The Price Of Darkness

by Hurley, Graham

  It was Gabrielle. She knelt beside him. Faraday felt her stiffen as she made sense of the image on the tiny screen.

  ‘Merde …’ she said softly.

  Carisbrooke Road backed onto the south side of the football stadium at Fratton Park, a row of modest terraced houses with single bays on the ground floor. The curtains upstairs at number 14 were still pulled shut.

  Suttle took a chance on Sam Taylor being in. At eight in the morning, he told himself, a man in his sixties who’d recently been made redundant was unlikely to be at work. He knocked again, listening for signs of life inside. He’d rung Lizzie Hodson for the address last night. He’d read her News feature piece on the collapse of Gullifant’s, and Sam Taylor seemed to have been the most articulate of the victims quoted. He’d talked of pension rip-offs and the helplessness of the little man in situations like these, and according to Lizzie he’d appointed himself spokesman for the abandoned Gullifant’s workforce. Ask him about the day they all got their P45s, she’d said. And give him my love.

  At last Suttle heard footsteps. A shadow loomed behind the pebbled glass in the front door. The News photographer had pictured Taylor as a sturdy, big-boned man with steady eyes and a quiet smile. In barely six months he seemed to have aged a decade.

  ‘Yeah?’ He was wearing an old dressing gown. He needed a shave.

  Suttle showed him his warrant card. He’d appreciate a moment or two of his time. It wouldn’t take long.

  ‘What’s it about?’

  ‘Gullifant’s.’

  Taylor invited him in. From upstairs somewhere came the sound of a bath being run. Then the clump of heavy footsteps overhead.

  ‘My missus. She takes first turn. I jump in afterwards. You want tea?’

  Suttle found himself in the kitchen. A cat eyed him briefly then disappeared through the flap in the back door. Taylor was plugging in the electric kettle. Shopper’s Choice tea bags. Just one for the pot.

  Suttle perched on a stool. There was a gruffness about Taylor that told him his time was limited. A bathful of hot water cost a fortune. Best not to waste it.

  ‘I got your name from Lizzie Hodson at the News, Mr Taylor.’

  ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘Because I’m interested in what happened to Gullifant’s.’

  ‘Why’s that?’

  Suttle mentioned Mallinder. Just the sound of his name brought Taylor to a halt.

  ‘That man deserved everything he got,’ he said at once. ‘And you can write that down if you want. I haven’t a clue how it happened but I just hope to God that whoever did it took his time. Can you shoot someone slowly? I hope you can. And I hope the bastard suffered - excuse my French.’ He gave the teapot a stir and filled a mug. ‘Sugar?’

  Suttle took the mug. He wanted to know about the local Gullifant’s workforce. How many had been made redundant?

  ‘In this town? Sixteen. That’s nine full-timers and the rest just fillers-in. It’s the full-timers that really copped it.’

  ‘People like you?’

  ‘That’s right. Like I say, nine of us in Pompey, but across the whole company you’re talking over a hundred, women too, not just blokes, and all of us out on our ears. Was it a surprise? No, of course it wasn’t. We knew trade wasn’t good, hadn’t been for a while. But that was their fault, the new blokes, the management, Redmayne, whatever they called themselves. They just weren’t interested. You could tell that from the start. Whatever you asked for, the answer was always no. Customers after a new line of paint? Forget it. Buy in extra stocks for spring? When everyone starts decorating? You’re joking. New lead for the staff electric kettle? Make do with the old one. An attitude like that, we were bound to go under. The only surprise was it took so long.’

  Suttle had a feeling Taylor had made this speech before but there was no mistaking the anger, and the bitterness.

  ‘So what happened the day they went bust?’

  ‘We all got a letter. Not even personal. Just “Dear Sir”, and even then they couldn’t be arsed to get that right. Just imagine. You turn up to work, a Monday morning, and there’s a security van parked up outside with a couple of goons in uniforms in case anything kicks off, and then you walk in, just like normal, and there are all these letters waiting, envelopes with names on. You know how mine started? With my name on the envelope? Mr S. Taylor? It started “Dear Madam”. They’d put the wrong one in. That’s how much they cared about us.’

  Many of the local blokes, he said, had been with Gullifant’s all their working lives.

