No Lovelier Death

by Hurley, Graham

  ‘His mate?’

  ‘Ault. Apparently they’re top buddies. Before Ault went on holiday, Baz promised he’d keep an eye on things. Like you do.’

  Mackenzie had therefore waded in.

  ‘In his own words, the place was already a khazi. Apparently they’d liberated Ault’s cellar. He kept some really tasty reds. Half of them were over the carpets. The rest they’d had away or they were necking. Baz couldn’t believe it.’

  ‘So what happened?’

  ‘He set about finding some faces he knew. Like I said, he didn’t have to look far. The kids who did the real damage were out of Somerstown. One of them called him a silly old cunt. Apparently that did it.’

  Bazza, in his own words, had totally lost it. He’d been a scrapper most of his life but he’d lost his edge recently and an evening’s drinking didn’t help. He’d whacked a couple of them before he took a bottle of single malt, full force, on the top of his head.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘The bottle smashed. It was full. He was lucky the cuts weren’t deeper and I guess the alcohol was a pretty effective antiseptic but you should read the Custody Sergeant’s notes. Even this morning he still stank.’

  ‘And that was it? Inside the house?’

  ‘Pretty much. He was on the carpet after they bottled him so he took a bit of a kicking but another lad lent him a hand.’

  ‘We’ve got a name?’

  ‘Yeah, boss.’ He flicked back through his pad. ‘Matt Berriman.’

  ‘Where is this kid?’

  ‘Newbury. Apparently Mackenzie knows him from way back.

  Which might explain the intervention.’

  ‘And that’s when Mackenzie left the party?’

  ‘Yeah. He says his missus had treble-nined us by then. I checked with Charlie One. They logged her call at 12.39.’ Charlie One was the force control room at Netley.

  ‘What did she say?’

  ‘Basically she told us to get our arses down to Sandown Road. The house belonged to a Crown Court judge. She said we were looking at serious grief.’

  ‘She’s right. Probably righter than she knows.’

  Faraday broke off to watch Mackenzie. One of the interviewing D/Cs was quizzing him about exactly what happened after Marie had sent him home.

  ‘I went to bed, didn’t I? Like you would …’

  ‘You didn’t clean up at all? Have a bit of a wash?’

  ‘Yeah, I must have done, but to tell you the truth I felt shit, totally knackered, plus I had a headache like you wouldn’t believe. Four Ibuprofens, couple of mouthfuls of Scotch, out like a light.’

  Faraday was staring at the screen. There were implications here. And one of them was suddenly all too obvious. He turned to the TIA.

  ‘We arrested him in bed, am I right?’

  ‘Spot on, boss.’

  ‘And his wife we arrested outside?’

  ‘Yeah. In the street.’

  ‘So they never talked, never met, not after he got back from next door?’

  ‘Absolutely right.’

  ‘So he doesn’t know that one of the bodies was Rachel? Is that what we’re saying?’

  ‘No, boss. Not yet. He was arrested for sus homicide. No names.

  No details.’

  ‘What about his brief?’ Faraday nodded at the screen. ‘The Chinese lady?’

  ‘She knows. We had to disclose it.’

  ‘And she hasn’t told him?’

  ‘As far as I can gather, no. I think she’s playing it long. We’re going to get to Rachel in the end, probably soon, and she wants Baz to react for real. He’s not going to be pleased. And that says there’s no way a killing like that is down to him. Good move on his brief’s part. Fucking smart.’

  Faraday nodded. The TIA was right. Fucking smart.

  Next door there seemed to be a problem with the audio cassettes. One of the D/Cs brought the interview to a formal pause while the other one tried to sort it out. Mackenzie went into a huddle with his lawyer. Seconds later, the door opened. D/C Dawn Ellis was holding an audio cassette. She asked the TIA to call for a techie.

  Faraday looked up at her. He’d worked with her for more years than he cared to remember, trusted her judgement completely.

  ‘Mackenzie? What do you think?’

  ‘No chance, boss. The way he’s calling it is the way it happened.

  I’d put my life on it.’

  ‘You’re going to tell him about Rachel?’

  ‘It’s next on our list.’ She nodded at the screen. ‘Stay tuned.’

