Beyond Reach (20 page)

‘OK,’ he grunted. ‘Let’s say I believe you.’

The silence between them stretched and stretched. A woman in a loose cotton dress sauntered past. She was beautiful and she knew it, but for once Mackenzie didn’t spare her a second glance. Winter was watching him carefully. Waiting was becoming a chore.

‘It’s something about Ezzie, isn’t it?’

‘How do you know?’

‘Because she’s pressing your buttons. It’s not just Madison being a copper. It’s what she might have told him.’

‘Very clever.’ He mimed applause. ‘No wonder you potted all those low-life villains.’

‘So what is it?’

The head went down again. He took another sip of coffee. Whiskers of milky froth appeared beneath his mouth. Then he shrugged.

‘It may be nothing,’ he said.

‘That’s not an answer, Baz. Try me. Trust me.’

‘OK.’ He frowned. ‘You won’t believe this but I meant it as a present for Ezzie and Stu. What a fucking joke.’

‘Meant what?’

‘The project.’

‘And does Ezzie know about it? This project?’

‘Of course she fucking does. She has to because she’s done most of the negotiations. What she doesn’t know is that the whole deal will end up in her name.’

At last he put the cup aside and beckoned Winter closer. Last year, he said, he’d been contacted by a mate in Spain. This was a guy who lived out in Galicia on the Atlantic Coast. He had plenty of useful connections and wanted Señor Mackenzie to know about an investment opportunity in a place called Baiona.

‘Where’s that?’

‘Down near the Portuguese border. Bang on the coast. Big with Spanish tourists who know a thing or two. Pretty as you like.’

This guy’s brother, he said, had a stake in a big apartment development. The thing was half built already and six of the apartments had been sold off plan, but the consortium in charge had hit rough water and were now looking for an injection of fresh capital.

‘And you were interested?’

‘Not in a deal like that. Not in a million years. But I went down there with Ezzie to check it out. You might remember.’

Winter nodded. Last year Bazza and his daughter had disappeared in a hurry to Spain. At the time Winter had assumed they’d gone to the Costa del Sol. He’d been wrong.

‘So what happened?’

‘It turned out the spics had fucked up big time. No one in his right mind would buy into their consortium. They were totally over-leveraged. What had to happen was a fire sale. It took Ez about half a day to sniff that out. She’s got real talent, that girl. Sharp as you like.’

Between them, Mackenzie and his daughter had put together a business plan. They knew they had the Spaniards over a barrel. They knew the consortium was facing a banking deadline only weeks away. They could drive the bargain of their dreams. And so it proved.

‘You bought the apartments?’

‘Yeah. For a song. Then it got a bit more complicated.’

The land for the apartments had once belonged to a local businessman who also owned a hotel in the resort. This too was for sale.

‘Cheap?’

‘Not especially. He was much cannier than the guys in the consortium. He knew he was sitting on something pretty valuable. You should see the place. The views, the rooms, the potential, every fucking thing. We were staying there. Ezzie fell in love with it.’

‘How much did he want?’

‘A lot of money. We got him down a bit but it still wasn’t cheap.’

‘So you decided to spread the risk?’

‘Yeah, too right. Like you wouldn’t.’

Winter looked away a moment. Bazza had learned a great deal over the past couple of years, and one of the more important lessons had been about risk. No matter how wealthy you might be, always minimise your exposure.

‘You cut someone else in on the deal?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Who?’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘How much?’

‘A million. Euros, not pounds.’

‘And where does this money come from?’

‘Toot.’ He winced. ‘As it turns out.’

SATURDAY, 24 MAY 2008. 17.45

Live by the powder, die by the powder. Winter knew the Proceeds of Crime Act backwards. If Mackenzie was ever silly enough to get himself involved with tainted money, and the subsequent case was proved in court, then the authorities could turn up the next day, seize cash and other assets, and start tearing his empire apart. This was the evil bit of legislation that had driven Operation
Tumbril.
This was what top cops dreamed about in the small hours of the night. The prospect of returning Bazza Mackenzie to his Copnor roots was the crock of gold at the end of Willard’s rainbow.

