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

by LJ Ross

  “I had a word with the pathologist earlier today,” Lowerson said. “He had nothing much to add on that score. Faulkner found a bunch of unidentified samples in Tucker’s car, but that’s completely normal considering the number of people who would’ve been in and out of it, over the years. There was nothing useful in the dinghy, no prints or useable substances since it’d been exposed to the weather and the rain would’ve washed anything juicy away.”

  “What about his hotel room?” Ryan asked. “Anything come back on that?”

  Lowerson just shook his head.

  “There were numerous prints found in the room—some they’ve identified as belonging to Tucker himself, others they’ve identified as Paul Hutchinson, Gemma Dawson and Daisy Jones. Any of them might have been in to clean the room, since they tend to do it all themselves. There were numerous old, partial prints we can safely assume belonged to previous hotel guests, too.”

  Ryan sighed, running through his mental checklist.

  “Alright, so we didn’t hit lucky, there. How about phone records from his mobile? Any sign of his electronics, yet?”

  “Naht, the phone company still haven’t come back with anything, probably because it’s the weekend. I’ll chase them up first thing tomorrow,” Phillips said. “There’s still no sign of any papers or electronics, either at Tucker’s home or his office.”

  “Yeah, they’re long gone,” Ryan surmised.

  “It doesn’t matter so much now,” MacKenzie pointed out. “If our perp was hoping to prevent you from finding the wreckage by disposing of Tucker’s charts and records, then they’ve failed miserably, haven’t they?”

  Ryan smiled grimly and glanced at his watch.

  Time to go.

  “Wish us luck,” he said. “We’re about to find out why somebody went to all that effort.”

  CHAPTER 28

  “What the hell are you doing?”

  Daisy walked into the bedroom to find Josh stuffing clothes into a holdall. He worked quickly, as he packed a meagre selection of his worldly belongings into the bag he’d been given as a teenager, on his first day of secondary school.

  “We need to leave,” he said urgently, his voice bordering on panic. “I can’t sit around here waiting any longer, wondering if you or me, or somebody else I care about will turn up dead.”

  “That isn’t going to happen!” She reached for him, but he shrugged her off.

  “Look, you can come with me or stay here, it’s up to you,” he said. “But you need to decide now.”

  “For God’s sake, Josh—”

  “Are you listening to me?” he said, grasping her arms in a bruising grip. “I told you last night, there is no way out except to run. I offered to pay the money back, but that was refused. I don’t know what else I can do.”

  “You can speak to Gemma, or Hutch,” she said desperately. “Please, Josh. You can’t leave.”

  Her face was a pale mask, her eyes enormous and filled with hurt.

  “Please, don’t leave me.”

  Something triggered in his mind, a memory that was not his own but had been planted inside his mind ever since he’d been old enough to understand.

  Kris left them, they’d say. How could he leave them?

  He remembered his mother’s polite mask as another old woman from the church committee came to call, bearing second-hand toys or clothes she neither needed nor wanted. But she’d accepted them with good grace, had smiled and nodded as they stayed to coo over her baby boy, the one who looked so like his wayward father.

  Shameful, they’d whispered.

  How will he cope, growing up without a father?

  He recalled the proud tilt of his mother’s chin, the regal silence she’d employed until it was an acceptable time to show them the door. Then, once it had closed, he’d heard her soft tears behind the bathroom door; muffled sounds she’d tried to hide from him and from the world.

  Mummy? Mummy, are you in there?

  I’ll be out in a minute, sweetheart. Go and play.

  He saw his mother’s tears in the face of the woman standing before him and the clothes fell from his numb fingers. He sank down onto the edge of the bed and held his head in his hands.

  “Do you really think there’s nothing else we can do?”

  He brushed the sleeve of his shirt over his eyes and looked up.

  “This isn’t your problem, Daisy, it’s mine. You’re not a part of it.”

  “Of course I am,” she said, angrily. “We’re in this together, Josh.”

