The Price Of Darkness Read Online Free PDF

they were all dying to stitch Baz up. We had an auction in the end and the scrote I was silly enough to believe put Bazza alongside a couple of thousand Ecstasy tabs. The bloke said he’d bought them in Amsterdam, then shipped them home on the ferry. That kind of weight, we were bound to knock a few doors down.’
    ‘You did Mark’s flat?’
    ‘Yeah.’
    ‘And?’
    ‘Nothing. Or not much, anyway. A bit of weed, a couple of tabs of speed, but all of it recreational. We tore the place apart, trying to stand the intelligence up. Shame really. Mark had just redecorated.’
    ‘You pulled them all in?’
    ‘Of course. Mark was outraged and his two mates weren’t too happy, either.’
    ‘What about Bazza?’
    ‘He was clever. The rest of them used the duty brief but he phoned for another solicitor, someone he’d met through the estate agency. This guy was shit hot, ran rings round us. Mid-twenties, he was, mad on football, used to guest in Bazza’s team when they were so far ahead of the rest of the league they could afford to drop a point or two. Fact was, we had nothing on Bazza except the whisper from the shitbag grass, and this brief knew it. It all came down to the passport in the end. Bazza had stuffed the ferry tickets and an Amsterdam hotel receipt in the back, and there was a Dover entry stamp bang on the date we got off the bloke in the holding cell. Naturally we challenged him and you know what he said? He swore blind he’d gone to Holland to buy tulips for his new girlfriend.’
    ‘Was that my mum?’ It was Esme.
    ‘Yeah. Before you were born.’
    ‘She hates tulips.’
    ‘Exactly. Baz was winding us up. Not just us, but Mark too. They threw Baz out after that little episode, made him find a place of his own. Wise bloody move, says me.’
    ‘And this solicitor?’ Stuart again. ‘He’s still around?’
    ‘No. He went to London and made his fortune. You’ll see his name in the crime reports sometimes, exactly the same MO. Get alongside the quality criminals and help them to a bigger fortune. Down here he’d have got the same result with Bazza but it would have taken a bit longer. A young bloke like that, he was impatient. And who can blame him, eh? In the end it’s just money, whichever way you cut it.’
    Winter chuckled, gazing out at the blackness of the night, waiting for a response that never came. Finally, he caught a murmur from Esme. She wanted her husband to drop her at home before he ran Winter back to Portsmouth. She was tired. She’d had enough of travelling and she needed to check that the live-in nanny hadn’t done anything vile while they’d been away.
     
    Bazza’s daughter lived on a seven-acre spread on a flank of the Meon Valley. Winter caught a glimpse of a sprawling hacienda-style confection in white stucco and black wrought iron as the Volvo purred up the drive. Two double garages formed a right angle at one end, and there was a line of trellis around a swimming pool at the other. A child’s red and yellow tractor lay abandoned outside the front door and there were lights on in three rooms upstairs.
    ‘Slut.’ Esme got out. Without a backward glance, she walked to the door, unlocked it and disappeared inside. Moments later the lights upstairs went out. Then the front door slammed shut, leaving Stuart and Winter alone in the darkness.
    ‘She’s knackered,’ Stuart said. ‘You can always tell.’
    They set off again. For miles, as they sped down the Meon Valley, Winter was glad of the silence in the car. Then, as the lights of the city appeared, he stirred. He wanted to know why Esme had never used her law qualifications. Bazza had put her through years of university, followed by a pupillage at a leading barristers’ chambers just off the Strand, but to Winter’s knowledge Esme had never set foot in court to plead a case of her own. So what had happened?
    ‘Me.’ Stuart didn’t elaborate.
    ‘And the kids?’
    ‘Yeah. She still wants four. I say three’s