Deadlight (49 page)

Briefly, she tried to get up again but gave up the struggle. Then she nodded at the open door.

‘Look in the kitchen. There’s a letter on the side, behind the cake tin.’

Yates disappeared. When he came back, he was carrying a blue envelope.

‘Is this it?’

‘Yes. Go on, read it.’ She made a brief, despairing gesture with her hand, then leaned back and shut her eyes. She wanted no further part of this.

Yates handed the letter to Faraday. It carried the Kingsley Road address but no stamp. He weighed it in his hand for a moment, sensing that they’d finally found the key to Coughlin’s death.

‘Is this from your son? Matthew?’

‘Yes.’ Her eyes were still closed.

‘When did you get it?’

‘Twenty years ago. It was the last letter he ever wrote us. That’s why I never opened it. I couldn’t bear to hear his voice again. Not until …’ She frowned. ‘Not until I thought I was ready.’

‘And when was that?’

‘Nearly a month ago. The twenty-first of May.’

Faraday looked at her a moment longer, then unfolded the letter. It was like an aerogram, a single sheet of paper with a front panel for the address. It began innocuously enough, big loopy scrawl, stuff about the passage south, about Ascension, about painting out the ship’s number. The weather, Matthew said, had been getting colder by the day and twice they’d depth-charged whales by mistake. Then, after a one-line space halfway down, came a sudden change of tone.

If you wanted the truth, he wrote, life aboard was a nightmare. He was in a mess with thirty-six other blokes. One of them was a cook. His name was Coughlin. He worked in the wardroom galley which meant being with him day after day. He’d never leave you alone. He was a big bastard and he made you do things that were wrong, things that made you want to throw up. Lots of times he’d thought of going and telling someone about it – the Divisional Officer, the Master-at-Arms, maybe even the Captain – but he knew that would be asking for trouble because Coughlin was bound to find out and after that he’d be a dead man. He couldn’t explain how horrible this bloke was. It made him sick just thinking about him. He’d made his life a misery. And what made it worse was not knowing what to do about it. So now he was hoping against hope that something might come along and sort it all out. A couple of Argie bombers, maybe. Or an Exocet. The letter petered out on the next line. After the scrawled signature, the boy had added three kisses.

An Exocet?

To Faraday, with a son of his own, the letter was truly shocking. It amounted, in essence, to a suicide note.
Whether Coughlin had physically dumped the young steward overboard or not was immaterial. Hands-on or otherwise, the fact was that the older man had driven this woman’s son to his death. Not at the hands of the enemy, but at the vicious whim of a messdeck bully with a taste for young boys.

Faraday gave the letter to Yates. Mrs Warren was staring up at him.

‘Who really took the call that night?’

‘My husband.’

‘He’d read this letter?’

‘Of course he had. He read it after I opened it. It broke his heart. Like it’s broken mine.’

‘Did you talk to anyone else about it? Anyone from the navy?’

Mrs Warren hesitated a moment. Then she nodded.

‘I phoned Mr Wallace. He’s in Drayton, runs the association. He’s been good to us, like Paulie.’

‘And you read him the letter?’

‘I told him what was in it.’

‘And what did he do?’

Once again, there was a pause.

‘I think he talked to the First Lieutenant,’ she said at last. ‘I think Mr Harrington was the person he got on to.’

Faraday glanced at Yates but Yates was still deep in the letter. This was why the Ship’s Investigation had gone missing, Faraday thought. The tight little family that were the surviving
Accolade
s had closed ranks and were doubtless deciding exactly what to do. Not that either Wallace himself – or, indeed, the Vice Admiral – were going to share the contents of this letter with a stranger. No. Both men, in their separate ways, had marked Faraday’s card. But there was a deeper and more complex loyalty here that only the
Accolade
s themselves would understand. Because that’s what war did to you.

Yates passed the letter back to Faraday. A tiny shake of the head. Faraday refolded the thin, blue paper, trying
to imagine how you’d ever cope with a bombshell like this, a cry for help that twenty years had done nothing to mute.

‘What about your husband?’ he said gently. ‘What did he do about it?’

Mrs Warren was crying now, her pale cheeks shiny with tears.

‘He talked to Paul. He wanted to find Coughlin, you know, find an address for him.’

‘And Paul told him?’

