The Take (28 page)

‘But
exposing
himself? You’re telling me he’d go that far?’

‘Yes. Definitely. Kennedy was the one who told him that Addison was shagging his daughter. Kennedy wanted to screw Addison himself. Putting him in the frame for the Donald Duck job was perfect. Except he needed some guy actually to put the mask on and do it.’

‘And you’re saying Beavis?’

‘Yes.’

‘Not Addison at all?’

‘No.’

There was a long moment of silence. From away down Highland Road, the distant blare of a two-tone. Faraday’s gaze never left Dawn’s face.

‘Shit,’ he said quietly.

The third session with Parrish bogged down almost immediately. For one thing, he’d decided to accept the offer of a lawyer. For another, he was as ready with answers as ever.

Winter wanted to know about the boat,
Crazy Lady
. How long had he had it?

‘I bought it when I came back from Dubai. I made a whack of money out there and I fancied something, you know, really flash. It was a Boat Show offer, San Remo thirty-five, good discount for cash.’

‘When was that?’

Parrish frowned. ‘Ninety-three,’ he said at last.

‘You used it a lot?’

‘To begin with, yeah. Women loved it. We used to bomb over to France or the Channel Islands. Boat like that, you could be there as quick as the ferries. It was like driving a sports car. You just put your foot down and
boom
.’

‘So where is it now?’

I sold it.’

‘When?’

‘A couple of weeks back. French bloke, businessman of some kind, comes over here a lot. Turned out he’d been eyeing it for months.’

‘How did he pay for it?’

‘Cash.’ Parrish was enjoying himself, anticipating Winter’s next question. ‘Hundred and fifteen grand, can you believe that?’

Winter sat back for a moment, only too aware that the figure Parrish had just mentioned was exactly the sum Hennessey himself had withdrawn from his bank account before he disappeared. Coincidence, bollocks. Parrish was starting to take the piss. The cassette he’d given to McIntyre was supposedly recorded in the outhouse behind the pub. Yet where was the evidence of the dodgy neon tube? The hum you couldn’t miss if you were in there for more than a second or two?

‘This French guy,’ Winter said slowly. ‘You wouldn’t have an address by any chance?’

The lawyer began to protest at the question, but Parrish told him he wasn’t bothered. Then he turned back to Winter.

‘Afraid not,’ he said sweetly. ‘Real nomads, these business types.’

An hour later, Winter phoned the hospital. The sister in charge of the ICU confirmed that his wife had been transferred to another ward and was awaiting a full psychiatric assessment.

‘How is she?’

‘Awake. Cogent. Remarkably well, considering.’

Winter nodded, glancing at his watch. Rick was already down in the Camber, checking out the story on Parrish’s boat. Depending on the outcome, Winter might just make the evening Jersey flight out of Southampton. Either way, he needed to get home for a shower and a change of clothes.

The ICU sister was telling him the name of Joannie’s ward. He didn’t bother writing it down.

‘Give her my best,’ he said. ‘Pecker up, eh?’

En route home, Winter phoned Rick. So far he’d talked to half a dozen locals, most of whom remembered Parrish’s boat. The landlord of the Weather Gage had never quite mastered the art of berthing and the hull of
Crazy Lady
was scarred from countless small collisions. The fact that the cruiser had now gone for good was, said Rick, the cause for some rejoicing.

‘Anyone see it go?’

‘Not so far, but there’s a guy runs the tugs. He lives on top of Parrish’s old mooring. If anyone can help us, he can. Bloke’s back in an hour or so.’ He paused. I also phoned a magazine called
Motor Boat
. Ran the price past some guy who seemed to know about the second-hand market.’

‘What price?’

‘The hundred and fifteen grand Parrish got for his boat.’

‘And?’

‘Way over the top. At least twenty thousand over the top. Whoever paid him that was off his head.’

Winter sealed the conversation with a grunt. Twenty grand was the price Hennessey had paid for making good his escape. He wasn’t interested in appearing in front of the GMC. He didn’t want to be dragged through the courts. And he certainly didn’t need his face plastered all over the papers yet again. And so Parrish, with Ronald McIntyre none the wiser, had ghosted him away. Clever.

