Deadlight (40 page)

Willard came back on the line and began to muse about what to do with Beattie. Already, Faraday sensed that favourite was to ship both Beattie and Phillips to Hampshire. The Police and Criminal Evidence Act put strict limits on the time available for interview but as long as Faraday kept his distance, resisting the temptation to press Beattie further about events on last Monday night, the PACE clock wouldn’t start ticking until both men were booked into a Portsmouth police station. Faraday could, on the other hand, take them down to Plymouth and conduct the interviews on Devon and Cornwall’s turf, although he’d need another detective alongside him, ideally someone like Bev Yates. Either way, he was looking at a lengthy wait before they’d be able to get down to business.

‘We’ll ship them back here,’ Willard decided. ‘I’ll talk to Devon and Cornwall, they’ve been helpful on a couple of jobs recently. We’ll get Beattie’s mate nicked and Operational Support can sort out the transport. Devon and Cornwall can do the searches, too. You’ll need to brief them.’ He paused. ‘This other fella … Gault. You’re telling me Yates has got him down for interview?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘OK, tell him Gault’s on a nicking. That way we get all three tonight, separate police stations. Have a think about interview strategies and give me a bell once you’re on the road.’

The line went dead and Faraday found himself looking once again at Beattie. The beginnings of a friendship had
definitely been there, and even now Faraday found it hard to credit the man with murder. He’d quarried out a life for himself deep in this glorious valley. Why hazard all that – the cottage, the solitude, the business – for an arsewipe like Coughlin? Were there really situations aboard ship that would justify measures that extreme? Or did the act of war itself damage men for life? Loosen their hold on reality? Remove the taboo about killing?

The fact that Faraday didn’t know came as something of a surprise. He’d often heard fellow police officers, guys at the end of a particularly difficult shift, talk about the job in terms of war. The bombardment of calls, incidents piling up, the shock of finding someone lying in the street on a Friday night with half their face hanging off. Little could prepare you for this and nothing could soften its impact.

Policemen, though, got in the habit of expecting the worst. Indeed, in some ways it almost served as a defence mechanism. But the odd thing about the navy was that most sailors would serve twenty years at sea and never hear a gun fired in anger. There were plenty of exercises, and vast amounts of guile went into making them as realistic as possible, but nothing could prepare a man for the real thing and Faraday had met enough veterans through the years to know that war – organised violence on a major scale – was indescribably horrible. One young officer aboard HMS
Glamorgan
, attacked for the first time by Argie bombers, had stood on the helicopter deck waving the plane away. Didn’t the bloody pilot know that firing guns in earnest was liable to hurt somebody?

Faraday smiled at the story. The young officer had later been killed by an Exocet, but his first taste of enemy fire lived on in letters home, the starkest possible evidence that war, once unleashed, turned your world on its head. Had Beattie felt that? Trying to keep the peace aboard
Accolade
as the frigate ploughed its way south? And days later, when the bombs sent his ship to the bottom, had
the Master-at-Arms come through the experience unscathed? Faraday, remembering the incident on the pub terrace at lunchtime, rather doubted it. He sensed a violence in the man, unexpended. The biker had felt it too.

The sun had gone in now and rain clouds were building over the wooded hills to the west. Faraday stepped back into the bungalow, checking his watch. The woman who did Beattie’s accounts had disappeared into her bedroom, embarrassed by this sudden turn of events, but when Faraday put his head round the lounge door, Beattie was still buried in a copy of the
Daily Telegraph
, as peaceable and untroubled as ever.

For a moment, their eyes met.

‘Taking their time, aren’t they? Your mates?’

‘Yeah. I’ll give them another bell.’

‘OK.’ Beattie was smiling. ‘You do that.’

Winter wasn’t the least surprised to find Bev Yates at Dawn Ellis’s house. Between them, they were trying to wrestle a roll of foul-smelling carpet into the back of Yates’s Golf. Winter stood on the pavement, watching.

‘Good deed for the day?’

Yates ignored him. With the carpet wedged across the back seats, he slammed the tailgate shut and gave Dawn a peck on the cheek. After a visit to the city dump, he was off to arrest someone. Faraday’s orders.

‘Is this the Coughlin job? Only I’d heard that laughing boy had it sewn up.’

