by LJ Ross
“She thinks the body could be him?”
Ryan nodded.
“She drove up to Seahouses this morning, for a meeting they’d arranged for ten o’clock. He never turned up, and nobody has seen him since last night. Apparently, Tucker’s car is still parked beside the inn where he was staying but his boat is missing from the harbour.”
“Aye,” Phillips mused. “He must’ve taken it out and run into some trouble. The waters around the Farnes are dangerous. It wouldn’t take much more than a few heavy waves or a jagged rock to take a boat under—and him with it. Wouldn’t be the first time that’s happened, although you’d think he’d have put a call through to the Coastguard.”
Ryan nodded.
“You’d think.”
“Still, it might be nothing suspicious.” Phillips was ever the optimist. “It’s bad luck if the bloke took a tumble, but we have no reason to think anybody wanted him dead, do we? It might not be a case for CID, at all.”
“I’m not so sure about that,” Ryan surprised him by saying. “If the body turns out to be Iain Tucker, he might have made a big discovery. What if somebody got wind of it and decided they wanted it for themselves?”
Phillips snorted.
“Sounds a bit far-flung, if y’ ask me. It’s not as if he’ll have found a chest of gold doubloons.” He barked out a laugh. “More likely, some old duffer had one too many pints last night and lost control of his boat.”
As they approached the village, they spotted a couple of squad cars parked by the harbour wall and a growing crowd of locals who had come to witness what the sea had tossed up. Ryan parked the car as close as he could and, after a brief discussion with the first police responders, they began to make their way down the slipway to where the lifeboat had just returned from its grisly task.
“Come on,” Ryan said. “Let’s see whether Iain Tucker has turned up, safe and sound.”
CHAPTER 4
The man who had been Iain Tucker might now be safe, but he was no longer sound.
He was little more than a bloated shell, a beached carcass that had once been a man, and the two murder detectives looked upon the wasted life with eyes that were twin reflections of compassion.
“Poor bastard,” Phillips said, gruffly.
Ryan simply nodded.
The body had been strapped to a lifeboat stretcher and was afforded some protection from the elements—and the prying eyes—by a thick body bag, which was unzipped to allow the two men to view the damage.
Phillips felt his stomach perform an uncomfortable somersault and the gentle sway of the lifeboat did little to help matters.
“I’ll, ah, I’ll just—”
“Take a breather, Frank.”
Ryan didn’t begrudge his sergeant a moment’s respite; it was all he could do to keep his own system in check.
A crowd had gathered by the harbour wall, wrapped up warm in overcoats and woollen hats as if it were a variety show, and a couple of local police had been dispatched to keep them as far back as possible. All the same, Ryan could feel their eyes boring into his back as he disembarked the lifeboat a minute or two later and stepped aside to allow a pair of technicians to transport the man to the mortuary, where a full post-mortem would be carried out.
“What d’ you reckon, then?” Phillips asked, once they were back on firm ground. “At least we know for certain that it’s Iain.”
They had recovered a sodden wallet from the inner zipped pocket of the dead man’s coat and, while much of its contents had been reduced to pulp, the plastic cards had survived to help identify their owner.
“We know that he had Iain’s wallet,” Ryan said. “But we need to track down a next of kin, if there is one. Somebody needs to make a formal identification.”
It was a grim task, one he regretted having to ask of anyone, but necessary all the same.
“I’ll ask Yates to get on to it,” Phillips said, referring to Trainee Detective Melanie Yates, who was manning a desk back at CID. “It looked to me as though he’d been bashed about a fair bit, so it’s hard to tell how long he’d been underwater. Then there’s the birds and the fish.”
On that last meaningful observation, Ryan stuck his hands in his pockets and looked out across the sea, thinking of what gallons of salty water and sharp rocks did to a man. The image of Iain Tucker’s swollen flesh, of the skin that had been flayed from his body, imprinted itself upon his memory like the shutter of an old camera.
