Cut To Black

by Hurley, Graham

  “So does that make him Trude’s dad?”

  Misty looked away. When Winter asked the question again, she gave a tiny shrug.

  “You’re telling me you don’t know?”

  “I didn’t. Not for years I didn’t.”

  “But now?”

  “Now I do know.”

  “And Trude?”

  “Yeah.” She nodded, wistful. “She knows too. We did one of them DNA tests. Hundred and fifty quid. You do a couple of swabs, the inside of your mouth, and send them off. Couple of days later…” She smiled to herself. “Bingo!”

  “You said a couple of swabs.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Trude and who else?”

  “Listen, you’ve got to promise me something.” Misty’s nails began to trace a pattern on the back of Winter’s hand. “You’re right about Bazza. He’s always thought Trudy was his from day one. He’s never said so, not to Trude, only to me, but I know that’s what he thinks. That’s why we stuck together for so long. That’s how come we got this place. OK, part of it was so me and Baz could still keep getting it on but there was Trudy as well. She’s part of his life. He loves her like a daughter. I know he does.”

  “Sure.” Winter held eye contact. “So Bazza needs a bit of protection? A bit of TLC? Is that what you’re saying?”

  “Protection from what?”

  “The truth. About young Trude.”

  “Fucking right.” Misty nodded. “And not just Bazza, either. If it ever crossed his mind…” She shook her head, then shuddered.

  Winter squeezed her arm. “It’s Valentine, isn’t it?”

  There was a long silence, then, from the harbour, three long blasts from an outbound ferry.

  “Yes.” Misty’s eyes were swimming. “Trude belongs to Mike.”

  “And that’s why he never touched her.”

  “Yes.”

  “Because he knew?

  “Because he thought he knew. We only did the test last week. Trude and I had had a set-to over Mike. She’d come in unexpected and caught us at it. In the end, there was no way I couldn’t tell her. The test was her idea.”

  “She’s happy about it?”

  “Over the fucking moon. Not just a mum and a dad but a mum and a dad who are still’ she nodded towards the bedroom ‘getting it on.”

  “And Bazza?”

  “Hasn’t got a clue. Never had. You want to know how long I’ve been with Mike? Off and on?” She reached for the nearby box of tissues. “Eighteen years.”

  Trudy wanted to know why Jimmy Suttle wasn’t drinking alcohol. The car in the nearby parking lot was a reasonable excuse but the rest of it made her laugh. Whoever played squash on a Friday night?

  “Me, for starters.”

  They were sitting in a busy waterside pub in Port Solent, a marina complex tucked into the north-east corner of Portsmouth Harbour. Trudy had taken a cab up from Gunwharf and was bitterly disappointed that their evening would go no further.

  “What about afterwards?” she said again. “I can watch you, go for a walk or something. Then we can go on some place. Like last night.”

  “Can’t do it, Trude.”

  “You’re meeting someone.”

  “You’re right. His name’s Richard. I beat him last time so tonight we’ve got a tenner on it. We play. We go to the pub. We get pisssed.”

  “I’ll come, too.”

  “You can’t, love. It’s a blokes’ thing.”

  “Oh yeah? So what does that make me? Some fucking slapper you shag when you’re in the mood?”

  “I never said that.”

  “No, but that’s what you think, ain’t it? I had you down for someone half decent last night, I really did. That must make me fucking brain dead. How come you blokes are all the same?”

  “We’re not all the same. It’s Friday night. We’ve had the game fixed all week. And that’s all there is to it.”

  “So where does that leave me?”

  She stared at him a moment. Suttle leaned forward to kiss her but she turned her head away. Two lads at the next table exchanged grins.

  “Listen, Trude…”

  “Fuck off. I hate you.”

  “No, you don’t.”

  “I do. You come over all sincere, all nice, you get what you want and now look what happens.”

  “Last night was your idea.”

  “Oh yeah? Twist your arm did I? Or was that someone else fucking the arse off me?”

  “Listen, maybe…”

  “Forget it.”

  “What?”

