Deadlight, page 13
part #4 of Faraday & Winter Series
‘What kind of choices?’
‘Everything, you name it. I’d give you a list but we haven’t got time.’
‘Women?’
‘Of course, by the hundreds. Sometimes I think he found safety in numbers but he’s got married again recently so it can’t be true, can it?’
For the first time, Faraday sensed a wistfulness, the hint of an ache between this tumble of reminiscence, and it occurred to him that her sex life with her ex-husband might not be quite over. There were lots of ways to pay for a flat like this and an occasional shag for old times’ sake might well be one of them.
‘You haven’t told me about Ambrym Productions,’ he said gently.
‘I haven’t?’
She cleared the plates away and then poured more wine. Divorce had given her a good financial settlement – more money than she’d ever had in her life – but she bored easily and knew she had to find something to do with her time. The local poly ran a production course for aspiring film directors and she’d enrolled. After a couple of years running round with a cheap VHS camera, she’d pretty much mastered the basics and Doug had been happy to stake her when she decided to chance her arm and set up a small production company. Ambrym Productions still occupied the same two rooms in premises in Hampshire Terrace and though she’d never make a fortune, she’d certainly managed to pay her way.
‘It’s fun,’ she said. ‘How many jobs can you say that about?’
Faraday smiled, toying with his wine glass. He liked this woman. She was vivid and gutsy and this story of hers seemed totally in keeping with the warmth of her physical presence. Unlike so many people he knew, she didn’t waste time on regrets or blame. Life, he suspected, would never intimidate her.
‘That film you’re making at the moment. The one with J-J. You were going to show me the …’ Faraday frowned. He couldn’t remember the term.
‘Rough cut. I dubbed a copy and brought it home. Kick off your shoes. I’ll put it on.’
She pulled out a video cassette from a satchel on the floor and slipped it into the player under the big wide-screen television. Faraday made himself comfortable on the sofa. There were worse things in life, he’d decided, than a couple of bottles of Rioja and conversation that had absolutely nothing to do with DNA and cloned hard disks. It had been this way when he’d first met Marta – a pleasure uncomplicated by any kind of commitment, physical or otherwise – and in the long, empty months since she’d ended the relationship he’d realised just how much he missed the chance to let his guard down. Women, he’d decided, were brilliant at cracking one of life’s toughest challenges: how to relax.
‘Comfy?’ Sykes threw him the remote control and returned to the kitchen to make coffee.
Faraday thumbed the play button and settled down. Expecting shots of tiny launches bucketing in across the Solent, he found himself watching a slow pan across acres of white headstones. There were hundreds of them, bone-white under the bluest of skies. On the soundtrack, haunting flute notes dipped to make way for a man’s voice. It was an old voice, bitter and reflective, and as he began to talk the cemetery on the screen resolved into a single headstone. ‘An Australian Soldier of the 1939–1945 War’ went the inscription. ‘20th – 27th May, 1941’.
Faraday felt a stir of movement beside him. Sykes had returned from the kitchen and was staring at the screen.
‘Shit,’ she said. ‘Wrong cassette.’
She reached for the remote but Faraday shook his head.
‘Leave it,’ he said. ‘I want to watch.’
Dawn Ellis was in the bath when she heard the knock at the front door. She reached for her watch. Quarter past ten. She listened for a moment or two, then sank back into the water. Whoever it was could come back some other time, preferably at a respectable hour. If it turned out to be Winter again, she’d kill him.
‘Dawn?’ It wasn’t Winter. No way. ‘Dawn?’
The voice was familiar, though. Not a stranger. Reluctantly, she climbed out of the bath and towelled herself dry. Wrapping herself in a dressing gown, she made her way downstairs. The knock again, louder this time. He’s been round the side, she thought. And seen the light in the bathroom window.
She put the chain on the door and opened it. Through the gap, she could see a figure silhouetted against the street lights. He had boots on and shiny leathers. He was cradling a helmet.
‘Andy?’
‘I knew you were in.’
‘What’s the matter? What is it?’ For a moment she thought he must have had an accident.
