Heaven's Light (6 page)

‘Months.’

‘
Months
?’

‘Yeah. I thought she could handle it. She couldn’t.’

‘And you?’

‘I looked after her.’

‘But can you handle it? Whatever it is?’

Haagen didn’t answer. He’d found two more slices of bread and examined them in the light of the candle before toasting them. For the first time, Barnaby saw the tattoos on the backs of his fingers, the four fat blue letters, J – E – S – S, and the sight of his daughter’s name brought the blood flooding into his face. He’d had faith in Haagen. He’d trusted him. He’d even given him a job in his own office, fulfilling his promise to the court. Now this.

‘Do me a favour, Haagen,’ he said thickly. ‘Just tell me what we’re talking about.’

Haagen was poking the toast with a knife. ‘Heroin,’ he said briefly. ‘Smack.’

‘You’re telling me Jess has been on heroin? All this time?’

‘Yeah. It’s good for her, too. It suits.’

‘You’re out of your mind.’

‘Not at all. She can’t handle anything else. Uppers. Downers. E. Whiz. She just gets in a muddle, gets sloppy. Even alcohol breaks her up.’

‘Handle? What do you mean, handle?’

‘Can’t take it. Can’t cope.’

‘Why should she have to? Who says she needs all this stuff?’

‘She does. I do.’

‘Why?’

‘Because the rest of it is so much shit.’

‘Rest of what?’

‘This…’ Haagen gestured round with the knife ‘… this shit-hole we have to live in. The strokes we have to pull to get by. Not just us. Everyone.’

‘She doesn’t have to live here. That was her decision.’

‘Sure.’ Haagen pushed his glasses up his nose. ‘And you know why?’

‘No.’ Barnaby shook his head. ‘But I’m sure you’ll tell me.’

‘You want to know?’

‘Yes.’

‘OK,’ Haagen said. ‘Because she couldn’t stand it at home with you and that nice wife of yours. The little lies. The big lies. It made her sick, physically sick. Her words, not mine.’

Barnaby nodded, letting his anger subside, knowing he should have expected a scene like this. Talking to Haagen was something you did at some peril. Softening the truth was beyond him.

‘So you put her onto heroin?’ he said wearily. ‘Is that what you’re saying?’

‘Yeah,’ Haagen agreed. ‘We tried it and it was good for us. It worked.’

‘How?’

‘It gave her peace. And a bit of quiet.’

‘And last night?’

‘Last night was different. That wasn’t smack, not the stuff we’re used to, anyway.’ He shrugged. ‘Maybe it was purer than usual. That can be a problem. Fuck knows.’

‘Where did you get it?’

‘Where did I score?’

‘Yes.’

‘Last night?’

‘Yes.’

Haagen turned away. Barnaby asked the question again. Jessie had nearly died. Someone had nearly killed her. He wanted to know who. Haagen shook his head. ‘That’s down to me,’ he said. ‘And Oz.’

‘Oz?’

Haagen beckoned Barnaby over to the window. The window was tiny, set high in the wall. Through the grime, Barnaby could see the squat bulk of a dog. When Haagen tapped on the window, the dog turned round, the cold glass clouding with its breath.

‘Bull terrier.’ Haagen grinned. ‘Never lets go.’

Two hours later, past seven o’clock, a black Daimler took the last exit off the southbound motorway and nosed through the quiet suburban streets that covered the eastern slopes of Portsdown Hill. In the back of the car sat two men. One was Raymond Zhu. The other was a small, broad, bearded Englishman called Mike Tully. Until the journey south from London, Zhu and Tully had never met.

The Daimler drove west. At the top of the hill, opposite a pub, a car park offered spectacular views over the city. At Tully’s direction, the young Chinese behind the wheel pulled the Daimler off the road and came to a halt on the edge of the tangle of couch grass and bramble that fell away to the distant housing estate below. From a hamper in the boot, the driver produced a Thermos of tea, pouring the thin green liquid into exquisite bone china cups.

Zhu and Tully were out of the car, studying the view. Below them, softened by the early morning haze, a fat tongue of land reached out from the foot of the hill, miles long, miles wide, a blur of rooftops, tower blocks, warehouses and the odd gasometer, parcelled by ribbons of motorway. Traffic raced to and fro, in and out of the city, while closer, on the lower slopes of the hill, a woman was tossing handfuls of bread to the wheeling gulls.

