Blood And Honey Read online

  Praise for Graham Hurley

  Blood and Honey

  ‘Hurley’s decent, persistent cop is cementing his reputation as one of Britain’s most credible official sleuths, crisscrossing the mean streets of a city that is a brilliantly depicted microcosm of contemporary Britain … The unfolding panorama of Blair’s England is both edifying and shameful, and a sterling demonstration of the way crime writing can target society’s woes’

  Guardian

  ‘There is no doubt that his series of police-procedural novels is one of the best since the genre was invented more than half a century ago’

  Literary Review

  Cut to Black

  ‘The book has everything required of a first-rate police procedural and Hurley is now firmly at the top, with few rivals in this genre’

  Sunday Telegraph

  ‘Hurley is one of my favourite Brit crime writers of the last few years, and long may he continue to chronicle Portsmouth’s seedier side’

  Independent on Sunday

  ‘This series gets stronger and stronger, and there is obviously space for more’

  Crime Time

  Deadlight

  ‘I officially declare myself a fan of Graham Hurley. His attention to detail (without slowing the pace of the novel) and realistic display of police work mark him as a most accomplished purveyor of the British police procedural’

  Deadly Pleasures

  ‘Graham Hurley’s Deadlight is excellent modern British crime writing. Hurley demonstrates great attention to detail in regard to police procedure, as well as highlighting the conflicts of ideology that exist within the police force’

  Independent on Sunday

  ‘Uncompromisingly realistic and often depressing in its view of the battle against crime, this series grows in stature with each book’

  Sunday Telegraph

  ‘Deadlight is a complex and skilfully plotted book and Hurley has a rare knack for understated characterisation that is extremely effective in building up people’s lives. Deadlight is acutely observed and Hurley is quite simply a superb storyteller’

  Sherlock

  ‘This is a bravura piece of downbeat crime writing; Hurley just seems to get better and better with each Faraday book’

  Crime Time

  Angels Passing

  ‘An ambitious police procedural epic … The often sordid life of a large British city is caught with pinpoint accuracy, together with a host of realistic characters on both sides of the law … A splendid achievement’

  Guardian

  ‘Splendidly gritty … most enjoyable’ FHM

  ‘This impressive series … With the grimness of his concerns and the liveliness of his writing, Hurley is in some ways a South Coast answer to Ian Rankin – before long, I suspect, he’ll be just as famous’

  Morning Star

  ‘A realistic depiction of modern police work … strong stuff, and it makes gripping and, at times, grim reading’

  Sunday Telegraph

  ‘With this, his third novel in the Joe Faraday series, Graham Hurley has taken another step forward and merits comparison with some of the best writers in that branch of the genre … It is the sense of Panda cars going down mean streets in Portsmouth which makes this novel so good’

  Crime Time

  Graham Hurley is an award-winning TV documentary maker who now writes full time. He lived in Portsmouth for 20 years. He is married and has grown up children. He now lives in Exmouth, Devon.

  www.grahamhurley.co.uk

  By Graham Hurley

  FEATURING DI JOE FARADAY

  Turnstone

  The Take

  Angels Passing

  Deadlight

  Cut to Black

  Blood and Honey

  One Under

  The Price of Darkness

  No Lovelier Death

  Beyond Reach

  OTHER NOVELS

  Rules of Engagement

  Reaper

  The Devil’s Breath

  Thunder in the Blood

  Sabbathman

  The Perfect Soldier

  Heaven’s Light

  Nocturne

  Permissible Limits

  BLOOD

  AND HONEY

  Graham Hurley

  Contents

  Cover

  Title

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Praise for Graham Hurley

  About the Author

  By Graham Hurley

  Acknowledgements

  Prelude

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Epilogue

  Beyond Reach

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  AN ORION EBOOK

  First published in Great Britain in 2006 by Orion

  This ebook first published in 2010 by Orion Books

  Copyright © Graham Hurley 2006

  The moral right of Graham Hurley to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  All the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN: 978 1 4091 3351 3

  This ebook produced by Jouve, France

  The Orion Publishing Group Ltd

  Orion House

  5 Upper Saint Martin’s Lane

  London WC2H 9EA

  An Hachette UK Company

  www.orionbooks.co.uk

  For Lin

  again and always

  To the victor, the bones.

