Eadie slipped between him and the view, suddenly contrite. For a moment Faraday wasn't at all sure if this wasn't tactical, another puzzling little bend in their road, but when she nodded back towards the sofa he allowed himself to sit down. Some of the anger had boiled away and he was grateful when she returned with a Stella from the fridge.
'Drink this.' She pulled the tag on the can. 'Then I'll tell you.'
'Tell me what?'
'About tomorrow.'
'More glad tidings?' He shot her the beginnings of a smile.
'Afraid so. Two big gulps now. Attaboy.'
She waited until he'd poured the lager and taken a long pull. Then she told him about the post-mortem she'd arranged to tape. Kelly's father had faxed his permission and the coroner was on side There was no guarantee she'd ever use the footage but it wasn't the kind of sequence you could ever reconstruct.
Faraday absorbed the news. A lifetime of postmortems had left him more or less indifferent to dead flesh. The sight of Daniel Kelly weaving his way to his grave had been far, far worse.
Eadie was eyeing him with obvious caution.
'You don't want to shout at me?'
'No.'
'Thank God for Stella.' She leaned across and kissed him. 'You want the remains of the curry? Only J-J's left most of his.'
'J-J?'
'Yes.'
'He's been here?'
'He's in the spare bedroom. Asleep.'
'You're serious?'
Eadie thought about the question for a moment or two, then frowned.
'Tall bloke? Skinny? Bit quiet?'
She got to her feet and returned to the kitchen, leaving Faraday to absorb this latest revelation. He heard the pop of the gas as she fired up the oven, ready to warm the curry. Moments later, she was back with three poppadoms and a bowl of onion chutney. She gave a poppadom to Faraday, and then took his hand.
'J-J was adamant. No way was he sleeping at home.' She glanced briefly towards the bedroom. 'You two guys have some talking to do.'
Chapter fourteen
FRIDAY, 21 MARCH 2003, 01.20
Faraday was still asleep when the call came in. He'd left his mobile next door, lodged in a corner of the sofa, and it was Eadie who shook him gently awake.
'Yours.' She blew in his ear. 'Might be important.'
Naked, Faraday made his way into the lounge. A pale grey light washed through the big picture windows and he could see a lid of cloud clamped over the Isle of Wight. Dimly, he remembered that his son was asleep in the spare bedroom. Unless, of course, something else had happened.
'DI Faraday.' He didn't recognise the number. 'Major Crimes.'
'It's Graham Wallace.'
'Yeah?' Faraday rubbed his eyes. 'Something come up?'
Wallace began to describe a call he'd just taken from someone he described as 'our mate'. He wanted a meet within the next couple of days. Wallace had promised to get back to him as soon as he'd checked his diary and now needed some advice. Faraday was still wrestling with the implications of this sudden development when he looked up to find Eadie standing beside the sofa. She was wearing an unfastened cotton wrap and wanted to know whether it was too early for tea. Faraday said yes to the tea and took the mobile back to the bedroom.
By the time Eadie joined him, the conversation was over and Faraday was sitting on the edge of the bed, deep in thought. Eadie looked down at him, the tray in her hands.
'Something you're going to share with me?' she enquired drily.
Paul Winter had been up since dawn. Nights when he couldn't sleep — and there were more and more of them he'd taken to prowling round the bungalow, chasing his insomnia from room to room, often pausing in the tidy little lounge to reach for one of Joannie's well-thumbed paperbacks, giving the first page or two the chance to ease him back to sleep. On occasions, to his surprise, it worked. Half a chapter of Jeffrey Archer had the coshing power of Nembutal. But lately even the bludgeon of Archer's prose had left him alert and fretful, turning on the radio, pulling back the curtains, scouring the late winter baldness of the back garden for signs of what the coming day might bring.
The postman arrived earlier than usual, a cascade of junk mail through the letter box. Nursing his second mug of tea, Winter stooped to the mat. He wasn't sure what demographic these people used when they drew up their hit lists of likely punters but lately he'd become slightly depressed by the flood of geriatric appeals. Help the Aged. Saga Insurance. Motability. Forty-five, Winter told himself, was the prime of a man's life, but the sight of yet another warning about prostate cancer had begun to make him wonder. How come these envelope-stuffers knew he was feeling so washed-up?
The biggest of this morning's missives was a novelty: Guide Dogs for the Blind. He returned to the kitchen, meaning to bin the lot, then had second thoughts. The last couple of months, he'd thought seriously about getting himself a dog. The couple next door had one. There was a pretty redhead with the tightest jeans imaginable who walked a greyhound on the top of Portsdown Hill. Saturdays at Asda, shoppers on foot lashed their poodles to a special bar beside the trolley park.
He'd watched these people and their pets, idly puzzling about what a dog brought to their lives, and he'd concluded that the right choice of animal nothing mad could offer the perfect antidote to his increasing sense of solitariness. At three in the morning, it might be nice to have something to talk to.
Winter perched himself on the kitchen stool and shook out the contents of the envelope. A folksy collection of black and white photographs caught his eye, domestic snaps featuring Labradors and their unsighted owners. A mere 5 a week, according to the copy beneath, could make all the difference when it came to training another of these miracle wowsers. Was that too high a price when someone's life might be transformed?
Winter returned to the biggest of the photos, a shot of an eager-looking Labrador threading a portly gent in a long raincoat through a busy shopping centre. Without the dog, this man would be banged up at home, dependent on the Tesco phone delivery service.
Thanks to Rover, and trillions of caring donors, he could toddle off to the shops any time he liked.
Winter nodded to' himself amused. Half close his eyes, and he could be the man in the picture, someone so helpless, so out of touch, that only a guide dog could map his path through life. Maybe that's what he really needed, thought Winter. Maybe he'd got so old, so preoccupied, so blind, that something as tasty as Tumbril had passed him by.
Last night, sitting in Mackenzie's den, he hadn't let on about his own ignorance of this covert operation, but the more he'd thought about it afterwards, the more annoyed he'd felt about his own failure to clock whatever was going on. There was always the possibility, of course, that Mackenzie had got it wrong. Serious villains were famously paranoid and they often mistook a casual passing interest for a full-scale operation, booted and spurred. But on the evidence of last night, he rather suspected that Mackenzie wasn't kidding himself.
Christ, he even had a code name.
Operation Tumbril? Winter shook his head. His entire CID career had been dedicated to sensing the likely passage of events. Keep your ear to the ground, learn to tune out all the rubbish, and a footfall half a world away could tell you everything you needed to know. Yet here he was, dumb as the next detective, totally unaware that someone way above him had emptied the piggy bank, rolled up their sleeves, and decided to take on Bazza Mackenzie.
The thought, even this late in the day, put a smile on his face. Given the success of Mackenzie's recent
