Still Waters (12 page)

‘A bad one,’ she said penitently. ‘I should be encouraging you to give the coroner the straightforward information that Minton topped himself because he was temporarily depressed and then close the file.’

‘Perhaps you should. But I’m glad you’re not.’

‘You may well regret that. Now, Pete, to the important things in life – is there any decent coffee anywhere?’

Before he could reply, her mobile told her a text had arrived. One from Mark.

Neither of them had mastered the shorthand of the young, so she wasn’t surprised to see what looked like a standard email.
Phone ASAP re water. We’re involved
. It took seconds to connect her to him.

‘Invitaqua have contacted us,’ he announced without preamble.

‘Us as in the police?’

‘In one. It seems they’ve just happened to notice something irregular in some water tests and they phoned to say, please can they borrow our divers? I just happened to overhear, you understand.’

Fran knew better than to ask for his source. ‘What on earth would they want divers for?’

‘A swim in some enclosed reservoir just down the road from us in Lenham. It seems they’ve found one of the reservoir covers unlocked – they have special keys, it seems – and they’re shitting themselves in case someone has put something nasty inside.’

‘And about time too.’

‘We’ve got a DCI supervising, but I thought you might just want to be there.’

His tone might be casual, but there was a wealth of meaning behind it. The fact that Mark, as ACC (Crime), wanted her to be part of the investigating team meant he was tacitly backing her against his superior, the assistant chief constable. How would the chief react? They both knew that Mark enjoyed his respect, as did Fran when she wasn’t being wilfully awkward.

‘I might just,’ she conceded, with a huge smile he’d certainly detect.

‘Do you want the map coordinates? I believe there’s a team already on its way.’ Without waiting for a reply, he dictated them.

What about Henson? Was he still off sick? She dialled his number.

His secretary answered. ‘I’m terribly sorry. DCS Henson’s going to be off all week, Ms Harman.’

‘With that cold he shouldn’t have been in last Friday, should he?’ Fran sympathised. More especially he shouldn’t have been standing around outside without a coat on, participating in that foolish mothers’ meeting. ‘Has he left any instructions, Daphne?’

‘Just to refer any problems to you.’

‘That’s his explicit instruction?’

Daphne laughed. ‘It isn’t like you to worry about that sort of detail, is it, Ms Harman?’

‘Oh, you’d be surprised,’ Fran declared.

It wasn’t often Fran resorted to blues and twos and called on the skills once honed driving IRA informers and MPs alike briskly round the country. But when she did, once the panic had subsided that she could no longer trust her reflexes and the sweat on her palms had dried, she let rip. As she cleaved a way through the motorway traffic, she laughed aloud. What would her staid colleagues at tedious meetings make of her now?

The reservoir was not the sort of beauty spot that drew people like the open air ones in Wales or Yorkshire. Indeed, the uninitiated might not even know it was there. Any sightseers were firmly discouraged by locked gates and high fencing with a decorative topping of razor wire. It was next to a few acres of allotments, similarly fenced; today the allotment gates were wide open, and Fran could see a cluster of cars near the main track spoiling an otherwise perfect rural idyll. Clearly you didn’t need to guard early vegetables as closely as drinking water, so no one could complain about the allotment tenants being relaxed about security. She’d guess, however, that any of the people digging away or tending little bonfires would have clocked a stranger from five hundred paces. And spades and forks would have made handy weapons. All the same, it was not impossible that whoever had tampered with the water supply gained access from the allotments by dint of wire cutters and a little brute force.

She, however, had to gain access a more legitimate way. There seemed to be someone inside a Portakabin just inside
the gates, but a gentle toot on the horn failed to make him respond. Eventually a particularly loud and prolonged burst of the siren drew his reluctant attention, and he emerged to walk slowly towards her. Getting out of the car, she strode to the gates and rattled them.

‘Hold on, hold on. You’re not allowed in here.’

She flourished her ID and obviated any problems he might have with missing reading-glasses or inability to read with a loud declaration of who she was and what rank she held.

‘I told you, we’re not open. There’s a bit of a problem and I can’t allow anyone in. Specially a lady.’ He sounded genuinely outraged at the thought.

‘I’m not a lady, I’m a police officer and I’m in charge of the investigation.’

