Cut to Black faw-5

by Graham Hurley

  Back in the hall, the first door he tried opened into a narrow bathroom. The rail for the shower curtain was hanging from the ceiling and the washer had gone on one of the taps in the hand basin. He stepped back into the hall again and pushed lightly at the sole remaining door. It was open already, a foot or two ajar, but the moment he stirred the air inside, the smell enveloped him, the hot, meaty stench of shit.

  This time, the window was draped with a blanket. Daylight leaked in around the edges and in the semi-darkness Suttle could just make out a figure on a bed. He fumbled against the inside wall until his fingers found the switch. He snapped on the light, bracing himself for whatever might happen next. Almost expecting some kind of physical attack, he found himself looking at a naked male body spreadeagled on the bare springs of the bed frame. Wrists and arms had been cable-tied to the edges of the frame and the flesh was red-raw where the trussed body had tried to struggle free. A conclusive ID was difficult because the head was covered in a grubby pillowslip but there was no problem guessing a name. Deja-vu, Suttle thought. Dave Pullen. Had to be.

  He stepped forward, meaning to remove the pillowslip, but then stopped.

  Beneath the bed, visible through the bare springs, was one of the football magazines, open at a double-page spread of a team in red shirts with the Carlsberg logo scrolled across their chests. The photo had been positioned at ground zero, directly beneath Pullen's arse.

  Michael Owen, in the front row, had taken a direct hit. Another heroic curl of turd had obliterated the bottom half of Emil Heskey. A third, a huge dump, had splat ted across most of the back row. Half the Liverpool team wiped out by the contents of Pullen's flabby bowels. No wonder the place stank.

  Suttle at last removed the pillowslip. Pullen stared up at him, his eyes huge in his parchment face. A length of gaffer tape sealed his mouth and it gave Suttle immense pleasure to tear it off. Pullen yelped in pain, then swallowed hard and began to lick his lips.

  "Thank fuck," he kept saying. "Thank fuck."

  "Thank fuck for what?"

  "You. Jesus…" He closed his eyes and shook his head. "Just get me out of here."

  The mattress and a duvet had been thrown against the far wall. Suttle retrieved the duvet and draped it over Pullen's naked body. As he did so, he noticed a line of DIY tools neatly arranged on the carpet beside the bed. With the electric drill came a roll of extension cable and a plug. The Stanley knife looked brand new and there was a generous selection of blades. Help yourself time.

  "What's this, then? DIY?"

  "Don't ask."

  "I just did. So tell me. What happened?"

  Pullen shook his head. It had been a game, one too many bevvies. He didn't want to talk about it.

  "Whose game?"

  "No way." Another shake of the head, more emphatic this time.

  "Tell me."

  "Fucking no way."

  "Was it the Scousers?"

  "The Scousers} Shit, no. That's the whole fucking point." His eyes had gone down to the tools beside the bed.

  "What point? Whose point?"

  "No, please, just get these fucking ties off me. Then maybe we'll talk."

  Suttle gazed down at him. A couple of nights ago this man had taken a billiard cue to Trudy Gallagher. In bed last night, on the promise that Suttle could keep a secret, she'd spelled it out for him, blow by blow. Pullen had said he was doing her a favour. He'd told her a smacking would mend her ways. This morning, outraged, Suttle had decided to administer a little correctional punishment of his own. Now this.

  Pullen had started up again about the cable ties. He was stiff as fuck. He needed a wash. He had loads of stuff to sort out but absolutely no interest in making any kind of statement, official or otherwise. Wasn't that right up Suttle's street? Wasn't he doing him a favour, sparing him all that paperwork?

  Dimly, Suttle was beginning to put it all together: the newly scrawled name on the speakerphone downstairs, the open door, the carefully recreated tableau in the bedroom, the hostage offered up and waiting, the shiny blades beside the bed, the open invitation to a spot of help-yourself revenge.

  "Aren't you going to do anything, then? Just standing there?"

  "Afraid not, Dave." Suttle made a show of checking his watch. "I've got an important meeting at nine. All kinds of shit if I'm late.

  Listen' he began to back towards the door, away from the reeking magazine 'if I get a moment later, I'll try and pop back, OK?"

  "Fuck you."

