No Lovelier Death Read online

  The old man looked briefly troubled. He didn’t know quite what to make of this stranger. Then he asked exactly what connection Winter had with the Mackenzies.

  ‘I’m a business partner, really. Ex-copper, if that helps.’

  ‘Policeman?’

  ‘Detective. CID. Twenty-plus years, man and boy.’

  ‘Ah …’ The man smiled, plainly relieved, then said he’d been up most of the night with his wife, up in the top bedroom, watching events unfold. His wife wasn’t too well. They’d moved to Craneswater from Gunwharf for a quieter life. He’d tucked her up in bed an hour ago and decided to take the dog for an early stroll.

  ‘I’m in Gunwharf,’ Winter volunteered. ‘And I couldn’t agree more. Let the riff-raff in, and you have to put up with all kinds of aggravation. ’

  ‘You find that?’

  ‘Definitely. It’s the tenant situation. Half the apartments are let-tings, and say what you like but people don’t know how to behave any more. And the younger they are the worse it gets.’

  ‘You really think that’s true?’

  ‘I do, I do.’ Winter nodded. One of the lessons he’d learned over the past year was just how many people had come to the same conclusion. In the Job he’d always been aware of what the management called ‘low-level disorder’ but out on his own he’d quickly sussed what a pain inner-city life could be. It was like a kind of collective toothache, he’d decided. Now matter how hard you tried to ignore them, no matter how thick your front door, the scrotes were always in your face.

  ‘So how’s it been?’ He nodded again towards Sandown Road.

  ‘Dreadful. The noise. The music. Just unbearable.’

  The trouble, he said, had started around ten. Everyone in the road knew that the Aults were away, and no blame attached to young Rachel for taking advantage, but no one in their right mind would have invited so many people to a party.

  ‘How many are we talking?’

  ‘It seemed like hundreds. We weren’t counting, of course, but they just came and came.’

  ‘What sort of kids?’

  ‘All sorts, and some of them young too, really young, thirteen, fourteen years old, swarms of them.’

  ‘On foot?’

  ‘Yes. And lots of them …’ he offered Winter a weary smile ‘… obviously the worse for wear.’

  The music, he said, had started soon afterwards. Quite decent stuff to begin with, melodic, bit of a tune, but then coarser, much uglier, much louder.

  ‘I think it must be the frequency they play this stuff in. It’s totally unreasonable. It gets to you. It shakes you up. So in the end we decided to phone the police.’

  He frowned, jerking the lead to extract the Scottie from a scatter of broken glass. Winter caught sight of the label on the neck of the bottle. Cheap vodka. Co-op’s own brand.

  ‘And what did the police say?’

  ‘They said they’d call by. They asked us if it was more than just the noise. We said no.’

  It was an hour before a patrol car arrived. Two officers, he said, knocked on the Aults’ front door. One of them was a woman. There was a short conversation, then they drove away.

  ‘And the music?’

  ‘It made no difference. For a minute or two, to be fair, it was a bit quieter. But then they just turned it up again, louder if anything.’

  A neighbour, braver than most, had lost his rag and crossed the road. When he finally got someone to open the Aults’ front door, the place was evidently on the way to being wrecked. The youths on the doorstep told him to fuck off back to bed. Just like that. Fuck off back to bed. They were rough, he said. Really rough. Another call to the police.

  ‘What happened this time?’

  ‘They said they’d come back.’

  ‘Your neighbour mentioned the damage?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And what happened?’

  ‘Nothing. Not for half an hour or so. Then the Mackenzies turned up. My wife recognised the Range Rover. I must say we were relieved. Mackenzie might have a reputation but at least he speaks these people’s language. Unlike us poor souls.’

  The Range Rover, he said, stopped outside Mackenzie’s house. The pair of them got out and stood in the road for a minute or so. Then Mackenzie went and rapped on the door. In the end someone opened it and Mackenzie disappeared inside. For a while his wife waited for him on the pavement. Then he reappeared.

  ‘He had blood all over his shirt. It was on his face too.’

  ‘You could see that?’

  ‘We have binoculars. For the sea view.’

  ‘So what happened?’

