Down Among the Dead Men

by Peter Lovesey

  Two patrol cars and a minibus full of uniformed officers sped out of the police station and across the A27 by-pass. In the holiday season it’s a crawl to the coast along the A286, but today the road was almost clear. The leading driver still used his siren and flashing light when necessary.

  Diamond, squeezed into the back seat of the second car between Georgina and Montacute, said, “Is it far?”

  “A mile or so.”

  “Tell them to cut the blues and twos. It’s supposed to be an ambush. He doesn’t know we’re onto him—or shouldn’t.”

  The order was given over the radio.

  “Will he be armed?” Montacute asked.

  “No idea. Have you issued weapons?”

  “You bet I have.”

  “We want him alive. He’s no good to us dead.”

  “Relax. We’re professionals here in Sussex.”

  They swung right onto the narrow road to the marina running alongside the canal. Montacute told the driver to pull over and stop.

  “It’s still half a mile off,” he explained, “but we don’t want to be obvious so we’ll let the leading car go ahead and find where the yacht is berthed.”

  “Do we know the name?”

  “The Michelangelo David.”

  “That’s a work of art, isn’t it?”

  “Just about the most famous statue in the world,” Georgina said. “A perfectly proportioned nude male figure. Davy the model must have delusions of grandeur.”

  “Or a sense of humour.”

  “Men don’t joke about their own bodies,” she said. “I’ve never met one who did.”

  No one argued with her.

  Parked at the roadside, they were close enough to see some masts rising weirdly above the hedge in the flat landscape.

  Static was heard from the intercom, followed by: “We’ve located the yacht, sir. It’s at pontoon H, on the right as you drive in. Over.”

  “Can you see the suspect?”

  “Not at present. It’s a big ship, about the biggest here. Over.”

  “We’ll join you.”

  “A ship?” Diamond said. “Do they mean that?”

  Georgina treated them to more of her worldly wisdom. “A ship can carry a boat, but a boat can’t carry a ship.”

  They covered the short distance to the marina entrance. The facility was on a scale Diamond had not anticipated, at least the size of the lake at Fortiman House, with berths for several hundred craft of all sizes. Support buildings, restaurants, boatsheds and a chandlery were ahead.

  “We may have got lucky,” Diamond said and pointed to the Lamborghini, parked opposite one of the berths for the largest vessels.

  All attention switched to the Michelangelo David, moored at the end of pontoon H, a tri-deck monster that dwarfed all the others. No one was visible on deck or in the wheelhouse.

  “I thought only Russian oligarchs owned things like that,” Diamond said.

  Georgina nodded. “He didn’t buy it from his modelling fees.”

  Montacute was with a uniformed sergeant deciding on a strategy. The problem was that the boarding ramp midway along seemed to be the only means of access. The gleaming white hull rose at least fifteen feet above water level.

  Georgina then surpassed herself by saying, “You’re looking at the wrong end. As I remarked, a ship can carry a boat. Any decent hundred and fifty footer has a tender garage. Go aft and you’ll find it. That’s your way in to all the decks.”

  Where had that piece of expertise come from? Diamond had no idea how his boss had become familiar with the design of luxury yachts. There were areas of her life she’d never spoken about.

  Deliberately, no doubt, the yacht was moored with its aft end overhanging the open water, but Georgina was right. A boarding party could reach it by using some kind of dinghy, and there is no shortage of them in a marina. It didn’t take long to commandeer one from a neighbouring boat owner.

  They sealed off pontoon H and the approaches to it.

  Montacute took two officers up the boarding ramp while another half-dozen approached by water. A short interval followed to allow them to get aboard and find positions. Diamond and Georgina remained in radio contact in the car. Waiting passively didn’t come naturally to Diamond, but this was Montacute’s operation. The locals had to be trusted to get on with it.

  One of the three on the ramp yelled, “Armed police. We’re coming in.”

  No reaction.

  They stepped over the gunwale. It wasn’t like battering a door down.

  Watching from the patrol car, Georgina said, “Let’s hope he’s home.”

  “And hospitable,” Diamond added. “Something’s got to happen shortly.”

  The heads and shoulders of armed men could be seen moving on the open areas of each of the decks.

  Shouting carried to them from the ship, but it wasn’t combative shouting, more like a repeat of the first announcement.

  At least another minute went by—and felt like ten.

  Then the radio crackled.

  “Mr. Diamond, you’d better come up.”

  “Have you got him?”

  “Yes and no.”

  What sort of answer was that? He turned to Georgina, eyebrows raised. She spread her hands.

  They left the car and ran along the pontoon and boarded the yacht. Officers with drawn guns waved them along a stretch of deck to the main salon, a carpeted space with a marble inlay bar, L-shaped leather sofa and chairs and a fold-down plasma TV. Forward was the dining area, with a walnut wood table capable of seating twelve. Another police officer directed them down the steps of a companionway and into a spacious cabin where Montacute and two others were standing beside a king-size bed with a black duvet.

  Georgina said, “Tarnation.”

