Western Approaches djs-1

by Graham Hurley

  Houghton insisted on taking Suttle for lunch. They drove to Topsham, a flourishing village upstream from Exmouth, and went to a pub down by the river. It was a glorious day, warm enough to sit at a table by the water. Suttle insisted he wasn’t hungry but Houghton ignored him. She knew his affection for ham, egg and chips. She even returned with two sachets of brown sauce.

  ‘You look terrible,’ she said. ‘Is it Kinsey or something else?’

  Suttle wouldn’t answer. In one sense it was both. But how on earth could he explain that his wife had been off with a key witness?

  Houghton wouldn’t give up.

  ‘Are you sleeping OK?’

  ‘Yeah. Pretty much.’

  ‘Grace all right?’

  ‘She’s sweet.’

  ‘Lizzie?’

  ‘Lizzie’s fine.’

  ‘So what happened to your hand?’

  Suttle fought the temptation to cover his right hand. His knuckles were bruised from last night. He said he didn’t want to talk about it.

  ‘Some kind of fight?’

  ‘Yeah. My fault.’

  ‘And the other guy?’

  ‘Don’t ask.’

  ‘It was a guy?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Not Lizzie?’

  ‘No.’

  The food arrived. They ate in silence. Suttle didn’t want to talk about Kinsey or Donovan or Symons or any of the rest of it. He didn’t really want to talk about anything. On every front his life seemed to have come to an end. Much like Constantine.

  Houghton had other ideas. She told him that Nandy had been impressed.

  ‘He might not show it, Jimmy, but he thinks you’re the business.’

  ‘Great. Didn’t work though, did it?’

  ‘That doesn’t matter. What matters is you tried. He likes that. He loves people who answer back.’

  ‘Is that how you got to be a D/I?’

  ‘Partly.’ She nodded. ‘Yeah. He likes people who argue their case. You did just that. He can’t fault you for running with it. And he can’t fault you for effort.’

  He eyed her for a moment. He felt immensely weary.

  ‘Is all this meant to be some kind of compensation prize?’

  ‘That’s infantile, if I may say so. You’re better than this, Jimmy.’

  ‘Yeah? Am I?’

  He held her gaze, then pushed the plate away. He said he was grateful and he meant it, but she was right. He was going through a shit time and the worst of it was that he didn’t know how it was going to end.

  Houghton nodded, said nothing. A swan pushed through the reeds at the water’s edge. She tossed it a fragment of roll. Then one of Suttle’s chips. More swans.

  ‘Crack on, Jimmy,’ she said at last. ‘That’s the only option we’ve got.’

  Lizzie was back at home when she got the call. It was Tessa from the rowing club.

  ‘We have a bit of a situation,’ she said at once. ‘And I’m wondering whether you might be able to help.’

  Molly Doyle, she said, had phoned half an hour ago after a conversation with the Coastguard. The club’s single scull had been spotted by a fishing boat a mile off Straight Point. It was upside down in a worsening chop and there was no sign of the rower. Tessa had gone straight down to the club compound and found a pile of clothes inside the Portakabin. She was convinced they belonged to Tom Pendrick. He hadn’t booked himself out the way he should have done, but the single’s trolley was on the beach, awaiting his return.

  ‘Why are you phoning me?’

  ‘Because Tom might have mentioned taking the single out. Have you seen him recently?’

  ‘I saw him this morning.’

  ‘And he didn’t mention it?’

  ‘No. He was on the machine. He’d just done twenty K. Why would he go out rowing after that?’

  ‘Good question.’

  Tessa promised to keep her in touch and then rang off. Lizzie sat by the phone. All day she’d been on the point of putting a call through to Jimmy. Given what she’d inflicted on the man, it was the least she could do, but the more she thought about it, the more she realised she didn’t know what to say. She imagined the squad must be close to arresting Pendrick. Hence this morning’s confession. And hence, she assumed, his abrupt disappearance. The man had too much pride to hang around. Life had taken him to a very bad place. He’d settled his debts with Kinsey, and now, like his wife, he’d chosen the ocean to end his days. Full circle, she thought, reaching for the phone.

