Turnstone Read Free Page B

can’t sort out.’
    Minutes later, through the pub window, winter was watching Harrison climb into a dented BMW when his mobile rang. It was Cathy Lamb, the duty CID sergeant.
    ‘We’ve pulled a bloke in for murder,’ she said briskly. ‘Boss wants you to talk to him.’
    The first interview with Mick Spellar began at seventeen fifty-three. He’d spent the last four hours at the city’s Bridewell police station, sobering up in one of the cells. A police surgeon had given him a full examination, and taken scrapings from under his fingernails. Sealed in plastic containers, these would be readied for despatch with the blood samples from Mick Spellar’s runners and jeans to a forensic laboratory in Chepstow. A match with Sammy’s DNA would help seal the case against Mick Spellar. Son kicks father to death. Another home defeat.
    The interview rooms at the Bridewell had recently been repainted and the tang of white emulsion still hung in the air. An audio feed was relayed through speakers to the room next door, and Faraday settled himself on the edge of the bare table, a pen and scrap of paper beside him. Putting together an interview team had been less than easy. At full strength he had five detectives at his disposal, but a couple had been extracted to join a major inquiry up in Aldershot while another was on leave. That left just two bodies. And one of them, to Faraday’s infinite regret, was Paul Winter.
    Not that winter lacked interviewing skills. On the contrary, he was bloody good at it. He knew how to build relationships, how to lard a conversation with a smile and a wink, how to worm his way into someone’s confidence, and win their trust, and lead them ever so gently towards the series of yawning traps he’d dug in their path. On the edge of that first abyss he’d let them pause, and glance down, and when they reached out to steady themselves – as they inevitably did – it would always be Winter’s hand they found first.
    In the eyes of some of his fellow detectives, winter had turned duplicity and verbal sleight of hand into an art form, scoring a series of amazing results, but as far as Faraday was concerned, the man was an affront, the living proof of how corrupting CID work could be. It wasn’t only that he was dishonest or untrustworthy. It was the way he regarded trust as just another currency – to be accumulated, invested, and then spent. To Faraday, Winter was a man without any shred of morality. Give Winter too much rope and you’d be dangling from the nearest tree by nightfall.
    His voice came through the speakers at Faraday’s elbow, warm, intimate, the kind of guy you’d open up to in a pub. He was inviting everyone to grab a seat. There followed the scraping sound of chairs and then another voice Faraday recognised as the duty solicitor. Fenwick was new to the city, an ambitious young northerner who’d already badged himself with a V-reg BMW, and it was obvious to Faraday that he regarded the case as a windfall challenge. Keep Mick Spellar out of prison, and Fenwick would be the toast of the legal community within hours.
    ‘My client would like to make a statement,’ he began.
    They took the first break at seven o’clock, standing around the table in the room next door while Winter sorted a tray of coffees from the machine down the corridor. The other interviewer was a young female detective, Dawn Ellis, a slight, pretty twenty-six-year-old with a cap of auburn hair and the clearest eyes Faraday had ever seen. She’d only been on the division since Christmas, but already she’d earned herself a reputation for shrewdness and a certain tenacity. In her previous life, Dawn had been a hairdresser. Anyone who could survive eight months of jokes about blow jobs in the CID room would have few problems with the likes of Mick Spellar.
    ‘He’s making it up as he goes along,’ she said to Faraday, ‘and Fenwick knows it.’
    According to Mick Spellar, his son Scott was responsible for