Angels Passing

by Hurley, Graham

  Sullivan did his best to pump Paul Winter about the gym but Winter wasn’t having it. They were driving down to Flint Street from the MIR at Fratton and all Winter would volunteer was the name of the woman who owned it. He’d had quite enough of Gary Sullivan stealing a march on him and saw no point in making life any sweeter for the boy. Life shouldn’t be easy in this line of work. There was a pecking order here, and it was Winter’s job to reassert it.

  ‘Her name’s Simone,’ Sullivan grunted. ‘Foster told us that already.’

  ‘And what else did he tell you?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘There you are then.’ He tapped his nose. ‘Local knowledge.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘It means we ought to pay her a visit. I’ll fix it with Dave Michaels. Leave it to me.’

  They turned into Flint Street and Winter left the car under a lamp post. It was only a gesture but this could sometimes be a rough area and the forms you had to fill in for vandal damage were as long as your arm.

  Flat 2 was on the first floor of number 59, one of a sturdy brick-built block of council flats that looked as though they’d passed into private ownership. Winter rang the bell a couple of times, hearing the sudden blast from a television set as someone opened an interior door. With the main door open, the sound was even louder. Home and Away, he thought.

  ‘Mrs …?’

  A small, wispy-haired woman peered out at him. She was wearing a pink shawl around her shoulders and a threadbare blue dressing gown underneath. She hadn’t heard the question and it took Winter nearly a minute to establish her name. Finally, he got it. Mrs Prendergast. She shuffled back down the hall with the two detectives in tow. By the time they were inside the tiny living room, she was convinced they were from the gas board.

  ‘Police,’ Winter repeated. ‘We’re detectives.’

  He caught Sullivan’s eye and nodded at the television. Sullivan turned the sound down.

  ‘It’s about Bradley, Mrs Prendergast.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Bradley. Your grandson.’

  For a moment, it occurred to Winter that they were lumbered once again with breaking the bad news, but then she sorted the name out in her head and told Winter that he was dead. She said it with some regret, nodding to herself, as if it was an apology. All this way in the rain. And young Bradley gone.

  ‘We’re very sorry, Mrs Prendergast.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Doesn’t matter.’

  He helped her into the chair pulled up by the television and turned the set off completely. She watched the little white dot disappear, more confused than ever, then favoured Sullivan with a slightly crazed smile.

  ‘Would you like an apple, dear?’

  Sullivan said no thanks. He had his pocketbook out and he was studying a couple of cheaply framed photos on the mantelpiece. The younger Bradley, still unmistakable, had the kind of winning, trustful smile that could get a young lad into big trouble with certain kinds of older men.

  Winter wanted to know when Mrs Prendergast had last seen her grandson.

  ‘Often.’ She nodded towards the open door. ‘He stayed here a lot. Gave him a key, see?’

  ‘But when did you last see him?’

  ‘Had his own room, like. I’ll show you.’

  She held out both hands and Sullivan helped her to her feet. The three of them went back into the hall. A door at the end opened into Bradley’s bedroom. Mrs Prendergast fumbled with the light switch.

  ‘Did Bradley do all this?’ Winter gestured round.

  ‘Yes, I told you, this was his.’

  The walls were painted black, though there were bits in the corner and down near the skirting board where he hadn’t bothered. The single bed was unmade and there were the remains of a Chinese in a foil carton on the floor. Posters for R & B gigs at the Wedgwood Rooms were Blu-tacked over the bed, and when Winter opened the drawer in the little bedside cupboard he found himself looking at a roll of passport photos, four colour shots featuring Bradley and Louise Abeka. Of the two faces, the girl seemed infinitely happier, a really bright smile. Winter removed the photos and poked around amongst the rest of the clutter. Beneath a sheaf of Rizla papers and a decent-sized lump of cannabis he found a brown envelope. Inside was a roll of ten-pound notes. He counted them. One hundred and thirty pounds.

  ‘Did Bradley live here all the time?’

  ‘What, dear?’

  ‘Bradley? Was this his home?’

  He turned round to see whether she’d at last understood but she was shuffling away down the hall. Sullivan began to go after her but Winter stayed him, nodding at the chest of drawers. They went through them from top to bottom. More T-shirts, more jeans, even a pullover or two, all black. In the bottom drawer, beneath a tangle of unwashed socks and underwear, a red silk basque. Winter held it up against Sullivan, trying it for size.

  ‘Bet it looks better on her,’ he muttered.

