by LJ Ross
Grief flitted across her face and she shook her head.
“Awful, what’s happened. I can hardly believe he was here one minute and then just… gone.”
Ryan nodded again. There wasn’t much he could offer in the way of platitudes.
“Perhaps you could arrange a private room, where we could sit down and take a preliminary statement from both of you—and anybody who was working here last night?”
Gemma nodded.
“I’ll see to it.”
* * *
They left Gemma to her work and stepped out into the beer garden at the back of the inn, which was blessedly empty. Sea winds had swept away the cloudy morning and left blue skies overhead, but the air was unmistakably cold and nipped at their skin.
It was still preferable to the metaphorical hot-house they’d left behind.
“How’re you doing, lass?” Phillips asked of Anna, as they seated themselves around a wooden picnic table. One would be forgiven for thinking that Anna Taylor-Ryan carried bad luck around with her, judging by the number of police investigations she found herself embroiled in.
“Ah, I’m fine. Really,” she said, rooting around her bag for a pair of gloves. “I’m just so sorry this has happened to Iain.”
“I wish it had been anyone but you he’d called,” Ryan confessed. “Morrison won’t like it when I tell her you’re mixed up in another one.”
Their Chief Constable was a fair woman, but the desk she occupied demanded that things were not only done by the book, but that they were seen to be done by the book. When the wife of her most high-profile murder detective found herself a party to one too many of her husband’s investigations, it didn’t look good.
“I can hardly help who Iain chose to call, last night,” Anna said, a bit testily. “Besides, right at this moment, I couldn’t give a flying…fig what Morrison thinks. I’m more concerned with finding out what happened to a good colleague of mine. Iain has family who will miss him.”
Ryan reached across to give her hand a squeeze.
“We’ll do all we can.”
“I know you will,” she said, returning the pressure. There was nobody in the world she trusted more to seek justice for the dead and those they left behind.
“Yates came back with the details about Tucker’s next of kin,” Phillips put in. “He was divorced, but he has a son who’s twenty-one.”
“Sounds about right,” Anna said.
“MacKenzie’s contacted him, anyhow. The lad’s away at university but he’s heading back today. He and his mother are going over to the hospital together to make the identification.”
“Decent of her,” Ryan said quietly. In his experience, death was a great leveller.
He was momentarily distracted from his chain of thought by a flock of ducks which had wandered into the garden and found their way beneath the picnic table.
“I didn’t know they had eider ducks here,” he said, idly.
“That’s southern talk,” Anna said, with the ghost of a smile. “Around these parts, we call them ‘cuddy’ ducks.”
As always, Ryan found there was more to learn about his adoptive home.
“What’s the difference?”
“Nothing, except legend has it Saint Cuthbert made lifelong friends with the ducks while he was a hermit on one of the Farne Islands, back in the Seventh Century. Apparently, they were so tame you could stroke them. ‘Cuddy’ is local slang for ‘Cuthbert’.”
The local area had a long Christian tradition and the saintly, duck-loving Cuthbert had lived most of his life at the priory on Lindisfarne, except for a short stint living on one of the smaller, uninhabited islands where, presumably, he could commune with his God.
“Aye, I bet they taste nice with a bit of hoisin sauce, n’all,” Phillips joked, earning himself a playful nudge.
“I wouldn’t risk it,” Anna laughed. “The birds are protected around these parts. The Farnes themselves are a nature reserve, under the custodianship of National Heritage.”
As if to reinforce the point, one of the ducks gave a loud quack.
“There, there,” Phillips patted its head. “Keep your feathers on, I was only joking.”
Bemused, Ryan shook his head.
“I know you got the call from Iain at about five o’clock, yesterday,” he picked up the thread of their conversation. “Can you remember exactly what was said?”
Anna cast her mind back.
