Turnstone

by Hurley, Graham

  After supper, Ruth and Faraday lay together on the sofa, listening to old records that Faraday hadn’t played for years. More relaxed than he could remember, he mused about his fortnight’s leave. He fancied somewhere abroad, hunting for bearded vultures on the Spanish side of the Pyrenees above Benasque. Or maybe a week in Gibraltar watching the autumn passage of raptors, heading south to winter in Africa. Thousands of white storks. Hundreds of black kites. Dozens of honey buzzards. Maybe even the odd Bonelli’s eagle. The thought made him sigh with pleasure and Ruth nestled closer to him, listening to the music. After a while, he drifted off to sleep.

  Past midnight, Ruth kissed him softly on the lips, slipped her sandals on and tiptoed out of the house. By the time Faraday woke up, she’d gone.

  Next morning, returning briefly to work, Faraday discovered that Cathy had put the remains of the Maloney inquiry to bed. The in-trays were back in the stationery store. The paperwork had been cross-indexed and tucked away in a master file tagged ‘No Further Action’. All that remained of Maloney himself was a single comment in red Pentel on the bulletin board: ‘Serial shagger,’ it read. ‘Gone to heaven with a smile on his face.’ The handwriting was Paul Winter’s.

  Faraday finally found Cathy by the photocopier. He wanted a word or two with Winter about young Scottie, but she hadn’t a clue when he’d next be in. His wife had reported him sick this very morning and she didn’t think he’d be back on his feet for at least a couple of days.

  ‘Anything serious?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Shame.’

  Cathy was running off a dozen dupes of Kate Symonds’s front-page splash for Coastlines. Faraday picked one up, still hot from the machine.

  ‘Who are these for?’

  ‘Us. We all have to read it. Bevan’s instructions. He thinks we need motivation.’

  Faraday wondered whether she was joking. She wasn’t.

  ‘You’re supposed to be on leave,’ she said pointedly, ‘or hadn’t you heard the rumour?’

  ‘I’m off tomorrow.’

  ‘Anywhere nice?’

  ‘No idea. I think I’ll just follow my nose.’

  ‘Nothing changes, then, eh?’

  She gave him a smile and when he asked what else there was to do on the Maloney inquiry she told him it was all done. Then she changed her mind.

  ‘You might pop up to see Elaine,’ she said, ‘if you were really brave.’

  Elaine Pope opened the door to Faraday’s knock. It was obvious at once that she’d been beaten up. Her face was swollen and purple, and there were more bruises on her arms. She tried to shut the door on Faraday but he wouldn’t let her. He wanted to know what had happened.

  She wouldn’t tell him. They stood in the hall, shouting at each other. She said she’d been crazy ever to have talked to him in the first place, crazier still to have believed his promises of immunity. She’d had the management round twice now. The place was rented. They were threatening to terminate the lease, to run her out of town, to send her back over the tracks to fucking Paulsgrove. And if that wasn’t bad enough, she’d now got this to put up with.

  She looked at herself in the hall mirror, too angry to cry. Faraday tried again but she shook her head and told him to fuck off.

  ‘You want me dead or something? Isn’t this good enough?’

  Faraday didn’t answer. On the table was a copy of Coastlines. Faraday picked it up.

  ‘Where did you get this from?’ he asked her.

  Elaine stared at him, then shook her head in disbelief.

  ‘Everybody gets one,’ she said. ‘Hadn’t you even worked that out?’

  Charlie Oomes was out in the sunshine barely a hundred metres away, sprawled in a deckchair in front of his waterside house, his face shadowed by a baseball cap. He had a mobile phone in one hand and a tall glass of something pink in the other. There were documents piled on the briefcase beside the chair, and every now and then he’d clamp the glass between his knees while he referred to a figure or a line of text.

  Faraday watched him for a minute or two. He’d walked down the path beside the house, alerted by the sight of Oomes’s Mercedes parked outside. Oomes had done the damage to Elaine Pope, he knew he had. He’d picked up his copy of Coastlines, read the front page and drawn the obvious conclusion. Elaine had told Faraday about Henry coming to the boat. And now she’d paid the price.

  Oomes ended his conversation and began to dial another number. Faraday, approaching from behind, lifted the phone from his hand.

