by J. S. Law
Dan watched him, deliberately waiting.
‘Sorry,’ he said, looking as though he meant it. ‘I’m doing a degree in Criminal Psychology at the Open University, so I followed the case and read about it afterwards. Some of the guys on here knew him, you know.’
‘That’s the same course I started with,’ said Dan. ‘It’s really good. If you put a lot into it, you’ll get an awful lot more out. Are you still doing it?’
He nodded. ‘Yeah, but it’s tough. I’m on here a lot; you can see there’s nowhere really to study, and then with the little one when I’m home …’ He seemed to pause and think about what he had said, about his home. ‘I want to get the degree, maybe do something different, earn more cash. I was thinking of applying to the police, you know, less time away from home at least, but I’ve got two more years’ study to do yet.’
‘Navy police or civilian?’ asked Dan.
She could immediately see from his expression his thoughts on the navy police. She knew what sort of stick he’d get from his shipmates for even thinking about becoming a ‘crusher’ and wondered if it would be worse for him than it was for her, though she had always felt like an outsider and so it had been only a small step further away in her mind.
‘You should keep at it,’ she said, not forcing him to air his views. ‘Don’t give up and don’t rule out the navy police; we do some really interesting stuff and it’s harder than people like to admit.’
He nodded again.
Dan just looked at him, waiting and saying nothing.
‘Are we done, ma’am?’
‘Yes. Thank you.’
He stood up and walked towards the ladder.
Watching him go, she tried to imagine what it would be like to have so many demands on her time as he did. Work, child, partner, time away from home, and all the while trying to study and better himself and get home to his family. Dan just had her work and felt as though she had been away from any of those other things for too long.
‘Richie,’ she said quietly.
He turned back but didn’t speak.
‘You know those novelty shops with the pictures, the really colourful ones, and you have to stare at a point right in the centre of them and then eventually, slowly, you start to see some bits taking shape, and then you recognise elements of it, but not the whole picture? Then, if you keep looking, eventually the whole thing comes into view.’
He nodded. ‘Yeah, I know the ones. My missus can’t see them no matter how long she stares.’
‘Well, honestly and truthfully, I just saw the shapes come together more quickly than some others. I don’t know why.’
He looked at her for a few moments, visibly thinking over what she had said, before he smiled. ‘Why do you think he hated women so much? And the other things you said, after it was all over, why did you think he wasn’t alone—’
‘Knock. Knock.’
Richie looked up at the ladder, cut off in mid-sentence, and Dan was glad that he had been.
Some boots appeared on the ladder and Richie stepped back to let Lieutenant McCrae climb down.
McCrae looked at them both, his face changing from an overly authoritative frown at Richie, to an undisguised sneer as he looked at Dan.
Dan thought about asking him to leave again, to tell him that he should wait at the hatch until called, but she suspected he would simply leave and not come back, and the only thing left to talk to Richie Brannon about was the answer to his last question. Even speaking to McCrae seemed like a more attractive option than explaining the events that occurred after the Hamilton investigation.
McCrae walked the length of the bomb-shop, ignoring Richie’s mumbled greeting, and slumped down onto the stool.
‘Thanks, Richie,’ said Dan, watching the young sailor leave before she drew in a deep breath and turned back towards McCrae. Her clipboard was on her bunk and she turned to a new sheet and sat down to face him.
‘Another Richard,’ she said, trying to smile. ‘Do you prefer Richard, or Rich?’
‘Just call me McCrae,’ he said, raising an eyebrow and then looking around the bomb-shop.
‘OK,’ she began, summoning her patience to her side. ‘Thanks for coming down. I understand that you were Chief Walker’s section officer?’
‘Yep.’
‘How long had you been in that role?’
‘One year, give or take.’
‘So how often would you see or interact with Walker?’
‘Daily.’
‘Were you someone he talked to?’
‘It would be tough to get work done if we only communicated using the arts of mime and modern dance.’
