Swimming with the Dead

by Peter Guttridge

  Gilchrist was a bit of a middle-of-the-night-boxset woman, thanks to Netflix. She recognized that the Commodore’s style – haircut, clothes and tightly packed look – was based entirely on the House of Cards character Claire Underwood, played by Robin Wright. But far browner – northern-style brown.

  The Commodore flicked her blonde hair as she clacked over in tall high heels. Her smile was whiter than white. As usual in the company of slender women, Gilchrist felt like a heifer.

  ‘Alice Sutherland,’ the woman said, extending her hand. Gilchrist took it and introduced herself and Heap. Sutherland disengaged and hugged Evans, air-kissing him.

  ‘So?’ she said, scanning the three of them.

  ‘Commodore?’ Gilchrist said.

  ‘Honorary title for whoever is chair of the yacht club,’ Sutherland said, gesturing to a table for four. ‘I do have a motor yacht out there but I’m not qualified in any way to sail boats. Would you like a drink?’

  A man appeared from out of the shadows behind the bar.

  ‘This is Billy,’ Sutherland said. ‘He’s our steward.’

  ‘Quiet tonight,’ Gilchrist said to him smiling pleasantly. She saw Evans look down with a small smile on his face.

  ‘Closed tonight,’ Billy said, walking back to the bar to fill their orders.

  Gilchrist looked at Sutherland.

  ‘Perks of the job,’ Sutherland said.

  ‘We’re here to talk about Roland Gulliver,’ Heap said. Gilchrist looked at him. He was being abrupt but she understood why.

  Sutherland looked at him too. ‘Don’t know him, detective sergeant.’

  ‘He was murdered the other night,’ Heap said.

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that but I still don’t know him,’ Sutherland said, crossing her shiny legs. ‘Is that why we’re here?’

  ‘He was involved with the Save Salthaven Lido campaign,’ Gilchrist said.

  Sutherland frowned and leaned forward from the waist, very straight-backed. Gilchrist instinctively straightened up.

  ‘I’m still no wiser,’ Sutherland said.

  ‘Salthaven Lido is a place you’re trying to buy and develop just outside Brighton,’ Heap said. ‘That’s why we’re here.’

  There was something in Heap’s tone Sutherland took exception to. All warmth and smiles a moment ago, she hardened her expression.

  ‘As we speak I’m trying to buy and develop around fifty properties, detective sergeant, so forgive me if I can’t immediately remember one of them.’

  Heap was looking at the table as he said: ‘Understood, Ms Sutherland. Perhaps you recall your involvement with a West Pier project in Brighton. In partnership with William Simpson? Among all your other projects?’

  Gilchrist looked at Heap sharply. What the hell was this? William Simpson? The shitty, corrupt father of Kate. She looked at Evans, who was looking down at the table, perhaps embarrassed by the change of tone.

  ‘Your point is?’ Sutherland said coldly.

  ‘Your focus on Brighton and its environs,’ Heap said.

  Sutherland recrossed her legs. She addressed Gilchrist not Heap.

  ‘As I said, I have many projects. But this swimming pool you mentioned …?’

  ‘Did you have any dealings with a Roland Gulliver?’ Gilchrist said.

  ‘My business team or my lawyers may have done but I really don’t know. The name doesn’t ring a bell.’

  ‘I understood you to be very hands on with all your projects,’ Heap said. Gilchrist glanced at him. He might appear shy but he was a persistent little bugger.

  Sutherland looked at her perfectly manicured hands. ‘Usually.’

  ‘But not in this instance?’

  ‘Brighton went … sour for me.’

  ‘In what way?’

  Sutherland glanced at Evans. ‘Do I really have to talk about this stuff?’

  She wasn’t particularly addressing him but he gave a little shrug and looked across at Gilchrist. Sutherland looked back at her.

  ‘I mean, you want to know about this Roland Gulliver, don’t you? And I’ve said I never had any dealings with him. I don’t see why you need to know anything else.’

  ‘A murder inquiry needs to cast its net wide, Ms Sutherland; it’s not immediately apparent what is and is not relevant.’

  Sutherland stood.

  ‘Talk to Philip Coates. He headed up our Brighton team. But anything else you want to ask me should be done in the presence of my lawyer.’

