Time and Tide

by Peter Grainger

  Terek said, ‘I imagine, then, that this is about what DCI Reeve told me this morning. About your decision to hand in your resignation.’

  ‘Indirectly, yes, it concerns that.’

  ‘Well, I was sorry to hear about it, and I was sorry to hear about it in that way. As your line manager, you could have come to me first. I would have preferred not to hear about it from above, to be honest.’

  For just a moment, Smith looked slightly taken aback, as if he was unable to decide whether the thin, bespectacled man in front of him was afflicted with monumental insensitivity or a monstrous ego.

  “That’s as maybe, sir. I’m sure you’ll get over it. As I say, the reason I’m speaking to you now is only indirectly related to my resignation.’

  It was Terek’s turn to look surprised. He pushed his glasses back towards the bridge of his nose, as if he needed to see more clearly the man in front of him. Smith seemed to be very upright, somehow, as if he was standing to attention, as if he had been some sort of soldier. But the clearer view, if he had taken one, and the pause in the conversation, did not seem to have helped his handling of it.

  ‘As your line manager-’

  ‘Three days.’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘You’ve been my line manager for three days. I’ve known DCI Reeve for more than ten years, and worked closely with her for much of that time, right from when she was a new detective sergeant, sir. So, for both personal and professional reasons, I’m not here to apologise for the way you heard about my decision to resign.’

  Simon Terek’s face had turned a paler shade of white.

  ‘I see. Why are you here, in that case?’

  ‘To say, sir, that you should not treat any members of my team the way you treated Detective Constable Waters just now. Whatever issues you might have with me, personally or professionally, they should not have the slightest impact on how you manage Detective Constables Murray, Butler or Waters. They are all excellent people, and it would be a serious mistake on your part not to give them every opportunity to show what they can do.’

  The detective inspector looked down at his desk and then opened his laptop. Smith concluded that Terek wanted to sit down but would not do so while he himself remained standing.

  Then Terek said, ‘You believe that we have issues – that I have issues with you?’

  ‘I believe it’s possible. We first met under unusual circumstances last year but you have made no reference to that, and you’ve made no attempt to clear the air. Personally, I would have done so in your situation.’

  ‘Would you?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Terek took a little more time out, pressing a button on the laptop that opened a screen.

  ‘And when are you proposing to leave the force, exactly?’

  ‘I have suggested this Christmas as a natural sort of time to finish. I’m told that three months is manageable as far as the procedures are concerned.’

  Terek’s spectacles had slipped a little way down his nose again, and with a forefinger he pushed them back quite unconsciously.

  ‘That gives us – you and me – three and a half months to clear the air, as you put it. I hope that we can do so, DC.’

  Smith acknowledged the offer with a nod, and said, ‘As I say, sir, for myself, I can deal with whatever comes, my days being numbered, so to speak. But I can’t have any member of my team suffering through their association with me. Sir.’

  ‘You have made that abundantly clear.’

  There was another pause. Smith had nothing more that he needed to say, and Terek, perhaps, wanted to be sure that he was saying the right thing.

  ‘So, how would you like to see these three months out? There are always ways for people to wind down, as you well know. We will need someone to office-manage this case, for example. You could go onto that while still making an invaluable contribution, and be pretty much nine to five. If that’s what you want.’

  ‘Not at all, sir. Quite the opposite – I’d rather be out of the office. Nothing personal intended there at all, but I think I’ve always been more use out there talking to people than in here talking to a telephone. And I’m the last person you want responsible for intelligence that needs to be put onto servers and interactive whiteboards.’

  Terek took the point, though he made no further comment about it. Instead, he said, ‘Out in the field it is, then. Anything else?’

  ‘I’ll be taking a couple of weeks’ leave before I go, apparently. I haven’t had much in the past three years, and I’m over the limit that I can take as payment in lieu. It’s the only way they can keep the books straight, they tell me. Apart from that, I’ll just carry on as normal, sir.’

