Western Approaches (Jimmy Suttle) (6 page)

‘I’m sorry?’

‘In rowing. Only we do taster sessions for novices. Think of it as three free goes. If you like it, you become a member. If you don’t . . .’ He shrugged. ‘No harm done.’

Suttle looked around. It seemed like the place was falling apart: the sagging doors, the piles of abandoned kit, the bird shit. Yet at the same time there was no arguing with the buzz. These kids were really going for it.

‘So anyone can turn up?’

‘No problem.’

‘When?’

‘Sundays are best. As long as the weather’s not too evil, you’ll find us on the beach.’

The coach turned back to the rowing machine and checked the readout again. Suttle couldn’t resist a look: 4,567 metres. In 19.03. The rower, a young lad of maybe seventeen, was cranking up for a final push. Sweat darkened his T-shirt. His face was contorted with effort, and every time he pushed back against the footstretchers the effort squeezed a grunt from his gasping lungs.

Suttle caught his eye. ‘This is
good
for you?’ he murmured.

The boy had the grace to muster a smile.

‘Fuck off,’ he mouthed back.

Exmouth police station occupied the middle of an otherwise picturesque square on rising ground beyond the main shopping centre. An undistinguished 1960s building, it had a slightly alien presence. An apron of parking contained a handful of cars and the clock on the church opposite had stopped at twenty to four. Suttle, already struck by the slightly retro feel of the seafront, regarded this as somehow symbolic. Exmouth, he thought. The town that time forgot.

Houghton was putting the finishing touches to the smaller of the two offices commandeered for
Constantine
. Three desks: one for Nandy, one for Houghton, the third for Suttle. A poster featuring a Thai beach occupied one wall. A second poster warned uniformed coppers that
FIRST IMPRESSIONS COUNT
.

‘This used to be the sergeants’ locker room,’ Houghton grunted. ‘You should feel at home, Jimmy.’

Suttle tallied the names of Kinsey’s crew he’d picked up from Molly Doyle. Eamonn Lenahan, he said, served as cox. He lived up the river in Lympstone. Andy Poole, who turned out to work for a hedge fund partnership, had a flash apartment in Exeter. Tom Pendrick, who rowed in the seat behind Poole, was listed with an Exmouth address. While a guy called Milo Symons evidently dossed with his girlfriend in a caravan on farmland near Budleigh Salterton. She’d been at the party too. Her name was Natasha Donovan.

Houghton had scribbled down the names. Kinsey’s body, she said, had been removed after the Scenes of Crime photographer had done his work. A Crime Scene Manager had joined the CSI and they’d made a start on boshing Kinsey’s apartment. Documents from the desk that served as his office and from a filing cabinet in one of the spare bedrooms were waiting for Suttle’s attention, and Kinsey’s computer had been bagged for full analysis.

‘The CSI also pinged me this.’ She beckoned Suttle closer. ‘He found it on the man’s Blackberry.’

Suttle read the text on Houghton’s iPhone. It read, ‘V. We stuffed them. The whole lot. Decent time too. The Krug’s on ice. Usual place. J. xx’.

Houghton wanted to know who V might be.

‘The Viking. Her real name’s Doyle. Molly Doyle. She’s the one who gave me the crew names.’

‘“Usual place”?’

‘Yeah. Interesting.’

‘You sound surprised.’

‘I am, boss. The woman’s no fan of Kinsey.’

‘Are we sure?’

‘Of course not.’

‘But?’

Suttle shrugged. He honestly didn’t know. Molly Doyle, in his judgement, had her finger on the pulse of the club and her description of Kinsey had sounded all too plausible.

‘The guy muscled his way in,’ he said. ‘No one liked him. He thought money could buy him anything.’

‘Including her?’

‘I doubt it.’ Suttle made a mental note to check the lead out.

Houghton nodded, then updated Suttle on the house-to-house calls. Gerald Smart, who occupied the apartment below Kinsey, confirmed that his neighbour had entertained guests last night. He’d heard laughter and music and a bit of stamping around but not much else. Getting on for midnight, everything had gone quiet and after that he and his wife had retired to bed.

‘Nothing afterwards?’

‘No.’

‘What about the other properties? Line of sight?’

