No Lovelier Death (53 page)

‘Sure. But he needs me, doesn’t he? Because it turns out I was fucking right.’

‘About the girl? Rachel?’

‘Yeah. Dunlop’ll cough that too, in the end.’ He reached for Suttle’s can and swallowed a mouthful or two of cold Stella. Then he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. ‘What about Scenes of Crime?’

‘Nothing. Not yet.’

‘You want another tip?’

‘Go on.’

‘She’s got a little office down Victoria Baths. I’d take a look at that as well, if I were you.’

 

The second interview with Nikki Dunlop started at ten o’clock next morning. Suttle had been at his desk in Major Crime since seven, trawling through interview statements, looking for any scrap of evidence that might be useful in the coming encounter. A night in the cells might have loosened Nikki’s tongue as far as Berriman’s whereabouts were concerned but as she stepped into the interview room he rather doubted it.

Given the circumstances, Faraday also thought she looked remarkably composed. He settled himself in the monitoring suite, adjusting the volume on the set. The rumour had spread that
Mandolin
was heading for a result and the Custody Sergeant had been thoughtful enough to provide a plate of custard creams to go with Faraday’s coffee.

The interview was well under way by the time Faraday’s mobile began to trill. So far, Nikki had stonewalled every question, simply repeating what she’d said last night. She had a friend in trouble. She’d gone to his aid. She’d done her best. Whatever happened next was beyond her control.

Faraday bent to the phone. It was the Crime Scene Investigator whom Proctor had tasked to take a look at the office at Victoria Baths. He’d found a pair of trainers in a box at the back of a cupboard. They were Reebok Classics and they looked to be on the big side.

‘Blood?’

‘Caked, boss. You can see it in the eyelets, in the seams, everywhere. ’

‘You’re serious?’

‘Yeah … real DNA-fest.’

Faraday thanked him. On the point of hanging up, the CSI said he had another bit of news. Just might be of interest.

‘And what’s that?’

‘A knife, boss. Ten-centimetre blade, give or take. Wrapped up in tissue paper in the same box.’

‘Jesus.’

‘Exactly.’ He was laughing. ‘How stupid is that?’

Faraday thanked him a second time and hung up. Moments later he brought the interview to a halt while he conferenced briefly with Suttle and Dawn Ellis, sharing this latest development.

Suttle shook his head. Winter, he knew, would be impossible.

‘What now, boss?’ Ellis nodded at the video screen. ‘She’s not going to tell us about Berriman. I’m not sure she even knows where he might be.’

‘Keep pressing. But start with the trainers.’

The interview resumed. Confronted with the evidence from her office, Nikki Dunlop simply nodded. She’d seen the guys in the grey forensic suits walking up Adair Road, Faraday thought. She’s sensed the reach of the Major Crime machine. One way or another, she must have known that this moment would come.

Ellis wanted to nail the evidence down. No shadow of ambiguity. ‘These trainers belong to Matt?’

‘Yes.’

‘And they’re the ones he was wearing on Saturday night?’

‘Yes.’

‘You told us you washed them.’

‘You’re right. But I didn’t.’

‘Why not? And why on earth hang on to them?’

‘I don’t know. I just don’t know. I should have got rid of them. I know I should. But ever since last weekend I’ve somehow thought we might have a proper conversation about what happened. Shouting wasn’t enough. Maybe I’d have to force it out of him. Maybe I’d have to stick those bloody trainers under his nose,
make
him look at them,
make
him remember.’

‘And the knife?’

‘That too. In fact that especially.’

‘So you must have assumed … ?’

‘I assumed nothing.’

‘You didn’t think he’d killed her?’

‘I didn’t think anything. I wanted to
know
. I needed that knowledge. ’

‘OK. So if he’d told you what really happened? And if it turned out he’d killed them both?’

‘Then we’d have to deal with it.’

‘We?’

‘Yes, we.’

‘And how would you do that?’

‘I’ve no idea. It never happened. But there’d have been a way, I know there would, because that’s the way it’s always been. If you go through the kind of years we had together, then you kind of sign up to each other. Total dependency. Total trust. The going gets rough, you hack it. What you don’t ever do is give up.’

