by J. S. Law
Copyright © 2015 James Law Author Ltd.
The right of James Law to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publishers or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.
First published as an Ebook by Headline Publishing Group in 2015
All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library
eISBN: 978 1 4722 2789 8
HEADLINE PUBLISHING GROUP
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
About J. S. Law
About the Book
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
About J. S. Law
J. S. Law started in the navy as an apprentice engineer and worked his way up through the ranks. He has worked on helicopters, ships and towards the end of his naval career, submarines. He is a passionate advocate for education and now works providing nuclear training and education to the defence and civil sectors. James lives in Hampshire with his partner and his two children. Tenacity is his debut novel and the first in the Lieutenant Danielle Lewis series.
About the Book
Suicide must be investigated.
Especially when a Royal Navy sailor kills himself on a nuclear submarine, only days after his wife’s brutal murder.
Now Lieutenant Danielle Lewis, the Navy’s finest Special Branch investigator, must interrogate the tight-knit, male crew of HMS Tenacity to determine if there’s a link.
Isolated, and standing alone in the face of extreme hostility, Dan soon realises that she may have to choose between the truth and her own survival.
Justice must be served, but with a possible killer on board the pressure is rising and her time is running out …
To my family and friends who supported me on this journey – thank you.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Elizabeth, Sammy and Elaine for your patience and support.
Thanks to my mum, dad, Vicky, Alan and Carol, who I know are always on my side.
Thanks to my friends Steph B, Steph R, Martin & Mary, Sara and Matt for reading and critiquing, in the nicest possible way, until Tenacity was ship shape, and to Matt Seldon for all his creative endeavours.
To Jonny Geller and Kirsten Foster at Curtis Brown, to Vicki Mellor, Sara Adams, Darcy Nicholson, Tom Noble, Sarah Bance, Frankie Edwards, Yeti Lambregts and Sarah Badhan at Headline, I thank you all for your help and support, it is very much appreciated.
And finally …
To all my brothers and sisters in the Armed Forces who are deployed away from their loved ones around the globe – be safe, look out for each other, and remember, never let the truth get in the way of a good story!
Prologue
Tuesday Evening – 2nd November 2010
‘How did you know?’
Dan froze and then swallowed as she heard his voice, but she didn’t turn around. She placed him as being some way away from her, across the dusty, grey-stone garage floor, next to the door, the only door. She knew that she had some time; this wouldn’t be quick.
‘Answer me please, Dan,’ he said, his voice calm, without any real trace of menace, even though it echoed in the open space.
Dan turned to face him, slowly. The nausea she’d felt on hearing him speak hadn’t yet diminished and it needed to be under control when he saw her face.
‘So?’ he said, his head cocked slightly to the side as he watched her.
Christopher Hamilton’s Royal Navy uniform was neat, his shoes polished, and the toecaps bulled to a dark sheen. His white shirt was immaculately pressed and it contrasted perfectly with the black and gold of the Lieutenant epaulettes he wore on each of his shoulders. He was clean-shaven and his hair was cropped short, neatly gelled in place. His eyes didn’t bore into her as she might have expected, they weren’t reminiscent of a cat watching its prey; they were cool and blue, inquisitive. He looked so calm, was speaking as though he had all the time in the world.
Looking at him and seeing that, seeing the relaxed smile on his face and the way his hands were loosely thrust into his pockets, was, to Dan, the most terrifying thing she’d ever witnessed.
He raised both eyebrows.
‘It’s a civil enough question, Dan. I just want to know why I’ve had to come home and find you interfering with my belongings, snooping around in my garage?’
Out of the corner of Dan’s eye she could still see the blue-grey skin of Amanda Waller’s forearm poking out from beneath a dirty green tarpaulin. The forearm was bent back on itself at a repellent angle, both the ulna and radius clearly snapped and pushing hard against the mottled skin.
Dan had pulled back the tarpaulin, had seen the three women beneath it, their bodies marbled with bruising. The life had long since been drained from them, but the marks gave an insight into the suffering they had endured prior to their violent deaths.
She looked at the door, her eyes involuntarily flicking that way for just a moment.
‘Locked,’ he said. ‘The whole house is locked now. Seems like you just can’t be too careful these days; never know who might come calling.’
He reached towards a workbench that ran along the wall next to the door. The tools looked old and dirty, unused in a long time, and they were laid so randomly across the bench that Dan wondered if they’d been arranged that way, as though he might have taken time to try and create the appearance of chaos.
