No Lovelier Death (32 page)

‘He gave you a description?’

‘Yeah. Balding. Overweight. Shiny trousers. Sweating fit to bust.

You want me to go on? He clocked you and more to the point he clocked the motor. How many cars like that turn up in Salcombe Avenue?’

‘It was hot last night.’ Winter sounded defensive. ‘Hot enough to make anyone sweat.’

‘So you
were
there … right?’

‘Yeah.’ He nodded. ‘I was.’

‘Why?’

‘
Why?
Is that a copper’s question? Or is this my ex-mucker being nosy? Only there’s a difference, son.’

‘There is?’

‘Of course there fucking is. So tell me. Is this official? Do I bell my brief? Put my sandals back on? Let you drive me to the Bridewell? Or do we have a little chat here? In the sunshine?’

Suttle looked down at him a moment. Then he draped his jacket over the back of the other deckchair, moved the sports bag and made himself comfortable.

‘Good decision, son.’ Winter was demolishing the last of the ice cream. ‘Did I tell you about your mate Lizzie? She asked me to pass a message. She says to tell you she’s had enough of the sapphics.’ He glanced across at Suttle and raised an eyebrow. ‘Sapphics? Me neither. I had to look it up. I think it means she’s not a lezzie any more, not this month anyway. Could be you’re in with a chance.’

‘Pimp now, are you? As well as my scumbag informant?’

‘Very funny. Tell me more about Danny.’

Suttle gave him the facts. He held nothing back because he knew so little in the first place. Cooper, he said, had been stabbed. The attack had been violent, even frenzied. A knife had been used. Blood everywhere.

‘Was the knife recovered?’

‘I’ve no idea.’

‘Witnesses?’

‘Pass. You know the way these things work. Isolate the scene first.

Then think about house-to-house.’

‘But it’s a cul-de-sac, son. People come and go. People watch.’

‘Sure. And one of them clocked you. Which is why I rang.’

‘Very thoughtful. I appreciate it.’

‘You’re not answering the question, Paul. You were there last night.

And you’d help yourself by telling me why.’

‘I owed the bloke a conversation. There were one or two things we had to sort out.’

‘Like what?’

‘I can’t tell you. It was confidential, to do with the business. Bazza gets funny about stuff like that. He’s a very private guy. You might have noticed.’

‘This is murder, Paul. The machine’s cranking up. Like it or not, it’s going to spit your name out.’

‘This bloke across the road’s been statemented?’

‘Of course he has. It’ll be on HOLMES by now. I don’t want to labour the point but you’re not hard to miss. Balding? Overweight? Flash motor? This guy took the reg number, Paul. Not the whole plate but enough for a match. Seriously, you need to be thinking about things.’

‘Thanks.’

‘I mean it.’ Suttle paused, letting the message sink in.

Winter propped the shades on his peeling forehead and gazed out to sea.

‘You’ll have to make this official,’ he said at last. ‘There’s no way you can’t.’

‘That’s right. It might not be today, and it probably won’t be me, but it’ll happen.’

‘So why now? Why the call? What do you want to know?’

‘I just need a bit of a steer. Does that sound reasonable?’

‘Go on.’

‘Was last night anything to do with Sandown Road?’

‘You mean the girl? Jax Bonner?’

‘I mean Sandown Road.’

Winter took his time.

‘This is me being nice to you,’ he said at last. ‘I can’t swear by it.

And you lot sure as fuck won’t get anything out of me if I end up in the Bridewell. But for old times’ sake, Jimmy …’ he nodded ‘… the answer’s probably yes.’

Suttle knew this was as far as he’d get. He checked his watch. 12.32.

DCI Parsons had stipulated lunchtime as a deadline for a preliminary report. He struggled out of the deckchair and retrieved his jacket. As he did so he became aware of two figures emerging from the water. They paused in the shallows, stepped out of their costumes and bent to rinse them before walking up the beach. The man was tall, well-built, broad shoulders, flat belly. The woman was older. Their hands touched briefly. They were laughing.

Winter was already reaching for a towel, aware of Suttle’s interest.

‘You’re right, son. Matt Berriman.’

 

Faraday was at Kingston Crescent by two o’clock. The sight of Willard’s Saab convertible in the car park braced him for yet another meeting.

