Cut To Black

by Hurley, Graham

  “Drink this.” She pulled the tag on the can. “Then I’ll tell you.”

  “Tell me what?”

  “About tomorrow.”

  “More glad tidings?” He shot her the beginnings of a smile.

  “Afraid so. Two big gulps now. Attaboy.”

  She waited until he’d poured the lager and taken a long pull. Then she told him about the post-mortem she’d arranged to tape. Kelly’s father had faxed his permission and the coroner was on side There was no guarantee she’d ever use the footage but it wasn’t the kind of sequence you could ever reconstruct.

  Faraday absorbed the news. A lifetime of postmortems had left him more or less indifferent to dead flesh. The sight of Daniel Kelly weaving his way to his grave had been far, far worse.

  Eadie was eyeing him with obvious caution.

  “You don’t want to shout at me?”

  “No.”

  “Thank God for Stella.” She leaned across and kissed him. “You want the remains of the curry? Only J-J’s left most of his.”

  “J-J?”

  “Yes.”

  “He’s been here?”

  “He’s in the spare bedroom. Asleep.”

  “You’re serious?”

  Eadie thought about the question for a moment or two, then frowned.

  “Tall bloke? Skinny? Bit quiet?”

  She got to her feet and returned to the kitchen, leaving Faraday to absorb this latest revelation. He heard the pop of the gas as she fired up the oven, ready to warm the curry. Moments later, she was back with three pappadams and a bowl of onion chutney. She gave a pappadam to Faraday, and then took his hand.

  “J-J was adamant. No way was he sleeping at home.” She glanced briefly towards the bedroom. “You two guys have some talking to do.”

  Chapter 14

  FRIDAY, 21 MARCH 2003, 02.20

  Faraday was still asleep when the call came in. He’d left his mobile next door, lodged in a corner of the sofa, and it was Eadie who shook him gently awake.

  “Yours.” She blew in his ear. “Might be important.”

  Naked, Faraday made his way into the lounge. A pale grey light washed through the big picture windows and he could see a lid of cloud clamped over the Isle of Wight. Dimly, he remembered that his son was asleep in the spare bedroom. Unless, of course, something else had happened.

  “DI Faraday.” He didn’t recognise the number. “Major Crimes.”

  “It’s Graham Wallace.”

  “Yeah?” Faraday rubbed his eyes. “Something come up?”

  Wallace began to describe a call he’d just taken from someone he described as ‘our mate’. He wanted a meet within the next couple of days. Wallace had promised to get back to him as soon as he’d checked his diary and now needed some advice. Faraday was still wrestling with the implications of this sudden development when he looked up to find Eadie standing beside the sofa. She was wearing an unfastened cotton wrap and wanted to know whether it was too early for tea. Faraday said yes to the tea and took the mobile back to the bedroom.

  By the time Eadie joined him, the conversation was over and Faraday was sitting on the edge of the bed, deep in thought. Eadie looked down at him, the tray in her hands.

  “Something you’re going to share with me?” she enquired drily.

  Paul Winter had been up since dawn. Nights when he couldn’t sleep -and there were more and more of them he’d taken to prowling round the bungalow, chasing his insomnia from room to room, often pausing in the tidy little lounge to reach for one of Joanie’s well-thumbed paperbacks, giving the first page or two the chance to ease him back to sleep. On occasions, to his surprise, it worked. Half a chapter of Jeffrey

  Archer had the coshing power of Nembutal. But lately even the bludgeon of Archer’s prose had left him alert and fretful, turning on the radio, pulling back the curtains, scouring the late winter baldness of the back garden for signs of what the coming day might bring.

  The postman arrived earlier than usual, a cascade of junk mail through the letter box. Nursing his second mug of tea, Winter stooped to the mat. He wasn’t sure what demographic these people used when they drew up their hit lists of likely punters but lately he’d become slightly depressed by the flood of geriatric appeals. Help the Aged. Saga Insurance. Motability. Forty-five, Winter told himself, was the prime of a man’s life, but the sight of yet another warning about prostate cancer had begun to make him wonder. How come these envelope-stuffers knew he was feeling so washed-up?

