Deadlight (45 page)

The Vice Admiral was younger than Faraday had expected, no more than his own age. His eyes were nearly black and he had a gambler’s smile, at once mischievous and knowing. He waved Faraday towards a comfortable-looking armchair and offered him a cigarette.

‘No, thanks.’

Still on his feet, Faraday couldn’t take his eyes off the view. This was a perspective on the harbour he’d never seen before, a line of pensioned-off warships lying in the deep-water channel that curled up towards Portchester Castle, and Faraday thought at once of Plymouth, those same grey shapes dancing in the haze.

‘Sorry about the short notice. It was good of you to come.’

Faraday at last sat down. Wylie had shaken a cigarette from its packet, and was patting his trouser pockets for a
lighter. The ashtray on the low coffee table between them was brimming with discarded butts.

‘It’s about
Accolade
’ Wylie drew the first lungful of smoke deep into his chest, then expelled it, tipping his head sideways. ‘You’ll forgive me getting to the point.’

‘Of course.’

‘I understand you’re mounting some kind of investigation?’

‘That’s right. A man named Coughlin was murdered last week. It’s my job to try and work out why.’

‘Why or how?’

‘How we know. How’s easy. Why’s more important because why might take us to the killer.’

‘And you’re getting there? Making progress?’

‘Yes.’

The Vice Admiral waited for more but Faraday just smiled. There was no professional guidance he’d ever seen that obliged him to share investigative details with a total stranger.

A moment later, there came a knock at the door. The Wren was back again, this time with coffee. The Vice Admiral was on his feet at once, making space on the table.

‘Milk? Sugar?’ The Wren had gone.

Faraday watched Wylie at work with a sachet of sugar. Finally, he opened it with his teeth.

‘You’ll know we lost a lad at sea.’ He didn’t look up. ‘Name of Matthew Warren. I understand you’re keen for sight of the Ship’s Investigation.’

‘That’s right.’

‘May I ask for what reason?’

‘Of course.’ Faraday reached for the proffered coffee. ‘In cases like these we find it pays to try and get inside the victim’s head. To begin with, that may be the only lead we have to go on. And so we go back and back, years back, decades sometimes, putting a life together. You’d be amazed at what we find.’

‘I’m sure. We do it with our blokes, all the time. Read between the lines of a man’s service record, talk to one or two of his shipmates, and it’s all there.’

‘Exactly. For us, that kind of research has become a forensic tool. I wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t have Coughlin pretty much taped.’

‘And you think you’ve done that?’

‘I think I’ve made a start, certainly.’

‘Enough to take the inquiry in a certain direction?’

‘Enough to give us a steer or two.’

‘So why your interest in the Ship’s Investigation?’

Matthew Warren again. And the winter’s night, way down south, when the young steward had inexplicably disappeared.

Faraday began to explain about possible evidence of some kind of relationship aboard, a tiny cancer that might have grown and grown over the intervening years.

‘I’m afraid I’m not with you.’

‘We think there might have been bullying. Coughlin and the boy Warren.’

‘That’s possible.’ Wylie frowned. ‘Of course it’s possible. We do our best to stamp on that kind of abuse, and it’s much better now than it was, but I’d never claim we’re a hundred per cent successful. But forgive me …’ The frown deepened. ‘What’s that got to do with this man’s death?’

‘We don’t know.’ Faraday smiled at him. ‘Yet.’

‘But you think there might be a connection?’

‘Yes. Abuse is a good word. Maybe Coughlin didn’t stop at bullying.’

The Vice Admiral was looking thoughtful now. His coffee lay on the table, untouched. Finally he got up and went across to his desk. The buff envelope was on top of the files beside his PC.

‘This is the orginal.’ He gave Faraday the envelope and sat down again. ‘I’m afraid you can’t take it away but you’re welcome to read through it.’

Faraday slid the contents on to his lap. Four photocopied sheets of paper, stapled together. This, he quickly realised, was the Ship’s Investigation missing from the archive at HMS
Centurion
. He scanned quickly through the first page, a summary of events.

Warren had been reported missing at 05.48 Zulu. The ship, after seeking permission from
Hermes
, had commenced a sea search a little over an hour later. By mid-morning, in a rising gale, the search was officially abandoned.

