Free One Under by Graham Hurley Page B

moment.
    ‘Passing isn’t an option, Joe,’ he said at last. ‘Not in this case.’
    ‘No.’ Faraday reached for his lager. ‘So I gather.’

Four
    Tuesday, 12 July 2005, 06.10
     
    Faraday was up early next morning, patrolling the edges of one of the freshwater ponds on Milton Common. The ponds, barely half a mile north of the Bargemaster’s House, were home to a variety of summer birdlife and Faraday spent a deeply contented hour or so keeping tabs on a family of little grebes.
    The parents were shy, demure, slipping in and out of the reeds, fastidious in the care of their downy brood. Faraday had been watching them for months, ever since the emergence of the young, and this glimpse of parenthood gave him an oddly comforting sense of personal nourishment. The grebes, in common with most birds, faced a number of natural predators. Mere survival demanded constant vigilance. The young, with their rattling, slightly comical, high-pitched trills, were forever hungry. Yet the family seemed to flourish, bonded by the instinctive knowledge that their best chance in a hostile world lay in staying together. Life, thought Faraday, could be so simple.
    By ten o’clock, after a brief visit to the crime scene out at Buriton, he was climbing the stairs to the Major Crimes Suite. Winter was at his desk in the Intelligence Cell when Faraday put his head round the door.
    ‘You’ve got a moment?’
    ‘Sure, boss.’
    Winter began to get up to accompany Faraday to his own office but the DI had already helped himself to one of the two spare chairs. The sheaf of padlock photos lay beside Winter’s phone. Faraday began to leaf through them. The padlock was chunky, solid-looking, a brass body with a steel hasp on top.
    ‘So how are you getting on?’
    Winter consulted his notes. So far, he said, he’d talked to two managers at B&Q, the area director at Homebase, and a helpful young totty at GA Day. Next, he’d be starting on the smaller hardware stores listed in Yellow Pages. As detective work, he confessed, it didn’t hold a candle to busting high-class knocking shops or chasing drug dealers but fat old bastards like him were grateful for small mercies.
    Faraday acknowledged the quip with a smile. On one side of the padlock was the make, Tri-Circle. Beneath, a figure, 266. He glanced through the rest of the photos. On the other side of the lock he could make out a company logo, three interlinked circles nesting in an oval.
    ‘So who stocks them?’
    ‘They all do. Homebase is your best bet. Six ninety-nine. That’s a steal, believe me.’
    ‘Why so popular?’
    ‘They’re Chinese. That’s retail for cheap. The Chinkies knock ’em out, ten to a quid. Bloke at B&Q told me they buy them by the thousands. Says padlocks have become a hot item. Half the people in this city have something to their name. The other half can’t wait to nick it. That’s him talking, not me. Pompey? He thinks it’s padlock heaven.’
    ‘What about the paper trail? Do these people keep records of every transaction?’
    ‘Yeah, the bigger stores do, but it only works for us if someone uses a card. Pay cash and there’s obviously no name attached. Plus they’re less than keen to sort through all the paperwork. Bloke at Homebase said he was ten understaffed as it was, could barely keep the bloody shelves stocked.’
    ‘How many keys do they supply? With the padlock?’
    ‘Two.’
    ‘Always?’
    ‘So they say.’
    Faraday nodded. Maybe Winter would get a better result at one of the local hardware stores. Maybe a man behind his own counter might remember a specific transaction, or a face.
    ‘Yeah, sure. But those blokes charge the earth. That’s why they’re going out of business. Who’s going to be paying over the odds when you can go down the road and get one half the price?’
    Faraday said it didn’t matter. Detective work, as both men knew, was often a simple question of persistence. Dozens of phone calls, hours of getting nowhere.