  ‘They’d paid into the pension scheme. That’s five per cent of everything they earned. You do the sums. Take me, for instance. I’m sixty-three. I joined Gullifant’s out of the Navy, nineteen seventy-three. So for thirty-three years I’m paying my dues, keeping my nose clean, thinking it’s all watertight, and then - bang - they say there’s a problem with the pension fund, bloody great hole, not enough money, and you know what we get come the finish? Fifteen per cent of what we’re due. Fifteen per cent. And that’s if we’re lucky. My missus got the calculator out. She reckoned I’d paid in tens of thousands come the finish. And what will I see of that? A pittance. Pathetic. Absolutely pathetic. Should never have been allowed. Not in a decent country.’

  Suttle asked about redress. Surely there was some kind of right of appeal? Some kind of compensation fund?

  ‘Yeah.’ Taylor nodded. ‘You’d think so, wouldn’t you? Well let me tell you, son, there’s bugger all you can do about it. You write to your local councillor. You phone up your MP. You get a letter in the paper. You make a fuss. We even got a petition going, not just us Gullifant’s blokes but loads of others in the same boat. Thousands of signatures, thousands of them. And then what happens? You get a letter from some smartarse minister telling you there’s all kinds of help available, this scheme, that scheme, but then you look a bit harder and it’s never that simple. Either the money’s not there at all, or if it is then it’s nowhere near enough. My missus has got a file upstairs thick as your arm, all the letters she wrote, but what it boils down to is a queue. All you want is what you put in. But they’ve had it off you. It’s gone. Just disappeared.’

  ‘Who’s they?’

  ‘Bloody good question. I asked that myself. Tell you the truth, I’m still asking it. It’s like a conjuring trick. You put all that money in and - puff - it just goes. Someone’s had it. I know they have. Thieving bastards.’

  ‘And what about Mallinder. Did you ever write to him?’

  ‘Yeah. We went up to see him too, took a little deputation over to Croydon, tried to put our case. That Lizzie Hodson was very helpful. She was the one who got us all the information, all the stuff about Benskin, Mallinder, how they’d bought Gullifant’s in the first place, then sold it, then bought the freeholds back. Makes you dizzy, doesn’t it? Trying to keep up with these people?’

  ‘So you met Mallinder?’

  ‘Yeah. Charming bloke, couldn’t be more sorry for us. Not his fault, though. Not the way he saw it. Market pressures, that’s what he blamed it on. That and the way the hardware trade had changed. Me, I asked him why he’d bought Gullifant’s in the first place in that case, and you know what he said? He said that every time a businessman made a decision he took a risk. That was the nature of the beast. Sounds brave, doesn’t it? All that risk-taking? Except it turned out that the risk wasn’t his at all, it was ours. Like I say, a conjuring trick.’

  Upstairs Suttle could hear movement again. His wife’s out of the bath, he thought.

  ‘So what are you doing now? How do you make ends meet?’

  ‘I’ve got a job. B&Q, just up the road. I do the afternoon shift. The money’s not great but it’s better than nothing.’

  ‘Still in the hardware trade then?’

  ‘Yeah, funny isn’t it? A couple of the other Gullifant’s blokes are in there with me. Tell you the truth, B&Q couldn’t wait to snap us up. It’s not the same though, in fact it’s not a shop at all, more a warehouse. Cheap, th
ough, compared to the prices we used to charge.’

  Suttle finished his tea. He’d asked for details on other members of the Gullifant’s workforce and Taylor said he’d get something together for later in the day. Walking back up the narrow hall, Suttle wondered how big a blow the Gullifant’s collapse had been for Taylor and his wife. These days even some occupational schemes would barely keep your head above water. How on earth could you survive on a state pension alone?

  ‘Good question.’ It was Taylor’s wife. She was sitting on the stairs, a big woman in a grey tracksuit with a pair of pink fluffy slippers. ‘Tell him, Sam.’

  ‘Tell him what?’

  ‘Tell him what we were going to do. Before this lot all happened.’

  ‘Yeah … ?’

  With some reluctance Taylor described their retirement plans. The cash element of the Gullifant’s pension was going to pay off what they owed on the house with a bit to spare. They then planned to sell the house, invest the money in a little place in Spain, and live off the annuity plus the state pension.

  ‘It’s cheap, see, Spain. And nicer too. Quieter.’