  The biggest of this morning’s missives was a novelty: Guide Dogs for the Blind. He returned to the kitchen, meaning to bin the lot, then had second thoughts. The last couple of months, he’d thought seriously about getting himself a dog. The couple next door had one. There was a pretty redhead with the tightest jeans imaginable who walked a greyhound on the top of Portsdown Hill. Saturdays at Asda, shoppers on foot lashed their poodles to a special bar beside the trolley park. He’d watched these people and their pets, idly puzzling about what a dog brought to their lives, and he’d concluded that the right choice of animal nothing mad could offer the perfect antidote to his increasing sense of solitariness. At three in the morning, it might be nice to have something to talk to.

  Winter perched himself on the kitchen stool and shook out the contents of the envelope. A folksy collection of black and white photographs caught his eye, domestic snaps featuring Labradors and their unsighted owners. A mere 5 a week, according to the copy beneath, could make all the difference when it came to training another of these miracle wowsers. Was that too high a price when someone’s life might be transformed?

  Winter returned to the biggest of the photos, a shot of an eager-looking Labrador threading a portly gent in a long raincoat through a busy shopping centre. Without the dog, this man would be banged up at home, dependent on the Tesco phone delivery service. Thanks to Rover, and trillions of caring donors, he could toddle off to the shops any time he liked.

  Winter nodded to’ himself amused. Half close his eyes, and he could be the man in the picture, someone so helpless, so out of touch, that only a guide dog could map his path through life. Maybe that’s what he really needed, thought Winter. Maybe he’d got so old, so preoccupied, so blind, that something as tasty as Tumbril had passed him by.

  Last night, sitting in Mackenzie’s den, he hadn’t let on about his own ignorance of this covert operation, but the more he’d thought about it afterwards, the more annoyed he’d felt about his own failure to clock whatever was going on. There was always the possibility, of course, that Mackenzie had got it wrong. Serious villains were famously paranoid and they often mistook a casual passing interest for a full-scale operation, booted and spurred. But on the evidence of last night, he rather suspected that Mackenzie wasn’t kidding himself. Christ, he even had a code name.

  Operation Tumbril? Winter shook his head. His entire CID career had been dedicated to sensing the likely passage of events. Keep your ear to the ground, learn to tune out all the rubbish, and a footfall half a world away could tell you everything you needed to know. Yet here he was, dumb as the next detective, totally unaware that someone way above him had emptied the piggy bank, rolled up their sleeves, and decided to take on Bazza Mackenzie.

  The thought, even this late in the day, put a smile on his face. Given the success of Mackenzie’s recent makeover drug baron turned millionaire businessman the case would be a real bastard to make. Any serious bid to hurt him would doubtless revolve around dismantling Bazza’s vast commercial empire but Mackenzie wasn’t joking when he talked about the people he paid to advise him, and they’d have drawn up a survival kit for bent millionaires.

  Rule one was stay away from drugs: no possession, no supply, absolutely no involvement with the distribution chain. The money-laundering legislation seemed to be getting more powerful by the month, but even under the latest set of rules Winter thought you still had to prove some kind of drugs-related offence. In view of the mountain of goodies he stood to lose, the last thing Ma
ckenzie would therefore risk was a criminal charge. That way, he’d hand the Tumbril boys the victory of their dreams. So how would they do it? And why now, when Bazza seemed so armour-clad?

  Winter helped himself to more tea. Bazza’s terse mention of Whale Island was intriguing. On one level it made perfect sense to ring-fence an operation like this, to bury it away from canteen chatter, yet on another level the strategy plainly hadn’t worked. And if Bazza himself knew about Tumbril, then who else was reading the files? Winter reached for the sugar bowl. The implication, of course, was that Bazza numbered coppers on his payroll, tame porkers uniformed or otherwise with their snouts in Bazza’s trough. That in itself would be no surprise Winter knew a number of DCs who’d gone to the same school, drank in the same pubs, and would doubtless regard the odd titbit from Bazza’s table as a gesture of mate ship but what gave last night’s revelation a real edge was the fact that Tumbril was far from common knowledge. For once in their lives, the bosses had managed to keep a secret. So who was keeping Bazza in the loop?

