Big Cathy Lamb with her bursting heart and limitless, headstrong loyalties. Little Dawn Ellis with her trophy rugby shirts and chaotic love life. Then the older guys like Rick McGivern and Bev Yates. Bev had swapped dreams of football stardom for a brace of jet-skis and marriage to a woman half his age. Invited to the reception, Faraday had marvelled at Bev’s sheer nerve. Melanie, his new wife, was beautiful, and educated, and came from a solid naval family in the Meon Valley – at least three reasons for giving Bev a very wide berth indeed.
Faraday smiled at the memories. They’d all clubbed together to buy the happy couple a jumbo-sized fridge. They’d filled it with champagne, foie gras, truffles, Belgian chocolate – plus a year’s subscription to Loaded – and after Rick McGivern’s best-man speech in the big reception tent behind the family spread, they’d all got drunk together. Even Faraday had succumbed and for one glorious afternoon he was able to shed the job title and most of the rest of his life, and simply marvel at the daftness of it all. Bev Yates. In the bosom of a family like this.
Even Paul Winter had made an effort. Bumping into him in the hired de luxe Portaloos behind the stables, Faraday had mumbled something about Bev not being able to believe his luck. Winter had grinned his evil grin, unzipped his fly, and then laughed.
‘Neither can we, boss. Neither can fucking we. Good, though, innit?’
And it was.
That night, Faraday drove down to the ferryport to meet the incoming boat from Caen. A final check on the PC at home had revealed no further e-mails and Faraday could only assume that J-J hadn’t – after all – decided to flog his return ticket. Now he stood in the window of the arrivals’ hall, watching the towering, slab-sided hull nudge alongside.
Already, it seemed like months since he’d seen the boy. Twenty-two years together had imposed a certain pattern on the way they’d lived, measuring out the beginnings and ends of each day with the small courtesies of a shared life. An early-morning cup of tea for J-J before he struggled upright from the wreckage of his bed. An exchange of signs on the state of the shopping list. A couple of early-evening beers and a chat before tackling the supper. With J-J so suddenly gone, these routines had lapsed, and with the boy due back again Faraday had become aware of a fluttering in his stomach that he’d at first put down to indigestion. Only towards the end of the afternoon, with his in-tray down to manageable proportions, had he realised the truth. That he was nervous.
A couple of pints in the pub round the corner from the ferryport had helped. He’d settled in a corner of the bar, trying to read the evening paper, telling himself that this was absurd. J-J was his son, not his lover. But even the second Guinness, normally so reliable, had failed to achieve the right degree of numbness. Six days ago, J-J’s departure had thrown him into confusion. Now, with the ferry moored alongside, Faraday was even further from any kind of peace.
Cars from the crossing began to whine past. Faraday left the window and walked towards the mouth of the arrivals’ tunnel. Back-packers appeared in twos and threes, then came a big group of French schoolkids, chattering away to each other. A couple of families followed in their wake, and a moment or two later a small, plump priest arrived, gazing across the concourse through thick pebble glasses. Faraday watched him for a moment, wondering if his son had, after all, sold his ticket, when he felt a tiny pressure on his arm. He spun round to find himself looking at J-J’s lopsided grin.
Awkwardly, the boy held out a bony hand. He was tall, taller than his father, and the blond curls had darkened since his days making sandcastles on the beach at Eastney, but he had Janna’s eyes – big and candid – and that same knack of defusing a potentially awkward moment.
‘Got ya,’ he signed.
They had a private vocabulary of sign, father and son, letting the years add little flourishes to the repertoire that they’d both picked up at J-J’s special school. ‘Got ya’ was two fingers tapping the soft skin beneath J-J’s right eye, followed by the index pointing at Faraday, and now, as always, Faraday ducked the way you might try and duck a bullet, miming a chest wound over the heart to signal that the boy had, indeed, taken him by surprise.
Recovering, he picked up the heavier of J-J’s two rucksacks, absurdly pleased that the newly arrived priest had witnessed the exchange, and looped one strap over his shoulder. J-J was wearing a brand new denim jacket and jeans, but he hadn’t shaved for days and the dark growth of beard gave his long face an entirely new cast. The boy loped beside him towards the sliding exit doors and they were out in the car park before Faraday realised exactly what difference the beard had made.
