Western Approaches

by Graham Hurley

  MONDAY, 11 APRIL 2011

  Lizzie woke early on Monday morning, recognising a sound she dreaded. In the distance, coming down the lane outside the cottage, she could hear a squad of young marines from the nearby Commando Training Centre at Lympstone. They spent all night on Woodbury Common, doing God knows what, and then jogged down through the village to be picked up by trucks at first light. When she’d first got used to this early-morning wake-up call, she’d thought it mildly quaint. If Grace had woken early, they’d stand at the window and wave as the young lads sped by. But then she’d realised that the rhythm of all these boots could tell her what the weather was doing. And this morning, as the splash-splash of the approaching squad grew louder, she knew it was raining again.

  She closed her eyes, willing herself back to sleep, telling herself that it was a passing shower, that she’d wake later to bright sunshine and maybe the prospect of a new chapter in this life of theirs. Sleep came more quickly than she expected, and she woke again an hour or so later, reaching for Jimmy’s hand under the sheet, but he’d gone. Downstairs, the kettle and the teapot were still hot to her touch and she realised that the growl of the car that had woken her up was probably the Impreza. She checked the clock on the wall: 07.03. Even earlier than usual.

  Suttle was at Exmouth nick by half seven. To his surprise, Carole Houghton was already at her desk, busy on the phone. Suttle sorted a couple of coffees from the adjoining kitchenette. By the time he got back, Houghton had finished her call.

  ‘We found Pendrick,’ she said. ‘He turned up last night.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Back home at his place. He told us he never checks his phone. Not on Sundays.’

  Pendrick, she said, had evidently gone to north Cornwall in search of some decent surf. He’d returned late afternoon and gone down to the rowing club to use one of their single sculls. You couldn’t waste a sunset like last night’s, he’d told the D/C.

  ‘We get the feeling he likes exercise.’ Houghton was reaching for a pad of jotted notes.

  Suttle was back on the seafront at Exmouth, watching the lone sculler in the red singlet powering back on the flooding tide. This had to be Pendrick, he thought. Had to be.

  ‘So what did he tell us?’

  ‘Not a lot, to be frank. He confirmed all the other accounts. They won the race, came back, got pissed, went over to Kinsey’s place. Kinsey, as we know, started throwing up off the balcony. Pendrick thought he’d gone out for a breath of air. He put the guy to bed and soon afterwards they all left in a taxi. Pendrick was the first to be dropped off.’

  Pendrick, she said, lived alone in an upstairs flat in an area of Exmouth known as the Colonies. Saturday night the flat below was empty. One of his neighbours in the terrace had heard the taxi arriving but had gone to bed shortly afterwards. Pendrick had stayed up a while to check out the weather on his PC and watch the first half of a DVD. He’d been out of the house by eight the next morning to catch the tide at Widemouth Bay. The surf, he’d told the D/C, had been crap. He’d tried other beaches further north but had drawn a blank. Hence his visit to the rowing club.

  Suttle wanted to know what the interviewing D/Cs had made of Pendrick.

  ‘They thought he sounded pretty credible.’

  ‘Was he surprised? About Kinsey?’

  ‘Yes, apparently he was.’

  ‘Upset?’

  ‘The guys think not but we can’t do him for that, can we?’

  Suttle smiled. The coffee was horrible. He was trying to imagine this man, trying to get beyond the slumped figure in the red singlet. How did he present himself? What kind of place did he live in?

  ‘Very tidy, very together. Andy says the guy reads a lot. Loads of music too, neat little sound system. Not too much furniture but loads of photos on the wall. Apparently the man’s surfed everywhere: California, Oz, New Zealand, Hawaii, the lot. Been around a bit.’

  Suttle nodded. Simon Maffett was one of the older D/Cs on the squad, an ex-marine who’d put in a couple of decent years on the force rugby fifteen until his knees gave out and his missus persuaded him to chuck it in. Andy could build a rapport as quickly as any detective Suttle had met. He also knew a thing or two about pushing the physical limits. Pendrick, Suttle suspected, would have recognised a fellow soul.

  ‘What else did he say about Kinsey?’

  ‘Not a lot. Like I say, Andy got the impression there was no love lost but he didn’t press him.’

