Angels Passing (5 page)

‘This won’t take very long,’ Ellis heard herself saying, I promise.’

All morning, Faraday had known that there’d be no alternative to a head-to-head with Hartigan about the Brennan’s job. From the moment Cathy had briefed him on the intelligence that had come Winter’s way, he’d anticipated the path that led to the Ops Superintendent’s door. Everything in the world now boiled down to money. And as far as volume crime was concerned, Hartigan held the purse strings.

The Superintendent’s office was at Fratton police station. Hartigan was a small, intense, obsessively neat little man who’d acquired a well-earned reputation for management prowess. He’d sniffed the winds of change that had blown through the upper corridors of police forces all over the country and knew that serious ambition was best served by falling in step with their new political masters.

If fighting crime required a mastery of New Labour-speak, then so be it. If Best Value Performance Indicators and European Foundation Quality Management flagged the path to ACPO rank, then Hartigan was the first in the queue to volunteer for the endless seminars, translating the lessons he’d learned into a blizzard of must-read memos that fluttered slowly down to the shop floor. Some of these memos had become collectors’ items, but strip away the fancy language and what you were left with was the simplest of messages: think money. The politicians were demanding more and more for less and less, an unsquareable circle that led to confrontations like these.

Hartigan was on his feet behind his desk, supervising his management assistant as she cleared away the remnants of the last meeting. As Superintendent in charge of operations city-wide, he’d done well from recent upheavals in the organisation of Portsmouth’s policing and, judging by the number of coffee cups, he’d soon be needing a bigger conference table.

‘You’re a busy man, Joe.’ Hartigan waved Faraday into a chair. ‘This won’t take long.’

He summarised his brief conversation with Cathy Lamb. Winter had produced untested intelligence with regard to the Brennan’s site. While Ray Brennan was undoubtedly a pillar of the community, one couldn’t be seen to confer special favours. In short, he needed more than a nod and a wink from the likes of Paul Winter to authorise a substantial overtime spend. With two months to go to the end of the financial year, he was already five per cent over budget and an operation like this – especially on a Friday night – would only make the deficit worse.

Faraday, who’d anticipated every word of this little speech, enquired what alternatives Hartigan had in mind. As he understood it, Ray Brennan was already aware of the impending raid because DC Winter had told him. As a ratepayer, if nothing else, he’d expect a little protection. Might he not have a point?

‘Of course he would. Which is why I’m prepared to make a patrol car available, all night if necessary, two up.’

‘Visible?’

‘Of course. That’s why the guys are there. Even our criminal friends won’t be able to miss them. Assuming they turn up, of course.’

‘Meaning?’

‘Meaning that we don’t always get it right, Joe. Did I ever tell you about the missing gynaecologist who was allegedly buried under a block of flats? Found him in Jersey, didn’t we? After you wanted to dig up half of Gunwharf.’

Faraday ignored the jibe. Last year’s hunt for the high-profile Misper had indeed led to Gunwharf, but at the time the intelligence and deductions had seemed solid enough. Winter again, and a definite result at the end of it all.

‘You agree, Joe? About Brennan’s?’ Hartigan was looking at his watch.

‘I see the logic, yes.’

‘But?’

‘But I just thought we might do better than that.’

‘How can we?’

Faraday gazed at him a moment, then allowed himself a smile.

‘Arrests would be nice,’ he said mildly.

A tiny muscle fluttered under Hartigan’s left eye. He leaned forward, his carefully buffed nails spread across the desk. His patience, like his time, was clearly limited.

‘Let me spell it out, Joe. Staking out Brennan’s will cost me a fortune. So far we’ve got nothing to go on but Winter’s word.’

‘Are you telling me he’s lying?’

‘Of course not. But can he put a name to this source? Have we provenanced it? Is he properly registered? Is there any other intelligence to back it up?’

Faraday, for a moment, was robbed of an answer. Instead, he found himself gazing at a line of family photographs arranged in a neat semicircle on one of Hartigan’s filing cabinets: the bemedalled Superintendent and his wife at a Buckingham Palace garden party, his oldest son graduating from Cambridge, his daughter beside the font at her new baby’s christening. Hartigan lived in a world where appearances mattered a great deal. No wonder he’d fallen in love with New Labour.

‘Warning these guys off just moves the problem sideways,’ Faraday said at last.