  “I said forget it.” Trudy was reaching down for her bag. She knew the cab number by heart. She began to stab the numbers in, then paused. “You know what you’re missing, don’t you?”

  “What?”

  “I’m off next week. Going away.” She gave him a cold smile. “Play your cards right, and we could have done it all night again.”

  “When?”

  “Tonight, dim lo Except squash with your little friend’s more important. Maybe it’s right what they say about the Filth. All fucking queens together. Still’ she shrugged. ‘see if I fucking care.”

  Suttle reached across and snatched at the mobile.

  “Tomorrow night,” he said. “I promise.”

  She looked at him, then laughed.

  “Tomorrow night what?”

  “Anything. Anything you like.”

  She studied him a moment. “Gunwharf? Forty Below? Somewhere nice afterwards?”

  Forty Below was the happening nightclub. Kids Trude’s age couldn’t get enough of it. Neither could some of Bazza’s chums.

  Suttle gave the proposition a moment’s thought, then nodded.

  “Deal?” She grinned at him, retrieved the mobile, blew him a kiss, then started on the number again.

  Faraday sat in the flickering darkness, understanding nothing. A woman in a burka was making some kind of journey. She needed to find her cousin in Kabul. En route across the parched landscape, she skirted a number of lives, stopped now and again for lengthy conversations, pondered the problems of contemporary Afghanistan. Kids were everywhere. Many of the men had lost limbs to land mines In a sequence that held Faraday spellbound, hundreds of Afghanis hopped madly across the desert as a tangle of prosthetic legs descended from the heavens on a parachute. It was a strange way, Faraday thought, to frame one of the world’s undoubted tragedies crazy, surreal, funny but then he sank back into the puzzling chaos of his own life, and conceded that this young film-maker might have a point. Surreal was pretty close.

  He awoke, some time later, to find the house lights on and Joyce bent over him.

  “You OK, sheriff? Only I think they want us to go.”

  Outside, it had started to rain. The film was showing at an art-house cinema in a marina development in Southampton. They’d driven across from Portsmouth, Faraday relieved to get out of the city. Beside his car he paused to fumble for his car keys. Joyce again, a hand on his arm this time. She nodded across the car park towards a distant restaurant. Rain had slicked the tousle of dark curls against her head.

  “On me,” she said briefly.

  “What do you think?” It was a sign that Eadie Sykes had come to know well. An outstretched hand, palm up, a tiny interrogative twist of the wrist.

  She reached for the PC mouse over J-J’s shoulder and took the sequence back to the start. A line of placards she recognised from last night’s demo was swaying towards the camera. Late shoppers in the precinct were pausing to take a look. On the soundtrack, denied J-J, came the bellowed chant, “Esso, Mobil, BP, Shell, take your war and go to hell!”

  The head of the march broke like a wave around the camera, and as it did so, a slow mix dissolved the protesters into another scene. Eadie bent towards the screen, watching a crowd of Arabs gathered around the back of an ambulance. It was night-time. In the background,

  beyond the chaos of the street, a building appeared to be on fire. Paramedics, desperate men fighting their w
ay through the crowd, wrestled a small body into the back of the ambulance.

  Then, without warning, the camera was panning across a bare, tiled interior. Dozens of men and women lay on the floor, jigsawed haphazardly together. One or two were unconscious. The rest gazed numbly into the middle distance, or stared up at the camera, uncomprehending. There was blood everywhere, open wounds, makeshift bandages, the stooping presence of a nurse with a bottle of fluid in one hand and an iv line in the other. Then came a stir of movement in a far corner, and the camera tilted up and probed the gloom, hunting for another image.

  A young baby lay sprawled on its mother’s bloodsoaked lap. As she became aware of the presence of the camera, she gently rolled the tiny body over. The back of the baby’s head had disappeared. The image trembled for a moment, the cameraman twitching with the focus as he closed the shot around the tiny corpse.

  Faces again, Pompey faces, fists punching the air as the column of protesters swept across a dual carriage way Behind the wheel of a car, stalled in the waiting queue, a young man in a suit was reading the back page of the News, oblivious to everything.

  “Incredible.”

