Blood And Honey

by Hurley, Graham

  ‘He wanted you to help him choose his next house?’

  ‘It was a boast. Everything was a boast. It wasn’t the look of the place or the number of bedrooms or whether or not it had matching saunas, it was the asking price. Maurice wouldn’t give it a glance unless there were seven figures across the bottom of the page. A million pounds plus and he might be interested.’

  ‘And you?’

  ‘I played along. Told him what an amazing opportunity he had – all that choice, all those period features. In the end I think it was his wife who made the real decisions. Which is why he played fantasy house with me. People like Maurice are often less secure than they like to think. For eight hundred pounds I could turn him into Mr Powerful.’

  ‘But he is Mr Powerful. Or that’s what you’ve told me.’

  ‘Overbearing, yes. Greedy, definitely. Impatient, irrational, single-minded – all those things. When you first get to know him, it all seems to add up, and that’s definitely sexy, like I’ve said. But get to know anyone and you start to figure out the real picture. He couldn’t handle this, for instance.’ She touched Winter’s head. ‘Show him a hospital and he’d run a mile.’

  ‘So would I. If I had a choice.’

  ‘But you’re different.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Because I do. Because I’ve sensed it from the start. In the end you think it’s all nonsense, don’t you? That’s nice. That’s me. That’s why I’m here. The boat’s gone down. We’re on the same life raft.’ She grinned at him, white teeth in the darkness. ‘So how good is that?’

  Winter was lost but she was right. It didn’t seem to matter. He pulled her closer, felt himself stirring again. ‘You never told me about that new house of his.’

  ‘It’s a big place: sweet dormers in the roof, lovely windows, three storeys. There’s a wall at the front and big gates that he’s just had replaced. The photo I saw must have been taken in spring. There’s a huge chestnut tree in the front garden, lovely old thing, full blossom.’

  ‘Wimbledon, you say?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘And the name of the street?’

  ‘Home Park Road. He was always banging on about it. Backs on to the golf course.’ She propped herself on one elbow, looked down at him. ‘Why the questions?’

  Winter looked up at her in the darkness. Putting Wishart away had suddenly become immensely important. The thought of him anywhere near this woman of his was unbearable.

  ‘Nothing really.’ He pulled her down again. ‘Come here.’

  For the first time in days Faraday spent the night at home. A phone call to Dave Michaels in the Ryde MIT had supplied an update on the afternoon’s developments and he knew there was no pressing reason to hurry back. House-to-house calls with the reduced enquiry team were grinding on but the few trails Pelly had left simply petered out. Time and again, DCs returned with the same story. The man kept himself to himself. Provoked, he could be tricky. Give the bastard a wide berth. The surveillance team, meanwhile, were beginning to question the merits of sticking so close to their target. With the growing pressure of other claims on their time, they felt they might be better employed elsewhere.

  The Bargemaster’s House felt damp after all the rain. Faraday switched on the central heating, attended to his laundry, and found a decent concert on Radio 3 to fill the ticking silence. Brahms was an old favourite and tonight the gods had favoured him with a live performance of the German Requiem. He moved from room to room, afloat on the music, thinking vaguely about supper. Only in the flickering embers of the Requiem’s end, still on the prowl, did Faraday notice the small brown envelope on the mat inside the front door.

  The note was from Karen Corey. She apologised again for phoning him at the weekend. She’d like to buy him a drink. Under the circumstances it was the least she could do.

  Faraday returned to the kitchen, the note in his hand. Oddly enough, he’d been thinking of her grandfather’s letters only this afternoon. More and more, he sensed that Pelly’s obsession with a Balkan war was the real key to Congress. Quite how it might have shaped more recent events was still a mystery but Faraday knew that war, organised violence on the grandest scale, cast a very long shadow.

  A couple of years back the murder of a local prison officer had, it transpired, been rooted in an incident aboard a naval frigate ploughing south with the Falklands task force. Twenty years had done nothing to soften the anger and grief of those involved and only a great deal of painstaking historical research had finally unlocked the case. The Second World War, though even more distant, was doubtless still shaping thousands of lives. As Karen’s persistence made only too plain.

