Angels Passing (7 page)

‘Guess who’s favourite for the next DI job.’ She gestured back towards the knot of watching detectives. ‘On Major Crimes.’

The café-bar was already busy by the time Faraday arrived. Le Dome, with its big horseshoe bar and warm conversational buzz, had become a regular rendezvous before the Friday night Guildhall concerts. The place was often full of foreign students huddled together over cups of cappuccino, and Marta said she felt at home there.

Faraday found a quiet table near the back. He’d bought a paper from the newsagent across the road and he studied the weather report, wondering about prospects for the weekend. It seemed to have been raining non-stop since Christmas, and tonight’s chart showed yet another frontal system out in the Atlantic, preparing to dump a couple more inches on the swamp that had once been Faraday’s front garden. Weather like this could seriously get to you, yet another reason why Marta had become so important. Five minutes in her company, and the sun came out.

As ever, she caught him by surprise, approaching from behind and kissing him softly on the cheek. She was wearing a beautifully cut cashmere coat, filmed with rain, and a richly striped silk scarf wound turban-style around her head. Faraday had watched her knotting that scarf dozens of times and her deftness never ceased to amaze him. She smelled wonderful too, a subtle, slightly musky scent that always reminded Faraday of their first nights together. This was a world away from Raglan House, thank Christ, and Faraday got to his feet, pulling out the adjoining chair.

Marta had driven straight in from the big IBM complex at the top of the city. She had a huge job there, something to do with marketing, but it was one clue to this strange relationship of theirs that he’d never quite fathomed what she actually did. Face to face or even on the phone he was sure she could sell anything. He’d never met anyone so self-confident, so vividly themselves. But whenever he’d pressed her for details on her role or her responsibilities, she’d always change the subject. His was the job they should be talking about, she’d say. Something real for a change.

She loosened her coat and asked for a glass of white wine. Faraday had already talked to her on the phone, a snatched conversation between afternoon meetings, and now she wanted to know about Willard’s offer.

‘It wasn’t an offer,’ Faraday said hastily.

He did his best to explain the way Willard had put it. There were three DIs on the core Major Crimes team. They all reported to the Detective Superintendent, and Willard described them as the hinge on his door. They were the ones who’d act as his deputy on the really complex inquiries that couldn’t be handled on division. They were the ones he’d trust to run the well-oiled investigative machine that, in the end, had to deliver a result. Getting the right people was never easy. And with a vacancy looming, Willard had decided that Faraday was the ideal candidate.

Marta’s eyes were bright with excitement. A single glance would tell you she was Spanish: the dark eyes, the perfect make-up, the sheer animation in her face. Mediterranean women, Faraday had concluded, were seldom frightened of showing their emotions. Unlike the glum, blank, clouded faces he saw all around him, they challenged you with a smile.

‘Brilliant,’ she was saying. ‘
Perfecto
.’

Faraday grinned, warmed by the recklessness of her enthusiasm. No ifs or buts. No agonising about the downside. Just do it.

‘It’s not that simple. It’s a different set-up. At the moment I’m my own boss. On Major Crimes, you report to Willard. He sets the pace. We do the running.’

‘You run already, my darling. All the time.’

It was true. Faraday couldn’t remember a day when his desk had been empty, when he’d finally caught up with the backlog of so-called volume crime. Nicking domestic burglars and serial shoplifters might be the dream of every politician but the facts argued otherwise. In the real world, you’d never put all the bad guys away.

‘It’s a pain,’ Faraday admitted.

‘Then listen to this man. Let him help you.’

‘Help me?’ The thought brought another smile to Faraday’s face. Benevolence had never been part of CID management style. If Willard wanted him on board then there was something in it for Willard. But what?

‘You think I should do it?’

‘Definitely. Big, juicy murders?
Claro
.’ She bent towards him, her head close to his, and kissed him on the lips. ‘You smell terrible,’ she whispered. ‘Where have you been?’

The concert was built around a performance of Berlioz’s
Symphonie Fantastique
. Faraday and Marta sat through a Beethoven overture and a piece from Vaughan Williams, waiting for the evening’s highlight. Faraday had recently developed a passion for Berlioz, and Marta had given him a big two-volume biography for Christmas.

