Death Surge (18 page)

‘No.’ She smiled.

He rose. She studied him quizzically for a moment, and he thought how easy it would be to be seduced by her. ‘Were Eddie Creed, Craig Weatherby and Declan Saunders your patients?’

She stood up and eyed him steadily. ‘You’ll need that warrant, Inspector.’

‘Then I’d better get back and request it. Thank you for your help.’ He stretched out a hand. She took it while studying him evenly and candidly. Oh yes, he thought, it would be very easy to slip into bed with her, and he didn’t think she’d complain; on the contrary, he was getting a very strong signal that she’d do anything but. Maybe she’d already been to bed with Mister Bodyguard. He could be her husband or partner. He didn’t ask and he didn’t need to know, but as he left he saw the man standing at the corner of the house watching him.

His visit to Dr Needham hadn’t got him any further forward, but as he headed back to the station he wondered if Sawyer had already accessed that crew’s medical records. If Sawyer did suspect Masefield and his crew of those international jewellery raids then Horton was betting he had access to everything, including how much each of them had weighed when born. And he suspected that Sawyer wasn’t about to disclose any of it to Uckfield. Then, as though his thoughts had conjured up the big man, he pulled into the car park to see Uckfield marching towards him with a grim look on his craggy face.

‘Drink,’ he barked.

It wasn’t a question but a summons. Horton hid his surprise and resisted the temptation to glance at his watch. It must be about half six by now. As he climbed into Uckfield’s BMW he wondered what was so urgent and sensitive that Uckfield wanted to relay it away from the station. Then his heart plummeted. Uckfield must have a positive ID on the body, and they must be on their way to break it to Cantelli. Agent Eames must have reported back from her conversation with Andreadis’s skipper that Johnnie had a tattoo which matched the location and vague description Dr Clayton had given them. But Uckfield had said ‘drink’ and they were heading north on the motorway out of the city, the wrong direction for Cantelli’s house, so it couldn’t be that. Whatever it was that Uckfield had to say though, Horton wasn’t sure he was going to like it, because it was clear that Uckfield had been looking out for him and that wasn’t a good sign by any reckoning.

‘D
o you believe all that bollocks about international jewellery thefts?’ Uckfield swallowed a large mouthful of his half pint of bitter and glowered at the city spread out before them as though it had done something to personally annoy him.

Horton eyed him closely. ‘Do you?’

‘No, I bloody don’t.’ Uckfield swivelled his gaze back on Horton. ‘I didn’t the last time Sawyer shoved his beaky nose into one of my cases and I believe it even less now.’

‘Then what’s he doing here?’

‘I was going to ask you that.’

‘How should I know?’ Horton said, surprised, and yet deep inside him he thought of Zeus. He wondered what Uckfield had picked up from his sources. Sawyer was hardly likely to confide in Uckfield, but perhaps Sawyer had mentioned to Uckfield that he was interested in getting Horton seconded to the Intelligence Directorate. ‘Detective Chief Superintendent Sawyer doesn’t confide in me.’

‘But Agent Eames might.’ Uckfield eyed him pointedly with a grotesque leer.

‘There’s no reason why she should,’ Horton said somewhat stiffly, keeping his gaze steadily on Uckfield. Just what had been said in Cowes on Monday night when Uckfield had been there? Or was Uckfield implying that Harriet Eames fancied him?

Uckfield sniffed, shrugged and let it go. After a moment he said, ‘Funny how she’s shown up with Sawyer twice and how she seems to be spending more time here than at The Hague where she’s
supposed
to be working.’

Yes, wasn’t it?
Horton hadn’t checked that she really was working at The Hague; maybe he should. Even if he did though, he guessed whoever he asked would be primed to confirm it. Unless he could find someone he knew personally who was working on secondment there and could pump them for information on the quiet. Perhaps she, like her father, was working for the intelligence services. Or perhaps she was working with the Intelligent Directorate. He said, ‘Maybe there is some truth in these jewellery robberies, and maybe Johnnie Oslow is involved.’

‘Yeah, and maybe I’m the fairy on the Christmas tree.’

The mind boggled. Any Christmas tree would buckle under Uckfield’s weight. Horton suppressed a fleeting smile. ‘The Andreadis family are very wealthy, and they’re personal friends of Lord Eames. Xander’s probably pulled some strings to bring in the big guns.’

‘For a lad of twenty-three, only one amongst his hundreds of employees, who he’d normally think has gone off with a tart!’ scoffed Uckfield.