  Suttle was still in Topsham when his mobile began to beep. He checked caller ID. It was Lizzie. For a moment he didn’t want to talk to her but then he thought of Grace. Maybe something’s happened. Maybe she needs the car.

  ‘Hi.’

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘Topsham.’

  ‘We need to talk, Jimmy.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘Pendrick.’

  ‘There’s nothing to say.’

  ‘There is, my love. He killed Kinsey. How do I know? Because he told me.’

  It took Suttle less than half an hour to make it to Chantry Cottage. An ugly situation had just got a whole lot worse. How long had his wife known about Pendrick? A couple of days? Longer? Had they been so close she’d decided to shield a killer? Why hadn’t she told him before?

  He found her feeding Grace in front of the TV. The Good Life. Bizarre.

  ‘Just tell me what happened,’ he said.

  Lizzie told him about the conversation in the clubhouse. She tried to apologise for not contacting him earlier but knew it was pointless. Whatever she said, she was looking at serious trouble. In his current mood her husband was probably contemplating an arrest for perverting the course of justice.

  ‘So where is he? Pendrick?’ Suttle hadn’t sat down.

  ‘He’s disappeared. He took the little single scull and no one’s seen him since.’

  She told him about the call to the Coastguard. By now she assumed they’d have the helicopters out and maybe the lifeboat.

  ‘And what do you think?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You know the guy. What’s he up to?’

  ‘I think he’s had enough.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘I think he’s out there somewhere, probably dead.’

  ‘Why? Why would he have done that?’

  ‘I assume he knew.’

  ‘Knew what?’

  ‘That you were close to arresting him.’

  Suttle stared at her, then produced his mobile. Moments later he was heading for the patio, trying to get a signal to raise D/I Houghton. When he left the house he was still talking. He didn’t say goodbye.

  The club’s single was towed back to Exmouth by the trawler skipper who’d made the initial sighting. Molly Doyle and Clive, the Club Captain, were on the dockside to manhandle it out of the water, lash it to a roof rack and take it back to the club compound. An exhaustive search of the clubhouse had discovered no sign of a note from Pendrick or any other clue that might shed light on his disappearance. Neither was there anything in the single to suggest what had taken him to sea.

  The search for a body, alive or dead, continued after dark. Two helicopters with infrared gear worked slowly offshore from Straight Point, a couple of miles to the east, following the tidal drift. It was blowing a Force 4 by now and the sea temperature was a bare 13 °C. The search was called off at 21.49, to be resumed at first light.

  Thursday happened to be club night at the compound. News of Pendrick’s disappearance spread quickly. At Lizzie’s request Tessa had driven up to Colaton Raleigh and taken her and Grace back to the club. In the absence of Jimmy, she wanted to be close to people. The thought of an evening alone in Chantry Cottage filled her with dread.

  Rumours had been circulating for nearly a week now about Lizzie and Pendrick. No one knew that she was married, let alone that she was wedded to a detective investigating Kinsey’s death, and she was touched by the number of near
-strangers who offered her words of comfort. He may have made it ashore. He may still be out there. Don’t lose hope. Not yet.

  Past ten o’clock, still at the club, her phone rang. It was a voice she didn’t recognise.

  ‘My name’s Dom,’ it said. ‘I live in the flat under Tom Pendrick’s place.’

  ‘You’re the chiropractor?’

  ‘The very same.’

  He said he’d dropped by to pick up some paperwork and had found an envelope on his mat with her name and phone number on it. A couple of coppers had just been round and he understood that Tom, silly bugger, had gone missing. Maybe Lizzie ought to pop round and pick up the envelope. Sooner rather than later, eh?

  It was Tessa, once again, who supplied the lift. Dom was a big man. He gave Lizzie a hug and kissed Grace and told her he was sure everything would turn out OK.

  ‘He’s wild, that Pendrick, but he knows the sea. He’ll be back. I know he will.’

  He gave her the envelope and wished her luck. Lizzie opened it in the car. Two keys, both Yale. Tessa was about to take them back to Colaton Raleigh but Lizzie told her to hang on. She got out of the car and crossed the pavement. The lock on the street door at number 50 was a Yale. Lizzie struggled with the first key but the second was a perfect fit.

