The hall smelled of fresh paint. There were dust sheets on the carpet and an open tin of primrose gloss beside a wooden step ladder.
‘Long holidays.’ She gestured at the mess. ‘One of the perils of being a teacher.’
She took Faraday through to the lounge. There were books everywhere, ranged on shelves along the wall. Sandra Maloney waved Faraday into an armchair by the window. The glass was blurry with rain.
‘I hope to God he comes back soon,’ she said. ‘It’s breaking Em’s heart.’
Faraday was looking at a row of school portraits arranged on the mantelpiece. The latest showed a freckle-faced eight-year-old with wispy auburn hair and a slightly crooked grin. In five years, she’d barely changed at all.
‘He sees her a lot?’
‘At least twice every week. Often on a Tuesday night, because that suits him, and then again at the weekend, normally Saturdays. Sometimes she stays over with him. In fact she’s got a key of her own.’
‘To his place?’
‘Yes, he’s got a flat on the seafront near the pier. It’s a conversion. It used to be a hotel. She loves it there, takes a friend sometimes.’
There was another photograph, bigger, on the piano behind the door. It showed Sandra standing on a footpath, her eyes narrowed against the sun. The glum figure in the red anorak beside her looked older, his face shadowed by a baseball cap, his upper body bent under the weight of an enormous rucksack. Cliffs rolled away behind them, plunging into a deep-green sea.
‘That’s a friend of mine, Patrick,’ she said at once. ‘If you’re after a photo of Stewart, I’ll see what I can find.’
She got up and rummaged in a drawer before producing a battered album. Stewart Maloney had the kind of face that belonged in an advert for French cigarettes. He had a three-day growth of beard and a pair of wraparound sunshades hid his eyes. He wore a white T-shirt under a black leather jacket and he was sitting astride a heavily laden motorbike. His smile, to Faraday, spoke of pride of ownership and a deep sense of mischief, not necessarily in that order.
‘That was eleven years ago,’ Sandra said. ‘We were touring in Germany.’
‘Has he changed much?’
‘Hardly at all. Sadly.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Some men never grow up. Stewart is one of them.’
Faraday considered the statement for a second or two, then pocketed the photo and pushed the conversation along. The last thing he wanted was a lengthy analysis of Sandra Maloney’s divorce.
‘Has he been under any stress lately that you know of? Anything at work?’
Sandra shook her head. Stewart Maloney was a lecturer at the city’s university. He specialised in fine art, with an emphasis on representational drawing skills.
‘They seem to think the world of him. He’s a great communicator. Always has been.’
Faraday asked for a contact at the college, scribbling the name in his pocketbook. Jan Tilley.
‘Money troubles at all?’
‘Not that I’m aware of.’
‘Who does he bank with?’
‘NatWest.’
‘Branch?’
‘Southsea.’
Faraday scribbled another note, then looked up again.
‘Anything in his private life?’
‘Stewart doesn’t have a private life. That’s always been his problem. Was then. Is now.’
That same edge was back in her voice. Her gaze strayed to the pocket where Faraday had lodged the photograph.
‘I’m not with you,’ Faraday said softly. ‘No private life?’
‘Stewart never knew the meaning of private. He’s a terrible show-off. Whatever he does, he does it in public. He’s a child that way. He says he can’t help himself but that’s just an excuse.’ Sandra pursed her lips, suddenly the schoolmistress. ‘This isn’t very helpful, is it?’
Faraday did his best to look non-committal. Sandra Maloney was doing her best to play the cool, well-adjusted divorcee but her emotions kept letting her down. Faraday sensed that the over-burdened pack-horse beside her on the clifftop was very much second-best, a poor substitute for the wild man astride the motorbike, and what made it worse was the fact that she very probably knew it.
‘You say he can’t help himself,’ Faraday murmured. ‘Can’t help himself how, exactly?’
‘Friends. Relationships. His career. Even the bike, lately. He’s got a Honda now, a huge thing, and he fell off it on Wednesday, according to Em.’
