Beyond Reach (52 page)

Faraday folded the letter and then looked up.
Beyond reach.
Too right. He blinked, wiped an eye with the back of his hand, stared out through the big glass doors. The harbour was a blur. He didn’t know what to do, who to phone, who to talk to. He didn’t know anything. He’d never read anything so sad in his entire life.

 

The following afternoon he phoned Winter.

‘Have you got a moment?’

Winter didn’t want to talk on the phone. He said he’d drive over from Craneswater. Sandown Road was a tomb. He was back in charge of Tide Turn. Life, he thought, couldn’t possibly get worse.

Faraday opened a bottle of wine. Already, he felt like a convalescent. Tessa’s visit seemed to have blown away some of the fog in his head. He was beginning to think straight again. He was beginning to sense the need for decisions.

Winter had shed his jacket. It was another perfect day. They sat in the garden, two men deep into middle age, sharing a bottle of decent Rioja.

Faraday told Winter about Operation
Sangster
, about the doors that familial DNA could open, about the dawning realisation that he’d walked into a horror show. The guy was a loyal partner, a great father and the kind of social worker that gave the profession a good name. A thimbleful of semen, shed in a long-ago moment of drunken madness, had destroyed all that. Where was the logic? Where was the justice?

‘There isn’t any.’ Winter was monitoring the approach of a young blonde jogger along the towpath beside the harbour. ‘So how come you got the familial hit?’

Faraday told him about Jeanette Morrissey, Sturrock’s sister, and what had happened to Kyle Munday. Winter abandoned the jogger.

‘She
killed
this bloke?’

‘Ran him down.’

‘Deliberately?’

‘No question about it. She spelled it out for us. She saw him in the road and put her foot down. She’d been wanting to do it for ages, just never had the chance.’

‘And this is a
nurse
?’

‘Pillar of the community. Straight as a die. Saw the opportunity. Took it.’

Winter nodded and then turned his head away, remembering Sturrock sprawled on his sofa, pissed as a rat.
I just fancied it
, he’d said.
It just happened. Bang. You go for it.
At the time, Winter had assumed he was talking about the speech he’d made at the conference. Only now did he realise what he’d really been getting off his chest.

‘Something the matter?’ It was Faraday.

‘No, boss.’ Winter shook his head. ‘Nothing you shouldn’t expect.’

‘Share it with me?’

‘One day maybe.’ He reached for the bottle then raised his brimming glass. ‘Jimmy Suttle tells me you might be looking for something new. It happens I know just the man to talk to.’

 

On Monday the weather broke. Faraday, who’d spent most of the weekend on the phone talking to Gabrielle, drove to Kingston Crescent in pouring rain. Faintly surprised to find his name still on his office door, he shed his coat, sat down at the desk and lifted the phone. Willard’s secretary was about to put him on hold when Willard himself came on the line.

‘Joe?’

‘Me, sir.’

‘Had a think?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘And?’

Faraday suddenly saw the message scrawled across his whiteboard.
Sangster
was having a modest celebration upstairs in the bar at six o’clock. Be there. Faraday started laughing. Suttle must have been in.

Willard was getting impatient. He was demanding an answer. Did they still have the pleasure of Faraday’s company or not? Faraday bent to the phone, trying to compose himself. He needn’t have bothered. Willard made the decision for him.

‘I’ll take that as a yes then, Joe.’

The phone went dead.

My thanks to the following for their time and patience: Dave Anderson, John Ashworth, Gary Cable, Scott Chilton, Martin Chudley, Deborah Cook, Roly Dumont, Diana Franklin, Mark Hall, Alan Hunter, Liz Harkin, Andy Harrington, Simon Hodgekin, Richard John, Dean Juster, Tina Lowe, Terry Lowe, Bruce Marr, Teresa Norton, Paul O’Brien, Rosie Rae, Matthias Reiss, Tony Tipping, Danielle Stoakes, Wayne Tommans-Parker, Doug Utting, Alyson West.

Simon Spanton, my editor, loyally supported Paul Winter’s trek into the fictional unknown while my wife, Lin, kept him from his worst excesses. Winter owes them both.