Dead Tomorrow

25

Sergeant Tania Whitlock shivered as a cold draught blew steadily in through the window beside her desk. The right side of her face felt as if it was turning to ice. She sipped some hot coffee and glanced at her watch. Ten past eleven. The day was already almost half gone and the piles of reports and forms on her desk that she had to fill in were still alarmingly high. Outside a steady drizzle fell from grey skies.

The window gave her a view across the grass runway and parking area of Shoreham Airport, the oldest civil airport in the world. Built in 1910, on the western extremity of Brighton and Hove, it was now mostly used by private aircraft and flying schools. Some years ago an industrial estate had been developed on land at the edge of the airport, and it was in one of these buildings, a converted warehouse, that the Specialist Search Unit of Sussex Police was based.

Tania had barely heard the drone of an aero engine all morning. Hardly any planes or helicopters had taken off or landed. It seemed that this weather didn’t inspire anyone to go anywhere, and the low cloud ceiling discouraged inexperienced pilots with only visual flight rating.

Please let it continue to be a quiet day, she thought, then turned her attention back to her current task. It was a standard statement form for the Coroner, with space for diagrams, detailing how members of her team had dived last Friday, in Brighton Marina, to recover the body of a yachtsman who had missed his footing, apparently drunk, according to witnesses, and fallen off his gangplank with an outboard motor strapped to his back.

Twenty-nine years old, the sergeant was short and slim, with an alert, attractive face and long dark hair. Wrapped up at this moment in a blue fleece jacket for warmth, over her uniform blue T-shirt, baggy blue trousers and work boots, she looked fragile and delicate. No one meeting her for the first time would have guessed that for the previous five years before her posting here, she had been a member of Brighton and Hove Police’s elite Local Support Team, the frontline police officers who carried out raids and arrests, dealt with public disorder and any other situation where violence was anticipated.

The Specialist Search Unit comprised nine police officers. One, Steve Hargrave, had been a professional deep-sea diver before joining the force. The others had trained at the Police Dive School in Newcastle. One member of the team was an ex-Marine, another a former traffic cop – and a legend in the force because he had once booked his own father for not wearing a seat belt. Tania, the only female, headed the unit, which had, by anyone’s definition, the grimmest task in the entire Sussex Police Force.

Their role was to recover dead bodies and human remains, and to search for evidence in locations which were considered beyond the abilities or too hazardous or too grim for regular police officers. Most of their work involved finding victims underwater – in canals, rivers, lakes, wells, the sea – but their remit had no limits. Among the previous twelve months’ highlights – or lowlights, depending on perspective – her team had recovered forty-seven separate body parts from a particularly horrific car smash, in which six people had died, and the incinerated remains of four people from a light aircraft crash. Partially obscuring the view of parked private planes from her window was a trailer, in police livery, containing sufficient body bags to cope with a wide-bodied-airliner disaster.

Humour helped to keep the unit sane, and every member had a nickname. Hers was Smurf, because she was small and turned blue underwater. Of all the people she had worked with since joining the police, ten years ago, this team was just the greatest. She liked and respected each of her colleagues, and the feeling was mutual.

The building in which they operated housed their diving equipment, including a large Zeppelin inflatable capable of carrying the entire team, a drying room and their lorry, which was equipped with everything from climbing to tunnelling apparatus. They were on permanent standby, 24/7.

Most of the space in Tania’s small, cluttered office was filled with filing cabinets, on the front of one of which was a massive yellow radiation-warning sticker. A whiteboard above her desk listed in blue and turquoise marker pen all immediate priorities. Beside it hung a calendar and a photograph of her four-year-old niece, Maddie. Her laptop, plastic lunch box, lamp, phone and piles of files and forms took up most of the space on her desk.

During the winter months it was permanently freezing cold in here, which was why she had her fleece jacket on. Despite the asthmatic wheezing of the blower heater at her feet, her fingers were so cold she was finding it hard to grip her ballpoint pen. It would feel warmer at the bottom of the English Channel, she thought.

She turned the page of the dive log, then made more notes on the form. Suddenly her phone rang, distracting her, and she answered it a little absently.

‘Sergeant Whitlock.’

Almost instantly she switched to full attention. It was Detective Superintendent Roy Grace, from HQ CID, and it was unlikely that he would be calling for a chat about the weather.

‘Hi,’ he said. ‘How’s things?’

‘Fine, Roy,’ she said, transmitting more enthusiasm than she actually felt today.

‘Did I hear a rumour that you got married not long ago?’

‘In the summer,’ she said.

‘He’s a lucky guy!’

‘Thank you, Roy! I hope someone tells him! So – what can I do for you?’

‘I’m at Brighton mortuary – we’re doing a Home Office PM on a young male hauled up yesterday by the dredger, Arco Dee, about ten miles south of Shoreham Harbour.’

‘I know the Arco Dee – it operates mostly out of Shoreham and Newhaven.’

‘Yes. I think I’m going to need you guys to take a look and see if there’s anything else down there.’

‘What information can you give me?’

‘We have a pretty good fix on the position where they found it. The body was wrapped in plastic and weighted down. It could be a burial at sea, but I’m not sure about that.’

‘Presumably the Arco Dee hauled it up from a designated dredge area?’ she said, starting to make notes on her pad.

‘Yes.’

‘There’s a specific charted area for burials at sea. It’s possible a body could drift from there in the currents, but unlikely if it was a professional burial. Want me to come over?’

‘If you wouldn’t mind?’

‘I’ll be there in half an hour.’

‘Thanks.’

As she hung up, she grimaced. She’d been planning to leave early today to get home to cook her husband, Rob, a special meal tonight. He loved Thai food and she’d stopped and bought everything she needed on the way in – including some fresh prawns and a very plump sea bass. Rob, a pilot with British Airways long haul, was home tonight before going away again for nine days. By the sound of it, her plans had just headed out the window.

Her door opened and Steve Hargrave, nicknamed Gonzo, peered in. ‘Just wondered if you were busy, chief, or if you had a couple of minutes for a chat.’

She gave him an acidic smile that could have dissolved a steel girder in less time than it took for him to register her displeasure.

Raising a finger as he started retreating, he said, ‘Not a good moment, right?’

She continued smiling.