Faraday bent across the table, describing his morning’s visit to the Sigma across the harbour. He’d gauged the available space beneath the bunks in the forward cabin. He’d peered up through the open hatch. He’d tested his theory every which way he could and he’d found nothing to rule it out. It wouldn’t have been easy, but with a helping or two of darkness, and exhaustion, and maybe a bit of luck, it might have been possible.
‘So how do you prove that?’
Pollock was getting impatient. Faraday might have been a difficult child, refusing to put his toys away.
‘We keep plugging on,’ he said, ‘just like we always do.’
‘And you really think you’ll get a result?’
‘Yes.’
‘How can you be sure?’
‘Because I know that Maloney came to grief. He got himself into a fight over another guy’s wife and the other guy killed him. That’s murder. It says so in the book.’
‘Wrong. It’s supposition. Just like your McIlvenny was supposition. We could argue this all afternoon but facts are facts, Joe. And what we know so far, know beyond reasonable doubt, is fuck all.’
The phrase hung like a death knell over the conversation. Faraday, all too clearly, saw the inquiry slipping away. He’d anticipated this moment, and with great reluctance he played his last card.
‘Why not hand it on to a Major Inquiry Team?’ he suggested. ‘Throw some decent resources at it?’
Pollock and Bevan exchanged glances. They’d obviously been this route as well.
‘Out of the question,’ Pollock said bluntly. ‘We’ve got one team up at Petersfield on the stabbing. The Aldershot stranger rapes are going into their third week. And the DNA job in Woolston has turned into a nightmare. We haven’t got the bodies, Joe. And neither have you.’
‘So we pack it in? Is that what you’re saying?’
‘No, I’m not saying that at all. I’m just asking you to justify it, to give me one shred of evidence that there might, at the end, be some kind of result. So far, we’ve done the decent thing. Thanks to you, we’ve had a real go at it. But we haven’t even got a body. The guy could be anywhere. He could be in Rio, Timbuktu, North End, anywhere. This isn’t a murder inquiry. It’s an obsession. And obsessions don’t come cheap.’
‘So it’s money, is it?’
‘Of course it’s money. Everything’s money. Don’t play the innocent, Joe. You know that. The guy’s disappeared. We’ve looked for him. We can’t find him. Inquiry binned. OK?’
Bevan was gazing up at the ceiling.
‘Arnie’s right, Joe,’ he said at length. ‘Resource-wise, we’re cleaned out. The bloke’s an adult, for God’s sake. He should have known better.’
‘Better than what?’
‘Better than to have disappeared.’
‘And caused us all this trouble?’
‘Yes. If you want it from the shoulder, then yes.’
Faraday had a sudden image of Emma, Maloney’s daughter. She was up in her bedroom, that first and only time he’d talked to her. She’d been nervous, of course, and a bit uncertain, but there was something else in her eyes and he’d never doubted for a moment what it was. She loved her dad a lot. And she wanted him back.
‘Maloney was murdered,’ Faraday said softly. ‘Dress it up whichever way you like, but that’s what happened. I know it and I think you do too.’
Pollock steepled his fingers, his face half hidden behind his hands. The conversation with HQ must have been even more brutal than Faraday had thought. At length, his eyes appeared over his fingertips.
‘Let me get this straight, Joe. Let’s say I agree with you. Let’s say Maloney was murdered. You think the guy Potterne did it?’
‘Yes.’
‘And he drowned at sea?’
‘Yes.’
‘So what’s the problem?’
Faraday stared at him for a long moment. He wanted to ask a thousand questions. He wanted to ask about the others, the accessories to murder, Charlie Oomes, Derek Bissett, Ian Hartson. He wanted to tell them about the holes in their story, about the aborted Mayday call, about the EPIRB that suddenly mended itself. He wanted to suggest the importance of a link between crime and punishment, between involvement in murder and the inside of a prison cell. And he wanted, above all, to ask whether there was any longer any point in trying to do his job. Maybe Paul Winter was right. Maybe they should restrict themselves to the budgets and the paperwork and let the bad guys sort each other out.