‘Zilch. The guys aren’t through yet but we seem to be talking a particular demographic. These are retired people. They’re older rather than younger. I get the feeling they party early, get pissed and go to bed.’

‘How many of them knew Kinsey?’

‘Very few. There’s a residents’ association which is pretty active but it seems he could never be arsed. Most of these good folk knew him by name because of the property he’d bought but that’s pretty much as far as it went. You’re going to ask me whether he was popular but I don’t think it’s that simple. When it came to socialising and all that, he just wasn’t interested. Apparently he didn’t even have a Facebook account.’

Suttle nodded. This is exactly what Molly Doyle had told him.
This is the kind of guy who takes what he wants and turns his back on the rest
.

‘Mr Loner,’ Suttle muttered.

‘Exactly.’

‘What about the pub?’

‘The landlord was pretty helpful. Turned out to be an ex-marine. His line on Kinsey was pretty much everyone else’s. The guy very rarely made an appearance and when he did stuck to fizzy water. Last night seems to have been a one-off. Three bottles of Moët? The landlord couldn’t believe it.’

‘And the crack? The chat? Anything there?’

‘Not so far. The landlord was too busy to listen in but he’s given us the names of some regulars who were in last night in case they picked up a clue or two. I’ve scheduled the follow-ups for this afternoon.’ Her eye strayed to the list she’d made of Kinsey’s crew. ‘These guys need sorting. Where do you want to start?’

Eamonn Lenahan lived in a rented cottage in Lympstone, a waterside village a couple of miles upstream from Exmouth. Suttle’s first call had been Tom Pendrick, but his attempts to raise an answer on the phone or in person had come to nothing. Before leaving Exmouth nick, he’d run all six names – including Kinsey – through the Police National Computer but drawn a blank. No previous convictions. No one ever charged or even arrested. Model citizens, all of them.

Lenahan’s cottage lay in a tiny cobbled street with a glimpse of the river at the far end. Clouds of gulls swooped over the rooftops and Suttle could hear the soft lap of water on the pebbles that fringed the tiny harbour. He knocked again, wondering if Kinsey’s cox was still sleeping off last night’s piss-up, and then stepped back from the door and offered his face to a sudden burst of sunshine. The weather had brightened from the west, and standing in the quiet of this little village, listening to the gulls, Suttle realised that he was beginning to enjoy
Constantine
.

Most of the jobs that came to Major Crime were, to be frank, tacky. In Portsmouth he’d lost touch of the number of pissed retards who’d ended up battering a friend or a stranger to death. There was no mystery, no challenge, to enquiries like these, and even the drug scene – a dependable source of more interesting work – was riddled with lowlife. Heading west, he’d somehow assumed that he’d be stepping into a different world, classier, more sophisticated, but crime hot spots like Torbay and Plymouth were as squalid and mindlessly violent as anywhere in Pompey. To date, he’d worked on two murders and an alleged stranger rape. In all three cases the real culprit had been cheap vodka and the girl reporting the rape had turned out to have been as pissed as the rest of them. These were lives in free fall, tiny domestic tragedies played out against a landscape of crappy bedsits, cheap drugs and increasingly elaborate benefit scams.

Constantine
, on the other hand, already looked a great deal more promising. An alleged millionaire with no apparent reason to end his days plus five partygoing crew mates who may or may not have wished him well. Molly Doyle had painted a picture of each of these people. These very definitely weren’t lowlife. Eamonn Lenahan was a medic. Andy Poole worked in hedge funds. Pendrick was an electrician. These people had jobs, education, prospects. Booze had undoubtedly played a part last night, but it was a relief not to be looking at SOC shots of fat battered women lying dead on yet another stretch of fag-cratered orange nylon-pile carpet.

Suttle was about to knock for the last time when the cottage door opened. A small figure in a pair of black boxers was rubbing the sleep from his eyes. He’d found a pair of pink slippers from somewhere and hadn’t shaved for a while.

‘Mr Lenahan?’

‘The same. Who the fuck are you?’ Irish accent. Inquisitive smile.

Suttle offered his warrant card. He’d appreciate a word or two.

