makeover drug baron turned millionaire businessman the case would be a real bastard to make. Any serious bid to hurt him would doubtless revolve around dismantling Bazza's vast commercial empire but Mackenzie wasn't joking when he talked about the people he paid to advise him, and they'd have drawn up a survival kit for bent millionaires.
Rule one was stay away from drugs: no possession, no supply, absolutely no involvement with the distribution chain. The money-laundering legislation seemed to be getting more powerful by the month, but even under the latest set of rules Winter thought you still had to prove some kind of drugs-related offence. In view of the mountain of goodies he stood to lose, the last thing Mackenzie would therefore risk was a criminal charge. That way, he'd hand the Tumbril boys the victory of their dreams. So how would they do it? And why now, when Bazza seemed so armour-clad?
Winter helped himself to more tea. Bazza's terse mention of Whale Island was intriguing. On one level it made perfect sense to ring-fence an operation like this, to bury it away from canteen chatter, yet on another level the strategy plainly hadn't worked. And if Bazza himself knew about Tumbril, then who else was reading the files? Winter reached for the sugar bowl. The implication, of course, was that Bazza numbered coppers on his payroll, tame porkers uniformed or otherwise with their snouts in Bazza's trough. That in itself would be no surprise Winter knew a number of DCs who'd gone to the same school, drank in the same pubs, and would doubtless regard the odd titbit from Bazza's table as a gesture of mate ship but what gave last night's revelation a real edge was the fact that Tumbril was far from common knowledge. For once in their lives, the bosses had managed to keep a secret. So who was keeping Bazza in the loop?
This single question floated Winter through the next hour of his day.
He thought about it in the bath. He drew up a mental list of candidates over breakfast. Finally, sitting on the John, he realised that there were cleverer ways of carving a piece of Tumbril for himself. He was looking at the wrong target. It wasn't Whale Island or the covert ops team that mattered. It was Bazza himself.
He'd left his mobile on the window sill. Reaching up, he dialled a number from memory. She took a while to answer and sounded badly hung-over.
'Mist.' Winter was smiling. 'We need to talk.'
DC Jimmy Suttle never made promises he intended to break. Half past eight in the morning found him dropping Trudy off at the entrance to Gunwharf. She was due for an appointment at her GP's surgery and needed to get home to sort herself out. Leaning in through the car window, she gave Suttle a lingering kiss and told him to forget everything she'd said about Dave Pullen.
'Yeah?'
Suttle checked his image in the rear-view mirror and engaged gear. He'd phone her later about tonight. Maybe they could drive into Southsea for a curry or something. Then he was gone.
Minutes later, he found himself a parking space in Ashburton Road.
There was a squad meeting at Kingston Crescent scheduled for 9.15 and DI Lamb was merciless about latecomers but he still had forty minutes to get one or two things off his chest. A succession of CID colleagues, older and wiser, had warned him about the perils of mixing your private and professional lives. Unless you had some kind of death wish, letting the job fuck the inside of your head was the last thing you ever did. Standing on the pavement, staring up at Pullen's top-floor flat, Suttle permitted himself a grim smile. They were wrong.
At the top of the fire escape, he tried Pullen's door. It was locked.
He knocked twice, yelled Pullen's name, gave the handle a shake, and toyed briefly with kicking it in. Back on the pavement, aware of twitching curtains in the flats opposite, he walked round the corner and rang the top bell. Two days ago, the name space alongside had been empty. Now, in fat black capitals, DAVE PULLEN.
A third try with the bell produced nothing from the adjoining speakerphone. Checking his watch, Suttle rang the ground-floor flat.
At length, there came a small querulous voice through the speakerphone.
Suttle introduced himself, offering his warrant card a minute or so later when the door finally opened. The woman must have been eighty.
The cardigan was matted with ancient soup stains and when Suttle repeated that he was CID, she thought he'd come about the recent spate of doorstep milk thefts.