Back home in Bedhampton, Winter found a small pile of post on the mat. Most of it was cards for Joannie. Only a typed envelope with a London postmark was of any real interest.

Inside, he found a sheaf of unpaid duplicate invoices from the nursing agency Hennessey had used for the supply of theatre staff for the operations he conducted. Most of the nurses were obviously paid through the agency, but in one case they’d included photocopied invoices that had come direct from the nurse herself. Her name was Helen O’Dwyer, and there was a telephone number with her Guildford address.

She took a while to answer. Winter explained that he was CID. Hennessey had gone missing and various lines of inquiry were being pursued. She had absolutely no obligation to help him out, but he’d be really grateful for a steer or two.

There was a long silence. She wanted to know how she could be sure he was police. Winter gave her the control room number at Fratton and asked her to check him out before phoning back.

‘No, that’s OK.’ She’d made up her mind. ‘What do you want to know?’

Winter established that she’d done lots of operations with Hennessey. Indeed, she was the nurse he normally called on first.

‘You’re aware of the trouble he’s in?’

‘Of course.’

‘Have you seen him recently?’

‘Not for a while, no.’

Winter mentioned Nikki McIntyre. Was she familiar with the name?

‘Yeah. She was one of the regulars. Pretty girl.’

‘Was there anything in particular you remember? Anything’ – Winter paused – ‘special he did for her?’

‘Not really, he was slower, that’s all.’

‘What do you mean, slower?’

‘With most patients, he raced through the operation. He was famous for it.’ She offered a sour laugh. ‘Some days he even used to bring in an alarm clock. He’d set it for, say, thirty minutes’ time, then off we’d go. We’d have to be out and sutured by the time the bell went.’

‘He could do things like that?’

‘Of course he could. He was the client. He’d hired the theatre, hired the anaesthetist, hired us. He could do damn well what he liked.’

Anger had given her voice a sharper edge. She didn’t like Hennessey, Winter thought. No wonder she’s got so much to get off her chest.

‘And Nikki McIntyre?’

‘He never brought the alarm clock in. He’d take his time.’

‘Yeah?’ Winter could almost see her face now. ‘And anything else?’

There was a long silence. Then Winter heard a sigh.

‘He’d take photos,’ she muttered. ‘Lots and lots of them.’

An hour later, Winter lay full length in the bath, making his plans for Hennessey. He’d find him in Jersey, he knew he would. He’d be tucked up aboard Parrish’s motor cruiser, moored in the marina. Between them, the two men must have been plotting this for weeks. Probably longer.

Strictly speaking, Winter should now level with Faraday – telling him about McIntyre, the audio tape and the scam that Parrish had undoubtedly worked – but it was far too early for this kind of disclosure. Better, by far, to tie up the loose ends first. And if that meant a settling of personal scores, then so be it.

But what next?

For more than a week now, Winter had been doing his best to cast himself as some kind of crusader, righting wrongs on behalf of the poor bloody women Hennessey had maimed. Dierdre Walsh was one of them, Nikki McIntyre another. Conversations with both had taken the inquiry to the brink of success, but in his heart Winter knew that his pursuit of Hennessey had fuck all to do with philanthropy. He just wasn’t like that. He’d never fought other people’s battles and he wasn’t about to start. No, this was for him. Hennessey was his. When he’d told Cathy Lamb that he needed to hurt someone it was as close as he could get to the truth, and in the shape of a fat old pervy gynaecologist, he now had the chance. Squaring it with Hennessey wouldn’t be a duty but a pleasure, and afterwards he knew he’d feel a whole lot better about things.

So what next?

He gave Joannie’s plastic duck a little poke with his big toe, watching it bob around among the bubbles, then closed his eyes, considering afresh the possibilities. Hennessey, he thought. Mine, and mine alone.

Twenty-Six

Wednesday, 28 June, 0930

Rain had begun to fall by the time Faraday and Ferguson met up with the Gunwharf site engineer. He was young and fresh-faced with a mop of curly black hair, and he occupied one end of a stuffy, neon-lit office in a Lego city of portacabins at the top of the site. The uniformed Inspector in charge of the POLSA team had been here since nine and he wanted to know why Faraday and Ferguson were late. He had a million things to do this morning. A site survey ahead of a full-scale search was just another cross he had to bear.