  Eadie stepped back from the PC and gave J-J’s shoulder a squeeze. The first instalment of Al-Jazeera footage had come in half an hour ago, pumped down from London on the broadband link. Poking his head around Eadie’s door, J-J had signalled its arrival, but she’d been too busy with pictures of her own to spare the time for a look. Now, as J-J played her the rest of the news coverage, she realised how priceless the footage would be. This was the Arab view of the war, tens of millions of men and women on the receiving end of Bush’s hi-tech onslaught. Against Apache gunships and cruise missiles, these people were practically defenceless. All they could do was hang on and pray. The Americans and the British had promised them a bloodless war, liberation without tears, and here it was.

  J-J was on his feet, stretching his arms back to ease the cramps. He planned to work through the evening, dos sing down in the sleeping bag when he got too tired. What he wanted was five minutes of tightly cut footage, something for Eadie to take to London and give to the Stop the War people, something to let them glimpse the possibilities of this kind of document. Eadie nodded, thumbs up. In a couple of days, she’d find the time to sort out a series of sound bites from Bush and Blair -White House press conferences, House of Commons speeches all the drivel about WMD and the imminent threat, all the fervent pledges that the allies had embarked on a moral crusade. “Sometimes the tough decision are the right decisions,” she remembered Blair saying. Just how comforting was that when your baby had just been blown apart?

  Joyce had been to the restaurant before. Friday night, the place was packed but the waiter she knew found her a reserved table at the back. The people who’d booked it were half an hour late. Too bad if they still showed up.

  “They do scrummy chicken tagine.” Joyce surrendered her dripping raincoat. “Dunno how you feel about North Africa, but the couscous is to die for. Sheriff?”

  Faraday was still on his feet, gazing around at the sea of faces. Young couples, foursomes, conversations spiced with laughter and the chink of raised glasses. It seemed unreal, like the film he’d just watched, mysterious, inexplicable, remote. He shook his head the way you might try and adjust a badly tuned TV. This sense of detachment, of drift, was beginning to bother him.

  “Sheriff?”

  He turned his attention to Joyce and at last sat down. She was offering him a bowl of small, deep-fried objects in a nest of mint leaves. He wondered what they were.

  “Call me Joe,” he muttered. “Do you mind?”

  He tried one of the balls. It tasted spicy.

  “Falafel,” Joyce said helpfully. “I can’t believe you’ve never eaten this stuff. Sorry about the movie.”

  “It was good. Unusual.”

  “Yeah? So why did you go to sleep on me?”

  Faraday said he didn’t know. More to the point, while he’d never admit it, he didn’t much care. More and more, these last couple of days, life was passing him by, a piece of theatre for which he’d neglected to buy a ticket. This sense of detachment could be rather wonderful, a sense that nothing really much mattered, but other times -like now he felt a stir of something that felt close to panic. What was he doing here? Why wasn’t he at Eadie’s place, sorting out the central heating? What in God’s name was happening to him?

  “You want red or white?” Joyce was consulting the wine list.

  “Neither. Water will be fine.”

  “I can get you a cab back. Leave the car here.”

  “Water.” It sounded peremptory, almost an order, not at all the way he’d meant it. Joyce had abandoned the wine list. She looked genuinely concerned.

  “Joe? What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing. I’m sorry.”

  “Tell me, honey. Pretend I know nothing about all this shit. Pretend I’m someone you just met. This is Casablanca, OK? We’re in the same hotel. I’m happily married. You’re shacked up with someone luscious. No pressure. Just conversation.”

  “AH what shit?”

  “Tumbril. The office. Our little glee club. I know it’s Friday night, Joe, but Tumbril’s like rheumatism, isn’t it? Gets in your bones. Won’t let go.”

  “You find that?”

  “All the time. Constant damn ache. Doesn’t respond to medication. You don’t believe me? Then take a trip to the QA. That lovely Nick would back me to the hilt if he could only remember.”

  “You’ve been up there?”

  “Lunchtime. Guy’s away with the fairies.”

  “That wasn’t Tumbril’s fault.”

