Chapter 77

THE NEW CHARLIE FAULTLESS

It felt like the first time in days Faultless had been back in the flat he’d rented to write his book. The place was cold and dark. He switched on the light and took off his coat, flinching at the pain in his ribs. One of the filth had smashed him with his truncheon. But not before Faultless had decked his pal. Despite the pain in his side, he’d then turned on the copper who’d attacked him and laid him out with a right and a left. Then he’d legged it. It had felt good, standing up for himself. But it was going to cause problems. The Old Bill would come for him. And not just two of them this time.

He walked into the living room.

Writing felt like the last thing Faultless wanted to do. Things had changed. The book he’d intended to write would be very different if he started it now.

On July 24, 1996, my mother, Patricia Faultless, was murdered. Her killer has never been caught.

That had been his opening. Not anymore. Patricia Faultless wasn’t his mother.

He sat at the table near the window. He switched on the radio. The headlines reported more financial gloom, the death of a Mafia godfather, and a Premiership footballer jailed for rape. Faultless half-listened to the bulletin as he stared down into the quad. A large group of people milled around the area. He leaned towards the window. He saw camera crews. He saw placards and heard chanting.

The residents were protesting.

Faultless ignored it. He stared into space.

What would he do?

He’d come here to nail his mother’s killer. But not in the old Charlie Faultless way. Not with fists and feet. Not with a shank or a baseball bat.

He’d come here to nail him with words.

This was the new Charlie Faultless.

In the past few years he’d discovered that power lay in the pen. He could cause a lot of damage with a few sentences.

And the injuries caused by an article published widely would be slower to heal.

Sticks and stones might break bones, but they healed. It was being named that could really wound the prey Faultless hunted. Named and shamed. Hunted and humiliated.

He recalled some of his successes as a journalist. His book Scapegoat was about a British soldier wrongly accused of killing an Iraqi civilian ruffled feathers. And it left a few politicians red-faced.

It had been 2004. The war was going badly. The press and the politicians were looking for someone to blame. You’d had Abu Ghraib. The Yanks abusing Iraqi prisoners. You’d had the insurgency turning the country into a charnel house.

They wanted a fall guy. They got one. The soldier killed a would-be suicide bomber, but footage shot on a mobile phone made it appear he’d murdered an innocent local.

The soldier was drummed out of the Army.

Faultless’s book sold okay, but best of all it had government ministers squirming on Question Time and Newsnight.

Faultless remembered another hunt.

Psychic detectives.

He fizzed now thinking about that investigation.

He was working for a news channel in Chicago. He and a female colleague he was dating at the time had gone undercover, pretending to be the parents of a missing child.

There wasn’t a missing child, but that didn’t stop three “psychic detectives” from claiming to have pinpointed the made-up kid’s body.

A fourth said the fake daughter was still alive but had been taken into slavery in the Far East.

One of the psychics led Faultless and his fellow reporter to a quarry and started having a fit and speaking in tongues.

Another led them to an apartment building in the city and said their bogus baby had been brought there. “But I am truly sorry to say, she was killed here and thrown into the river—but her soul is now at rest and with Jesus in heaven.”

Faultless and the investigation team then set up a TV show where the psychics appeared—and were outed as scammers.

The psychics and their supporters were furious. They claimed to have read Faultless and the other reporter’s minds. They said they felt there was a child. Their spirit guides or auras, or whatever, had led them to those places.

So how had they all come to different conclusions?

The psychics refused to accept they were making it up. They were either convinced they had a gift, or they were liars.

“Liars,” Faultless had said on the TV show.

The psychics fumed. They threatened him with a lawsuit. They told him to “go back to England, where you are all godless”.

Faultless then reminded them that God frowned on mediums, quoting the First Book of Samuel in the Bible, which states they should be put to death.

The psychics stormed off the TV show.

Faultless had gloated. And he gloated now. It made him feel better. But he still had no idea what he was going to do. He considered leaving Barrowmore. He looked at the flat. It would be easy to leave some of his stuff here and get out, today. He was thinking seriously about it now, seeing himself taking a train to Heathrow and getting a flight back to New York.

Get away from this hell. Escape the cops. Avoid the judgment.

He blew air out of his cheeks and made his decision.

His phone rang. He checked the caller ID.

Tash.

He thought about not answering.

Easier to go without saying a word, he thought.

But an ache in his chest led him to answer.

“Tash,” he said.

And she cried and wailed down the phone.