Deadlight (2 page)

The guy he’d glimpsed earlier was still in the mess. He could see his bulk, pressed back against the surviving partition. He had his hands out, trying desperately to follow the billowing smoke, up towards the chill sweetness of the open air.

‘Hey you!’ he managed. ‘Come here! Give us a hand!’

The man turned and stared at him. From the main broadcast, faint along the passageway, came a shouted order, repeated twice. The Captain’s voice. Abandon ship.

The figure beside the partition was on the move again, faster this time, lunging towards the passageway. Feeling a hand on his shoulder, he spun round. The eyes were wide, letter-boxed in the anti-flash hood.

‘There’s a guy back there. Give us a hand.’ It wasn’t a polite request. It was an order.

The man stared at him for a moment, then shaped to take a swing.

‘You’re fucking joking,’ he snarled. ‘Piss off, will you?’

TUESDAY
, 4
JUNE
, 2002,
07.00

It took a while for Faraday to make sense of the shape swimming up towards him in the fixing bath. A structure of some kind? Big? Small? He didn’t know.

J-J stood beside him, a tall, thin shadow in the tiny darkroom. Despite the pressures of the last three days, he’d been up with his camera before dawn, patrolling the crust of driftwood and debris as the tide fell, and the bitter-sweet saltiness of the harbourside still clung to him.

‘Recognise it now?’ One bony finger put the question, circling in the gloom.

Faraday rubbed his eyes and peered down as the greys slowly thickened and the ghostly smudge that overlooked the foreshore began to resolve. The big glass doors downstairs, ablaze with the first low rays of the sun; Faraday’s study above, still curtained; and a careless arrangement of clouds behind, framing the square, sturdy shape of the Bargemaster’s House. The boy must have taken the shot way out on the semi-sunken causeway that dried at low tide, a suspicion confirmed by his mudsplattered Reeboks. Faraday could think of better reasons for this seven a.m. summons but just now he couldn’t muster the energy to argue.

J-J reached for a pair of plastic tongs. He gave the fixer a stir, then pointed at another upstairs window on the emerging photo.

‘You.’ He pillowed his head on his hands, a faintly accusatory gesture. ‘Asleep.’

He lifted the dripping print from the fixing bath and
held it up between them, a trophy from his morning’s work. Then he turned to one of the lines he’d strung across the cramped little space and pegged the Bargemaster’s House amongst the dozens of other prints already hanging in the half-darkness: old, weather-roughened faces; shy smiles; gnarled hands on brass wheels; and Faraday’s favourite: an armada of tiny ships, harshly backlit against the June sun, rolling in past the Round Tower, butting against a lumpy ebbing tide.

Faraday gazed at the photo a moment or two longer, aware of J-J’s eyes on his face. Then he raised an approving thumb.

‘Nice,’ he murmured.

Back in bed, enjoying the lie-in he’d been promising himself for weeks, Faraday let himself drift into sleep. The decision to give J-J his mother’s camera hadn’t been easy, but the pictures he’d managed to conjure from the battered Olympus they’d shared for years had been more than impressive and in the end the decision had made itself. Since then, months back, the photos had got better and better. His deaf son had discovered a new language through the viewfinder of Janna’s treasured Nikon, and the installation of the darkroom had given J-J’s black and white prints a hard-edged clarity that Faraday found both startling and eerie. These were images that bridged the years, echoes of another life. Just looking at them, he felt nineteen again.

It was gone eleven before his mobile rang. He recognised the voice at once.

‘Dave,’ he muttered wearily.

Dave Michaels was one of the two DSs on the Major Crimes team. Last thing yesterday, leaving the office, Faraday had made a point of mentioning his rostered rest day, keenly awaited for what felt like weeks. Already, he knew he shouldn’t have bothered.

‘We’ve got a body down in Southsea,’ Michaels was saying. ‘Uniform rang it in thirty minutes ago.’

‘What’s that got to do with me?’

‘Guvnor wants you down there. ASAP.’

‘Why can’t someone else take care of it?’

Faraday waited until Michaels’ soft chuckle began to subside. The last month or so, Portsmouth had become Murder City, the peace of the early summer disturbed by killing after killing. Most of it was rubbish, three-day events, domestic disputes turned into murder by booze or frustration, but every next body in the mortuary fridge triggered a mountain of paperwork as Faraday, above all, knew only too well. There were undoubted benefits to a divisional DI like himself winning a place on the Major Crimes team but a conversation like this wasn’t one of them.

