by LJ Ross
“I can’t comment on that,” the man said, and jutted his chin towards the Jolly Roger and the men and women who watched with frank curiosity to see how the discussion would pan out. “Please ask your team to stand down.”
“I’ll do no such thing,” Ryan shot back. “That wreck might be a war grave—and I have every sympathy for the families of the seamen who lost their lives—but it’s also a crime scene and that takes precedence, in my book. If you’ve got a problem with that, take it up with my superiors.”
The man’s jaw almost dropped at the audacity of Ryan’s response; it was rare to come across anyone who would argue with a naval officer, and rarer still to find rebellion in the lowly ranks of the police. But then, he knew very little about the man standing before him, especially not the fact that Ryan had grown up around diplomats and military types and was therefore completely unfazed.
“I warn you again, Chief Inspector, we have the capacity to impound your boat.”
“Then do it,” Ryan said, taking a step closer so they stood toe to toe. “All I’m hearing from you is a lot of hot air. If you plan to stop me from fully investigating a crime scene, you’ll have to impound that boat because I’m going back to the wreck of HMS Bernicia, whether you like it or not.”
Smythe-Weston couldn’t help admitting a measure of respect for the man who was prepared to stand his ground and, as it happened, Ryan was right. Unless he called up one of Her Majesty’s warships, he couldn’t prevent the boat leaving the harbour.
“I strongly advise against it,” he blustered, conscious of losing face in front of his staff.
“What civilian jurisdiction do you have?” Ryan asked him, and then answered the question for him. “You have no powers of arrest or prosecution. In fact, all you’re doing is wasting our time. Now, if you believe a crime has been committed here in Northumberland, report it through the usual channels or, even better, call the Incident Room,” he drawled, slapping one of his business cards into the man’s unsuspecting hand. “In the meantime, I’ve got a triple murder to investigate.”
With that, Ryan turned and climbed back onto the boat, without looking back.
* * *
On land, Phillips and MacKenzie made their way to The Cockle Inn for the stroke of nine o’clock, finding it open to the breakfast crowd which consisted of two fishermen and a Dutch family who’d been staying at a holiday cottage by the beach nearby. They found Gemma serving in the dining room, moving with practised efficiency despite the fact she’d hardly slept the previous evening.
“Morning, Ms Dawson,” Phillips said, and she barely held back a sigh. It seemed her family would be subject to a never-ending cycle of questions and interviews and she wondered if they would ever be free of it.
“Morning,” she said, with as much feeling as she could muster. “Let me get the last of these breakfasts out, then I’ll come and join you. Would you like a coffee?”
“That’d be very kind,” MacKenzie said, and watched the woman slip back into the kitchen.
They had just settled on a table in the corner when Josh came in, pausing only briefly before walking across to join them at the table.
“Do you need to speak to us again?” Josh asked, and Phillips cleared his throat.
“Have a seat, lad. We wanted to wait until—ah, here they are.”
Gemma and Hutch emerged from the kitchen, the latter drying his hands on a tea towel as he walked out, and they realised he must have been standing in for the chef.
“Gemma says you need to see us?” he said, with none of his usual friendly charm.
“Why don’t you have a seat,” Phillips replied, pulling out the chair beside him. What they had to say was best said face to face.
MacKenzie lowered her voice, so that her words wouldn’t carry across the room.
“Our laboratory worked through the night to extract DNA from the bone marrow in the remains we found on board the naval shipwreck yesterday afternoon,” she said. “Once they had a profile, it was a simple exercise to compare it with the samples Josh and Paul kindly volunteered previously, in connection with the death of Iain Tucker.”
“Is it him?” Josh asked, through lips that were bone dry. “Please, just tell me.”
MacKenzie nodded.
“Yes, we believe the man we found on board what we now know to be the HMS Bernicia was your father, Kristopher Reid. I’m very sorry for your loss,” she said, to all of them.
Hutch stared, while Gemma simply rested her head in her hands.
Only Josh remained clear-sighted, his eyes blazing with unshed tears.
“Are you sure?”
MacKenzie’s eyes pricked with sudden emotion, taking her by surprise. She’d given news of this kind to countless families before; in fact, she’d delivered much worse than the message she’d just relayed, but there was something about the vulnerability in the young man’s face that wormed its way behind her defences.
Underneath the table, Phillips put his hand over hers and that simple gesture almost tipped her over the edge.
“We’re as sure as we can be,” she said briskly. “There was a familial match between the diver’s DNA, yours and your uncle’s profile.”
They did not include Gemma in that analysis, given that there would be no genetic link between her and the late Kristopher Reid.
Josh nodded, then scrubbed both hands over his face.
“That’s it, then,” he said, with false cheer. “Now we know.”
“Yes, now we know,” Hutch repeated, in a funny sort of voice.
“How did he die?” Gemma forced herself to ask, though part of her didn’t need to know. “Did he drown?”
“The cause of death cannot be established definitively at this stage, although it’s most likely Mr Reid suffocated by drowning, yes.”
