The Take

by Hurley, Graham

  Dawn thought of Faraday’s natural caution.

  ‘If you were the guvnor, you’d be carrying the can when the CPS slung it out for lack of evidence.’

  ‘You’re joking. The forensic’ll be back by next week.’

  ‘Yeah? And what happens if there’s no match?’

  Stapleton stared at her. The blank incomprehension in those big blue eyes made her laugh.

  ‘I didn’t hear that,’ he told her. ‘Whose bloody side are you on?’

  Footsteps down the corridor announced the return of Addison. He stepped aside to let Julia into the interview room. Neither of them made any attempt to sit down.

  ‘My client has a proposal to offer,’ the solicitor began. ‘He’s prepared to take part in an ID parade.’

  Stapleton began to laugh.

  ‘It was dark,’ he pointed out, ‘and the bloke was wearing a mask. What kind of parade’s that?’

  ‘It’s not the mask the witnesses might be interested in.’

  ‘No?’ Stapleton was looking lost again.

  ‘No. As we understand it, the nature of the complaints has to do with … ah … exposure. Am I right?’

  Dawn nodded. ‘In all three cases.’

  ‘Excellent. In which case, we would suggest’ – she glanced at Addison – ‘an ID parade with a difference.’

  There was a long silence. Dawn was staring at the solicitor. She’d been right about the mischief, righter than she could possibly have known. Was this a legal first? Or just a wind-up? She began to ask for clarification, but Stapleton got there first. He sounded slightly awed by the practicalities.

  ‘You mean a willy parade? Ten guys getting it up?’ He made a loose gesture at belly level. ‘For real?’

  Back home by half-eight, Faraday began to read the accident report for a second time, realising at once that it was a mistake. There were some things he could – should – do here, steps he could take, but nothing would ever blunt the impact of those hideously perfect photographs. Even in black and white, after their passage through the photocopier, they were far too graphic for Faraday’s peace of mind. Vanessa Parry was dead, and no post-impact investigation would ever change that.

  Putting the photocopies back in their envelope, Faraday collected his binoculars from the study upstairs and set off along the towpath for the distant smudge of Farlington marshes, an RSPB bird reserve at the top of Langstone Harbour. It was still warm, and the afternoon sea breeze had eased to the faintest stir of air. Striding north at a faster pace than usual, Faraday could smell the scents of summer, the richness of the harbour-side grasses spiked with wild honeysuckle, grateful for the distractions of memory.

  June, for father and son, had been a time for squabbling. As far as Faraday was concerned, high summer was a hiatus, a largely empty bridge between the vivid passage of spring migrants – wheatears, chiff-chaffs, willow warblers – and those golden days in early autumn when the first of the Brent geese returned from their breeding grounds in the far north. To wake up to their comical honking across the eel-grass was to know that summer was over. Time to struggle into an anorak and a pair of sturdy boots. Time for some serious birding.

  J-J, on the other hand, loved June. A neighbour had a little dinghy on a harbourside mooring that dried out at low water. He taught J-J how to row, gave him a key to his garden shed, and told him to help himself to the oars and rowlocks. J-J, who’d swum like a fish since the age of seven, needed no encouragement. In all weathers, he’d be out there, an increasingly tiny dot through Faraday’s living-room window.

  It wasn’t that J-J was blind to birdlife. On the contrary, birds – their plumage, the way they flew, their habitats, their tiny offspring – had been one of the shared secrets that had cemented the bond between father and son, an entire world they’d made their own. No, it was simply that J-J, in common with many deaf kids, lived through his nerve ends. He loved the kiss of sunshine on his near naked body. He loved the surge of the harbour beneath the dinghy. And he loved most of all the smell of crusted salt on his skin at the end of a hot, hot day. Faraday remembered him now, perched on a stool in the kitchen, offering his skinny little arm for his dad to sniff.

  Up on the marshes, Faraday walked along the seawall until the other birders had shrunk to dots in the distance. The tide was low, and he found a comfortable perch before raising the binoculars and taking a precautionary sweep across the gleaming spaces of the harbour. A tiny scatter of little terns on an outing from their colony on a nearby island. A handful of lapwings windmilling around. The constant chatter of sedge warblers from somewhere behind him, heard but so rarely seen. Apart from that, nothing.