  ‘Moved offices?’

  Charlie heaved himself out of the deckchair and snatched the phone back. For a big man he could move surprisingly quickly.

  ‘They ever tell you about private property?’ he said hotly. ‘Or is it another fucking search?’

  Faraday ignored the question. He was looking at the yacht moored beside Oomes’s private pontoon. It looked bigger than Marenka and it looked new.

  Oomes was back in control of himself.

  ‘Hundred and seventy grand,’ he said, ‘in case you were wondering.’

  Faraday was still studying the yacht. A burgee sporting the logo of Oomes International fluttered from one of the mainstays.

  ‘Any thoughts about a crew?’ he said. ‘Anyone daft enough to risk it?’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘Work it out.’

  He turned to face Oomes for the first time. The scratches down his left cheek looked barely hours old. No wonder he was wearing a baseball cap.

  ‘At least she fought back,’ he said. ‘Must be a change, not getting everything your own way.’

  Oomes didn’t flinch. He took a tiny step forward, his nose inches from Faraday’s face.

  ‘You’ve got fucking nowhere,’ he said softly, ‘and you know something else? You never will.’

  Faraday held his gaze for a long moment. He could smell the bacon on Oomes’s breath.

  ‘I just called to share the good news,’ he said at last.

  ‘And what’s that?’

  ‘They’ve doubled my resources,’ he said. ‘We’ll be in your face for a while yet.’

  It wasn’t true, of course, and Faraday knew that it was a measure of his failure that he should be driven to a lie as infantile as this. Back at the station he made a final check with Cathy, asking her to call on Elaine again. She seemed determined to keep her mouth shut, but at the very least they should get photographs of her injuries in case she changed her mind.

  Faraday looked round. Bev Yates and Rick McGivern were back from leave. CID was nearly up to strength again. Cathy caught his eye, and nodded towards the corridor. She wanted a private word.

  ‘I wouldn’t do a Maloney again,’ she said. ‘Not if I were you.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘Meaning the management’s mega-pissed off. And one or two others, as well.’ She indicated the newly tidied office. ‘Were you thinking of taking a lot of leave?’

  ‘Not really. Couple of weeks at the most.’

  ‘That’s probably wise.’ She touched him lightly on the shoulder. ‘Have a great time.’

  Back home, Faraday found a parcel waiting for him beside the front door. It felt like a picture. He settled in the warm sunshine, easing back the Sellotape, and found himself looking at the photograph of the turnstone he’d admired at Ruth’s place. She’d mounted it in a wooden frame and added a note. ‘One turned stone deserves another,’ she’d written. ‘Thanks for a brilliant evening.’

  Twenty-Five

  It was a while since Paul Winter had tried his luck with some serious surveillance and the whole day watching Juanita reminded him how tedious it could be. Whether parked outside her Port Solent apartment block, or tracking her Jeep on her occasional excursions, he’d stuck rigorously to the rules – forever hanging back in traffic, forever masking his interest behind a newspaper or a feigned conversation on his mobile – and the sum total from all those hours of rigorous sentry work had been the dawning
conviction that she’d become a very hard lady to intercept.

  In her flat, she appeared always to have company. In public, she walked or rode with another heavy – occasionally Dave Pope, more often other members of Marty Harrison’s entourage. Either way, after the conversation with Harry Wayte, Winter had no appetite for being humiliated yet again.

  She’d suckered him twice. She’d fed him all kinds of crap about Marty screwing around with Elaine Pope, and when he’d been daft enough to believe her she’d dug stuff out of him about Scott Spellar that had very nearly amounted to a death sentence. Winter had rarely paid much attention to his conscience but this little episode left him little choice. All he wanted was thirty seconds of her time. Alone.

  Now, mid-morning, she was off to see Marty again. Three cars back in heavy traffic, Winter watched as Dave Pope indicated left, pulling the gleaming Jeep into the street that led uphill to the hospital. If they repeated yesterday’s routine, Winter might just lever himself into her busy, busy day without the risk of a confrontation.

