One Under (5 page)

Winter wiped a smudge from the glass. He’d seen a thousand rooms like this in the city, temporary bolt-holes for solitary men. There’d be curdled milk in the fridge, abandoned plates in the washing-up bowl, grease marks down the kitchen walls, drip stains in the bathroom sink, maybe a poster or two on the bedroom wall. These were rooms that spoke of shipwreck and surrender, of lives abandoned to the daily struggle to make it through. Already, Winter could smell the place, the airless taint of cheap tobacco and unwashed bodies. He shook his head, easing back from the window.

Round the side of the house, the mountain bike was still U-locked to the drainpipe. Winter squatted for a moment, taking a careful look, then lifted the rear wheel and gave it half a forward turn. The pattern of rust on the chain argued for a long period of neglect. Givens hadn’t been cycling for quite a while.

At the rear, a patch of untended garden stretched maybe twenty metres to a badly plastered back wall. Grass was growing up around a bird bath in the tiny square of lawn and someone had tried to grow vegetables in the beds beyond. Looking down at the riot of greenery, Winter began to have second thoughts about Givens. Amongst the weeds, he could see lettuces, spring onions, a fattish marrow, even a tomato plant or two. If this was Givens’ work and not the upstairs tenant’s, then maybe he was less of a stranger to self-respect and a spot of decent veg than he’d thought.

Back at the front door, Winter pressed the top bell. For a while nothing happened. Then he heard footsteps, very slow, very heavy, clumping down a flight of stairs. Finally the door opened. Blinking in the sunshine was a huge man, the wrong side of seventy, his cardigan crusted with soup, three days’ stubble on his chin, a strand or two of greying hair combed sideways over his enormous skull.

‘Mr Petchey?’

Winter produced his warrant card. The man studied it without much interest.

‘Yeah?’ he said finally.

Winter asked about the tenant downstairs. There were anxieties regarding his whereabouts. No one had seen him for a while.

‘Who?’

‘Mr Givens. Alan Givens. Your neighbour.’ Winter nodded at the door behind him. ‘The bloke in there.’

‘What about him?’

Winter went through it again. Finally the man said that Givens hadn’t been around for a while.

‘Like how long?’

‘God knows. Weeks? Months? It’s hard these days. Dunno where the time goes.’

‘Did you know him at all? Talk to him?’

‘Yeah, a bit. I lives round the back, can’t stand the sun. Some days I’d have the window open, natter to him like.’

‘When he’s in the garden, you mean?’

‘Yeah. Always out there, he was. Veg and stuff. Strange, isn’t it, what some blokes get up to? That stupid bird bath was his idea. Bloody seagulls. Shitting everywhere.’

Winter was eyeing Givens’ door. A single Yale. Easy.

‘You want to get in there?’ The question took Winter by surprise. He nodded. ‘Ain’t you got a key?’

‘No.’

‘You’re not his mate, then? Alan’s?’

‘No. I told you. I’m a copper.’

‘Why’s that, then? In some kind of trouble, is he?’

‘Dunno.’ Winter gave him a smile. ‘That’s what I’m here to find out.’

The old man nodded, uncertain, then made his way upstairs again. Winter opened the blade of his penknife and slipped the lock to Givens’ flat. The single overhead light revealed a tiny hall. An anorak hung beside an oval mirror. On the doormat, beneath the letter box, a stack of mail. Winter eyed it a moment. The man upstairs, he thought. Playing postman for his absent neighbour. Winter gazed round. From somewhere came a very bad smell.

A couple of steps took him into the living room at the front of the property. A stripe of bright sunshine lay across the carpet and Winter could see the bulk of a sofa angled towards a big, widescreen TV in the corner. There was a copy of the TV listings carefully folded open on the arm of the sofa and Winter made a note of the date. Sunday 22 May. Apart from the table against the back wall and a couple of chairs, the room was empty of any other furniture. It was a neat room, carefully organised, not at all the dump that Winter had been expecting.

Back in the hall, he followed his nose to a door at the end. The smell was stronger here, curdy, acid, and the moment he stepped into the kitchen he knew it had to come from the fridge. He opened the door. The contents of a carton of milk had jellied and yellowed with age, while the cling film over a Tupperware box, curling at one corner, hadn’t managed to contain the stench of rotting mince. The mince formed part of some kind of risotto. Givens was clearly a man who never let the remains of a meal go to waste.