MacKenzie thought of the conversation she’d had with Jeff Pinter, the police pathologist, who’d worked overtime to provide a preliminary assessment of the pitiful remains they’d found inside the diving suit. It had taken him half the morning to lay out the parts of Reid’s skeleton in the correct formation, but the process had confirmed one thing: there were no puncture marks or indentations to the bones that spoke of a knife assault, nor any clean knife tears to the diving suit.
Nevertheless, the man had been trapped inside the cabin space, an underwater tomb that would have been the last thing he ever saw. She didn’t like to think of the kind of terror he must have felt knowing he would die alone, in darkness, beneath the oppressive weight of the sea.
“We’ll be re-opening the old files relating to your brother’s disappearance,” Phillips was saying. “It may be a distressing time for all of you, having to re-live the trauma all over again, but I’m afraid we need to look at the lines of enquiry that were relevant back in 1995.”
“We understand,” Gemma said, when Hutch remained silent.
“In that case, we need to ask you and Mr Hutchinson a few questions which, I think, would best be done in private,” Phillips added, sparing a thought for the young man who couldn’t possibly have any answers relating to his father’s disappearance.
“I’ll see how Daisy’s getting on,” Josh murmured, and excused himself from the table.
Once he’d left and was well out of earshot, MacKenzie and Phillips exchanged a glance. They had more news to impart and, in some ways, what they had to tell this family now was worse than before.
“Ms Dawson, Mr Hutchinson, during the course of our DNA enquiry we came across another familial link between an existing DNA profile and the one we now have for Kristopher Reid.”
MacKenzie paused, waiting for that to sink in and readying herself for the backlash.
“Another…I’m sorry, I don’t understand. Do you mean you have a profile for our mother—Kris’s mother, on record, which matched? Or Kris’s father?”
Phillips shuffled in his chair, wishing himself anywhere but there at that precise moment.
“No, I’m afraid it’s neither of them. T
he fact is, we found an extremely high probability of a familial link between your late brother’s DNA and that of Daisy Jones.”
Gemma felt the blood rush into her ears, pumping oxygen around her body to keep her from collapse.
“That—that’s not possible,” she whispered. “Daisy’s the same age as Josh; they were born less than a month apart.”
The two detectives fell silent, considering it to be a more tactful approach.
Gemma clasped a hand over her mouth to stifle a cry. Thoughts of Kris having been unfaithful to her paled in comparison with the implications it had for the relationship Josh had with Daisy, and hoped to have in the future.
She felt sick, and rose quickly from her chair, hurrying towards the bathroom.
“I’ll see if she’s alright,” MacKenzie murmured, and dashed after her.
In the residual silence, Hutch stared at a deep scratch on the table where they sat.
“Pity, that,” he muttered, running his finger over the wood. “It was only new last year.”
“I know this has come as a shock,” Phillips said quietly. “We had the lab check the results again, to be doubly sure.”
“I knew he had someone else on the go,” Hutch said, in a voice so small Phillips strained to hear him. “Mandy wasn’t half the woman Gemma is.”
Phillips frowned, thinking it was hardly a fair comparison to make now that the woman was dead and, besides, what happened in the past didn’t matter half so much as the future of the two young people who had fallen in love with one another but for whom a future would never be possible.
“I don’t know how to tell them,” Gemma gasped, once she returned from the ladies’ room. “It’ll shatter them both, all over again.”
“We can do it, if you’d rather,” MacKenzie offered.
Gemma shook her head.
“It can’t come from a stranger,” she said, and reached across for Hutch’s hand only to find it clasped in his lap.
“Daisy won’t have anyone, once she finds out,” he said, sadly. “What’ll she do?”
Gemma drew in a trembling breath, hardly knowing what to think or how to feel. Only yesterday, she’d lamented her grown-up son entering a relationship with another woman in his life and, now, this had happened.
It was too much to take in.
“Please,” she said, looking between Phillips and MacKenzie. “I want to give them one last day. We’ll tell them, I promise, but not until the morning. She’s just lost her mother and he—he’s just lost a father, all over again.”
MacKenzie inclined her head.
“How you tell them will be your decision, Ms Dawson, but we’re obligated to share this information with Josh and Daisy at the earliest opportunity. We’ll call by again in the morning.”
Gemma closed her eyes and nodded, wondering how she was ever going to find the words.
CHAPTER 33
Despite his best intentions, conditions at sea had been too dangerous to dive that morning and Ryan had been forced to call off the trip to HMS Bernicia until the high winds died down sufficiently to allow them to proceed. He was honest enough to admit that it was disappointing to find himself in compliance with the Navy’s high-handed command, albeit due to forces outside of his control, when he’d rather have been out there doing his job. The weather had been changeable all week; smooth and calm one minute and violently stormy, the next. He and the archaeological team had hoped for a few days’ grace to allow them to begin the first stages of an excavation that was already making headlines, no doubt thanks to Jasper Vaughn’s own PR machine that had secured him several newspaper and television interviews before their work had truly begun.
Ryan knew what Vaughn was doing, just as he felt certain the rest of the team would know: he was cementing his position as the foremost expert on the project, a move that was both sad and degrading to the highly-qualified team that surrounded him—and to the memory of his former colleague, Iain Tucker. For his part, Ryan had never cared who was given the credit for a collar, preferring to believe that another criminal off the streets wasn’t just a triumph for one person, it benefited them all.
