The Take (19 page)

‘Hey, neat idea.’

‘But that obviously depends …’ Faraday nodded at the pad clutched in her hand, not bothering to finish the sentence.

She beamed down at him for a moment longer, evidently thrilled by the news that he was about to turn a page in his life, then backed out of the office. Minutes later, with Faraday busy on the phone, she was back with a large white envelope. She sealed it with a lick and left it balanced on the keyboard of his PC.

Faraday studied it while he finished his conversation. The Mercedes had been lifted onto a recovery vehicle and trucked to secure storage by a firm on Hayling Island. Among the items recovered from the residues in the footwell on the passenger side was seventy-five pence in coins and a tempered steel blade that just might have belonged to a surgical scalpel.

The conversation over, Faraday opened the envelope. Inside was a Larsen Far Side card featuring a field full of cows. ‘I bought this for my nephew’s birthday’, Joyce had written, ‘but I guess you beat him to it. I talked to Vodafone, by the way, and the number you need is 07772 456372.’

Vodafone?

Faraday looked up. Joyce was back in the doorway with her third coffee since lunch. She nodded at the card, scolding him for opening it a day early.

‘Vodafone?’

‘They rang this morning and tried to give me the run-around. They’ve got Prentice’s account details but there’s some kind of waiting list for print-outs. You have to sit tight and take your turn.’

Faraday was up to speed now. Vodafone had supplied Matthew Prentice’s mobile. One look at his account would tell them whether he’d been on the phone when he killed Vanessa Parry.

‘And this is the number he was phoning?’

‘Yep.’

‘So how come you got hold of it?’

Joyce, anticipating the question, was already grinning.

‘The girl was American.’ She handed him the coffee. ‘We Yanks stick together.’

Winter was home by just gone six. He left the car in the street and tried the side door that led into the kitchen. If Joannie hadn’t made it back, he’d drive to the station and wait for her there.

The side door was unlocked. Winter looked round the kitchen, calling her name, wondering whether she might be asleep again. The kettle was cold and the cat, winding itself around his ankles, appeared not to have been fed. He went next door, into the lounge, finding the television on but the sound turned down. His wife’s slippers were on the carpet beside the sofa.

Winter turned towards the open door, raising his voice.

‘Joannie? You here, love?’

Again, no reply. The front door was secured on the deadlock. Retreating back down the hall, he pushed softly at the bedroom door. The curtains were drawn against the early-evening sun but the little window at the top must have been open because he could hear the put-put-put of next door’s sprinkler. He peered into the shadowed room, relieved to see the shape of Joannie’s body under the light summer duvet. He whispered her name again but got no response. Asleep, he thought, stepping back into the hall.

For a moment, he thought about getting some food ready for when she awoke, then decided against it. What Joannie’s mother had failed to suss was the state of her daughter’s insides. She no longer took regular meals. Instead, at the oddest hours, she snacked on mush.

Back in the bedroom, he tiptoed across to the bed. Joannie lay on her side, her greying hair splayed across the pillow, her knees drawn up the way she always slept. Her breathing was very slow, the way you might breathe if you were in some sealed chamber way underground. Her lips were a strange shade of blue and there was a flecked white chalky deposit caked in the corners of her mouth. Winter, looking at her, felt the first faint stirrings of panic. He’d been in situations like this before. He recognised the symptoms, knew where clues like these might lead.

They kept all the tablets in a cabinet in the bathroom. Joannie had the middle shelf, a carefully sorted collection of painkillers, sinus tablets and sleeping potions, lately supplemented by heavier prescription drugs. Winter stared at them now, not knowing quite what he was looking for. Anadin? Ibuprofen? He could see neither.

Beside the bed, he bent down to Joannie and began to shake her, gently at first, then with more force. Her body felt floppy and sack-like. No matter what he did, he couldn’t rouse her.

‘Joannie? Shit …’

On his hands and knees, he began to search under the bed, looking for a discarded bottle of pills, a note, anything. The other side, his side, was also empty. He fumbled for his mobile, dialling 999, asking for an ambulance, still hunting for whatever it was she’d taken. Only when the operator was checking his address did he find what he was looking for.

He’d pulled back the duvet and the sheet. His wife’s thin body was curled protectively around a small white plastic container. The label read
PARACETAMOL:
40 tablets. The container was empty.

At the hospital, hours later, Winter was still sitting beside Joannie’s bed. The ICU staff kept appearing to check the drips and the monitor read-outs, but Winter barely registered their presence. Outside, he thought it was getting dark. Inside, in the very middle of him, it was pitch black, an inky nothingness that seemed to have put the future beyond rational calculation.