The big Zanussi was divided in two, freezer at the bottom, fridge at the top. In the freezer compartment Winter found an assortment of vegetables, all washed and wrapped, and shutting the freezer door he thought again about the carefully dug plot out the back. On a shelf beside the cooker Givens had been assembling a collection of recipe books. A list pinned to the nearby board reminded him to buy olive oil and fresh chillies. The bloke cared, Winter thought. He cared where his food came from and he was fussy about what happened to it afterwards.

Beneath the kitchen window was a swing bin for rubbish. Winter gave the lid a poke, stepping back as a gust from more rotting food billowed upward. Inside he glimpsed a slimy ball of what looked like lettuce and onions. On the evidence he’d seen so far, Givens was a man who tidied his life into neat little parcels. So how come he’d suddenly abandoned it all?

A visit to the adjoining bedroom offered few clues. A pile of magazines on the chair beside the single bed included four editions of
Digital Photographer
and a brochure for upmarket package deals to Venice. There was a line of shoes on the carpet beneath the window, while a swift riffle through the MFI wardrobe revealed a couple of suits, a leather jacket, a nice-looking overcoat and a fleece. At the back of the wardrobe, in one corner, Winter spotted a tripod, black, the legs secured with a Velcro strap. He looked at it for a moment, then used the chair by the bed to fetch down a couple of holdalls on top of the wardrobe. Both were empty. There was no sign of a camera.

Back in the hall Winter collected the post before turning on the light in the living room and settling himself in a chair at the table. The bulk of the post was rubbish, charity appeals from Save the Children, cut-price offers on insurance, but three items caught his eye. One was a letter with a Southsea postmark. Another, this time marked
Confidential
, had evidently come from Leeds. The third looked like a bank statement.

Winter hesitated a moment, then glanced at his watch. In less than an hour, ahead of the squad meet, Faraday would be expecting a report on the Misper list. Already Winter had eliminated two of the likeliest candidates. Givens, on the face of it, might well qualify as a possible but seven weeks was a long time to go missing and then suddenly turn up. Nonetheless, the abruptness of his disappearance definitely merited further investigation. One moment this man had been planning a menu, sorting out his evening’s viewing, leading a life. The next he’d simply vanished.

The Southsea letter had come from Givens’ landlord. Givens had evidently written to ask permission to build a lean-to round the side for his bike. The letter was friendly. Of course Mr Givens could go ahead. The landlord even offered to pay for the materials. Winter smiled, returning the letter to its envelope and making a note of the landlord’s details. Were these the plans a man would make if he was plotting some kind of disappearance?

The Leeds letter carried the name and address of a firm of solicitors. The letter was brief. It acknowledged Givens’ cheque in the matter of probate on his mother’s estate and assured him of the firm’s continuing support, should Mr Givens have need of their services. Once again Winter scribbled himself a note. Goldstein, Everey and Partners. 0113 2177762.

The last letter was indeed a bank statement. Winter flattened it on the table and studied it for a moment. Then came another smile, wider this time, and he tucked the statement inside his jacket pocket before checking his watch again and searching for his mobile. Aqua answered his call on the third ring. A cab would be with him in minutes.

 

By late afternoon, still out at Buriton, Faraday was beginning to think about the first squad meeting. Tracy Barber had been on the Airwave to him several times, updating him on the individuals Barrie was putting in place, and to Faraday’s satisfaction the Detective Superintendent appeared to be assembling a decent-sized squad. The priority at the moment was recovering evidence from the scene of crime, and Jerry Proctor was keeping a careful eye on the search team as they combed through the tunnel, inch by inch.

By now, the DS was happy that most of the victim had been bagged and tagged. The shortest straw, he told Faraday, had gone to a young uniform from Petersfield who’d spent the last hour or so carefully scraping flesh and miscellaneous gristle off the wheels of the first two carriages. In an aside to a nearby mate, he’d confessed to once fancying a life as a train driver. After this, he’d muttered, the romance of the railways would never be quite the same.

