by Elise Noble
Black switched his regulator over, then wrote me a message.
Sorry about the vacation.
I hooked an elbow around the rope as I scribbled out my reply.
You take me to all the best places.
He smiled with his eyes. Should’ve gone to Abu Gallum.
Right. Instead of Gabr el Bint II?
Bob was relaxing in a fucking deckchair when we surfaced, reading a novel with his feet up on the deck rail. Next time, he could dive and I’d do the supervising.
“That was fast. Nothing down there?”
I left it to Black to explain this one.
“There’s a good variety of coral, a reasonably large sea turtle, an army of barracudas, and a corpse.”
“A corpse? What do you mean, a corpse?”
“Do you want the dictionary definition or the photos?”
I sat on a bench to release my tanks. Boy, that felt good. “Look on the bright side—at least we weren’t a group of tourists because that would’ve been awkward.”
“A fucking corpse?”
“Dude, you can keep asking the question, but the answer won’t be any different. Yes. It’s a half-eaten, spectacularly ugly corpse.”
“I’m retired. I don’t do corpses anymore.”
“So who do we call around here?” Black asked. “Do you have a contact in the police?”
“I do, but they don’t know a whole hell of a lot about dead bodies either. The last time there was a murder around here… That was the debacle in Fidda Hilal two years ago.” Fidda Hilal was a similar-sized town a half hour north, and although Blackwood hadn’t been involved, one of our clients had got tangled up in the mess, so I was familiar with it. “They got rid of the bad apples, I gather, but they still lack any kind of investigational expertise.”
“How about diving expertise? Somebody needs to bring the body up.”
“By the time they get around to organising that, there’ll be nothing left but bones.”
Bob looked at Black, Black looked at me, and I looked at Bob.
“We’re on vacation,” Black said. “I thought you wanted to get ice cream?”
“I’ve lost my bloody appetite now. And whoever’s down there, they’ve got family.”
“We don’t have jurisdiction.”
“When has that ever stopped you before?”
“We can’t do everybody’s jobs for them. We had precisely this discussion yesterday with Lieutenant General Fakhry.”
Ah, yes, our meeting in Cairo. With all the rumblings going on in the Middle East and North Africa, the Egyptian government wanted to hire a contingent of Blackwood’s former special forces operatives to run an advanced training program for some of their troops. The problem was, their basic training wasn’t good enough, and you couldn’t teach soldiers to sprint, climb, and jump before they mastered walking or they’d fall flat on their fucking faces.
Last month, we’d run a trial, and it had been a disaster. We weren’t about to risk our reputation or the morale of our people until the Egyptian army put some effort in, and we’d told them that in no uncertain terms. So I kind of understood where Black was coming from, but he had a tendency to think in cold, hard facts when sometimes a little empathy was needed.
Bob was on the same wavelength, it seemed.
“Remember the day after Eid al Adha in Northern Iraq?” he asked. “When Briggs got shot by a sniper and you insisted on going back for the body?”
“I was young and stupid then.”
“Young, yes, but never stupid. You said you wanted him to have a proper burial.”
Black didn’t much like to talk about his time as a Navy SEAL, but I knew he’d been nineteen when that incident happened. He still had the faintest scar on his thigh from the bullet wound he’d received that day, plus a Silver Star tucked at the back of our bedroom safe back in Richmond.
“I can’t argue with both of you.” A pause. Black liked space to think, to mull things over. “Fine. We’ll bring the body up.” He glanced around the boat, and I could see the cogs turning. “Diamond, you’d better empty that fucking ice chest.”
CHAPTER 4 - EMMY
FOR THE SECOND time that sunny Wednesday, a chill ran through me, partly due to the water seeping into my wetsuit but mostly because this time, I knew what awaited us at forty-five metres.
We’d spent the last hour and a half talking over our plan to recover the body, watching the footage Black had filmed on our first dive and discussing the logistics, the potential problems, and how to mitigate those problems before they happened.
