One Under (11 page)

‘Who said it was
Coppice
?’

‘Ah … ’ Suttle was edging his way forwards towards the lights. ‘You’re telling me it’s something else?’

‘I’m telling you it’s none of your business.’

‘Some other job? Loose end? Statement check?’ He glanced across at Winter. ‘We
are
talking work here, I assume? Only you’re a bit old for next season.’

Winter ignored the dig. He’d found a loose Werther’s in his jacket pocket. Stripping off the paper, he popped it in his mouth.

‘Traffic in this city is barmy.’ He gazed out of the window. ‘This rate, we’ll all be buying fucking bikes.’

Suttle dropped Winter at the end of the cul-de-sac that led down to the football stadium and watched him stroll down towards the main entrance. He knew when Winter was happy. It showed in his body language, in the way he walked, in the way he dug his hands into his trouser pockets, in the way he made a tiny detour to sidefoot an empty Pepsi can towards the gutter. With the passenger window still down, he could even hear Winter’s tuneless whistle. ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, Suttle thought. Definitely something up.

The office that dealt with season ticket enquiries was on the first floor. Winter went in without knocking, pinged the bell a couple of times for attention. He heard a muffled phone conversation coming to an end, then a blurred glimpse of someone standing up through the ribbed glass behind the counter.

She was young and extremely pretty, Pompey accent, big smile.

‘Can I help you?’

Winter extended his warrant card. He’d already talked to someone on the phone about a bunch of season tickets that had been sold last month. There were twelve of them, different dates but all on the same debit card. Winter had details of the name on the card, the dates of the transactions and the number of the bank account. A Mr Givens. With an HSBC card.

‘Ring any bells?’

The girl disappeared. Seconds later, Winter found himself talking to an older woman. She had a folded piece of paper in her hand, some kind of computer printout, but she looked worried.

‘We don’t usually give out these kinds of details,’ she said. ‘We have our customers to think about.’

‘Of course.’ Winter gave her a smile. ‘I can go to court for a Production Order if you’d prefer.’

The woman’s frown deepened. She sucked her teeth for a moment or two, then shrugged.

‘Here,’ she said, flattening the printout on the counter. ‘Have you got a pen?’

Lines of pink highlighter ran through several entries. Winter could read anything upside down.

‘That’s a Somerstown address,’ he said. ‘Were all the tickets sent there?’

‘Yes.’

‘In the name of Alan Givens?’

‘Yes.’ She paused. ‘What’s the problem? Do you mind me asking? Only it might be nice to know.’

Winter scribbled down the address, then pocketed his warrant card. At this point, he told her, enquiries were strictly at the preliminary stage. Should anything dodgy have happened, he’d doubtless be back again.

He turned for the door, then paused. ‘I take it all those transactions went through OK?’ he said.

‘Oh yes.’ The woman nodded. ‘But apparently there were a couple of other calls from Mr Givens. He wanted more season tickets.’

‘And?’

‘The card was rejected.’

‘Why?’

‘Insufficient funds.’

 

Faraday spent the late afternoon in the Coroner’s office in the city’s Guildhall, confirming that the events surrounding the death in the Buriton Tunnel were currently under criminal investigation. The Coroner, Martin Eckersley, listened carefully to Faraday’s account of progress to date before declaring the inquest into the mystery death opened and adjourned. Should police enquiries lead to charges and a conviction in court, then a formal inquest would no longer be necessary. If, on the other hand, Faraday drew a blank then the inquest would be resumed at a later date.

On his way out of the Coroner’s office, Eckersley called him back. He wanted to know how Eadie Sykes was getting on. Momentarily nonplussed, Faraday had forgotten Eadie’s success in enrolling him in a project of hers a couple of years earlier. Eckersley had smoothed the path to certain sequences in a video she was making, an exploration of the circumstances leading to the death of a young local junkie, and some of this footage had even been screened at the lad’s inquest. This official nod of approval from the city’s Coroner had helped immeasurably when the contents of the video - shocking, graphic, immensely powerful - provoked a storm of controversy, and Eadie had afterwards made a point of adding Eckersley to her invite list of trophy professionals. Eckersley had come to a couple of her parties, enjoying the slightly raffish company Eadie liked to keep. Now he wanted Faraday to pass on his best. He hadn’t seen Eadie for a while. She was a live wire, made things happen. Where on earth was she hiding?

