Cut to Black

Chapter fourteen

FRIDAY, 21 MARCH 2003, 01.20

Faraday was still asleep when the call came in. He'd left his mobile next door, lodged in a corner of the sofa, and it was Eadie who shook him gently awake.

"Yours." She blew in his ear. "Might be important."

Naked, Faraday made his way into the lounge. A pale grey light washed through the big picture windows and he could see a lid of cloud clamped over the Isle of Wight. Dimly, he remembered that his son was asleep in the spare bedroom. Unless, of course, something else had happened.

"DI Faraday." He didn't recognise the number. "Major Crimes."

"It's Graham Wallace."

"Yeah?" Faraday rubbed his eyes. "Something come up?"

Wallace began to describe a call he'd just taken from someone he described as 'our mate'. He wanted a meet within the next couple of days. Wallace had promised to get back to him as soon as he'd checked his diary and now needed some advice. Faraday was still wrestling with the implications of this sudden development when he looked up to find Eadie standing beside the sofa. She was wearing an unfastened cotton wrap and wanted to know whether it was too early for tea. Faraday said yes to the tea and took the mobile back to the bedroom.

By the time Eadie joined him, the conversation was over and Faraday was sitting on the edge of the bed, deep in thought. Eadie looked down at him, the tray in her hands.

"Something you're going to share with me?" she enquired drily.

Paul Winter had been up since dawn. Nights when he couldn't sleep — and there were more and more of them he'd taken to prowling round the bungalow, chasing his insomnia from room to room, often pausing in the tidy little lounge to reach for one of Joannie's well-thumbed paperbacks, giving the first page or two the chance to ease him back to sleep. On occasions, to his surprise, it worked. Half a chapter of Jeffrey Archer had the coshing power of Nembutal. But lately even the bludgeon of Archer's prose had left him alert and fretful, turning on the radio, pulling back the curtains, scouring the late winter baldness of the back garden for signs of what the coming day might bring.

The postman arrived earlier than usual, a cascade of junk mail through the letter box. Nursing his second mug of tea, Winter stooped to the mat. He wasn't sure what demographic these people used when they drew up their hit lists of likely punters but lately he'd become slightly depressed by the flood of geriatric appeals. Help the Aged. Saga Insurance. Motability. Forty-five, Winter told himself, was the prime of a man's life, but the sight of yet another warning about prostate cancer had begun to make him wonder. How come these envelope-stuffers knew he was feeling so washed-up?

The biggest of this morning's missives was a novelty: Guide Dogs for the Blind. He returned to the kitchen, meaning to bin the lot, then had second thoughts. The last couple of months, he'd thought seriously about getting himself a dog. The couple next door had one. There was a pretty redhead with the tightest jeans imaginable who walked a greyhound on the top of Portsdown Hill. Saturdays at Asda, shoppers on foot lashed their poodles to a special bar beside the trolley park.

He'd watched these people and their pets, idly puzzling about what a dog brought to their lives, and he'd concluded that the right choice of animal nothing mad could offer the perfect antidote to his increasing sense of solitariness. At three in the morning, it might be nice to have something to talk to.

Winter perched himself on the kitchen stool and shook out the contents of the envelope. A folksy collection of black and white photographs caught his eye, domestic snaps featuring Labradors and their unsighted owners. A mere 5 a week, according to the copy beneath, could make all the difference when it came to training another of these miracle wowsers. Was that too high a price when someone's life might be transformed?

Winter returned to the biggest of the photos, a shot of an eager-looking Labrador threading a portly gent in a long raincoat through a busy shopping centre. Without the dog, this man would be banged up at home, dependent on the Tesco phone delivery service.

Thanks to Rover, and trillions of caring donors, he could toddle off to the shops any time he liked.

Winter nodded to' himself amused. Half close his eyes, and he could be the man in the picture, someone so helpless, so out of touch, that only a guide dog could map his path through life. Maybe that's what he really needed, thought Winter. Maybe he'd got so old, so preoccupied, so blind, that something as tasty as Tumbril had passed him by.

