by LJ Ross
“We’ll get through this together,” he promised her.
The police watched their exchange and felt like voyeurs, but they had a job to do, one that could not wait.
“Daisy, I need to ask whether your mother had been concerned about anything, or anyone, lately? Had she mentioned anything that was troubling her?”
The girl let go of Josh’s neck reluctantly, but continued to grip his hand as she forced herself to continue.
“I hardly saw her, really. We both work—worked,” she amended. “Then, I usually see Josh in the evenings.”
He gave her hand a squeeze, right on cue.
“Is that where you were, after your shift ended yesterday?” Ryan queried.
Daisy nodded.
“After I spoke to you at the inn, Josh and I hung out for a while at his mum’s.”
Ryan didn’t bother to ask how they’d spent the time.
“And then, you came directly home?”
“I walked her home around eleven,” Josh interjected.
Phillips raised a bushy eyebrow at that, heartened to find that the age of chivalry was not altogether dead.
“Did you see anyone loitering around the street or any strange cars parked outside?”
They shook their heads.
“I wasn’t looking,” Daisy confessed. “Besides, it was foggy last night. You couldn’t make out very much.”
Ryan knew that was all they were likely to get from her at present, and it was time for them to leave. They bade her farewell and offered more hackneyed words of sympathy, for which she thanked them in a small, toneless voice.
“If anything comes to mind, get in touch,” Ryan said. “We’ll call around again soon.”
Outside, Phillips turned to his friend with sad eyes.
“Poor lass,” he said, gruffly. “Doesn’t seem like she’s got anybody, now.”
“She has Josh,” Ryan replied, with a small frown. “And we have work to do. Somebody panicked last night, Frank. Killing Mandy Jones in the open like that was a reckless act.”
“You said you wanted them to be nervous,” Phillips pointed out. “Well, seems to me they’re nervous but they’re arrogant too.”
“A heady combination,” Ryan said. “Come on, let’s find them before they take another rash decision and shatter any more lives.”
CHAPTER 17
After they’d taken a preliminary statement from Gemma, Hutch showed the pair of police constables out of the Cockle and turned the latch-key behind them, flipping the sign to ‘CLOSED’. Nobody would be venturing out so early in the morning, anyway, and he needed a moment’s respite; a quiet space to reflect on what had happened in their small, close-knit community.
Gemma watched him from one of the new, expensive leather booths they’d installed a few months previously.
“How’re you doing?” he asked, softly.
She looked up at him with tired, red-rimmed eyes, and simply shook her head.
“You should have seen her, Paul,” she said, using his real name for a change. He liked how it sounded on her lips and wished she would use it more often; he was ‘Hutch’ to everybody else, but he’d rather be ‘Paul’ to her.
“It was awful.”
“Try not to think about how she looked,” he said quickly, and slid into the booth beside her. He was pleased when she didn’t shift away but stayed exactly where she was.
“What’s happening around here?” she said, suddenly, and turned to him in wild confusion. “First, Iain, and now, Mandy. What’s going on?”
“One might have nothing to do with the other,” he said, although he didn’t believe it any more than she did. “Mandy was a good laugh but, let’s just say, she’d lived life to the full. Who knows what she’d got herself mixed up with?”
“You mean, drugs?”
Hutch shook his head.
“I don’t know. But there was always somebody new in her life, every few months it seemed. Maybe one of them wasn’t all they were cracked up to be.”
Gemma said nothing.
“Where’s Josh?” she asked instead.
“With Daisy,” he told her, and sighed when he saw hurt flicker in her eyes, quickly masked. “It doesn’t mean he doesn’t care about you. He knows I’m here, whereas Daisy has nobody.”
She nodded stiffly, knowing he was right.
“I miss him,” she admitted, and brushed away sudden tears. Stupid, she thought. Stupid to cry.
“He’s growing up, finally,” Hutch said, with a lopsided smile. “It took twenty-two years, but Josh is his own man and he’s doing the right thing by that girl. You taught him that.”
