by LJ Ross
Anna pulled a face.
“It’s not him, personally. It’s what he represents,” she said softly. “Jasper Vaughn is everything I hate about academia and, when I’m forced to put up with him for any significant period of time, I start wondering whether I’m in the wrong profession.”
“Anna, you said yourself that Iain Tucker was a leading expert in his field. A man like that knows who he can trust, whose professional opinion matters. He didn’t ring Jasper, he rang you. Don’t you think that means you’re in the right profession?”
She nodded.
“You’re right. I only wish I’d been able to help him when he called me.”
“You’re helping him now, by helping me. I need to know what he found down there, Anna. It feels like it could be the missing piece.”
“If somebody killed Iain to poach treasure, that isn’t the kind of thing they can keep a secret for long,” she argued. “I don’t understand why it matters about the details of his find—”
“It matters because I’m starting to wonder whether Iain was killed because somebody didn’t want the treasure to be found, not because they wanted to keep it for themselves.”
“But, if that’s the case, somebody would have had to know it was down there already,” she said, in disbelief. “Why would they keep it hidden for so long? Why wouldn’t they want to claim it?”
“That’s the question,” Ryan said, and then jerked his head in the direction of the kitchen as his mobile phone began to bleat out a metallic jingle from its position on the granite worktop. A quick glance at his watch told him it was almost seven-thirty, much too early to receive calls from anybody other than the Control Room.
“I think it just got harder,” Anna said, and stepped aside as he crossed the room with long strides, his carefree spirit locked away once more behind a mask of indomitable strength as he prepared to face whatever challenge lay ahead.
CHAPTER 15
An hour later, Detective Constable Jack Lowerson parked his car along a side street in Seahouses and turned off the engine. He rested both hands on the steering wheel and took a moment to collect his thoughts, half expecting the old fear to return. Crippling social anxiety had been his constant companion for months; a persistent torment that preyed on his mind and reared its ugly head in moments such as these, serving to remind him that he was not ready, not capable, not enough.
It had been more than six months since Jennifer’s death and six months since he’d learned his mother had been responsible. It had been a long, painful process of introspection and recovery—long, sleepless nights battling between love for his mother and hatred of what she had done. No matter how bad a person, no matter how wrong their actions, there was never any justification to kill. That was how he had been raised; it was the foundation of his belief system and the morals upon which he’d built his life. His mother had been the first person to teach him that.
And yet, she’d flouted her own rules. Coldly, and without remorse.
He’d visited her once in prison, the jury not having agreed with the defence barrister’s argument that Wendy Lowerson had acted in self-defence and, the truth was, neither did he. It would take a lifetime to forgive her, not only for having taken the life of Jennifer Lucas, former Detective Chief Superintendent of Northumbria CID and the woman with whom he had once shared a bed, but for having shattered the illusion. Or to forgive her for having allowed the police to believe—even for a few days—that he had been responsible.
His mother was not the person he thought she had been.
Lowerson sat there for a while longer, mustering the strength to get out of his little blue Citroen and face the people who had, unbelievably, stuck by him throughout the ordeal. Despite all he had said and done, despite how far he had fallen in both integrity and self-respect, his friends had remained constant. They had stepped back—pushed back, by him—but never so far that they couldn’t step forward again, to catch him when he inevitably fell.
He would never forget it, and he owed them a debt of gratitude that demanded he pitch up today and be part of the team again.
“Come on, Jack,” he muttered, and looked at himself in the rear-view mirror.
He’d made a bit of an effort, deliberately wearing the clothes he’d preferred before meeting Jennifer and wearing his hair the way he liked, not the way she’d told him looked better.
Chip, chip, chip.
That was what she had done to his self-esteem.
But when he looked in the mirror, he saw a man with fewer shadows than before. It had taken strength to get on a plane and fly to Italy for Frank and Denise’s wedding—he hadn’t been ready to face the world, not then. And when the call had come through from Phillips late last night, asking him to return to work, he’d flown into a panic.
I’m not ready, he’d said.
I need more time, he’d said.
And yet, here he was.
Squaring his slim shoulders, Lowerson looked himself dead in the eye.
“Get out of the car and put one foot in front of the other,” he told himself. “You can do this.”
He emerged into the cold November morning and began to make his way towards the harbour, one step at a time.
* * *
When Lowerson reached the seafront, bright yellow road signs had already been set up to create a diversion to lead oncoming traffic away from the section of road giving direct access to the harbour, which had been designated a crime scene. He gave his name to the constable manning the police barrier, who dutifully entered it into the log book and waved him on, pointing him in the direction of a slipway leading down towards the harbourside and a series of tall stone arches. He found Ryan standing outside one of them, deep in conversation with Tom Faulkner, the Senior CSI. A wave of something like brotherly love washed over him, a profound relief at having found someone whose face he knew and recognised, one he had always looked up to.
Both men turned at the sound of approaching footsteps and broke into spontaneous smiles that were so easy, so natural, that Lowerson was embarrassed to find a lump rising in his throat.
“Hey, Jack! Long time, no see,” Faulkner said.