Faraday turned the page, spotting a contribution from the Master-at-Arms. In Beattie’s view there were no grounds for viewing Warren’s disappearance as anything other than a tragic accident. His Divisional Officer had reported no undue anxieties. To his friends’ knowledge, there were no girlfriend problems at home. A search of his locker had revealed nothing untoward. Beattie had signed his report in a small, crabbed hand, making way for a paragraph each from the two officers co-opted to oversee the investigation. Like Beattie, they’d concluded that Warren had been the victim of an unfortunate accident. What contribution he might have made to his own death – by ignoring regulations, by taking an unwarranted risk – was unclear, but there was a measure of sympathy for the rating throughout the ship, and his messmates had responded generously.

‘Sympathy?’ For the first time, Faraday detected a chink of light.

The Vice Admiral shrugged the word away.

‘It’s what you’d expect,’ he murmured. ‘They raffled his tapes, bunged money his way. Normally it goes to the wife but in Warren’s case it would have been the parents. Happens on every ship.’

Faraday turned to the final page. The First Lieutenant, Mark Harrington, had respectfully brought the report to the attention of the ship’s Captain. He, in turn, had signed it off.

Faraday felt a little jolt of recognition. Commander Jock Wylie. No wonder, he thought.

‘Maybe I should have told you earlier.’ Wylie could see Faraday’s finger anchored beneath the Captain’s signature. ‘Might that have been more diplomatic?’

‘Not at all.’ Faraday slipped the report back into the envelope. ‘Do you mind if I ask you a question?’

‘Delighted. Fire away.’

‘Was this why you asked me in?’ Faraday tapped the envelope.

‘My ship, you mean?’

‘Yes. I imagine you’d get quite parental. Especially if she’d gone down like that.’

‘Parental?’

‘Protective.’

‘Of what, exactly?’

‘I don’t know.’ Faraday tried to get a fix on what he was trying to say. ‘Her reputation? Her memory? The blokes you served with? It can’t be a small thing, losing your ship.’

Wylie gave a little bark of laughter and then stood up. By the time he got to the window, he’d lit another cigarette.

‘I’ve no idea how much you know about
Accolade
, Inspector Faraday, but let’s suppose you’ve done your homework.’ He turned back into the room. ‘You’re right about losing your ship. It hurts in personal terms, of course it does. We lost far too many men. Caused far too much grief. But it goes a lot further than that, especially if you’re the one carrying the can. The navy, quite rightly, is unforgiving. They want to know exactly what went wrong. Boards of Inquiry can be brutal.’

Wylie was beside the coffee table, the cigarette smouldering between his stained fingers. He’d shipped home, like everyone else, aboard the
QE2
. The management had given him a palatial cabin on one of the upper decks. His XO had christened it ‘The Penthouse Suite’. He’d sat
up there for days and days on end, writing letter after letter, to wives, mothers, even – when he knew them personally – kids. And he’d emerged from that personal taste of purgatory with the conviction that there was nothing –
nothing
– more important than a man’s family. Not victory. Not honour. Not medals. Not glory. What mattered, what really mattered, were the people left behind. How they’d cope. How they’d adjust. How they’d somehow be able to heal that yawning hole a war had blasted in their lives.

‘And Matthew Warren?’

‘I was coming to him.’ Wylie sucked in a another lungful of smoke. ‘That lad didn’t go down like the rest of them. It wasn’t the war that killed him. But you know something? We did our level best to gloss the difference. And you know something else? I truly believe it worked. The Warrens are a Pompey family. You probably know that. They live out Milton way. And as the years have gone by I think they’ve come to believe that Matthew gave his life for Queen and Country. We used to hold annual services, remembrance services, on the twenty-first of May, and the whole family – mum, dad, and I think his brother – used to turn up. One year, I’ve an idea it was eighty-seven, I remember his mother approaching me after the service and telling me that she’d made a sort of peace with herself. Matthew’s death had broken her heart, her own words, but now she realised that it was a kind of sacrifice. He was dead, just like the other nineteen were dead. They’d been killed because they’d gone to war. Is that self-deception,
pro patria mori
? It probably is. Does it matter, even in the slightest? No.’ The Vice Admiral retrieved the buff envelope from the coffee table, then weighed it in his hand. A moment later, he checked his watch. ‘Peace is a precious commodity, Mr Faraday,’ he murmured. ‘It would be a shame to disturb it.’