‘Australia,’ Faraday told him. ‘Sydney.’

‘Holiday?’

‘Work. She’s making videos there, films, too. She loves it.’

It dawned on Eckersley that they were no longer together. He shook his head, said he was sorry to hear it. The city was poorer, he murmured, without people like Eadie.

‘You think so?’

‘Definitely.’

 

Now, crawling home through the traffic, Faraday resisted the temptation to brood about Eadie again. Their relationship was well and truly over. Of that he was certain. Yet there were moments, like now, when he’d have welcomed the chance to drive down to the seafront, let himself into her top-floor apartment, and let the often-volatile chemistry between them take care of the rest of the evening. The challenge with investigations as unusual and potentially complex as
Coppice
was the fact that they could so easily become all-consuming. You needed time out. You needed perspective. You needed a dig in the ribs, a reminder that there might be more to life than the consequences of flange damage and the overtime implications of running a thirty-strong squad. Eadie, he knew, would have provided all three.

Stuck behind a coachful of kids barely half a mile from home, he forced his mind back to the day’s developments. Winter’s news about the woman who’d heard the car roar by early on Monday morning sat nicely alongside the Scenes of Crime haul from the plantation, and while Faraday was keeping an open mind about the Cleavers - resisting Winter’s conviction that a bent property developer must be somehow linked to the body in the tunnel - he’d quickly arranged for a couple of DCs to start trawling through footage from cameras covering the northern approaches to the city. The tapes were kept in the CCTV control room deep in the bowels of the Civic Centre, and most detectives loathed the hours they’d be spending in front of the tiny monitor screens.

Faraday had ordered every incoming car to be checked for driver and address details and as soon as some kind of decent list was available he’d set about organising house calls. Anyone heading into the city between three and four on Monday morning needed to account for their journey. If they couldn’t, he’d want to know why. He nodded to himself, pleased by the progress they were beginning to make, at last easing the Mondeo into the cul-de-sac that would take him down to the water.

The Bargemaster’s House was at its best this time of year. Faraday parked the car and pushed through the gate at the side. He’d made a big effort with the garden during the winter and all those back-breaking weekends with the spade and hoe had paid rich dividends. He paused beside a row of tomato plants, wondering whether one day he’d run out of recipes, then he walked on round the front of the house, casting his eye over the paintwork, hoping to God that he wouldn’t have to redecorate for at least a year or two.

The house itself, brick-built with a timber-clad upper floor, sat four-square on a modest parcel of land beside Langstone Harbour. Down here, on the south-easterly tip of the island, Portsmouth was no more than a rumour, a low burble of traffic spiked by the occasional siren. Summer sunsets, if Faraday cared to stand in the garden at the rear of the house, etched the city’s distant battlements - tower blocks, mainly - against the crimson flare of the western skyline, but the truth was that the Bargemaster’s House had turned its back on Pompey and for that Faraday was grateful.

He loved the peace and quiet of this little area, peopled mainly by retired folk and weekend dinghy sailors from the club along the towpath. This time of year, he could wake early on summer mornings to the mirrored calm of the harbour. Up in his study, overlooking the water, he’d installed a tripod and a decent scope, and there was always a pencil and notepad readied for another set of sightings.

Faraday had been logging the harbour’s birdlife for longer than he cared to remember, ever since he and the infant J-J had embarked on this collective adventure, and thousands of entries later - with J-J in his mid-twenties - he was still peering into that intricate web of relationships that gave the harbour its eternal fascination. The fussiness of a lone turnstone on the foreshore. That busy sequence of bright spring mornings when rafts of brent geese gathered in their hundreds for the long passage back to Siberia. The sudden glimpse of a low-flying shag, just feet above the water, arrowing seawards. Sights like these, however familiar, never failed to send a little jolt of pleasure through Faraday, and only last month, journeying through the lush green uplands of Thailand, he knew he’d never be able to live out of reach of the water.

He let himself into the house, realised he hadn’t eaten since breakfast, checked the state of the fridge. He had courgettes, onions, a big bag of tomatoes, and a couple of plump heads of garlic. Ratatouille, he thought, with rice, grilled sardines and a chilled bottle of Chablis he’d been saving.

