Dead Tomorrow

by Peter James

  ‘Look,’ he said. ‘If I tell you, you’ll promise not mention anything about organs at this stage?’

  More chewing down the earpiece. Followed by the sound of a paper or cellophane wrapping being torn off. Then, ‘OK, deal.’

  ‘Sussex Police are treating this as a suspicious death.’

  ‘Top man! Thank you.’

  ‘Here’s something else for you, but not to be printed. I’m having the area scanned and police divers are going down tomorrow.’

  ‘You’ll let me know what they find?’

  Grace assured him he would and ended the call. Then he finished his lunch and, almost instantly, his stomach feeling uncomfortably bloated, began to regret the doughnut.

  Checking his electronic diary, he saw a reminder that he needed to send a request to Cellmark Forensic Services, the private laboratory at Abingdon which now handled Sussex CID’s DNA testing, for the six-monthly check on the DNA profiles of his cold cases.

  While the perpetrators had so far eluded justice, there was always the chance that a relative would have their DNA taken by the police after committing an offence – even for something as comparatively minor as a drunk-driving charge. Parents, children and siblings could provide enough of a match, so although this was a considerable expense out of the force’s annual forensic budget, it did occasionally produce results to justify the outlay. He emailed his MSA, instructing her to put in a request.

  As he had reflected many times, being a detective was a bit like fishing. Endless casting, endless patience. He glanced at the seven-pound six-ounce brown trout, stuffed and mounted in a glass case fixed to a wall in his office, and alongside it, a huge stuffed carp which Cleo had recently given him, with the terrible pun, Carpe diem, embossed on the brass plaque at its base. He referred to the trout, occasionally, when briefing young, fresh-faced detectives, making an increasingly tired joke about patience and big fish.

  Then he focused his mind back on Unknown Male and made a series of phone calls to assemble his initial inquiry team. All the while, he kept staring at the damn fish, his eyes moving back and forth between them. Water. Fish lived in water. In the sea and in rivers. Then he realized why he kept staring at them.

  A few years back, the headless and limbless torso of an unidentified African boy had been found in the Thames. Grace was sure he remembered, from all the publicity at the time, that this boy had had his internal organs removed too. It had turned out to be an occult ritual killing.

  Feeling a sudden surge of adrenalin, Grace tapped out a search command for details of the file he knew he had saved somewhere on his computer.

  31

  Sometimes, Roy Grace wondered whether computers had souls. Or at least a sense of humour. He had not yet elevated Unknown Male to Major Incident status, but because the investigation was now a formal operation the protocols required that it be allocated a name. The Sussex Police Computer had a program for this purpose, and the name it allocated the Detective Superintendent was bizarrely apt. Operation Neptune.

  Shoulder to shoulder around the small, round table in his office were five detectives whom he had come to regard as his most trusted team.

  Detective Constable Nick Nicholl was in his late twenties, short-haired and tall as a beanpole, a zealous detective and a handy centre forward, whom Grace had encouraged to take up rugby, thinking he would be perfect to play in the police team, of which he was now president. But the poor man was permanently bleary-eyed and zapped of energy, thanks to the joys of recent fatherhood.

  Rookie Detective Constable Emma-Jane Boutwood, a slim girl with an alert face and long fair hair scooped up in a bun, had nearly been killed in a recent operation, when she had been crushed against a wall by a stolen van. She was still officially convalescing and entitled to more leave, but she had begged to come back, determined to get on with her career, and had already proved her worth to him in an earlier operation.

  Shabbily dressed, with a bad comb-over and reeking of tobacco, Detective Sergeant Norman Potting was an old-school policeman, politically incorrect, blunt and with no interest in promotion – he had never wanted the responsibility, but nor had he wanted to retire when he reached fifty-five, the normal police pension age for a sergeant, and would probably extend his service. He liked to do what he was best at doing, which he called plodding and drilling. Plodding, methodical police work, drilling down deep beneath the surface of any crime, drilling for as long and as deep as he needed until he hit a seam that would lead him somewhere. A veteran of three failed marriages, he was currently on his fourth, with a young Thai woman who, he boasted proudly at every opportunity, he had found via the Internet.