‘Paul didn’t know.’ She fumbled for a tissue, and then blew her nose.

‘What about Wallace? Wouldn’t Wallace have known?’

‘Paul tried but Wallace hadn’t got an address. Coughlin never came to any of the services, never kept up.’ She was gazing at the letter. ‘Not surprising, really.’

‘So your husband didn’t have an address until Monday night? Until Paul Gault phoned?’

‘No.’ After the call came in, she said, her husband had left the house within minutes. An hour or so later he was back again. His boots had blood on them. His jeans, too. When she asked him what had happened, what he’d done, he wouldn’t say a word.

‘What happened to the clothing?’

‘I burned it.’ She gestured hopelessly towards the back garden. ‘White spirit.’

‘The boots?’

‘They went into the Glory Hole.’

Her husband had left early the next morning, taking the van with him. He’d packed some spare clothes, and taken stuff from the larder, cereals and biscuits mainly. She’d heard from him a couple of times since but she’d no idea where he was. He said they were sleeping in the van, the pair of them. He sounded pretty rough.

‘Pair of them?’

‘My husband’s a builder. Warren and Son. Malcolm’s
disappeared as well. He lives round the corner, Sheryl and a couple of nippers. She’s like me. Out of her mind with it all.’

‘They both went round to see Coughlin?’

She nodded, her eyes moist, saying nothing.

Faraday glanced at Yates, then left the room. From the kitchen a door opened on to a tiny square of back garden. In one corner, he found a circle of flattened earth and a scattering of ashes. He gazed down at it for a long moment, unable to rid himself of the image of the Vice Admiral, bent over the coffee table, the cigarette smouldering between his fingers. The man had been more right than he’d known. The war they’d fought had cast a long, long shadow. After twenty years, this woman hadn’t lost one man from her life but three.

Faraday looked up to find Yates at the kitchen door. He, too, had spotted the ashes.

‘Scenes of Crime?’ he muttered.

Ten days later, Faraday took the road back down to the West Country. He’d taken the precaution of phoning ahead, making sure that Beattie would be at home, and when the ex-Master-at-Arms had asked what lay behind this latest visit, Faraday had told him not to worry. There were one or two details he needed to sort out. Nothing that Beattie himself wouldn’t have done.

Past Dorchester, Faraday ran into torrential rain. Crawling along behind a lorry, he thought of Willard at Kingston Crescent, supervising the final preparation of the
Merriott
file prior to submission to the Crown Prosecution Service. Warren and his son had walked into a Midlands police station after a fortnight’s misery in the back of a Transit van. Whether Warren’s decision to give himself and his son up had been prompted by a phone conversation with his wife wasn’t clear, but either way it made no difference. Both men had held their hands up to assaulting Coughlin. They’d never meant to kill him, but now he was gone they had no regrets. Forensic tests on ash residues from Warren’s back garden had been disappointing but under the circumstances, with two signed confessions on file, Willard had organised a modest celebration.

Faraday, pleading a prior appointment, hadn’t turned up. His first solo Major Crimes had been a troubling experience. Procedurally, he hadn’t put a foot wrong. He’d explored every line of enquiry, put all the ticks in all the right boxes. In Willard’s absence, he’d been punctilious about the Policy Book, and with the Det Supt back at the helm, he’d finally achieved a result. Given the
circumstances surrounding Matthew Warren’s death, it was highly likely that the CPS would settle for manslaughter charges on the basis of the two confessions, but whatever happened the interests of justice had been served. But was that the end of the story? Faraday thought not.

The Vice Admiral had, in the end, been right. Peace was a precious commodity and so was a family as troubled and vulnerable as Matthew Warren’s. By doing his job, and by doing it well, Faraday had shattered both. Given exactly the same circumstances, he couldn’t think of a single decision he’d take differently, but that bleak knowledge gave him no comfort whatsoever. A death like Warren’s would haunt you for ever.

Beattie, two hours later, was pleased to see him. He put the kettle on and produced a tin of home-made scones. The Alsatian loped in from the garden and gave the visitor a sniff.

Faraday explained about the Warren family. Beattie didn’t appear to be the least surprised.

‘You’re telling me you knew?’ Faraday had helped himself to a chair by the fireplace.

‘I’m telling you nothing.’

