Free Beyond Reach by Graham Hurley Page A

he bent to the Lexus’ now-open window did Winter realise who he was looking at.
    The recognition was mutual. The face from the darkness stared at Winter for a long moment, then the door was wrenched open.
    ‘Out,’ he said.
     
    An evening with his new Mahler CD had lifted the worst of Faraday’s gloom. Depression was too big a word, irritation too meagre. Somewhere in between lay the growing realisation that Gabrielle really had left him, that he was once again alone in the world.
    As far as women were concerned, this had happened before. In fact Faraday had lost count of the times when he’d piled all his chips on a single square only to fall victim to a roll of the croupier’s dice. Years ago it had been Ruth Potterne, the widow of a tormented soul who’d run an art gallery. Then had come Marta, a vivid, sexy IBM executive who’d remained, to the end, an enigma. An Australian video producer, Eadie Sykes, had stolen his heart for a while before she, too, had drifted away. And now there was Gabrielle. Immense promise. Total immersion. Real tenderness. Then, quite suddenly, an empty space. Was it a case of recklessness on his part? Of naivety? Was he expecting too much of human flesh and blood? Or might he, one day, stumble on a woman - a relationship - that lasted longer than a year or so?
    In truth, he wasn’t sure. If he’d shown judgement this flawed in the Job, he knew he’d never have made it into CID. With every justification, they’d have kept him in uniform and put him in charge of lost property. So how come he’d ended up on Major Crime, with a real talent for reading the criminal mind, if he was so hopeless when it came to making more personal judgements?
    He shook his head, switching off the audio stack, happy that it was one o’clock in the morning and his body was at last ready to surrender to sleep. Upstairs, in the bathroom, he was looking for a new tube of toothpaste when the big framed etching of the naval dockyard caught his eye. The etching had been a present from Gabrielle. She’d spotted it in a local antiques shop and brought it home, wrapped in newspaper. Hanging it in the bathroom had been her idea. With its wealth of detail it was an extraordinary snapshot of mid-Victorian Portsmouth and she’d wanted it to become an everyday part of their lives.
    Faraday gazed at it now. The tall brick chimneys belching smoke. The lines of horse-drawn wagons outside the Rigging House. The South Camber dock, brimming with navigational buoys. The comings and goings of thousands of men, tiny figures, perfectly realised. In that sense, these harbourside acres would have been the beating heart of the city, the very reason for its existence, but it was Gabrielle who’d pointed out something else. That this army of men, and all the generations before them, had helped build and protect the project that had become the British Empire. Without these skills, she said, the trade routes to the east would have been wide open. Without the sawmills, and the rope sheds, and the new machines for making blocks and pulleys, the French or the Dutch or the Portuguese would have feasted on India and Singapore, and those great pink-painted swathes of Africa. Without Pompey, in short, the cut and thrust of British imperial history would have been very different.
    The truth of this had struck Faraday with some force and he thought about it again now. The Bargemaster’s House was a relic of the same period and talking to Steph Callan had made him realise how much he owed to the place. It had become a friend as well as a refuge and at times like now it was something else as well. A solace.
    With its sturdy red-brick construction it was a survivor from the days when energy and confidence were the only currencies that mattered. The navy’s expansion had relied on keeping its supplies of raw materials out of reach of the marauding French, and so a canal had been dug to connect the dockyard on one side of the city to Langstone