Longstone: A DCI Ryan Mystery (The DCI Ryan Mysteries Book 10)

by LJ Ross

  CHAPTER 22

  “I remember where I’ve seen him before.”

  Much later, back in the little house they shared in Newcastle, MacKenzie paused in the act of brushing her teeth in their en suite bathroom and called out to Frank, who was unbuttoning his work shirt.

  “Eh? What’s that, love?”

  She spat out the toothpaste and walked back into the bedroom.

  “I said, I remember where I’ve seen Paul Hutchinson before. When I was doing a search on missing persons recently, a name flagged up as a possible match for like crimes. He didn’t fit, as it turned out, but I had a quick look at the file, anyway. I’m sure it listed Paul Hutchinson as the man’s brother. It was covered in the local press, too—there was a picture of Paul taken from when he’d given an interview.”

  “You’ve got a memory like an elephant,” Phillips said.

  “And don’t you forget it,” she joked.

  “Well, at least that explains why Josh’s father seems to be such a taboo subject,” he said. “No pictures, no casual references. It makes you wonder.”

  “Let’s see if I can find anything on it,” she muttered, snatching up her mobile phone from the bedside table to run a quick Google search.

  Phillips climbed onto the bed beside her and leaned back against a stack of cushions, wondering why in the world anybody would need more than two at any one time.

  “Here we go,” she said, after a moment. “Paul’s brother, Kristopher Reid, was reported missing on 21st October 1995. There doesn’t seem to have been much of a police appeal, but there’s a bit in the Northumberland Gazette about it.”

  “Different surnames,” Phillips remarked. “Must be half-brothers.”

  MacKenzie passed him the phone so he could look at a grainy photograph of Kris Reid that filled the screen.

  “He’s the spitting double of his son,” he said, moving the screen closer to his eyes, then further away again to accommodate his ageing vision. “Even down to the curly hair.”

  MacKenzie nodded.

  “It says here there was no suggestion of foul play and no evidence of suicide or suicidal intent. His car was found abandoned in the long-stay car park at Newcastle Airport a week after Kristopher went missing and the police concluded he’d gone off the grid of his own accord.”

  “It happens,” Phillips said, scrolling through the article.

  “I wonder what he was like,” MacKenzie murmured, thinking of a little boy who had never known his father.

  “No bloody good, if he’d bugger off and leave his pregnant girlfriend high and dry,” Phillips said, with simple logic.

  “Plenty of people agreed with you,” she said, scanning the old article. “Local sources who wish to remain anonymous have told this paper that the missing man was known to have an unreliable temperament.”

  “There you go,” Phillips sniffed. “I tell you what, if my old Da had ever caught me trying to do a runner on a lass, he’d have given me the hidin’ of my life.”

  “We’ll not argue about the way to ensure a long and happy relationship,” she said dryly. “But I’ll venture to say that nobody would really want to spend their days with somebody who was only there out of a sense of obligation.”

  “Depends how much they love them,” Phillips argued, and MacKenzie fell silent because he was right.

  Love knew no reason, sometimes.

  * * *

  “Do you have everything you need?” Gemma asked, and reached out to stroke a gentle hand over the girl’s hair.

  “Yes, thanks,” Daisy replied.

  She felt utterly drained, her tears having dried up during the course of the day to be replaced by a dull, burning sensation at the back of her eyes. Her head felt fuzzy and unreal, as though she were swimming underwater, and she couldn’t quite remember how she’d come to be at the inn, only that Gemma had tucked her into the big double bed that had been hers.

  There was still no sign of Josh.

  “I wonder where Josh could be,” Gemma worried, as if she’d read her mind. “It’s getting late.”

  “I think he was visiting a friend or something,” Daisy said, lamely.

  Gemma wondered how her son could flit off meeting friends when his girlfriend had just suffered the loss of her mother, but kept her thoughts to herself.

  “Well, try to get some sleep now. I’ll tell him to be quiet when he comes in.”

