Deadlight, page 34
part #4 of Faraday & Winter Series
Faraday had asked Bev Yates to lead. He started with the obvious, inviting Gault to describe exactly what he’d done on the Monday night. Ignoring the question, Gault launched into a furious protest about the way he’d been treated at home. In front of his wife and kids, that had been a disgrace, totally out of order. The lightest touch on his arm stopped him in mid-flow.
‘Just answer the question,’ Michelle mumured.
Gault stared at her for a moment. He’d refused point blank the offer of soap and a razor and this decision had given his dark, jowly face a maniacally lop-sided look. Meet this big, shambling man on the street and you’d probably cross the road.
‘Monday I was at work at the pub.’ He was frowning now. ‘Couple of dozen lunches. I’d booked off the evening shift months before. I was home by half three. The missus’ll tell you that.’
‘So what did you do at home?’
‘Put my feet up. Had a couple of tinnies. Watched telly with the kids. Nice it was, knowing I didn’t have to go back.’
Around six, he went upstairs for a shower. It wasn’t often these days he wore a suit but his wife had ironed it specially and it was on the bed waiting for him. He broke off and the frown returned.
‘What d’you want to know all this for?’
‘Just tell us, OK?’ Yates was making a note. ‘We’ll ask the questions.’
Gault was close to another outburst but another look from Michelle was enough to return him to Monday night. He’d decided to treat himself to a cab to the Home Club. The walk from Milton would have taken him the best part of an hour.
‘The other two hadn’t been in touch?’ It was Faraday.
‘What other two?’
‘Beattie and Phillips.’
‘No.’ Gault shook his huge head. ‘But then there was no reason why they would have done. We weren’t special mates or anything. Nodding terms, maybe. Nothing more.’
‘Really?’ Faraday had somehow assumed all three had been close.
‘No way. Like I knew them, seen them before, but’ … he shrugged … ‘no.’
He’d got to the Home Club around seven fifteen. The bar had been filling up nicely, and he’d sunk a couple of lagers with blokes he knew well, proper messmates, by the time they’d gone next door for scran. That’s when he’d found himself on the same table as Phillips and the Joss.
‘They were right beside me, know what I mean? I’m not sure who did the table plan but it was crap. Me and my real mates were all over the fucking room.’
‘You didn’t like Beattie and Phillips?’
‘It wasn’t that, I just didn’t know them. Phillips was a Tiff, worked in the engine room – when does a cook get to meet a Tiff? As for the Joss, he’s not the kind of bloke you get rat-arsed with, not unless you’ve got a death wish.’
‘So what happened? Monday night?’
‘You want the truth, I don’t remember too well. I know we had a bit to drink at the meal. Me and Beattie and Phillips started buying wine between us, house red, not a bad drop, then we got on to whisky chasers in the bar afterwards. They turned out OK, both them blokes. Must have done, otherwise we’d never have gone on together, know what I mean?’
Faraday stirred. He could sense the effort Gault was making to reassemble the evening and he began to wonder about the long-term legacy of an experience like the Falklands. ‘The bottle of Grouse on the bedside table,’ Beattie had said. And now this, an alcoholic ex-cook having a problem remembering what happened just seven days ago.
Yates wanted to know whose idea the Alhambra had been. Gault shrugged.
‘Wasn’t mine. I’d never heard of the place. Wouldn’t have been the other two, either. They were Guzz lads. Must have been someone else. We were up for it, I remember that much, so we’d have asked around.’
‘How did you get there?’
‘Walked. I wanted to take a cab but the Joss was for doing it on foot.’
‘Call in anywhere en route?’
‘Doubt it. It would have been late by then.’
Faraday nodded. So far, everything Gault had said tallied with notes he’d made from the tapes: Beattie on the steps of the club, wrapped in his leather jacket, surrounded by half a dozen others. Two of them must have been Gault and Phillips. He’d check later.
Yates had nudged Gault on to the Alhambra. At this point his memory gave out altogether, until Faraday mentioned Coughlin.
‘You remember him coming into the bar at the hotel?’
‘Too fucking right I do.’
‘Where were you?’
