Death Lies Beneath (3 page)

Something nudged at the back of Horton’s mind. Was it something one of Woodley’s mourners had said in the interviews during the investigation? Most of it was lies, including the fact that Sholby, Hobbs and Reggie Thomas had all given each other an alibi for the time of the attack on Woodley. They’d been drinking at Sholby’s house and watching football on the telly. Had thinking about Sholby and Hobbs jogged at an elusive fact tucked away, which they’d missed in the investigation? Or perhaps it was something the chaplain had said during Woodley’s short funeral service?

The thought of funerals took him back to another he’d attended four weeks ago, that of former PC Adrian Stanley. It had been very different to Woodley’s. Horton had recollected it while in the chapel but had pushed it aside to concentrate on Woodley. Now he focused his full attention on it, or rather on what Adrian Stanley, the copper who had investigated his mother’s disappearance just over thirty years ago,
hadn’t
told him about Jennifer Horton’s disappearance. When he’d visited Stanley in April, the ex-copper could throw no light on why Jennifer had walked out of their council tower-block flat on a chilly November day in 1978 leaving her ten-year-old son to fend for himself. There had been no reports of her carrying a bag or suitcase and her clothes had still been in the flat. A witness, their neighbour, had claimed that Jennifer had been dressed up, wearing make-up, and had been happy. She never showed up that night at the casino where she worked, and no one had seen or heard of her again.

Horton sipped his coffee, feeling the familiar jag of emptiness in the pit of his stomach which the memory always conjured up. He tried to ignore it and instead thought back to Stanley’s last words to him, uttered from his hospital bed after suffering a stroke following Horton’s visit to his flat. They had been about a brooch, or at least Horton thought that was what Stanley had managed to utter before dying. It tied in with the fact that a photograph of Stanley’s late wife, wearing a brooch when her husband received his Queen’s Gallantry Medal for thwarting an armed robbery, had vanished, along with the brooch itself. But how that connected with his mother’s disappearance Horton didn’t know except he suspected Stanley had either stolen it from her belongings or had been given it as payment to keep quiet about something he’d discovered.

He’d questioned Stanley’s son, Robin, after his house had been broken into the day his father had died. Along with the family photograph albums, jewellery belonging to Robin Stanley’s family had been taken. It was the neatest burglary that Horton had ever come across. No prints, no mess. A double-glazed kitchen door lifted off its hinges, no witnesses, not even a report of a car or van. A highly professional job.

Robin didn’t remember the brooch and said he hadn’t really noticed it in the photograph. And so far Horton had drawn a blank tracing the missing photograph of Adrian Stanley’s wife wearing it. He wished he could remember what the brooch had looked like but he hadn’t realized its significance until too late. So with that line of enquiry a dead end, did he go back to the beginning of Jennifer Horton’s life and try to trace her movements from a young girl until the day she vanished in the hope that somewhere along the line he would find the answer? That would take months, though, years even and could result in nothing. Alternatively should he take up DCS Sawyer’s offer and work with the Intelligence Directorate who believed his mother had connections with a wanted criminal they’d codenamed Zeus? That would be far the quickest and easiest option. He’d already refused Sawyer’s offer twice, not because he was afraid of Zeus, but because he was afraid of what he might discover about his mother and what others, especially his colleagues, might learn in the process. Besides, he had told himself several times, if Jennifer had been involved with this Zeus then in all probability she was dead.

A police siren caught his attention but gradually it faded as it headed along the seafront westwards. It was still hot. What little breeze there had been had died completely. The flags outside the marina office hung limp. He swallowed the remainder of his drink and surveyed the marina a moment longer before going below. All was quiet. As he lay on his bunk Woodley’s funeral again came to mind and along with it that nagging thought that something he’d seen or heard today was significant but try as he might it refused to surface. Perhaps it would come to him in his sleep.

T
he trilling of his mobile phone woke him. Scrambling to answer it, he registered it was daylight and six twenty-three. A call at this hour could only mean one thing: work.

‘We’ve got a suspicious death, sir. PCs Somerfield and Seaton are at the scene.’

