Angels Passing (19 page)

Minutes later, Winter was making himself comfortable in the control room. In the six weeks since his last visit, they’d acquired two more potted plants and a brand-new catering-size tin of Gold Blend.

‘Milk, one sugar?’

Winter nodded. He was gazing at the banks of colour monitors racked beyond the control desk. The system was brilliant, no question, but there was something slightly eerie about chopping up the city’s life this way. Concentrate on one monitor, zoom the camera, and you were watching some student trying to get his leg over a giggling redhead in a bulky anorak on the beach by South Parade Pier. Pan another camera in the Commercial Road shopping precinct, wait for the focus to settle down, and you were with the rest of the guys at the control desk, trying to work out if the bloke bent over the brand-new Muddy Fox was nicking it or not.

‘Over here, mate.’

Winter turned to find himself looking at a pile of video cassettes on a smaller desk at the back of the room. Dave Michaels wanted him to check out coverage on half a dozen cameras over a twelve-hour period last Friday. The time frame straddled the approximate time of death established for Bradley Finch at the post-mortem and might – with a definite on the registration – yield a positive sighting or two of the white Fiat.

The desk was fitted with a monitor, plus video machines to play and record. Winter could toggle the tapes into fast forward and reverse but even so he knew – barring miracles – that he’d be a video slave for the rest of his working day. He looked quickly through the tape boxes, matching the label on each to a specific camera on the wall chart beside him. Most of the CCTV cameras covered hot spots in the south of the island – the nightclubs along South Parade by the pier, the Leisure Centre at the Pyramids by Southsea Castle, the pubs on Spice Island beside the Camber Dock. These locations became a battleground on Friday and Saturday nights but the further north you went, the fewer cameras had been installed. One day, he thought, the whole bloody city would be taped, every single street, every single house, but for now video coverage had crept no closer to Hilsea Lines than a couple of cameras on major roundabouts half a mile away. He sorted out the relevant tape, and slipped pictures from the Portsbridge interchange into the play machine. To save video tape, this coverage was restricted to single still frames captured every two seconds.

Winter sat back, gazing at the screen as cars hop-scotched towards the camera. By six o’clock on Friday night it was already dark and under the orange loom of the big street lights it was by no means easy to suss a white Fiat. He toggled into fast forward and the traffic became a blur. What if the Fiat had had a maniac at the wheel? What if he’d been doing seventy and had shot past in the brief couple of seconds between still frames? He shook his head, toggling back on the picture speed, trying not to think about Kenny Foster. Willard, just to make his day, had told Dave Michaels to sort out another couple of blokes to pay a visit to Foster’s garage. Not just that, but one of them – on Willard’s specific instructions – was to be Gary Sullivan. Winter shook his head, appalled at how vindictive the man could be, reached for his coffee and toggled the video into fast forward again.

The Brook Centre lay in the heart of Somerstown, an unlovely flat-roofed brick building surrounded by tower blocks, with a fenced-in play area round the back. Years of comings and goings had left their mark on the green swing doors, and someone had recently taken a crack at one of the wired windows.

The Persistent Young Offender project had found a perch in a suite of rooms on the top floor. The entrance door was locked and Faraday had to knock to attract attention. He’d promised Anghared Davies eleven o’clock. It was already quarter past.

Anghared was a small, bustling, bespectacled woman with a reputation for getting her own way. At fifty-two she was old for a job as demanding as this but she had a certain mumsiness that some of the kids, before they knew better, mistook for an easy touch. Faraday had known her for years, way before she’d pioneered the PYO project, and had always admired the deftness with which she managed to carve her way through the tangle of local government-speak that went with any youth initiative. Anghared, as anyone who’d ever crossed her knew to their cost, took very few prisoners.

Just now she was sitting behind a desk, sorting quickly through a towering pile of assessments. From somewhere nearby came the thunder of drums. No rhythm, no shape, just raw noise.

‘Doodie, is it?’ She was nearly shouting.

‘Prentice.’

‘Who, dear?’

‘Prentice, Gavin Prentice. That’s his real name.’