Faraday leaned forward, wanting the details. Maloney had been over on the Isle of Wight, racing in Cowes Week. He regularly crewed aboard a yacht called a Sigma 33. At the end of Cowes Week he’d been due to do the Fastnet, but he’d crashed the bike on Wednesday night and broken his arm.
‘Bad break?’
‘Bad enough to need a replacement on the boat. The hospital must have sorted him out over on the island. I gather he came back afterwards.’
‘When would that have been?’
‘He phoned Em Thursday lunchtime, from the flat. She insisted I drove her down to see him.’
‘What was he like?’
‘I don’t know. I waited outside.’
‘But your daughter …?’
‘Said he was fine. Same old daddy. You know what kids are like.’
Faraday nodded. Didn’t he just.
‘And after that? After Thursday?’
‘Nothing. We haven’t heard from him since. Saturday was Em’s birthday. Now he wasn’t doing the race, he was going to take her to London on the train. When he didn’t turn up, she was terribly upset. You can imagine.’
‘Did you phone him?’
‘Of course. The answerphone thing was on.’
‘Did you go round?’
‘Yes.’ She bit her lip. ‘I did.’
‘And?’
‘The place was empty. He hadn’t … you know … collapsed or anything.’
She got up again and left the room. When she came back she had a pair of keys on a loop of scarlet ribbon. Faraday stared at them. He’d done exactly the same thing the first time he’d given J-J the key to their little house by the harbour, tying it to a length of ribbon. Red for the great spotted woodpecker, J-J’s favourite bird. Red for love.
Sandra was still dangling the keys to Maloney’s flat.
‘You should go and look for yourself. It’s number seven, Solent View Mansions. The bigger key fits the main door to the street.’
Faraday took the keys and pocketed his notebook. What sounded the loudest alarm bells was the routine Maloney had kept, that pattern of obligation he’d laid upon his life, and Faraday knew only too well how important his daughter would have become. Who wouldn’t give up a couple of evenings a week for the dimpled grin on the mantelpiece?
‘They were pretty close, then,’ Faraday said, ‘Emma and her dad?’
Sandra took a tiny step backwards, then ducked her head. It had been Em’s idea to try and find her dad, Em’s idea to raid her jam jar full of coins, get on a bus and ride down to the police station. The first she’d known about the child going to Kingston Crescent was a call from the officer she’d been talking to. They were sending her back by squad car. And they wanted to check the name of her father.
Sandra finally raised her face to Faraday and nodded.
‘Em loves him,’ she sniffed, ‘to death.’
Nine
The taxi dropped Paul Winter outside Le Dome several minutes late for his appointment. The rain was sheeting down by now, and Winter made the mistake of trying to open his borrowed umbrella for the dash across the pavement. Within seconds, the wind had turned it inside out and he pursued it into the shelter of the shadowed café-bar.
The venue had been Templeman’s idea. The partnership offices were three doors down the street and he’d made it plain on the phone that he could spare Winter the time for a double espresso and not a second more. Why he didn’t come to the offices like everyone else was beyond him.
&n
bsp; Winter shook himself like a dog by the door. Morris Templeman was waiting for him at a table near the back. He lifted a thin hand in greeting and then gestured limply at the waiting cappuccino. Winter always drank cappuccino.
‘Crap weather.’ Winter indicated the wreckage of the umbrella. ‘Any idea how much these things cost?’
Templeman ignored the question. The onset of emphysema had practically bent him double.
‘What’s the problem?’ he wheezed.
‘There isn’t one. Or not yours, anyway, and not mine, either.’
‘So why are you here, Paul?’
Winter smiled at the question, and took a cautious sip at the cappuccino, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand. Lawyers were always the same, even ones as physically wrecked as Morry Templeman. They were forever dividing their time up, pricing each segment, mesmerised by the need to account for each passing hour.
Winter leaned forward. The cuffs of his suit left damp marks on the tabletop.
‘You’ll be representing Marty Harrison,’ he said.
‘Yes.’
‘And I expect you’ll be framing some kind of claim.’
