Turnstone

by Hurley, Graham

  ‘We should have asked the police for protection,’ Templeman said. ‘It’s the least they owe us.’

  ‘The Filth? You’re joking. Given half a chance, they’d finish the job.’

  It was Templeman’s turn to smile. He’d come armed with half a bottle of whisky and a couple of good books, but the best present for his client was the news he passed on now.

  Harrison couldn’t believe it.

  ‘Pissed? You’re winding me up.’

  ‘It’s true, my friend.’

  ‘The guy that shot me?’

  ‘Indeed.’

  Harrison took a moment or two to absorb the news then, with a patience that surprised his lawyer, began to button up his pyjama jacket.

  ‘We’ll have them,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘Bastards.’

  Mid-evening, Faraday abandoned the office and drove down to Old Portsmouth. All afternoon, he’d been trying to think through the sequence of events that might have led to the cancelled Mayday from Marenka. A mistake was out of the question. On a boat that professional, with veterans like Henry Potterne aboard, you simply didn’t fool around with something as serious as a distress call. No, it had to be something else, some sudden drama that had driven one or other of the crew to dial channel sixteen and call for help. After thirty hours banged up on a thirty-three-foot yacht, someone’s nerve had broken. But whose? And why?

  Faraday parked his car and wandered down through the maze of cobbled streets towards the water. This was the corner of the island where the city had begun, an arm of shingle that curled in from the harbour mouth, enclosing a tiny pocket of sheltered water that had become the Camber Dock.

  For eight hundred years, merchants had traded from here, and the scents and sounds of the tiny harbourside settlement lived on in the street signs and the names of the pubs. Spice Island. Oyster Street. The Still and West. The naval dockyard had expanded to the north, hundreds of acres of dry docks, mast lofts, victualling stores and all the other facilities that had made this battered city indispensable in time of war, but Faraday’s favourite haunt was still Old Portsmouth with its chaotic mix of ancient fortifications, cobbled streets and gimcrack post-war infilling. Until very recently, no one had very much bothered about Old Portsmouth, which was altogether in keeping with the neglect that had settled on the rest of the city.

  Faraday bought himself a beer and settled on one of the new stone plinths on Point, the tip of the tiny promontory of Spice Island. From here, the view of the harbour was uninterrupted. He loved this place, not simply the waterfront but the city itself. He loved its busyness and its blunt, unvarnished ways. He loved the rough pulse of life that pumped through the pubs and endless terraced streets. Portsmouth wasn’t a city you’d choose for sparkling dinner parties or dainty conversation, and for those two blessings Faraday was eternally grateful. In a country which had largely sold its soul, it remained uncursed by money.

  Faraday thought about Charlie Oomes. If Portsmouth sometimes felt like a state of mind – stoic, gruff, implacably stubborn – then Oomes would understand that because Oomes came from a very similar culture. Life in South London must have been Pompey without the seaside, but Oomes had turned his back on all that and Faraday despised him for it. He’d seen what success had brought the man, how success had fenced him in, and what angered Faraday more than anything else was the assumption that money, his money, could buy anything. It wasn’t just jealousy that had killed Stewart Maloney. It was the arrogance that came with Oomes’s assumption that you could simply cover it up. Money had delivered Ian Hartson. Money had handcuffed Derek Bissett. But money, in the end, couldn’t buy the perfect murder. Not if Faraday’s job meant anything at all.

  At the end of his second pint, he wandered back from Point, pausing at the foot of the Round Tower on the harbour entrance. In the gathering darkness, the last of the day-sailors were ghosting in on the tide, their sails white against the bulk of the submarine base on the other side of the harbour mouth, while closer still a fishing boat puttered past, outward bound for the scallop beds off Selsey Bill. Listen hard, and he could hear the swish and suck of water in its wake.

  Faraday watched the lights of the fishing boat disappear, thinking about Charlie Oomes again. The investigation had become a chess game, one on one. So far Oomes had played a blinder, his pieces still intact, but the first tiny cracks were beginning to appear in his defence and the aborted Mayday was an opening Faraday couldn’t afford to ignore. Like all good chess players, he should come at Oomes obliquely, from the direction he least expected.

