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  ‘So what do we know, Joe? What can we stand up in court? Apart from the four bodies in the house?’

  Faraday finished his sandwich, brushed the crumbs from his lap, then went through the list from memory.

  ‘We know that Holman has been tied in with faces in Portsmouth. How current that might be we can’t be sure about, not yet at least. We know that the relationship at home wasn’t working. We know, or we think we know, that he’s coming on to his stepdaughter, who’s a pretty girl, and from what Jimmy’s saying we think that the boyfriend might have a thing or two to say about that.’

  ‘So you think he might have motive?’

  ‘To burn the house down? With his girlfriend inside?’ He shook his head. ‘No way.’

  ‘I agree. So where next?’

  ‘Scenes of Crime have come up with an interesting lead that relates to the previous Wednesday. It seems Holman had been in touch with a clinic in London. Sexual dysfunction.’

  Suttle blinked. This was new to him. Faraday explained about the advert the CSI had retrieved from the office in the barn.

  ‘Has anyone actioned this?’

  Faraday nodded. A D/C in Suttle’s intel cell had been in touch with the clinic. They weren’t prepared to go into details but confirmed that Holman had attended for an afternoon session on the Wednesday.

  ‘And then he came home again?’

  ‘They couldn’t say. Our next sighting is the Thursday morning. Local CID talked to the postman first thing Monday. He says he delivered a parcel on the Thursday and Holman signed for it.’

  Suttle nodded. He’d read the statement only last night. ‘He also said that Holman stank of horse shit,’ he said, ‘ which made a change because he normally stank of booze. Plus he’d obviously been doing something pretty physical because he told the postie he was knackered.’

  ‘And the inference is?’ Parsons was lost.

  ‘There’s a big hole at the back of the property,’ Faraday explained. ‘Someone had been digging and we think they may have had to shift a load of horse manure first.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Good question.’ Suttle again. ‘We’re going to re-interview the postman. See if he remembers any strange vehicle. It’s a punt, but you never know.’

  ‘And you’ll ask him about the Friday too? If he delivered there that day?’

  ‘Obviously.’

  Parsons wanted to know more about the hole. How big it was. What it might have contained. Suttle paced it out on the office floor. Parsons was impressed.

  ‘Fair size.’ She frowned. ‘So Holman goes to London on the Wednesday to this clinic. Something’s not working for him, something’s wrong with his willy. Is that a fair assumption?’

  ‘I’d say so.’ Faraday was smiling at last.

  ‘He then comes home and starts moving this pile of horse shit. Big pile? Small pile?’

  Faraday was trying to visualise the scabs of sodden manure. They’d been scattered everywhere, exactly the way you’d do it if you were in a hurry.

  ‘There was a lot,’ he said. ‘Certainly enough to cover what may have been underneath.’

  Suttle nodded. ‘And cover the scent too.’

  ‘Scent. Ah …’ Parsons was beaming now. ‘Are we all on the same page here? Horse manure? Something stashed underneath? Big hole? House burns down a day or two later? Four bodies inside? Are we getting warm?’

  ‘Warm’, under the circumstances, was unfortunate. Suttle and Faraday exchanged glances. In some past life Parsons must have been a bloodhound or a Labrador. Once she got a sniff, nothing put her off. A stash of something valuable. Valuable enough to justify four homicides.

  Suttle was still looking at Faraday, who seemed to be perking up.

  ‘Have you mentioned Winter, boss?’

  ‘Winter?’ Parsons’ eyes were gleaming now. ‘Where does he come into this?’

  ‘We’re not sure.’ Faraday was checking his watch. ‘He contacted Suttle first thing this morning. He wants to come across for some reason. He wants a little chat.’

  ‘Does he know about the fire? About us?’

  ‘I imagine he must. It’s been all over the media.’

  ‘So what’s his interest?’

  ‘Difficult to say unless we meet him.’

  ‘We?’

  ‘Jimmy. It’s Jimmy he wants to talk to.’

  ‘I see.’ Parsons was appraising this new development, studying it from every angle.

  At her command level, thought Faraday, life was one long risk assessment. ‘Anything to do with that man is a problem,’ she said at last. ‘Just ask Mr Willard.’