Pollock got to his feet. The meeting was obviously over.
‘You should be thinking of a holiday, Joe.’ He offered Faraday a thin smile. ‘Especially this time of year.’
Twenty-Four
Faraday slept late next day. He got up at twenty past nine, determined to build a dam between himself and the events of the last ten days. Maybe Pollock was right. Maybe obsession had begun to warp his better judgement. Jesus, even Neville Bevan’s patience was running out.
He made himself sandwiches and a flask of tea. Before he’d left the office last night, Bevan had secured from him a promise to take the day off as a down-payment on a proper holiday. Pollock would try and sort out some cover from one of the other Eastern Division DIs. There was no suggestion that he’d failed, or that he’d in any way wasted resources, but there were some inquiries that would never work out and Maloney, alas, was one of them.
In his heart, Faraday knew that they were wrong but he knew as well that there was no longer any point in arguing. Every life had a price – measured in man hours, and overtime, and backfill – and Maloney had simply run out of budget. Leaving the house, Faraday glimpsed a flash of green from the grass beside the harbourside path. Woodpecker, he thought. Good sign.
Titchfield Haven nature reserve flanked the estuary of the River Meon, half an hour’s drive from Portsmouth. A three-pound ticket bought Faraday a day of solitude in any of the purpose-built hides that looked out on to the ponds and tall stands of reeds. Seated on the wooden bench, his elbows propped on the shelf beneath the viewing slot, he watched cormorants, moorhens and a family of grebes shepherding their young. Black-tailed godwits poked about in the shallows. Flocks of dunlin pecked at the mud. A lone grey heron stood sentry over a trickle of sluggish water. Everything in place, he thought. Everything tied together by the simple imperatives of hunger and procreation.
This ever-changing tableau never ceased to work its magic on Faraday. Occasionally, fellow birders slipped into and out of the hide. Conversation, if it happened at all, was limited to a whispered exchange of information. Sightings of a spotted crake in a nearby reedbed. Talk of the dazzling little egrets over at Thorney and Farlington. The atmosphere was reverent, almost churchlike.
In the heat of the afternoon, the rough-cut wood began to sweat beads of resin and Faraday basked in the warmth, savouring the sharp, tangy smells. Happiness was yet another page of his notebook, filling up with jotted observations. A water rail, half hidden by the rushes. Above it, a bearded reedling, swaying in the breeze from the sea. Soon, in September, the Arctic skuas would be passing through, dramatic shadows in the morning mists, while later still – back home – he’d be waking up to the first flocks of Brent geese, grunting at each other across the eel-grass after their long flight from the Siberian tundra.
On the way home, peaceful at last, he phoned Ruth Potterne from the car. He’d got some seafood in the freezer and a bottle or two of decent Chablis. Why didn’t she come over for the evening? Make it by seven, and he’d walk her up the harbourside path, show his separate kingdoms: the grasses and scrubland fringing the harbour itself, busy with stonechats and dunnock; the freshwater ponds, home for moorhen and coot; and – of course – the mud flats and shingle beach beneath his very own windows. Paradise for a wader-nut like himself.
To his intense delight, she said yes at once. The day had been awful, far too much time spent thinking about Sam, and getting out would be a godsend.
‘You know how to get to my place?�
�
‘No problem.’
‘Scallops OK? And salad and French bread?’
‘Lovely.’
‘And turnstones?’
‘Yes, please.’
Ruth arrived on her bicycle. Faraday gave her the tour, as promised, and afterwards she settled in the kitchen while he busied around the stove. Conversation, to Faraday’s surprise, was effortless, not the question and answer of their previous encounters but something infinitely less forbidding. She wanted to know all about him. She wanted to know about Janna, and J-J, and the reasons he’d abandoned their gypsy life for a career as a policeman. She wanted to know about this house of his, and his passion for birds, and just where he’d learned how to master Coquilles St Jacques. Each fresh inquiry unlocked another door in Faraday’s past and he pushed through them one by one, glad of the opportunity to show her around, flattered by the depth of her interest.
