The Take (30 page)

By the time Winter had finished his lemon sorbet and paid the bill,
Crazy Lady
was attracting a great deal of attention. Among the figures clambering aboard were two paramedics in hi-vis jackets. He was curious to know what they might find in the master bedroom, but a glance at his watch told him there was no point hanging round to find out. With luck, he thought, Hennessey might just have succumbed to a heart attack.

The restaurant obliged Winter by phoning for a cab. It took five minutes or so to arrive, a sleek Peugeot with a guy young enough to be his son at the wheel. Winter threw his hold-all onto the back seat and settled cheerfully beside it.

‘Airport, please,’ he said. ‘Flight’s at half-four.’

Epilogue

Friday, 7 July, 1400

Just over a week later, Dawn Ellis ran into Rick Stapleton at Fratton nick.

‘I just wanted to say thank you,’ she said, waiting for the plastic cup to drop in the hot-drinks dispenser.

‘Thank you for what?’

‘Keeping Kennedy out of my knickers.’

Rick smiled. On the basis of statements from Kevin and Shelley Beavis, Kennedy had been charged with GBH in relation to the Donald Duck incidents. In view of his previous convictions, he’d been refused bail and was now on remand in Winchester prison.

Rick waited for Dawn to finish with the machine, then inserted a coin of his own. There was something bothering him about Addison. He was OK now about the guy being innocent, but why hadn’t he fingered Kennedy? The bloke had put on all kinds of pressure to enlist his editing skills. According to Shelley, he’d even made verbal threats. Wasn’t it obvious that the mask was Kennedy’s plant?

‘Of course it was.’

‘So why didn’t he tell us?’

‘Because he was certain he’d get the verdict in court. Plus he wanted to protect Shelley. He thought she’d be genuinely at risk if Kennedy thought she’d been talking.’

‘Really? Was she that great a shag?’

‘It’s nothing to do with shagging. He believes in her. He’s convinced she’ll go the whole way.’

‘Yeah, and some …’

The best part of a year with Rick should have prepared Dawn for this. There was no way he wouldn’t interpret every human relationship in terms of body fluids. Motives like generosity or belief just didn’t figure.

‘Listen.’ Dawn was watching Rick over the brim of her milkless tea. ‘There’s something else you ought to know about Addison.’

‘What’s that?’

‘He’s gay.’

‘
Gay?
Who says?’

‘Shelley.’

‘And you believe her?’

‘I do. It takes time with Shelley, but you get there in the end.’

Rick was staring at her. Disbelief gave way to bewilderment, then irritation, and finally an expression dangerously close to embarrassment. He should have known. He should have picked up the clues: the obsessive tidiness, the way the guy dressed, his enjoyment of the subtler touches, the icy self-control. It was all there. And he, of all people, had missed it.

‘You wanted a result,’ Dawn pointed out. ‘And you thought you’d got one. Why bother with the rest of the story?’

Rick was still staring at her.

‘Have you told anyone else?’ he asked at last. ‘About him being gay?’

‘No.’

‘Thank fuck for that.’ He checked both ways down the empty corridor. ‘Our little secret, eh?’

Faraday escaped early from an informal sandwich lunch with Hartigan and drove north through the city, out towards Petersfield.

His divisional boss, somewhat to his surprise, had been almost effusive. The Hennessey investigation, by confirming that the surgeon was alive, had been a masterly demonstration of exactly what lengths Hartigan’s CID squad would go to in a bid to establish the real truth in a misper inquiry. The bag of bones and pig offal recovered by the POLSA team on the Gunwharf site wasn’t, alas, enough evidence to warrant any kind of charge against Parrish, but the developers, nonetheless, had been generous in their thanks. It was, wrote the company’s MD, a perfect example of the police and big business working in partnership for the greater good of the city as a whole. The consequences of disinterring that same bag a couple of years down the line just didn’t bear thinking about.

Willard, in an earlier meeting, had been somewhat blunter. As far as Hennessey was concerned, the whole job had been down to Winter. He’d set the hare running and he’d led most of the pursuit. Not because he’d been especially conscientious or dutiful, but because the guy’s MO was starting to verge on professional suicide. Pursuing hunches was one thing. Doing what Winter had done – declaring total UDI and running his very own investigation – was quite another. Only the fact that his missus was dying had kept his name off the internal charge sheet.

And Addison?

Both Willard and Hartigan had ignored it. Never underestimate the persuasiveness of circumstantial evidence. Never penalise guys hungry for a quick result. Mistakes happen. Gold star to young Dawn for sticking with it. Damages, alas, for Mr Addison. But here’s hoping Lee Kennedy goes down.