Last night, sitting in Mackenzie's den, he hadn't let on about his own ignorance of this covert operation, but the more he'd thought about it afterwards, the more annoyed he'd felt about his own failure to clock whatever was going on. There was always the possibility, of course, that Mackenzie had got it wrong. Serious villains were famously paranoid and they often mistook a casual passing interest for a full-scale operation, booted and spurred. But on the evidence of last night, he rather suspected that Mackenzie wasn't kidding himself.

Christ, he even had a code name.

Operation Tumbril? Winter shook his head. His entire CID career had been dedicated to sensing the likely passage of events. Keep your ear to the ground, learn to tune out all the rubbish, and a footfall half a world away could tell you everything you needed to know. Yet here he was, dumb as the next detective, totally unaware that someone way above him had emptied the piggy bank, rolled up their sleeves, and decided to take on Bazza Mackenzie.

The thought, even this late in the day, put a smile on his face. Given the success of Mackenzie's recent makeover drug baron turned millionaire businessman the case would be a real bastard to make. Any serious bid to hurt him would doubtless revolve around dismantling Bazza's vast commercial empire but Mackenzie wasn't joking when he talked about the people he paid to advise him, and they'd have drawn up a survival kit for bent millionaires.

Rule one was stay away from drugs: no possession, no supply, absolutely no involvement with the distribution chain. The money-laundering legislation seemed to be getting more powerful by the month, but even under the latest set of rules Winter thought you still had to prove some kind of drugs-related offence. In view of the mountain of goodies he stood to lose, the last thing Mackenzie would therefore risk was a criminal charge. That way, he'd hand the Tumbril boys the victory of their dreams. So how would they do it? And why now, when Bazza seemed so armour-clad?

Winter helped himself to more tea. Bazza's terse mention of Whale Island was intriguing. On one level it made perfect sense to ring-fence an operation like this, to bury it away from canteen chatter, yet on another level the strategy plainly hadn't worked. And if Bazza himself knew about Tumbril, then who else was reading the files? Winter reached for the sugar bowl. The implication, of course, was that Bazza numbered coppers on his payroll, tame porkers uniformed or otherwise with their snouts in Bazza's trough. That in itself would be no surprise Winter knew a number of DCs who'd gone to the same school, drank in the same pubs, and would doubtless regard the odd titbit from Bazza's table as a gesture of mate ship but what gave last night's revelation a real edge was the fact that Tumbril was far from common knowledge. For once in their lives, the bosses had managed to keep a secret. So who was keeping Bazza in the loop?

This single question floated Winter through the next hour of his day.

He thought about it in the bath. He drew up a mental list of candidates over breakfast. Finally, sitting on the John, he realised that there were cleverer ways of carving a piece of Tumbril for himself. He was looking at the wrong target. It wasn't Whale Island or the covert ops team that mattered. It was Bazza himself.

He'd left his mobile on the window sill. Reaching up, he dialled a number from memory. She took a while to answer and sounded badly hung-over.

"Mist." Winter was smiling. "We need to talk."

DC Jimmy Suttle never made promises he intended to break. Half past eight in the morning found him dropping Trudy off at the entrance to Gunwharf. She was due for an appointment at her GP's surgery and needed to get home to sort herself out. Leaning in through the car window, she gave Suttle a lingering kiss and told him to forget everything she'd said about Dave Pullen.

"Yeah?"

Suttle checked his image in the rear-view mirror and engaged gear. He'd phone her later about tonight. Maybe they could drive into Southsea for a curry or something. Then he was gone.

Minutes later, he found himself a parking space in Ashburton Road.

There was a squad meeting at Kingston Crescent scheduled for 9.15 and DI Lamb was merciless about latecomers but he still had forty minutes to get one or two things off his chest. A succession of CID colleagues, older and wiser, had warned him about the perils of mixing your private and professional lives. Unless you had some kind of death wish, letting the job fuck the inside of your head was the last thing you ever did. Standing on the pavement, staring up at Pullen's top-floor flat, Suttle permitted himself a grim smile. They were wrong.

At the top of the fire escape, he tried Pullen's door. It was locked.

