by Damien Boyd
‘May I,’ said Dixon, turning the book around and ignoring the frown. At least the officer had realised it wasn’t a question.
Dixon began flicking back through the pages, each listing searches here, there and everywhere: Bristol Harbour, the River Avon underneath Clifton Suspension Bridge, Bridgwater Docks, drains under Weston-super-Mare.
Yes, he’d definitely complain a bit less about Express Park in future.
Then came the entry he had been looking for: 23 to 29 March 1995; River Severn beneath SSC viaduct. It even gave the latitude and longitude: 51° 34’ 40.3608’’ N and 2° 42’ 55.6884’’ W. Dixon glanced down the list of personnel taking part. He didn’t recognise any of the names.
Except one.
Getting out of Portishead with the original logbook tucked under his arm had been a bit of a struggle. Several forms had had to be signed and the clerical officer had insisted on authorisation from someone higher up the food chain.
DCS Potter had come to Dixon’s rescue. After all, she was sitting in meeting room 2 at Express Park waiting for him.
She was still there when he walked past the glass partition an hour later.
‘Well?’ she shouted through the open door.
Dixon glanced across the atrium to the CID Area, where Louise was sitting behind a computer. He raised his eyebrows and she gave a thumbs-up in reply.
Dixon opened the logbook at the relevant entry and slid it across the table to Potter.
She shook her head. ‘How did you—?’
‘Excuse me, Ma’am,’ said Louise, poking her head around the door.
‘Come in.’
‘What’ve you got, Lou?’ asked Dixon.
‘Ex-Royal Navy. He was one of our dive team officers for five years between 1992 and 1997, then he left to go on the oil rigs. More money, I expect.’
‘What d’you want me to do?’ asked Potter.
Dixon smiled. ‘Nothing, Ma’am.’
‘I’d better let David Charlesworth know.’
‘Will he tell anyone at EDF?’
Potter frowned. ‘We’ll tell him afterwards,’ she said. ‘Just to be on the safe side.’
Chapter Thirty-One
Dixon waited while Louise, Dave and Mark filed through the turnstiles. Their Hinkley Point passes still worked, which was a bonus, but for how much longer?
‘Find out where he is, will you, Lou?’ he asked, watching through the window as PC Cole and PCSO Sharon Cox signed in at reception. He had bumped into them in the staff car park on the way out of Express Park and brought them along for the ride. And the backup. It seemed fitting somehow that Sharon should be in at the death too, although that was an unfortunate choice of words.
He could think of few people he’d rather have watching his back than PC Cole too.
‘He’s at the Viewing Gallery,’ said Louise, jogging back from the security office with a smirk on her face. ‘The Assistant Chief Constable is there too. Routine visit, apparently.’
There were four Assistants, but Dixon knew which one it would be before he asked the question. ‘Not—?’
‘Yes, Sir.’
Two beat team officers pulled up in a patrol car.
‘Where’s Martha?’ asked Dixon, leaning in the passenger window.
‘She’s gone to check the bat house, then she’s got a meeting in Welfare Block West,’ replied the driver. ‘We’ve lined up a minibus to get you out to the Viewing Gallery. We’ll be following you, Sir.’
‘Thank you.’
The ride out to the Viewing Gallery took ten minutes, mainly due to the queue of lorries at the entrance to the Welfare Block North construction site. A couple of cranes had moved, perhaps, and the last tunnelling machine had gone; it was easy to guess where. Otherwise it was difficult to see much of a difference, but then it had been only two days since his last visit.
At least they were spared the tour guide this time.
Dixon spotted Charlesworth standing at the railings looking out across the site, as the minibus turned into the car park. He was flanked by hi-vis jackets, all three of them wearing white plastic hard hats.
The patrol car parked alongside them, Charlesworth spotting the familiar vehicle markings, and then Dixon as he climbed out of the minibus.
‘What the hell’s going on?’ he snapped, striding towards them, the hi-vis jackets close behind him.
‘We’re looking for your head of security, Jim Crew,’ said Dixon, turning to David Pickles.
‘Why?’ asked Charlesworth.
