‘You asked me to keep an eye on Winter. The way you see it, the POCA legislation is a stick we can use to beat the likes of Mackenzie. You think Winter might be part of that process.’
‘It’s possible, yes. Though my senior colleagues are far from keen on the idea. They think Winter belongs on the street. Not poncing around the force trying to spread the word about the Proceeds of Crime Act.’
‘They may be right.’
‘You think so?’
‘Yes, sir. But there may be a better way to bring these people down.’
‘I’m not with you.’
‘OK, then let me explain. It works like this. Mackenzie’s got Winter by the throat. He’s humiliated the man and he’s got the evidence to prove it. He thinks there’s no way Winter’s going to risk losing face with the rest of us, and that’s a judgement you’d understand. Except it now happens that Mackenzie’s wrong.’
Somebody behind the galley counter announced a ticket number. Two plates of fish and chips. Willard didn’t take his eyes off Faraday.
‘You want to put Winter into play against Mackenzie, ’ he said slowly.
‘Yes, sir.’
‘By having him run with the man.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘As a kind of double agent.’
‘Exactly.’
‘Terrific. So who says we can trust him?’
‘Who?’
‘Our Mr Winter.’
‘Me, sir.’
‘That’s a very big claim, Joe. What makes you so sure?’
He glanced at his ticket, then got up and headed for the bar. Faraday cleared a space on the table for the plates. Willard returned, unloading sachets of tartare sauce from his jacket pocket.
‘Well?’ He was wrestling with the foil on the tartare sauce.
Faraday speared a chip, popped it in his mouth. Finally, he said that Winter loved the job too much to hazard it. That was their guarantee. That said they were bulletproof.
‘But people change, Joe. Especially after all the traumas he’s been through.’
‘That’s true.’
‘Which is why I OK’d the deployment to Major Crimes in the first place. So you could keep an eye on him. Remember?’
‘Of course, sir.’
‘So where are the real guarantees? Only it’s more than Winter’s head on the block.’
Faraday acknowledged the point. He’d already taken Winter off Coppice, an obvious precaution while Mackenzie was still, at least technically, in the frame. Tomorrow, with Barrie’s agreement, he intended to remove him from the Intelligence Cell altogether. That way he was denied access to key resources, like the Police National Computer.
‘Good point.’ Willard nodded his approval. ‘So what will you do with him?’
‘I’ll pair him up with Dawn Ellis. She’s steady. That way he’ll still be on Tartan, which is fair enough because Givens was his Misper from the start.’
‘Driving licence?’
‘He’ll have to depend on Ellis. It shouldn’t be a problem.’
‘Fine. And in the meantime? As far as Mackenzie is concerned?’
‘Winter reports to me. Or Martin Barrie. That would be your call.’
Willard nodded, turning his attention to the plate of food in front of him. Minutes later, most of it had gone. Willard tidied his remaining chips into a neat pile and coated them with sauce.
‘This is huge, Joe,’ he said at last. ‘It’s a clever idea, I’ll grant you that, but I’ll have to sleep on it. It’s not just Winter, it’s Mackenzie too. He’s a clever bastard. One minute he’s playing into your hands. The next he bites you on the arse. I’m not going through Tumbril again. Not even for you.’
‘It’s not Tumbril, sir, with respect. On Tumbril we made the running, or tried to. This time it’s Mackenzie’s call.’
‘Says you.’
‘Who else then? Who else makes the running?’
‘Winter, of course.’ Willard licked a smear of sauce from his finger. ‘Which is where we began this conversation.’
Winter sat on his balcony, watching the lights of the Gosport ferry approaching across the harbour. This afternoon’s conversation with Faraday had disturbed him more than he cared to admit, not least because he’d let the DI play him so artfully. Not only that, but - in a move that Winter recognised only too well - he appeared to be keeping his knowledge of Winter’s little transgressions entirely to himself. It wasn’t that he mistrusted Faraday. It wasn’t even that he disliked him. On the contrary, he’d begun to develop something close to a healthy respect for the man.