One of the support workers appeared at the open doorway with a youth of about eleven in tow. She had a question about Health and Safety. Did the budget run to earplugs?

Anghared ignored her. She was getting towards the bottom of the pile now, and Faraday left her to it, his eyes following the youth as he drifted across the room towards a typist’s revolving chair beneath the window. He detoured to kick aimlessly at a waste paper bin, then pulled the chair into the middle of the room and sat down, spinning himself first one way, then the other, his body slumped, his feet dragging listlessly across the battered carpet tiles. Faraday watched him for a full minute, aware of the boy’s eyes beneath the baseball cap, the way they locked with his each time his head came round. His expression was quite blank. Even when Faraday nodded a greeting, the face gave nothing away.

Anghared got to her feet and bustled away down the corridor. Seconds later, the drumming stopped. Back at her desk, she pulled a file from a drawer. Doodie, it transpired, had been on her books for nearly six months. She turned to the youth on the chair and told him to sort out some crisps for himself from one of the support workers. The youth nodded and wandered away. Anghared shut the door after him.

Doodie, she said, had been their little Pimpernel, attending only when there was something on offer that really turned him on. One of those activities was drama. All too often he could be as vile and abusive as any of the other kids, but give him another role to play – let him pretend to be someone else for a while – and you’d sense the depth of potential in the child. It was the same in the graffiti workshops. Get the kid to concentrate for more than ten seconds and interesting things started to happen. As far as Anghared could see, Doodie had shown a real talent for colour and design, an opinion she’d been rash enough to share with the ten-year-old. The following afternoon he’d absconded with a bagful of spray cans, the contents of which had ended up on a brand-new Jaguar parked overnight in Old Portsmouth. Detection, in this case, had been simplicity itself. Doodie had signed the biggest of his praying mantis designs with the unmistakable ‘D’ he liked to use to badge practically everything. Lucky it wasn’t in pink, Anghared had told the WPC who’d arrived to track him down.

‘Why’s that, then?’

‘Pink’s his favourite colour.’ Anghared had hooted with laughter. ‘Doodie and good taste were never friends.’

Faraday nodded.

‘So where is he now, young Doodie?’

‘Haven’t a clue. His mum’s over in Raglan House but you needn’t bother. Most days she’s out of it, and when she isn’t, she’s even more of a nightmare.’

Faraday pulled a face. He could still smell the kitchen, with its spilling refuse sacks.

‘Out of it on what?’

‘Smack, mostly. The guy she lives with deals a bit but doesn’t use. If her luck’s in, she gets the sweepings. She used to be into vodka big time but the bloke she was living with then, not the smack dealer, tried to bottle her one night after some row or other and after that she wasn’t so keen. Plus I think she’s got a liver problem. Any more abuse and it’ll explode.’ Anghared looked up from the file. ‘Doesn’t help you though, does it?’

Faraday asked about other places he might look. Doodie, it seemed, had turned ducking and weaving into a way of life, moving constantly from address to address. Some nights, allegedly, he kipped with some relative or other but no one had ever come up with an address. Other nights, he depended on friends, or friends of friends, or people whom – to be frank – she’d prefer not to think about.

‘The boy sleeps rough a lot, has done for a while. Get him to concentrate for a minute or so, and he even claims to like it.’

‘What does “rough” mean?’

‘Houses for letting. Empty garages. Shared squats. Little hidey-holes on the seafront and round the Common during the summer. There’s a whole other city out there. One we never see.’

‘But he’s ten, Anghared.’

I know, and there’s not much to him, either.’

‘So how does he get by?’

‘Thieving, mostly. Last year he was shoplifting for gangs of older kids. They go in mob-handed, upset stuff, and Doodie nips behind the till while the staff are trying to sort everything out. It’s a trick you can only pull once but there are lots of shops. Doodie was on a percentage. I think the kids screwed him down to bugger all but he was helping himself before they even saw the takings so it worked out OK in the end.’

‘You’ve got names for these kids?’