‘So where would that have taken you? As a matter of interest?’

‘I don’t know.’ Nikki looked round, a sudden vagueness in her eyes. ‘Here, I suppose.’

On DCI Parsons’ instructions, Nikki Dunlop was charged with conspiracy to murder. Her solicitor’s plea for bail was turned down by the magistrates and she was remanded to Winchester Prison.

Later that morning a bather reported a pile of abandoned clothing on the beach close to the Langstone Harbour narrows. The clothes were still damp from the overnight rain. In the back pocket of the jeans the attending PC found a note on blue paper. It read,

It was Suttle, hours later, who remembered the quote.
King Lear
, he said, Act Four, Scene Seven.

The coastguards commissioned a search for Matt Berriman which lasted until nightfall. On Tuesday, at daybreak, it recommenced. When there was no sign of a body the search was called off.

That evening, in a specially convened
Mandolin
squad meet, Willard commended Acting Sergeant Jimmy Suttle for driving the intelligence cell throughout an extremely difficult investigation. The Sandown Road job, he said, had been neither prolonged nor - in the end - especially complex. But everyone had been under the cosh in terms of the media and, speaking personally, he never wanted to see another TV crew in his life. When the ripple of laughter subsided, he added a final word of praise for DCI Gail Parsons. She’d steered the ship through choppy waters with skill and determination, he said, and she was owed a collective debt of gratitude.

 

The following week Bazza Mackenzie announced the establishment of a fund in memory of Rachel Ault. He’d seeded the fund with a personal donation of £100,000 and proposed to put Paul Winter, a trusted friend and colleague, in charge. Paul’s brief was to explore ways of integrating kids into the wider culture in a city as densely packed and volatile as Portsmouth. The word he used, after a glance at his notes, was ‘interface’.

That evening he and Marie hosted a dinner in Gunwharf for a couple of dozen of the city’s key figures in the world of juvenile offending. Invitations went to social workers, academics, psychologists, sports officials and a priest. Pathways forward were discussed and there was a collective sense that the evening had been a success.

Afterwards, in the privacy of Winter’s apartment, Bazza confessed that he felt guilty over Berriman’s disappearance. Winter, by taking his new boss at his word, had triggered the set of events that had led to the clothes on the beach. Not for a moment had Mackenzie believed the lad capable of killing his ex-girlfriend and even now he found it hard to believe. Only mad people do something like that, he told Winter. And he’d never had Berriman down as a loony.

 

The Aults stripped their house of its remaining possessions. The property - cleaned, repaired and redecorated - went on the market at a price of £899,000, but after nearly a month there’d been little interest. During a phone call to Belle Ault Faraday had enquired about her husband’s health. Peter, she said, was undergoing treatment for clinical depression. She understood the outlook was promising but it was still early days. When he was a little better they’d start the process of looking for somewhere else to live. Her own preference, just now, was New Zealand. The peace, for one thing. And the quiet.

 

Five weeks after the discovery of the clothes on Eastney Beach, a man’s body was recovered by fishermen off Selsey Bill. DNA analysis confirmed it to be that of Matt Berriman. At the inquest the Coroner delivered a verdict of death by suicide. The funeral, the following week, attracted an even larger congregation of mourners than the earlier service for Rachel Ault. The press turned up en masse, and among the photos published in the following day’s edition of the
News
was a shot taken as kids streamed away from St Stephen’s Church.

Faraday brought the paper home that night and Gabrielle’s attention was caught by a face at the back of the shot. She was looking directly at the camera. She was wearing a black cloak, buttoned at the neck, and the light fell pale on her shaven skull.

‘
C’est Jax
,’ Gabrielle murmured. ‘That’s her.’

As late summer gave way to the first chills of autumn, Paul Winter was still expecting a visit from his ex-colleagues. When nothing happened he gave Jimmy Suttle a ring. Suttle confirmed that the investigation into Danny Cooper’s death was ongoing. Intelligence from Spain indicated the disappearance of a young German artist from Malaga in mid-August. She’d last been seen in the company of a tall male of Afro-Caribbean extraction whose description matched that of Brett West. While the couple may simply have moved on together, Spanish police were treating her disappearance as suspicious. Should developments warrant further investigation at the UK end, it might pay Winter to have his ear to the ground.