‘Off the record?’

Beattie smiled to himself and called the dog over. The big, old Alsatian padded across the slate flagstones and made himself comfortable on the sofa beside his master. Beattie tossed Faraday another scone from the open tin at his feet. With jam and little whirls of clotted cream, they were delicious.

‘Off the record, there’s not much left to tell,’ Beattie said carefully.

‘How about Coughlin’s address? I’m still not clear how Gault found out. You were all in the hotel. Coughlin came and went. No one followed him. He’s not in the book because I checked. And Pritchard would have been the last person to part with the address.’

The dog was licking jam off Beattie’s fingers.

‘Pritchard was nearly as pissed as Gault,’ Beattie said. ‘He made a call out in the hall then left his mobile behind the bar.’

‘And Gault accessed the directory? In his state?’

‘No.’ Beattie offered the dog a dot of cream. ‘I did.’

‘
You
did. Why?’

Beattie ignored the question, so Faraday went at it a different way. Pritchard’s mobile had been behind the bar. Beattie had gone to the trouble of retrieving Coughlin’s details. What happened next?

‘I wrote the address down, brought it back to the table.’

‘And Gault saw it?’

‘Must have done.’

Faraday, sensing regret, leaned forward in the chair.

‘Did you know he’d phoned the boy’s parents?’

‘No.’

‘He didn’t do it from the bar?’

‘No.’ Beattie shook his head. ‘He went out for a piss a couple of times. It doesn’t take long to make a call like that.’

‘Are you sorry he made it?’

Beattie thought about the question. At length, he permitted himself a tiny frown. Irritation, as well as regret.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I am. Gault was out of his head. The last person he should have phoned was the lad’s father, putting it on him. You know what I’m saying?’

‘Of course.’ Faraday nodded. ‘But what about Coughlin? If Gault hadn’t seen the address, what would
you
have done … ?’

Faraday let the question tail away. Matthew Warren’s letter, twenty years unread, had lodged in his brain. The thought of an eighteen-year-old boy praying for an Exocet was grotesque.

Beattie stirred.

‘There’s something else you ought to know,’ he said.

‘About that Monday night?’

‘About the war. About
Accolade
. The evening we were hit, I was down in the S and S mess. That’s Two Delta. Coughlin’s mess. Warren’s mess. We were at Condition Zulu, fully closed down, then we got the word on the inbound raid. At that point, wherever you are, you hit the deck. The Argie Skyhawks were visual, seconds away.’ He paused, then reached across for the dog. ‘The first bomb hit aft. You could feel the whole ship lifting beneath you, the weirdest sensation. Then the PWO called a second aircraft, which made sense because those bastards always came in pairs.’

He turned his head towards the window, gazing out at the rain, and Faraday wondered just how many times this man must have relived
Accolade
’s final moments. Would you ever share an experience like this with anyone else? Or did you spend twenty years keeping it under lock and key?

‘We had Seacat on the 21s.’ Beattie laughed softly. ‘The Marines used to call it Seamouse. That tells you everything. They let one go, you could hear it blasting off, then some brave soul had a pop with the Oerliken, and then – bang – we were stuffed. You just have no idea. You just can’t imagine what’s happening. One moment you’re lying there, cacking yourself. The next you’re in some movie. There’s smoke everywhere. The ship’s listing. The bulkhead’s gone. There’s a big fire down below. Fucking grade A chaos.’

He looked down at his empty plate. At this point, he said, the drills kicked in. He knew guys had been hurt, had to have been, and so he went looking. One guy had lost it completely, didn’t know where he was. Beattie gave him a couple of smacks and shoved him towards the ladder. Another bloke, Taff, was obviously dead. Then he spotted a third body, the other side of what had once been the bulkhead. This guy turned out to be alive,
wrecked but alive. He was a big guy, too. Beattie tried to get him to help himself but knew he was past it. Getting him out was a two-man job. At least.

‘And you were by yourself?’

‘No. There was one other bloke down there. Barely injured at all.’

‘And?’

‘I tried to get him to help, yelled at him, ordered him, but no way was he interested. In fact it was worse than that. He wanted to fight me.’

‘
Fight
you?’

‘Yeah. The guy I was trying to get out was none of his business. Me? I could fuck off. The guy flat on his back? He was a goner.’