‘Sitting down. We had a table at the window end of the bar, manky fucking place. The door was down by the bar itself. Fuck knows how but there he suddenly was, horrible as ever, make your flesh creep just looking at him.’ He paused, staring down at his hands. ‘I think we’d bought the bottle by then. Bacardi. Phillips’ idea. Claimed he’d picked the taste up in Spain getting pissed with his missus. He was all for giving Coughlin a glass, but I remember telling him we should empty the bottle first, then I could smash it over Coughlin’s fucking skull. Yeah.’
He nodded, the same abrupt downward thrust of the head that had broken Dave Michaels’ nose. Faraday and Yates exchanged glances, aware of the look on Michelle Brinton’s face. There were easier clients to defend than Paul Gault.
‘Why do you say that?’ Yates enquired.
‘Say what?’
‘Say you’d have liked to have whacked him with the bottle?’
‘Because he was a trunker. A trunker’s trunker. The biggest fucking trunker of all time. Real shagnasty. And because he made that nipper’s life a fucking misery.’
There was a long silence. Michelle was close to interrupting again, trying to bring this particular exchange to an end, but this time Gault just ignored her. Playing it by the book, Faraday – too – should have kept Gault on the rails, insisting he finish his account of what had happened on Monday night, but something told him they were closing on a more important truth.
‘Nipper?’ he queried.
Gault looked startled.
‘You don’t know about Matt?’
‘Tell us.’
‘He was a kid. Our mess. Two Delta. I can see him now, runs ashore, cropped hair, Doc Martens, cut-offs, strutting his stuff, the Marine that never was. Skates don’t fool that easy. We all knew the lad was just out the egg. Yeah … Mattie Warren. Mr Disco.’
‘And Coughlin?’
‘Spotted him at once. Easy meat. Easy, easy meat. That’s the thing about blokes like Coughlin. They’re like animals. They are fucking animals. You can see them sniffing the wind. The first time he laid eyes on Warren, he knew he was there for the taking. You did what you could but blokes like Coughlin around, what fucking chance did you have?’
‘You got to know the boy?’
‘I did, yeah. He was a nice lad. He was pretty fucking clueless but that wasn’t his fault, we all have to start somewhere. What he needed was someone to keep an eye out for him. You do your best but … fuck.’ He lowered his head again, a gesture – Faraday realised – of defeat. Whatever else this man had brought back from the Falklands, he’d never forget Matthew Warren. ‘There’s a saying in the navy. Everyone like Mattie, all the skins, they need a sea daddy. That was me, believe it or not. I tried to be there for him. My own marriage was down the khazi. I had two kids, a missus who couldn’t stand me, a bloke who’d moved in when I was away, and nowhere to fucking go if we ever got through the poxy war. I was Mr Fucked-up, believe me, and the least I thought I could do was try and keep the boy in one piece.’
‘You’re talking about Warren?’
‘Yeah. There was pressure on all of us, we were all cacking ourselves about what would really happen, but young like that, Mattie really took it bad. That’s where Coughlin creamed himself. Couldn’t get enough of winding the kid up.’
‘How?’
‘You really want to know?’
‘Yes.’ Faraday nodded. ‘Please.’
‘OK.’ Gault looked first at Faraday, then at Yates. ‘Take the Jack Dusties, the stores blokes, they were in our mess. When we stopped at Ascension, we took on a load of body bags. It’s just what you do. You’re going to war, you take body bags. Now the great question was how many body bags. That’s what Coughlin banged on about all the time, how many body bags. Now I knew one of the dusties really well, good bloke, all right, and he told me it was seventy. Coughlin trebled it, trebled it, just to wind the boy up. Two hundred body bags, one each. The boy was terrified, never got to sleep at night worrying about all those Argie torpedoes. Two hundred? There wouldn’t be anyone left on the fucking ship.’
As Accolade sped south, life for Matthew Warren got worse. For one thing, according to Gault, he kept picking up little buzzes from the officers in the wardroom. How the French were flying thousands of Exocet missiles into Buenos Aires in the dead of night, and how effective these missiles were supposed to be. None of this mattered until Sheffield went down, then everyone – not just Warren – started taking the war very seriously indeed.
