Nocturne

by Hurley, Graham

  Reviews for previous Graham Hurley novels

  SABBATHMAN

  ‘Graham Hurley is on a roll… convincing and disturbing’

  DAILY TELEGRAPH

  A thriller with a lethal plot, sharply drawn characters and a nail-biting ending’

  PUBLISHING NEWS

  ‘Puts him firmly in the premier league of British thriller writers.

  One of the best thrillers I’ve read in years’

  YORKSHIRE EVENING PRESS

  Probably one of the best thrillers you’ll ever read’

  LANCASHIRE EVENING TELEGRAPH

  ‘It’s all done with a high degree of plausibility and hard-edged topicality and comes recommended’

  GLASGOW EVENING TIMES

  ‘Brilliant stuff of the kind that keeps you awake at night’

  NORTH EASTERN GAZETTE

  THE PERFECT SOLDIER

  ‘A thriller full of compassion and excitement… the pace never flags. A gem of a story’

  PUBLISHING NEWS

  ‘A moving story… unique and gripping.”

  PETERBOROUGH EVENING TELEGRAPH

  Passionate and powerful… one hell of a compelling read’

  DARLINGTON NORTHERN ECHO

  ‘Compelling and thought-provoking’

  YORKSHIRE EVENING POST

  ‘A book written from the heart, a book that deserves to be read all the more because of it’

  EXETER EXPRESS & ECHO

  NOCTURNE

  Also by Graham Hurley

  RULES OF ENGAGEMENT

  REAPER

  THE DEVIL’S BREATH

  THUNDER IN THE BLOOD

  SABBATHMAN

  THE PERFECT SOLDIER

  HEAVEN’S LIGHT

  NOCTURNE

  Graham Hurley

  Copyright © Graham Hurley 1998

  All rights reserved

  The right of Graham Hurley to be identified as the author

  of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with

  the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1998.

  First published in Great Britain in 1998 by Orion

  An imprint of Orion Books Ltd

  Orion House, 5 Upper St Martin’s Lane

  London WC2H9EA

  A CIP catalogue record for this book

  is available from the British Library

  ISBN o 75281 304 8 (hardcover)

  o 75281 305 6 (trade paperback)

  Typeset at The Spartan Press Ltd,

  Lymington, Hants

  Printed in Great Britain by

  Clays Ltd, St Ives

  For Jane and Simon

  with love

  ‘La nuit bien-aimee. La nuit, la raison dort,

  et simplement les choses sont.’

  ‘Pilote de Guerre’

  Antoine de Saint Exupéry

  Prologue

  If this were a film, the opening sequence would find me in bed. It’s half past four in the morning, still dark. I’ve been awake all night, worried sick about Billie. Billie is my baby daughter. She’s nearly three months old. This afternoon, in a local park, someone took her away.

  I’d been in the cafe for maybe a second or two longer than usual. I was buying myself a sticky bun and a can of Diet Coke. There were lots of people and I had to push my way through to get back outside. The pram was still there, hard up against the window. But Billie had gone.

  In the flat upstairs, I can hear Gilbert on patrol, six steps across, nine steps up and down. He’s been walking the circuit for hours on end, caged in his own back room, as helpless and as desperate as I am. I broke the news this afternoon. It was obvious he didn’t believe it and neither can I. I thought that finding Billie gone was the worst moment of my life but every hour that passes makes the feeling worse. What kind of monster takes a baby like that? What kind of mother lets it happen?

  I think guilt must wall you off from the world because it takes me longer than usual to pick up the sound of movement outside my bedroom window. I first put the footsteps down to party-goers from the squat across the back. Then, very distinctly, I hear a squeaking hinge. It belongs to the kitchen door that leads to the garden. There’s a whispered conversation, two people at least, then silence again. Even Gilbert’s footsteps overhead have stopped.

  Given what I’ve been through these last few hours - indeed, these, last few months – I suppose I should be hardened to excitements like these but sadly I’m not. I pull the sheet up to my chin. I shut my eyes. I say a prayer. Dear God, please let all this stop.

  Seconds later, my bedroom door is opening. I search for the light beside my bed but the torch has already found me. I hear a voice, male, urgent.

  ‘Miss?’

  I’m shielding my eyes. I expect the worst. It doesn’t happen. ‘Get dressed. Quick as you can, love.’

  At last I’ve found the light switch. My visitor is wearing a black jump suit. His hands are gloved. Across the buttoned pocket on his chest, a velcroed strip reads DC Flowers. I should ask him how he forced the door, what right he’s got to be here, but this list of sensible questions is the last thing on my mind.

  It’s about Billie, I say. It’s about my baby. Have they found her? Has he come with news? It’s obvious he hasn’t a clue what I’m talking about. He tells me again to get dressed, to keep calm. The street is being evacuated.

  ‘Evacuated?’

  He nods, backing towards the door.

  ‘You’ve got two minutes’ he says. ‘Then you’re out of here.’