  Lizzie returned to the car and bent to the window.

  ‘Here’s fine,’ she told Tessa. ‘You’ve been brilliant.’

  Suttle was at home watching the late-evening news when the text arrived. He spared it a glance. It came from Lizzie. She’d be staying in Exmouth overnight with Grace and would be back in the morning. He put the mobile to one side. On his return from Middlemoor, hours earlier, he’d found a note on the kitchen table: ‘Gone to the club. Tess is sorting us out. No news yet.’

  No news yet? Suttle was beginning to wonder whether it was worth sustaining a relationship on notes and texts and a great deal of silence. When he’d got back to the office, late afternoon, Houghton had been waiting for him. He’d already given her the bones of Lizzie’s news and now she wanted to know exactly what had been going on. Suttle had done his best. Through no fault of his own, his private life had overlapped with Constantine and finally been swamped. Lizzie, he said, had hooked up with Pendrick. He’d no idea how far the relationship had taken them both, but no way had it come to a clean end. At this point Houghton had nodded at his injured hand.

  ‘Pendrick?’

  ‘Yes, boss.’

  ‘You’ve assaulted a prime witness? Who turns out to be the killer?’

  ‘Yes, boss. A couple of good shots, if we’re talking detail.’

  ‘Pleased to hear it. So where is he?’

  ‘I’ve no idea.’

  The meet with Houghton had ended soon afterwards. Given the relationship with Pendrick, she wanted Lizzie interviewed under caution. If it turned out she’d been shielding Pendrick, she’d be in deep shit. As far as Pendrick was concerned, Constantine had no option but to wait. If his body was found, the file would go to the Coroner. If he’d simply disappeared, the file would remain open. As for Suttle himself, she had no choice but to remove him from the enquiry. Any further input to Constantine, she said, would be prejudiced by what she called his ‘personal circumstances’.

  ‘You’re happy with that? We understand each other?’

  ‘Perfectly, boss. I’ll sort out the interview and look after the baby. Happy days, eh?’

  Now he was watching the last of the national news. The local headlines followed. Pendrick’s disappearance was the top story. Suttle found himself looking at footage from last year. A gaunt figure, barely recognisable, was climbing a set of stone steps at Penzance Harbour. A battered-looking rowing boat was secured to an iron ring beneath him. His hair was long, hanging in tangles around his bare shoulders, and in close-up his eyes seemed to have lost focus. The news coverage cut to a grainy shot of a helicopter sweeping seawards in the dying light, but what stayed with Suttle were the eyes. What had really happened out there in the Western Approaches? Had this man been nursing a serial grudge against the world at large? Had his poor bloody wife gone the way of Jake Kinsey?

  Minutes later Suttle’s mobile began to ring. It was Gina Hamilton. He got to his feet and went out onto the patio. Even here the signal wasn’t great, but he got the gist of what she was saying. She too had been watching the news. So what was the real story?

  ‘We got him,’ Suttle said. ‘He did Kinsey.’

  ‘And you can prove it?’

  ‘No problem.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Full confession.’ He stared into the windy darkness, his vision beginning to blur. ‘Piece of piss.’

  It took Lizzie nearly an hour to get Grace to sleep. Pendrick’s bedroom was at the back of the flat. There were clean sheets on the bed and even a couple of neatly folded towels on the low table beneath the curtained window. Elsewhere, Pendrick had made a similar effort to tidy up. There were more towels in the tiny bathroom and a new tablet of soap in the shower tray. The kitchen was spotless, the draining board empty of washing-up. A note beside the electric kettle told her where to find tea bags and coffee, and there was fresh milk in the fridge. She might have stepped into a well-run holiday rental. All it lacked was a cheerful note about local must-see attractions.

  With Grace asleep in the clean white spaces of Pendrick’s bed, Lizzie went back into the living room. She’d half-expected another note — longer, more intimate — but there was nothing to explain the decision he’d taken. She’d absolutely no doubt about what he’d done.