‘No, and there’s no point either. Last time I asked, he’d fallen in with some bunch of asylum seekers – Kosovans maybe, or Albanians. The way I heard it, they thought he was wonderful. Lots of guts. Lots of initiative. Funny, isn’t it, how it takes a foreigner to see the worth in a child? This must be the worst country in the world to be a kid in.’

This was vintage Anghared, kicking against the Establishment line, and Faraday thought again of the youth in the revolving chair – bored, aimless, spinning ever more slowly in circle after circle. At least Doodie wasn’t like that. At least he was making some kind of life for himself.

‘The incident I mentioned on the phone …’ he began.

‘The girl off the flats?’

‘Yes.’ Faraday nodded towards the empty chair. ‘Have the kids been talking at all?’

‘Not that I’ve heard. She came from Old Portsmouth, didn’t she?’

‘That’s right. But she had lots of friends from round here. Including Doodie.’

Anghared peered at him over her half-moon spectacles, unconvinced. ‘How does that work, then? Nice middle-class girl like that straying over the border?’

Faraday shrugged. He wanted to explain about the mother, banged up in a nightmare of her ex-husband’s making, about the daughter’s life spinning out of control, about the fights and violence, but the truth was that Anghared would have heard it all before. Not in Old Portsmouth perhaps, but certainly here in Somerstown.

The truth was that Pompey was an island, 150,000 people living cheek by jowl, one of the most densely populated cities in the country. There were still social divisions, of course there were. There were still enclaves of tree-lined streets with off-street parking and freshly painted front doors where the middle classes hung on for grim death, believing desperately in all the New Labour tosh about choice and citizenship. But the fact remained that whole areas of the city had become tribal reservations, carpet-bombed by poverty, family breakdown and schools so woebegone and under-funded that even the teachers had given up. The evidence of this was everywhere – street fights, domestic violence, gangs of kids running amok – and in his bleaker moments Faraday had begun to wonder whether the Luftwaffe hadn’t been a blessing in disguise. At least, after the Blitz, you knew you were in trouble. How many people recognised a crisis when all the kids were wearing designer gear and no one would be seen dead in trainers under fifty quid?

Anghared was asking him whether he knew how Doodie had got his nickname. Faraday shook his head.

‘It came from last summer,’ she said. ‘All the kids swim in the sea. It’s free and it gives them a chance to get up lots of people’s noses. Wherever there’s a sign saying “No Diving”, they’ll all have a go.’

Faraday smiled. This had been going on for years and one of J-J’s favourite summer pastimes had involved sitting on the pebbles by South Parade Pier, watching the braver kids take a header off the end. At high tide you were relatively safe. A couple of hours either side and you were on your way to hospital. One year, no less than three kids had been seriously injured – one paralysed – in this Pompey rite of passage.

‘And Doodie?’

‘Round Tower. The kids here say he was the youngest ever off the top. Serious respect, my love. Believe me.’

The Round Tower lay beside the harbour mouth, a Tudor relic that had grown over the centuries. Now it was a favourite tourist spot, with a marvellous view up the harbour, and Faraday himself often climbed the long flight of stone steps, dizzied by the drop, after a pint or two in one of the nearby pubs. There were rocks heaped against the foot of the tower and anyone jumping had to clear them by at least a couple of metres to survive.

‘So how did he manage that, then?’

‘He didn’t. He had to be thrown.’

‘Other kids threw him in?’

‘Exactly. But the point is, it was his idea. One took his hands, one took his ankles, gave him a couple of swings, heigh-ho, and in he went. Made a big splash. Believe me.’

‘You were there?’

‘God, no, but I’ve listened to the kids. That’s why he’s called Doodie.’ She grinned. ‘One cool dude.’

Fourteen

MONDAY
, 12
FEBRUARY
,
late afternoon

By the time the tray of stickies appeared, four in the afternoon, Winter knew he was never going to find CCTV traces of the white Fiat within the parameters Dave Michaels had laid down. Of course it made perfect sense to concentrate on the cameras closest to Hilsea Lines, but those cameras only covered the exits from the island onto the mainland. Drive north, and the Fiat would have turned up on one camera or the other. Head south, back into the city, and there was mile after mile of streets without any coverage at all. Thousands of front doors. Hundreds of garages. And any one of them could still be home to a rusting K-reg Uno.