  Her breath hitched as tears clogged her throat and she struggled to contain them, imagining the terrible loneliness of a life without her mother as well as the man, who was still a boy, sitting in front of her.

  “If we go, we go together,” she told him, firmly.

  They heard the creak of the stairs and Josh rose, thrusting the holdall into a cupboard before somebody could see.

  “Nothing’s changed,” he told her quietly. “And, if you’re serious about coming with me, start packing a bag, because I’m leaving tonight.”

  * * *

  At the wreck site, Ryan stood on the deck of the Jolly Roger and watched the small crew of MAST divers alongside Jasper Vaughn, as they prepared their tanks to enter the water. The sun was spectacular as it slowly descended towards the horizon, throwing beams of light across the rippling water as the tide changed and Knivestone appeared once again from the depths of the sea to the west and, beyond it, Longstone lighthouse and civilisation.

  “Nearly there,” Ursula said, coming to stand beside him. “I’ve agreed to stay up here for the first run. Next time, it’ll be my turn to go down.”

  Ryan smiled at her enthusiasm, thinking it was a rare person who actively missed being able to dive into the freezing water of the North Sea.

  “Jasper’s got a camera fitted to his cap,” she said. “That’ll be linked to the monitor here, so we’ll be able to watch things unfold.”

  “You said the wrecks were lying between forty-five and fifty metres below,” he said. “That makes it a deeper dive than usual, doesn’t it?”

  Her face sobered.

  “Everybody here is an experienced professional,” she assured him. “But I won’t lie to you, it’ll be a difficult dive. The currents are very strong around here—added to which, it’s likely there’ll be poor visibility as they go down, partly due to geophysical factors and partly due to the fact we’re rapidly losing daylight.”

  Ryan nodded towards the group of men and women who were strapping on tanks.

  “I’m not telling you how to do your job,” he said, simply. “But I have my own due diligence to take care of. I’m here representing an investment made by the Northumbria Constabulary and, put simply, we’ve already lost two people because of whatever’s lying down there. I don’t intend to lose any more.”

  Ursula nodded.

  “We’ll do our best.”

  She moved off to oversee the dive lift, which was fitted to the back of the boat and was designed to make it easier for professional divers to enter deep water. As the mechanism activated, Ryan joined Ursula and Alex Walker in the cabin area, where their eyes were glued to the television monitor that would feed real-time video images from Jasper’s camera back to the boat.

  As the footage began to roll, Ryan’s first thought was that the underwater world was an opaque, mossy-green landscape where it was impossible to see further than a couple of feet in any direction. But then, it was as if a veil was slowly lifted and the underwater panorama revealed itself.

  “Incredible,” he murmured.

  While they remained in the shallows, the vastness of the ocean spread out before the divers and the three who remained on board watched as their powerful searchlights shone white beams through the murky water to guide their way, deeper into the unknown.

  Suddenly, Jasper’s camera jolted, and the footage bobbed as something darted in front of him. Time was suspended for a moment until the whiskered face of an Atlantic grey
seal swept into view. Inquisitive and charming, the five-hundred-pound animal wriggled its nose into Jasper’s face, no doubt trying to work out what had invaded its home.

  “If only I could see Jasper’s face,” Ursula said, with a snigger.

  “They’re like Labradors,” Walker said, with a chuckle. “There’s a colony of thousands of seals around the Farnes. If you go into shallower waters, you can pet them like puppies.”

  “I don’t believe it,” Ryan said.

  “I wouldn’t tell a lie,” Walker said, crossing his heart. “They’re great big soppy beasts; that’s why divers keep coming back here, to see the seals as much as the shipwrecks.”

  They fell silent again as the divers moved on, entering a different realm that was alien to them, deeper and deeper into the darkness of the ocean floor. Above sea level, the boat crew waited with bated breath; unable to look away from the monitor, transfixed by the slow progress of Jasper’s camera. Now and then, they caught a hand signal or gesture from one of the other divers as they moved in formation, lowering themselves by degree as they drew closer and closer to their destination.

