Hilary Bonner

by Braven

  “So shall I do that, then, boss?”

  Phil Cooper’s voice came from the distance. Karen realized she hadn’t heard a word he’d said.

  “Do what, Phil?”

  “Get Search and Recovery down there, the dive team. See what else they can come up with. Maybe they can find some teeth for us. Maybe there are signs of another body.”

  Cooper was ahead of her. He may not have been around back in the seventies, but he knew all about the Marshall case. He, too, would have been wondering if they had finally found the body of Clara Marshall. And, if so, had her children been dumped in the sea with her? And was it stretching probability too much to consider that their remains, too, might have been protected in such a way within the sunken German U-boat?

  “Yes, Phil,” she replied. “Thank you. That’s the logical next step. And have we warned those treasure hunters off?”

  “Marine archaeologists, boss.”

  “What?”

  “Marine archaeologists. Not treasure hunters.”

  “Whatever they’re called. I don’t want them anywhere near that wrecked boat till we’ve done with it. It’s a crime scene.”

  “Right, boss.”

  Audley Richards had delivered quite a blow when he had effectively scuppered her belief that a DNA match might swiftly be obtained. But Karen was determined that somehow or other the identity of this mystery skeleton would be revealed.

  She walked with Cooper to the car park. But he had managed to park a little closer to the pathology department than her and as, by then alone, she approached her car over by the road, Karen was not at all surprised to see John Kelly standing quietly alongside it. Kelly was still a journalist, one who had come almost full circle. After a chequered career—he had been a Fleet Street high-flyer before falling from grace somewhat spectacularly—he was back in his old Torquay stamping ground, chief reporter now of the Evening Argus. His hair had thinned and turned grey with the years, and he had a very slight paunch. Nowadays he favoured Marks & Spencer’s sports jackets, often worn with jeans, a combination he still considered to be quite trendy and daring, having long ago discarded any more extravagant fashions like those he had been so proud of in the seventies. Kelly had travelled a long way along a bumpy road. Surprisingly, perhaps, his attitude to his job had not changed a bit. He drove himself just as hard and remained as easily excited by a big story as he had ever been. In addition, Karen knew he had always followed very closely the case she thought they might, just might, be about to reopen and, anyway, it was typical of him to be there when there was the scent of anything unusual about. Kelly almost invariably seemed to be ahead of the game, when it came to stories if nothing else.

  It was also typical of Kelly to pick a location for his approach to her which would give him the best chance of at least a word or two. Karen might walk away from her old friend had he tried to approach her within the hospital itself or while she was with Cooper, but not if confronted by him alone and discreetly.

  “Fancy seeing you here,” she muttered without a great deal of enthusiasm.

  “And thank you for the warmth of your greeting.”

  She smiled, giving in a bit.

  “Might have known you’d be first on the scene,” she said.

  “I’ll take that as a compliment.”

  “Still like to know how, though.”

  “A reporter must never reveal his source.”

  “Thank God for that.”

  She laughed briefly. They both knew she had been Kelly’s source often enough. They went back a long way. They had that sort of relationship.

  “So, is it Clara Marshall?”

  “Well, that’s getting to the point of it, Kelly, I must say—”

  “C’mon, Karen,” he interrupted. “There can’t be anyone who was in Torquay when Clara and her children disappeared or who knew anything about what happened then who won’t think that as soon as they hear about the body.”

  “I know.” She ran her fingers through her hair, turned her face towards the sun and screwed up her eyes. The day was getting warmer by the minute, which made a change that summer. Karen’s head was in a whirl. All those memories chasing themselves around in her brain. It was so hard to keep a grip on this case, to maintain the professional approach. And yet she knew she had to be more in control than ever if she was to have even a chance of handling it properly.

  “So, is it?”

  Karen shrugged. “Don’t be ridiculous, Kelly,” she said. “If it were her you know how long she’d have been in the water. No immediate identification is possible.” She thought about Audley Richards’ remark and allowed herself a little self-indulgence. “I don’t have a crystal ball, you know,” she continued.