Dan stopped and looked at him, weighing him up. He wasn’t the first asshole she’d ever interviewed and wouldn’t be the last, but he had something about him that made his hostility seem more tangible than many before him; it was hard to place.
‘So, I understand that Walker had a number of friends on board. Who would you say were his friends, from your knowledge of him?’
‘He was friends with everyone.’
‘Were you his friend?’
‘I was his boss.’
‘So he wasn’t friends with everyone then?’ said Dan. She was watching him carefully now, seeing how he reacted to her retort; he didn’t like it.
He rolled his eyes but said nothing.
Dan changed direction again, trying to provoke a reaction and get him talking. She suspected that if she got him started, he would want to continue, to show off, to try and appear knowledgeable and superior.
‘Who decides who does duties on which nights?’
‘Coxswain forward. A Nuclear Chief-of-the-Watch aft.’
‘Did you know that Walker manipulated the watch bill to ensure that he could take leave with his friends?’
‘No, but I wouldn’t care if he did. Happens on boats everywhere.’
‘But if he was friends with everyone,’ she began, ‘except you, of course, then that would be very difficult to achieve, right? He’d have to take leave with the whole submarine.’
McCrae was staring at her, his right leg starting to jostle up and down, bouncing on his toe. He didn’t answer, just carried on staring.
‘Except you, Richard, because you’re the only one that wasn’t his friend.’
‘What the fuck are you doing here?’ he said, leaning forward, his leg still jostling and his hands coming onto his knee. ‘You’ve taken up a space on the boat to come and talk about this shit?’
‘I want to find out about how Walker was, who his friends were, who he talked to, but I can only use what you tell me.’
‘Walker was a submariner; he did his fucking job. He had lots of friends, he had been on boats for a long time. He talked to his friends, his wife, people he met in shops, whoever he fucking wanted to speak to—’
‘You?’ Dan cut in. ‘Did he speak to you?’
McCrae stopped.
‘Or shall I go out on a limb and guess that someone like Whisky never really bothered with you outside of work?’
‘We talked,’ McCrae retorted, quickly.
Dan leaned away as casually as she was able, as though just making herself more comfortable. Every ounce of concentration was now being shared equally between continuing to provoke McCrae into speaking, and controlling her own fear at being in this proximity alone with him. His animosity had grown and spittle flew from his mouth with every word.
‘Really? Because I’m not seeing that, you and him, heart-to-hearts …’ she said, letting her words hang.
‘We didn’t “heart-to-heart”, but I was his boss—’
‘Yes, you mentioned that, twice.’
McCrae ploughed on, ignoring her, but his body began to tense as he spoke. ‘I had to sign for him to take leave, give my permission, so we talked about that. He’d taken quite a bit of his annual leave allowance and had made a big deal about getting some fifth watch time, that’s time off the boat when she’s still at sea. I thought he might be having problems with hi
s woman, but he said it was all fine.’
‘His woman? Do you mean his wife?’
McCrae seemed to calm a little at this, leaning back slightly on the stool. ‘Whatever,’ he said.
‘Did you know her?’ asked Dan.
‘We’d met,’ he answered.
‘What was she like?’ Dan softened her voice, trying to change the tone of the interview and keep McCrae in his newly relaxed state.
He didn’t speak for what seemed like a long time.
‘She was just lovely,’ he said, the sentiment as fake as his new smile.
‘When did you last see Mrs Walker?’
‘Don’t remember.’
‘Where did you see her, at the family home or at a function?’
His smile was sickly now and Dan couldn’t stop a small shudder escaping. She moved again, hiding her feelings as she did.
‘I wasn’t one of them that went to see her at his house, no,’ he said, still leering, trying to appear smart as though he were toying with Dan.
‘Who did go to the house to see her?’ asked Dan, deliberately lowering her voice, trying to sound conspiratorial, to keep McCrae talking.
