Time and Tide

by Peter Grainger

  Smith was nodding and smiling at her, but Waters had seen the look before as the blue eyes measured her – Smith was not looking at her any more. He was looking through her at the image of the man that was still printed on her memory.

  Smith said, ‘Gina, I’m sure you won’t be offended. There are some questions that I have to ask if my boss isn’t going to say I’m not doing my job. Did you see this man after he left the restaurant?’

  Gina Clarke wasn’t offended so much as flattered.

  ‘No, I didn’t. I could lose my job an’ all.’

  ‘Quite right, good for you. Can I get one thing clear, though? He suggested that you go to his room, here in the hotel? He was definitely staying here?’

  She nodded.

  ‘And do you happen to know the room number, Gina?’

  She shook her head with a smile - she wasn’t so daft as not to see what he was doing there.

  ‘You’ve been really helpful. We could use more witnesses like you, Gina. Sometime in the next day or two, we’ll talk to you again, write this all down and get you to sign it. Will that be OK? Good. And if you remember anything else in the meantime, get in touch – Detective Sergeant Smith, Kings Lake Central police station.’

  When she had left the lobby, Waters said, ‘I think you’ve made a conquest, DC.’

  ‘And I think what you meant to say was, you’ve made another conquest, DC.’

  Waters thought and then said, ‘Funny what she said about him – his face not fitting the suit. That he was a hard man of some sort. That’s a good guess, isn’t it?’

  ‘People always surprise you, even after you’ve learned that lesson. She’s an ordinary girl in a menial sort of job, but that doesn’t mean she’s stupid. I’d say Gina has got the opposite sex summed up pretty well…’

  ‘And I’d say that Gina has remembered something else already.’

  She was back in the lobby and walking towards them. Smith smiled at her and raised his eyebrows.

  ‘He said ’e’d stayed here before. Not here in the hotel, but on the coast a few miles down, in a pub. Earlier this year. Said ’e liked it so much he came back.’

  ‘Gina! Excellent! What was the name of the pub? Did he say?’

  ‘Don’t think so. But ’e said where it was, I remember that. Overy. He said ’e’d stayed in Overy.’

  Smith looked at Waters and said, ‘Small world up here, isn’t it?’

  Then John Murray was striding towards them, and it was clear that he had news.

  ‘He’s in the register, DC. Signed in under his own name on Friday afternoon and was due to stay for two nights. Then it’s a bit confused at the moment – but he seems to have checked himself out on Saturday night. Nobody seems to have seen him go but his bill has been paid. He phoned up and paid it on the Sunday morning.’

  Smith thanked Gina Clarke again, and when she had left for the second time, he said to Murray and Waters, ‘He paid the bill by telephone on Sunday morning?’

  Neither of them offered answer, and after another few seconds, Smith said, “You have to admire the man’s honesty and rectitude then, especially as by then I reckon he was dead.’

  Chapter Eleven

  ‘So there is nothing yet written down?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Nothing that we can all look at as a team this morning?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  To a man, Wilson’s half of the team was looking at Smith, even Mike Dunn, which made a change for him as he was usually looking at Serena Butler. Wilson was maintaining a convincing expression of surprise for Terek’s benefit, while Smith’s own three detectives were gazing elsewhere and waiting for the moment to pass; they had all been here before, of course, but the difference was that it was a new face and a new detective inspector having to confront Smith’s way of doing things – or, as in this case, not doing them.

  Christopher Waters would have felt embarrassed once upon a time, and sometimes these confrontations had in the past led to Smith deciding to take them on, which had been more unnerving than embarrassing. But today Smith was wearing his most serene and aggravating smile, and it was DI Terek who was beginning to look a little flustered.

  ‘I see. And, obviously, I accept that it’s going to take some time for us all to be moving in the same direction and singing from the same hymn sheet…’

  Waters glanced at Smith. If Terek was trying to provoke him, the regular use of such clichés was certainly one way to go about it. But there was nothing, not the slightest acknowledgement of that superbly exhausted phrase, to indicate that Smith had even heard it. And Waters thought, he’s been a bit like that lately, almost as if he’s finally given up trying to single-handedly save the English language from the barbarians.

  Terek was continuing with, ‘…so shall we say that in this case the time it will take will be two hours? Let’s have everyone’s work available to everyone else on the team by 11.00 hours. This technology,’ with a dramatic wave at the latest interactive board behind him, ‘enables us all to access all the data instantly, wherever we are in the county. It doesn’t work, however, unless all the data is inputted. We need to get into the habit of doing so on a daily basis.’

  And neither does it work, Waters told himself, for Smith’s benefit, if you’re up on the coast where we were yesterday, and there is not only no phone signal but almost no satellite signal either. But it was obvious that for Terek this was less about communication and more about humiliation – he had just effectively told the most experienced detective in the room that he was in detention until he had done his lines. This was not going to end well if this was how the new detective inspector was determined to begin.

  In the absence of any response to his last words, Terek turned to Wilson and said, ‘John, can you take us through what the home team found yesterday?’