‘Without a doubt.’
Templeman nodded. He was interested now, Winter could see it in his pouched little eyes, in the way they’d stopped straying to the door, in the way his yellowing fingers had suddenly stilled over the coffee spoon. Greed always gave men away. Always.
‘Seen him yet? Marty?’
‘Of course not. He’s still in the ICU.’
‘But getting better?’
‘Definitely. He’s off the danger list. As of yesterday.’
‘Talked to the girlfriend at all?’
‘Of course.’ Templeman frowned as he sucked in another breath. ‘These are clients of mine, Paul. There’s a protocol here, as well you know.’
‘Absolutely.’ Winter sat back, his hands in the air, a mute gesture of apology.
A waitress approached with an armful of menus. Templeman waved her away.
‘Well?’ he said.
Winter had his eyes on the retreating waitress. He’d got up too late for breakfast and he was starving. At length, he looked at Templeman’s pinched face.
‘The pillock on the TFU who shot Marty was a guy called Pete Lamb,’ he said carefully. ‘If I was to tell you he was pissed at the time, might we stretch to a spot of early lunch?’
Faraday stood in the window of Maloney’s third-floor flat, listening to the wind. Already it was blowing hard enough to hunch the tiny figures below him on Southsea Common, their dogs in tow, while out beyond the seafront the Isle of Wight was no more than a smudge behind the dirty, ragged skirts of low cloud. Tuned in to the police traffic net in the car driving down, he’d heard the controller warning about high-sided vehicles coming to grief on exposed sections of the motorway. Now, looking at the horizontal sheets of rain, he could understand why.
He turned back into the room, drawing a mental curtain over the view. He was here to do a job: to note, and assess, and – if possible – draw conclusions. In Faraday’s experience, every room told a story, and this one would be no exception. The image that haunted him more than any other was that of Maloney’s daughter, Emma. To do what she’d done – to jump on a bus, find the police station and report the loss of her dad – required either courage of a high order or simple desperation. The least he owed the child was the possibility of a happy outcome.
He looked round. The decor was aggressively minimalist – white emulsion on the walls, black carpet, single leather sofa and a round glass table – but the intended effect was spoiled by the clutter of a life very obviously interrupted.
On the table was a litter of bills, letters, circulars and various other items including an exposed roll of film and an appointments card for the fracture clinic at the city’s Queen Alexandra Hospital. Faraday gazed at the debris, fixing the image in his mind: an open bottle of ibuprofen, a half-drunk cup of coffee, a Ricard ashtray brimming with cigarette ends, a half-eaten and very stale Danish pastry, a copy of Friday’s Guardian with pages five to fourteen missing and a barely touched packet of cheese and onion crisps.
Settling on the sofa, Faraday stared at the wall opposite. In a neat line across the wall hung a series of aluminium-framed black and white photos. He examined them one by one, recognising the locations immediately.
Each of the photos captured one of the city’s landmarks. There were shots of the harbour mouth, of the Guildhall steps, of HMS Victory glimpsed from the bottom of the dry dock in which she sat. There were studies of a breaker’s yard – a resting place for generations of naval junk out beside the motorway – and of the Tricorn Shopping Centre, a brutal essay in unadorned concrete that had won prizes for the ugliest building in western Europe. This was a very different city from the Portsmouth of Nelly Tseng’s dreams, infinitely more real, and there was something about the photographs – their framing, their texture, their refusal to compromise – that reminded him of Janna, his dead wife. As a photographer, she’d had a similar eye, a similar fascination with the awfulness of things. Odd, really, remembering how vivid she’d been, and how alive.
More photos lined the wall behind the sofa, but these were gentler in subject and treatment: minutely detailed studies of flowerheads, beach shells, and the deeply etched grain on lengths of ash-grey driftwood. Towards the window, beneath a hook on the picture rail, was an empty space, an oblong of white emulsion bigger than the photo frames and perceptibly brighter than the rest of the wall. Faraday gazed at it a moment, wondering where the missing item had gone.
