Angels Passing by Graham Hurley Read Free Book Online

Southsea nick. Winter watched him put his head round the corner of the CID office, summoning Cathy with a nod, and found himself wondering again about the DFs love life.
    He’d long had Faraday down as a loser when it came to women. Twenty years bringing up a deaf son had obviously cramped his social style, and office gossip suggested that a brief affair with the widow of a local art dealer had quickly hit the buffers, but with the boy at last off his hands he seemed to be making up for lost time.
    In one sense, Winter wished him nothing but good luck. In his own experience, affairs with married women offered the perfect fusion of theft plus brilliant sex. Once you’d blagged it off a woman who was dying for the odd variation or two you knew there was nothing better. But the thought of Faraday at it with someone else’s wife sat oddly with everything else he knew about the man. When it came to the job, Faraday could be a nightmare. He’d never met anyone else who was so straight.
    At last, Winter bent to the phone. He’d lost count of the number of calls he’d made this morning, trying to pin down the job at Brennan’s. The informers he rated were plugged in right across the city but so far all he’d drawn was a big fat blank. No one had heard as much as a whisper. Brennan’s was known as a dodgy place to screw. Word was the bloke kept Alsatians on site at night and never fed the bastards. Who’d trade their arse for a vanful of fucking cordless drills?
    The voice at the other end hadn’t a clue. After yet another dispiriting football conversation about Pompey’s last home performance, Winter hung up. Soon Cathy Lamb would be after him for hard intelligence on tonight’s little expedition. She’d have chivvied Faraday into negotiating the overtime, but this kind of extra resource would only come at a price. No one parted with fifty hours’ overtime unless they were guaranteed a result. That’s the way the job worked these days. That’s why fewer and fewer of the troops were prepared to take a punt. Stick your neck out, wave a flag for a bit of that nice pre-emptive policing, and God help you if you got it wrong. Winter thought about it for a moment or two longer, then pushed back his chair and headed for the door. In situations like these, there were certain calls you couldn’t risk from the office. Not if the word ‘pension’ meant anything at all.
    Mrs Bassam wasn’t at home when Dawn Ellis returned to Old Portsmouth. She’d already tried her mobile with no result and now she understood why. According to the WPC parked outside, Jane Bassam had taken herself off to the cathedral for a while.
    The cathedral was a couple of minutes’ walk down the High Street, a pleasant modest building that had once served as the township’s parish church. Ellis hesitated at the door, wondering quite where CID procedure ended and privacy began. Anyone in this situation deserved an hour or so of quiet contemplation, she thought. Lose your only child and there’d be knots that only silence could untie.
    Inside, she thought at first that the cathedral was empty. Rows of seats extended across the nave towards the organ loft. Beyond were the choir stalls and finally the altar. She paused, telling herself that Jane Bassam was already on her way home or on the nearby seafront, but then her eyes adjusted to the big, shadowed spaces and she recognised the tall, erect figure in a distant pew, bent in prayer.
    Ellis found a chair at the back of the nave and settled down to wait. It was rare to make a space like this for yourself in the working day and almost at once she was drawn back to the sprawled, broken figure on the wet pavement beneath the flats. Whether or not this girl’s death deserved a full-scale CID inquiry wasn’t the issue. People like herself and Bev Yates were there to investigate breaches of the law but in this case the only law that really mattered was the law of gravity. Something had tipped Helen Bassam