The Take (15 page)

Thirteen

Thursday, 22 June, 0800

Marta had gone by the time Faraday awoke. He felt for her body the way a blind man might, his hands reaching out in the expectation of warm flesh, but the bed was empty and the only evidence he could find of her presence was his own clothes, neatly folded on the chair by the bedroom door. He got up, knowing at once that it was going to hurt. The sun was already high and the dazzle of light from the harbour spiked the inside of his skull.

Downstairs in the kitchen, swallowing his second glass of water, he caught sight of the note. She’d retrieved an old envelope from somewhere and scrawled a mobile number on the back. ‘Call me’, she’d added. ‘Before lunch’.

Call me? Faraday, still naked, gazed out of the window at the spot where her car had been. He’d built an entire working life on the painstaking assembly of evidence and he found himself doing it now, amazed at how little he really knew about her. She lived somewhere out beyond Fareham, in the sprawl of suburbs that stretched west towards Southampton. She had a dog called Gaudi, a spaniel of some kind. She had a job at IBM at the big headquarters up at North Harbour, something moderately high-powered. She drove a sexy car with immense panache. And she was great in bed. About everything else – her private life, her friends, whether or not she had any kids – Faraday was literally clueless.

He filled the washing-up bowl and plunged his face in. The shock of the cold water made him gasp, but the thunder in his head began to quieten and he managed a couple of slices of toast without throwing up. The pleasures of nights like that were distinctly double-edged. The sex was brilliant because it had been so long coming, but the hangover was brutal because you just weren’t used to it. Reasonable trade-off, though. And long overdue.

Back upstairs, he checked his watch, then began to dress. This morning there was another session with Hartigan and the senior management team, the second of the week’s visits to Planet Make-Believe, and the last thing he needed was one of those reproving silences that followed a late entrance. On his way out of the house, back in the kitchen looking for his car keys, he spotted the photocopy of the accident report that had come down from Accident Investigation in Winchester. Marta must have been taking a look at it because it lay open at one of the location photographs that showed the whole scene. Goodbye Fairyland, Faraday thought. Welcome to real life.

Prentice’s Vectra had come to rest at a slight angle across the road, leaving a trail of broken glass from the shattered front headlights and indicators. The bonnet of the estate car had folded upwards, distorting the frame around the windscreen, and the windscreen itself had become dislodged. The Fiesta lay some ten metres down the street, spun backwards by the impact. The front of the car had virtually ceased to exist and there were gouge-marks in the tarmac where the gearbox and engine outriggers had scored the road surface.

Faraday gazed at the image, aware of the blood pulsing to his head again. He’d been through the report a number of times now, trying to follow the calculations Accident Investigation had made. They had started with the available evidence and worked backwards. They had used computer software and measurements of distortion in the body shells to calculate relative impact speeds. They had done complex sums around something called momentum exchange to reconstruct exactly what had happened. Taking into account a margin of error of three per cent, they’d sworn by the accuracy of their figures. Which was just as well, because that was exactly what the court would require them to do. And their conclusion?

Faraday closed the report and slipped it into his briefcase. Matthew Prentice had been travelling at fifty-three miles an hour when he’d killed Vanessa Parry. There’d been no skid marks on the road, and to Faraday this was the conclusive evidence. The guy had been on the phone, checking some figure or other in the file the young traffic cop had retrieved from the car. Prentice had had the mobile in one hand and a biro in the other and he was probably steering with his knees. Whether or not he’d looked up before smashing into the Fiesta was immaterial. Average response time in a situation like this was a second and a half. At 23.6 metres a second, he could have been thirty-five metres away and been able to do absolutely bugger all about it.

Faraday closed his eyes a moment, fighting the hot gust of nausea bubbling up from his stomach. Life, in the shape of Marta, had suddenly been kind to him, but those last few seconds, from where Vanessa sat, didn’t bear thinking about.

Dawn Ellis was a couple of minutes away from Southsea nick when she remembered that Rick Stapleton had a couple of days off. Somehow, among all the grief about abstractions and lack of cover, he’d managed to persuade Faraday to honour a long-ago promise. His partner’s fortieth birthday was tomorrow. Rick had lots of time off stacked up and he wanted to make the occasion special.