For a moment he toyed with having the full ruck, if only to satisfy his own disappointment, but knew there was no point. The rules of homicide – who, where, when, why – took absolutely no account of the rest-day roster.

Michaels was telling him what little he’d gleaned from the uniformed inspector who’d passed on the first report from the attending PCs. Guy in his fifties dead in his Southsea flat. Body discovered by a mate sent round from work. Chummy was naked on the floor, stiff as a board, and someone had given the rest of the room a good seeing-to as well.

‘Where’s the flat?’

‘Niton Road. 7a.’

‘Witnesses? Neighbours? Anyone upstairs?’

‘Too early to say. Scenes of Crime are there already and they’ve sealed the premises. No response from the top flat.’

Faraday peered at the alarm clock beside the bed. 11.36. Given the timescale, events had moved extraordinarily fast. How come the referral to Major Crime had come so soon?

‘Willard’s decision.’ Michaels laughed again. ‘He can’t wait to get his hands on this one. He’s talking twenty DCs. He’s going to blitz it.’

‘Why?’

‘Bloke was a prison officer.’

Faraday found J-J bent over the toaster in the kitchen, still enveloped in the harsh, chemical tang of the developing fluids from the darkroom. In a flurry of sign, Faraday explained about the summons to work. Their planned trip to London would have to wait for another day.

J-J was less than happy.

‘When?’ he wanted to know.

Faraday spread his arms wide. The temptation was to gloss it, to pretend that this latest spasm of violence would be sorted in days, just another settling of domestic accounts, but something in the conversation with Dave Michaels told Faraday to expect a more complex challenge. Detective Superintendents with Willard’s experience seldom called out the cavalry in such numbers without due cause.

‘I can’t say,’ Faraday signed. ‘Could be next week. Could be next month.’

‘What about this woman we’re meeting?’ J-J’s hands shaped the question, then left it hanging in the air between them. He was seriously upset and Faraday knew it.

‘I’ll phone her. Sort something out.’

‘But she’s going back next week. You told me.’

‘I know. Maybe she can come down here.’

‘Really?’ A sudden smile brightened J-J’s face. At twenty-three, there was still something childlike about the way his mood could change in an instant. Thunder one moment, sunshine the next.

Faraday nodded at the toaster. Smoke was curling from the thick slice of granary that J-J had wedged inside. J-J ignored it.

‘When?’ he insisted. ‘When can she come?’

Faraday signed that he didn’t know. He’d arranged the afternoon’s meeting months back, after Janna’s parents in Seattle phoned with the news. London’s Hayward Gallery were planning to mount a major Ansel Adams exhibition, a centenary celebration of the American photographer’s finest work, and one of Janna’s long-ago college friends had been charged with liaising between the Hayward and the Adams family trust. J-J had inherited his mother’s passion for Adams’s landscapes, and the offer of a sneak preview – the best prints a month before the exhibition was due to open – was a dream windfall for a young novice photographer as eager and ambitious as J-J.

Faraday rescued the remains of the toast and scraped the worst of the damage into the bin. J-J was looking thoughtful.

‘I could go by myself,’ he signed at last. ‘Go up and meet her.’

‘Yeah?’ Faraday was checking his watch.

‘Of course. You can tell me where and when. And then you can phone her and explain you won’t be there.’

‘What if she doesn’t know sign?’

‘Doesn’t matter. We’re looking at photographs, aren’t we? No need for anything else.’

Still preoccupied with what awaited him in Niton Road, Faraday found himself staring at his deaf son. There were moments when J-J astonished him and this was one of them. The boy was right. The whole point of images as dramatic and artful as Ansel Adams’s was the way they transcended language. Who needed mere words when a photograph could say it all?

Faraday reached for the butter dish.

‘I’ll ring her in a moment.’ He tapped his watch. ‘And then I must go.’

Niton Road was one of a series of streets that webbed the eastern reaches of Southsea. The houses were terraced, but generous bay windows gave them a hint of gentility, and a dozen or so trees – recently planted – had so far escaped the attentions of Friday night drunks.

Faraday parked his Mondeo round the corner and showed his warrant card to the young PC guarding the blue tape that sealed the front gate of number seven. The line of vehicles at the kerb included Willard’s gleaming new BMW. Seconds later, Willard himself stepped into the sunshine, deep in conversation with the Crime Scene Manager, a youngish DS called Jimmy for whom – on the evidence of the last two murders – Faraday had a great deal of respect.