‘You look French,’ he signed, touching the newly sewn tricolour on the back of J-J’s rucksack.
J-J beamed back, delighted, and when he shifted the weight of the rucksack on his back Faraday saw the thin silver chain around his son’s neck. J-J had never expressed the slightest interest in rings or chains or any other kind of bodily ornament. Never. Now, aware of his father’s curiosity, he reached behind his neck and undid the clasp, offering the chain for Faraday’s inspection.
‘A present,’ he signed, ‘from Valerie.’
On the way home, Faraday stopped to pick up fish and chips. They ate it together in the kitchen, straight from the paper, not bothering with plates, but when Faraday delved in a cupboard and emerged triumphant with a brand new bottle of his son’s favourite brown sauce, J-J shook his head. For the first time in his life, he’d stripped the fish of batter, picking daintily at the plump flakes of cod, and Faraday watched him with a deepening sense of bewilderment. Already they seemed to have run out of things to say to each other. It was like eating with a stranger.
After supper, he made a renewed attempt to find out what had happened in Caen. Had he got on with Valerie’s family? With the French in general? Had he made friends out there? Had he seen anything in the way of birdlife?
The latter question produced a derisory shake of the head. He and Valerie had been far too busy for birds. They’d been out every night, out to bars, and clubs, and the flats of Valerie’s friends. J-J had met lots and lots of people and he’d loved them all, especially the ones who knew how to sign. Signing was international. Signing meant that you didn’t have to speak French to understand the people. He’d made friends, lots of friends, real friends, and some of them had belonged to a troupe of street actors, so he’d joined too. He’d gone to rehearsals, and worn a costume, and had his face painted white. The play was about life after a nuclear holocaust and he’d been cast as an elder, the morning after the end of the world. The four tribes of the earth had come together in the ashes, determined to build a new society. Valerie was going to teach him the guitar. They’d drunk lots of wine.
The stories spilled out, a torrent of free association, and it had taken Faraday a while to realise just what it was that bound all this passionate reminiscence together. J-J was digging a moat. Not the inch-deep little rivulets he used to scrape in the sand at Eastney but something infinitely deeper and wider, the depth and width – indeed – of the English Channel. J-J loved France, loved the French, loved Valerie. And he plainly couldn’t wait to get back.
At ten, after a series of theatrical yawns, J-J headed for the stairs. Half a bottle of Scotch later, prone on the long sofa, Faraday fumbled for the phone. Cathy answered on the second ring. As soon as she heard Faraday’s voice she told him she was OK. Things were getting better. She’d heard the good news about Marty Harrison pulling through. She’d even managed to have a sensible conversation with Pete. He’d left for Cowes already and was staying with his Fastnet mates, looking forward to the race. It was good that he’d managed to get away.
Faraday let her finish. The tumbler of Scotch beside him was beginning to blur.
‘This isn’t about you, Cath,’ he muttered. ‘It’s about me.’
Eight
On Saturday the Fastnet Race got under way from Cowes. Nearly three hundred yachts crossed the start line, then tacked down the western Solent into a steady ten-kn
ot breeze. By the following morning the lead boats were already closing on Land’s End and the Scilly Isles when Faraday left his sleeping son and drove the forty miles to Pennington, a bird reserve on the coastal fringes of the New Forest.
On the edge of the tidal saltmarsh, he settled down with a groundsheet, a flask of tea and his binoculars. Across the Solent, the last of the yachts from Cowes Week were streaming out of the Medina River in bright sunshine, and he watched them as they raised sail and ran before the breeze under bulging spinnakers. All morning, weather forecasts had been warning of a sudden drop in barometric pressure over the eastern Atlantic, a portent of a major storm. Back in 1979, fifteen men had died on the Fastnet Race when hurricane-force winds tore into the fleet. No one wanted it to happen again. Least of all, Cathy Lamb.
