The Take

by Hurley, Graham

  ‘He could be. They don’t like that, but he could be.’

  ‘OK.’ Pete scribbled himself a note. ‘How long have I got?’

  ‘Couple of days.’ Garrett relieved Pete of the Jaffa cakes. ‘That’s all the Gunwharf lot are prepared to pay.’

  Paul Winter was contemplating yet another pot of tea when his mobile rang. It was Cathy Lamb at Fratton nick, wanting to know where he was.

  ‘At the QA.’ The lie was automatic. ‘Why?’

  ‘How’s it going?’

  ‘Crap, love. You know what these places are like. Wait, wait, wait.’ He paused. Next door, in the lounge, he could hear Joannie crying again – tiny, choking sobs. He closed his eyes and put the phone to his ear. ‘They want us now, boss. Call you back?’

  Without waiting for an answer, Winter ended the conversation.

  Joannie was curled into her favourite recliner. Already, in less than an hour, she seemed to have physically diminished. She looked pale and thin and beaten. The spark had gone, the energy, the life. She was a stranger in their little bungalow, not Joannie at all.

  ‘Love,’ he began, ‘it’ll be—’

  ‘Don’t.’

  ‘Don’t what?’

  ‘Don’t say it. Don’t say anything. It’s just the shock. I’ll get over it in a minute. Just give me a bit of time.’

  She looked up at him, doing her best to summon a weak smile, then buried her face in her hands, her whole body rocking back and forth. Winter was on his knees beside her, carefully moving the empty cup to a safer place, feeling hopelessly inadequate. On the shelf above his head their single goldfish flapped slowly around the bowl. He put his arms round his wife and watched it for a moment or two, trying to work out what to say, realising that he didn’t know. He thought he’d got the world sussed, and he’d been wrong. He thought life owed him no surprises, and here he suddenly was, completely helpless. Not an operation. Not a week or two in hospital. But a death sentence. Delivered, in Winter’s view, without a shred of compassion.

  ‘Wanker,’ he said softly. ‘Complete tosspot.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘That bloke. Your specialist.’

  Joannie, who’d rarely seen anything but the brighter side of life, shook her head. It wasn’t the consultant’s fault. He was only doing his job.

  ‘His job? His job is to make you better. Not sit you down like that and tell you there’s no point even bloody trying. What are these people for, for God’s sake? We pay their wages. We build them all these bloody hospitals. There are drugs. Machines. All kinds of stuff. All he’s got is a white flag. Fuck him. Just fuck him.’

  He shut his eyes, close to tears himself. Rage and self-pity. Then he felt Joannie’s hand on his, stroking and stroking.

  ‘It’ll be all right,’ she was saying softly. ‘I’m still here.’

  A minute or two later, standing in the kitchen, Winter realised he’d just washed the same cup three times. Can’t cope with this, he told himself. No bloody way.

  Opening a drawer, he pulled out a drying-up cloth. Beautifully ironed, it smelled of fresh air. Shutting his eyes again, he visualised a line of washing in the garden, the way Joannie pegged the big stuff in the middle, the way she planted the pole so the sheets never snagged on the rose bushes. Twenty-four years she’d been doing that. Twenty-four years he’d taken it all for granted, every single time. And now she was next door. Dying.

  He’d left the mobile on the side. Cathy was in her office.

  ‘We’re through at the hospital, boss.’ He tried hard to sound normal. ‘What have you got for me?’

  Faraday was reading the front page of the News for the second time when the duty DS from Fratton phoned. Joyce, ever gleeful, had left the midday edition on his desk, DONALD DUCK RAPIST STRIKES AGAIN ran the headline, MOTHER FLEES IN TERROR.

  ‘We’ve had a bloke at the front desk, sir,’ the DS was saying. ‘Not sure about the strength but we thought you might be interested.’

  ‘What’s it about?’

  ‘His daughter. He thinks she’s been molested.’

  Faraday was leafing through the paper. A search of the area around the ponds was still going on, but the News editorial left it in no doubt that the city’s women deserved a better deal from the police. Three incidents in a row. Three chances to nail the guy. And absolutely nothing to show for it. This was the kind of nonsense that sent the suits at headquarters racing to their PCs. Any minute now Joyce would be bending over his shoulder, reading the first of the e-mails.

