Said he thought the money was dodgy."
"Drugs money?"
"Has to be. He didn't say it in those terms but Mackenzie will draw his own conclusions."
"He thinks you're in the same game?"
"With luck." He nodded. "Yes."
Faraday was eyeing the last of the sandwiches. A legend within a legend. Neat.
"So Mackenzie really does need you off the plot?"
"Exactly. For one thing, I'm after his precious fort. And for another, I'm potential competition. The way I understand it, he's got this city pretty tied up. Me, he doesn't need."
"And you're thinking he'll compromise himself?"
"That was Nick's bid, sure. I just play along."
Faraday reached for the sandwich, impressed by the lengths to which Nick Hayder had gone. Set up a sting operation like this the false ID, the credit cards, the Porsche, the London office, the flat to go with it — and you were looking at a six-figure bill. Putting Mackenzie away and confiscating all his assets would dwarf that sum but there was absolutely no guarantee that this would ever happen. No wonder Nick hadn't been sleeping at night.
"Has this survey of yours happened yet?"
"No."
"But it's kosher? You've got it organised?"
"Oh yes. Structural engineer, architect the lot. Last time I talked to Mackenzie he told me I should forget it. Why piss away all that money, mate?" The Pompey accent again. "Why give yourself the grief?"
"And you?"
"I just laughed."
"So when's the survey due?"
"End of next week." Up on one elbow, Wallace nodded at the phone and flashed Faraday a smile. "Which is why our friend will now be wanting a meet."
It took three attempts on the mobile before DC Jimmy Suttle managed to get through to Paul Winter.
"Where are you?" The older man sounded half asleep.
"Hampshire Terrace."
"What's happening?"
"It's pouring with bloody rain." Suttle was doing his best to find shelter beneath a dripping lime tree across the road. Rush hour traffic was beginning to back up from the nearby roundabout, blocking his view of the terrace. "The lad went into an office. Number 68.
There's a solicitors' on the first two floors and something called Ambrym Productions at the top. Haven't seen him since."
"Ambrym belongs to a woman called Eadie Sykes." Winter smothered a yawn. "She makes videos."
"Should I know her?"
"Only if you're a mate of Faraday's."
"The DIOn Major Crimes?"
"Yeah. She's his shag. Big woman. Australian."
"And the lad?"
"Faraday's son You could try for an interview but don't hold your breath."
"Why not?"
"He's deaf and dumb. Only speaks sign."
Suttle was still trying to work out why a DI's son, Major Crimes for God's sake, should be keeping such bad company. Winter beat him to it.
"Kid's got a reputation for getting himself in the shit. You should have been around a couple of years back." "So what do I do now? Any suggestions?"
"Stay there. Cathy's sending a relief on this job. I'll pick you up."
"Like when?" "Like soon." Suttle heard Winter laughing. "Looks evil out there."
J-J had waited nearly half an hour for Eadie to finish her phone call.
She'd signed that one of the video's backers, the Portsmouth Pathways Partnership, were demanding an update on what was going on. It was taxpayers' money they were handing out and Ambrym were a month late sending in the quarterly progress report. Without the right ticks in the right boxes, there'd be problems releasing the next tranche of funding. And if that happened, according to the Ambrym spreadsheet she'd been obliged to share with the agency, her cash flow would turn to rat shit.
Eadie went through the agreed project milestones for the second time.
Yes, they'd completed the initial research. Yes, they'd touched base with each of the city's drug abuse organisations. Yes, they'd circulated full details of the project to a thousand and one other interested parties including every school in the city, every further education college, every youth group, every neighbourhood forum. And yes, she'd even managed to comply with the positive discrimination requirements by hiring someone with a registered disability.
"That's you," she signed, at last putting the phone down. "How did you get on?"
J-J had spent most of the last half-hour wondering just how much to tell her about Pennington Road. In the end, he decided there was no point even mentioning it. He'd come away empty-handed. With luck, he'd never see the guys with the dog ever again.
"Daniel's sick," he signed.