No, it was altogether simpler than that. Buoyed by self-belief, Winter had kept his head above water for decades. Now, that self-belief had gone, stolen first by Mackenzie’s little jape, then latterly - for reasons he still couldn’t fathom - by Faraday. In front of both men, unaccountably, Winter had lowered his guard. And the results, all too predictably, were extremely ominous.
There still, of course, remained the possibility that Faraday would simply lift the phone and hand the whole affair, the entire shambles, over to Professional Standards. That would undoubtedly make life a great deal simpler for a hard-pressed DI. Winter would be ghosted away, put out to grass pending some kind of disciplinary hearing, and in due course the bureaucracy would wash its hands of him. There might be a paragraph or two in Frontline, glossing the facts, and a cheerless round of farewell drinks in the Fratton bar, but that, essentially, would be that. Like so many other washed-up cops, beached by graft, or greed, or a misplaced enthusiasm for breaking the rules, Winter would be left with the dribble of a pension and a terrifying emptiness that nothing else could possibly fill. One week would vanish into the next. He’d start getting interested in the horses or Sudoku. He’d lift the phone to the odd face enquiring about the possibility of a pint or two. He might even find himself saving up the weekly Tesco shop until Friday afternoons, the high spot of this exciting new life of his. The prospect, all too real, filled him with gloom, and he flailed about, looking for some kind of explanation.
Was it really his fault? He thought not. He’d never, for a second, considered throwing in his lot with the likes of Bazza Mackenzie and it hurt him to think that someone up the hierarchy had gone to the trouble of tasking the surveillance boys to keep an eye on him. That, to be frank, was way out of order, and he was still toying with a letter to Willard to nail the bastard who’d taken a step like that. Simple logic, he told himself, would tell anyone with half a brain that getting into bed with Mackenzie was the shortest cut to getting well and truly fucked. He’d seen it happen to countless people in the city. They sniffed the money, spread their legs, and Bazza was only too happy to help himself. But simple logic clearly wasn’t enough. Someone had laid treason at Winter’s door, and the charge - or the whisper - appeared to have stuck.
So what might he expect in the days to come? That, in essence, was the issue. After the operation in Phoenix, with Maddox still attending to his every need, Winter had kidded himself that close acquaintance with death changed a man, changed his perspectives, his needs, his priorities. But now, faced so abruptly with the loss of the job he loved, he knew that wasn’t true. He was still, for better or worse, a detective. He teased out facts. He drew a series of lines between them. He punted his judgement on this pattern or that. And when he knew the bet was safe, the odds stacked overwhelmingly in his favour, he mustered his chips and returned to the table, and when his number came up, as it usually did, there was nothing sweeter than the knowledge of yet more credit in the account he kept against rainy days like this. That was what fuelled him. That was what made him get up in the morning. Take it away, and he wasn’t at all sure there’d be anything left.
He got to his feet and peered into the warm darkness, wondering whether to risk a late call to Faraday. He’d doubtless be home by now, tucked up in that house of his beside the water. There was just a little part of Winter that envied the DI’s composure, the breadth of his interests outside the jo
b, the way he seemed so armour-clad. He knew, of course, that Faraday was no stranger to life’s sterner challenges. Bringing up a deaf-mute kid, essentially on your own, couldn’t have been easy. Yet there was a steadiness about the man, a seeming peace of mind that Winter - at times like this - knew he could have done with. Winter thrived on chaos, on mischief, on the splash you made when you lobbed a big, fat rock into the very middle of life’s pond. Faraday, on the other hand, preferred silence and a sense of order. With a bird book and a decent pair of binos, thought Winter despairingly, he’d never even dream of looking for the rock.
He stepped in from the balcony and wandered through to the bathroom. Minutes later, as he soaped his face, he heard the two-tone trill of his new mobile.
‘It’s Jake,’ said the voice. ‘We’d like you to come round.’
Faraday was home late, gone eleven. Upstairs, in his study, he checked his e-mails before turning in. One of them had come from Gabrielle. Faraday had sent her a selection of his own shots from Thailand, with a couple of extras he’d taken locally, and she’d now replied in kind. Chartres, she pointed out, had one of the finest cathedrals in Europe, and she’d attached a series of photos to prove it.
