By the time the Scenes of Crime vans arrived, Suttle had managed to raise the local manager of the plantation. He confirmed that a gate at the end of the track would take you directly onto the railway and said he’d been doing his best to dissuade courting couples from using the wood after dark. A series of warnings about stiff fines for trespassing had been moderately effective, while planted rumours in the local pub about dog patrols had done the rest.
‘These dogs exist?’ queried Suttle.
‘Christ, no. They cost the earth.’
Still laughing, Suttle left the Scenes of Crime team to get on with it. He’d already met the tracker from Cosham the previous day, a spirited redhead with a mischievous smile, and he blew her a kiss as he drove Dawn Ellis away. Ellis was still preoccupied with Mrs Cleaver.
‘You think she told us everything?’
‘No. The way I see it, we were lucky to get as much as we did.’
‘So why hold back?’
‘Christ knows. What does the husband do for a living?’
‘He’s a property developer. In Pompey.’
‘How do you know?’
‘I phoned Paul Winter. He’s in Intelligence. He knows everything.’
‘And?’
‘Cleaver’s one of the bad guys. Money coming out of his ears. Bent as fuck.’
‘Ah … ’ Suttle smiled. ‘No wonder she sleeps by herself.’
‘Who says?’
‘Me. I had a look round when I went up there for a leak. The master bedroom’s at the back. Like she said, she sleeps at the front. She’s a slut, too.’ Suttle grinned. ‘The room was a tip.’
Winter stepped out for half an hour at lunchtime, glad of the sunshine on his face. There was a tiny park up the road from Kingston Crescent, a couple of benches and half an acre of grass, and he loosened his tie and sat down with his sandwich, wondering whether to wash it down with a pint at the nearby pub. Mention of Chris Cleaver in his conversation with Dawn Ellis had suddenly put all the other phone calls in perspective. Coppice, he thought, was beginning to look promising.
Ellis, to be fair, had been extremely cautious. The wife, she’d explained, was a bag of nerves. She’d hated them being there. Couldn’t wait for them to leave. But the business in the tunnel had obviously got to her in some way and an outburst about her former life in Southsea seemed to indicate she might have a great deal more to say.
At this, Winter had chuckled. Helen Cleaver, much as she resented it, was a Pompey girl. Six years at the High School, plus a couple of winters as an upmarket rep in a French ski resort, had raised her social game but in the end she’d married a local, admittedly a Grammar School boy, who even then was devoting his considerable talents to the property game.
Chris Cleaver, to Winter’s certain knowledge, had cheerfully broken law after law en route to his first million. Hookey mortgages. Ruthless pressure on sitting tenants. Massive bungs to any individual, local authority or otherwise, who could conceivably influence the outcome of difficult planning decisions. By the time he and Helen celebrated his thirtieth birthday, young Chris was a major player amongst the several dozen Pompey businessmen who could afford to jet their friends en masse to Grenada without bothering to count the change.
Over the next decade the Cleavers continued to prosper. The purchase of an eight-bedroom spread in Craneswater Park brought them a swimming pool and a view of the Isle of Wight, as well as a whole new set of neighbours. Amongst the latter, equally new to Craneswater, was Bazza Mackenzie, by now controlling every last gram of the Pompey cocaine trade. Winter had never laid hands on the kind of proof that could stand up in court, but what he knew of Chris Cleaver made some kind of association with Mackenzie incontestable. Profit was Cleaver’s middle name. The markups in cocaine were astronomical. A thousand quid spent in Venezuela would turn into ten grand on the streets of Portsmouth. No one with the nerve to call himself a businessman could resist that kind of arithmetic.