  Detective Chief Superintendent Willard, like Faraday himself, had been badly burned by Winter on a number of occasions. Since the D/C’s defection to the Dark Side he’d avoided trap after trap, much to the Head of CID’s disgust. The temptation to nail him was still there, though. Not least because Winter offered a key to putting Mackenzie away.

  Parsons was still weighing the odds.

  ‘You both know him, yes?’

  ‘We do.’ Faraday nodded.

  ‘Jimmy trained under him. I used to be his boss.’

  ‘But I take it you don’t meet socially?’

  ‘No.’ Suttle shook his head.

  ‘Never?’

  ‘Never. I like the man.’ It was Faraday.

  ‘I’ve always liked the man. But you’re right. He has an agenda. And it isn’t ours.’

  ‘Well put.’ Parsons turned to him.

  ‘So what do you suggest we do, Joe?’

  ‘About Winter?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Faraday gazed at her. For the last hour or so he’d had Gosling under control. Things were progressing at a reasonable pace. One action was folding neatly into another. They had the beginnings of a timeline. And now, with the speculation about the hole, they had some clue as to motive. Drugs? A decent stash of cocaine? Holman maybe liquidating a pension he’d been hoarding for a while, or even babysitting a consignment for someone else?

  ‘What do we do about Winter?’ Parsons was getting impatient.

  ‘I think we run with him. See what he’s got to say. He’s fronting for Mackenzie. He has to be.’

  ‘Exactly. And might that not play to our advantage?’

  Faraday nodded.

  There was a knock at the door. It was the Outside Enquiries D/S. He’d just taken a call from the pathologist. Simon Pembury had some news that might be of interest.

  ‘And?’ It was Parsons, her face upturned.

  ‘They’ve finished checking the bodies against dental records.’ He was still looking at Faraday. ‘It turns out none of them are Johnny Holman.’

  Chapter Seven

  TUESDAY, 10 FEBRUARY 2009. 18.46

  Kieron O’Dwyer lived with his Auntie Karen, a spinster in her fifties who was a keen spiritualist. On Tuesday evenings she attended a meeting at her local Temple. Kieron, newly released from the custody suite at Central police station, was playing Grand Theft Auto 3 on a games console he’d lifted from a kid down the road.

  At first he ignored the knock on the front door. His auntie had some weird friends, skinny old blokes her own age who banged on about messages from outer space and talking to their dead mums. Then he remembered some mates who’d texted him earlier. Maybe they’d scored some dosh from somewhere. Maybe they could all pick up where they’d left off.

  He parked Grand Theft on hold and went through to the bedroom at the front. He peered down but the angle was tight and he couldn’t see anyone at the front door. Then came the knock again. The alarm clock beside the single bed said ten to seven. Had to be Connor and Riley. Had to be.

  Kieron clattered downstairs and opened the front door. For a split second he glimpsed a face above the Adidas track top. Then the face disappeared inside a khaki balaclava. There was someone else on the doorstep too, much bigger, the face already hidden. He felt a hand grab his throat as he fell sideways. The back of his head smashed against the wall. The hand
was squeezing tighter and tighter. Flailing with his arms and legs, he began to choke.

  Moments later, pinned against the wall in the front room, Kieron watched the smaller of the two men pull the curtains tight. He was trying to yell but nothing seemed to work. The big guy still had him by the throat. He stank of aftershave. Calvin Klein.

  The smaller one turned on the table light beside the telly. He dumped an Asda bag on the floor and then came across. The choke-hold slackened. Kieron waited until the little guy was in range and then kicked him as hard as he could, just under the knee. Big mistake.

  The little guy paused. The hand around his throat was squeezing and squeezing and the room was going a funny grey colour. The big guy’s weight was pressed against his body and he could hear him breathing hard. Semi-conscious, he felt himself being pulled away from the wall. Then, with a deft twist, the big guy was behind him. Both his arms were bent double behind his back, his fists pinned between his shoulder blades. Colour was flooding back into the room. It felt like his arms were popping out of their sockets. He screamed with the pain.