  He’d pushed his body to the limits on the rowing machine. He’d wheeled the tiny single down to the water’s edge. He’d set off on an ebbing tide with the knowledge that the weather was about to get a whole lot worse. And somewhere out there, maybe at a time of his choosing, maybe not, he’d capsized the single and slipped away. An end like that, she realised, was totally in keeping with the journey he’d made. His wife had blazed the trail. And, after ridding the planet of Jake Kinsey, Pendrick had followed.

  Might this be evidence of madness? She didn’t think so. In awkward, uncomfortable ways Pendrick was a man who hung together, a jigsaw puzzle that made a kind of hallucinatory sense. His wasn’t everyone’s view of the world. In many ways it was savage, unforgiving. In others, she thought, it had an almost childlike naivety. He seemed to believe in the simple things — in getting by on very little, in taking people at face value — and when he realised that real life didn’t work that way, that people rarely played by the rules, he’d decided to fold his hand and chuck it in. That’s what had taken him to sea in the single. And this flat of his was pretty much all that was left.

  She prowled around, trying to ignore her emotional investment in his story, trying to play the investigative journalist, not knowing quite what she was looking for. Leaving her the key this way was, she imagined, a kind of apology. Pendrick had brought sunshine and chaos to her private life. He hadn’t understood that this thing of theirs was over and he’d made it infinitely worse by turning up pissed the other night. Any man could imagine the consequences of a scene like that, and access to his flat was his way of saying sorry. Thus the clean sheets and the readied towels. You might be hurting. You may need a place of refuge for a while. Make yourself at home.

  His PC was on a table in the corner. There were file boxes beneath the table, each file neatly labelled. She knelt on the rug and started to go through the first box. This was stuff that went back years, letters to friends, photos from a thousand beaches, shots of Pendrick and the woman who’d shared all those adventures. Lizzie spread a handful of the photos on the rug. She was struck at once by how similar the woman was to herself — her own slightness, even her own smile. This must be Kate, she thought. No wonder he’d been so eager, so earnest, so committed. Déjà vu was too weak a word. In the sand dunes at Trezillion he must have been talking to a ghost.

  She pulled out another box, extracted another file. This one was more recent. Inside she found an appointment
slip for an SD clinic in Bristol. Mr T. Pendrick was due to attend on three dates in January this year. Beside each date was a pencilled tick. SD? Lizzie returned to the file, extracting a printout from the Internet: The web address was www.nhs.uk/conditions/erectile-dysfunction. She stared at it a moment, beginning dimly to understand. SD meant sexual dysfunction. Pendrick, poor man, couldn’t get it up.

  She sat back on her haunches, her gaze returning to the photos of Kate. Was this something that had happened to Pendrick recently? Or had it been casting a shadow for years? If the latter was true, she could only imagine the consequences. SD had never played a role in her life. Far from it. None of her boyfriends had ever let her down in that respect, and even a night on the Stella didn’t seem to affect her husband’s prowess. Pendrick on the other hand clearly had a problem.

  She began to read. Physical causes of SD apparently included diabetes and nerve damage after prostate surgery. Psychologically, you could blame guilt, depression or some kind of unresolved conflict. She gazed at the list of triggers. As far as she could gather, it pretty much summed up the person that Pendrick had become. Guilt about Kate. Depression about the fate awaiting Trezillion and all the other Cornish coves. And the conflict with Kinsey, which, until a wet Saturday night a couple of weeks ago, had defied resolution.

  She picked up a photo. It could have been one of a million beaches — the blueness of the ocean, the curl of faraway surf, hints of a palm tree in the corner of the frame — but what took her eye was the grin on Pendrick’s face. It was natural, unforced, wholly genuine. This was a man who was happy in his skin. In the last hours of his life had he met that person again? Before he’d slipped under the waves had he found a kind of peace?

  She thought about that last question, knowing she’d never be able to satisfy herself with an answer. Then she heard Grace beginning to stir. The tiny cry took her back to Chantry Cottage, and she shut her eyes, trying not to think about the wreckage of her private life.

  After a while she got to her feet. Her mobile was in the bedroom. Grace, thankfully, was still asleep. She took the phone back to the living room and scrolled through the directory until she found the number she wanted. After a while she thought she might have got the time difference wrong but then came the familiar voice.