“Hey, buddy. How you doing there?” he said, his face creased in concern. Jake just stared ahead. “Do you want a can of Coke? It’ll help with the shock.”
“Yes, he would. Thank you,” said Kate. Henry nodded to the police officer, and she went off to the squad car. Kate crouched down next to Henry.
“That lad. He wasn’t wearing diving gear,” said Jake, his voice wobbling. “What was he doing down so deep, with no gear? He was all beaten up. His body was black and blue.” He wiped a tear from his cheek, and his hands were shaking.
The police officer returned with a can of Coke and a tartan blanket. The can was warm, but Kate cracked it open and held it up to Jake. He shook his head. “Have a tiny sip. The sugar will help with shock . . .”
Jake took a sip, and the officer put the tartan blanket over his bare shoulders.
“Thank you. What’s your name?” asked Kate.
“Donna Harris,” she said. “Keep rubbing his hands. Get the blood moving.”
“Donna, put in a call for the marine dive team. And tell them it could be a deep dive,” said Henry. She nodded and placed a call on her radio.
The air was heavy and humid, and dark-gray clouds were forming low in the sky. At the far end of the reservoir sat the hydroelectric plant, a long, low concrete building. A faint rumble of thunder came from behind it. Henry tapped the pencil on his pad.
“Are you both qualified to dive? I know the reservoir is strict, especially with the depth and the fact that the water feeds the hydroelectric dam.”
“Yes. We took our dive certificates at the beginning of August,” said Kate. “We can dive to twenty meters, and we’ve logged thirty hours in the water whilst Jake’s been staying with me over the summer . . .”
Henry flicked back through the pages of his notebook, a frown creasing his smooth forehead.
“Hang on. Jake is staying with you?” he said. Kate felt her heart sink. She would now have to explain Jake’s living arrangements.
“Yes,” she said.
“So, who lives at the address you gave when you called the emergency services . . . Twelve Armitage Road, Thurlow Bay?”
“I do,” said Kate. “Jake lives with my parents, in Whitstable.”
“But you’re Jake’s real, erm, biological mother?”
“Yes.”
“His legal guardian?”
“He’s sixteen. He lives with my parents. They were his legal guardians until his sixteenth birthday. He’s about to start sixth form college in Whitstable, so he’s still living with them.”
Henry peered at Kate and Jake.
“You’ve got the same eyes,” he said. As if this were the confirmation he was looking for. Kate and Jake shared the same rare-colored eyes: blue with a burst of orange emerging from the pupil.
“It’s called sectoral heterochromia, where the eyes have more than one color,” said Kate. Donna finished on the radio and came back over to join them.
“How do you spell sectoral heterochromia?” asked Henry, looking up at her from his pad.
“Does it matter? There’s a young boy’s body under the water out there, and it looks to me like a suspicious death,” said Kate, starting to lose her temper. “He was covered in cuts and bruises, and he must have died recently, because a body will float a few days after sinking. The pressure at that depth and the cold water will slow down decay, but as you know, eventually, a dead body always floats.”
Kate had been rubbing at Jake’s hands as she spoke. She checked his fingernails, relieved to see some color returning. She offered him more Coke from the can, and this time he took a big gulp.
“You seem well informed,” said Henry, narrowing his eyes. They were beautiful eyes, the color of caramel. He was so young to be a detective chief inspector, thought Kate.
“I was a detective constable in the Met Police,” she said.
A faint recollection moved across his face. “Kate Marshall,” he said. “Yes. You were involved with that case a couple of years ago. You caught that guy who was doing the copycat murders of the Nine Elms Cannibal case . . . I read about that . . . but, hang on. You were working as a private investigator?”
“Yes. I caught the original Nine Elms Cannibal back when I was a police officer in 1995. I caught the copycat killer two years ago working as a private investigator.”
Henry flicked back through his notepad, a look of confusion on his face.
“You told me earlier you work as a lecturer in criminology at Ashdean University, but you’re saying you used to be a police officer, and you also moonlight as a private detective? What should I write in my report as your occupation?”
