The Price Of Darkness (14 page)

‘Fuck me,’ he said softly, ‘Not just an arsehole copper then?’

 

Faraday had heard of Gibbon, Prentiss, Verne. Estate agents, he thought. Down in Old Portsmouth. The call had just been routed through to him by one of the squad’s management assistants.

‘Who am I speaking to?’

‘My name’s Fraser, Fraser Gibbon.’

‘And what can I do for you, Mr Gibbon?’

‘It’s in connection with this business in Port Solent. The murder. I’ve been meaning to call you all week.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I think we ought to talk.’

‘About what?’

‘About Mr Mallinder.’

‘You knew him?’

‘Yes.’

Faraday glanced at his watch. In a couple of hours he was due at the regular
Billhook
squad meeting. In the meantime everything else could wait.

‘I’m at Kingston Crescent police station. Do you want to come in?’

‘I’d prefer not. We’re down in Broad Street. Do you know the Camber Dock?’

 

The Camber lay at the heart of Old Portsmouth. The city had grown up around this ancient harbour, and it still served as home for a clutter of fishing boats, pilot launches and assorted leisure craft. Faraday loved the area. A thousand years of history had worked into the bones of the place and even now the developers hadn’t quite ruined its scruffy charm.

Gibbon, Prentiss, Verne had premises on the seaward side of the dock. Faraday paused outside for a moment, his attention caught by the properties in the window. A great deal of money had settled in this corner of the city and he briefly wondered what J-J’s Russian windfall would really buy him. A one-bedroom waterside apartment was up for sale at £210,000. How many postcards would his son have to sell to find that kind of sum?

Fraser Gibbon occupied an office at the back of the agency. He was a tall, sallow-faced man with thinning hair and a clammy handshake. He apologised at once for dragging Faraday away from his desk.

‘Not at all.’ Faraday took the offered seat. ‘I assume it’s important.’

‘It may be. I suspect that’s for you to judge. It’s just that I thought it best … you know … to volunteer myself before you came knocking at my door.’

‘Why would we want to do that?’

‘Because you’ll be going into Mallinder’s affairs. Or at least that’s my assumption. Am I right?’

Faraday said nothing. Gibbon looked uncertain for a moment. Then he tried to warm the atmosphere with a smile. The silence stretched and stretched.

‘You told me you knew Mr Mallinder,’ Faraday said at length. ‘Exactly how did that come about?’

‘He called in here one morning, back in the spring, April, I think. He said he was looking for a property.’

‘What kind of property?’

‘A house. It had to have at least five bedrooms and one of them had to be en suite. He wanted off-road parking and if possible a sea view. He was very specific.’

‘Did you know what he did for a living?’

‘No.’

‘Did you get the impression that this was some kind of business investment?’

‘On the contrary, he wanted to live in it. It was to be his family home. He said he had children. And he said his wife was pregnant.’

‘He wanted to move down here? You’re sure about that?’

‘Absolutely certain. Finding a property that size isn’t easy round here. They exist, of course, but they very rarely come up for sale. As it happens, Mr Mallinder was in luck.’

He explained that a very pretty Georgian house round the corner from the cathedral had suddenly come on to the market. The sea view was limited to a glimpse of the harbour from a dormer window in the roof and it lacked parking, but the accommodation was perfect and the owner was including an option on a lock-up garage round the corner.

‘Mr Mallinder went to see the property the following weekend. He spent no more than half an hour looking round but I could tell he fell in love with it. He put an offer in the following week, which I thought was strange.’

‘Why?’

‘Because his wife hadn’t had sight of the place. He seemed to be making all the decisions himself. When I made a little joke of it, he just said he knew his wife’s taste inside out. That may be true, of course, but moving house is a big decision. Especially at that kind of price.’

‘How much was it on for?’

‘£545,000.’

‘And his offer? Do you mind telling me?’

‘Not at all. He opened at £400,000. That was a marker, of course, to test the water. He would have gone much higher.’

‘So what happened?’