  ‘But can’t you still do that?’

  ‘No way.’ He nodded in the direction of the stadium. ‘This new chairman wants to move the club somewhere else. That means they’ll tear the old ground down and build loads of houses, flats, whatever. With all that going on, no one in their right mind would want a house like this. It’s development again. Can’t bloody win, can you?’

  Suttle said he was sorry. He found a card and handed it across. With the door open he turned to say goodbye but Taylor beckoned him back.

  ‘I don’t want you to think I’m moaning,’ he said. ‘There are blokes worse off than me, much worse off. Did that lass from the News mention Frank Greetham at all?’

  Suttle shook his head. He couldn’t remember the name from Lizzie’s article. Taylor was nodding at the notebook in Suttle’s hand.

  ‘Write it down,’ he said. ‘Frank Greetham. Lovely man. Lovely, lovely bloke. Been with Gullifant’s all his working life.’

  ‘Where do I get hold of him?’

  ‘You don’t, son. That’s the whole point. He killed himself last month. I was going to give that Lizzie Hodson a ring but I never got round to it.’

  Bazza had told Thom Pollard to make himself available. Winter found him in the locker room at the indoor tennis centre, a five-minute walk from Gunwharf. His hair still wet from the shower, he was pulling on a pair of tracksuit bottoms. Beside him, on the bench, was a list of names with pencilled notes beside each.

  Winter glanced at it. In his late forties, Pollard had a reputation in the city for putting himself around. Fitter than most twenty-somethings, he made a precarious living by mixing tennis lessons with fashion shoots and occasional appearances in various TV soap operas. Teenage girls got silly about him, often finding themselves in competition with their mothers for his attentions. Winter had always liked him. He was wry and funny, with a reckless streak that had always appealed to Bazza.

  Pollard consulted the list. His first pupils were due on court at a quarter to ten. There was a café upstairs. Winter had half an hour of his undivided attention. After that he’d have to queue up, like everyone else.

  Winter bought two coffees. Pollard was deep in the sports pages of the Daily Telegraph. The morning run had put colour in his face.

  ‘This bloke Cesar …’

  ‘You met him at all?’ Pollard didn’t look up.

  ‘Never. So tell me.’

  ‘Big bloke. Handy too. Used to box a bit, years ago. Nearly turned pro, or that’s what he always says.’

  Winter reached across and folded the newspaper. Pollard looked up, amused.

  ‘Baz says you’re on the payroll now.’

  ‘He’s right, son.’ Winter nodded at the paper. ‘So a bit of respect, eh?’

  ‘Good money?’

  ‘Not bad. Better than working my nuts off for the Men in Black.’

  ‘Yeah, I heard about that. You want to be careful of policemen. Some of them are nasty bastards. Bent too, if you believe everything you hear.’

  Winter ignored him. Bazza had mentioned Pollard giving private lessons to Dobroslaw’s kids.

  ‘That’s right, I did, a couple of months back. One of them turned out to be good. The kid had real talent plus he wasn’t quite so much of a dickhead as most of them. There were days on court when he even listened to me. Shame, really. If he’d stuck at it, he might have got somewhere.’

  ‘So what happened?’

  ‘I took him to Barcelona. There’s a tennis school there. The standard’s really high. I turn up with a handful of kids, plus their mums, and we put them through three days’ intensive coaching. It’s just a taste of what they can expect if they want to be serious about the game but it sorts out the duffers - you know, the ones who’ve got an attitude problem.’

  ‘And Cesar’s boy?’

  ‘Was bloody good.’

  ‘So what was the problem?’

  The café area was beginning to fill up. Pollard gestured Winter closer.

  ‘The deal in Barcelona was this. The mums bugger off to some fancy hotel and go shopping for a couple of days while I sort the kids out. The accommodation’s pretty rough but that’s all part of it. There were three kids and me. We were dossing down in a Portakabin, basically. The first night I’m trying to get to sleep but the kids are pissing themselves laughing. In the end I’ve had enough so I put the light on. Turns out they’ve got this electronic thing, hand-held, some kind of gizmo that gets you on to the Internet. And there they all are, perving on some porn site. Not the usual stuff but really heavy - women giving donkeys blow jobs, that kind of shit. Truly vile.’

