Western Approaches (Jimmy Suttle) (21 page)

‘Fuck knows,’ he said.

‘Where are you?’

‘Pompey. This is a room you will not believe.’

‘What room?’

Suttle tried to explain but gave up. When he tried to pretend a renewed interest in Tom Pendrick she saw through it at once.

‘What are you after?’ she said.

Suttle stared at the rain dripping down the window pane. Good question.

‘A meet. A drink,’ he said at last. ‘I need someone to talk to. You call it.’

‘You’re serious?’

‘Yeah.’ He’d shut his eyes again. ‘I think I am.’

Lizzie lay in bed. Grace’s cot was beside her. Lizzie had moved it in as a precaution. If anything happened, she told herself, better that they faced it together.

The last couple of hours the wind had got up. She pulled the duvet closer, buried herself in its warmth, tried not to listen to the noises outside in the garden, but every creak, every sigh, every rustle in the long grass beyond the patio sparked another image. Someone watching. Someone waiting. Someone stealing ever closer to the gaping window downstairs.

Once she switched on the light and risked a look at her watch. 03.17. In a couple of hours a pale grey light would wash through the thin curtains. After that, God willing, she might sleep. In the meantime she had to fight this sense of welling panic, this certainty that things could only get worse, and to do that she had to concentrate on something amusing, something positive, a single image that might keep the busy darkness at bay.

She tried and tried, raiding her memories from Gill’s visit. The ducklings in the stream at the bottom of the garden. The horses on the beach the afternoon they’d walked to Straight Point. The expression on Grace’s tiny face when her mum had staggered to her feet after the first session on the rowing machine. For a moment or two this worked. But then the images faded and the darkness crowded back in and she flailed around in her mind’s eye, looking for some place to hide.

Then, quite suddenly, she had it. She was afloat again, taking her first strokes towards the dock, listening to the big man with the huge hands. He’d told her she could do it. And he’d been right.

Five

THURSDAY, 14 APRIL 2011

Suttle was on the road early next morning. By five to nine he was mopping up the last of a hangover with an all-day breakfast in a café off the Bridport bypass. The rain had cleared overnight and the hills in west Dorset were a vivid green in the fitful sunshine. He stood in the car park, enjoying the taste of the wind, waiting for Lizzie to pick up. After some thought he’d decided to pretend last night never happened. When she finally answered, he could hear banging in the background.

‘What’s going on?’

‘I’ve got a guy in from down the road. He’s fixing the window.’

‘Right . . .’ Suttle wondered who was paying but decided not to ask. ‘You OK?’

‘We’re fine.’

‘Grace?’

‘She’s teething again. Don’t forget about tonight.’

‘What?’ Suttle was fumbling for his car keys.

‘I’m rowing. You need to be back by half five. You think you can manage that?’

Suttle’s office was still empty when he made it to Exeter. The Office Manager, a resourceful divorcee called Leslie, brought him coffee and a couple of stale biscuits. Luke Golding, she said, was about to be redeployed by Mr Nandy but the lad was still upstairs. She knew he wanted a word.

Suttle nodded. He was looking at the list of messages on his desk. Leslie had already arranged them in order of priority. The first one asked him to bell the CSI at Scenes of Crime.

Mark was en route to an aggravated burglary in Totnes. Suttle heard the
tick-tock
of his indicator as he pulled in to take the call.

‘Kinsey’s PC,’ he said. ‘Christ knows how but we got bumped up the queue. They haven’t done full analysis yet but they’ve taken a good look.’

Suttle was impressed. The techies were as hard-pressed as everyone else in the force and the wait for hard disk analysis often stretched to weeks, sometimes months. Nandy’s doing, he thought. Has to be.

Mark told him to get a pen. He’d spent a couple of hours with the key data yesterday afternoon and sorted what he thought might be useful.

‘The guy’s a businessman, right?’

‘Right.’

‘Building resort hotels?’

‘Retirement communities. Top-end stuff. High six figures for a nice view and fancy CCTV.’

‘Gotcha.’ For once in his life Mark was laughing. ‘There’s a whole load of emails about a site at a place called Trezillion. It’s hard to get the context without more info but I get the feeling this thing’s still on the drawing board. He’s forever nailing the planning guys to the wall. Telling these people what to do and when. Real fucking arsewipe.’

Suttle reached for a pen. Mark’s language always enriched a conversation. Scene of Crimes guys were a special breed but Mark was a one-off. Mr Gloom one minute. Mr Yippee the next. Definitely bipolar.

‘Where’s Trezillion?’

‘Cornwall. North coast. Lovely little bay with nothing but a public lavatory and a bit of car park. Used to be a top bogging spot for gays down from Newquay. You should give it a go before Kinsey gets his hands on it.’

‘He’s dead, Mark.’

‘Fuck me, so he is. Surprise or what?’ Another growl of laughter. ‘I’ll ping you the meat of this stuff. See what you make of it.’

‘Anything else?’

‘Yeah. We’ve got a single blonde hair from the floor beside Kinsey’s bed. Proves nothing except he might have got lucky.’

Suttle scribbled himself a note. The Viking, he thought. Definitely worth a return visit.

‘Is that it?’

‘No.’ Mark confirmed that Kinsey hadn’t belonged to Facebook or any of the other social sites. Neither did he appear to have any close mates worth an email or two. There was, however, one chink in his armour.

‘What’s that?’

‘The guy was a huge video gamer. Played most nights.’

‘Really?’

‘Yeah. I don’t know how much you know about all this gaming shit but there’s a service called Steam. It’s a deal you sign up to. You buy games through the site and they organise everything else for you, keep your games in the cloud, help you find friends in multiplayer, keep a record of how you’re doing, sort out the social side.’

‘Social side?’