  As she turned away, Daisy stopped her.

  “Thanks for looking after me,” she whispered, and Gemma’s heart wept at the broken sound of her voice. She said nothing but leaned down and pressed a kiss to the girl’s head.

  “Try to sleep,” she repeated.

  Downstairs, Hutch still hadn’t re-opened the pub, but he had stoked up the log-burner until it roared with cheerful flame.

  “I’ve put Daisy in my room,” Gemma told him, coming to settle in a chair beside the fire. “The police are planning to go through Mandy’s cottage tomorrow, so it’s best that she’s here.”

  “How’s she doing?”

  “She seems calmer than before.”

  “Aye, it’ll get worse for her before it gets better,” he murmured, closing the stove door again and straightening up. “Why didn’t you just put her in Josh’s room?”

  She huffed out a sigh.

  “Paul—”

  “Gemma, they’re in their twenties, for goodness’ sake. This isn’t the eighteenth century; they’ll want to be together.”

  When she said nothing, he moved across to frame her face in his hands.

  “Just like we want to be together,” he said, hardly believing it was true. “Soon enough, all this nasty business will be behind us and it’ll just be you and me again.”

  She nodded, watching a hunk of paper curl and burst into flame inside the log-burner.

  “I hope so,” she said. “And, for the record, there’s nothing wrong with being old-fashioned. I threw myself into a relationship, once, and look where it got me.”

  Hutch wouldn’t allow his happiness to be dimmed.

  “That was a long time ago,” he said, firmly. “Kris has gone and he’s not coming back.”

  Just then, a key turned in the outer door and it seemed, just for a moment, as though Kris Reid had come back to prove his brother wrong.

  Josh looked between their shocked faces.

  “You look as if you’ve seen a ghost,” he said, wearily. “Night.”

  In the silence that followed, they heard his quick steps as he jogged upstairs and thought of another man who’d moved with the same energy, the same zest for life, and wondered where he was now.

  * * *

  When Ryan returned home after eight o’clock, he found Anna immersed in a volume of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People. It was not what he might have described as light bedtime reading, but he supposed she might say the same of the forensic reports and case summaries that made up the majority of his reading material.

  She tilted her chin up as he leaned down to give her a kiss.

  “Have you eaten?” he asked, and was unsurprised when she shook her head.

  “I got a bit engrossed in all this,” she said, gesturing to the books spread out across the kitchen table.

  “Just as well I stopped off for a take-away,” he smiled, and held up a couple of brown paper bags. “Feel like some sweet and sour pork?”

  Her stomach gave a timely rumble.

  “Have I ever told you how much I love you?”

  “Because I keep you in egg fried rice?” He grinned.

  “Mostly, it’s for your body,” she said. “But sometimes it’s because you think of me, even when your mind must be full of all kinds of other, more important things.”

  Ryan paused in the act of unpacking the food and walked across to hunker down beside her chair.

  “I always think of you,” he said, covering her hands with his own. “Even when I’m neck-deep in a murder investigation, I think of you and of how wonderful it’ll feel
to come home to you. I’m never happier than when I’m with you, Anna.”

  She leaned in to kiss him.

  “Thank you,” she murmured, then walked her fingers up his chest. “You know, I was reading about a Viking warrior today who quite reminded me of you.”

  “Really?” he said, as his hands snaked around her waist. “You’ll have to tell me how similar we are, later.”

  “Later?”

  “I’d say around an hour.”

  She raised an eyebrow.

  “Didn’t think you’d have the energy,” she said, sticking her tongue in her cheek.

  “Never underestimate a Viking warrior.”

  CHAPTER 23

  Sunday, 4th November

  The following morning, Ryan entered the Coastguard’s Office with a definite spring in his step, whistling Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer under his breath, a fact of which he was entirely unaware.

  “Thought you said it was too early for Christmassy stuff?” Phillips called out, with a wink for Lowerson. “Seems to me you’re as cheerful as Santa’s favourite elf.”