While he washed lettuce and chopped tomatoes for a salad, Ruth drifted next door again, taking another look at Janna’s photographs. When she returned, her glass was nearly empty.
‘How long were you together?’
‘Fourteen months and three days.’
‘And was she always that good a photographer?’
‘Yes. If anything, I was a distraction.’
‘But a welcome distraction.’
‘Yep, I guess.’
This sudden gust of America made him smile. Ruth, simply by asking the right questions, had brought it all back. The first weeks in Seattle. The wild afternoons in a borrowed dinghy in Puget Sound. The evening she hid his precious tickets for Pink Floyd and took him to bed.
‘I like her.’ Ruth was laughing now. ‘I like her a lot. No bullshit about prior arrangements. Just do it.’
‘Yeah. And we did.’
‘Better than Crazy Diamond?’
‘We never made it to the concert so I never got the chance to judge.’
‘Serves you right. She obviously spoiled you.’
Faraday nodded.
‘Spoiled is good.’ He poked a scallop. ‘Spoiled is right.’
‘Spoiled how?’
‘Spoiled afterwards. Nothing could be that good again. Ever.’ He glanced up at her, an eyebrow raised, wanting confirmation, but she shook her head.
‘Not from where I sit,’ she said simply.
She’d met Sam’s father on a blind date. She’d been doing a lot of dope and it had taken her for ever to get organised enough to realise that she fancied him.
‘His name was Chris. He was blond and kind of craggy – incredibly good-looking. He had women queuing round the block and that really put me off because he’d stopped trying. Underneath, though, he was really quiet, really thoughtful. Guys like that shouldn’t have good looks. It makes them lazy.’
She laughed to herself, and reached for the bottle. Chris had earned a living delivering yachts to far-flung locations. They’d gone halfway round the world before they’d slept together.
‘That was good, though. Because by then it mattered.’
‘You think we rushed it, me and Janna?’
‘I’m sure you did. And I’m sure it was brilliant. Just look at you. It was brilliant.’
Faraday caught sight of himself in the kitchen mirror. Ruth was right. He was grinning fit to bust.
‘Here,’ he said, reaching for the plates. ‘Soulfood.’
They ate at the kitchen table. At Faraday’s prompting, she told him about New Zealand and the place she and Chris had rented in Doubtless Bay. Sam had been born there and for several years she’d been so happy she’d simply vanished.
‘I was part of the landscape. I was a rock or a ponga fern or something and the strange thing was that I never gave it any thought. I’d become Polynesian. The place we had was miles from anywhere and we’d hang out half naked in the summer, just the two of us, Sam and me. I had a little veggie plot round the back of the house. We’d spend the mornings there, digging and weeding and planting, and in a way it got to be a bit like school. I taught him everything. I taught him the names of the plants, and the dishes you could make with them, and the bits you could eat and the bits you couldn’t, and then in the afternoon we’d go out on the beach and I’d teach him about the shells and the driftwood and what it took to splash around in the shallows and dream you were a dolphin. Most of his toys were driftwood and he really treasured them. He’d give them names and then we’d make up stories about them. Sounds loopy now, but at the time it was amazing.’
She garnished the story with that same quiet laugh and looking at her, Faraday saw the woman on the chaise longue, heavy-breasted, slender-legged, her hands cupping her belly. Tonight she was wearing jeans again, with an Indian cotton shirt in deep olive greens and swirly blues. The shirt was opaque to the light but he could imagine the contours of her body beneath the thin cotton.
‘And Chris?’ he murmured.
‘He’d gone back to sea. In fact he was at sea most of the time.’
‘Did you miss him?’
‘No, not really.’
‘Did Sam?’
‘Yes, especially when he got older. That’s why we came back. I think I told you.’
She pursued the last of the scallops with her fingers, then licked the sauce from each individual fingertip. She had a sense of inner calm that Faraday found almost mesmeric. He’d never met anyone so obviously at peace.
‘Tell me about Henry,’ he said.
‘Henry?’