‘Just fancied a chat.’ He flashed her an uncertain smile. ‘Can I come in?’
She didn’t know what to say. They’d had a drink on a couple of occasions, it was true, but that hardly qualified for a full-on relationship. What on earth possessed him to turn up so late like this?
She pulled the dressing gown more tightly around herself. It wasn’t that cold with the door open but she knew she was shivering. Pathetic, she told herself. I’m being pathetic.
She slipped off the chain and opened the door. Corbett gave her a nod and stepped round her as she shut the door behind him. He smelled of fresh air and new leather.
‘Coffee?’
‘Please.’
He waited in the chaos of the lounge at the front while she boiled water in the kettle. He must have put the television on because she could hear the round-up of the day’s World Cup scores at the end of the BBC news.
‘Milk? Sugar?’
‘As it comes.’
He was sitting on the tiny sofa, stiff as a board. He’d moved all her magazines up to one end and found a nest for his helmet amongst the laundry she’d been meaning to dump in the washing machine. The sight of her thong wound in with assorted knickers and tops brought the colour to her face.
‘You hungry? Want anything to eat?’
Corbett shook his head. He still hadn’t looked up at her. In fact he’d barely moved.
‘No, thanks. Sorry to barge in like this.’
She began to tell him it didn’t matter but he held up a hand. He wanted to pick her brains, get one or two things off his chest.
‘About what?’
‘Faraday.’
‘What about him?’
She passed him the coffee and at last he looked up at her. His face was drained of all expression. She’d never seen such dead eyes.
‘He’s a disgrace,’ he said softly. ‘The man shouldn’t be let anywhere near a major crime.’
‘What makes you say that?’
The question, innocent enough, set him off. He told her about Davidson, about going to London, about the intelligence stuff he’d put together with the help of old mates. He told about the interview he’d done and the conclusions he’d drawn. He’d got Davidson by the bollocks, worked the whole thing out, saved the inquiry trillions in overtime, and now, as a thank you, Faraday had put him on house-to-house. The man, he said again, was a disgrace. He had no experience, no proper grip. He played everything by the book. He was ignoring a lead other governors would have given their eye teeth for. He was terrified of stepping outside the rules.
‘Really?’ Dawn had her own quarrels with Faraday but would never have accused him of over-respect for his bosses. On the contrary, the bloody man was forever going his own sweet way. ‘He’s new to Major Crimes. It’s a big challenge.’
‘Yeah, and wasted on people like him. In the Met, I’d give him a week, maybe two, then they’d find him something more suitable. School crossings, if he was lucky. You want to know what I really think? I think he’s got something on Willard.’
‘And Willard protects him? That’s daft. Willard wouldn’t protect anyone he didn’t think was doing their job.’
‘Yeah, unless he had no choice.’
‘You’re being paranoid. You really are. You ought to watch yourself on that bike.’
‘Yeah? And what’s that supposed to mean?’ He stared at her and for a split second she saw something in his face that made her feel deeply uncomfortable.
‘Joke?’ she said. ‘Listen, I sympathise, I really do. I don’t know what you expected down here but it’s obviously not working out. It happens sometimes, we all know that, but you just have to ride with the knocks. Blokes like Faraday are doing their best, just like the rest of us. We may not be as cool as the guys you’re used to, and most of the jobs are pretty crappy if you want the truth, but at least you’ve got something half-decent for a change.’
‘Yeah, and look what’s happening. Maybe he’s just trying to string it out. This Davidson’s well-sus, believe me. He’s a hundred per cent totally in the frame and we haven’t even rattled his cage yet. So how do you explain that?’
‘Faraday has a strange way of doing things sometimes.’
‘Tell me about it.’
‘Yeah, but it may not be the way it looks. You think he’s lost interest but often it’s the reverse. You ought to talk to some of the other guys. Bev Yates is good on Faraday, reads him like a book.’
‘He’s another one.’
‘Who?’
‘Yates. Should have been pensioned off years ago. If he bangs on about bloody football again, I’ll fucking throttle him.’
