Dead Tomorrow

78

As Glenn Branson drove along the perimeter road of Shoreham Airport, the strong wind buffeted the small Hyundai. He passed a cluster of parked helicopters, then glanced at a small, twin-engined plane that was coming in to land on the grass runway. He turned right, beyond the end of the hangars, and drove up to the converted warehouse, inside a mesh-fenced compound, that housed the Specialist Search Unit. The car clock read 12.31 p.m.

A few minutes later he was in the cluttered conference room, which doubled as the canteen and shared communal office, with a mug of coffee beside him, carefully spreading out the photocopy of an Admiralty chart, which Ray Packham had helped him to prepare, on the large table.

There were charts on the walls, wooden shields, a whiteboard, some framed photos of the team, as well as a bravery award certificate. The view through the window was on to the car park and the featureless grey metal wall of the warehouse beyond. On the windowsill was a goldfish bowl, containing a solitary fish and a toy deep-sea diver.

Smurf, Jonah, Arf and WAFI were already seated. The young woman sergeant wore a black, zippered fleece, embroidered with the word police and the Sussex Police shield above it. The three men wore blue, short-sleeved shirts, with their numbers on the epaulettes.

Gonzo, also wearing a fleece, came in and handed Glenn Branson a stiff paper bag. ‘In case you need it.’

The other four grinned.

Glenn looked puzzled. ‘Need it for what?’

‘To throw up in,’ Gonzo said.

‘It’s quite rough outside!’ Jonah said.

‘Yeah, and this whole building moves a bit on a windy day,’ said WAFI, ‘so we thought – you know – bearing in mind last time you were with us…’

Tania Whitlock gave Glenn a sympathetic smile as her team ribbed him.

‘Yeah, very witty,’ he retorted.

‘Heard you applied for a transfer to this unit, Glenn,’ Arf said. ‘Cos you enjoyed being with us so much last time.’

‘Mutiny on the Bounty springs to mind,’ Glenn said.

‘So, Glenn,’ Tania Whitlock said, ‘tell us what you have.’

The chart showed a section of coastline from Worthing to Seaford. There were three crude red ink rings drawn on it, marked A, B and C, with a sizeable space between each. A green dotted line plotted a course out to sea from the mouth of Shoreham Harbour, with a childlike drawing of a boat at the end of it, beside which someone had written Das Boot. There was also a large blue arc.

‘OK,’ Branson said. ‘The skipper of the Scoob-Eee, Jim Towers, had a mobile phone on the O2 network. These three red circles indicate the O2 base stations and masts covering this section of coast. The phone company has given us a plot, which is all marked on here, of base station signals received from Towers’s mobile phone on Friday evening, between 8.55 p.m., when it was noticed by a harbour pilot and by a shore boatman passing through the lock, and 10.08 p.m., when the last signal was received.’

‘Glenn, are these calls that Jim Towers made?’ Sergeant Whitlock asked.

‘No, Tania. When the phone is in standby mode, once every twenty minutes it sends out a signal to a base station, a bit like the way, when I was with you, you radioed the coastguard from time to time and gave him your position, yeah?’ he explained, pleased with his analogy. ‘It’s like checking in – calling home. It’s called, technically, a location update.’

They all nodded.

‘The signal gets picked up by the nearest base station – unless it’s busy, and then it gets passed to the next one. If there’s more than one base station in range, it could be picked up by two or even three.’

‘Blimey, Glenn,’ said Arf. ‘We didn’t realize you were a telephone scientist as well as a master mariner.’

‘Piss off!’ he retorted with a big grin. Then, continuing, he said, ‘So this is what was happening here. After the boat left Shoreham Harbour, the first location update was picked up by this Shoreham base station and this Worthing one.’ He pointed at the ones marked A and B. ‘Twenty minutes later, the second signal home was also picked up by these two. But the third one, approximately one hour after leaving harbour, was picked up by this third one as well, just east of Brighton Marina.’ He pointed at C. ‘That tells us Towers was steering a south-easterly course – which we’ve marked, as a best guess, with this green dotted line.’

‘Good film, Das Boot,’ Gonzo said.

‘Now here’s where it gets interesting,’ said Glenn, ignoring him.

‘Oh, great!’ WAFI said. ‘We’ve been waiting for it to get interesting, because it’s been pretty boring so far!’

The DS waited patiently for them all to stop laughing.

‘The timing advance can be anything from zero to sixty-three for a given link with a phone,’ Glenn went on, ignoring their barracking. ‘So if the maximum range is about twenty miles, then divide that into sixty-three slots and you can work out distance to within about eighteen hundred feet.’

‘OK,’ Gonzo said. ‘If I’m understanding this correctly, you said this shows the direction the boat was heading. So this is its last known position before it went out of range?’

Glenn Branson shook his head.

‘No, I don’t think it went out of range.’

He looked up. The others all frowned.

‘This is where the fourth and last signal – the last location update – was transmitted from,’ he continued. ‘Now, the seaward range from standard base stations is about twenty miles. But I was told that the mobile phone companies, where possible, build their coastal masts exceptionally high to increase range, so they can pick up lucrative roaming charges from foreign ships passing, so the range here is probably quite a bit further than that – could be as much as thirty miles.’

Gonzo scrawled some calculations down on a notepad.

‘Right,’ Glenn said, ‘you all know the Scoob-Eee. It’s not a fast boat – its maximum speed is ten knots – roughly twelve miles an hour. When this last signal was picked up, she had only been out for less than ninety minutes – and she was sailing at an angled course, putting her approximately ten miles out to sea – well within range.’

There was a few moments’ silence while they all reflected on this. It was Tania Whitlock who broke it.

‘Perhaps his phone battery died, Glenn?’ she suggested.

‘It’s possible – but he was an experienced skipper and the phone was one of his lifelines. Don’t you think it’s unlikely he’d have put to sea either without a charger or with an uncharged battery?’

‘He could have dropped it overboard,’ said Gonzo.

‘Yep, he could,’ Glenn agreed. ‘But again unlikely for an experienced skipper.’

Gonzo shrugged. ‘Yeah, Towers knew what he was doing, but it’s easily done. You think something else happened?’

Branson stared at him levelly. ‘What about the possibility that it sank?’

‘Ah, now I get it!’ Arf said. ‘You want us to go out there and take a look for it, scan the bottom?’

‘You guys are catching on quick!’ Branson said.

‘She’s a solid boat, built to take heavy seas,’ WAFI said. ‘She’s unlikely to have sunk.’

‘What about an accident?’ Branson said. ‘A collision? A fire? Sabotage? Or something more sinister.’

‘Like what, Glenn?’ Tania asked.

‘The voyage doesn’t make sense,’ Branson said. ‘I’ve interviewed his wife. Friday night was their wedding anniversary. They had a restaurant reservation. He had no clients booked for any night fishing trip. Yet instead of going home, he got on the boat and headed out to sea.’

‘Yep, well, I can sympathize with him,’ Arf said. ‘The choice of dinner with your missus or being out at sea on your own – no contest.’

They all grinned. Tania, who was newly married, less humorously than her colleagues.

Gonzo pointed out of the window. ‘There’s a Force Nine hooley blowing out there. Do you know what the sea’s like at the moment?’

‘A bit choppy, I should imagine.’ Glenn looked back at Gonzo quizzically.

‘If you want us to go out there, mate, we’ll go,’ WAFI said. ‘But you’re coming with us.’