He relaxed back into the couch.
Right now, it was just what he needed.
EIGHTEEN
They drive back from the Bonefish Grill in two taxis: Ed, Sue and Marina in one car, Angie, Barry and Dave in the other. It’s only a ten-minute journey to the Pelican Palms and the cabs stay together all the way. Arriving in the village, there’s a little good-natured argy-bargy about who is paying the fare, then once the cabs have left, the three couples walk slowly back into the resort, none of them seemingly keen for the evening to end.
Though there is no sign of any officers, there are three police vehicles in the car park.
‘Wonder if there’s any news?’ Angie asks.
‘Nothing good,’ Dave says. He takes Marina’s hand and nods towards the police cruisers. ‘Or they wouldn’t still be here.’
Ed says that they should have gone on to a bar somewhere, last night of the holiday and all that, but Sue reminds him that they have a long trip home the following day and they still have some packing to do. Angie confesses that she started packing two days earlier. Marina claims that she and Dave have done nothing and are just planning to throw their stuff into cases right before they’re due to leave.
‘I wish I could be that casual,’ Angie says.
‘It’s not casual,’ Marina says, ‘so much as being disorganised.’
‘Right then …’ Sue says.
There are hugs between the three women, and between the women and men. Barry and Dave shake hands, then are both pulled into an embrace by Ed, who tells them that they need to relax and get in touch with their feminine sides.
‘Or latent homosexuality,’ he says, winking at Dave.
They start to separate, then, as the goodnights drag on, they drift back together and talk briefly about plans for the following day. There is some suggestion of seeing each other the next morning, grabbing a final hour or so by the pool, though nothing definite is arranged. Each couple has a hire car to return and some are planning to set off for Tampa airport earlier than others, but there is general agreement that they will all see each other in the departure lounge before the flight home.
‘Definitely,’ Angie says. ‘Don’t forget we need to swap those email addresses.’
Half an hour later, one of the couples is in bed and both he and she are reading: a novel that was discussed on a television book club and the autobiography of a northern comedian. Another couple is making love, and, although the cabins are detached, the walls are thin and on a still night such as this one the sound carries easily from one to another, so they take care to keep the noise down.
The third couple is arguing.
‘Why did you lie? In the restaurant.’
‘It was what I told the police, so—’
‘That’s what I mean. Why did you lie to the police in the first place?’
There is anger, plenty of it, but the volume is deliberately muted. Like the couple making love in the cabin just behind their own, they are making sure that they are not overheard.
‘You know why.’
‘I know that because of you I had to lie as well.’
‘It was sensible, all right?’
‘Sensible?’
‘You know what the police are like, you know the way they think. They’re the same all over the world. It just felt like the simplest way of getting crossed off the list or whatever and making sure we could get out of here tomorrow without being held up.’
‘It was stupid.’
‘Keep it down.’
‘It was stupid because it’s easy enough to check.’
‘I don’t see—’
‘For heaven’s sake, cameras, a witness, anything.’
For half a minute, neither of them says anything. One of them sits on the edge of the bed, working with clippers at their toenails. The other walks around, from one side of the bed to the other and back.
‘Look, it doesn’t really matter, does it?’
‘No?’
‘It was nothing important, it was just a detail.’
‘We’ll have to see. It depends if they find that girl, doesn’t it? And what state she’s in if they do …’
PART TWO
SUE AND ED
NINETEEN
Pete and Andy pushed their rented kayaks into the water just before 8.00 a.m. They had flown down from New York for a week’s R&R away from college; seven days of sun and beer and hot Florida girls and so far things had been going pretty well on at least two of the three fronts.
Andy had not been overly keen on the kayak trip, preferring to spend his days sleeping – in bed or by a pool, he wasn’t choosy – but Pete had finally convinced him that this was a good way to keep that chest of his nicely toned, which would surely increase his chances of scoring later on.
‘Let’s face it, you need all the help you can get,’ Pete had said. ‘Besides, the wildlife’s awesome out there. We might even see a manatee.’
‘Great,’ Andy had said. ‘That’s all we need, getting the frigging canoe turned over … and there’s alligators, right?’
‘This isn’t the Everglades, you moron. And it’s a kayak, not a canoe.’
Following the map provided by the rental company, they paddled south into Blind Pass, the channel no more than seventy-five feet wide for the first ten minutes or so. There were houses on either side. Apartment blocks or pricier, detached places, all with wooden docks alongside and boats of various sizes raised up out of the water.
They passed a sign in the water that said MANATEE ZONE, and Pete said, ‘Told you.’
‘What the hell are they anyway?’ Andy asked, already out of breath in the kayak behind him. ‘Giant seals or something?’
The day was bright and warm, same as every other day had been since they’d arrived. It would get even hotter as the morning wore on, so they each had bottles of water and cans of beer in their boat, along with tubes of sunblock in plastic bags next to their cameras and wallets.
‘Just an hour, right?’ Andy shouted. ‘Then breakfast.’
