Free Angels Passing by Graham Hurley Page B

nightmare.
    Faraday quickly scanned the rest of the fax. He had regular dealings with the PYO project and admired the woman who ran it, a combative fifty-three-year-old, Anghared Davies. Dealing with tearaways as young as Doodie required a great deal of patience as well as a preparedness to take substantial risks, and he scribbled himself a reminder to give their office a ring first thing Monday. Doodie would have been assigned an individual support worker, maybe even two, and in theory they’d been seeing him on a near-daily basis. In the meantime it was important to get hold of the kid, and the best place to start was his home address.
    He reached for the phone. The CPU fax had been right about Denise Prentice’s mobile: the number was no longer available. Faraday checked his watch. Half past five. Dawn Ellis, to his certain knowledge, was out on another inquiry, while Bev Yates would be driving over to Fratton for the Brennan’s briefing. Tonight, he was due to meet Marta for a drink before going on to a concert in the Guildhall. That still gave him an hour or so to pay a visit to Doodie’s mum.
    Denise Prentice lived on the seventh floor of Raglan House, another gaunt sixties block which always reminded Faraday of the wastelands of Eastern Europe. Sodden chip wraps and pizza boxes clogged the gutters in the street outside while an upended supermarket trolley lay in the pool of light outside the main entrance. Bucharest, maybe. Or East Berlin before the Wall came down.
    Doodie’s mum lived in 703. Faraday rang the buzzer on the speaker phone but got no reply. He buzzed again and this time a voice answered. It was a woman’s voice, husky with fags. Faraday announced himself. He was a policeman. He wanted a word in connection with Gavin. The speaker phone went dead. Nothing else happened.
    At length Faraday took advantage of a returning resident to get inside the building, standing beside the guy as the lift creaked slowly upwards. These people could smell the Filth. He knew it. At the seventh floor he got out of the lift without a backward glance, making his way around three sides of the block until he found 703. The nearest of the overhead lights was out but even in the gloom he could see that the door lock, a Yale, had recently been replaced.
    He knocked twice. He could hear kids inside and the blare of a television. The television was really loud, a cartoon of some kind, and it took four more knocks, ever harder, before the door opened. Faraday found himself looking down at a tiny girl. She was wearing a grubby, food-stained vest and not much else. How she’d ever managed the door was beyond him.
    ‘Is your mum there?’
    A woman appeared, shooing the girl away. She was thin and blonde with a sharp face and stained teeth. Her Gap T-shirt was cut low enough around the neck to show a fading love bite and there was a dark blue tattoo in the shape of a flower beneath her left ear. She looked exhausted.
    Faraday held up his warrant card while she struggled to push the door closed against the weight of his body. Finally, she shrugged and gave up.
    The flat was cold and bare, and smelled of dogs and old chip fat. Through an open door Faraday could see three kids, all young, sitting on the lino in front of the television. Even the little girl who’d opened the door had ceased to take any interest in the new visitor.
    ‘You’re Mrs Prentice?’
    ‘That’s right.’
    ‘I’ve come about Gavin. Is he here?’
    The woman gave him a long hard look. A bit of make-up, Faraday thought, and a decent meal and she’d be halfway attractive.
    ‘No,’ she said at last, ‘he ain’t.’
    ‘You’re sure?’
    ‘Of course I fucking am.’
    ‘Mind if I take a look?’
    ‘Help yourself. Everyone else does.’
    She leaned back against the wall and folded her arms while Faraday looked quickly round the flat. The bottom had fallen out of the single armchair in the TV room while the kitchen seemed to house little more than a