“Hi, Tom,” he managed. “Early start for you, today.”
“No rest for the wicked,” Faulkner winked. “Good to see you back.”
When he stepped away to re-join the small team of forensic staff photographing the area where the body of Mandy Jones had recently lain, tactfully giving the two men a moment to catch up, Ryan turned to Lowerson with a searching expression.
“Thanks for coming in,” he said, quietly. “I have to ask, are you sure you’re up to it?”
Lowerson read patience and understanding but, mercifully, found no trace of pity. He couldn’t have coped with pity from Ryan; that would have been too much to bear.
“I’m up to it,” he said firmly, and realised with a soaring heart that he meant it. “What have we got here?”
Ryan gave a short nod, trusting the man to know his own mind.
“I’ve arranged a briefing at the Coastguard’s Office in half an hour,” Ryan said, getting straight down to business. “They’re loaning us a room for the time being.”
“Fast work,” Lowerson remarked. “Considering the call only came through this morning.”
But Ryan shook his head.
“There’s more to this than meets the eye, Jack. First, a university professor washes up on the rocks at Longstone yesterday morning, only a few hours after he announced that he’d found an important Viking wreck. We’re still in the process of unravelling whether Iain Tucker died of natural causes and, now, the Harbour Master has turned up dead too.”
Ryan’s eyes turned flat as he looked over Lowerson’s shoulder, towards the archway where Mandy Jones had been found. A large pool of blood stained the floor, seeping into the old weathered stone cracks, and the dull glint of an earring or bracelet was just visible in the centre of it all.
“That’s a lot of blood,” Lowerson r
emarked. “She must have bled out, or nearly.”
“They used an old metal hook,” Ryan explained. “We found it lying on the ground, nearby. Faulkner reckons she took a single blow to the back of the head which cracked her skull, then a second blow which pierced her neck and tore an artery in the process. That would account for the heavy blood loss.”
“Who was she?” Lowerson asked, deliberately blocking out the image of another woman whose head had been caved in; a woman he had once loved.
“Amanda Jones, more commonly known as ‘Mandy’. Aged forty-eight, resident of Seahouses and its full-time Harbour Master, employed by the Harbour Commissioners. Phillips and I met her yesterday.”
And joked about her flirtatious nature, Ryan recalled, with a small stab of guilt.
“What’s the connection?”
Ryan simply shook his head.
“We don’t know yet. There may be no connection but that seems very unlikely. Two deaths in as many days in a village where crime is mostly limited to shoplifting are too many to pass off as coincidence.”
Just then, they heard the unmistakable sound of Phillips’ voice carrying on the morning air, as he made his way down the slipway with MacKenzie.
“…I’m tellin’ you, lass, that was Kevin Keegan we passed on the road back there. I’m positive it was.”
MacKenzie’s long-suffering Irish lilt could be heard clearly too.
“Frank, that would be a lot more interesting as a conversation-starter if I knew who Kevin Keegan was.”
Phillips stopped dead at the corner of the first lime kiln, completely oblivious to the fact he had an audience, and stared at his new wife in disbelief.
“Howay, don’t tell me you don’t know the man who single-handedly managed the finest footballing era Newcastle United has ever known? Y’nah, KEE-GAAN, KEE-GAAN!”
He bellowed the simple football chant and several heads turned, including the CSIs, who looked across in varying degrees of confusion.
“Still not ringing any bells, Frank. I must have been busy solving murders, while this golden era of football was underway,” MacKenzie replied, pointedly.
Before he had a chance to respond, she spied the young man she had helped to train and who, until recently, she had thought might never return.
“Jack,” she said, warmly. “I wasn’t sure if you’d come, but I’m so glad you did.”
Uncaring of who might see, MacKenzie pulled Lowerson in for a hug, which he returned wholeheartedly.
All thoughts of football now forgotten, Phillips trotted up and grabbed Lowerson by the shoulders to take a good, hard look at him.
“Good to see you, lad,” he said, in a voice that was suspiciously thick. “About time you came back to work; neither of these two know a thing about The Beautiful Game.”
The smile that spread across Lowerson’s face was so broad, and so real, it transformed him.
“If we can wrap this up by next Saturday, how about we take ourselves off to the match?”
“You’ve got yourself a deal, son.”
CHAPTER 16
Now that the team was reunited, Ryan set about the task of organising their ranks. A brief telephone conversation with the police pathologist confirmed that they had been able to identify a deep skull fracture on the back of the man’s head. There was a possibility it had been sustained post-mortem as the body had been swept back and forth against an unforgiving rock bed, but there was also a very real chance it had been the reason Iain Tucker had ended up in the water in the first place. Since Mandy Jones had been found with a similar head wound, it represented the second injury of its kind and Ryan had long since learned never to ignore a pattern, however incidental.
Leaving MacKenzie and Lowerson in charge of the crime scene, Ryan and Phillips made the short journey to the house Mandy had shared with her daughter, Daisy. Neither man relished the prospect of questioning her next of kin, especially in circumstances such as these, but they both knew that it was better to gather as much information as they could while memories remained fresh in the minds of all concerned.
