Dead Tomorrow

by Peter James

  On his mobile, he phoned through to the control room at Southern Resourcing Centre.

  ‘Glenn Branson here. I’m the on-call DS for the Major Crime Branch. I’ve just seen the boys go by in Saltdean with the blues and twos – anything for us?’

  ‘No, they’re on their way to an RTC.’

  Relieved, he ended the call. Within moments his full focus was again on his house. His anger was growing. He did not care about anything except what was going on inside his house.

  And finally he could not restrain himself any longer. He climbed out of the car, crossed the road, walked up to his front door, feeling furtive, a stranger, as if he should not be here, should not be walking up the path to his own front door.

  He pushed the key into the lock and tried to turn it. But it would not move. He took it out, puzzled, wondering for an instant whether he had used the key to Roy Grace’s front door in error. But it was the right key. He tried again and still it would not turn.

  Then it dawned on him. She had changed the lock!

  Oh shit! No, you don’t, lady!

  Memories of a hundred movie scenes of spouses fighting flashed through his mind. Then, in an explosion of rage, he rang the doorbell, a long ring, a good ten seconds of jangling noise from inside the house. And he realized, through his red mist of anger, that he had never in his life before rung his own doorbell. He followed it by hammering on the door.

  Moments later he sensed light above him and looked up. Ari was standing at the bedroom window, the curtains parted. She pushed the window open and looked down, her face peering out of the top of her pink dressing gown, her sleek, straightened black hair looking immaculate, the way it always did, as if she had just stepped out of a hair salon. It even looked that way after they’d gone white-water rafting, one time.

  ‘Glenn? What the hell are you doing? You’ll wake the kids!’

  ‘You’ve changed the fucking locks!’

  ‘I lost my keys,’ she shouted back, defensively.

  ‘Let me in!’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Fuck you, this is my home too!’

  ‘We agreed to be apart for a while.’

  ‘We didn’t agree you could bring men home and fuck them.’

  ‘I’ll talk to you in the morning, OK?’

  ‘No, you let me in and we talk now!’

  ‘I’m not opening the door.’

  ‘I’ll break a fucking window if that’s what you want.’

  ‘Do that and I’m calling the police.’

  ‘I am the police, in case you’d forgotten.’

  ‘Do what the hell you want,’ she said. ‘You always have done!’

  She slammed the window shut. He stepped back to get a better view, saw the curtains being pulled tightly shut and the light go off.

  He clenched his fists, then unclenched them, his mind a maelstrom. He walked some yards up the street. Then down again. A car drove past, some small custom job with rap playing on boom-box speakers, shaking the already shaken air. He stared up at his house again.

  For a moment, he was tempted to smash a window and let himself in – and break the fucking babysitter’s neck.

  The problem was, he knew that’s exactly what he would do if he went in.

  Reluctantly, he turned away, climbed back into the Hyundai and drove down to the main coast road. He halted at the T-junction, signalling right. As he was about to pull out, he noticed a tiny pinprick of light a long way off in the murky darkness. A ship of some kind, out at sea.

  And suddenly he had a thought that momentarily pushed his anger to one side.

  The thought stayed with him, developing more in his mind, as he drove along the gusty road, through Rottingdean and Kemp Town, and then along Brighton seafront.

  Back in Roy’s house, he poured himself a large whisky, then sat down in an armchair and thought some more.

  He was still shaking with anger about Ari.

  But the thought stayed with him.

  And it was there when he woke, three hours later.

  He had been rubbish at most subjects at school, because his dad, who was either drunk or stoned, and beat up his mother, consistently told him he was no good, the way he told his two brothers and his sisters they were no good either. And Glenn had believed him. He’d spent his childhood being moved from one care home to another. Geometry was the one subject he had liked. And there was one thing he remembered from that, and it had stuck in his head all night.

  Triangulation.

