Heaven's Light Read online

  He slipped out of bed and padded across to the window. Liz was asleep, a long untidy comma of blonde hair splayed across the pillow. When he looked back at her face there was something in its helplessness that reminded him of Jessie at the hospital. He stood at the window for a full minute, watching her, before shuddering and reaching for his jeans.

  Outside, it was still cool, the wind off the sea. Away to the east, a ledge of cloud masked the first blush of sunrise. He used the bleep in the key-ring to unlock the Mercedes and then slipped behind the wheel. The basement flat where Jessie lived was barely a mile away, one of a series of streets that ran down into the heart of Southsea, the city’s resort area. Barnaby slipped the car into gear and eased towards the main road. His route took him past the hotel where he’d exercised the previous day and he paused at the roundabout, looking across at the extension that housed the swimming pool. The heat from the pool had pebbled the smoked glass with condensation, and he tried to imagine Kate Frankham, in just a couple of hours’ time, cruising back and forth, cooling down after her forty minutes on the machines.

  Meeting her again had troubled him more than he cared to admit, partly because she’d taken him by surprise, the kind of social ambush he hated, and partly because she’d become so obviously independent. Leaving her had been the hardest decision he’d ever had to make and he’d believed her when she’d told him they were throwing away a relationship that neither would ever be able to duplicate. Yet here she was, barely a year and a half later, plainly in control of a life she adored. He’d seen it in her eyes, in the way she’d sat back and so openly appraised him. And he’d caught it again in the look she’d given him as she’d driven away. You don’t know what you’re missing, she’d been telling him. You poor, sad man.

  The Mercedes purred away from the roundabout. The Common stretched away to the right, a big green buffer between the genteel terraces of Southsea and the rash of cafés and amusements along the seafront. Barnaby slowed for the bend by the Queen’s Hotel, catching sight of the reviewing stand erected for yesterday’s memorial service. The structure was somehow smaller than he’d expected, an untidy tangle of scaffolding, planked and timbered for rising tiers of seats. From the road, against the cold dawn light, it looked bare and empty and on an impulse he pulled in and parked, switched off the engine and let the window purr down. The air in his face tasted of low tide, a rich mixture of salt and seaweed, and Barnaby sat back, letting it sluice through him, clearing his head.

  After a minute or two, he got out and crossed the road to the Common. The grass was still waterlogged after Saturday’s rain and he listened to his own footsteps as he squelched around the reviewing stand. He clambered onto the scaffolding and zipped up his thin cotton jacket against the swirling wind. The chairs that had been here yesterday had gone and someone had been round with a broom, but when he reached the third tier and turned to face the sea, it was easy to people the muddy, tyre-rutted spaces, to imagine the marine bandsmen with their helmets and their glittering instruments, to hear the long keening salute from the lone bugler.

  Barnaby plunged his hands deep into the pockets of his jeans, thinking of Clinton again. The big man had sat here, barely feet away. He’d listened to the Archbishop intone the service. He’d watched the seated rows of veterans, stiff-backed, attentive, bemedalled. And minutes later, when HMS Illustrious slipped out of the harbour mouth to take up her position for the fleet review, he’d probably reached across and touched Hillary lightly on the arm, drawing her attention to the big grey aircraft carrier ghosting slowly past the war memorial. As a piece of theatre, the service had translated wonderfully to television, and Barnaby had watched it again last night, drunk and remorseful, after returning from the hospital.

  Now, he raised a weary arm to the imaginary crowds below, wondering again what it might be like to be Bill Clinton, then began to retrace his footsteps to the road. Jessie’s flat lay a couple of blocks inland from the Common, and he walked the hundred yards or so to the street where she lived. The houses here were Victorian, tall forbidding mansions built for the families of naval officers but long since given over to multi-occupation. Most of the flats were let to students or families on benefit and the area had developed a shabby, unloved look: permanently curtained windows, dripping water pipes, loud music, and little nests of bulging bin bags spilling their contents onto the street.