  Outside, it’s freezing. At the far end of the street, a double-decker bus is filling with other residents. I join them on board. Faces I recognise: families, babies, students, drop-outs, old folk. We’re all half-asleep, wall-eyed, bewildered. The place is swarming with police. Everywhere you look there are men and women murmuring into radios. They looked watchful, keyed up. Of Gilbert, I realise, there’s absolutely no sign.

  A couple of minutes later, after a head count, they drive us away. The local library has obviously been opened specially. There are mattresses on the floor and a pile of neatly folded blankets. A woman behind the issuing counter is dispensing mugs of cocoa from a big urn.

  We whisper to each other, neighbour to neighbour, wondering what possibly might have happened. No one seems to have any information. After a while, curled up beside Fiction G-J, I try to sleep but Billie won’t let me. I want her back. I want her in my arms. Nothing else in the world matters.

  Later, I’m not sure when, I feel a hand on my shoulder. It’s Gaynor. She squats beside me, as sane and sensible as ever, a radio in her hand. I’ve never seen her in black before. It suits her.

  ‘You OK?’ she says.

  I blink. What a silly question. ‘Have they found her?’

  She shakes her head and says there’s been no news. I explain about the park, and the cafe, and the way it had happened, so abrupt, so sudden, but I can tell from the look in her eyes that she’s got something else on her mind.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ she asks.

  ‘Tell you what?’

  She stares at me a moment, the kind of look my mother used to give me as a child when I’d done something wicked.

  ‘Gilbert?’ Gaynor says softly. ‘Are you really telling me you didn’t know?’

  One

  Film-making brought me to London. I was twenty-three years old. I had a degree in media production from Bournemouth University, a cardboard box full of windsurfing trophies, and a debt that - by October, 1996 - was nudging £6,000. Most of this money I owed my father and aft
er his abrupt death - a stroke followed, mercifully, by a massive heart attack - my mother was nice enough to call it quits. He’d left her a modest sum in various stocks and shares and I suspect it softened her grief to think that his passing returned me to solvency.

  At the time, I’m ashamed to say that I was less grateful for this gesture than perhaps I should have been. I had my own problems with losing my dad like that and whether or not I still owed him £6,000 was the last thing on my mind. In any case, money was irrelevant, merely the preoccupation of a society I was desperate to expose as greedy, self-centred, and in most cases bloody unfair. Unlike the vast majority of my buddies at Bournemouth, I wanted to change the world.

  Was I naive? Probably. At Bournemouth, a large part of your final year is devoted to what they call ‘the major project’. This is a ten- minute video and it counts thirty-five per cent towards the degree. They give you a word or a phrase, like a chord on the piano, and you develop it in whatever direction you like. Our theme was ‘Letting Go’. Bournemouth isn’t California, but there are lots of young people in the town, and a great beach, and sunshine, and most of the final year opted for various combinations of rave music, soft drugs, and moodily-lit raunch.

  To no one’s surprise, I went for something altogether more gritty. I wanted to explore the urban wastelands, those scruffy inner-city Bantustans where the underclass had been cast adrift. The link with ‘Letting Go’ was a bit tenuous but the invitation was there to explore the phrase at every level and it seemed to me that poverty and a general sense of lostness could drive weaker individuals over the brink. In retrospect, of course, I was dead right, prescient even, but at the time my theory was pretty half-baked, an undergraduate mix of Irvine Welsh, The Big Issue, and the songs of Billy Bragg.

  Bournemouth, alas, was quite the wrong setting for what I had in mind. It has its share of Nineties blight - there’s an alarming heroin problem - but images are everything in video and the town looks far too leafy and prosperous to sustain even ten minutes of inner-city grief. I wanted rain-stained concrete, drifts of sodden chip wrappers, vandalised cars, abandoned supermarket trolleys, flattened cans of Special Brew. I wanted drug dealers, teenage mums, gangs of rampaging kids, huddles of bent pensioners, faces and lives hollowed out by the blessings of the Thatcher years. None of them were available in Bournemouth in quite the right combination but after a three day recce I found the council estate of my dreams in Southampton, the next city up the coast.

  The estate overlooked Southampton Water. Every wall had been spray-painted with graffiti and the man from the Social Services warned me about leaving my borrowed car unlocked. The estate even had tower blocks, wonderfully gaunt, where the lifts never worked, the windows leaked, and no one in their right mind ventured out after dark. I spent most of the day there and afterwards I sat on the crescent of tarry pebbles by the water, committing my impressions to paper. Behind me, the tower blocks threw long shadows across the bleak expanse of windswept concrete and when I got back to the car I found kids loitering nearby, waiting for me to find the flattened scabs of chewing gum over the keyhole on the driver’s door. ‘Brilliant,’ I remember scribbling at the bottom of my location notes, underlining the word three times.

  Making the video was harder going than I expected. For one thing, the people I wanted to feature wouldn’t let me anywhere near them. I’d pick up gossip about battered women or schoolgirls on the game or - in one block - rumours of a black guy who was dealing huge quantities of stolen amphetamine. Yet when I knocked on the relevant door, or ambushed a particular individual in the lift, I got nothing but silence or a shake of the head. However hard I earbashed them, these people just didn’t want to know. They were, I told myself, totally alienated, totally out of it. In the spirit of our final year project, society had let them go and this was the result.

