‘I just want to say thank you,’ he muttered.
‘For the note? For the photos?’
‘For what you did this afternoon.’
For a moment Gill was lost. Then she remembered.
‘The rowing, you mean?’ She bent and kissed him on the lips. ‘You need to be careful, Jimmy Suttle. You might lose that woman one day.’
Three
TUESDAY, 12 APRIL 2011
Suttle was at his desk at Exmouth nick by eight next day. Already the bulk of Constantine’s D/Cs had been redeployed on other inquiries and a text from Houghton instructed Suttle to vacate their temporary office and return to MCIT’s permanent base in Exeter. The message was plain. In the absence of hard evidence, Constantine was effectively over.
An admin assistant from up the corridor supplied Suttle with a couple of cardboard boxes. He filled them with the seized files from Kinsey’s apartment and headed out to the car park. That morning, for once, he hadn’t been woken by Grace. Both Lizzie and Gill had still been asleep when he’d left. With last night’s photos tucked safely in his jacket pocket, Constantine’s demise gave him a little time to frame up some kind of plan.
Houghton’s Major Crime Investigation Team worked out of a converted police house on the sprawling force HQ site at Middlemoor, on the edges of Exeter. Suttle’s desk occupied a corner of a ground-floor office with views of the car park. The other three desks in the room belonged to squad D/Cs, all of whom had been with the MCIT far longer than Suttle. As well as the usual maps and whiteboards on the wall, tracking progress on current investigations, he’d arrived to find a World War Two poster (KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON), a photocopy of the Obama electoral chant (‘Yes, we can’) and a medal for the Exeter half-marathon draped over a framed copy of a Robert Frost poem, ‘The Road Not Taken’.
Suttle was looking at it now. The office was empty.
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I -
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
Really? He dumped the file boxes on the floor and sank into his chair. Twice in the last twenty-four hours he’d had to face the consequences of his move west. First, his wife threatens to leave him. Next, her best friend arrives with evidence that he and his family are under surveillance. On both counts, Pompey’s shadow was far longer than he’d ever imagined.
He got out the note and the photos. His only real lead was the mobile number. He was tempted to add it to the list going to the phone companies but knew that the intel techies would be the first to review the data that came back and he didn’t fancy trying to explain how a Pompey address might fit into the vanishing phantom that was Constantine. In any case, it was odds on that the phone was pay as you go, registered to a hookey name and address. These people weren’t stupid.
His phone began to ring. It was Luke Golding, the young D/C tasked with chasing up Henri Laffont and Kinsey’s ex-wife. More bad news.
‘I’ve nailed Kinsey’s missus, Sarge. I talked to that guy in Bristol again, Bill. He gave me a couple of numbers in Seattle.’
Sonya, it turned out, had spent the weekend with a bunch of religious fundamentalists on a retreat in the Cascade Mountains. If Suttle fancied taking this thing any further, Golding had a list of witnesses who’d willingly attest to her presence. It seemed she’d discovered Christ big time. The Cascade Mountains, he added as an afterthought, were on the west coast of America so it seemed unlikely she’d find the time or opportunity to dispatch her ex-husband to his death.
‘And Laffont?’
‘We’re still working on that but my money’s on Shanghai. I managed to make contact with the woman who organises his diary, Chinese lady, very helpful. I don’t think he ever made it to London.’
‘Great.’
‘Sorry, Sarge. You want me to stick at it? Only time might be a problem now.’
‘Of course.’
The phone went dead, leaving Suttle gazing at the whiteboard. To date, Constantine didn’t even merit a mention because inquiries had been coordinated out of Exmouth. He got to his feet and found a marker pen. The fact that both Sonya and Laffont were probably out of the frame was, he tried to tell himself, a definite plus. It meant that he could concentrate on the ripples that Kinsey had been making locally. The guys in the boat. Maybe other rowers at the club. Possibly someone from Exmouth Quays, or the wider community, who’d nurtured some kind of grudge. This was a guy who was serially offensive. He thrived on pissing people off. That, at the very least, Suttle knew he could prove.
He blocked off a square of the whiteboard and scrawled Constantine across the top. Then he returned to his desk and fired up his PC. It took him seconds to find D/I Gina Hamilton’s details. She was working out of the Plymouth HQ at Crownhill. She answered on the second ring.
Suttle introduced himself, mentioned their previous meeting back in Pompey. For a moment there was silence. Suttle could hear her talking to someone else. Then she was on the line again.
‘You had a beard,’ she said. ‘And an office on the third floor.’
‘That was my boss. D/I Faraday. I was the one who took you for a drink.’
‘The younger guy? Reddish hair?’ She was laughing.
‘That’s me.’
‘Gotcha. What can I do for you, young man?’
Suttle explained about Tom Pendrick. He understood Hamilton had interviewed him down in Penzance after the Atlantic crossing.
‘That’s right. I did.’
‘You mind if I come and see you? Talk about him?’
‘Of course not.’ She paused. ‘What’s he done?’
‘I don’t know.’ Suttle was looking at the whiteboard. ‘Yet.’
It took more than an hour to drive to Plymouth. An accident near Ivybridge had brought traffic to a standstill and Suttle spent the time reviewing his options on the surveillance photos. The thought of a bunch of Pompey heavies sniffing around Lizzie first angered then alarmed him. Last night, with Gill, he’d tried to be cool about it, telling her he’d get the thing sorted, but in the cold light of day he knew that wouldn’t be simple. The temptation was to call in a favour or two from CID mates still working in the city. He could think of a couple, in particular, who’d relish the chance to have a quiet conversation and stir these guys up. But that, he knew, wouldn’t hack it.
Neither was he prepared to make it official by lodging the evidence with Det-Supt Gail Parsons. His ex-boss on the Pompey-based Major Crime Team would doubtless view the photos as yet another opportunity to advance her ACPO prospects. She’d take the issue to the top. She’d knock on the Chief’s door and tell him it was a direct threat to the force’s standing in the city. The moment these people were allowed to get away with a threat this crude was the moment Hantspol should call it a day and look for something else to do. A threat against one of us, she’d say, was a threat against us all.
In this, thought Suttle, she was probably right, but leaving a bunch of Pompey heavies to the likes of Parsons wouldn’t work either. They played by different rules. They didn’t care a fuck about ambitious detective superintendents banged up in a bubble of their own making. The Filth, in their view, were like the weather. A minor inconvenience.
So what to do? As the traffic at last began to inch forward he was no closer to cracking it, but minutes later, as the dual carriageway crested the last hill before the distant sprawl of Plymouth, he thought — quite suddenly — of Paul Winter. A situation like this, back in the day, would have been meat and drink to Suttle’s one-time mentor. He’d have studied it from every angle, looking for advantage, scenting a weakness here, identifying an opportunity there, finally lifting the phone to arrange a meet. Somewhere quiet. Somewhere companionable. Some pub where he could open negotiations, bait traps, orchestrate an outcome that the enemy, far too late, would recognise as a total stitch-up. Suttle could imagine him now. Steady on, son, he’d say. You always have more time than you think.