‘No problem, my friend. Always a pleasure.’ He stooped to retrieve a pint of milk and stood aside to let Suttle in. The house smelled of burned toast. Lenahan blamed his fellow tenant.

‘Sweet wee girl. Off out early, she and her lovely friend. How can I help you?’

The sitting room was tiny and dark – a single tatty armchair, a battered sofa and a trestle table in the corner loaded with books and a copy of yesterday’s
Guardian
.

Suttle took a seat. There was a row of framed photos on the opposite wall, randomly hung. Somewhere hot. A village setting. Some kind of open-air market in the background. A crowd of black faces mugging for the camera, many of them kids.

‘Sudan.’ Lenahan had found a T-shirt from somewhere and a pair of trackie bottoms. ‘Know it at all?’

‘No.’

‘Shame. We all need a bit of Sudan. Keeps you fucking sane.’ He perched on the sofa, his legs tucked beneath him. ‘So what have you got for me?’

Suttle explained about Kinsey. The news that he’d been found dead sparked no reaction whatsoever. Lenahan just looked at him.

‘You’re not surprised?’ Suttle asked.

‘Nothing surprises me.’

‘You’re not . . .’ Suttle frowned, hunting for the right phrase ‘. . . upset?’

‘Never. You go, you’re gone. That’s pretty fucking final. Dying would have upset yer man, for sure. Kinsey was one for the options, you know what I mean? That’s how he operated. Always. Options. Possibilities. That sweet little opportunity no other fucker ever spotted. Dying’s a terrible option. And you’re talking to an expert.’

Suttle blinked. He’d been right. This definitely wasn’t Torbay. Lenahan hadn’t finished.

‘Under that apartment of his, you say?’

‘Yeah.’

‘So you’re going to want to know about yesterday, about last night. Am I getting warm?’

‘You are.’

‘OK, so here’s the way it was. We need to start with the race. The race is everything. And why’s that? Because the race, my friend, is where it begins and ends.’

Yesterday’s outing, he explained, was a head race, nine and a bit miles down the River Dart from Totnes to Dartmouth, pretty as you like, acre after rolling acre of God’s fucking England. The boats start every thirty seconds and the trick is to knock them off, one by one.

‘Knock them off?’

‘Pass them. That’s the trick, that’s what we’re there for, that’s what Kinsey wants us to do. Fastest boat wins. And if you pass every other bugger, you’re home safe.’

Off the start line, he said, they were towards the back of the fleet. Lenahan is in the cox’s seat face to face with Andy Poole. Andy is stroke. He sets the rate. Lenahan’s known Andy for ever, rowed with him for years on the Thames, won oodles of fucking cups. Between them, they’ll boss the race.

‘So we’re half a mile down the course, a long straight bit before the first bend, and already we’ve reeled in the boat ahead. The guys doing the work have no idea what’s going on because they’re all looking backwards, but I haven’t said a thing so far because it’s good to toss the guys the odd sweetie, and so I’m nudging towards the right bank for the overtake and you know what? It’s Kinsey, the man himself, who’s up there in the bow, he’s the one who susses what’s happening and steals a little glance over his shoulder, just a little look now, one of his trademark looks, and here’s the point, here’s what I’m trying to tell you. As we step on these guys, as Andy pumps up the rate and we go surging past,
racing
past, I get to see the expression on Kinsey’s face. He’s creamed them, he’s fucking
buried
them, and the sweetness of that knowledge, that big fucking jolt of adrenalin, puts this nasty little smile on his face. He’s top dog. He’s up there with the angels. The heavenly fucking chorus is giving it full throttle and every last cell in his body tells him he can do this for ever. He doesn’t feel a whisper of knackeredness. That man’s got the world by the throat. All the nausea we’ve gone through in training, all the money he’s spent, all that has paid off, big time, in spades, and all he needs now is more of the same. One bunch of muppets crushed. Eleven to go. And you know what? Yer man’s right to think that. Because that’s called winning.’

Lenahan shifted his weight on the sofa and offered an emphatic nod, driving the point home. There was a moment of silence and Suttle wondered whether to applaud or not. Was Kinsey’s prize cox like this all the time? Or was the performance strictly for Suttle’s benefit? Either way, he needed to find out more.