of the rucksack’s side pockets. It was a small digital camera in a soft leather pouch. He looked at it a moment. Inside the pouch, tucked beside the camera, was a memory card wrapped in cling film.

The camera was an Olympus. Faraday found the power button and turned it on. Prompts on the tiny screen took him through a couple of dozen stored shots, faces mainly, beaming at the camera. The venue seemed to be some kind of bar. Many of the shots featured J-J himself. He had a bottle in one hand while the other was draped round an assortment of friends. He looked drunk and happy. Faraday peered at the digital readout. 03.09.06 / 23.13. This must have been his leaving party, he thought, a chance for J-J’s mates to say goodbye. Next day, thick-headed, this son of his would have been heading out to the airport.

The rest of the memory card was empty. Faraday stripped the cling film from the other card and loaded it into the camera. The first shot, from street level, showed a block of flats. Next came a railway station, somewhere out in the suburbs, with an electric train disgorging hundreds of commuters. Then, suddenly, Faraday found himself looking at a woman in early middle age. Naked, she was sitting on a bed with her back against a bolster. She had a full body, big breasts, and a smile that spoke of recent sex. One hand held a tumbler of something pale and fizzy. The other, between her splayed legs, was displaying her genitalia. Faraday gazed at the image. The detective in him was trying to fathom the link between the station and this moment of post-coital celebration. The father in him was starting to wonder what else J-J had got up to.

He flicked on through the memory card. Many of the shots were close-ups. The woman had scarlet nails and a dedicated sense of adventure. Whatever pleasure she derived from an empty bottle of vodka and a series of other implements was difficult to gauge because these shots rarely included her face, but she was clearly determined to leave J-J with a reminder of what he was missing once he got home. Towards the end of the card J-J must have put the camera on remote and lodged it elsewhere in the room because there were now two people on the bed, J-J on his knees, his thin white body arched back, while the woman took him in her mouth. Faraday was still trying to cope with the strangeness of seeing his son like this when he heard the door open behind him.

It was Gabrielle. She knelt beside him. Faraday felt her stiffen as she made sense of the image on the tiny screen.

‘
Merde …’
she said softly.

 

Carisbrooke Road backed onto the south side of the football stadium at Fratton Park, a row of modest terraced houses with single bays on the ground floor. The curtains upstairs at number 14 were still pulled shut.

Suttle took a chance on Sam Taylor being in. At eight in the morning, he told himself, a man in his sixties who’d recently been made redundant was unlikely to be at work. He knocked again, listening for signs of life inside. He’d rung Lizzie Hodson for the address last night. He’d read her
News
feature piece on the collapse of Gullifant’s, and Sam Taylor seemed to have been the most articulate of the victims quoted. He’d talked of pension rip-offs and the helplessness of the little man in situations like these, and according to Lizzie he’d appointed himself spokesman for the abandoned Gullifant’s workforce. Ask him about the day they all got their P45s, she’d said. And give him my love.

At last Suttle heard footsteps. A shadow loomed behind the pebbled glass in the front door. The
News
photographer had pictured Taylor as a sturdy, big-boned man with steady eyes and a quiet smile. In barely six months he seemed to have aged a decade.

‘Yeah?’ He was wearing an old dressing gown. He needed a shave.

Suttle showed him his warrant card. He’d appreciate a moment or two of his time. It wouldn’t take long.

‘What’s it about?’

‘Gullifant’s.’

Taylor invited him in. From upstairs somewhere came the sound of a bath being run. Then the clump of heavy footsteps overhead.

‘My missus. She takes first turn. I jump in afterwards. You want tea?’

Suttle found himself in the kitchen. A cat eyed him briefly then disappeared through the flap in the back door. Taylor was plugging in the electric kettle. Shopper’s Choice tea bags. Just one for the pot.

Suttle perched on a stool. There was a gruffness about Taylor that told him his time was limited. A bathful of hot water cost a fortune. Best not to waste it.

‘I got your name from Lizzie Hodson at the
News,
Mr Taylor.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘Because I’m interested in what happened to Gullifant’s.’

‘Why’s that?’

Suttle mentioned Mallinder. Just the sound of his name brought Taylor to a halt.

‘That man deserved everything he got,’ he said at once. ‘And you can write that down if you want. I haven’t a clue how it happened but I just hope to God that whoever did it took his time. Can you shoot someone slowly? I hope you can. And I hope the bastard suffered - excuse my French.’ He gave the teapot a stir and filled a mug. ‘Sugar?’

Suttle took the mug. He wanted to know about the local Gullifant’s workforce. How many had been made redundant?

‘In this town? Sixteen. That’s nine full-timers and the rest just fillers-in. It’s the full-timers that really copped it.’

‘People like you?’