  61

  At nine o’clock in the morning, Ian Tilling sat at his desk in his office in Casa Ioana, in Bucharest, and enthusiastically studied the lengthy email and scanned photographs that had come in from his old mate Norman Potting. Three sets of fingerprints, three e-fit photographs, two of young males and one of a young female, and several photographs, the most interesting of which was the close-up of a primitive tattoo of the name Rares.

  It felt good to be involved in some detective work again. And with the briefing meeting about to start, it was really going to feel like the old days!

  He sipped his mug of Twinings English Breakfast tea – his elderly mother in Brighton posted him regular supplies of the tea bags, as well as Marmite and Wilkin & Sons Tiptree Medium Cut Orange Marmalade. Just about the only things he missed from England that he could not easily obtain out here.

  Seated on wooden chairs in front of his desk were two of his female social workers. Dorina was a tall twenty-three-year-old with short black hair who had come to Romania from the Republic of Moldova with her husband. Andreea was an attractive girl. She had long brown hair and was dressed in a V-neck brown jumper over a striped shirt and jeans.

  Andreea reported first, giving the general consensus that Rares was quite a posh name, and was unusual for a street kid. She opined that the tattoo was self-inflicted, which indicated the girl might be a Roma – or Tigani – a gypsy. She added that a Roma girl and a non-Roma boyfriend would be very uncommon.

  ‘We could put an announcement up on the main noticeboard,’ Dorina said, ‘with the photographs. See if any of our homeless clients have any information who these people might be.’

  ‘Good idea,’ Tilling said. ‘I’d like you to contact all the other homeless charities. Andreea, if you could get these to the three Fara homes, please.’

  There were two Fara homes in the city and a farm out in the country, charitable institutions set up by an English couple, Michael and Jane Nicholson, which took in street kids.

  ‘I’ll do that this morning.’

  Tilling thanked her, then glanced at his watch. ‘I have a meeting at the local police station at half past nine. Can the two of you contact the placement centres in all six local authority areas?’

  ‘I already started,’ Dorina said. ‘I’m not getting a good response. I just spoke to one, but they refused to assist. They’re saying that they cannot share confidential information – and that it’s the police who should be making the enquiries and not some director of a charity.’

  Tilling thumped his desk in frustration. ‘Shit! We all know what kind of help to expect from the bloody police!’

  Dorina nodded. She knew. They all knew.

  ‘Just keep trying,’ Ian Tilling said. ‘OK?’

  She nodded.

  Tilling sent a brief email back to Norman Potting, then left the room for the short walk to Police Station No. 15. To the only police officer he knew who might be helpful. But he was not optimistic.

  62

  Glenn Branson, feeling alert and wired despite his ragged night, stood in the corridor outside the briefing room, holding a cup of coffee in one hand and an All-Day Breakfast egg, bacon and sausage sandwich in the other. Members of the team were filing in through the doorway for the Wednesday morning briefing meeting.

  Bella Moy stepped past him, giving him a wry smile. ‘Good morning, Mr Healthy Eating!’ she said.

  Glenn mumbled a reply through a mouthful of his sandwich.

  Then Bella’s phone r
ang. She glanced at the display before stepping to one side to answer it.

  Moments later, the man Glenn was waiting for, Ray Packham, from the High-Tech Crime Unit, appeared.

  ‘Ray! How are you doing?’

  ‘I’m tired,’ he said. ‘The wife had a bad night.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Jen’s diabetic,’ he said, nodding. ‘We went out for a Chinese. Her blood sugar was off the scale this morning.’

  ‘Diabetes is a bummer.’

  ‘That’s the problem with Chinese restaurants – you don’t know what they put in their food. All tickety-boo in your neck of the woods?’

  ‘My wife’s got a medical condition too.’

  ‘Oh blimey, I’m sorry to hear that.’

  ‘Yeah, she’s developed an allergy to me.’

  Packham’s eyes gleamed behind the thick lenses of his spectacles. He raised a finger. ‘Ah! I know just the chap! I’ll give you his number. Top allergist in the country!’