  Gilchrist stood too, enjoying towering over this perfect-looking bloody woman, despite the additional six inches Sutherland’s heels gave her.

  ‘Is there a reason you would require your lawyer to be present?’ Gilchrist said.

  ‘I understood that to be my right,’ Sutherland said. ‘But perhaps you’re concerned because I have very good lawyers.’

  Evans had stood too but was still looking down – at the ground now. Heap was taking his time.

  Gilchrist locked eyes with Alice Sutherland. ‘I know they get a bad press from crap newspapers but I’d match the Crown Prosecution Service against the best you can muster anytime. I repeat: this is a murder enquiry.’

  ‘What are you up to, Bellamy?’ Gilchrist said as she hung back from Evans on the causeway back to the promenade. ‘Do you think you might have warned me about William Simpson?’

  ‘She’s not involved,’ Heap said.

  ‘And you know this how?’ Gilchrist said. ‘Policeman’s intuition? At what stage did you segue into Inspector Morse?’

  ‘The fact she had no idea what the Salthaven thing was,’ Heap said. ‘That’s when I realized she was not involved.’

  ‘You really think she doesn’t? You mean it really is just one of her projects?’

  Heap nodded.

  ‘Then we’ve had a bit of a wasted journey.’

  ‘Not necessarily. This West Pier–William Simpson thing …’

  ‘Yes, thanks for the heads up about that.’

  ‘Sorry – I’d looked at Company House records and his name popped up.’

  ‘And you went into Defend Kate mode. The penny has dropped.’

  ‘Not exactly. But it means there’s something else going on that isn’t to do with this case that we should look at in due course.’

  ‘OK,’ Gilchrist said as they stopped by the police car that had brought them there. ‘But let’s talk to this Philip Coates, shall we?’

  They had time for a quick dinner in an Italian restaurant at the harbour edge. As night fell and lights winked on over the water, Gilchrist thought it looked quite magical.

  Evans hadn’t joined them. He’d been rather stiff with them, probably because of whatever dealings Sutherland had with the local authorities. Nothing illegal, just the usual mutual backscratching. It worked the same way in Brighton but Gilchrist never got directly involved. That was more the job for Karen Hewitt. Gilchrist idly wondered if Bob Watts was now obliged to do that in his new role of police commissioner. She couldn’t see it. He was too upright.

  ‘So we should leave Sutherland alone?’ Gilchrist said. Heap had his mouth full of pasta so took a moment.

  ‘For this, I think so. I see no reason to think she’s the hiring-a-hit-man type.’

  ‘You are using intuition, Bellamy!’

  Heap pushed his pasta round on his plate.

  ‘Possibly, ma’am. It just seems unlikely to me that anyone mischievous enough to pull that stunt with the advertising hoarding in front of her ex-husband’s office would also be ruthless enough to have someone killed. I’m sure she’s tough as nails, as we saw, but she uses her brain, her nous, to sort stuff.’ He picked up another forkful of food. ‘In my opinion, ma’am.’

  Gilchrist was eating Caesar salad. She chomped on it for a bit thinking about what Heap had said.

  ‘Wasted journey, then,’ she decided. ‘You’ll still call Philip Coates tomorrow?’

  Heap nodded and looked at his watch. Gilchrist followed suit.

  ‘We’d better hustle if
we want to get that train back.’

  ‘We could always stay over, ma’am.’

  Gilchrist gave him a mock-shocked look. ‘Is that a proposition, detective sergeant?’

  Heap, inevitably, flushed.

  York station was echoey and deserted when they arrived back there. A few sleepy people were on the platform for the last London train. Gilchrist was pretty sleepy herself. She slept until Peterborough. When she woke, Heap was looking out of the window at the black night but his hands were resting on his keypad.

  ‘Never stop working, Bellamy?’ she said, her voice a little thick.

  ‘Just catching up on William Simpson – he’s one of the backers for the West Pier project that lost out to i360.’

  ‘I thought he was a globe-trotting international consultant on peace now?’

  ‘He spins bad news for oppressive dictatorships,’ Heap said. ‘Not sure that constitutes advocating for peace.’

  ‘What do you know about Simpson?’

