Graham Hurley: Cut to Black

Lucky Middlesbrough, went the first toast.

Hartigan's successor was a quietly spoken West Country copper in his mid forties called Andy Secretan.Taller than Hartigan, with a bluff outdoors face and an obvious impatience with the dressier rituals of command. Secretan had quickly won respect across the BCU for his preparedness to put common sense ahead of New Labour performance-speak.

Unlike his predecessor, there were no genuflections before the latest blizzard of Home Office diktats. Neither did he have the slightest interest in self-promotion or belittling his staff. As a result, morale on the first floor had been transformed. The Corridor of Death was no more than a memory.

DI Cathy Lamb, summoned this morning from her desk in the same building, rather liked the new boss. After Hartigan's mania for meticulously prepared risk assessments and the correct use of the apostrophe, it was refreshing to work under someone who treated all paperwork with profound mistrust and was prepared to throw the wider issues open to something approaching real debate. Not that Secretan didn't have views of his own.

"Barmy, wasn't it? Not knowing about the house up the road?"

Cathy had spent most of the night asking herself the same question. The newly established Portsmouth Crime Squad had been one of the first BCU initiatives to win Secretan's backing. She had fought hard for the post of DIon the squad and last night's operation should have been the first of her battle honours. Yet here she was, well and truly on the back foot.

"My responsibility," she said at once. "And my fault."

"Very noble. Where did it go wrong?"

"I haven't a clue, sir. As soon as I find out, I'll let you know."

"You were happy with the intelligence material? And the surveillance package?"

"There wasn't a problem."

"And the guys were all briefed properly?"

"Of course."

"Then' Secretan held his hands wide 'what bloody happened?"

Cathy glanced down at the single sheet of precautionary notes she'd brought with her. A bunch of young Scouse drug dealers had turned up after Christmas, bored with life in Bournemouth. Within weeks, they'd dropped a very large boulder into the peace and quiet of the Portsmouth drug scene. There were reports of rival street-level dealers — Pompey kids being kidnapped and tortured. There was talk of Stanley knives and electric drills. The word on the estates, with just a hint of admiration, was 'ultra-violence'.

Secretan, alerted by one of his Drugs Intelligence Officers, had sensed this sudden rise in temperature and knew at once the probable consequences. The last thing he wanted was a full-scale turf war, a major nightmare in a city already plagued by drug-related crime. Hence the clarity of the task he'd handed to Cathy Lamb. Get these guys sorted, he'd told her. I want them locked up before it all gets out of hand.

Cathy, well versed in the difficulties of getting any kind of result in court, had been painstaking in her preparation. The DIO had devoted countless man-hours to establishing supply patterns. The surveillance team had installed a camera in a property across the road and organised a round-the-clock watch. Yet not once had they sussed the house that the Scousers were using as an annexe. Hence last night's disaster.

In theory, by now DI Lamb should have had bodies in the Bridewell and a sizeable stash of Merseyside Class A narcotics mainly heroin and cocaine in the property lock-up. In practice, the moment the House Entry boys had done the business, the Scousers had abandoned the late movie two doors along and fled.

Secretan wanted to know about the later incident at Bystock Road. Who owned the premises?

"DC Winter was onto the housing benefit people first thing," Cathy said at once.

"And?"

"It belongs to a Dave Pullen."

"We know him?"

"Very well. He's just done two years for supply. Came out the back end of last year."

"He's had the property a while?"

"No, sir. Winter says he only signed the contract a couple of months ago. The place was a repo."

"So where did he get the money? You're trying to tell me he stashed it away? Little nest egg for later?"

"No, sir. Pullen's big mates with Mackenzie."

"Meaning?"

"Mackenzie staked him when they auctioned the place. Or at least persuaded him to act as nominee. Either way, it puts Pullen alongside Bazza."

"And our northern friends would have known that?"

"Must have done."

"Because they wanted to get in Mackenzie's face?"

"Yes."

"Ah…" Secretan reached for a sheet of paper and wrote himself a note. "Just what we didn't need."

He paused a moment, staring down at the scribbled names. Then Cathy offered an apologetic cough.

"I'm afraid it gets worse, sir."

"Really?" Spcretan elanced up. "How?"

"The girl we found on the bed, the one that went to hospital. Her name's Trudy Gallagher. According to Winter, she's the daughter of a woman called Misty Gallagher."

"And Misty?"

"Is Mackenzie's shag. Or certainly used to be."

There was a long silence. Then Secretan, in a tiny spasm of anger that took Cathy by surprise, screwed up the sheet of paper and tossed it into the bin.

"I warned you the Scouse kids were trouble," he said quietly.

"Didn't I?"

Det-Supt Willard's Major Crimes Team also operated from Kingston Crescent, a neighbourly arrangement that put the Basic Command Unit and the MCT closer than in practice they really were. While Secretan's brief was getting on top of so-called 'volume crime', the small print of policing a challenging and frequently violent city, it fell to Willard's squad to take on crimes that attracted a more generous helping of CID resources, unavailable to the likes of Secretan. The bulk of murders, stranger rapes, and complex conspiracies were thus referred to the MCT's secured suite of offices, which occupied an entire floor in a ne wish block to the rear of the Kingston Crescent site. The largest of these offices, a south-facing room dominated by a long conference table, naturally belonged to Willard.

Faraday found him in his shirtsleeves, his massive body bent over the phone. Mention of house-to-house parameters and a POLSA search suggested a sizeable operation already underway out at Fort Cumberland.

Willard nodded towards the conference table and Faraday took a seat.

Driving back from the hospital, he'd managed to raise Hayder's partner on his mobile. Maggie had spent most of the night at the hospital, waiting in Critical Care for some returning flicker of consciousness, and now she was at home, excused classes until she felt able to face the real world again. The conversation had been brief, Faraday offering whatever help he could, but before Maggie had rung off she'd told him that what had happened had come as no surprise. "He'd been working up to it," she'd said. "Something had really got to him."

Quite how this squared with the facts of the case some kind of confrontation, injuries consistent with being run over wasn't remotely clear, but Faraday understood at once what she'd meant. The times the two men had met over the last couple of weeks, Hayder had struck him as reticent to the point of preoccupation. He felt, he admitted at one point, 'under siege', a state of mind that seemed to have absolutely nothing to do with his domestic situation.

Willard had finished on the phone. He left the office without a word and returned minutes later with three mugs of coffee.

Faraday nodded towards the phone.

"How's it going?"

"It isn't. Not yet. Scenes of Crime are talking multiple tyre tracks and we don't even have a proper fix on where it might have happened.

It's a famous shagging spot. Half the city uses it."

Faraday was curious to know who was coordinating the inquiry.

"Dave Michaels is sorting it out."