  Detective Sergeant Bella Moy, an attractive woman in her mid-thirties, with a tangle of hennaed hair, was something of a lost soul. Unmarried – although, like many, married to the police force – she was stuck living with, and looking after, her elderly mother.

  The fifth was Glenn Branson.

  Also attending were the Crime Scene Manager, David Browne, and the HOLMES analyst, Juliet Jones.

  A phone rang, to the tune of ‘Greensleeves’. Everyone looked around. Embarrassed, Nick Nicholl plucked the offending machine out of his pocket and silenced it.

  Moments later, another phone rang. The Indiana Jones theme. Potting yanked his phone out, checked the display and silenced it.

  In front of Grace lay his A4 notebook, his red case-file folder, his policy book and the notes Eleanor Hodgson had typed up for him. He opened the proceedings.

  ‘The time is 4.30 p.m., Thursday 27 November. This is the first briefing of Operation Neptune, the investigation into the death of Unknown Male, retrieved yesterday, 26 November, from the English Channel, approximately ten nautical miles south of Shoreham Harbour, by the dredger Arco Dee. Our next briefing will be at 8.30 a.m. tomorrow, and we will then hold briefings here in my office at 8.30 a.m. and 6.30 p.m. until further notice.’

  He then read out a summary of the post-mortem report from Nadiuska De Sancha. Another phone began ringing. This time David Browne dived into his pocket to retrieve it, checked the display, then silenced it.

  When Grace had finished the report, he continued, ‘Our first priority is to establish the young man’s identity. All we know at this stage is that he was in his mid-teens, and his internal organs appear to have been professionally removed. A fingerprint check on the UK database has proved negative. DNA has been sent to the lab on a three-day turnaround, but as that takes us into the weekend, we won’t get their report until Monday, but I doubt whether we’ll get a hit.’

  He paused for a moment. Then he addressed DS Moy.

  ‘Bella, I need you to get the dental photographs out. It’s a massive task, but we’ll start local and see what we get.’

  ‘There is a designated charted area for burials at sea, right, chief?’ Norman Potting said.

  ‘Yes, fifteen nautical miles east of Brighton and Hove – it’s a burial ground for everyone from Sussex,’ Roy Grace replied.

  ‘Don’t the prevailing winds and currents run west to east?’ the DS continued. ‘I remember that from geography lessons when I was at school.’

  ‘Around the time they built the ark?’ quizzed Bella, who was not a Norman Potting fan.

  Grace gave her a stern, cautioning look.

  ‘Norman’s right,’ Nick Nicholl said. ‘I used to do a bit of sailing.’

  ‘It would take some storm to move a body that far in a few days,’ Potting said, ‘if it was weighted down. I just spoke to the coastguard. He’d need to see the weights, then he could try to plot a movement path.’

  ‘Tania Whitlock’s on that already,’ Grace said. ‘But we need to speak to all the organ transplant coordinators in the UK and see if we can find a connection with our teenager. Norman, I’d like to task you with that. We already have one negative, from the Royal Sussex County Hospital.’

  Potting nodded and made a note on his pad. ‘Leave it with me, chief.’

  ‘We can’t rule out the pos
sibility that the body came from another county, can we?’ Bella Moy asked.

  ‘No,’ Grace said. ‘Or from another country. I would like you to speak to our counterparts in the ports of France bordering the English Channel. Also, Spain should be checked out as a priority.’ He explained his reasons.

  ‘I’ll get on to it straight away.’

  ‘We don’t yet know the cause of death, right?’ Nick Nicholl asked.

  ‘No. I want you to do a trawl with Crime Intelligence Bureaux around the country and see if you can find any other cases of a similar nature. And I want you to check the Mispers list for Sussex, Kent and Hampshire for any possible match to our Unknown Male.’

  That was a big task, he knew. Five thousand people were reported missing in Sussex alone each year – although the majority were missing for only a short time.

  Then he handed Emma-Jane Boutwood a folder. ‘These are the briefing notes we were given in September in Las Vegas, at the International Homicide Investigators’ Association Symposium, on the headless and limbless torso of a boy, believed to be Nigerian, pulled from the Thames in 2001 missing his vital organs. The case is unsolved, but it’s almost certainly a ritual killing of some kind. Take a look through and see if there are any comparisons with our young man.’