  The TIA returned with a technician. Within minutes the interview had restarted. The other interviewer was D/C Bev Yates. Another veteran.

  ‘Mr Mackenzie, we’re dealing with two bodies beside your swimming pool. Do you know how they got there?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘No idea at all?’

  ‘None.’

  ‘You didn’t see them when your wife sent you home?’

  ‘I couldn’t have done. I went in through the front door. The pool’s at the back of the house.’

  ‘Really?’ There was quickening in Yates’s voice. ‘So why didn’t your wife use the front door too? When she came back to check on you?’

  ‘Because I’d locked it. Probably chained it too. Tell you the truth, I wasn’t thinking straight. A night like that, you wouldn’t blame me.’ He leaned forward. ‘Check it out, son. Have a look for yourself.’

  ‘We will.’ Yates scribbled himself a note then sat back.

  ‘These bodies, Mr Mackenzie.’ It was Ellis.

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Would you have any idea who they might be?’

  ‘How could I?’

  ‘That’s not an answer. I’m asking you whether you might have any suspicions, any …’ she frowned ‘… clues.’

  Nelly Tien broke in to protest but Mackenzie shut her up with a look. There was something in his face that told Faraday he’d scented bad news. He wanted the names. Now.

  There was a silence broken, in the end, by Yates.

  ‘One of them was a lad called Gareth.’

  ‘Gareth Hughes? I know him, met him round at the Aults’.’ Mackenzie’s head was cocked at an angle, his undamaged eye bright. ‘And the other?’

  ‘Rachel.’

  ‘Rachel Ault?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He stared at Yates for a long moment, then shook his head. ‘Shit. Shit. Shit.’ He turned to Nelly Tien. ‘You knew this?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then why the fuck didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘Why do you think?’

  ‘I don’t know, love. I’m not paid to think. You’re paid to think. And you’re also fucking paid to keep me in the fucking loop. That girl’s my responsibility. She’s my neighbour’s daughter, for fuck’s sake, his only daughter, his only fucking child. She’s precious, she’s what it’s all about, and pretty soon he’s going to be back in Sandown fucking Road wondering just what’s happened to this wonderful life of his. Not just his house. Not just his fucking cellar full of posh wine, but his daughter, for fuck’s sake. Out there by my pool. What do you say to a man who’s just lost everything? What do you say when you were the one who promised to keep things cushty?’ He stood up, shaking his head, distraught. ‘I’m out of here.’ He turned on Yates, scarlet with rage. ‘Just fucking sort it, son, yeah?’

  Next door, in the monitoring room, the TIA glanced sideways at Faraday. Then he reached forward and closed his notepad.

  Chapter four

  SUNDAY, 12 AUGUST, 2007. 11.31

  Summoned to his video entryphone, Winter found himself looking at three tiny faces peering up at the camera guarding Blake House. Guy, Lucy and Kate, Bazza’s grandchildren, his pride and joy.

  ‘Ezzie? You there?’

  The kids shuffled sideways and Esme appeared. Esme was Bazza’s daughter, a qualified lawyer who lived with her husband and three kids on a seven-acre spread in leafy Hampshire. She was wearing a halter top Wint
er recognised from her last expedition to the Maldives. The scowl on her face told him she’d been tuned in to BBC News 24.

  He buzzed the door open. The kids loved banana smoothies. He kept a regular supply for just these occasions.

  They were up in the lift seconds later. Winter could hear them laughing as they ran along the corridor towards his apartment. At three, four and six, he thought, they still lived in a world of their own. Winter was their favourite uncle. They’d told him so. Uncle Paulie. With the well-stocked fridge.

  The moment they romped into the flat, Guy headed for the kitchen. Winter heard a clunk as he pulled the fridge open for the smoothies, and then the usual squabble over who was to clamber on the kitchen stool to grab the yellow plastic Lion King mugs.

  He was right about Esme. She needed to talk about her dad. Badly.

  ‘What’s he done this time?’

  Winter laughed. Things had been tricky between him and Esme to begin with. She hadn’t bothered to hide her misgivings about letting an ex-cop so close to the family business but they’d slowly fumbled their way towards some kind of truce. Esme was a girl who always spoke her mind, and Winter liked that.