  “Can’t be far now,” Ursula muttered. “They’ve been down there for ten minutes.”

  No sooner had she spoken than the wreck was upon them, rearing up towards the monitor as if from nowhere. It emerged from the shadows like a ghost ship, its metal lines standing face-up and intact, its port-side wedged forever against the underside of a long shard of whinstone rock which had been there for centuries and had, for reasons best known to its creator, decided to reveal itself. Centuries of tidal currents had swept tonnes of silt and sand from the seabed, creating a steep ridge against its outer edge which might have concealed the wreck for centuries to come, had a twist of fate and the turn of the tide not decided otherwise.

  “That’s only the first,” Ursula said. “It looks fairly small; maybe a naval trawler of some kind. Look, they’re splitting up into teams.”

  Sure enough, the divers fanned out in two teams, with Jasper leaving the less exciting military vessel behind in favour of the more prestigious offering that might await him.

  “How long do they have left?” Ryan asked, never losing sight of the practicalities.

  “Around forty minutes. It’ll take them twenty to get back up, so they’ve got around twenty minutes left to explore.”

  They watched as Jasper passed through a jungle of trailing sea kelp that had made a home around the first wreckage, trailing its slimy fingers against the edge of his camera as he swam through it. The camera panned out again and shifted to the same murky grey-green nothingness as before and Ryan felt a certain disquiet as he watched the two divers braving the deep.

  “There,” Ursula whispered, reverently. “Oh, my God.”

  The three of them were silent as the underside of a long wooden ship came into view, nestled beneath the same protective shield of rock and silt as its younger neighbour but significantly older.

  “Do you think—?”

  Walker began to speak, then came to an abrupt stop as an elaborately carved bow and stern of a Viking warship came into view, its clinker-built hull still showing the seamless lines of overlapping wooden craftsmanship that had been the stuff of Nordic tradition.

  “It’s beautiful,” Ursula said, and Ryan glanced across to find she was weeping. Tears of silent joy fell down her face and he realised something that she had not, perhaps, realised herself. The joy she displayed at the second-hand experience of seeing the wrecks couldn’t possibly compare with seeing it first-hand and so, for her to have foregone that pleasure to allow Jasper the opportunity instead, spoke volumes of her latent feelings for the man.

  He fished out a small packet of tissues, which he offered to her.

  “Thanks,” she muttered. “You must think I’m ridiculous.”

  “No,” Ryan said. “I think you’re dedicated.”

  She nodded.

  “I’ve dived around the Farnes for nearly fifteen years,” she said. “In fact, I’ve dived all over the world, from the Pacific to the Indian Ocean. I’ve seen the Oseburg, which was the best-preserved example of a Viking longship. But even just by looking at the fleeting images on Jasper’s camera, I can see it doesn’t compare to what we’ve found here.”

  She turned to look at the two men beside her.

  “This—it’s the stuff marine archaeologists dream of,” she said, sniffling again. “Iain was right,” she added. “He was absolutely right, and I laughed at him. I’m so sorry.”

  Ryan only shook his head.

  “You had a natural scepticism, which is different.”

  He was about to say more when Walker tapped his shoulder to draw their attention to the monitor again. Reluctantly, Jasper was now making his return journey towards the surface with his dive partner, retracing his route through the artificial reefs, past anemone and Dead Man’s Fingers, past rows of crab and kelp. But he had paused to meet the other diving team, who had been exploring the first wreck.

  And who were now making furious, panicked hand gestures.

  “Get the diving lift ready,” Ryan muttered. “Something’s wrong.”

  CHAPTER 29

  Word of a shipwreck had spread like wildfire amongst the villagers, who gathered down by the harbour to greet the Jolly Roger as she made her triumphant return. They lined the harbour wall, waving the colourful diving boat in and expecting to hear its horn blast once, twice, three times to acknowledge the moment. But it remained silent as it entered Seahouses, as neither boat nor crew brought any glad tidings for the people who lived there.

