by LJ Ross
Phillips sighed, and set his spoon down.
“It’s daft, really, but…listen, my Sam had a rough start in life. When we adopted her, we promised ourselves we’d do all we could to make sure no harm ever came to her, not while we’re around, anyhow.”
And, oh, how he wished he could live forever, to see her grow into a woman, then a mother herself.
“It’s not daft,” Annie said. “I can only imagine how protective you must feel. Sam—my Sam, that is—hasn’t been through half of what yours must have, and I feel like a giant clucking hen, at times.”
He smiled at that.
“I’ve got a mate who’s just had a little girl, and we were thinkin’ of settin’ up a support group for confused and sleep deprived parents.”
“Let me know when you have your first meeting,” she said. “I’ll bring the sandwiches.”
Phillips let out a rumbling laugh and, this time, when he looked over at his daughter in the window, he smiled.
* * *
By the time they covered the length of the beach at Roker, Lowerson and Yates were no closer to finding any sign of an injured woman. They went as far as they could along the sand before heading back up to the cliff road, to begin retracing their steps towards Souter and, beyond that, to Marsden. The stretch of land between Roker and Souter formed part of Whitburn Coastal Park, which had been reclaimed from the old colliery after its eventual closure. Now owned by National Heritage, the area was prone to landslips and erosion thanks to its geological make up and previous mining exploits, but it was still a popular draw for locals.
Soon, they approached an area around two hundred metres south of Souter Lighthouse, known to locals as ‘The Leas’.
“It’s beautiful here,” Mel said, breathing in the sea air.
“Beware the sink holes,” he replied, and pointed towards a sign and a permanent barrier, further along.
“Really? I didn’t realise there were so many.”
Jack nodded.
“People have fallen, but you still get the occasional nitwit who likes to skirt with danger.”
The idea formed in his mind even before the words came out.
“Mel—”
“Jack—”
“You go first,” she said.
“I was going to say, what if this injured woman fell, and that’s why she ended up trapped in a cave?”
Mel nodded.
“Exactly my thoughts,” she said. “These holes would be deadly, at night, and especially in the middle of a storm.”
Lowerson took out his phone and put an urgent call through to the boss.
* * *
Marsden Beach and much of the neighbouring Whitburn Sands was inaccessible by the time Ryan arrived at the seafront, the tide already having closed in, but he made directly for The Leas, where Lowerson and Yates awaited him.
And, if Melanie noticed how the breeze swept Ryan’s dark hair back from his face, or how he threw a stick for a passing dog with the kind of playfulness that made him seem less hardened than your average murder detective, she certainly thought nothing further about it.
“Jack, Mel,” he said, nodding to them both. “Mac’s gone over to have a word with Faulkner about the trawler, now he’s had a chance to go over it, a bit. What’ve you got for me?”
They explained their theory, and where they had searched, so far.
“We checked all the little caves and inlets in Marsden Bay, yesterday,” Lowerson said. “There was nobody in there, and no sign of there having been anybody in distress—no blood spatter, or anything of that kind.”
Ryan nodded.
“Following the anonymous caller’s instructions, we then headed directly to Spottee’s, but, again, there was nothing to find and, frankly, nowhere for the woman to have become trapped. It’s an open cave, with easy access.”
“This is the only remaining stretch,” Yates added. “Although we haven’t had an opportunity to check the caves from the beach, we thought the sink holes could explain how this injured woman came to find herself trapped, sir.”
Ryan thought that it had been a while since his immediate team had called him ‘sir’ in casual conversation, but let it go. Old habits sometimes died hard, he supposed.
“On the other hand, it could be a wild goose chase,” Lowerson said, with admirable honesty.
Ryan looked at the barrier, then at the dark, gaping holes in the cliffside that were just visible from the safety of the footpath.
“It could be any one of them,” he said. “So, let’s look at this logically. For this anonymous caller to have found a woman at all, they’d almost certainly have accessed the cave from the beach. In that case, there are only a finite number of accessible caves from the beachside which correspond with the sink holes up here, on the cliffside. Agreed?”
The others nodded.
“In that case, let’s try to tally them up.”
“The photos,” Yates muttered, and hurriedly brought up a reel of images on her phone, taken by the forensics team the previous day and showing the length of the cliffs along Marsden Bay.
Unfortunately, they didn’t show the cliffs past Souter, where they now stood.
Yates was in the process of seeking out some reliable images of that stretch of coastline, when a movement caught Ryan’s eye. He turned to see two men dressed in hard hats and high-vis jackets making their way underneath the cordon further up ahead, and he called out to them.
“Hey!”
Ryan jogged along the footpath with the others trailing after him, raising his hand to attract their attention.
One of the safety engineers turned to meet him at the barrier.
“Help you, mate?” he enquired.
“DCI Ryan, Northumbria CID,” Ryan explained, flashing his warrant card. “Can I ask what’s going on, here?”
The engineer, who turned out to be called Dave, was suitably impressed by the mention of CID, and called across to his partner.