  Faraday had scribbled her number in the address book he kept by the phone. When she answered, he asked her whether she’d eaten.

  ‘No.’ She sounded surprised. ‘I just got in from badminton.’

  ‘Pasta and a bit of ratatouille? Only I’ve got an evening to myself.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Here.’ Faraday smiled to himself. ‘Compliments of the chef.’

  She arrived within the hour, her face still pinked from the shower. Faraday had forgotten how attractive she was, with her snub nose and urchin hair, a figure that might have stepped jauntily out of a Dickens novel. In the classroom, Faraday thought, she’d be a natural: enthusiasm and good sense spiked with a hint of mischief.

  The Jiffy bag containing Karen’s grandfather’s letters lay on the kitchen table. Faraday poured her a glass of Coôtes-du-Rhône and then proposed a toast.

  ‘To Harry …’

  They touched glasses. Karen nodded at the Jiffy bag.

  ‘What did you think?’

  ‘I thought they were charming. It’s hard, isn’t it? Some things never change. Other bits …’ He smiled at her. ‘It could have been another world.’

  ‘It was another world. Nan says so. That’s what Harry can’t grasp. That’s what makes him so unhappy.’

  Faraday blinked. Last time they’d talked Karen had mentioned the spiritualist temple. Her mum accompanied Madge every Sunday. Recently they’d been in touch with the long-departed Harry. These meetings apparently extended to conversation.

  ‘She talks to Harry? Your nan?’ Faraday wanted to be sure.

  ‘Yes. Often. And not just at the temple.’

  ‘And what does he say?’

  ‘Well, that’s the point really; that’s why we thought of you in the first place.’ Her head had gone down, her face flushed again, this time with embarrassment. ‘This is going to sound weird … bizarre … truly daft.’

  ‘Try me.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘I wouldn’t have asked you otherwise.’

  She looked at him a moment, a brief, searching glance that sought a certain assurance. She trusted him. She didn’t want him to laugh at her. Faraday made a tiny gesture with his hand. Go on.

  She reached for the Jiffy bag and emptied the letters onto the table. With them came Harry’s watch and she held it for a second or two, perched on the kitchen stool, before dropping it into her lap.

  ‘Harry was with a special outfit. It’s not in those letters but Mum’s checked it all out. A bunch of them volunteered for something called COPPS. That stood for –’ she frowned ‘– Combined Operation Pilotage Parties.’

  COPPS, she explained, were sent across the Channel in the winter of 1943–44 aboard midget submarines. Off the Normandy coast they’d swim the remaining mile or so under cover of darkness, crawling out of the surf to take core samples from the beach. Back home, these samples would be carefully analysed to gauge the load-bearing properties of the designated invasion beaches. Only if the underlying rock and sand were firm enough could heavy armour be shipped ashore.

  ‘It must have been really dangerous.’ Her eyes never left Faraday’s face. ‘There were Germans everywhere and getting caught would have been the end.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘They’d have been tortured, for sure,
and Madge says that no one could withstand that. So they each had a special tablet. Just in case. A suicide pill. Even back home they weren’t allowed to tell anyone what they were up to. Can you imagine?’

  Faraday couldn’t. No wonder Harry’s letters had so suddenly stopped.

  ‘So what happened?’

  ‘Harry apparently made half a dozen trips without any real problem. It was the last one that killed him.’

  That night they were heading for a little coastal township called St-Aubin-sur-Mer. The beach there was codenamed Nan Red. Royal Marines and a Canadian armoured regiment were designated to storm ashore, provided the beach could bear the weight of the tanks. Harry and his oppo swam into the shallows. Waiting for the forty-five seconds of darkness between the regular sweep of the searchlights, they worked their way out of the shallows. It took about fifteen minutes to screw the core sampler down through the layers of sand. Then they eased themselves back into the water with their precious trophy, invisible against the blackness of the night.

  ‘It was a good mile back to the submarine. Harry had a problem already. He’d done something to his shoulder a couple of days previously and he was getting bad cramps.’