  Wilson pressed a button on his laptop and the interactive screen was transformed into a page of typed notes, complete with headings and sub-headings and all sorts of organisational devices. From the corner of his eye, Waters saw John Murray wink once at Smith, but again there was no reaction from the recipient – he sat with his arms folded and dutifully read what was on the screen as Wilson took them through it.

  The home team had had a successful day. After contact had been established by Alison Reeve at DCI level, they had been linked to a detective sergeant at a station in Dagenham who knew Sokoloff’s borough and some of the people mentioned in his criminal past, though he did not know the man personally. After brief initial calls, there had been a conference call later in the afternoon during which the Lake detectives had been brought up to speed.

  It seemed that Bernard Sokoloff had been legitimate for at least a decade. He was, and had been for a number of years, the part-owner of a successful health and beauty business, a club with extensive property in a prime position in the Essex countryside but within easy driving distance of the capital. There was nothing in police records or intelligence to suggest that The Gables had ever been involved in anything criminal. A check of public accounts records showed that it made plenty of money perfectly legally through applying a wide variety of therapies, some more alternative than others, to the torsos and egos of the well-heeled and, more significantly, their wives. If Bernard Sokoloff was taking his fifty per cent regularly, he was probably a relatively wealthy man.

  Waters checked on his iPad and found that Wilson’s report was indeed already there in the file set up to receive it. This was the way, of course, everything synced up, every device talking to every other device, but he recalled, in one of the usual arguments with DC, the latter saying that was all very well but when was every copper going to start talking to every other bloody copper? He’d been here nigh on thirty years and it hadn’t happened yet – if anything, matters had got worse since people had their noses glued to screens all day. There was no convincing him, of course, and that’s why there were awkward moments like that one a few minutes ago. Idly, Waters wondered how much longer Smith wou
ld put up with it.

  Then Wilson interrupted his summary and turned towards Terek, looking a little apologetic - a danger sign for sure.

  ‘Sorry, sir, but there is more now. I got some additional information this morning, just minutes ago. I’ve not had the opportunity to-’

  Terek said, ‘No, of course, John. This is all very good. What came in this morning?’

  ‘Detective Sergeant Fuller got back in touch, sir. They’ve been to Sokoloff’s address now. A woman answered, a Mrs Anneliese Nowicki…’

  Wilson spoke the names in their full, flat English glory, so that the woman’s surname became something that meant she was at this moment rather distasteful.

  ‘It turns out that she is his partner, and also a manager at the health club. She was able to give Sergeant Fuller further information about Sokoloff’s movements these past few days, sir. If you’d like I can…’

  ‘Absolutely John, go on.’

  A tiny frown had appeared on Smith’s forehead. He was capable of much more impressive ones, but nevertheless something had his attention now, and Waters could have taken a good guess at what it might be, because his own mind was heading in a similar direction. Bernard Sokoloff had a live-in partner. He had ‘disappeared’ four or five days ago. His name had been put into the central computer system after yesterday’s autopsy, yet there was no record of him being reported missing. Perhaps there was such a report, and that particular bit of syncing had not been done, but…

  Wilson explained that before she was given the awful news, Miss Nowicki had told the detectives that Bernard did sometimes go away on business for a day or two. She hadn’t been too worried, as he had called her on the Friday night, and he had read her texts on the Saturday afternoon. On the Sunday, he had not answered, and she had been calling him ever since but her calls had only gone to voice mail.

  Other people were beginning to catch up now, and O’Leary said it aloud – ‘So had she reported him missing, sarge?’

  Wilson answered, ‘It doesn’t look like it. This Sergeant Fuller is alright, and he was onto it there and then. He quizzed her about why not, and she started saying that although they’ve lived together for a while, they’re not married, they have their own lives, and all that. Fuller kept pushing like any of us would, and she said that they sometimes had rows and he would piss off for a while or she would. Sort of suggesting that it had happened before but she didn’t give any details or say where she thought he might have gone. It’s fair to say, sir, that Detective Sergeant Fuller was not entirely convinced by all of this.’

  ‘Neither am I, not entirely, but look at what we already know about the man.’

  Waters had forgotten that Detective Chief Inspector Reeve was still in the room. She had positioned herself away to the side and let Terek run the meeting.

  She went on, ‘Maybe she knows where he went, maybe not. But it might be that she doesn’t care much either way. We do know that Sokoloff disappeared on his birthday and spent at least one evening trying to get a waitress up to his room. This is giving me a picture of the man. If this was his regular behaviour, perhaps Miss Nowicki was glad of a few days without him.’

  Serena Butler was agreeing, and most of the men present were capable of accepting the female point of view on this one, but there were plenty of alternative explanations for why Sokoloff’s partner had not called the police to report that he was missing. Smith’s frown had deepened a little, and Waters tried to guess what was going on behind it. Smith often said, write all the logical possibilities down if you must, a new line for each one, changing one variable at a time. Mentally, Waters began to list them, and came to one that interested him – the woman did know where Sokoloff had gone, and she did care but something had prevented her from reporting him missing. For example, if she knew that he was up to no good, something seriously no good and maybe life-threatening, Miss Nowicki would then be in something of a dilemma, wouldn’t she?

