Dark Skies: A DCI Ryan Mystery (The DCI Ryan Mysteries Book 7)

by LJ Ross

  At the very least, it was suspicious.

  “No,” he decided. “We’re not handing him over. Somebody must be missing him and we need to find out who that somebody is. Until then, he’s one of ours.”

  * * *

  Angela Gray scrubbed an invisible speck of dirt from the sales counter inside the gift shop, her cloth turning in rhythmic circles against the glass until it shone. The whole place was immaculate, from its polished wooden floor to its rigorously-maintained shelves filled with knick-knacks, toys and books of all shapes and size. At her back, large windows boasted panoramic views of the reservoir which was coming alive as the sun crept higher into the sky towards midday.

  But she wouldn’t look.

  She knew there were police divers down by the waterfront. She’d seen them arrive a couple of hours ago with a smattering of local police in their noisy squad cars. The sound of the sirens rang in her ears, interrupting the peace of her surroundings, reminding her of all the other times they’d come calling, telling her they’d found a body that might be Duncan. They refused to accept what she had been forced to accept—it was a constant intrusion, a wound that would never heal so long as the police continued to pester her with their well-intentioned house calls over the long, empty years.

  Hadn’t she told them, time and again?

  Duncan had run away.

  He hadn’t wanted to stay in a quiet place like Kielder, that was all. Her boy had been ambitious, with dreams of travelling the world. What was there to keep him here? Lord knew, there’d been precious little money to spend on fancy holidays abroad after John had been made redundant.

  Her son had upped and left—that was all there was to it.

  Sometimes, she allowed herself to imagine how Duncan might look now. He’d be handsome, she was sure of that, with his floppy ash-blond hair and green eyes. He probably lived somewhere very exciting, like New York. Or maybe he was in Africa, helping to save endangered animals. He’d always been so caring.

  A tear leaked from her eye and she swiped it away quickly, her arm working faster and faster, scrubbing harder at the glass.

  Other times, she wondered whether Duncan suffered from amnesia. There might have been an awful accident that prevented him from getting in touch all these years. She’d watched documentaries about it on television.

  There’s a smudge.

  Angela paused for a moment to look critically at the glass, tutted, then began all over again.

  Busy hands, she thought. Busy hands distracted her from the busy thoughts crowding her mind. People said she should retire, that she was too old to carry on working as she did. Maybe they were right but what else was there to do?

  If she stayed at home, there’d be too much time to think.

  Angela blew an errant hair from her eyes and caught sight of herself in the gleaming counter. The face was blurry but she saw a woman pushing seventy with a thatch of wiry grey hair, not fashioned in any particular style. She’d given up trying to fight the passage of time and, in many ways, she welcomed it. There were no grandchildren to entertain and no big, messy dinners on Sundays. No babies to croon over, with their soft hair and tiny hands.

  Sometimes, she thought she heard his voice calling her name.

  “Mum! Did you wash my jeans?”

  She smiled and shook her head, one hand straying to rest against her cushioned belly, where once a baby had grown.

  No sense in wishing for things that were out of reach and always would be.

  CHAPTER 4

  After exchanging a few words with the local police and thanking the Marine Unit for their efficient work, Ryan put a call through to Jeff Pinter, the senior pathologist attached to Northumbria CID. Even to a layperson, it was clear that the body they’d recovered from the water had been down there for some time and a specialist would be required to assist with any post-mortem examination. To that end, he approved the additional funds to engage Doctor Ann Millington, a forensic anthropologist based out of Edinburgh whose unique skills had been invaluable to them in the past.

  After putting those wheels in motion, Ryan slipped his phone into the back pocket of his jeans and turned in a wide circle to locate his sergeant, who was by now chatting amiably with some of the locals in a picnic area on the far side of a grassy verge overlooking the reservoir. He took a moment to admire Phillips’ easy, trademark style and decided to leave him to work his magic while he went in search of Freddie Milburn.

  Ryan found the diving instructor inside his kiosk, talking in hushed tones with another middle-aged man who had the same healthy, outdoorsy look as his friend. They wore bright blue all-weather jackets bearing their company’s logo and cut-off khaki shorts, displaying a frank disregard for the biting September wind rolling in from the lake.

  He rapped a knuckle on the open door and watched them turn in surprise.

  “Freddie Milburn?” he enquired, reaching for his warrant card. “I’m Detective Chief Inspector Ryan. Do you have a minute?”

  The two men exchanged a glance.

  “I’ll give you some privacy,” the taller one began.

  “Do you work for the company?” Ryan’s voice stopped him.

  “I—yes, I’m Mitchell Fenwick—Mitch.” He held out a hand, which Ryan shook briefly. “Freddie and I co-own the company. I was the first aider when they brought Lisa in this morning,” he added. “Got a hell of a fright, I can tell you.”

  “Her, or you?”

  Mitch’s laugh was strained.

  “Both of us, I s’pose. We haven’t had an emergency like that in a good long while and, to be honest, I was a bit worried I might have forgotten the procedure.”

  “You did a grand job,” Freddie put in. “She’s going to be alright because of you.”

