Backstory Page 19

  The two men are celebrating in a Southsea club. Mackenzie has just made a joke.

  Winter laughed. On the strength of tonight, he’d bought a second bottle of champagne, another forty quid that prompted Bazza to ask what the fuck they were celebrating.

  “Nothing, Baz, just this.” Winter had waved vaguely at the space between them. “You get to an age, you know that?”

  “Get to an age what, mush?” he was genuinely interested. Winter could see it in his eyes.

  “An age when stuff starts sorting itself out. You’re way too young, Baz, you won’t have a clue what I’m talking about. And between you and me, I’m far too pissed to explain. Except it’s nothing but good news. Drink to that?”

  They had. And the second bottle, with a wave of Winter’s credit card, had given way to a third. Now, with the crowd at the bar beginning to thin, Bazza suggested an expedition to Misty Gallagher’s.

  “It’s two in the fucking morning, Baz.”

  “Doesn’t matter. She’s an owl, that woman. Be a laugh.”

  He ordered a cab. It was waiting at the kerb within minutes. At the top of the island, where the motorway divides, Bazza told the cabbie to take the left fork.

  “Port Solent, mush.” He gave him an address.

  The cabbie laughed. “Lottery win, is it?”

  “Fuck off.”

  The escort agency lay in the genteel clutter of £400,000 houses fringing the marina. Telling the cabbie to wait, Bazza steered Winter up the front path. The woman who opened the door recognised Mackenzie at once.

  “You should have phoned earlier, Baz. She’s busy right now.”

  “Doesn’t matter, love. It’s my mate here. We’re talking an all-nighter. What have you got left?”

  “Has he got a tongue in his head, your mate?” The woman was eyeing Winter. “Only he can choose for himself, can’t he?”

  Inside, Winter found his way to an over-furnished lounge. Three girls were sprawled in various states of undress, watching a DVD. It was unbearably hot.

  Bazza nodded at them. “Freebie, mate. Call it a thank you. Help yourself.”

  Winter took his time. All three girls ignored him. Finally, he chose a shapely blond with dead eyes. She looked easily the oldest but even so, she could have been his daughter.

  Bazza tapped her on the shoulder. “You got a name, love?”

  “Dawn.” She was chewing gum.

  “Dawn, this is my mate Paul. I want you to be very nice to him. You listening to me?”

  He disappeared from the room without waiting for an answer. Winter wanted more champagne. Badly. He nodded at the huge plasma screen.

  “Like him do you, love? Tom Cruise?”

  “It’s Kevin Costner.”

  “Costner, then.”

  “I think he’s a wanker.”

  “Really? Ever see Top Gun?”

  “Top what?”

  Bazza was back. He’d sorted a deal for the night and promised to have young Dawn back in time to get breakfast for her nipper.

  “Nipper?” Winter was lost.

  “Little girl. Dawn’s mum stays over nights but she has to be at work by seven. Ain’t that right, Dawn?”

  Dawn wasn’t paying attention. Bazza walked them all out to the cab. The three of them sat in the back with Dawn in the middle. Bazza had his arm round her. From time to time he nuzzled her ear and whispered something Winter couldn’t catch. After a while, she started to scratch herself.

  Winter leaned across, poked Bazza on the knee.

  “She’s a junkie.” He said. “I can tell.”

  “No way, mush. I asked. It’s just a habit. The girl gets nervous. Mist’s got a fridge full of Moet. She’ll warm up a treat.”

  Misty was in bed when they arrived. Winter caught sight of her in one of the upstairs windows, trying to check out the noise at the gate. Bazza paid off the cabbie and found the key to the front door. By the time they were inside, Misty was half way downstairs. The sight of Winter, the state of the man, put a smile on her face.

  “Company, Mist. Paulie here’s played a blinder, clever cunt that he is. Thought he deserved a little pressie. Say hallo, Dawn. Pretend you’re a fucking human being.”

  Dawn ignored him. Misty, laughing now, took Winter by the hand.