  This single question floated Winter through the next hour of his day. He thought about it in the bath. He drew up a mental list of candidates over breakfast. Finally, sitting on the John, he realised that there were cleverer ways of carving a piece of Tumbril for himself. He was looking at the wrong target. It wasn’t Whale Island or the covert ops team that mattered. It was Bazza himself.

  He’d left his mobile on the window sill. Reaching up, he dialled a number from memory. She took a while to answer and sounded badly hung-over.

  “Mist.” Winter was smiling. “We need to talk.”

  DC Jimmy Suttle never made promises he intended to break. Half past eight in the morning found him dropping Trudy off at the entrance to Gunwharf. She was due for an appointment at her GP’s surgery and needed to get home to sort herself out. Leaning in through the car window, she gave Suttle a lingering kiss and told him to forget everything she’d said about Dave Pullen.

  “Yeah?”

  Suttle checked his image in the rear-view mirror and engaged gear. He’d phone her later about tonight. Maybe they could drive into Southsea for a curry or something. Then he was gone.

  Minutes later, he found himself a parking space in Ashburton Road. There was a squad meeting at Kingston Crescent scheduled for 9.15 and DI Lamb was merciless about latecomers but he still had forty minutes to get one or two things off his chest. A succession of CID colleagues, older and wiser, had warned him about the perils of mixing your private and professional lives. Unless you had some kind of death wish, letting the job fuck the inside of your head was the last thing you ever did. Standing on the pavement, staring up at Pullen’s top-floor flat, Suttle permitted himself a grim smile. They were wrong.

  At the top of the fire escape, he tried Pullen’s door. It was locked. He knocked twice, yelled Pullen’s name, gave the handle a shake, and toyed briefly with kicking it in. Back on the pavement, aware of twitching curtains in the flats opposite, he walked round the corner and rang the top bell. Two days ago, the name space alongside had been empty. Now, in fat black capitals, DAVE PULLEN.

  A third try with the bell produced nothing from the adjoining speakerphone. Checking his watch, Suttle rang the ground-floor flat. At length, there came a small querulous voice through the speakerphone. Suttle introduced himself, offering his warrant card a minute or so later when the door finally opened. The woman must have been eighty. The cardigan was matted with ancient soup stains and when Suttle repeated that he was CID, she thought he’d come about the recent spate of doorstep milk thefts.

  “Both bottles went last week.” She peered up at him. “I’d buy from the shops if I could get there.”

  Suttle left her in the cavernous hall. Three flights up, he paused on the top landing. Pullen’s was one of only two apartments. To Suttle’s surprise, the door to the flat was open. Even at ten paces, there was a perceptible smell of shit. He paused by the door, called Pullen’s name. The smell was much stronger now. He called again, hesitated a second or two, then pushed inside.

  The gloom of the tiny lobby had an almost physical texture, thickened by the stench. From memory, Pullen’s living room lay beyond the door on the right. Suttle nudged it open with his foot, alert now, aware of the thud of his own pulse. Situations like these, it was wise to have back-up, at the very least a message left with someone who’d know where to come looking. Like this, totally solo, he was horribly exposed. Another rule broken.

  “Pullen?”

  Suttle looked round the chaos of the living room. The curtains were closed against the grey March morning. There was a copy of yesterday’s News folded across the back of a chair and the collection of football magazines he recognised from his last visit. Pullen must have tripped over them because they were scattered everywhere, big cover-page faces of Beckham and Thierry Henry peering up from odd corners of the room.

  On a work surface in the tiny kitchenette, Suttle found a half-eaten kebab and chips in a nest of stained newsprint. Beside it, an open can of Tennant’s Super. He studied it a moment, aware that this abandoned room was beginning to resemble a crime scene. There were things he should do here, steps he should take. Any more freelancing, and he was in danger of tainting the evidence.

  “Pullen? Where the fuck are you?”

  He heard a faint moan. Motionless in the half-darkness, Suttle strained every nerve to pick up the faintest movement. It happened again, louder this time. Somewhere close, he thought. And definitely human.

  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?”