Instinctively, he knew why she’d done it. In her place, had he been brave or desperate enough, he might well have tried something similar. But that wasn’t the point. The point was that by giving life a nudge, by accelerating the inevitable, she’d forced Winter to acknowledge what awaited him. Now, or later, he’d be totally alone. There was no way round it, no escape. It was Joannie slowly dying by his side, but it was more than that. It was the whole of his adult life, the whole of that long sequence of minor and major betrayals he’d turned into a twenty-four-year marriage. He didn’t feel remorse. He didn’t regret that he’d never apologised for not making life sweeter for her. It wasn’t about that at all. It was about him. And about what came next.

Past midnight, with the doctors worrying about the possibility of brain damage, he phoned Faraday. He’d never felt so cold in his life.

‘Me,’ he said, when Faraday answered. ‘Winter.’

‘What’s the matter?’

‘Nothing. That squad of yours. Count me in.’

He was still looking at Joannie. Her face was grey against the whiteness of the pillow. She gave a little sigh – regret, perhaps, or maybe even amusement – and then her breathing resumed the same slow rhythm, the trace lines barely spiking against the black of the overhead monitor screens.

Seventeen

Saturday, 24 June, morning

Half-awake, Faraday was still dreaming about the lamp-posts. They were brand new, a boldly modern design, street furniture to garnish the city’s huge harbourside restoration scheme. Already they’d appeared in Old Portsmouth, eyecatching lines of them. The lamps themselves were hung from crescent-shaped supports, bolted to the upward slash of the post, and each lamp was topped with a glass filter, the deepest blue, so that every night the harbour was necklaced with tiny jewels. In the paper, they’d said that the filtered light was visible from the moon, something to do with the colour frequency, and Faraday half-believed it because the effect after dark was so magical.

Colour was the key. The blue of the jewels and the white of the lamps stole into this dream of his, a squad of lamp-posts on the march, implacable, terrifying, locked together in perfect formation. On Hot Walls, the fortifications overlooking the approaches to the harbourmouth, they paused beside Tower House for a conference. Dawn was approaching. The clouds were pinked with the rising sun but it was still chilly. Faraday hid behind the thick stone battlements, desperate to catch what they were saying, desperate to find out whether he’d been seen. Haunted by a lifelong terror of rats, he felt a scuff against his shoe and peered down in the half-darkness. Nothing. Then he heard a sigh, and the beginnings of laughter, and when he looked up again he found himself staring at a lamp-post, the white light in his eyes, barely feet away.

He awoke at last, fumbling for the alarm clock. Six o’clock exactly. Late. He lay motionless for a minute or two, ridding himself of the nightmare, then padded through to the bathroom and doused his face in cold water. Joyce had managed to organise a briefing of sorts last night and he knew there was little he could add to the Hennessey inquiry until the crop of current actions yielded some kind of harvest. Ferguson, his DS, had searched the New Forest cottage. He’d called out the security firm to disable the alarm before forcing an entry, but found nothing to warrant a Scenes of Crime operation. Sour milk in the fridge and a pile of post on the door mat suggested that the place hadn’t been lived in for a while. The neighbours next door were out, but the folk across the road hadn’t seen Hennessey for nearly a week.

Only at the village pub did inquiries turn up a positive lead. Hennessey had booked himself one of his regular rides at a local stables for Thursday morning, but had failed to turn up. The owner of the stables had been concerned enough to try his mobile, but several calls failed to get through. Armed with the mobile number, Ferguson had commissioned urgent inquiries but was still awaiting a response from Cellnet.

Faraday’s other DCs, meanwhile, were pursuing inquiries in Old Portsmouth. Already, at the Sally Port, they’d drawn a blank. Staff at the hotel confirmed that he often stayed, but no one seemed to have seen him for at least a week. Pete Lamb, to Faraday’s disgust, had been right. Once he’d left the Marriott, up in the north of the city, Hennessey had simply disappeared.

The postman came at a quarter to seven. Faraday, still wrapped in a towel, sat in the kitchen sorting through the half-dozen envelopes. The fact that there was nothing from Ruth wasn’t really a surprise – she seemed to regard birthdays, including her own, with total indifference – but more hurtful was the total absence of anything with a French stamp on it. Maybe J-J had muddled up the date, he thought. Maybe there’s been a strike or something over in Caen. Maybe the card’s with the rest of the mail on the midday ferry and won’t be delivered until Monday.