The young Berlioz had written the symphony in just six weeks, breaking most of the accepted rules of orchestration in the process. He’d based its development quite shamelessly on episodes in his own life and Faraday warmed to the notion of an overpowering, obsessional passion for the woman of his dreams. A year at French evening classes had offered Faraday a working knowledge of the language, and the phrase
idée fixe
stirred definite echoes. It was these same evening classes, after all, that had given him Marta.

The first movement began and Faraday settled back, letting the suddenness of the rhythmic changes envelop him. The real pleasure of music like this was the depth of the moat it dug between himself and the increasingly brutal demands of his working day. Berlioz was no stranger to the kind of inner turmoil that could take you to the very edge but he’d managed to conjure something magical and lasting from the experience. Unlike Helen Bassam.

Faraday thought about the girl as the music swirled on. On Monday there’d be a post-mortem. Maybe the pathologist might throw up a lead or two. On Monday, as well, he’d have to organise a serious bid to pin down the kid, Doodie. At first he’d been tempted to dismiss the mother’s version of events out of hand. The thought that a child of ten was on the loose somewhere, living from hand to mouth, was absurd. He’d already put the boy’s name on the official Mispers list, a heads-up for every beat man and squad car in the city, but he still clung to the assumption that Denise Prentice had been lying. This was 2001. The city of Dickens, of vagrant kids fending for themselves, had long gone. Or had it? Maybe life at 703 Raglan House really was as desperate and threadbare as appearances suggested. Would anyone in his right mind want to live in circumstances like that? Would Doodie?

The first movement came to an end and Faraday felt Marta’s hand in his lap. She was looking at him, a hint of concern in those deep, brown eyes.

‘OK?’

He smiled and gave her hand a squeeze, glad to forget at last about Misper kids and teenage corpses. She’d made every difference, this woman. She was funny and sexy and immensely stylish, and she’d brought light and laughter to parts of him that had been shadowed for decades. For a working detective, it was worrying that he’d taken so long to discover that she was married but even this realisation hadn’t made him any less needful. They’d been seeing each other now for more than a year, and each new stolen evening convinced him they were a perfect fit.

Back in September, she’d somehow managed to steal a whole week away from work and family. Faraday had booked a last-minute package to Corsica, and they’d flown out from Gatwick. The holiday had been a dream – empty beaches, tiny bays, fabulous snorkelling – and towards the end of the week they’d taken a train inland, finding a back-street hotel in Corte and walking the mountain paths deep into the Restonica Valley. There’d been warblers darting in and out of the
maquis
and the distant silhouette of buzzards riding thermals in the hot afternoons. At night, from their hotel bedroom, he could hear the call of a scops owl, clear as a bell, and he’d whispered the name to Marta in the warm darkness.

The magic of those days had made him unusually bold. They had an unspoken pact that banned discussion of life back home but the last evening in Corte they’d gone shopping for presents and Marta had emerged from a toy shop with an armful of goodies for her kids. The sight of a Star Wars Landspeeder and a bright yellow teddy bear had been too much for Faraday and over supper that night he’d demanded to know where this relationship of theirs was going. Her husband’s name was Francis. He was a civil servant of some kind. David was eleven, Maria just five. Where, exactly, did Faraday fit in this tight little ménage?

Marta had put her finger to his lips. They were on holiday. They were enjoying each other. Why ruin it? Faraday, having seen off the first bottle of Patrimonio, was in no mood for compromise. This refusal of Marta’s to discuss either her family or her work had always sat oddly with her openness in every other respect. When she told him she loved him, he didn’t doubt her for a moment. When she gaily found time to see him on a couple of weekday evenings, or even a whole Saturday, he’d almost come to take her warmth and passion for granted. Yet when they finished making love, up in Faraday’s big, book-lined bedroom, there’d always come the moment when she’d reach for her watch and clip it to her wrist, and then suddenly – after the briefest shower – she’d have gone.