‘I agree.
If
we’re taking this threat seriously.’

‘You really think we shouldn’t?’

‘I have my doubts.’ He nodded at the phone. ‘So do the CIMU.’

The Crime and Incident Management Unit worked from a nearby suite of offices, twenty-seven clerks and police officers charged with keeping their ears to the ground. Like everyone else, they knew the way that Hartigan liked to provide himself with scapegoats ahead of any operation, and they’d be less than keen to put their heads above the parapet. In circumstances like these, if you were truly cautious, hard intelligence would amount to names and addresses, supplied well in advance.

‘But we’re coppers,’ Faraday pointed out. ‘Most days we’re working in the dark so sometimes we have to take a punt or two.’

‘Wrong, Joe. That’s playing catch-up. Those days are over. It’s all about hard intelligence now. It’s all about knowing how and why and when and being there when it happens. That’s what the community expects and that’s what I’m determined to deliver. Get me evidence that Brennan’s is definitely on and I’ll look at it again. Otherwise, the answer is no.’ He stood up, offering Faraday a tight smile. ‘Happy?’

Faraday got to his feet. On certain days he was beginning to hate the job, and this was one of them. It was bad enough attending to the remains of a fourteen-year-old jumper, bad enough trying to work out why on earth she’d done it, but these were mysteries that lay deep inside the girl’s head. Brennan’s was something else entirely. Brennan’s was where the bad guys surfaced for an hour or so and set themselves up for a little surprise. Yet here he was, the poor fool detective, listening to a lecture on resource management from a boss who didn’t have the first clue about CID work.

In these situations, with prats like Hartigan, it didn’t pay to give up. Not if you valued your sanity.

‘I’ll have a word with the CIMU guys,’ Faraday grunted. ‘And see how Winter’s getting on.’

‘Of course.’ Hartigan’s smile had vanished. ‘And you might knock on Mr Willard’s door as well. I gather he wants a word.’

Dawn Ellis was still a mile from St Mary’s Hospital, stuck in traffic, when she mentioned Doodie. Jane Bassam said she’d never heard the name.

‘
Ten
, you say?’

‘That’s right.’

‘But why would Helen have known him?’

‘I’ve no idea, Mrs Bassam. We believe they were together last night.’

‘You mean … on the roof?’

‘Possibly.’

Mrs Bassam nooded, staring out at the roadworks puddled with rain, and Ellis knew she was still fighting to understand this terrible event that had turned her life upside down. In front of them was the back of a garbage truck. The dustmen had wedged a lone teddy bear beneath one of the retaining bars. The stuffing was spilling out round his middle and his head wobbled comically every time the truck inched forward.

Ellis wondered about putting the radio on but decided against it.

‘I’ve been trying to work out how you must be feeling,’ she said instead. ‘But to be honest I don’t know where to start.’

Mrs Bassam managed a small, cold smile.

‘Neither do I,’ she muttered. ‘The last couple of months, it’s been like living with a stranger.’

At the hospital, Ellis parked round the corner from the mortuary. A side entrance led to a waiting room. Jake, the senior technician, was in a jacket and tie, as sombre as the undertaker’s men.

‘Your daughter’s in the Chapel of Rest.’ He nodded at the connecting door. ‘Just say when you’re ready.’

Ellis asked Mrs Bassam whether she wanted to do this alone. All Ellis needed was confirmation that it really was her daughter. There was a chair beside the body and her time was her own.

Mrs Bassam said she understood. She’d be grateful if Ellis could come in with her. Jake led the way into the tiny chapel, standing carefully to one side as the two women approached the body.

The trolley on which the girl lay had been softened with a draped white sheet. Her body was covered with a funeral pall and her head lay on a pillow. Cotton wool in her ears had stemmed the trickle of fluids from the wreckage of her brain and her eyes were closed.

Mrs Bassam stepped slowly towards the body, then stopped. She was staring down at the girl’s unmarked face and for a second or two Ellis wondered whether they had, after all, got it right.

‘It’s her,’ Mrs Bassam said at last. ‘She looks different but it’s her.’

‘Different?’

‘Yes. Here and here.’ Mrs Bassam touched her own temples, her own cheekbones. ‘She looks slightly Chinese, flatter faced.’