‘Traffic,’ Ferguson grunted. ‘Sir.’

The engineer gave them each a hard hat. Faraday’s was too small so he wore it tipped down over his eyes, letting the rain drip onto the front of his anorak. The weather was horrible, not just rain but a cold, hard wind that blew across the harbour from the Gosport side and played havoc with the huge sheets of polythene stretched across lattices of scaffolding. For late June, it felt arctic.

The Gunwharf’s thirty-three acres were broadly divided by the cavernous dry dock which would soon become City Quay. To the north, the leisure and retail complexes were already taking shape: huge grey boxes, metal clad, which would house the shopping malls, pubs and restaurants. Carrying anything heavy this far would be a pain, and logic told Faraday that they should be much more interested in the south-west corner of the site, the couple of acres that abutted directly onto the harbour and the Wightlink ferry terminal. This muddy chaos, criss-crossed by dumper trucks and gangs of sodden navvies, had yet to support the gleaming elevations of Arethusa House, though foundation work had been going on all winter, the steady thump-thump of the huge pile-drivers audible all over the city.

The uniformed Inspector caught Faraday by the arm. The weather had done nothing for his temper.

‘When was all this supposed to have happened?’

Faraday had already had this conversation with someone else in his office. Clearly messages didn’t get passed on.

‘We’re interested in the night of the eighteenth.’

‘That’s ten days ago.’ The Inspector gestured at the churned-up mud and pools of standing water. ‘And you’re telling me we’re looking for
footprints?
’

‘I’m telling you we’re looking for human remains.’

‘Like where?’

Faraday glanced at the site engineer. As yet he hadn’t fully grasped quite what Faraday and Ferguson were trying to investigate. Were they really saying that someone had turned up with a dead body?

Faraday took him by the arm. Only yards away, there was access to the site from the jetty of the Wightlink terminal. A metal ladder climbed the newly piled seawall, and at the top it was child’s play to squeeze around a poorly secured stretch of fence.

‘Our suspect came in here,’ he explained. ‘That’s the way we see it.’

‘With a corpse?’

‘Probably with parts of a corpse. Maybe a couple of journeys. We don’t know.’ He stepped across a tangle of pipes, aware of the boom of the enormous construction crane revolving slowly above their heads. ‘So how do you build these flats? How do you put them together?’

The site engineer looked relieved. Here was a question he understood. He walked Faraday around the boundaries of the apartment block. Dozens of sunken piles poked up through the yellow mud. These piles, he explained, would be linked laterally, creating a raft of reinforced concrete on which the structure itself would rise. Faraday, trying to picture it, asked about the space beneath the concrete raft. To the naked eye, there would appear to be a gap between the base of the building and the soil beneath.

‘That’s right.’ The engineer nodded. ‘You’ll get voids. Bound to.’

‘But the building is obviously walled on all four sides.’

‘Of course.’

Faraday glanced at the Inspector, but the uniformed man was deep in conversation with Ferguson. He was asking about site security. His POLSA search team included specially trained sniffer dogs, and a look at the on-site video tapes might short-circuit all this guesswork bollocks.

‘Any intruder would be caught on camera, right?’

‘Afraid not, sir.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘There are no cameras.’

The Inspector didn’t believe it.

‘What about patrols?’

‘One guy, on all night.’

‘One guy? For this lot?’ He gazed round. ‘There must be a fortune in gear here. Doesn’t anyone keep an eye on it?’

The site engineer admitted that stuff went missing. Break-ins at night were frequent. Hence the management’s interest in a close working partnership with the police.

‘That’s above my head,’ the Inspector grunted. ‘But I’d suggest more bodies and a decent camera set-up. Still, that’s your decision.’ He turned back to Faraday. ‘What’s the story then, Joe? Bloke climbs up your ladder. Bag full of bits. Then what?’

Faraday scrambled down the earth bank and into the wide trench that surrounded the base of the apartment block. The mud was glutinous underfoot and there were big puddles of standing water, pitted with rain. Everyone else followed.