“I was asked to help solve that one cold case two years ago. I was a one-off private investigator. I’m a full-time university lecturer,” said Kate.
“And you live alone, and Jake lives with your parents in Whitstable . . .” He stopped with his pencil hovering above the page and looked up at her again. His eyebrows had shot up into his hairline. “Whoa. Your son’s father is the serial killer Peter Conway . . .”
“Yes,” said Kate, hating this moment, having experienced it many times before.
Henry blew his cheeks out and bent down, peering at Jake with renewed interest. “Jeez. That must be tough.”
“Yes, family get-togethers are difficult to organize,” said Kate.
“I meant it must be tough for Jake.”
“I know. It was a joke.”
Henry looked at her for a moment, confused. You’re nice to look at, but you’re not the sharpest tool in the box, she thought. Henry stood up and tapped the pencil against his pad.
“I read a fascinating study about the children of serial killers. Most of them go on to live pretty normal lives. There was one in America, her father raped and murdered sixty prostitutes. Sixty! And now she works in Target . . . Target is a shop in America.”
“I know what Target is,” snapped Kate. He seemed oblivious to how insensitive he was being. Donna had the decency to look away.
“It must be tough on Jake,” he said, scribbling in the pad again. Kate had a sudden urge to grab the pencil and snap it in half.
“Jake is a perfectly normal, happy, and well-adjusted teenage boy,” she said. At this point, Jake gave a moan, leaned over, and threw up on the grass. Henry jumped back, but one of his expensive-looking tan leather shoes was caught in the firing line.
“Bloody hell! These are new!” he cried, stomping off to the squad car. “Donna, where are those wet wipes?”
“It’s okay,” said Kate, crouching next to Jake. He wiped his mouth.
Kate looked back out across the reservoir. A low bank of black clouds was moving over the moor toward them, and there was a rumble and a flash of lightning.
How did that boy die?
3
After Kate had signed her police statement, she and Jake were free to leave. On the way out of the reservoir car park, they passed two large police vans and the coroner’s van.
Kate watched them in her rearview mirror as they pulled up at the water’s edge. The image of the young boy suspended in the water came back to her, and she wiped a tear from her eye. Part of her wished she could stay and see his body brought safely to the surface. Kate reached out and grabbed Jake’s hand. He squeezed hers in return.
“We need petrol,” she said, seeing the tank was low. She stopped at the petrol station close to her house, pulled past the pumps, and parked at the back. “You should put some dry clothes on, love. There’s toilets here, and they keep them nice and clean.”
Jake nodded, his face still pale. She wished he would say something. She couldn’t bear the silence. He scraped back his wet hair, which was now shoulder length, and tied it with an elastic band he kept on his wrist. Kate opened her mouth to say how terrible elastic bands were for his hair but closed it again. If she nagged him, he would only clam up more. Jake got out of the car and grabbed his dry clothes from the back seat. She watched him trudge away to the toilets, his head hung lo
w. He’d been through so much, more than most sixteen-year-olds.
Kate pulled the mirror down and looked at her reflection. Her long hair was now shot through with gray. She looked pale and every one of her forty-two years. She flipped the mirror back up. This was Jake’s last day before he went back to her parents. They had planned to get pizza after their dive, and then they were going to go down on the beach below Kate’s house, make a fire, and toast marshmallows.
She would now have to call her mother and tell her what had happened. It had almost been a perfect summer. They had almost been a normal family again, but now there was a dead body.
Kate tipped her head back and closed her eyes. The average person in the world didn’t stumble on dead bodies, but here it was, happening again to Kate. Was the universe trying to tell her something? She opened her eyes.
“Yeah, it’s trying to tell you to pick nicer places to take your son,” she said out loud.
