Dead Tomorrow (6 page)

In the cosy warmth of the spacious, high-tech bridge there was an air of quiet concentration. Ten nautical miles south-east of Brighton, they were almost over the dredge area now. Yellow, green and blue lines on a black screen, forming a lopsided rectangle, marked out the 100 square miles of seabed leased from the government by the Hanson Group, the conglomerate which owned this particular dredging fleet. The land was as precisely marked out as any farm onshore, and if they strayed out of this exact area, they risked heavy fines and losing their dredging rights.

Commercial dredging was, in a sense, underwater quarrying. The sand and gravel that the ship sucked up would be graded and sold into the construction and landscaping industries. The best-grade pebbles would end up on smart driveways, the sand would be used in the cement industry, and the rest would be either crushed up into concrete and tarmac mixes, or used for rubble ballast in the foundations of buildings, roads and tunnels.

The captain, Danny Marshall, a lean, wiry, good-natured man of forty-five, stood at the helm, steering with the two toggle levers that controlled the propellers, giving the ship more manoeuvrability than a traditional wheel and rudder. Sporting a few days’ growth of stubble, he wore a black bobble hat, a chunky blue sweater over a blue shirt, jeans and heavy-duty sea boots. The first mate, similarly attired, stood watch over the computer screen on which the dredge area was plotted.

Marshall clicked on the ship-to-shore radio and leaned forward to the mike. ‘This is Arco Dee, Mike Mike Whiskey Echo,’ he said. When the coastguard responded, he radioed in his position. Working out on one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world, where visibility could fall to just a few yards in the frequent mists and fogs that came down over the English Channel, it was important for all positions to be noted and updated regularly.

Like his other seven crewmates, most of whom had worked together for the past decade, the sea was in Malcolm Beckett’s blood. A bit of a rebel as a child, he had left home as soon as he could to join the Royal Navy as a trainee engineer, and had spent his first years at sea travelling the world. But, like the others on this ship who had begun their careers on ocean-going vessels, when his first child, Caitlin, was born, he wanted to find work that kept him at sea but enabled him to have some kind of family life.

Dredging had been the perfect solution. They were never at sea for longer than three weeks and returned to harbour twice a day. On the periods when the ship was based here in Shoreham, or in Newhaven, he was even able to nip home on occasions for an hour or so.

The captain reduced speed. Malcolm checked the engine revs and temperature gauges, then glanced at his watch. They would be back in phone range of the shore in about five hours. Five o’clock this evening. The phone call from Lynn had left him deeply disturbed. While he had always found Caitlin a difficult child, he was immensely fond of her and saw a lot of himself in her. On the days that he took her out, he was always amused by her complaints about her mother. They seemed to be exactly the same issues that he had had with Lynn too. In particular, her obsessive worrying – although, to be fair, Caitlin had given them both plenty to worry about over the years.

But this time it had sounded even worse than anything before and he felt frustrated that the call had been cut short. And very worried.

He pulled on his hard hat and high-visibility jacket, left the bridge and clambered down the steep metal steps to the gridded companionway, then down on to the main deck. He could feel the sharpness of the winter breeze rippling his clothes as he walked across to get into position to supervise the lowering of the dredge pipe into the sea.

A couple of his former navy colleagues, whom he met up with from time to time for a drink, joked that dredgers were nothing more than floating vacuum cleaners. In a sense they were right. The
Arco Dee
was a 2,000-ton Hoover. Which meant 3,500 tons when the dust bag was full.

Mounted along the starboard side of the ship was the dredge pipe itself, a 100-foot-long steel tube. For Malcolm, one of the highlights of each voyage was watching the dredge pipe sink out of sight into the murky depths. It was the moment when the ship truly seemed to come alive. The sudden clanking din of the pumping and chute machinery starting up, the sea all around them churning, and in a few moments water, sand and gravel would be thundering into the hold, turning the whole centre of the vessel, which was the cargo hold, into a ferocious cauldron of muddy water.

