Beyond Reach (8 page)

Esme, Winter quickly realised, was prone to sudden mood changes. One day, wildly extrovert, she’d be a walking exclamation mark. The next, moody and withdrawn, she’d barely bother with conversation. Winter, who didn’t have to live with her, began to feel sorry for Stu Norcliffe. How would you cope with someone who was as volatile and headstrong as this? Blame her gangster dad and pray for quieter times? Or sit her down and tell her the facts of life?

As it turned out, Stu had probably done neither. Managing hedge funds gave you loads of scope to bury yourself in work, and if the wife ever complained about lack of personal attention you could shower her with goodies. An annual subscription to the Tatchbury Mount Health and Beauty Spa had probably been one peace offering. The gleaming BMW 4 x 4 doubtless another. Both had cheered up Ezzie no end.

The rain, if anything, was getting heavier. A nearby path ran the length of the spa, and Winter stepped out of the gazebo, the umbrella shielding his face. Walking slowly beside the glass, he had a perfect view of the blur of legs. Ezzie wore a thin gold chain around one ankle and favoured Nike runners. Today’s choice were in silver with mauve laces. Beside the treadmill, he recognised her sports bag abandoned on the floor. On top of the bag was a squash racket.

Winter quickened his step. Somewhere, he told himself, there would be a reception area, a place where you could book a session on the squash court. And that meant there’d be a reservations schedule. With names.

Entrance to the spa took him into a lobby. A vending machine offered a range of isotonic drinks and there were glass cabinets stocked with expensive sports gear. The reception desk lay beside a pair of swing doors that led into the exercise area. Behind the desk, a striking-looking redhead was studying her PC screen. The name badge on her sports shirt read Dominika.

Winter asked her about court availability. He and his daughter were staying overnight. She was mad about squash and in the absence of a decent partner she was threatening to teach her dad the basic moves.

Dominika eyed Winter’s bulk then smiled. Perfect English with a light Polish accent.

‘You sure you’re ready for this, sir?’

‘Of course I’m not. Have you got anything in the next hour or so?’

Dominika bent to the keyboard, then studied the screen again.

‘I’m afraid not. We’re fully booked until nine o’clock.’

‘Can I have a look?’ Winter reached for the screen, angled it towards himself. The reservation was in Esme’s name. Ms E. Norcliffe. Court Two. 18.30-19.10.

‘Shame.’ Winter didn’t hide his disappointment.

‘You want to give me your room number? We might get a cancellation. ’

‘No need. Tell you the truth, love, it’s the perfect excuse.’ He shot the receptionist a grin. ‘I’ll take her to the bar instead.’

He retreated to the car park and settled himself behind the wheel of the Lexus, resigned to a longish wait. A name for the new man in Ezzie’s life would have been a flying start.

By now, it was gone six. Ezzie and her partner would be on court until way past seven. After that might come a sauna, or a swim, or maybe both. Followed, in all probability, by something more intimate. Stu was up in town. Back home, the babysitter would be putting the kids to bed. If lover boy had £184 to spare, they could shag all night.

Winter wondered whether to bell Mackenzie but knew it was pointless. Bazza paid him a great deal of money to look after his best interests. In the early days it had been a question of business. More recently the Tide Turn Trust. Tonight it happened to be his wayward daughter. Stick with it, mate. Get me a name, an address, a guarantee that this tosser will get out of our lives. Pretend you’re back with the Old Bill, plotting up some poor bloody criminal. Time-wise, it takes what it takes.

Winter punched a button on the radio, then changed his mind. Anything was better than Chris Evans. He sorted through his collection of CDs, chose an early Elton John album, settled down to enjoy ‘Bennie and the Jets’
.
The tracks slipped by. It began to get dark. After

‘Yellow Brick Road’ came ‘Candle in the Wind’. By half eight, singing along to ‘Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me’, Winter was suddenly aware of two figures heading for the car park. One of them was Ezzie. The other, taller, had his arm round her.

At Mackenzie’s insistence, Winter had brought along a camera with a decent telephoto lens. It lay on the seat beside him. He picked it up, squinted through the viewfinder, anchored the auto-focus over the approaching couple. Ezzie was laughing. Then she nuzzled her head against her companion’s shoulder. From this angle it was impossible to get a proper look at his face but Winter squirted off a couple of shots regardless. The tableau told its own story. A display of affection like this, in Bazza’s book, would be quite enough to justify a spot or two of serious violence.

