'You didn't tamper with them? Take them apart?'
'Never. Why should I?'
'Why the little tools, then? The jeweller's kit?'
'My watch broke.'
'And you mended it?'
'Yeah.'
'So where is it?'
'The watch? I threw it away.'
'Why's that, Barry?'
'It bust again.'
'What a surprise.'
'Not really. I'm crap at repairs.'
'But you're a mechanic. You repair stuff all the time. It's your living, Barry. It's the label on your box. Mechanic. Repairman.'
'That's big stuff. Watches ain't Beemers.'
'OK.' Winter was the soul of patience. 'So let's get this straight.
You go to the car boot. You spend twenty quid on four model engines.
We come along a couple of weeks later and, guess what? We're looking at twenty grand's worth of cocaine. Is that it?'
'Yeah, more or less.'
'What's more or less about it?'
'You missed out the bit about me lending them to a friend.'
'When was that?'
'Last week.'
'And who is this friend?'
'Calls himself John. Don't know his surname.'
'Where does he live, this John?'
'Dunno. He's gone abroad somewhere. Met him down the pub.'
'And talked about model engines? Like you do?'
'Yeah, he's a model nut himself. I let him have them for a couple of days. Favour really.'
'What did he do? Stroke them? Talk to them? Take them apart and stuff them full of cocaine? You're talking nonsense, Barry. You're taking the piss. If I had a pen, I wouldn't even write this down. How thick do you think we are?'
The paralegal intervened. In her view, it was no part of Winter's job to put oppressive questions like this.
French ignored her. Leggat's wind-up had found its mark.
'We just sent those little tools away,' French said. 'The whole lot, wallet, screwdrivers, everything. Forensics these days, they can find flakes of paint you can't even see. So why don't you help yourself, Barry? Before the lab boys do it for you?'
'Help myself how?'
'By telling us where the cocaine came from.'
Leggat shrugged. This kind of pressure didn't alarm him in the slightest. Winter took up the running again. One of the surprises at Leggat's house had been the complete absence of any sign of dealing: no readied paper wraps, no scales, no deal list, no money stash. Even the directory on his mobile phone had been limited to a handful of friends and family. Now, Winter wanted to know how long Valentine had employed him.
'Six weeks, give or take.' Leggat shrugged.
'You know him well?'
'Known him years, Mike.'
'And he trusts you?'
'Trusts me how?'
'Trusts you to unload all that charlie he's been shipping down. I'm just curious, that's all. Does he know you've been skimming it? Or is it some kind of deal you've got with the guy? Charlie in lieu of overtime? Only from where we're sitting, Barry, you've done rather nicely. Bit of a pension, in fact. Seven ounces.'
The word 'pension' at last stirred a response from Leggat. For the first time, he looked almost animated. When the paralegal voiced her objections to this new line of questioning, Leggat put a restraining hand on her arm.
'Pension?' he repeated. 'You're talking to the wrong bloke.'
'Care to give us a name?'
'Fuck, no.' He sat back, amused. 'You think I'm that stupid?'
Eadie Sykes had been at Ambrym for a couple of hours, working on the drugs video, before she keyed the final edit in the rough cut.
Last night, working late, she'd pushed herself to within sight of the end. Just occasionally, she thought, there comes a moment in the editing process when the story acquires a life of its own, when decisions about the next talking head or the next action sequence take themselves, when your own role becomes somehow secondary to the onward thrust of the story. At that point, strangely, you find yourself surfing on a wave of the video's own making, your sole responsibility limited to pressing the right keys in the right order. This experience, a gleeful creative surrender, had only happened to her once before. On that occasion, a video about the Allied evacuation from Crete in 1941, she'd come close to winning an award. This time, she sensed there'd be no such disappointment.
She went across to the window, opened it wide, and took a deep lungful of air. Fifty metres down the road, a man in his back garden was piling winter debris onto a bonfire. Excitement, she thought, tastes faintly of woodsmoke.
She returned to the laptop and sat motionless for the best part of thirty minutes, trying to pretend she'd never seen these images, heard these voices, before. Deliberately, she'd opted for letting Daniel's story unfold against the events that had surrounded his death. By the time he was describing his first encounter with heroin, therefore, we already knew that the little wraps of brown powder would finally kill him. As his love affair with smack deepened, sudden cuts to the post-mortem offered a very different perspective, a brutal bass note that underlined the depth of his self-deception.
In a particularly striking passage, he talked with real passion about an early fix. He'd gone short for days. He'd kept himself going on toast and shots of neat vodka. Then, thanks to a new friend, he'd managed to fill his works with a particularly pure teen th and talked of that sudden rush of unconditional sweetness that had stripped the world of its pain and its menace. It had, he testified, been a glimpse of eternity, an experience that he'd cherish for the rest of his life.
The first time Eadie had heard this story, she'd almost been tempted to try smack for herself. Now, as she watched the glint of the pathologist's scalpel as she readied Daniel's stomach for the dissecting bowl, Eadie felt only revulsion.
Towards the end of the video she'd left space for Daniel Kelly's funeral, but the closing sequence a carefully assembled reprise of his final steps from the kitchen of the Old Portsmouth flat to the bed where he'd die was unbearably poignant. By now, his story should have held few surprises. We knew Daniel was bright. We'd grasped his despair, his sense of lost ness We understood how money and heroin had offered him the promise of salvation. And we knew just how false that dawn turned out to be. Yet watching him lurch down the darkened hall, Eadie at last understood how big a lie this tormented young man had sold himself. He'd surrendered his life to the guys in Pennington Road. And that same life had bubbled away through the mouthful of vomit that had finally choked him.
Eadie was still debating where to run the end credits when her mobile began to trill. She recognised the number.
'Doug.' She was grinning. 'Come over any time. Have you eaten?'
'No.'
'Just as well.'
Willard, for once in his life, had skipped breakfast. Now, a couple of minutes before noon, he sat behind the