  Barnaby counted the front doors until he found number 26. At the hospital, they’d given him a small polythene bag containing Jessie’s possessions. With the pound coin and the packet of Rizlas was a key. Barnaby pushed through the gate, avoiding the flattened scabs of dog turd. Steps led down to an alleyway beside the house. The walls were green with damp and he could feel broken glass underfoot. Halfway along the alley were steps down to a door. Barnaby paused at the bottom and inserted the key in the lock. It turned at once, he stepped inside, leaving the door open, feeling along the wall for a light switch. The smell was overpowering, a mixture of old fat, rising damp, and a rich oriental perfume Barnaby recognized from the days when Jess had taken to burning incense in her bedroom. His hand closed over a wall switch and he found himself surrounded by bicycles in a narrow hall. To the left, a half-open door. He pushed at it with his foot, muffling a cough then announcing his presence.

  ‘Haagen?’ He hesitated, waiting for an answer. When nothing happened, he stepped inside the room. Light from the street spilled in through the half-window at the front. The room was sparsely furnished, bare floorboards, a table, a council deckchair lifted from the beach, a television, a pile of wooden crates full of books, and a double mattress on the floor. Blankets were thrown back across the top as though someone had just got up, and there was a pile of clothes beside a candle in a saucer.

  Barnaby bent to the clothes and untangled a rust-coloured halter top that Liz had given Jessie for Christmas. He lifted it to his face. It smelled of sweat and roll-ups, a sourness that reminded him at once of the prison visits he made to interview clients. He balled it in his hand, meaning to take it home, and bent to inspect the books in one of the crates. A lot were from libraries, thick biographies on various Nazi luminaries, ministers like Speer and Goering; when he looked at the return dates it was obvious that they’d been stolen. He prowled around the room again. Behind the door, on a tea chest, was a sound system. The needle was dancing on the VU meter on the cassette deck, and when he turned up the volume control he found himself listening to something sombre, heavily classical, scored for full orchestra. He lowered the volume again and noticed the flag for the first time. The Union Jack was huge, covering the entire wall, hanging limply from a line of drawing pins pressed into the picture rail. Barnaby touched it. It felt as damp as everything else.

  ‘What is it, man? Help you at all?’

  Barnaby spun round. A small figure stood in the open doorway. Under the army greatcoat, he was wearing a pair of boxer shorts. His feet were bare and his hair was brutally cropped against the bony outlines of his skull. In one hand he carried a mug of something hot. In the other was a kitchen knife.

  ‘Haagen,’ Barnaby said mildly. ‘No need for that.’

  Haagen stepped closer, peering at Barnaby. His face was as thin as the rest of him and though he recognized Barnaby’s voice, he plainly wanted to make sure. Without his glasses, Haagen was semi-blind.

  ‘Want these?’ Barnaby had spotted them on top of the audio stack. He offered them to Haagen, who put them on. They robbed him of a little of his menace.

  ‘Brahms,’ he muttered, nodding at the cassette deck, ‘Requiem.’ He stood by the door for a moment or two then sucked at the liquid in the mug. Then he looked up, studying Barnaby over the rim. The steam began to mist his glasses, and he took them off, rubbing the lenses on the greatcoat. ‘You want some toast or anything?’

  Barnaby thought about it. He hadn’t eaten for nearly a day. Toast might help the headache. He followed Haagen through to the kitchen. Another candle stood on a plate beside an ancient electric stove;
its guttering flame cast a thin yellow light over the crumbling plaster walls. Haagen speared a slice of bread with a fork and held it over one of the rings.

  ‘I thought you’d be at the hospital,’ Barnaby said, after a while, ‘last night.’

  ‘I was.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Before you came. And afterwards.’

  ‘Why didn’t you stay? Say hello?’

  Haagen glanced over his shoulder, a smile edged with the same faint derision Barnaby remembered from the first time he and Haagen had met. The social worker had done the introductions and Haagen had simply sat there in the court interview room, waiting patiently to have his say. When it came to the details on the charge sheet, he’d admitted everything with an indifference verging on contempt. He’d done the burger bar because they kept lots of ready money. The stuff about animal rights, Barnaby’s suggested line of defence, was bullshit.

  ‘This OK?’

  Haagen was holding out a blackened slice of toast, thickly coated with Marmite. Barnaby bit into it, realizing how hungry he was.

  ‘So when did you get back?’ he enquired through a mouthful of crumbs. ‘From the hospital.’

