The Trawlerman

by William Shaw

  Beside her, Kenny gasped. Raised his arm and pointed. ‘There,’ he said.

  A streak of light floating upwards at speed, only visible for seconds, and then it was lost in the growing darkness. An unearthly silver streak, rising rapidly against dark sky.

  ‘That’s what you saw?’

  He had spilled what was left of his pint on the grass at his feet. He looked at her, bug-eyed.

  Twenty-nine

  ‘Finish your pint,’ said Alex. ‘I need to show you something.’

  Glass in one hand, cigarette in the other, Kenny was still having trouble understanding what he had just seen. He gulped the last of the brown liquid down and put the glass onto a crowded picnic table, then stared once more out towards the north horizon where the streak of light had been. Nobody else in the pub garden seemed to have noticed anything.

  ‘Was that just the same as before?’

  He nodded.

  Kenny was a little like her daughter. Like Zoë, Kenny had trained himself to notice the world around him; naturalists were like that. Like good police officers, they trained themselves to spot unseen patterns, to be always alert to anomalies.

  ‘Come with me,’ Alex said again.

  He snapped out of it and followed her. ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘To the Younises’ house.’

  ‘Why?’ He sounded afraid.

  ‘I want to show you something.’

  Headlights on in the darkening evening, they drove the short distance down the lane.

  She tucked her car by the gate and untied the piece of cord that had been there. Zoë was sitting on the steps in the gloom. ‘Did I do it right?’ she asked.

  ‘Perfectly.’ She leaned forward and kissed her daughter’s forehead.

  ‘I wasn’t sure I should do it at all,’ said Zoë, looking at Kenny as if she expected him to be angry with her.

  Kenny said, ‘No. Whatever it is . . . it’s cool.’

  ‘There may have been souls rising up from here last week, but that’s not what you saw.’ Alex pointed at the open garage door and the cylinder of helium that she had seen in Georgia Coaker’s photograph. ‘I found a pack of four silver weather balloons in there. Two had already been used. Ayman Younis probably used one as a test and a second on the night. That’s what you saw.’

  ‘A weather balloon?’

  She had inflated the third balloon, tied it to the Younises’ front gate, and asked Zoë to cut the cord at exactly seven minutes past ten. ‘They’re large and silver. At this time of night I figured you’d probably just get a glimpse of the shine of it as it was shooting up.’

  Poor Kenny seemed lost. ‘Someone was getting killed here and Ayman Younis was letting off balloons? That’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard. Are you going to explain it to me?’

  ‘No. Sorry. Not really.’

  ‘It was Ayman Younis who released the balloon? Before he was killed?’

  ‘Kind of,’ said Alex. ‘Look, Kenny. I’d really appreciate it if you didn’t talk about what you’d seen, about coming here, to anybody at all.’

  ‘Not even your daughter?’ He looked at Zoë.

  ‘Jesus, no. Especially not my daughter.’

  Zoë said, ‘I didn’t do it to make you feel like an idiot, Kenny. She asked me to, just at the last minute.’

  ‘Course you didn’t.’

  ‘I didn’t want to do it at all.’

  ‘It’s OK. It was like an experiment, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Do you still believe in souls?’ she asked. ‘’Cause I do.’

  Kenny smiled. ‘Course I do. I was wrong this time though, that’s all.’

  Zoë looked relieved.

  After she’d dropped Kenny at his house, they drove back to Dungeness in the dark.

  Zoë remained a dark bundle of silent anger in the passenger seat next to her.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Alex. ‘We had to do it, though. I would have asked Bill, but he’s not here. I asked Jill but she’s . . . busy.’

  ‘Why? Because you wanted to prove a point?’

  ‘No. Because there’s a man being held on a charge of murder who shouldn’t be. He’s ill, a bit like me, I think. Only, what he has is much worse. I think he must be very confused and scared. I am pretty sure that it can’t have been him. So thank you for helping,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry I had to, but there was no one else I could ask.’

  The headlights swept up the track towards Arum Cottage; it was still dark. Neither made mention of it.

