The Restless Dead

27

The rain dripped off the edge of the sea fort’s tower in swaying silver curtains. Every now and then a squall of wind would blow a sheet of it into its shadowy underside, a cold spray that ran down necks and sleeves, chilling to the bone.

The sandbank that had built up around the tower had been exposed by the low tide, revealing a smooth brown island by one of the legs. Dappled with seaweed and the rusted carcasses of tin cans, it had been colonized by dozens of small, pale crabs. They’d emerged cautiously into daylight, pincers raised as they made scuttling runs that left stippled patterns in the wet sand.

I watched them from the edge of the docking platform under the tower. The tide had begun to return, and now the crabs were disappearing as the sea reclaimed the sandbank. I’d be sorry to see them go. Watching them had been a welcome distraction from the activity going on above my head. A blanket was draped around my shoulders, replacing the ruined coat I’d left inside the tower. The marine unit’s RHIB was moored to the platform next to the smaller boat I’d come out in with Rachel and Lundy, bobbing on the waves. A larger launch was anchored in deeper water further out, wallowing on the heavier swell.

As we’d waited outside the tower for the emergency services to arrive, Rachel had wiped tears from her face.

‘It’s my fault. He didn’t even want to come out here.’

I told her it was no good blaming herself, that there was no way to have foreseen any of this. I doubted it made any difference. The shock of what had happened was numbing. I felt useless myself, unable to even hold her. Lundy’s blood was still caked on my arms, cold and sticky, but I couldn’t wash it off before the police got there. They would need to test our hands for gunpowder residue to rule us out as suspects. And so I stood while it dried on me, a clotted coat smelling of iron and offal that cracked when I moved.

A fast coastguard launch arrived first, bringing paramedics who’d clambered up the ladders to Lundy. The urgency was in contrast to the way they’d re-emerged a short while later, empty-handed and defeated. They’d offered blankets and hot coffee while we waited for the police. The marine unit had arrived next, vaguely familiar faces I recognized from the estuary recovery. They’d been followed by a bigger police vessel, discharging the first of what seemed like an endless stream of CSIs and crime scene personnel. Or perhaps it was the same ones coming and going.

I didn’t keep check.

Rachel had been taken back to shore to be interviewed and make a formal statement. Although I’d not asked to stay, no one suggested I leave. I could guess why, and so I’d waited on the platform out of everyone’s way, watching the busy crabs. It was a relief when my hands had been swabbed by a member of the forensic team and I could finally clean Lundy’s blood from my hands. I’d crouched down on the platform and plunged my arms in the sea, rubbing the caked mess from my skin and letting the cold saltwater carry it away.

It was mid-afternoon when the coastguard launch returned with more passengers. It bumped alongside the platform, and I turned and waited as DCI Clarke and Frears climbed out. Both wore coveralls, and the DCI’s face was bleak. She looked over at me as she accepted help out of the boat from a police officer, but went straight to the ladder without a word. Behind her, the pathologist appeared uncharacteristically solemn as he clambered on to the platform. He saw me and paused, as though in two minds.

‘Dr Hunter. Glad you’re all right.’ He looked up at the tower, shaking his head. ‘Bloody bad business.’

I nodded. It was.

A bloody bad business.

I went back to watching the crabs on the diminishing sandbank. Only a small patch remained above the surface when the first seagull found them. Within a few minutes several more had joined it, their cries echoing under the tower. I was still watching nature run its course when I heard someone coming back down the ladder. I waited until footsteps approached behind me, and then turned to face Clarke.

The DCI’s pale eyes were red-rimmed, and the wispy ginger hair was even more dishevelled than usual. Her voice held a quaver, but I thought that was barely contained fury.

‘What the hell happened?’

I went through it one more time, even though I knew she would have already been briefed. She didn’t interrupt, but her mouth compressed into an ever tighter line.

‘Jesus Christ,’ she said when I’d finished. ‘Jesus fucking Christ! Whose idea was it?’

‘Mine.’

I could tell she didn’t believe me. Or perhaps she already knew: Rachel wouldn’t have spared herself in her statement. But I wasn’t about to point any fingers. No one had forced Lundy to come out here. Or me either, come to that.

Clarke gave me a hard look, then stared off at the waves through the curtain of rain. A wisp of escaped ginger hair flapped unnoticed in the wind.