  On the other wall, behind the door, was an MFI wardrobe in white melamine. One of the hinges had worked loose and Sullivan held on to the door while Winter rummaged around inside. Unlike the clothes in the chest of drawers, there seemed no theme to the jackets and overcoats hanging from the rail. They came in different sizes and different styles, mainly suede or leather, and a couple of longer coats in lambswool or cashmere, and it took Sullivan to voice the obvious conclusion: ‘They’re nicked,’ he said. ‘Look.’

  Every garment still carried a price tag, proof to would-be buyers that the gear was indeed brand new.

  ‘And here.’

  Sullivan had pulled out a holdall from the bottom of the wardrobe. Inside, under a pair of tracksuit bottoms and a ribbed khaki sweater, was a wrecking bar, a jemmy, a selection of screwdrivers and a number of other items. When he tried the torch, it still worked.

  Mrs Prendergast was back in the open doorway. She was carrying two little glasses, the kind you win at funfairs. There was amber liquid in both and she gave one to each of them. Winter sniffed his and grinned.

  ‘Sherry,’ he said. ‘Ten quid says it’s Bristol Cream.’

  He offered Mrs Prendergast a toast, Queen and Country, and then led the old lady gently back towards the living room. Sullivan still had the envelope with the money in it. Only when they were all sitting down did he notice the scrawled notes under the flap.

  ‘Paul?’

  He showed Winter. One line of figures was definitely a local phone number. The other, 38593 84247K, was harder to decipher.

  ‘Seize it.’ Winter had caught sight of the bottle of Harvey’s Bristol Cream. ‘We’ll sort it out later.’

  He got to his feet and helped himself to more sherry. Mrs Prendergast’s glass lay on the low table beside her chair. He topped it up, asking again about Bradley. When had she last seen him?

  This time the question seemed to register. She gazed at the television, a fierce frown of concentration. Then she had it.

  ‘Friday,’ she announced triumphantly. ‘It was just starting.’

  ‘What was?’

  ‘Emmerdale Farm.’

  ‘So what time would that be?’

  ‘Seven o’clock, dear. On the dot.’

  ‘Was he by himself?’

  ‘Yeah.’ She nodded. ‘Seven o’clock.’

  ‘But did he have company?’

  ‘Cheers.’ She reached for her drink and swallowed nearly half of it. Then she was on her feet again, unaided this time, bending over the television. She poked at the controls for a moment or two, then shook her head.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. I don’t know how he did it.’

  ‘Did what, Mrs Prendergast?’

  ‘When he showed me those pictures. Funny, it was, seeing me.’

  ‘You?’

  ‘Yes, dear. On the telly.’ She peered at the set again, as if the pictures were still inside. ‘How would you do that?’

  Winter and Sullivan exchanged glances. Bristol Cream did nothing for this woman’s sanity.
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  ‘Clever, eh?’ She’d retrieved the bottle. She wanted Winter to feel at home.

  Sullivan caught his eye, and then nodded at the telephone in the corner. It looked brand new, a Panasonic unit with fax and digital answerphone. Winter got to his feet. Nicked, he thought. Like everything else in Bradley Finch’s life.

  He looked down at the phone. There was a message waiting that Mrs Prendergast had yet to pick up. Not that very much would penetrate her deafness.

  ‘May I?’

  Winter pressed the replay button for the waiting message. There was a moment of silence, then a male voice, youngish, frightened, close to tears. ‘Nan,’ went the voice, ‘help me. For fuck’s sake help me. Nan, get the—’ The line went abruptly dead.

  Across the room, Mrs Prendergast was still gazing at the television. Winter bent to the phone, replaying the message. He’d heard this voice before, only days before, but he had to hear it again to be sure. The message came through once again, as panic-stricken as ever, the flat, gruff Pompey vowels unmistakable this time. Winter gazed at Sullivan. The voice on his own mobile, he thought. The lad who’d phoned him in the middle of the night about Brennan’s.

  For a moment Winter just sat there. Then he checked his watch and nodded at the phone.

  ‘We’ll have that, too,’ he said.

  Fifteen

  MONDAY, 12 FEBRUARY, early evening

  This time round, Winter was taking no chances. The moment he saw Willard’s Saab backing out of his allotted garage in the car park at Kingston Crescent, he told Sullivan to stop. Getting out of the car, he bent to Willard’s open window.

  ‘Just been round to Finch’s nan, boss,’ he began. ‘One or two things you ought to know about.’