  “There’ll be DNA, though. You’ll be able to find out for certain eventually.”

  Kelly’s voice was sharp and edgy. Karen stopped looking up at the sky and turned to face him, studying him closely. He looked tense. Pinched. Much as she felt herself. She wasn’t overly surprised. She knew Kelly had worked on the case at the time. She didn’t know any more. She had no idea if he had any other involvement. But she was aware that everybody who’d ever been near it seemed to have been touched in some way.

  “Not necessarily, Kelly,” she said quietly. And she explained briefly what Audley Richards had told her.

  Kelly nodded glumly. He didn’t say anything. Instead he produced a packet of cigarettes and offered her one.

  She shook her head. “I prefer these,” she said, taking out her own packet of menthols. “Anyway, I thought you’d given up.”

  “Many times,” he said. “Christ, Karen, it’s the only vice I’ve got left. Give a guy a break.”

  “I just hope we get a break.”

  “It’s time, Karen.” He was suddenly very serious. She noticed that his fists were clenched by his sides. “It’s time. It really is. We’ve all lived with this too long. Richard Marshall has had all the luck so far. It’s time the luck changed.”

  Karen knew what he meant. And John Kelly’s words were still ringing in her ears when, twenty minutes or so later, she walked into her office.

  She picked up her desk phone at once to make a call to Scotland. Then she thought better of it. It was far too early. It really was. But as she replaced the receiver the phone immediately rang, and she picked it up again at once.

  “It’s Bill,” said a quiet voice.

  Karen smiled. “You didn’t take long,” she responded. She had expected to hear from retired Detective Chief Inspector Bill Talbot sooner or later—but not quite this soon.

  “I still have one or two good contacts.”

  “I’ll bet you do.”

  “So is it true?”

  “Depends what you’re asking about. It’s true we’ve found a skeleton, or parts of a skeleton to be exact, off Berry Head. But we’ve not been able to identify it yet nor can anyone even say how long it’s been in the water.” She paused, savouring the moment, knowing the effect her next words would have on him. “Audley Richards reckons it’s a youngish woman, though, about five foot four or five.”

  At the other end of the phone she heard Bill Talbot’s sharp intake of breath.

  “Clara Marshall was five foot five,” he said straight away.

  Karen was not surprised. She would have expected her old boss to remember every salient detail of the case which she knew had bugged so much of his career.

  “Thanks, Bill,” she said quietly. “I thought you’d know that.”

  “So what do you think?” Talbot asked sharply.

  “Same as you, I expect. But I’m trying to be led only by science.”

  “I don’t know whether I want it to be her or not.”

  “No. But if it is, then maybe we could get that bastard at last.”

  “You know how I feel about that.”

  “It wasn’t your fault, Bill.”

  “I’d heard the gossip around the town. At the little girls’ school. Everybody had. We should have moved ea
rlier. But you know all about that. One big cock-up.”

  “With the benefit of hindsight, yes. But how many times have you and everyone else been over it all for almost three decades? Marshall was always so bloody plausible. And how many cases have there been in history of men murdering their entire family like this, for God’s sake? A tragic murder and then a suicide, yes. But not this. It’s just so unusual. And we always look for precedents, don’t we? Policemen and lawyers, that’s what we do. As for gossip? Well, it would be just crazy to act on gossip, which is so often malicious, too. Crazy. And if nobody has been reported missing by their family it’s rare to say the least to launch a missing-persons enquiry. A vicious circle, I know. But that’s how things were on this one. And do remember, there’s nobody who’s ever touched the bloody case who doesn’t have regrets, Bill.” Karen paused. “I know I do.”

  “It was all history by the time you even came into the job, and you were just a kid when it happened. How could you have any regrets, Karen?”

  “I guess it just always seemed close.” Karen didn’t want to go into that. “I lived next door to the Marshalls, remember,” she continued.