Faraday met them on the pavement. The CSM was sweating inside the hooded one-piece suit. There was evidently a problem with getting hold of the Home Office pathologist and Willard wanted to know why. The CSM stepped back towards the house, retrieved his mobile from the PC on the door and peeled off a glove to punch in a number. The pathologist lived in Dorset.

Willard turned to Faraday.

‘Took your time, Joe. Half day is it?’

Faraday ignored the dig. Willard, as Detective Superintendent in charge of the Major Crimes team, was banged up in his office most of the day, walled in by paperwork, budget-juggling and a traffic jam of meetings. One glance at his diary took Faraday straight back to his own managerial days on division, and it was rare for someone of Willard’s exalted rank to make a personal appearance at the sharp end. Yet more proof that dead prison officers got five-star service.

‘We’ve got a name, sir?’

‘Sean Coughlin. He’s a PO over at Gosport nick. Never turned up for his shift this morning. No phone call. No e-mail. Nothing. The supervisor sent someone round and here we are.’

‘He had a key?’

‘Didn’t need one. He banged on the door a couple of times and then found a window open at the front.’

Faraday followed Willard’s pointing finger. One of the small top windows in the downstairs bay had been open overnight. Reaching in, Coughlin’s colleague had managed to unfasten the bigger window beneath. The room was still curtained but the smell had been enough to warrant further investigation.

Faraday frowned. Even with the central heating on, it took at least twelve hours for decomposition to set in.

‘He’s been dead a while?’

Willard shook his head.

‘He was at work until five last night. The smell was vomit. Coughlin had puked all over the carpet. His mate thought he must be ill.’

The CSM snapped his mobile shut. The Home Office pathologist had finally responded to his pager and would be putting a call through to the morgue to book a slot for the post-mortem. Since last month, despite the rash of local murders, all post-mortems had been transferred to Southampton General, twenty miles to the west, where the facilities were judged to be better. The fact that this transfer also halved the pathologist’s journey time to the dissecting slab was – in Faraday’s judgement – no coincidence.

‘Today would be good,’ Willard grunted. ‘Where are we with the body?’

The CSM began to detail progress inside. The police surgeon had certified death and gone on to his next job. The photographer from Netley had burned through five rolls of 35mm film and was now committing the scene to video. Clear plastic bags had been secured around Coughlin’s feet, hands and head, and the corpse was about to be readied for transfer to the mortuary. The guys from the undertakers were waiting with their casket in a Transit down the street and the CSM planned the
handover inside the shared hall. In the interests of good taste, the neighbours would be spared the sight of a sixteen-stone body bag.

Willard nodded, his eyes following a young WPC up the street, and Faraday realised what a difference a couple of years in charge at Kingston Crescent had made. With his sheer physical bulk, and absolute refusal to accept excuses, Willard had set new standards for the dozen or so men and women at the heart of the Major Crimes team. His insistence on painstaking detective work, allied to the incessant pressure of events, had put a couple of the weaker souls to the sword but over the last eighteen months Major Crimes had posted some famous victories.

Willard wasn’t the kind of man to wear success lightly. His taste in well-cut suits now extended to an expensive bespoke tailor in Winchester, and lately – after the attentions of a hairdresser called Roz in a Southsea salon – he’d begun to look positively sleek. Gossip amongst the first-floor suite of offices at Kingston Crescent suggested that there was more to this relationship than a ten-quid tip, but Faraday had yet to be convinced.

Willard took him by the arm and stepped back on to the pavement, pausing beside the BMW for a kerbside conference. Time was moving on. He wanted Faraday back at Kingston Crescent to keep the lid on the pot as the inquiry team gathered. He’d been on to Operational Support at HQ for a couple of dozen DCs to kick-start the investigation. With luck, they’d manage twenty. House-to-house enquiries would be number one, Personal Description Forms for every address, and it would be down to Faraday to fix the parameters. He’d told the Prison Liaison Officer – a DS on division – that he wanted an interview team into Coughlin’s nick and he’d just put in a personal call to the governor to smooth the way. Bloke was a hundred per cent on-side, no-nonsense guy, old school. He’d promised to make arrangements
for a secure office and would provide a list of Coughlin’s work colleagues. Back at Kingston Crescent, they were already firing up HOLMES but there was a problem with the indexers. One of them was on leave. The other was in bed with a migraine. Willard wanted it sorted, priority.