Zhu shaded his eyes against the glare of the sun. In the far distance, on the horizon, lay the dark blue swell of the Isle of Wight. The strip of water in between, said Tully, was called the Solent. It insulated the city to the south while east and west Portsmouth was flanked by deep natural harbours enfolded at their seaward ends by spits of sand and shingle. Tully turned from the view, pointing out a structure along the crest of the hill. It was massive, brick-built, one of the chain of nineteenth-century forts protecting the city to the north. There were three in all, and coupled with the intricate defence lines around the harbour mouth, they made Portsmouth impregnable to attack from either land or sea. It was, said Tully, a unique situation. Nowhere else had the military planners taken so much trouble to keep an English city out of foreign hands.

Zhu smiled, beckoning the young driver across and handing Tully one of the cups of steaming tea. This
morning he was wearing a baggy high-necked jacket and a pair of blue serge trousers, and one hand kept going to his scalp, flattening the shock of unruly grey hair. Tully was explaining a little of the city’s history. How the first settlements had grown up around the harbour mouth. How the King had ordered the construction of a primitive dockyard. How the city’s fortunes had always been tied to endless cycles of peace and war. This close to France, and the trading routes along the English Channel, Portsmouth had been a natural base for the King’s fleet, and in time of conflict men had flooded into the little town, eager for work. They’d brought their families with them, putting down roots in the sprawl of slum dwellings outside the garrison walls. Commissioners from the Admiralty, befrocked and bewigged, had rattled down the turnpike from London and it had been on their decisions that the city’s fortunes had always hung. If the nation was under threat, Pompey prospered. In time of peace, London turned its back. Zhu sipped his tea, catching a new note in Tully’s voice. He liked this man. He liked his bulk, the quietness in his eyes, the measured way he talked, and he liked as well the respect that he showed, not just for Zhu, his new employer, but for this city of his.

Zhu gestured at the view. ‘You’ve lived here a long time?’

‘All my life, sir. Except for the service.’

‘Service?’

‘The Royal Marines.’ He indicated the forest of cranes in the naval dockyard. ‘We used to be based here but it’s all gone now. Not that you stayed put at all. We were everywhere. Middle East. The Gulf. Hong Kong. You name it.’

‘Good life?’

‘The best.’

‘But you came back?’

‘Had to. My dad was ill and my wife’s folks weren’t too clever, either,’ he said. ‘It’s not a bad place, Pompey. I’ve seen plenty worse.’

Zhu didn’t respond. Tully was a partner in Quex Corporate, an investigation agency in the city. The agency specialized in commercial work, and Tully exactly met Zhu’s careful stipulations. He’d wanted someone local, someone discreet, someone who’d know exactly how to access certain information. So far he’d limited the brief to business enquiries but the service he’d received from Tully had already impressed him. Responses to specific questions had seldom taken longer than a day, and as the pile of telexed reports thickened, Zhu had become more and more curious about the kind of man he’d find behind the painstaking analyses and the colourless prose. The Englishmen he dealt with in Singapore were a different breed – arrogant, young, shallow – and meeting Tully in the flesh had been a relief. There were some things in this man that money couldn’t buy. And he sensed that loyalty was one of them.

Hua, the driver, had reappeared with the Thermos. Zhu told him to refill Tully’s cup.

‘Tell me about the hotel again,’ he said. ‘Can we see it from here?’ Tully peered into the distance, shaking his head. ‘It’s down in Southsea,’ he said. ‘Big place on the seafront. They’ll have seen my letter by now. I don’t anticipate a problem, Mr Zhu. The evidence is pretty watertight.’

‘And the lawyer? The one you recommended?’

‘You’re booked in this afternoon. Five o’clock.’

‘But is he good? This Mr Barnaby?’

Tully glanced across at him, weighing the question carefully. ‘Sure,’ he said finally. ‘He’s the best.’

Chapter Three

Charlie Epple slipped into the waiting chair at the long glass table, still holding the flowers he’d bought half an hour ago from a florist behind the station. After the meeting he’d be taking a cab to the hospital. The flowers, he thought, might just cheer Jessie up.

