Free Turnstone by Graham Hurley Page A

wall.
    ‘There’s one question you haven’t asked me.’ She looked up at Faraday. ‘Don’t you want to know who Pete shot?’
    ‘Go on.’
    ‘Harrison.’ Cathy swallowed hard. ‘Marty fucking Harrison.’
    Faraday phoned Paul Winter at home.
    ‘What’s this about then?’ he asked sleepily. ‘World War Three?’
    Faraday told him about Harrison. He wanted to know whether Winter had caught up with Scott Spellar since the night they’d threatened him with a murder charge.
    ‘Yeah. I saw him yesterday morning.’
    ‘And?’
    ‘Gave him his money back. Like you said.’
    ‘Anything else?’
    ‘Nothing. We had a little chat, you know, but nothing you’d want to get excited about.’
    ‘He’s not working for you?’
    ‘He’s not working for anyone. If he’s got any sense, he’ll fuck off out of it. He’s convinced that half of Paulsgrove have him down as a grass and he’s terrified Marty Harrison will get to hear of it.’
    ‘I doubt it. Not for a while, anyway.’
    ‘How come?’
    ‘Harrison’s in intensive care. Harry’s boys busted him this morning. He took a bullet from the TFU.’
    Faraday told Winter what little he knew. Then he went back to Scott Spellar. Harrison’s premises had been clean. Just the way you’d expect if someone had tipped him off. He let the thought sink in, then wondered aloud whether Winter hadn’t had a longer conversation with the lad than he’d let on.
    ‘I’m not with you. You think I’d tell him Harrison was under the cosh?’
    ‘I think you’d want to run him. It may be the same thing.’
    ‘But you really think I’d jeopardise an operation? For a scrote like Spellar?’
    ‘It’s a question. That’s all.’
    There was a long silence, and Faraday began to suspect he’d pushed it too far. An allegation as serious as this, if it was to lead anywhere, needed hard evidence – evidence that Faraday simply didn’t have. Finally, he heard Winter stifling a yawn.
    ‘I’m back to bed, boss,’ he said. ‘If that’s OK by you.’
    The
News
broke the Harrison shooting in their midday first edition. Placards outside the city’s newsagents read ‘Police Shoot Father In Dawn Raid’. The bust had happened on Neville Bevan’s patch and all morning the phones had been ringing in the superintendent’s outer office with inquiries from other branches of the media. Local radio and television wanted briefings on the background to Red Rum. For how long had the raids been planned? How good was the intelligence that underpinned them? How come armed police had burst into a house that sheltered a sleeping baby?
    With immense patience, Bevan referred each of the callers to the headquarters press office at Winchester, but a couple of the more persistent journalists managed to pin him down for a quote or two. The drugs war, he pointed out, was both dirty and dangerous. The men and women on the Drugs Squad, though not directly his responsibility, regularly put their lives on the line. If mistakes occasionally happened then it was deeply regrettable, but the police invested enormous amounts of time and effort in operations like Red Rum and there’d been absolutely no reason to doubt the intelligence. Other addresses raided across the city – many of them occupied by people who were close to Harrison – had yielded a rich harvest of Class A drugs. That, strictly off the record, might help to put the thing into some kind of perspective.
    Just after lunch, Faraday bumped into Bevan in the corridor. The superintendent looked him in the eye and then beckoned him into a nearby office which happened to be empty. The hospital was putting Harrison’s chances at sixty-forty. Given the passage of the bullet three millimetres beneath his heart that made him a very lucky man. In the meantime, a senior officer from another force had been called in to investigate the circumstances of the shooting and Pete Lamb had been suspended from duties while the initial inquiries got under way.