Backstory Page 5

  Faraday turned away, swamped by a sudden anger, staring out at the lights mirrored on the blackness of the harbour. The city, with all its rough imperfections, lapped at the walls of this new development. So far, Gunwharf’s security headaches had been limited to the theft of materials from the building site but there’d soon come a point when they’d have to sort out just who exactly this gleaming lifestyle vision was for. Would closed-circuit TV and smart door locks really keep the inner city where it belonged? Or were they prepared to face the social consequences of building paradise next door to one of the most deprived areas in the country?

  This kind of friction was deeply promising. As was the possibility of giving Winter more of a starring role. I wanted him off the leash. I wanted him put to the test. I wanted him to seize the narrative by the throat and give it a good shake. And so I came up with The Take.

  In the book’s opening pages, Faraday’s treasured Management Assistant, Vanessa Parry, is killed in a head-on collision. The guy responsible is a rep selling crisps to Pompey corner stores. This isn’t the stuff of prime-time drama but such a pointless, avoidable death sparks a deep anger in Faraday, which colours everything he does thereafter.

  Winter, meanwhile, has bad news of his own to cope with. For one thing, he discovers he’s not even in contention for a prized D/C vacancy on the city’s pro-active drugs squad. And for another, he’s just been told that his wife, Joannie, has inoperable cancer.

  The Take turned out to be a book about rage. Faraday’s (over the dead Vanessa). And Winter’s (over his dying wife). Granted compassionate leave to nurse Joannie, Winter finds himself unable to cope with his bewilderment and his grief and sets out to freelance an enquiry into a rogue gynaecologist who has gone missing under suspicious circumstances after maiming a number of ex-patients. This same Misper case is also the subject of an official investigation led – inevitably – by Joe Faraday.

  As anticipated, Winter steals the book. Always a lap or two ahead of Faraday, he finally nails the denouement in a revenge scene that came out of nowhere and was an absolute joy to write. As well as a maverick surgeon and a dickhead crisp salesman, The Take features a rich cast of supporting characters including a maddened publican with a grudge against the Gunwharf developers, a beautiful chanteuse performing cabaret at a top Jersey hotel, a university lecturer with a supplementary career in Albanian skin flicks, and a perv in a Donald Duck mask who is terrifying after-dark walkers on Milton Common. Later challenged to justify this collection of grotesques, I settled on the Charles Dickens defence. The great man, of course, was born in Pompey. In a city that shelters every possible variety of the human condition, I pointed out that – like Dickens - I’d be failing in my duty as a novelist if I didn’t put one or two of these people on the page.

  Writing The Take (originally called Blackwit) served me well. Research took me to the yawning hole that was the Gunwharf site, where a construction engineer explained exactly where to bury a body if I wanted to cause maximum disruption a couple of years down the line, while an Accident Investigator from Hantspol taught me how to reconstruct every aspect of a fatal head-on from the damage to both vehicles and the marks left on the road.

  More and more, I was coming to realise that countless plot possibilities lurked in the margins of conversations like these, and more and more I sensed a real fascination with the writing process on the part of my interviewees. A motor cycle cop who operated out of Kingston Crescent wanted to know exactly how the fifteen pages of notes I’d taken from our conversation would feature in the finished book. When I told him I’d probably stitch in a couple of the killer phrases he’d used, as well as reflecting a little of the procedure he was obliged to follow for an incident like this, he was amazed.

  “Just that?” He said. “After all the work you’ve done?”

  I told him that wasn’t the point. I was grateful for his time and the effort he’d made to get me up to speed but I pointed out that he had to see it from where I was sitting. What I did for a living was an act of trespass. I was intruding in stuff about which I knew nothing. Finding out as much as I could was the least I owed people like him.

  He nodded, then reached for his helmet.

  “You want to be careful,” he said. “You’re starting to sound like a bloody detective.”

