No Lovelier Death (26 page)

‘Except he didn’t do it.’

‘Very probably not. His defence brief at the trial drives a cart and horses through the evidence from the lock-up. What kind of drug baron can’t afford a new roll of cling film? Why pollute all that charlie with bits of tuna salad? And why go on holiday with your lock-up door wide open? It wasn’t just the charlie he had in there. There was a motor, for fuck’s sake, plus a bunch of tools and a Harley-Davidson he was going to do up. Some of the blokes on the squad thought the case was so thin that Giles would do them for false arrest. Then came the judge’s summing-up. After that he was lucky not to pull a life sentence.’

The D/C, said Suttle, had been present at the trial. Astonished by this sudden bend in the road, he’d made notes. Judge Ault, he said, hadn’t dwelt overlong on the evidence. Instead he’d directed the jury’s attention to the plague of drug dealers, big and small, preying on the city’s youth. As it happened, most of Giles’s alleged deals list had been middle-aged and moneyed. Coordinated raids on multiple addresses had certainly turned up recreational amounts of charlie and weed, but no one was talking and it hadn’t been possible to tie any of it to Giles. This, though, was mere detail. The accused, said the judge, was educated, clever and undoubtedly interested in making money. To make money you need money. That money may well have come from drug dealing, and but for one tiny slip Mr Giles might still be in the extremely profitable business of supply.

‘One tiny slip?’ Faraday was smiling.

‘Exactly. Over a grand’s worth of charlie and he leaves the door wide open. Not to mention the motor and the Harley and everything else.’

‘What about the girl? Any idea whether she was at the trial?’

‘Every day. I asked. I took the Facebook photo up to Havant and the D/C confirmed it. She’s not hard to spot.’

‘And after the verdict?’

‘She had a go at the judge. And nearly ended up on a contempt charge.’

‘What did she say?’

‘She called him a fucking disgrace.’

‘Threats?’

‘No.’

Faraday nodded. He could imagine the scene only too well. Justified or otherwise, there were few families in the city who didn’t take a guilty verdict very personally indeed.

‘And your feeling, Jimmy?’

‘About what, boss?’

‘About Scott Giles. You think he was fitted up?’

‘I think it’s odds on, yes. The lad had definitely been knocking out serious weight in his time but the lads on
Fiddler
never got to prove it. As it is, he’ll probably be back in a couple of years with all kinds of new tricks up his sleeve. And he won’t be interested in lock-ups any more.’

‘But where does it take us? With the girl?’

‘Jax Bonner? She’s angry already. Her brother going down like that probably confirms all the shit that’s pumping around her fevered little brain. I can imagine she enjoyed taking the knife to that picture. Whether she took it to the daughter as well has got to be a possibility. ’ He offered Faraday a thin smile. ‘No?’

Faraday’s head turned towards the window. By now Jax Bonner’s photo and details would be with every force in the country. Media Relations was talking to the tabloids about tomorrow’s editions and he’d heard a whisper that
Newsnight
was fishing for mobile footage from the party. In some strange way Rachel Ault, and the wreckage she’d left behind her, had become the property of the nation. Look what we’ve done to ourselves. Look where we’re heading.

‘The Aults are back tomorrow,’ Faraday said softly. ‘What a bloody homecoming.’

 

En route back to the Intelligence Cell, Suttle made a detour to the office Jerry Proctor had commandeered down the corridor. He’d noticed his Volvo estate in the car park. Proctor’s bulk hung over the desk.

‘Jerry … ?’

Suttle stood in the open doorway. He’d talked privately to Proctor first thing this morning and asked him what he could do to press the Fingerprint Department at Netley to fast-track the lifts from Mackenzie’s kitchen. Proctor had naturally asked why but had respected Suttle’s shake of the head.

Now he said it was sorted. The guy in charge of the print department owed him a favour or two and he’d been happy to quietly reprioritise.

Suttle said he was grateful.

‘So what are we looking at?’ he asked.

‘I checked in about an hour ago. Most of the prints they eliminated against Mackenzie and his wife. There are a bunch of much smaller lifts but they’d fit the grandkids. Apparently they come down every week. Netley are now looking hard at two other lifts.’