  “Are we up for a foursome?” She said to Mackenzie. “Or what?”

  “Piss off, Mist.” He grinned back at her. “You’re the pressie.”

  I finished the first draft of The Price of Darkness with time to spare before the Orion deadlight expired. A couple of days later news arrived that I’d made it from the Theakston’s long list to the short list. This appeared to put me in the running for the UK’s top crime prize. I phoned Simon. He didn’t seem the least surprised.

  “About time too,” he said. “Fingers crossed, eh?”

  Ten

  In the end, sadly, the Theakston’s prize didn’t happen. I journeyed north to Harrogate for the crime-fest and shared the stage with the other half dozen contenders, all too aware that the next half hour could make a sizeable difference to both my sales and my national profile. After the difference of editorial opinion with Lisa Milton over One Under, I’d pretty much given up on the latter but nothing quickens ambition faster than the thought of piles of my paperbacks stickered with the Theakston’s glad news, and for the hour it took for us to be group-interviewed before the magic envelope yielded a name, I’m ashamed to say I was drifting peaceably around in fantasy land. The prize that year went to Allan Guthrie, a gifted Scottish crime writer, and I went through exactly the same trial-by-shortlist the following year, though by then I was on better terms with disappointment. The ’08 prize, incidentally, went to Stef Penny for The Tenderness of Wolves. Excellent book.

  The Price of Darkness, though, definitely touched a nerve amongst the reviewers. James Urquhart, in the Financial Times, applauded D/C Winter’s “tongue-in-cheek vitality” while the Toronto Globe and Mail wrote that “Hurley’s graphically realistic Portsmouth is very similar to David Simon’s amazing picture of an equally besieged Baltimore.” To share a sentence with the creator of The Wire was a rich moment but there was even better to come from Laura Wilson, a fellow crime writer reviewing for the Guardian. She very definitely got it.

  “Residents of Portsmouth disgruntled by Boris Johnson’s description of their town as drug-ridden and populated by obese under achievers will not necessarily be pleased to learn that it is the setting for Britain’s finest and hardest-hitting series of police procedural novels. The Price of Darkness is Graham Hurley’s best book yet and should put Pompey firmly on the literary map. Maverick D/C Paul Winter has gone under cover and is finding that the rich pickings of criminal life are too much of a burden for his slender conscience to bear while stalwart D/I Joe Faraday is trying to piece together a jigsaw of graft and corruption in order to solve a murder and an assassination. Hurley presents a world which has lost its moral compass, where selfishness, betrayal and brutality prevail, and the rare instances of decency and kindness seem almost aberrant. Readers who enjoy convincing, well-crafted thrillers won’t go wrong with this one.”

  Reviews like this, precisely because they recognise the reef beneath the suck and flow of circumstance that takes the reader from page to page, are – in my experience – literally priceless. I’m not sure whether Laura Wilson ( or Mark Timlin, or Susanna Yager, or Margaret Cannon, or Michael Carlson) ever knew it, but the knowledge that reviewers – especially fellow writers – understood what Joe Faraday and I were really about went a long way towards sustaining my faith in the series. These books, I hope, were never going to be sociological essays, or political rants, but neither were they a bunch of cartoon characters in search of the fabled mass market. Page-turning, yes. Plot-driven, of course. But also stories with ample space for the kind of characters and situations that make you pause from time
to time and have a bit of a wonder about where we’re all heading.

  So where next for the series? It was a Saturday in late April and my eye was caught by a full page story in the weekend’s Guardian. The headline – Police arrest girl whose MySpace site led to £20,000 party disaster – gave you all the clues you’d ever need but the real potential was in the small print. This was a 17 year old “A” level student whose secret plans for a modest get-together went catastrophically wrong after the party’s location was broadcast on MySpace.