She tensed, watching to see what he would pick up, her eyes scanning and spotting a hammer and a hatchet among the mess.
He smiled, seeming to sense her discomfort as he dragged an old stool towards him.
The sound of the metal legs grating against the bare floor made Dan shiver. It was loud, highlighting how silent all else was around them, how alone Dan was in this house set in the countryside away from disturbances and traffic noise, away from dog walkers and cyclists, away from any realistic chance of help.
She felt cold, frozen, and she knew that feeling this way, feeling frightened, could only lead to defeat; she had to keep going, to find a way to move forward. She looked again at the ta
rpaulin and felt her stomach lurch for the girls beneath it. The shape of their bodies, dumped in the corner like next winter’s firewood, was imprinted on her vision, slipping across her eyes like bright shapes that had been flashed at her in the dark.
‘Dan,’ he said, easing himself up onto the old metal stool. ‘Come on now. I’m being friendly and you aren’t.’
‘It doesn’t matter how I knew, Chris. It only matters now that I do know,’ she said, glad the words had come out strong and clear, but struggling to swallow as her throat seemed to stick to itself whenever she tried. ‘And I’m not the only one that knows.’
He smiled and shook his head.
‘You knowing doesn’t matter at all,’ he said, and looked at her in such a charming way that Dan was sure he must have practised it.
She could imagine him rehearsing the way he tilted his head and how far he opened his mouth; everything he did now seemed, to her, to be a carefully practised movement, all designed, developed and delivered to hide what it was that propelled him underneath.
‘Let’s not pretend anyone else knows you’re here,’ he continued. ‘John Granger would be standing at your heel, panting and awaiting his mistress’s orders if he even had an inkling of what you’re doing.’
Hamilton tilted his head again; a look between friends that said Dan must know he was right.
‘And Roger Blackett would hardly send his golden girl into the breach so poorly prepared. I think even he would realise that you versus me is a fairly obvious inequality of arms. Don’t you think?’
Dan managed to swallow.
‘Come now, Dan, we don’t send investigators out alone to scrutinise their colleagues; we don’t let them break into their colleagues’ homes and search through their colleagues’ personal waste. We certainly don’t send little girls out on their own to catch the bad men, not with the sheer number of poor young things that have gone missing this past thirty years or so.’
He smiled at her as though they were sharing an inside joke.
‘So I know you’re freelancing here, and you do too. So, I’ll ask again, how did you know?’
He was watching her so closely that Dan was frightened to look away from him, knowing that he could follow her eyes wherever they went, but she needed to know her surroundings, needed to look around and form a plan. She needed a weapon. She would have to fight for her life.
Hamilton was a big man, gristly, not bulky.
Dan knew he spent a great deal of his time compulsively training for triathlons that he rarely did, and disappearing alone onto the moors fell running and camping.
He was physically superior and his manner said he knew it.
Standing in his garage with the sour smell of slowly rotting flesh assaulting her nostrils, Dan realised that she barely recognised this man, the same man that she’d worked with on and off for almost ten years.
‘Don’t let your mind wander, Dan,’ he said, ‘just answer my question, because I really and genuinely want to know – you might say that, at some point in the future, my freedom could depend on it.’
‘How many did you kill?’ Dan asked, using the question as permission to turn away from him, to look in the direction of the tarpaulin and the bodies beneath it, to let her eyes dart around and catalogue everything that was near to her. There was a spade leaning against the wall a few metres to her left. It looked big and heavy and used, albeit some time ago. There were large clumps of dry mud stuck to the surface of the dull metal blade. There was space around her, enough space to swing it, and the only other potential weapon was a pair of hedge shears leaning against the wall only a foot or so closer to her than the spade.
She looked back to him and knew that he’d seen her looking, had read her intent.
‘I just want to say now, Dan, that, for the record, I decided several years back not to take you; oh, but how we come to regret these decisions,’ he said, chuckling and shaking his head. ‘I don’t want you to feel bad about that, that I didn’t want you; I just thought that you might like to know that you could have lived your life out in safety, from me at least.’
Dan looked at him, unsure of what she could possibly say in response.
‘A stunned silence?’ Hamilton said. ‘Or a stunned gratitude, perhaps? But don’t be shy, Dan, tell me how you knew and I’ll promise you that you’ll be glad you did.’
Dan looked around the garage, then at Hamilton, calm and smiling; she needed time.
‘The team at Operation Poacher had suspected it was someone from the armed forces, and probably the navy, for some time,’ she said. ‘But you know this stuff. It was the pattern of disappearances, the sudden series after long gaps without any.’
