Angels Passing (42 page)

‘Where was he? Your dad?’

‘All kinds of places but sometimes he’d come to the cinema.’

‘The ABC?’

‘Yeah, where we was living, me and them others.’

The ABC cinema had formed part of Faraday’s brief. The PC was back on terra firma.

‘Tell me about your dad, then. At the cinema.’

‘I knows him a couple of months. I knows him in the summer.’

‘You didn’t know him before that?’

‘No.’

‘How did he find you?’

‘He asked my mum. My mum said about the cinema. He knows my name, too, my nickname. That’s how. That’s how he found me.’

‘And he really was your dad?’

‘Yeah, he really was.’ The grin nearly split his face in two. Then, abruptly, it vanished.

His dad had got into trouble. He knew he had. Bad trouble.

‘How? How did you know?’

‘I sees his picture in the paper.’

‘Why?’

‘Because he was dead. Someone killed him. Yeah.’ He nodded. ‘Someone killed my dad.’

‘And did that make you sad?’

‘Fucking right, mister.’ He nodded, this tiny figure in the armchair. ‘And we had petrol. Lots of it. Big bottles of it. In case.’

‘In case what?’

‘People came after us in the cinema.’

There’d been arrests. Men had been nicked for killing his dad. There were blokes selling drugs used to come into the cinema and these blokes knew who’d done his dad. Except the geezers who got nicked got away with it. Got set free.

‘You had names?’

‘Yeah.’

‘And addresses?’

‘One of them, yeah. Stamshaw geezer.’

‘So what happened?’

‘I burns his house down.’ The grin was back again, and the legs were kicking. ‘Bit of guttering like that.’ He held his tiny hands out wide. ‘I stuffs it in the letter box and then pours the petrol down it.’

‘Did you think there was anyone inside the house?’

‘Yeah. The bloke who killed my dad. They puts his name in the paper next day. Mush called Terry.’ He nodded, proud as well as happy. ‘Went up lovely, he did.’

When Faraday put a call through to the MIR, a couple of hours later, Willard had gone to Bristol. The voice at the other end belonged to Dave Michaels.

‘Urgent, is it? Only he keeps the mobile on.’

Faraday wondered whether or not to call him. Up at Havant, he’d brought the interview to a halt and arrested Gavin Prentice on suspicion of murder. The DS had driven them both down to Central. There, Faraday had handed Doodie over to the Custody Sergeant. Later, the boy would be interviewed again, this time by a DC. If he repeated his story under caution, and Faraday saw no reason why he wouldn’t, then he’d be standing trial on a charge of murder. Whether or not Gavin Prentice understood the gravity of all this was no longer the issue. From here on in, the boy was well and truly nicked.

‘You want Willard’s mobile?’ It was Dave Michaels.

‘Please.’ Faraday reached for a pen.

*

Willard was on the outskirts of Bath when Faraday got through. He explained what had happened. The length of the silence suggested that Willard had trouble believing him.

‘The kid’s making it up,’ he said at last. ‘It’s attention-seeking. Comes with the territory. They all do it.’

‘Really, sir? So what happens if it all checks out? I’ve got a POLSA team into the cinema. According to the kid, some of Finch’s stuff is in there. I’ve also had someone round to see the mother.’

‘Why?’

‘To check out Finch, sir. Confirm he really was the father.’

‘And?’

‘She says she doesn’t know. Might have been, might not. But when Finch asked her recently she said yes, for definite, just to get him out of the flat.’

‘So why didn’t she tell you all this to begin with?’

‘Because she hates us, sir. Just like they all hate us.’

Another silence. Faraday could hear a police siren. Bath or Southsea? He didn’t know.

‘That still doesn’t put the kid at Harris’s place,’ Willard said slowly. ‘It may stand up, the paternity thing, but we can’t do the boy for arson just because he happens to fancy it.’

‘I’m afraid we can, sir.’

‘How?’ Willard still refused to believe it.

‘He’s telling us he left his signature round the back at Harris’s place. There’s a rear entrance. The kid’s a real artist with the spray can. We’re looking for a praying mantis with a big “D” underneath. Probably in pink.’

‘And?’

‘It’s there. On the brickwork under the kitchen window.’

‘Scenes of Crime never mentioned it.’

‘No?’

Another silence. Willard must have stopped the car because there were no more gear shifts in the background.

‘So let’s get this straight, Joe. You’re telling me this kid, a ten-year-old, burned someone else’s house down? No guarantee there weren’t kids asleep in there? Or Harris’s wife? You’re saying he just went ahead and did it?’