Just how serious a threat was Mackenzie facing? Winter knew it was hard to say. Bazza’s still-nameless partner had evidently acquired much of his wealth from the cocaine trade. That was no surprise, especially in the kind of social circles Mackenzie still occasionally frequented, but amongst serious players there was always an unspoken assumption that your money was properly laundered. You never came to the party, as Bazza had once observed, without having a good scrub-up first.

In this case, to Bazza’s alarm, that hadn’t happened. The guy had excellent connections. His reputation as a major wholesaler, importing huge quantities of Colombian cocaine, was second to none. Like Bazza himself, he’d invested wisely, residential property first, then commercial developments. Awash with profits, all of them legit, there’d been no need to keep dabbling in the Dark Side. And yet the sheer size of the mark-up on good-quality toot had been irresistible. Cocaine addiction went way beyond chemistry.

The man, it turned out, was in deep shit. A couple of weeks back, Bazza had taken a call from a Spanish-domiciled Colombian dealer called Riquelme. He lived near Cambados, north of Baiona, and Baz had never had any reason to doubt his word. Riquelme told him that Mackenzie’s new partner, who was in and out of Spain every week on narco-business, was being shadowed by English cops. He knew this because one of them had totalled his hire car in a collision with a lorry. The hire car had ended up in a Cambados garage, where a mechanic had discovered a New Scotland Yard expenses form in the glove box. Word had reached Riquelme. With interests of his own to protect, he’d instructed a couple of local guys to sit on the cops and within days he knew the garage mechanic had been right. Bazza’s new partner was under investigation. Big time.

This morning, at the café-bar, Winter had done his best to squeeze out more information. Was this bloke home-grown? Was he English? Did he operate out of London? Had Bazza been asking around, making guarded enquiries, trying to suss whether he was as reckless and brain-dead as Riquelme seemed to suggest? To all these questions, Bazza had no answer. Like the rabbit in the onrushing headlights, he seemed paralysed. Bad stuff was happening. And he didn’t know what to do.

To Winter the latter realisation was deeply troubling. It meant that Bazza had surrendered more of this project to his daughter than might have been wise. With a thousand other deals on his mind he’d given Ezzie free rein. He had trusted her completely. He knew she was bloody good. But then she’d met Madison and slipped the leash. It was, as Bazza freely admitted, a fucking disaster.

Not necessarily. Back in his apartment Winter stood on the balcony, mobe to his ear, waiting for Ezzie to answer. A couple of dickhead canoeists were out on the harbour, riding the wake from the Gosport ferry, and Winter watched as one of them dug deep with his paddle, executing a neat U-turn. There was still time, he thought, for a word or two with Bazza’s daughter. He knew she respected him. He’d suggest a spot of lunch. She might even listen.

Finally her number answered. It was the au pair. Mrs Norcliffe had packed her bags that very morning. A taxi had arrived a couple of hours ago. She’d gone.

‘Gone where?’

‘I don’t know. I have an envelope here. For Mr Norcliffe.’

‘Open it.’

‘I can’t.’

There was a thump in the background then the wail of a child in floods of tears. Winter tried again, telling her to open the envelope, telling her he’d square it with Stu, telling her it was really
really
important, but all he could hear was the child. After a while, knowing it was hopeless, he gave up. Out on the harbour, one of the canoeists had capsized.

 

Faraday spent the rest of the day on Farlington marshes. There’d been reports of a pectoral sandpiper on a local birding site and a glance at the tide tables told Faraday that late afternoon, with a big spring tide, would give him a decent chance of enjoying this shy little bird.

The marshes lay at the northern end of Langstone Harbour, an hour’s walk from the Bargemaster’s House. A tongue of land reached deep into the mudflats, accessible from a scruffy car park beside the motorway. The best pickings at this state of the tide were to be found on a small lake at the western side of the bird reserve. Here there was every chance of settling down with black-tailed godwits and with luck the pectoral sandpiper. Further out on the harbour hundreds of waders would be gathered on their island roosts, waiting for the water to fall, but with the exception of the big oystercatchers sheer distance turned solid identification into guesswork.