  ‘Molested by who?’

  ‘Her lecturer.’

  The DS named a college in the city. The girl was on some kind of media course. The lecturer taught drama and film studies. According to the father, she’d been pressured into sleeping with him. She was a good girl, weak-minded but a good girl. Bloke needed sorting out.

  Faraday at last closed the paper. The college was up in the north of the city, part of Cathy Lamb’s patch.

  ‘So why me?’ he enquired drily. ‘Can’t you lot cope?’

  ‘It’s not that, sir.’

  ‘What is it, then?’

  ‘His address, for a start, and hers. They both live down your way. She’s in some kind of bedsit in Southsea. He’s got a place in Milton.’

  Faraday reached for a pen. The Donald Duck incidents had all occurred around the edges of Langstone Harbour. Milton was half a mile away.

  ‘And?’ he said.

  The DS paused a moment, then laughed.

  ‘This is the father talking,’ he said, ‘but apparently he’s got a thing about dressing up.’

  Two

  Monday, 19 June, noon

  Winter stood in a room at the Marriott hotel, staring down at the view. The sun had come out at last, and from the seventh floor the city was laid out at his feet: rows and rows of gleaming yachts in the nearby Port Solent marina, the motorway threading across the wide spaces of the harbour, the big black silhouettes of the cranes in the naval dockyard and a cluster of sentinel tower blocks far away in the haze. Half-close your eyes and it might be somewhere foreign and exotic, an island city ringed with blue. For a view to start your morning, you could certainly do worse.

  ‘Will you be wanting to bring other guys up here? Seal the room off?’

  The manager was a softly spoken Scot and his recent dealings with the Drugs Squad had fuelled many a laugh at the social club bar down at Fratton nick. Only last month, the drugs guys had used the hotel to set up surveillance in expectation of a big cocaine delivery. The wholesalers were coming down from Manchester and trans-shipping in the hotel car park. Teams of three from the Drugs Squad had organised a twenty-four-hour watch – still cameras, video, the lot – but the bad guys hadn’t shown and on the third day, under their noses, some local scrote had turned up with a rusty old Transit and nicked the hotel lawnmower. They’d all watched him do it – back the van up, open the rear doors, wrestle the bloody thing in – yet none of them had even made a note of the Transit’s registration number. Too busy sizing up the big picture, Winter thought bitterly. Too fucking grand to bother with a £1700 slice of volume crime.

  The hotel manager was still waiting for an answer. Winter finally dragged himself away from the view, back to the room. On the manager’s instructions, nothing had been touched.

  ‘Tell me again,’ Winter grunted. ‘The guy booked in and paid?’

  ‘Yesterday afternoon. Cash. No problem there.’

  ‘But you’re worried about this?’

  ‘Aye, and the bathroom, too.’

  Winter looked round. There’d certainly been some kind of disturbance. An armchair had been upended and there were shards of china from a smashed tea service on the carpet by the telly. Next door, in the bathroom, blood had dried on the splashback tiles around the handbasin. Not a vast amount of blood, but more than enough to warrant the maid putting a call through to the manager.

  Winter inspected the bloodstains more closely, in search of the splatter patterns that might indicat
e use of a weapon. Stab somebody with a knife, or use a cosh or a hammer on their skulls, and the moment you withdrew the weapon was the moment you sent little drops of blood over your shoulder, flecking the surfaces behind. On this occasion, though, Winter could find no such evidence. The blood was restricted to the tiles around the basin. The guy might have cut himself shaving.

  Winter nodded to himself and then bent to an empty glass on the shelf beside the bath and sniffed it. He was going through the motions, his brain on automatic, and he sensed that the manager knew it. Not that Winter really cared.

  ‘What’s the guy’s name?’

  ‘French. Angus French.’

  ‘And you say he’s checked out?’

  ‘He’s left, certainly. His clothes have gone, as you can see, and we can’t find his car. He wouldn’t need to check out.’

  ‘Nothing from the minibar?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘No phone calls?’

  ‘Not on our system.’

  ‘Nothing downstairs? The restaurant? Breakfast on his tab?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  Winter was inspecting the contents of the little wicker basket of goodies by the sink. Bath gel. A shower hat. A complimentary bar of herb-scented soap. The latter was one of Joannie’s favourites. He weighed it in his hand and then slipped it into his pocket, trying hard not to picture her huddled in the recliner at home.