Occasionally, something unexpected, like a cannonball or part of a Second World War aircraft or, on one nerve-racking occasion, an unexploded bomb, got sucked up and jammed in the drag head – the mouth of the pipe. Over the years, so many historical artefacts had been dredged up from the ocean floor that official procedures had been established for dealing with them. But no guideline existed for what the Arco Dee was about to haul up on this occasion.

When the hold was full, all the water would drain off through openings in the spillways, leaving what was, effectively, a sand and pebble beach in the middle of the ship. Malcolm liked to walk along it as they headed back to harbour, crunching through some of the hundreds of shells that got scooped up, or occasionally coming across a hapless fish or crab. Some years ago he had found what was later identified as a human leg bone, a tibia. Even after all these years, the mysteries of the sea, especially what lay beneath it, filled him with a childish excitement.

In about twenty minutes or so it would be time to raise the dredge pipe. Malcolm, taking a quick break in the empty mess room, sat on a battered sofa, cradling a mug of tea and eating a tabnab – as scones were called in navy slang. The television was on, but the picture was too blurry to make anything out. His attention wandered distractedly to the evening meal menu, which was scrawled in red marker pen on a whiteboard: Cream of leek soup, Bread roll, Scotch egg, Chips, Fresh salad, Steamed sponge and custard. Once they returned to port, there were several hours of hard work unloading the cargo before dinner, and by then normally he would be ravenous. But at the moment, his thoughts on Caitlin, he lost interest in the scone after a couple of bites and dropped it in the bin. As he did so, he heard a voice behind him.

‘Mal…’

He turned to see the second mate, a burly Scouser in overalls, hard hat and thick protective gloves.

‘We’ve got a blockage in the drag head, Chief. I think we need to raise the pipe.’

Mal grabbed his hard hat, following the second mate out on to the deck. Looking upwards, he immediately saw only a trickle of water coming down the chute. Blockages were unusual because normally the heavy steel pincers of the drag head pushed obstacles clear of the nozzle, but just occasionally a fishing net was sucked up.

Shouting out instructions to his crew of two, Mal waited till the suction pumps and the chute were switched off, then activated the winding gear to raise the pipe. He stood, peering over the side, watching the churning water as it slowly came into view. And when he saw the object that rose to the surface, firmly wedged between the massive steel claws, he felt a sudden tightening in his gullet.

‘What the fuck’s that?’ the Scouser said.

For a moment, they all fell silent.

Roy Grace felt increasingly that his life was a constant challenge against the clock. As if he was a contestant in a game show that did not actually offer any prize for winning, because it had no end. For every email he succeeded in answering, another fifty came in. For every file on his desk that he managed to clear, another ten were brought in by his Management Support Assistant, Eleanor Hodgson, or by someone else – most recently by Emily Gaylor, from the Criminal Justice Department, who was there to assist him in preparing his cases for trial, but who seemed to take a malevolent delight in dumping more and more bundles of documents on his desk.

This week he was the duty Senior Investigating Officer, which meant that if any major crime happened in the Sussex area, he would have to take charge. He silently prayed to whichever god protected police officers that it would be a quiet week.

But that particular god was having a day off.

His phone rang. It was an operator called Ron King he knew from the Force Control Department. ‘Roy,’ he said. ‘I’ve just had a call from the coastguard. A dredger out of Shoreham has pulled up a body, ten miles out in the Channel.’

Oh great! Grace thought. All I bloody need. Being a coastal city, Brighton received a quantity of dead bodies from the sea every year. Some were floaters, usually suicide victims or unfortunate yacht crew who had gone overboard. Some were people who had been buried at sea, hooked in nets by fishermen who hadn’t read their charts and had trawled over one of the areas marked out for funerals. Mostly, they could be dealt with by a uniformed PC, but the fact that he was being called indicated something was not right.

‘What information do you have about it?’ he asked dutifully, making a mental note not to say anything to King about his cats. Last time the controller had gone on about them for ten minutes.

‘Male, looks young, early to mid-teens. Not been down long. Preserved in plastic sheeting and weighted.’

‘Not a burial at sea?’