  He took out his mobile and dialled a number he’d written on the palm of his hand. When a woman’s voice answered, he turned from the view, sheltering the conversation from the sudden rumble of a passing ferry.

  ‘Mrs Bissett? My name’s Frank Terry. I’m an old colleague of Derek’s from his Thames Valley days. I’m just wondering whether he’s there?’

  He listened while she explained that he was away on business in Hamburg. He was due back tomorrow. Might Mr Terry be able to return his call?

  Faraday did his best to sound disappointed. He was on holiday in the area with his wife and kids and he was rather looking forward to a lunchtime pint or two with Derek and a chat about the old days. What time was he due back?

  ‘Late, I’m afraid. The flight gets in to Heathrow about four. That’s cutting it a bit fine for lunch, isn’t it?’ She paused. ‘What was your name again? I’ll make sure I mention it to him.’

  ‘Just tell him Frank.’ Faraday turned to watch the ferry. ‘I expect I’ll catch up with him in the end.’

  Twenty-Two

  The Hamburg flight was ten minutes early arriving at Heathrow the following afternoon. Faraday barely had time to find a spot by the exit gate before the first passengers came hurrying out. Bissett was amongst them, carrying a holdall and a briefcase. He was smaller and slighter than Faraday remembered from the hospital, and he looked exhausted.

  Faraday stopped him on the concourse. Bissett recognised him at once.

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘I’ve come to meet you.’

  ‘Why?’

  Faraday took his holdall in one hand and an elbow in the other. At the foot of the escalator, Bissett tried to shake him off.

  ‘You want me to call the police?’ he said.

  Faraday laughed.

  ‘I am the police.’

  Upstairs, on the main concourse, Faraday steered him towards the bigger of the two snack areas. There was a table vacant beside one of the big picture windows.

  ‘Tea or coffee?’

  Faraday was still holding his bag. Bissett shrugged, resigned now, and elected for tea. Back at the table, balancing a tray of tea and doughnuts, Faraday sat down. He wanted to talk through one or two things about the Fastnet Race. And it might just be in Bissett’s interests to listen.

  By the time he’d finished, the tea had gone cold. He sat back, awaiting a reaction. As an ex-policeman, Bissett – above all – would understand the implications.

  Bissett at last picked up his doughnut. He had a sallow, slightly oriental face, and affected a thick Burt Reynolds moustache. His eyes were a deep, deep brown, settling on Faraday for a second or two and then slipping away.

  He finished his mouthful and carefully brushed the sugar from his fingertips.

  ‘You should know why we all got into this,’ he began. ‘It might help to understand.’

  Faraday listened to Bissett describe his early sailing days. He’d bought a second-hand Laser and learned to race it on the Welsh Harp reservoir, just off the North Circular Road. In a way, he’d been responsible for Charlie’s conversion to the sport because the two men were friends by then and Charlie used to wander down on Sundays and cheer him on.

  ‘Charlie used to sail dinghies?’

  ‘No. He was only ever interested in the big stuff. He got into that through Henry. But it was me who planted the seed.’

  Bissett was still in the Thames Valley force at
this stage in his career, but the department he headed was doing a lot of business with Oomes International and it was easy for Faraday to imagine the policeman sucked into Charlie’s boiling wake. Bissett had a natural flair for IT, and Charlie liked that. He also had an eye for a deal, and Charlie liked that even more.

  ‘Thin ice?’

  ‘Not at all. I drove a hard bargain.’

  ‘In whose favour?’

  ‘Ours. Thames Valley’s. Take a look at the accounts. I squeezed him for more product and tighter service agreements than we’d ever achieved before. Charlie thought I was crucifying him.’

  ‘Sure.’ Faraday nodded. ‘And he couldn’t wait to buy you out.’