  ‘Has anyone checked the dredge area to see if there is any evidence down there?’ Potting asked.

  ‘The SSU are going out at first light. Glenn will be with them.’ He looked at his colleague.

  Branson grimaced back at him. ‘Shit, chief, I did tell you this morning, I don’t really do boats very well. They’re, like, way out of my comfort zone. I threw up the last time I went on a Channel ferry. And that was dead calm. The forecast’s crap for tomorrow.’

  ‘I’m sure our budget will stretch to seasickness pills,’ Grace said breezily.

  32

  Forget seasickness, Glenn Branson thought. The speed humps along the southern perimeter road of Shoreham Harbour were really doing it for his stomach. Those, combined with a bad hangover and an early-morning row with his wife, kicked him off on this Friday morning in a mood that was a long way south of sunny. It was as dark as the grim, grey, early-morning sky through his windscreen.

  To his left he drove past a long, deserted pebble beach, to his right were the big, ugly, industrial structures, the warehouses, gantries, stacks of containers, conveyor belts, barbed-wire fences, power station, bunkering station and storage yards of a commercial seaport.

  ‘I’m working, for fuck’s sake, aren’t I?’ he said into the hands-free.

  ‘I have to be at a tutorial this afternoon at three,’ his wife said. ‘Could you pick the kids up and be with them until I get home?’

  ‘Ari, I’m on an operation.’

  ‘One minute you’re complaining I don’t let you see the kids, then, when I ask you to look after them for just a few hours, you give me crap about being busy. You need to make your mind up. Do you want to be a father or a policeman?’

  ‘Shit, that’s not fair.’

  ‘It’s perfectly fair, Glenn. This is what our marriage has been like for the past five years. Every time I ask you to help me to have a life of my own, you pull the I can’t, I’ve got a job on number, or, I’ve got an urgent operation on, or, I’ve got to see Detective Superintendent Roy Sodding Grace.’

  ‘Ari,’ he said. ‘Please, love, be reasonable. You’re the one who encouraged me to join the force. I don’t get why you’re so fucking angry about it all the time.’

  ‘Because I married you,’ she said. ‘I married you because I wanted a life with you. I don’t have a life with you.’

  ‘So what do you want me to do? Go back to being a bouncer? Is that what you want?’

  ‘We were happy then.’

  The turn-off was ahead of him. He indicated, then waited for a cement truck that was racing down from the opposite direction, thinking how simple it would be to pull out in front of it and end it all.

  He heard a click. The bitch had hung up on him.

  ‘Shit,’ he said. ‘Fuck you!’

  He drove in through a timber yard, past massive planks piled high on either side of him, and saw the quay of Arlington Basin directly ahead. Slowing to a crawl, he dialled his home number. It went straight to the answering machine.

  ‘Oh, come on, Ari!’ he muttered to himself, hanging up.

  Parked to his right was a familiar vehicle, a massive yellow truck, emblazoned with the Sussex Police logo and the wording specialist search unit in large blue letters along the side.

  He parked just behind it, tried Ari once more and again got the answering machine. Then he sat for a moment, pressing his fingers against his temples, trying to ease the pain that was like a vice crushing his skull.

  He was stupid, he knew. He should have had an early night, but he hadn’t been able to sleep, not for ages now, since he had left home. He’d sat up late on the floor of Roy Grace’s living room, alone and tearful, going through his friend’s music collection, drinking his way through a bottle of whisky that he’d found – and needed to remember to replace – playing songs that brought back memories of times with Ari. Shit, such good times. They had been so much in love with each other. He was missing his kids, Sammy and Remi. Desperately missing them. Feeling totally lost without them.

  His eyes misty with sadness, he climbed out of the car into the cold, wet, salty wind, knowing he needed to put on a brave face and get through today, the way he had to get through every day. He took a deep breath, sucking in air that was thick with the smells of the sea, and fuel oil, and freshly sawn timber. A gull cried overhead, flapping its wings, stationary against the headwind. Tania Whitlock and her team, all wearing black baseball caps marked POLICE in bold lettering, red waterproof windcheaters, black trousers and black rubber boots, were loading gear into a tired-looking deep-sea fishing boat, the Scoob-Eee, that was moored alongside the quay.

