No Lovelier Death (18 page)

‘Knackered.’

‘Too knackered to give me a ring this morning? Like I asked you? Too knackered to remember your fucking manners?’

He stepped back, giving Westie the room he needed. No gestures, no instructions, just a couple of feet of floor space between the wall and the bed. Westie reached down, dragging Cooper out of bed. Underneath the duvet he was naked. Beside him, curled in a tight foetal ball, was a girl in her early teens. She was so thin, so small, that only Winter had realised there’d been two people in the bed. She too was naked.

Westie hesitated. Bazza told him to throw her out. He scooped her up and dumped her on the landing outside, smothering her screams with the duvet.

‘Shut it,’ he yelled. ‘Just fucking shut it.’

The screaming stopped. Cooper was terrified. Winter could see it in his eyes. He was crouched on the bed, his back against the wall, his knees tucked under his chin. He was a well-built lad barely out of adolescence. He had a Chinese tattoo on one bicep and badly needed a shave.

‘Listen,’ he kept saying. ‘Just please fucking listen.’

‘Sure.’ Bazza settled on the bed beside him. ‘How long will it take Westie to boil a kettle? Only that’s how long you’ve got.’

‘To do what, Mr M?’

‘To tell me what kicked off at that fucking ratshit party on Saturday night. You were there, Danny. I know you were. So don’t even bother to tell me different. We understand each other?
Comprende
?’

‘Yeah, sure, yeah, whatever.’

‘So tell me, son. What happened?’

‘I dunno.’

‘Yes, you do, son.’

‘I don’t. I swear. I got texted. A bloke I trust. I gave him a bell back. He said there was open house in Craneswater.
Craneswater?
You have to be fucking joking. He said it wasn’t no joke. Then he gave me the address. It was right next to your place, Mr M. Number 13.’

‘So you went? Because of that? Because of
me
?’

‘Yeah. The way I figured it, you’d know about the party. So I thought I’d make a bit of a contribution.’

‘With half-price bags of toot?’

‘Yeah.’ He swallowed hard, staring up at Mackenzie’s battered face. ‘Kind of two-for-one offer. Bit of a thank you, like. All the favours you’ve done me.’

Bazza stared down at him a moment, then he bent low, his mouth to Cooper’s left ear. His voice was low, barely a whisper.

‘Listen, shitface. Are you hearing me?’

‘Yes, Mr M.’

‘There never were any favours. Never. They never happened. We never met, never talked, not even on the mobe. I never lifted a finger to help you, not in any way, not once, and you know why? Because you’re a twat.’ He straightened up. Winter heard footsteps clumping up the stairs. Westie, he thought.

Bazza hadn’t finished. He wanted to know more about the party. In particular he wanted a name or two.

‘Like who?’

‘I dunno, do I? Otherwise I wouldn’t be asking. Twat.’

‘But what kind of name?’

‘The kind of name that might give my friend here a chance.’ Bazza nodded in Winter’s direction.

‘Chance?’

‘To find out which evil cunt put two bodies in my back garden. Is this news to you? Or don’t you read the papers?’

Cooper nodded. Of course he read the papers. It had been all over the telly too. It was the talk of the city. He’d heard you couldn’t see Sandown Road for flowers. He’d heard people were wearing memorial fucking T-shirts. Unbelievable.

Westie had appeared at the door. Steam from the kettle curled in on the draught along the top landing. Winter was starting to feel uncomfortable. Bazza sometimes let these situations get out of control.

‘Well? You gonna tell me or what?’

‘I’ve got nothing to tell, Mr M.’

‘You’re a fucking liar, mush. You’ve got your ear to the ground. You
know.’

‘Know what?’

Bazza was losing patience. Winter could sense it.

‘Tell me, son,’ he said. ‘Save yourself a lot of grief.’

‘Listen …’ There were tears in Cooper’s eyes. He’d been around long enough to understand what came next. He bunched his knees together, then began to hug himself, his knuckles white, his whole body swaying backwards and forwards. He nodded towards Westie.

‘Just tell that fucking ape to get back in his tree. Then I’ll tell you.’

‘You will, son. You will.’

Bazza glanced at Westie. No one called him an ape, least of all this quivering lowlife. He stepped forward, held the kettle high, then slowly tipped it. The scalding water splashed on Cooper’s knees. He screamed, reached for a nearby towel, exposing himself. More water. Lots of it. The entire kettle. Higher up.