She was undone by his kindness and, when he opened his arms, she paused only for a fraction of a second before allowing herself the luxury of comfort. She nuzzled against his chest and breathed deeply of his earthy scent, enjoying the sensation of being held by a man.
They sat there for endless minutes as she let the emotion drain out and he listened, murmuring endearments, rubbing his calloused hand over her back as he would a child. She didn’t know when the sensation changed and the mood shifted, she only knew that she was reaching for him, touching her lips to his, searching.
She felt his body shudder, then he was plundering her mouth, hauling her up against him with a strength she hadn’t realised he possessed.
“Hutch,” she said, putting a firm hand on his chest.
Immediately, he reared away, preparing himself for the rejection that would certainly follow.
“Sorry, I got carried away—”
“I was going to say, we should move upstairs,” she said.
He could hardly believe it, and said as much.
“You—you’re sure?”
“Are you trying to talk me out of it?” she joked, with a lazy smile. “For God’s sake, carry me upstairs before I change my mind.”
With a giddy joyfulness he hadn’t felt in years, Hutch lifted the woman he’d loved for over forty years out of the booth and up into his arms.
* * *
At the precise moment Hutch elbowed his way into Gemma’s bedroom and tumbled them both onto the bed, Ryan and his team congregated in the break room at the Coastguard’s Office. Alex Walker had been true to his word and they found the area had been cleared of clutter to make way for their temporary visitors.
“We’re packed in like sardines, here,” Phillips said, but was mollified somewhat by a tin of custard cream biscuits that was making its way around the room.
“Just don’t make any sudden movements, or we’ll all fall like dominoes,” MacKenzie said, and shuffled to make way for Trainee Detective Melanie Yates, who had recently arrived from Police Headquarters.
Ryan had come armed with photocopied summaries he’d produced overnight, and these were circulated around the room, precipitating a wave of rustling paperwork as its occupants began to thumb through the pages.
“Grab a seat, if you can,” he called out, and tacked another image to the wall, allowing them another couple of minutes to settle in.
“You’re looking well,” Yates said, as she slid into a small space beside Jack Lowerson.
He turned to look at his colleague and blinked, as if seeing her for the first time. A year ago, he’d admired the young woman standing beside him—in fact, he’d spent most of his days mooning over Melanie Yates like a lovesick puppy. She’d always preferred to remain friends and, he supposed, looking back, he could understand why.
Then, Jennifer had come along and changed everything.
“You’re looking well, too,” he said, in friendly tones. “You’ve changed your hair.”
Automatically, she touched a hand to her head, which had previously been capped by a mane of mid-brown hair she tended to pull back into a ponytail. Now, it was styled into a short pixie bob and had been coloured a bold, platinum blonde.
“Yeah,” she said, self-consciously. “It’s a bit different.”
“Suits you,” he said, and then turned away as Ryan beg
an to address the room.
Yates looked at his profile for a few seconds longer and realised something very important and very, very inconvenient.
She was attracted to Jack Lowerson. The New Jack, with soulful eyes that spoke of life and loss, coated in a layer of steel that hadn’t been there before. For a second, she mourned the Old Jack, then her stomach gave a little flutter as he turned to pass her the tin of biscuits that had eventually made their way past Phillips.
Damn, she thought.
“Thanks,” she mumbled, and stuffed a biscuit into her mouth.
* * *
Ryan passed his assessing gaze over the other faces in the room.
Phillips, MacKenzie, Lowerson and Yates all stood at the front, with Coastal Area Commander Alex Walker completing the row beside a couple of his deputies. Tom Faulkner had discarded his polypropylene suit in favour of corded chinos and a thick woollen jumper under an all-weather coat and, at first glance, he might have passed for one of the many fishermen whose livelihoods had been disrupted in Seahouses, of late. Members of the local police had also gathered, led by DS Carole Kirby, and one of them had already been put to work manning a phone that was linked to the Incident Room number, in case of emergencies or if a member of the public had something to report. And they usually did, Ryan thought. Wasting police time with preposterous calls ranging from complaints about slashed tyres to spectres dressed as the Ghost of Christmas Future.