  ‘And the rowing?’

  ‘He loves it. Nearly as much as surfing.’ Houghton paused, a rare smile on her face, and Suttle realised there was something she was holding back.

  ‘Well?’ he said. ‘What else?’

  ‘Pendrick? Doesn’t the name mean anything to you?’

  Suttle shook his head, remembering the prickle of recognition he’d felt when he’d seen the slightly scary face in the photo Houghton had circulated but failing to suss exactly why.

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘It was last year. Summer. June 24 to be exact. I just looked it up on CIS. You remember the bloke who rowed the Atlantic and lost his wife en route? That was Pendrick.’

  CIS was force-speak for the Crime Information System, a database that listed everyone who’d appeared on the Devon and Cornwall radar. Suttle had it now. The story had been all over the media. The couple had been rowing west to east. They’d made the Western Approaches after God knows how long at sea and Pendrick had woken up early one morning to find his wife missing. He’d alerted the Coastguard, and the rescue centre at Falmouth had coordinated an air search that had lasted a couple of days before being called off. At this point Pendrick could have made a landing in southern Ireland or been retrieved by any number of ships in the area, but he’d insisted on completing his voyage alone, ending up in Penzance Harbour, fighting for balance on the quayside as media crews battled for a word or two.

  ‘He had hair then,’ Suttle said. ‘Lots of it. Hippy-looking guy. Never said much.’

  ‘You’re right. A couple of the uniforms at PZ took a statement, and there was a longer interview afterwards, CID this time.’ Houghton scribbled a name and slipped it across the desk. Suttle stared at it. D/I Gina Hamilton. Another face from the past.

  ‘You know her?’

  ‘Yeah. Not well, but yeah.’

  Hamilton, he said, had been part of a Devon and Cornwall intel operation a couple of years back. They had a bunch of local dealers plotted up and had successfully traced a supply source back to a Spanish fishing port called Cambados in Galicia. The cocaine, lots of it, was coming into the UK through Portsmouth, and Suttle, then a D/C, had been tasked to give her whatever assistance she needed when she drove east to coordinate the surveillance.

  In the event Ms Hamilton been impressively well organised and the operation had ended with a meticulously planned hard arrest on Honiton bypass. The Drugs Squad had actioned a whole pile of warrants that same night, scooping up dealers across the entire force area. Hamilton herself had made a bit of an impact up in the social club at Fratton nick. Tall, blonde, nice leather jacket, bit of a looker. Even Faraday had been impressed.

  ‘You know her?’ Suttle asked.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Wouldn’t have done her any harm, that job.’

  ‘It didn’t.’

  ‘But?’

  ‘But nothing.’ Houghton nodded at the contact details. ‘You might want a conversation. I gather she did the interview with Pendrick herself.’

  Minutes later, Houghton was gone. She had a meet with Nandy at force HQ in Exeter, and then she was due at the Royal Devon and Exeter Hospital for the post-mortem on Kinsey. She’d be back, fingers crossed, in time for a bite of lunch. By which time, the future of Constantine might be a great deal clearer.

  Suttle went through the morning’s tasking for Houghton’s squad of D/Cs. In truth, the guys were already beginning to run out of doors to knock on and Suttle knew that the preliminary findings from the PM would probably be decisiv
e. Evidence of injury to Kinsey before the fall would bump up the enquiry to a full murder investigation. Anything else, especially with Nandy at the helm, might well be curtains.

  Already Suttle had started the process of applying for the dead man’s financial records, plus billing on his landline and mobile. It would be a day or two before the banks and the phone companies came through with anything solid and in the meantime Suttle needed to get a feel for exactly how this man had led his life. What did he do for a living? Where had his money come from? And who else might have shared his life in Regatta Court?

  By late morning, with the help of a couple of phone calls, Suttle had the answers to most of these questions. Kinsey, it turned out, had been an engineer. For a while he’d worked for Boeing in Seattle. Afterwards, still living in the States, he’d run a one-man consultancy, Kittiwake, which specialised in wind-turbine technology. He’d come up with a new way of configuring the power train that converted blade movement to grid-ready electricity, and had sold the process to a major international corporation with operations across the globe. The proceeds of this deal appeared nowhere in the files at Suttle’s disposal but a conversation with a contact in the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills put the figure at not less than $35 million. In three short years Kinsey had made himself a very rich man.