‘Nothing. Absolutely nothing. The owner turned down his offer, which I must say was no surprise, and Mallinder simply withdrew.’

‘Do you know why?’

‘Not then I didn’t, no.’

‘But now?’

‘Now …’ He nodded. ‘Yes, I do.’

Mallinder, he said, had reappeared in Old Portsmouth in late June. This time he had something much smaller in mind. Character was important, and a sea view would have been nice, but the key driver was price. He had £270,000 to spend, not a penny more. For that kind of money, said Gibbon, he was struggling already.

‘He still wanted all those bedrooms?’

‘Not at all. Three would have been ample. I asked him whether he’d thought about an apartment but he wasn’t keen.’

Mallinder returned the following week, late in the day. After discussing a handful of properties, he suggested a drink in one of the pubs round the corner. Over a glass or two of wine the two men became friends.

‘I’d no idea, of course, that he was in the property game himself but he was pretty hard-nosed when it came to negotiation and I remember not being surprised when he told me what he did for a living.’

‘What did he say, as a matter of interest?’

‘He said that he was in partnership with another developer, a man called Benskin. Basically they assembled land and then sold on with planning permission. It doesn’t sound like rocket science but to make decent money you have to be extremely choosy where you buy in the first place. Either that or bloody lucky. Mallinder, Benskin were a bit of a legend, real players in the land-assembly game. It was slow of me not to make the connection earlier.’

‘So you did know him?’

‘
Of
him, certainly.’

After the pub they’d shared a meal in a fish restaurant up beyond the cathedral.

‘To be frank, I liked him. I’m not married myself and he was incredibly charming, in fact excellent company. This is an old family firm and I pretty much run the show single-handed. Charlie Verne died years ago, Edgar Prentiss is in a nursing home, and my father has retired to the Costa del Sol. That leaves little me. After twenty years in the navy it can get pretty lonely, take my word for it.’

The friendship deepened. By now Mallinder had confessed that his original bid for a big family house had been in the nature of a gamble. His wife had wanted a larger house to cope with a new baby and he’d tried to bounce her into moving down to Portsmouth. By this time, though, she’d set her heart on a property in Wentworth and wouldn’t hear of leaving London.

‘So where did the smaller place fit?’

‘I’m not entirely sure. I think he was a bit reluctant to admit it but I sensed that the relationship might have been in trouble. On a number of occasions he told me he was fed up with living in London and by that I think he meant more than the location. Plus he seemed to have fallen in love with this place.’

‘You mean Old Portsmouth?’

‘Yes. But in a wider sense too. He could see the potential in the city. He could see the possibilities for
growth
. I know a lot of people bang on about the history of the place, and the up-and-coming university, and all the big sporting events and so forth, but Jonathan was different. He was prepared to put his money where his mouth was. He really
believed
it.’

‘What kind of money?’

‘Hundreds of thousands, on a fifty-fifty split.’

‘You were going into partnership?’

‘It was mooted, certainly. In fact in principle we had the makings of an outline agreement. My father played a very modest role in this business - he made all his money in the motor trade - but he’s always been more than generous when it comes to a sensible investment and he was certainly interested in this one.’

‘So what was it?’

‘Essentially, as far as he was concerned, it boiled down to more of the same. Jonathan and I were going to set up a limited company. With my local knowledge and his development expertise, the prospects looked extremely promising. Jonathan was right. This city is on the up. Chose the right targets and you can’t fail to make decent money.’

He quickly tallied a list of possible development opportunities. They ranged from a sprawling Victorian fort on the city’s south-eastern tip to a handful of more modest inner-city sites just begging for the wrecker’s ball. The Taj Mahal, thought Faraday. And the Halal Grocery Store.

‘What about his current work?’ Faraday said carefully. ‘What about Benskin, Mallinder?’

‘He’d cut and run.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Absolutely.’

‘He told you that?’

‘On several occasions.’

‘And had he discussed that with his partner? Stephen Benskin?’