“Ready?” Ryan asked, as they reached a tiny fisherman’s cottage with a blue-painted door, a couple of streets back from the harbour.
“Aye, let’s get it over with,” Phillips said, and rang the doorbell.
DS Carole Kirby answered, wearing a solemn expression of mourning that paid no deference to her profession. The Harbour Master had been one of them, a neighbour and sometime friend, and her loss was an affront to the village and its sensibilities.
“She’s through here,” Kirby said, and led them along a colourful, seaside-themed hallway towards a cosy living room with an open fireplace and even more colourful décor. Trinkets, pictures and wall hangings covered every available wall space, mirroring its late owner’s eclectic personal style. It took them a moment to realise that Daisy was seated amongst it all, huddled on a teal blue velvet sofa with her legs tucked up beside her.
“Daisy?” Kirby said, gently. “DCI Ryan and DS Phillips are here. You remember, you met them, yesterday?”
Daisy’s head turned automatically, her face haggard with grief.
“I remember,” she said, dully.
Ryan nodded his thanks to Kirby, who melted away into the kitchen to make cups of tea.
“I think DS Kirby has already told you what’s happened,” Ryan began, drawing an easy chair closer to where Daisy sat, while Phillips perched on the other end of the sofa beside her. “We’re very sorry for your loss, Daisy.”
The words always sounded trite, Ryan thought. No matter how many times he said them, no matter how much he meant them, they sounded empty and clinical.
Daisy continued to stare at the wall above the fireplace with a vacant expression.
“I think there’s a cup of tea on the way, but is there anything else we can get you?” Ryan asked, watching closely for signs of medical shock. “Can we call someone? Your dad, perhaps?”
Her face dissolved into fresh tears and Ryan looked to Phillips for divine intervention.
“How about a friend, love? An aunt or an uncle?”
“Josh,” she managed, between great, heaving sobs. “I want Josh.”
They’d rather she’d asked for a family member, but beggars could not be choosers.
“I’ll make the call,” Phillips murmured, and stepped out of the room.
After another minute passed and the tears had abated, Ryan tried again.
“I know this is hard,” he said softly, and dug a bit deeper than he might otherwise have done. “I know, because I lost someone very close to me as well. My sister.”
Daisy’s eyes flickered to his, and held.
“She was murdered, four years ago,” he said, and felt the usual sharp pain in his chest, somewhere in the region of his heart. “At first, it’s hard to believe, impossible to take in,” he said. “But whoever did this to your mum deserves to be brought to justice.”
Daisy lifted a shaking hand to scrub away fresh tears, but continued to watch him with eyes that were glassy pools of misery.
“I don’t know who would have wanted to hurt her,” she choked.
“I can’t give you any answers, yet, but I want to. I want to find whoever hurt your mother, but I need your help,” Ryan said.
“I don’t know how,” Daisy whispered.
“I’m going to ask you some questions. Answer them as honestly as you can and that will be enough.”
Daisy sniffed, then nodded.
“When was the last time you saw your mum?”
The girl raised a hand to her eyes, covering them while she tried to hold herself together.
“Before bed,” she said, almost inaudibly. “We had an argument and then I went to bed.”
“Alright, Daisy. You’re doing fine,” Ryan said, and exchanged a nod with Phillips, who slipped back into the room. “Around what time was that?”
“About eleven,” she mumbled. “I got home a bit before then. We argued, and I went up to bed.
”
She thought of the words she had used, the names she had called her mother, and thought she might be sick.
“What did you argue about?”
Wordlessly, Daisy accepted the cup of tea that was pressed into her cold hands.
“Josh,” she said simply. “Mum didn’t like him.”
The two men exchanged a glance.
“Why not?” Phillips asked.
“She thought he was a waster,” Daisy said.
Daisy raised the cup to her numb lips, scalding her tongue in the process.
“She doesn’t know him like I do.”
“Alright,” Ryan murmured, unwilling to find himself embroiled in matters of the heart. “Did you hear anybody come to the house, after you went upstairs to bed? Or did you hear your mum leave the house at any time?”
Daisy shook her head, dark curls swinging around her pale cheeks.
“I heard the telly go off at midnight, or around then,” she said. “I suppose, I never heard her come upstairs. I didn’t think about it. I didn’t—I didn’t check—”
She broke down again, her body wracked with harsh sobs as she gripped Phillips’ hand, which he’d silently offered.
“You weren’t to know this would happen,” he said.
Before she had a chance to respond, they heard the front door open and close again, followed by the sound of fast approaching footsteps down the hall.
“Daisy?”
“In here,” she called out, brokenly.
When Josh entered the room, Ryan’s first thought was that he looked very young and, in the harsh light streaming through the living room window, very tired—as though he’d hardly slept.
“Daisy,” he said again, and moved across to hunker down beside her, where she threw her arms around his neck. “I’m so sorry.”
“Somebody killed her,” she whimpered. “They left her, down by the kilns, as if she was nothing. Why would anyone do that?”
Josh stared at the wallpaper as she gripped him in a desperate embrace, and he made soothing sounds as his head began to spin.
First Iain, now this.