For a tiny moment she looked guarded. Then she shrugged and helped herself to another hunk of bread. After she’d shown Henry some of her portfolio, he’d begun to invite her across to Southsea regularly. She had practically no money so he’d send a twenty-pound note in an envelope. At first she’d taken Sam across, too, but then she found it worked better à deux. Henry wasn’t good with kids. Especially Sam.
‘Why not?’
‘Because he was jealous.’
‘Of Sam?’
‘Of me. Of his time with me. It wasn’t a love affair or anything but we were good together. He was a great storyteller. He could make me laugh. He had money, too, and he began to sell a lot of my work. I liked him. He made me feel I was worth something. Not as a person. I’m OK with that. But as an artist. Believe me, that’s a very sexy word if you say it properly.’
A couple of months later, Henry had proposed marriage. They weren’t even sleeping together but for Ruth that hadn’t been a problem. By now, she liked Henry a good deal. And more than that, she felt sorry for him.
‘Why?’
‘He’d had a rough time. He’d married his first wife in America. He was in the Navy and they met at some embassy cocktail party or other. She was Hispanic – Consuela – and really beautiful. See photos of her and you’d understand.’
‘What happened?’
‘He brought her back here and it all went wrong. She wouldn’t make friends. She couldn’t settle down. And like an idiot he got himself way into debt trying to keep her happy. I can see him doing it now. If she wanted a country cottage, he’d go off and buy her one. In fact that’s exactly what happened. Henry was a bit of a highflyer and took a couple of risks he shouldn’t have done on the money side. The cottage turned out to be a wreck and he needed even more to sort it out. He never told me the details but he got himself chucked out of the Navy in the process.’
‘What about Consuela?’
‘She went off with the builder. It broke his heart.’
Faraday nodded. Over the last few days, Henry Potterne had become an almost physical presence. He could visualise the tall stooped figure in Maloney’s photograph and every word of Ruth’s story rang true. Life had put those lines on his face, and life had doubtless driven him to the bottle.
‘So you married him? Out of sympathy?’
‘No, of course not. Partly, maybe, but other things too. We were good together. I was flat broke and it was a bit of security for Sam. Then there was the gallery, and everything he was doing for my career. It all s
eemed to add up. None of those are desperately important on their own, but put them all together and you end up with a marriage.’
While Faraday opened another bottle of wine, she told him the rest of the story. How the gallery had prospered. How they’d found larger premises. And how Charlie Oomes had walked into their lives.
‘He came in one day to buy a picture. It was a hideous thing, a huge oil painting. It was a present for his mother. She was in a nursing home on the Isle of Wight and he was always popping over. In fact that’s why he got the house at Port Solent.’
‘And her name was really Marenka?’
‘Yes. According to Henry, she was a Polish Jewess with an amazing past. Charlie was devoted to her. He’d hated his father but his mum could do no wrong.’
‘Is she still alive?’
‘As far as I know, yes.’
Charlie had named his yacht after his mother, and he’d enlisted Henry’s help to teach him how to sail. When it came to money, Charlie was always more than generous and the stake he’d taken in the gallery had enabled them to buy the old Victorian house where she now lived. For a couple of years even Sam had been happy, but then she’d slowly come to realise that there were demons inside Henry that would never go away.
‘Demons?’
‘Ghosts. I don’t think he ever got over Consuela.’
‘Or you?’
‘I was first reserve.’
‘That I doubt.’
‘It’s true. He tolerated me. I pleased him in various ways. It’s not such a hard thing to do.’
‘Have you ever thought you were more to him than that?’
‘No.’ She held out her glass. ‘I thought so once, but no. He had an idea about me, like most men, but it happened not to fit.’
‘How come?’
‘He wanted all of me. He wanted sole possession.’
‘Isn’t that reasonable? If he was your husband?’
‘Of course it was, but we’re not talking fidelity here. It wasn’t a question of other men. Or even of Sam. What Henry wanted just wasn’t possible. He wanted all of me and then something else as well. It obviously mattered a great deal but I was never quite sure what it was.’ She paused, sipping at the wine, then she looked up again, an expression of absolute candour on her face. ‘He used to say I was beyond reach. Does that make sense to you?’
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