He didn’t know, and wished he didn’t care, consoling himself with a double-rasher bacon sandwich and a retreat upstairs to his study, where his second-hand coastguard binos, mounted on a refurbished stand, awaited him in the big picture window. For a while, he did his best to bury his disappointment among the turnstones and oyster catchers feeding on the foreshore below, but the thought of his absent son wouldn’t go away. What was he up to? How was he coping? Had Hennessey not gone missing, Faraday would be on the ferry now, en route for Caen and a surprise weekend visit, but as it was he was trapped by the ongoing inquiries, obliged to wait at the end of a telephone in case anything important turned up.

A cormorant settled on a distant piling, spreading its wings to dry, and Faraday reached for the focus ring, wishing it hadn’t been one of J-J’s favourite birds. As a kid, he’d gone through a phase of drawing cormorants on the big flip-charts that Faraday occasionally liberated from the CID stationery cupboard. The best of them, a wild confection in mauve and green Pentel that made the birds look positively prehistoric, still hung on his study wall.

Nearly an hour later, motionless at his scope, Faraday heard a car pull up outside. Moments later, someone was ringing at the front door. It was Marta. She stood in the sunshine in a pair of denim shorts and a Prada T-shirt. Her hair was tied up in a twist of scarlet and she was carrying a large present, flamboyantly wrapped in lime-green paper.

‘
Bonne anniversaire
,’ she said, kissing him. ‘Happy forty-second.’

Faraday, astonished, invited her in.

‘How did you know?’

‘I asked your age the other night. You told me. To the day.’ She kissed him again. ‘You don’t remember anything, do you?’

It took Winter most of the morning to get a home number for Alan Ashworth. He was still at the hospital, still haunting the long corridor outside the intensive care unit, but from time to time he’d take little excursions down in the lift and out into the sunshine, making calls on his mobile, grateful for the chance to think of something else beside Joannie. This morning the ICU staff were more optimistic about her chances. Her vital signs were better, they said. She was still unconscious, but there was definitely an agreement that she’d pull through. Be nice to have her back again, they seemed to be saying. If only for a couple of months.

It was the woman who ran the press office for the hospital trust who finally came through with Ashworth’s number. Winter knew her from way back, an inquiry about a serious Saturday-night assault in the A&E department, and this morning he’d played the CID card again in his determination to trace the consultant who’d saved Nikki McIntyre’s life. Normally, decisions to release home numbers could only come from way up the management tree, but on this occasion, at Winter’s suggestion, the press officer rang Ashworth herself and secured his consent. He lived out in Denmead. He was off sailing after lunch but could spare Winter a couple of minutes if he got up there smartish.

Ashworth was in his back garden when Winter arrived, a tall, fit-looking man who pushed the mower up and down the quarter acre of lawn with a stern sense of purpose. His cropped hair was greying at the edges and his eyes, deep set, gave little away. When Winter apologised for intruding, he simply nodded. Normally, he’d never dream of discussing a patient’s case history. Only the fact that Nikki had rung him personally had made him break this iron rule.

‘She’s been on?’

‘Yesterday afternoon.’

‘And what did she say?’

Ashworth didn’t answer. His wife came out of the house with a couple of glasses of something cold.

‘Apple juice,’ Ashworth explained shortly. ‘What is it you want to know?’

They talked on the long flagstoned terrace at the back of the house. Winter explained his interest in the operation that Ashworth had performed after Nikki had been rushed in by ambulance. She said she’d been in pain. Pain so terrible she couldn’t find the words to describe it.

‘I can believe that,’ he said.

The pain had been in the abdominal area. An external examination had revealed a gross swelling and he’d operated within the hour, finding her single remaining ovary ballooned to the size of a honeydew melon. Another twelve hours, he said, and septicaemia would have killed her.

‘Whose fault was that?’

Ashworth was toying with his empty glass.

‘It’s difficult to say.’

‘But she’d just had another operation, hadn’t she?’

‘Yes.’

‘Done by Hennessey.’

‘Yes.’

‘So was there a connection? Cause and effect?’

Ashworth frowned, unhappy with the crudeness of the linkage.

‘Every operation carries a modicum of risk. You have to be careful about attribution of blame.’

‘But Hennessey was the only one who’d operated before, no?’

‘That’s true. And I must say his work wasn’t pretty.’

‘Does that make him incompetent?’

‘Possibly.’

‘What else could he have been?’

There was a a long silence. Ashworth was gazing out at his half-mown lawn, deep in thought. At length, he asked whether this was a criminal investigation. Winter told him it wasn’t. Not yet.

‘Then I want you to understand that this is off the record. I have no intention of giving you a statement or of appearing in court. If you ever quote me back, I shall deny it. Is that understood?’