  Willard was eyeing the clock on the dash. He had a rare social engagement he was determined to keep. What was so important it couldn’t wait until the morning?

  ‘Finch phoned me the night before he died. Only it’s taken me a while to suss the voice.’

  Minutes later, upstairs in the MIR, Willard convened an impromptu meeting. Seated around the conference table were Sammy Rollins, Brian Imber and the DS in charge of outside enquiries, a sturdy Yorkshireman called Paul Ingham. Dave Michaels, en route home, had been summoned back on his mobile. For Willard, the time had come to light a fuse under his ever-growing team of investigators.

  On the basis of Winter’s report from Flint Street, immediate lines of enquiry were pressing and obvious. Ray Brennan was to be contacted at once. He still owed Winter an up-to-date list of staff, and every one of them was to be TIE’d. That meant personal interviews as well as PNC checks. One or more of them must have known Bradley Finch and Willard wanted names ASAP. That way, Brian Imber and his Intelligence Cell could start some serious development of their association chart, the web of underworld contacts in which Finch had got himself ensnared.

  Secondly, Willard shared the common view that Kenny Foster deserved a great deal more attention. The lack of any previous simply showed that the man was lucky, as well as clever. Five minutes listening to Brian Imber on the subject would convince anyone with half a brain that Foster was into criminality big time. There’d obviously been friction of some kind between him and Bradley Finch, and Willard wanted to know why. The stop-check on the Fiat which had left the traffic crew with Foster’s name and address was barely a week old, and although murder sounded a touch extreme as a reprimand for this bit of harmless fun, Finch’s recklessness may well have set him up for a smacking.

  Thirdly, Willard wanted forensic to have a good sniff at the envelope Winter and Sullivan had seized at Flint Street. The phone number on the back had turned out to be the main switchboard at the local Inland Revenue office. Out of hours, there was only a recorded message but that had been enough to decode the other line of scribble beneath. 38593 84247K was a tax reference number. Whoever owned the envelope in the first place must have been talking to the tax people. With luck, the reference would lead to a firm ID.

  At this point, Sammy Rollins wondered whether the tax reference might not have belonged to Finch himself, a suggestion that earned a snort of derision from Brian Imber.

  ‘Little scrote never paid a penny of tax in his life,’ he said. ‘Depend on it.’

  This interjection simply darkened Willard’s mood. He wanted the people round the table to be in absolutely no doubt where they were. This inquiry wasn’t young any more. They’d been at it since Saturday morning and in three long days they’d achieved nothing of great significance. Every line of enquiry indicated that they were dealing with professional criminals – maybe not the Premiership, maybe not even the Nationwide League, but bent guys who very definitely deserved a lesson in civilised behaviour. What you didn’t do in this city was take the piss. By stringing up some ne’er-do-well and making some half-hearted attempt to mask murder as suicide, they’d done exactly that. These animals needed sorting, fast, otherwise this kind of mayhem would only spread. He wasn’t having it. Not on his watch. And that was that.

  In the ensuing silence, Winter raised a cautious hand. What about surveillance on the girl, Louise Abeka? Hadn’t anyone turned up to put the squeeze on her? Assuming she knew what had happened to Finch? Willard pushed his chair back from the table and stood up. With luck, he could still make his date.

  ‘We lost her coming back from work this evening,’ he said briefly. ‘You want the details, ask Dave Michaels.’

  Back home by seven, Faraday found a battered Skoda parked outside. Peering in through the driver’s window, he could just make out a pair of muddy-looking football boots and a towel on the passenger seat. Letting himself into the house, he heard the sound of laughter from the kitchen. J-J’s laugh was immediately recognisable, a high-pitched cackle that still scored Faraday’s sweetest dreams, but there was someone else in there with him, deeper voiced.

  J-J was standing by the stove, stirring something in a saucepan, while the stranger was sitting at the table with his back to the door, nursing a can of Stella. He was wearing jeans and a hooded top. Evidently fluent in sign, he was telling J-J a story that involved skiing, and as Faraday watched he pushed his chair back from the table, keeping his knees together and swaying his body as he sped down some imaginary mountain. J-J, who’d spotted his father at the door, signed his new friend’s name.

  ‘Gordon Franks,’ he explained.

  The newcomer spun round. He was thickset and fit-looking, with a grade one haircut and a small dragon tattoo on the back of his right hand. His handshake was a bonecruncher and his smile revealed an enormous set of teeth. He said he was sorry to have invited himself along like this but Anghared Davies had said there’d be no problem. As for the Stella, that had been J-J’s idea.