  The binoculars came briefly to rest on the distant silhouette of his own house, still shimmering in the heat at the very edge of the harbour. A nudge to the right, and he was looking at the acres of scrub and bushes that fringed the ponds between the water and the Eastern Road. Against the setting sun, it looked remote and impenetrable, untouched by the bricks and mortar that covered the rest of the island, and he found himself musing about the tracksuited figure in the Donald Duck mask who’d managed to taint even this last relic of wilderness.

  More and more, he realised what policing – detective work – really entailed. In the Home Office research papers and on the more fanciful courses it was all proactive, staying-ahead-of-the-game, intelligence-led stuff, but in practice he and his blokes were rarely more than sweepers-up. Society had hit the buffers during the eighties, he knew this now for certain, and all that remained was to poke around among the wreckage, connecting one torn wire to another in a wildly optimistic bid to put the lights back on.

  Sometimes, absurdly gratified, they got a result. Other times, they eyed each other through the drifting smoke, trying hard not to gag. Vanessa Parry hadn’t been killed by a pervert, or a psychopath, or some animal with a record as long as your arm. No, she’d had the life crushed out of her by a twenty-five-year-old with a diamond stud in his ear who’d been too busy on the phone to see where he was going. No one would care much about restitution or justice, and in any case there wasn’t much point because the poor woman, through no fault of her own, was dead.

  Faraday put the glasses down. If you were looking for a metaphor for a wider madness, it was all there. Fifty miles an hour down a suburban street. A car full of crisps and fizzy drinks. An appointment at some pub or other. The need to squeeze in just one more phone call. And the second it took you to look up and realise you were metres away from killing that frightened-looking lady in red. A very big bang. Lots of broken glass. And then silence. It was that bloody sad.

  Faraday’s mobile began to chirp ten minutes later. He was on his feet again, completing the long circuit of the seawall. It was Rick Stapleton with news about Addison’s proposal for an ID parade. At first, Faraday thought he’d been drinking.

  ‘He can’t, boss,’ Stapleton pointed out. ‘He’s banged up.’

  ‘I meant you.’ He could hear Stapleton laughing. Against the darkening sky, a pair of mute swans. ‘Whose idea was it? Addison’s or the brief?’

  ‘Pass. The brief tabled it.’

  ‘Then she’s either off her head’ – Faraday was still watching the swans – ‘or she’s playing games. What do you think?’

  ‘She’s sending us a message,’ Stapleton said at once. ‘She thinks we’ve got no chance. She’s that confident. We should charge him. Get it over with.’

  ‘And the Custody Sergeant?’

  ‘He’ll support a charge.’

  Faraday strained to hear the last swish-swish of the swans’ wings before they vanished, then bent to the phone again. The final decision on a formal charge lay with the Custody Sergeant. If he thought the evidence justified it then Faraday saw no reason to delay any further.

  ‘Charge him,’ he said. ‘We’re talking GBH here. What’s the bail situation?’

  ‘We’re contending the guy’s a public menace. The Sergeant’s agreed to keep him in.’

  ‘Charge him,’
Faraday repeated. ‘Go for it.’

  By the time Winter returned from the kitchen with a fresh pot of tea, Joannie was asleep again. He poured her a cup, leaving it on the little table by her elbow before settling into the file again. He’d printed out Hennessey’s patient notes on his PC upstairs, and now he was cross-checking them with the newspaper reports he’d lifted from Pete Lamb. Fifty-two case histories. Healthy wombs ripped out. Bladders punctured. Infection spread. Lives either risked or, on an all-too-permanent basis, wrecked. Was he imagining things here? Or were there fifty-two reasons why Hennessey himself might be history?

  On a pad by his elbow, Winter had been keeping track of exactly where these women lived. Hennessey had been a consultant at a hospital in West Sussex, saving his private patients for appointments in Harley Street, and there were clusters of victims dotted around Arundel, Littlehampton and Bognor Regis. One in particular had caught Winter’s eye.