  ‘His wife sent him back home. Then she got on her mobile. God knows what she said but there was a police car here within minutes. And another one shortly afterwards.’

  ‘Maybe she mentioned Peter Ault.’

  ‘Maybe she did. If so, God bless her. But that’s when it started getting complicated.’

  The police, he said, kept looking up at the house but stayed in the road. No attempt to intervene. No knocks on the Aults’ front door. Pretty soon afterwards a white van arrived, full of more policemen.

  ‘At that point Mrs Mackenzie went home. I saw her walking down the road. I assume she wanted to check on her husband. She went in through those big front gates of theirs but she was out again within a minute or so. And this time she was running.’

  ‘Where to?’

  ‘To the policemen. There were lots of them by now, more than a dozen. A couple of them went back with her to the Mackenzies’ place. Then one of them reappeared. He was talking on his mobile. Within half an hour or so you couldn’t see the road for police vehicles. They were everywhere. At that point we realised something serious had happened, something really serious.’

  ‘And do you know what that something was?’

  ‘No. And we still don’t. Except the men in those strange suits turned up. They’re the ones with the small white vans. My wife said it looked like an episode of Silent Witness.’

  ‘Scenes of Crime investigators?’

  ‘I imagine so.’

  The old man looked down again and spotted a smear of blood on the pavement. The dog had cut his paw on the glass. ‘Damn,’ he said softly, producing a handkerchief.

  Winter asked him if he had any idea of the time when the Mackenzies returned.

  ‘Yes, as a matter of fact I do.’ Still bending to the dog, he looked up.

  ‘And?’

  ‘Twenty-three minutes to one. I expect they’d been to a party themselves.’

  ‘You’re sure about that? Twenty-three minutes to one?’

  ‘Absolutely certain. I was keeping a log by this time. It’s a habit, I’m afraid. I used to be in the merchant navy - bridge officer. I somehow felt that this thing had got completely out of control and that if there were ever to be … ah … repercussions, then it might help to have an accurate chronology’

  ‘But you’ve no idea of what might have happened? At the Mackenzies’?’

  ‘I’m afraid not.’

  Winter brought the conversation to an end and wished him a very good morning. Walking on, he took the first road on the left, then left again at the bottom, wondering what else he might pick up from the other end of Sandown Road.

  It was full daylight by now, the rich yellow spill of sunrise throwing long shadows across the road. With Sandown Road in sight, he suddenly came to a halt. The greying bearded figure walking towards him was unmistakable. Faraday.

  Winter ducked into a front garden, watching the D/I fumbling in his jacket for his car keys. Same old clapped-out Mondeo, he thought. Same RSPB sticker on the top corner of the windscreen. With the door open, Faraday took off his jacket and then had a stretch, his face to the sun, his chin tilted up. Watching him Winter realised how much he seemed to have aged. There were lines in Faraday’s face that he’d never seen before, and when his head came down, his whole body seemed to slump.

  Over the last years of his service Winter had developed a
soft spot for Faraday. They’d never been mates, and never would be, but he recognised a loner when he saw one, and he knew too that in a job that was rapidly becoming impossible, Faraday would never make it easy for himself.

  Younger D/Is with an eye on promotion were cluey enough to buy the right drinks for the right bosses. Older detectives might succumb to the odd short cut. But Faraday did neither, maintaining a prickly independence that won him more respect than friendships. With his passion for birdlife and his deaf-mute son, he’d won himself a reputation as something of an oddball. Before Winter left the force, Faraday had also added a new girlfriend to this strange life of his. Not some retread divorcee from over the hill, standard MO for detectives of his age, but a youngish anthropologist. And French, to boot.

  Winter watched Faraday check the road behind him, then execute a messy U-turn before accelerating away. He’s knackered, Winter thought. And it’s starting to show.