  Ryan looked at the amused faces around the room.

  “Nothing wrong with enjoying one’s work,” he said, haughtily. “Besides, I was whistling Bohemian Rhapsody.”

  “If that was Bohemian Rhapsody, I think I just heard Freddie Mercury turning in his grave,” Lowerson chipped in.

  “Alright, alright,” Ryan said, and started to dish out the cups of coffee he’d picked up from a little artisan shop on the way in.

  “Lifesaver,” MacKenzie told him, and took the first greedy sip. “That’s almost better than sex.”

  Phillips looked across with an accusing eye.

  “I said almost, Frank.”

  Ryan checked his watch.

  “It’s just coming up to eight o’clock,” he said. “The marine team will be here any minute now. Phillips, I’ll take a wild guess and say that you’d rather not come out on the boat again, so why don’t you stick around here?”

  “There is a God,” his sergeant declared, pressing his palms together. “I’ll make myself useful from the comfort and security of dry land.”

  Right on time, there came a brief knock at the door before it opened to reveal Ursula Tan and a couple of her colleagues from MAST.

  “I think Jasper’s parking his car outside,” she told them. “We managed to rope in a couple of additional divers from the local British Sub-Aqua Club who’ve been working with us down at Beadnell. We’ve got a limited window since you can only see Knivestone at low-water and, according to the tide forecast, that means we’ve got around three hours this morning and possibly another two hours this evening.”

  “What difference does the water level make?” Phillips asked the obvious question the non-divers amongst them had undoubtedly been thinking.

  “It makes visibility easier, for one thing,” she replied. “There’s a shallow gully which bisects Knivestone island—that’s where you’ll find the Abyssinia wreck. Judging from the coordinates you sent through last night, our theory is that the gully spreads out much further than originally thought, past the intersection through the island and into open sea to the east. With long-term tidal changes and strong water currents, our best guess is that it’s altered the silt on the seabed, revealing more of the gulley and perhaps that’s what Iain found, the other day. But it’s much harder to find and explore gullied areas at high tide.”

  She paused as the door opened again to reveal Jasper Vaughn, who had returned with his own assistant, a mousy-haired young man he introduced only as ‘Michael’.

  Ryan looked around at their motley crew and smiled roguishly.

  “Let’s get this show on the road.”

  * * *

  Although they had the coordinates provided by the GPS tracking on Iain Tucker’s Personal Locator Beacon, they were only accurate to within five-hundred feet in any direction. A search of his home, office, hotel room and car had not turned up any notes or charts to help narrow their search any further, which Ryan suspected had been a deliberate move on the part of Tucker’s killer. It was therefore necessary to use sonar and magnetometry to locate what had come to be known as ‘Tucker’s Wreck.’

  The team of experts from MAST had brought their own dive boat named the Jolly Roger, which came equipped with all they would need for a prospecting excursion, including a top-of-the-range magnetometer. However, this was no substitute for local knowledge, so they enlisted Coastal Area Commander Alex Walker to navigate them through waters he knew like the back of his hand.

  “Handles differently to the lifeboat,” he said, testing the wheel. “Nippy on the water, too. Wouldn’t mind something like this, myself.”

  “Test driving a new one?” Ryan asked.

  “Always in the market,” Walker grinned. “I’ve never been on a prospect mission before. Shipwreck diving isn’t really my thing, usually, but that could change after this little excursion.”

  “How come?”

  “Just never got into it.” He shrugged. “It can be a bit like a gambling addiction, or so I hear. Once you get bitten by the treasure-hunting bug, you keep coming back for more.”

  Ryan thought of Iain Tucker’s obsession and nodded.

  “What’s that?” he asked, pointing towards a huge, twenty-foot cliff face as they rounded the southern edge of the islands.

  “That’s ‘the Pinnacles’,” Walker replied, and slowed the boat a little so Ryan could get a better look at the jutting rocks which looked to have sprung from the sea like kryptonite. “That’s where you’ll see thousands of birds nesting during the summer, puffins mainly. It’s even more impressive underwater; the rock goes down much further below.”