  The Take did well. The reviewers, once again, were kind and the people who organise crime festivals up and down the country began to inquire if I was interested in making the odd appearance. I said I was, and the first invitation appeared within weeks, but the more I thought about The Take the more I realised its real importance lay in the structure of the book. For the second time, I’d run two major figures through the same story and once again it seemed to have worked.

  In some respects, Faraday and Winter couldn’t have been a greater contrast. Faraday was hardworking, scrupulously honest, and prone to worrying too much about the darkness that enveloped so many of the jobs that came across his desk. Winter, on the other hand, thrived on the human wreckage that littered so many corners of the city he policed. Every new contact, every stranger’s voice on the mobile he reserved for Job calls, every 8.00am conversation in the cells at the Custody Centre, represented a fresh opportunity for seeding a little mischief way beyond the permitted investigative limits.

  In terms of MO, and perhaps raw nerve, these were two very different individuals. Yet I was coming to realise that both of them, in their separate ways, were loners, solitaries, banged up on the tiny squares of turf they’d made their own. Neither of them paid many visits to the canteen. Nor were they much interested in friendships outside the Job. Instead they drew a bead on the next enquiry, and the enquiry after that, and did their level best to get a result. In books to come, in ways that I couldn’t possibly have anticipated, this dawning truth was to have profound consequences but for the time being I was simply relieved that – on the page, at least – they seemed to do the business. They weren’t mates, far from it, and I doubted they ever would be. But between them they kept the pages turning, and for that I was deeply grateful.

  Three

  In April of the year Turnstone was published, Steve Watts put my budding relationship with the Major Crime operation on a more formal basis. He talked to his bosses at headquarters in Winchester and drew up a letter on headed notepaper. This letter was the key to a very important door and I still have it. It gave me access to the Major Incident Complex at Kingston Crescent Police Station. More importantly, “subject to operational commitments”, it confirmed that I may “observe the management of a major investigation, subject at all times to the discretion of the Senior Investigating Officer”. The SIO would be Steve Watts. A major investigation would be a murder. All I had to do now was wait for a body to turn up.

  In talks to libraries, reader groups, and sundry other gatherings I often make the point that Pompey is God’s gift to the working novelist. It’s a city bursting with stories and it’s never once let me down. On this occasion it was early afternoon in the dead time between Christmas and the New Year. There was snow on the ground. A man was walking his dog in woodland north of the city. The dog was rooting around in undergrowth when it began to bark. Its owner caught up. Buried in a shallow grave was the body of a young man. Thus began Operation Becton.

  Steve Watts was as good as his word. The investigation kicked off on 2nd January 2001 and I was invited along to watch. The whole of the third floor in the block behind Kingston Crescent police station belonged to the Major Crime Team. On the first working day of the New Year it was humming. D/Cs and Management Assistants hurried up and down the long central corridor, toting armfuls of files. In the tiny kitchen at the end, waiting for the kettle to boil, more D/Cs were comparing New Year parties. Someone had laid hands on a packet of Jammy Dodgers. Rain drummed at the window. Most of these guys, I realised, had been praying for a decent murder over Christmas. The overtime, said one, would help settle all those bills.r />
  I caught up with Steve Watts. The crime scene out in the woods had been sealed off within an hour of the dog discovering the body. A tent had been erected over the grave and the Highways Authority had taken steps to control traffic on the nearby road. Inner and outer cordons had been established and a subsequent POLSA search, radiating slowly outwards from the shallow grave, had found a bungee, a pair of cable ties, a shoe, and an upturned flower pot. The Crime Scene Manager meanwhile, the detective who would be driving the forensic operation, had called for a Home Office pathologist.

  The post-mortem took place within 24 hours. The victim had a broken rib and stab wounds. The cause of death was a compression ligature around his neck, in all likelihood a bungee tightened by the insertion of a twig. DNA tests and a distinctive tattoo provided ID. Our victim turned out to be a low-level drug runner with an address in the city and a criminal record for offences including burglary, shoplifting, drug dealing and low-level assault. He’d been released from prison only seven months earlier. The last time anyone had seen him alive was 11th November, 2000, which happened to be Armistice Day.

