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

by LJ Ross

  “Because I was the one who bought it for him, nearly twenty-five years ago.”

  Ryan reached inside his inner jacket pocket and withdrew the evidence bag, watching the man’s eyes register shock and pain.

  The little navy-blue diving knife was rusted over but, on one side of its handle, they could clearly see a single word engraved: ‘KRAKEN’.

  Two technicians wheeled a gurney from the boat towards the ambulance, its wheels grating against the old asphalt slipway and the crowd fell silent as they spotted a black body bag strapped to the top, little more than a pocket of air, so decomposed were the remains resting inside the diving suit they had recovered.

  “It can’t be,” Hutch managed, and his chest closed up so tightly he could hardly breathe. “It can’t be him.”

  Gemma’s eyes rolled back, and her legs buckled. There was a shout and then she was falling, falling into sweet oblivion where nothing and nobody could hurt her.

  * * *

  The inn had re-opened in time for the lunchtime crowd but, since most of their customers had made their way down to the harbour to greet the Jolly Roger, it remained empty except for a couple of passing cyclists who’d stopped in for an orange juice on their way to Berwick-upon-Tweed. As the minutes ticked by, Josh manned the bar and watched the clock, waiting with increasing levels of anxiety for Daisy to return with her bags packed so they could leave, once and for all.

  When the main door opened, he turned immediately, expecting to see her standing there. Instead, his mother entered with Hutch close behind her wearing an expression of utter devastation.

  For Josh, all thoughts of escape melted away in the face of his mother’s obvious distress. He imagined who else might have turned up with a shattered skull and thought immediately of Daisy.

  “Mum? What’s happened? Is it Daisy?” He abandoned his work and hurried around the bar.

  Gemma stopped and looked up at him, her face a pale mask of fragility and exhaustion.

  “No, Josh. It isn’t Daisy,” she said at length.

  “What is it then?” he demanded, looking to Hutch for the answers but finding only a hollowed-out version of the man he’d been that morning.

  “I need to sit down,” Gemma whispered, and didn’t wait for a response before making her way through to the dining area, which was completely empty. She slumped into the first chair she found and stared at the crackling fire with eyes that were bone dry.

  She’d cried so many tears for Kris; oceans and rivers of tears over the years, so that now the worst had been confirmed, there was nothing left.

  “It’s your father,” she said, in a curiously detached tone, as Josh and Hutch joined her at the table. “They think—the police think they’ve found his body.”

  “It’s him,” Hutch muttered softly.

  Josh looked between the pair of them and then let out a short, angry laugh.

  “If this is a joke, I’m not laughing.”

  “Look at your mother, boy, and tell me if you think we’re joking,” Hutch’s voice cracked like a whip.

  Josh could feel the emotions rising, all the anger he’d buried since childhood.

  “Are you sure?” he asked. “You have to be sure.”

  “The police will confirm the identity by the morning,” Hutch told him. “But I’m telling you, I know it’s Kris. They found his diving knife inside the zipper pocket of his diving gear and he never went anywhere without it.”

  Josh tried to compute the information, his face revealing very little of the turbulent emotions running beneath.

  “Years ago, when I asked…you told me they found his car at the airport. The papers reported it, at the time,” he said. “That’s why the police closed their investigation. They concluded he was missing but didn’t want to be found.”

  “That’s what we thought,” Hutch agreed, in a low voice. “That’s what everybody thought.”

  “There has to be a mistake, then. It has to be somebody else.”

  Gemma listened to them both with a deepening sense of detachment as the years rolled back in her mind. She thought of the woman she had been, pregnant and heartbroken, with very little money. She remembered the kindness Hutch had shown her, all the quiet, unstinting support as she’d come to terms with a future without the man she had loved and the father of her child.

  Now, that child was a man, one who’d spent his whole life believing the father he’d never met to be selfish and unkind; someone who hadn’t cared enough about his child to get in touch or come back to visit, not even once during his lifetime.

  To find out that everything he’d believed about his father might have been wrong was life-altering news.

  “What if we’re right?” she said quietly. “What if it’s Kristopher?”

  “I’ll need to contact mum,” Hutch said, taking comfort in practical things that he could control. “I only hope the news doesn’t kill her all over again.”

  The first time, when she’d heard of her younger son’s disappearance, had been enough to precipitate a minor stroke that had left her needing years of physiotherapy. Now that she was older still, the outcome might not be so rosy.

  “What if it is him?” Josh repeated slowly, turning the notion around in his mind. “Everything changes, if it’s him they found trapped inside that wreck.”

  Gemma’s eyes sharpened.

  “What do you mean, love? This doesn’t change what we’ve always known: that he’s gone.”

  Josh only shook his head.

  “It changes everything,” he said, clutching his hands together to stop them trembling. “All these years, I believed he was a certain kind of person, one who’d let everybody down. I saw pieces of him in myself, all these years, and every time I messed up it was as though I was hurting you all over again,” he said.

  “You didn’t, sweetheart. You aren’t the same person he was—”

  Josh held up a hand to reject the comfort she wanted to give him because he was not in any frame of mind to accept it. He was angrier than he’d ever believed it possible to be, filled with the need to understand and avenge a man he’d never truly known, whose character had been muddied and maligned for over twenty years.