‘I really don’t have time—’
‘He had to leave,’ said Pickles.
Dixon grimaced. ‘When was this?’
‘About five minutes ago. He had a call from the security office.’
‘On his mobile?’
‘Yes. Then he went in the Portakabin,’ replied Pickles, gesturing to the unit behind him, the door standing open and blowing in the wind. ‘He just said “OK, I’m needed elsewhere”, made his apologies and left.’
‘Which way did he go?’
‘He got in a maintenance van and went that way.’ Pickles was waving in the direction of Welfare Block West and the concrete batching plant.
‘It’s a white Ford Fiesta with an orange light on top,’ said a beat team officer. ‘I’ve told them before about leaving the keys in their vans.’
Dixon looked west along the service road, the van sandwiched between two lorries waiting at the traffic lights on the small bridge. He sprinted across to the minibus. ‘Follow that van,’ he yelled, jumping in the passenger seat. Dave Harding slid open the side door behind him and he and Mark Pearce scrambled in as the minibus driver accelerated away, the patrol car right behind them with Cole and Sharon Cox squeezed in the back.
The van was two hundred yards ahead. It pulled out and raced across the bridge, jumping a red light and sending a lorry swerving into the Armco barrier on the nearside. Workmen in fluorescent overalls working on an aggregate conveyor belt turned at the sound of racing engines as the minibus tore after it along the service road.
A line of lorries was coming towards them, a Land Rover with a blue light flashing and a flag on the roof overtaking them on a head-on collision course with Crew’s van, its headlights flashing at him.
‘Who the hell is that?’ demanded Dixon.
‘That’ll be Martha,’ said the minibus driver.
‘What’s she playing at?’
‘She must be trying to stop him.’
‘Playing chicken, more like.’
Dixon watched the van and Land Rover racing towards each other, the Land Rover sounding its horn. At the last second Crew’s van veered off the road and down the ramp to the construction site, dirt flying up as it hit the bottom and sped off along the groundworks access road, overtaking a dumper truck heading back towards the excavations at the second nuclear island, its hopper empty.
‘Where does he think he’s going?’ asked Dixon.
The small van was sliding on the dirt track, Crew fighting the steering wheel to control the skid.
‘There’s no way out,’ said the minibus driver.
Martha sped down the ramp, following the van.
‘Can you get hold of Martha and tell her to call off her pursuit?’
‘No, Sir.’
‘Follow them.’ Dixon tapped the driver on the shoulder.
‘I can’t. I’m not allowed down there. We ain’t got no flag on the roof.’
‘Neither has the van. Just do it.’
Crew, with Martha’s Land Rover behind him, sped out of sight around the corner as the minibus accelerated down the ramp.
‘I’ll get the bloody sack for this,’ muttered the driver.
‘No, you won’t,’ said Dixon.
The minibus slowed as it turned the corner, all but the two blue turbine halls of Hinkley Point A on the skyline obscured by a cloud of dust, a blue light flickering in the maelstrom of grit and mud flying through the air. An empty dumper truck was stationary on the nearside
, the driver out of his cabin and standing on the platform at the front peering down as the dust began to settle.
The minibus stopped, all of them waiting in silence for the dust to clear.
Martha’s Land Rover was first to loom out of the cloud, parked sideways on in front of a heavily laden dumper truck, the orange light still flashing on the roof. The dumper was heading towards the earthworks, a pile of mud visible above the cabin, the driver in his fluorescent jacket leaning over the wheel, his forehead resting on his hands.
‘Where’s the van?’ asked Pearce.
Dixon sighed. ‘Under the truck.’
The yellow metal steps at the front of the dumper were visible now, the mangled roof of the white van embedded in them, the orange light still on top. The rest of the van was wedged under the engine compartment of the truck, dwarfed by the huge tyres.
‘Call it in, Dave,’ said Dixon, jumping out of the minibus.
Martha was standing behind the Land Rover, talking into her mobile phone. ‘Yes, and an ambulance. We’re down on the earthworks road, not far from the access ramp. We’re going to have to close it off, so tell Sam to stop the diggers and hold all the dumpers where they are. Yes. Until I say so.’ She rang off.