“I was a bit surprised to hear from him,” she began. “Iain Tucker was a colleague, but I wouldn’t have said we were close enough to be called friends, so it was unusual for him to ring me at home on my personal mobile. There’s a list of our contact details on the internal database at the university but it’s usually for emergencies only.”
“Perhaps he thought it was an emergency,” Phillips murmured, while he stroked the downy head of one of the ducks that had flapped up onto the bench beside him.
“Did he sound nervous? Worried?” Ryan asked.
“No, he sounded excited,” Anna replied, after a moment’s thought. “He was talking so quickly, I had to tell him to slow down. He said I needed to hurry up to Seahouses first thing in the morning because he’d made a major find and he wanted to ask me a couple of questions.”
She smiled at the memory.
“He told me he’d found the Viking shipwreck he’d been searching for all his professional life. He’d seen artefacts, treasure, and, according to him, the ship was mostly intact.”
“Did you believe him?”
Anna lifted a hand and then let it fall away again.
“Iain was a reasonable man. If anything, he could be a bit of a nit-picker on procedure and university bureaucracy. But when it came to his pet project, he was like another person. Diving for wreckage was his passion,” she said, thinking of the man she had known. “And he was so certain there would be wreckage found somewhere off Lindisfarne. To be honest, I wasn’t sure what to think. I didn’t disbelieve him, but I wondered if his enthusiasm might have got the better of him. Does that make sense?”
“Perfectly,” Ryan assured her. “Did he tell you anything else about it?”
Anna turned up her collar against a sudden rush of wind, while she considered the question.
“Well, it was no secret around the university that Iain was searching for something specific, but he rarely went into details. It was a private project, something he kept out-of-hours. All we knew was it concerned the Viking era, specifically around Lindisfarne—but that’s been so heavily researched and documented I don’t know what he hoped to add, particularly as a marine archaeologist. There’s never been a Viking shipwreck, or, at least, we’ve never discovered one around here. There have been other Viking boats discovered in Scandinavia…”
She trailed off as her mind wandered, struggling to remember the snatches of conversation they’d shared.
“I remember he was very interested in a discovery we made on land a couple of years ago, but I don’t understand how that would relate to this project. It wasn’t Viking, for one thing.”
“What was it?” Ryan asked, curious despite himself.
“It was an excavation of an old Pagan burial site beside the Drake Stone, up near Morpeth,” she replied, with a slight shrug. “The practice was for people to be buried with their most prized possessions, so it was a fairly interesting discovery but not particularly unusual from a historical perspective. We found nothing associated with the Viking tradition, as I recall. The bodies were dated to at least fifty years prior to the first Viking raid on Lindisfarne, in 793 A.D.”
“Sounds unconnected,” Ryan agreed, and shelved it for now. “Did he tell you anything about what he’d actually discovered—and where?”
Anna shook her head.
“He was very tight-lipped about its location,” she said. “Iain told me half the village would love to find it for themselves, so he couldn’t afford to take any chances.”
“Is that true?” Phillips asked. “Do you
think he would have been in any real danger?”
“I thought it was paranoia talking,” Anna admitted. “But then, this has happened—”
“We don’t know what’s happened, yet.”
She nodded, drawing strength from Ryan’s steady gaze.
“I told Iain to report his discovery to the proper authorities, but I don’t know whether he took my advice.”
“Who are the proper authorities in a case like this?” Ryan asked. Shipwrecks were hardly his usual milieu.
“If treasure is found, it must be reported to the Receiver of Wreck within a certain timeframe,” Anna said. “There are strict rules about it all. They supervise the salvage of the wreck and produce a report which manages all the competing demands from interested parties.”
“I thought it was a case of ‘Finders Keepers’?” Phillips put in.
“It would be simpler,” she smiled. “Unfortunately, there are all kinds of rules and regulations around marine archaeology, surveying and salvage. It differs, too, depending on the kind of wreck. Either way, Iain could never have claimed any booty as his own.”
“How come?” Ryan asked, in surprise. “I presumed that was why he was so excited about it.”