Ezzie got into the 4 x 4. Her bloke had his back to Winter’s probing lens. Seconds later, the big BMW was pulling out of the car park. Winter gave it a moment or two, stowed the camera, and set off in pursuit. For Ezzie, the quickest way home was via the motorway but the BMW was heading west, deeper into the New Forest. Winter hung back, glad of the darkness, wondering quite what might happen next. Did this guy have a place of his own nearby? Somewhere they could get their heads down and enjoy some serious nooky?

It seemed the answer was yes. On the outskirts of a village called Bramshaw Ezzie suddenly indicated right. Winter slowed, then took the turn. Less than a hundred metres ahead the BMW had come to a halt. Then Ezzie was indicating right again, hauling the 4 x 4 into a driveway. Winter gunned the engine, sweeping by. There were no street lights but he had time to register a modern-looking bungalow, set back from the road, before the darkness swallowed him up again. He drove on for perhaps half a mile, then pulled onto an apron of mud in front of a farm gate. A three-point turn took him back down the road, moving very slowly. At length, round a couple of bends, the bungalow came into view. There were a pair of dormer windows set into the roof and a light was on in one of them. Ezzie’s BMW was still in the drive.

Winter parked on the verge and took more photos. Later he’d confirm a house number and the name of the road but for the time being - once again - all he had to do was wait. He toyed with another helping or two of Elton John but settled for Carly Simon instead. By the end of the first album, he’d developed a serious respect for this bloke’s stamina. By the end of the second, he was convinced Ezzie was staying the night. Then he realised that the light in the dormer window had been switched off. Moments later, the front door opened and two figures stepped out. Expecting a lingering farewell kiss, Winter watched the pair of them walk around the front of the bungalow to the driveway. For the first time, he realised that another vehicle was parked in front of the BMW. It was an estate car. It looked like a Renault or maybe a Vauxhall.

Ezzie kissed her lover goodnight, tossed her sports bag into the back of the BMW, got in behind the wheel. The bloke watched her for a moment or two, raised his hand in a farewell wave, then reached in his pocket for his car keys. Ezzie was already backing the big 4 x 4 into the road. The estate car followed. At the top of the road both cars signalled left, back towards the motorway. Winter stirred the Lexus into life. The next village was called Brook. Ezzie, as Winter expected, headed east while the estate car turned right, accelerating hard, plunging deeper into the forest.

Winter had left the village behind before he caught sight of a pair of red lights in the distance. He couldn’t be sure it was the estate car but it was way past midnight and he had no choice but to find out. It had stopped raining by now but this part of the forest was virtually treeless, a vast plateau of heather and scrub, and despite the 40 mph speed limit the driver had his foot down. Slowly, Winter began to close the gap between them, pushing the Lexus past ninety on the faster stretches. From time to time, in the flare of the headlights, he caught a glimpse of ponies grazing at the roadside. Once, he saw a cow look up with a start as he swept past. What might happen if one of these animals ambled onto the tarmac didn’t bear contemplation but Winter didn’t care. He was back doing what twenty years in CID had trained him for: getting tighter to the target, plotting his next move, trying to assess the many possibilities that lay ahead. By now he’d closed the gap to a hundred metres. Definitely the estate car.

A signpost flashed by. FORDINGBRIDGE 3 MILES. Winter didn’t know this part of the world but they seemed to have crossed the New Forest in no time at all. The road started to descend. Suddenly they were back in the trees. Then, for whatever reason, the hazard lights came on in the estate car. It began to slow. Winter did the same, his brain furiously computing his next move. Should he hit the indicator and overtake? Should he then find a spot down the road from which he could resume the chase? Seconds later, the mystery driver saved him having to make the decision. Slewed across the road, the estate car blocked his path. Right first time. A Renault.

Winter braked and came to a halt barely yards away. The driver’s door opened and a tallish figure in a black tracksuit stepped out. In the throw of his headlights, Winter watched him approaching. There was something familiar in the way this man held himself, in the rigid upright posture, in the jut of his chin, but only when he bent to the Lexus’ now-open window did Winter realise who he was looking at.