‘Is he dead?’ asked Dixon.
Martha grimaced. ‘I was on my way over to the bat house when I got the call. I was trying to stop him.’
‘And what call did you get?’
‘Just that he’d stolen a van.’
Dixon peered in under the offside rear tyre of the dumper truck at the bonnet of the van wedged under the hopper lift. Both front tyres had blown out and there was a small gap between the driver’s door and the sump, enough to look in if he tipped his head to one side and used the torch on his phone. There was even a chance Crew might be alive if he’d thrown himself across the passenger seat. Dixon winced.
Perhaps not.
‘Is there a chance the casualty is alive?’ asked Harding, appearing next to Dixon, still with his phone clamped to his right ear.
‘He’s been decapitated,’ said Dixon, taking a deep breath. ‘So, the answer to that one is no.’
‘I never stood a chance. He just came belting round the corner and went straight under me.’
‘It’s all right, Sir.’ Dixon looked up at the dumper driver, now standing on the metal landing outside his cab, the blood leaching from his knuckles as he gripped the railings. ‘Stay in your cab and we’ll get a ladder to get you down. OK?’
‘Is he dead?’ he asked, looking down at the back of the van.
‘I’m afraid he is, Sir.’
‘Oh, God.’
‘Let’s get a ladder down here as quick as we can,’ said Dixon.
Martha stepped back, speaking into her radio.
Orange lights flashing now, alternating with the blue, reflecting off the puddle under the van – Dixon hoped it was oil; sirens in the distance too. He turned to see a patrol car pull up next to the minibus, Louise in the passenger seat.
‘Is he dead?’ she asked, when Dixon walked over and opened the door.
‘He is.’
‘The call came from the security office.’ Louise dropped her phone into her handbag. ‘They were just letting him know we were looking for him.’
‘Go with Dave, Lou. Search his desk in the security office. And get Scientific to lift his car. Not his house until we get there. All right?’
‘Did he have a wife and kids?’ she asked.
‘He did.’ Dixon slammed the car door. He was watching the dumper truck driver climbing down a ladder. The driver tried to look under his truck, but turned away, before the man holding the ladder led him to a pick-up truck and sat him in the back.
‘We’ll need a statement from him,’ said Dixon.
‘I’m sure that’ll be fine,’ replied Martha. ‘I know him.’
‘We’ll need one from you too.’
‘It wasn’t the truck driver’s fault. Like he said, he never stood a chance.’
‘How fast was Crew going?’
‘At least fifty, and accelerating hard. He was pulling away from me.’
‘And why did you pursue?’
‘I wasn’t pursuing him.’ Martha frowned. ‘I was just following him. Keeping him in sight; trying to anyway. He braked, though. Hard.’
‘Not suicide then,’ said Dixon. He was watching a line of blue lights approaching along the service road from the main entrance: two ambulances and three police cars, two of them estates from the traffic division.
‘How long is this going to take?’ asked Martha, holding her radio to her shoulder.
‘The rest of the day, probably,’ replied Dixon, ‘but you’d better check that with the road accident investigators. They’re here now.’
‘Do we have any witnesses?’ asked a uniformed police sergeant, climbing out of a marked Volvo estate.
‘Three,’ replied Martha. ‘Me, and the dumper truck drivers. He was overtaking one and went under the other.’
‘Let’s get these vehicles out of the way so we can measure his skid before it rains.’
‘How will you get the van out from under it?’ asked Dixon.
‘Back the truck off, I expect. We may have to let the tyres down on the van.’ The police sergeant was peering in under the dumper truck with a torch. ‘What happened?’
‘He was a murder suspect fleeing arrest.’
‘How on earth—?’
‘He knew we were coming.’
‘Well, he’s not going to tell you much now, is he, Sir?’ The traffic sergeant shook his head. ‘Police Complaints will want to have a look at it too.’
Louise was leaning back against the front wing of Martha’s Land Rover, watching the pool of blood under the van getting larger.