One thing we all agreed on was that Captain Bob wouldn’t notify the authorities until Black and I were back underwater. The only thing worse than manhandling half a corpse while on vacation was attempting to do that with a dozen men who didn’t know what they were doing barking opposing instructions on the matter.
Black carried Bob’s camera this time, a professional setup with lights that cost more than a small family hatchback and weighed about as much as one too. I guided the picnic cooler into the water, now modified with drainage holes in the bottom and a sturdy rope cradle we’d use to haul it back to the surface again. The cradle hooked to a winch on the back of the Blue Tang, and when we set off the submersible flare Black carried in his pocket, Bob would slowly, slowly start reeling our haul in.
We descended quickly—going down was never the issue, rather it was coming back up that slowed things with pesky decompression stops. Take Ahmed Gabr’s world-record dive if you want an extreme example. Three hundred and thirty-two metres deep, fifteen minutes to get there, and thirteen and a half hours to safely ascend again.
At forty-five metres, the body was right where we left it, but minus another pound or two of flesh. Since I hadn’t eaten lunch yet, I figured it was safe to take a closer look. Was it a man or a woman? Difficult to tell, but from the size, I guessed at a female, or perhaps a teenage boy. Light brown hair curled around the edges of the skull, wafting in the current. The clothes didn’t give much away. Blue jeans and a red T-shirt hung in tatters, floating eerily in the blue, and the feet were bare. One scrap of the T-shirt had a logo—two fish fashioned into a heart shape.
It was Bob who’d asked the inevitable question: accident or murder? I didn’t know the answer to that yet either. Could the body have drifted with the current? Had a tourist slipped on the rocks above and drowned before they managed to escape? If they’d hit their head…curtains. Or had some sick freak tossed our victim into the sea, assuming their remains would sink straight to the bottom of the abyss?
Our plan called for me to act as barracuda-blocker while Black documented the scene. I got all the good jobs. Even though I wore gloves, their teeth could still do plenty of damage, so I carried a knife just in case. A five-inch clip-point with a matt-black blade. Barracudas were like magpies—attracted to shiny things—and I didn’t want to encourage them over.
With better lighting, I saw details I’d missed on the first trip down. The silver ring on a bony finger. The pair of flowers embroidered below the left-hand jeans pocket and pink nail polish on what was left of the toes that suggested our victim was female. The words printed on the purple backpack: Love Life, Love Dahab.
That philosophy hadn’t worked out so well for her, had it?
The tiny shrimps crawled over her exposed flesh, hundreds of them, thousands even, and Black used his spare hand to sweep a bunch of them away before he resumed filming. Odd. The straps of the backpack were tied together with a piece of yellow cord, making it harder for her arms to slip out. Had she done that? Or had somebody else done it for her?
Something silver flashed in my peripheral vision, and the mother of all barracudas swam at me. I turned in what felt like slow motion and punched the bloody thing as it shot past an inch from my face. One chance. I’d give it one chance.
In front of me, Black focused on the task at hand, panning slowly from left to right, recording every detail of the scene for posterity. Another barracuda�
�or maybe the same one—glided past me towards the reef wall, and I spotted something twinkling, half-buried in the sand on a ledge just below the girl’s feet. A hair clip. Hers? And where were her shoes? I looked above and beneath us, but I couldn’t see them, so either they’d tumbled to the bottom or she’d gone in barefoot.
Black beckoned me forward, and I let a little air out of my wing to make myself heavier, then hooked myself to the reef wall. He did the same—we needed stability for the next part—and also clipped the camera onto the rope to free up his hands. Now came the tricky part. First, we manoeuvred the cooler into position underneath the girl’s legs, and I held it steady while Black worked out how best to free her. He tried lifting her backpack, and I caught the surprise in his eyes as he shook his head. Whatever she had in there was heavier than he’d expected.
How was our air? A third gone. At these depths, every lungful was denser than at the surface, so we went through it much faster. Black’s gauge would say about the same as mine, I knew from experience. He may have been bigger, but practice meant he was also better at conserving air.