Faraday’s route took him past Bedhampton. Winter’s bungalow was up there somewhere, and as far as Faraday knew, his wife was back in residence, buoyed by a care package from social services. One of her daily visitors was evidently a psychiatric nurse, and Faraday hoped that he or she had the time to spare for Winter as well. It was still far from clear exactly what had happened in Jersey, but the front-page splash in the
Jersey Evening Post
, gleefully pinned to noticeboards in police stations throughout Portsmouth, had been explicit about Hennessey’s luck in escaping with his life. Another hour or so and the guy would have been history. As it was, the journos had got there in time. Thanks to an anonymous phone call.

Had Winter somehow been implicated in this little stunt? Faraday didn’t know, and the fact that Hennessey had set his face against any kind of formal investigation made it unlikely that he’d ever find out. Pumped dry and repaired,
Crazy Lady
had already slipped away, bound for God knows where. Winter, meanwhile, was now on extended compassionate, trying to do his best for Joannie. Forty paracetamol had done nothing for her prognosis, but, fingers crossed, she might just see the summer out. Unlike Vanessa Parry.

Matthew Prentice lived in an estate on the southern edges of Petersfield. The houses, judging by the rash of extensions, had once been council but were now privately owned. Prentice lived in the one with a purple door near the end of the street. Faraday knew he’d be in because the young lad he’d talked to at the café had phoned him and said so.

‘He wants a word,’ he’d mumbled. ‘Said it would be cool if you called round.’

A middle-aged woman in jeans and a nice-looking blouse opened the door. To Faraday’s surprise, she turned out to be Prentice’s mother.

‘It’s my house,’ she explained briefly. ‘He’s in the front room.’

Faraday remembered the face from the car park after the funeral: the gelled hair, the diamond ear-stud, the tilt of the chin shadowed by a couple of days’ growth of beard. Prentice got up from the sofa and extended a hand. Another surprise.

‘Well?’

Faraday wasn’t in the mood for small talk. Prentice was looking confused.

‘Is this, like, official? Only—’

‘Of course it is, Mr Prentice. You got a message to me. You’ve got something to say. So just say it.’

Prentice was looking at the carpet. Faraday was aware of the open door behind him. Was the mother still outside in the hall? Was this her idea?

‘It’s about that woman,’ Prentice began.

‘Vanessa Parry?’

‘The woman who died. I was gonna leave some flowers.’

‘Yeah, without your name on. I saw them in the car park. In the back of that motor of yours. Brave man. Say you’re sorry. Leave a blank for your name. Then piss off.’

Despite his every best intention, despite telling himself that he had to stay calm, be grown up about it, Faraday knew it would come to this. A moment’s recollection of the photographs, a single remembered glimpse of the interior of the crushed Fiesta, and he’d thrown the rulebook out of the window. Maybe Winter had a point. Maybe, in the end, it came down to this. Red, the colour of anger. Red, the colour of blood.

‘So what happened?’ Faraday was trying to rein himself in.

‘I was on the phone. I remember now.’

‘Oh, yeah? And why’s that?’

Prentice didn’t answer. Faraday had established that the lad in the café had just been given a season ticket for Fratton Park, £320 worth of spontaneous present. The name on the credit-card slip had been Prentice’s. Beyond any reasonable doubt, he’d bought the lad’s silence.

Faraday could hear Prentice’s mother in the kitchen now, noisily putting the kettle on. All she’d wanted was her boy to tell the truth. And at last, for whatever reason, he’d done it.

The door was still open. Faraday closed it.

‘OK, son, this is what you’re going to do. You’re going down to Kingston Crescent police station. You’re going to ask for PC Barrington. You’re going to tell him the truth about the crash. You’re going to tell him you were on the phone when you hit the Fiesta, and that afterwards you bribed the lad to cover for you. PC Smith will sit you in an interview room with your solicitor and a tape recorder and you’ll go over the whole story again.’ Faraday nodded towards the door. ‘You want your mother to go with you?’

Prentice shook his head.

‘What happens afterwards?’ he muttered.

‘You’ll be charged.’

‘What with?’

‘Perverting the course of justice. You’ve interfered with a witness. Courts take a dim view of that. You’ll be lucky to avoid a jail sentence.’

‘
Jail?
’ Prentice sank onto the sofa. For a while, he did nothing but study his hands. When he finally looked up, his eyes were glistening. ‘I just wanted to say I was sorry,’ he said hopelessly. ‘I don’t need any of this.’

Faraday gave him time to compose himself. If he felt anything, he felt weary. The longer he did the job, he thought, the less certain his take on what really made people tick. We’ve all got in a muddle. We’ve all lost the plot. Actions and reactions, causes and effects. One tiny moment, and a life blown away.

‘The whole story,’ he repeated stonily. ‘OK?’