He knocked twice, yelled Pullen's name, gave the handle a shake, and toyed briefly with kicking it in. Back on the pavement, aware of twitching curtains in the flats opposite, he walked round the corner and rang the top bell. Two days ago, the name space alongside had been empty. Now, in fat black capitals, DAVE PULLEN.

A third try with the bell produced nothing from the adjoining speakerphone. Checking his watch, Suttle rang the ground-floor flat.

At length, there came a small querulous voice through the speakerphone.

Suttle introduced himself, offering his warrant card a minute or so later when the door finally opened. The woman must have been eighty.

The cardigan was matted with ancient soup stains and when Suttle repeated that he was CID, she thought he'd come about the recent spate of doorstep milk thefts.

"Both bottles went last week." She peered up at him. "I'd buy from the shops if I could get there."

Suttle left her in the cavernous hall. Three flights up, he paused on the top landing. Pullen's was one of only two apartments. To Suttle's surprise, the door to the flat was open. Even at ten paces, there was a perceptible smell of shit. He paused by the door, called Pullen's name. The smell was much stronger now. He called again, hesitated a second or two, then pushed inside.

The gloom of the tiny lobby had an almost physical texture, thickened by the stench. From memory, Pullen's living room lay beyond the door on the right. Suttle nudged it open with his foot, alert now, aware of the thud of his own pulse. Situations like these, it was wise to have back-up, at the very least a message left with someone who'd know where to come looking. Like this, totally solo, he was horribly exposed.

Another rule broken.

"Pullen?"

Suttle looked round the chaos of the living room. The curtains were closed against the grey March morning. There was a copy of yesterday's News folded across the back of a chair and the collection of football magazines he recognised from his last visit. Pullen must have tripped over them because they were scattered everywhere, big cover-page faces of Beckham and Thierry Henry peering up from odd corners of the room.

On a work surface in the tiny kitchenette, Suttle found a half-eaten kebab and chips in a nest of stained newsprint. Beside it, an open can of Tennant's Super. He studied it a moment, aware that this abandoned room was beginning to resemble a crime scene. There were things he should do here, steps he should take. Any more freelancing, and he was in danger of tainting the evidence.

"Pullen? Where the fuck are you?"

He heard a faint moan. Motionless in the half-darkness, Suttle strained every nerve to pick up the faintest movement. It happened again, louder this time. Somewhere close, he thought. And definitely human.

Back in the hall, the first door he tried opened into a narrow bathroom. The rail for the shower curtain was hanging from the ceiling and the washer had gone on one of the taps in the hand basin. He stepped back into the hall again and pushed lightly at the sole remaining door. It was open already, a foot or two ajar, but the moment he stirred the air inside, the smell enveloped him, the hot, meaty stench of shit.

This time, the window was draped with a blanket. Daylight leaked in around the edges and in the semi-darkness Suttle could just make out a figure on a bed. He fumbled against the inside wall until his fingers found the switch. He snapped on the light, bracing himself for whatever might happen next. Almost expecting some kind of physical attack, he found himself looking at a naked male body spreadeagled on the bare springs of the bed frame. Wrists and arms had been cable-tied to the edges of the frame and the flesh was red-raw where the trussed body had tried to struggle free. A conclusive ID was difficult because the head was covered in a grubby pillowslip but there was no problem guessing a name. Deja-vu, Suttle thought. Dave Pullen. Had to be.

He stepped forward, meaning to remove the pillowslip, but then stopped.

Beneath the bed, visible through the bare springs, was one of the football magazines, open at a double-page spread of a team in red shirts with the Carlsberg logo scrolled across their chests. The photo had been positioned at ground zero, directly beneath Pullen's arse.

Michael Owen, in the front row, had taken a direct hit. Another heroic curl of turd had obliterated the bottom half of Emil Heskey. A third, a huge dump, had splat ted across most of the back row. Half the Liverpool team wiped out by the contents of Pullen's flabby bowels. No wonder the place stank.

Suttle at last removed the pillowslip. Pullen stared up at him, his eyes huge in his parchment face. A length of gaffer tape sealed his mouth and it gave Suttle immense pleasure to tear it off. Pullen yelped in pain, then swallowed hard and began to lick his lips.