  Neither was ready to sleep. After visiting the Younises’ house, they both felt jumpy and strange.

  In the kitchen, Zoë was making herself a cup of mint tea. ‘I had to sit in the dark next to that creepy house where two people were murdered.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘You have to tell me why you made me let off the balloon. It’s not fair if you don’t.’

  Alex nodded. The kettle clicked. ‘Is it true you’re thinking of leaving home?’

  Zoë’s jaw dropped. ‘Did Kenny tell you that? He had no right,’ she said angrily.

  Alex put her hand on her daughter’s. ‘He kind of let it slip by accident. It’s not really his fault. Is it true?’

  ‘Maybe.’ She sniffed. ‘I don’t know. I just thought I could live in a caravan somewhere. There are loads for rent. I asked him if he knew anyone with one, that’s all. He wasn’t supposed to say anything at all.’ She poured the hot water and stood for a while, dipping the tea bag in and out of the cup.

  ‘I think it’s a great idea,’ said Alex.

  Zoë kept her eyes fixed on her cup. ‘Maybe in a little while. When . . . you know. It’s a bit easier.’

  Alex nodded.

  ‘So? The balloon?’

  Alex sighed.’Do you want to hear this, Zoë? It’s pretty gruesome.’

  ‘It always is, Mum.’

  ‘You’re seventeen.’

  ‘You seen the stuff we can actually see on YouTube?’ She picked up her cup and cradled it in both hands.

  They went to sit on the living-room sofa together, side by side, and as she talked, her daughter leaned in close, laying her head against her shoulder, and it felt like the first time they had been like that for months, together and close; and it made Alex sad to think that she might soon be gone.

  On Thursday she called DI McAdam at his desk, but there was no answer. When she tried Jill’s number, Jill said he had gone to a conference in Maidstone and wouldn’t be in until tomorrow. ‘I can prove that Robert Glass is innocent,’ she said.

  ‘I’m not supposed to talk to you about this,’ said Jill miserably. ‘I told you. He gave me orders.’

  ‘Who else can I speak to?’

  Jill lowered her voice. ‘Like I said, he’s told everybody they shouldn’t discuss it with you. Only because he’s worried about you. You know that, don’t you?’

  Alex returned home after work, still angry. Even Zoë noticed. ‘What’s wrong, Mum?’

  ‘You don’t mind if I go out tonight, do you?’

  Zoë shrugged.

  It was a new detached house in a perfectly maintained garden with close-cut grass and neat borders. There were two cars on the driveway, his and hers, so she parked hers on the narrow verge and walked up to the large blue door surrounded by yellow roses. A security light blinked on as she approached.

  She had only just rung the bell when DI Toby McAdam answered, yanking the door back with a loud ‘Ta-da!’

  He was wearing a red sequinned dress that stopped mid-thigh.

  Thirty

  DI Toby McAdam’s grin vanished. ‘Oh. I wasn’t expecting . . .’

  ‘Clearly not,’ said Alex. He was wearing eyeshadow too; it made him look unexpectedly good. She tilted her head to one side. ‘Sorry. Am I interrupting something?’

  �
�Toby?’ A voice from inside the house.

  ‘No. Wait,’ said Toby, beneath the arch of yellow roses. ‘I’d better explain . . .’

  ‘Are they here?’ Inside the house, Colette McAdam, Toby’s wife, was calling to him. ‘I need to pin the back properly first.’

  ‘I need to talk.’

  ‘It’s for a play,’ her senior officer explained. ‘What the Butler Saw. The local am-dram. We’re doing a costume-fitting.’

  Colette appeared around the door. ‘Oh.’ She looked Alex up and down. ‘It’s you.’ She gave a tight, small smile. ‘Work, is it?’

  ‘Kind of.’

  Colette sighed. ‘Could you be a dear and come back later? The director was going to come here to check on Toby’s costume? Oh. Here he is now.’ A man with an exuberance of grey hair and a paisley shirt had arrived on foot with a paper folder under his arm. Colette paused, looking from her husband to Alex, and back again. ‘I suppose you’d better all come in then,’ Colette said. ‘You can wait until they’re done.’