‘Young lady like you? You’re not in uniform. You don’t want to get that nice suit muddy.’

‘I’m a plain clothes officer – a detective! Open these gates, please.’

‘Nah, you don’t want to see what they’re up to.’

‘Indeed I do. Now, are you going to let me in or do I have to radio one of my colleagues down there to come and arrest you?’

‘You don’t want to do that.’ He shuffled a little closer, producing an impressive-looking key from a sagging side pocket.

‘Indeed, nothing would give me greater satisfaction. Unless,’ she added silently, ‘it would be to pop you in the reservoir yourself for a spell.’

Since the site was only now being set up, presumably her colleagues had had similar problems, despite their large official van brightly declaring it carried the Kent County
Constabulary Underwater Search and Recovery team. The van even had some sort of boat on the roof, complete with impressive-looking outboard motor.

So all that haste and adrenalin had been a waste of time – worse, a risk to herself and others. She tore a strip off herself at least as vigorously as she would have dressed down a junior officer who had been as rash, and then settled down to observe real policing at first hand, as opposed to from the far side of a wide, wide desk.

‘Didn’t expect to see you here, ma’am,’ said the DCI in charge of the operation, striding over and saluting. He was carrying a superfluous couple of stone, and had a tendency to puff. ‘Dan Coveney, ma’am.’

Another one who knew she had problems with names. ‘Guv,’ she said with a smile. ‘Well, I always like to be in on an inquiry right at the start, and Mr Henson can’t cover everything at the moment. In fact, he’s off sick this week.’ Why did she need to justify herself? And to a colleague, who, judging by the look on his face, knew which of the two he preferred. Encouraged, she continued, ‘Plus today, Dan, I’ve got this project for the deputy chief constable, checking what people on the ground – or in this case in the water – need to make them more efficient.’

‘Get rid of another layer of top brass, for a start, begging your pardon, guv. The more chiefs, the less money for Indians’ work.’

‘Mark Turner apart, I wouldn’t argue. But then I’m biased.’

‘Now he’s a good bloke, they say. A worker.’ There was no higher praise. ‘That’s Sergeant Mills over there – he’s the diving team leader – calling me over. Would you excuse me, guv?’

‘Of course. Just ignore me and I’ll watch.’

If her other colleagues were disconcerted by her presence there, they knew better than to query it, especially when she produced a clipboard. In her experience, whatever you were doing, a clipboard lent authority to it. Even if she didn’t need a spurious token, since with luck she’d be running the investigation, she clutched it like an amulet. Perhaps it would ward off Gates’ evil eye.

Everyone scuttled round obligingly, ostentatiously taking no notice of her.

At last, she spotted a familiar face among the lads in the diving team. She beckoned the young man over.

‘How’s things, Roo?’ He’d acquired his nickname through his habit of running to work, burdened only by a bumbag that inevitably slipped round his waist. His colleagues thought this made him look like a marsupial; Fran had considered that since he was so tall and skinny him it made him more like a pregnant lamppost. He’d filled out in the five or six years since she’d known him, and was rumoured to have turned his sporting sights on the triathlon.

‘Fine, ma’am, thanks.’

‘Guv. And Kanga?’ Inevitably, Roo had met a young woman his opposite in build. Sharon was a constable who neither sought nor particularly deserved promotion, a rounded girl whose nickname, Kanga, bestowed by Roo’s mates, was far more appropriate than Roo’s had ever been. Fran could always imagine her doling out medicine.

‘These days she actually looks more like a Roo than ever I used to – she’s expecting. Due next month, ma’am. Guv.’

Hadn’t she read somewhere that it could be harmful to carry too much weight while you were pregnant? ‘And is she well?’

‘Her blood pressure’s up a bit, so it looks as if she may have to start her maternity leave earlier than we’d hoped.’

‘And you’re going to be present at the birth?’ Fran hoped she sounded as if she knew about such things.

‘You bet! We’ve been going to these classes together, guv.’ All six-foot five of him demanded an approving pat on the head.

‘Excellent. Don’t forget to take your paternity leave, Roo, will you? All of it!’