  Parking at the hospital was a nightmare. Outside the main entrance, Dave Pope slowed and then stopped completely. Juanita got out, shut the door and turned for the big double doors. This morning she was wearing brown leather hot pants and a spray-on vest, and watching her cross the pavement Winter realised why Marty had been so keen on a private room. This woman would be far more therapeutic than any antibiotic.

  Winter waited for the Jeep to depart in search of a parking place, then slipped his Prelude on to an oblong of yellow hatching marked ‘Ambulances Only’. Hurrying into the hospital, he spotted her across the concourse, buying a huge bunch of flowers from the League of Friends’ shop. With the flowers wrapped, she picked up copies of the Sun and the Daily Sport, and then made her way towards the lift. Winter followed, praying that the lift would give them the privacy he needed.

  It didn’t. The moment the steel doors opened, a couple of porters pushing beds stepped in, then a fat woman of uncertain age and a slim, harassed-looking man who appeared to be a priest. The last two passengers for the ride to the third floor were Juanita and Winter.

  The lift was moving before she realised who had squashed against her. Winter had been hoping for thirty seconds. With luck, he might get half that.

  The lift juddered to a halt. Second floor. Winter stepped aside to let the priest out. With more room inside the lift, Juanita made no attempt to make space between them. She loved to taunt him, even now, and bodily contact was infinitely better than anything she could say.

  The lift was on the move again. Winter reached inside his jacket. She didn’t flinch.

  ‘You owe me one,’ he said. ‘Here. Give it to Marty.’

  He produced a folded copy of Coastlines. Her hand brushed his, hesitating a moment longer than was necessary. Winter gazed down at her. All he could smell, all he could think about, was big puffballs of spearmint foam.

  The lift came to a halt again. Her hand gave his a little squeeze.

  ‘One what?’ she asked.

  In the end, Faraday chose the Isle of Wight for what Bevan, in an unguarded moment on the phone, had called his ‘convalescence’, and the moment he tucked himself into cover on the edges of Newtown Creek, he knew that it had been the right decision. No problems getting up at some ungodly hour for an early flight. No hassles with holiday crowds at the airport. No aisle seat beside the talkative granny or the squalling kids. Just the solitude of the salt marsh and the sweet knowledge that the next seven days were his for the keeping.

  The morning passed in a satisfactory muddle of waders. There were greenshanks, the purest elegance, chest deep in water; and black-tailed godwits striding around the glistening mud flats; and away in the distance, a pair of ruffs, wandering aimlessly between the tidal pools. Each bird had its own special place in this tableau – no duplication, no wasted effort – and as the hours slipped by Faraday felt himself at one with a pageant that made a great deal more sense than the world he’d left behind. Passage on the car ferry across the Solent had dug a moat between himself and the past couple of weeks, and he wasted not a single second on regret or frustration. He’d done his best, he’d failed, and that was that. Some you won, some you lost. Maloney, in all probability, was lost for ever.

  At lunchtime, when the sky to the west began to darken with the threat of rain, Faraday made his way back to a pub in Shalfleet. He treated himself to a crab salad and a pint of Goddard’s Fuggle-dee-Dum and then drove south, to Freshwater Bay. From here, a footpath climbed the long green humpback of Tennyson Down, and he put on his anorak against the thin drizzle, striding across the springy turf, his body bent forward as the climb began to steepen.

  He’d once lived here with Janna, those first months when they’d returned from North America, renting a half-derelict bungalow in Freshwater Bay. The kitchen offered glimpses of the sea between neighbouring properties. There’d been no hot water, barely any furniture, and they’d conducted a permanent war against a family of mice which nested in the attic. Even on windy nights you could hear them scurrying back and forth.

  The memories brought him to a halt. Away to the left, a black-headed gull was riding the updraught from the cliff face. Ahead lay the tall, sturdy monument to the dead poet, and beyond that the bared chalk teeth of the Needles. Faraday hadn’t walked this path since Janna died, a deliberate parcelling-up of sights and smells and sounds too painful to contemplate, but he remembered her now, on this very stretch of downland, taunting him with verse after verse from In Memoriam.

