Cut To Black by Graham Hurley

Author:Graham Hurley [Hurley, Graham]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2003-12-31T13:00:00+00:00

Chapter 14

FRIDAY, 21 MARCH 2003, 02.20

Faraday was still asleep when the call came in. He’d left his mobile next door, lodged in a corner of the sofa, and it was Eadie who shook him gently awake.

“Yours.” She blew in his ear. “Might be important.”

Naked, Faraday made his way into the lounge. A pale grey light washed through the big picture windows and he could see a lid of cloud clamped over the Isle of Wight. Dimly, he remembered that his son was asleep in the spare bedroom. Unless, of course, something else had happened.

“DI Faraday.” He didn’t recognise the number. “Major Crimes.”

“It’s Graham Wallace.”

“Yeah?” Faraday rubbed his eyes. “Something come up?”

Wallace began to describe a call he’d just taken from someone he described as ‘our mate’. He wanted a meet within the next couple of days. Wallace had promised to get back to him as soon as he’d checked his diary and now needed some advice. Faraday was still wrestling with the implications of this sudden development when he looked up to find Eadie standing beside the sofa. She was wearing an unfastened cotton wrap and wanted to know whether it was too early for tea. Faraday said yes to the tea and took the mobile back to the bedroom.

By the time Eadie joined him, the conversation was over and Faraday was sitting on the edge of the bed, deep in thought. Eadie looked down at him, the tray in her hands.

“Something you’re going to share with me?” she enquired drily.

Paul Winter had been up since dawn. Nights when he couldn’t sleep -and there were more and more of them he’d taken to prowling round the bungalow, chasing his insomnia from room to room, often pausing in the tidy little lounge to reach for one of Joanie’s well-thumbed paperbacks, giving the first page or two the chance to ease him back to sleep. On occasions, to his surprise, it worked. Half a chapter of Jeffrey

Archer had the coshing power of Nembutal. But lately even the bludgeon of Archer’s prose had left him alert and fretful, turning on the radio, pulling back the curtains, scouring the late winter baldness of the back garden for signs of what the coming day might bring.

The postman arrived earlier than usual, a cascade of junk mail through the letter box. Nursing his second mug of tea, Winter stooped to the mat. He wasn’t sure what demographic these people used when they drew up their hit lists of likely punters but lately he’d become slightly depressed by the flood of geriatric appeals. Help the Aged. Saga Insurance. Motability. Forty-five, Winter told himself, was the prime of a man’s life, but the sight of yet another warning about prostate cancer had begun to make him wonder. How come these envelope-stuffers knew he was feeling so washed-up?

The biggest of this morning’s missives was a novelty: Guide Dogs for the Blind. He returned to the kitchen, meaning to bin the lot, then had second thoughts. The last couple of months, he’d thought seriously about getting himself a dog.

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