  The little guy had found some gloves from somewhere. They looked like boxing gloves, only smaller, lighter. He stopped rubbing his leg and pulled the gloves on. Then he came very close, the balaclava inches from his face. His voice was low, barely a whisper.

  ‘I’m gonna say this once, my friend. You’ve got to stop twatting about. You understand me?’

  Kieron tried to muster some kind of reply. Couldn’t. The guy had the scariest eyes he’d ever seen. Cold. Blue. Unblinking. He was testing the gloves, flexing the fingers, making himself comfortable.

  ‘What I’m gonna do now is break your jaw. It’s gonna hurt like fuck for a couple of weeks, and just in case you don’t get the message I’m gonna do the other side as well. Best to keep your mouth closed, son. Otherwise you might bite your tongue off. You hear me?’

  Kieron nodded. It was all he could do. Keep your mouth closed. Shit.

  The little guy took a step back. The tiny nod of warning must have been meant for the bloke behind him. He felt the grip on his arms tighten. He couldn’t take his eyes off the man in the balaclava. The way he positioned his body. How light he was on his feet. How perfectly balanced.

  Then, as if from nowhere, came an explosion of pain, a blinding white light that reached into every corner of his brain. His face wasn’t a face any more, just a big fat crater full of scalding water. He felt his body sag. He could taste his own blood. The guy behind him propped him up, got him ready again. He lifted his head, tried to plead for mercy, tried to say sorry, tried to do any fucking thing to stop the pain. Then came the second blow, the other side of his face, another meteor hit, another explosion, more lights in the darkness.

  The floor came up to meet him. He felt himself fighting for air, the way you might if you were underwater, his grasp of time and distance gone. His stomach was heaving. He was trying to throw up through the wreckage of his mouth. Very close, a voice in his ear, the warmth of someone’s breath.

  ‘Don’t even think of going to the Filth. Otherwise we’ll do it again. Yeah?’

  He tried to nod but it hurt too much. Far away he heard the front door open and then close. Everything was a blur. He tried to focus. The Asda bag was inches from his face. On top, some kind of leaving present.

  He shut his eyes, started to cry. Some time later, he didn’t know when, he managed to move, managed to reach for the bag, managed to make sense of whatever it was they’d left. A can of mushroom soup. With a single straw.

  Faraday rode the hovercraft back to Southsea, bumping and bucking across the darkness of the Solent. A taxi on the Southsea side took him home, where he showered and changed. By half past seven he was heading west on the motorway. Salisbury, at this time in the evening, was less than an hour away.

  He’d found time during the day to put a couple of calls through to Gabrielle. On the first occasion she’d been on divert. When he tried again, mid-afternoon, they’d had a brief, strained conversation. She was at the hospital with Leila. The little girl was asleep. She’d had to step outside to take Faraday’s call. She needed to be back beside the bed in case Leila woke up. Faraday said he understood. He was planning to drive up this evening to see her. Where might she be?

  This news seemed to take Gabrielle by surprise. At first she said she’d be at the hospital. Then she changed her mind and gave him the name of the bed and breakfast where she was staying. It was called the Avon View. Finally, when Faraday said he’d try and be there by half eight, she told him to come to the hospital. There was a big car park at the back, she said. Then just follow the signs to the Burns Unit.

  The turn off the motorway was a few miles beyond Southampton. From here the road headed due north. Too late Faraday spotted the traffic queue ahead. The A36 was notorious for high-speed accidents. Already trapped by a stream of vehicles behind, he knew he could be here for some time.

  He pulled the Mondeo to a halt. Since leaving the island he’d done his best to forget the million decisions he’d left on his desk in the Major Incident Room. Parsons had returned to the mainland in mid-afternoon, due at a cold-case review at headquarters in Winchester. The news about Holman had tied Gosling in knots. If he hadn’t died in the fire, then where was he? And just who was the fourth unidentified body?

  In Faraday’s view the latter question was the key to everything, and he’d instructed Suttle to re-interview the taxi driver who’d driven the younger daughter home on the Saturday night. This was a priority action and Suttle himself had driven across to Newport to knock the guy up. He worked regular night shifts throughout the week and spent most of the day in bed.