“Archaeologists are prevented from asserting any form of ownership over treasure like that,” she said. “It’s presumed that their job is to further the body of evidence for the benefit of an ongoing historical record, for future generations.”
“You’re telling me he wouldn’t even get a penny piece?” Phillips was outraged, and the duck let out an indignant quack. “What if he uncovered rubies, pearls…diamonds?”
“Sounds like you’re getting gold rush fever,” Anna said, with a grin. “He might have been allowed to keep a couple of mementos, as a salvage reward, but Iain was a respected marine archaeologist. He wanted to uncover the wreck not for the fortune, but for the fame. If he made an important find, it had the potential to turn him into a household name and he’d be touring the lecture circuit for years to come.”
“Him and a bunch of former prime ministers,” Ryan said, which earned a bark of laughter from Phillips. “Here’s the thing I still don’t understand: what could possibly be rich enough, or important enough, to kill for?”
“If he was killed,” Phillips was obliged to say, and Ryan nodded.
“If Tucker was killed, what could be important enough? There’ve been wrecks before, plenty of them over the years, and nobody’s bothered to kill for them.”
Anna realised she had simply assumed they knew enough about regional history to understand the potential significance.
“Perhaps I wasn’t clear,” she said, looking between them with dark, serious eyes. “The Viking raid on Lindisfarne in 793 A.D. is the first known Viking raid in history. It marks the beginning of the Viking era, between the eighth and twelfth centuries. Aside from a sketchy record of three Viking longboats beaching at Weymouth four years before that, there are no other records to suggest any Viking landings before that time. No longboats have been discovered on the coastline, until now.”
Anna paused, choosing her next words with care.
“The discovery of a Viking longboat in these waters isn’t just remarkable from an archaeological perspective,” she said. “Depending on the date of Iain’s find, it has the potential to rewrite the whole timeframe of the Viking era, as we know it.”
Ryan was a quick study.
“That’s the kind of fame somebody could kill for,” he said, and turned to Phillips with renewed energy. “C’mon Doctor Dolittle. Let’s find out whether any of the locals wanted a taste of immortality.”
CHAPTER 8
“What d’ you think happened to him?”
Daisy spoke in a stage whisper, fearful that, by saying the words aloud, she would be struck down by the same fate as the man who now lay on a cold metal slab.
“How should I know?” Josh replied. “The police are looking into it, aren’t they?”
He let out a short grunt as he lifted a fresh barrel of beer and began connecting the pipes to supply the tap somewhere above their heads. Nobody wanted to go diving today, so he might as well make himself useful.
“What if there’s a killer on the loose?” she tried again, enjoying the play of muscle as he hauled the keg upright.
“Don’t be daft,” he muttered.
“I’m not,” she insisted, her mouth pouting in a way that both infuriated and aroused him. “It’s bad, what happened to Iain. Nobody knows why he was on the water so late and Hutch says he’d hardly touched his champagne, which means he must’ve left pretty soon after nightfall. I can ask my mum about it.”
“She probably isn’t allowed to tell you,” Josh said, straightening up again. “The Harbour Master is supposed to keep an official log—”
“Exactly,” Daisy interrupted him, and hitched herself up onto one of the scarred wooden benches in the basement of the inn. “She has a log, so she’ll know for sure.”
Josh sighed. Some things weren’t worth fighting over.
“Anyway,” she said, her tone changing. “Would you protect me, if there was a psycho killer on the loose?”
Deciding to play along, Josh smiled and walked across to her.
“What if I’m the psycho killer?” he said, and wriggled his eyebrows to make her laugh. “What if I lured you down here, just to have my wicked way with you?”
Quick as a flash, one hand whipped up to circle her neck. Her eyes widened in alarm, then relaxed again as his hand fell away, just as quickly as it had come.
As her arms came up to wind around his neck, they heard the basement door creak open and, a moment later, his mother’s voice called down to them.