  Faraday poured himself a large Scotch, delighted that his call to Anghared had been so productive. Better still, it was obvious that J-J and Anghared’s thesp had struck an immediate spark. Taking people at face value had never been a problem for J-J – indeed, he’d always had a truly heroic faith in his fellow man – but it was rare to find that kind of enthusiasm so quickly returned. Maybe Marta was right when she said that spirit – animo – was the key that opened every door.

  J-J, halfway through his third can of Stella, happily surrendered the cooking to Faraday. He turned J-J’s soup into the beginnings of a stew, adding mushrooms, leeks, carrots and thick roundels of chorizo sausage, while J-J sat across from Gordon Franks, explaining what he’d been up to in Caen. The stew ready, Faraday ladled it straight onto plates for the table. He broached a decent bottle of Rioja to go with it and let J-J saw the remains of the weekend’s loaf into inch-thick slices to mop up the juice. Already the evening felt like an echo from the distant past: gusts of laughter and a blur of hands as the conversation pinballed from topic to topic.

  Gordon had spent five years in the Royal Marines. He’d loved the physical challenges and the camaraderie, and the world-conquering feelings inside that went with the green beret, but in the end he’d called it a day, partl
y because some of the stuff was getting repetitious and partly because of his younger brother.

  Steve had been an afterthought. Fifteen years younger than Gordon, he’d been born into a different world. Their parents had moved from Exeter to Plymouth. They had no money, a crap house and few prospects. Dad had got himself injured at the abattoir where he scraped a living and was resigned to being on the sick for ever. Young Steve, far from thick, had gone off to primary school, got bored, and made lots of trouble. At home, with troubles of their own, his parents had virtually ignored him. Steve fell into bad company. Things got quickly worse and before anyone could slow him down the kid was off the piste and over the edge.

  At twelve, he was doing serious drugs. By thirteen, he’d become an apprentice dealer, successful enough to warrant a savage beating from three seventeen-year-olds who robbed him of everything and left him unconscious in a bus shelter. After a fortnight in hospital and several brain scans, Steve had at last got some kind of grip on his young life – but not before he’d put the fear of God into his few friends and his hopelessly dysfunctional family. Including, at 4000 miles’ distance, Gordon.

  ‘I was in Belize,’ he signed, ‘and I knew it was time to jack it in.’

  Now, six years later, he’d put himself through drama school, started an MA in social studies, and developed a passion for mounting cutting-edge theatre in the local Portsmouth arts centre. In every one of these endeavours, he’d found a champion in Anghared Davies, who’d somehow screwed funding for a part-time drama post with the Persistent Young Offenders scheme. Gordon’s brief was to open minds and change lives, and if make-believe violence plus a helping or two of more orthodox drama could achieve that, then so much the better.

  ‘And J-J?’ Faraday nodded at his son.

  ‘He’ll be brilliant with them.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because the kids are so far off the pace. That’s part of the problem. Most of them don’t bother trying because they don’t see the point. Talk to them properly, get their attention, and they’ll tell you they’re the bottom of the heap. They’ve got nothing to offer. Everyone thinks they’re shit. Think that long enough, get to believe it, and – hey presto – you become shit. It’s all nonsense, of course, just excuses on their part. OK, some are seriously deprived. OK, some aren’t the brightest. But none of us, none of us, really understands what’s inside. Listen’ – he signed for J-J to come closer, exactly the way you’d share a secret – ‘we had a sergeant on the Mountain Leader course, and you know what he used to get us to do? We’d be yomping up in Scotland. We’d be carrying the full kit, bloody great sack on our backs. We’d start on the west coast and we’d walk right across the Highlands to just short of Inverness. Most of the time it would be pissing with rain and blowing a gale. You’d do twelve hours straight, just ten-minute smokos every hour. It would get to be the middle of the night and you’d be totally knackered. Then you’d hit yet another crest line and down there, in the valley, would be a dam and a bloody great reservoir, at least another hour away. OK, so one or two of us would have a moan, make a bit of a fuss, and this sergeant would come up to us and say, “Come on lads, this is the big one, and you’d better be bloody up for it because once we get down there, we’re all walking across, single file.” It was his party piece, that dam. Two-hundred-foot drop one side. Water so cold you’re dead in minutes on the other. And you know how wide the top of the dam was?’ He measured the space with his hands. ‘Under a metre.’