Deadlight Read online

  DEADLIGHT

  Graham Hurley

  Graham Hurley is an award-winning TV documentary maker who now writes full time. He lived in Portsmouth for 20 years. He is married and has grown up children. He now lives in Exmouth, Devon.

  www.grahamhurley.co.uk

  Praise for Graham Hurley

  Blood and Honey

  ‘Hurley’s decent, persistent cop is cementing his reputation as one of Britain’s most credible official sleuths, crisscrossing the mean streets of a city that is a brilliantly depicted microcosm of contemporary Britain … The unfolding panorama of Blair’s England is both edifying and shameful, and a sterling demonstration of the way crime writing can target society’s woes’

  Guardian

  ‘There is no doubt that his series of police-procedural novels is one of the best since the genre was invented more than half a century ago’

  Literary Review

  Cut to Black

  ‘The book has everything required of a first-rate police procedural and Hurley is now firmly at the top, with few rivals in this genre’

  Sunday Telegraph

  ‘Hurley is one of my favourite Brit crime writers of the last few years, and long may he continue to chronicle Portsmouth’s seedier side’

  Independent on Sunday

  ‘This series gets stronger and stronger, and there is obviously space for more’

  Crimetime

  Deadlight

  ‘I officially declare myself a fan of Graham Hurley. His attention to detail (without slowing the pace of the novel) and realistic display of police work mark him as a most accomplished purveyor of the British police procedural’

  Deadly Pleasures

  ‘Graham Hurley’s Deadlight is excellent modern British crime writing. Hurley demonstrates great attention to detail in regard to police procedure, as well as highlighting the conflicts of ideology that exist within the police force’

  Independent on Sunday

  By Graham Hurley

  FEATURING DI JOE FARADAY

  Turnstone

  The Take

  Angels Passing

  Deadlight

  Cut to Black

  Blood and Honey

  One Under

  The Price of Darkness

  No Lovelier Death

  Beyond Reach

  OTHER NOVELS

  Rules of Engagement

  Reaper

  The Devil’s Breath

  Thunder in the Blood

  Sabbathman

  The Perfect Soldier

  Heaven’s Light

  Nocturne

  Permissible Limits

  AN ORION EBOOK

  First published in Great Britain in 2003 by Orion

  This ebook first published in 2010 by Orion Books

  Copyright © Graham Hurley 2003

  The moral right of Graham Hurley to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  All the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN: 978 1 4091 3350 6

  This ebook produced by Jouve, France

  The Orion Publishing Group Ltd

  Orion House

  5 Upper Saint Martin’s Lane

  London WC2H 9EA

  An Hachette UK Company

  www.orionbooks.co.uk

  Deadlight – Hinged metal flap which can be lowered and clamped over a scuttle in order to darken a ship.

  Jackspeak – a Guide to British Naval Slang and Usage

  – Rick Jolly

  To

  Jean and Charles Wylie

  with love

  Contents

  Cover

  Title

  Copyright

  Dedication

  About the Author

  By Graham Hurley

  Praise for Graham Hurley

  Acknowledgements

  Prelude

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Epilogue

  Beyond Reach

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Acknowledgements

  My thanks to the following for their time and patience:

  Jim Allaway, John Ashworth, Ralph Barber, Mark Davenport, Lee Dinnell, Roly Dumont, Alan Estcourt, Diana and Bob Franklin, Alastair Gregory, Barry Hornby, Bob Lamburne, Pete Langdown, Howard Lazenby, Steve McLinn, Clive Morgan, Mary and John Mortimer, Joe Morton, Laurie Mullen, John Roberts, Alfie Saye, Colin Smith, Ray Taylor, Mark Tinker, David Watts, Steve Watts, Tony West, Dave Wilson, Dave Wright and Charles Wylie.

  Mark Higgitt’s fine book, Through Fire and Water, was an indispensable source of reference, and should be compulsory reading for anyone interested in naval aspects of the Falklands War. As ever, I owe an enormous debt to my editor, Simon Spanton, while Lin, my wife, was an unflagging source of comfort and inspiration throughout a long campaign.

  Prelude

  SAN CARLOS WATER, 21 MAY, 1982

  All the training, all the waiting, all the unvoiced speculation: what it might feel like, how you might cope. And now, all too suddenly, this.

  The first bomb fell aft. His face an inch from the mess deckplates, he could feel the ship lift, shudder, and then settle again. Helo deck, he thought. He’d been out there only hours ago, marshalling Lynx ops in the bright, cold winter sunshine. Now, in the neon-lit harshness of the Delta Two mess he raised his head a little, adjusting his anti-flash, trying to picture the scene above.

  ‘Second aircraft. Red two zero.’ The PWO’s voice on the main broadcast Tannoy.

  The Argie Skyhawks normally came in pairs. Concentrating on a single ship was favourite because it narrowed the odds on a sinking. Nice one.

  ‘Brace! Brace! Brace!’