Faces around the table studied the flowers. The meeting had been called for eleven. It was already ten past.

‘Welcome …’ A figure at the head of the table stood up, extending a hand. Introductions followed, names and titles, smiles and handshakes. The city’s Strategy Unit occupied a corner of the third floor in the Civic Centre, a smoked-glass seventies building straddling two sides of the Guildhall Square, and numbered half a dozen key officers. With one exception, they were all around the table.

A secretary came in with a tray of coffee and relieved Charlie of the flowers. She admired them at arm’s length and reminded him to collect them before he left. Charlie watched her retreat to the big open-plan office outside. An hour’s walk along the seafront had dispelled the worst of the hangover but he’d remembered, far too late, that he’d left his file in Barnaby’s spare bedroom.

‘Love the concept,’ he murmured to no one in particular. ‘Bloody exciting.’

The man at the head of the table was on his feet again. His name was Alan Carthew and he and Charlie had already established the beginnings of a rapport on the telephone. Carthew had been routed to Charlie’s agency via a business associate in the city. Charlie’s agency – Braddick, Percy – had handled a key account for a big computer company, and the results had evidently been sensational. Thus the invitation for Charlie to attend an exploratory meeting to discuss ways of working a little of the agency’s London magic on the city itself.

Carthew, as far as Charlie could determine, was a new recruit to the city’s administration, a small, intense man with a floral waistcoat and a distinctly pugnacious manner. He’d arrived from another local authority in the north with a brief to build bridges to the private sector. What the city needed was investment, a massive infusion of money and jobs, and it was Carthew’s job somehow to make that happen. On the phone he’d been candid about the difficulties he faced and his question to Charlie had been brutally direct: given the black arts of marketing and promotion, how would he go about selling Portsmouth? Charlie, whose feelings for the city were fogged by memories of cheerful excess, had sensibly refused to supply a straight answer. Pompey was a product, like everything else. Step one would be a list of the things that made it special.

Carthew was warming to his theme and Charlie found himself wondering just how many times the people round the table had heard this pitch. In his experience, sessions like these quickly became exercises in corporate reassurance, gift-wrapping the product in a thin tissue of superlatives.

‘We’ve a story to tell here,’ Carthew was saying, ‘and, believe me, it’s pretty damn wonderful. Take communications. London in seventy minutes. Two major airports,
same journey time. Rail links in every direction. Brand new motorway up to the Midlands. And that’s before we’ve even mentioned the ferryport.’

Charlie smiled. Trying to visualize Portsmouth as the centre of anything was a contradiction in terms. The city of his birth had always been the end of the line, the last name on the destination board at Waterloo, a blur of rabbit hutches and lean-tos and sagging lines of washing as the train clattered through mile after mile of Victorian back-to-backs. In this sense, Pompey had always seemed an orphan on the south coast, friendless, ugly, a wedge of east London torn from its mother city and left to fend for itself.

Charlie toyed fondly with the image, wondering if it had any place in Alan Carthew’s hi-tech fantasy. He was talking about the skills base now, the local army of highly qualified labour that evidently gladdened the hearts of incoming personnel directors. These men, Carthew growled, were often ex-Navy. They were computer literate. They’d had hands-on experience of the latest command and control systems. And, best of all, they understood a thing or two about the meaning of the word discipline. Portsmouth had already established a bridgehead into the defence sector. What other city could offer so perfect an employee profile?

Carthew was clearly expecting a comment, and Charlie glanced up at him, masking another smile.

‘My dad ran a newsagent’s in Fratton,’ he said. ‘All this is pretty new to me.’

‘But you get the point? The drift? History has made this place what it is. Economically, it’s given us immense advantages. Talk about the peace dividend and you’re talking about the people round this table. It’s our job to cash that dividend in, to turn it into jobs, opportunities, pathways into the next millennium. That’s the mission statement,
Mr Epple. That’s the message we’d want you to spread.’

Charlie made a note on the pad at his elbow. Then he looked up again. ‘What about the heritage stuff? All those ships in the dockyard?
Victory? Mary Rose? Warrior?
Shouldn’t all that figure as well?’