‘Laughing boy?’

‘Your mate Corbett.’

‘Fat chance. Haven’t seen him for days, thank Christ.’

Yates got in the car and gunned the engine. Dawn watched him disappear down the road, then nodded at the house.

‘I’m living in the kitchen,’ she said, ‘if you fancy a coffee.’

Winter followed her indoors, perching himself on a stool while Dawn spooned Gold Blend into a couple of mugs.

‘Bev been helpful, has he?’

‘Very.’

‘Nice of him to take the carpet, too.’

Dawn ignored the comment.

‘I had a call this morning,’ she said. ‘Sergeant from Traffic. He’s looking for a statement.’

‘Surprise, surprise. So what are you going to tell him?’

‘The truth, I imagine.’

‘You’ll have to remind me, love. I’ve forgotten.’

‘Really?’ She glanced up. ‘There were witnesses, Paul, probably dozens of them. There’s no way you kept below thirty and me lying through my teeth just puts two of us in the shit.’

‘Breaking the limit isn’t necessarily dangerous driving.’

‘Is that the charge?’

‘That’s what they’re after. Dangerous driving could mean a disqual. And that would put me back in uniform.’

‘Would that be the end of the world?’

‘Yes. Since you ask.’

‘Enough for me to lie for you? Put my own career on the line?’

‘Lie?’ Winter looked hurt. ‘Who said anything about lying?’

‘That’s what it boils down to. I sit down with this nice sergeant, tell him you drove like an angel, what happens then? They have guys who’ll be looking at the car, Paul. They can reconstruct the whole thing, you know they can.’

Winter nodded. It was true.

‘There’s another way,’ he said at last.

‘What’s that?’

‘Put the prat from Traffic on hold. You’re off sick at the moment. You’ve got every excuse you’d ever need.’

‘Cathy expects me back tomorrow.’

‘Delay it. Give her a call. I just need a couple of days.’

‘What difference will that make?’

‘Christ knows.’ Winter made room on the work surface for the coffee. ‘But give it a shot, eh?’

Faraday, still waiting for the Devon and Cornwall car from Plymouth, made Beattie a cup of tea. There was no way he was going to discuss Coughlin outside an interview room but there were still loose ends in their wider conversations about the Falklands which intrigued him. This wasn’t material for any court of law but in Faraday’s head there remained a profound suspicion that this half-forgotten war may have somehow shaped the events of Monday night.

Beattie accepted the tea with a nod, added two spoons of sugar, then returned to the
Telegraph
crossword. Faraday settled himself in the other armchair, gazing out at the garden as the first fat drops of rain blurred the view from the window. The silence stretched and stretched, neither hostile nor embarrassing, but simply an acknowledgement that the situation between them had changed.

‘What was it like, then?’ Faraday asked at length.

‘What was what like?’

‘The Falklands.’

Beattie studied him for a moment, surprise laced with something close to curiosity.

‘Is that a serious question?’

‘Yes.’

‘You really want to go back to all that?’

‘Yes.’

‘And you think I’m the best man to ask?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why?’

‘Because you were down there, obviously, and because you’ve thought about it since.’

‘Like everybody does.’

‘I’m sure. So what’s the harm in telling me?’

Beattie looked away, turning the proposition over.

‘There isn’t any harm,’ he said. ‘I’m just not sure why you want to know. If you’re trying to build some kind of case then I’d be mad to help you.’ He paused. ‘Is this a conversation that needs a solicitor?’

‘Far from it. Fighting a war isn’t a crime.’

‘No?’ The smile again, fainter this time.

There was a long silence. The rain was getting heavier. From miles away, a rumble of thunder. Faraday lay back in the armchair and closed his eyes. Finally, he heard the rustle of paper as Beattie put the
Telegraph
to one side.

‘If you really want to know …’ he began. ‘The whole thing was weird. Not the going down there. Not even fighting the bloody war. Not even sinking, for that matter. No, it was afterwards. They’d got us out of the water. They’d saved our lives. They’d even found cabins for us on
Canberra
, hot water, civvy food. But we were spare. We were gash. Two hundred blokes and no ship, you’re a waste of space. That’s hard to take, believe me.’

Beattie’s voice was low, a man sharing a secret. Faraday opened one eye. Beattie was staring into space.