‘And you didn’t see who it was? Nothing at all?’

‘The engine sounded like a small boat’s, but that’s as much as I can tell you.’

She sighed, impatiently pushing the loose strand of untidy hair out of her face. ‘Christ, what a mess.’

‘What about forensics?’ I asked. ‘Can you tell anything from the footprint?’

‘Not much. It’s only a partial, and there’s no sole pattern or any identifying marks. Doesn’t look like it’s been worn down, so probably a smooth-soled shoe. Most of the surfaces are too rusty for fingerprints, but we’ve found two distinct sets in the room and five on the aluminium ladder. We’re assuming that three of those will be from you, Rachel Derby and… and DI Lundy. We don’t know about the other two yet, but they aren’t recent. If we’re right about the set-up here I think we’ll find they belong to Emma Derby and Mark Chapel.’

I thought so too. The natural oils in older fingerprints would have been dried out by weathering and the salty air. I’d have to have my fingerprints taken at some point to exclude those I’d left, and so would Rachel and even Lundy. But if the five sets the police had found could all be accounted for, that meant whoever had climbed up to the tower to shoot Lundy had been wearing gloves.

The same as Stacey Coker’s killer.

‘He knew we were here,’ I said.

‘He? I thought you didn’t see who it was?’

I bit back an angry retort. But she was right, and I should know better than to make assumptions. ‘OK then, whoever it was knew we were here.’

‘We don’t know that.’

‘Why else would they have come out? By the look of it no one had been inside the tower for months, and it can’t be an accident they turned up at the same time as us. Not with a shotgun.’

‘So what are you saying? Someone tipped them off?’

The only person who’d told anyone we were going out to the sea fort was Lundy. He’d called in to let his team know, but I couldn’t believe one of his colleagues would set him up to be murdered.

‘Or they were keeping a watch on the fort somehow, I don’t know. I just don’t believe the timing was a coincidence.’

‘I don’t like it either,’ Clarke said flatly. ‘But the alternative is that someone came out here to deliberately execute a detective inspector. And two civilians, given half a chance. What would they gain by that?’

‘To keep anyone from knowing what was inside.’

‘And shooting a police officer’s really going to keep a lid on that.’

Her voice was heavy with scorn, but she had a point. Even if Lundy’s murderer had succeeded in killing all three of us, the tower would have been searched as a matter of course when Lundy didn’t report in. Shooting him had only escalated the situation.

‘I didn’t say it made sense,’ I said wearily. ‘But our boat was moored outside, so it was obvious someone was here. If the intention wasn’t to kill us why come into the tower?’

‘I don’t know, Dr Hunter, all right? If I did I’d be a hell of a lot closer to catching the bastard!’ Clarke massaged her temples, taking a second to compose herself. ‘Look, we know someone was keeping ammunition and probably a shotgun at Edgar Holloway’s house. Maybe they wanted another hiding place now that’s gone and panicked when they realized someone was out here.’

I remembered the persistent attempts to get through the bolted door. That didn’t seem panicked to me, but there was no point labouring the point. Clarke didn’t have any more answers than I did.

‘What about the stain on the floor?’ I asked. ‘Is it blood?’

A gust of wind blew a sheet of rain under the tower on to us. She didn’t seem to notice. ‘We think so, but I doubt it’ll tell us much. It’s probably from either Emma Derby or Mark Chapel, but between the rust and the salt air we’ll be lucky if we can say which.’

‘I think it’s Mark Chapel’s.’

Clarke regarded me. ‘I’m listening.’

I’d had plenty of time to go over it while I’d been watching the crabs. It was better than thinking about Lundy lying in the tower. ‘You know it’s probably his body we found on the barbed wire?’

‘I’ve been briefed,’ she said irritably. ‘Go on.’

‘Someone hit him hard enough in the face for a piece of bone to be driven into his brain. An injury like that would have shattered his nose. It’d have bled. Perhaps not a lot if he died straight away, but enough to explain the patch of blood.’

‘You’re saying he was killed here? That’s reading a hell of a lot into one bloodstain.’

‘Not if you take into account the multiple fractures on Chapel’s body. They were the sort you’d expect from a fall, and one hip was literally wrenched from its socket. That would take a huge amount of force. I couldn’t work out how it could have happened until I came here.’