  The ship heeled savagely as the Captain tried to throw the Argie pilot’s aim. Then came the fairground boom-boom-boom of the 20mm Oerliken and a sudden whoosh as a Seacat engaged. Even with target lock at three miles, Seacats were famously crap. Loosing one at six hundred metres, you’d give its little electronic brain a seizure. Even the PWO admitted it.

  The sudden roar of the Skyhawk overhead ground his face into the deck. He shut his eyes and began to count, but he hadn’t got past one before the mess erupted around him. Thrown upwards by the blast, he had a moment of absolute clarity before the world closed in around him. Small things. The long-overdue bluey he’d started this morning, finished except for a couple of lines at the end. The bet he’d taken a couple of days back with the XO, the date they’d all be h
ome again. And the boy Warren, adrift in the South Atlantic, so much gash.

  Smoke, everywhere. And the roar of water blasting out of a ruptured main. Voices yelling, and the clang of metal on metal as men took a Samson bar to the heavy secured doors. All that, plus a licking flame from the yawning gap below.

  For a second or two, pure instinct, he checked himself over. His ears were still ringing from the explosion and when his hand came down from his face it was sticky with blood, but he could get up, no problem, and his mind was clear enough to latch itself on to the emergency drills.

  According to the book, he was to return to the flight deck to assess the situation. His instincts, though, told him that the ship was finished. Already she’d taken a heavy list. Port? Starboard? He couldn’t work it out but the smoke was getting thicker by the second, and judging by the thunder below the fire was spreading towards the Seacat magazine. Situation like this, any sailor with half a brain would be binning the Damage Control Manual and thinking about an orderly evacuation.

  On his hands and knees, hunting for clean air, he began to move. Already the deckplates were uncomfortably hot and the upward blast of the fire below drove him to the edges of what remained of the Two Delta mess. Seconds earlier, he dimly remembered three other guys with him in this cramped little space. Where were they now?

  He found one of them sprawled beside a yawning locker. Surrounded by packets of crisps, bits and pieces of civvy kit, plus assorted copies of Mayfair, the man was rigid with shock but still alive. He slapped his face hard, hauled him into a half crouch, and pushed him towards the jagged hole where the door had once been. A final shove took the man through.

  ‘Out!’ he shouted. ‘Get out!’

  Back inside the mess, the smoke coiled into his lungs. It had a foul, greasy, chemical taste. He could feel his throat burning, his airways beginning to tighten. This is how you die, he thought. This is what the Fire School instructors at Matapan Road meant by suffocation.

  He found the next body beside the fridge. Jones. Definitely. He tried for a pulse, spared a breath or two for mouth-to-mouth, all he could muster, then gave up. Taff was very dead.

  Two down. One to go.

  ‘Anyone there?’ he yelled.

  There was a movement in the half-darkness. Someone staggering uncertainly to his feet, shocked but still mobile. He moved towards the man, meaning to help him out, then stopped. Away to his left, beyond a gaping hole in the forward bulkhead, he could just make out the shape of another body.

  He ducked low again, sucking in the last of the good air, picking his way through the debris. The casualty was face up. His anti-flash gloves were charred where he’d tried to protect himself, and one of his legs was bent out at a strange angle, but his eyes were open and he blinked in response to the upraised thumb. Yes, I’m still alive. And yes, for Christ’s sake get me out of here.

  The body weighed a ton. Every time he tried to heave the deadweight towards the mess, towards the passageway and the ladder beyond, the man screamed in agony. Getting him through the tangle of debris would be a joke unless he could find another pair of hands.

  The guy he’d glimpsed earlier was still in the mess. He could see his bulk, pressed back against the surviving partition. He had his hands out, trying desperately to follow the billowing smoke, up towards the chill sweetness of the open air.

  ‘Hey you!’ he managed. ‘Come here! Give us a hand!’

  The man turned and stared at him. From the main broadcast, faint along the passageway, came a shouted order, repeated twice. The Captain’s voice. Abandon ship.

  The figure beside the partition was on the move again, faster this time, lunging towards the passageway. Feeling a hand on his shoulder, he spun round. The eyes were wide, letter-boxed in the anti-flash hood.

  ‘There’s a guy back there. Give us a hand.’ It wasn’t a polite request. It was an order.

  The man stared at him for a moment, then shaped to take a swing.

  ‘You’re fucking joking,’ he snarled. ‘Piss off, will you?’

  One

  TUESDAY, 4 JUNE, 2002, 07.00

  It took a while for Faraday to make sense of the shape swimming up towards him in the fixing bath. A structure of some kind? Big? Small? He didn’t know.

  J-J stood beside him, a tall, thin shadow in the tiny darkroom. Despite the pressures of the last three days, he’d been up with his camera before dawn, patrolling the crust of driftwood and debris as the tide fell, and the bitter-sweet saltiness of the harbourside still clung to him.