The recognition was mutual. The face from the darkness stared at Winter for a long moment, then the door was wrenched open.

‘Out,’ he said.

 

An evening with his new Mahler CD had lifted the worst of Faraday’s gloom. Depression was too big a word, irritation too meagre. Somewhere in between lay the growing realisation that Gabrielle really had left him, that he was once again alone in the world.

As far as women were concerned, this had happened before. In fact Faraday had lost count of the times when he’d piled all his chips on a single square only to fall victim to a roll of the croupier’s dice. Years ago it had been Ruth Potterne, the widow of a tormented soul who’d run an art gallery. Then had come Marta, a vivid, sexy IBM executive who’d remained, to the end, an enigma. An Australian video producer, Eadie Sykes, had stolen his heart for a while before she, too, had drifted away. And now there was Gabrielle. Immense promise. Total immersion. Real tenderness. Then, quite suddenly, an empty space. Was it a case of recklessness on his part? Of naivety? Was he expecting too much of human flesh and blood? Or might he, one day, stumble on a woman - a relationship - that lasted longer than a year or so?

In truth, he wasn’t sure. If he’d shown judgement this flawed in the Job, he knew he’d never have made it into CID. With every justification, they’d have kept him in uniform and put him in charge of lost property. So how come he’d ended up on Major Crime, with a real talent for reading the criminal mind, if he was so hopeless when it came to making more personal judgements?

He shook his head, switching off the audio stack, happy that it was one o’clock in the morning and his body was at last ready to surrender to sleep. Upstairs, in the bathroom, he was looking for a new tube of toothpaste when the big framed etching of the naval dockyard caught his eye. The etching had been a present from Gabrielle. She’d spotted it in a local antiques shop and brought it home, wrapped in newspaper. Hanging it in the bathroom had been her idea. With its wealth of detail it was an extraordinary snapshot of mid-Victorian Portsmouth and she’d wanted it to become an everyday part of their lives.

Faraday gazed at it now. The tall brick chimneys belching smoke. The lines of horse-drawn wagons outside the Rigging House. The South Camber dock, brimming with navigational buoys. The comings and goings of thousands of men, tiny figures, perfectly realised. In that sense, these harbourside acres would have been the beating heart of the city, the very reason for its existence, but it was Gabrielle who’d pointed out something else. That this army of men, and all the generations before them, had helped build and protect the project that had become the British Empire. Without these skills, she said, the trade routes to the east would have been wide open. Without the sawmills, and the rope sheds, and the new machines for making blocks and pulleys, the French or the Dutch or the Portuguese would have feasted on India and Singapore, and those great pink-painted swathes of Africa. Without Pompey, in short, the cut and thrust of British imperial history would have been very different.

The truth of this had struck Faraday with some force and he thought about it again now. The Bargemaster’s House was a relic of the same period and talking to Steph Callan had made him realise how much he owed to the place. It had become a friend as well as a refuge and at times like now it was something else as well. A solace.

With its sturdy red-brick construction it was a survivor from the days when energy and confidence were the only currencies that mattered. The navy’s expansion had relied on keeping its supplies of raw materials out of reach of the marauding French, and so a canal had been dug to connect the dockyard on one side of the city to Langstone Harbour on the other. The old lock gates were still recognisable, a stone’s throw away down the harbourside path, and further sections had been planned to take barges beyond Arundel to London. In the event, the spread of the railways had doomed canals nationwide but the Bargemaster’s House remained, a souvenir from this extraordinary era, and Faraday felt eternally privileged to live in it. It connected him to something bigger than himself. It gave him a perspective untainted by the small disappointments of everyday life. And it was some consolation to know that Gabrielle had felt this too.

Before he finally turned in, Faraday stood at the bedroom window, gazing out at the blackness of the harbour, trying to picture the laden barges riding at anchor, waiting for dawn. Then he became aware of his own reflection in the glass: the bearded face, the greying hair, the hint of sag in his chest and belly. He managed a shrug, acknowledging the slow drip-drip of time, then turned to his PC, hearing the
ping
of an incoming email.