Winter helped himself to a doughnut and a custard tart. He’d been through the twelve-hour period four times – twice on the mainland cameras and twice, for luck, on a couple of cameras monitoring the major north-south roads down the western side of the island. As the traffic thinned during the evening and then became a trickle after midnight, he’d forced himself to concentrate harder and harder, examining the shape and the colour of the vehicle behind every pair of headlights, but all he’d got for his troubles was a headache. How the guys behind the control desks put up with this every working day was beyond him. Given the choice, he’d have been back in an unmarked Escort, tucked up some darkened side road, working his way through an entire bag of Werther’s Originals.

Recorded tapes were kept for a month before being wiped and recirculated. The boxed cassettes were stored in a locked cabinet inside the control room, accessed only by the staff, and he checked the big camera location map pinned to the wall before requesting specific recordings. The Southsea branch of Thresher’s, where Bradley Finch had bought the champagne, was in Clarendon Road, barely twenty metres from Camera 20. He located the tape for Friday, 9 February and slipped it into the play machine. Pictures from CCTV cameras were recorded in multiplex – a grid of four pictures to each tape – and Camera 20 occupied the top right-hand corner. The time-of-day readout was down on the bottom left of frame. Tapes were always changed at four in the afternoon and he began to spool through, watching as a wet, grey afternoon quickly darkened. According to the note in his pocketbook, the Thresher’s receipt was timed at 18.56. Give Finch ten minutes to sort himself out, and the action should kick off around quarter to seven.

At 18.48, a white Fiat appeared at the bottom of the picture. The camera was pointing east, down the road towards Thresher’s, and Winter watched as the car halted at a pedestrian crossing beside a big department store. A woman pushing a wheelchair gave the driver a little wave and then the Fiat was on the move again, not bothering to signal left before pulling abruptly into the kerb and stopping on double yellow lines opposite the off-licence. Old habits die hard, Winter thought, watching a thin, slightly stooped figure emerge from the driver’s side and limp across the road.

Winter toggled the picture to a halt and peered at the screen. You were supposed to be cautious in these circumstances. You were supposed to perform a little private risk assessment, weighing all the various rogue factors that could conceivably make this someone else – a chance shopper, an impulse buyer, a stranger from way out of the city who just happened to drive a white Fiat and just happened to fancy three bottles of Moët – but Winter knew at once that this was Bradley Finch. The black leather jacket. The black jeans. The lank hair just brushing his collar. The fact – after his appearance in the café – that he was still limping. In six hours this skinny little runt will be having the shit kicked out of him, he thought. And half an hour after that, if he’s lucky, he’ll be dead.

He toggled forward, keeping an eye on the time readout, trying to imagine the scene inside the offie: the women behind the counter, the scruffy bloke in the leather jacket eyeing the display of champagnes, the detour to the counter to collect the Bristol Cream, and then the ‘kerchunk’ of the cash till as he swopped £50.47 for a neatly printed receipt. Where had he laid hands on money like that? How come someone who was perpetually skint was suddenly so flush?

Winter was still pondering this mystery when the passenger door abruptly opened on the Fiat. He slowed the pictures back to normal speed, watching a tall, striking-looking woman in a dumpy black puffa jacket emerge from the car. Closing the door behind her, she walked back towards the camera and stood beside the corner window of the department store, gazing at a display of ethnic rugs. She was there for a good minute – one minute fourteen seconds to be precise – and she must have been yelled at because she only turned round when Bradley Finch was back beside the car, holding up a weighty Thresher’s carrier bag.

Winter toggled the pictures into reverse, sending Finch back into the off-licence. As she gazed at the rugs in the store window, the camera offered a perfect quarter profile of the passenger in the Fiat. Louise Abeka hadn’t been on the seafront at all. She was here, in full colour, with a man she claimed not to have seen in days.