Jake murmured something technical about the force of the impact. It could have a compressive effect on the shape of the skull. He used the word accident.

Mrs Bassam was still gazing down at her daughter. ‘It wasn’t an accident; it could never have been.’ She shook her head. ‘Helen didn’t take those kinds of risks.’

There was a long pause. Then Ellis cleared her throat.

‘On purpose, then? Suicide?’

‘Never.’ Mrs Bassam reached out and touched her daughter’s cheek. ‘She was far too selfish for that.’

Four

FRIDAY
, 9
FEBRUARY
,
midday

Bev Yates started sorting through the CCTV pictures from Chuzzlewit House shortly before lunch. Fifty-seven cameras from five massive blocks on the estate fed real-time coverage to a central control room in Palmerston House, and the pictures were captured on a matrix on two recording machines. The footage was watched twenty-four hours a day by the concierge staff but feeds from the various cameras were rotated automatically through the seven monitor screens and it was pure chance whether the Chuzzlewit cameras were displaying at moments critical to the inquiry. None of the staff remembered seeing a ten-year-old on the monitors after midnight, so Yates tucked himself away in an alcove behind the control room to go through the recorded Chuzzlewit pictures, camera by camera.

He first spotted the tiny figure on an exterior camera bolted high on a corner of the flats and remotely controlled from Palmerston House. According to the digital readout, it had been 23.58 on 8.2.01. The boy’s jeans looked several sizes too big and he was wearing a baggy grey top with the hood pulled low over his face. At the entrance to the building he kept his face shielded from the camera, reaching up on tiptoe to punch numbers into the automatic security device. For a ten-year-old, he seemed to know a great deal about video surveillance.

Yates made a note of the time and spooled through the pictures on the other cameras to pick up his passage into the building. In the ground floor hallway, as aware as ever, the boy kept his back to the camera, jiggling up and down as he waited for the lift. When it arrived, he crabbed in sideways, the hood still pulled down. The camera inside was up high, tucked into a corner, and throughout the ascent to the twenty-third floor he remained facing the door. But the jiggle was still there, one foot to another, a kid who just couldn’t keep still, and the moment the lift doors opened he was gone. Scamp.

There were no cameras on the landing, or any on the stairs up to the roof area. What Yates now needed to establish was the time of Doodie’s departure. For the next hour and a half, beginning with the cameras in the two lifts, he spooled through the video coverage, condensing the entire night into a blur. No one came or went. Both lifts remained empty. Only at 05.35, once the milkman had found the body and raised the alarm, did anyone appear.

Had this savvy little kid stayed up in the flat while Faraday’s old lady was asleep? Had he kipped on the floor and slipped out once things got hectic? Yates rather doubted it, returning to the pictures from the exterior camera. At 12.43, though, the operator in Palmerston House had panned it away to a different view after reports of a disturbance in the shrubs behind the block, and it stayed that way for the rest of the night – one reason why no video pictures of the girl’s body existed.

The only remaining exterior camera was built into the security control panel at the main entrance to Chuzzlewit House, and Yates bent to the monitor, his finger on fast forward, watching for movement. For hours nothing happened. Once again the milkman arrived, his face bagged with shadows under the harsh overhead light. Only when Yates was winding back, the tape speed slower, did he spot a blur of movement at a door beyond the main entrance. There was another exit, had to be, and this was the one that Doodie had used. He ran the pictures frame by frame, watching the door slowly open then a small grey hooded figure emerge, bolting away into the darkness beyond the street lamps.

02.57. 9.2.01.

Had the girl come off the roof by now? Was she lying dead on the pavement under the rain? If so, why had this scrawny little kid avoided using the lifts? Why had he run down twenty-three flights of emergency stairs and done his best to stay invisible? Was he frightened? Traumatised? If so, why hadn’t he looked for help?

Yates inched the sequence backwards, then selected a frame that offered just a hint of a face, a smudge of white against the enveloping greys. Evidentially, for ID purposes, the picture was useless. He’d make arrangements to take a hard copy of the image because the time was as important as the possibility of a positive ID, but he knew he was no closer to giving this scrap of a child a name or an address. He could be any of dozens of similar kids. The estates and the shopping centres were awash with them, maybe not quite so young but certainly as streetwise.