On the phone the other night she’d been more than generous with her time. They’d talked for more than an hour, Faraday trying to sort out the muddle of emotions the boy’s return had stirred, Cathy offering the kind of unvarnished home truths Faraday knew he needed to hear. There was no point wallowing in a past that had gone. J-J was a man now. Of course he had problems, of course it would be hard for him, but that was the way life took most people. He’d fled the nest. And the sooner Faraday grasped that simple truth, the sweeter life would be for all of them.
Deep down, Faraday knew she was right. Calmer now, he spent the morning watching groups of waders. Their feeding was frenzied. They moved quickly from area to area, pausing to peck and worry at the rich soup of nutrients beneath the glistening mud flats, and as Faraday eased the binoculars from bird to bird he wondered whether they were aware of the weather that might be soon sweeping east.
From Pennington, in mid-afternoon, Faraday drove north to a car park deep in the New Forest, and walked across the heath into the woodland. The woods were cool and dark after the blaze of sunshine. He sat beneath a beech tree, watching a redstart chasing flies, then smiled as the little bird darted into a holly bush, disturbed by the brief shadow of a sparrowhawk circling overhead. The forest was in full leaf and overhead the trees were beginning to stir, a constant muted rustling that spoke of deep unease.
Faraday felt it on his nerve ends. All morning he’d done his best not to think about J-J, but here in the woods it was impossible not to let the last few days crowd in on him. A week in Caen had changed the boy beyond recognition. Time after time, Faraday had tried to revive the old rapport, the old easy ways, but to no avail. J-J had become evasive, hard-edged, calculating, wary. His vulnerability was as evident as ever but he wore this new persona like a baggy, off-the-peg coat bought for him by a stranger. It didn’t fit. It didn’t suit him. And sooner or later, Faraday knew that he’d have to take it back.
In the meantime, though, Faraday had come to realise that there was no point worrying about what might happen next. Maybe the old relationship, the old rapport, would come back. Maybe it wouldn’t. Either way, it was probably beyond his control. Cathy Lamb had been right all along. The boy was twenty-two years old. Real life had consequences for us all. It was time to let his precious J-J work it out for himself.
Faraday had supper alone in a pub in Lyndhurst. Driving back to Portsmouth, he turned on the radio to check on the weather. The isobars were tightening into a dizzy whorl off the west coast of Ireland and the Fastnet Race committee had issued an advisory notice requesting yachts to report in hourly. Should the weather worsen over the next twenty-four hours, some commentators were calling for the race to be abandoned completely.
At home, J-J was back in bed. Faraday sat out in the darkness, listening to the eerie plaint of a distant curlew. It was low tide in the harbour and on the hot breath of the exposed mud flats came the tarry smells of driftwood and the tang of drying seaweed. Overhead, the moon was gauzy behind a thin layer of high cloud but the wind seemed to have died completely. Perhaps the storm has gone away, thought Faraday. Perhaps, like so much else, it was nothing more than make-believe.
The next morning, Monday, he knew at a glance that the forecasters had got it right. From his bedroom, the last of the sunshine had acquired a curiously livid cast and the waters of the harbour were gun-metal grey. Little flurries of wind were raising the dust along the waterside path and the birds were flying low, skittering from bush to bush. On the morning news, there were reports of huge seas in the Western Approaches and it seemed that dozens of boats on the Fastnet were already in trouble, overwhelmed by the storm’s leading edge.
Before he got round to a shave, Faraday phoned Cathy. She’d been up since five, listening to the radio, wondering whether she ought to phone the Rescue Co-ordination Centre in Plymouth, but something had stayed her hand.
‘They know what they’re doing,’ she kept saying. ‘I don’t want to tempt fate.’
Forty minutes later, on the point of leaving for work, Faraday bumped into J-J on the stairs. He’d taken to wearing a black T-shirt in bed. Another innovation.
The boy wanted money, quite a lot of money, and Faraday knew why.
‘I haven’t got it,’ he signed.
J-J didn’t believe him. He turned his back on his father but Faraday followed him into the kitchen. It was a revelation how sulky he could get.
J-J’s eyes found his in the mirror over the spice rack. He held up five fingers.
‘Fifty?’
‘No.’ The boy shook his head before spelling it out with his hands. He wanted five hundred.