‘Just tell me, son. Just give me some names. Westie likes doing everything in threes.’

Cooper’s eyes had widened. Steam curled from his groin. The scream became a whimper. This was a pain he’d never even contemplated. He tried to get the words out. Failed completely. Westie stepped forward again. This time he had a Stanley knife in his hand. Bazza stopped him.

‘Talk to me, son. Take your time.’

Cooper’s breathing slowed. He gulped. Tears were pouring down his face. He looked like a kid, Winter thought. He felt soiled by even being in the same room as these animals.

Mackenzie was still waiting for an answer. At length, to Winter’s surprise, he got what he wanted.

‘She calls herself Jax.’ His eyes were closed now.

‘Jax who?’

‘Jax Bonner.’

‘And she was at the party?’

‘Yeah. But you want to be fucking careful, Mr M. She carries a blade. She’s off her head. She doesn’t care who she hurts.’ His eyes opened, pleading for this nightmare to stop.

‘Where do we find her?’

‘I’ve no idea.’

‘Yes, you have.’

‘No.’ He shook his head. ‘You’re wrong, Mr M. I haven’t got a clue.’

‘So how do we find her?’

‘Fuck knows. Ask anyone. Ask the social fucking services. They all know her. Jax Bonner.’

Another face had appeared at the door. It was the girl from the landing. She was staring at the patches of damp on the bed, at Danny Cooper’s crimson thighs.

Bazza, Winter sensed, was on the point of leaving. Then he bent low again, gave Cooper a pat on the shoulder.

‘Remember what I said about you and me?’ He grinned. ‘Never happened, right?’

‘Yes, Mr M.’

‘Else we’ll come calling again. And next time Westie might stay the night.’

MONDAY, 13 AUGUST 2007
. 17.25

Jimmy Suttle, on Faraday’s orders, left the Major Crime suite early for once. The inquiry wasn’t going well and everyone knew it. The so-called golden hours, the first precious day of any investigation, had come and gone and
Mandolin
was no closer to linking names to the bodies beside the pool. Worse still, the squad’s every move was under intense scrutiny. The press and telly were still queuing at
Mandolin
’s door. The bosses in Winchester - even the normally unflappable Willard - were constantly on the phone demanding updates. There were rumours of a serious ruck with the Craneswater Residents’ Association. Only the new DCI seemed to be holding her nerve.

Suttle turned out of the car park and inched into the rush-hour traffic, heading for Gunwharf. He’d spent the last hour or so with Faraday and a DVD from the Comms Intelligence Unit containing the best of the images from the seized mobiles at the party house.

For Suttle, the experience had been odd. His previous twelve hours had been devoted to going through hundreds of pages of witness statements. The stiff prose that most interviewing detectives reserved for these forms rarely did justice to real life. You listened to someone describing six hours of drunken madness, you did your best to get the right facts in the right order, you added a verbatim quote or two, and you asked for their signature at the end. What you rarely pinned down was the raw experience of being there.

The Netley images, downloaded from umpteen mobiles and a couple of digital cameras, changed all that. This was the movie of the book and one look at the swirl of faces, the crazy camera angles, the sheer press of bodies surging from room to room was as good as being there. Watching this stuff, hearing the soundtrack, Suttle could smell the weed, could feel the thump of techno deep in his bones, could sense how quickly you’d abandon every shred of restraint.

He tried to imagine himself as a friend of Rachel’s, tried to figure how he’d feel about this army of strangers crashing in from the dark.

First off, you’d be spooked. There might even be a hint of menace. But then the booze would kick in, and whatever else, and pretty soon you’d tell yourself you were all here for a good time. Some of the girlies you might fancy. Some of the blokes might be a laugh. Pretty soon everyone would be your mate.

He’d watched a mad circle of guys dancing together, tinnies in hand. He’d admired the chest of a dark girl in a red top, exposed by her leering boyfriend. He’d grinned when another youth had hosed her down with foam from a shaken tinny. And when Faraday had replayed footage of kids wrecking the judge’s study, he’d begun to understand how even this might somehow be part of a quality night out. The party, in the end, had been about abandon. No rules. No grown-up bollocks about behaving yourself. Let’s just rinse the fucker.