He was right, but what was he driving at? ‘Then why spin us this yarn about jewellery thefts if it’s not true? We can easily check it out.’

‘Trueman’s working on it when the blonde beauty isn’t breathing down his neck, and before you suggest it I’ve also got him checking out Masefield and his jolly jack-tar crew.’

Good. Trueman had contacts everywhere. Horton said, ‘And that seems even more relevant now. Two of them sailed with the same charity as Johnnie.’ He told Uckfield about his visit to Don Winscom and Dr Needham, adding, ‘So if it isn’t jewellery robberies or a woman, what do you think is going on, Steve?’

‘Blackmail.’

‘You’re not serious?’ asked Horton, surprised.

‘Perfectly.’

‘You think Xander Andreadis is being blackmailed?’

Uckfield nodded and swallowed his beer.

‘By Johnnie!’ said Horton incredulously.

‘By someone who used Johnnie Oslow to get the information they need, and now they have it they’ve disposed of him.’

Horton considered this. Maybe it wasn’t so far fetched. But would Johnnie have had access to highly sensitive information? He said as much.

‘Why not?’ was Uckfield’s prompt reply. ‘He’s been working on-board that private yacht and racing with Xander Andreadis’s team for some years. He’s probably picked up a great deal, being a bright lad. There must be some shady dealings in Andreadis’s past.’

Or a member of his family, thought Horton, recalling what Harriet Eames had told him on Saturday night about Christos Andreadis returning to Greece from England with enough money to kick-start his business fortune even though he’d only been barman, and Giorgio Andreadis’s love of art, antiques and women.

Uckfield said, ‘No one gets that rich without soiling their hands somewhere along the line.’

‘Would Xander tell the police that he was being blackmailed? Surely he’d want it kept quiet if it was something illegal. Wouldn’t he have paid up and then thought of a way to get even, or perhaps hired a private agency to handle it?’

‘Maybe he struck a deal with Interpol: help me get this blackmailer off my back and I’ll give you something you need on someone. Maybe Xander Andreadis has information on these jewellery thefts or some other villain, and the latter’s much more plausible if you ask me.’

Zeus? Or was Horton just getting obsessed about him? ‘And whatever Andreadis is being blackmailed over, Sawyer doesn’t want us to know about it.’ He wondered if Johnnie could have met this blackmailer or someone working with him on the sixteenth of July. Could he have been in on a cut? Or perhaps he had no idea that what he was handing over was so valuable and dangerous. He said, ‘How are Europol getting on at digging deep into Xander’s finances?’

‘I’ll ask Agent Eames,’ Uckfield said in a manner that left Horton in no doubt that he didn’t expect to get a truthful answer. ‘We keep this blackmail theory to ourselves,’ he added, tossing back his beer.

Horton had no intention of sharing it with anyone. ‘If it is blackmail then we’re not going to be told about it.’

‘No. We follow up the leads we’ve got on Johnnie, of which there are none, and we carry on investigating the death at the Lines.’

‘What did they tell you in Cowes last night? Don’t play dumb, Steve. I know you were summoned there. To the Castle Hill Yacht Club, was it?’

Uckfield sniffed and scratched the inside of his thigh. ‘Yeah. Sawyer just gave me the gen he spouted today about the thefts and Johnnie being involved, and then you phoned with news of the burnt offering.’

‘Only Sawyer?’

‘And the blonde beauty.’

‘No one else.’

‘No.’

Horton searched the craggy face to see if that was the truth. He thought it was. He tossed back the remainder of his coke and fell into step beside Uckfield as they headed to the car. ‘So if the body hadn’t been found, what were your instructions?’

‘To sit on the missing persons report for the rest of the week and make sure Bliss did the same.’

‘That stinks,’ Horton said angrily, halting.

‘Yeah, and I told the bastard that.’ Uckfield zapped open the car but didn’t climb in.

‘But you’d have done it.’

Uckfield shrugged. ‘That wouldn’t have stopped you. And you don’t report to me.’

Horton could read between the lines. Bliss would have obeyed without question, and his own continued investigations would have got him reprimanded unless he’d been pushed on to working on something else. Cantelli would have been ordered to take some time off. Would Uckfield really have done nothing? He valued his career. ‘I take it that Dean was in on it.’

‘Yes.’

Horton liked to think that Uckfield would at least have helped with the investigation into Johnnie’s disappearance, but he wasn’t certain. He felt bitter and sickened by the fact that the force wouldn’t even look out for its own.