  “Howay, let’s get moving,” Phillips said to Lowerson, and began to usher the crowd back from the slipway to allow better access for an unmarked black-painted ambulance vehicle that had been called out in readiness.

  Whispers began to spread, rumours of a police presence that was not normal for a happy event such as this.

  Where were the local camera crews? Where was the pomp and circumstance?

  The locals, who had already felt the impact of two deaths in their community, began to grow restless and a strange hush befell the proceedings. They watched the diving boat slow as it came alongside the northern pier, watched as the tall, dark-haired chief inspector leapt onto the pier to tie off the ropes and began to feel a prescient kind of dread for what was to come.

  Amongst them were Hutch and Gemma.

  “I wonder what’s going on?” she said. “I thought they’d be…you know, a bit more excited about it all.”

  Hutch said nothing and watched Ryan stride along the pier, where he was met by a couple of members of his team.

  “There could have been an accident,” he said, in an odd, faraway voice.

  “Maybe,” she said. “If that’s the case, we should leave them to it.”

  She started to walk off, then realised he wasn’t following.

  “Paul? Aren’t you coming? What’s wrong?”

  “I—I get a funny feeling.” He placed a hand against his chest. “Let’s wait a minute longer.”

  He began to move slowly towards the barrier; closer to where Ryan stood talking to one of the technicians who would transfer the body to the mortuary. In his hand, he held a clear evidence bag and, inside that, a diver’s knife he recognised instantly.

  Kristopher’s diving knife.

  “Gemma.”

  She rubbed a hand across his back, worried by the look on his face.

  “What’s the matter?”

  But he wasn’t really listening. Hutch muscled his way forward, making directly for the group of police.

  “…unidentified remains. This was the only personal effect we could find.”

  He heard Ryan’s well-spoken voice over the din of the surrounding crowd and surged through them, desperate to see the thing up close, to see if he was right.

  “Whoa there, lad. Where d’you think you’re going?”

  He came up against an immovable object in the form of DS Phillips, whose mild-mannered expressio
n belied a core of pure iron.

  “I-I need to see. It’s the knife. Kris had that knife.”

  Phillips followed Hutch’s eyeline, but the evidence bag was no longer in view.

  “What’re you on about, son?”

  “The knife! I saw it!”

  His raised voice attracted Ryan’s attention and he turned, moving across to join them with an unreadable expression in his misty blue eyes.

  “Hello, Mr Hutchinson. Ms Dawson. I’m afraid we have a barrier in place for the moment. We’ll lift it as soon as we’re able.”

  He was about to turn away again, to oversee the sad business of transferring the liquid shell of what had once been a person, when Hutch grabbed his arm.

  Ryan’s eyes turned to steel.

  “You don’t want to do that, Mr Hutchinson.”

  But the man was not himself.

  “I saw a knife. In a plastic bag. You were carrying it, just now.”

  “Hutch, I think we should leave the police to it—” Gemma tried again, her eyes full of apology.

  But Ryan’s focus had changed.

  “What about it?” he asked him, softly. “What about the knife?”

  Hutch’s throat bobbed, and his eyes were wide and frightened as he forced himself to say what he needed to say.

  “It belonged to my brother. It belonged to Kris.”

  Gemma’s hand fell away, and she took an involuntary step backwards.

  “What do you mean? What are you talking about?”

  Ryan saw panic and denial, horror and hope mingled all into one. He gestured for them to come forward, and they stepped away from the crowd.

  “Describe the knife to me,” he said. “What did your brother’s knife look like?”

  Hutch rubbed his chest as he spoke, in a dull, flat voice Gemma hardly recognised.

  “It was dark blue, about this long,” he said, using his index fingers to estimate the size. “There was a little black octopus symbol at the hilt and it was engraved with the word, ‘KRAKEN’.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  Hutch swallowed painfully.