Deadlight (36 page)

He moved across to the bay window and peered through the gap in the curtains. It was one of the Traffic cars, a marked Volvo, and he thought he recognised the bulky figure behind the wheel. One of the sergeants from Kingston Crescent. Not a good sign.

For a moment, he wondered about getting dressed but then decided against it. Better, at this stage, to play the invalid, the heroic detective who’d risked life and limb in the interests of justice. He checked the Volvo again. The sergeant was flipping through a sheaf of notes on a clipboard. At length, he opened the door and got out, and Winter stepped back behind the curtain as he glanced across at the bungalow before heading for the front gate.

‘DC Paul Winter?’

On the doorstep, Winter rubbed his eyes and then stifled a yawn.

‘Just got up.’ He looked down at the clipboard. ‘What’s this, then?’

The sergeant studied him for a long moment. He was a squat, thickset man, the wrong side of forty. The frustrations of the job had emptied his face of everything except a stoic interest in the facts.

‘The name’s Leavis,’ he grunted. ‘Traffic. We may have met but I don’t recall it.’

‘And?’

‘I understand you were involved in an incident.’ He nodded at the plaster cast. ‘We need to know what happened.’

‘Is this a criminal investigation?’

‘Yes.’

‘What’s the charge?’

‘Dangerous driving. We can do it here, contemporaneous record. Or I can take you down the station. In which case we tape it.’ He paused. ‘You know the drill.’

Winter weighed his options for a moment, then shrugged and stood aside.

‘Kitchen’s through there,’ he said. ‘Be handy if you could put the kettle on.’

The sergeant made the tea while Winter ducked into the bathroom for a quick shave. Scraping away with his good hand, he watched his baggy face appear from the whorls of foam. Get the next half-hour wrong, he thought, and his case file would start its journey to the local branch of the Crown Prosecution Service. Worse than that, should a court case be pending he was now convinced that Hartigan would have him back in uniform.

‘Sugar?’

‘Two.’ Winter settled into the chair by the fridge, easing his plaster cast on to the kitchen table. ‘Keeping you busy, are they?’

The sergeant didn’t answer. He passed Winter the cup and sat down before reciting the formal caution. Winter listened to the familiar phrases then helped himself to a chocolate digestive.

‘No tea for you?’

‘No, thanks.’

‘Biscuit? Bacon sarnie? Only—’

‘I said no.’

‘OK, OK.’ Winter held up his good hand. ‘Just asking.’

The sergeant had buried himself in his notes. Winter, staring glumly at the RSPCA calendar on the wall above his head, wondered quite how far the investigation had progressed.

By now, the boffs from the investigation unit over at Winchester would have been to the scene of the accident and then crawled all over the remains of the Skoda,
trying to back-calculate the exact sequence of events. On top of that, there might well have been witness statements, passers-by astonished to watch a portly man in his mid-forties turning the quieter reaches of Old Portsmouth into a race track. And as well, of course, there was Dawn Ellis.

The sergeant at last looked up, biro in hand.

‘Let’s start at the beginning,’ he said. ‘I understand you were on a job.’

‘That’s right. Down by the Camber. Little scrote called Darren Geech—’ Winter broke off. There was something else he wanted to establish, right off, before he wasted any more of this busy man’s time.

‘What’s that, then?’

‘I don’t remember any of this stuff too well.’

‘Don’t remember any of what stuff?’

‘Exactly what happened. Don’t ask me why. Maybe it was the concussion. Fact is, most of it’s gone. Apart from the call, that is.’

‘Call?’

‘I seem to remember we put a call through to control. Request for a marked car? Isn’t that the way we do it?’

‘You remember the call but you can’t remember chasing the lad?’

‘I can’t remember anything after he spotted us – and even that’s foggy.’ He looked regretfully up at the ceiling. ‘Red motor? Astra? VW? Yellow? Blue?’

The sergeant sat back. The biro had come to a halt. He gestured at his notepad.

‘This isn’t much use then, is it?’

‘Probably not.’

‘You want to have a go?’

‘Up to you. I’m just here to help.’

The sergeant gave him a sour look.

‘I checked with the hospital,’ he said carefully, ‘and they told me you’d make a complete recovery.’

‘They were talking about this.’ Winter lifted his arm
from the table, wincing as he did so. ‘And I just hope they’re right.’