As the image juddered on the monitor screen, Yates found himself wondering about his own child, Freya. In a couple of months’ time, he and Melanie would be celebrating her first birthday. For the time being they were still living in a rented cottage up the Meon Valley, Melanie’s home patch, but as soon as they could manage it, he planned a move back to the Southsea area, somewhere with a bit of a buzz. After the collapse of his first marriage, Yates had spent thirteen happy years in a tiny terraced house near the seafront and the city had got into his blood.

Looking at this ghost-like presence on the screen, though, Yates felt the first stirrings of doubt. The sight of the girl’s body sprawled on the pavement had been bad enough. You wouldn’t be human if a jumper that young and that pretty didn’t get to you. But she was part of something bigger, and so was the kid Doodie.

Lately, Pompey kids like these seemed to be everywhere. Something had happened, someone had let them off the leash, and he wondered if he was really prepared to expose his own flesh and blood, his precious Freya, on these same streets. Wind on ten years or so and it might be her face on the video cameras, her name in the CPU files. Maybe Melanie’s mother had it right about the charms of country living. Maybe clean air and decent neighbours really did give you a better chance in life.

He frowned, knowing in his heart that there was more to Pompey than kids like Doodie. One way or another, they’d find him. God knows, he might even have a story of his own.

He reached for his mobile. When Cathy Lamb answered, he got to his feet.

‘Faraday back yet?’

It was Willard’s idea to talk over a snatched lunch. The Detective Superintendent ran the Major Crimes operation from a secured suite of offices at Fratton police station, and the social club was only a couple of floors above. Cheese salad baguettes and instant coffee was hardly haute cuisine but Faraday seldom bothered with food at midday, even if he could find the time to eat it.

Detective Superintendent Geoff Willard was a detective’s detective, a bulky man with a mop of greying curls and a taste for nicely cut suits. He had no patience with gossip or office politics and set a keen pace for the ever-changing army of DCs he roped in for major investigations. As the senior CID officer for the county’s Eastern Area, his fiefdom covered a huge swathe of territory from the Isle of Wight in the south to Aldershot and Farnborough in the north. The heart of this empire was Portsmouth. The city had a combustible social mix – lots of young people, lots of drugs, lots of booze, lots of single men – and Willard’s core team in the Major Crimes suite were seldom short of trade. They dealt in the currency of murder, serious assaults and stranger rape, and under Willard’s watchful eye they’d developed a no-nonsense, nuts-and-bolts style of detective work as effective as it was unglamorous.

Willard, in his gruff way, never tired of preaching the virtues of patience, thoroughness and rat-like cunning. On serious crime, in his view, you had to make certain assumptions about the human condition. Expect the worst, and then some. Never be fooled by a smile. Faraday respected him a great deal.

‘What’s the strength on Brennan’s?’

Faraday went through the latest developments. He’d talked to some of the guys in the CIMU and they were sending an officer to run his eye over the Brennan’s premises and plot the parameters up. This was nothing that Winter hadn’t done hours earlier, but if the system insisted on a second opinion, so be it. The intelligence was still there, and they’d be mad to ignore it.

‘Don’t get in a pissing match with Hartigan,’ Willard warned. ‘You’ll lose.’

There were turf implications here but Willard seldom made anything of them. Faraday’s CID strength answered to Hartigan. He was the Operational Superintendent, one of the city’s top uniforms, and regarded the likes of Faraday as a resource at his command, foot soldiers to dam the tidal waves of volume crime. But Faraday also had a separate CID boss in the shape of Willard, a division of loyalty that could occasionally be tricky. Whatever Willard thought of Hartigan, he largely kept to himself.

‘He needs collateral,’ Willard concluded. ‘Another source.’

‘He’s got one.’

‘Really?’

‘Crimestoppers put a call through to the CIMU. They had a guy on about an hour ago. Exactly the same whisper.’

Willard nodded. Crimestoppers offered a direct route into the intelligence system and it was open to any member of the public to make a call on the advertised number. Willard, like most detectives, regarded it as a worthy civic initiative but largely useless. The best intelligence still came from the coalface, from the dwindling numbers of paid informants who ghosted around in the underworld.

‘It’s down in writing, though,’ Faraday pointed out. ‘And no one knows that better than Hartigan.’

‘Sure.’

‘So maybe it’ll concentrate his mind. He wouldn’t want to be caught napping with that in the log.’