"What do you mean, sick?"
"Strung out. Hurting."
"Strung out enough not to do the interview?"
J-J hesitated. 90 worth of heroin was the price of the interview. He wasn't at all sure what would happen if they turned up without the accompanying wraps.
"I don't know. He looks really bad to me." He shrugged lamely, then mimed a state of imminent collapse.
Eadie watched him, scenting an opportunity.
"A real mess, you mean? The shakes? The sweats? Clucking?"
J-J nodded, an emphatic yes.
"You think he's got anything stashed away? Emergency supplies?"
A shake of the head.
"And this was when?" She glanced at her watch. "An hour ago?" With the greatest reluctance, a nod.
"Excellent." Eadie was on her feet. "I'll give you a hand with the lights and tripod. The car's out the back."
Chapter six
WEDNESDAY, 19 MARCH 2003, 17.00
Faraday, alone in Eadie Sykes's se afront flat, gazed out at the rain.
Ten minutes ago, he'd finally brought the session with the u/c officer to an end. In an hour or so, he'd have to drive down to the historic dockyard for yet another meet with Willard. For now, though, he owed himself a pause for thought.
Eadie rented her flat from her ex-husband, a successful accountant, and the block lay on the se afront within sight of South Parade pier. It had once been a hotel but the kind of holiday makers who booked for a week or a fortnight had long since fled to Spain, and the building, like so many others in the terrace, had been converted into apartments.
Eadie's was at the very top, a big, open space that she'd floored with maple wood and garnished with the bare minimum of furniture. Over the last year or so, Faraday had sometimes wondered about an extra chair or two, something to make it cosier, but Eadie always insisted that the whole point of the place was the view, and in this, as in so much else, Faraday knew she was right.
Four floors up, a stone's throw from the beach, the apartment offered a seat in the dress circle. Away to the left, the rusting gauntness of the pier. Offshore, the busy comings and goings of countless ferries, warships, fishing boats, yachts, their passage fenced by the line of buoys that dog-legged out towards the English Channel. Beyond them, the low, dark swell of the Isle of Wight.
Faraday had lost count of the number of times he'd stood here, marvelling at the play of light, at the constant sense of movement, at the way a line of squall showers could march up the Solent, bringing with it a thousand variations of sunshine and shadow. Today, though, was different. Today there was only a grey blanket of thickening drizzle and the grim, squat shape of Spit Bank Fort.
Eadie kept her binoculars on a hook beside the big glass doors that opened onto the recessed balconette. They'd been a Christmas present from Faraday, an unsuccessful down payment on birding expeditions together, and now he slid back one of the tall plate-glass doors and raised the binos. The optics were excellent, even on a day like this.
The skirt of green weed around the bottom of the fort told Faraday it was low tide. Above the weed, an iron landing stage looked newly painted. A big grey inflatable hung on a pair of davits and a staircase ran upwards to double doors set into the granite walls. One of the doors was open, an oblong of black, and higher still Far
aday's binoculars found a white structure the size of a mobile home perched on the roof of the fort.
He lingered a moment, wondering what it might be like to live on a site like this, to wake up every morning to views of Southsea se afront across the churning tide, then he let the binos drift down again until he was following a line of open gun ports. Spit Bank Fort, he thought, looked exactly the way you'd imagine: unlovely, purposeful, thousands of tons of iron and granite dedicated to the preservation of the city at its back.
Faraday permitted himself a smile. Over the years, he'd talked to old men in Milton pubs who remembered the last war. There'd been ack-ack guns on Southsea Common, barrage balloons ringing the dockyard, and Spit Bank Fort would undoubtedly have played its own part in protecting the city against the swarms of Luftwaffe bombers. Odd, then, that a German should find herself in charge here. And odder still that Bazza Mackenzie, Pompey born and bred, should choose this sturdy little piece of military history to mark his coronation. King of the City indeed.