  ‘From where I’m standing, I doubt he’s done anything.’

  ‘So why all the hassle?’ She nodded towards the TV. ‘Nelly phoned me first thing. Dad and Mum?’

  ‘It’s routine, Ez. We’re not talking subtle here. Show cops a crime scene and they grab what looks obvious. Baz? These days he might be pushing to join the Rotary Club but that’s not the first thing they’re going to remember.’

  ‘Nelly said he’d got into some kind of fight.’

  ‘More than likely.’

  ‘And ended up with two bodies beside his pool.’

  ‘Spot on.’

  ‘So how come that happened?’

  ‘Christ knows. You want coffee?’

  They talked in the kitchen while the kids played in the lounge next door. In Winter’s view, unless he’d misread the situation, Ezzie had nothing to worry about. Bazza and Marie would doubtless remain in custody until Scenes of Crime had taken a good look at the house itself but that shouldn’t take long and he’d be surprised if they spent another night in the cells. As for the bodies beside the pool, Winter was as clueless as everyone else.

  ‘We’re dealing with kids on the piss,’ he said. ‘It could be they necked so much vodka it all just got silly.’

  ‘In Dad’s garden, you mean?’

  ‘Yeah. They’d have known from Rachel there was a pool next door. So they hop over the fence and stagger around and maybe one of them falls in and the other one gets him out, and then …’ He shrugged. ‘Fuck knows.’

  ‘So why all the drama?’

  ‘A body’s a body. Blokes in the Job take death seriously. It’s what they do.’

  ‘So maybe we’re not talking murder at all? Is that what you’re saying?’

  ‘Yeah, maybe we’re not. Just a bunch of kids trashing someone else’s house. What did Nelly say?’

  ‘She didn’t know. Not when I talked to her first thing.’

  ‘Fine. Just relax, then. It’s cushty. No way would Baz have done anything silly. He’ll be sitting it out until they can’t think of anything else to ask him. Then he’ll be home again.’

  She nodded, unconvinced, then turned to find her youngest daughter standing in the kitchen doorway. Her tiny face was covered in the tangerine Post-its that Winter kept by the telephone. Each carried the logo of the Burj al-Arab hotel, one of the many trophies Winter had brought back from a thank-you trip to Dubai.

  ‘Guy did this, Mummy,’ she piped. ‘He’s always horrible to me.’

  DCI Gail Parsons was back in Portsmouth by half past two. She’d rung ahead, asking Faraday to convene the first of the Mandolin management meetings for 14.45. She’d borrowed the Detective Superintendent’s office and wanted all the principals to attend. That, she emphasised, included the hard-pressed civvy ex-journo who headed Media Relations.

  Faraday had done her bidding. It was strange seeing the DCI behind Martin Barrie’s desk. Parsons seemed to occupy it with an instinctive air of entitlement, as if she’d been storing her handbag beside the battered old chair for months. The forbidden tang of Barrie’s roll-ups still hung in the stale air, and Parsons had both windows open before the Mandolin team began to gather around the conference table at the other end of the office.

  As brisk as ever, she kick-started the meeting with news from the post-mortem. Marie Mackenzie, she said, had found two bodies lying full-length beside her pool. One was Rachel Ault, the other Gareth Hughes. Rachel had stab wounds and was plainly dead. Marie had tried to revive Gareth, thinking he might be unconscious, but quickly realised he too was beyond help.

  Hours later the attending pathologist examining Hughes had noted a number of facial injuries including a patterned stamp mark on his left cheek. There was blood on the paving stones beneath his head, with more blood beside Rachel’s body, and the pathologist had found evidence of an impact injury on the rear right-hand side of his scalp. In Jenny’s view, this might be consistent with a backwards fall.

  ‘Stamp mark?’ Jimmy Suttle wanted to know more.

  Parsons was leafing through her notes. She produced a digital print taken last night at the poolside. Hughes had milky white skin and reddish gelled hair. He lay cheek down on the paving stones beside the swimming pool. His mouth hung open, revealing a line of crooked teeth, and blood was caked around an injury to his left eye. More blood pinked the whiteness of his T-shirt.