Faraday of course hadn’t seen it this way. He wanted - needed - to squeeze the footage for evidence, for clues, for faces, for names. He wanted to tally one sequence against another, to confirm a timeline from the flickering digital readouts, to somehow tease order from this night-long helping of chaos.

Tomorrow Suttle was to make arrangements for Samantha Muirhead to see the footage. She’d been there. She knew many of these people. She could put names to some of the faces. But for the time being, this afternoon, he and Faraday had treated themselves to a preview.

Spotting Rachel had been a priority. A couple of the mobes had belonged to friends of hers. There were plenty of images from early in the evening: Rachel sucking booze through a straw from a shallow glass dish, Rachel dancing with a girlfriend, Rachel showing her arse to the camera as she fed a DVD into the player beneath the Aults’ telly. A bit later someone else discovered her in the kitchen, necking with Gareth. Suttle recognised the boy’s ginger hair and the pale blue shirt later photographed by the CSI at the poolside. He was thin and a bit clueless and watching him back Rachel against the kitchen fridge Suttle began to wonder quite what the attraction had been. She was too quick for him, too natural, too lively. In the kitchen she’d licked the side of his face and then stuck her tongue in his ear, winking at the camera as he tried to wriggle free. In short, to Suttle the new boyfriend seemed a bit of a prat.

Faraday had noticed it too, but the D/I’s real attention had been caught by later shots of Rachel. By now she was obviously pissed. She carried a different glass in every shot and the glass was never empty. Often she was with the same bunch of friends, Gareth among them. In company she seemed to mother him.

Twice Suttle caught glimpses of Matt Berriman, tall and commanding, body-checking his way through the scrum in the background, and on both occasions it was obvious that Rachel had clocked him too. Faraday had paused the footage at this point, leaning forward to peer at the screen. There’d been a wistfulness, he said, in the way she looked at him. She was there and she wasn’t there. She’d become a ghost at her own party.

This phrase of Faraday’s had stayed with Suttle. Ghost was right but ghost was a word he’d never have dreamed of using. He’d got to know the D/I well over the past year or so and he’d come to recognise just how different this man was from the other detectives on the squad. Working with Paul Winter on division, Suttle had let the city get in his face. That was the way Winter liked it, down at street level, touching hands, bending arms, calling in favours, baiting evil little traps. He talked the language of the toerags he so artfully screwed and took enormous pleasure in putting them away. But Faraday wasn’t like that at all, not remotely. Faraday was a watcher. He stood back. He analysed. He thought hard about stuff. And above all he tried to understand what it was like to
be
someone else. Suttle had seen it time and time again, this bid to get inside other people’s heads, other people’s lives, and it had been the same this afternoon, with Rachel. Ghost was spot on, he thought. And in a way it applied to Faraday as well.

Suttle drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. The lights by the dockyard gates took an age to change.

He checked his watch. Five to six. Shit.

 

Lizzie Hodson was on the point of leaving when Suttle finally made it to Gunwharf. He’d phoned earlier, catching her between stories at the
News
offices, and she’d agreed to meet him at the Customs House, a pub beside the canal that ran the length of the new development.

He saw her the moment he rounded the corner from the main square, a small, slight figure in jeans and a linen jacket. She was sitting at a table in the sunshine, folding a copy of the
Guardian
into her canvas satchel. Still out of breath, he mumbled an apology and nodded at her empty glass.

‘Another?’

He’d known Lizzie for a while now and he’d liked her from the moment they’d first met. She’d been one of a handful of journos invited to a presentation on the work of the Major Crime Team, an exercise in transparency that the Media Department had quickly come to regret. With her degree in political science and her stubborn determination to separate the bullshit from the truth, she’d concluded that the Major Crime set-up represented an awful lot of money targeted on offences that affected a tiny fraction of the city’s population.

Most of us, she’d written in a subsequent
News
feature, never came across homicide, or kidnap, or serial rape. Nobody would dream of querying the phrase ‘Major Crime’ to describe offences like these but ask most people in the street what really bothered them and the answer would be vandalism, and the yob culture, and the kind of unthinking selfishness that badged more and more areas of daily life. This conclusion had won Lizzie few friends at force HQ but she’d said yes when Suttle phoned to suggest a drink, and it was barely weeks before a brief affair had settled into friendship. With her usual frankness Lizzie had always insisted she was a lesbian at heart, but even now Suttle didn’t believe her.