  When Terek nodded, Smith turned to go, but when he had reached the door, the inspector said, ‘DC? I had no intention of causing offence today. If I did so…’

  ‘I understand, sir. Thank you.’

  Waters was waiting outside the mortuary, his hands in his pockets and leaning back against the wall in the sunshine. Smith said, ‘Come on into the morgue. Stop lounging around like some male model advertising cardigans.’

  ‘Cardigans? What’s a cardigan?’

  ‘It’s a highly functional and quite stylish item of male apparel, timeless in its own way, and that’s why you know nothing about it. Have you been in, yet?’

  ‘No. I was waiting for you.’

  ‘Well, you’ll have to stop doing that. There’s a new DI to impress, and I’ve just spent ten minutes impressing him myself. Don’t fall behind, detective constable. Come on.’

  Olive Markham sat at her bench. She must have heard them opening the door, but she was peering down into a stereo microscope, and she did not look up. Smith approached, respectfully as always, as if he never forgot the possibility that one day she might be examining samples from his own corpse to explain his own untimely end.

  ‘Good morning, Sergeant.’

  How did she do that sort of thing? Is there a little mirror in that microscope that shows her the rest of the room as she works? Or has she remembered the sound of his footsteps? Has he really been in here that many times over the years?

  ‘Good morning, Olive,’ and then, with a glance at Waters, ‘Miss Markham.’

  ‘Olive is fine, Sergeant. Christopher and I ought to be on first-name terms by now. What can I do for you both?’

  Smith directed his well-fancy-that expression towards Waters before he answered her.

  ‘We’re just off to the seaside again, for the day-’

  ‘And you popped in to let me know. How kind!’

  ‘And I was wondering whether you’ve got any further with our new client. Anything else you can tell me?’

  She adjusted minutely the wheel that focused the microscope, and uttered a quiet ‘Hmm.’

  Now it was a time for waiting. Smith looked around the room, her domain, and stared at the tools of her trade, neatly arranged on another bench to the left of her. There were bone-saws of different sizes. Once he had watched a pathologist using one to open up a thigh bone because he wanted to sample the bone marrow, though for the life of him Smith couldn’t remember why.

  ‘Diatoms, sergeant. Do you know what they are?’

  ‘Yes, absolutely. They are very small.’

  ‘And you, detective constable?’

  Still she had not looked at them, or even taken her eyes from the lenses. Smith was nodding encouragement to his companion, however.

  Waters said, ‘Microscopic forms of plant-life found in water?’

  ‘Go to the top of the class, detective constable. Ecologically, they are one of the foundations of the food-chain. I’m speaking of the planktonic forms, obviously.’

  Smith said, ‘Yes, so was I, when I said they are very small…’

  ‘They have a boom and bust cycle which is driven by sunlight, water temperature and the level of nutrients available to them. They are single-celled organisms but in their growth phases, they can combine to form ribbons or strands. A
lso, there are differences in the species and concentrations found in sea-water, brackish water and fresh water. I expect that’s really why you came to see me this morning, isn’t it, sergeant?’

  ‘Olive – you have a way of seeing right into a man’s very soul.’

  ‘Ye-es… That might explain why, after all these years, I’m still waiting for a good one to come along. Take a look for yourselves.’

  Smith looked vaguely alarmed for a moment, as if there was some doubt as to exactly what she might be inviting them to take a look at, but Waters had accepted her invitation to stare into the microscope.

  She said to him, ‘Tell me what you can see.’

  ‘A mass of tiny dots and squiggles – mostly a sort of greenish-brown.’

  ‘Very good, Constable Waters. And now?’

  As she spoke, she had rotated something on the microscope. Waters looked again.

  ‘The same more or less but not nearly so many of them. Probably only about ten per cent as many as last time.’