  ‘That he’s Kate’s dad and was somehow involved with events around the Milldean Massacre before my time in Brighton. That he was a big friend of Bob Watts before he turned Mr Watts over. His wife left him for reasons she has never shared with Kate. The rest I only know from newspapers.’

  ‘Did you know I was part of the armed response unit involved in the killings in Milldean?’

  Heap nodded. ‘You were exonerated.’

  Gilchrist sighed. ‘And I still don’t know what really happened.’ She sat up and leaned across the table between them. ‘You think we should be looking at William Simpson?’

  ‘For this stabbing? I don’t think so. But he’s probably dirty, don’t you think?’

  Gilchrist nodded. ‘But he’s not our focus now. We need to focus entirely on who stabbed Roland Gulliver to death. Thoughts? Do you think it was random?’

  ‘Unlikely with the partial drowning first.’

  ‘What about his ex-wife?’ Gilchrist said.

  ‘Well, she’s on the list to interview.’

  Gilchrist nodded and looked out of the window but as it was so dark saw only her reflection. She grimaced and turned away. She didn’t much like herself at the moment.

  Heap was watching her. She swore that sometimes he knew exactly what she was thinking.

  ‘So … Kate and the Channel?’ she said, to change what she thought might be the unspoken subject.

  ‘Yes – it’s stupid, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘I can’t imagine anything worse. But Bob Watts is doing it too.’

  ‘He would,’ Gilchrist said. ‘He has that Iron Man thing going on.’

  Heap nodded slowly. ‘Seems a waste of energy to me.’

  Gilchrist stretched a little in her seat. ‘To me too, Bellamy. To me too.’

  FIVE

  ‘How are you feeling about this, Kate?’ Police Commissioner Bob Watts looked down at the young woman standing beside him, muffled up in a bright blue tracksuit. She had a towel wrapped round her neck and her hair scraped back.

  Kate Simpson looked out from the jetty in front of the Bluebird Café up the length of Lake Coniston. She couldn’t see the far end of the lake, over five miles away, and the nearest end was concealed behind the tree-fringed bay to the left of the café.

  ‘Terrified,’ she said.

  ‘It’s warm, at least,’ Watts said.

  ‘For the first hour,’ she said. ‘I’ve got two and half hours more to go after that. Possibly longer. This is my longest swim by far.’

  Watts looked over at the board propped against the near wall of the octagonal boat hire office. Dolphin Smile Coniston Free Swim.

  Dolphin Smile was the name of the commercial swimming set-up that had organized this July race the length of Lake Coniston, the pretty stretch of water at the south end of the Lake District National Park. Since it was a commercial enterprise, the ‘free’ simply referred to the style of swimming and what Watts jokingly referred to as ‘the dress code’. Two-thirds of the fifty or so swimmers gathered at nine this extremely sunny morning for the pre-race briefing were probably going to be swimming as near to au naturel as decency would allow. Including Watts and Kate.

  But that still left about a third already in wetsuits or in the thigh-length rubber trunks and armless rubber tops that triathletes wore in competition.

  A muscular man with a lined, tanned face, a hipster beard and dirty-blonde hair cropped high on his head, was standing near the placard talking to a fine-featured, statuesque woman. Her blonde hair was long enough to reach her waist. Both were well into their fifties, Watts reckoned.

  He’d met them briefly at the registration desk: Derek and Rasa Neill, co-owners of Dolphin Smile. The registration fee was £100 per swimmer so the race, one of thirty or so they did each year on rivers and lakes in the UK and abroad, wasn’t a bad little earner. The swimmers also had to pay a fee to their boat people of £150 each and Watts guessed Dolphin Smile got a cut from that.

  ‘I’ll never do it in three and a half hours,’ Kate Simpson said. ‘I’ll get disqualified.’

  ‘You’re not here for the race,’ Watts said. ‘Which is going to be a bit of a joke anyway with all these people in wetsuits floating along and all the different strokes people will be doing. You’re here to swim the distance as part of your training. And if it takes you four hours or even longer that’s great too. It will show that you can swim for that length of time.’

  Simpson gave a little shiver. ‘I’ll be all right once I get in.’