  Winter gazed at him. ‘How old were these kids?’

  ‘Eleven, twelve …’ Pollard scowled. ‘Much too young for donkeys.’

  ‘So what did you do?’

  ‘I took the machine off them, told them to go to sleep. The machine belonged to Cesar’s kid. Next day I got on the phone and had a word with his mum, told her what had gone down. And you know what? She just fucking shrugged. Nothing she could do about it. Just gave him the thing back and let them get on with it. Kids will be kids. Qué será …’

  Outraged, Pollard had phoned Cesar. Within half a day the kid and his mum had been on a plane to Gatwick.

  ‘Did you see him afterwards? This Cesar?’

  ‘Yeah. He called me over to his place in Southampton. Believe me, mate, this bloke’s impressive. He lives like a king … big, big spread on the outskirts of Chilworth. Tennis court, swimming pool, stables, the lot. But he’s still strict, hard as nails with his kids. Maybe it’s the Catholic thing, Christ knows, but he thanked me for what I’d done and told me how he’d sorted the boy out, and I believed every word. Which is odd, really, isn’t it? Given where the money comes from?’

  Winter nodded. Brodie had got more details from the D/I who was running her. Dobroslaw had a successful import/export business, all totally legit, but on the side he was thought to be buying Belarussian girls on forged documents from an agent in London. These girls were lodged, four to a house, in premises in Southampton. With each of them servicing ten punters a day, Dobroslaw was looking at a take of around twenty grand a week from each house. Naturally, there wasn’t a shred of proof to connect the Pole to any of this, but years of trying to nail Bazza on narcotics charges had taught Winter how money could buy the very best in terms of protection. The right financial advice, a clever brief, a series of offshore accounts, and you were home safe.

  ‘So the kid’s not playing tennis any more?’

  ‘Not to my knowledge. And that’s just one of the things he’s not doing. Like I say, the guy’s really old-fashioned. Won’t put up with any shit. Christ knows how he ever married that bimbo of a wife.’

  ‘Right.’ Winter glanced at his watch. ‘Did he ever mention jet skis at all?’

  ‘Jet skis?’ Pollard shook his head. ‘No. Why?’
/>   Winter explained. The possibility of Cesar backing a big event drew a nod from Pollard.

  ‘He’d do that,’ he said at once. ‘That’s exactly what he’d do.’

  Before it had all kicked off in Barcelona, Pollard had got to know Cesar’s wife a little. Like her husband, she was from Poland. The Polish community in Southampton, she’d said, was enormous, and there was a lot of pressure to get to the top of the pecking order. What spoke loudest, of course, was money but what mattered as well was profile. You had to be seen. You had to be recognised. And the quickest way to acquire a sprinkle or two of that kind of stardust was to buy it.

  ‘It’s true about immigrants,’ Pollard said. ‘They just try harder. All that acceptance stuff matters. They want to end up more English than the English, and if spending a couple of bob on some dickhead race round the Isle of Wight does it for them, then so much the better. Cesar wants to join the club. He’s got deep pockets. Because he’s a businessman he’ll call it an investment but actually it’s a lot more than that. Like I say, it matters to him.’

  Winter smiled. Bazza, in his own way, was doing exactly the same thing. He remembered the garden at Sandown Road, the guests flocking round for the raffle, the endless supply of Krug, Marie’s extravagantly wrapped birthday presents heaped on a table in the lounge. The club, he thought. And all the countless benefits of membership.

  ‘That’s my lot.’ Pollard was eyeing three adolescents beside the drinks machine. They’d abandoned their rackets on the floor and were debating how many cans of Pepsi they could afford.

  Pollard got to his feet, glancing at his watch. Then he picked up the paper.

  ‘You’re going to have dealings with Cesar?’

  ‘I expect so.’

  ‘Then watch yourself. He’s like all these alpha guys. Just hates to lose.’

  Twenty-four hours of intense activity had failed to locate Dermott O’Keefe. Checks with the Education Department at Southampton Civic Centre confirmed that persistent truanting had brought him to the attention of the Youth Offending Team. Attempts to transfer him to a special school had come to nothing chiefly because no one could ever find the lad, but Suttle - at Faraday’s prompting - had turned his attention to Social Services, and in the shape of a guy dealing with vulnerable young people, he thought he might have raised a lead.