‘That’s right. Like I say, nine of us in Pompey, but across the whole company you’re talking over a hundred, women too, not just blokes, and all of us out on our ears. Was it a surprise? No, of course it wasn’t. We knew trade wasn’t good, hadn’t been for a while. But that was their fault, the new blokes, the management, Redmayne, whatever they called themselves. They just weren’t interested. You could tell that from the start. Whatever you asked for, the answer was always no. Customers after a new line of paint? Forget it. Buy in extra stocks for spring? When everyone starts decorating? You’re joking. New lead for the staff electric kettle? Make do with the old one. An attitude like that, we were bound to go under. The only surprise was it took so long.’

Suttle had a feeling Taylor had made this speech before but there was no mistaking the anger, and the bitterness.

‘So what happened the day they went bust?’

‘We all got a letter. Not even personal. Just “Dear Sir”, and even then they couldn’t be arsed to get
that
right. Just imagine. You turn up to work, a Monday morning, and there’s a security van parked up outside with a couple of goons in uniforms in case anything kicks off, and then you walk in, just like normal, and there are all these letters waiting, envelopes with names on. You know how mine started? With my name on the envelope? Mr S. Taylor? It started “Dear Madam”. They’d put the wrong one in. That’s how much they cared about us.’

Many of the local blokes, he said, had been with Gullifant’s all their working lives.

‘They’d paid into the pension scheme. That’s five per cent of everything they earned. You do the sums. Take me, for instance. I’m sixty-three. I joined Gullifant’s out of the Navy, nineteen seventy-three. So for thirty-three years I’m paying my dues, keeping my nose clean, thinking it’s all watertight, and then - bang - they say there’s a problem with the pension fund, bloody great hole, not enough money, and you know what we get come the finish? Fifteen per cent of what we’re due.
Fifteen per cent.
And that’s if we’re lucky. My missus got the calculator out. She reckoned I’d paid in tens of thousands come the finish. And what will I see of that? A pittance. Pathetic. Absolutely pathetic. Should never have been allowed. Not in a decent country.’

Suttle asked about redress. Surely there was some kind of right of appeal? Some kind of compensation fund?

‘Yeah.’ Taylor nodded. ‘You’d think so, wouldn’t you? Well let me tell you, son, there’s bugger all you can do about it. You write to your local councillor. You phone up your MP. You get a letter in the paper. You make a fuss. We even got a petition going, not just us Gullifant’s blokes but loads of others in the same boat. Thousands of signatures,
thousands
of them. And then what happens? You get a letter from some smartarse minister telling you there’s all kinds of help available, this scheme, that scheme, but then you look a bit harder and it’s never that simple. Either the money’s not there at all, or if it is then it’s nowhere near enough. My missus has got a file upstairs thick as your arm, all the letters she wrote, but what it boils down to is a queue. All you want is what you put in. But they’ve had it off you. It’s gone. Just disappeared.’

‘Who’s they?’

‘Bloody good question. I asked that myself. Tell you the truth, I’m
still
asking it. It’s like a conjuring trick. You put all that money in and - puff - it just goes. Someone’s had it. I know they have. Thieving bastards.’

‘And what about Mallinder. Did you ever write to him?’

‘Yeah. We went up to see him too, took a little deputation over to Croydon, tried to put our case. That Lizzie Hodson was very helpful. She was the one who got us all the information, all the stuff about Benskin, Mallinder, how they’d bought Gullifant’s in the first place, then sold it, then bought the freeholds back. Makes you dizzy, doesn’t it? Trying to keep up with these people?’

‘So you met Mallinder?’

‘Yeah. Charming bloke, couldn’t be more sorry for us. Not his fault, though. Not the way he saw it. Market pressures, that’s what he blamed it on. That and the way the hardware trade had changed. Me, I asked him why he’d bought Gullifant’s in the first place in that case, and you know what he said? He said that every time a businessman made a decision he took a risk. That was the nature of the beast. Sounds brave, doesn’t it? All that risk-taking? Except it turned out that the risk wasn’t his at all, it was ours. Like I say, a conjuring trick.’

Upstairs Suttle could hear movement again. His wife’s out of the bath, he thought.

‘So what are you doing now? How do you make ends meet?’

‘I’ve got a job. B&Q, just up the road. I do the afternoon shift. The money’s not great but it’s better than nothing.’

‘Still in the hardware trade then?’

‘Yeah, funny isn’t it? A couple of the other Gullifant’s blokes are in there with me. Tell you the truth, B&Q couldn’t wait to snap us up. It’s not the same though, in fact it’s not a shop at all, more a warehouse. Cheap, though, compared to the prices we used to charge.’

Suttle finished his tea. He’d asked for details on other members of the Gullifant’s workforce and Taylor said he’d get something together for later in the day. Walking back up the narrow hall, Suttle wondered how big a blow the Gullifant’s collapse had been for Taylor and his wife. These days even some occupational schemes would barely keep your head above water. How on earth could you survive on a state pension alone?

‘Good question.’ It was Taylor’s wife. She was sitting on the stairs, a big woman in a grey tracksuit with a pair of pink fluffy slippers. ‘Tell him, Sam.’

‘Tell him what?’

‘Tell him what we were going to do. Before this lot all happened.’