‘Of course.’ Carthew tugged at his waistcoat. ‘Absolutely. You know the numbers we’re getting through the city now? Tourists? Four million. Four
million.
And that was last year. This year it’ll be way up.’ He gestured out of the window at the flags bedecking the colonnaded Victorian façade across the Guildhall Square. ‘Take D-Day, what’s been going on over the weekend. This is world-class stuff. We’re talking millions of viewers, countless column inches. After yesterday there won’t be anyone in the UK who won’t be able to put their finger on Portsmouth. We’re on the map, well and truly. And that’s without the Tour de France. You follow cycling at all? Know about all this?’

He pointed out a line of posters on the wall behind him, dramatic shots of the
peleton
at full throttle, and Charlie nodded. He and Barnaby had been discussing the Tour de France only yesterday, chuckling at how unlikely the whole thing seemed. An entire stage of the world’s premier cycling event. Starting and ending on the bloody Common.

‘Brilliant,’ he conceded. ‘Fucking ace.’

Carthew blinked at Charlie’s comment, then recovered himself. ‘You’ll be there?’

‘No question.’

Carthew beamed. One of the big team sponsors had extended an invitation for his kids to meet one or two of their stars. Maybe Charlie’s would like to come too. Charlie looked regretful, apologizing for his lack of children, then grinned at Carthew, trying to soften the ripple of laughter
around the table. He’d no desire to make an enemy of this little man but he was still having a problem bridging the gap between the Pompey of his childhood and the glitzy, dynamic fairy-tale he might soon have to sell.

‘Advertising works on exclusivity,’ he said carefully. ‘So tell me again … What’s so special about this place?’

‘France,’ Carthew said promptly. ‘The continent. Europe. That’s the dimension that really matters. Three hundred and forty-two million punters on our doorstep. Biggest free-trade area in the world. Believe me, we look south from this city not north. It’s Le Havre, Caen, Bilbao. Not bloody Guildford. You know how successful we’ve been with the ferryport? Three million throughput a year. Second busiest in the UK Major earner for the city. And still growth to come.’ He nodded. ‘Flagship Portsmouth. Gateway city. City for the millennium. Yessir …’

Charlie was scribbling another note to himself. Maybe Carthew had a point. Maybe the continental dimension was the key. He glanced up. Carthew was back on the peace dividend, using a flip-chart on an easel, pointing out areas of the city soon to be released from Ministry of Defence ownership. There were hundreds of acres involved. For commerce and manufacturing it was a unique opportunity.

He reached for a pile of brochures on a low table beside his chair, tossing a couple across to Charlie. One was a pitch for a redevelopment on reclaimed land at North Harbour. The other, thicker and glossier, promoted the attractions of a marina complex. Charlie flicked through the pages of carefully framed photos. Expensive yachts nuzzled wooden pontoons. Handsome couples sipped aperitifs at open-air restaurants. Businessmen conferred on mobile phones against a background of eternal summer.

Charlie gestured loosely at the brochure. ‘Where’s this?’

‘Port Solent.’ Carthew’s finger found a corner of the harbour on the flip-chart. ‘It’s very eighties, of course, but it shows you what can be done. Decent design. High build quality. Bit of imagination. Bit of style. Take a look at Port Solent and you’ll see the shape of things to come. Believe me, there’s nothing that investment and a bit of effort can’t achieve. Absolutely nothing.’

Charlie peered at the map. Port Solent lay at the north of the harbour, at the foot of Portsdown Hill. Across the motorway was one of the roughest council estates in western Europe, a snarl on the face of a very different Pompey. Charlie thought of pushing the contrast, seeing what creative sparks might fly, then decided against it. Elements of this challenge were beginning to interest him.

‘You’re selling the past,’ he said, ‘and you’re selling the future. You’re selling quality of life and quality of expectation. I get a feeling of growth, of opportunity. Am I right so far?’

‘Absolutely.’ Carthew was beaming again. ‘Absolutely.’

‘But that puts you in the same frame as every other UK city. So I go back to my question. What makes Pompey Pompey?’