Winter chewed the last of the sandwich, still tempted by the prospect of a pint. At the end of his chat with Dawn Ellis she’d sounded nervous about sparking more interest in the Cleavers than ten minutes of conversation could possibly warrant, but Winter knew that was bullshit. A working lifetime as a detective had taught him many lessons and one of them was that there was no such thing as coincidence. If someone as bent as Cleaver found himself within a mile or so of a body in a tunnel then somehow, somewhere, there’d be a connection. Cocaine? Winter didn’t know. Some link to the ever-spreading tentacles of Bazza Mackenzie’s empire? Pass. But these were early days. Pretty soon, one way or another, they’d have a name for the body. At that point Coppice would change gear. With a firm ID and a stir or two at the Pompey tea leaves, Winter could see immense possibilities in the weeks ahead.
He brushed the crumbs from his suit and got up, taking a short cut across the grass towards the pub, thinking again of last night’s conversation with Jake about Alan Givens. Outside the pub were a couple of tables. He treated himself to a pint of chilled Stella and returned to the sunshine. People these days seemed not to drink at lunchtime, so he had the patio pretty much to himself. Before leaving the office he’d taken the precaution of jotting down the number of the Pompey FC ticket office. After a morning on the phone to every DIY outlet in the city, it would be a pleasure to get back to serious detective work.
Jerry Proctor phoned Faraday at two. Proctor seldom gave way to anything as unprofessional as excitement but on this occasion he let the mask slip.
‘Recent tyre marks,’ he said, ‘down towards the railway. There’s a kind of hollow where the rain gathers. It’s a bit of a mess, lots of churn, but we’ve got the tracks at both ends, plus good sets of footprints.’
‘All the same?’
‘No. I’m guessing but I’d say a size nine, and maybe a seven.’
Faraday nodded, making a note of the time and scribbling down the details. It had rained on Saturday evening, a sudden downpour. He remembered the rainbow afterwards, an almost perfect arch over Langstone Harbour.
‘Boss?’ It was Proctor again. He was reminding Faraday that they’d recovered both trainers from the tunnel. ‘They were Reeboks. The lads are taking a cast of the footprints here now.’
‘Excellent. What else?’
‘Too soon to say. The Tracker’s doing her stuff on the fence. She’s not one for jumping to conclusions but the last time I looked she was smiling.’
‘But nothing obvious?’
‘Aside from the bloke’s credit card and address book? No, boss.’
It took a second for Faraday to realise that Proctor had made a joke. He couldn’t remember the last time that had happened.
‘Great,’ he said. ‘Stick them in the post.’
After telling Proctor to make sure he was back in time for the evening meet, he put the phone down. Faraday knew that the first forty-eight hours of any major enquiry were absolutely key. In this case Coppice was still handicapped by the lack of a positive ID on the body in the tunnel but Proctor and his boys were playing a blinder and it looked odds on that they were close to confirming an access point to the track. What mattered now was blanketing the local area with house-to-house teams. People’s memories were short. One tiny detail could make all the difference. He sat back, pondering a call to the DS in charge of the Outside Enquiry Teams. Then came a knock at his door.
It was Winter. He was looking pleased with himself.
‘May I?’
Faraday waved him into the spare chair. He could smell the alcohol on his breath. Winter beamed at him for a moment, then slipped the middle button on his suit.
‘Anyone tell you about Chris Cleaver?’ Winter enquired.
‘No.’
‘Ah … ’ Winter’s smile widened. ‘ … Then let me have the pleasure.’
DC Jimmy Suttle was back at Kingston Crescent by late afternoon. After checking in with the Incident Room, he found Paul Winter standing on a chair in his office, putting the finishing touches to the tim
eline on his wall board. The line began in the middle of the board. At 02.50, a car had driven away from the forest beside the railway track. Two hours later, at 04.58, train driver David Johns had reported hitting a body in the Buriton Tunnel. To the left and right of these two evidenced facts yawned the big white spaces that Faraday’s team were charged to fill. Who was the body in the tunnel? Where had he been in the hours and days beforehand? What could a man possibly have done to warrant a death like that? And, most important of all, who had been at the wheel of the departing car?
Suttle wanted to know whether the casts had come down from the plantation.