  ‘You’re not bothered?’ the manager said at last, looking pointedly at the bloodstains.

  ‘I’ve seen worse.’

  ‘But you’ll understand our concern? Calling you guys in?’

  ‘Yeah, but I don’t think you’ve got a problem here. Bloke’s on his own, gets pissed, staggers around a bit, cuts himself somehow, drowns his sorrows.’ He picked up the glass and offered it to the manager. ‘I’d say Scotch, but you’d be the expert.’

  The manager was looking at the glass.

  ‘You’ll not be bringing in forensic, then? Or a photographer?’

  ‘No point. It’s not even a damages claim, is it?’

  ‘No, but—’ He shrugged. ‘I guess it’s up to you.’

  ‘I’d leave it. Anything else comes up, give me a call.’

  Winter gave him a card before stepping back into the bedroom. The manager glanced at the card, took a final look at the blood crusting beside the basin, then shrugged again. Next door, Winter had returned to the window.

  ‘That bloody lawnmower of yours,’ he mused. ‘Ever get it back, did you?’

  It was lunchtime before Faraday had the chance to pursue the message from Fratton CID. Rick Stapleton and Dawn Ellis had been part of the team mounting the search after last night’s Donald Duck incident and they had little to report. They’d come away with a boxful of used condoms and enough empty lager cans to fill a couple of supermarket bags, but the guy they were now referring to as ‘DD’ hadn’t obliged them by dropping anything really helpful, like a pair of keys, or a nice little slip of paper with his name and address on it. They’d managed to match the woman’s trainers against a footprint on the edge of one of the ponds, but the surrounding mud was a mess of overprints and they’d found nothing worth even a photograph.

  Faraday let them finish before mentioning the call from the DS over at Fratton. Dawn was a slight, fine-boned twenty-five-year-old with a sharp intelligence and a chaotic love life. Stapleton, seven years, older, was fiercely gay and lived with his partner, a Southsea restaurateur, in an exquisite Victorian terrace near the seafront. To Faraday’s surprise, they made a good team. Stapleton, who happened to own a Suzuki 1100cc superbike, was one of those guys who tackled most of life’s corners at a thousand miles an hour, and Dawn was one of the few individuals who could slow him down. The fact that she very obviously fancied him had fuelled months of office gossip, but it was Vanessa, typically, who’d put her finger on the essence of this strangely effective partnership. Dawn, she’d concluded, had a passion for lost causes, and in Rick Stapleton she’d found herself the perfect specimen. The guy was superglued to his partner. Even Dawn, with her wardrobe of trophy rugby shirts, didn’t have a prayer.

  ‘I’ve got an address on the Donald Duck job,’ Faraday said at last. ‘Definitely worth a visit.’

  Stapleton was studying the slip of paper Faraday had handed over.

  ‘Who’s Beavis?’

  ‘He’s the guy who made the complaint. Thinks his daughter’s at it with her teacher.’

  ‘How old is she?’

  ‘Eighteen.’

  ‘That makes it legal, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Not if he’s wandering around at night in a mask.’

  Dawn looked briefly troubled. Faraday, for once, was sounding like Rick Stapleton. Assumptions first, evidence a distant second.

  ‘Why would we put him in the frame?’ she enquired.

  ‘We might not. It’s a punt, that’s all. He lives close by. The father thinks he’s over-sexed. He might be into dressing up. Run last night past him, and the other dates, too. Joyce is sitting on the file.’

  Joyce was perched on a corner of her desk, demolishing a doughnut. Tuned in to the conversation, she licked the sugar from her fingers and reached back to open a drawer. Dawn Ellis got there first, grabbing Joyce’s arm moments before she toppled onto the floor. A second or two later, the contents of the open drawer caught Dawn’s attention.

  ‘What’s this?’ She began to giggle. ‘And this?’

  She pulled out a handful of magazines, full colour. Well-muscled young men in a variety of come-on poses. All of them naked, and most of them in a state of some excitement. Faraday joined her. The magazines were German. Der Fleisch.

  ‘Are these yours?’ Faraday was gazing at Joyce, amazed.