"Thank fuck," he kept saying. "Thank fuck."

"Thank fuck for what?"

"You. Jesus…" He closed his eyes and shook his head. "Just get me out of here."

The mattress and a duvet had been thrown against the far wall. Suttle retrieved the duvet and draped it over Pullen's naked body. As he did so, he noticed a line of DIY tools neatly arranged on the carpet beside the bed. With the electric drill came a roll of extension cable and a plug. The Stanley knife looked brand new and there was a generous selection of blades. Help yourself time.

"What's this, then? DIY?"

"Don't ask."

"I just did. So tell me. What happened?"

Pullen shook his head. It had been a game, one too many bevvies. He didn't want to talk about it.

"Whose game?"

"No way." Another shake of the head, more emphatic this time.

"Tell me."

"Fucking no way."

"Was it the Scousers?"

"The Scousers} Shit, no. That's the whole fucking point." His eyes had gone down to the tools beside the bed.

"What point? Whose point?"

"No, please, just get these fucking ties off me. Then maybe we'll talk."

Suttle gazed down at him. A couple of nights ago this man had taken a billiard cue to Trudy Gallagher. In bed last night, on the promise that Suttle could keep a secret, she'd spelled it out for him, blow by blow. Pullen had said he was doing her a favour. He'd told her a smacking would mend her ways. This morning, outraged, Suttle had decided to administer a little correctional punishment of his own. Now this.

Pullen had started up again about the cable ties. He was stiff as fuck. He needed a wash. He had loads of stuff to sort out but absolutely no interest in making any kind of statement, official or otherwise. Wasn't that right up Suttle's street? Wasn't he doing him a favour, sparing him all that paperwork?

Dimly, Suttle was beginning to put it all together: the newly scrawled name on the speakerphone downstairs, the open door, the carefully recreated tableau in the bedroom, the hostage offered up and waiting, the shiny blades beside the bed, the open invitation to a spot of help-yourself revenge.

"Aren't you going to do anything, then? Just standing there?"

"Afraid not, Dave." Suttle made a show of checking his watch. "I've got an important meeting at nine. All kinds of shit if I'm late.

Listen' he began to back towards the door, away from the reeking magazine 'if I get a moment later, I'll try and pop back, OK?"

"Fuck you."

"Yeah, and fuck you too." Suttle smiled at him. "Bye then, and, hey …" He raised a derisive thumb. "Good luck."

He left the room, pulling the door to behind him. A pace or two down the hall, Pullen began to yell. Anything, he said. He'd do anything to get these fucking ties off. Just name it. Anything. Suttle paused, let him plead a little longer, then returned to the bedroom.

Breathe through your mouth, and the smell wasn't quite so bad.

"Anything, Dave?"

"Yeah… Fuck you… Yeah."

"So did Bazza do this to you?" He beamed down at the bed. "Or is that too much to ask?"

The post-mortem on Daniel Kelly was scheduled to start shortly after nine, the first on the morning's mortuary list. Eadie Sykes had driven up to St. Mary's hospital half an hour earlier, keen to steal a little of the pathologist's time. She'd never attended a post-mortem in her life but she'd taped several surgical operations and knew the importance of a proper briefing. Miss the crucial cut and the impact of the sequence disappeared.

To her surprise, the pathologist was a woman. Martin Eckersley had mentioned a couple of names over lunch yesterday, promising to phone once permission came through from Kelly's father, but both had been male.

"Pauline Schreck." She was a small, neat woman with dancing eyes and a light, dry handshake. "My colleagues send their apologies. I'm the closest you'll find to a lo cum "Bodies R Us?"

"Something like that."

She led the way into a small, bare office and offered Eadie a seat.

Eadie produced a copy of the fax from Kelly's father. The pathologist barely spared it a glance.

"I've seen it," she said. "You wouldn't be here otherwise. So tell me … How can I help you?"

Eadie explained a little about the video. What she needed was graphic coverage of the post-mortem procedure, nothing spared. The more clinical and explicit the footage, the better it would serve the video she had in mind.