  ‘Recognise it now?’ One bony finger put the question, circling in the gloom.

  Faraday rubbed his eyes and peered down as the greys slowly thickened and the ghostly smudge that overlooked the foreshore began to resolve. The big glass doors downstairs, ablaze with the first low rays of the sun; Faraday’s study above, still curtained; and a careless arrangement of clouds behind, framing the square, sturdy shape of the Bargemaster’s House. The boy must have taken the shot way out on the semi-sunken causeway that dried at low tide, a suspicion confirmed by his mudsplattered Reeboks. Faraday could think of better reasons for this seven a.m. summons but just now he couldn’t muster the energy to argue.

  J-J reached for a pair of plastic tongs. He gave the fixer a stir, then pointed at another upstairs window on the emerging photo.

  ‘You.’ He pillowed his head on his hands, a faintly accusatory gesture. ‘Asleep.’

  He lifted the dripping print from the fixing bath and held it up between them, a trophy from his morning’s work. Then he turned to one of the lines he’d strung across the cramped little space and pegged the Bargemaster’s House amongst the dozens of other prints already hanging in the half-darkness: old, weather-roughened faces; shy smiles; gnarled hands on brass wheels; and Faraday’s favourite: an armada of tiny ships, harshly backlit against the June sun, rolling in past the Round Tower, butting against a lumpy ebbing tide.

  Faraday gazed at the photo a moment or two longer, aware of J-J’s eyes on his face. Then he raised an approving thumb.

  ‘Nice,’ he murmured.

  Back in bed, enjoying the lie-in he’d been promising himself for weeks, Faraday let himself drift into sleep. The decision to give J-J his mother’s camera hadn’t been easy, but the pictures he’d managed to conjure from the battered Olympus they’d shared for years had been more than impressive and in the end the decision had made itself. Since then, months back, the photos had got better and better. His deaf son had discovered a new language through the viewfinder of Janna’s treasured Nikon, and the installation of the darkroom had given J-J’s black and white prints a hard-edged clarity that Faraday found both startling and eerie. These were images that bridged the years, echoes of another life. Just looking at them, he felt nineteen again.

  It was gone eleven before his mobile rang. He recognised the voice at once.

  ‘Dave,’ he muttered wearily.

  Dave Michaels was one of the two DSs on the Major Crimes team. Last thing yesterday, leaving the office, Faraday had made a point of mentioning his rostered rest day, keenly awaited for what felt like weeks. Already, he knew he shouldn’t have bothered.

  ‘We’ve got a body down in Southsea,’ Michaels was saying. ‘Uniform rang it in thirty minutes ago.’

  ‘What’s that got to do with me?’

  ‘Guvnor wants you down there. ASAP.’

  ‘Why can’t someone else take care of it?’

  Faraday waited until Michaels’ soft chuckle began to subside. The last month or so, Portsmouth had become Murder City, the peace of the early summer disturbed by killing after killing. Most of it was rubbish, three-day events, domestic disputes turned into murder by booze or frustration, but every next body in the mortuary fridge triggered a mountain of paperwork as Faraday, above all, knew only too well. There were undoubted benefits to a divisional DI like himself winning a place on the Major Crimes team but a conversation like this wasn’t one of them.

  For a moment he toyed with havin
g the full ruck, if only to satisfy his own disappointment, but knew there was no point. The rules of homicide – who, where, when, why – took absolutely no account of the rest-day roster.

  Michaels was telling him what little he’d gleaned from the uniformed inspector who’d passed on the first report from the attending PCs. Guy in his fifties dead in his Southsea flat. Body discovered by a mate sent round from work. Chummy was naked on the floor, stiff as a board, and someone had given the rest of the room a good seeing-to as well.

  ‘Where’s the flat?’

  ‘Niton Road. 7a.’

  ‘Witnesses? Neighbours? Anyone upstairs?’

  ‘Too early to say. Scenes of Crime are there already and they’ve sealed the premises. No response from the top flat.’

  Faraday peered at the alarm clock beside the bed. 11.36. Given the timescale, events had moved extraordinarily fast. How come the referral to Major Crime had come so soon?

  ‘Willard’s decision.’ Michaels laughed again. ‘He can’t wait to get his hands on this one. He’s talking twenty DCs. He’s going to blitz it.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Bloke was a prison officer.’

  Faraday found J-J bent over the toaster in the kitchen, still enveloped in the harsh, chemical tang of the developing fluids from the darkroom. In a flurry of sign, Faraday explained about the summons to work. Their planned trip to London would have to wait for another day.

  J-J was less than happy.

  ‘When?’ he wanted to know.

  Faraday spread his arms wide. The temptation was to gloss it, to pretend that this latest spasm of violence would be sorted in days, just another settling of domestic accounts, but something in the conversation with Dave Michaels told Faraday to expect a more complex challenge. Detective Superintendents with Willard’s experience seldom called out the cavalry in such numbers without due cause.