Now, he studied the scene, head slightly tilted and a knife in his hand. He needed to cut something, but what?
A barracuda got curious, swimming up to take a bite of its favourite meal as though it realised the table would soon be cleared. I batted it away, and it glared at me through beady little eyes. Good thing we weren’t dealing with piranhas. Finally, Black sawed through the cord, and I grabbed it off him and stuffed it into a pocket as the girl slid free from her bounds and concertinaed into the makeshift casket. Not exactly the ideal procedure, but with time and location against us, it was the best we could do.
I made sure to pick up the hair clip too, then went for the backpack. What the bloody hell was she carrying? Rocks? Black held out a hand, ready to secure the bag to the winch cable, when my hook came loose and I plummeted towards the depths. Ah, fuck. Think, Emmy. I blasted more air into my wing, which slowed me down, but it wasn’t enough. Whatever was in the bag had to weigh at least fifteen kilos. Fifty metres, fifty-five… My ears began aching, and my dive computer beeped helpfully to let me know I was too deep. No way was I letting go of the evidence, though, so with little other choice, I sacrificed my weight belt to the sea. Nine kilos gone, and with a bit of kicking, I began to ascend. At a maximum safe rate of nine metres per minute, it took me two minutes to get back to Black, and when I drew level, the asshole fucking laughed. I gave him the finger as he set off the flare and sent the school of barracudas bolting into the blue.
Since I’d lost my weight belt, I had to hold on to the backpack as we made our way to the surface, and my impromptu adventure meant I had a longer decompression time to look forward to. At ten metres, Bob had hung two small bottles of oxygen to help us out. The winch cable had depths marked at intervals, and he paused the ascent of our grisly cargo too, three bodies hanging in the water while we counted down the minutes.
Black rolled onto his back and studied the ripples on the surface. When I followed his gaze, I saw a shadow off the Blue Tang’s stern, what looked like a small dinghy tethered to the bigger boat.
Black wrote on the slate strapped to his arm.
Police?
I nodded. That seemed the most likely scenario. Suddenly, a longer decompression stop didn’t seem so bad. The prospect of answering questions for hours when I still hadn’t eaten lunch didn’t spark joy, as that TV cleaning lady Bradley loved so much kept saying, and it was tempting to leave the cops with the body and swim a little way up the coast. We could hide the gear, walk into town, and come back for it later. Probably no one would steal it. Crime rates were low in Dahab, apart from a possible murder, obviously.
Black scrawled on his slate again. Don’t even think about it.
This was the problem when you met your soulmate. They knew you as well as you knew yourself—sometimes better—and maintaining an element of surprise was almost impossible. But the good times far outweighed the bad. If I hadn’t met Black, I could’ve become an accounts assistant or a marketing executive or an HR administrator, another faceless desk jockey working forty hours a week to afford the rent on a one-bedroom flat in a shitty part of London, a Netflix subscription, and the occasional package holiday to the Costa del Sol. That was a best-case scenario. More likely, I’d be dead on the streets I’d tried so hard to escape.
With little else to do underwater, I got to wondering what was in the victim’s bag. I really wanted to open it, but I held back in case some vital piece of evidence got loose and floated away. The last thing I fancied was another swim to retrieve it.
No, I had to wait, and patience wasn’t my strong suit. For long stops, I usually liked to read. Nonfiction, mostly—science, politics, history, stuff that made me sound intelligent at parties. I pushed the boundaries with my waterproof e-reader case as well as with everything else in my life. But today, there were only fish to look at.
After a minute or two, Black pulled out a torch and signalled to Bob in Morse code. I didn’t follow everything, but my fuck-up was mentioned, as was the resulting delay. After what seemed like forever, we were on our way upwards again, water pouring off us as we emerged in front of Bob and our two new guests, neither of whom appeared too thrilled by today’s developments. While the younger private chewed his bottom lip in apprehension as he glanced at the cooler, his boss, who wore the three-star epaulettes of a captain, looked plain ol’ pissed off. Both stepped back as puddles spread across the deck.