  Dierdre Walsh was a fifty-two-year-old widow from a village near Arundel. She’d gone to hospital with a diagnosis which suggested a urinary problem. Hennessey, in his wisdom, had persuaded her to consent to a hysterectomy as well, claiming she’d risk cancer if her womb stayed in place. In the event, though, the botched operation had left her in chronic pain, worse by far than anything she’d experienced earlier, and incontinence had added insult to injury. Embarrassed by social contact, and too ashamed to risk applying for a job, this poor bloody woman had been consigned to an eternity of days and nights alone. When she’d asked Hennessey what had gone wrong, he’d accused her of making it up, a dismissal confirmed by a terse comment in Hennessey’s own notes. ‘Largely psychosomatic’, he’d written. ‘NFA’. NFA meant No Further Action.

  Joannie stirred in her armchair and rubbed her eyes. Winter put the paperwork carefully to one side and gave her the tea. She took a sip or two, then pulled a face.

  ‘Cold,’ she said.

  She looked down at the slew of papers across the carpet, then up at her husband. She could feel the remains of her supper still lying heavy in her belly, but she didn’t want to make a fuss. Winter was buried in his file again. At length, she struggled to her feet and stifled a yawn. She thought it might be nice to spend a couple of days with her mother in Brighton. They might pop over together. Make it a bit of a break.

  Winter glanced up. He didn’t seem to have been listening.

  ‘I’ll run you over there, love,’ he grunted. ‘First thing.’

  Nine

  Wednesday, 21 June, 0930

  Hartigan’s secretary was still clearing away the cups from an earlier breakfast meeting when Faraday appeared at the door. There was a plate of Danish pastries on the sideboard where the Superintendent displayed his various trophies, and Faraday eyed them with some anticipation. The summons from Hartigan had meant skipping his usual bacon sandwich. He was starving.

  ‘Sir?’

  Hartigan waved him into a chair in front of his desk. The desk, as usual, was nearly empty.

  ‘Gunwharf.’ Hartigan nodded towards the conference table. ‘A couple of their guys were up here this morning for a get-together on our strategic partnership strategy. We were chatting afterwards. Apparently we have a mutual interest in a man called Hennessey.’

  Faraday struggled to recall the name, then remembered the night Paul Winter had turned up at his home. Hennessey was the disgraced surgeon who’d been involved in some fracas at the Marriott. Since then, Faraday hadn’t heard a thing.

  ‘The Gunwharf people are up to speed on the Marriott business. It seems the man represents a great deal of money to them. Can I assume we’re looking for him? Vigorously? And can I assume you’ll keep me in the loop?’

  Faraday blinked, instinctively uncomfortable with this new interpretation of strategic partnership. He pointed out that any search for Hennessey would be governed by the circumstances of his disappearance. With all due respect, his detectives weren’t in the business of running around for a bunch of London developers.

  Hartigan ignored the remark.

  ‘I’m here to keep the peace, Joe, and from where I sit that’s a pretty elastic phrase. Our Gunwharf friends are important to this city. As far as Hennessey is concerned, they’re naturally keen to be in the loop as well. It isn’t a problem. I said we’d be delighted to keep them briefed.’

  ‘We?’

  ‘Me, Joe. I’ll keep them briefed. That’s why it’s important you keep me abreast of developments.’ He paused. ‘So what’s the status of the inquiry?’

  The last thing Faraday was going to admit was his own ignorance. There was a point of principle at stake here, and if it took a bit of footwork to defend it then too bad.

  ‘There isn’t one, sir.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘There’s nothing to investigate. The guy’s not around. That’s not a crime.’

  ‘The state of the hotel room?’

  ‘He had a row with someone.’

  ‘False name on the check-in form?’

  ‘He paid cash. The name he used was immaterial.’

  ‘What about the video evidence? Hennessey staggering to a car at God knows what hour? Another man involved?’

  Faraday hesitated for a moment longer than he’d have liked. This was new to him. He had to tread carefully.

  ‘To my knowledge, we have no direct evidence of a crime. The damage to the room was minimal. The man Hennessey chose to leave early. The fact that he hasn’t been seen since is of absolutely no significance. There are millions of people out there. We can’t chase them all. Not without good reason.’

  ‘He represents more than a million quid to the Gunwharf people.’ Hartigan paused. ‘You didn’t know that?’

  Faraday shook his head. ‘Should I?’

  Hartigan explained about the options on the three flats. The ten per cent deposits were now owing, and beyond that the balance on completion. He sounded, Faraday thought, like an estate agent.

  ‘But maybe he doesn’t want to take up the option. Isn’t that a possibility?’