“The pathologist will be able to help with post-mortem interval,” was all he said. “I’m more concerned about the fact he wasn’t found in his diving gear.”
Phillips rubbed his chilly hands together.
“Why?”
“Because Iain Tucker was here to dive. It was the only reason for him to be out on the water, of his own accord. Why else would he head out, at night or in the early morning?”
Phillips nodded slowly.
“You’re thinking someone forced him out there, or maybe he was meeting someone?”
Ryan squinted as the sun broke through the clouds and burnished the water in gleaming light, so that it lapped against the harbour walls like molten silver.
“I don’t know what to think. We need to have a word with the coastguard, the lighthouse keeper, and then find Anna and speak to the people who were the last to see him alive.”
“Did somebody call for a coastguard?”
When Ryan and Phillips spun around, they were greeted by a man who might have stepped straight off a Californian beach and not a windswept Northumbrian shoreline. The coastguard was a little under six feet and unseasonably bronzed, dressed in all-weather uniform. A pair of expensive-looking sunglasses were propped in his gravity-defying blond hair and, when he flashed a smile, they were treated to a line of blinding white teeth.
“Well, look what the tide dragged in,” Ryan said, before he was enveloped in a bear hug. “It’s been a while.”
“Aye, good to see you,” Phillips said, and accepted a dose of the same medicine.
Coastal Area Commander Alex Walker stepped back and looked between the pair of them.
“Haven’t seen you both since the wedding, last year,” he said, referring to Ryan and Anna’s quiet, romantic nuptials the previous summer. “Shame that you’re here on business—not that it isn’t great to see you two reprobates,” he added.
“Thankfully, the circumstances are different from the last time we were in the area on business,” Ryan said. “We don’t know whether there’s anything to investigate, yet.”
Walker reached inside one of the pockets of his waterproof coat and pulled out a packet of mints, which he offered around. The past was painful, not least because it had been his own father who had perpetrated a series of vicious murders on Lindisfarne three years before. The awful truth of it had nearly destroyed his family, not to mention his friendship with Anna and Ryan, and any reminder of that time in his life was a topic best avoided.
“Well, that’s something,” he said, grasping around for a change of subject. “I hear congratulations are in order, Frank? Denise finally made an honest man of you, eh?”
Phillips beamed.
“Aye, I’m a lucky man,” he said, thinking of how lovely Denise had looked standing beside him at the altar in Florence. Lord knew what she saw in him, but he was wise enough not to question it.
“Give the new Mrs Phillips a kiss from me,” Alex winked.
“Aye, you’d be lucky,” Phillips growled, good-naturedly. “Besides, that’s still MacKenzie, to you.”
“Modern woman, eh?”
“She’s a brave one, that’s for sure,” Ryan chipped in, and steered the conversation gently back to the matters at hand. “Talk us through what happened in the last hour, Alex.”
The coastguard blew out a windy breath.
“Let’s see, now. The call came through from HQ in Humberside to the Coastguard here in Seahouses around an hour ago,” he began. “Turns out, Anna had already been around to the offi
ce asking after Iain Tucker.”
“And had they heard anything?” Ryan asked.
Walker shook his head.
“No, they hadn’t heard a thing, so they rang Lindisfarne to ask whether we’d received any distress signals or pan-pans—”
“Panna-whatty?” Phillips asked.
“Pan-pan is an urgency signal,” Alex explained. “It’s the signal people use if they’re in an urgent situation but not one that poses an immediate danger to life or to the vessel. If there was imminent danger, they’d send a mayday signal.”
“And you hadn’t received either?”
“Not a peep,” Walker confirmed. “Same for Howick and Berwick-upon-Tweed. None of the nearby coastguard stations received anything from Tucker, and there’s no sign of his vessel on the radar, either. My best guess would be that it went under sometime during the night or it’s out of range.”