Faraday, alone in the darkness, had come to hate that watch. To him it seemed that it ran his love life the way his own Omega ran his working day. Occasionally, far less often than he’d have liked, he’d try and talk to her about it but she always changed the subject. Relax, she’d say. Relax and enjoy it.

That night in Corte, over the remains of wild boar and
loup de mer
, he’d been determined to get some answers. What did she really want from him? Where would this relationship take them? Once again, she’d simply shaken her head, filling her own glass with mineral water, and in the end Faraday had lost his temper, accusing her of bolting him onto this other life of hers, of using him to fulfil the bits of Marta that weren’t quite satisfied with two kids and a husband, and the weekly trek to Safeways. She’d listened to him, attentive at last, and when he’d got it off his chest she’d leaned forward over the table and looked him in the eye, and told him there was always an alternative. If he wanted her that badly, really needed her, then she’d leave her husband, abandon her kids, and come to him. There was no middle way, no negotiation. It was an offer that was wholly typical of the way she conducted every other transaction in her life. All or nothing.

Faraday, even drunk, finally realised he was lost. He knew about single parenthood. He understood what it was like to bring up a child alone. And most of all, he had twenty years’ experience of trying to fill in for a wife who’d died. There was no way he could wreak that kind of havoc, not wittingly, no way he could rob two kids of their natural mother and still look himself in the eye when he shaved every morning. Marta was the cross he’d made for himself, and if he occasionally sagged under the weight of the relationship, then so be it.

As the quarrel blew itself out and they walked back to the hotel, Marta herself volunteered a phrase for it.
Llevamos nuestro merecido
, she whispered. They’d earned their just desserts.

Was it really as simple – and final – as that? As the orchestra surged into the fourth movement, The Walk to the Scaffold, Faraday found his feet tapping, keeping pace with the music. Joe-Junior, his own son, had fled the nest nearly a couple of years back. He was living in Caen now, with a French social worker called Valerie. The fact that he’d always been deaf made telephone conversations a non-starter but father and son still communicated by email, increasingly brief conversations that simply confirmed – at the age of twenty-three – that J-J had acquired a life of his own.

Faraday, in his private moments, was proud of the childhood and adolescence they’d shared, of the way they’d built a life together, but the boy’s abrupt exit for France had left a huge hole and only Marta’s flamboyant arrival had filled it. But where next? And how? Or was Faraday sentenced forever to a series of doomed relationships? First a deaf son who’d fled the nest. And now a married woman about whom, like Berlioz, he was crazy.

The symphony came to an end with a flourish from the conductor. He turned to face the audience, acknowledging the applause, then brought the orchestra to its feet. Faraday was beginning to wonder about supper, a Chinese down in Southsea perhaps or one of the new places on Gunwharf Quays. He glanced across to Marta to see which she preferred. That bloody watch again.

I have to go.’ She leaned across, kissed him, then tapped the handbag where she kept her mobile. ‘Be good, darling. Ring you tomorrow.’

Faraday was parked on the seafront. The haddock and chips had been limp and greasy, and he wound down the window to get rid of the smell. At 11.15, it was far too early to check on events at Brennan’s and he settled instead for late-night jazz from one of the FM channels. Beyond the blackness of the Solent, he could see the lights of Ryde on the Isle of Wight. From somewhere much closer came laughter and the sound of someone throwing up. She should be here now, Faraday thought. She should be giving me a good ticking off for the haddock and chips, for settling for rubbish. They should be tucked into the corner of some restaurant, putting the world to rights. That’s what friends did, as well as lovers.
N’est-ce pas?

Long minutes later, thoroughly depressed, he gunned the engine and headed east along the seafront. Home was the Bargemaster’s House beside the water on Langstone Shore, the modest little timber and brick cottage that represented more than two decades of his life. It was a solace as well as a home, and just the thought of the curlews calling across the mudflats gave him comfort. He was duty DI for the weekend, on call should anything major come up, but he’d still treat himself to a whisky or two and maybe play a bit more Berlioz. There were worse things in life than solitude.

The Bargemaster’s House lay towards the end of a quiet cul-de-sac. He pulled in towards the garage, surprised to see the lights on. Only Marta had a key. Was this another game of hers? Had she prepared another of those little surprises?