  – Milos Stankovic

  Acknowledgements

  My thanks to the following for their time and advice: John Ashworth, John Banfield, Glen Barham, Robert Bradley, Steven Burton, John Campbell, Mike Dobson, Roly Dumont, Pat Forsyth, Diana Franklin, Jason Goodwin, Simon Goss, Colin Griffiths, Andy Harrington, Mark Hickson, Richard John, Ken Littlewood, Clare Mason, Dave McKinney, Chris Meadus, Clive Merritt, Lucy Pickering, Nick Pugh, John Roberts, Dave Sackman, Morag Scott, Pete Shand, Sarah Skelton, Colin Smith, Debbie Spurlock, Sean Strevens, Tara Walker, Pat Wedick and Nicola Wragg. Simon Spanton offered the book the softest of editorial landings, while my wife Lin shamed us all by doing something practical for Pompey’s many asylum seekers. Actions, not mere words.

  Prelude

  Monday, 16 February 2004

  Flat on her belly on the freezing turf, she sucked in a tiny lungful of air and then steadied the binoculars and tried again. Hundreds of feet below, a flooding tide washed over the tumble of chalky boulders at the foot of the cliff, w
ave after wave curtaining the shape she thought she’d glimpsed. The shape worried at her. It couldn’t be, just couldn’t be. Not the way she’d seen it. Not in that kind of state.

  Shifting her weight in the bulky anorak, she tracked slowly left, waiting for the next wave to fold, collapse and die. Sluicing back, it revealed only the pale whites of the broken chalk latticed with the rich greens and browns of half a winter’s growth of seaweed. She swallowed hard, wondering whether she might have imagined it, this split-second image that refused to go away. Maybe it was a mirage, a trick of the light. Maybe getting up at six in the morning and shipping across to the island on the rumour of an abnormally early nesting season did funny things to the inside of your head.

  On the point of giving up and finding a new location, she eased the binoculars a little further to the left, trying to go with the grain of the tide. For an instant came the blur of a black-headed gull riding the column of wind blasting up the cliff face, then – all too distinct – she found herself looking at the shape again, unmistakable this time, momentarily trapped against a sizeable boulder. She watched, fascinated, appalled, then fumbled for her mobile, one hand still locked on the binoculars. For a second, presented by the operator with a brisk list of options, she didn’t quite know what to say.

  ‘Police,’ she managed at last.

  But it was the coastguard who arrived first, bumping over the frosty turf in a new-looking Land Rover. Pausing for a brief account of what had happened, he accompanied the woman to the edge of the cliff, using his own binoculars to confirm the presence of the body beneath. Back at the Land Rover, he leaned into the cab and reached for the radio. The woman caught mention of ‘Bembridge’ and ‘lifeboat’ before the clatter of a big helicopter drowned out the rest of the conversation. The helicopter seemed to appear from nowhere, tracking low over the down, then banking steeply as it left the cliff face behind it. The coastguard motioned the woman away from the edge of the cliff as the rotor wash swirled around them.

  ‘Cliff rescue team should be here any minute,’ he said. ‘Police, too.’

  The policeman was young. He took the woman through what she had seen and asked her if she was prepared to make a statement later. Beyond them, on the clifftop, the rescue team were lowering four men and a stretcher on a skein of ropes while the helicopter hovered offshore, the face of the watching pilot clearly visible. Abruptly, he waved to someone down below; gave him the thumbs up. Then, as if this was something they did every day of their working lives, the team on the clifftop were hauling their cargo in.

  The woman edged back to the cliff, absorbed by this small drama, by the way that the shape in her binoculars had surrendered to this smooth exercise in retrieval. Peering over, she had time to register two of the men steadying a stretcher, halfway up the cliff. Strapped to the stretcher was a plastic body bag, grey, bulky. From this distance it looked like a parcel they’d found on the beach.

  The woman shifted, unable to tear herself away. The blast of the wind. The steady whump-whump of the helicopter. The angry scream of disturbed gulls. And the deadweight of that strange grey package, bumping against the cliff face. Then came a hand on her shoulder and she turned to find herself eye to eye with the coastguard. He was tall, blue jumpsuit, tightly cropped grey hair.

  ‘Best not to look, madam. This wind. Don’t want two of you down there, do we?’

  Chastened, the woman stepped away from the edge. But, try as she might, she couldn’t rid herself of that first glimpse of the body now on the stretcher, the image that had registered for a split second in her binoculars and triggered this extraordinary operation. The mottled naked greyness of the flesh. The huge distended belly. The floppy limbs flailing in the tide. And how strange a body looked without a head.

  One

  Friday, 20 February 2004

  Faraday stood at the window in the Southsea hovercraft terminal, staring out. The gale anticipated on last night’s TV weather forecast had arrived at last, low ragged skirts of cloud and a hard, driving rain that had soaked him in the brief dash across the road from the seafront car park. Now, half-expecting the service to be suspended, he peered through the blurry, salt-caked glass.

  The low, dark swell of the Isle of Wight had long disappeared. Beyond the angry lunge of the waves and a glimpse of the heaving buoy that marked the deep-water channel, he could see nothing. Even the seaweed, long brown ribbons of the stuff, was blowing like litter across the glistening concrete ramp that plunged down towards the boiling tideline.