‘You are getting paranoid.’
‘You really think so?’ His voice sank to a whisper and he began to knot and unknot his hands, staring down at the carpet, avoiding Dawn’s eyes. She gazed at him for a moment, wondering what really lay behind this strange visit. Was he lonely? Was it as simple as that? Or did career frustration do strange things to you? She sat down beside him, clearing a space for herself. When she put an arm around him, she realised he was crying.
‘Andy? What’s the matter?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Tell me.’ She could feel him trembling through the thick leathers.
He shook his head, then began to wipe his nose on the back of his hand.
Dawn pulled a Kleenex from a box on the floor.
‘Here.’
He looked at the Kleenex, his eyes glazed, then took a deep breath.
‘I can’t hack this, you know, I really can’t. I thought I could but I can’t.’
‘Hack what?’ Dawn waited for an answer. ‘Andy?’
‘This. Us. The job. Everything. Sometimes, some mornings, I wake up and I’m fucking superman. Other times, like now, I can’t get a single thing straight. You want the truth, it’s all just falling to pieces.’
‘What is?’
‘Every bloody thing.’
Dawn smiled at him, and touched his face. The news that someone else was as confused and bewildered as her was a huge relief.
‘Things work out,’ she said softly. ‘In the end, they do, I promise.’
‘Yeah? You really think that?’ It was a little boy’s question, voiced through a blur of tears.
Dawn gave him the Kleenex. She had some vodka next door. She’d fix up a couple of drinks. She’d put some music on, nothing hectic, and they could just chill out on the sofa. There was no pressure, no deadlines, no crimes to solve, just the two of them. Whatever else he wanted to get off his chest, she was here to listen.
She slipped off the sofa and eased the side zips on his boots. When she glanced up at him, he was trying to force a smile.
‘OK?’ she said.
The video had long come to an end. Faraday stood at the big glass doors, nursing his third cup of coffee. Down the road, queues were forming round the block for one of the clubs by the pier.
Eadie Sykes was folded into a corner of the sofa, her knees tucked beneath her chin. Faraday studied her for a moment. Behind the laughter and the repartee, he’d just glimpsed an altogether different woman.
‘Your dad fought in Crete? 1941? He was part of all that?’
‘Yep. Got the last boat out. Bombed stupid for five days then nearly swam back to bloody Egypt. Tell me something, Joe, why do the Brits always fuck it up?’
To Faraday’s shame, he hadn’t known the full story. He’d heard about Crete, of course, known that it hadn’t been the army’s finest hour, but the shaming weight of detail, the sheer scale of the catastrophe, had never dawned on him. Allied commanders who’d lost their nerve. Counter-attacks that were never properly developed. Thousands of men, poorly led, chucking in the towel against a handful of German paratroopers then legging it through the mountains for yet another botched evacuation. Brilliant.
‘What possessed you to make the film?’ he asked.
‘My dad. He died a couple of years ago. It was a kind of tribute if you like.’
‘Has it been seen anywhere? Have you sold it?’
‘Oz, New Zealand.’ She smiled. ‘And Germany.’
‘Not here?’
‘Not yet. The Brits are odd. They like to celebrate their defeats. That treatment might be a bit close to the bone.’
Faraday joined her on the sofa, thinking of the Dunkirk film she was making with J-J. She was right about the Brits. There was nothing they treasured more than a military disaster.
‘Did your dad talk about Crete a lot?’
‘Not until very recently. In fact it was only when he was in a home in Oz and I went back to see him that I realised he’d been in the war at all. He never mentioned it when I was a kid and I was away most of the time after that.’
‘And was he bitter?’
‘Resigned. Maybe even amused. He saw a lot, my dad. I only knew what he chose to tell me.’
‘What about the Brits? Did he like them?’
‘Not much. On a good day he’d say he felt sorry for them.’
‘But you married one.’
‘Yeah.’ She pulled a face. ‘Not my cleverest move.’
‘You’re telling me you regret it?’