“We got a call to come and check out a new sink hole,” Dave explained. “Apparently some dog walker noticed it as they were passing.”
“Where?” Ryan asked. “Can you show us?”
“I don’t know about that,” Dave said, dubiously. “Members of the public aren’t supposed to come over the barrier, it’s Health and Safety—”
Ryan gave him a long, level look.
“We’ll try to restrain ourselves from diving into the hole,” he said.
Dave saw the funny side.
“Aye, well, you all look sensible enough,” he chuckled. “It’s over here—mind where you walk.”
He made them stand well back, in deference to the fact none of them was equipped with hard hats, and pointed out a new hole which hadn’t been there a couple of days before.
“This was only reported to you today?” Ryan enquired. “By whom?”
“Couldn’t tell you,” Dave said. “It would’ve gone through to the main office, and they contacted us separately to get down here, pronto, and make sure it was safe for the public. They don’t like havin’ to deal with any complaints.”
Ryan turned to the other two.
“Get onto the National Heritage main office and find out who that call came through to,” he said. “I want to know who called this in, and when.”
“On it, boss,” Yates said, and moved away to make some calls.
First, ‘sir’, now, ‘boss’? he thought, with a slight frown, before addressing the engineers again.
“Can you see anything down the hole?” he asked. “Any sign of an accident?”
They took a few minutes to rig up a safety rope, in case either of them should slip, following which Dave and his partner approached the edge of the sink hole with extreme caution to peer inside.
“There’s a cave at the bottom,” Dave called back. “It’s too dark to see anythin’ from up here, even with the torch!”
Ryan had been required to make borderline judgment calls throughout his career, and this was no exception
. He was in the process of weighing up the pros and cons of calling in a specialist mountaineering team to abseil into the heart of the cave, when Yates hurried back across the grass to join them.
“I’ve just spoken to the regional office,” she said. “The call they received was actually a voicemail message, received just before ten p.m. last night. They didn’t pick it up until later today, because they admitted they’d forgotten to check their voicemails.”
“Did the caller leave a name?”
“No name, no personal details,” she said. “Only a brief message to let them know a new sinkhole might have appeared near Spottee’s.”
The two men exchanged a glance.
“Spottee’s, again?” Lowerson said.
“Exactly. They said they’d sent someone out to check, but they’ve never had sink holes around that area, and it’s run by the council, so doesn’t fall under their remit. They passed on the message to Sunderland City Council, and sent the engineers out here to check over the existing sink holes, just in case that’s where the caller meant to direct them.”
“Looks like our caller isn’t so hot on their geography,” Ryan said. “But that makes two for two, which is good enough for me. Jack? Put a call through to the nearest mountain rescue team and tell them we need to borrow a couple of personnel. We need to get down there and have a proper look.”
CHAPTER 21
Mick watched the early afternoon news with a growing sense of unease.
He leaned forward in his chair, barked at the others in the room to keep quiet, and listened intently to the newsreader.
At lunchtime today, engineers were dispatched to local beauty spot, The Leas, after a report was received about a new sink hole having appeared overnight. In a surprising turn of events, police have now cordoned off the area and are assisting National Heritage engineers in their assessment of the area…pedestrians are advised to keep clear of the area…
A short reel of footage began to play across the screen, showing the engineers alongside a small crowd of other men and women, some dressed in harnesses as they prepared to abseil into the sink hole, and a small group of other, plain-clothed police officers.
Why were they plain clothed? Mick wondered.
And then, he spotted one he recognised.
Ryan.
Even if he hadn’t been so recognisable, and even if he hadn’t garnered a bit of a cult following for all the collars he’d taken, Mick would have known him—he’d been given a list of names and faces to look out for.
He swore softly, and reached for the burner phone resting on the chair leg beside him.
“Whassamatter, Mick?” Noddy asked.
There came no reply, and Mick left the room to put through an urgent call.
“What’s up wi’ him?” Callum wondered.
Noddy yawned and then shrugged.
“Pro’ly just cheesed off that we’re havin’ to stay here longer than usual,” he said. “We’d be long gone, by now.”
“Aye, it’s draggin’ on, like,” Callum said, keeping his voice down lest his boss should overhear. “The longer we hang around with the girls, the more chance there is of someone gettin’ tipped off. We need to move.”
Further conversation was forestalled when Mick returned, with a face like thunder.
“It’s the woman,” he told them. “She’s gotta be down that sink hole.”
The other two stared dumbly at the television screen, although the news had moved on.
“How d’you know that?” Callum wondered.
“It’s that big bugger—Ryan,” Mick spat. “He’s CID, not some beat copper. There’s no chance he’d be on site lookin’ at a friggin’ sink hole, unless there was owt to find down there.”
“What if she’s alive—and talks?” Noddy asked, with the kind of bald stupidity Mick found infuriating.
He turned on him like a shark.
“What d’you think happens, Nod? We all go on a bloody jaunt to Marbella?”