‘Yeah. Most of these games you can either play solo against the computer or with other people. The guys you’re playing with have weird screen names. Think cyber handles.’

‘Who was Kinsey? What did he call himself?’

‘Jalf Rezi. As in you know what.’ Mark invited Suttle to picture Kinsey bent over the rail of his balcony, barfing mouthfuls of chicken jalfrezi into the night.

Suttle needed to get back to the video games.

‘Kinsey was part of a team? Is that what you’re telling me?’

‘Yeah. Definitely. Some nights he must have played alone. Other nights he logged into a server and went out with his mates.’

‘What kind of games are we talking about?’

‘I can only give you names, I’m afraid. Most of this shit’s way over my head.’

He tallied some of the games in Kinsey’s Steam library: Grand Theft Auto IV, Arma 2, Need for Speed, Shift, Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood, Battlefield 2, Civilisation IV, Half Life 2, Left 4 Dead, Left 4 Dead 2, Counterstrike, God of War, Team Fortress 2, Wings of Prey.

Suttle was scribbling fast. He wanted to know what these games were like.

‘Haven’t a clue. I’ll email you the guy’s Steam profile. You might need someone younger to make sense of it. These guys live under stones during the day, which is why they’ve all got such shit complexions. Good luck, eh? And tell him to get a life.’

Kinsey’s Steam profile arrived by email within minutes. Suttle could make little sense of it. Luke Golding, mercifully, was still at his desk. Suttle drew up a chair while the young D/C explained that Henri Laffont, the Swiss engineer, had definitely spent the weekend in Shanghai. Another name off the suspect list.

‘Sorry, Sarge.’

‘No problem. How much do you know about video games?’

‘Why?’

‘Just answer the question.’

‘Quite a lot.’

‘OK . . .’

Suttle consulted the Steam profile and read out the list of games. Golding wanted to know what this had to do with Kinsey.

‘They were on his computer.’

‘Really? He was a
gamer
?’

‘Yeah. Surprised?’

‘Very.’

Suttle wanted to know what you could read into a guy by his choice of favourite games.

‘Lots. Show me.’

Suttle gave him the Steam profile. Golding studied Kinsey’s list of games, which included the hours Kinsey had logged on each. His head came up.

‘Well, he certainly liked his shooters.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Kinsey was big on two games, right? Counterstrike and Team Fortress 2. Look, he played 400 hours on Counterstrike. That’s serious addiction. Plus nearly 200 on TF2. OK. They’re both shooter games but the likeness ends there. TF2 is basically one big party. The action could come straight out of
Looney Tunes
. It’s also way more player-friendly than CS, especially when it comes to respawning.’

‘Respawning?’

‘That’s when you’re returned to the game after you die. On most games you wait a couple of seconds and then bang, you’re back in the game. Not with Counterstrike. When you get killed playing CS, that’s it for the rest of the round. You’re dead. End of.’

CS, he said, was pure. It had no fancy bells and whistles, no back story, no million-dollar cut scenes, just a very simple premise: beat the other team. To do that, in Golding’s view, you had to be fucking ace.

‘Plus it’s multiplayer only, Sarge. Which means you’re always playing against real humans so practising against the computer is out of the question.’

‘So you have to play with other people? Is that what you’re telling me?’

‘Yeah.’

‘And the other game? Team Fortress 2?’

‘Completely different. TF2 is way too anarchic for someone as hard core as Kinsey. It’s a bit tongue-in-cheek.’

‘So why would he play it so often?’

‘Good question.’ Golding’s gaze had returned to the Steam page. ‘This must have to do with the company he’s been keeping.’

The notion of company was intriguing. So far, according to dozens of accounts, Kinsey was the near-perfect definition of a loner. On the face of it, all the guys in Saturday’s winning quad had been his buddies, but the closer you questioned them the more obvious it became that Kinsey had bought their friendship, or perhaps just their company. So how come he’d spent most nights banged up in cyberspace with a bunch of gamers? Were relationships simpler this way? No messy stuff like having to talk face to face, or having to cope with the million tiny aggravations that came with having real mates?

Golding was still engrossed in the printouts from Kinsey’s Steam page.

‘I need to have a proper look at this.’

‘Why?’

‘Because you’re going to ask me whether he had a special friend. And the way Steam works, the answer is yes.’

‘So who is he?’

‘This guy.’

Suttle followed his pointing finger. Somehow he’d missed the name on the bottom left of the page. He reached for a pen and ringed it carefully. ShattAr. Then he looked up.

‘So this guy has to be a mate of Kinsey’s? Is that what we’re saying?’

‘Yeah.’

‘So how do we find out his real name?’

Suttle’s question hung in the air. What he dreaded was having to go to one of the companies that controlled the servers. Most of them were in the States and in his experience even a routine enquiry could take months to process.

Golding, it turned out, had another idea.

‘We join the games, Sarge. We play Counterstrike and TF2. And we pretend to be Jalf Rezi.’

‘We? I think not. You mean you.’

‘Sure.’ He was grinning. ‘My pleasure.’

Suttle phoned Nandy from his own office. He caught the Det-Supt emerging from a meeting. A million detectives, he said, had been looking for a head to fit the body at the Bodmin scene of crime and so far they’d got nowhere. He’d like to chalk this up to a superior breed of criminal but his instincts told him it was pure luck. Nandy hated factors like luck. Luck, in his view, had no role to play in a properly run investigation.

‘You’re going to give me a name?’

‘Sorry, sir?’

‘For Kinsey?’

‘I’m afraid not. Not yet.’

Suttle briefly explained about Kinsey’s passion for video games. He needed D/C Golding’s help just a little while longer. He’d have asked D/I Houghton for the go-ahead but she wasn’t picking up.

‘She’s gone to Brittany,’ Nandy said. ‘She’s looking for the head.’