‘Yeah, yeah …’
They made steady progress through the shallow brown water, thick with weed. There were birds everywhere: blue herons, spoonbills and cormorants; snowy egrets in the branches of the trees on either side and the occasional osprey looking down on them from higher up, or perched on the signs reading Slow Down or No Wake. After twenty minutes or so, Pete pointed to the shoreline on their right and they paddled across. They hauled the kayaks up on to the shore, grabbed towels and walked over a ridge and down on to Turtle Beach. They drank their beer and swam for a while, the ocean calm enough that they were able to watch a group of dolphins breaching, black against the horizon a hundred yards away from them.
Even Andy was forced to concede that it was pretty cool.
Back in their kayaks, they paddled out towards Casey Key, where the channel widened and there were a few big boats moving around and the shoreline was nothing but mangroves on either side of them.
Pete pointed to a house in the distance, its flat grey roof just visible above the treeline. ‘I think that’s Stephen King’s place,’ he said.
‘Wow, really?’
‘It’s round here somewhere.’
Andy looked and shrugged. ‘Looks pretty ordinary.’
‘What were you expecting? The Munster house?’
They paddled around a narrow spit of land and back on themselves into a small inlet, no more than fifty feet across. It was suddenly very quiet and they drifted for a while, birds occasionally taking flight as they passed and fish jumping all around them.
‘That means something’s after them,’ Andy said.
The only sounds were the splashes as Pete paddled across to the furthest corner where a narrow channel was all but obscured by low branches.
‘Come on, let’s go into the tunnels,’ he said.
Andy looked towards the scattering of narrow, overgrown inlets that snaked away into the trees. ‘Are you kidding? How are we going to get
in there?’
Pete reached up with his paddle and pushed the branches out of the way, lying low in his kayak and easing himself in. The mangrove roots twisted into the water all around them. Looking up, they could see enormous spiders waiting to eat on webs spun from tree to tree and translucent crabs scurried across the mud just inches away on either side. After only a few feet, Andy was complaining, saying that there were probably snakes. Insisting that it would be impossible to turn round, that they were going to get trapped and there was no way he was getting out of the boat.
The channel narrowed still further until it was barely wider than the kayaks themselves. ‘This is stupid,’ Andy said.
‘Come on.’
‘Jesus, what’s that stink?’
There was a smell like rotten eggs as their paddles dug into the black, sulphurous sludge. Andy’s kayak got tangled, hard to the bank, and, irritated, he told Pete to wait up. Pete paddled on. ‘Don’t be such a pussy,’ he shouted.
A few yards ahead, Pete saw something wedged against the bank to his right, just below the waterline. A black mass of crap held fast in the tangle of roots. He pushed himself towards it, reaching up to keep the branches off his face. When he was close enough, he nudged tentatively at the black shape with the tip of his paddle. It felt like rubber. He saw that whatever it was had been wrapped in trash bags. The plastic was torn in places and he glimpsed a flash of red below the water. A sliver of something else: mottled, like a dead fish.
He leaned out of his boat and wrestled the package until it was released from the cage of mangrove roots and floated free. Sweating from the effort, he dragged it to the side of his kayak.
‘Andy, come here …’
He prodded at it and felt something give. He pulled his hand away.
‘Andy.’
Using his paddle, he pushed the blade into one of the tattered holes in the plastic and shifted it hard from side to side. He watched a crab scuttle out of the hole, saw the pale mass it had left behind. Stared at what was left of a foot.
Pete shouted. Screamed.
Behind him, his friend – still desperately trying to release his kayak from the mess of roots and branches – shouted back.
‘What is it, man? A gator? I fucking told you—’
From: Angela Finnegan [email protected]
Date: 25 June 11:17:09 BST
To: Susan Dunning
Edward Dunning
Marina Green [email protected]
Subject: Amber-Marie
Hi Everyone,
Not sure if any of you have been keeping up with this on the web, but just seen that they found that poor girl’s body last week. Here’s a couple of the stories I found online if anyone is interested.
http://www.mysuncoast.com/news/local/story/missing-girl-found-inmangroves/PbuFJfJgJOoyA.cspx
http://bradentonsarasota.com/content/amber-marie-body-discovered
Probably been in the water since the day she went missing, that’s what they reckon. Now I can’t stop thinking about that woman and what she must be going through. There but for the grace of God etc etc.
See you all in a couple of weeks at Sue and Ed’s. Sue, are you sure there’s nothing I can bring? Happy to knock up a starter or a pudding or something.
Love to all,
Angie xx
TWENTY
Jenny Quinlan started slightly as a healthy stack of paperwork was dropped on to the desk she shared with another TDC, and as she smoothed her skirt and caught her breath, she looked up to see Detective Sergeant Adam Simmons grinning down at her.
‘Here you go, Trainee Detective Constable Quinlan.’
Simmons parked his sizeable backside on the corner of the desk. Jenny slid her chair back a few inches and nudged the Tupperware container that held her lunch out of harm’s way.
‘Right up your street, this one.’
Jenny turned back to her computer screen. ‘Really?’ Simmons said much the same thing every time he palmed off some tedious or menial job on her.