  Olive Markham looked into the microscope again for several more seconds after Waters had moved back. She was methodical in all things – if it was possible to live one’s entire life methodically, Olive Markham did so. She was, Smith knew, one of the most eccentric people that he had ever met, and yet also one of the most sane. Years ago, at the very worst time in his life, when his GP had recommended an evening class as an alternative to a bottle of tablets, Smith had found to his astonishment that the person leading the group in the school hall was none other than Olive. She had taught him what he needed to know about transcendental meditation without ever once referring to their work in the evening class, and without ever once referring to the evening class during their work together since. He would be eternally grateful for her judgement and her discretion.

  Now, for the first time since they entered the mortuary, she was giving the two men rather than the diatoms her full attention.

  ‘I have prepared these samples for Dr Robinson. He will examine them tomorrow morning and send his conclusions along to your detective chief inspector in the usual way.’

  Smith knew where this was going, of course, having heard Olive utter these procedural precautions a number of times by now. He could have completed them himself but instead simply said, ‘But…’ with a hopeful look, and she understood him perfectly.

  ‘But, if I must, I can suggest what he is likely to conclude from them. Sample A, the first one that Christopher viewed, is water taken by yourselves from the saltmarsh creek at,’ and then she checked the label on a test tube beside the microscope, ‘Barnham Staithe. It has a high concentration of diatomic algae. We haven’t the facilities here to determine these down to species level, but that can be done elsewhere if need be. Sample B, the second you viewed, has a much lower concentration of diatoms. It was collected by yourselves from the open sea, some three hundred yards from the shore, according to the geo-tagging data which Detective Constable Waters so helpfully attached.’

  Smith said, ‘And about time, too. I’ve been on and on at him to start doing that geo-tagging thingy, Olive. Go on, then. What did you find inside Mr Sokoloff? Sample A or sample B?’

  She sighed like an elderly teacher confronted with an incurably naughty boy, but there was no point in telling Smith yet again that she was merely the technician and that only Dr Robinson’s conclusions carried the weight of authority – he, Smith, would drag it out of her anyway. She was very good at this – she surveyed the meticulously organised theatre of analysis around her – and he, Smith, was very good at making people tell him what he wanted to know.

  ‘There is not a perfect match here to the samples of water taken from the lungs of the deceased. However, Dr Robinson is likely to suggest that the deceased drowned in water that was much closer to sample B than to sample A.’

  It was a simple enough piece of evidence, of course, not a eureka moment, but Waters could see Smith working on it straight away, going over the pathways that opened up from this point, though he would undoubtedly have already rehearsed them since they had been told that Bernard Sokoloff had drowned.

  Smith said, ‘He got run down by a vehicle on land but he drowned in the open sea. We know he didn’t walk to the beach, and we know he was incapable of swimming any distance at all. Somebody gave him a lift.’

  Waters said, ‘Unless he was knocked over right by the water, somebody gave him two lifts, DC. One in a vehicle and another one in a boat.’

  Olive Markham was back at work with the samples she was removing from the microscope. To neither of them in particular, she said, ‘Or one lift in an amphibious vehicle…’

  Smith actually considered that suggestion before he smiled and shook his head. Then he asked Olive whether she could get traces of fuel oil from Sokoloff’s clothing and tell them the name of the boat that had taken him out to the scene of his murder. At which point, the senior technician of the Kings Lake Central police mortuary bid them good day.

  A little under an hour later, the two of them were sitting in Smith’s Peugeot, in the car-park behind the Royal Victoria. It wasn’t a large car-park, and if every guest brought a vehicle when the hotel was fully booked, there might not be room for them all here. Smith leaned forward and peered up at the rear wall of the building.

  ‘So there’s the camera. What did that Mr D’Olivera say? It doesn’t make a continuous record? Takes a still every so many minutes, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Every ten minutes.’