Faraday found a perch beside the lake and made himself comfortable. He’d brought a Thermos of coffee and sat back, enjoying the warmth of the sunshine. An initial sweep with his binos had already confirmed the godwits in decent numbers, many of them dousing themselves in the lake’s fresh water to rid themselves of salt.

He steadied the binos for a more methodical search. The pectoral sandpiper was a vagrant from North America. It normally appeared in late summer and Faraday loved its cape of mottled brown and the way it stalked amongst the tangles of seaweed, alert, erect, like a patrolling dowager cursed to be in less elevated company. Quite what it might be doing here in May was anybody’s guess but global warming was starting to play havoc with migration patterns and the big frontal troughs across the Atlantic were depositing all kind of surprises on European shores.

After a while, disappointed by the absence of the sandpiper, he put the binos to one side, lay back and closed his eyes. This expedition had offered the possibility of an escape from all the nonsense up in Paulsgrove but the memory of the brief kerbside head-to-head with Gail Parsons was still with him. He’d long begun to suspect that the battle to preserve law and order was - to use Winter’s mocking word - doomed. Society had changed. The glue that stuck everything together was disintegrating. It was commonplace now to keep your head down, your fingers crossed, and ignore the mounting evidence that life was getting nastier. All that was true, and Munday’s tyro psychopaths were the living evidence, but Parsons was right to demand that Faraday kept his pessimism to himself. It was one thing to find your FLO entombed in a Paulsgrove lavatory by a bunch of predatory kids, quite another to assure her that things could only get worse.

He stifled a yawn, his eyes still closed, letting his mind drift back to last night. Winter, in some strange instinctive way, must have seen this coming. With his matey smile and his devious little ways he’d spent twenty years carving a path of his own through all the procedural bullshit. The sheer number of scalps hanging from his belt, some of them much-prized, had kept the Professional Standards Department at arm’s length for most of the time, but in the end even Winter had been forced to raise his hands and call it a day. Why? Because the Job had changed as much as the society it served.

Gone were the evenings when the Fratton bar would fill with a CID squad celebrating a trophy result. Gone were the wild nights on the piss. Faraday himself had no time for the cruder excesses of the canteen culture but even he missed the camaraderie that went with it. These days you watched your back, had salad for lunch, drank sensibly and got home in time to put the kids to bed. Not Winter’s style at all.

He struggled upright and reached for the binos again, wondering where Perry Madison fitted into the squeaky-clean world of modern policing. Faraday had never liked him, never got on. He was brisk to the point of abruptness and took a savage pleasure in belittling subordinates. He’d never bothered to hide his burning ambition and had stepped over a number of bodies on his way up the promotional ladder. Madison wasn’t bright enough to get any further than DCI but what had always struck Faraday was his recklessness. At life’s table, the man had always been a gambler. He played for high stakes and took it hard when he lost. Was Mackenzie’s daughter his latest throw of the dice? Or might Winter have a point in suspecting a darker agenda?

Faraday took a last sweep across the lake, searching in vain for the sandpiper, knowing that the answer was probably beyond him. Then he got to his feet, bending to retrieve a half-crushed can of Stella before turning for a last long look at the harbour. A low mist had hung over the water all day, impervious to the sun, and in the far distance, for a split second, he thought he made out the shape of a sailing barge. Bringing the binos to his eyes, he racked the focus in a bid to resolve the image but it disappeared into the greyness like a phantom. Something snagged in his mind, something recent, and he was still trying to resolve the thought when his mobile rang.

It was Jimmy Suttle. More drama. Faraday checked his watch. Gone six.

‘What’s happened?’

‘There’s a Chinese restaurant in Paulsgrove. Something horrible kicked off about half an hour ago. Uniforms have got the place secured. I think it’s Munday’s lot again. I’m on my way up there now, boss.’

Faraday told him to detour via Farlington marshes. He’d be waiting in the car park. Suttle gone, Faraday looked seawards again. He’d got it now. The sailing barge was a throwback, a ghost. It had slipped in from the nineteenth century, en route to Pompey dockyard, and now - after a taste of the shiny new millennium - it had simply vanished. He paused, treasuring this private moment. Gabrielle, he thought. Her kind of fantasy.