“Alright, let’s make a start,” he said, for once not having to raise his voice to be heard. “Before we get into it, I want to thank you all for pulling together on this. We’re only just beginning our investigation but, if we start as we mean to go on, there’s every chance we’ll crack this one together.”
He hoped.
Angling his body towards the wall behind him, Ryan rapped a knuckle against the first of two large images he’d stuck in the centre.
“This is Professor Iain Tucker,” he said, looking into the man’s harmless, slightly myopic gaze as it stared out from a photograph taken from his profile on the university website. “He was the Head of Marine Archaeology at Durham University, until his body washed up against the rocks beside Longstone lighthouse yesterday morning. He was fifty-seven, divorced with a grown-up son. By all accounts, he was a regular feature at Seahouses as well as a well-known member of the local and wider Northumbrian diving community. He’d worked on countless projects in his professional capacity, but we’re most interested in his lifelong interest and possible obsession with a Viking longboat wreck he claimed to have found the night before he died.”
Ryan paused, letting the information sink in.
“As you can imagine, by the time we found Iain, there wasn’t too much of him left. However, I’ve now received a preliminary report from the pathologist, who hasn’t ruled out the possibility that a deep skull fracture was sustained prior to his entering the water. It’s also probable that Iain had spent up to fifteen hours in the water, given the advanced state of decomposition and distension of his body. That tallies with the witness statements we’ve taken from the last people to see him alive, who confirm that he was alive and well at five-thirty.”
“We got the PLB data back just before,” Walker interjected, correctly assuming that Ryan would want to know the update. “Turns out, the Personal Locator Beacon inside Iain’s dinghy had been transmitting consistently throughout the past week. We haven’t had a chance to look into it, yet, but I thought you’d want to know.”
This was a major development. If, as they suspected, the dinghy had been tethered to Iain’s diving boat throughout his time at Seahouses, it provided a means by which they could map his movements and, moreover, narrow down the search for the precise coordinates of the wreck he had found.
“I thought PLBs worked as emergency distress signals,” Ryan said. “Don’t you need to activate them before the GPS will operate?”
“Yeah, but there’s a new generation of them, now,” Walker explained. “Before, the battery life was so bad you couldn’t keep them on all the time but now the technology’s a bit better, people can leave them on and transmitting constantly, which is good news for us.”
Ryan flashed a smile.
“You can say that, again. If you could start working back through the data and mapping the coordinates, it’d be a huge help. I can give you a couple of analysts to work with, if need be.”
Walker waved the offer away.
“It’ll be quicker if I do it myself,” he said, and mentally re-shuffled his workload. It was, as Ryan had already said, a matter of everyone pulling together.
“For those of you who are just coming to the investigation today, I should tell you that Tucker’s boat remains missing. The Automatic Identification System had been disabled, as had all other forms of GPS transmission, for at least a week. That would strongly suggest that Iain was responsible for disabling the AIS himself, possibly because he wanted to keep the exact location of his diving search private from other vessels, but he forgot to do the same for his PLB.”
“You think somebody would kill for an old Viking longboat?” MacKenzie asked. “Seems a lot of trouble to go to.”
Ryan’s thoughts exactly, but he did not voice them, yet.
“Until we know what’s down there beneath the water, we can’t say whether it played any part in Tucker’s death. All we can say for certain is that he went missing in unusual circumstances and that his behaviour was out of character.”
“Any suggestion of suicide?” Lowerson asked, slipping back into his old skin with remarkable ease.
Ryan shook his head and spoke to the room at large.