‘Yeah?’

Willard demolished the last of his baguette and changed the subject. He’d heard about the girl coming off the flats last night and he wanted to know what Faraday was doing about it. There might, in the end, be an outside chance of declaring it a Major Crime and the last thing he wanted was surprises.

Faraday laid out the sequence of events. If Willard took over the investigation, his own involvement would cease. He had enough shoplifters, house burglaries and vehicle thefts to fill any working day but Helen Bassam’s death offered a different kind of challenge and there were threads in the girl’s story that he wanted to tease out for himself. Better, therefore, to keep the incident low profile and hang onto the role of SIO. Not that Willard was easily snowed.

‘You’re sure she came off the roof? Not some flat or other?’

‘Ninety-nine per cent.’

‘Any witnesses? Anyone with her?’

‘It’s possible. There’s a kid we’re trying to TIE.’

Trace, Implicate or Eliminate. Willard wanted to know more.

‘He’s young.’

‘How young?’

‘We think around ten.’

‘
Ten?
’ Willard whistled. ‘What’s wrong with this city?’

It was a good question; Faraday didn’t volunteer an answer. Instead he mapped the routes the inquiry was taking. There was nothing to help them on the Misper list. The CPU at Netley had yet to send anything through. The post-mortem wouldn’t happen until Monday.

‘You think she jumped?’

‘It’s a possibility.’

‘But why would she do that?’

Faraday explained about the Afghan boyfriend. According to the mother, she was wild about him and something seemed to have gone wrong.

‘Wild enough to kill herself?’

‘Wild enough to do something crazy.’

‘How old’s this guy?’

Faraday hesitated, thinking of the face in the photograph. It was a question he’d asked himself, but according to Yates the mother hadn’t been sure.

‘Mid-twenties? Older? We don’t know.’

‘And the girl?’

‘Under age. Fourteen.’

Willard shot Faraday a look then bent forward. There was a low table between them and he moved his plate to one side, an almost unconscious gesture that suggested the conversation was about to move on. For the first time it occurred to Faraday that there was another reason for this casual invitation to pop upstairs. Not just an update after all.

‘There’s a job coming up,’ Willard began, ‘and it might be worth you having a think about it.’

Bev Yates finally raised Niamat Tabibi, the Afghan, on his mobile. The man’s English, though heavily accented, was near perfect. In particular, he seemed to have mastered the art of evasion. He was very busy just now. It would be very hard for him to find the time for a chat. No, he had no idea where the police station might be in Highland Road. And, no, his place was in no state to entertain visitors.

Yates sensed an opening. Asylum seekers needed work permits for paid employment.

‘Busy doing what exactly?’

‘Teaching. I teach.’

‘Teach what?’

‘French. And mathematics.’

‘For the love of it?’

‘Of course. I have a great deal of time. I spend it on other people. Is that a crime?’

‘Depends.’ Yates had the photograph at his elbow. Even on the phone you could sense this man’s charm. He was quick-witted and plausible. No wonder the girl had been suckered.

‘I’m making enquiries in connection with someone you may know,’ Yates began. ‘Helen Christine Bassam.’

‘Helen?’ His manner changed at once.

‘You know her?’

‘Of course.’

‘Then I really think we ought to talk.’

To Yates’s surprise, he said yes. There was a café he sometimes used. It was in Milton, a little place on the main road. It was called Kate’s Kitchen. The woman did cheap vegetarian breakfasts.

‘Round the corner from the police station?’ Yates enquired drily.

‘That’s it.’

It took Yates and Ellis a couple of minutes to walk the quarter mile to the café but the Afghan was already there, sitting at the table in the window. He’d lost a little weight since he’d had the photograph taken and if anything it underscored the hint of wistfulness in his smile. That at least was Ellis’s view. ‘Hunk,’ she muttered as Yates pushed the door open.

Niamat got to his feet at once. He was wearing black jeans and a scruffy leather jacket with an old Manchester United shirt beneath. A copy of the
Guardian
lay open in front of him and there was a plastic bag full of potatoes beside his chair. Strictly speaking this was Yates’s party but Ellis headed him off before the going got difficult. Despite his slightly Italian good looks, Bev had a definite problem with foreigners.

‘There’s something you ought to know about Helen,’ Ellis said at once, ‘unless someone’s told you already.’