‘No, but my dad did, big-time. Me? I never give it a moment’s thought. Looking back’s a waste of time. What’s done is done. Only the Brits bang on about the past. There …’ She grinned at Faraday. ‘How’s that for an insult? Bet you’re really glad you came now.’
Faraday said it didn’t matter. He’d had a great evening, totally unexpected, and one day soon he’d try and repay the hospitality. In the meantime, he’d tell J-J the Dunkirk video was going well.
‘True?’
She didn’t answer him. Instead, she got to her feet and looked him in the eye.
‘We haven’t talked about you at all, have we? Your wars?’
‘No.’ Faraday was trying to find his car keys. ‘And thank Christ for that.’
Nine
THURSDAY, 6 JUNE, 2002, 08.00
Faraday was at his desk early next morning, the worst of the hangover gone. He’d been out first thing, tramping north on the path that skirted Langstone Harbour, glad of the wind on his face. Clouds were piling up to the west, the promise of rain in the air, but the rich orange spill of dawn had brought him to a pause and he’d lifted his binos for a sweep across the gleaming mud flats.
June was a dead time for birds but he’d caught a glimpse of shelduck, way out on the harbour, and later en route back towards the Bargemaster’s House, he’d taken a brief detour to check out one of the fresh-water ponds that dotted Milton Common. He loved this time of the morning, no one around, the first fat drops of rain on his face, and he’d paused in the cover of a blackberry bush, checking on a family of reed warblers nesting in the bulrushes at the water’s edge.
For days now, mother and chicks had been sharing the nest with a cuckoo. One by one, the cuckoo had expelled the other chicks, hogging the mother’s food for itself, and Faraday asked himself yet again what the shy little warbler made of this huge baby with its ever-open gape. Something deep in her brain made sure that she kept supplying the food but surely – at the very least – she’d be resentful that this greedy stranger had taken over her entire world. Could reed warblers feel resentment? he’d wondered. And, given this ever-diminishing family, were they able to count?
Now, gazing down at the Policy Book still open on his office desk, he heard a knock on the door. It was one of the management assistants. She held out a big manila envelope.
‘The navy bloke,’ she said. ‘Dropped it off earlier.’
Faraday opened the envelope. Inside was a thick stapled photocopy headed ‘In Confidence’. From the top left-hand corner, a younger, thinner face swam out, staring at the camera, backed by the pleats of a photo-booth curtain. Coughlin, Faraday thought, remembering that same face, swollen and purpled, on the SOC video.
The Divisional Officer’s Report ran to a dozen pages, tracking Coughlin from his days as a sixteen-year-old junior seaman through to his discharge seventeen years later. Faraday flicked through it, skipping from posting to posting, trying to distil the essence of the man from the various handwritten comments.
Early on, the training officer at HMS Raleigh had talked of ‘disappointment’ and warned that Coughlin ‘must temper his undoubted energies with a degree of self-discipline if he is to realise his full potential’. A couple of years later, at sea aboard HMS Edinburgh Castle, another officer had written guardedly of ‘competence’ and ‘occasional flair’, a judgement heavily qualified by a Lieutenant Commander reviewing his progress on his next posting. ‘CK Coughlin,’ he’d scrawled, ‘still requires a significant degree of supervision, disappointing after nearly five years in the service.’
Faraday eased back in his chair, gazing out as the first drops of rain smeared the view. He’d need a translator to properly understand a document like this – what did ‘CK’ mean? – but twenty-two years in the police force had left him fluent in the stilted bureaucratic prose reserved for career assessment.
Coughlin, without doubt, had been a handful, a judgement amply confirmed by more or less every officer who’d crossed his path. He seemed to have survived, just. He’d obviously been canny enough to avoid a major disciplinary drama. But nowhere was there any evidence that he’d happily submitted to the demands of teamwork. ‘Coughlin can be a solitary individual,’ another Lieutenant Commander had written in 1976, ‘and sometimes he appears unaware of the needs of others. Confronted with his shortcomings, he finds it difficult to accept or even acknowledge blame.’