‘Can you remember the twelve words, Lou?’ asked Dixon.
‘Etched on my memory,’ she replied, shrugging her shoulders.
‘And you’ve got Scanlon’s phone with you?’
‘Yes, Sir.’
‘Log into the bitcoin wallet then. His phone passcode was twenty-five, ten, fifty-six.’
‘What’s she do—?’
‘Logging into the bitcoin wallet,’ said Dixon, cutting Mark Pearce off mid-sentence. ‘If she gets in, Crew will get an alert via text message.’
‘Well, the pin number’s not twenty-five, ten.’ Louise sighed. ‘I’ll try ten, fifty-six.’
Dave Harding and Mark Pearce took up position either side of the nearside rear wheel of the dumper truck, Dixon by the offside.
‘I’ve got the verification code and I’m entering it now,’ said Louise. ‘That’s it, I’m in.’
Dixon leaned over, listening for the text message arriving on Crew’s phone somewhere in the carnage under the dumper truck.
A muffled ‘bleep, bleep’ just carried over the sirens wailing in the distance.
‘Did you hear that, Sir?’ asked Harding, straightening up.
‘You might as well go and leave this to us now, Sir,’ said the traffic sergeant.
‘Not until I’ve got his mobile phone.’
Chapter Thirty-Two
‘The curtain definitely moved,’ said Louise, looking up at the first floor window.
Dixon pressed the doorbell again.
The upstairs curtains were drawn behind leaded windows, a magpie picking at the new ridge on the thatched roof.
‘It must be rented,’ said Dixon, watching a small plume of smoke rising from the chimney. ‘Nobody would be daft enough to light a fire in a thatched cottage if they owned it, surely? I wouldn’t.’
‘You’d be surprised,’ said Louise.
‘Cottage’ was a bit of a stretch too. At least four bedrooms, thought Dixon, counting the dormer windows.
‘How much d’you reckon it would cost to re-thatch?’ asked Louise.
‘More than you and I earn in a year,’ replied Dixon, ringing the doorbell again. ‘Put together.’
‘I can hear footsteps,’ whispered Louise, her ear to th
e front door.
Fully clothed under that dressing gown, and the hair’s dry under that towel, thought Dixon when the front door opened. ‘Mrs Crew?’
‘Yes.’
‘Mrs Angela Crew?’
‘Yes.’ She frowned, the lines on her forehead masked by the layer of make-up.
‘May we come in, please?’ asked Dixon, handing her his warrant card.
He waited. She could’ve read the small print as well by the time she handed it back.
‘Is he dead?’ she asked, oddly matter of fact.
‘It would be better to do this inside, if you don’t—’
‘Is. He. Dead?’
‘Yes.’
She retreated into the hall with a loud sigh. ‘The kitchen’s through here. I was just going to have a coffee.’
A faint smell of alcohol, although it was difficult to tell over the perfume.
‘After you,’ said Dixon, watching her unwrap the towel and drop it on the bottom of the stairs. She shook her head, but her hair hardly moved; testament to the power of hair spray, probably.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, draping the dressing gown over the banister. ‘I thought you were bailiffs.’
Dixon wondered in what world two police officers delivering her husband’s death message was preferable to bailiffs. No doubt he would find out.
‘Was it a car accident?’ asked Angela, sliding a wine bottle behind the microwave, the tremble in her voice conspicuous by its absence.
‘Is there someone who could come and sit with you, perhaps?’ Dixon tried a disarming smile. Not every marriage is a happy one, he knew that well enough, but he would tread carefully – for the time being.
‘Round here?’ Angela sneered. ‘You’ve got to be kidding.’
‘A solicitor then?’
She frowned. ‘Why do I need a solicitor?’
‘Mrs Crew, your husband was under investigation for murder and—’
‘Murder?’ Angela was filling the kettle. ‘You’ve got that wrong. He never killed anyone.’
‘I should tell you that we have a warrant to search these premises. There are officers outside and . . .’
Louise stepped forward and took the kettle from Angela when it started overflowing. ‘Here, let me,’ she said, turning off the tap and emptying some of the water down the sink.