Maloney’s bedroom lay at the back of the flat. A big unmade double bed occupied most of the space but there was still room for a wardrobe, a chest of drawers and a smallish desk on to which he’d managed to cram a PC and a keyboard. Propped against the monitor screen was a nicely framed pen-and-ink drawing of sailing boats in a boisterous wind. The setting, instantly recognisable, was the entrance to Portsmouth Harbour and the artist had caught the chop and curl of the ebbing tide with absolute precision. Though unsigned, it was a beautiful piece of work, strangely out of place in this claustrophobic little bedroom, and Faraday took it to the window for a closer look. It was far too small to have hung in the vacated space in the front room. What was it doing here?
A cable snaked down from the PC to a printer on the floor. Behind the printer was a big leather briefcase. Faraday hauled the briefcase on to the bed. Inside he found an address book and a manila envelope full of bank and credit card statements, but a cursory check found no obvious debts or financial embarrassments. On the first of every month, Maloney made a series of standing-order payments, and one of them – for £280 – was to his ex-wife, Sandra. Faraday made a note of the sort code and account number, then returned the envelope to the case.
In a side pocket of the briefcase, he spotted Maloney’s passport. The photograph at the back showed the same close-cropped face he’d seen astride the motorbike at Sandra Maloney’s house. This time, the pose was deliberately pugnacious – chin tilted, head thrown back – but Maloney wasn’t wearing sunglasses and Faraday recognised something in the eyes, something almost playful, that many women would find attractive. Slipping the passport back, Faraday’s fingers snagged on a curl of something faintly plastic. He pulled it out and found himself looking at a strip of photographs. There were four. They came from a photo booth. And they all showed the freckled face which had decorated Sandra Maloney’s mantelpiece.
Faraday stared down at them. Why had Maloney’s daughter got herself photographed this way? And what were the prints doing in her father’s briefcase?
Back in the living room, Faraday went through Maloney’s pile of correspondence on the table. Towards the bottom, he found a half-completed passport application form made out in his daughter’s name. The new passport was to replace the current arrangement whereby Emma travelled as a named child on her mother’s passport, but the section requiring a parent or guardian’s consent had been scored through with a
thick black Pentel. Attached to the form was a yellow Post-it with a handwritten message. ‘You know there’s no way I’m going along with this,’ it read, ‘and please don’t discuss it with Em.’
For the first time, Faraday felt a tingle of excitement. On the face of it, Maloney was locked into a dispute with his ex-wife about their daughter’s passport. His disappearance had been reported not by his wife, who might well have worries about continuing maintenance payments, but by his eight-year-old daughter. So what did that suggest?
Faraday returned to the front room and checked the messages on Maloney’s answerphone. They included calls from Sandra, his ex-wife, and a plaintive inquiry from a man named Marcus, wondering why Maloney hadn’t shown up for his barbecue on Sunday.
None of these messages offered Faraday any clues to Maloney’s disappearence, but when he pressed the ‘redial’ button on the phone, the voice on the other end turned out to be a despatcher at Aqua Cabs, one of the city’s biggest taxi firms. Faraday made a note of the details, then returned to the window and gazed out.
Any serious investigation flagged various paths forward. There’d be checks to make on neighbouring flats, interviews to arrange with friends and employers, leads to pursue with banks and phone companies. Every single one of these actions carried a price in time and manpower – manpower that Faraday simply didn’t have. Was he serious about Stewart Maloney? Was there really enough evidence to warrant launching a full-scale inquiry? He simply didn’t know, but the longer he stared at the watery blur of the common and the seafront, the clearer became the image that swam towards him. Maloney’s daughter, at the very least, deserved some kind of result.
Winter and Templeman were outside Le Dome. In the end, to Winter’s immense satisfaction, the meal had extended to three courses and a bottle of Chardonnay. Now, inevitably, only one question remained.
They were both sheltering beneath Le Dome’s ample canopy.
‘So what do you want out of this?’ Templeman was still studying the bill. ‘Marty’s bound to ask.’
Winter gave the question some thought.
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