The pathologist nodded. She had no problem with any of that. The body in the fridge had become a parcel and it was her job to unpack it.

Vital organs brain, heart, lungs, liver, stomach, spleen, kidneys, bladder came out for inspection. Various fluids went off to an address in Kent for analysis. Afterwards, the mortuary boys would sew Mr.

Kelly back together again.

"End of story?"

"From my point of view, yes. It's a procedure, just like proper surgery. There are techniques you pick up, like tying off the stomach at either end to preserve the contents, but you learn it stage by stage. The only difference is that Mr. Kelly isn't going to get better." She nodded down at Eadie's file. "You've got a spare sheet of paper in there?"

Eadie obliged with the back of a flyer from the Stop the War Coalition.

The pathologist sketched the outline of a body and then talked Eadie through the sequence of cuts: the long central-line incision from the Adam's apple to the pubis, rib-shears to remove the breast plate and get at the tongue and neck organs, a smaller scalpel to draw a line from ear to ear across the top of the hairline.

"Why the hairline?"

"We have to take a look at the brain." She tapped the diagram with her pencil. "Sorry to disappoint you but that's more or less it."

"And the stuff you take out? The organs?"

"We weigh them, measure them, then seal the lot in a plastic bag and pop them back in the body."

"Whereabouts in the body?"

"Here." She patted her own stomach. "Abdominal cavity. Sealing the bag's important. We also pack the neck and mouth with tissues. Leakage is the last thing we need."

"And that's it?"

"Afraid so. I'd love to tell you otherwise but it's not rocket science. Death is rarely complicated. Medically, we're talking the full stop at the end of the sentence. No more."

Eadie made a note of the quote. It had a chill matter-of-factness perfectly in keeping with the effect she had in mind. After the chaos of Daniel Kelly's final months and the hand-wringing over his death, it all boiled down to this grey March morning in a provincial mortuary with a schedule of bodies to dismember and a pile of forms to fill in.

The full stop at the end of the sentence. Perfect.

Eadie glanced up.

"Would you mind me doing an interview? Just briefly."

"With me?"

"Yes."

"About what?"

"Daniel Kelly." Eadie gestured down at the pencilled body shape. "And this."

"Of course I'd mind." The pathologist was laughing now. "How on earth can I talk about someone I never knew?"

Suttle rang Winter on his mobile. He was standing on the pavement outside Pullen's apartment block with line of sight to the communal entrance. Pullen himself was still upstairs, cable-tied to his bed frame.

Winter was at his desk in the Crime Squad office at Kingston Crescent.

The 9.15 meeting, he said, had been cancelled. Cathy Lamb had been summoned to a council of war in Secretan's office, along with every other major player on the drugs containment scene. With the News evidently planning a major feature spread on the erupting turf war, the time had come for some hard analysis.

"Hard analysis?" Suttle was lost.

"Damage limitation. Pathways forward. All that managerial bollocks."

Winter stifled a yawn. "Where are you, then?"

Suttle briefly described what had happened to Dave Pullen. Mackenzie, it turned out, had got word that the state of Trudy Gallagher was down to Pullen and not the Scousers at all. Far from suffering at the hands of a bunch of Liverpool toe rags she'd in fact been smacked around by her so-called boyfriend.

"We'd sussed that already," Winter pointed out.

"Yeah, but Mackenzie hadn't. He'd believed Pullen. That's why he ordered the Scouse kid to be sorted. Now it turns out that Pullen was lying all along, just to protect his arse, because he knew Mackenzie would go ballistic if he thought he'd laid a finger on the girl. And he's right."

"So what did Bazza do?"

"You won't believe this." Suttle began to laugh, then told Winter about the little tableau he'd discovered in the wreckage of Pullen's bedroom. "Kippered," he said finally. "Totally fucking kebabbed."

"But why the Stanley knives?"

"Because Mackenzie's put the word out to the Scousers that Pullen's there for the taking. Directions. Address. The lot. The guy's caused them no end of grief so his front door's open and the rest is down to them. That's why Pullen's been cacking himself. Literally."

Suttle's description of the mess beneath the bed drew a low whistle down the phone. Even Winter had heard of Michael Owen.