  The McAdams lived on the edge of one of those downland villages that were now full of couples, one of whom usually working in London, the other raising the kids. They were hamlets full of community spirit.

  ‘There was a part for a policeman who wears a dress. I thought it would be hilarious if Toby did it,’ Colette explained, unsmiling. ‘After all, he never does anything else, apart from work.’

  Alex waited in the kitchen while the amateur-dramatics director and the costume maker worked on Toby’s dress. She heard occasional gales of laughter. The fitting seemed to take an age and then the director stayed for a glass of Picpoul. In his boomy voice he announced he thought it absolutely hilarious that his actor had opened the door to a police officer, dressed in his wife’s party dress. ‘I’m sorry. I expect you’re here on important business.’

  ‘At nine o’clock in the evening,’ said Colette McAdam.

  ‘Priceless,’ the director declared, when he finally left. ‘Absolutely priceless. You will come and see the show, won’t you?’

  ‘I’m just going upstairs to put some clothes on,’ Toby called as the man left.

  Alex was finally allowed into the living room. ‘Toby says you’ve been ill,’ Colette said. ‘He said you’ve had some mental health issues.’

  ‘Did he?’

  ‘He’s been very worried about you, actually.’ Colette McAdam was a tight-wound woman, who sent her husband to work each day with neatly made packs of sandwiches. ‘Are you on the mend?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes.’ Alex smiled brightly, her jaw clenching. ‘Much better.’

  ‘Really?’ Colette smiled.

  Toby McAdam bounded down the stairs. He had quickly changed into sweatpants and a T-shirt; almost as if he had been reluctant to leave the two women alone together for too long. ‘I suppose you’ll tell everyone at work that you saw me wearing a dress?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Oh God. How much do I have to pay you?’

  She knew, though, that Toby McAdam would be disappointed if she didn’t. Police officers loved to tell stories about each other and if nobody told stories about you, you barely existed in the force. ‘To be fair,’ she said, ‘I’ve seen worse-looking people in dresses like that.’

  ‘So? What are you here for?’

  ‘I think I have just worked out who killed Ayman Younis and his wife. And it’s not Bob Glass.’

  He exhaled; walked to the living-room door and closed it so no one could overhear. ‘I don’t think it’s appropriate to discuss this with you, Alex. You do understand why, don’t you?’

  ‘You think you’re trying to help me, don’t you?’

  He frowned. ‘Of course.’

  ‘If you don’t listen to me now you are going to end up in the shit. You have an innocent man in custody. Five minutes. Please.’

  He looked at her, moving his head slightly to one side, as if trying to judge if she was crazy or not, then said, ‘OK. We’d better sit down then.’

  He took her to his study, a room at the front of the house, and he sat and listened, while she told him about the balloon and the flash of silver light that Kenny Abel had seen, which he thought had been carrying souls up to heaven.

  ‘What’s this about? I don’t get it, Alex.’

  ‘You never found the gun that Bob Glass is supposed to have killed Ayman Younis with, did you?’

  He looked irritated by the question. ‘He had plenty of time to dispose of it.’

  She looked at the silver-framed photos on his desk of Colette and the boy and the girl whose name she could not remember. ‘He didn’t dispose of it. Ayman Younis did.’

  ‘But . . .’ Some time in the last year he had developed crow’s feet at the side of his eyes. You could only see them when he smiled or frowned.

  ‘Did he have life insurance?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then it wasn’t a murder. It was a murder suicide. Ayman Younis had money saved up to look after his son, Callum. I’m guessing that the money he lost in the Biosfera scam was pretty much everything he had in that pot. Maybe he wanted to increase it. Maybe he was just being greedy. But either way, he lost it all, and with it the prospect that his child would be cared for privately.’

  McAdam said nothing, just narrowed his eyes a little more.

