in a different class. Play your cards right, knock the charlie and all that booze on the head, and you could have turned pro. But it didn't happen, did it, Dave? And you know what that makes you? One sad bastard. You're right, couple of years ago Bazza thought the world of you. Now he's thrown you to the dogs.'
'Yeah.' Suttle nodded. 'And about fucking time too.'
Pullen didn't want to know. He was squirming around in the back, trying to ease the bite of the handcuffs. Winter watched him for a moment or two, not bothering to hide his disgust. Then he readjusted his seat and began to toy with the car keys.
'One last question, Dave. What's with Bazza and Valentine?'
'They're mates.'
'I know that. I meant with Trudy. Did Bazza know Trude was living with Valentine?'
'Of course he did.'
'And he thought Valentine was shagging her?'
'No way.'
'No way} How does that work?'
Pullen's eyes found Winter's in the mirror, the look of a man who knows he's gone too far but can't do much about it.
'He warned him off,' he said at last. 'Told him he'd break his legs if he laid a finger on her.'
'That personal?'
'Yeah.' Pullen closed his eyes again. 'You know fucking Bazza.'
Willard sat at his desk in the Major Crimes suite, waiting for Prebble to pick up his extension. According to Joyce, who'd answered Willard's call to Tumbril HQ, the young accountant was busy putting another thousand documents through the photocopier. She'd given him a shout and told him the chief was on the line, top priority. He responded well to pressure, she said, and would doubtless be back in seconds.
Willard, who'd taken a while to tune in to Joyce's sense of humour, scribbled himself a note about an extension to Prebble's contract. Once they had Mackenzie in the bag, the accountant would be working flat out preparing the paperwork for the CPS file. Willard also foresaw endless conferences with the Assset Recovery Agency, the new government body charged with stripping major criminals of their ill-gotten gains. This would be Tumbril's real harvest, the seizure of millions of pounds' worth of property, business holdings, cars and sundry other goodies which Mackenzie had accumulated over the last decade. Prebble had spent the best part of a year sorting out the artful chaos Mackenzie had created around himself, and it would be Willard's pleasure to watch dusk fall on the city's biggest criminal. Up like a rocket, he thought.
Down like a stick.
'Apologies, Mr. Willard.' It was Prebble. 'Ran out of toner.'
'How's it going?'
'Fine.'
Willard had already rung this morning, telling Prebble that he'd need a headline summary of Mackenzie's major investments by the middle of next week. Now, he advanced the deadline.
'Monday morning,' he said. 'On my desk.'
Prebble's silence suggested this might be a problem. When he asked why, the accountant had a question of his own.
'What are you going to use this stuff for?' he enquired. 'Only it might help me to know.'
'Why?'
'Because there's ways I can dress the thing up.'
'I don't want it dressed up. I just want a simple breakdown what the guy's worth, where it comes from, what he's into.'
'Like a wiring diagram?'
'Yeah.' Willard liked that idea. 'Exactly.'
'You're going to use it for some kind of presentation?'
'It doesn't matter what I'm going to use it for. It just has to be clear. If we can follow the links, see how it all ties up, so much the better. You know what I mean? We discussed it this morning.'
'Of course, sir.'
'Monday morning,' Willard repeated. 'OK?'
He put the phone down and sat back in his chair for a moment. Prebble had been right to talk about a presentation. If Sunday furnished the appropriate evidence ideally some kind of drugs-related inducement then Willard would be using the recordings and Prebble's asset analysis to lock in his own boss for the next stages of the operation.
To secure a result when Tumbril finally got to court, Mackenzie had to be seen to be behaving as a major drug dealer. Given a fair wind, that evidence might come from Sunday. Alternatively, Mackenzie might insist on a subsequent meeting for the physical exchange of drugs or money.
Either way, the tapes, photos, and first-person testimony from Wallace would be all the more persuasive with the backing of Prebble's impressive research. The accountant was mapping every corner of Mackenzie's empire, vital reconnaissance if the asset recovery boys were to conduct a slash-and-burn raid of their own.
Willard pushed at the desk with his foot, letting the bulk of his body slowly revolve the chair. The last couple of months he'd put on a pound or two that he regretted, but he'd begun to invest in made-to-measure suits, cleverly cut, and knew that the extra weight remained a secret between him and his bathroom mirror.
He steepled his fingers and gazed out at the rain. Beyond next week, lay the press briefings and the headlines, those glorious moments when Tumbril could at last break surface and give a decent account of itself. Already, Willard was mentally preparing a briefing for the headquarters media unit, an outline account of the violence and intimidation that had smoothed Mackenzie's path to a fortune. This, he'd insist, was the reality that lay beneath the glitzy cafe-bars and the fuck-you lifestyle. The guys on the media unit would shape it into a press release, and Willard smiled at the thought of the subsequent off-the-record conversations he himself would be having with favoured local hacks. Then would be the time to gently muse about bent solicitors and corrupt accountants, about the raft of middle-class expertise on which Mackenzie and his tribe had floated to glory. These people knew who they were, he'd say, and they too should start thinking hard about explaining themselves in front of a judge and jury. Time to make them sweat, he thought. Time to make the bastards understand that not everyone was for sale.
He revolved full circle on the chair and found himself looking at the phone again. Checking his watch, he dialled a number from memory. This time in the afternoon, she was normally up in the living quarters on the fort, sorting out the day's ration of paperwork. Faraday had been right. There were wrinkles here that needed straightening out.
The phone answered on the second ring.
'Gisela?'
Eadie spent the afternoon at the Ambrym offices, sorting out the rushes on her drug project. With J-J already hard at work on the PC, she decamped next door to a small, bare room with a card table, a folding director's chair, and a view of the tiny backyard they used for parking. J-J had brought in a sleeping bag in anticipation of working through the night, and she unzipped it with his blessing and hung it over the window to mask the light before setting up her laptop and starting work.
She'd already been through the interview with Daniel Kelly, selecting the pieces she knew played best, and now she did the same with this morning's interview at the Marriott Hotel, filleting the tape for the moments when Daniel's father met the harder questions head on. The Adobe Premiere editing software supplied on-screen bins into which she could tuck the choicer morsels, and as the afternoon wore on she realised that even in rough-cut form way over length the impact of the video was going to be enormous.
After a break for coffee and a doughnut from the Cafe Parisien down the road, she steeled herself for a look at the footage from the mortuary.
Already this felt like history something she'd done weeks ago and she marvelled at how dispassionate and professional she seemed to have remained. From time to time she could hear her own voice on the soundtrack asking the pathologist or her assistant exactly what was going to happen next, and there was no trace of the bile she'd tasted in her own throat.
Turning away from the laptop as the mortuary assistant began to pack the inside of Daniel's skull with paper