  “No?” She leaned forward across the table, V-necked cashmere sweater, enormous breasts bursting for attention. “You should have seen him the past couple of weeks. Whoever ran him over did him a favour. The way I read it, Nick was a nervous breakdown waiting to happen, the real thing, totally blown away. Couldn’t concentrate, couldn’t hold a conversation, couldn’t make a decision. Talk to him most days, you had to check he was still sentient.” She paused, her hand closing over Faraday’s. “Am I getting through here?”

  For the first time, Faraday sensed something he recognised, something familiar in the torrent of noise he kept trying to tune out.

  “That’s what his partner says. You know Maggie?”

  “Sure.” Joyce helped herself to a falafel. “Pretty girl. Teacher. Met her twice. Mad as a coot. Goes with the job.” She looked up at him. “So how come they saddled you with Tumbril? Only from where I’m standing, it wasn’t an act of kindness.”

  “You think I’m making a mess of it?”

  “Other way round, sheriff.”

  “It’s that obvious?”

  “Didn’t I just say so?” She gave his hand a squeeze, then reached for her napkin. “Tell me about that boy of yours. Blew it, I hear.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “Doesn’t matter. Our job, Joe, there’s no such thing as secrets. My favourite DI’s son goes AWOL, launches a new career, becomes a drug baron, the world knows about it within seconds. We thrive on this stuff. We love it. Marty Prebble says it’s ironic. Marty’s big on irony.” She paused. “So how is he?”

  Faraday considered the question. The last day and a half he’d thought of little else.

  “You want the truth? I haven’t a clue. We’ve met a couple of times, bumped into each other, but he won’t talk to me, won’t communicate, won’t even look at me.”

  “Talking’s tough, isn’t it? Guy like him?”

  “You know what I mean. You met the lad a while back. Nothing’s changed since then. Normally, he’s all over you. Now…” Faraday shrugged, wishing he’d said yes to the wine. “He’s just not there any more.”

  “Not at home, not opening the door. Not to you, at least.”

  “That’s right.” Faraday gazed at her, surprised and hurt by the stab of the metaphor. “Definitely not to me.”

  “What about your lady friend
? Is she any use?”

  “She’s closer to him than I am. Has been for months.”

  “Sounds like robbery. Arrest her.”

  Despite himself, Faraday laughed. When Joyce pushed a little further, he found himself telling her about Eadie, about Ambrym, about the protest march they’d been on back in February, about her commitment to her video work, about the sense of possibility she’d brought to his life.

  “Possibility how? I don’t get it.”

  “She’s different. It’s hard to explain. She just comes at everything with this incredible’ he frowned, trying to pin it down ‘conviction.”

  “She knows who she is.”

  “Exactly.”

  “And you don’t.”

  “Is that a question?”

  “No, my love, it’s one of those folksy little home truths. You won’t mind me sharing it with you because it happens to be true. Matter of fact, it’s something I’ve thought ever since we first met. Remember what happened after Vanessa? How hard you found it to cope with this big Yankee dame that stepped into your life? I used to sit and watch you some days, and wonder what you were doing in a job like this. Don’t get me wrong, Joe. You were a damn fine cop, still are and I should know because I was married to the other sort but sometimes damn fine isn’t enough. You know what I’m talking about?”

  “No.”

  “You’re vulnerable, Joe, and it shows. That’s why women like me want to mother you. Is your Eadie like that?”

  “No. But that’s the point. That’s what I love about her. She’s got it cracked, Joyce. She knows exactly what she wants to do. She gets angry, not at me, not personally, but at bits of the bigger picture, and instead of sitting around and moaning like we all do she gets out there and does something about it.”

  “Megalomaniac, then. No wonder you’re a basket case.”

  “You don’t understand.”

  “You’re serious? You really think I don’t? When I’m sitting here? Looking at you? Seeing a man I admire in deep, deep shit? I might be a little crazy, Joe, and I guess I might be just a shade megalomaniac myself, but I recognise what I see. You’re lost, honey. And this Eadie is a woman who should be coping with that.” She extended a perfect nail, accusatory. “So where is she tonight? Why isn’t she here instead of little me?”