Horses for courses, he supposed.
Ryan set aside a copy of Kristopher Reid’s old missing persons file which, he’d been sorry to note, was scant at best. The nineties had been Gregson’s era, he recalled, and their corrupt former Detective Chief Superintendent had spread his poison far and wide, infiltrating all echelons of the police hierarchy and debasing the standard of workmanship to be expected of the staff in his employ. Gregson might be languishing behind bars now, but his disease could still be felt; echoes of past misdeeds leaving their mark in many of the old case files they stumbled across during the course of routine enquiries.
“It says here that Kristopher Reid had a few pops for D and D,” Lowerson remarked, from his position at the other end of the conference table in the Coastguard’s Office. “Petty arguments, mostly; nothing that looks malicious. Sounds like the bloke had too much to say for himself when he’d had a few, and it rubbed some of the other punters up the wrong way.”
“He was expelled from secondary school,” Yates put in, and stood up to stretch her legs for a moment. “Sounds like he was a bit of a tearaway.”
“What was he expelled for?” Ryan asked.
“Setting fire to a toilet roll in the boys’ locker room,” she replied. “Standard dumb thing to do.”
Ryan thought of his own regimented upbringing and idly wondered what it would have been like to be the class tearaway. Dangerous and fun, most likely, in equal measure.
“We need to get down to that wreck,” he muttered, feeling all kinds of frustration.
“There won’t be anything left after all this time,” Lowerson said. “The water would have washed it away.”
Ryan huffed out a laugh. There was a saying, he thought, about teaching your granny how to suck eggs. Clearly, Lowerson wasn’t familiar with it.
“I realise that,” he said, and reached for a photograph of the diving knife they’d found tucked into the pocket of Kris Reid’s suit. He shoved a copy of the image across the table and pointed a finger towards it. “Look at the blade on that thing.”
Lowerson and Yates both looked again.
“What about it? The rust?”
“Carry on at this rate and you’ll be on the first available refresher course,” Ryan said, darkly. “No, the rust isn’t the interesting bit. The blade is almost completely blunt, and the tip has broken off. What does that tell you?”
The penny dropped.
“He tried to use it to get out,” Yates suggested.
“Or to leave a message,” Lowerson said, at last following the train of Ryan’s thoughts. “You think he might have carved a message on the wall down there?”
Ryan leaned back in his chair.
“I started thinking about this, last night. If I was trapped inside that cabin underwater and I knew I’d die there once my tanks ran out, what would I do as a final act?” he asked. “How could I punish the person responsible for bringing about my death, trapping me inside a metal room full of water, nearly fifty metres beneath the surface, without any means of escape?”
“You’d implicate them,” Lowerson realised.
Ryan nodded.
“Bingo. Now you know why I want to get down there as soon as possible.”
Just then, his phone began to jingle a loud rendition of Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree which he had not been responsible for, and Ryan swore affectionately.
“Frank,” he muttered, before answering.
“Ryan?”
He came to attention as Chief Constable Sandra Morrison’s voice came down the line.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I’ve just received an extremely irate complaint from a Lieutenant Commander Smythe-Watson or Weston, or something,” she said irritably. “He tells me there was an altercation at Seahouses Harbour earlier today and that you’re refusing to respect a designated war grave, in di
rect contravention of the legislation and, I might add, the standards of morality and integrity I expect of my staff. Got anything to say?”
Ryan breathed a sigh of relief and switched the receiver to his other hand while he poured himself a cup of bad coffee from the ancient filter.
“Is that all? I thought you were calling about something serious,” he replied. “Yes, I had a conversation with Lieutenant Commander Smythe-Weston, although I’d hardly call it an altercation. He wanted to stop me investigating a crime scene within the wreckage of the HMS Bernicia, the naval trawler we uncovered yesterday, and I told him where to get off.”
Back at her desk in CID, Morrison had to smile.
“I’m afraid it doesn’t work that way,” she said, severely. “I’ll admit it’s a grey area as far as jurisdiction goes, but don’t you think it might have been better to seek a compromise, or to ask him to grant a license to enter the wreck for the purposes of your investigation?”
Ryan pulled a face and took a fortifying sip of coffee-flavoured sludge.
“Frankly, ma’am, I don’t. They’re the ones who charged down to the harbour this morning, bandying around rules and regulations. He was trying to scare me off and I called his bluff. They have no jurisdiction and he knows it.”
“You told him to call 999 if he had a crime to report!” Morrison burst out. “Ryan, there’s a bit more to this than you realise. The HMS Bernicia was sunk in 1940 by friendly fire. Official Secrets might have expired but they’re still touchy about that kind of thing getting out and they’re trying to keep the coverage low-key.”
And instead, Jasper Vaughn was running around doing interviews with every paper and glossy magazine within a fifty-mile radius, Ryan thought.
“The Bernicia was found within a couple of hundred feet of the Viking wreck,” Ryan said. “They can’t hope to keep its existence a secret any longer, not when it’ll forever be associated with its famous neighbour.”