  “Did the police say how they found him?”

  Hutch shook his head.

  “They only said that they discovered the remains of the body inside one of two wrecks they discovered over near Knivestone. We aren’t supposed to tell anybody our suspicions—not until they can check their records and try to make a positive identification. Otherwise, the press will go mad.”

  “So what if they do?” Josh snarled, surprising him. “I’ve read all the old local tabloids with their nasty, gossipy little quotes. It’s there, in black and white, for anybody to read and, thanks to the internet, it’ll be there for a long time to come. What if they were wrong? What if you were all wrong? He deserves to have the record put straight, doesn’t he?”

  Gemma’s head was pounding, and her throat felt scratchy and sore when she spoke.

  “Your dad was…Kris wasn’t a bad man. I loved him,” she remembered. “But he was no angel, either.”

  Hutch didn’t bother to argue with the truth.

  “He loved the sea and, maybe for a while, he loved me. But he didn’t choose to share with me whatever took him out all that way to Knivestone,” she said. “He had secrets.”

  Josh looked between their faces and thought, for the first time, that they looked old. His mother, who normally appeared smooth and unlined despite her years now looked faded, as though she’d aged decades since he’d last seen her.

  “He never left us,” she said brokenly, as the tears finally came. “He never left us after all.”

  She buried her head into the warmth of Hutch’s chest, seeking a safe harbour, not sure she could withstand the hurt and upheaval of another police investigation. It had taken years to recover from the last time.

  Hutch ran a gentle hand over her hair while he watched his nephew’s face across the ta
ble, reading the anger and the confusion in his eyes.

  His brother’s eyes.

  It had taken twenty-three years to try to overcome the long shadow Kris had cast over their lives and to earn his own place in the affections of the woman whose head now rested against his heart. He’d wanted to believe Gemma’s son might become his son, in all the ways that mattered.

  But he realised he’d been naïve.

  Naïve to imagine he could ever replace his brother, even in the eyes of one who had never known him. It had been devastating and touching, all at once, to hear Josh forgive a man who had been reckless, stubborn and self-centred, in life. But then, even as a young boy, Josh had created all manner of imaginary tales about his father, preferring to think that Kris was a hero or an international spy, rather than accept he’d been lacking. Even as he’d grown up, a small part of Josh had always hoped to prove them all wrong one day and show the world that his father had been everything a boy could dream of, and it was a hard pill to swallow.

  Where had Kris been, while he’d taught Josh to ride his first bike? Or, when Josh had asked about girls and what the hell to do with them?

  At the bottom of the sea, his mind whispered. Dead, at the bottom of the ocean, while you led the life he was supposed to have.

  CHAPTER 30

  While the marine archaeological team dealt with the tedious administration that went alongside discovering not one, but two shipwrecks, Ryan got down to the business of opening a third murder investigation. The circumstances were highly irregular, the bureaucracy was off the scale and they were still no closer to understanding who might be responsible for some or all the deaths clustered in that tiny corner of the world.

  “Alright, settle down,” he snapped.

  Police and forensic personnel buzzed around the tiny Incident Room in far greater numbers than before, word having spread far enough to entice volunteers who were clearly energised by the glamour of finding a body in such unusual circumstances. Ryan waited for the noise to die down before disabusing them of that notion.

  “Before we go any further, I want to remind you that murder is murder regardless of the setting,” he said. “You don’t get extra brownie points for solving this one over the death of a local gang member found inside a flop house. Their deaths are equally important and should be treated as such. Is that understood?”

  He saw a couple of faces fall.

  “If any of you have suddenly realised you have other places to be, there’s the door,” he said, pointing to the back of the room. “As for the rest of you, let’s get down to it.”

  Outside, darkness had fallen and the lights inside the room were reflected in the window panes. Ryan turned down the blinds to block it out, unwilling to allow something as prosaic as tiredness to interfere with the job in hand.

  “Two of the divers belonging to the local British Sub-Aqua Club discovered the remains of another diver during their initial exploration of the first of two shipwrecks discovered off Knivestone. It hasn’t been named, yet, but it appears to be a British naval trawler, dating back to the First or Second World War,” he said. “Photographs were taken, and they’ll be circulated at the first opportunity. In the meantime, this is what we know so far.”

  Ryan paused to ensure he had their full attention, then continued.

  “Six divers went down at around three-thirty this afternoon, splitting into two teams once a second, much older wreck was discovered nearby. A video link had been set up with one of the members of the second team, which was fed back to a monitor on the boat and which I followed throughout the dive. Unfortunately, no video footage was recorded of the first naval wreck and so we’re relying on the statements given by the underwater team, for now.”

  He held up a photocopy of each statement he’d taken during the journey back to the harbour, earlier in the day.