  Operation Becton gathered speed. Early on, this killing had been identified as a “medium runner”, an inquiry with legs, a chain of events complex and challenging enough to warrant a decent helping of the “R” word. The “R” word is code for resources and I was quickly learning that the major crime machine eats money. Already there were twenty three officers assigned to Becton, and Steve Watts had put in an initial bid for 400 hours of paid overtime, with a contingent reserve bid for 100 more. It wasn’t to be enough.

  Every major investigation inches forward meeting by meeting. I sat in on one of the first of them. This was a coming-together of the guys who were to manage the forensic strategy. They included the Crime Scene Coordinator and a liaison forensic scientist , both of whom were reporting back from the crime scene. According to the pathologist, the body had been out in the woods between two weeks and six months. This comfortably fitted the last known sighting of the victim a month and a half earlier. Another cable tie had been found on the body, securing the wrists, and the lad had been bare-chested under his jacket. The bungee, as far as the team could determine, had been applied at the scene and the stab wounds administered afterwards. There were no tyre marks in the vicinity.

  By now the Major Incident Room was at full throttle. The God of the MIR is the HOLMES 2 software package. This, in essence, is a huge electronic filing system indexing every last particle of information retrieved by the investigation team. When it detects what one of the civvie indexers called “cross-related inputs”, it flags them up. This tool, bred from the near-abortive hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper in the late Seventies, has become indispensable in major investigations but carries its own health warning. The same civvie indexer, a woman of immense experience, put it rather well. “It ends up by driving the inquiry,” she said. “You become a slave to the system. It’s self-perpetuating. It breeds like a rabbit.”

  What it breeds are “actions”, specific tasks allocated to individual D/Cs. These guys were already fanning out across the city, tracking down associates of the deceased, knocking on front doors in the area where he’d lived, trying to Hoover up any glimpse, any half-remembered scrap of gossip or conversation, any tiny shred of information that might feed the HOLMES monster back in the Major Incident Room.

  At eleven o’clock on this first morning, Steve called a core management meeting, attended by all the major players in the enquiry team. It was at this point that I realised the importance of his conference table. Eight chairs weren’t enough. Neighbouring offices were raided for more.

  By now, Steve – in his own words – had spent nearly half a day putting the squeeze on the organisation for added resource. He’d recognised from the start that Becton would be picking its way through the Pompey underworld, a demi-monde of petty criminals, drug debts, sexual favours, and lifestyles badged by massive helpings of chaos. These “associates of the deceased”, as he dryly put it, could be violent and he wanted his officers to be aware of the implications. It would be the job of his detectives to TIE some of the city’s more volatile brethren and he wanted appropriate back-up wherever possible. TIE, I learned, meant “Trace, Implicate, or Eliminate”.

  The meeting went on. Already, Steve was anticipating what lay down the investigative road. He wanted Arrest Strategies drawn up. He wanted Tactical Interview Advisers (TIAs) appointed. He wanted to scare up possible leads through a selective release of information to media outlets. He was thinking posters. And, most important of all, he was emphasising how close Becton needed to get to the victim himself: what kind of man was this? Who had he shared his life with? Who were his friends? Who were his enemies? What kind of circumstances, in short, might explain his death?

  Putting together this kind of jigsaw was the job of the Intelligence Cell. It was led by a D/S called Andy Harrington, an ex-matelot with decades of CID experience. He was a big man, like Steve Watts, and I never met another serving detective who didn’t have a good word for him. He carried himself with an air of cheerful authority and had won himself a force-wide reputation for nailing the bad guys. Andy, said people who should know, was the best.

  For some years now, Andy had been monitoring the Pompey drug scene, trying to get a fix on exactly how it worked. This kind of intelligence, I was fast realising, was absolutely key in all kinds of law and order contexts because the bulk of crime – acquisitive or otherwise – is drug related. So just how did Becton fit into this jigsaw?

