Graham Hurley: Cut to Black

"Again?" Suttle nodded at the door and mimed a kick.

"No." Winter shook his head, then patted the young DC on his arm.

The heavy torch at the ready, Winter turned the handle and felt the door give. The music came at him like a wave, a wall of noise. He stepped inside the room, aware at once of a panel of lights in the darkness. Snapping on the torch, he found himself looking at the hi-fi stack in the corner, an amplifier flanked by enormous speakers. He swung the beam towards the window, almost expecting someone to lunge out of the darkness, but saw nothing but an iron bedstead standing on the bare floorboards a couple of feet in from the open window. Lying on the springs of the bedstead was a woman, naked except for a pillowcase draped loosely over her head.

Winter stepped towards the bedstead, then changed his mind and sorted out the hi-fi. A cable ran to a point on the skirting board. When he tore out the plug, the silence flooded in, an almost physical presence.

From the street, the voice of the neighbour.

"What's happening?"

Winter ignored him. The woman was alive, shivering in the draught from the open window. Winter could see the rise and fall of her chest, hear the faintest sound from inside the pillowcase. Both ankles were tied to the bed frame with cable ties, and more ties had chafed her wrists where she'd tried to struggle free. Winter stared down at her for a moment, trying to guess at an age. She was young, certainly, with the kind of body that deserved a better setting than this. Goose-pimpled white skin, big breasts, flat belly, and the faintest bikini marks from her last encounter with serious sunshine. Recent bruising had purpled her ribcage on the left-hand side but there was no sign of other injuries.

Winter reached down, telling her that everything was going to be OK, that everything was going to be fine, and eased the pillowcase off her head. A pale, almond-shaped face. A slash of scarlet gag across her mouth. Eyes that began to swim with tears.

Winter felt a jolt of recognition. For a second, the beam of the torch wavered. Impossible, he thought. Not here. Not like this.

"Lost a bit of weight, love." He smiled in the darkness. "Suits you."

WEDNESDAY, 19 MARCH 2OO3, 01.00

Faraday's second sweep with the Leica Red Spots revealed a flash of white amongst the scrub and gorse around the freshwater ponds a stone's throw from the Bargemaster's House. Racking the focus on the binoculars, he eased slowly left, convinced already that he'd spotted the season's first wheatear. Seconds later, the little bird broke cover again, staying low, scurrying a few feet at a time, finally hopping up onto the back of one of the old wooden benches that ringed the pond.

A couple of months back, this tiny creature would have been wintering south of the Sahara. Late January would have found it in Morocco. Days it devoted to finding food. Nights, often alone, it sped north again.

Only now, in mid March, had it finally returned to its nesting ground, bringing with it the promise the guarantee of spring. Faraday made a second tiny adjustment to the focus. Carved into the bench below the spread of claw was another message that had survived the winter.

Deano's a wanker, it read. Welcome to Pompey.

Faraday settled himself beside the pond, hoping for a glimpse of the bearded reed lings that were rumoured to be making their way south from the low smudge of Farlington Marshes. It was still barely seven o'clock, the air still, the sky cloudless, barely a ripple on the blue mirror of the nearby harbour. In a couple of hours, after a leisurely breakfast, he'd drive into work where the clear-up on a recent high-profile murder awaited his attention.

A psychopath in his mid forties had taken out a lifetime's frustration on a foreign language student, a Finnish blonde unlucky enough to cross his path. Stranger murders were never supposed to be easy, but the Major Crimes Team had blitzed the backstreets of Fareham where the girl's severed head had been found in a Londis bag, and scored a result within seventy-two hours.

Caged by the evidence, mainly DNA, the suspect had thrown in the towel after barely an hour's interview. The transcript of what followed, while dark in the extreme, had put a smile of satisfaction on the face of Willard. This, he'd grunted, was a classic MCT investigation, conclusive proof of the linkage between resource, effort, dedication, and justice. A couple of years back, they'd have been months trying to get a result. Now, thanks to a major reorganisation, they'd redrawn the time lines. Faraday, who had profound doubts about trophy-talk and management-speak, was just glad the bastard was locked up.

The wheatear had gone. Faraday had begun to search the nearby scrub, wondering whether it was too early for a sedge warbler, when the peace of the morning was disturbed by the roar of an approaching aircraft.

Faraday swung the binos in time to catch a blur of shadow as the military jet crested the distant swell of Portsdown Hill. Seconds later, it was almost on top of him, blasting south over the harbour, the noise so physically shattering he could feel it in his bones. Then the plane had gone, leaving clouds of black-headed gulls squawking madly, and several rafts of brent geese doing their best to get airborne. Any more stunts like that, thought Faraday, and the wheatear would be back in North Africa.

Faraday's mobile began to chirp. It was Eadie Sykes. The plane had got her up and she wanted to know what on earth was going on.

"You think it's started? You think the Iraqis are getting theirs in early?"

Faraday found himself laughing. Eadie feigned outrage.

"What's so funny? You think we ought to get married? Before it's too late?"

"I think you ought to go back to bed."

"After that? Listen, you remember the Sixties, Cuba? What do you do with those last four minutes?"

"I still think you ought to go back to bed."

"Yeah… but it's more fun with two, eh? Ring me later."

The line went dead. Faraday slipped the mobile back in the pocket of his anorak, then began to search half-heartedly for the wheatear again.

He'd been with Eadie last night, tucked up on the sofa with Newsnight and a bottle of Rioja. The past couple of months, they'd watched the government Blair in particular shepherding the nation to war. Bombing Iraq back to the Stone Age made absolutely no sense whatsoever, yet here they were, in lockstep with the Americans, hours away from releasing the first fusillade of cruise missiles.

Eadie, behind the wry one-liners, was incandescent with rage. Bush was a retard. Blair was an arse-licking con man. The Brits should be ashamed of themselves. Only the fact that her own prime minister seemed as hell-bent on Armageddon as the rest of them had kept her from packing her bags and phoning Qantas for a ticket home.

Rack in February, at Eadie's insistence, they'd taken the early train to Waterloo and joined a million and a half other people who felt less than convinced about killing Iraqi women and kids. The river of protesters stretched for miles, stopping traffic, filling bridges, swamping the Embankment, and Faraday, who'd never been this side of the bararicades in his life, found it an oddly comforting experience.

Students, mums, kids, pensioners, asylum seekers, nurses, civil servants, a huge slice of Middle England shuffling slowly towards Hyde Park under the watchful gaze of a couple of thousand policemen.

To Faraday, that was the oddest experience of all. Not that he was himself under surveillance, a copper coppered, but that he found this single act of protest so natural, so long overdue. Ex-Labour Voters Against The War, read one placard. Too bloody right.

He stirred at the sound of the mobile. Expecting Eadie again, instead he found himself listening to an all-too-familiar voice. Willard.