She took her phone out of the glove compartment and switched it on. Kate found her mother’s phone number and was about to press “Call,” but then she opened her internet browser and googled “missing teenage boy, Devon, UK.” The data signal wasn’t great out by the petrol station, surrounded by the Dartmoor hills, and her phone ticked over for a minute before the results loaded. There was nothing recent about a missing teenage boy. There was a report about a seven-year-old on the Devon Live website. He’d gone missing for an afternoon in Exeter town center, and he’d been reunited with his family after a tense few hours.
She then googled “DCI Henry Ko, Devon, UK.” The first result was from the local paper.
DISTINGUISHED DEVON & CORNWALL
CHIEF SUPERINTENDENT PASSES THE BATON
The article was from the previous week, about the retirement of a Chief Constable Arron Ko. It said when he’d joined the police in 1978, he’d been the first Asian officer in the Devon and Cornwall borough. There was a picture at the bottom with the caption “Chief Constable Arron Ko was presented with his retirement gift—a pair of silver engraved handcuffs and the Police Long Service and Good Conduct Medal—by his son, Detective Chief Inspector Henry Ko.”
Henry was standing with his father in front of the Exeter police station with the framed award. Arron Ko was portly and overweight in comparison to his handsome son, but Kate could see the resemblance.
“Aha. That’s why you’re so young to be a detective chief inspector. Nepotism,” said Kate. She disliked the jealous voice in her head, but she couldn’t help but compare herself to Henry. She’d worked hard for four years, sacrificing everything to gain promotion to the plainclothes rank of detective constable when she was twenty-five. Henry Ko was only in his early thirties and was already a DCI, two ranks higher than detective constable. She thought back to her days in the police, her life in London.
Detective Chief Inspector Peter Conway had been Kate’s boss in the Met Police when they’d been working on the Nine Elms Cannibal serial killer case. One night, after a visit to the crime scene of the fourth victim, Kate had cracked the case, discovering that Peter was the Nine Elms Cannibal. When she’d confronted Peter, he’d almost killed her.
In the months leading up to this fateful night, Kate and Peter had been having an affair, and unbeknownst to Kate, she was four and a half months pregnant with Jake. By the time she had recovered in hospital, it was too late to have an abortion.
The newspapers had a field day with the story. It had destroyed Kate’s credibility within the police, and her career came to an abrupt end. After Jake was born, she struggled. The trauma of the case and the sudden unplanned motherhood and postnatal depression piled onto her, and she started to drink heavily.
Kate’s parents stepped in several times over the years to look after Jake, but her drinking grew worse, and she ended up in rehab. Kate got clean, but it was too late. Her parents were awarded custody of Jake when he was six, and for the last ten years they had remained his legal guardians.
Sobriety had been hard. She had rebuilt her life and got to see Jake on school holidays and weekends, but his childhood was almost over. She still felt the loss like sharp shards of glass. The loss of Jake, and of the career she had loved as a police officer.
There was a knock on her window, making Kate jump. Jake was now dressed in his skinny black jeans and a blue hoodie. He had more color in his cheeks. She wound down the window.
“Mum, have you got a couple of quid for a pasty and a bar of chocolate? I’m starving.”
“Of course,” she said. “You feeling better?”
He nodded and smiled at her. Kate returned the smile. She grabbed her purse, and they went into the petrol station.
As hard as she tried, she couldn’t shake the image from her head, of the young boy floating under the water. It was frustrating that she would have to wait and see if there was anything about him in the news.
4
SIX WEEKS LATER
Kate emerged through the creaky wooden doors of Ashdean Community Center and paused to take in the view over the rooftops to the waves churning up and smashing against the seawall. A howling wind was blowing, and it whipped her hair around her head. She took a pack of cigarettes from her bag and teased one out, ducking back under the awning to light up.
There were around twenty or thirty people at her Alcoholics Anonymous meeting on this cold October evening, and they nodded good night as they passed. She watched as they hurried to their cars, heads bowed against the freezing wind.
The cold quickly got the better of her. Kate took a final, hasty drag of the cigarette and dropped the half-finished butt on the ground, extinguishing it with her heel. She started walking back to her car, not looking forward to going home to an empty house. The road was now dark and deserted. Her car was parked at the end of the road in a gap between the terraced houses. When she reached it, there was a white BMW squashed in next to her old blue Ford. The door of the BMW opened, and a thin, pale-faced woman got out.