  ‘Of course it is. But there’s another possibility, too. Maybe he can’t take up the option. Because something’s happened to him.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘I don’t know, Joe. I thought that’s what you people were for.’ He was beginning to lose patience. ‘Or are you too busy poking around in traffic files?’

  Faraday phoned Cathy Lamb from his office. A certain kind of anger had emptied his mind of all the usual clutter. He wanted to know about Hennessey. And, even more importantly, he wanted to know about the Gunwharf management.

  Cathy was as dismissive as he’d been.

  ‘It’s a non-runner,’ she said. ‘The bloke’s disappeared, of course he has, but what am I supposed to do about it? He doesn’t live in this patch. He doesn’t work here. He was just visiting for the night. And now he’s gone.’

  ‘Is anyone on it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What about Winter?’

  ‘Yeah. I’ve given him seven days’ compassionate. Like you told me to.’

  ‘But how far had he got? Before he bailed out?’

  Cathy went through the case Winter had made to her and Faraday agreed that Winter was chasing ghosts. A long list of surgical mistakes didn’t add up to a murder inquiry. Not without a great deal more evidence.

  ‘That’s what I told him.’

  ‘How did he take it?’

  ‘You know Paul. He just smiled. That meant he thought I was being a prat.’

  Faraday nodded, letting some of the anger seep away. There were, after all, some reasonable people around, and Cathy Lamb was one of them. He described his meeting with Hartigan. The Gunwharf people knew all about the incident at the Marriott. They knew about the false name Hennessey had used, about the damage to the room, about the pictures on the video tapes, the lot. In fact, for at least a day, they’d known more than he did. How come?

  ‘Haven’t a clue.’

  ‘But it must be your end, Cath.’
>
  ‘Like who?’

  Good question. Faraday thought long and hard, trying to resist the obvious conclusion, then gave up.

  ‘Winter,’ he grunted. ‘Has to be.’

  Paul Winter stayed for as long as he could bear at the tiny flat Joannie’s mother called home. The flat was on the fourth floor of a walk-up conversion half a mile back from Hove seafront, and the eight flights of stairs left their mark on Joannie. She sank into a seat by the window, her face the colour of putty. Her mother, a small, slightly querulous woman called Marge, fussed around with a towel, mopping the sweat from her forehead, shooting Winter the odd look as if to blame him for the climb. Minutes later, refusing a second cup of tea, Winter checked his watch, mumbled an apology and said he had to leave. He’d be back the moment Joannie decided she’d had enough. In the meantime, no partying.

  Joannie looked up at him, too exhausted even to pretend she got the joke, then offered her cheek for a brisk peck. Winter left his hand a moment longer on her shoulder. He could feel the bones beneath the dampness of the thin cotton.

  ‘Bye, love.’

  Outside, he stood for a moment in the street, feeling the warmth of the sun on his face. Brighton had never ceased to excite him – the piped icing of the Regency crescents on the seafront, the cheerful scruffiness of the terraces behind – and he watched a couple of young girls on the pavement across the road, striding beach-wards. They wore jeans and scoop-necked halters. A couple of towels and a bottle of wine poked out of the tall one’s bag. They were sharing a joke about some bloke or other, agreeing the guy had definitely been worth it. Laughter went with this place, and good times, and easy sex, and Winter followed them down towards the sea, remembering the way it had been for him and Joannie in the early days.

  They’d met at a party in Portsmouth, Winter the probationer PC with all of nine months’ service, Joannie doing her time at the local teacher training college. They’d got it on almost at once, pissed as rats on a blanket in the back of Winter’s borrowed van. Weeks afterwards, summer as always, Joannie’s term had come to an end and she’d gone back to Brighton for a fine-weather job collecting money on the deckchairs. Her mum and dad had a property in Portslade, a bay-fronted terraced place with a caged budgie in the window, and both parents worked, which meant that she had the run of the house on her frequent days off. There was a bed in her room she’d inherited from an uncle, bigger than a single, and when Winter was on nights he’d take the train across and they’d spend the day screwing. Joannie had been a brilliant shag, quite brilliant, really up for it, really wild, and Winter remembered the night shifts afterwards, dead on his feet on beat patrol, just aching for somewhere to steal an hour’s kip.