  Faraday was at his desk in the Major Crime suite by quarter past five. The tiny kitchenette was at the end of the corridor. He filled the kettle, scoured the empty fridge for milk, scraped a spoonful of instant off the bottom of the catering tin of Nescafé and then ducked into the lavatory next door. The mirror over the handbasin told him everything he needed to know about a night’s work after an evening’s drinking. His eyes were bloodshot. His face was pouched with exhaustion. A splash or two of cold water certainly helped but he knew he needed Ibuprofen. Month by month he was aware that the tablets were becoming a habit. He drank too much and too often, every night if he was to be honest, but still preferred self-medication to the nauseous thump of an early-morning headache.

  Back in his office with the milkless coffee, he popped a couple of tablets and then settled down with a pad and a pencil. The key to the next twenty-four hours, as Parsons had already pointed out, was some kind of matrix to impose the beginnings of order on the chaos of Sandown Road. For a start he needed to prioritise the interviews, take a first stab at a list of possible suspects, then match that list to his best teams of interviewers.

  Already, he had a scribbled tally from the duty Inspector who’d been supervising the controlled release of partygoers from number 11. In all, he’d taken ninety-four names and addresses and anyone with visible traces of blood on their clothing had been heavily underlined. These youths, nineteen of them, would have joined the rest of the partygoers in custody suites scattered across four counties.

  By now the booking-in process should be complete - including fingerprinting and checks on the Police National Computer - and with luck Faraday would soon be looking at printouts indicating whether or not they had previous form. This of course indicated nothing beyond an early taste for mischief, but a great deal of experience had taught him how helpful a PNC profile, supported by intelligence from Hantspol’s own database, could be. Everyone belonged to some kind of network. Mates. Fellow criminals. Ex-girlfriends. And in a city as tightly knit as Pompey, this kind of information could open all kinds of doors.

  The list began to take shape, name after name transcribed from the duty Inspector’s notes. Curtis. Jason. Damian. Carl. Some, he knew, would be Grammar or High School kids, friends of Rachel Ault, offspring of Pompey’s moneyed middle class. Others, often badged by their Christian names, came from the other side of the tracks. Quite how all these paths had come together and knotted at 11 Sandown Road would be the subject of countless interviews but on the face of it the social mix would have been all too combustible. Put a bunch of rugby-playing toffs alongside youths from the inner-city estates, and literally anything could happen.

  Faraday sat back and tried to imagine how it might have kicked off. Part of Pompey’s charm to him had always been the sheer numbers of people heaped together on this marshy little scrap of land off the Hampshire coast. He could think of no other city where areas of serious deprivation - Portsea, Buckland, Landport, Somerstown - lapped so closely around enclaves of relative wealth. Buy yourself a four-bedroomed villa in Southsea or a half-million-pound apartment in the new Gunwharf development, and you were - often literally - a stone’s throw from the sixties tower blocks that housed some of the city’s most damaged and challenging families.

  The fault lines between these areas were often hard to detect but it was always the kids who were more aware of the consequences of social and territorial difference than anyone else. In inquiry after inquiry, over the years, he’d dealt with twelve-year-olds who’d rarely leave their own tight web of streets, let alone the city. Straying into Somerstown, if you were a Buckland boy, was a journey fraught with danger. Making it down to Craneswater, with all its rumoured posh-ness, was a glimpse of another planet.

  He gazed down at his list, unsurprised that so many kids seemed to have arrived mob-handed, then realised that he’d yet to make room at the top of the page for Bazza Mackenzie.

  Mackenzie was the city’s best example of what the politicians were now calling social mobility. He’d come from the backstreets of Copnor, a journey that had taken him into the property business. Unlike his mates, he’d avoided getting his hands dirty on a building site, preferring to chance his arm working for an estate agency. On a rising market he’d watched other faces in the city make serious money by buying old terraced properties for a song, toshing them up and selling on. It was silly money, there for the taking, and Bazza had seen no reason not to help himself.

  Drug-dealing gave him the working capital - first Ecstasy, then cocaine. Within a couple of years he’d banked, spent or reinvested more cash than his dad had ever seen in his entire life. The wheel went round and round - drug money, property, more drug money, more bricks and mortar - until his accountant grew more ambitious and drew up a blueprint for a wholly legitimate commercial empire. Not just property but a raft of other businesses: café-bars, hotels, shares in a taxi company, tanning salons, nail bars, developments abroad, and most recently a security consultancy offering a variety of services. The latter was the richest of ironies but Mackenzie himself didn’t care a stuff. It was a chance to make silly money … again. Because these days people were really scared of the bad guys.