  ‘He made me an offer. I’d got twenty-five years in. Charlie knew that.’ Twenty-five years’ service gave any policeman what the personnel people called ‘career flexibility’. Bissett could go at any time of his choosing and still keep his pension. ‘It was a brilliant move,’ he said. ‘Even my DCI admitted it.’ Bissett toyed with the remains of his doughnut. If anything, he looked smug. ‘I’ve been with the man for nearly three years now and I haven’t regretted it once. The guy’s a genius. That’s why we win.’

  Genius. Charlie had used the word, too, this time about Henry Potterne. Was that a judgement that Bissett shared?

  ‘You wouldn’t want for a better nav.,’ he said. ‘And that certainly takes something pretty special. But Henry was unstable and we all knew it.’ He paused for a moment and stared out of the window as a big jet rolled slowly past. ‘He also saved my life, so maybe you’re talking to the wrong guy here.’

  With some reluctance, he described Marenka’s final hours. In the bedlam of the storm, Bissett had damaged his safety harness beyond repair. Without the ability to clip himself on to something solid, he was as good as dead.

  ‘So what happened?’

  ‘Henry offered me his. Insisted, actually.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’ve thought about it a great deal and I don’t know. But it doesn’t alter the facts. I owe him my life.’

  ‘He gave you his safety harness?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So he wasn’t secured at all?’

  ‘No.’

  Faraday remembered Charlie Oomes telling him that Henry had been unclipped when he tried to sort out the rudder, but he’d never realised that Henry had discarded his harness altogether. This was a new development and Faraday took a couple of moments to let it sink in.

  Why on earth would a man like Henry Potterne, with all his years at sea, take a decision that verged on the suicidal? Was he wrestling with the consequences of what he’d done to Maloney? Was death by drowning a better option than a life sentence at the hands of a judge and a jury?

  Faraday stared out across the concourse.

  ‘You used the word unstable,’ he said at last. ‘Do you mean during the race?’

  ‘No. In general.’

  ‘How, exactly? In his behaviour? In his judgements?’

  ‘Neither. Maybe unhappy is better. Henry was a disappointed man. If you spent time with him you got to recognise it. There were things he wanted that he couldn’t have.’

  ‘Like his wife?’

  Bissett’s eyes settled on a passing stewardess and a smile briefly warmed his face. Faraday wanted to go into detail about Friday, about the likelihood of Henry reading Maloney’s e-mail to his wife, about the revenge he’d taken on an assumed rival, about Henry’s state of mind when he returned from Port Solent, about the watch-keeping arrangements that first night at sea, but the harder he pushed Bissett, the less the man said. He was a copper. He’d spent years in the CID. He knew the ways to cosy up to a man, to trick him into tiny lapses of concentration, to sweet talk him into lowering his guard, and then to pick over his story again and again until the first inconsistencies began to appear, hair-like cracks that a good interviewer could lever wide open in seconds.

  Bissett knew all of that and he made it plain that Faraday had a choice. If he wanted to do this thing properly, then it had to be formal. If he was down for an interview, then he needed advance warning, and a tape recorder running, and his solicitor present.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because you have no case. You know that and I know that. Maloney has disappeared. That’s all you know for sure. The rest is conjecture. To make anything stick you need evidence. Forensic’s hopeless. There isn’t any. If you’re suggesting a scene of crime then I suppose you might be talking about the yacht, but there’s no point doing that because the yacht’s gone—’

  ‘OK.’ Faraday leaned forward, interrupting him. ‘Let’s talk about that, then. The yacht went down. Pretty unusual, wouldn’t you say?’

  Bissett conceded the point with a nod. Over a twenty-four-hour period, more than two dozen crews had been rescued but only one yacht – Marenka – had completely disappeared. The rest, in various stages of disrepair, had remained afloat, awaiting salvage.

  ‘We took a couple of huge seas,’ he said. ‘It’s like being under shell fire. The cabin was completely stove in.’

  ‘I thought Sigmas had a reputation for build quality?’

  ‘They do. Just goes to show what we had to survive.’ He revolved the plastic stirrer between his fingers. ‘You have another theory?’

  ‘Yes. I think you might have sunk it on purpose.’