‘Yeah.’ Winter nodded. ‘The big one’s a perfect match. Spot on. The bloke in the tunnel was definitely in that car. Faraday’s creaming himself.’
‘What else?’
‘Not a lot. I’m sure there’s a pile of actions in the Incident Room. If you fancy a couple of hours overtime round the DIY stores, be my guest.’ Winter’s morning on the phone had generated dozens of follow-up calls to individual hardware stores across the city.
Suttle shook his head. He was about to check out a bloke in Eastney who drove a timber truck to the trackside forest three or four times a week. Maybe the person in the car had been out to recce the location prior to Sunday night’s visit. Maybe there’d been a sighting, a lead to the car’s colour or make.
‘Eastney?’ Winter glanced at his watch.
‘Yeah.’
‘Give me a lift?’
‘Where to?’
‘Fratton Park.’
‘Why?’ Winter had never expressed the slightest interest in football.
‘Doesn’t matter. It’s on your way. Just drop me off, eh?’
Suttle knew Winter far too well not to press the issue. As they left the car park and joined the thickening traffic, he wanted to know what the football club could possibly have to do with Coppice.
‘Who said it was Coppice?’
‘Ah … ’ Suttle was edging his way forwards towards the lights. ‘You’re telling me it’s something else?’
‘I’m telling you it’s none of your business.’
‘Some other job? Loose end? Statement check?’ He glanced across at Winter. ‘We are talking work here, I assume? Only you’re a bit old for next season.’
Winter ignored the dig. He’d found a loose Werther’s in his jacket pocket. Stripping off the paper, he popped it in his mouth.
‘Traffic in this city is barmy.’ He gazed out of the window. ‘This rate, we’ll all be buying fucking bikes.’
Suttle dropped Winter at the end of the cul-de-sac that led down to the football stadium and watched him stroll down towards the main entrance. He knew when Winter was happy. It showed in his body language, in the way he walked, in the way he dug his hands into his trouser pockets, in the way he made a tiny detour to sidefoot an empty Pepsi can towards the gutter. With the passenger window still down, he could even hear Winter’s tuneless whistle. ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, Suttle thought. Definitely something up.
The office that dealt with season ticket enquiries was on the first floor. Winter went in without knocking, pinged the bell a couple of times for attention. He heard a muffled phone conversation coming to an end, then a blurred glimpse of someone standing up through the ribbed glass behind the counter.
She was young and extremely pretty, Pompey accent, big smile.
‘Can I help you?’
Winter extended his warrant card. He’d already talked to someone on the phone about a bunch of season tickets that had been sold last month. There were twelve of them, different dates but all on the same debit card. Winter had details of the name on the card, the dates of the transactions and the number of the bank account. A Mr Givens. With an HSBC card.
‘Ring any bells?’
The girl disappeared. Seconds later, Winter found himself talking to an older woman. She had a folded piece of paper in her hand, some kind of computer printout, but she looked worried.
‘We don’t usually give out these kinds of details,’ she said. ‘We have our customers to think about.’
‘Of course.’ Winter gave her a smile. ‘I can go to court for a Production Order if you’d prefer.’
The woman’s frown deepened. She sucked her teeth for a moment or two, then shrugged.
‘Here,’ she said, flattening the printout on the counter. ‘Have you got a pen?’
Lines of pink highlighter ran through several entries. Winter could read anything upside down.
‘That’s a Somerstown address,’ he said. ‘Were all the tickets sent there?’
‘Yes.’
‘In the name of Alan Givens?’
‘Yes.’ She paused. ‘What’s the problem? Do you mind me asking? Only it might be nice to know.’
Winter scribbled down the address, then pocketed his warrant card. At this point, he told her, enquiries were strictly at the preliminary stage. Should anything dodgy have happened, he’d doubtless be back again.
He turned for the door, then paused. ‘I take it all those transactions went through OK?’ he said.