‘Perfectly.’

‘Good.’

Another silence. Still Ashworth seemed undecided. Winter mentioned Nikki again. They’d talked at length. She’d gone into great detail. The suggestion that Winter should bother Ashworth was hers, not his.

‘I know,’ he said. ‘She told me. That’s why I agreed to this.’

His wife appeared with another carton of apple juice. Again, Ashworth didn’t introduce her. When she’d gone, he sat forward on the wrought-iron chair, his elbows on his knees, his decision made.

After that first afternoon in theatre, he’d operated on Nikki twice more, repairing the worst of Hennessey’s work. An investigation of her internal scars, coupled with an exhaustive patient history, had led him to conclude that most of the operations performed by Hennessey had been unnecessary. Her original problem was gastro-enteric, nothing to do with her reproductive system. There was absolutely no clinical reason to have removed her womb and one of her ovaries.

‘So why did Hennessey operate at all?’

‘That’s a very pertinent question. First time round, he might have done it blind, strictly as an exploratory option. Surgeons do that all the time. It’s standard procedure. But after that, you’d be looking for another explanation.’

‘And?’

Ashworth glanced up at him. He wasn’t enjoying this.

‘In my opinion,’ he said slowly, ‘I think he wanted her back.’

‘But how could he do that?’

‘By making deliberate mistakes. Every time he operated, he left a little calling card, an unstitched incision, a deliberately loose suture. Once you knew what you were looking for, his signature was all over her. In time, the wound would break down. And then she’d be on the phone again, wanting – needing – to come back.’

Winter was staring at him, mesmerised.

‘But why? Why would he want to do that?’

Ashworth tipped back his head, staring up at the blueness of the sky. Then he glanced at his watch and extended a hand.

‘I can’t say it’s been a pleasure, Mr Winter.’ His grip was firm. ‘But good luck, all the same.’

Cathy Lamb sat on the pebbles at Hayling Island, watching Pete racing out towards the distant curve of the sandbar, his body hanging way off the windsurfer in the stiffening breeze. The invitation to join him for the day had come first thing. With another empty weekend yawning before her, Cathy had been happy to say yes. Half-close your eyes, she thought, and the events of the last year or so need never have happened.

She’d thrown a picnic together in the time it had taken for him to drive up to the neat little Portchester semi he’d once called home. She’d made sandwiches with thick wedges of Cheddar and coated them with Marmite, the way she knew he liked. She’d run down to the corner store and bought crisps and a four-pack of Guinness. By the time he arrived, she’d even managed to change into something that proved she’d shed the stone she’d put on over the winter. A big woman, sturdily built, she’d managed to absorb the extra weight without too many dramas, but now, with the help of a gym subscription and twice-weekly aerobics, she was back in shape again. She knew exactly what turned Pete on when she’d first met him and she believed Dawn Ellis when she said that men never change their ways. Lately, somewhat to her own surprise, she’d begun to ache for him.

Pete was coming back now, tramping the board over the waves, hauling in the boom and skidding sideways to avoid a gaggle of swimmers trying to coax a ride from the modest surf. He sailed the board the way he seemed to organise this new life of his, with minimum effort and maximum pleasure, and watching him Cathy was glad that all the angst, the endless letters and midnight phone calls, was over. He was recognisably the guy she’d first dragged off to bed during Nationals week at Weymouth. She’d been crewing for a friend of her brother. Pete had been helming on a borrowed 470. They’d got pissed together in a pub down near the harbour and they’d gone back to her B&B after closing time. She’d fancied him then, like she fancied him now. Dawn again. And the way life just went round and round.

Pete wanted to know whether she wanted the board. The wind was great, picking up nicely. She shook her head, throwing him a towel and spreading the blanket. If the sun stayed this hot, she might have to go topless. The last thing she wanted to talk about was Joe bloody Faraday.

‘He’s totally out of order.’ Pete was inspecting the inside of his sandwich. ‘I’ve been thinking about what you said.’

‘It doesn’t matter. Forget it. It’s what blokes like him do. I thought he was better than that, but I got him wrong. He’s greedy, that’s all.’

She dismissed him with a shrug, but Pete wouldn’t let it go. She should do something about it. Put up a fight.

‘Like how?’

‘Like go and see Willard. There are two sides to every story. He’s only heard one.’

‘And what do I say?’

‘You say that the Hennessey thing happened in your patch, that there are procedures here, a kind of protocol thing, and that people like Faraday don’t have the right to just’ – he shrugged – ‘take it away from you. You’re a DI, Cath. You have rights here. He’s treating you like a bloody infant.’