‘I don’t know what you mean,’ he replied and looked around the bomb-shop again, bored with the conversation.
‘But it wasn’t you,’ she said, bracing herself, but hoping she could get him back.
‘No, it wasn’t me,’ he said. He stood up. ‘Right, enough, I got to go.’
‘We’re not finished,’ said Dan.
‘Well, you’ll have to book me again,’ he said, and walked away.
‘I’m sorry about that thing in the wardroom yesterday,’ she said. ‘It was just a bit of harmless fun. I didn’t mean to make you look quite so stupid.’
He turned and hesitated, and for a second Dan thought that he might run at her.
‘You didn’t,’ he said. ‘You shouldn’t even have been in there.’
‘Because I’m not a submariner, or because I am a woman?’
He looked around the room, as if checking that they were alone. ‘Both,’ he said. ‘Three places for you lot, the bedroom, the kitchen and off my fucking submarine.’ His smile was broad as he winked at her and then climbed the ladder out of the bomb-shop.
Chapter 18
Sunday Lunchtime – 28th September 2014
The scent of lunch seemed to have permeated through the ventilation system and as Dan finished up another interview, she imagined that her senses must have been operating at an enhanced level through sheer physical need; her hunger was beginning to make her feel queasy.
Above her, along two-deck, she could hear the chatter of sailors as they queued, waiting for a seat in their tiny mess-decks to become free as they cycled through the constant, monotonous routine of sleep-wake-eat-work-eat-sleep. She climbed out of the bomb-shop and made her way down two-deck towards the wardroom.
The queuing sailors, a mixture of junior and senior rates, were all waiting for access to their own separate messes.
As Dan passed them, some that she had spoken to already nodded a greeting to her while others didn’t. Some of them smiled and many others didn’t, but they all looked. Conversation seemed to stop ahead of her and start again in muted whispers and unheard comments as she passed, as though she were the epicentre of a verbal Mexican wave.
The two-deck passageway was narrow, and it was impossible to pass down it without touching and brushing against everyone she met.
By the time Dan reached the pantry she was no longer sure if it was only hunger that was making her feel queasy. The silence as she passed, the blank stares, the closeness that prevented her from having any personal space, the way the submarine forced her near to people, their arm or elbow touching here, their back pressed against her there, all of these things drove a numbness through her body.
She almost bumped head-first into Steward Roach as he hustled around preparing for lunch and carrying the officers’ food from the galley, across two-deck and into the pantry, where he would carry out final preparations before it was served.
Stepping into the pantry to get out of his way, and away from all the queuing sailors, she immediately heard chatter from inside the wardroom. Some officers were already there, waiting for their lunch.
McCrae’s voice was recognisable as the loudest as he talked over all others around him. He was talking about the foreign ports that the Old Man wanted them to go to. How good they would be, how the Old Man was hoping for a quick stop in another UK port before they went back to Devonport after the patrol, how cheap the whoring was in some of the cities under consideration.
Dan’s head physically slumped forward; she had hoped to be in and out first, to be gone before anyone else arrived to eat, even if it meant just taking whatever was there.
‘You OK, Steward Roach?’ she asked quickly, hoping he would reply and not blank her today.
The young man pursed his lips but didn’t look at her. His eyes looked sunken and dark.
‘Sure, I’m fine, I am, ma’am,’ he replied and made to skirt around her in the tiny pantry. ‘You can’t really be in here, ma’am. I need to get all the lunches done.’
Dan stepped out of his way and pressed herself against the wall to let him pass. ‘Look,’ she said, stopping him and gently placing a hand on his arm. ‘We’re scheduled to meet later this afternoon,’ she said. ‘For an interview.’
Ben nodded.
‘I was wondering,’ she looked at the curtain that separated them from the wardroom, an arm’s length away across the small pantry. Her lips curled gently under her teeth as she thought about what to say next. ‘Is there any way …?’
Ben Roach didn’t look at her directly, but he managed a small nod.