The house that Rick shared with his partner was in one of the leafy Thomas Owen crescents in the heart of Southsea. They’d only been there since Christmas, but Dawn already felt she knew the place inside out. Sharing a car on one of the more tedious surveillance jobs, Rick would agonise for hours about the choice of wallpaper for the upstairs lounge, or the aesthetic consequences of favouring whisper grey over string beige when it came to offsetting the pastel shades in the larger of the two bathrooms. To Dawn, whose interest in decorating began and ended with the B&Q catalogue, this kind of talk was a joke, but it was altogether typical of Rick that he should have plunged in with such gusto. The day he bought himself a year’s subscription to
Traditional Homes
was the day she knew he was hooked.

The house lay in a terrace of five, with big pillared entrances, tall sash windows and ornate wrought-iron verandas on the first floor. When Rick came to the door, he was wearing an apron flaked with prawn shells and looked harassed.

Dawn was grinning.

‘Aren’t you going to invite me in?’

Rick stepped back without a word. After the heat of the street, the house felt almost sepulchral: cool greens in the spacious reaches of the hall, beautifully framed pictures on the wall, extravagant stands of flowers in tall Chinese vases and a glimpse of a carpeted staircase winding grandly upwards. The contrast with the suburban chaos Dawn normally associated with the domestic side of CID life couldn’t have been more marked. No wonder so few of Rick’s colleagues had ever made it past the door.

Rick led the way downstairs. The basement seemed to extend for ever, as carefully thought-out as the hall, and Dawn found herself in a huge kitchen at the back of the property. The terracotta tiles on the floor looked new and the room was flooded with light from a pair of big glass doors that opened into an exquisitely landscaped garden.

Rick was obviously in the middle of preparing something elaborate. A long pine table was covered in baking trays, and there was a big heap of discarded prawn shells on yesterday’s copy of the
News
. Rick’s partner, Callum, ran a legendary French restaurant down in Old Portsmouth, but the fact that the man had been cooking most of his life wouldn’t have put Rick off for a second. Competitive as ever, he’d have bought himself a handful of books and set to.

Dawn was looking at the cafetière bubbling softly on the Rayburn. Under pressure, Rick could get incredibly crabby, but she asked for coffee just the same.

‘Help yourself,’ he grunted, mashing several cloves of garlic and scraping the results into a blender.

‘Expecting company?’

‘Coupla friends.’

‘How many?’

‘Forty-five, give or take.’ He frowned with concentration, adding yoghurt and a spoonful of spices to the blender.

‘Tonight?’

‘Tomorrow.’ Rick waved a hand at a line of casserole dishes, carefully sealed with clingfilm. ‘This lot goes in the chiller. Along with everything else.’

‘What’s that, then? The Baden Powell school of cookery?’

‘Very funny.’

Dawn poured herself a mug of coffee. She wanted to talk about Shelley Beavis.

‘That’s work.’ Rick was chopping spring onions now. ‘How fucking dull.’

‘Not to me.’

She told him about the encounter at Jimmy’s and the late-night phone call that had followed, repeating the dialogue word for word. The rhythm of Rick’s chopping began to slow.

‘What’s all that about, then?’

‘I don’t know. But I’m going to find out.’

She explained her need to build a better case against Addison. He was looking across at her, one hand still on the blender, impatience written all over his face. As far as he was concerned, the Donald Duck thing was history. They’d nicked Addison, dredged up loads of evidence, and the rest was down to the lawyers. The mask alone should put him away.

‘What if he didn’t do it?’

‘He did,’ Rick said shortly. ‘You obviously weren’t listening.’

‘I thought I heard him say he didn’t do it.’

‘You did, love. How rude of me not to believe him.’ Rick was washing watercress now, shaking each sprig out over the sink. When he’d finished, he turned to face her again. ‘Look, where is this getting us? Only, I’m really busy.’

‘It’s getting me a date with my new friend.’

‘Are you serious? You’re really going to meet this guy?’

‘That’s right. That’s why I’m here.’

Rick gazed at her a moment longer, trying to work out whether she meant it or not, then began to shake his head.

‘No way,’ he said. ‘There’s absolutely no fucking way I’m getting involved.’

‘I just need back-up, that’s all.’

‘You’re right.’

‘You needn’t actually meet him. Outside will be cool. Nearby. Whatever. It’s your call. You choose the time.’