Faraday gazed at the message, wondering what he’d find. The first shots were undeniably impressive, twin spires soaring above the surrounding rooflines, but what took Faraday’s eye were the later images Gabrielle had captured inside. He scrolled slowly through them, photo after photo dominated by the glow of the stained-glass windows. Gabrielle had written of the feelings they inspired in her. They were medieval, she said. They celebrated the triumph of truth over darkness, of hope over bewilderment, of the spirit of the stonemasons and carpenters and artists who had devoted their lives to this extraordinary building.
These thoughts were in French, and even with the aid of a dictionary, it took Faraday a while to properly make sense of them. Satisfied with his translation, he took a second look at the photos, concentrating on the windows. She was right. The stained glass had the startling brilliance of fireworks against the night sky. They were, in the exact sense of the word, luminous.
He gazed at one in particular. Square in shape, it pictured Christ on the cross, his pale body pierced by a spear, and he found himself thinking of the garden at Gethsemane, and Judas’ soft kiss, and what Duley could possibly have meant by entwining this age-old story of betrayal with the woman he’d so successfully caught in the opening pages of his crime novel. Was this woman of his real? Had she walked into Duley’s life they way she’d walked into the meeting that freezing night? Had he too been betrayed?
Faraday didn’t know but the bursting radiance of the stained glass fascinated him, and the longer he looked, the more determined he was to see them for real. In one sense, he thought, the cathedral itself was no more than a device for framing these images. Without them, the building would be empty, an orchestra without a score. He tried to put this into French but abandoned the attempt when he realised that even in English he was struggling to voice what he really meant. Instead, remembering the standing invitation to pay her a visit, he decided to say yes.
‘Merci beaucoup de tes photos, surtout les vitrails,’ he tapped. ‘Peut-être, il faut que je te visite pour vraiment les apprécier sur place.’
The lights were on in Tarrant’s house when the cab dropped Winter at the end of the cul-de-sac. Jake opened the door to his knock. One glance at his face told Winter that he’d just emerged from a monster row.
‘She’s in the living room,’ he said. ‘I said you ought to hear it from the horse’s mouth. Went down a bomb, that.’
He stood aside as Winter stepped in and went through to the lounge. Rachel was at one end of the sofa, her feet propped on a low coffee table, watching television. At first, she barely acknowledged Winter’s presence. Then, with a snort, she reached for the remote and turned the set off.
‘Jake says we’ll have to give the money back.’
‘What money?’
‘The money from Alan.’
‘Does he?’
‘Yeah, isn’t that right?’ She was staring up at her husband, daring him to disagree.
‘That’s what you told me, Mr W.’ Tarrant was looking acutely uncomfortable. ‘All I did was pass it on.’
‘See?’ It was Rachel again. ‘Well, you’re wrong, Mr Winter. What you don’t know about is the agreement we’ve got.’
‘Agreement?’ This was news to Winter.
‘Yeah. When we get the place in Southsea, Alan’s coming to live with us. That’s the whole point. That’s why he gave us the money to begin with.’
‘Gave? I thought it was a loan.’
‘Yeah, well, loan then. Only it’s huge, the new place - huge compared to this, anyway. Four bedrooms, nice bit of garden. Alan came down to see it with me as soon as it came on the market. He can have one of the bedrooms at the back for now but we can probably go up into the roof, do a proper conversion, so he can have his own little place. The way I see it, the arrangement should work a treat.’
‘You’re telling me you’ve seen Givens? Recently?’
‘No, not for a while, but he’ll be back, I know he will.’
‘Back from where?’
‘God knows.’ She paused. ‘Anything else you want to know?’
Winter nodded. ‘This agreement you’ve got. Is it in writing?’
‘Of course not. Why would we do that?’
‘Because … ’ Winter shrugged. He hadn’t come here for a family row. Neither was he a solicitor.