Wallace's two phone conversations with Mackenzie had been taped, the transcripts and cassettes locked in Willard's office safe. According to Wallace, Mackenzie had been up front, even matey, one businessman talking to another. He'd wanted to gauge the strength of Wallace's interest and he'd been blunt enough to ask whether Wallace really knew what he was getting into.
Mackenzie said he'd been out to the fort three or four times and taken a good nose round. The place, he warned, was damp as fuck. The roof needed a total sort-out and some days if you talked to the right people they didn't have enough buckets to cope with all the leaks. Health and Safety would be taking a hard look at some of the exterior ironwork and he wouldn't be at all surprised if they red-carded the lot. On top of that, there were problems with the well that supplied the fort with fresh water and if he was honest you'd be looking to rewire the whole place as well as shelling out for a new generator. That's why his bid was so low. Pay anything close to the million and a quarter quid she was asking, and you'd be adding half that again easy for the refurb.
Wallace had ridden out the warnings and when Mackenzie, in the most recent conversation, had begun to press him about his own funding he'd kept things deliberately vague. He said he'd been lucky with a shopping development in Oman. Currency fluctuations had gone in his favour. A big investment in euros had netted him a small fortune and there were other bits and pieces that kept his bank manager more than happy. This last phrase had stopped Mackenzie in his tracks, and shortly afterwards he'd dropped his conversational guard to offer what to Wallace sounded like a buy-off. "What would it take," Mackenzie had mused, 'for you to pull out?"
Wallace had parried the offer with a chuckle. Money, he told Mackenzie, was the last thing he needed. Neither was he up for a compensatory slice of whatever business Mackenzie had in mind for the fort. No, his own interest was quite clear. Various trips abroad, he'd seen what a good architect could do with a site like this. He wanted to turn Spit Bank into one of Europe's most unusual five-star hotels. On Nick Hayder's prompting, he'd added that he might even be considering gaming facilities.
This last conversation had hit the buffers shortly afterwards but one phrase in particular had stuck in Wallace's mind. "This is a funny town," Mackenzie had said, 'but you won't know that until you've lived here a bit." This observation had struck Wallace as a warning and he'd pressed Mackenzie on the kind of time scale he had in mind. What did 'bit' mean? Mackenzie, it seemed, had laughed down the phone. "A lifetime," he'd said. "Anything less, and you're fucking playing at it."
Faraday's own session with Wallace had concluded with a handshake and an exchange of mobile numbers. The u/c, it turned out, was keeping his visits to Portsmouth to an absolute minimum. Faraday got the impression Wallace had another u/c job on the go, different legend, but he certainly seemed to have plenty to keep himself occupied. Wallace had reported Mackenzie's interest in a face-to-face meeting and he'd been waiting for Nick Hayder to make some kind of decision. With Hayder now in hospital, that decision would presumably pass to Faraday.
Now, Faraday stepped back into the big living room, closing the glass door behind him. His previous experience of undercover operations had given him none of Nick Hayder's confidence and he'd heard enough about Bazza Mackenzie to suggest he'd be an exceptionally difficult target to sting. The problem with jobs like Tumbril was their very isolation.
Walled off from real life, it would be all too easy to talk yourself into a result.
Faraday helped himself to a banana from the fruit bowl in the kitchen.
The TV zapper lay beside the bowl and he pointed it across the room towards the wide screen television.
The TV was tuned to BBC News 24. In Paris, according to the presenter, President Chirac was expressing shock and dismay at the American build-up on the Iraqi border. UN Resolution 1441 was not an authorisation to go to war and even at this late stage he found it inconceivable that President Bush would put the framework of international order at risk. Thank God for the French, Faraday thought. He slipped out his mobile and dialled Eadie's number, watching yet more footage of British tanks on the move. To his surprise, she didn't answer.
To J-J.s relief, getting back into the Old Portsmouth apartment block was no problem. Daniel Kelly was standing in his first-floor window, visibly anxious, and the street door yielded at once to Eadie Sykes's touch. She led the way upstairs, carrying the camera box and a lightweight tripod. J-J followed with two lights on stands and an armful of cabling.