‘Yeah. That’s exactly what I’m saying.’

‘Shit.’ This time Willard sounded shocked. ‘What the fuck have we done?’

Epilogue

Faraday, at Willard’s insistence, took the next week off. Relations with Hartigan were at an all-time low but Willard despatched a long memo to the Assistant Chief Constable in charge of Special Operations. Headquarters, he said, owed Faraday a substantial debt. Only by persisting with the Helen Bassam inquiry had he made the key linkage between Bradley Finch and his ten-year-old son. In manpower hours alone, he’d saved the MIR budget a small fortune. Some viewed this as a bid to flag Faraday’s path to the Major Crimes team. Others, Faraday included, were just grateful he’d survived in one piece.

Bisley
, in investigative terms, was dead and buried. Mick Harris was remanded on suspicion of killing Kenny Foster, the kid Doodie was only too happy to tell any passer-by how he’d poured petrol through the letter box of 62 Aboukir Road, and the weight of circumstantial evidence from Louise Abeka was enough to convince Willard that Foster had been responsible for the Hilsea Lines killing. Whether or not he’d ever set out to murder Bradley Finch was beside the point. Games like this could get out of hand, as young Doodie had demonstrated only too well.

Terry Harris’s involvement in Finch’s murder was less clear-cut. Louise hadn’t actually seen him in the street outside her flat when Foster took Bradley Finch away but Willard was convinced that Harris was implicated throughout. There was no direct evidence to put him on Hilsea Lines, and in front of a jury Harris might well have been acquitted. Either way though, it no longer made any difference.

The
News
, meanwhile, published a thoughtful double-page feature about teenage suicides in the city. While the article was clearly pegged to Helen Bassam’s death, there was no attempt to peer behind the curtains at 27 Little Normandy. Even Jane Bassam found Simon Pannell’s treatment sympathetic and Hartigan fired off a long memo to HQ, pointing out the linkage between adolescent turmoil, teenage deaths and the city’s exploding drug scene. Two days later, stirred into action by the
News
feature, Ray Brennan pledged £10,000 to launch a project to keep kids like Helen Bassam and Gavin Prentice off the streets.

Back home, Faraday ignored three more calls from Marta. He preferred to spend the week with J-J, driving west along the coast, stopping at site after site as the first stirrings of spring dotted the sodden turf with colour. Treading the coastal path, both father and son stayed well clear of the cliff edge. There was a closeness between them, a bubbling enjoyment of each other’s company that – in his bleaker moments – Faraday had consigned to the past.

Evenings they spent in pubs and Indian restaurants. Nights they shared a room in a succession of B & Bs. Once, in a bar in Lyme Regis, Faraday talked at length to J-J about his mother – not as a stranger, not as someone who’d died over twenty years ago, but as someone who might walk in through the door, carrying the knowledge of sunshine and laughter.

At the end of that week, as happy as they’d ever been, they arrived at Exmouth, a modest, cheerful little coastal town in Devon. The nearby estuary was famous for its bird life and Faraday bought tickets on a river cruise specially organised for birders.

The weather was perfect – icy cold, brilliant sunshine – and they nosed around the sandbanks and mudflats as the dark green water sluiced past. Soon there was a little knot of birders at the stern of the boat, binoculars raised, murmured comments, instant friendship. They saw avocets and brent-geese, widgeon and pintails, and once – high above them – there were rumours of a peregrine falcon as the flocks of waders suddenly scattered.

Back ashore, they carried on the conversation in a dockside pub, half a dozen of them around a table. They picked over the highlights of the morning’s cruise. They talked about other sites, other winters. They had more drinks. Then, after an impassioned debate about the merits of rival scopes, there came a long moment of silence. Even J-J, who’d been relying on Faraday to keep him in the swim, was aware of it. People looked at each other. Then they grinned.

Faraday winked at J-J. The French, as always, had a phrase for it.

‘
Un ange passe
,’ he murmured.

Back at his desk some days later, Faraday took a call from Paul Winter. At first Winter was as bluff and evasive as ever. He just wanted to check out the Gavin Prentice story. Was it really true about the cinema? The lemonade bottles full of syphoned petrol? The kid’s determination to sort out whoever had killed his dad? Faraday assured him that it was, wondering what was making the DC chuckle.

‘See how simple it is?’ Winter started to laugh again. ‘Set a scrote to kill a scrote. Never fails.’