  Even here in the shelter of the harbour basin, the Scoob-Eee was rocking from the choppy waves. On the far side of the harbour was a cluster of white petroleum storage tanks. Beyond them, steep grass banking rose up to the main road and a row of houses.

  The DS, dressed in a cream raincoat over his beige suit and tan, rubber-soled yachting shoes, strode over to the team. He knew them all. The unit worked closely with the CID on major crimes, as they were trained in search techniques, especially in difficult or inaccessible places, such as sewers, cellars, river banks and even burnt-out cars.

  ‘Hi, guys!’ he said.

  Nine heads turned towards him.

  ‘Lord Branson!’ said a voice. ‘Dear fellow, welcome aboard! How many pillows will you be requiring on your bed?’

  ‘Hello, Glenn!’ Tania said pleasantly, ignoring her colleague as she lugged a large coil of striped yellow breathing and communication lines over to the edge of the quay, and handed them down to another of her colleagues on the boat.

  ‘Where do you think you’re going dressed like that?’ said Jon Lelliott. ‘A cruise on the Queen Mary?’

  Lean and muscular, with a shorn head, Lelliott was known as WAFI, which stood for Wind Assisted Fucking Idiot. He passed a folded body bag that reeked of Jeyes Fluid down to Arf, a man in his mid-forties, with a boyish face and prematurely white hair, who took it and tidily stowed it.

  ‘Yeah, got a first-class cabin booked, with my own butler,’ Glenn Branson said with a grin. He nodded at the fishing boat. ‘Presumably this is the tender that’s going to take me to it?’

  ‘In your dreams.’

  ‘Anything I can do to help?’

  Arf held a heavy red anorak up to Glenn. ‘You’ll need this. Going to be lumpy and wet out there.’

  ‘I’ll be fine, thanks.’

  Arf, the oldest and most experienced member of the team, gave him a bemused look. ‘You sure about that? I think you’ll need some boots.’

  Glenn lifted a leg, showing his dainty yellow sock. ‘These are boat shoes,’ he said. ‘Like, non-slip.’

  ‘S
lipping’s going to be the least of your problems,’ said Lelliott.

  Glenn grinned and pushed back his coat sleeve, baring part of his wrist. ‘See that, Arf, the colour, right? Black, yeah? My ancestors rowed the Atlantic in slave ships, yeah? I got the sea in my blood!’

  *

  When they had finished loading the gear, they assembled on the quay for the pre-dive briefing, given by Tania Whitlock, who was reading her notes from a clipboard.

  ‘We are proceeding to an area ten nautical miles south-east of Shoreham Harbour, and the coastguard will be informed that we will be diving in that area,’ she said. ‘In terms of risk assessment on board, we will be out in the main shipping lanes, so everyone needs to keep a careful watch – and to inform the coastguard if any vessel is heading too close. Some of the larger tanker and container ships using the Channel have a clearance of only a few feet above the seabed in places, so they present a real danger to divers.’

  She paused and everyone nodded their understanding.

  ‘Other than shipping, the risk assessment for the divers is low,’ she continued.

  Yep, thought Steve Hargrave. Apart from drowning, decompression illness and risk of entanglement.

  ‘We will be diving in approximately sixty-five feet of water in poor visibility, but this is a dredge area and there will be an undulating seabed, with no underwater obstructions. The Arco Dee is dredging in a different area this morning. Yesterday we surveyed the area using sonar, where we identified, and buoyed, two anomalies. We will commence our dive on these today. Because of the tidal current we will wear boots for standing on the seabed rather than fins. Any questions?’

  ‘Do you think these anomalies are bodies?’ Glenn asked.

  ‘Nah, just a couple of first-class passengers enjoying the pool facilities,’ quipped Rod Walker, who was known as Jonah.

  Ignoring the titter of laughter, Tania Whitlock said, ‘I will dive first, and then WAFI. ‘I will be attended by Gonzo, and WAFI will be attended by Arf. When we have investigated and videoed the anomalies, and brought them to the surface, if appropriate, we will consider whether any further diving will serve any purpose, or whether to spend the time scanning a broader area. Any questions at this stage?’