different addresses at least. For an operation as major as Red Rum, it made perfect sense.
Anson Avenue was in its normal state of torpid chaos: abandoned cars, sullen kids, and a lurching drunk who was doing his best to piss into a pillar box. Winter gave him a toot and waved a finger as he drove past. The guy could barely get the thin yellow stream up above waist level.
At the top of the road, Winter turned the car round and then parked outside number seventy-three. He killed the engine and then gazed up at the house. Word must have spread about Scott’s appearance at the Bridewell on Saturday night because someone had already been at the front door with a spray can. ‘Scum’ went the simple message.
Winter checked his watch, wondering whether the boy was in. One way or another, he badly needed to get him alongside Harrison. If Scott came back with serious intelligence – a sudden change of address, say – then Winter would make his name with the Drugs Squad. If, on the other hand, he simply passed on the warning then Winter would have planted his very own grass bang in the middle of the city’s number one network. A tip like that, as long as the boy kept his nerve, would guarantee Scott Spellar a place in the sun. Harrison would owe his young gopher. Big time. And where, Winter wondered, might that lead?
Getting out of the car, Winter smiled. These were the kinds of strokes he enjoyed pulling most, stepping outside the system, turning his back on the paperwork, running private informants, inching his way into the heart of the action without anyone –
anyone –
being any the wiser. Then, at a time of his choosing, he would cash in all that information, all those carefully harboured secrets, step into the spotlight and take the applause he so richly deserved. Criminals, serious criminals, needed detectives like Paul Winter. The fact that there were few of his breed left was one of the reasons crime was getting so out of hand.
He pushed in through the gate and rapped on the door. The paint from the spray can was even fresher than he’d thought. At length, a girl appeared, opening an upstairs window. She had nose rings and long black hair.
‘Yeah? What is it?’
Winter asked for Scott. She said he wasn’t in.
‘Where is he?’
‘Downtown somewhere.’
‘Doing what?’
‘No idea.’ She peered down at him. ‘Are you the filth, then? Only he said you were a fat bastard.’
For once, Winter didn’t know what to say. Then he gave her the finger, turned on his heel and went back to the car. Gone downtown, he thought. Good sign.
*
Faraday was home by seven. Upstairs, in the study, he checked the PC but there were no more e-mails from J-J. Was he really going to flog his return ticket? Was this really the time to pack up twenty-two years of fatherhood and start again?
There was an unopened bottle of malt in the drinks cabinet in the lounge. Faraday poured himself three fingers, added ice, and drank it in the garden, watching a distant jet-ski trailing curtains of water on the Hayling side of the harbour. With pressure high, the breeze was from the east, and the insect-buzz of the jet-ski finally drove him back indoors. His glass recharged, he put on some music – the Goldberg Variations – and tried to bury himself in the tinkling arpeggios. Anything to stop him thinking about J-J. Anything.
Twenty minutes later, the glass empty again, he abandoned Glenn Gould, hauled himself upright on the sofa and headed for the stairs. The diaries were in a cardboard box at the back of J-J’s wardrobe. He hesitated for a moment, then opened one at random, settling himself on J-J’s bed. The diaries had been written up in school exercise books with drawings and text from J-J’s class teacher, and from Faraday himself. This daily tally of events had passed back and forth between home and school for years, bridging the gap between the child’s two worlds, and as J-J had learned to write, his own scrawled
Anson Avenue was in its normal state of torpid chaos: abandoned cars, sullen kids, and a lurching drunk who was doing his best to piss into a pillar box. Winter gave him a toot and waved a finger as he drove past. The guy could barely get the thin yellow stream up above waist level.
At the top of the road, Winter turned the car round and then parked outside number seventy-three. He killed the engine and then gazed up at the house. Word must have spread about Scott’s appearance at the Bridewell on Saturday night because someone had already been at the front door with a spray can. ‘Scum’ went the simple message.
Winter checked his watch, wondering whether the boy was in. One way or another, he badly needed to get him alongside Harrison. If Scott came back with serious intelligence – a sudden change of address, say – then Winter would make his name with the Drugs Squad. If, on the other hand, he simply passed on the warning then Winter would have planted his very own grass bang in the middle of the city’s number one network. A tip like that, as long as the boy kept his nerve, would guarantee Scott Spellar a place in the sun. Harrison would owe his young gopher. Big time. And where, Winter wondered, might that lead?
Getting out of the car, Winter smiled. These were the kinds of strokes he enjoyed pulling most, stepping outside the system, turning his back on the paperwork, running private informants, inching his way into the heart of the action without anyone –
anyone –
being any the wiser. Then, at a time of his choosing, he would cash in all that information, all those carefully harboured secrets, step into the spotlight and take the applause he so richly deserved. Criminals, serious criminals, needed detectives like Paul Winter. The fact that there were few of his breed left was one of the reasons crime was getting so out of hand.
He pushed in through the gate and rapped on the door. The paint from the spray can was even fresher than he’d thought. At length, a girl appeared, opening an upstairs window. She had nose rings and long black hair.
‘Yeah? What is it?’
Winter asked for Scott. She said he wasn’t in.
‘Where is he?’
‘Downtown somewhere.’
‘Doing what?’
‘No idea.’ She peered down at him. ‘Are you the filth, then? Only he said you were a fat bastard.’
For once, Winter didn’t know what to say. Then he gave her the finger, turned on his heel and went back to the car. Gone downtown, he thought. Good sign.
*
Faraday was home by seven. Upstairs, in the study, he checked the PC but there were no more e-mails from J-J. Was he really going to flog his return ticket? Was this really the time to pack up twenty-two years of fatherhood and start again?
There was an unopened bottle of malt in the drinks cabinet in the lounge. Faraday poured himself three fingers, added ice, and drank it in the garden, watching a distant jet-ski trailing curtains of water on the Hayling side of the harbour. With pressure high, the breeze was from the east, and the insect-buzz of the jet-ski finally drove him back indoors. His glass recharged, he put on some music – the Goldberg Variations – and tried to bury himself in the tinkling arpeggios. Anything to stop him thinking about J-J. Anything.
Twenty minutes later, the glass empty again, he abandoned Glenn Gould, hauled himself upright on the sofa and headed for the stairs. The diaries were in a cardboard box at the back of J-J’s wardrobe. He hesitated for a moment, then opened one at random, settling himself on J-J’s bed. The diaries had been written up in school exercise books with drawings and text from J-J’s class teacher, and from Faraday himself. This daily tally of events had passed back and forth between home and school for years, bridging the gap between the child’s two worlds, and as J-J had learned to write, his own scrawled
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