  ‘Midnight. They threw me out. Sussed I wasn’t a doctor.’

  ‘Why would they think you were?’

  ‘I’d copped a white coat. Found it in an office. It’s just like anywhere. Wear a uniform, people leave you alone.’

  Barnaby nodded, licking Marmite off his fingers. Haagen was the brightest nineteen-year-old he’d ever met, an East German refugee who’d fled to the West with his eldest sister and somehow ended up in Portsmouth. He’d attended schools in the city since the age of five but classroom learning had never appealed to him and at fourteen, expelled from a series of comprehensives for disruptive behaviour, he’d dropped out of formal education altogether. Thereafter, according to the social worker’s case notes, he’d embarked on a fitful career of burglary and petty theft, using the proceeds to fund years of voracious reading. He’d devoured Ernst Junger. He’d gone through most of Nietzsche. He’d read everything he could find on the history of the Third Reich. And with the knowledge he’d acquired went a scalding candour that landed him in almost permanent trouble. Not once had Barnaby known Haagen stoop to telling a lie, one of the many reasons he’d fought so hard to keep him out of custody.

  ‘So how was she?’ Barnaby asked at last.

  ‘Pretty rough. You must have seen her yourself.’

  Barnaby nodded, sluicing his fingers under the cold-water tap. Before he’d left the hospital, Jessie had been awake, sprawled on her side on the trolley, retching into a bucket. Liz had been beside her, holding her forehead, telling her that everything would be OK. Jessie had wanted them to ignore her, leave her alone, but Barnaby could sense just how badly she’d been frightened. Whatever she’d been using had nearly killed her. And she knew it.

  ‘The sister showed me the marks in her arm,’ Barnaby said quietly. ‘How long has this been going on?’

  ‘Months.’

  ‘Months?’

  ‘Yeah. I thought she could handle it. She couldn’t.’

  ‘And you?’

  ‘I looked after her.’

  ‘But can you handle it? Whatever it is?’

  Haagen didn’t answer. He’d found two more slices of bread and examined them in the light of the candle before toasting them. For the first time, Barnaby saw the tattoos on the backs of his fingers, the four fat blue letters, J – E – S – S, and the sight of his daughter’s name brought the blood flooding into his face. He’d had faith in Haagen. He’d trusted him. He’d even given him a job in his own office, fulfilling his promise to the court. Now this.

  ‘Do me a favour, Haagen,’ he said thickly. ‘Just tell me what we’re talking about.’

  Haagen was poking the toast with a knife. ‘Heroin,’ he said briefly. ‘Smack.’

  ‘You’re telling me Jess has been on heroin? All this time?’

  ‘Yeah. It’s good for her, too. It suits.’

  ‘You’re out of your mind.’

  ‘Not at all. She can’t handle anything else. Uppers. Downers. E. Whiz. She just gets in a muddle, gets sloppy. Even alcohol breaks her up.’

  ‘Handle? What do you mean, handle?’

  ‘Can’t take it. Can’t cope.’

  ‘Why should she have to? Who says she needs all this stuff?’

  ‘She does. I do.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because the rest of it is so much shit.’

  ‘Rest of what?’

  ‘This…’ Haagen gestured round with the knife ‘… this shit-hole we have to live in. The strokes we have to pull to get by. Not just us. Everyone.’

  ‘She doesn’t have to live here. That was her decision.’

  ‘Sure.’ Haagen pushed his glasses up his nose. ‘And you know why?’

  ‘No.’ Barnaby shook his head. ‘But I’m sure you’ll tell me.’

  ‘You want to know?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘OK,’ Haagen said. ‘Because she couldn’t stand it at home with you and that nice wife of yours. The little lies. The big lies. It made her sick, physically sick. Her words, not mine.’

  Barnaby nodded, letting his anger subside, knowing he should have expected a scene like this. Talking to Haagen was something you did at some peril. Softening the truth was beyond him.

  ‘So you put her onto heroin?’ he said wearily. ‘Is that what you’re saying?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Haagen agreed. ‘We tried it and it was good for us. It worked.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘It gave her peace. And a bit of quiet.’

  ‘And last night?’