Prompted by Finch, she ran back to the car. The lights came on, and Finch pulled the Fiat into a tight U-turn ahead of an oncoming bus. Ignoring a couple of pedestrians venturing onto the crossing, he accelerated away, leaving – as he’d arrived – at the bottom of the screen. Winter stopped the tape and made a note of the time readout. There were facilities for dubbing sequences like these onto a fresh tape he could remove from the control room but he’d leave that until later. For now, he wanted to know where Finch was headed. Camera 49 lay at the end of Osborne Road, the continuation of Clarendon Road in a westerly direction. Winter found the tape and spooled through. The Fiat had left camera 20 at 18.59. At 19.00, exactly on cue, it sped into Camera 49’s frame. Winter grinned. This was fun, a video game for real. He watched as the car stopped at the T-junction. Turn right, and Finch would be on his way back to Margate Road, where the girl lived. Turn left, and he’d be driving east, beside the big expanse of Common which stretched towards the seafront. He turned right.

Winter sat back a moment, trying to calculate the driving time to Margate Road. Friday night, in light traffic like that, it would be a couple of minutes at the very most before he’d be parking outside Louise Abeka’s house. He swung round to the map. Camera 26 policed the traffic junction which offered access to Somerstown, the most direct route. He found the tape and loaded it but, to his disappointment, the white Fiat didn’t appear. Not at 19.02. Not at 19.05. And not, as a last resort, at 19.10. They must have gone somewhere else, he thought. Maybe a quick pint or two in a pub somewhere, just to get them in the mood for the Moët. On the point of abandoning Camera 26, Winter stiffened. There it was, the white Fiat, coming to an untidy halt in the very middle of the picture. Winter froze the picture, trying to explain the time lag. 19.12. Too brief a delay for a pint, but far too long if they’d simply driven the half mile.

Aware of a movement behind him, Winter looked round. The shift leader wanted to know whether he fancied another cuppa. Winter nodded. He needed a phone, too. There was a handset built into the main control desk. Consulting his pocketbook again, Winter dialled a local number. He’d tried twice already today but on both occasions there’d been no answer. This time he was in luck.

‘Mr Naylor? DC Winter. We met on Saturday. About your lad, Bradley.’

There was a muffled noise at the other end and Winter thought for a moment that Naylor had hung up, but then he was back. He wanted to know what the state of play was. About the gear Winter had seized.

‘We’re still making enquiries, Mr Naylor, but listen …’

He explained he was keen to talk to Bradley’s nan. He understood the two were close.

‘He’d keep an eye on her, yeah.’

‘Did he ever stay there?’

‘I’ve no idea. Why don’t you ask her?’

‘I’m going to, Mr Naylor. I just need to know where she lives.’

‘Yeah?’ There was another pause and Winter heard a woman’s voice in the background. Flat 2. 59 Flint Street. Southsea.

Winter didn’t bother to say goodbye. Hanging up, he returned to the wall chart, confirming what he knew already. Flint Street was only a tiny detour from the route north to Camera 26. Bradley Finch, the night he died, had paid a visit to his nan.

Faraday was alerted to the email while he was still wrestling with his report for Hartigan. One of the Assistant Chief Constables at headquarters was busy developing Project Implementation Documents to support the Chief’s new policing strategy. There were dozens of individual subjects to be addressed and every uniformed Superintendent in the force had been assigned at least one of the PIDs.

Hartigan had drawn ‘Investigating Burglary’ in this management lottery and like every other Superintendent he’d promptly passed the paperwork down the line until the project had landed on Faraday’s desk. The last thing Hartigan needed just now was the head-banging challenge of trying to boil down two years’ worth of B & Es onto a single sheet of A4 but he suspected that the resulting Best Practice booklet would get the widest distribution and he was determined to earn himself a gold star. Just as long as Faraday did the work.

Faraday put his notes to one side. The email had come from J-J, and wasted few words. ‘You promised to talk to someone about me doing drama with kids,’ it went. ‘What happened?’

