Little Boy Blue

111

Sanderson paced up and down, fervently wishing she were a smoker or a nail biter. But she was neither – never had been – so there was nothing to do but wait.

The divers had been in the lake for nearly twenty minutes and Sanderson had by now got used to the strange, repetitive rhythm of their work. Dive, resurface, discuss, dive, resurface, discuss… Each time they came back up, she was convinced that this would be the breakthrough she needed. And each time she saw that they were empty-handed another little part of her died.

This was a massive gamble on her part. She had gone over Gardam’s head straight to the Chief Constable. It had been hard enough to get him to agree to surveillance, it was harder still to get them to agree to the expense of a dive. But in the end the Chief Constable had agreed that there were grounds for concern and Sanderson’s decisiveness initially appeared to have paid dividends. Helen Grace had had a five-person team on her as she made her way across Southampton Common. They had lost her initially as she disappeared in the depths of the woods, but a pair of young officers posing as lovers had picked her up again a little later on, as she emerged back on to open ground.

Sanderson had been beyond relieved at this news – she’d feared Helen was on to them and had deliberately lost her tail – and had radioed another member of the team to watch her from a safe distance. This officer had clearly seen Helen throw something in the lake and from then on Sanderson hadn’t stood still, petitioning the Chief Constable for a dive, detailing more people to the surveillance effort and drawing DS McAndrew into her confidence to run some further checks.

Standing by the side of the lake, a brisk autumnal wind whipping around her, she wondered whether she had made a mistake. What if the item that Helen had discarded was something else entirely, something personal and unrelated to the case or, worse than that, merely a piece of rubbish. She shuddered at the thought of how she would explain that to her paymasters.

A shout made her look up. One of the divers was signalling that he’d found something and was returning to the shore. Sanderson set off towards him and moments later she was in possession of a mobile phone, neatly encased in an evidence bag. She didn’t recognize it but it could be Helen’s – there was a lot they didn’t know about her boss, it appeared. Slipping on gloves, she opened the back of the phone, but there was no SIM card inside. Sealing the bag, Sanderson now pulled her phone from her pocket and called McAndrew – even without the SIM card there was lots they could do with the phone’s memory, the serial number and so on. Concluding her call, she handed it to a colleague to ferry back to Southampton Central and resumed her position on the edge of the lake, hopeful that there might yet be more discoveries.

They were inching forward, but painfully slowly and Sanderson wondered how long it would be before Helen smelt a rat. Time was ticking and Sanderson knew her case against Helen would have to be bulletproof before she made her move. If she fudged the execution or, worse still, was just plain wrong, it wouldn’t be Helen’s neck on the block – it would be hers.