‘Don’t worry,’ he said.
‘Who’s worried?’
‘Piece of piss, this one, I promise.’
‘Meaning it’s something you can’t be arsed with.’
‘Spot on.’
‘Great …’
Jenny glanced up to see that Simmons was grinning again and, not for the first time, she wondered if the attention she was being paid was because her self-styled mentor had taken something of a shine to her. It was hardly flattering – the man could not be less sexy if he worked as a Jeremy Clarkson lookalike – but whether he was taking the piss or simply taking advantage, it made his presence fractionally less annoying.
It wasn’t as though she was beating off admirers with a stick.
‘Come on, Jen, you know that this is all part of the training. Sucking up to your sergeant.’
She knew well enough, having spent five months based in the CID room at Lewisham station. The weekly sessions attending court and observing post-mortems, the training in interviewing prisoners and handling evidence had gone hand in hand with those equally important modules that were not to be found in any Met Police prospectus or TDC handbook. The nod and the wink as favours were done and earned. The pulling of rank and the passing of bucks. The banter and the bullshit.
‘As long as it’s only sucking up,’ she said.
She was delighted to see Simmons blush. This was the first time she had given him anything back – anything like that at any rate – and it was thrilling to see that it made him so uncomfortable. She remembered one of the female DIs in the pub one night, leaning across and whispering, ‘Plenty like him around. All gob and no truncheon …’
Simmons eased himself away from the desk and slapped the flat of his hand down on the pile of papers he had delivered. ‘Anyway, just as long as we’re clear,’ he said. ‘Anything comes of this, any testifying needs doing and I’m the one who gets to go to Florida.’
‘Eh?’
Jenny reached across and took the top sheet of paper. She recognised the seal of the US government and glancing down she saw that the covering letter had been sent from the office of the embassy’s assistant legal attaché. She looked at Simmons.
‘Don’t get excited,’ he said. ‘It’s just a couple of interviews, nothing too far away.’
Jenny was starting to get very excited, but did her best to hide it. She flicked through the pages, shaking her head and puffing out her cheeks as she looked at the names and addresses. ‘I’ll try not to get too carried away with the glamour,’ she said.
‘Just ask the questions and write it up.’
‘Then you put your name on it?’
‘Only if you’ve done a good job,’ Simmons said. ‘If you haven’t, I tell them I trusted you with something but you obviously weren’t up to it.’
‘I think I can manage to ask a few questions,’ Jenny said.
‘I’m sure you can, love.’
‘Here’s a question …’ Simmons had turned away, but now he turned back and leaned down towards her; up for the banter, for the craic. It was fine because, for once, she wanted him close. ‘How much aftershave can one man wear before it actually becomes an arrestable offence?’
The expression on the sergeant’s face – the attempt to look as though he had found it funny, the nodding and that eyes-closed smile – would be the second-best moment of Jenny Quinlan’s day.
Reading through the documentation over the next hour or so, it was easy enough to follow the paper trail. The request, made almost a week earlier, had been fielded initially by staff at the US Embassy’s legal department and passed on to New Scotland Yard. Jenny could only surmise that it had finally filtered down through assorted Territorial Policing units to CID at Lewisham because of the station’s proximity to one of the three addresses on the original request form from the US.
Sarasota Police Department. The Crimes Against Persons Unit.
‘C
offee would be great, if you’re making …’
Jenny looked up. Two detective constables, a man and a woman, had just come back into the office; the woman doing the asking ever so nicely. This was part of it too, the glorified fagging, and Jenny swore to herself that when she became one of them, she would not do the same to whoever was in her position.
She laid the paperwork to one side. Said, ‘Yeah, not a problem.’
She smiled at the two DCs as she walked across to the coffee machine, only too aware that they had probably sworn the very same thing to themselves once upon a time.
‘Black with one sugar and white without,’ the man said.
‘Right,’ Jenny said, but she did not need to be told. She could manage to ask a few questions and she could remember coffee orders.
As she waited for the ancient, grumbling machine to do its work, she thought back to the exchange with Simmons an hour or so before. The crack about his aftershave. Pleased with herself as she had been, her leg had been trembling as she’d said it and, even now, just thinking about him slowly rolling his head around before walking back to his desk, she could feel something tighten in her stomach.
‘Funny, love,’ he had said. ‘That’s funny.’
She looked across, but Simmons was engrossed in something on his screen. Instead, she caught the eye of the male DC, who nodded and smiled. Now, he was sexy, but like most men with any standards or a modicum of self-esteem he had never shown the remotest interest in her and Jenny turned quickly back to stare at the machine before the blood had a chance to reach her cheeks.
She could hear her friend Steph giving her a good telling-off, asking her why she never believed any man could be interested. Why she thought so little of herself. Easy enough for Steph, who looked like Courtney Cox pre-surgery and who’d had a boyfriend since they were in junior school, for God’s sake.
‘You do tell them you’re not a lesbian,’ Steph had said once. ‘Don’t you?’
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