Faraday glanced at his watch. He’d meant to pursue this with Anghared Davies and forgotten. She’d still be at her desk in the Brook Club. He lifted the phone and dialled her number. When he explained the idea she said at once that Gordon would love it. Gordon Franks was the young thesp she was using on the drama side. He had an unusual background – a spell in the Royal Marines before drama college – and one of his specialities was fight sequences. The kids loved the way he could choreograph violence and one of the reasons Doodie had taken to the drama sessions so quickly was a little playlet Gordon had composed, calling for Doodie to sort out three older boys with the aid of a cricket stump and a length of electric flex. Doodie had been meticulous about rehearsals, missing no opportunity to perfect his throttling skills before the big performance.

‘J-J, you say?’

‘That’s right. He’s been doing lots of drama over in Caen. Mime, mostly. He seems to have a talent for it.’

‘Well, he would, wouldn’t he?’

Faraday could hear Anghared laughing. She knew J-J from way back, when she’d had a job with Educational Assessment, and she’d always regarded him as a tryer.

‘I’ll give Gordon a ring right now,’ she said. ‘It’ll be right up his alley.’

Faraday wrote the name down and looked up to find Dawn Ellis at the door. She’d been talking to Cathy Lamb and wanted to know more about the bloke who’d phoned in from Chuzzlewit House.

‘I don’t know any more. Cathy’s got the details.’

‘You want me and Bev to check him out? Only now’s the time.’ She tapped her watch. Today had plainly been a bitch.

Faraday looked up at her and then shook his head. There were decisions he’d been deferring far too long about Helen Bassam and the sight of Ellis at the door was a reminder that he couldn’t let the inquiry simply dribble on. He had to make up his mind what was and wasn’t important.

‘The girl was pregnant.’ He nodded at the phone. ‘I talked to the pathologist this morning.’

Ellis nodded. Like Jane Bassam, she didn’t seem the least bit surprised.

‘Are we talking a crime here?’

‘We might be. If it was the Afghan guy you told me about.’

‘You want me to see him again?’

‘Yes. Ask him what he and the girl were up to around Christmas. And tell him we might be interested in a DNA sample.’ He offered her a bleak smile. ‘OK?’

Operation
Bisley
was beginning to make its mark on Dave Michaels by the time Winter made it back to the MIR at Fratton. The DS was sitting in his office, gazing numbly at the photo of his kid’s football team on the wall. He’d been getting by on five hours’ sleep a night since the investigation began and already Saturday seemed half a world away. The days of cheering on AFC Anchorage from the touchline were temporarily over.

Winter shut the door before helping himself to a chair. Despite his run-in with Willard, he still regarded hot news as precious currency, to be invested with care.

‘Told you, skip.’ He put the video cassette in Michaels’s lap. ‘The girl was definitely lying.’

He explained about the tapes, and the sequence of moves that had taken Finch from the off-licence to Somerstown. The missing twelve minutes had been spent at his nan’s place in Flint Street. He’d bet his life on it.

‘What about later? Round Hilsea Lines?’

‘Nothing. Fuck all.’

‘How hard did you look?’

‘As hard as the last guy.’

Winter drove the point home with a nod. He’d found the entry in the log the CCTV guys kept in the control room. Someone else from the MIR had trawled the same tapes only twenty-four hours earlier.

‘Great use of resources, skip.’

‘Two pairs of eyes are better than one.’ Michaels nodded up the corridor towards Willard’s office. ‘You know how we like to get things bottomed out.’

‘How is he, then?’

‘Like a pig in shit. He got another ten guys at lunch time, came over from the Force Crime Unit. Just to tide us over, mind. They go back on Wednesday, close of play. Still …’ he gestured at the pile of statements on the desk beside his PC ‘… better than nothing.’

At Willard’s insistence, two-man teams of DCs had been combing the flats around Eddie Galea’s café, calling door-to-door in case anyone had caught the delivery of the envelope containing Finch’s ring. So far, enquiries had produced absolutely nothing though many addresses had been empty and the call-back list now stretched to two A4 pages. The ring itself, meanwhile, had been added to the second batch of items for DNA analysis, and would be on the morning run to Lambeth for the Premium One service. The ring had obviously been handled by someone who knew a great deal about Finch’s death and even sweaty fingertips could leave enough material for the latest Low Copy Number technology which could retrieve even minute traces of DNA.