  “Yeah,” Mitch ran an agitated hand through a mop of thick dark hair and, were it not for the deep laughter lines around his eyes and the odd grey hair, Ryan might have pegged him for a much younger man. “If you’ll let me know when she’s up to having visitors, I was thinking of heading along to the hospital to see for myself.”

  “I’m sure that can be arranged,” Ryan replied.

  Fenwick nodded his thanks.

  “Could have been one of my own girls,” he said quietly. “But there’s no sense in thinking of what might have been, not when you’ve found some other poor soul who was lost down there.”

  Ryan bobbed his head in the direction of the water.

  “What do you make of it?”

  Mitch and Freddie let out a sort of synchronised murmur and shook their heads in a manner Ryan had come to understand was part and parcel of interviewing witnesses from the North East. In this neck of the woods, the pageantry was part of the process.

  “You’ve got two hundred and fifty square miles of forest out there,” Mitch began, jerking a thumb over his shoulder to reinforce the point. “Some tourists stay in the holiday lodges so they can hike around or go sailing, maybe visit the observatory and see the stars. Others, they like to keep themselves to themselves, take a tent and go off the beaten track to get lost in nature and all that. Makes them feel better about going home to their desk jobs in the real world.”

  “Had a few get lost in the woods,” Freddie added, and his friend nodded sagely. “The forest rangers searched high and low, had the 4x4s out looking for them, helicopters and all that. Mostly, they find those who want to be found.”

  Ryan understood what he meant. It was a sad fact that some of the missing didn’t want to be found. But the boy they’d recovered from the lake had a severe head wound, the kind he could not have inflicted upon himself, and that was a different matter entirely.

  “How about teenagers?” he prodded. “Any been reported missing, lately?”

  Freddie leaned back against the edge of a little wooden desk stacked with leaflets and paperwork. On the wall behind him was an enormous cork board covered in photos taken of Freddie and Mitch smiling alongside an assortment of diving partners Ryan presumed were former student
s.

  “There was that French lad, back in July,” he offered.

  “Nah, they found him pretty quick,” Mitch interjected. “Suffering from exposure but mostly alright.”

  The two men scratched their heads and blew out another synchronised breath.

  “Sorry, I can’t think of anyone recently. Nobody local, anyhow.”

  Ryan shrugged off the wistful hope of an easy identification and resigned himself to a long conversation with his counterparts in the Missing Persons department.

  He turned to Freddie and asked one final question.

  “Did you see the body while you were down there?”

  The man tugged at the zip on his jacket, burying himself deeper into the folds of the jersey lining to stave off a sudden chill.

  “Aye, I saw it…him. Lisa lost her mouthpiece and took in a lot of water, so I didn’t have time to worry about it because I needed to get her back up to the surface. But it looked as if he was asleep, you know? Peaceful, like he was just resting.”

  “Yes,” Ryan said.

  Freddie compressed his lips and looked away, out of the window and into the distance, before turning back to meet Ryan’s eyes.

  “D’ you think it was an accident? Like, maybe, he fell somehow?”

  Ryan’s eyes turned flat.

  “Our enquiries are ongoing,” he replied. “But we are treating his death as suspicious until further notice.”

  He went over a few more questions, retracing the ground already covered by the local constables when they had taken preliminary statements earlier in the day, before stepping back out into the nippy air. The little passenger ferry was just departing the jetty to make its journey across the water to Kielder Village, on the north-western tip of the reservoir, and Ryan watched its progress for a couple of minutes while his mind wandered.

  Secrets, he thought.

  There were secrets to uncover in this little corner of the world, he could feel it.

  * * *

  Anna spotted him immediately, a tall, solitary figure standing at the waterside with his hands thrust deep inside the pockets of the waterproof jacket she’d bought him. The wind ruffled his black hair away from a striking profile that was hard and unsmiling, and she could almost hear the thoughts whirring through his mind as he considered his investigation. It might have been intimidating, if she didn’t know him so well.

  When her walking boots crunched across the ground, Ryan’s head whipped around, grey eyes instantly alert.

  “Hello, stranger,” she said.

  Ryan flashed one of the brief, blinding smiles he reserved especially for her.

  “Hello, Doctor Taylor,” he murmured. “Or should I call you Doctor Ryan?”

  He bent his head to bestow a kiss.

  “I’ll answer to either,” she said, then gave him a pained look. “You know, one of these days, I’ll go to work and come home again without being part of a police investigation.”

  “But not today, it seems.”

  She looked over his shoulder towards the reservoir.

  “Lisa Hope was right, then? There was a body?”

  Ryan nodded.

  “Yes. He looks adolescent but could be early-twenties, I suppose.”

  She thought of the small group of history students who were happily settled at the Inn tucking into a late lunch. They were Masters level, mostly twenty-one or twenty-two, fully grown adults. All the same, she was responsible for their welfare and if life had taught her anything, it was to expect the unexpected.

  “Do you think I should cancel this trip? If the area is unsafe…”

  Ryan considered the question but shook his head.

  “I can’t discuss any details, but I can tell you the boy didn’t die recently. I don’t have reason to believe there’s any immediate danger; for one thing, we don’t know how the kid died. We’ll know more after the post-mortem.”