Faraday had some sympathy. His own walk-through at the scene would have to wait until the search team had got the tunnel plotted up, but already he’d seen enough physical evidence to shudder at the thought of what the last few moments of this man’s life must have been like.

Unless he was already dead, the anticipation of what was to come would have been unbearable. Fear sharpened the nerve ends. He’d have heard the train miles away, felt the vibrations through the rail. Then would come the moment when the train entered the tunnel, a sudden blast of air, the thunder of the wheels on the track, the flare of lights from the oncoming cab. Did you scream in those final moments? Turn your head? Squeeze your eyes shut?

Faraday didn’t know and told himself it was pointless to even speculate. At this point in time, Operation
Coppice
needed a name, a firm ID, friends, lovers, a life for Paul Winter’s Intelligence Cell to sink its teeth into. DNA samples were already en route to the Forensic Science Service laboratories, an urgent submission that would make a £1000 dent in the investigation’s budget, but it would be a full forty-eight hours before a readout emerged, and even then an ID would depend on a match in the national database. If the victim hadn’t already come to police attention, then they’d be no closer to knowing who on earth this man was.

A glance at his watch told Faraday that he should be back on the road by now. Portsmouth was close - half an hour at the most - and he had a million issues to sort out before he’d feel confident enough to gather his team around him and point them in a sensible direction. But first he was curious to know what kind of prominence the
News
, the city’s daily paper, was giving to the story.

A reporter had been on site for an hour over the lunch period, hanging around the queue at the Fire Brigade catering wagon, and although Proctor had told his blokes to zip their mouths pending a formal press conference, Faraday had learned that a wise copper never underestimated the power of the press to build a story on the tiniest fragment of overheard gossip. The reporter, a woman in her early twenties, was far from unattractive. Twice, to Faraday’s certain knowledge, she’d been in conversation with blokes fresh from the tunnel.

He borrowed a paper from one of the gaggle of villagers that had lurked on the edges of the cordon all day. It was the midday edition and the story featured on the front page. Under the headline TUNNEL DRAMA TRIGGERS COMMUTER CHAOS was a spread of photographs: the southern mouth of the tunnel, a queue of relief buses waiting at Havant station and finally a shot of a smallish group of police officers in conference beside the Buriton pond.

To his amusement, amongst the familiar faces Faraday recognised himself. Beside the looming figure of Jerry Proctor, he looked smaller and older than he’d somehow assumed. The beard didn’t help, the way it was visibly greying, but there was something in the stoop of his shoulders that spoke of a deep weariness. Maybe he needed another holiday, he thought. By himself, this time.

He returned to the paper, scanning the accompanying story. To his relief, no one appeared to have talked. There was mention of an ‘incident’ and the implication of a body on the line, but the thrust of the story - the meatiest quotes - came from disgruntled passengers. There was a grid of faces on page three. These were busy people. They had lives to lead. Schedules to keep. Deadlines to meet. Life, said one of them, should be a great deal simpler than this. Faraday read the quote twice, then found himself nodding in agreement. Too right, he thought.

‘Sir?’ It was Proctor. Faraday showed him the picture on the front page. Proctor barely spared it a glance. ‘We’ve found a padlock. Thought you ought to know.’

Faraday looked up at him. He knew from the glint in his eye there was something else.

‘And?’

‘A key.’

 

Faraday was in conference with the Crime Scene Coordinator when Winter tapped on his office door, back at the Major Crimes Suite. The CSC, a cheerful DI from the force training HQ at Netley, got up to shake Winter’s hand and congratulate him on beating the odds.

‘Odds?’ Winter hadn’t a clue what he was talking about.

‘Brain job.’ He tapped his own skull. ‘The big C. Every article I’ve ever read says you’re a gonner. Can’t have been easy, operation like that.’

‘Picnic,’ Winter said drily. ‘Recommend it to anyone. ’ He turned to Faraday, readying the Misper file he’d grabbed on the way out of his office. ‘You belled me, boss.’

‘That’s right.’ Faraday began to hunt amongst the papers on his desk. Finally he found what he was looking for. ‘Here. It came out of the tunnel this afternoon. The key fits. We’ve tried it.’