‘I get it,’ he said. ‘Come back in ten minutes and there’ll be some scran just there.’ He pointed to a polished stainless steel catering shelf on one side of the pantry work-surface. ‘It’ll only be a few rolls; I’ll wrap ’em in foil for you. You a veggie or anything?’
Dan shook her head and felt like she might cry with gratitude. ‘Thank you,’ she whispered, and turned away to head back towards the bomb-shop, steeling herself to run the gauntlet of submariners that she would have to pass to get there.
She waited for as long as she could, checking intermittently until the route was almost clear, before she retrieved her ‘scran’. She ate it alone, sitting on her bed, and enjoyed every morsel of the plain, home-baked rolls that she had heard the other sailors call ‘fat pills’. It was obvious why. The dough was soft and still warm, but much more dense than the bread she was used to from the supermarkets at home.
Ben Roach had done her another favour too, using a selection of the salad that was still available on the first few days of the transit and adding two thick slices of ham to each roll. Certain that this would count as double rations, Dan devoured them quickly and washed it down with water from a plastic bottle that had been with the food parcel.
Time was tight and she knew she needed to get through the interviews as quickly as possible in the remaining days that she had on board. The Coxswain ran a tight ship, though, and the men, McCrae aside, were arriving as they were supposed to, or at least informing her when other priorities meant that they couldn’t. It was non-stop. With one hundred and thirty men in the ship’s company and only six days to interview them all, she needed to hit more than twenty interviews a day. Each one was scheduled for ten to twenty minutes, and, so far, some of them had run over and she was already one person behind as she headed into the post-lunch period, with nothing at all to show for it, except the firm knowledge that McCrae was an asshole.
Dan was already feeling fatigued, the dry atmosphere and heat in the submarine making her feel more tired and grimy than she had anticipated. For the submariners, time of day wasn’t really an issue. The boat operated twenty-four hours a day and they were up and awake at all sorts of times on their ‘six hours on, six hours off’ continuous cycle. Now, though, it was already past lunchtime
, and as half of the ship’s company settled down to sleep, Dan thought that without a watch, it would be easy to get lost in time.
In the bomb-shop, the compartment where she spent almost all of her time, the lights never went off and Dan was trapped in a perpetual, although very welcome, bright faux-daylight.
In all of the other shared sleeping compartments, such as the bunk-space forward of twenty-nine and the other bunk-spaces down on three-deck, it was the opposite; the lights were only turned on for a period of thirty minutes at the very centre of the watch changeover, a routine that made Dan shiver.
The interviews so far had been like dipping her hand into a bag of ‘pick and mix’. There had been a selection of dour, uncooperative sailors who wished to say nothing and had nothing to say. Others had been smooth, too smooth, as though they thought there was a real chance that they might get their leg over with the ‘police lady’ right there in the bomb-shop. None had offered anything of interest concerning Whisky’s death and all had easily checkable alibis for the night of Cheryl Walker’s murder, mostly with their families or in crowded pubs with groups of friends.
Then there had been McCrae, hostile and angry, his interview unfinished. He had made comments about Cheryl Walker, about people visiting her house, and Dan needed to follow up on these, but carefully. It was apparent that McCrae’s misogyny ran deep and the conclusion of his interview was a necessary nightmare lurking in her future.
The only other theme that ran through the submarine was the excitement about being on the Old Man’s last patrol.
The younger submariners looked up to the Old Man as some kind of demigod, to be revered and feared in equal measure. Dan suspected that he was considered in a similar light by many of his older crew members, only experience and pride making them tone down and hide these feelings.
The return of the Chief Stoker to replace Whisky was met, fairly universally, with silence.
‘Ma’am,’ said Steward Roach, snapping Dan out of her thoughts as he climbed down the ladder and approached her.
She turned, smiled and gestured towards the stool. ‘Thank you so much for the rolls, Steward Roach; they were very much appreciated.’