‘Where?’ asked Horton, fully awake and heading for the shower.

‘The former Tipner Boatyard.’

That was on the western shores of the city and the opposite side of town from his marina. It was a stone’s throw from the commercial ferry port, ten minutes from the police station by car, and about fifteen on the Harley before the rush-hour traffic. He remembered reading that the boatyard had been sold for re-development a couple of years ago and that a salvage operation had only recently begun. They were clearing a Second World War munitions barge from the seabed and he wondered if a skeleton had been discovered during the clearance operation. He asked for more details.

‘Sorry, sir, don’t have them,’ came the unsatisfactory answer. Horton didn’t waste time enquiring why.

‘OK, tell them I’m on my way.’

He ran an electric razor over his chin and was on his Harley heading there within ten minutes, mentally preparing himself for what he might see and hoping that it was a long-ago fatality rather than a recent one. He headed west and then north and soon was turning off the main road and travelling through the narrow streets of terraced houses, which reminded him of Daryl Woodley because this was where he had lived and where Reggie Thomas and the rest of Woodley’s associates still did. Again he considered what was nagging at the back of his mind about the Woodley investigation. It hadn’t surfaced during sleep. As he turned off by the allotments and rode under the motorway bridge onto the small peninsula that butted out on to the upper reaches of Portsmouth harbour, he again tried to conjure up the elusive thought but it refused to come. No matter. It might occur to him later.

He pulled into the boatyard and parked beside the police car. PC Kate Somerfield broke off her conversation with a suntanned, muscular man in his late forties standing beside a van, and headed towards him. There was a frown of concern on her fair face and he thought she looked paler than usual, which didn’t bode well.

‘The body’s on the wreckage, sir,’ she greeted him sombrely.

Body, not bones then, so a recent death.
That certainly wasn’t the news he had wanted. His eyes travelled across the yard to the far side of the quay, where a blackened rotting wooden hulk rested. It was still attached to the large yellow crane perched on a floating barge. Clearly the wreck wasn’t the Second World War munitions barge. It looked as though it had been a small yacht. PC Seaton was standing beside it. Two men were some distance to the right of him, one reading a newspaper and the other doing something on his mobile device.

Several thoughts rapidly ran through Horton’s mind as he made towards it. How long had this wreck been submerged? How long had the body been on it? How did it get there? Were they looking at suicide or an accident? Or was it an unlawful killing? He sincerely hoped it wasn’t the latter, the first two were bad enough but the third would stretch their resources even further and wouldn’t be good for the victim’s relatives either, he thought caustically.

Walking beside him, Somerfield continued with her report. ‘The crane operative, Bill Shoreham, that’s him reading the newspaper, spotted the body as he was setting the wreck down onto the quay. The other man on his mobile phone is Ethan Crombie. He’s the boatman.’

‘I hope he’s not calling the press.’

‘Seaton told them they weren’t to.’

But Horton knew people didn’t always do as they were told.

Somerfield added, ‘Mr Crombie, and another man, piloted the floating crane around from the Camber yesterday on tugs. Mr Crombie returned in one of the small tugs this morning at five thirty and moored up just behind the crane barge.’

Horton could see the black and orange tug boat.

‘The crane operative drove here from where he lives in Fareham. That’s his blue saloon car parked beyond ours. He arrived at about the same time as Mr Crombie,’ Somerfield continued. ‘And Kevin Manley, the man I was talking to when you arrived, sir, who’s in charge of the salvage operation, got here with his team at first light at about five a.m. Mr Manley called us.’

Horton glanced back to see Manley’s crew of three sitting on the ground beside the van. Their diving suits were peeled back to their waists and they were watching the proceedings with interest. Not so Manley, who was pacing the ground impatiently with a frown of irritation.

By now they had reached the hulk. Horton tensed in preparation for what he was about to see.

‘She’s lying face down, sir, sort of wedged into the corner of the wreck. Seaton and I haven’t touched her and neither have the others, or so they claim. It doesn’t look as if she’s been dead very long.’