  Faraday lingered for a moment over the image before passing it down the table. The stamp mark on the lad’s cheek was clearly visible, a windfall lead, but what caught Faraday’s attention was the hint of vulnerability, even surprise, in the still-open eyes. Whatever Gareth Hughes had been expecting from last night’s party, it certainly hadn’t included this.

  Suttle briefly studied the stamp mark. The sole pattern suggested a trainer of some sort. In due course the imaging department at Netley would be supplying full albums of photographs but this one was high priority.

  ‘Nice one.’ He made himself a note. ‘I’ll action it.’

  Parsons ran through the findings on Hughes at post-mortem. Periorbital haematoma around the left eye with areas of laceration to the inner eyebrow. Superficial scratches on his forehead. Bruising inside his mouth plus a single-line fracture running from the rear of his skull. That was pretty much it.

  ‘Any self-defence injuries?’ It was Proctor.

  ‘None that Jenny could find.’

  ‘That makes him unlucky, doesn’t it? Either it was over in seconds or he didn’t put up much of a fight.’

  Parsons nodded in agreement. In the pathologist’s view a backward fall onto the paving stones could have been fatal.

  ‘So we’re looking at some kind of confrontation?’ Jimmy Suttle again.

  ‘I think that’s a safe assumption.’

  Heads nodded around the table. Proctor asked about Rachel Ault. Eyes turned towards Parsons.

  ‘She was beside the pool as well, four metres from Hughes. She had injuries to her face and neck, and more bruising to her lower ribcage. Jenny found multiple stab wounds to her chest and abdomen. She had a major internal injury to the aorta. There was certainly enough blood loss to kill her. The size and depth of the entry wounds would suggest a ten-centimetre blade. We might be talking about a kitchen knife, a hunting knife, a switchblade, whatever.’

  ‘Nothing recovered?’ Faraday this time.

  ‘Not yet.’

  Faraday turned to the other photo. The brightness of the flash on the camera had done her no favours, but Rachel Ault had been striking. Her face was bloodied but it spoke of a strength and purpose that had survived sudden death. She had a full mouth, her lips drawn back in what - to Faraday - looked like a gasp, and it was all too easy to imagine the scene by the swimming pool, the unimaginable strangeness of a knife driving into her flesh, the sudden flooding warmth as her belly filled w
ith blood. He gazed at the photo a moment longer. Her eyes were open, a startling green.

  ‘Some of the blood by the pool is presumably hers?’ he asked.

  ‘Could be. We’re talking two locations by the poolside. The samples went off this morning. We’ll know for sure within a week or so.’

  Faraday nodded, returning to the photo. Even now, after years on the Major Crime Team, he was always fascinated by the way that a lab analyst a hundred miles away could begin to coax a narrative from a few drops of blood.

  Parsons hadn’t finished.

  ‘Jenny took body swabs at the poolside, and a fresh set before the PM began. She found semen in the girl’s vagina. More in her throat. She also mentioned a strong smell of alcohol.’

  ‘And the lad? He’d been drinking as well?’

  ‘The tox results won’t be back for weeks, and Jenny’s not prepared to chance her arm on an exact time of death, but the party had probably been going on a while by the time they died so it’s a reasonable assumption that he’d had a few. Probably more than a few.’

  Faraday finally passed Rachel’s photo down the table. In his morning briefing he’d alerted interview teams to the importance of sightings of Rachel and Gareth. When had they last been clocked at the party? Who had they been with? What had they been up to?

  Parsons had finished with the PM. The pathologist’s full report should be available within three weeks, she said, but now she wanted to concentrate on the interviews and statement-taking. She’d couldn’t remember a homicide with so many potential witnesses. In some ways it reminded her of the aftermath of a train crash or a terrorist incident: multiple points of view knotting into a single complex story.

  ‘Joe?’

  Faraday glanced up, nodding. He’d had a brief phone conversation with one of the Crime Scene Investigators starting work on Ault’s house. In many ways the DCI’s image of a bomb attack was all too telling: blood and wreckage everywhere, almost beyond belief, and an aftermath that might stretch - for some - deep into the future. The picture of last night’s events, just now, was still chaotic. Facts first, he thought.