‘Turned out the blokes in the wardroom were right. The Exocets were fucking lethal. One of them in your galley, and you were history.’ Gault was back aboard, reliving those days. ‘You ever see the state of Shiny Sheff? The fucking boat was a hulk, burned-out, nothing left, and within hours the buzz is going round, Christ knows how many blokes have been wasted. So what does Coughlin do? He bangs on, day and night, about all this French technology. Heat-seeking, heat-seeking, I can hear him now. And why does he go on and on about the guidance system? Because the fucking missile heads straight for the galley, where the heat is, and that – surprise, surprise – is where Mattie spends most of his working life. Fetching and carrying, flashing up for Coughlin, helping do the washing up, thinking all the time about the next fucking Exocet.’
‘But what about Coughlin himself?’ Yates was confused. ‘Wasn’t he in the galley too?’
‘Of course he was. And so was I for that matter. Different galley, thank fuck, but same principle. No, the difference with us was that we were older. In my case, to be honest, I didn’t care the fuck what happened. In Coughlin’s, he thought he was bloody immortal. Just wouldn’t happen. Mattie? Like I said, he was cacking himself, just thinking about it.’
Faraday eased back from the table, aware of Michelle Brinton looking pointedly at the clock. This wasn’t an interview at all, more a glimpse of what it was like to go to war.
‘My client …’ she began.
Gault put his hand on her arm, a gesture of reassurance. Leave this to me, he was telling her.
‘You won’t know this, but Coughlin was screwing him.’
‘You’re sure about that?’
‘As sure as I can be, yeah. You don’t go to sea for years on end without getting a nose for stuff like that. And Mattie would have blown the whistle, for definite, had Coughlin not scared the crap out of him.’
‘You talked to him about it? The boy? Warren?’
‘A couple of times, yeah.’
‘And?’
‘He wouldn’t say, but that meant nothing. Coughlin was pulling strings all the time, getting Mattie on night watches, just the two of them in the wardroom galley. Trunker’s paradise, that galley. Even the fucking officers knock twice before going in. Tell you something else, too. Flaherty had sussed it. The killick Reg. He was in our mess, not a bad bloke for a Reggie. Shrewd, too.’
Faraday glanced up from a note he was making. Flaherty reported to Beattie. Had the Joss mentioned anything about Warren on Monday night?
‘I don’t know. He may have done.’
‘But when Coughlin turned up at the hotel … you must have talked about him afterwards. Didn’t Warren’s name come up then?’
Gault stared at Faraday, trying to remember. Faraday offered a prompt.
‘The bloke behind the bar, the hotel owner, he said you were up on your feet after Coughlin left, giving him the finger through the window.’
‘Yeah. I expect he’s right. Shame it was just the finger.’
‘And that was because of Warren?’
‘Yeah, and a million other things, but Warren mainly. Listen,’ – he beckoned Faraday closer – ‘what you have to understand is what it does to you, something like that. The kid went over the side. Fuck knows how, we’ve all got our little theories, but either way he’s dead and gone. We should have done better than that, all of us, and maybe he’d still be with us now. That’s why I went to see his folks afterwards, did my best like, still do.’
‘Still do what?’
‘Still pop round, bunch of flowers every May the twenty-first, make the odd call, pay my respects.’
This, too, was news to Faraday. Warren’s family were still in Pompey?
‘Yeah, absolutely, couple of streets down from me. Dad’s a builder and Matt’s brother does a bit, too. Ask me, they’ve never got over it, especially the mum. Poor bloody woman. Son goes off to war and ends up trunked to death.’
‘Is that an allegation?’
‘No, but I’m marking your fucking card, aren’t I? You ask me why we all hated the cunt, I’m telling you. You ask me why he deserved whatever he got, I’m telling you that, too.’
Faraday nodded, accepting the logic of Gault’s argument. Then he pushed his notes to one side, and looked Gault in the eye.
‘OK,’ he said. ‘So what do you say if I suggest that you killed Coughlin? That he came into the hotel that night, that you somehow traced him back to where he lived, and that you squared it with him later? Maybe you didn’t mean to kill him. Maybe you just meant to settle a debt or two. But that’s a bit academic now because either way he died. That means you murdered him’ … he spread his hands wide … ‘doesn’t it?’