One, he said, was a full set from a glass found beside the sink. There’d also been smears of blood around the lip of the same glass.

‘And the other?’

‘Two palm prints, both on the top exterior surface of the fridge, about a foot and a half apart. Like this …’ He stood up and held out both arms, palms flat.

‘As if you were leaning against the fridge, you mean?’

‘Looks like it.’

‘Have they ID’d them yet?’

‘No. They’re going to bell me.’

Suttle was thinking hard. Maybe the Mackenzies had someone in to clean during the week. Maybe the fridge had gone on the blink and a call-out engineer had been wrestling it back in after working on it. There were, he knew, a thousand explanations.

Proctor turned to face Suttle. As he did so, his eyes flicked left. Faraday was standing in the corridor. He must have heard every word.

There was a moment of absolute silence. Suttle knew exactly what was coming next.

‘Why the interest in Mackenzie’s kitchen?’ He enquired. ‘And what’s so important you couldn’t tell me first?’

 

Winter met Lizzie Hodson early in the afternoon. She’d called him from the Mary Rose Museum in the naval dockyard. She’d been doing an interview and had half an hour to spare before she had to be back at the
News.
It was a lovely day. Did he fancy a meet on The Hard?

The Hard was a busy length of harbour front flanked by HMS
Warrior.
Winter hurried down from Gunwharf, intrigued. First Hodson wanted to know about Jimmy Suttle.

‘You two got together?’

‘We did, my love. We did.’

‘Profitable, I hope?’

‘Very. I’ve got a soft spot for the lad. I must be getting old.’

Talking about Suttle like this felt mildly embarrassing. Was there any other reason she’d suddenly been in touch?

‘We took a call in the newsroom yesterday,’ she said. ‘I thought you might be interested.’

‘Who was it?’

‘A girl called Jax Bonner. She wanted to talk to somebody about Saturday night. One of the subs has been pulling all our coverage together. He was the guy she talked to in the end.’

‘And what did she want?’

‘Money. She said she’d sell us her story for ten grand. By that time we were aware of the new Facebook posting. You’ve seen that stuff? With the knife and the picture?’ Winter nodded. ‘That gave us a problem. On the one hand, she’s probably got some kind of a story to sell. On the other, she’s obviously down for criminal damage. Plus the police are circulating her photo. There are rules about this kind of thing and our bosses won’t put a foot out of line. Even if we ended up with a reasonable figure, we’d be mega-exposed. Plus we never pay more than peanuts.’

‘So no deal?’

‘None. In these cases you sometimes end up with a freebie because what the person really wants is publicity, but even so I don’t think we’d ever have touched it.’

‘So it was a waste of time? Is that what you’re telling me?’

‘Not at all. The sub was bright enough to 1471 the number. He tells me she phoned again this morning. Same number.’ She smiled. ‘It was local. You want it?’

 

Faraday told himself the mid-afternoon trip back to the Bargemaster’s House was strictly in the line of duty. Gabrielle was no longer just his lover and his muse. By virtue of the kids she was meeting, of the stuff they were telling her, she may well have become a key source for
Mandolin.
A diligent CID officer like himself needed to know that she was safe.

Last night he’d spent the best part of two hours scrolling through Gabrielle’s notes, laboriously scanning page after page of her French, trying to get a fix on the chain of events that had finally put her in the back of a taxi, bleeding and bruised.

None of the interviews carried names or contact details. Instead, she’d capitalised each of the people she’d talked to. K, for instance, sounded like a youngish adolescent from Portsea. She’d talked about how much she missed her dad, how much she worried about her mum, how hard it was to get to school in the morning if you’d spent half the night sniffing lighter fluid.

F, on the other hand, was more forthright. He had a jigsaw of ASBOs across the city and shoplifting in Commercial Road had become a bit of a nightmare. The guys working the street cameras from the CCTV control room had your face on file, and if they spotted you in a banned area then you and the gear got nicked in minutes. Getting home in one piece had therefore become a real challenge. Last time he tried it, keeping to streets where he was legal, he must have done near-on ten miles. No doubt about it. ASBOs made you seriously fit.