She could have spouted about bonding and all the other buzzwords in the documentation she’d helped prepare for the policy, now standard in forces across the country, but she was all too aware that they were no more than words to her. Would she ever have made a good mother? She doubted it. But at least she hoped she had helped young people like Roo and his Kanga to be happier parents.

But now it was clearly time to don his diving suit, so she gave him a comradely pat on the arm to dismiss him. The atmosphere became perceptibly tense, the hum of the generator recharging the compressed air bottles taking over from conversation.

Soon Roo would be down there in an environment so totally alien to her that she couldn’t imagine it. Hazel, her sister, had been born, according to her parents, with webbed feet. She’d certainly won medals at a number of school swimming galas. How would even Hazel feel about plunging through that ludicrously small manhole or whatever they called it into icy darkness? About groping for dead flesh, whether human or animal, and lugging it to the surface? All Fran knew was that, state-of-the-art underwater floodlights illuminating it or not, she couldn’t do it.

Roo, now unrecognisable apart from his height, gave a cheery wave as he and two colleagues, all dressed like something from a nautical horror film, headed for the water. She waved back, a grin of encouragement strapped to her face. She hoped he wouldn’t notice the finer details such as the fact it didn’t reach her eyes and her teeth were clenched in a rictus, not a smile.

As soon as they lifted the hatch to the access hole there were yells. She didn’t need Mills to beckon her over – she set off at a run. Junior officers parted like corn in the wind to let her through.

Immediately beneath the hatch, floating face down, was a fully dressed woman, her hair drifting around her as if she were a mermaid. As they watched, she moved a few inches, just out of sight.

Mills pointed. It was clear what the divers had to do. Roo was in first, and she could see him reach for the white hand and touch it. He would pull it back to the hatch where the others could grab it to heave it onto the grass. There. He was almost there. Fingers reached for fingers.

And hers came off in his. Huge flakes of skin and tissue, soft green-blue threads and fair hair exploded in slow motion around the corpse. And Roo’s vomit filled his mask.

Fran did everything by the book, including offering a possible ID. That green-blue top – would that be the same colour as the thread in the Lenham woman’s hand bowl? And the blonde hair the same as in the sinks of Mrs Green and even the unreliable Mrs Carter? Given the age of the young woman and her clothes, Fran wondered if she’d just looked at the remains of Janine Roper. She uttered a silent prayer of thanks to St
Anthony – who else could have set this up? – that this had occurred in the middle of the case review, not after everything had been wrapped up. Then, without doubting his efficiency for one moment, she checked that Coveney had set up everything needed at what had clearly become a crime scene – one look at the remains of the body had convinced everyone that it had not been the young woman who had strung herself onto the concrete beam immediately above the water line. Meanwhile, the Home Office pathologist was on her way. All the mobile paraphernalia of modern crime detection would be lumbering past the unwilling gatekeeper within the hour.

Good. She had another job to do she couldn’t see Coveney volunteering for. But first she called him over. ‘This is clearly going to take a long time,’ she said. ‘And the fewer people tramping round here the better. So I’m going to take myself off. We’ll use HQ’s incident room since it’s so close.’ She rather thought that that would prevent any argument about who took on the case.

He nodded his understanding, if not total approval.

She was halfway to her car when she turned back to him. ‘And I’d like a list of everyone who’s ever used or had access to those manhole keys.’

He pulled a face, hands gesturing an object eight inches long. ‘They’re not the size you could slip into your back pocket, guv.’ He stopped short. As people tended to do when they saw that glint in her eye. ‘On your desk first thing, ma’am.’

Wearing nothing but a foil blanket, Roo was sitting dithering in the ambulance. Fran gripped his hands. ‘It’s all right. It’s all right, Roo. We’re taking you to hospital, and then I’m going to see Kanga and tell her what’s going on.’

‘This woman. Those fingers… I’ve seen bodies before, guv. Lots of them. I’ve seen them run over and crushed in a steel mill and dying in a cot at six weeks. So why am I like this?’

Fran couldn’t tell him. She’d once shifted a man to give him mouth to mouth only to have the whole head come off in her hands. She was as well acquainted with maggots and blowflies as most. But there was something that made even her hardy gorge rise at the sight – now the memory – of the tissue that Roo had had to deal with.