  As Ryan listened, a thought struck him quite forcefully: he was happy. There were always snatched moments of happiness in his life, mostly thanks to Anna and the friends he had around him, but lasting contentment tended to elude him. He supposed that was understandable; it had been an eventful few years, filled with loss and trauma, and he was only human after all. A person needed time to heal.

  He didn’t know what the future would hold or what fresh trauma awaited him around the corner but, standing there on the dive boat with the wind blowing against his face, he could say he felt truly happy knowing he was doing what he’d been born to do, living where he felt most at home, learning the land that had adopted him as its own.

  “Anna not coming along today?” Walker asked, and then glanced over his shoulder to make sure they wouldn’t be overheard. “I thought maybe Jasper had put her off.”

  Ryan smiled at the unlikely prospect of Anna being put off her passion for local history by anyone or anything.

  “No, nothing like that. She’s teaching today,” he said. “Marine excavation isn’t her forte anyway; she said she’d swing by if we bring up any artefacts, though. I was speaking to Vaughn this morning and, say what you like about him, the man’s useful to know. He’s a dendrochronologist as part of his archaeological repertoire which, he told me at length, is the analysis of tree rings to help date the wood used to build a vessel.”

  “All the way back to Viking times?”

  “Let’s see if we can find anything at all, first,” Ryan said.

  Alex slowed the boat as they approached the northern edge of Knivestone, fully visible since the water was at a low level, as Ursula had said it would be. Jasper Vaughn stepped inside the cabin armed with a nautical chart, presumably to make sure that Walker hadn’t suffered an amnesiac episode and was no longer able to read a chart for himself, nor operate the high-tech navigational deck the boat had fitted.

  “Bear north, north-west,” he said, without any pleasantries.

  “Aye, aye, Cap’n,” Walker replied, with a heavy layer of sarcasm.

  “What happens when we get there?” Ryan asked, to pre-empt any forthcoming argument.

  “We’ll try the sonar and the magnetometer,” Vaughn replied. “There are several different kinds but, to keep things simple, Ursula
and I have agreed to use synthetic aperture sonar, or SAS. It’s more expensive but it gives a higher resolution.”

  “How does it work?” Ryan asked, as they left Knivestone rock behind them and motored into open waters.

  “It’s a sophisticated form of post-processing sonar data,” Vaughn replied, with an air of condescension Ryan might have found irritating if he hadn’t been in such a good mood. “Very simply put, you move the sonar device, which is attached to the boat, in a straight line to illuminate the same spot on the seabed with a series of acoustic pings. Those sounds bounce off any large, foreign entity that might be lying on the seabed. It’s integrated with a navigation system and motion sensor to help process the data and should provide a good quality image of anything that’s down there as well as being able to tell us the distances between here and the seabed.”

  “And what about the magnetometer?” Ryan asked. “I wouldn’t have thought there’d be much metal on a Viking wreck.”

  “Why don’t I show you?”

  Vaughn led Ryan to the back of the boat and pointed to what looked, at first glance, like an enormous blue fishing rod with a long PVC nose cone at the end of it.

  “It’s attached to the boat by this retractable cord,” he explained, and gestured towards what looked like a bright yellow hosepipe. “You lower it into the water and drag it through the area you’re interested in. It detects anomalies in the Earth’s magnetic field which occur when new, alien magnetic fields are superimposed, the kind created when ferrous materials gather on the seabed.”

  “Like old warships?” Ryan asked.

  “Exactly. We don’t expect to find anything new on that score,” he said. “The more modern wrecks around this area have already been catalogued and we know their positions.”

  “If we were prospecting for something more recent, we’d use ultraviolet light,” Ursula said, joining their conversation. “Most metals, apart from gold, disintegrate over time and the ions dissipate into the water. That shows up under UV, which helps to find wrecks from the First and Second World Wars.”