‘I’ve no idea. Given the kind of man Jonathan was, the answer’s probably no. The more I got to know him, the more I realised the degree to which he relied on bluff. His life was one long poker game. But he was bloody good at it.’

‘Did he bluff you?’

‘I’m sure he did in some respects but that’s because it was so much part of his nature. Deep down I’m positive he meant it about coming down here and setting up a business together.’

‘You’ve got paperwork?’

‘Of course. That’s why I phoned you in the first place. I assumed you were bound to find his end of it. My copies are in here.’ He nodded down at the desk drawer.

‘May I see them?’

‘Be my guest.’

He unlocked the drawer and brought out a thinnish file. Faraday flicked quickly through. As well as a draft partnership agreement, heavily amended in pencil, there was a series of reports on prospective development targets.

Faraday looked up.

‘There’s no mention of the Gateway project. Up at Tipner.’

‘Why should there be?’

‘I understood Mallinder had an interest.’

‘He certainly never mentioned it to me. And if he had I’d have been astonished. Getting involved in something like that would run counter to everything he believed. The scheme’s far too complicated, for one thing. And, to be frank, the profit’s not there, certainly not on a scale to justify the effort you’d have to expend.’

Faraday returned to the file. In all, he counted a dozen development targets.

‘So what was the time frame here? When was it all going to happen?’

‘That was dependent on funding.’

‘His or yours?’

‘His. I have a line of credit I can call on from my father. With the balance from Jonathan, it would have been more than enough for our purposes. Jonathan needed to release funds from Benskin, Mallinder. He was very loath to go to the banks.’

‘You’re sure about that?’

‘Absolutely. Not only did he say so but it’s entirely in keeping with the kind of man he was. He hated the very idea of mortgaging himself to some third party if there was the prospect of the loan rolling on and on. Benskin, Mallinder were always very inventive in the way they financed their deals. With short-term money, Jonathan never had a problem. With an immature business, on the other hand, something like this …’ Gibbon nodded at the file, ‘… there had to be another way.’

‘Which meant pulling his share out of Benskin, Mallinder?’

‘Inevitably.’

‘I see.’

Faraday sat back a moment, trying to get this new development into perspective. For one thing, he now understood why Mallinder had gone to the lengths of leasing a house in Port Solent. He wasn’t down on the south coast to invest in fifty-three acres of Pompey scrapyard at all. He was down here to change the course of his entire life, with untold consequences for both his family and his business partner. Whether or not either of them had got wind of this latest project of his remained to be seen. What mattered now was turning this conversation into solid evidence.

‘I’ll need to get someone to take a statement.’ Faraday glanced at his watch. ‘Will that be a problem?’

THURSDAY, 7 SEPTEMBER 2006.
21.45

 

Winter was asleep when the buzzer rang. He struggled upright on the sofa, gazed at the television, fumbled for the remote to mute the volume. He’d had a bath earlier and the belt on Maddox’s dressing gown had somehow loosened. Parcelling himself up again, he padded into the hall, peering at the videophone. Bazza again. Second time in one day.

He buzzed the entry, unlocked his own front door and returned to the lounge. On screen a pair of mangy lions were disembowelling an antelope. The animal’s eyes were wide open, its long neck arched back, and Winter was trying to work out whether it was still alive when he heard a footfall behind him. Reflected in the big picture window was Bazza’s short, squat silhouette. Winter was about to suggest a nightcap when another figure, much bigger, stepped in from the hall. Brett West was wearing a light raincoat, beautifully cut, ankle length, unbelted. The sight of Winter in a woman’s dressing gown failed to put a smile on his face.

Bazza studied Winter a moment, then gave West a nod. West strode across to the window and pulled the curtains shut. Moments later he was back in the hall. Winter heard the double turn of the mortise lock. Not a good sign.

‘What’s this about then?’ Winter was still looking at Mackenzie.

‘Sit down.’

‘Why? What the fuck’s going on?’

West was back in the room. When Winter refused to move, he took a step towards him. Mackenzie lifted a cautionary finger. West stopped, then shrugged.