Graham Hurley - Cut to Black

"Excellent." Eadie was on her feet. "I'll give you a hand with the lights and tripod. The car's out the back."

WEDNESDAY, 19 MARCH 2003, 17.00

Faraday, alone in Eadie Sykes's se afront flat, gazed out at the rain.

Ten minutes ago, he'd finally brought the session with the u/c officer to an end. In an hour or so, he'd have to drive down to the historic dockyard for yet another meet with Willard. For now, though, he owed himself a pause for thought.

Eadie rented her flat from her ex-husband, a successful accountant, and the block lay on the se afront within sight of South Parade pier. It had once been a hotel but the kind of holiday makers who booked for a week or a fortnight had long since fled to Spain, and the building, like so many others in the terrace, had been converted into apartments.

Eadie's was at the very top, a big, open space that she'd floored with maple wood and garnished with the bare minimum of furniture. Over the last year or so, Faraday had sometimes wondered about an extra chair or two, something to make it cosier, but Eadie always insisted that the whole point of the place was the view, and in this, as in so much else, Faraday knew she was right.

Four floors up, a stone's throw from the beach, the apartment offered a seat in the dress circle. Away to the left, the rusting gauntness of the pier. Offshore, the busy comings and goings of countless ferries, warships, fishing boats, yachts, their passage fenced by the line of buoys that dog-legged out towards the English Channel. Beyond them, the low, dark swell of the Isle of Wight.

Faraday had lost count of the number of times he'd stood here, marvelling at the play of light, at the constant sense of movement, at the way a line of squall showers could march up the Solent, bringing with it a thousand variations of sunshine and shadow. Today, though, was different. Today there was only a grey blanket of thickening drizzle and the grim, squat shape of Spit Bank Fort.

Eadie kept her binoculars on a hook beside the big glass doors that opened onto the recessed balconette. They'd been a Christmas present from Faraday, an unsuccessful down payment on birding expeditions together, and now he slid back one of the tall plate-glass doors and raised the binos. The optics were excellent, even on a day like this.

The skirt of green weed around the bottom of the fort told Faraday it was low tide. Above the weed, an iron landing stage looked newly painted. A big grey inflatable hung on a pair of davits and a staircase ran upwards to double doors set into the granite walls. One of the doors was open, an oblong of black, and higher still Faraday's binoculars found a white structure the size of a mobile home perched on the roof of the fort.

He lingered a moment, wondering what it might be like to live on a site like this, to wake up every morning to views of Southsea se afront across the churning tide, then he let the binos drift down again until he was following a line of open gun ports. Spit Bank Fort, he thought, looked exactly the way you'd imagine: unlovely, purposeful, thousands of tons of iron and granite dedicated to the preservation of the city at its back.

Faraday permitted himself a smile. Over the years, he'd talked to old men in Milton pubs who remembered the last war. There'd been ack-ack guns on Southsea Common, barrage balloons ringing the dockyard, and Spit Bank Fort would undoubtedly have played its own part in protecting the city against the swarms of Luftwaffe bombers. Odd, then, that a German should find herself in charge here. And odder still that Bazza Mackenzie, Pompey born and bred, should choose this sturdy little piece of military history to mark his coronation. King of the City indeed.

Wallace's two phone conversations with Mackenzie had been taped, the transcripts and cassettes locked in Willard's office safe. According to Wallace, Mackenzie had been up front, even matey, one businessman talking to another. He'd wanted to gauge the strength of Wallace's interest and he'd been blunt enough to ask whether Wallace really knew what he was getting into.

Mackenzie said he'd been out to the fort three or four times and taken a good nose round. The place, he warned, was damp as fuck. The roof needed a total sort-out and some days if you talked to the right people they didn't have enough buckets to cope with all the leaks. Health and Safety would be taking a hard look at some of the exterior ironwork and he wouldn't be at all surprised if they red-carded the lot. On top of that, there were problems with the well that supplied the fort with fresh water and if he was honest you'd be looking to rewire the whole place as well as shelling out for a new generator. That's why his bid was so low. Pay anything close to the million and a quarter quid she was asking, and you'd be adding half that again easy for the refurb.

Wallace had ridden out the warnings and when Mackenzie, in the most recent conversation, had begun to press him about his own funding he'd kept things deliberately vague. He said he'd been lucky with a shopping development in Oman. Currency fluctuations had gone in his favour. A big investment in euros had netted him a small fortune and there were other bits and pieces that kept his bank manager more than happy. This last phrase had stopped Mackenzie in his tracks, and shortly afterwards he'd dropped his conversational guard to offer what to Wallace sounded like a buy-off. "What would it take," Mackenzie had mused, 'for you to pull out?"

Wallace had parried the offer with a chuckle. Money, he told Mackenzie, was the last thing he needed. Neither was he up for a compensatory slice of whatever business Mackenzie had in mind for the fort. No, his own interest was quite clear. Various trips abroad, he'd seen what a good architect could do with a site like this. He wanted to turn Spit Bank into one of Europe's most unusual five-star hotels. On Nick Hayder's prompting, he'd added that he might even be considering gaming facilities.

This last conversation had hit the buffers shortly afterwards but one phrase in particular had stuck in Wallace's mind. "This is a funny town," Mackenzie had said, 'but you won't know that until you've lived here a bit." This observation had struck Wallace as a warning and he'd pressed Mackenzie on the kind of time scale he had in mind. What did 'bit' mean? Mackenzie, it seemed, had laughed down the phone. "A lifetime," he'd said. "Anything less, and you're fucking playing at it."

Faraday's own session with Wallace had concluded with a handshake and an exchange of mobile numbers. The u/c, it turned out, was keeping his visits to Portsmouth to an absolute minimum. Faraday got the impression Wallace had another u/c job on the go, different legend, but he certainly seemed to have plenty to keep himself occupied. Wallace had reported Mackenzie's interest in a face-to-face meeting and he'd been waiting for Nick Hayder to make some kind of decision. With Hayder now in hospital, that decision would presumably pass to Faraday.

Now, Faraday stepped back into the big living room, closing the glass door behind him. His previous experience of undercover operations had given him none of Nick Hayder's confidence and he'd heard enough about Bazza Mackenzie to suggest he'd be an exceptionally difficult target to sting. The problem with jobs like Tumbril was their very isolation.

Walled off from real life, it would be all too easy to talk yourself into a result.

Faraday helped himself to a banana from the fruit bowl in the kitchen.

The TV zapper lay beside the bowl and he pointed it across the room towards the wide screen television.

The TV was tuned to BBC News 24. In Paris, according to the presenter, President Chirac was expressing shock and dismay at the American build-up on the Iraqi border. UN Resolution 1441 was not an authorisation to go to war and even at this late stage he found it inconceivable that President Bush would put the framework of international order at risk. Thank God for the French, Faraday thought. He slipped out his mobile and dialled Eadie's number, watching yet more footage of British tanks on the move. To his surprise, she didn't answer.