  Privately, Anna thought that if he truly believed there was nothing to worry about, Ryan would have handed the case over by now.

  “Whoever he is, you’ll do your best for him. You always do,” was all she said.

  Ryan looked faintly embarrassed.

  “I’ll try. That’s all any of us can do.”

  Anna rested her hand against his chest and rubbed the invisible ache festering there. She knew he was thinking of others he hadn’t been able to save; crimes he hadn’t solved, murders he couldn’t have prevented. He carried the memory of them on his shoulders and it was a heavy burden to bear. Now they’d decided to spend their lives together, she hoped she might be able to help lighten the load.

  For now, she asked the question that was uppermost in her mind.

  “Did you—ah, did you see your new boss this morning?”

  There was no casual, nonchalant way of asking and it came out in an awkward rush of words.

  “I saw her,” he replied, and his tone conveyed a wealth of meaning. “Giving a speech to the masses about how the department has been up shit creek without a paddle—before her timely arrival, that is. Lucas organised an all-staff meeting for a time when she thought I’d be away from the office. Unfortunately for her, I decided to surprise them,” he tagged on.

  Anna’s heart sank. Years ago, Ryan had moved away from London to escape a woman whose behaviour had become erratic and volatile. Jennifer Lucas had been his superior officer at the time and their personal relationship had been discreet. When things became unbearable, there had been little recourse except to make a clean break of it. Now, Lucas had followed Ryan north, invading the new life he had built, and it remained to be seen whether they could work together given all that had passed before. One thing was clear: Ryan didn’t trust his new superintendent and, frankly, neither did she.

  “You haven’t had a chance to clear the air a bit?”

  Ryan scrubbed a hand over his face.

  “What would I say? Hey, Jen, long time, no see?”

  His voice dripped sarcasm but, beneath it, she caught a thread of unease.

  “You have to try speaking to Morrison again,” she said, urgently, but Ryan shook his head.

  “The Chief Constable made it abundantly clear she’s not interested in ancient history. Morrison doesn’t understand what happened and, since I didn’t make a formal complaint…” He trailed off, thinking of what a monumental error that had been.

  “Lucas has an impeccable work record,” he continued. “She’s respected, and Morrison wants her to swoop into the department and overhaul it, so we can all bask in the reflected glow of her popularity with the people who matter.”

  “And you’re thinking of her husband—and children, if she has any,” Anna concluded, softly. Ryan’s compassion might be cloaked in steel but it was there all the same.

  He gave a brief nod.

  “I don’t know who it might hurt if I start raking up the past. For all I know, she might have kids now and they don’t deserve to have their mother dragged through the mud if she’s a changed person. So, for as long as Lucas does the job she’s paid to do without causing trouble, I’ll set it aside,” he said, but then his voice grew cold. “But if she tries to tear down everything we stand for, everything we’ve worked so hard to do—”

  “She couldn’t,” Anna interjected. “Nobody has the power to do that.”

  Ryan looked down into his wife’s soft, dark eyes and wondered what it would be like to believe so wholly and completely in the better side of human nature. After all she had been through and all she had lost, Anna still believed people were fundamentally good and that it was within their power to change. He wondered whether he’d lost that idealism somewhere along the way, but listening to her unshakeable faith in people made him want to grasp at the threads of it.

  “I love you,” he said simply.

  “Same goes, Chief Inspector. Now, are you planning on doing any work today? Taxpayer’s money and all that.”

  “I wondered how long it would take before you started nagging me in a wifely fashion.”

>   Anna gave him a toothy smile.

  “Darling, I’ve been doing it since Day One, you were just too love-struck to notice.”

  “’Love-struck’? I’m a grown man,” he argued.

  “Whatever you say, dear.”

  CHAPTER 5

  The running machine echoed loudly in the empty basement gym at Northumbria Police Headquarters but Detective Inspector Denise MacKenzie couldn’t hear it above the sound of her own laboured breathing and the music pounding in her ears. There were no frills and no view except an empty concrete wall, but that was just how she liked it.

  No distractions.

  Her muscles ached and sweat ran in rivulets down her back and across her forehead, seeping into her eyes, but there was no question of slowing down or stopping. Not yet.

  Just a bit further…

  Every muscle ached, and she could feel the old wound in her leg beginning to protest, reminding her of why she needed to push herself harder, faster, until she regained her strength.

  Not so long ago, she’d been the prisoner of a madman who almost killed her. He hadn’t succeeded but The Hacker had still left his mark, branding her leg with a six-inch scar to remind her of where his knife had torn through muscle and flesh. But the scars were more than skin-deep; they went all the way to her very core, and she fought each day to help them heal.

  The music shifted, and she picked up her feet to sprint into the crescendo.

  From her position in the doorway, Jennifer Lucas cast a thoughtful eye over Denise MacKenzie. She was aware of what had happened earlier in the year—the whole country knew about it—and couldn’t fail to be impressed by the determination etched into every line of the woman’s body. It would have been easy for her to take more time off work to lick her wounds and ruminate on what had happened but, instead, she was down here in the police gym pushing herself to the limit.