Then, quite suddenly, she had it. She was afloat again, taking her first strokes towards the dock, listening to the big man with the huge hands. He’d told her she could do it. And he’d been right.
Five
THURSDAY, 14 APRIL 2011
Suttle was on the road early next morning. By five to nine he was mopping up the last of a hangover with an all-day breakfast in a café off the Bridport bypass. The rain had cleared overnight and the hills in west Dorset were a vivid green in the fitful sunshine. He stood in the car park, enjoying the taste of the wind, waiting for Lizzie to pick up. After some thought he’d decided to pretend last night never happened. When she finally answered, he could hear banging in the background.
‘What’s going on?’
‘I’ve got a guy in from down the road. He’s fixing the window.’
‘Right. .’ Suttle wondered who was paying but decided not to ask. ‘You OK?’
‘We’re fine.’
‘Grace?’
‘She’s teething again. Don’t forget about tonight.’
‘What?’ Suttle was fumbling for his car keys.
‘I’m rowing. You need to be back by half five. You think you can manage that?’
Suttle’s office was still empty when he made it to Exeter. The Office Manager, a resourceful divorcee called Leslie, brought him coffee and a couple of stale biscuits. Luke Golding, she said, was about to be redeployed by Mr Nandy but the lad was still upstairs. She knew he wanted a word.
Suttle nodded. He was looking at the list of messages on his desk. Leslie had already arranged them in order of priority. The first one asked him to bell the CSI at Scenes of Crime.
Mark was en route to an aggravated burglary in Totnes. Suttle heard the tick-tock of his indicator as he pulled in to take the call.
‘Kinsey’s PC,’ he said. ‘Christ knows how but we got bumped up the queue. They haven’t done full analysis yet but they’ve taken a good look.’
Suttle was impressed. The techies were as hard-pressed as everyone else in the force and the wait for hard disk analysis often stretched to weeks, sometimes months. Nandy’s doing, he thought. Has to be.
Mark told him to get a pen. He’d spent a couple of hours with the key data yesterday afternoon and sorted what he thought might be useful.
‘The guy’s a businessman, right?’
‘Right.’
‘Building resort hotels?’
‘Retirement communities. Top-end stuff. High six figures for a nice view and fancy CCTV.’
‘Gotcha.’ For once in his life Mark was laughing. ‘There’s a whole load of emails about a site at a place called Trezillion. It’s hard to get the context without more info but I get the feeling this thing’s still on the drawing board. He’s forever nailing the planning guys to the wall. Telling these people what to do and when. Real fucking arsewipe.’
Suttle reached for a pen. Mark’s language always enriched a conversation. Scene of Crimes guys were a special breed but Mark was a one-off. Mr Gloom one minute. Mr Yippee the next. Definitely bipolar.
‘Where’s Trezillion?’
‘Cornwall. North coast. Lovely little bay with nothing but a public lavatory and a bit of car park. Used to be a top bogging spot for gays down from Newquay. You should give it a go before Kinsey gets his hands on it.’
‘He’s dead, Mark.’
‘Fuck me, so he is. Surprise or what?’ Another growl of laughter. ‘I’ll ping you the meat of this stuff. See what you make of it.’
‘Anything else?’
‘Yeah. We’ve got a single blonde hair from the floor beside Kinsey’s bed. Proves nothing except he might have got lucky.’
Suttle scribbled himself a note. The Viking, he thought. Definitely worth a return visit.
‘Is that it?’
‘No.’ Mark confirmed that Kinsey hadn’t belonged to Facebook or any of the other social sites. Neither did he appear to have any close mates worth an email or two. There was, however, one chink in his armour.
‘What’s that?’
‘The guy was a huge video gamer. Played most nights.’
‘Really?’
‘Yeah. I don’t know how much you know about all this gaming shit but there’s a service called Steam. It’s a deal you sign up to. You buy games through the site and they organise everything else for you, keep your games in the cloud, help you find friends in multiplayer, keep a record of how you’re doing, sort out the social side.’
‘Social side?’
‘Yeah. Most of these games you can either play solo against the computer or with other people. The guys you’re playing with have weird screen names. Think cyber handles.’
‘Who was Kinsey? What did he call himself?’
‘Jalf Rezi. As in you know what.’ Mark invited Suttle to picture Kinsey bent over the rail of his balcony, barfing mouthfuls of chicken jalfrezi into the night.
Suttle needed to get back to the video games.
‘Kinsey was part of a team? Is that what you’re telling me?’
‘Yeah. Definitely. Some nights he must have played alone. Other nights he logged into a server and went out with his mates.’
‘What kind of games are we talking about?’
‘I can only give you names, I’m afraid. Most of this shit’s way over my head.’
He tallied some of the games in Kinsey’s Steam library: Grand Theft Auto IV, Arma 2, Need for Speed, Shift, Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood, Battlefield 2, Civilisation IV, Half Life 2, Left 4 Dead, Left 4 Dead 2, Counterstrike, God of War, Team Fortress 2, Wings of Prey.
Suttle was scribbling fast. He wanted to know what these games were like.
‘Haven’t a clue. I’ll email you the guy’s Steam profile. You might need someone younger to make sense of it. These guys live under stones during the day, which is why they’ve all got such shit complexions. Good luck, eh? And tell him to get a life.’
Kinsey’s Steam profile arrived by email within minutes. Suttle could make little sense of it. Luke Golding, mercifully, was still at his desk. Suttle drew up a chair while the young D/C explained that Henri Laffont, the Swiss engineer, had definitely spent the weekend in Shanghai. Another name off the suspect list.
‘Sorry, Sarge.’
‘No problem. How much do you know about video games?’
‘Why?’
‘Just answer the question.’
‘Quite a lot.’
‘OK. .’
Suttle consulted the Steam profile and read out the list of games. Golding wanted to know what this had to do with Kinsey.
‘They were on his computer.’
‘Really? He was a gamer?’
‘Yeah. Surprised?’
‘Very.’
Suttle wanted to know what you could read into a guy by his choice of favourite games.
‘Lots. Show me.’
Suttle gave him the Steam profile. Golding studied Kinsey’s list of games, which included the hours Kinsey had logged on each. His head came up.
‘Well, he certainly liked his shooters.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Kinsey was big on two games, right? Counterstrike and Team Fortress 2. Look, he played 400 hours on Counterstrike. That’s serious addiction. Plus nearly 200 on TF2. OK. They’re both shooter games but the likeness ends there. TF2 is basically one big party. The action could come straight out of Looney Tunes. It’s also way more player-friendly than CS, especially when it comes to respawning.’
‘Respawning?’
‘That’s when you’re returned to the game after you die. On most games you wait a couple of seconds and then bang, you’re back in the game. Not with Counterstrike. When you get killed playing CS, that’s it for the rest of the round. You’re dead. End of.’
CS, he said, was pure. It had no fancy bells and whistles, no back story, no million-dollar cut scenes, just a very simple premise: beat the other team. To do that, in Golding’s view, you had to be fucking ace.