  “Of course I remember. Your mother took the kids in after Clara disappeared. We interviewed her. Yes, I do realize, Karen, you lived it too.”

  “I used to babysit Lorraine and Janine sometimes, never for long and only two or three times that I remember, for an hour or so when their mother went shopping or something. Did you know that?”

  “No.”

  “Only for pocket money. I was at that stage when I didn’t really like little kids around me. Well, it makes no difference, anyway.” Karen shrugged, made an effort to pull herself together.

  “No, I don’t suppose it does. Look, do you fancy a jar or something later on? Go over things if you like, I might be able to help.”

  Karen sighed. Bill Talbot had never been able to let go of this one, and she doubted he ever would. On the other hand, maybe he could help. He knew more about the case from the very start than anybody else in the world, that was for certain.

  “It’ll have to be a hell of a lot later on. This is going to be a long long day.”

  “How about if I come round the Bell about eight, eight thirty?” Bill Talbot was suggesting a pub close to the nick, somewhere pretty much on the spot. “You pop over when you can. I’ll just stay there. Time makes no difference to me nowadays, I’ve nothing else to do.”

  Karen had never been able to imagine Bill Talbot in retirement. This was not a man who had been looking forward to the golf course or cultivating his roses. This was a man who had lived for his work. She considered for a moment the workload she knew faced her now that the skeleton had been found. And there were already other cases on her desk.

  “All right,” said Karen. “But make it tomorrow night, will you? I think today is going to be impossible.”

  “No problem,” said Bill as he hung up.

  Karen replaced the receiver very slowly.

  How could she have any regrets? Little did Bill Talbot know.

  Chapter Five

  Throughout the rest of the day Karen was immersed in the complex business of setting up a modern murder investigation. And a murder investigation with a bit of a difference. One that involved a corpse that was at least a quarter of a century old. Paperwork and meetings with fellow officers kept her at Torquay Station until well past 10 P. M. when she gratefully beat a retreat home to her bed.

  The following day dawned horribly. It was a truly ghastly morning. Wet, windy and cold. More like November than August.

  “It would be,” muttered Karen as she dragged herself over to her bedroom window. “It just bloody well would be.”

  She peered out at the sea. Summer or not, it looked iron-grey and extremely uninviting. There were big breakers even quite close in within the bay. Karen had made plans to visit the crime scene, and her first inclination was to change her arrangements. She had no wish to be aboard a boat in these conditions. But a combination of professionalism and bloody-mindedness forced her to proceed according to plan. Stoically she rummaged in a drawer for her thermal underwear and pulled on a tracksuit.

  Three mugs of tea and two menthol cigarettes later, telling herself yet again that she really would give up smoking the following day, Karen put on a fleece and a hooded waterproof over her tracksuit and set off for the harbour. There a police dive boat was waiting to pick up her and Phil Cooper and take them to what passed for the crime scene. It was difficult to see quite how an old wartime wreck at 50 meters was a modern crime scene, but that was indeed what it had now become.

  In spite of the inclement weather Karen decided to walk along the seafront to the harbour on the far side of the bay. There was, after all, never anywhere to park in Torquay once the tourist season was in full flow. Averting her eyes from the uninviting heaving grey mass of the sea, Karen concentrated on the matter in hand. She considered what she and Phil might achieve from their trip out to Berry Head. She realized there would be little to see, and although she was an amateur scuba diver she had neither the skill nor the inclination even to attempt the kind of diving necessitated. But Karen was the sort of detective who liked to see everything for herself and was hands-on to a degree not always considered proper in a senior investigating officer. Karen always liked to do, or at least sit in on, as much of the interviewing of prime suspects as she possibly could—to the irritation, she knew, of many members of her team. Reports on pieces of paper, or in e-mail form half the time nowadays, did not get through to Karen in the same way. She liked to feel the very texture of any crime she was investigating all around her and that meant being there, right on the spot. That was how she got her head around things. And that was why she wanted to visit the place where the skeleton had been found, even though it would be 50 meters below them, under the sea.