Carthew frowned, reaching for his coffee, giving the question some thought. Across the table, silhouetted against the window, someone stirred. He was an older man, taller than Carthew, his long body folded comfortably into the chrome-framed chair. He was wearing a well-cut suit, and when he turned his head to gesture at the Guildhall Square outside, the sunlight gleamed on his thick pebble glasses.

‘Pompey gets shafted,’ he said quietly, ‘again and again.’

At last, Charlie heard the authentic voice of the city he
counted his own. Paranoia went with the turf. Always had. Always would.

‘How?’ he said, leaning forward.

The man across the table offered Charlie a wry shrug. He had an air of infinite weariness, touched by a conspiratorial good humour. ‘I’m a lawyer,’ he said, offering the word as a kind of explanation, ‘and lawyers know far too much about the small print.’

Charlie stole a glance at Carthew. Carthew was back in his chair, his lips pursed, his fingers drumming impatiently on the file that lay before him. Any minute now, Charlie thought, he’ll be up on his feet again. More flip-charts. More statistics. More wish-fulfilment.

He returned to the man across the table. According to the notes he’d made earlier, his name was Dekker. ‘Tell me,’ Charlie murmured, ‘about the small print.’

It was half past eleven before Barnaby, free of client meetings, got back to the hospital. He parked the Mercedes opposite the Accident and Emergency Unit. Inside it looked different. There were new faces behind the reception desk and the rows of seats in the waiting area were largely occupied by young mothers doing their best to quieten bored kids.

Barnaby went to the desk and gave his name to a middle-aged woman trying to juggle two telephones. He watched her scribbling his name on the back of a newly opened envelope. Finally, both phone conversations came to an end.

‘Can I help you?’

Barnaby explained about Jess. His daughter had been brought in yesterday afternoon. He imagined she must have
been transferred to one of the hospital’s wards. He wanted to see her. He needed the name of the ward. The woman was already flicking through the register and Barnaby followed her finger as it raced up and down the page, astonished at the sheer number of people who’d passed through the unit since he’d left.

The woman looked up. ‘Jessie Barnaby?’

‘That’s right.’

‘She went this morning.’

‘Went?’

‘Yes.’ The woman pointed at the right-hand column and Barnaby glimpsed a name and a scribbled signature. ‘Seven forty-five. She discharged herself.’

‘She can do that?’

‘Of course.’

‘She just walked out?’

‘I imagine so.’

One of the kids in the seats behind Barnaby was howling, and the woman behind the desk offered the mother a wan smile. Barnaby bent forward, getting a better look at the register. He might have been at the post office, he thought, trying to trace a missing parcel.

‘I need to talk to a doctor,’ he said urgently, ‘someone who knows what’s going on.’

The woman’s hand reached for the phone again. She pressed a series of numbers and told Barnaby to take a seat. Someone would be along soon.

‘But when?’

‘Soon.’

‘Yes, but I haven’t got all day.’ Barnaby tapped his watch.

The woman was talking on the phone now, looking at Barnaby and shaking her head. A small haphazard queue had formed at the counter, headed by a man in his fifties.
His shirt was torn and crusted with blood and vomit. He was swaying on his feet and when the woman asked his name he spent several seconds trying to remember it. Barnaby shuddered, thinking of Jessie’s flat again, the stinking basement, the shabby street outside. That’s where derelicts like this lived. These were the kind of people she’d chosen as neighbours.

At length, a young doctor appeared. He had a muttered exchange with the woman behind the desk before walking across towards Barnaby, extending a hand and apologizing at once for being new. He’d been on the unit barely a week. One or two things were still a bit unfamiliar.

‘It’s my daughter,’ Barnaby was saying, ‘Jessie. It seems she’s gone.’

‘That’s right. She went this morning.’

‘Just like that?’

‘So I understand.’

Barnaby gazed at him. Another blank. Another tract of no man’s land where people disappeared without trace.

The doctor was fumbling irritably with his stethoscope. The hollows of his face were shadowed with exhaustion. ‘You shouldn’t worry too much, Mr Barnaby. I’ve read your daughter’s notes. We gave her Narcane. It all seems pretty straightforward.’

‘What’s Narcane?’

‘It’s an antidote. We use it for morphine overdoses. It’s pretty effective.’ He paused. ‘She’ll be in no medical danger, if that’s what you’re thinking.’