  In Pompey, according to Andy, an organised crime network controlled the supply of cocaine, MDMA, ecstasy, amphetamine and cannabis. Of the city’s major players, a couple were rated as Tier Three, a mark of honour in the Pompey underworld. These were the quality criminals who’d set up sophisticated laundering operations, washing their dirty drugs money through property, café bars, tanning salons, estate agencies, taxi firms, and any other legitimate enterprises they could add to their growing business empires.

  Below this layer of top faces lay the wholesalers, criminals who bought from the Tier Three guys and made a tidy living from dealing out narcotics to street level drug pushers. According to Andy, they also dealt in stolen goods, nicked benefit cheques, and pretty much anything else from the black economy that would find a buyer. The wholesalers were protected by enforcers who also acted as debt-collectors.

  Which brought us back to Becton. In Andy’s view, our victim – in all probability – lay at the very bottom of the pile of low-life that serviced the city’s appetite for drugs. These were the worker ants who flogged tabs, or weed, or a gram or two of the laughing powder to the end users. Their lives were frequently a mess. They got by on alcohol and cheap drugs and were generally clueless when it came to money. They moved from address to address and got slapped from time to time by some of the bigger guys. Andy called them “work rats”.

  Was this, then, a slapping that had got out of hand? Was our young victim paying a higher price than normal for not keeping his accounts in order? Andy smiled but wouldn’t commit himself.

  “Anything’s possible,” he said.

  At half past eleven that same morning a handful of forensic officers gathered in Steve’s office for an update. The investigation was moving very fast now and decisions had to be taken. One of them concerned a newish forensic technique called Low Copy Number, or LCN. This enabled analysts to build a court-proof DNA profile from a handful of human cells. The cable tie around the victim’s wrists had clearly been handled by what Steve called “persons of interest”. Ditto the bungee ligature that had ended his life. Both were prime candidates for LCN analysis and Steve ordered the full Monty accordingly. He also wanted soil samples to be taken from the area around the body with a view to inviting a forensic soil expert to join the Becton team. Should matching soil later be found on a suspect’s footwear or clothing, or in his car, this might prove conclusive.

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nbsp; By now a third crime scene had been declared at the victim’s flat (the first two crime scenes were the grave, and the body itself). The scenes of crime team had identified 85 visible marks (fingerprints or palm prints) and Steve wanted all of them launched against the national data base. The victim had clearly kept rough company and many of these marks might well raise a name and contact details, thus expanding the Association Chart already taking shape in the Intel Cell. To Steve’s slight disappointment, the SOC team had found no traces of blood at the victim’s flat, suggesting that the killing had taken place elsewhere, but he wanted the premises chemically treated to determine whether or not the scene had been cleaned-up. By now the first tranche of submissions was ready for despatch to the laboratory of the Forensic Science Service at Chepstow. A second would follow within 24 hours. Each of these little parcels, needless to say, would have significant cost implications.

  Lunchtime came and went. We snacked on sandwiches and Jammy Dodgers. Down the corridor, the HOLMES monster coughed out a series of High Priority (HP) actions. D/Cs came and went, reporting to the Receiver then picking up another job from the Action Allocater, while Andy Harrington and his team in the Intel Cell fed more names into the Association Chart and mused over the all-important Time Line. By now, attention was settling on two items, both of which were missing. One was the victim’s white van, in which he may have met his death. The other was his mobile phone, a potential treasure trove of information.

  A meeting of the full Becton squad was called for five o’clock. I counted 37 bodies in the Major Incident Room. Civvie indexers were still at their terminals, inputting the latest data. The floor was a tangle of computer cables and outside, in the darkness, it was still raining.

  Steve chaired the briefing, calling for contributions as the story unfolded. He concentrated, in the first place, on the victim’s van. The city had been checked, street by street. Details had been passed to Traffic and circulated force-wide. Tomorrow the search would be extended to the Portsmouth/Fareham corridor in the west, and Cosham and Paulsgrove in the east. If necessary, the Hantspol spotter aircraft, call sign Boxer One, would also be available, extending the search parameters ever wider.