‘They never mentioned amnesia.’

‘I’m not surprised. I never told them.’

‘You never told them? You never wondered what had happened? How you’d got there?’

‘It wasn’t that. I knew I’d been driving a car and I knew something had gone wrong because – bang – there I am in some newsagent’s fucking lap. But you ask me what happened between the OP and the ambulance and I have to tell you I haven’t a clue. Sad, I know. But true.’

The sergeant didn’t bother to mask his disbelief. ‘No comment’ would have been more acceptable than a piss-take like this. For a moment, Winter thought he was going to have a real go. Instead, he glanced at his watch.

‘You know the drill from here on? Preparing the case file? Submitting it to the CRS? Deciding whether or not to press charges?’

‘Yeah, of course.’

‘And you know the view that judges take over obstructive defendants?’

‘Of course. Occupational hazard. Pain in the arse for all of us.’

‘Just thought I’d mention it, Mr Winter. Might be germane, that’s all.’

He gave Winter another look, then drew the notepad towards him again.

‘I’m going to write it your way,’ he grunted. ‘I’m going to say you remember the beginning and the end but have absolutely no recall of anything in between. Fair?’

‘Spot on.’

‘Good.’

The sergeant sorted a statement form from his clipboard, checked the date on his watch, then began to write. After a couple of lines of careful script, he suddenly looked up.

‘That bus, by the way. The doubler-decker down by the Hard. The one you nearly hit.’

Winter gazed at him for a moment, then offered a bemused grin.

‘Bus?’ he queried.

It was barely mid-morning by the time Faraday got to Plymouth. Dave Beattie’s directions unfolded on his lap, he picked his way through the northern suburbs, following the road to Tavistock. There were bubbles of cloud now, away over the distant swell of the moor, and the weather forecast on Radio Four was talking about the possibility of rain before nightfall.

Beyond Bickleigh, he slowed for a turn to the left, astonished at how quickly the city had disappeared. Barely ten minutes from the urban tangle of roundabouts and Londis stores, they were in a world that might have belonged to a different age: lush green fields; dry-stone walls yellowed with moss and lichen; even the glimpse of a buzzard, riding the thermals above a nearby tor.

The road narrowed, then plunged abruptly to the right. Trees on either side splashed the windscreen with shafts of livid sunlight. Winding down his window, Faraday could hear the suck and gurgle of running water. Soon came a bridge, impossibly narrow, and a glimpse of sleek brown pebbles on the riverbed, then the road was climbing again, the trees beginning to thin. From time to time, a bend surprised him, revealing a bungalow hunkered down behind a thickly-hedged bank, or a hint of something more substantial beyond the drifts of cow parsley. From time to time, he saw signs for nurseries, directions in fading blues and yellows that seemed to point nowhere. Rarely had he been somewhere that felt so reclusive, so shut away. This, he thought, was a landscape that turned its back on you, determined to keep its secrets.

Minutes later, realising he was lost, he stopped the car.
A signpost indicated Bere Ferrers, three miles. He drove on, meaning to stop for a decent map. Untangling an area like this with a page of scribbled notes was hopeless.

Bere Ferrers turned out to be a tiny village beside a wide stretch of river. Faraday parked the Mondeo and walked to the water’s edge. Returning to the car for his binoculars, he swept the glistening mud flats, tallying cormorant, shelduck and common sandpiper, realising that this was the place that Scottie had mentioned the first time he’d dropped into Faraday’s office. Something large and slightly comic caught his eye, standing rigidly to attention beside the eelgrass on the far side of the river. Grey heron, he thought. Then came a flurry of movement, much closer. A pair of wagtails, brilliant yellow, flycatching like mad. Faraday tracked them for a moment through the binos then turned away, a wistful smile on his face. What a place to live.

The village stores lay at the back of a hairdressing salon. Faraday bought an Ordnance Survey map, returned to the car and flattened it on the bonnet. Transferring Beattie’s directions to the web of tiny roads, he finally tracked Ezentide Cottage to a stretch of river a couple of miles upstream. He refolded the map and checked his watch. Just time for a little stroll.

A footpath took him up through the churchyard. The weathered granite headstones spoke of generations of families, bloodlines stretching centuries back. One, in particular, brought him to a halt. ‘Cholera,’ it said simply, ‘1849.’