‘Say he came down here.’ Faraday was looking at the site engineer. ‘And say he dug sideways into this lot.’ He nodded at the banked earth on the inner side of the trench. ‘Or went much deeper into the site, in among the pilings there. What would we be looking at in, say, a year’s time?’

‘An apartment block. Arethusa House.’

‘Starting where?’

‘Starting where we’re standing now.’

‘So everything inside this line would be’ – he was still looking at the site engineer – ‘under what?’

‘Under two feet of reinforced concrete.’

‘So if you wanted to dig it up? Get at it?’

The site engineer at last understood. He plunged his hands into the pockets of his anorak and shook his head.

‘Don’t even think about it,’ he said bleakly.

Winter had been waiting for nearly two hours in the drenching rain before the golf umbrella finally appeared. It was striped blue and white and the bulky figure beneath held it low, angled into the howling wind.

Crazy Lady
was berthed towards the end of the outer pontoon, riding uneasily on the swell. According to the marina authorities, she’d been there for a couple of days, though Hennessey had booked in under a false name. Winter wasn’t good with boats, but he judged the motor cruiser to be about forty feet, moulded in sleek white plastic, with a high exposed bridge at the rear of the superstructure and a wide sitting-out area at the stern where you’d pose with your evening drinks. In a different setting, with better weather and a couple of semi-naked women, it might have come straight from the pages of
Hello!
magazine. How fitting, thought Winter, watching the umbrella approach.

The early morning flight out of Southampton had brought him to Jersey. He’d taken a cab to the marina, walking the pontoons until he found Parrish’s motor cruiser. When he’d tried the big glass access doors at the back they were locked, but he could see the glow of a television in the saloon and there were clothes strewn everywhere. Over at the marina office, the girl behind the counter thought that
Crazy Lady
had been on the pontoon for a couple of days, but she couldn’t be sure. When asked for the name of the skipper, she’d just looked blank.

Not that it mattered. Tucked into the meagre shelter of the big seawall, Winter was certain he knew. The same slight roll to the walk. The same impression of size and bulk. And, as he collapsed the umbrella, retrieved his shopping and stepped carefully aboard, the same long, jowly face that had stayed with Winter ever since he saw the Marriott video tape. Hennessey wasn’t dead at all. He’d just been to the supermarket, and now he was due a little surprise.

Winter gave him a minute or two to settle in. Then he picked up a bag of his own, a black hold-all, double-zipped, and began to walk. The portable electric drill and lengths of rope were heavier than he’d thought and he was out of breath by the time he got to the seaward end of the pontoon.
Crazy Lady
was moored stern-on. Winter paused to pull on a pair of leather gloves, then stepped aboard, feeling the deck stir beneath him. The tall smoked-glass doors still barred the way to the saloon. Winter wiped the rain from his face, then tried one of the doors. This time it wasn’t locked.

Hennessey was sitting at a kidney-shaped table, his thinning hair still tousled where he’d just towelled it dry. A copy of the
Daily Telegraph
was open in front of him and he was nursing a large glass of red wine. He looked up, confused by this sudden intrusion, this black silhouette against the grey light outside.

‘What’s going on?’

Winter didn’t reply. The tall glass door locked on the inside. Hennessey was struggling to his feet now, penned in by the table. He was trying to reach his mobile. Winter got there first.

‘Pieter Hennessey?’

‘Who the hell are you?’

‘I asked you a question.’

Hennessey paused. Something in Winter’s voice prompted a nod.

‘That’s me,’ he confirmed. ‘I’m sorry, but I can’t recall the name.’

For the first time, Winter saw the bandaged wrist.

‘Sit down,’ he said.

‘You have absolutely no right—’

‘I said sit down. You have a choice. Either you do what I say or I’ll hurt you.’

Hennessey, with some reluctance, sank back onto the buttoned velour. Despite his bluster, and his evident unfitness, Winter could sense him measuring up the distance between them. Winter stepped closer, then paused before extending a gloved hand in greeting. Hennessey gazed up, relief flooding his big face.