  ‘Scuppered the yacht? In conditions like that? We were pretty desperate, you’re right, but we weren’t suicidal.’ He began to laugh. ‘This is crap,’ he said. ‘You’re talking crap.’

  Faraday ignored him. Given that Marenka foundered, he wanted to know exactly where.

  The laughter died. Bissett tipped his head back, staring up at the roof.

  ‘North-west of the Scillies,’ he said at last. ‘We were heading three three five.’

  ‘How far north-west?’

  ‘Thirty, forty miles? I wasn’t counting.’

  ‘So when did you go down?’

  ‘Just before dawn. Four? Four-thirty?’ He shrugged. ‘The eye of the storm had just passed through. The seas were chaotic. We were all over the place then the wind came back – bam! – stronger than ever.’

  ‘OK, let’s say four-thirty.’ Faraday was visualising the chart of Pete Lamb’s. ‘Ten hours later you were winched out of the raft way down to the south.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘So how come the time gap?’

  ‘That’s what we wondered.’

  ‘Have you asked them since?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And what did they say?’

  ‘They said they didn’t pick up our EPIRB until just before noon.’

  Faraday leaned back in his chair, nodding. The EPIRB was the emergency radio beacon Oomes had snatched from the cockpit seconds before he jumped for the life raft. Faraday had checked a number of models that very morning in a boat chandlery in Old Portsmouth. Pete Lamb had been right. They were all sealed units.

  ‘So how come the EPIRB wasn’t working properly?’ he said.

  Bissett was watching him carefully now, trying to anticipate the next question the way a helmsman might study a following sea. One mistake, one over-correction on the tiller, and he might lose it completely.

  ‘I’ve no idea,’ he said. ‘Nothing electronic is ever perfect.’

  ‘Did you try and mend it?’

  ‘Of course I didn’t.’

  ‘Oomes says you did.’

  ‘Then he’s wrong. It’s impossible. You’d need a test bench and specialist kit even to get inside it. I expect you know that by now, don’t you?’

  Faraday permitted himself the beginnings of a smile. Touché, he thought.

  ‘So how come it just started working?’

  ‘I’ve no idea,’ he repeated. ‘It might have been a loose connection, saltwater damage, some problem at the other end. God knows. As far as we were aware, the thing was OK. The mystery was that nothing happened. No choppers. No lifeboats. Nothing. You start taking it pe
rsonally after a while, believe me.’

  ‘What about the mobile?’

  ‘What mobile?’

  ‘You have a grab bag, don’t you? For emergencies like this?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘And it included a mobile?’ He was gazing at Bissett. ‘Didn’t it?’

  Bissett shook his head, emphatic now.

  ‘On this occasion, it didn’t,’ he said. ‘Don’t ask me why, but it didn’t. If we’d have had a mobile, we’d have used it. Wouldn’t you? Under those circumstances?’

  ‘Of course.’ Faraday beckoned him closer again, trying to bridge the gap between them. ‘But look at it another way. The yacht’s gone down. You don’t know the depth of water. You don’t know how easy it might be to salvage. So the sensible thing would be to put as much distance between you and it before anyone came to the rescue. Then no one can even find it, let alone salvage it. Doesn’t that make sense?’

  ‘Only if you’ve got something to hide.’

  ‘And did you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Nothing? You had nothing to hide?’

  Bissett shook his head, refusing to qualify the statement. There was nothing to talk about, nothing to discuss. Marenka had foundered in a force eleven storm. They’d taken to the life raft. They’d drifted south. They’d been picked up. End of story.

  ‘Sunday night,’ Faraday began, ‘around twenty past eight.’

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘You were off Falmouth.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And someone sent a Mayday. Or tried to.’

  ‘Really?’

  For a second, Faraday almost believed the surprise in his eyes.

  ‘You didn’t know?’

  ‘Absolutely not. I was on the helm. What happens down below is a mystery. No one mentioned it afterwards.’

  ‘Charlie Oomes says there are no secrets aboard a racing yacht. He told me himself.’