Fascinated, Faraday walked on. The path left the churchyard and climbed a nearby hill. More breathless than he cared to admit, Faraday got to the top. Miles away to the south, hazy in the distance, lay a wide stretch of water surrounded on both sides by the dark sprawl of Plymouth. Through the binoculars, he could make out towering blocks of flats, tiny church spires, huge dockyard gantry cranes, and street after street of terraced
housing. Pompey, he thought at once. The same huddled lives. The same post-war clutter. The same echoes of spilled blood and hard-won treasure.

He racked the focus on the binoculars, quartering the water. The distinctive coathanger humps of Brunel’s bridge lay at the farther end, but closer he could make out the sleek grey shapes of warships at anchor in the tideway. Similar vessels dotted the upper harbour at Portsmouth, frigates and destroyers put out to grass pending some unimaginable catastrophe that might coax them back to sea, and Faraday found himself wondering whether any of these ships might be relics from the Falklands War. Did Dave Beattie ever climb this hill? With a memory or two and a good pair of binos?

Back in the car, Faraday drove north again. Within minutes, aware that he was getting a feel for this shy little patch of God’s England, he was back on track. The peninsula lay between two rivers. The biggest of them was the Tamar. On the map, Ezentide Cottage appeared beside the blue, fat, sinuous line of the river, miles from anywhere, a tiny black oblong at the end of a single-track road.

Faraday drove on. The road began to narrow again until there was barely room for the car. More cow parsley. A farmyard or two. Then – slowly – all signs of habitation began to disappear. Minutes later, still bathed in sunshine, Faraday found himself looking at a five-barred gate. Carefully wired to the gate, a sign hand-lettered in red.

‘Keep Out. Private.’

Faraday pushed at the gate and returned to the Mondeo. A track swung in beneath thick stands of spruce and pine. The ground fell away to the right, and at the first bend Faraday glimpsed the rusting, upturned body of an old Cavalier, wedged against the bottom of a tree. He was in shade now, and with the window down the air felt cold and damp. Two more bends, and the track petered
out. To the left, quarried into the hillside, was a levelled patch of beaten black earth that clearly served as a kind of makeshift car park.

Locking the Mondeo, Faraday gazed down at the thickness of wheeltracks in the loamy earth. A four-wheel drive of some kind, maybe a Land-Rover. Still carrying the binos, Faraday followed a path down through the trees. The cottage came as a surprise, appearing suddenly as the path veered to the left: slate roof, newly whitewashed elevations, tiny recessed windows. The garden in front of the cottage stretched down to the water’s edge, a patchwork of carefully cropped lawn, shrub-filled borders and – beyond a timber summerhouse – a sizeable veggie patch.

Faraday shook his head, overwhelmed by the isolation, the peace, that this man had created for himself. The cottage was overhung on three sides by trees, yet facing south the front of the cottage was flooded with sunshine. Beyond the slow, green drift of the river, more trees. Could life get any better than this?

It could.

On the far side of the cottage, Faraday found half a dozen chickens in a coop, counted four fresh eggs tucked carefully into a bucket lined with straw, caught the scent of freshly sawn timber from a pile of newly stacked logs beside the back door, knelt to tickle the chin of a pink-nosed tabby, sprawled in the sunshine. In another life, unshackled from the Pompey underworld, Faraday would kill for a place like this.

When he couldn’t raise anyone at the front door, he strolled back down the garden. The key, as promised, was under a pile of spare slates to the rear of the summerhouse. With it, black capital letters, was a note. ‘Make yourself at home. Little grebe (if you’re lucky). Back by lunchtime. DB.’

Faraday, amused, went to the water’s edge. Beattie was right. Little grebe were notoriously hard to find. Stand
here for hours and he’d be lucky to spot them. Stand here for days and even then they might never appear. But that wasn’t the point. How on earth had Beattie known about his passion for birding in the first place?

Winter’s call found Bev Yates in Faraday’s office at Kingston Crescent. He had a list of
Accolade
interviews as long as your arm to do and so far he was making fuck all progress. Blokes at work. Blokes away on holiday. Blokes too idle to get out of bed to even answer the phone. The job was never in any danger of getting easier, but this one in particular was proving a real bastard.

‘Where’s Faraday, then?’

‘Off to Devon somewhere. Gleam in the eye.’