Faraday studied him for a moment. J-J had a job at a factory on the Hilsea estate, packing hair dryers into boxes for transit. It wasn’t the most exciting challenge in the world, but for an assembly line it paid well.
‘Why don’t you ask them for a loan at work? Or save up for a couple of months?’
‘I hate that place.’ J-J pulled a face.
‘Then try the bank.’
‘They’ll say no.’
‘How do you know?’
‘They always say no.’
Faraday wondered who had planted this idea in J-J’s head. His son hadn’t been inside a bank for years. Finally, Faraday bunched his fist, touched it lightly with his middle finger, and shrugged. J-J stared at him a moment, openly hostile, then turned away again. The bunched fist had always been the gesture one or other of them made when they’d run out of options. In plain language, it meant ‘Tough’.
At Kingston Crescent, Faraday attended morning prayers. The regular nine a.m. update on developments overnight in the city took place in the police station social club, with as many CID and uniform as possible attending. Today, with cover stretched to the limit, there were just three bodies. Dawn Ellis, a worried-looking Cathy and the crime desk clerk looked lost amongst the dozens of circular tables.
‘Paul Winter was duty over the weekend,’ Cathy told Faraday the moment he appeared. ‘He’ll be back tomorrow.’
Faraday made no comment, shredding a beer mat while the clerk went through the usual tally of arrests for shoplifting, attempted thefts from cars, neighbourhood mayhem from drunk and disorderlies, and half a dozen reported burglaries. Only at the end, almost as an afterthought, did she mention the reported misper that had come in from the duty reception officer.
Faraday abandoned the remains of the beer mat. ‘Misper’ was CID-speak for missing person. A city the size of Portsmouth received misper reports at the rate of two or three a week, but most of them came from the regular band of teenage runaways who simply got bored with living with mum and dad, or who fled from one or other of the city’s children’s homes. Their details would be circulated through the normal channels and they’d normally be back as soon as their money ran out. This report, though, hit a different nerve. For a start it had come from a child.
‘How old was she?’
‘Eight.’ Dawn was peering at the form ‘Emma Maloney’.
‘And she’d lost her dad?’
‘So she said. The reception officer phoned her mother to check. She lives in North End. Her name’s Sandra. She and her husband are divorced.’
‘And he’s disappeared?’
Dawn nodded. There wasn’t much detail, but it seemed that father and daughter spent lots of time together. The arrangement had worked perfectly for months, until Saturday.
‘And?’
‘It was the little girl’s birthday. She and her dad were going out somewhere. He never turned up.’
Faraday reached out for the form, making a note of Sandra Maloney’s address and phone number. Cathy Lamb was watching him over the rim of her coffee cup. Priority mispers were normally those deemed to be especially vulnerable: the elderly, the Very young and the mentally afflicted. A middle-aged divorcee who’d missed out on his daughter’s birthday didn’t appear to fit into any of these categories.
The meeting over, Cathy caught up with Faraday on the stairs.
‘You want me to put someone on that?’ Cathy indicated at the form in Faraday’s hand. ‘Only we’re a bit stretched today.’
‘I know. That’s why I thought I’d do it.’
‘You? With everything else on our plate?’ For one brief second Cathy seemed to have forgotten about the Fastnet Race.
Faraday smiled, and paused beside the open door to the inspectors’ office. A phrase from their recent heart-to-heart had come back to him.
‘I need to get out more,’ he said. ‘You’re absolutely right.’
Outside, the wind was swirling around the police station car park and there was a hint of rain in the air. Sandra Maloney and her daughter lived in a tall, bay-fronted Victorian terraced house with Greenpeace stickers in an upstairs bedroom window. Faraday sheltered in the lee of a dripping privet hedge, waiting for an answer to his knock at the front door. It was raining hard by now.
Eventually, the door opened. Sandra Maloney was a tired-looking blonde woman in jeans and a grubby sweatshirt. Her hair was tied up with a twist of blue ribbon and there were scabs of white emulsion on her hands. Faraday explained about the missing-person report. She nodded, checked his ID more carefully than most, then let him in.
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