  “You’ll find copies of these statements in your packs,” he said, referring to the summaries he’d created in the past hour. “You’ll note that the accounts of the three divers belonging to the first dive team are virtually identical,” he said, while papers rustled around the room. “The naval trawler is wedged in an upright position with its port side against a long sill of whinstone rock which has gathered silt during the intervening years, leaving the starboard side of the boat visible and intact. After a brief risk assessment, the divers judged it to be stable and safe enough to explore. They approached what was the captain’s deck, photographing their progress, before proceeding along an accessible gangway leading towards what looked to be a cabin area. The door to the starboard cabin had been wedged closed from the outside using what appeared to be a metal rod, which they were unable to move because it was covered entirely by sea and plant life and had rusted itself to the surrounding metal.”

  Ryan leaned back against the wall and folded his arms.

  “The presence of the rod appeared out of place and gave the team some cause for concern. By swimming back out and around to the side of the ship, they were able to see through to the interior of the cabin, where they saw the remains of a diving suit and helmet, including a set of tanks which appeared to be much newer than the boat itself. At that point, the team returned to the surface to report the find. After refilling their tanks, the divers—one of whom is also a voluntary member of the Northumbria Police Underwater Search and Marine Unit—were able to safely remove the starboard window and recover the remains from that direction.”

  Ryan thought back to what had been a risky, time-pressured operation as the water level continued to rise with the changing tide. He’d been ready to call it off, not willing to risk lives in the process, when they’d managed to break through.

  “Do we have any idea who it is?” Yates asked.

  Ryan nodded.

  “We have the tanks and helmet and, of course, the remains of a skeleton inside what was left of the diving suit,” he replied. “They’ve been transferred to the lab for testing and any DNA they’re able to extract will be cross-checked against missing persons.”

  “There’s only one missing person from around these parts who would’ve had the know-how to dive around Knivestone,” DS Carole Kirby spoke up. “A man called Kristopher Reid, who went missing back in ‘95.”

  Ryan nodded and produced a photograph of Reid taken from a newspaper article, the same one MacKenzie and Phillips had discovered the previous evening, which he stuck on the wall behind him.

  “This is Kristopher Reid,” he said, for the benefit of the others in the room. “His brother, Paul Hutchinson, was present on the harbour when we transferred the remains. He witnessed me carrying an evidence bag containing the only other piece of physical evidence we recovered from the zipped pocket of the diving suit: a small, engraved knife. He claims the knife belonged to Kris and his description matched the knife in our possession.”

  There were murmurs around the room.

  “Kris Reid did a bunk, years ago,” Kirby argued, not quite able to see that the local rumour mill might have been wrong. “He left Gemma Dawson pregnant and it was the talk of the town. She doesn’t have much in the way of family, so it was a bad time for her.”

  “I’m sure,” Ryan agreed. “The fact remains, we’ve got a dead diver in possession of a knife belonging to Kris Reid—the only diver reported missing in the past twenty-five years who is still unaccounted for.”

  “As soon as we can extract some DNA, we’ll compare it with the samples already provided by Josh Dawson and Paul Hutchinson and see if we can find a familial match,” Faulkner said, from the edge of the room. “It’s highly unlikely there’d be any DNA record on file for Kristopher Reid from the mid-nineties; the DNA database was still in its infancy, back then.”

  Ryan nodded.

  “The upshot is, we’ve had two unexplained deaths in the past week. At first, we thought somebody out there wanted to claim the victory of discovering a Viking shipwreck for themselves,” he said, and thought of the academics who were, no doubt, arguing the toss over who would m
anage the excavation of today’s find, their interest focused entirely on the relics of the past rather than the loss of human life. “I think we were wrong on that score. I think somebody killed two people to prevent the discovery of an older murder, one they hoped would remain undiscovered.”

  “You’re sure it’s murder?” MacKenzie asked. “It couldn’t have been nitrogen narcosis or an air tank failure of some kind?”

  Ryan’s lips twisted as he shook his head.

  “Nobody bars themselves into a room from the inside, unless they’re Houdini,” he replied. “Somebody else did this. Somebody in this village knew about the body and they’ve killed to protect it.”

  “If it is this lad, Kris Reid, who’d have wanted to kill him?” Phillips asked.

  Ryan pointed to his sergeant, as if to capture the thought.

  “That’s the question, Frank. If we crack this murder, we crack them all.”

  * * *

  Later, after the briefing ended and Ryan was packing away his things for the evening, there came a knock at the door.

  He looked up to find Josh Dawson hovering by the doorway.

  “Can I come in for a minute?”

  Ryan’s eyes flicked across to the murder wall, which contained a number of colour photographs, including one of the man’s father.

  “Let’s talk outside,” he offered, but it was too late.

  Josh stared at the image on the wall, recognising it as one from a newspaper article back in 1995. He could remember the name of the newspaper, too, since he had copies of all the clippings stored safely in the folder he carried beneath his arm.

  “People say I look like him,” he said.

  Ryan glanced back at the image on the wall, then into an almost identical pair of deep brown eyes.

  “You look very much like him,” he said, honestly. “Does it bother you?”

  Josh was surprised by the question, never having asked it of himself consciously before.

  “It did, until today.”

  Ryan picked up his bag and closed the door to the Incident Room, forcing them both outside and into the Coastguard’s workspace with its humming computer monitors and mounted digital radar.