Winter, still digesting the news, asked about Suttle’s promotion. ‘It came through last week,’ he said. ‘
Sergeant
Suttle to you, my friend.’

 

Two days later Bazza Mackenzie took a call from Alice Berriman, Matt’s mother. She wanted a private chat. Mackenzie invited her to the Royal Trafalgar for lunch. They talked about the old days, and about Matt, and about what had happened at the party.

Alice had produced a letter. She’d found it in her kitchen the morning Matt disappeared. It described exactly what had happened the night Hughes and Rachel had died. Winter had been right. There’d been a confrontation. Hughes had emerged from the kitchen with a knife. There’d been lots of shouting, and then Matt had hit him just the once, enough to knock him off his feet. Rachel had emerged from the kitchen, gone to her boyfriend’s aid, tried to revive him.

The fact that he wasn’t breathing had freaked her out. The next thing Matt knew, he was looking at the knife. Killing Gareth, she’d said, was the end of everything. In the letter the phrase was underlined.
The end of everything
.
Matt knew she was right. If there was no way forward, no way they’d ever be together, then that was the way it had to be.

When she tried to attack him, Matt had grabbed the knife, stabbing her a number of times. He wanted to put her beyond reach. He’d driven the knife in deep and he’d known exactly what he was doing. Sometimes, he’d written at the end, life is black and white, all or nothing. Now, with Rachel’s death on his hands, it boiled down to precisely nothing. Very soon the torment would be over. For both of them.

As a postscript to the letter Matt had scribbled an extra line that had, Alice said, offered a tiny crumb of comfort. Not because it softened the overwhelming sense of waste, but because it was, in its own way, so beautiful. She didn’t know whether he’d copied it from somewhere else or dreamed it up himself but either way it didn’t matter.
You die for what you cherish,
her son had written.
There is no lovelier death in all the world.

At the lunch table, embarrassed by the tears rolling down her cheeks, Alice wanted to know what to do with the letter. Mackenzie reached across for it, tore it into tiny pieces, and signalled for a waiter to put it in the bin. That evening Alice phoned and said thank you. It wasn’t what she’d expected, she said, but then life had never done her bidding.

 

In mid-October, with the
Mandolin
file submitted to the CPS, Faraday seized advantage of a lull in the ongoing war that was Major Crime and booked a weekend in a hotel in London. On the Saturday afternoon he and Gabrielle attended the launch of J-J’s exhibition in Chiswick. The photos had won a review in the
Guardian
and J-J had a modest pile of photocopies for visitors who might be interested. Faraday folded one into his pocket. A couple of sentences from the review had caught his attention. J-J’s work opened a door into the mystery that was autism. This was someone, the critic had written, who understood handicap from the inside.

That night the three of them celebrated J-J’s success in a Szechuan restaurant in Parson’s Green. Conversation turned to Gabrielle’s project on the Pompey estates. Her work, she said, was nearly done. Now came the challenge of building all those interviews into a coherent account. J-J, fascinated, wanted to know what the months of research had taught her. She gave the question some thought then signed her answer. After all the questions, all the listening, all the evenings of transcribing her notes, the one word she was left with was
folie.
Madness.

 

On Monday, back at work, Faraday glanced up from the weekly overtime sheets to find himself looking at D/S Jimmy Suttle. Suttle was newly returned from a break of his own. A week in Crete with Lizzie Hodson had given him a decent tan.

From a Manila envelope he produced two colour prints. Faraday cleared a space on the desk.

‘I got to thinking about
Mandolin
again …’ Suttle began.

‘On holiday?’

‘Yeah. And I realised what we missed.’

He laid the two photos side by side on the desk. One was a shot of Matt Berriman from the Newbury custody suite. The other came from the best of the mobe footage at the party. Faraday gave it the briefest glance.