Rachel was on her feet now. ‘Does that clear it up then? Only it’s late.’
She gave Winter a cold stare, then disappeared into the hall. Seconds later, Winter could hear her footsteps overhead, then came the slam of a door.
Tarrant was still standing by the sofa. He tried to raise a smile but nothing could hide his embarrassment.
‘I’m sorry, Mr W. She made me.’
‘Made you what?’
‘Ring you like that. It was out of order. I apologise.’
Winter patted him on the shoulder, reminded him of the call he’d made himself, only a couple of days ago.
‘Glad to help out, mate.’ He stepped across to the mantelpiece and looked at the photographs tucked beneath the gilt frame of the big mirror. ‘Are these Givens’?’
‘Yeah. He’s taken loads.’
‘They’re all right. You should be pleased.’
‘Rach loves them. She thinks he’s a genius.’
‘And you?’
‘They’re snaps, Mr W. But she’s right, of course she’s right. And kids are only young once, aren’t they?’ He paused, then offered Winter a drink. ‘Beer, Stella, vino, whatever you fancy.’
Winter shook his head.
‘I’ll ring for a cab, son. Heavy day tomorrow.’
Tarrant said there was no need. He’d run Winter back to Gunwharf. Again Winter said no.
‘Why not? It’s no trouble. Honest.’
Winter shook his head. The wife looked as though she might need a bit of TLC, he said. The last thing she wanted was her husband running round half the night again.
‘You’re sure?’ Tarrant sounded disappointed, almost plaintive.
‘Positive.’ Winter was already talking to Aqua. ‘Five minutes, max,’ he said, pocketing his mobile.
They waited in the living room, talking about the kids again, Winter pushing the conversation along. Jake said they were a handful, difficult age, got on Rach’s nerves.
‘Not easy, then?’
‘Not at all, Mr W. You think, you know, to begin with it’s going to be fine, but then kids want everything these days, don’t they? DVDs, music, designer gear, the whole deal. And living here doesn’t help either. There just isn’t the space. Know what I mean?’
‘Of course.’ Winter had caught the growl of the cab as it pulled up outside. ‘It’ll get better though, won’t it? Once you’re down in Southsea?’
He stepped into the hall, aware of Tarr
ant behind him. ‘Mr W… . ?’ he began.
‘Yeah?’ Winter was reaching for the door handle.
‘It will be OK, won’t it?’
Winter looked at him. The cab was at the kerbside.
‘What’ll be OK?’ he asked at last. ‘The money?’
Tarrant didn’t answer. The cabbie beeped the horn. Winter studied Tarrant a moment longer, then gave him a little pat and stepped into the night.
Fifteen
Wednesday, 20 July 2005, 09.13
Dawn Ellis had known Winter for years. A while back, when she’d got herself in deep shit with a predatory ex-Met DC, it had been Winter who’d come to her rescue. He was nearly twice her age, and she knew exactly how manipulative he could be, but she was famous in the bar for her stout defence of his working methods. Winter, she explained, lived in a world of his own. You might not understand the language or much like the way he set about things, but his track record - the villains he’d put away - spoke for itself.
Now she wanted to know more about the bank statement.
‘This came in yesterday. Right?’
‘Right.’
‘And we’re talking Jake Tarrant up at St Mary’s? The one and the same?’
‘Spot on.’
‘Has anyone taken this up with him yet?’
‘Me.’
‘And?’
Winter explained about the loan. They were driving north, heading for St Mary’s. At Faraday’s insistence, they were now treating Tarrant as a potential suspect. The DI wanted them to start with Givens’ line manager, an administrator at the hospital, Deborah Percy. She’d be able to provide a picture of Givens’ working day - the people he met, the schedule he kept. Operation Tartan had suddenly acquired a new momentum.
‘This could be tricky, couldn’t it?’ Ellis readied herself to overtake a bus, then backed off. ‘Knowing Jake the way we do?’
‘No alternative, love. Every bloke on the squad knows him. If it wasn’t us, it’d be someone else. Exactly the same problem.’
‘But what do you think? About Jake?’
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