"And you're telling me he's still up there? Still on offer?"

"Yeah."

"And he's really expecting a visit?"

"Yeah. You can smell it in the next street."

"But they'd be mad, wouldn't they? Half the city looking for them?

Attempted murder charge in the offing?"

"They are mad. That's the whole point."

There was a moment's silence. Pullen could imagine Winter at his desk, computing the possibilities. Suttle cleared his throat. Time for a suggestion of my own, he thought.

"Why don't we just leave him there? Mount surveillance? Wait until they turn up?"

"And then nick them?"

"Yeah. Bloody sight easier than racing around after a bunch of lunatics."

Suttle heard Winter chuckling. Then the older man put his finger on the obvious problem.

"We'd get crucified in court," he said. "Imagine what a half-decent brief would make of this. Hazarding a victim's life. Exposing him to further injury."

"But he's not a victim. What he did to Trudy adds up to GBH."

"Can we prove that?"

"Yeah."

"How?" "She told me." "Who told you?" "Trudy."

"Trudy Gallagher told you? When?" "Yesterday." "When yesterday?"

"Last night."

"Ah…" Winter was beginning to chuckle again. "Then I think we have a real problem."

Faraday was summoned to Willard's office minutes before the big troubleshooting meeting with Secretan. He'd put a call through to the Det-Supt first thing, as soon as he'd spoken to Graham Wallace, and now a couple of hours later Willard had reached a firm decision.

"We run with it," he said briskly. "We have no option."

"I already told Wallace that."

"You did?"

"Yes, sir, subject to your approval. Wallace says Mackenzie's definitely up for some kind of negotiation though he's still waiting for him to come back with a time and a place."

"You think he's going to fuck us about? Switch locations at the last moment? Throw the covert?"

"I'd imagine so. Wouldn't you?"

"Yeah." Willard was gazing at a newly arrived e-mail on his PC. "I suppose I would." He scribbled a note to himself and then turned back to Faraday. "So we're talking the weekend?"

"Saturday or Sunday."

"Can't Wallace pin him down? Try and box a meeting off?"

"I'm suggesting Sunday. It's busier in Southsea, more cover. Wallace took the point, said he'd plead a prior engagement for tomorrow."

"But you're telling me it might still be tomorrow? Regardless?"

"I'd put money on Sunday, but yes, tomorrow's still a possibility. I've talked to Wallace's handler at Special Ops. Wallace is happy to wear a wire."

"Recorder/transmitter?"

"Yes."

"Fine, but we'll need to record at our end as well. If Wallace gets shaken down, they'll find the recorder and we lose the lot. As long as he's been transmitting, at least we've got a fallback. People with nothing to hide don't shake business partners down. Plays really badly in court."

"Fine." Faraday nodded. "I'll tell Wallace that."

"You don't sound convinced, Joe."

"I'm not, sir. We're hanging this guy out to dry. Mackenzie could turn up mob-handed. What happens if it all gets silly?"

"We deal with it."

"How?"

Faraday's challenge hung in the air between them. This was the crux of the issue, and Willard knew it. Enlist half a dozen blokes to supply back-up and they'd give themselves an enormous problem. There had to be time for proper briefings salted with the kind of information that any Pompey cop could turn into the target's name. From that point on, no matter how briefly, Tumbril itself might be at risk. Something similar had already happened on the aborted vehicle stop before Christmas, with Valentine taunting them afterwards on the covert.

Spreading the word about Tumbril might trigger another disaster.

Willard was gazing out of the window, deep in thought. At length, he appeared to make some kind of decision.

"We handle it ourselves, Joe."

"Ourselves?"

"Yeah." He nodded. "You, me, and the handler from Special Ops."

Minutes later, Willard and Faraday descended a floor to Secretan's office. Most of the key players had already gathered, familiar faces around the Chief Superintendent's conference table, and Faraday slipped into the empty chair beside Cathy Lamb. She was busy sorting out a trayful of coffees but she still found time to enquire about J-J.

"How is he?"

"Fled the nest. Decamped."

"Really?" Cathy stopped pouring. "When?"