  ‘And because of that, maybe he was too ashamed to admit it to his wife. He wanted a perfect life, and while it may not have been perfect, what they had was being taken away from them. From what I gather they were a couple who kept up appearances. Ayman did, that’s for sure. I think he gambled that and lost, and rather than face up to the humiliation, he tore it all down instead. Some men are like that. I don’t know. But I do know that he had life insurance. If he just killed himself, Callum wouldn’t get anything at all. But if he made it look like murder, Callum would have enough money to last him a lifetime.

  ‘So,’ she continued, ‘he killed Mary by cutting her throat. He put the body downstairs so the delivery woman would find her the next morning. Made it look like the work of a madman. Then he went outside and shot himself with a gun tied to a weather balloon. There was a north-west wind that day. I checked. Nobody found the gun because it’s probably somewhere at the bottom of the Channel. I presume the knife was on there too. He ordered a pack of four balloons. There were two left. One would have been a test run, to see how much a balloon would carry. The second was outside, holding the gun to his head.’

  Cradled against her last night, Zoë had been silent as she had explained this. Alex had known why; her teenage daughter would have been imagining the dead hand slipping off the trigger, the silver ball full of helium rising upwards with the deadly metal cargo beneath it, thinking about the knife and the gun floating away on the night air, falling somewhere indeterminate, far away from here.

  ‘And that’s what this man saw? The balloon?’ said McAdam incredulously.

  ‘That’s why there are no fingerprints of anyone else at the house,’ she said. ‘Because there never was anyone else there anyway.’

  She recognised the look of apprehension on his face as she talked. He had locked up an innocent man who was mentally ill on a charge of murder. There would be repercussions for him.

  ‘It gets worse,’ said Alex.

  McAdam’s face tightened.

  ‘I don’t know for sure, I’m guessing now, but I think this is what happened. Ayman Younis was so ashamed of losing the money they had saved for their son that he killed his own wife rather than tell her. Her pacemaker said she died at four minutes past ten, right? To the exact minute. He shot himself at about seven minutes past ten, because that’s when the balloon went up. We know he cut her throat on the bed upstairs. He probably thought he had killed her then. He thought she was dead when he arranged her body at the bottom of the stairs to make it look like the work of a madman. And he killed both
of their dogs too. He wrote the message on the mirror and then cleaned the place up. Three minutes was not enough time for him to do all that.’

  He had his hand in front of his mouth now.

  ‘How long would that have taken? Twenty, thirty minutes? Longer?’

  ‘And you’re saying she was alive all that time?’

  ‘Yes. She died where you found her at the bottom of the stairs. Everybody talks about what a nice man Ayman Younis was. How much he cared for his son. He may have thought he had killed her, but she was not dead. Her own husband. You have to hope that she wasn’t conscious.’

  When she got back home afterwards she was utterly exhausted. Zoë had gone out somewhere. Normally Alex would have wandered up the road and talked to Bill about what had happened; that helped sometimes. Instead, she lay on the couch alone, numb. Bob Glass would be released soon, at least.

  Moths had gathered on the window, drawn by the light. More arrived, banging against it. The air seemed full of them.

  ‘But you know what you’ve just done, don’t you?’ her daughter had said when she’d told her the story.

  ‘Hopefully, I’ve found a way to get an innocent man out of custody.’

  ‘Yes. And now the insurance aren’t going to pay for Callum Younis’s care any more because you’ve proved it wasn’t a murder. Finding this out means he won’t get any money, just like with Bill.’

  The moths seemed to multiply on the window. Those that didn’t settle knocked against the glass, over and over, the sound of a gloved knuckle gently tapping. There seemed to be hundreds of them there. Alex shivered.

  Thirty-one

  The weekend came and went, with still no sign of Bill. Alex waited for news about the Younis case but heard nothing.

  On Monday, for the first time, on Jill’s advice, she tried heels, to mark her first week back at work. Low ones.

  ‘Really, Mum?’ said Zoë.

  ‘I’m just trying them. You’re the one who wants me to change, after all.’

  ‘They just look wrong on you, that’s all. I prefer your dykey look.’