  ‘Of course they’re mine. Three pounds a month including postage. A little man in Hamburg sends them over.’

  Stapleton reached for one of the magazines, flicking through it with growing interest. He kept himself in trim with near-nightly runs along the seafront, bounding along in wraparound sunglasses and a pair of scarlet shorts. Dawn was watching him carefully.

  ‘Speak German do you, Rick?’

  ‘No chance.’ He was looking at Joyce. ‘How about you?’

  ‘Me neither.’ Joyce beamed at him. ‘Be my guest.’

  Cathy Lamb found Winter beside the coffee machine at Fratton police station. Just back from the Marriott hotel, he was trying to work out why his thirty pence had failed to produce a shot of Gold Blend, creamer, two sugars.

  ‘How’s your wife?’

  Winter didn’t take his eyes off the cash read-out.

  ‘Fine,’ he said stonily. ‘Why doesn’t this bloody thing work?’

  ‘You need another ten.’ She pointed at the price tag alongside the Gold Blend logo. ‘Here. Have one on me.’ She put a coin in the slot and watched the plastic cup drop into place. ‘There’s a stack of stuff come in. We need to talk.’

  ‘No can do, boss.’ Winter shook his head. ‘I’m buggered for the rest of the day.’

  ‘How come?’

  Winter, waiting for the cup to fill, wouldn’t look at her. He had paperwork going back the best part of a week, he said. He had two CPS files to sort and neither would wait. On top of that, she’d sent him to the Marriott.

  ‘And?’

  ‘Very dodgy. There’s evidence of a fight and the bloke’s disappeared.’

  ‘What evidence?’

  ‘Blood all over the bathroom.’

  ‘You want to get a SOCO in?’

  Winter ducked his head towards the cup. SOCO was CID-speak for Scenes-Of-Crime Officer. Putting a SOCO into the Marriott was the equivalent of pressing the alarm button, and though Cathy wouldn’t think twice about giving him the go-ahead if circumstances justified it, there were serious financial implications. A full forensic search of the hotel suite would carry a hefty price tag.

  ‘The manager’s sealed the room off,’ he lied, ‘but I thought I’d make a few calls first.’

  Kevin Beavis lived in Frat
ton, barely half a mile from the police station. The history of Portsmouth was writ large across the city’s face – street after street of tightly packed terraced houses pushing outwards from the naval dockyard – and the fields of Fratton had disappeared under a wild frenzy of nineteenth-century speculative building. Piped water and the tram had brought a measure of comfort and civic pride to the area, but nowadays much of that spirit had long gone. There were curls of dog shit beside Kevin Beavis’s front door and one of the windows beside it had been boarded up with plywood. Across the plywood, in red aerosol, someone had scrawled ‘Becks Sucks’. Waiting for an answer to her second knock, Dawn Ellis obliged Rick Stapleton with a translation.

  ‘Football talk,’ she explained. ‘In case you were wondering.’

  Beavis was a tall, bulky man in his early forties who filled the narrow entry. His sagging jeans were stained with engine oil and the lumberjack shirt hadn’t seen the inside of a washing machine for weeks. His big jowly face was buttoned with tiny eyes, jet-black, and a savage side-parting gave his whole body a curiously lop-sided look. If you were launching an inquiry into inbreeding, then Kevin Beavis was definitely where you’d start.

  The moment he saw Stapleton’s proffered ID, he extended an enormous hand. Stapleton ignored it.

  ‘Just a word or two, Mr Beavis,’ he said. ‘Inside, if you don’t mind.’

  The house was a tip: bare boards in the hall, and a glimpse of a motorcycle frame propped up on a raft of breeze blocks in the front room. The kitchen lay at the back of the house, the sink full of motorcycle parts, the single window misted from a recently boiled kettle. Both Stapleton and Dawn Ellis refused Beavis’s offer of tea.

  ‘We understand you made a complaint,’ Dawn began. ‘Regarding your daughter.’

  Beavis nodded. His daughter’s name was Shelley. She was a bright girl, clever, not like her mum or dad, and she’d done well. At school they’d said she was college material, definitely. She liked films and plays. She wanted to be an actress. She read a lot. In fact, she read all the time. Which was why she’d ended up with a pervert like Addison.

  ‘Who’s Addison?’ Stapleton was making notes.