  The woman at the ticket office, to his faint disappointment, met his enquiry about cancellation with a shake of her head. Conditions weren’t perfect, she admitted, but the weather was still within operating limits. If the inbound service was a minute or two later than scheduled, she counselled patience.

  Faraday returned to his sodden briefcase and extracted a thin manila envelope. Settling damply in the moulded plastic chair, he reread the file that had been sent back to Major Crimes a couple of days ago.

  The details were sparse. A twenty-five-year-old white male, name of Aaron Tolly, had been found dead at the back of a block of flats off Ryde seafront. The body had been discovered before dawn by a local runner in early training for the London marathon. His 999 call had brought both an ambulance and a patrol car to the scene and by mid-morning Detective Superintendent Willard had dispatched Detective Inspector Nick Hayder plus two DCs from Major Crimes to spearhead what the local DI was already calling a murder investigation.

  Faraday flipped quickly through the file. Same-day inquiries had established that Tolly was an alcoholic and occasional heroin user with a long record of convictions for shoplifting and benefit fraud. He’d shipped over to the island from Pompey and now lived in a heavily secured squat on the third floor of the premises. On the night of his death, according to a witness who knew him by sight, he’d been drinking alone in a shelter on the seafront. Later that evening he’d evidently tried to cadge money for more drinks in a local pub. His keys had been found inside the squalid flat he called home. To someone with a head for heights and plenty of nerve, a fire escape to a locked door at the rear of the flat offered access to an adjacent bedroom window. One of the other vagrants who dossed there thought he might have heard a bang or two at the door and then a brief scraping noise at the window. At the post-mortem the pathologist identified injuries consistent with a fall. Recorded body temperatures put the time of death at around midnight. In Nick Hayder’s judgement Tolly had got pissed again, found his way up the fire escape, tried for the half-open bedroom window, and missed.

  At the back of the file Faraday found a sheaf of colour stills from the Scenes of Crime photographer. He lingered for a moment on the last of the shots. Tolly lay sprawled beside a line of brimming dustbins, his arms outstretched, one leg buckled beneath the other. There was a glimpse of white flesh through a tear in his jeans and Faraday noticed that one of his battered runners was unlaced. Faraday gazed at the thin, gaunt face, the eyes wide open, the mouth shaping the beginnings of a scream. Tolly hadn’t shaved for a day or two and a brown trickle of congealed blood tracked through the stubble below his left ear. The post-mortem report had spoken of multiple skull fractures with haemorrhages in the underlying brain tissue. With injuries like these, according to the pathologist, Tolly would have been killed on impact.

  Faraday leafed back through the file, checking every link in the sequence of events Hayder and his team had put together. The stretch of unswept concrete where Tolly had met his death lay directly beneath the bedroom window. With his keys inside a locked flat, there was every possibility he’d tried to find an alternative way in. No witnesses had spoken of any kind of altercation earlier in the evening. Drunk and alone, Tolly had tumbled into oblivion.

  Faraday looked up, hearing the approaching roar of the hovercraft. Hayder and his team had stayed on the island for another couple of days. Unearthing no evidence to convince him otherwise, he’d returned the file to the local DI with a note confirming an
absence of suspicious circumstances. By now the Coroner should have held an inquest and returned a verdict. Yet here was Faraday, en route to CID headquarters in Newport. The DI was insisting on a full review. And Willard, whose responsibility for Major Crimes extended to the Isle of Wight, wanted to know why.

  Faraday got to his feet, slipping the file into his briefcase. The hovercraft was a dark shadow fifty metres offshore. Emerging through the grey curtain of rain, it yawed violently from side to side, clawed its way out of the waves, climbed the weed-strewn ramp, and then settled unsteadily on the wet concrete.

  The departures hall had mysteriously emptied. The youth on the exit door inspected Faraday’s ticket.

  ‘You ready for this, sir?’ he muttered.

  The trip across was mercifully brief. Never had he been closer to losing his breakfast. On landfall at Ryde, half-expecting a waiting CID car, Faraday was obliged to take a taxi. Half an hour to Newport with the heater on full blast was enough to dry out, and by the time he’d settled himself in the DI’s office he felt a good deal better.

  Detective Inspector Colin Irving had been in charge of the island’s CID for longer than anyone could remember. A tall, bespectacled, slightly bookish figure, he guarded his independence with the kind of fierce pride that went with an Aldershot youth and three years in uniform patrolling the badlands of Basingstoke. As someone who himself had once lived on the island, Faraday was the first to acknowledge that the most passionate islanders were always the ones who’d blown in from somewhere else.