  ‘Nevertheless,’ Reeve said, ‘as possibly one of the last people to see him alive, at least in London, we may well need to speak to this woman ourselves. He died on our patch, and we have the body and the responsibility – an example of possession being nine tenths of the law. I’m going to get in touch with Dagenham again and set that up, tentatively. A couple of us need to be ready to go down there with all the right questions.’

  Waters could guess which half of the team would be supplying someone to go down to London. He would like to go, just to see whether the Met detectives really were a different breed, and at some point he had to begin thinking about his next career move. The fact that he had voluntarily left the accelerated development programme didn’t mean that he was no longer ambitious; working with Smith and Murray and Butler had taught him a great deal, just as he had intended, but there was a world of possibilities away from Kings Lake. Instead of which, they would be back on the coast as soon as Smith had done his digital detention, taking statements from the hotel staff, perhaps walking the streets looking for an abandoned car.

  ‘So, how many do you think, Chris?’

  Terek was speaking to him directly.

  ‘Sorry, sir. How many what?’

  The predictable smirks, aimed not only at Waters but also in Smith’s direction. Someone muttered ‘Away with the fairies as usual!’

  Terek said, ‘I asked how many people we need to send back up to the coast today. I thought you might like to participate in a resource management decision. Never mind now – we need to get on.’

  Suddenly there was a chilly air in the room. Reeve was watching Smith, and Smith was watching Terek with an expression that Waters had seen only once or twice before in the past two years. It was something beyond anger, something much more cold and dangerous than that, and Waters knew that Reeve had seen it – she was poised to intervene if Smith so much as opened his mouth at that moment to respond to Terek. And John Murray was involved as well somehow, leaning forward over the table towards Smith, one hand in the air, ready to take hold of someone or something.

  Terek himself seemed oblivious. With one hand and one eye on his laptop, he said, ‘I’ve sent for the full records of all Sokoloff’s cases and a list of his known associates. We have to consider that a past like his may have some bearing on what’s happened to him. That will take us a day at least to examine and cross-reference, and we also need to begin looking into his phone records and his vehicle and his bank, so I’m keeping John and Serena here today. DC, you said something about a camera at the hotel?’

  Smith nodded and Waters could see that the moment of danger had passed as suddenly as it had arisen – what he could not see was what had triggered it in the first place.

  ‘Right, you and Chris go and see what you can make of that. While you’re there, you can take the statements of the hotel staff, and then follow up this idea that Sokoloff had stayed in the area before. That’s a possible lead, and it needs looking at today.’

  If Terek was hoping for more than a nod this time, he was disappointed. Waters was aware of Wilson watching this one-sided exchange now, as well as Reeve and Murray.

  ‘Right then. So, DC, forget what I said earlier. If you could hand over any notes to John and Serena, they can write up yesterday for the central record before they join the rest of us in room 17, going over Sokoloff’s past. We’re done here for now, so you and Chris can head straight off. If you need to get in touch, try driving up to that coastguard station!’

  Terek looked around, perhaps for a little appreciation of how quickly he was acquiring the local knowledge, but the atmosphere in the room was still icy, and everyone was aware of it by now. People began to pick up their papers and iPads, uncertain whether the briefing had actually ended.

  Smith turned to Waters and said quietly, ‘I’ll meet you outside the mortuary in about ten minutes,’ and then to John Murray, ‘Sorry you got lumbered with that.’

  Murray said, ‘Not a problem, DC.’

  Waters saw the look that went between Smith and Murray –
a look of understanding that he could not understand, and then he said, ‘The mortuary? DI Terek just said…’

  But Smith was already moving away, out of his chair and towards Detective Inspector Terek. Waters heard Smith say that he wanted a word, heard Terek say, ‘Of course, what is it?’ and then the answer, ‘Not here, sir. A private word in your office.’

  On the way there, DCI Reeve had managed to position herself so that she could intercept Smith. She said to him, ‘Thank you for your letter. I’ve passed it on. You’ll be in the system by the end of the day, DC. Congratulations, I suppose…’

  ‘Thank you, ma’am.’

  ‘I just wanted you to know that before you have a private word with DI Terek.’

  Smith thought it over before he said, ‘And have you made DI Terek aware of the situation, ma’am?’

  ‘Yes, I have – first thing this morning.’

  ‘I imagine he took it well.’

  ‘Why? He… He was surprised, I’d say.’

  ‘Life’s full of those, isn’t it? Surprises?’

  There was a space between them, a space which she had anticipated as a consequence of her promotion but which had grown wider and more quickly than she had feared it might. Reeve reached out, put a hand on his forearm, and said, ‘You’ve got a little way to go yet, and a case to work. I don’t need a war in my first week, DC.’

  ‘There’s no fear of that, not from me. But you know what I’m going to say to him, about the rest of them. He’s not doing that.’

  She let go of his arm.

  ‘I get that. Just… I’ll be in my office.’

  Smith was moving then, heading up to the other office that she had once called her own. It was OK. All things must pass. Change is the only constant. Not a war, of course not a war. Just a sniper’s bullet, perhaps – a minor assassination, maybe.

  Chapter Twelve

  They stood in Terek’s office – Smith had declined an invitation to sit down.