  ‘He was alone?’

  ‘No. They always worked in twos. Kind of buddy system.’

  ‘And Harry got back to the submarine OK?’

  ‘No.’ Karen’s hand had found the wristwatch. ‘Towards the end of the swim, Harry got really bad. His oppo was pulling him. It was quite rough. He could see the submarine but he was knackered. Whatever happened, Harry’s oppo knew they both had to get back. If the Germans found a body in a wetsuit, there’d be all hell to pay.’

  Harry’s oppo, she said, had done his very best, but by the time the submarine manoeuvred alongside Harry had gone.

  ‘Apparently he was just floating,’ she said. ‘He’d probably died a while before. In a sea like that it must be hard to tell.’

  Faraday reached for the bottle and refilled her glass. The ratatouille had been bubbling for a while. He turned it off.

  ‘The men on the submarine got Harry aboard. I don’t know whether they tried mouth-to-mouth and all that, but if they did, it didn’t work. They brought his body back and notified Madge sometime later. They kept his body in one of the mortuaries under the hill. It was months before she could bury him.’

  Faraday nodded. The chalk beneath Portsdown Hill was honeycombed with tunnels. An entire underground hospital had been constructed during the war years and even now there was a subterranean headquarters beneath one of the hilltop forts, a command centre for use in the event of nuclear attack.

  ‘How was Madge?’

  ‘It broke her heart. Mum was still a tiny baby. Madge wasn’t even married but that didn’t matter. All she wanted back was Harry. He meant the world to her. Read those letters and you can see why.’

  Faraday sipped at his wine. So far it was a touching story, doubtless an echo of countless other wartime tragedies. But why, sixty years later, did it still matter so much?

  Karen ducked her head. ‘It was Bob, really. You remember Bob?’

  Faraday nodded. Bob’s name had appeared in the letters. He’d been Harry’s best mate. They’d enlisted together, trained together, and they’d both ended up in COPPS.

  ‘Bob stayed in touch?’

  ‘Big time.’ Karen nodded.

  ‘And that was a problem?’

  ‘Yes, it was. Madge had always had a feeling about him. He was a nice enough bloke, nothing horrible about him, but sometimes he let one or two things slip and Madge began to wonder.’

  ‘How? About what?’

  ‘About …’ she ran a finger round the top of her glass ‘… everything really. Bob had been going out with Daisy for a while, Madge’s sister, but we think Madge was the one he really … you know … fancied. He used to buy her chocolates sometimes, and pick bunches of flowers for her when there was really no need, and it was always when he knew Harry was away.’ She lifted her head. ‘You know what I mean?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Well … when Harry had gone, and D-Day was all over and done with, and everyone knew the war was coming to an end, Bob came back to Pompey, made himself a real nuisance, wanting to take care of Madge and Mum. Madge said it was really awkward some nights. She was boarding with a family in Fratton and she’d get the baby down for the night and then there’d come the knock at the door and there was Bob. Chocolates again, and more bloody flowers. God knows where he got the money. It was embarrassing, too. The people Mum was boarding with were Methodists, really strict. They thought Madge … you know … she was a looker; I’ve seen the pictures …’

  ‘How did she handle him?’

  ‘She didn’t. It was her friend, Grace, the woman you met a couple of years back. They were really close, Madge and Grace, and Grace was the kind who didn’t put up with any nonsense from men. She was really bold that way. She’d been on the boats already, the liners across to New York, and she knew how to look after herself. So she saw Bob off, told him his fortune. You can imagine, can’t you?’

  Faraday smiled. Grace Randall, at eighty-four, had personality to spare. Faraday remembered her again from the previous inquiry, pencil-thin, racked with emphysema, but sharp as a tack. God knows what she must have been like in her prime.

  ‘So what’s the problem?’ Faraday asked again.

  Karen asked for another glass of wine. Then she cupped the glass between her hands as if she was trying to warm it.