He found the Head of CID in conference with Gail Parsons. The flowers on the window sill were beginning to wilt in the heat and Faraday detected a hint of weariness in the flap of her hand as she directed him into the spare chair. A plate of sandwiches at her elbow had barely been touched.

Willard wanted to know about the Aults.

‘We dropped them off in Denmead,’ Faraday told him. ‘They’re going to drive down tomorrow. I’ll get Jerry to the house to meet them. Jessie Williams too.’

‘How have they taken it?’

‘Badly. As you’d probably imagine.’

‘Do you think they’re disappointed?’

‘Disappointed?’

‘That we haven’t got a result yet?’

‘I’ve no idea, sir. I don’t think they’ve even got that far. They’re still trying to cope with what’s happened. Nothing we do is going to change any of that, is it?’

‘You don’t think so? He’s a judge, Joe. He’s not some punter off the street. He understands the system. He knows how these things work. He’s bound to have a view on how we perform.’

‘That’s not going to happen. Not yet anyway.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Because the guy’s away with the fairies. You can see it in his face, in his eyes. He’s lost it.’

‘That sounds like jet lag.’ It was Parsons. ‘I think Mr Willard’s right. We need to be extremely careful where we tread.’

‘Meaning?’

‘Meaning he’ll be watching us. Every step of the way. He’s pals with Richard Brooke. Or maybe that’s passed you by.’

Brooke was Chairman of the Police Authority. Faraday was tired of this conversation. He’d been here before only days ago. Politics again.

‘We do our best, boss. As I’m sure you know.’

The silence was far from comfortable and Faraday wondered how long the pair of them had been up here fretting about Judge Ault. At length, Parsons’ eyes strayed to her PC. Jimmy Suttle had just sent through a preliminary assessment of the Cooper killing. In his view there was a probable link to
Mandolin.

‘Based on what?’

‘On the Facebook message posted yesterday. The one that mentioned Cooper by name. That has to be more than coincidence. Scenes of Crime have recovered some diary material from Scott Giles’s flat in North End. Some of this stuff also mentions Danny Cooper and it appears to be in Bonner’s handwriting.’

‘We’re treating her as a suspect?’

‘Prime facie, I’d say yes. She has motive. Suttle’s come up with a couple of calls she made to the
News
on a local number, so that would suggest she’s still in the area. It looks like Suttle’s also taken some other soundings.’

‘With whom?’

‘I’m not sure.’ She was peering at the screen. ‘It doesn’t say.’ Willard broke in. He’d made a detour on his way in to check out the location for himself. If you were looking for a bit of quiet stabbing, he said, you couldn’t do better than Cooper’s place. The garden backed onto a football pitch. To the north there was a bunch of allotments. In terms of approach, no one would be any the wiser.

‘Entry?’

‘Through the kitchen door at the rear.’ Parsons had just been briefed by Jerry Proctor. ‘Scenes of Crime found the lock forced. They’re thinking crowbar or tyre lever or something similar.’

‘They’ve recovered a weapon?’

‘Not so far. The house isn’t big. I get the impression they should be through by this time tomorrow. They’ll bosh the garden before they leave and we’re doing a full POLSA search on the football pitch and the allotments.’

‘Prints?’

‘A few. I’m still waiting to hear from Netley.’

Faraday nodded. Lifts from the scene would be sent electronically to the force Fingerprint Department. Once Cooper and his girlfriend had been eliminated, the rest would be matched against a huge database.

‘So what are we thinking?’

‘We don’t know. Not yet.’ She glanced at Willard. She seemed to be waiting for some kind of cue. Faraday wondered whether he’d decided on a change in
Mandolin
’s command structure and whether this was the moment he’d find himself looking at new responsibilities. As it turned out, he was right.

‘A name’s come up already,’ he said. ‘And it raises certain issues.’

 

It was mid-afternoon by the time Jimmy Suttle got a reply on the photos he’d emailed earlier. He was looking for names to attach to the faces he’d snapped in Bransbury Park and copies had gone from his hard disk to a number of agencies in the city. Some could be sticky about imparting this kind of information but a call to the uniformed Inspector who sat on the city’s Crime and Disorder Partnership appeared to have done the trick.

‘The lad’s name is Edmonds, boss. His mates apparently call him Jersey. No one knows why.’