He nodded towards the sea which seemed so placid, then pointed towards the dark clouds that rumbled in the distance.
“Storm came in through the night,” he told them. “It’s moving out, now, but if he was out on the water after dark, Tucker might’ve found himself caught up in it.”
“You’d have to be a bloody fruitcake to go out on the water in the dead of night,” Phillips declared.
“A fruitcake, or just a fool in love,” Ryan muttered, with a trace of embarrassment. A few years before, it had been Alex Walker he had to thank for guiding him through the rocks and safely into Lindisfarne Harbour so that he could reach Anna in the nick of time. He’d never known anything like the fear he’d experienced manning a tin-pot boat against all the might of the North Sea. Give him murderers and psychopaths; he’d take them over a fight against Nature, any day.
“I was lucky that night,” he said, with his usual flair for understatement. “But Iain Tucker wasn’t. How come there was no alert, if his boat got into trouble?”
Walker slipped his sunglasses onto the end of his nose as another bright shaft of light broke through the clouds.
“Good question. If he didn’t send a manual ‘mayday’ or urgency signal over the radio, Tucker could have pressed the distress button on his radio, if it was equipped with DSC—”
“I need a glossary here, man,” Phillips complained.
“It’s Digital Selective Calling over the VHF…that’s Very High Frequency channel sixteen, on the marine radio,” Ryan explained.
“Might’ve known you’d be clued up about it all,” Phillips grumbled. “If that Tuscan villa’s anything to go by, you probably have a super-yacht stashed away in your back garden.”
“Har har,” Ryan replied
“Villa?” Walker’s eyes lit up. “What villa?”
“I’ll tell you later,” Ryan muttered. “You were saying there should have been other ways for Tucker to send a distress signal?”
Walker nodded.
“I’d need to know more about his boat but, theoretically, yes. It should have had an Automatic Identification System and an Emergency Position-Indicating Radio Beacon with an in-built GPS receiver. Hell, he could have sent up a flare and done it the old-fashioned way.”
“The boat should have had GPS?” Ryan queried.
“Yeah, should’ve. Except, it’s looking like the boat’s EPIRB wasn’t registered on our system,” he said, and pulled an expressive face. “That would’ve made life a lot easier, if it had been. As it is, we’re pissing in the dark.”
The other two men nodded sagely.
“Best thing would be to speak to the Harbour Master,” Walker advised. “They should have a record of when Tucker’s boat left the harbour, as well as its vital statistics.”
He turned and pointed towards a squat, boxy building on the far side of the pier.
“Harbour Office is right over there.”
CHAPTER 5
Far from being the gnarly old sea captain they might have expected, the Harbour Master turned out to be a glamorous woman in her late forties, who managed the turnover of boats in and out of Seahouses Harbour with a pair of capable and impressively manicured hands.
“Amanda Jones?”
She held up a single, blue-painted fingernail as she spoke rapidly into her radio and then swung around in her desk chair to face the newcomers. While her eye passed over Phillips with what he considered to be indecent haste, it lingered for a noticeably longer time on the tall, cool, raven-haired drink of water standing beside him.
“Yes?” she said.
“My name is Detective Chief Inspector Ryan, and this is Detective Sergeant Frank Phillips.”
He held up his warrant card for her inspection.
“Call me Mandy,” she said, barely glancing at his warrant card. “I guess you’re here about Iain.”
“Yes,” Ryan nodded. “We’re hoping you can help us by answering a few questions.”
“Anything for you,” she said.
“Thank you,” Ryan said, trying not to feel disconcerted by what appeared to be a thorough inspection of his jean-clad legs. “To begin with, can you give us a brief description of Iain Tucker’s boat?”
“The Viking Princess?”
“That’s the one.”
“Let me see,” she turned back to one of the computer screens on her desk, nestled alongside the remnants of a half-eaten pain au chocolat and a stack of glossy magazines.