Noddy reddened.
“I just meant…won’t he take care of it?”
Mick didn’t reply directly.
“He’s comin’ round tonight,” he said. “Apparently, he’s got it fixed for us to move them tomorrow.”
Callum and Noddy exchanged a relieved glance, but Mick didn’t share the emotion. There was a long way to go, yet, and they’d already been delayed by over twenty-four hours. The risk to himself grew higher with every passing hour, and not just from the pigs—although, it didn’t help that there was an All-Ports Warning in place. That only made the job harder.
But all of that paled in comparison with the single overriding concern which played over and over in his mind.
Why were CID investigating that sink hole?
Because they thought somebody was down there, dead or alive.
Why did they think that? They had no way of knowing for certain how many women were brought in on the boat.
Unless some bugger told them.
Mick looked at the faces of the other two in the room, considering what lay behind their eyes.
Callum was pushing forty, but had the mentality of a teenager, which made him pliable and easy to manage, most of the time. The fact he happened to have no sexual drive was an added bonus, and meant he could be trusted with the women—more so, than any of the others, or himself, for that matter. He’d been a part of the business for the past five years, and he’d known him a lot longer, since the bloke was his half-brother. The possibility of him having blabbed was so far outside the realms of possibility, he could barely imagine it.
As for Noddy…
He was more of a problem. He was young—and dumb, for that matter—but he had a strong back and a taste for power which could be useful in their line of work. It could also be difficult to keep in check. Ambition and delusions of grandeur had led many a promising young recruit to find themselves at the bottom of the Tyne, before all was said and done, because they’d forgotten themselves. There was a pecking order in all things, and he didn’t need any hot-headed little upstarts swingin’ their dicks about, tryin’ to get the jump on him.
Mick stared hard at Noddy, who felt the heat of his gaze and looked up in surprise.
“Y’alreet, Mick? Can I get you somethin’?”
Mick shook his head slowly.
There was still enough deference in that one and enough healthy fear—if not quite respect. He couldn’t be trusted around the women, at least not on his own, but he could be trusted to do whatever it took to bring in a healthy profit, which included not squealing to the police.
No, it wasn’t Noddy.
That left Gaz or Ollie.
Mick paced across to the window and looked out at the courtyard beyond. A light drizzle had begun to fall, coating the rusted lawnmowers and other small-scale machinery he kept there, for show. He thought of the first time he and Gaz had opened the doors to ‘Donnelly’s Scrap Yard’, full of big ideas and hungry for success. They’d been mates since school, when Mick had been the runt of the litter, always the one to take a beating in the playground, except when Gaz intervened. Gaz, the one all the girls wanted, the one all the lads wanted on their team. They’d palled up, the pair of them, when Mick had shown him a better, more profitable way to make money than delivering newspapers on a Saturday morning. He supposed it had been his way of thanking his mate for the times he’d stepped in, when he hadn’t needed to.
That was loyalty.
That was friendship, as far as it went, and was deserving of reward.
The possibility that Gaz could have betrayed his trust, betrayed the bond they’d shared for twenty-five years, was beyond the pale. Besides, Gaz had grown used to the life and all the perks that came with it—and knew the consequences of defection better than most, since he was usually the one to dole out any punishments when they were due.
But Ollie…
Ollie.
The boy was young, and still wet behind the ears. He might have been Gaz’s son, but Mick had
misgivings on that front as well. There was no physical resemblance, other than them both having dark hair, and the boy had more of his mother in him, than anything else. He was submissive, but he was too intelligent for Mick’s liking. Too thoughtful, too quiet by far.
What went on, inside the boy’s head?
He’d sent the pair of them to check that stretch of coastline, to turn it inside out and find their missing woman. They’d reported back with nothing, having sworn they’d checked everywhere.
And yet, the police were swarming around that sink hole.
It didn’t make sense.
Mick turned back to the other two and reached for the packet of cigarettes in his back pocket.
“When’s Gaz due back?”
“He’s pickin’ up some more brown sugar for the girls,” Noddy told him. “Said he’d be back with some food around three.”
Mick checked the time, which was half-past-two.
“Tell him to come and find me, when he gets in. I’m off to check the women.”
A moment later they heard him leave and cross the courtyard beyond, boots clicking against the broken tarmac.
CHAPTER 22
Ryan spotted the television camera and sighed in a mixture of resignation and frustration.
How they managed to arrive so quickly, he didn’t know, but there was seldom a time when they could simply get on with the job in hand without having to worry about having their every move recorded for posterity. Unfortunately, there was little he could do about it, unless they found a body, in which case they’d be intruding upon an active crime scene.
“How are you getting along?”
Two professional climbers from the Northumberland National Park Mountain Rescue Team, led by a woman by the name of Ginny, were rigged up and strapped into their harnesses, and were testing the strength of their supporting ropes which had been secured to firmer ground, away from the entrance to the sink hole.
“Just about ready to go down,” Ginny said. “We’ll record what we see using the body-cams.”