Free The Take by Graham Hurley Page B

tongs in the interview room at the Bridewell, going over his story time and time again, bringing a fresh brain to the tissue of lies the man had woven around himself. Yet when the clock finally stopped, and Oomes was still running rings round them all, it was Winter who’d found an alternative resolution for the age-old tension between crime and punishment. It might not have been orthodox, and it certainly wasn’t legal, but the knowledge that Charlie Oomes had taken a beating in the showers on the remand wing at Winchester nick brought Faraday a small warm feeling of satisfaction. Winter’s way wasn’t Faraday’s way. But, with every other option exhausted, it had worked.
    Langstone Harbour lay in the darkness outside. The big sliding doors to the lounge were still open and the night wind spiked the room with the scent of seaweed and newly cut grass. Ruth had promised to keep an eye out for a decent mower. Something motorised. Something Faraday wouldn’t have to push.
    Winter was sitting on the sofa with a big glass of Scotch, talking about the incident at the Marriott hotel. How the guy had checked in under a false name. The mess he’d made of the room. The blood around the hand basin next door. Faraday knew him in these moods. He was setting the scene, baiting a trap.
    ‘So what’s it worth?’ he said at last.
    ‘You tell me, boss. On the face of it, fuck all. But you get an instinct, don’t you?’
    ‘And what does that tell you?’
    ‘It tells me the guy was attacked.’
    ‘Do you have a name?’
    ‘Hennessey. He was a surgeon.’
    ‘Was?’
    ‘Yeah, and I can think of several thousand women who’d gladly see him dead.’
    Faraday reached for the bottle and splashed more Scotch into Winter’s empty glass. The name Hennessey rang bells.
    ‘Gynae surgeon? Cocked up lots of operations?’
    ‘That’s right. You’d have seen him in the papers.’
    ‘So what’s the evidence? At the Marriott?’
    Winter was staring at the photos on the wall. The photos were Janna’s work, Faraday’s dead wife. She’d had a talent as mysterious as Ruth’s, only in her case it revealed rather than hid itself. He’d kept the photos ever since she’d died, in exactly the same place on exactly the same walls, part of the geography of his life, and he must have mentioned them to Winter the last time he’d been here because he seemed to recognise them. He was pointing to a shot of Puget Sound during a snowstorm. Seattle had been Janna’s home town.
    ‘That’s where I am,’ Winter said quietly, ‘that’s exactly where I am. Snowed in. Totally fucked.’
    Faraday blinked. This wasn’t about the Marriott at all.
    ‘What’s happened?’
    Winter glanced round at him.
    ‘Cath not told you?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘Joannie’s got cancer. Three months, give or take. How do you cope with something like that? Eh?’
    The question was genuine. And, more importantly, Faraday knew that Winter wanted him to answer it. His own wife had been taken by cancer. Same brutal news. Same brutal outcome.
    ‘I’m sorry,’ Faraday said quietly. ‘Truly sorry.’
    ‘I don’t want sorry. I want advice. How do you cope? What do you do? I’m telling you, I’m fucked, snowed under. I need clues, boss. Know what I mean?’
    Faraday nodded. He’d been a younger man when Janna died, much younger, but at the time youth hadn’t helped at all. Whenever it happened, you looked death in the face and refused to believe it.
    ‘It must seem unreal.’
    ‘It does.’
    ‘And bloody unfair.’
    ‘Yeah. And it gets worse.’ Winter gestured down at his ample belly. ‘It gets you like you don’t know what to do, how to react. I just want to …’ He stared at the empty tumbler, leaving the sentence unfinished.
    Faraday reached for the bottle of Bell’s. A moment or two with the memories of Janna’s final weeks and he could do with a refill himself. Day after day in the tiny bungalow over at Freshwater Bay, doing his best to nurse his infant