“Tucker called my wife, Doctor Anna Taylor-Ryan, who happens to be a colleague of his at the university. Phone records tell us the call was made shortly after he returned to dry land, which was at ten-past-five, according to the Harbour Master’s log. Tucker rang Anna to ask for a meeting the next morning. That isn’t the action of a man who doesn’t intend to be alive the next day and, besides which, all the witnesses agree his mood was upbeat.”
Lowerson nodded.
“We’ve requested CCTV footage from all available businesses and private residences in the village, but it’ll be a huge task to go through it all,” Ryan continued. “As it currently stands, there’s no footage of Iain leaving The Cockle Inn for the final time and no witness evidence to tell us when, exactly, that was.”
“Not much in the way of forensics, either,” Faulkner chipped in, from the back of the room. “I’ll chase up the samples today, but we found no evidence of an altercation in the room where Iain was staying. There were dozens of separate DNA samples, as well as fingerprints in the hotel room and the same amount again in the dinghy.”
Ryan held back a sigh. There were some things, he knew, that couldn’t be rushed. More importantly, they shouldn’t be rushed.
“Understood, Tom. Let’s ask everyone at the inn to provide some voluntary samples, to assist the investigation.”
Faulkner nodded.
“We have the opposite problem at the crime scene on the harbour,” he continued. “There, we have a body, a murder weapon and a clear cause of death. We’ve photographed everything, and we’ll bag everything up as the day goes on. We’ll be working our way back over the likely route she took going down to the lime kilns, then we’ll make a start on the Harbour Office and her cottage.”
It was good, fast work.
“Thanks,” Ryan said, with feeling. “Let us know what you find. For the rest of you, this brings me on to the second image on the wall.”
He moved across to a colour photograph of Amanda Jones, taken from a frame at home provided by her daughter.
“This is Mandy Jones, the former Harbour Master of Seahouses. She was single, with a daughter, Daisy, who’s twenty-two and a resident of the village. She was found dead this morning by another local resident, Gemma Dawson, who helps to run The Cockle Inn, employs Mandy’s daughter and whose son, Josh, is currently dating the daughter, t
oo.”
“Bloody hell, it’s like Cabot Cove,” Phillips muttered, earning himself a sharp jab from MacKenzie.
“Without the loveable Angela Lansbury to help us to solve the mystery,” Ryan lamented, choosing to see the funny side. “Mandy was found with a deep head wound and laceration to her neck, which most likely severed an artery and precipitated cardiac arrest. We’re in the process of gathering statements to understand her last movements, which are unclear. Her daughter has no knowledge of when she left the cottage, except that it would have been sometime after around eleven-thirty, when she was still alive.”
“What about phone records?” MacKenzie asked. “Eyewitnesses?”
“None so far,” Ryan replied. “In the three hours since Mandy was found, we’ve made good progress, but there’s a long way to go. No mobile phone has been recovered for Mandy, so we’ll have to go to the telephone company for the information. Considering it’s the weekend, that’s like requesting the Ark of the Covenant.”
There were a couple of laughs, then Ryan grew serious again.
“For the moment, I’m treating these deaths as a linked investigation, which has been cleared by the Powers That Be. That being said, please bear in mind the possibility that there may be no link at all, so I want to know about all former spouses or partners, any recent problems or assaults, even arguments over parking spaces. You never know.”
There were nods around the room.
“There’s going to be a lot of footwork and plenty of long hours,” he warned them. “I’m making no apologies; this is what you signed up for. However, to streamline things, I’m going to assign two Senior Investigating Officers, one to each victim. I’ll oversee the Tucker case, and I’m going to ask you, MacKenzie, to oversee Mandy Jones. We’ll reconvene regularly to discuss progress and see where the two overlap.”
Denise nodded her assent.
“Consider it done,” she said.
“Good. Phillips, you’re with me. Lowerson, Yates, you’re with MacKenzie. The rest of you will be assigned tasks as and when the need arises, and we’re grateful for your assistance.”
He drew in a deep breath and then clapped his hands together.