  ‘After the war one of the matelots off the submarine came and looked Madge up. He’d left the navy by now and he was working as a roofer building the new estate in Paulsgrove. He said he’d been with Harry the night he died. Turned out he was one of the blokes who hauled Harry out of the water.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘He said Harry was bleeding.’

  ‘Bleeding?’

  ‘Apparently, he had a stab wound, right through his rubber suit, just here.’ She reached forward and touched Faraday’s shirt above the waistband of his trousers. ‘That’s what had killed him. It wasn’t exhaustion at all.’

  ‘He’d bumped into a German? There’d been a fight on the beach?’

  ‘That’s what his oppo said.’

  ‘And was it true?’

  ‘No one knows.’

  ‘What did the sailor think?’

  ‘He said there was no way Harry could have swum a mile with a wound like that. Harry bled to death. It wouldn’t have taken long.’

  Faraday tried to visualise the situation: a heaving swell, the black winter night, two men struggling back towards the dark bulk of the submarine, then a sudden flare of violence. The key issue, he realised at once, was motivation. Why would one man knife another when they’d just spent the last couple of hours cheating death?

  He looked up at Karen. Her eyes were shiny.

  ‘So who was in the water with Harry?’ he asked.

  ‘Bob.’ She nodded. ‘And he’s still alive.’

  Twenty-one

  Tuesday, 2 March 2004

  The ping of an incoming email awoke Faraday next morning. It was still dark. He swung his legs out of bed and fumbled his way through to the study next door to find a message from Eadie Sykes awaiting him.

  Her schedule, vague as it was, suggested she should be in Melbourne by now, but for the time being she was hanging on in Sydney, pending news of possible backing for a film. A chance meeting in one of the bars up on the Macquarie campus had given her an introduction to a Pom anthropologist who was doing a PhD on the social impacts of the Pacific War on the native population of Vanuatu, and he appeared to be interested in turning his thesis into a movie.

  Faraday scrolled on, recognising Eadie’s limitless appetite for new projects, new faces, new departures. A sign-off paragraph offered an update on the rest of her social life. She’d looked up a couple of buddies from her own days at uni and made a mental note never to have kids. A nice American had taken her out on his yacht for a couple of
days. And she’d even borrowed a bodyboard and hung out for a week on Manly Beach, making friends half her age and learning how to keep her mouth shut in the bigger waves.

  Only at the end of the email, checking the addressees, did Faraday realise that this message served as a chatty update for a wide circle of friends. He counted them. Including J-J and himself, the readership came to nineteen. Brilliant, he thought. The big relationship in my life, and I qualify for just over five per cent.

  He got up from the desk and stood at the window for a moment or two. Dawn was spilling over the harbour, a cold, pale light that sharpened the low outline of Hayling Island. A raft of brent geese was floating gently seawards and he caught the black silhouette of a pair of cormorants, arrowing past in the same direction.

  Twice in the night he’d woken up to thoughts of Karen and the luckless Harry. Two generations on his story still moved her but the real victim, she said, was her mum. Gwen somehow held herself responsible for what had happened. Without a young baby, she argued, Madge might have been less of a sitting duck for Bob’s advances. Without the needful single parent in his sights, Bob might never have drawn the dagger in the first place.

  Faraday, over supper, had been as gentle as he could. Recent conversations with Harry at the spiritualist temple might well have confirmed Madge’s worst fears, and he believed Karen when she said that Gwen herself was only too prepared to go into the witness box, but the real issue here was evidence. The submariner was evidently dead. So was Harry. The rest, alas, was supposition. One day testament from beyond the grave might be admissible in court. But not yet.

  Karen, three glasses down, had simply nodded. In her heart she’d known it was nonsense but she owed her mum and Madge everything. They’d been brilliant over her recent divorce and she could never do enough to repay the debt. So if they’d got themselves into a state about Harry, and if Grace Randall knew a man who might help, then who was she to call any of this stuff into question? Women can be crazy, she’d told Faraday, reaching for her coat.

  Faraday had insisted on calling a cab. She could come back for the Renault in the morning. At the door, the cab waiting, she’d given him a hug and he’d held her for a moment longer before she’d turned away.