  ‘Of course you will,’ Watts said. ‘I’ve seen you swim for three hours in the Serpentine and you’re going to do six hours in Brighton Bay next week. This is the perfect intermediate distance.’

  He pointed across to the car park beside the café. ‘And it looks like your kayak man has arrived. Good-looking guy that Liam.’

  They both looked across to a tanned, fit-looking young man in dark glasses, who flashed a white-toothed smile as he raised his hand in a lazy wave.

  ‘I only have eyes for Bellamy,’ Simpson said. Then she obviously clocked the man’s biceps. ‘Mind you …’

  Watts laughed and looked for Eric, his own kayak man, among the vans with roof racks arriving in procession down the narrow road from Coniston town centre.

  Watts looked around the other swimmers gathered by the lakeside, some in dappled tree-shade, others in the bright sunlight. Mostly younger than him; mostly fit looking. He glanced down at Kate, her face pink, overheating in her tracksuit.

  ‘You’d better slather yourself with sun lotion before you get in,’ he said.

  She grinned up at him. ‘Yes, Dad.’

  Watts smiled back. He thought but didn’t say: not dad but uncle. Kate didn’t know that her father, William Simpson, was not only Watts’ erstwhile friend, he was also Watts’s half-brother, since they shared the same promiscuous father. Watts himself had found out only by chance and decided that, on balance, it was a bit late in the day to say anything about it to Kate. However, in consequence, he kept a fond eye on her.

  It was sheer coincidence that both of them had made the decision to swim the Channel. Kate was a keen scuba diver, he knew that, but he hadn’t quite got to the bottom of why she had decided to aim for the Channel, which was something very different.

  He and Kate needed to train hard if they were to stand any chance of making a successful crossing. A Channel swim was going to take somewhere between eleven and twenty hours depending on stroke rate, currents and weather conditions.

  Since wetsuits or any other aid to maintaining body temperature were strictly forbidden, it involved getting used to cold water. They had done some cold-water training together a few early mornings in the chilly spring waters of Pells Pool in Lewes, a few miles outside Brighton. They were more or less the same speed. Although Kate was only half his size she had a faster stroke rate than his own long, seemingly lazy, stroke. He’d been finding it quite companionable swimming more or less alongside her.

  Bellamy Heap had joined them once. Watts liked t
he intelligent young man and, insofar as he thought about such things, approved of the match they had made. He thought Heap that rare thing: a person of integrity. Swimming wasn’t his forte though and he’d done a painful-looking few lengths of breaststroke, his head held stiffly out of the water, before leaving the pool, shivering and slump-shouldered.

  Once the briefing was over, the four of them got in Watts’s Saab convertible and he drove them up the west side of the lake to the point where the kayaks had been beached. It was a narrow, winding road, the water glittering through the trees to the left, the sun lancing down through the gaps in the tree canopy above their heads.

  The kayakers were laconic men and Kate kept her eyes fixed on the lake. Watts focused on the road and the oncoming camper vans and caravans spreading over into his lane.

  Once they arrived, he and Kate stripped to their costumes, handing their clothes to their kayakers to be put in dry bags. They took turns to spray suntan lotion on. Both were doing front crawl so focused particularly on their backs, necks and legs. Then they applied Vaseline to prevent chafing under their arms and at the base of the neck where the edge of the swimming cap might rub. Watts turned away to apply it to himself between his legs where, on a long swim, tight trunks – the only kind allowed – were definitely a chafing problem.

  He’d read that Captain Webb had coated himself in porpoise fat to stave off the cold and had assumed Channel swimmers these days still lathered themselves with all kinds of fat or grease. But, no, that wasn’t allowed as insulation although it could be used in spots to prevent chafing. It was messy though, as was lanolin. So most swimmers used Vaseline to stop sores developing.

  Aside from that it was just the basic swimming costume, a single thin rubber hat and ear plugs. As Tingley had indicated, Channel swimmers deliberately put on weight to resist the cold.

  On the short journey in the light craft across to the starting point Watts and Kate put in their ear plugs and fitted tight swimming caps. Watts didn’t much care for ear plugs as they caused a weird acoustic effect inside his head on every breath but they were essential to keep the cold out. He trailed his goggles in the water to clean them, then placed them carefully over his eyes, trying not to smear the lenses with his fingers.