“Here we are,” she said. “The Viking Princess is listed as being a passenger vessel equipped with diving lift, eight by four metres, blue and red painted stripes with a max speed of thirty knots. Do you want the MMSI?”
Phillips rolled his eyes.
“Maritime Mobile Service Identity,” Ryan murmured, for his benefit. “No, that’s alright, we’ll follow up with a formal statement later. Can you tell us who was on shift here, last night?”
“Sure, that would be me, same as every night. I started at midday, finished around nine.”
“Who fills in the rest of the time?”
“I’ve got a deputy,” she said. “The Commissioners spring for extra staff in High Season but, since it’s autumn, it’s just the two of us at the moment. Carl did the six a.m. to midday shift, yesterday.”
“So who logs the boats after dark, when neither of you are around?”
Mandy leaned back and crossed her legs.
“In the first place, hardly anybody would take a boat out in the dead of night around these parts. It’d be tantamount to suicide, especially with a storm raging off-shore,” she said. “But aside from that, we use a VTS system. That’s the Vessel Traffic Service,” she explained. “It’s a monitoring system, a bit like air traffic control. We use a vessel’s Automatic Identification System, radar and VHF radio to keep track of all the vessels coming in and out. Whenever a new boat comes within range, it gets flagged up, not only to us but to each other. It’s a public system, so the boats can avoid a collision.”
Ryan thought of what Alex Walker had already told him about the boat’s GPS.
“Do you have any automated record of the Viking Princess?” he asked.
“Iain’s boat?”
Ryan inclined his head and Mandy tapped a few keys on her desktop, then clucked her tongue.
“That’s weird,” she muttered.
“What is?”
She leaned back and ran agitated fingers through her stylish blonde bob.
“It looks like Iain’s AIS wasn’t activated,” she said. “I guess because I always saw him coming in or out, I never stopped to check if he was transmitting.”
“Isn’t it a legal requirement?” Phillips asked, without rancour.
“It is, of all passenger vessels regardless of size, and international voyagers above a certain weight,” she told him. “There’s no legal requirement for other boats to have one.”
“Besides which, an AIS can be deactivated,” Ryan added. “Marine authorities sometimes do it if they want to take pirates by surprise, or sail beneath the radar. The reverse is also true.”
“That’s right,”
she agreed. “The whole reason to have AIS is to make your boat visible to other boats in the area but, around here, the boats are mostly smaller until you get further out—and then you’re talking about tankers and cruise ships. I can’t think why Iain would want to deactivate his.”
Her face took on a thoughtful, troubled expression, and Ryan thought privately that a man in search of an important archaeological find might have had plenty of reasons to keep his precise location a secret.
“Does that mean you can’t tell us what time the Viking Princess left the harbour, last night?”
She had the grace to look abashed.
“Without an automatic log on the system? No, I can’t. I can only tell you the boat was still here when I finished my shift, at nine.”
“What about a Personal Locator Beacon?” he asked, and worked hard to rein in his mounting frustration. “Had Tucker registered one of those?”
Mandy brought up another database and performed a quick search. PLBs had a unique identification number and were designed to be carried on a person’s clothing during situations with a high risk of ‘man overboard’ or in other similarly dangerous scenarios. There was a chance—just a chance—that Iain Tucker had carried one.
“Yes,” she said, excited to have redeemed herself. “There’s one registered here, with details of the Viking Princess. I can tell the Coastguard—”
Ryan thought quickly. There had been no PLB recovered with Tucker’s body, but it might still be with the missing boat. When they found the boat, they may find further clues as to how a mild-mannered university archaeologist wound up dead on the rocks.
He looked at Phillips, who read the silent message in his eyes.
“I’ll get in touch with them now,” he said. “They can get a search underway.”
As Phillips stepped outside to make the call, Ryan turned back to the Harbour Master.
“What about CCTV? There must be something covering the harbour.”
“Yes, we’ve got two small cameras,” she told him. “Would you like to see?”