‘Without any being detected,’ he corrected.
‘Of course,’ said Dan. ‘I started to suspect it was someone who had some – but not always complete – knowledge of the investigation; a police officer, crime scene technician, or one of us.’
He nodded, made to ask a question, then seemed to decide against.
Dan waited.
‘Why?’ he finally blurted the question out, seeming agitated as though he couldn’t wait a second longer, as though he might forget what he wanted to know if he didn’t ask right away, like a child.
‘Changing patterns,’ said Dan, taking a small step further away from him to her left. ‘I wanted to look at the investigation from a different angle. So, I looked right back over the whole case and I began to map, as best I could, when the various pieces of information were released, and how quickly after that the next event occurred.’
Hamilton frowned at her.
‘You not keeping up?’ Dan asked, taking another small step away from him and towards the spade.
‘Carry on please, Dan,’ he said, his eyes narrowed as he focused on her.
‘Well, when I looked back it was clear that whenever the Operation Poacher team worked up a victim profile and it became any kind of knowledge within the investigation, the killer would change something, or an event would occur to throw the team off again, to put doubt back in their minds.’
She nodded towards Hamilton, trying to appear as though it were grudging admiration. ‘I’ll give you your due; you were good. Some of the subtleties you used to keep them guessing – the spate of young men around Aldershot, the children in Plymouth and later around the Clyde area. You had them believing there were more important cases to look at, that there were other killers operating that they might actually be able to catch.’
He smiled again and nodded appreciatively. ‘You made that link. Very good, Danielle, very good indeed.’
‘Thank you,’ she said, sliding her foot slowly along the floor and taking another step. ‘I just started to focus on the investigation, trying to imagine that everything else that could affect or influence the investigation team was done deliberately with that aim in mind.’
‘All very interesting, Dan; sounds like the genesis of one of your fascinating papers, which I’m sure would have been widely published, but, in truth, almost impossible to put together. So how did you really know?’ He paused and looked at her. ‘And be quick now. I’m getting bored and you’re easing yourself further away from me all the time, despite knowing you’re locked in here with me, which seems a little daft.’
Dan swallowed and stopped her foot from sliding across the floor again.
‘I’m telling you,’ she said, trying not to let fear creep into her voice and finding it easy to do. ‘I started mapping, and yes, I did think it would be a worthwhile paper, to compare the time at which information was released against any incident that then caused that information to be called into question. I specifically looked at the time between the two data points.’
Hamilton was frowning again. He looked upwards as he thought about what she was saying, and Dan took another small step.
‘It became clear that there were times when the delay between information release and some subsequent act that decried it was relatively short, too short. That for the
killer to react to what had been released meant that he had to have had the information earlier, and that meant an insider. You were too jumpy.’
Dan tried to make the last comment sound conspiratorial, gently chiding.
He snorted at her last remark and shook his head.
‘There were times when you were reacting so quickly that you almost confused the Operation Poacher team by pre-empting what they were going to release.’
Hamilton smiled again and nodded. ‘It was a lot of fun.’
‘Yeah, I can see that,’ said Dan. ‘But I’m stunned that I was the first to see it. The last few years you lost your subtlety, got sloppy. You really weren’t that smart, but then, me being here proves you’re not all that smart.’
He continued to watch her, a long, steady stare. ‘You walking out of here would prove that I’m not all that smart,’ he said. ‘Now keep your feet still.’
Dan registered the first real sounds of stress in his voice, the first cracks that told her she might be unsettling him, and she stepped again despite his order.
‘So, everyone else was looking at the bodies we found and trying to decide why you seemed to torture the blondes more than the dark-haired girls.’
He laughed again, but it was different this time, more forced.
‘They were wondering whether your mum was blonde, or your sister, or your wife. You know the sort of thing, right? You’ve been involved in these investigations before; hell, you worked on Operation Poacher twice, hunting for yourself.’
He nodded and snorted again. ‘As I say, a lot of fun.’
‘You did seem to be having fun,’ said Dan, and she took another small step, the shovel and shears now six feet away.
‘Full of shit, the lot of them,’ he began, his eyes leaving her as he looked around the garage. His hands started to fidget as he thought about what she was saying. ‘Morons. Always trying to figure out why this and why that, why blondes and why strangulation, why signs of violence pre- and post-mortem. As though knowing that makes any difference at all.’
‘Yeah, exactly, all that stuff,’ said Dan, hoping desperately to keep him talking. ‘Trying to figure out why you do it.’