  At this point, though, his success had been evidently soured by two developments. An industrial competitor, in the shape of a Swiss engineer called Henri Laffont, had threatened to sue Kinsey for patent infringement. Laffont claimed that Kinsey had ripped off key elements of his own wind-turbine design and owed him compensation that would have taken a huge bite out of the $35 million.

  As far as Suttle could judge, this was an ongoing battle. Kinsey had refused Laffont’s claims point blank and hired a firm of expensive commercial lawyers, Zurich-based, to put the Swiss engineer back in his box. The last email in the file was dated 8 February 2011, barely two months ago. Laffont, it seemed, was currently working on a contract in Shanghai. He was due to fly into London ‘in early April’ and was demanding a meet. He was tired of dealing through attorneys and suggested they could sort out a settlement, amicable or otherwise, face to face. Kinsey didn’t seem to have replied to this suggestion but Suttle made a note to check on the seized PC. ‘Amicable or otherwise’ was an interesting phrase and he ringed it before putting the file aside.

  Kinsey’s other source of grief was his ex-wife. He’d met Sonya in Seattle. Her half-brother lived in Bristol. Suttle had found a phone number in one of Kinsey’s files and given him a ring. Sonya, of course, needed to be made aware of Kinsey’s death, but the brother-in-law, whose name was Bill, was more than happy to fill in a little of the background.

  His half-sister, he said, had been making a decent living in the real estate business when she married Kinsey, but the crash of 2008–9 had wiped her out. At this point Kinsey had decided to return to the UK to look for new business opportunities. With some reluctance Sonya followed, but the marriage was a disaster. After less than a year, she’d maxed out her credit cards, emptied the joint bank account, left a pile of plastic on Kinsey’s desk and flown back to Seattle. Since then she’d been fighting to extract every last cent from the divorce settlement. Even now, said Bill, she was still harassing Jay for money, and lately her demands had escalated. Only last week, to his certain knowledge, she’d been threatening to pay her ex-husband a personal visit.

  Surprised by his candour, Suttle had asked Bill how things were between himself and his half-sister.

  ‘You want the truth?’ he’d said. ‘Those two folks deserved each other. Anything for money. And I mean anything.’

  ‘Do you see her at all, Sonya? Fly over for the occasional visit maybe?’

  ‘Never.’

  ‘And Kinsey?’

  ‘I wouldn’t spend a second with the guy. You’ve got an experience to share with him? A holiday, maybe? A trip to some nice Polynesian island? He’s been there already, probably owns the place. You’re proud of your new Prius? Want to show off about it a little? He tells you you’ve just made the dumbest purchase of your life. He knew everything about everything. He just didn’t need the other ten trillion people on the planet. This is a guy happiest in his own company. This stuff about the rowing is news to me. Those other guys must have had a lot of patience.’

  The conversation had ended shortly afterwards. Reviewing his notes, Suttle knew he’d unearthed two fresh lines of enquiry, both of which needed serious attention. A multi-million-dollar settlement for patent infringement might offer ample motivation for a personal visit, while a vengeful ex-wife – under the right circumstances – could do worse than dump her ex-husband off his fifth-floor balcony.

  He was still deciding how to develop each of these when Houghton returned. She eyed the spread of paperwork on Suttle’s desk. He brought her up to speed. Two more potential suspects for the pot. Maybe.

  ‘But what has he been doing since selling up?’

  ‘Property development.’

  ‘Where? How?’

  ‘He’s got a new company now, Kittiwake Oceanside. He seems to be catering to a particular demographic. These are couples in their sixties, made a bit of money – often in London – and they want to buy somewhere down here, nice view, private beach, total privacy, total peace of mind, full service, like-minded people, all that bollocks. Think retirement lite.’

  Suttle had skimmed the Kittiwake files. Kinsey had been paying estate agents in Cornwall to scout for suitable sites. So far he’d identified three and was in ongoing contact with the relevant planning authorities. In every case his pitch was the same. As a successful businessman committed to developments of the highest standard, he was keen – in his phrase – to add value to outstanding locations. In this context, he defined value in terms of employment opportunities, net capital inflows and what he called ‘the aesthetic and social gain from the provision of signature destinations’.