  Face down and naked on the duvet was a male body all too familiar to the two novice artists. Davy would not be posing for them again. Nor would he be answering questions.

  Diamond said, “This wasn’t in the script.”

  31

  The cause of death appeared obvious. A cocktail of drugs and champagne had killed him. Two empty Bollinger bottles and some used blister packs that must have contained sleeping tablets stood on the bedside shelf.

  Self-inflicted? Almost certainly. If you had resolved to take your own life, this method beat most others.

  Georgina said, “Damn you, Davy!”

  Diamond’s anger was focused elsewhere. “Some idiot tipped him off. I thought I could trust that dive team.” He snatched up one of the blister packs and looked at the label. A sedative, one of the benzodiazepine group.

  Montacute was shaking his head. “I can’t understand his thinking. If he’d co-operated, he’d have got a short stretch.”

  How naïve was that? “Co-operated by naming his clients, you mean?” Diamond said. “A short stretch is right. He’d have been found dead in his cell in days. These are major criminals with as much clout inside jail as out.”

  “Well, if he’d stayed silent and served a full term, he’d have survived.”

  “He wouldn’t. If he’d stayed silent as a bag of feathers the mob would still have killed him. He was too much of a risk. He knew if ever he was caught, his number was up. When his business was thriving, the killers came to him and paid him well. One failure and he was dead meat.”

  All the talk was negative. Montacute tried to be upbeat. “We’ll check everything he used, phone, iPad, computer.”

  “Don’t build up your hopes. In a high-risk job like his, you don’t leave a trail. It’s all too easy to drop things overboard.”

  The optimism was all used up. “I thought this was the breakthrough.”

  “You’re not the only one. We’re stuffed.”

  But Diamond knew better than to dwell on it. Out at Selsey, the dive team
were standing by to begin recovering bodies. He called Albison. Any recriminations about leaked information would have to wait. He told him tersely to launch the boat.

  The man couldn’t resist saying, “About bloody time.”

  “Where are you starting from?”

  “Selsey beach—where we were before.”

  “I thought you decided Selsey was too public.”

  “Doesn’t matter where we start from, does it?” Albison said. “Like you said, it’s where we land them that counts.”

  Fair comment. “So have you chosen somewhere else?”

  “Pagham Harbour. It’s quiet and should be getting dark by the time we return.”

  “Call me the minute you bring the first one up.”

  “One good thing about being from another force,” he remarked to Georgina when they were being driven back to their hotel. “The crime scene is someone else’s problem.”

  “I’m not sure about that, Peter.”

  “Why?”

  “We can’t cut ourselves off from it. As you said on the beach this morning, the press will have a field day when those bodies are brought to the surface. I keep wondering how Commander Hahn will react. It won’t play well in terms of public confidence. Rightly or wrongly he’s going to suspect we exceeded our brief. I entered on this mission from the best of motives, willing to help another force.”

  No you didn’t, he thought. You wanted to cosy up to your old flame and get out on the golf course.

  She went on: “He’s going to wish Davy’s grisly trade had never been exposed.”

  She was right about that.

  And then a smile flashed across her features like a flick knife and Diamond realised that his boss had seen the light at last.

  In the hotel entrance, Georgina said, “After the morning we’ve had, we deserve a late lunch.”

  “No offence,” Diamond said, “but I need to make a personal call.”

  “How long will that take?”

  “Depends. Don’t wait for me if you’re hungry.”

  “I’ll find a table for one, then.”

  This time, he felt a twinge of guilt. After that smile at Archie Hahn’s expense, she didn’t deserve to eat alone.

  The call he made wasn’t on the phone as he’d implied. He left the hotel and walked round to Hen’s flat. The morning’s discoveries would affect her profoundly and he wanted to break the news to her in person.

  In a tracksuit and flipflops, she appeared smaller and more vulnerable than he’d seen her before. “Come in, love of my life,” she said. Whatever you thought of Hen, you couldn’t call her standoffish.

  He’d been trying to think of a way of telling her about the bodies under the sea. She was certain to fear Joss was down there with the others. Family ties overrode everything. The fact that she had been proved right to agitate about missing persons would not be high in her thoughts.

  He set out the facts as calmly as he could, explaining how Jim Bentley’s information had led him to the discovery of the wreck containing the bodies and to Davy’s suicide, but he could see the increasing alarm in Hen’s eyes.

  “They’re starting to bring them up,” he said. “It’s not a job they can hurry. It may be days before the identification can start.”

  “So I should prepare for the worst. I can’t go on denying it,” she said. “The truth has been staring at me for days. Joss knew too much. She may not have known at the time it was a murdered corpse she was delivering to Littlehampton, but she found out later when the plan went to buggery and started a murder hunt. Poor kid must have been bricking it—and with her own daffy aunt heading the enquiry.”

  “Don’t knock yourself, Hen.”

  “Thanks to my incompetence no arrest was made at the time. The whole thing went on hold. After years went by, she must have hoped she was in the clear. She didn’t know about the DNA match. Finally it all got out because of that whistleblower I prefer to call a rat fink. I was suspended and Joss—now known to the police—put in danger of her life.”