  They’d first met in a bookshop in Seattle, and wherever they lived had always been littered with paperbacks. She’d read anything. Anything from trash recipes to Peruvian poetry to hard-bitten American crime thrillers. Her books were piled high by the bed and she’d reach down sometimes, those freezing winter mornings in the bungalow when they never got up, choosing a volume by touch. He could hear her voice now, feel the warmth of her breath on his ear. She read verse like she tackled everything else, with a gay ironic lilt, committing long passages to memory. Janna was the woman who’d touched him like no other. Janna was the woman who could read him Tennyson in the dark.

  Hours later, the rain heavier, Faraday picked his way through the quiet village streets, hauling himself back along the rope of years. The bungalow had occupied a corner plot. More than two decades later, it was virtually unrecognisable. The roof had been reslated and at the rear of the property, where the penetrating damp had blistered the wallpaper in the tiny living roof, there was a brand new conservatory in gleaming PVC. The garden was beautifully tended, brimming with flowers, and there was even a decent car in the drive, with two little baby seats strapped side by side in the back.

  Faraday stood in the rain for minutes on end, staring over the dripping hedge. On the left was the bedroom where he’d nursed her through those final hours. The oncologist had done his best to insist that she should die in hospital, with every last ounce of hi-tech support, but neither Faraday nor Janna would hear of it. Here was where they’d belonged. Here was where she’d given birth to J-J, where they’d sunk their roots. She’d died on a Sunday morning, early, with the sunshine on her face.

  Let Love clasp Grief lest both be drown’d

  Let darkness keep her raven gloss

  Ah, sweeter to be drunk with loss,

  To dance with death, to beat the ground.

  That night, Faraday booked into the Farringford Hotel, a mile away up a lane overhung with elms. The house had once been Tennyson’s family home and the hotelier had preserved a little of the comfortable Gothic gloom of the period. Faraday sat in the library with a drink, staring out through the mullioned windows, transfixed by the memories. There was a different view of the Down from here. On the far side of the hotel grounds was a wooden door inset into a brick wall. Beyond the door, he could see where the path tracked away between fields, hedged on both sides, then zigzagged up the swell of grassy chalk to the bare ridge that ran west towards the Needles. Just occasionally,
he thought, you can take the past by surprise and even – if you’re very lucky – survive it.

  He ate alone, avoiding conversation, thinking of Ruth. She was part of this, part of the gamble he’d taken by coming here. Meeting her, talking to her, being with her, had handed him the key to the gate at the foot of the garden. She’d reminded him of what was possible, and what was good, and the overwhelming temptation was to phone her, and invite her over, and see where the relationship might lead. Twice, during the meal, he nearly did just that. Twice, he pushed his plate away and checked to see whether the phone in the hall outside was free. But both times another instinct stayed his hand. He didn’t need her. He didn’t need anyone. Not yet.

  Early next morning, he awoke to bright splashes of sunshine on the duvet. By ten o’clock he was back on the road again, driving east along the coast towards the distant prow of St Catherine’s. Past Ventnor, he picked up signs for Shanklin and Sandown. He had no plans, no fixed itinerary, and was more than happy to ride along in little knots of holiday traffic, letting the day sort itself out. Maybe he’d do a little more birding. Maybe, for once, he wouldn’t.

  On the main road out of Sandown, he spotted a signpost for Bembridge Harbour. Traffic had slowed to a crawl and he could see the turn-off fifty metres ahead. He began to indicate right, changed his mind, then changed his mind again. Seconds later, he’d left the traffic behind, settling behind the wheel for the long descent towards the sea.

  He hadn’t been to Bembridge for many years, but very little had changed. The road still wound down the hill to a causeway on the landward side of the harbour, and there was still a collection of scruffy houseboats drawn up on the foreshore. One of them, he knew, was Ruth’s. Kalaringi? Kaluwhundi? He couldn’t remember.

  Faraday parked the car outside a café at the foot of the hill and slipped the binoculars into his pocket. Way out in the harbour he’d spotted a raft of duck. Were they eider? Even through the glasses, he couldn’t tell. He abandoned the ducks and began to walk along the causeway, passing the houseboats one by one, eyeing their names, trying to imagine what this place must have been like in the depths of winter. Towards the end there was a boxy little houseboat with curtained windows and an old bicycle padlocked to a stanchion on the foredeck. The colour – a deep, deep blue – struck a sudden chord. Close enough to read the name, he stopped. Kahurangi. Ruth’s place.