  The girl and her parents lived in a smart, new-looking house on a private estate in County Durham. The photo in the Guardian showed a double garage, bay windows upstairs and down, plus an area of lawn out front. Mum and dad had gone away on a caravanning weekend, forbidding their daughter to have guests around, and returned to find the place trashed and the neighbours in shock. There was vomit, graffiti and urine in every room and homeowners from the rest of the cul-de-sac had spent half the night chasing hundreds of drunken teenagers around with golf clubs.

  Some of these uninvited guests had come from as far away as London, blocking the mouth of the cul-de-sac with mini-buses and other vehicles, and the incident had required seven police cars and a dog unit before order was restored. Some of the kids, it seemed, were as young as 11, and had simply climbed in through a back window after the partying daughter and her friends had bolted the front door. Within days, reviews for the rave began to appear on social websites. 19 year old Emily from Newcastle was cock–a-hoop about a couple of boys she’d met. “I was on a field with one of these people,” she reported. “And in a bedroom with the other. Haha stunners.x”

  That same morning, more than intrigued, I did a bit of research on the internet and turned up a press release from a major insurance company. Specially commissioned research had established that British teens had run up a £136 million bill in damages in partying while their parents were away. Carpets, sofas, curtains were the first to fall victim to the tidal wave of Scrumpy Jack, discount vodka, cheap wine, plus a selection of body fluids, and the damage got to battleground proportions once the gatecrashers arrived. In some respects it would have been nice to interpret all this mayhem as episodes in some on-going class war, a cheerful weekend settling of accounts, but this analysis would have been wrong. The kids kept an eye on the social websites, turned up, got pissed, and wrecked everything. Next day, on FaceBook or MySpace, the comment that cropped up most often was “lol”. “Lol” means “Laugh out loud.”

  I read the press release again to make sure I had the facts right. Then I realised that the insurance company that had commissioned all this research was Zurich. People like me never discount the power of co-incidence. The UK headquarters of Zurich plc, a slightly sinister office block clad in black glass, lay in the middle of Pompey, just a mile from where I was sitting. I looked for something to write on. It’s rare to get a whole novel on the back of a petrol receipt. This is what I wrote: Bazza’s next door neighbour. Gone away. Bazza house-sitting. Chaos. Or worse.

  Where next? John Ashworth was the obvious place to start. He’d recently left the Major Crime Team and was now working as the managing D/I in the Department of Scientific Services at Hantspol’s Training HQ, a sprawling complex in the grounds of an old mental asylum at Netley, near Southampton Water. John’s new empire housed the guys responsible for comms analysis, video and stills recording, plus a unit of high-tech crime busters. John also had access to the Fingerprint Bureau, the Chemical Treatment Unit, and something called Forensic Intelligence Research.

  These are the crown jewels in terms of what investigators call “passive data”, crime-fighting tools which increasingly underpin successful convictions.

  The problem for outsiders like yours truly is that these techniques are state of the art and in the process of constant change. Keeping abreast with stuff like this can be a nightmare with a readership only too eager to spot the smallest technical mistake, and so I’d been ear bashing John for a series of in-depth briefings. These he was in the process of arranging when I phoned next day.

  “I’m on it, mate. No problem. I’m lining them all up. You’ll need a couple of days. You can stay over if you want. You can have the spare room. I’ll kick the dogs out.”

  I said that was kind of him. His plan to blitz the interviews sounded perfect. I also had something else in mind.

  “What’s that?”

  “Can’t say. Except you’ll love it.”

  John adores withheld information. It means I’ve learned a thing about CID. It means we’re talking the same language, playing the same covert game.

  “Gizza clue.”

  “Just one. Right?”

  “Go on.”

  “Kids. Millions of them. Trillions of them. All totally out of it.”

  “Fuck. Nightmare.”

  “Exactly.”

  We met the following week for a brainstorm. John had enlisted his boss, an engaging guy called Terry Lowe who was Deputy Head of Scientific Services. Terry is a bit of a jogger. He’s small and lean and he has what casting directors occasionally call “presence”. He’s quick on his feet, and has an engaging habit of attacking every problem from the least expected angle. The news that he was shortly to feature in a Channel Four documentary series about major crime investigations was no surprise.