  Glenn smiled. ‘If you’d said he was the top divorce lawyer, I might be interested. Look, before we get into the briefing, I need to ask you a quick technical question.’

  ‘Fire away. Divorce. Sorry to hear that.’

  ‘Not if you’d met my wife, you wouldn’t be. But hey! I need to pick your brains about mobile phones. Yeah?’

  More people squeezed past them. Guy Batchelor greeted Glenn with a cheery, ‘Good morning.’ The DS waved his sandwich at him by way of a reply.

  ‘You’re a film buff, Glenn, aren’t you?’ Packham asked. ‘Did you ever see Phone Booth?’

  ‘Colin Farrell and Keifer Sutherland. Yeah. What about it?’

  ‘Crap ending, didn’t you think?’

  ‘It was all right.’

  Ray Packham nodded. In addition to being one of the most respected computer crime experts in the force, he was the only other film buff Glenn knew.

  ‘I need some help on mobile phone masts, Ray. Is that your terrain?’

  ‘Masts? Base station masts? I’m your man! I actually do know quite a bit about them. What exactly are you after?’

  ‘A guy who disappeared – on a boat. He always had his phone with him. Last time he was seen was on Friday night, sailing out of Shoreham Harbour. The way I figure it is that I might be able to plot the direction he was heading in from his mobile phone signals. Through some kind of triangulation. I know it’s possible on land – what about out at sea?’

  More people filed past them.

  ‘Well, it would depend on how far out and what kind of boat.’

  ‘What kind of boat?’

  Packham launched into an explanation, his whole body becoming animated. It seemed that nothing in the world pleased him more than to find a home for some of the vast repository of knowledge that was stored in his head.

  ‘Yes. Ten miles and more, out at sea, and you can still be in range, but it depends on the structure of the boat, and where the phone is situated. You see, inside a steel tub, the range would be drastically reduced. Was this particular phone on deck, or at least in a cabin with windows? Also the height of the masts would be a big factor.’

  Glenn thought hard back to his time on board the Scoob-Eee. There was a small cabin at the front that you accessed via steps, where the toilet, kitchenette and seating area were. When he had been down there, he had the impression it was mostly below the waterline. But if Jim Towers had been driving the boat, he would have been up on deck, in the partially covered wheel-house area. And if he was heading out to sea, there would have been a direct line-of-sight behind him to the shore. He explained this to Packham.

  ‘Super!’ he said. ‘Do you know if he made any calls?’

  ‘He didn’t bell his wife. I don’t know if he called anyone else.’

  ‘You’d need to get access to the mobile phone records. On a major crime investigation, that shouldn’t be a problem. I take it this is connected to Operation Neptune?’

  ‘It’s one of my lines of enquiry.’

  ‘So here’s the thing. If on standby, a mobile phone registers with its network every twenty minutes or so – it sort of checks in, saying, Here I am, chaps! If you’ve ever left your phone lying near your car radio you can sometimes hear that beeditty-beeditty-beep noise as interference with the radio, yes?’

  Branson nodded.

  ‘That’s when it’s radioing in!’ Packham beamed, as if the sound was a trick he had taught all phones to perform. ‘Now, from the records, you could work out where the last registration occurred, to within a few hundred yards.’

  He glanced around, conscious that almost everyone had now gone into the briefing room.

  ‘It would probably be in contact with, say, two or three coastal base stations and would be talking to a known sector, about a third of the circle on each.’

  He glanced around again.

  ‘Very quickly, there is a thing called timing advance. Without getting too technical, the signal travels to and from the base station at the speed of light – three hundred thousand kilometres per second. That timing advance – depending on which network we are talking about – allows you to calculate a distance to the phone from each base station. Are you still with me?’

  Glenn nodded.