"Last night. He seems to have moved in with Eadie."

"That's two of you, then."

"Yeah." Faraday offered her a bleak smile. "For now."

While Cathy began to hand round the coffees, Faraday pushed J-J to the back of his mind and tried to take stock of the assembled company. He and Willard were representing the Major Crimes Team. Len Curzon, the DI in charge of the city's divisional detectives, had driven over from Highland Road, while Cathy Lamb would be inputting contributions from the newly formed Portsmouth Crime Squad.

One surprise to Faraday was the presence of Harry Wayte, the DI from the Tactical "Crime Unit. His was a similar mission statement to Cathy Lamb's: get out there, talk to the bad guys, anticipate their every move, then turn all that intelligence into arrests. The current buzzword for this style of policing was 'pro-active', a description which gave the higher echelons of management a certain degree of comfort. The belief, no matter how fanciful, that you weren't solely at the mercy of events, played wonderfully with the more gullible politicians.

Harry Wayte, across the table, caught Faraday's eye. Faraday, who hadn't seen him for a while, was shocked by how much older he looked.

Since his days as a Chief Petty Officer in the navy, Harry had made no secret of his fondness for decent Scotch. In the job, over the years, he'd won himself a reputation as a good solid cop and weathered more than his share of crises but the booze had never been a problem. Now though, with his watery blue eyes and vein-mapped face, he looked truly wrecked.

"All right, Harry?"

"Never better, Joe. You?"

"You want the short answer? My boy's in deep shit. The job's a bastard. And I haven't seen anything interesting with wings since the weekend before last. Apart from that' Faraday spread his hands wide 'life's a peach."

"I heard about your boy."

"Really?"

"Yeah, along with every other copper I know. Funny how bad news gets round quickest, isn't it? Drink later? Upstairs at lunchtime? It's my birthday."

Faraday nodded a yes, then Secretan and the DCI who acted as Crime Manager for the city stepped into the room and the buzz around the table began to die. Faraday had never seen the Chief Superintendent in action before but was already impressed by the framed colour shots on the wall above Secretan's desk. He'd heard from others that this man kept a regular date with some of the UK's more challenging mountains, week-long expeditions to the Cuillins and some of the tougher Welsh peaks, but if these rain-soaked, fog-shrouded walls of sheer granite were scalps on his belt then he already had Faraday's undivided attention. Finding a perch halfway up a mountain for some serious birding was one thing; conquering monsters like the Cuillins, quite another.

Secretan began with a brief update on what he called the developing situation. He spoke with a soft, West Country burr which did nothing to mask his irritation at the recent turn of events. After a period of relative calm, outsiders had decided to rock Pompey's little boat. Some of them, as everyone knew, came from Merseyside. Attempts at repatriation had so far failed completely. Others, according to Met Intelligence, were expected any day from Brixton and other areas of south London. These guys, largely West Indian, were driven by the prospects of selling into a largish and quickly expanding market. The size of the policing challenge, said Secretan, was best expressed in simple figures. The price of an ounce of cocaine in London was currently 1700. In Portsmouth, dealers would expect a 10 per cent premium. Supply and demand. Obvious.

There was a murmur of agreement around the table. None of this was news, but Secretan, in his understated way, had summed it up rather well. He turned to Willard. They were all busy men, and time was precious, but it was important to avoid investigative chaos one inquiry overlapping with another and to this end he'd asked the Det-Supt to establish a clear demarcation in terms of ongoing operations. The last thing anyone needed just now was dozens of blokes getting in each other's way.

Willard nodded. Faraday knew already that he rated Secretan, a rare accolade from someone as driven and unforgiving as Willard, and Faraday sensed at once that the two men were in virtual lockstep.

"We'll start with Nick Hayder," he said. "We've had a decent squad on what happened to Nick, and there's no question in my mind that it was drugs related. What Nick was doing there that night is still a mystery, and to be frank we might never get to the bottom of it. It might have been pure chance, though knowing Nick I doubt it. Either way, a senior police officer is seriously injured, seriously ill, and that's totally unacceptable. Thanks to some quality detective work from Cathy Lamb's squad, we've had a bit of a breakthrough. Cathy?"