He helped himself to a stick of celery and a square of cheese, then keyed the messages waiting for him on the phone. There were a couple of work-related calls. Then came a pause and a click before he recognised J-J’s cackle. His son was up in London now, working as a picture editor for a big video production house. The job, he knew, had been largely Eadie’s doing. After she’d taken him into Ambrym, her own production outfit, the pair of them had become very close. In fact virtually everything J-J had picked up about the industry he’d learned from Eadie and Faraday knew he owed her a huge debt. How many other hard-pressed video producers would have spared the time to school a deaf-mute in the black arts of documentary-making?

Faraday listened to the tape again. For obvious reasons, father and son normally communicated by e-mail but when J-J was especially pleased with life he’d plant a cackle or two on his dad’s answerphone to signal the presence of a waiting e-mail upstairs. Faraday was often lazy about electronic mail and if J-J had something important to say then he’d take no chances on his dad neglecting to check for incoming messages.

Faraday poured himself a beer and went upstairs. The bed was still unmade and he tidied the duvet before walking through to his study and settling at the PC. Most of the messages were bird-related - a reminder about his RSPB subscription, an exultant missive from an e-correspondent confirming that kites were back nesting in at least two Hampshire locations - and he scrolled quickly through the rest of the list until he found the electronic stone under which J-J had hidden his latest news. ‘You’ll never believe this,’ his son had written, ‘but these guys are sending me to RUSSIA. We’re doing a big thing on ENERGY SUPPLIES and we’re doing the rough-cut in MOSCOW. So that means I’ve got to check out all the gear and make sure it WORKS. Cool, eh?’

Faraday read the message a second time, warming to the headlong, madcap prose. J-J’s use of capitals echoed the way he communicated face to face, a wild frenzy of gesture, plucking meaning and nuance out of thin air, emphatic, urgent, most of it comprehensible even if you didn’t know the first thing about sign language. Quite what the Russians would make of his windmill of a son was anyone’s guess but this was a country that had produced the likes of Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninov, and in his own way Faraday suspected that J-J was no less romantic, no less theatrical. ‘You’ll love it,’ he tapped back. ‘And a big hug from your proud old dad.’

He sent the e-mail and scrolled through the rest of the messages. Nothing much caught his eye until he got to the very bottom of the list. He peered at the name, not recognising it. The message was tagged with an attachment. The suffix on the address,
fr
, meant France.

Puzzled, Faraday opened the message. It was long, maybe a couple of hundred words. ‘
Cher Joe
… ’ it began, ‘
vous m’avez dit que vous comprenez assez bien franc¸ais. Donc, je devrais peut-être vous écrire dans ma langue maternelle. Ça ne vous embête pas?
’ Faraday struggled on for a sentence or two, suddenly realising whose voice this was. Then he opened the first of the accompanying attachments and found a photograph of himself with a woman in her early thirties. They were standing on a thickly wooded hillside in northern Thailand. Faraday, in shorts and walking boots, was stripped to the waist. The woman was wearing a pair of baggy dark trousers and a plain white T-shirt. Her face was partly shadowed by the brim of a battered straw hat but her head was thrown back in helpless laughter and the photo had caught the whiteness of her teeth.

Faraday gazed at the image, instantly back on the jungle path amongst the bougainvillea and the wild orchids. He could feel the bubbles of heat rising from the red earth and the tickle of sweat on his bare chest. He could hear the deafening rise and fall of the cicadas in the thick green canopy overhead, and the faraway rumble of thunder as yet another storm tracked up the valley towards them.

On the eve of the wet season, with Eadie Sykes gone and Faraday travelling on his own, he’d met this woman on a country bus ten miles short of the Burmese border. Her name was Gabrielle and she was enjoying a brief holiday before returning to her native France. For the past year she’d been working with the hill tribes in the highlands that straddled the border between Laos and Vietnam. She was a qualified anthropologist with a PhD to her name, and European funding had made this expedition of hers possible. At some later date she’d be publishing a book. In the meantime, with the shrinking remnants of her research grant still in her pocket, she was making the most of Thailand.