As they headed back to the station in silence he mulled over what Uckfield had said. It was another possible theory but it didn’t get them any closer to finding out where Johnnie was or whether his was the body in the fire last night. They seemed to have a lot of theories and very little facts. And none of the latter seemed to be forthcoming either when Horton entered the incident suite some half an hour after Uckfield. Walters had left him a message saying he’d drawn a blank with trying to identify anyone acting suspiciously at the scene of the fire and the traffic cameras had come up with zilch. The house-to-house was progressing, and tomorrow Walters would begin checking out the vehicle licence numbers that uniform were collecting from the residents to possibly identify any vehicle that wasn’t usually parked in that area. In the incident suite Dennings reported that Sergeant Winton and his search team had returned from the Hilsea Lines with twenty black bags of rubbish, which had pleased the lab no end but they’d found no evidence of any accelerants. And Agent Eames had contacted the skipper of
Calista
to ask if Johnnie had a tattoo, but reported that no one seemed to remember seeing one. Horton had rapidly scrutinized the photographs that Sarah Conway had sent over of Johnnie and couldn’t see any tattoo. That didn’t mean to say he hadn’t had one done recently, though.

It was dark and raining by the time Horton climbed on his boat. He threw his keys on the table and ran a glass of water, drinking it while listening to the rain hitting the deck and the wind whistling around the yacht. No one had followed him and no one had been waiting for him. The pontoon was silent, no strange boats moored up close by and no one moored up for the night on the visitors’ pontoon outside the Cill or waiting to enter the marina when the Cill gate opened on the rising tide.

He pushed aside thoughts of Johnnie and of what Uckfield had told him and plucked the Manila envelope from his jacket pocket. He stared at it, recognizing a reluctance to open it not because he was afraid of what it might contain but because of what it might not. Would this be another blind alley along which he was to stumble? He feared the worse, like some school kid anticipating his exam results and expecting them to be dire. But he could put it off no longer.

Sliding open the kitchen drawer he picked out a sharp knife and then, taking a deep breath, slit the envelope under the red wax and drew out the contents. There were two sheets of white paper, folded lengthways in three. He unfurled them, his heart beating fast, the sweat pricking his brow, hardly daring to hope that Dr Amos had revealed facts about Jennifer that would explain her disappearance.

‘What the hell?’ Quickly, he turned them over. He held them up against the light. There wasn’t even a watermark. He was staring at nothing. Just two pieces of blank paper. He peered into the envelope, there had to be something. But there was absolutely sod all. Fury replaced his shock. Who was taking the piss – Quentin Amos? Or had someone intercepted what had been in this envelope and replaced it with blank pieces of paper? Were they laughing at him even now?

Disgusted, hurt, disappointed and angry he threw the paper and envelope on to the table. All that anxiety, anticipation, excitement for nothing. The belief that at last he might learn something about his mother had come to this. How could they do this to him? One fucking disappointment after another. It was a sick joke, and it was on him. How could he have been so naive as to think it would be so simple? That he’d only have to open the envelope and all would be revealed; the reason why his mother had left London, why she’d come to Portsmouth, who his father might be and ultimately why she’d vanished one November day in 1978, just like some sodding fairy tale. He was a fool. Memories of his childhood, spent in those shit, awful children’s homes, flashed before him, tormenting him. His life destroyed because of what he’d experienced, because of her and because of Lord Bloody Eames and his stupid intelligence games. He wanted to lash out at someone, anyone. Lord Eames was top of his list, and if he had been anywhere near Cowes now he’d have stormed into that yacht club or Eames’ house and shaken the superior little shit until he got the truth.

He rammed his clenched fist on the table. He wanted to get blind paralytic drunk, to sink into oblivion and forget his past, forget the bloody future. He could go out now and buy a bottle of whisky; the supermarket was open all night. He grabbed his jacket and swept up his keys but he got only as far as the cockpit. There he stood in the driving rain almost as though it had shocked him into reality. He let it pour off his face ignoring the fact that he hadn’t even bothered to put on his jacket. What stopped him he couldn’t precisely say, but a small voice inside told him that they would have won if he touched one drop of liquor, they would crow with delight if he got blind drunk, and through all this he saw in his mind’s eye young Johnnie Oslow as he’d known him when he was sixteen: angry, hurt, bewildered, afraid. And then his transformation on that sailing course: confident, laughing, enjoying life. And finally he saw Cantelli’s ashen, terrified face. How could he let Cantelli down? He couldn’t. He had to find Johnnie or at least the truth behind his disappearance, otherwise Cantelli and his family would live with the uncertainty, just as he had, for the rest of their lives. It would destroy them.