  Smith took a sideways glance at his companion. Waters hadn’t said much for the last quarter of an hour of the drive. He had his iPad open and was tapping away as usual but that wasn’t the reason for his silence. As they were leaving Kings Lake, Smith had said that it was time for a conversation about career prospects; Waters had said that he didn’t need another one of those just yet, and then Smith had said that they were not about to discuss the bright uplands of Waters’ future – no, this time the subject was to be the darkening vale of his own diminishing days in the police force. Waters had asked a few obvious questions, and then lapsed into a silence that was interrupted only on the outskirts of Hunston, when he had said unexpectedly, ‘Sorry. I suppose I should congratulate you,’ and Smith had answered, ‘Yes, I suppose you should.’ Waters had done so then, with an odd formality but little conviction, and the silence had returned.

  ‘So, what are you doing now?’

  This ‘so’ thing was proving to be highly contagious.

  ‘I’m logging into the hotel’s wifi.’

  ‘Right. Good. But is that covert surveillance? We’re supposed to get a magistrate’s order for that.’

  Waters managed a smile, just, and said, ‘I told Serena I would. We might be able to get calls through the wifi – if not she can at least send an email.’

  ‘Don’t you need a password, though?’

  ‘Yes. I asked for it when we were here last night, and stored it on my phone.’

  Waters was still avoiding any direct look, finding things to do on the screen in his lap, and Smith thought, we can’t have this dragging on all day – old DCI Miller used to say to him “Lad, the best way around trouble is through it.” Get this thing sorted and move on.

  He said, ‘Well, that was good thinking. You do realise that that wouldn’t have occurred to most of us? It’s one of your strengths. Never mind the “Away with the fairies” cracks – when you’re focused on the job, you’re well ahead of the curve. That’s what they say now, isn’t it? So get focused back on this job, even if it does turn out to be my last one. It’s a belter, I can tell you. It’s almost like someone set it up for me.’

  Waters said, ‘Is it the fact that they appointed Simon Terek as DI? I can see how that is awkward, we all can, but… You’d find a way of working with him, DC.’

  ‘I know that. But why should I have to, and why, more to the point, should he have to find a way of working with me? I accept that I’m not ‘old’, not these days, when we’re all expected to live to a hundred a
nd three and lead fulfilling lives as well, but I am old-school, Chris. I’m not going to get on board with all the tech stuff, no matter how hard they push it at me. That’s Terek’s world, and it’s yours, but it’s not mine. Change is happening faster. It’s exponential, and I feel about as relevant as Sherlock Holmes’s bloodhound, if he had one.’

  Waters was looking at him now.

  ‘Well… It just won’t be the same.’

  ‘No. Nothing ever is after it’s changed. That’s sort of the point. I was ready to go a couple of years ago. I was staying on mainly to annoy Superintendent Allen, and then you turned up one morning. You looked so lost I knew that only I could save you, and besides, I owed your dad a few favours. Then there was Murray getting pregnant… No way he could have coped with all that on his own. Then Serena turned up with a van-load of personal issues, and who else could she have turned to for emotional support and advice about relationships?’

  And Waters thought, always the jokes, always that ability to deflect your questions and concerns with humour, but actually, every word of that is true in some way. The screen on the iPad lit up, and a message appeared top right. He clicked on it and read what Serena Butler had just sent to him.

  ‘Sergeant Wilson asked Serena to look for Sokoloff’s bank account. She’s got into it just now. It confirms what the hotel told us last night. His card was used to settle his bill here on Sunday morning.’

  The familiar frown was back now.

  ‘And there’ll be a time attached to that?’

  ‘08.31.’

  ‘So Bernard left here in the middle of Saturday night, and then phoned up on Sunday morning to pay his bill?’

  Waters said, ‘It looks like it.’

  Smith’s expression at that point spoke volumes, and he didn’t need to say the words. It was Waters who continued with, ‘Which as you’ve already said doesn’t tie in very well with what we think we know about the time of death. If he was alive and making phone calls at twenty to nine on the Sunday morning… We said yesterday that what was done to him could hardly have been carried out in broad daylight, which would mean that he didn’t die until the Sunday night, which is right out of the evidential time-frame that we’ve already constructed.’