  He and John wanted to know what I was up to. I explained about the party in the house next door to Bazza. This is leafy Craneswater, as posh as Pompey ever gets. It’s Saturday night, the parents are away, and the daughter pings out some invites on her Facebook page. A little get-together round my place. Bring a bottle. Or maybe two.

  Terry Lowe, as I quickly discovered, preferred questions and answers to any form of speech-making. Very Socratic.

  “This girl’s at school, right?”

  “Right.”

  “PGS?”

  “Spot on.”

  “What age?”

  “Seventeen.”

  “Perfect.” Terry nodded in approval. PGS is Portsmouth Grammar School, educational institution of choice for aspirational Pompey parents.

  John wanted to know where the parents had gone.

  “They’re away on vacation. The guy’s nuts about crossing big oceans on big yachts. He and his wife have signed up for the sail of a lifetime. Just now they’re in the middle of the Pacific.”

  “Minted, then.”

  “Yeah.”

  “So what does he do for a living, this guy?”

  “He’s a Crown Court judge.”

  “And he’s living next door to Bazza?”

  “Exactly. And guess what, they’re best mates. The judge obviously knows a bit about Bazza but he thinks it’s kind of exotic and amusing. The wives get on really well. So when Baz offers to keep an eye on young Rach, just to make sure everything stays sweet, the judge says yes please ”

  “And means it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Nice one.”

  The notion of Pompey’s top face tucked up next door to a High Court judge had drawn a grin from Terry, too. Like John, he knew the series backwards.

  “So what happens?” This from Terry.

  I explained that the invite on Rachel’s Facebook page has leaked into the rougher quarters of Pompey. Young Rachel has history with Matt Berriman, a top swimmer from one of these areas, though the new beau for whom she’d throwing the party – a PGS boy her age called Gareth Hughes - comes from safer social stock.

  “So what happens?” Terry asked again.

  “The party kicks off, just like Rachel intended, then half of Somerstown turns up. Hundreds of kids. Rachel’s place is swamped. She’s got no chance. These kids have been pissed for hours. They’re out of their heads on Carling Export and whatever else they can neck. Think Lacoste. Think Stone Island. Think lippy thirteen year olds. Think attitude. Bloo
dbath. Total chav fest.”

  “Bloodbath?” John’s was getting seriously interested. Somerstown, though barely a mile from Rachel’s place, is on a different planet to Craneswater.

  I explained that neighbours Bazza and Marie are returning from an evening with friends. When they make it back to Sandown Road the judge’s house is heaving with pissed adolescents. They’re at every window. You can hear the music from the Isle of Wight. The kids are wrecking the place. Bazza leaps out of the car, wades in through the judge’s front door, and takes a beating. Marie calls the police and pulls her husband out. She walks him along the road to next door where they live. Beside the pool they find two bodies.

  “Dead?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Killed?”

  “Definitely. One’s been stabbed. The other one’s got blood coming out of his right ear.”

  “Kids?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Do we know them?”

  “We do.”

  I’m looking at John. John glances at Terry.

  “Rachel,” Terry says. “And the boy Gareth. Has to be.”

  Spot-on. The police arrive in time for Marie to give them the news about the bodies. I want Bazza arrested for suss murder and I want to know what happens next about the party house.

  Terry’s gone very quiet. He appears to be counting on his fingers. Finally he looks up.

  “We’re talking multiple crime scenes,” he says. “How many kids at the party?”

  “Hundreds.”

  “That’s not an answer.”

  “Two hundred and seventeen.”

  “Right. So we’ve got two bodies from the party. That’s Crimes Scenes One and Two. We’ve got the pool area, that’s Three. Then the road outside, that’s Four. Next door, we’ve got 217 scrote piss-heads. That makes two hundred and twenty one potential crime scenes. Plus the judge’s house, and the garden and all the rest of it. Can’t happen, mate. Totally impossible.”