Faraday had just stepped in from the corridor. He was standing beside Suttle’s desk inspecting the best of last night’s shots. Jersey Edmonds was the smallest of the kids, the one who’d waved to Gabrielle as they’d pedalled off towards the beach, the one she’d mentioned last night.

‘Does he have an elder brother? This Jersey?’

‘No idea. You want me to find out?’

‘Please.’

Suttle scribbled himself a note. Faraday shut the door. They had the Intelligence Cell to themselves. Faraday helped himself to a seat beside the window.

‘We need to talk about Paul Winter,’ he began.

‘I know.’

‘You’ve seen the statement from the guy in Salcombe Avenue?’

‘I met him this morning. I passed his name on to the Incident Room.

Who actioned it?’

Faraday named a D/C on the
Mandolin
squad. He’d interviewed the plasterer on a building site in the city centre, less than half a mile from Kingston Crescent.

‘It has to be Winter. Or that’s what Parsons is assuming.’

‘She’s right.’

‘You’ve seen him?’

‘This morning. He admits it. He says he was there.’

‘What else did he say?’

‘Not much. He told me it was a business call but he wouldn’t go into details.’

‘He’s still working for Mackenzie?’

‘As far as I can gather.’

‘Doing what?’

‘I dunno, boss. Chasing blokes like Danny Cooper, I suppose.’

‘And he gets a Lexus for that?’

Faraday let the question hang between them. When Suttle declined to take the conversation any further, he outlined Willard’s concerns. Winter, in the view of the Head of CID, was openly working for one of the tiny handful of Pompey faces to have made the New Scotland Yard list of nominals. SOCA Nominals, convicted or otherwise, were the top UK underworld figures deemed important or successful enough to warrant serious attention. The party in Sandown Road appeared for once to have put Mackenzie on the side of the angels. Yet here was Paul Winter, an ex-CID officer and now one of Mackenzie’s key lieutenants, implicated in a murder scene.

Suttle wondered whether ‘implicated’ wasn’t too strong.

‘You think last night’s visit was some kind of coincidence?’

‘I’ve no idea, boss. But we can’t arrest him for knocking on Cooper’s front door.’

‘Even when he won’t tell us why?’

‘We haven’t asked yet. Not properly.’

‘But I thought you said you’d talked to him this morning?’

‘I did.’

‘On what basis?’

The question stopped Suttle in his tracks. He’d been crazy to be so casual about the meet with Winter, crazier still to admit it. He nudged his chair towards the desk and reached for the photo of the kids.

‘Sometimes you take short cuts.’ He lifted the photo. ‘Sometimes it’s easier that way.’

‘I don’t doubt it. You think last night in Bransbury Park was a short cut?’

‘I was doing you a favour, boss.’

‘And this morning? With Winter? Were you doing him a favour too?’

‘How do you mean?’

‘By warning him about Salcombe Avenue? By marking his card? By giving him a heads-up?’

‘He’d have found out anyway.’

‘Of course he would. You know that. I know that. But now he has a chance to get a story together.’

‘If he needs one.’

‘You think he doesn’t?’

‘I think he’s extremely savvy. In fact I think he’s one of the savviest blokes I’ve ever met.’

‘And did that make him a good cop?’

‘It made him a bloody effective cop.’

‘So how do you measure that?’

‘By the blokes he potted. I worked with him for more than a year.

I lost count in the end.’

‘Great. So how come he ends up working for Mackenzie?’

Suttle bit his tongue. A couple of days ago he’d have been asking exactly the same question but after the curry in the Gunwharf flat he realised there was another side to Winter’s story, altogether less shameful.

He looked Faraday in the eye, wondering how much he really knew about Paul Winter.

‘Appearances can be deceptive, boss,’ he said quietly. ‘Winter was never an easy guy to read.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘Here? Now?’ Suttle gestured at the files scattered across his desk.

‘As far as
Mandolin
is concerned?’

‘Yes.’

‘OK.’ Suttle nodded. ‘The way I see it, Winter is a resource we can’t afford to ignore, not if we want to progress this thing. He works for Mackenzie. Presumably Mackenzie trusts him. Mackenzie himself also has a very big interest in getting this thing sorted. Those kids died by his swimming pool, remember. It’s his reputation on the line. So my guess is that Mackenzie has cut Winter some slack, let him off the leash.’