  “You think she knew Rigden’s killer?”

  “Must have got her orders from someone, mustn’t she?”

  “How would she have got into this in the first place?”

  “With her history as a druggie? Obvious, isn’t it? When you’re in deep, you meet bad people and get asked to do bad things. They don’t make life easy for you. I must face it. She’s going to be one of those bodies.”

  “She could have gone into hiding.”

  “Pete, I know you mean well, but this won’t have a happy ending.”

  He tried stressing the positive result of the morning’s discoveries. “You’ve been proved right about the people who went missing. That’s something Georgina and I can tell headquarters when we make our report.”

  “Do they really want to know? I’m a thorn in their flesh.”

  “With your job on the line, as it is, I’m going to make damned sure they know what a good cop you are.”

  “You’re pissing in the wind, Pete. They want me out.”

  “We’ll see about that.”

  She insisted on making coffee and sharing a pork pie she’d been saving for lunch. He realised that, like Georgina, he’d got hungry. While watching those images from the ocean floor, he’d thought he wouldn’t be able to face food for the rest of the day.

  With Hen busy in the kitchen, he stepped into the living room and tried calling Dave Albison for the latest news of the recovery operation. Without success. He left a message and used the word urgent twice over. As a non-diver he had no way of estimating how long it would take to retrieve the first body.

  Facing Hen across her small kitchen table, he said, “I still haven’t worked out a motive for Rigden’s murder. Everything stems from that. Find the motive, find his killer and we’d be motoring.”

  “And the best of British luck,” she said.

  “Did he have any connections to the underworld?”

  “Joe Rigden? You’re joking. The angels formed a guard of honour when he went through the pearly gates.”

  “Was mistaken identity a possibility?”

  “Crossed my mind, but I never got anywhere with it.”

  “You see what I’m driving at? The planning that went into his disposal suggests it was organised crime, same as the others you were on about, but he wasn’t a known criminal.”

  “Did you say organised? A large part of his head was blown away with a shotgun. Downright messy for professionals.”

  He nodded. He, too, believed the killing had been clumsy.

  Hen’s thoughts had moved on. “I don’t like to think what they did to Joss.”

  “Don’t go there, Hen.” He changed tack. “Yesterday, in Mrs. Shah’s garden, after Georgina and I found you sitting in the shed, I caught your eye at one point and you seemed to be on the point of saying something important.”

  “Was I?” Her thoughts were still elsewhere.

  “Shortly before you left,” he said. “Georgina was ranting about you wasting police time. Fair enough. She had got herself in a mess pursuing you around the lake next door.”

  She managed a slight smile. “She wasn’t dressed for a hike.”

  “She was in a strop and she ordered you to leave. That was when I thought you were ready to share something with us.”

  “Got you.” Attention was fully restored. “But I don’t know if it’s still worth sharing. When I first parked my car and looked inside Holly Blue Cottage, I thought I saw someone.”

  “In the cottage?”

  “Yes.”

  “It looked derelict to me,” Diamond said. “We knocked and got no answer and when I looked through the letterbox there was a heap of mail on the floor.”

  “I saw that, too. Like you, I took it that no one was at home, but when I went round the side I saw
a large black cat creeping through the long grass for all the world as if it thought it was a panther in the jungle. I must have startled it, because it turned into a moggy and dashed to the back door and straight through a cat flap. Made me think twice because it was obviously used to going in. I went right up to the kitchen window and looked in and I’m sure there was a movement inside.”

  “The cat?”

  “No. This was a figure framed in the doorway.”

  “Male?”

  “Couldn’t tell you. They darted out of sight immediately. I tapped on the window. After all, I was on someone else’s property and you don’t march through without so much as a good-day, do you? Whoever they were, they had no wish to meet me.”

  “A squatter?”

  “That was my thought. Empty place. It’s a temptation.”

  “You’ve got me interested, Hen. On Saturday, when the artists were doing their stuff at Fortiman House, I took a walk down to the lake and I definitely saw someone on the far side walking the bank. Beanie hat, long, brown coat and boots. They were in front of the wall, which we now know is shared with Holly Blue Cottage.”

  “Are you sure it wasn’t one of the artists?”

  “They were all in the studio. I thought I was alone out there until this person appeared. Could be your squatter.”

  “Don’t blame them on me, squire. I’m in trouble enough.”

  “Whoever it was could have come through the door in the wall, thinking they wouldn’t be seen. I’m going to take another look.”

  “Good call.” Her eyes glinted. “There’s something else you ought to know. I thought a lot about Holly Blue Cottage and its situation.”

  “So close to Fortiman House, you mean?”

  “And so neglected. I decided to make some enquiries about the owner. Got on the internet and accessed the Land Registry. It took persistence and a couple of phone calls as well, but finally I got some information. After Miss Shah died it was bought by a company known as Mombasa Holdings Limited.”

  “I know. I did a check myself. Makes sense—the Indian connection.”

  “So you would assume. So anybody would assume. But did you check the directors’ names?”

  “No.”