  ‘Thus you have some approximate bearings – but, more importantly, distances from each, which together should allow you to triangulate a location within a few hundred yards. But you have to remember, this is only the place where the last registration took place. The boat could have moved twenty minutes on.’

  ‘So at least I would get its last known position and roughly the course it was steering?’

  ‘Spot on!’

  ‘You’re a star, Ray!’ Glenn said, writing down notes on his pad. ‘You’re a fucking star!’

  63

  At half past eight in the morning, two people, looking to the outside world like a mother and son, stood in line at one of the dozen EU Passport Holders immigration queues at Gatwick Airport.

  The woman was a confident, statuesque blonde in her forties, with hair just off her shoulders in a chic, modern style. She wore a fur-trimmed, black suede coat and matching boots, and towed behind her a Gucci overnight bag on wheels. The boy was a bewildered-looking teenager. He was thin, with ruffled black hair cut short, and with a hint of Romany in his features, dressed in a denim jacket that looked too big for him, crisp blue jeans and brand-new trainers with the laces trailing loose. He carried nothing, except a small electronic game he had been given to occupy him, and the hope in his heart that soon, hopefully this morning, he would be reunited with the only person he had ever loved.

  The woman made a series of phone calls in a language the boy did not speak, German, he presumed, while he played with his game, but he was bored with it. Bored with the travelling. Hoping against hope the journey would soon be over.

  Finally, it was their turn next. A businessman in front handed his passport to the female, Indian-looking immigration officer, who scanned it, looking faintly bored, as if she was coming to the end of a long shift, and handed it back to him.

  Marlene Hartmann stepped forwards, squeezed the boy’s hand, her leather gloves masking the clamminess of her own hands, then handed over the two passports.

  The officer scanned Marlene’s first, looked at the screen, which flagged up nothing, and then scanned the boy’s. Rares Hartmann. Nothing. She handed the passports back.

  Outside, in the Arrivals hall, among the plethora of drivers holding up printed or handwritten name-boards, and anxious relatives scanning everyone coming through the door, Marlene spotted Vlad Cosmescu.

  They greeted each other with a formal handshake. Then she turned to the boy, who had never been outside of Bucharest in his life and was looking even more bewildered now.

  ‘Rares. This is Uncle Vlad. He will look after you.’

  Cosmescu greeted the boy with a handshake and, in his native Romanian tongue, told him he was happy to welcome him to England. The boy mumbled a reply that he was happy to be
here and hoped to see his girlfriend, Ilinca, soon – this morning?

  Cosmescu assured him Ilinca was waiting for him and longing to see him. They were going to drop Frau Hartmann off, then go on to see Ilinca.

  The boy’s eyes lit up and, for the first time in a long time, he smiled.

  *

  Five minutes later, the brown Mercedes, with grubby little buck-toothed Grigore at the wheel, pulled out of Gatwick Airport and on to the link road to the M23 motorway. Minutes later they were heading south towards the city of Brighton and Hove. Marlene Hartmann sat in the front passenger seat. Rares sat quietly in the back. This was the start of his new life and he was excited. But more than anything, he could scarcely wait to see Ilinca again.

  It had only been a few weeks since they parted company, in a flurry of kisses and promises and tears. And less than a couple of months since this angel, Marlene, had come into their lives to rescue them.

  It felt like a dream.

  His real name was Rares Petre Florescu and he was sixteen years old. Some time back, he could not remember exactly when but it was shortly after his seventh birthday, his mother had run away from his father, who drank and hit her constantly, taking him with her. Then she had met another man. This man did not want a family, she had explained sadly to Rares, so she was putting him in a home where he would have lots of friends, and would be with people who loved and cared for him.

  Two weeks later a silent old woman, with a face as flat and hard as a steam iron, led him up four flights of stone stairs, into a crowded, flea-infested dormitory. His mother was wrong. No one loved or cared for him there, and at first he was bullied. But eventually he made friends with other children his own age, though never with older boys, who regularly beat him up.