There’d been more material like this, pages and pages of it, a montage of young lives briefly caught on Gabrielle’s audio tape. Collectively, as Gabrielle had already told him, the interviews spoke of an almost tribal sense of belonging. Most kids talked about their mates, about getting by without money, about helping each other out, about partying in the park with a case of stolen Carlsberg after a mass descent on some corner shop or other. Life, they seemed to be saying, was a laugh as long as you didn’t take it too seriously.

Other kids were less convinced. They described the dangers of straying onto the wrong street at the wrong time. They drew a map of tribal Pompey, of fault lines between estates you’d be wise not to cross, of hot spots where you could pretty much rely on a good kicking. One in particular, a girl, talked of spirits briefly lifted by booze or drugs, of a relationship with a Buckland boy which had almost worked, of doors inched open then slammed shut again. She wanted to get out, she’d told Gabrielle. But getting out was so fucking hard.

Leaving the Mondeo outside in the sunshine, Faraday let himself into the house. There was no sign of Gabrielle on the ground floor. Upstairs, the bed was empty. He bent low to the pillow, smoothing the creases, pausing to stare at the ochre smears of blood. The clothes she’d been wearing last night were piled by the window. He picked them up one by one, finding more blood on the jeans, on her favourite Georges Brassens T-shirt. He’d never thought of her as a crime scene before and he found the image deeply troubling. Had he, in some unconscious way, been responsible for attracting her to a project like this? Had she watched him leave for work every morning? Had she seen that same face, wearied by another working day, trying to summon the energy to sustain this relationship of theirs? Had she decided to take her own look at the broken chaotic lives that sometimes threatened to swamp their little boat?

In the end he dismissed the thought. He’d rarely met anyone so nerveless, so independent as Gabrielle. She’d survived alone on the very edges of the civilised world and she had dozens of stamps in her passport to prove it. To her the Pompey estates were probably as exotic and alien as anywhere else she’d been and the hours of interview currently on her laptop were simply another path into the jungle.

Back downstairs, he looked unsuccessfully for a note. He was about to return to the car when he thought to check in the garden. He found her in the hammock he’d slung for the warmer days, swaying peacefully in the breeze from the harbour, her face splashed with sunshine, her eyes closed. He looked down at her for a long moment. The purple bruising round her eye was beginning to turn yellow at the edges. He was about to creep away, relieved, when he felt the touch of her hand.

She rarely called him Joe. She sounded sleepy.

‘You should be
au travail.
’

‘This
is
work.’

‘Me? I’m work? You mean that?’ She struggled to sit up, holding the sides of the hammock. For the first time Faraday noticed the broken nails on her left hand. She must have put up a struggle, he thought.

He gave the hammock a nudge. She fell back, mustering a grin.

‘Out tonight then?’ He said. ‘Only it might be wise to book an ambulance this time.’

‘It wasn’t like that.’

‘No?’

‘
Non.
’ She shook her head. ‘You have to be careful. Some of these kids are …’ she frowned, hunting for the word ‘…
instables
?’

‘Unstable. Volatile.’

‘
C’est ça.
’

‘So what happened?’

‘I was unlucky.’

‘Are we talking lots of kids?’

‘Five or six. Maybe more. I wasn’t counting.’

‘You knew them?’

‘Some of them. It was late too. And dark.’

‘Where?’

‘Cosham.’

Cosham was a suburb on the mainland, an area where the badlands of Paulsgrove seeped into rows of detached villas on the lower slopes of Portsdown Hill. Another fault line, another stretch of no-man’s-land.

‘So what happened?’ he asked again.

‘We were walking. I was looking for a bus. One of the kids wanted money. He was young, maybe fourteen. He was crazy too. He kept saying he wanted his money back. And he kept laughing.’

‘His money
back
?’

‘
Oui. Vraiment.
I think he was trying to be
philosophe
. Like he’d joined a club. Like he’d paid his money at the door. Like he didn’t like what he found inside. So …’ she shrugged ‘… he wanted his money back.’

‘Your money?’

‘
Oui.
’

‘And you gave him some?’