  "Yeah, and fuck you too." Suttle smiled at him. "Bye then, and, hey …" He raised a derisive thumb. "Good luck."

  He left the room, pulling the door to behind him. A pace or two down the hall, Pullen began to yell. Anything, he said. He'd do anything to get these fucking ties off. Just name it. Anything. Suttle paused, let him plead a little longer, then returned to the bedroom.

  Breathe through your mouth, and the smell wasn't quite so bad.

  "Anything, Dave?"

  "Yeah… Fuck you… Yeah."

  "So did Bazza do this to you?" He beamed down at the bed. "Or is that too much to ask?"

  The post-mortem on Daniel Kelly was scheduled to start shortly after nine, the first on the morning's mortuary list. Eadie Sykes had driven up to St. Mary's hospital half an hour earlier, keen to steal a little of the pathologist's time. She'd never attended a post-mortem in her life but she'd taped several surgical operations and knew the importance of a proper briefing. Miss the crucial cut and the impact of the sequence disappeared.

  To her surprise, the pathologist was a woman. Martin Eckersley had mentioned a couple of names over lunch yesterday, promising to phone once permission came through from Kelly's father, but both had been male.

  "Pauline Schreck." She was a small, neat woman with dancing eyes and a light, dry handshake. "My colleagues send their apologies. I'm the closest you'll find to a lo cum "Bodies R Us?"

  "Something like that."

  She led the way into a small, bare office and offered Eadie a seat.

  Eadie produced a copy of the fax from Kelly's father. The pathologist barely spared it a glance.

  "I've seen it," she said. "You wouldn't be here otherwise. So tell me … How can I help you?"

  Eadie explained a little about the video. What she needed was graphic coverage of the post-mortem procedure, nothing spared. The more clinical and explicit the footage, the better it would serve the video she had in mind.

  The pathologist nodded. She had no problem with any of that. The body in the fridge had become a parcel and it was her job to unpack it.

  Vital organs brain, heart, lungs, liver, stomach, spleen, kidneys, bladder came out for inspection. Various fluids went off to an address in Kent for analysis. Afterwards, the mortuary boys would sew Mr.

  Kelly back together again.

  "End of story?"

  "From my point of view, yes. It's a procedure, just like proper surgery. There are techniques you pick up, like tying off the stomach at either end to preserve the contents, but you learn it stage by stage. The only difference is that Mr. Kelly isn't going to get better." She nodded down at Eadie's file. "You've got a spare sheet of paper in there?"

  Eadie obliged with the back of a flyer from the Stop the War Coalition.

  The pathologist sketched the outline of a body and then talked Eadie through the sequence of cuts: the long central-line incision from the Adam's apple to the pubis, rib-shears to remove the breast plate and get at the tongue and neck organs, a smaller scalpel to draw a line from ear to ear across the top of the hairline.

  "Why the hairline?"

  "We have to take a look at the brain." She tapped the diagram with her pencil. "Sorry to disappoint you but that's more or less it."

  "And the stuff you take out? The organs?"

  "We weigh them, measure them, then seal the lot in a plastic bag and pop them back in the body."

  "Whereabouts in the body?"

  "Here." She patted her own stomach. "Abdominal cavity. Sealing the bag's im
portant. We also pack the neck and mouth with tissues. Leakage is the last thing we need."

  "And that's it?"

  "Afraid so. I'd love to tell you otherwise but it's not rocket science. Death is rarely complicated. Medically, we're talking the full stop at the end of the sentence. No more."

  Eadie made a note of the quote. It had a chill matter-of-factness perfectly in keeping with the effect she had in mind. After the chaos of Daniel Kelly's final months and the hand-wringing over his death, it all boiled down to this grey March morning in a provincial mortuary with a schedule of bodies to dismember and a pile of forms to fill in.

  The full stop at the end of the sentence. Perfect.

  Eadie glanced up.

  "Would you mind me doing an interview? Just briefly."

  "With me?"

  "Yes."

  "About what?"

  "Daniel Kelly." Eadie gestured down at the pencilled body shape. "And this."

  "Of course I'd mind." The pathologist was laughing now. "How on earth can I talk about someone I never knew?"

  Suttle rang Winter on his mobile. He was standing on the pavement outside Pullen's apartment block with line of sight to the communal entrance. Pullen himself was still upstairs, cable-tied to his bed frame.