‘You lost nineteen blokes,’ Faraday murmured.

‘That’s right. And you ask yourself, don’t you, you ask yourself why them? Why not me? That’s where the weird comes in. War’s a lottery. If you’re lucky, you die.’

Faraday thought he’d misunderstood.

‘If you’re
lucky
you die?’

‘Yes.’ There was a frown on Beattie’s face now and his voice had begun to falter. ‘You won’t believe this but that’s what a lot of us felt. We’d no right to be on
Canberra
, all tucked up. Don’t get me wrong. The blokes on board were brilliant, really generous, but none of us wanted the stuff they pushed at us. Not at first, anyway.’

‘So how did you cope?’

‘We didn’t. We just sat around, trying to make sense of it all.’ His voice tailed off and he turned his face away.
‘We transferred to the
QE2
after
Canberra
. That was even more bizarre. There were other 21s on board, other ship’s companies who’d gone down, but it made no difference. We were still refugees. Take away your ship, you take away everything. Our clothes had gone, our little knick-knacks, our music, our pride, every bloody thing. All you could think about was the training you’d done, how good you thought you were, how you could handle anything, and then came the great day – bam – and none of it worked.’ He looked across at Faraday again. ‘That’s a killer, believe me, and you know why? Because no one ever tells you the truth. High explosive is fucking horrible. Horrible. And worse than that, you knew you’d blown it.’

‘Blown it how?’

‘By losing the ship. By losing all those blokes. That wasn’t in the script. Ever.’

They sat in silence for a minute or so, Faraday’s thoughts about war confirmed. He’d put money on the fact that Beattie had been a hard case. You didn’t get to keep two hundred blokes in order by being nice to people. But even the Master-at-Arms had buckled before this savage eruption of violence.

Faraday stirred.

‘So what was it like coming home?’

‘Bizarre. Bizarre like you wouldn’t believe. For a start,
Accolade
was a Guzz ship so most of us lived in Plymouth. We steamed up past the Lizard and they could easily have choppered us off, but no, they wanted to save us for the curtain call, Maggie’s War, the big finale up Southampton Water.’ He began to laugh, a soft laugh, laughter emptied of any trace of merriment. ‘That was unbelievable. We were all mustered on deck, huge crowds, hundreds of boats, Page Three girlies with their tits hanging out, then there was this noise of low-flying jets, and we all hit the deck, flat on our faces, just praying
for the noise to go away. Just which clever bastard dreamed
that
up?’

Faraday remembered the live pictures on television: the
QE
2 nosing her way through an armada of smaller craft, flanked by fire tugs chucking up great arches of water while the Red Arrows roared overhead. Grand opera, he thought, scored for every front page in the world.

Beattie was describing the welcome now, the band on the quayside, the kids with bouquets of flowers, families and friends pressing up against the crowd barriers. From Southampton, he’d gone back to Plymouth. Down the pub, for night after night, friends and strangers bought him drinks, demanding to know what the war had been like, how it had
felt
to be caught up in it all.

‘At first you don’t say very much. Then they keep pushing and pushing until you realise that they want the Hollywood version, the
Sun
version, you know, strip cartoon stuff, the wicked Argies, the brave Brits, all that crap, then – if you’re like me – you lose it completely, and you sit them down and tell them a story or two, a true story, blokes with no heads, blokes you tried to save, blokes whose faces you’ll never forget, and then it all goes very quiet, and your missus has run off to the loo, and your kids are looking at their hands, and you realise that however hard you try, no one will ever understand.’

‘Except the blokes you served with?’

‘Yeah.’ He nodded. ‘Them and the Argies. They know, too.’

Faraday remembered the tapes again, the pictures he’d watched at the Home Club. These men will go on meeting until they die, he thought. Because they alone had been there.

There was another long silence. Then Beattie leaned forward in the chair.

‘You asked me what the war was like,’ he said softly. ‘But you know what really does it for me? The bottle of Grouse on the bedside table. That’s the Falklands in one.’

Faraday held his gaze for a moment, knowing that this was probably as close to the truth as he could ever reasonably expect, not a bunch of shipmates meeting every year or so, toasting each other until they were legless, but thousands of individual veterans, banged up with their memories, looking for some kind of solace, some kind of peace.