Winter had lost count of the times he’d relied on CCTV
footage. With more than a hundred cameras now covering most of the city, he’d raided the tapes again and again for evidence, pinning down a face and a time at a particular location, demolishing the tosh that passed these days for alibis. The on-street cameras were supervised from a spacious control room in the bowels of the city’s civic centre. The operation rolled on, twenty-four hours a day, and Winter’s favourite shift leader was called Len.

‘All right, Paul? What happened to that arm?’

Len was nearing retirement, a wiry little man with the world’s worst taste in ties. He had a passion for greyhound racing, and Winter occasionally sorted him out an invite for the local track.

‘I’m after Cosham, Len.’ Winter was inspecting the big wall map, each camera tagged with a number in red. ‘Down by the station there. Number ninety-seven.’

‘When?’

‘Last night. Two eighteen.’

‘No problem.’

Recorded tapes were kept for a month before being wiped. Cassettes with last night’s coverage were still on a shelf at the back. Len loaded one into a replay machine, part of a tiny edit suite, and then spun through the footage, pausing to check the digital time read-out. Finally, he beckoned Winter over.

‘This what you’re after?’

Winter looked at the screen. The length of Cosham High Street lay before him, empty except for a pair of cats stalking each other between the chemist and the Salvation Army shop. For a moment, he couldn’t remember where to find the phone-box.

‘There.’ Len was pointing.

Winter nodded, orientated now. The box was lit inside and a tall figure was bent over the phone, his face shielded. After a while, he began to talk, the briefest conversation, then he put the phone down and turned
back towards the street. Winter watched as he retrieved a helmet from the bike parked beside the call-box. Seconds later, his helmet on, he looked directly up at the camera. Then came the raised hand, the middle finger erect. He held the pose for a couple of seconds, just standing there, before straddling the bike and disappearing up the High Street.

Len couldn’t take his eyes off the screen.

‘What’s that about, then?’

‘He’s sending us a message.’ Winter grinned. ‘Any chance of a VHS?’

TUESDAY
11
JUNE
, 2002,
16.00

Faraday was walking Beattie’s dog on Southsea beach when Willard rang from London. Faraday had stolen fifteen minutes to duck out of the office and drive down to Southsea. Eadie Sykes, away for the day, had given him a spare key last night and now he was enjoying the warmth of a perfect June afternoon while the Alsatian prowled amongst the damp, shadowed spaces beneath the pier.

‘What was he after, then? The Admiral?’

‘Vice Admiral.’

‘Whatever.’

Faraday, who’d given the same question considerable thought, admitted to his own confusion. On the one hand, it was nothing more than an affable exchange of views. On the other, there might have been an altogether darker agenda. Therein, he supposed, lay the guile of senior commanders like Wylie.

‘I may be wrong.’ Faraday was trying to keep his eye on the dog. ‘But I got the feeling he was warning us off.’

‘Doing
what
?’

‘He never spelled it out. He’s far too clever for that. But he obviously thinks we’re trespassing. It doesn’t help that
Accolade
was his ship.’

‘At the time, you mean?’

‘Yes. He was Captain when it went down.’

‘So he’d know about Coughlin?’

‘And the lad Warren, yes.’

‘Shit.’ Willard sounded impressed. ‘You should have
interviewed him, got it down on paper. What was he up to on Monday night?’

Faraday assumed this was a joke, but Willard wasn’t laughing.

‘What about the Ship’s Investigation? Did you ask him about that?’

‘He had it there. He showed me.’

‘And?’

‘Nothing in it. The lad was reported missing. They searched the ship. Went back to look for him. Then got on with the war.’ He paused. ‘I get the feeling that if anyone killed Warren, it was the Argies. Everyone seems more comfortable with that.’

‘I bet.’ Willard broke off to bark at someone, then came back on the phone. ‘So why couldn’t we find the report in the first place?’

‘I’ve no idea, sir. Coughlin’s death may have sparked some kind of review. They knew his file had been accessed so they may have taken a look at what else was lying around.’

‘Just in case, you mean?’

‘Exactly.’ They’d sensed a storm coming, he thought. And they were clearing the decks.