‘Doesn’t sound like it. Not the usual kind of floater either. The coastguard said the captain is concerned it looks like it might be some kind of ritual killing – apparently. There is a strange incision on the body. Do you want me to ask the coastguard to send a boat out to bring it in?’

Grace sat still for a moment, his brain churning, switching his thoughts into investigation mode. Everything on his desk and in his computer was now going to have to wait, at least until he had seen the body.

‘Is it on the deck or in the cargo hold?’ he asked.

‘It’s wedged in the drag head. Beyond slitting open the plastic sheeting to see what it was, they haven’t moved it.’

‘They’re operating out of Shoreham?’

‘Yes.’

Grace had been on a dredger which had hauled up a severely decomposed body some years ago and remembered a little about the machinery.

‘I don’t want the body moved, Ron,’ he said. There could be key forensic evidence lodged around the body or in the nozzle of the dredge pipe. ‘Tell them to secure and preserve it as best they can, and get them to make an exact note on the chart where the body came up.’

As soon as he had terminated his call with Ron, he made a further series of calls, assembling the immediate team he needed. One was to the Coroner, informing her of the incident and requesting a Home Office pathologist to attend. Most bodies taken or washed up from the sea would be collected by the mortuary team straight away, after a cursory examination by a police surgeon or paramedic at the scene to certify death, no matter how obvious it was that the person was dead, and then assessed back at the mortuary for a suspicious or natural death. But here, Grace felt from the sound it, there was little doubt this was suspicious.

Thirty minutes later he was at the wheel of a pool Hyundai, heading towards the harbour, with Detective Inspector Lizzie Mantle, with whom he had worked on a number of previous inquiries, beside him. She was a highly competent detective, and the fact that she was nice to look at was another bonus. She had shoulder-length fair hair, a pretty face, and was dressed, as she always seemed to be, in a man’s style of suit, today in a blue chalk-stripe over a crisp white blouse. On some women it would have looked quite butch, but on her it was businesslike while still feminine.

They drove around the end of the harbour, passing the private driveway leading to the cul-de-sac where Heather Mills’s house was.

Seeing Grace turn his head, as if perhaps to get a glimpse of the Beatle’s former wife, she asked, ‘Did you ever meet Paul McCartney?’

‘No.’

‘You’re quite into music, aren’t you?’

He nodded. ‘Some.’

‘Would you have liked to be a rock star? You know, like one of the Beatles?’

Grace thought about it for a moment. It was not something he had ever considered. ‘I don’t think so,’ he said. ‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because,’ he said. Then he hesitated, slowing down, looking out for the right part of the quay. ‘Because I have a crap voice!’

She grinned.

‘But even if I was able to sing, I always wanted to do something that would make a difference.’ He shrugged. ‘You know? A difference to the world. That’s why I joined the police force. It may sound clichéd – but it’s why I do what I do.’

‘You think a police officer can make more difference than a rock megastar?’

He smiled. ‘I think we corrupt fewer people.’

‘But do we make a
difference?’

They were passing a lumber yard. Then Grace saw the dark green van bearing the gold crest of the city of Brighton and Hove Coroner, parked close to the edge of the quay, and pulled up a short distance from it. None of the rest of the team had arrived so far.

‘I thought the ship was supposed to be here already,’ he said a little irritably, mindful of the time, and of the retirement party he had to be at tonight. Several of the top brass of the Sussex Police Force would be there, which meant it would be a good opportunity to do a spot of brown-nosing, so he had been anxious to be there punctually. But there was no chance now.

‘Probably delayed in the lock.’

Grace nodded, and climbed out of the car, walking to the very edge, still limping and tender from rolling his beloved Alfa Romeo during a pursuit a while back. He stood beside an iron bollard, the wind feeling icy on his face. The light was fading fast, and if it wasn’t such a cloudless sky, it would already be almost dark. A mile or so in the distance he could see the closed lock gates and an orange superstructure, probably that of the dredger, beyond. He pulled his overcoat tightly around himself, shivering against the cold, dug his hands into his pockets and pulled on his leather gloves. Then he glanced at his watch.