  Winter was at his desk in the Crime Squad office at Kingston Crescent.

  The 9.15 meeting, he said, had been cancelled. Cathy Lamb had been summoned to a council of war in Secretan's office, along with every other major player on the drugs containment scene. With the News evidently planning a major feature spread on the erupting turf war, the time had come for some hard analysis.

  "Hard analysis?" Suttle was lost.

  "Damage limitation. Pathways forward. All that managerial bollocks."

  Winter stifled a yawn. "Where are you, then?"

  Suttle briefly described what had happened to Dave Pullen. Mackenzie, it turned out, had got word that the state of Trudy Gallagher was down to Pullen and not the Scousers at all. Far from suffering at the hands of a bunch of Liverpool toe rags she'd in fact been smacked around by her so-called boyfriend.

  "We'd sussed that already," Winter pointed out.

  "Yeah, but Mackenzie hadn't. He'd believed Pullen. That's why he ordered the Scouse kid to be sorted. Now it turns out that Pullen was lying all along, just to protect his arse, because he knew Mackenzie would go ballistic if he thought he'd laid a finger on the girl. And he's right."

  "So what did Bazza do?"

  "You won't believe this." Suttle began to laugh, then told Winter about the little tableau he'd discovered in the wreckage of Pullen's bedroom. "Kippered," he said finally. "Totally fucking kebabbed."

  "But why the Stanley knives?"

  "Because Mackenzie's put the word out to the Scousers that Pullen's there for the taking. Directions. Address. The lot. The guy's caused them no end of grief so his front door's open and the rest is down to them. That's why Pullen's been cacking himself. Literally."

  Suttle's description of the mess beneath the bed drew a low whistle down the phone. Even Winter had heard of Michael Owen.

  "And you're telling me he's still up there? Still on offer?"

  "Yeah."

  "And he's really expecting a visit?"

  "Yeah. You can smell it in the next street."

  "But they'd be mad, wouldn't they? Half the city looking for them?

  Attempted murder charge in the offing?"

  "They are mad. That's the whole point."

  There was a moment's silence. Pullen could imagine Winter at his desk, computing the possibilities. Suttle cleared his throat. Time for a suggestion of my own, he thought.

  "Why don't we just leave him there? Mount surveillance? Wait until they turn up?"

  "And then nick them?"

  "Yeah. Bloody sight easier than racing around after a bunch of lunatics."

  Suttle heard Winter chuckling. Then the older man put his finger on the obvious problem.

  "We'd get crucified in court," he said. "Imagine what a half-decent brief would make of this. Hazarding a victim's life. Exposing him to further injury."

  "But he's not a victim. What he did to Trudy adds up to GBH."

  "Can we prove that?"

  "Yeah."

  "How?" "She told me." "Who told you?" "Trudy."

  "Trudy Gallagher told you? When?" "Yesterday." "When yesterday?"

  "Last night."

  "Ah…" Winter was beginning to chuckle again. "Then I think we have a real problem."

  Faraday was summoned to Willard's office minutes before the big troubleshooting meeting with Secretan. He'd put a call through to the Det-Supt first thing, as soon as he'd spoken to Graham Wallace, and now a couple of hours later Willard had reached a firm decision.

  "We run with it," he said briskly. "We have no option."

  "I already told Wallace that."

  "You did?"

  "Yes, sir, subject to your approval. Wallace says Mackenzie's definitely up for some kind of negotiation though he's still waiting for him to come back with a time and a place."

  "You think he's going to fuck us about? Switch locations at the last moment? Throw the covert?"

  "I'd imagine so. Wouldn't you?"

  "Yeah." Willard was gazing at a newly arrived e-mail on his PC. "I suppose I would." He scribbled a note to himself and then turned back to Faraday. "So we're talking the weekend?"

  "Saturday or Sunday."

  "Can't Wallace pin him down? Try and box a meeting off?"

  "I'm suggesting Sunday. It's busier in Southsea, more cover. Wallace took the point, said he'd plead a prior engagement for tomorrow."

  "But you're telling me it might still be tomorrow? Regardless?"

  "I'd put money on Sunday, but yes, tomorrow's still a possibility. I've talked to Wallace's handler at Special Ops. Wallace is happy to wear a wire."