  Kittiwake Oceanside, he said, would attract high net worth individuals to areas of Cornwall that were demonstrably struggling. These discreet, beautifully designed retirement communities would kick-start the local economy. From every point of view, he wrote, ‘we’re looking at the perfect win-win’.

  Houghton was studying one of the brochures Suttle had extracted from the Kittiwake files. A sleek collection of apartment blocks towered above a line of sand dunes. There was lots of glass, lots of boasts about sustainability, and lots of hints that slouching in front of crap telly was strictly for losers. Couples playing tennis. A peleton of gym-honed retirees departing for a spin on their bikes. A woman in a bikini heading for the nearby surf. Kittiwake Oceanside, thought Suttle, was selling a kind of immortality. Settle here and your body will never let you down.

  ‘I wonder what the locals think?’ Houghton was equally unimpressed.

  ‘Exactly. Maybe we should talk to the local journos and find out. People are getting pissed off with tosh like this. Views are for everyone. They shouldn’t be something you have to reserve with a huge deposit.’

  ‘Sweet. Where have you been these last few years?’

  Suttle ignored the question. He sensed already that Constantine was dead in the water.

  ‘So what happened at the PM?’

  ‘Nothing. The guy died of impact injuries. Cranial contusions, severe spinal trauma and heart failure. Quick, if you’re looking for a way out.’

  ‘And you think he was?’

  ‘There’s no evidence to suggest otherwise.’

  Suttle nodded. Post-mortems were never less than thorough. Scrapings from under the fingernails to indicate some kind of resistance. Special attention to the throat and larynx to determine possible strangulation. Try as he might to find evidence of prior assault, the pathologist had drawn a blank. Houghton was right: there was absolutely nothing to suggest that Kinsey hadn’t been alone when he met his death.

  ‘But why?’ Suttle asked, ‘Why would he have done it?’

  Houghton shrugged
. ‘Not our call, Jimmy. People do what they do.’

  ‘And Mr Nandy?’

  ‘I haven’t managed to talk to him yet. We’ve got a body in a field down near Bodmin. It hasn’t got a head. I expect Mr Nandy thinks that’s a bit of a clue.’

  Gill Reynolds turned up just before lunch. Lizzie, deeply grateful that the sun had come out, met her on the patch of muddy gravel that served as parking for Chantry Cottage. She was driving a new-looking scarlet Megane convertible, a perfect match for her nails. Newsroom pay rates were clearly on the up.

  She swung her long legs out of the car and leaned back to retrieve a bag of goodies. Lizzie had Grace beside her. When Gill knelt for a kiss Grace turned away and hid her face in Lizzie’s jeans, plainly terrified by this sudden intrusion.

  ‘Lunch?’ Lizzie led Grace back towards the open kitchen door, determined to stay ahead of the game. Even when she was fit and well, doing a job she loved, Gill had always had a habit of swamping her.

  The kitchen, for once, looked almost presentable. Lizzie had worked all morning to clean the place up. There was nothing she could do about the dripping tap and the state of the units, but she’d brightened the general shabbiness with the last of the daffodils from the garden and she had a pot of chilli con carne bubbling on the stove. Gill had a famous appetite, a tribute to her hours at the gym.

  With the chilli went hunks of newly baked bread and a salad Lizzie had bought from the village store. Gill was in the garden, striding through the long grass, peering into a hedgerow, stooping to retrieve something from the reeds beside the stream. Frothy white blossom was beginning to appear on both fruit trees and she paused, gazing up, her face splashed with sunshine.

  Seconds later, she was at the kitchen door.

  ‘Fantastic,’ she announced. ‘So wild. So unspoiled. So fucking authentic. Lucky girl. Lucky old you. You have to keep it exactly this way. Promise me you will.’

  Lizzie smiled but said nothing. She was tempted to suggest that Gill stay a while, get a real taste of life in the country, see whether she could cope with the isolation and the damp and the mobile signal that seemed to come and go like the wind. Instead she perched Grace in her high chair and dished out the chilli.