A woman, then.
He steeled himself and leaned forward to study where Somerfield indicated but no amount of preparation could have primed him for the sight that greeted his eyes. With a shock he swiftly took in the figure-hugging black dress; the suntanned bare legs, the black high-heeled shoe on one foot, and the wide-brimmed black hat that was, remarkably, still lodged on the dark hair by a tangle of seaweed. Too late he knew what had been bugging him last night and he was angry he hadn’t seen the significance of her appearance at the crematorium sooner instead of being sidetracked by thoughts of Sholby and Hobbs and their flash new cars. But even if he had sat up all night wracking his brains he might not have thought of her and even if he had he couldn’t have done anything to prevent her murder, because although he was no doctor it didn’t need a medic to see the bloody wound in her back.

Sawyer had been right, someone had shown for Woodley’s funeral, only no one had expected a woman, and no one had paid any attention to her because he’d assumed, probably like Uckfield, that she was there for the funeral following Woodley’s. She still might have been, he rapidly thought, reaching for his phone, but that didn’t explain why she was here, dead. But if she was connected with Woodley then had she been sent to his funeral by Marty Stapleton? Why though, unless Marty really wanted to check that Woodley was dead and cremated, and even then she had arrived too late.

Uckfield cursed vehemently and loudly on receiving the news before emphatically declaring, ‘She can’t be Woodley’s killer.’

‘She might not have been his attacker but she could have picked him up outside the hospital and left him for dead at the marshes.’ On Marty’s instructions? he wondered. Only she didn’t look the type, but then what the hell did he know about her anyway?

Uckfield rang off after saying he’d be there within forty minutes. Horton called Trueman and quickly relayed what had happened, instructing him to notify the police doctor and mobilize the circus.

‘Is Walters in yet?’

‘He was in the canteen when I was there a few minutes ago.’

‘Tell him to skip breakfast. I know it will break his heart but I want him to check around the county for any reports of missing persons.’

He hadn’t seen a ring on the third finger of her left hand, but that didn’t mean anything. Someone might have expected her back last night.

He said, ‘Ask Walters to get the details of the funeral following Woodley’s and we’ll need photographs of the victim from Clarke’s video for circulating to all units.’ He hadn’t needed to tell Trueman that but he said it anyway.

Uniform arrived within minutes and began to set up the outer cordon just beyond the motorway flyover and the inner cordon at the entrance to the boatyard. Horton instructed Seaton and Somerfield to take initial statements from the crane driver, boatman and Manley and his crew. While he waited for Dr Price and the scene of crime officers to arrive, he surveyed the boatyard.

Its isolated position made it an ideal place to leave a body or to commit homicide. Except for the small sailing club next door there were no neighbours. The sea surrounded it on three sides. The fourth was the only road to it. This was the end of the line, which it certainly had been for their lady in black, and if she had driven here then where was her car? And why come here? It was several miles away from the crematorium, but not he had already noted from where most of Woodley’s associates lived.

There were no gates at the entrance to the yard and Somerfield had told him no security patrols. But there must have been people in the sailing club last night; the weather had been too good for there not to have been. And if so then someone might have seen something. He recalled seeing a CCTV camera at the front of the small timber-clad building as he’d driven past it before pulling into the boatyard. There was also one over the dinghy park; perhaps they had recorded the victim’s car arriving, and the killer’s. He crossed to one of the PCs on the inner cordon and asked him to get the contact details of the sailing-club secretary and commodore. As Horton headed back to the body, Manley pigeonholed him. Somerfield threw Horton an apologetic glance.

‘When can my men get back to work?’ Manley demanded irritably.

‘Not for some time, sir.’

‘How long?’ he pressed.

Horton explained they’d have to wait until the police divers had been down to retrieve any evidence and that could take a day or two.

‘I shouldn’t think they’ll find anything. We didn’t even see her when we went down this morning to attach the lines, and she certainly wasn’t there yesterday when we did a thorough check of the area, including that wreck and the others.’

‘Others?’ Horton asked surprised.