Daniel met them halfway down the hall. Pale and sweating, he blocked the path to his flat, ignoring Eadie. J-J looked down at his outstretched hand.
"What's going on?" It was Eadie. "Someone like to tell me?"
J-J edged past Daniel, fending him off with the light stands. When the student pursued him down the hall, he made an awkward bolt for the open door at the end. The flat smelled of burning toast and the air was blue with smoke. J-J dumped the light stands and the cabling in the lounge, reaching the kitchen in time to rescue the grill pan. Two slices of Mighty White were on fire and he smothered them with a washing-up cloth. Daniel stood in the door, oblivious to this small domestic drama.
"Where is it?" he kept saying. "Where's the gear?"
J-J had tipped the remains of the toast into the sink. The grill pan hissed beneath the cold-water tap. He turned back to Daniel and began to sign, tapping his watch. Maybe an hour, maybe two, but soon, I promise. Then came a movement in the lounge next door and Eadie appeared behind Daniel. She was staring at a plastic syringe and a battered old spoon readied on one of the work surfaces. Daniel was still demanding an answer. It wasn't hard to connect the two.
"You scored for him?"
J-J shook his head.
"Then how come…?" She'd spotted the belt Daniel would need to raise a vein. "Are you out of your mind?"
The student turned on her, angry now. He hadn't a clue who she was but this was his flat, his property. She had absolutely no right to barge in or pass judgement. He'd thought J-J was interested in realities, in what it meant to make certain decisions, certain choices. If that was still the case, no problem. If it wasn't, he could go and poke his camera into someone else's life.
Eadie blinked. Few people ever talked to her like this.
"We came because I understood we were invited," she said. "And it's my camera. Just for the record."
She looked witheringly at J-J, then stepped back into the living room.
Through the open door, J-J watched her beginning to unpack the Sony Digicam. Daniel ignored her. He demanded to know what the guys at Pennington Road had said. He asked whether there was any point trying them on their mobile number. Curiously, thought J-J, he never once mentioned the money.
"You ready, guys…?"
It was Eadie again. Calmer now, she wanted to know where Daniel would like to sit, the spot where he felt most comfortable.
"Comfortable?" The word raised a bitter smile. "You really don't have a clue, do you?"
Daniel shrugged and turned away, shaking his head. Then he began to hug himself, rocking backwards and forwards, his body hunched, his eyes shut, a man caught naked in a bitter wind.
"They drop it off by car," he muttered. "They ring the bell three times and I just go down." Daniel looked up at J-J, those big moist yellow eyes. "You'll stay with me? Help me?"
J-J nodded, easing Daniel gently out of the kitchen. Maybe an hour or two in bed might help.
Back in the living room, Eadie had set up the tripod and the camera.
Lights ringed the armchair beside the TV and now she was arranging a line of books on the shelf behind.
"Daniel," she said brightly, "I think we're about ready. That OK with you?"
The student paused, looking blankly at the waiting film set "Anything." He began to shiver again. "I don't care."
The interview, according to the time code generated by the digital camera, started at 17.34. Eadie Sykes, after the earlier bump in the road, was determined to smooth out any differences between them. She was grateful for Daniel's trust. What they were about to do was enormously important in all kinds of ways and she wanted to repeat what J-J had doubtless already established: that this was Daniel's video, Daniel's views, Daniel's life, and no one else's.
"You understand me, Daniel?"
In the camera's viewfinder, J-J watched her big freckled hand reach out. The student shuddered under her touch. The way he kept moving in the chair meant holding the shot wider than J-J would have liked, though it felt a mercy to be able to spare him the usual close-up.
"You want to start by telling me how it all began?" Eadie might have been talking to a child.
Daniel stared at her, uncomprehending. It was hot under the lights, and his big waxy face was bathed in sweat. Eadie prompted him again, an edge to her voice this time, and slowly he began to claw his way backwards through his life, picking up fragments here and there, trying to tease some sense, some logic, from the decisions he appeared to have made. Strangely enough, thought J-J, the very effort this involved seemed to ease some of his pain.
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