  ‘Last night was different. That wasn’t smack, not the stuff we’re used to, anyway.’ He shrugged. ‘Maybe it was purer than usual. That can be a problem. Fuck knows.’

  ‘Where did you get it?’

  ‘Where did I score?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Last night?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Haagen turned away. Barnaby asked the question again. Jessie had nearly died. Someone had nearly killed her. He wanted to know who. Haagen shook his head. ‘That’s down to me,’ he said. ‘And Oz.’

  ‘Oz?’

  Haagen beckoned Barnaby over to the window. The window was tiny, set high in the wall. Through the grime, Barnaby could see the squat bulk of a dog. When Haagen tapped on the window, the dog turned round, the cold glass clouding with its breath.

  ‘Bull terrier.’ Haagen grinned. ‘Never lets go.’

  Two hours later, past seven o’clock, a black Daimler took the last exit off the southbound motorway and nosed through the quiet suburban streets that covered the eastern slopes of Portsdown Hill. In the back of the car sat two men. One was Raymond Zhu. The other was a small, broad, bearded Englishman called Mike Tully. Until the journey south from London, Zhu and Tully had never met.

  The Daimler drove west. At the top of the hill, opposite a pub, a car park offered spectacular views over the city. At Tully’s direction, the young Chinese behind the wheel pulled the Daimler off the road and came to a halt on the edge of the tangle of couch grass and bramble that fell away to the distant housing estate below. From a hamper in the boot, the driver produced a Thermos of tea, pouring the thin green liquid into exquisite bone china cups.

  Zhu and Tully were out of the car, studying the view. Below them, softened by the early morning haze, a fat tongue of land reached out from the foot of the hill, miles long, miles wide, a blur of rooftops, tower blocks, warehouses and the odd gasometer, parcelled by ribbons of motorway. Traffic raced to and fro, in and out of the city, while closer, on the lower slopes of the hill, a woman was tossing handfuls of bread to the wheeling gulls.

  Zhu shaded his eyes against the glare of the sun. In the far distance, on the horizon, lay the dark blue swell of the Isle of Wight. The strip of water in between, said Tully, was called the Solent. It insulated the city to the south while east and west Portsmouth wa
s flanked by deep natural harbours enfolded at their seaward ends by spits of sand and shingle. Tully turned from the view, pointing out a structure along the crest of the hill. It was massive, brick-built, one of the chain of nineteenth-century forts protecting the city to the north. There were three in all, and coupled with the intricate defence lines around the harbour mouth, they made Portsmouth impregnable to attack from either land or sea. It was, said Tully, a unique situation. Nowhere else had the military planners taken so much trouble to keep an English city out of foreign hands.

  Zhu smiled, beckoning the young driver across and handing Tully one of the cups of steaming tea. This morning he was wearing a baggy high-necked jacket and a pair of blue serge trousers, and one hand kept going to his scalp, flattening the shock of unruly grey hair. Tully was explaining a little of the city’s history. How the first settlements had grown up around the harbour mouth. How the King had ordered the construction of a primitive dockyard. How the city’s fortunes had always been tied to endless cycles of peace and war. This close to France, and the trading routes along the English Channel, Portsmouth had been a natural base for the King’s fleet, and in time of conflict men had flooded into the little town, eager for work. They’d brought their families with them, putting down roots in the sprawl of slum dwellings outside the garrison walls. Commissioners from the Admiralty, befrocked and bewigged, had rattled down the turnpike from London and it had been on their decisions that the city’s fortunes had always hung. If the nation was under threat, Pompey prospered. In time of peace, London turned its back. Zhu sipped his tea, catching a new note in Tully’s voice. He liked this man. He liked his bulk, the quietness in his eyes, the measured way he talked, and he liked as well the respect that he showed, not just for Zhu, his new employer, but for this city of his.

  Zhu gestured at the view. ‘You’ve lived here a long time?’

  ‘All my life, sir. Except for the service.’

  ‘Service?’

  ‘The Royal Marines.’ He indicated the forest of cranes in the naval dockyard. ‘We used to be based here but it’s all gone now. Not that you stayed put at all. We were everywhere. Middle East. The Gulf. Hong Kong. You name it.’