  Phil Cooper was already standing on the jetty waiting to board. He was wearing bright yellow oilskins, and he raised one yellow arm in greeting. His face broke into a crooked grin. Cooper’s nose had been broken long ago in some rugby scrum or other. His floppy brown hair was blowing in the wind. The busted nose contrived to make him more good-looking rather than less, Karen thought. For a fleeting moment she was struck by how attractive he looked, much more so, and much more at home somehow, dressed like that than besuited at his desk.

  Karen waved back and hurried forward, dismissing such thoughts as quickly as they had arrived. She was Phil Cooper’s senior officer. He was thirteen years her junior and he was the married father of two little girls upon whom he doted and whose photograph, along with one of his pretty redheaded wife, he carried tucked in the back of his battered wallet. Karen knew that because they always seemed to drop out every time he attempted to remove any money. On purpose maybe. Phil took every opportunity to show off his family.

  She did a double take when she saw the vessel waiting to take her and Phil out to the scene about a mile off Berry Head, just where the shelf of the seabed dropped from around 30 meters to 50. It was what she knew the professionals called a rigid inflatable. To her it was a rubber dinghy. This was going to be a bumpy ride. Gritting her teeth she quickly removed her light waterproof in order to don the set of oilskins and the lifejacket provided by the two police divers crewing the boat. She removed her trainers and replaced them with rubber boots, hoping that conditions were not going to be as bad as these precautions suggested, and then clambered aboard.

  It took less than twenty minutes to reach the crime scene, but the ride was every bit as bumpy and as wet as Karen had expected. There, to her relief, a larger hard boat, the Blue Rose, a fishing vessel chartered from Brixham she was told, stood at anchor. The inflatable was moored alongside and all aboard transferred to the Blue Rose where they were greeted by the diving supervisor, Brian Stokes, a uniformed sergeant from Newton Abbot, whom Karen recognized by sight.

  “What puzzles me, Brian, if that body has been down there as long as we think it may have been, is how it’s remain
ed undiscovered for so long. There’s so much diving goes on off Berry Head, and all divers like shipwrecks.”

  “Yes, but this one was designated a war grave, ma’am, because the bodies of the crew were never recovered at the time,” Stokes responded. “So it was a restricted area. Now that doesn’t always stop divers, but also, this particular wreck was fairly inaccessible and 50 meters is a bit deeper than most sports divers will go. Deeper than they should go, anyway. My guys only get around nine minutes’ bottom time and they’re diving on surface demand too, which makes it a lot safer because if they do have a problem and need to make extra decompression stops, at least they won’t run out of air.”

  Karen nodded. She understood police diving procedure and the high standards that were adhered to. All the men and women were only part-time divers and had other jobs in the force, but they were trained to the very highest level.

  “I read about this U-boat, of course,” she said. “She went down towards the end of the war, and some historian has worked out that there could be some important papers aboard, if they could possibly have survived, that might give information about what happened to Hitler, what he was planning if things went wrong. Isn’t that it?”

  “More or less, ma’am. Bit far fetched if you ask me, but these marine archaeologists were called in and given permission to go down. And, of course, they had the same sort of equipment as we use. I’ve got two men down there at the moment, by the way, and the team that went down earlier today found a load of antique gold jewelry, Nazi booty presumably.”

  Karen expressed polite interest and concentrated on the scene around her. She was a West Country girl. She liked being on water, although she preferred rather pleasanter conditions. Mercifully, however, the rain had eased a little, and peering out towards the horizon she could see that the ominous black clouds she had studied so assiduously earlier were beginning to lift. The Blue Rose, a sturdily built vessel, was moving only relatively gently in the swell. Although, of course, it might just seem that way in comparison to the turbulent bounce of the RI, Karen thought.