“The body is in there?” the captain asked.
Where else would it be? “Yup.”
“You shouldn’t have moved it.”
“Captain al-Busari’s going to be running the investigation,” Bob told us. “He trained at the Police Academy in Cairo, and apparently, we shouldn’t have moved the body until the police documented the scene.”
“Were you planning to go down and document it yourself?” Black asked.
“We have a specialist team.”
“Really? Then where are they?”
“Alexandria.”
For fuck’s sake. The man was a grade A idiot.
“By the time they got here from Alexandria, there wouldn’t have been anything left of the woman,” I pointed out.
“It’s a woman?”
“Yes. Want to take a look?”
I didn’t bother to wait for an answer, just opened the cooler lid then stifled a laugh when the younger cop tripped over his feet running to the side of the boat to puke. The horror on the captain’s face didn’t escape me either. Had he even seen a dead body before?
“There you go. Guess you can start documenting everything now.”
A shout came from the shore, around thirty metres away, and another cop waved something black and plasticky in our direction.
“I have it! I brought the body bag.”
Good grief.
“That area’s also part of your crime scene,” Black pointed out. “Since it’s where the woman went into the water. You need to secure it and search it, not trample all over it.”
The captain swallowed hard, then yelled at the newcomer in Arabic. “Get back, you fool. Stop anybody from coming near.” Then to sidekick number one, who was wiping his mouth with his sleeve: “And Khaled, start documenting. Write everything down.”
What a charmer. Did he realise we foreigners spoke Arabic? Probably not. I usually preferred not to let on—that way, I could listen in on all sorts of conversations I wasn’t supposed to hear.
Khaled pulled out a notepad and stared around, pen paused over the page. I took pity on him.
“It’s easiest to start with photos,” I said. “We’ve filmed the scene underwater, but you’ll need to have a record of what we’ve brought up. Chain of custody. The body can stay in the cooler until it goes to the morgue, but you’ll need evidence bags for her backpack and a couple of other bits. Do you have any of those?”
A quick shake of the head. Of course he didn’t.
“Bo
b, do you have any plastic bags? We’ll need a big rubbish sack plus two smaller ones. The kind you put sandwiches in.”
“Around here, we use Tupperware for sandwiches. It’s better for the environment.”
“Okay, two boxes.”
“What are you doing?” the captain asked. “This is my investigation.”
“We appreciate that,” Black told him. Until that point, he’d managed to stay diplomatic, but the little tic in his jaw said he’d had enough of the good chief. “But since you’ve come woefully underprepared, we thought we’d help.”
“Thank you,” Khaled whispered, but the captain didn’t seem to share his sentiment.
“I will handle it,” al-Busari snapped. “You’re civilians. Foreigners. This is not your business.”
“Then get the body off our boat, and we’ll carry on with our vacation.”
Black turned his back on the man. Dismissed.
I took a small measure of joy at the shock on the captain’s face. Evidently, the big cheese wasn’t accustomed to being spoken to like that, but my husband didn’t suffer fools gladly. Me? I was conflicted. On the one hand, instinct told me the girl had been murdered, and I wanted to see her killer brought to justice. But on the other hand, this was our vacation. Perhaps that sounds selfish, but we couldn’t solve every crime in the world, and the thought of spending the next two weeks butting heads with the Egyptian police didn’t exactly fill me with glee. We’d offered to assist, and they’d turned us down.
“Here—you’ll want these.” I fished the piece of knotted cord and the hair clip out of my pocket and placed them on the cooler. “And this.”
I picked up the backpack, but without the water to support it, the flimsy fabric tore under the weight of its contents. Rocks tumbled out. One landed on my foot, and the rest scattered across the deck. Rocks? Actual rocks? I’d been kidding when I suggested that earlier. Who the hell went hiking with a bag of bloody rocks?