‘Christ,’ he said. ‘For a moment there, you had me worried.’

It was Dawn’s idea to confront Beavis with the video, and it was Faraday who insisted on coming along. With Winter’s unexplained absence, and with an hour to snatch between conferences, he was determined to get at least one job properly sorted.

Beavis, this time, was dressed to go out. He was wearing jeans and an old leather jacket with a faded transfer of James Dean on the back, and just as soon as the rain eased up, he was off to Lidl’s for a spot of shopping. Shel had just rung. Girl never really knew her mind, but it looked like she might be coming for tea. He beamed at Dawn and told her to come in. Bloody weather. Never stopped.

Faraday followed them down the hall. Beavis led the way through to the kitchen, but Dawn called him back. Did he have a video player?

‘Yeah.’ Beavis looked blank. ‘Old thing. Got it off a skip then had a bloke mend it. Works OK though.’

The player was upstairs. There were motorcycle magazines stacked beside Beavis’s bed and the tiny square of carpet was crusted with something yellow and sticky. Over by the window, water dripped steadily through the ceiling into a carefully positioned cake tin. Faraday looked round, wondering about the smell. Dawn had been right. Beavis needed a good scrub.

He was still talking about his daughter. He’d been on at her about Kennedy and, just like he’d thought, she’d told him it was all crap. Lee was like an uncle to her, or maybe a brother. No way would she get involved. He’d also phoned Lee.

‘What did he say?’ Dawn was on her hands and knees, trying to sort out the video player.

‘He said it was crap too. Must be Addison, he said. Just the kind of thing that little bastard would do.’

Beavis looked round for Faraday and nodded, making the point twice. Dawn had introduced him as her boss, but Faraday wasn’t certain he’d made the CID connection. I might be Dawn’s dad, Faraday thought grimly, or some passing stranger she’d pulled in off the street.

Dawn had finally got the video player to start. She hit the pause button and looked up at Beavis.

‘We came across this the other day,’ she held up the video cassette. ‘Thought you ought to see it.’

‘Lovely.’ He settled down on the end of the bed. ‘Why not?’

Dawn exchanged glances with Faraday. He hadn’t seen it either, though a brief conversation in the car coming over had prepared him for most of what followed.

Dawn bent to the video again. The picture wobbled on the screen, then a bed swam into view. It was the big double bed in Kennedy’s upstairs room. Shelley was sprawled across it on her back. She was naked and she was mugging a big stagey orgasm for the camera, her back arched, her head thrown back. Then she collapsed in giggles, earning a reproof from an unseen voice.

‘Shel, for fuck’s sake …’

It was Kennedy. Even Beavis knew it. He was gazing at the screen, fondness spiked with disbelief.

‘Silly bitch,’ he muttered to himself. ‘Stupid cow.’

Kennedy stepped into shot. He was wearing a tennis shirt and a pair of briefs. He took the shirt off first, disappeared for a moment, then returned with a bunch of grapes.

‘Go on,’ he said.

Shelley caught the grapes one by one, positioning them across her body, starting with the hollows at the base of her neck. Then, very slowly, she spread her arms wide, the perfect take-me cameo.

Kennedy was on his hands and knees. He had a grape in his mouth and he crushed it very slowly, letting the juice drip onto her face. Then he began to work downwards from grape to grape, biting into the purple flesh and licking at her glistening skin. The last of the grapes lay in a little cluster between her thighs, and soon it was clear even to Beavis that this daughter of his was enjoying herself. Kennedy’s face was buried between the spread of her thighs and she kept reaching down, both hands on the gleaming baldness of his scalp, making tiny adjustments, fitting herself to him. No one could pretend a pleasure this intense, and when it was over, and Kennedy took her place on the mattress, she had a skill and a theatricality that could only have come with practice. She was eager, too, and by the time Beavis finally stumbled from the room, Kennedy was doing conjuring tricks with an empty bottle of Becks. First you see it. Then you don’t.

Minutes later Beavis was still washing his mouth out in the tiny bathroom. Dawn stood in the open doorway, Faraday behind her.

‘We’re here about the Donald Duck business,’ Dawn said. ‘We need to know who did it.’