“Josh! Have you finished hooking up the line, yet?”
He hissed out a short, frustrated breath while Daisy stifled a laugh.
“Yep! All done!”
“Good, because the police are here and they need to speak to all of us. Come on up to the sitting room,” she said, referring to the cosy front room they shared in a small apartment Hutch had set aside for them on the first floor.
The Manager’s Apartment, he called it.
Charity, she called it.
“I’ll be up in a minute—”
“Tell Daisy to come up with you,” Gemma added, taking the wind out of his sails completely. “They need to speak to her, too.”
When the door slammed shut, Josh pulled Daisy in for a hard kiss.
“We’ll go up in a minute,” he whispered.
* * *
While a small team of Crime Scene Investigators combed the room Iain had occupied at the Cockle, Ryan and Phillips settled themselves a few doors along, in an upstairs sitting room. It formed part of a small but perfectly proportioned apartment which, Gemma had told them, she still shared with her son.
“In my day, you left home at eighteen—sixteen, sometimes—and made your own way in the world,” Phillips remarked, after Gemma left to seek out their first interviewee. “It’s all different now, though. The kids go off to university, or stay and do an apprenticeship or whatever, and they don’t leave until they’re starting to go grey themselves.”
“Maybe some parents like having their kids stay at home for longer,” Ryan remarked.
“Howay, man. They’d never be able to get their leg owa.”
Ryan was confused.
“Owa?”
“Y’nah, leg over, a bit o’ nookie, a bit of a snuggle, that sort of thing.”
“Ah,” Ryan said.
Phillips folded his arms as he warmed to his topic.
“Take this place,” he gestured to the comfortable sitting room with its framed pictures of Josh and chintzy curtains that were back in fashion. “I’ll bet you can hear every creak and moan…pardon the pun.”
He let out a laugh that Sid James would have been proud of, while Ryan hoped for the ground to swallow him up.
“I, ah, see your point,” he managed.
“Anyhow, all I’m saying is
, it’s no good having your grown-up kids wandering about if you’re into Naked Tuesdays.”
“Words to live by,” Ryan said, and made a mental note never to visit Phillips’ home on any given Tuesday.
“What about the lad’s father? Doesn’t seem to be on the scene.”
“Josh took his mother’s surname,” Ryan said quietly, as they heard footsteps approaching. “Who died and made you Jeremy Kyle, anyway?”
Phillips let out another bark of laughter, then the door to the sitting room opened and Gemma stepped inside, balancing a large tray of tea and biscuits from the kitchen downstairs.
“Thought you might need a bit of sustenance,” she said. “I don’t suppose you’ve had time for any lunch.”
Phillips’ stomach rumbled, right on cue.
“Thanks, Ms Dawson,” Ryan said, and waited for her to sit down on the sofa opposite.
“Daisy and my son, Josh, will be along in a minute. Hutch is just dealing with customers, but he’ll pop up when he can. Who would you like to speak to, first?”
“Well, since you’re here, why don’t we start with you?” Ryan said, with an easy smile.
She settled herself on a chair and began to pour the tea.
“Of course,” she said, handing him a cup. “Anything I can do to help.”
“Let’s start at the beginning, then,” Ryan said, taking a polite sip. “How long had you known Professor Tucker?”
She blew out a gusty breath.
“It must be getting on for ten years, now. He’d been coming to Seahouses for years before then, but I’d say he started staying at the inn regularly around ten years ago. That’s when we started renovating the place, too.”
“And you’ve been working here all that time?”
She nodded.
“Oh yes,” she let out a short, mirthless laugh. “I’ve been working and living here for twenty-three years and counting, back when Hutch’s dad still owned the place.”
“You don’t sound very happy about it,” Phillips was bound to say.
Gemma looked down at the tea she held in her hand, then set it back on the table.
“It’s a long story,” she murmured.
Ryan tried another tack.