  "Recorder/transmitter?"

  "Yes."

  "Fine, but we'll need to record at our end as well. If Wallace gets shaken down, they'll find the recorder and we lose the lot. As long as he's been transmitting, at least we've got a fallback. People with nothing to hide don't shake business partners down. Plays really badly in court."

  "Fine." Faraday nodded. "I'll tell Wallace that."

  "You don't sound convinced, Joe."

  "I'm not, sir. We're hanging this guy out to dry. Mackenzie could turn up mob-handed. What happens if it all gets silly?"

  "We deal with it."

  "How?"

  Faraday's challenge hung in the air between them. This was the crux of the issue, and Willard knew it. Enlist half a dozen blokes to supply back-up and they'd give themselves an enormous problem. There had to be time for proper briefings salted with the kind of information that any Pompey cop could turn into the target's name. From that point on, no matter how briefly, Tumbril itself might be at risk. Something similar had already happened on the aborted vehicle stop before Christmas, with Valentine taunting them afterwards on the covert.

  Spreading the word about Tumbril might trigger another disaster.

  Willard was gazing out of the window, deep in thought. At length, he appeared to make some kind of decision.

  "We handle it ourselves, Joe."

  "Ourselves?"

  "Yeah." He nodded. "You, me, and the handler from Special Ops."

  Minutes later, Willard and Faraday descended a floor to Secretan's office. Most of the key players had already gathered, familiar faces around the Chief Superintendent's conference table, and Faraday slipped into the empty chair beside Cathy Lamb. She was busy sorting out a trayful of coffees but she still found time to enquire about J-J.

  "How is he?"

  "Fled the nest. Decamped."

  "Really?" Cathy stopped pouring. "When?"

  "Last night. He seems to have moved in with Eadie."

  "That's two of you, then."

  "Yeah." Faraday offered her a bleak smile. "For now."

  While Cathy began to hand round the coffees, Faraday pushed J-J to the bac
k of his mind and tried to take stock of the assembled company. He and Willard were representing the Major Crimes Team. Len Curzon, the DI in charge of the city's divisional detectives, had driven over from Highland Road, while Cathy Lamb would be inputting contributions from the newly formed Portsmouth Crime Squad.

  One surprise to Faraday was the presence of Harry Wayte, the DI from the Tactical "Crime Unit. His was a similar mission statement to Cathy Lamb's: get out there, talk to the bad guys, anticipate their every move, then turn all that intelligence into arrests. The current buzzword for this style of policing was 'pro-active', a description which gave the higher echelons of management a certain degree of comfort. The belief, no matter how fanciful, that you weren't solely at the mercy of events, played wonderfully with the more gullible politicians.

  Harry Wayte, across the table, caught Faraday's eye. Faraday, who hadn't seen him for a while, was shocked by how much older he looked.

  Since his days as a Chief Petty Officer in the navy, Harry had made no secret of his fondness for decent Scotch. In the job, over the years, he'd won himself a reputation as a good solid cop and weathered more than his share of crises but the booze had never been a problem. Now though, with his watery blue eyes and vein-mapped face, he looked truly wrecked.

  "All right, Harry?"

  "Never better, Joe. You?"

  "You want the short answer? My boy's in deep shit. The job's a bastard. And I haven't seen anything interesting with wings since the weekend before last. Apart from that' Faraday spread his hands wide 'life's a peach."

  "I heard about your boy."

  "Really?"

  "Yeah, along with every other copper I know. Funny how bad news gets round quickest, isn't it? Drink later? Upstairs at lunchtime? It's my birthday."

  Faraday nodded a yes, then Secretan and the DCI who acted as Crime Manager for the city stepped into the room and the buzz around the table began to die. Faraday had never seen the Chief Superintendent in action before but was already impressed by the framed colour shots on the wall above Secretan's desk. He'd heard from others that this man kept a regular date with some of the UK's more challenging mountains, week-long expeditions to the Cuillins and some of the tougher Welsh peaks, but if these rain-soaked, fog-shrouded walls of sheer granite were scalps on his belt then he already had Faraday's undivided attention. Finding a perch halfway up a mountain for some serious birding was one thing; conquering monsters like the Cuillins, quite another.