‘You’re talking
today
?’ He flapped a hand at the dishes around the kitchen. ‘What am I supposed to do here? Just abandon it? Just walk out? This is supposed to be a
surprise
, love. Callum’s back this afternoon. Three. Just after. I’ve got all this to do, plus two other courses, all before three. Tonight we’re going over to Bosham. Friends.’

‘Just after three, then. Perfect.’

‘But
why?
What makes you so sure we’ve got it wrong?’

‘Shelley. The girl.’

‘What about her?’

‘There’s shitloads of stuff she’s not telling us. And most of it has to do with Addison.’

‘Yeah? And just how can you be sure about that?’

Dawn looked at him a moment, then dipped a finger in the yoghurt mix and licked it dry.

‘Womanly intuition.’ She gave him an extra-big smile and then nodded at the apron. ‘Half-three be OK? Give you time to change?’

Ronald McIntyre, Nikki’s father, lived in a handsomely converted barn on the edge of the village of Meonstoke, tucked away in the Meon Valley north of Fareham. Winter parked his car on the curve of gravel in front of the barn and took a moment to admire the view. A newly mown lawn stretched down to the river where a couple of ducks, in convoy with their young, were paddling slowly upstream. On the other side of the house, a sizeable kitchen garden featured a stand of runner beans and several lines of tomato plants. In the little window beside the front door, someone had stuck up a poster for the forthcoming village fête.

Winter got out of the car, smelling the sweetness of the air. Joannie would have loved this, he thought, realising that his choice of tense had already consigned her to the grave.

Ronald McIntyre was a thin, erect, troubled-looking man in his late sixties. His hair, combed straight back, was beginning to curl over the collar of his shirt and his blotched face suggested a serious interest in alcohol. Despite the weather, he was wearing a heavyish blazer, badged with some kind of naval insignia.

Sherry in a cut-glass decanter was already waiting on a silver tray in the lounge. Winter stood in the window while McIntyre poured two glasses. The view stretched down to the river and up to the soft green folds of chalk downland beyond. The ducks, Winter noted, had gone.

‘What’s your interest in Hennessey, Inspector?’

Winter accepted the promotion with the faintest of smiles and explained about the scene in the Marriott hotel room. McIntyre listened attentively, taking tiny sips of sherry in between nods. Winter, who preferred sitting to standing, wondered why this man was treating the encounter like a cocktail party. He’d rarely met anyone so insistently formal.

‘A lot of blood, you say? In the bathroom?’

‘Fair amount.’

‘Good.’ He offered Winter a small, chill smile. ‘Couldn’t happen to a nicer chap. Here.’

He led Winter across the lounge. Among the collection of framed photographs on top of the grand piano were half a dozen of a striking-looking girl with a lovely almond-shaped face, a near-perfect mouth and a cap of very black hair. Looking harder, Winter could see McIntyre in the tilt of her chin. The same determination not to be bested, the same sense of an answer readied for a question yet to come.

‘Nikki,’ he announced bleakly.

The photographs charted Nikki’s progress from childhood to her mid-twenties. She’d shed weight early on. She liked horses. And, in what seemed to be the most recent of the shots, she’d acquired an admirer in the shape of a thickset young man in a polo-neck sweater with glasses and an uneasy smile.

‘Married?’

‘Boyfriend. Local chap. Young farmers club. Never really liked him, to tell you the truth.’

Winter was peering at the other photographs, most of which featured McIntyre himself in a variety of foreign looking locations. He was wearing naval uniform in all of them, and as the face aged, the gold braid became heavier.

‘Captain by the finish.’ McIntyre reached for one of the bigger frames. ‘Not a bad life.’

‘You ever miss it?’

‘To tell you the truth, Inspector, yes. It hasn’t been a picnic lately, believe me.’

Over a second sherry, still standing, McIntyre told Winter the story of his last few years. The account was strangely clipped, as if he’d been reading it, each succeeding crisis carefully tagged with a date. It sounded more like a briefing than a chunk of someone’s life, and it slowly dawned on Winter that this formality of McIntyre’s was nothing more than an attempt to reimpose control on something that had obviously gone so catastrophically wrong. Join the club, Winter thought grimly, accepting a third glass of Tio Pepe.