  Suttle had checked in an hour or so later. The taxi driver remembered another vehicle parked beside Holman’s Land Rover when he’d dropped the girl off. He couldn’t be absolutely certain but he thought it might have been a Corsa. Robbie Gifford, Kim’s boyfriend, drove a Corsa. Odds on, he’d been at Monkswell Farm that night, protecting his beloved against her predatory stepfather.

  Faraday had put a call through to the pathologist. Pembury’s phone had been on divert so he’d left a message with Difford’s details and asked him to access the boy’s dental records. Pembury had yet to come back, but Faraday sensed already that the fourth body had to be Robbie Difford.

  Quite where that would leave Gosling was anyone’s guess. There was still plenty of room for some kind of narco involvement but the real question mark hung over Johnny Holman. Intel enquiries generated by Jimmy Suttle were now reaching deep into the Pompey underworld and word had come back that seemed to tie him to a woman called Lou Sadler.

  According to Suttle, Sadler ran an escort agency called Two’s Company from premises in Cowes, servicing the classier end of the market. She imported girls from the Baltic states, chiefly Estonia and Latvia, paid them well and kept her clientele extremely happy. Suttle had talked to a fellow D/S in the Southampton Vice Squad. He said that Sadler peddled her wares to visiting businessmen on the mainland, a handful of regulars on the island and minted yachtie types during Cowes Week. When Suttle mentioned Holman, the Vice Squad D/S had laughed. She gives him a little treat from time to time, he’d said. He’s a lucky boy, that Johnny Holman.

  The traffic jam was inching forward. Ahead, in the far distance, Faraday could see a flashing blue light. His mobile lay on the passenger seat beside him. Should he phone Gabrielle again? Warn her he wouldn’t make it by half eight? He decided against it. Maybe he could make up the lost time once he was free of the jam. Maybe she’d hang on at the hospital, give him a hug, tell him how much she’d missed him. Maybe.

  He sank a little deeper into the worn seat, all too aware he’d lost control of this relationship he’d treasured. They’d been together for more than three years now, ever since that first meeting. He’d sat beside her on a local bus deep in the back country near the Burmese border. Faraday had been in Thailand for a couple of weeks, entranced by the smells and sounds of the jungle. It lay like a t
hick green pelt over the mountains flanking the valley of the River Kwai, and he remembered telling her about the treks he’d made, camping rough, and the deafening chorus of birdsong that greeted each new dawn. He remembered the way she’d listened to his description of a white-throated kingfisher he’d spotted looking for frogs in a paddy field, and he remembered as well the quick grace of her smile when he’d showed her some shots of the bird on his camera. The way she shaded her eyes against the glare of the sun. The way her fingers had rested so briefly on his peeling arm.

  Gabrielle had been on a solo journey of her own, a chance to duck back into real life after six months cooped up in her apartment in Chartres, desperately trying to finish a book. She was an anthropologist by trade, scouting remote areas of the planet, happy in her own company, and Faraday knew within minutes that he’d fallen in love. She was a good deal younger than he was, but they shared the same sense of curiosity, the same hunger to open new doors in their lives. They’d swapped phone numbers on the bus and later that week they’d met again. Back home he’d half-drowned her in a torrent of emails. With them he’d sent trophy photos from his jungle treks.

  Later, at her invitation, he’d gone over to France. She had an old VW camper van, and from Chartres they’d motored south, crisscrossing the remoter corners of the Massif Central, Faraday trying to figure out exactly what he’d done to deserve such happiness. One night, camping au sauvage beside the headwaters of the Dordogne, he’d asked her whether she felt the same. She’d reached up for him, kissed him, nodded.

  ‘Oui,’ she’d murmured. ‘Pourquoi pas?’

  Why not? At the time he’d put the phrase down to a perfect sunset and too much wine, but now – years later – he was beginning to wonder. They’d made a decent life for themselves at the Bargemaster’s House, excitement and novelty hardening into something more permanent. To Faraday, the relationship had felt closer and more real than anything he’d ever experienced, yet he knew that parts of this extraordinary woman would always remain beyond reach. With Gabrielle, he realised, you took nothing for granted, and when the invitation arrived from Montreal for a two-semester attachment at McGill University, he knew with absolute certainty that she’d say yes.