‘Oh yes.’ The woman nodded. ‘But apparently there were a couple of other calls from Mr Givens. He wanted more season tickets.’
‘And?’
‘The card was rejected.’
‘Why?’
‘Insufficient funds.’
Faraday spent the late afternoon in the Coroner’s office in the city’s Guildhall, confirming that the events surrounding the death in the Buriton Tunnel were currently under criminal investigation. The Coroner, Martin Eckersley, listened carefully to Faraday’s account of progress to date before declaring the inquest into the mystery death opened and adjourned. Should police enquiries lead to charges and a conviction in court, then a formal inquest would no longer be necessary. If, on the other hand, Faraday drew a blank then the inquest would be resumed at a later date.
On his way out of the Coroner’s office, Eckersley called him back. He wanted to know how Eadie Sykes was getting on. Momentarily nonplussed, Faraday had forgotten Eadie’s success in enrolling him in a project of hers a couple of years earlier. Eckersley had smoothed the path to certain sequences in a video she was making, an exploration of the circumstances leading to the death of a young local junkie, and some of this footage had even been screened at the lad’s inquest. This official nod of approval from the city’s Coroner had helped immeasurably when the contents of the video - shocking, graphic, immensely powerful - provoked a storm of controversy, and Eadie had afterwards made a point of adding Eckersley to her invite list of trophy professionals. Eckersley had come to a couple of her parties, enjoying the slightly raffish company Eadie liked to keep. Now he wanted Faraday to pass on his best. He hadn’t seen Eadie for a while. She was a live wire, made things happen. Where on earth was she hiding?
‘Australia,’ Faraday told him. ‘Sydney.’
‘Holiday?’
‘Work. She’s making videos there, films, too. She loves it.’
It dawned on Eckersley that they were no longer together. He shook his head, said he was sorry to hear it. The city was poorer, he murmured, without people like Eadie.
‘You think so?’
‘Definitely.’
Now, crawling home through the traffic, Faraday resisted the temptation to brood about Eadie again. Their relationship was well and truly over. Of that he was certain. Yet there were moments, like now, when he’d have welcomed the chance to drive down to the seafront, let himself into her top-floor apartment, and let the often-volatile chemistry between them take care of the rest of the evening. The challenge with investigations as unusual and potentially complex as Coppice was the fact that they could so easily become all-consuming. You needed time out. You needed perspective. You needed a dig in the ribs, a reminder that there might be more to life than the consequences of flange damage and the overtime implications of running a thirty-strong squad. Eadie, he knew, would have provided all three.
Stuck behind a coachful of kids b
arely half a mile from home, he forced his mind back to the day’s developments. Winter’s news about the woman who’d heard the car roar by early on Monday morning sat nicely alongside the Scenes of Crime haul from the plantation, and while Faraday was keeping an open mind about the Cleavers - resisting Winter’s conviction that a bent property developer must be somehow linked to the body in the tunnel - he’d quickly arranged for a couple of DCs to start trawling through footage from cameras covering the northern approaches to the city. The tapes were kept in the CCTV control room deep in the bowels of the Civic Centre, and most detectives loathed the hours they’d be spending in front of the tiny monitor screens.
Faraday had ordered every incoming car to be checked for driver and address details and as soon as some kind of decent list was available he’d set about organising house calls. Anyone heading into the city between three and four on Monday morning needed to account for their journey. If they couldn’t, he’d want to know why. He nodded to himself, pleased by the progress they were beginning to make, at last easing the Mondeo into the cul-de-sac that would take him down to the water.
The Bargemaster’s House was at its best this time of year. Faraday parked the car and pushed through the gate at the side. He’d made a big effort with the garden during the winter and all those back-breaking weekends with the spade and hoe had paid rich dividends. He paused beside a row of tomato plants, wondering whether one day he’d run out of recipes, then he walked on round the front of the house, casting his eye over the paintwork, hoping to God that he wouldn’t have to redecorate for at least a year or two.
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