Free Blood And Honey by Graham Hurley

glanced at his watch. ‘Half eight. Pub in Shanklin High Street.’ He paused, enjoying himself now, waiting for Faraday to put the obvious question. Faraday obliged.
    ‘So where’s Unwin now?’
    ‘Pass. No one’s seen him since October. Before that, like I say, he was in and out of the home a couple of times a month. Christmas was always extra special. His nan’s apparently off the planet but he’d bring her presents, plus flowers and booze for the staff. Never failed.’
    ‘And this Christmas?’
    ‘He never showed. Not a peep, not a phone call, card, nothing.’
    Faraday sat back in his chair, struck again by what the inexplicably headless body should have told him from the start.
    ‘The pathologist’s report,’ he began. ‘She definitely found no injury marks?’
    ‘Nothing for sure. The bloke was blue all over, swollen – you know what they’re like. There was damage, obviously, but nothing that would hundred-per-cent put him in a crime scene.’
    ‘The head might have done that.’
    ‘Of course, sir.’
    Faraday began to doodle a series of circles on the pad. Webster was looking at the bird shots again.
    ‘And Unwin’s age?’ Faraday enquired at last.
    ‘Late twenties, sir.’
    ‘Height?’
    ‘Around six feet.’ There was a moment’s silence, broken by Webster. ‘You’ll be wondering why I’m bothering you with all this. Only it occurs to me that my DI might be calling you lot in. Major Crimes. It’s a resource thing, I know it is.’
    ‘And?’
    ‘I was just thinking …’ He shrugged, embarrassed now. ‘… There might be times you’ll need local knowledge, someone who reads the island really well,lived there all his life, knows the players, listens to the crack, all of that …’ He let the sentence trail off into silence.
    Faraday stirred, giving nothing away.
    ‘And that someone … ?’
    ‘Is me –’ Webster smiled at Faraday ‘– sir.’

Three
    Sunday, 22 February 2004
    Faraday happened on the invitation entirely by chance. Half past eight on a leaden Sunday morning, it was beginning to rain again. Consulting the BBC weather map on his laptop, he gazed at the long curl of an incoming front. By lunchtime, without a great deal of enthusiasm, he planned to be walking south on the coastal path that skirted the Purbeck Hills. Given the depth of the ugly, grey swirl of cloud, he’d be lucky to have dried out by dusk.
    Abandoning the laptop, he was wondering whether he might tempt J-J to the movies when he noticed the unopened envelope poking out of the nest of mail in the shoebox beside his desk. Pompey postmark. Awkward, backward-sloping handwriting. His name misspelled, one too many ‘r’s. The letter had been addressed to the Highland Road police station and one of the reasons it had taken a while to make its way through the system was the lack of rank on the envelope. ‘Mr Farraday’, it read, ‘Detective’.
    Inside the envelope, he found a single sheet of blue-lined paper. His eye went at once to the foot of the page: Gwen Corey, a name he didn’t recognise. Returning downstairs, he plugged in the kettle for another pot of tea. Then he read the letter.
    The tone was apologetic. Gwen Corey was sorry to be writing to him out of the blue like this. She hopedhe didn’t mind the intrusion but her mum’s best friend had recently passed away and Gwen had been put in charge of a party to mark her going. The party was today. The deceased’s name was Grace Randall and she’d evidently left a list of invitations she wanted sent. One of these invitations had Mr Farraday’s name on it. Not only that but a little note beside it had instructed Gwen to make sure he came. ‘You’ll like him,’ Grace Randall had written. ‘How often do you meet a gentleman these days?’
    Grace Randall? Faraday circled the kitchen, trying to sort through the ever-lengthening list of names thrown up by the drumbeat of recent inquiries. It had to be a job he’d done, had to be. A woman in