Cathy Lamb took up the story. A couple of her guys had traced a stolen Cavalier. Early indications from forensic tests on the vehicle suggested that the car might well have been used to run down Nick Hayder. A Merseyside youth hospitalised in a separate incident had been DNA-tied to the car and was now under armed guard in the QA hospital.

"For whose benefit?" It was Secretan.

"Ours," Cathy conceded at once. "And his, too."

"So are we suggesting the boy in hospital is down for Nick Hayder?"

"Yes, sir. But a witness who saw the car arrive puts another youth in the front. And we've yet to find him."

"Leads?"

"A few. Nothing that excites me."

Secretan nodded at the DCI by his side, who made a note. Then he looked across at Willard.

"So who's driving the Hayder inquiry? Major Crimes? Cathy's squad?"

"Cathy. Under my supervision."

"You're SIO?" — ,-vp arnuncj are Cathy's."

"Fine. So where does that leave the Major Crimes Team? As far as this discussion is concerned?"

It was a pertinent question and Faraday bent forward to be sure of catching Willard's answer. In reality, of course, Tumbril was a Major Crimes operation, albeit at arm's length.

"Nowhere, sir." Willard was looking down the table at Secretan. "If you want a list of ongoing operations, I'll happily supply one. Some are drug related but none of them need to be part of this debate."

Faraday smiled to himself. It was a consummate response, the perfect finesse, and Faraday wondered whether Willard would make a note of it for later use. In two years on the Major Crimes Team he'd never had Willard down as much of a politician but now he began to wonder.

Secretan had returned to Cathy Lamb. At his prompting, she confirmed the beginnings of a serious turf war. Getting some kind of result against two of the Scousers would doubtless thin their ranks but every last shred of incoming intelligence suggested that the certainty of fat profits spoke louder than anything else. Her guys had their thumbs in the dyke but the market, in the end, would swamp their best efforts at containment. If not the Scousers, then the West Indians. If not them, then any number of a dozen other tribes. Albanians? Turks? Chinese?

Russians? In this game, said Cathy, you could take your pick.

Down the table, a figure stirred. It was Harry Wayte.

"Cathy's right," he said softly. "We got word this morning of a major cocaine shipment down from town. Hand on my heart, I can't attest it.

Ask me where it's gone, I can't tell you. But demand is through the roof. And where there's demand, there's supply." He paused. "I know I sound prehistoric but this used to be a city I understood. We knew what we were in for. Weekends could be lively and drugs were part of all that, no question, but we knew the major players, talked to them, kept the lid on. Now, it's all turning to rat shit. One day soon, we're going to be wishing the locals had stayed in charge."

Willard was leaning forward. He wanted to know about this latest cocaine shipment. What was the strength of the intelligence? Who'd sourced it? Secretan extended a cautionary hand. They could discuss all that in a moment or two. For now, he was keen for Harry Wayte to continue.

Harry shrugged.

"There's nothing more to say, sir. Except it's sometimes better the devil you know."

"You mean Mackenzie?"

"Of course. To stay in the game nowadays, blokes like him have to up the violence. That's why it's all kicked off. But it didn't used to be that way. Not when they had the city to themselves."

"And you think that's a shame?"

"I think it made our job easier."

"Even when they were turning over millions of quids' worth? Flaunting it?"

"Yes. Because that's the price you pay for peace and quiet. Look at us now. We wouldn't be here, around this table, unless all that had broken down. You're asking me what to do about it? To be frank, I haven't a clue. Worse still, I don't think anyone else has. We're chasing our tails. I'm sorry, but it's true."

Heads around the table had turned to Secretan. To Faraday's surprise, he seemed completely at peace at the direction this meeting had suddenly taken. Where many men in his position would have dismissed Harry Wayte out of hand, there was absolutely no sense that his authority was being challenged. On the contrary, he seemed to view Harry's contribution as genuinely worthwhile.

"Geoff?" He was looking at Willard. "What's your take on this?"

"Me?" Willard gazed at his empty notepad a moment, then looked up at Harry Wayte. "I think you're talking absolute bollocks."