“Kate?” she asked with a London accent. Her brown hair was scraped back from a high, bony forehead, and she had deep-set eyes with dark circles, reminding Kate of a raccoon. She recognized the woman as a newbie from the AA meeting.
“Yes. Are you okay?” she said, having to raise her voice above the roar of the wind.
“Kate Marshall?” The woman’s eyes were running from the freezing air. She wore a long plum-colored puffa jacket, the type that looked almost like a sleeping bag, and she had on bright-white trainers.
Kate was surprised to hear the woman use her full name. She had spoken at the meeting, but she’d used only her first name, as was customary at AA. This woman’s a bloody journalist, thought Kate.
“No comment,” said Kate, opening her car door and intending to make a quick getaway.
“I’m not a journalist. You found my son’s body . . . ,” said the woman. Kate stopped, her hand on the car door. “His name was Simon Kendal,” said the woman, looking Kate directly in the eye. Her eyes were a piercing green and filled with sadness.
“Oh. I’m sorry,” said Kate.
“They told me he drowned.”
“Yes. I saw the local news report.”
“That was bullshit,” she cried.
Kate had followed the story, not that the local news had dwelled on it, but they’d reported it as a closed case. Simon Kendal had been camping with a friend; he’d gone in the water and drowned. His body had then been mangled by one of the maintenance boats that regularly patrol the reservoir. The local news also mentioned that it was Kate who found the body. This was why Kate’s first thought had been that this woman was a journalist.
“His body was all battered up. They didn’t want me to see him in the morgue . . . Look at this,” shouted the woman above the wind. She took a small plastic photo album from the pocket of her coat, fumbled with it, and found a picture of a handsome young man standing by a swimming pool, soaking wet in a Speedo. He had two medals around his neck. “That’s my Simon. He was UK regional champion. S
wimming. He was going to compete professionally. He only missed out on qualifying for the London 2012 Olympic swimming squad cos of an injury . . . A stupid injury . . .” She was flipping the photos and talking fast, as if Kate’s attention needed to be captured. “Simon wouldn’t have jumped in the water with all his clothes on, at night!”
“What’s your name?” asked Kate.
“Lyn. Lyn Kendal . . .” She came closer and looked up at Kate, beseechingly. “What do you think happened? I know you used to be a police officer. I read about you being a private investigator.”
“I don’t know what happened to Simon,” she said. The truth was, in the last few weeks, the story had been filed at the back of Kate’s mind. She had been preoccupied with work and Jake, who had been very distant since his return to Whitstable.
“Aren’t you curious?” Lyn was shaking. She wiped her tears away with an angry swipe of her hand. “You teach crime. You were an investigator. Isn’t my son’s death worth questioning?”
“Of course,” said Kate.
“Can we talk somewhere, please?” asked Lyn, brushing the strands of hair from her face as they were whipped by the wind. Kate wondered if Lyn was sober. The woman looked a wreck, which was understandable.
“Yes. There’s a small café, Crawford’s, on Roma Terrace, at the top of the promenade. I’ll meet you there.”
5
Crawford’s coffee bar was the oldest in Ashdean and Kate’s favorite. There were photos of Joan Crawford and Bette Davis on the black lacquered walls, and a huge smoked mirror hung on the wall behind the Formica counter, reflecting back the giant copper coffee machine, the faded red leather booths, and the view out over the dark promenade. It was empty on this cold, windy Wednesday night. Kate arrived first and chose a booth at the end.
Across the road, the tide was in right up to the seawall, and from her vantage point, Kate was able to see down the length of the promenade. The waves were breaking up over the wall and spraying froth and shingle over the parked cars. A white BMW roared up the road and pulled neatly into the space behind Kate’s battered Ford. Lyn got out, opened the passenger door, and grabbed a bright-green plastic folder and her long jacket.
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