'Both bottles went last week.' She peered up at him. 'I'd buy from the shops if I could get there.'
Suttle left her in the cavernous hall. Three flights up, he paused on the top landing. Pullen's was one of only two apartments. To Suttle's surprise, the door to the flat was open. Even at ten paces, there was a perceptible smell of shit. He paused by the door, called Pullen's name. The smell was much stronger now. He called again, hesitated a second or two, then pushed inside.
The gloom of the tiny lobby had an almost physical texture, thickened by the stench. From memory, Pullen's living room lay beyond the door on the right. Suttle nudged it open with his foot, alert now, aware of the thud of his own pulse. Situations like these, it was wise to have back-up, at the very least a message left with someone who'd know where to come looking. Like this, totally solo, he was horribly exposed.
Another rule broken.
'Pullen?'
Suttle looked round the chaos of the living room. The curtains were closed against the grey March morning. There was a copy of yesterday's News folded across the back of a chair and the collection of football magazines he recognised from his last visit. Pullen must have tripped over them because they were scattered everywhere, big cover-page faces of Beckham and Thierry Henry peering up from odd corners of the room.
On a work surface in the tiny kitchenette, Suttle found a half-eaten kebab and chips in a nest of stained newsprint. Beside it, an open can of Tennant's Super. He studied it a moment, aware that this abandoned room was beginning to resemble a crime scene. There were things he should do here, steps he should take. Any more freelancing, and he was in danger of tainting the evidence.
'Pullen? Where the fuck are you?'
He heard a faint moan. Motionless in the half-darkness, Suttle strained every nerve to pick up the faintest movement. It happened again, louder this time. Somewhere close, he thought. And definitely human.
Back in the hall, the first door he tried opened into a narrow bathroom. The rail for the shower curtain was hanging from the ceiling and the washer had gone on one of the taps in the hand basin. He stepped back into the hall again and pushed lightly at the sole remaining door. It was open already, a foot or two ajar, but the moment he stirred the air inside, the smell enveloped him, the hot, meaty stench of shit.
This time, the window was draped with a blanket. Daylight leaked in around the edges and in the semi- darkness Suttle could just make out a figure on a bed. He fumbled against the inside wall until his fingers found the switch. He snapped on the light, bracing himself for whatever might happen next. Almost expecting some kind of physical attack, he found himself looking at a naked male body spreadeagled on the bare springs of the bed frame. Wrists and arms had been cable-tied to the edges of the frame and the flesh was red-raw where the trussed body had tried to struggle free. A conclusive ID was difficult because the head was covered in a grubby pillowslip but there was no problem guessing a name. Deja-vu, Suttle thought. Dave Pullen. Had to be.
He stepped forward, meaning to remove the pillowslip, but then stopped.
Beneath the bed, visible through the bare springs, was one of the football magazines, open at a double-page spread of a team in red shirts with the Carlsberg logo scrolled across their chests. The photo had been positioned at ground zero, directly beneath Pullen's arse.
Michael Owen, in the front row, had taken a direct hit. Another heroic curl of turd had obliterated the bottom half of Emil Heskey. A third, a huge dump, had splat ted across most of the back row. Half the Liverpool team wiped out by the contents of Pullen's flabby bowels. No wonder the place stank.
Suttle at last removed the pillowslip. Pullen stared up at him, his eyes huge in his parchment face. A length of gaffer tape sealed his mouth and it gave Suttle immense pleasure to tear it off. Pullen yelped in pain, then swallowed hard and began to lick his lips.
'Thank fuck,' he kept saying. 'Thank fuck.'
'Thank fuck for what?'
'You. Jesus…' He closed his eyes and shook his head. 'Just get me out of here.'
The mattress and a duvet had been thrown against the far wall. Suttle retrieved the duvet and draped it over Pullen's naked body. As he did so, he noticed a line of DIY tools neatly arranged on the carpet beside the bed. With the electric drill came a roll of extension cable and a plug. The Stanley knife looked brand new and there was a