  Word had already come in from the custody suite at the Bridewell that Mackenzie had completed the booking-in process with barely a word of protest. This in itself was a bit of a surprise, as the Custody Sergeant had pointed out, but when Faraday had pressed him for more details it seemed that Mackenzie’s only real concern had been Marie, his wife. After an hour or so at the Bridewell, she’d been transferred to Fareham, a ten-mile drive away, and Bazza wanted her treated with a bit of respect. Beyond that, he’d been as good as gold. His solicitor had booked into the Holiday Inn down in Old Portsmouth. She’d be back at the Bridewell first thing Sunday morning for disclosure ahead of the interview. Bazza seemed confident he’d be home in time for lunch.

  On the face of it, Faraday could understand why. Bazza had plainly waded into the party and tried to restore a little order but in the end sheer numbers had overwhelmed him. Hence all the blood, his own and others’. That of course gave him an obvious motivation to settle a debt or two but Faraday doubted whether he’d do it there and then. Everything he’d learned about Bazza Mackenzie in his new incarnation - business tycoon, pillar of the community - told him that the man would bide his time and administer a cuffing, probably through a lieutenant, and preferably at a time of his own choosing. Not tonight, surrounded by a small army of pissed adolescents.

  So where else might this list take Mandolin? Faraday was still transcribing the last of the priority names when he heard footsteps down the corridor. Alerted by the light beneath his office door, the footsteps paused. Then the door opened, revealing Jerry Proctor’s unmistakable bulk. If anything, he looked even more knackered than Faraday.

  ‘How’s it going?’ Faraday nodded at the empty chair.

  Proctor was eyeing Faraday’s abandoned coffee cup. When Faraday told him the catering tin down the corridor was empty, he sank into the proffered chair.

  ‘Great,’ he m
uttered.

  Proctor, as Faraday knew only too well, had an appetite for challenging jobs. Years ago he’d spent six months on a secondment to Kosovo, disinterring hastily buried bodies in a bid to gather evidence for the War Crimes Tribunal at the Hague. More recently he’d had a spell in Basra, teaching the elements of forensic crime procedures to the Iraqi Police Force. But nothing, just now, compared to events in Sandown Road.

  ‘I’ve been counting the crime scenes,’ he said. ‘Do you want to hear something seriously funny?’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘OK.’ Proctor leaned forward on the chair, counting the scenes one by one. ‘First off there’s the victims. Young Rachel. The boy Gareth. Second, the poolside at Bazza’s. Third, the inside of Bazza’s house. Fourth, that Range Rover of his. Fifth, the bit of pavement that leads next door. Sixth, the judge’s place, what’s left of it. Then, last of all, ninety-four dickhead twats who should have been tucked up in bed with their iPods. I make that exactly one hundred and one crime scenes. Try working out the manpower implications. The time. The bodies. The bills. I just hope someone’s got deep pockets.’

  Faraday could only chuckle. It was, as Proctor was the first to point out, surreal. If a single party in leafy Craneswater could fill custody suites in Dorchester and Reading, and bring the Scenes of Crime machine close to breaking point, what would happen if two weekend parties kicked off? Or three? Or four?

  ‘We’ve made a cross for ourselves,’ Proctor concluded. ‘We’re too bloody careful.’

  Faraday sensed he meant it. These days, crime investigation was driven by fear of defence counsel months down the line - if an inquiry ever made it into court. A single tiny detail overlooked in the heat of the moment could blow an entire case. Hence the meticulous evidence-gathering at over a hundred crime scenes. Hence the endless cycle of management meetings over the coming days. Hence the prospect of DCI Parsons bent over the investigation’s Policy Book, committing every decision to paper in case of a later legal torpedo that might sink Mandolin’s fragile boat. Every year, it seemed to Faraday, the business of matching crime to punishment became more fraught and more complex. You maximised your chances in court by minimising risk on the job itself. But that, as he knew only too well, could reduce an investigation to walking speed.