Angels Passing by Graham Hurley Read Free Book Online Page A

over the edge and the truly frightening thing was how many other Helen Bassams – kids, for Christ’s sake – had taken that final step.
    Only months before, she’d been called to another jumper, a young lad of seventeen who’d chosen the top of the city centre’s multi-storey car park to launch himself into oblivion. The brief CID inquiry had run out of steam after a couple of days but its findings had been both uncomfortable and depressing.
    The boy had done wonders at GCSE. His predicted A levels were outstanding and he was a dead cert for a business studies degree at one of the better universities. Under these circumstances, no one had him down as a manic depressive or a suicide, least of all his parents. Yet there he was, on another metal tray in the mortuary fridge, leaving behind a note that was all the more chilling for its rationality. He’d looked hard at life. He’d played by the rules. He’d done his very best. And he’d decided, in the end, that it was all crap.
    Ellis leaned back, resting her head against the pillar behind the chair. How do you answer a challenge like that? How do you persuade a kid with everything to live for that he’d got it wrong? The note had run to a couple of pages, a charge sheet against a society he’d come to regard as obscene. The relentless materialism. The political cowardice. The pollution. The greed. The hypocrisy. Everyone got it in the neck, from Rupert Murdoch to Tony Blair, but the real sadness wasn’t the hole he left behind, or even the waste of a young life, but the fact that in so many instances the lad had been right.
    A copy of the note had done the rounds in the CID office, and different hands had added extra charges to the indictment. They ranged from gripes about political correctness to the strange sentencing habits of certain magistrates and they formed a characteristically acid footnote to a document that was terrifying in the bluntness of its truth. The fact was that the lad had been spot-on and the trick nowadays, Ellis had concluded, was finding a way to survive all the crap. If you were lucky, and thick-skinned, you got by. Otherwise, if you were young enough and had the guts, you might start thinking seriously about fall parameters.
    Ellis heard the squeak of a chair as Mrs Bassam got to her feet. She made her way towards the aisle, genuflected, hesitated for a moment, and then walked towards the back of the nave. Ellis intercepted her at the door, knowing at once that she was the last person this woman wanted to see.
    ‘This won’t take very long,’ Ellis heard herself saying, I promise.’
    All morning, Faraday had known that there’d be no alternative to a head-to-head with Hartigan about the Brennan’s job. From the moment Cathy had briefed him on the intelligence that had come Winter’s way, he’d anticipated the path that led to the Ops Superintendent’s door. Everything in the world now boiled down to money. And as far as volume crime was concerned, Hartigan held the purse strings.
    The Superintendent’s office was at Fratton police station. Hartigan was a small, intense, obsessively neat little man who’d acquired a well-earned reputation for management prowess. He’d sniffed the winds of change that had blown through the upper corridors of police forces all over the country and knew that serious ambition was best served by falling in step with their new political masters.
    If fighting crime required a mastery of New Labour-speak, then so be it. If Best Value Performance Indicators and European Foundation Quality Management flagged the path to ACPO rank, then Hartigan was the first in the queue to volunteer for the endless seminars, translating the lessons he’d learned into a blizzard of must-read memos that fluttered slowly down to the shop floor. Some of these memos had become collectors’ items, but strip away the fancy language and what you were left with was the simplest of messages: think money. The politicians were