  Happy that I was on track, I abandoned documentary and settled for actors and a script, threading a number of my precious storylines through the video, cutting the grainy black and white pictures to a track from my favourite Counting Crows album. The finished piece was wonderfully depressing, a sour cocktail of Nineties angst, exactly the kind of personal statement I wanted to put in front of my fellow cineastes. Already, I knew I was tipped for a First. When the summons to appear for a viva arrived, I looked the external examiner in the eye, warming up our encounter with my usual rant about the iniquities of capitalism. He listened with great courtesy, making the odd note, and when I finished by asked him what he felt about the piece, it was his turn to be direct.

  ‘You’ve got a good eye for a shot and I like the music very much,’ he smiled. ‘Maybe you should think about MTV.’

  I got the First but what stuck in my mind was the line about MTV. Was he serious? Had I really condemned myself to an eternity of music videos? Was I kidding myself trying to carve out a career as the new Ken Loach? For three months, like a couple of thousand other media graduates, I wrote to every address I could find, enclosing my CV, pitching my ideas, begging for work. The mainstream broadcasting companies didn’t want to know. The smaller production houses mostly didn’t answer. Even when I descended to the level of provincial advertising agencies, the replies were less than encouraging. I was beginning to think seriously about wedding videos when a letter arrived with a London N1 postmark.

  It came from a man called Brendan Quayle. He was one of the founding partners of Doubleact, a biggish London production company. He’d seen my letter and my CV and my eight outlines for various documentary series, and he wanted to meet me with a view to discussing a job. I read the letter twice then looked for my mother to share the good news. Our patience with each other was beginning to run out. Only the previous week she’d been making serious noises about secretarial work or looking for a job where I could use what she termed ‘my looks’.

  My looks, incidentally, are nothing special, at least not according to the evidence I see in the mirror. My mouth is slightly crooked, giving my face a lop-sided cast, my chest is unfashionably large, and I’d kill to be another couple of inches taller. Put these items together, and I totally fail to understand the effect I seem to have on men. They talk of my long blonde hair, and my ‘Scandinavian’ cheekbones and the sexy way I’m supposed to wave my hands about. One ex-boyfriend even likened me to a Victoria plum. I was, he said, ‘ripe’.

  Doubleact operated from a handsome three-storied house in Islington. I waited for forty minutes in a cubby hole on the ground floor, listening to the girl on the switchboard trying to cope with floods of incoming calls. Doubleact had made themselves a nice little corner in late-night entertainment. Most of their stuff went out on BBC2 or Channel Four, mildly anarchic quiz shows, fuelled by barbed wit and close-quarters nastiness. Their latest offering, Don’t Call Me Luvvie, Luvvie, had been one of the surprise hits of the summer season. Guest actors slagged each other off for half an hour while the quizmaster drove the wagon forward at breakneck speed. It was news to me that Doubleact should be remotely interested in my sort of documentary work, but I certainly wasn’t there to complain.

  Brendan Quayle had an office on the top floor. Autumn sunshine flooded in through the big sash windows and he seemed to have angled the desk so that most of it landed on the huge pile of scripts beside his telephone. On the wall behind the desk he’d hung framed press ads for some of Doubleact’s shows. Luuvies featured a blow-up of the best weekly audience figure, a big fat 5.6 million.

  ‘I watched this.’ He tossed me the video I’d sent. Twice.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Crap.’

  He was a freckled, lean, intense-looking man. He wore a pair of baggy cords and a rather nice collarless shirt. His sandy hair was beginning to thin and he looked knackered but there was mischief in his eyes and I liked that.

  I looked down at the video in my lap. After my signed Van Morrison CD, my Bournemouth major project was the most precious thing in my life.

  ‘Crap?’ I
inquired mildly.

  ‘Yep. Every cliché in the book. Plus one or two I’d never seen before.’

  ‘Isn’t that a contradiction in terms? A cliché you’ve never seen before?’

  He studied me a moment then conceded the point with a grin. Instinctively, I had the feeling I’d passed some kind of test. He rummaged in a drawer and produced my CV.

  ‘I went through this, too. Impressive.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘You liked it down in Bournemouth?’

  ‘Sometimes. Half and half really.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  I thought about the question, wondering whether he was serious. In the end I decided there was nothing wrong with the truth.

  ‘It was OK,’ I said. I had a good time, good mates, all that stuff, but I think we were a bit pleased with ourselves.’

  ‘Socially?’

  ‘Politically. We were all too lazy, too complacent, too… I dunno .. .’ I frowned, trying to find the right word.

  ‘Middle class?’

  ‘Yes, and privileged. Hard times were when you couldn’t find the mobile phone. You know what I’m saying?’

  He put his head back, barking with laughter, then he began to flick through the CV again. I’d sent a photo, too, paperclipped to the front . page, but that seemed to have disappeared. His finger had stopped halfway down page two.