Gault gave the suggestion some thought. Finally, he leaned back in the chair and shook his massive head.
‘Definitely not,’ he said. ‘I’d remember something like that.’
It was midnight before Faraday made it to Eadie Sykes’s seafront apartment. The rain had stopped now, and the air smelled fresher. Faraday coaxed the big old Alsatian out of his car and took him on to the beach for a last-chance walk, crunching down through the pebbles towards the soft lap-lap of the falling tide.
Another hour or so with Gault had failed to progress the investigation one inch. After a wealth of motivation – any number of reasons for wanting to see Coughlin dead – the interview had stalled on what Gault claimed to be the facts about Monday night. They’d all got arseholed at the hotel. Someone had called a cab. And Gault had finally tumbled into bed with his long-suffering missus. Challenged for times, Gault said he hadn’t a clue. Accused, once again, of giving Coughlin a well-earned seeing-to, he’d regretfully declined the honour. Given half a chance, he’d have beaten the man senseless. Alas, though, he’d been too pissed.
The Alsatian was nosing around amongst the bundles of drying bladderwrack. Tomorrow, thought Faraday, there’d be a chance to test Gault’s account against Beattie and Phillips. Tomorrow, as well, he’d organise for someone to talk to Gault’s wife, establish some times, check them against the CCTV tapes and taxi log. That way, fingers crossed, he’d be able to fill in the bits that had fallen through Gault’s memory. But what if it all tied together? What if the time-line put all three of them in the clear? Faraday shook his head, watching the dog at last lift its leg. Willard, for one, would be extremely vocal. And that didn’t bear thinking about.
Eadie Sykes fell in love with the dog on first sight. In two minds about the fairness of imposing a large Alsatian on this impeccably designer apartment, Faraday was amazed to see her on all fours on the carpet, giving the dog the full treatment.
‘Name’s Rory,’ Faraday muttered. ‘Lives in the country.’
‘But you’ve been on the beach, haven’t you? All that nice tar?’ She glanced up at Faraday. ‘Cupboard over the cooker. Stuff called Vanish. And there’s surgical spirit in the bathroom for his paws.’
Between them, they cleaned the dog up. The tar on the carpet, on the other hand, resisted their best efforts. Not that Sykes appeared to mind.
‘Rory? Here …’
She’d sorted out a makeshift bed in the bay window beyond the sofa, a couple of old blankets and – inexplicably – a stuffed pink elephant that had seen better days.
‘Got it when I was seven.’ She was back on her hands and knees, playing with the dog. ‘We used to have a couple of mutts in Ambrym. They used to kick the shit out of my poor little elephant. He can probably still smell them.’ She looked up. ‘You hungry?’
She’d made a big salad, tuna, mackerel, boiled egg, with a top dressing of green olives stuffed with anchovy. Much to his surprise, Faraday discovered he was ravenous, the kind of hunger that barely paused for a third glass of wine. At length he collapsed on the sofa, checking over his shoulder for the dog. Rory, to his immense relief, appeared to have settled.
‘You liked it then?’
‘Loved it.’
Faraday had been telling her about the Tamar Valley: the depth of the peace; the slow brown river flowing past Beattie’s cottage; the woods full of interesting birdlife; the knowledge that industrial life had come and gone, leaving this little cut-off promontory miraculously intact.
‘You must take me there. Sounds like a film to me.’
‘That’s the last thing it needs. Can you imagine somewhere that perfect that close to a major city? Doesn’t happen. Not round here.’
‘Is that a no, then?’
‘Not at all.’ He watched her sorting out meat for the dog. ‘Just me being selfish. Who’d want to spoil a secret like that?’
‘OK. No film. Does that make it better?’
‘Much.’
‘Is that a yes, then? Little expedition? You and me?’
Faraday smiled. He’d known this woman all of a week, yet already she seemed to have worked out how to square him away. Part of it was his own fault. Saddling her with Beattie’s dog was a definite imposition. Yet he was fascinated by the speed with which she’d managed to connect the various dots in his life. First, she’d established squatters’ rights over J-J. Now, she was talking of a long weekend in the Tamar Valley.