I indicated the scaffold-like arrangement of landings and ladders descending from the tower’s entrance.

‘That’s high enough to do it,’ I went on. ‘The easiest way of getting his body down from the tower and into a boat would be to drop it from the top. It’d have tumbled against the ladder on the way down, and if a foot got caught between the rungs the momentum would snap bones and dislocate the hip.’

A fall like that would also explain why Chapel’s cervical vertebrae were broken while, except for its facial injuries, his skull remained undamaged. Like his limbs, his head would have been twisted and jerked around like a rag doll’s during the descent, with enough force to break his neck. From that height his skull could easily have been fractured as well, but my guess was that either the fall had been checked by his leg catching on a rung, or else his head had been cushioned by an arm when it hit the steel platform.

I stayed quiet while Clarke frowned up at the dripping underside of the tower, thinking it through for herself. I’d worried at first over why anyone would take a body all that way into the Backwaters instead of dumping it at sea. But the reasoning wasn’t hard to follow. This close to shore there’d be a good chance it’d be washed up somewhere along the coast. Weighting it down was another option, but as silted up as the sea was around here there’d be no guarantee low tide wouldn’t expose it.

In the Backwaters, though, there was a good chance the body would never be found. And even if it was there’d be no reason to associate it with the sea fort. While it wouldn’t have been practicable to remove all traces of habitation from the tower, once anything identifying had been disposed of — with the exception of an overlooked lens cap and a small stain in the rust — it became an abandoned camp rather than a crime scene. There’d be no reason to think Emma Derby and Mark Chapel had ever been there.

And nothing to link Leo Villiers to any of it.

I looked across the sea towards the house on the promontory. It seemed shrunken from down here compared to the view from the tower window, blurred by spray and rain.

‘They were blackmailing Villiers, weren’t they?’ I said.

If I hadn’t felt so exhausted I might have realized something was off from Clarke’s sudden stillness.

‘Why do you say that?’

I was too tired for games. ‘What else could this be about? If they just wanted somewhere to meet they could have used the boathouse. They didn’t have to come all the way out to a sea fort. OK, Chapel might have liked the whole pirate radio thing, but enough to camp out here? And right opposite Leo Villiers’ house? They didn’t do all this for fun. They were spying on him.’

It was the only explanation that made any sense. The long-lens photographs Emma Derby had taken, even the video camera Chapel had stolen from work, it all pointed one way. The pair had used the sea fort as a hide, staking out Villiers’ home so they could observe him from a distance. And he’d killed them for it.

Clarke’s face was a mask. ‘What could they have seen worth blackmailing him over?’

That was where my reasoning broke down. Political ambitions or not, Villiers didn’t seem a natural fit for blackmail. He’d seemed almost to cultivate a bad reputation, flaunting his indiscretions rather than being ashamed of them.

‘I don’t know,’ I admitted. ‘He’d have destroyed any photographs or footage that was on their cameras. And any backups would have been lost in the burglary.’

‘Burglary?’

It was obviously news to her. But then a DCI probably wouldn’t have been told about a petty crime spree. ‘The Trasks had all their computers stolen. Not just them, there was a spate of burglaries around the same time.’

‘When was this?’ she asked sharply.

‘Not long after Emma Derby went missing,’ I said, feeling the fatigue that had been clogging my mind begin to fall away. ‘You think that was why they were stolen? The other burglaries were just a smokescreen?’

Clarke ignored the question. ‘Would she have any other backups?’

‘Not that I know of. Rachel — her sister — told me they don’t have the password to any cloud storage.’

And if Emma had printed out any hard copies, she wouldn’t have kept them at home where her husband might find them. In all probability they’d have been with Chapel at the sea fort, from where Villiers would have taken them, along with the cameras.

Evidently Clarke was thinking along the same lines. ‘Shit.’

Until now I’d been numb. Since Lundy’s shooting I’d felt trapped in a bubble, watching events around me without feeling a part of them. Now it burst.

‘You can’t keep this quiet any longer,’ I said, my voice harsh. ‘People need to know that Villiers is still alive.’

Clarke looked out over the windblown sea. ‘It’s not that simple.’

‘Why? Jesus, what more does he have to do?’ I didn’t care how powerful Sir Stephen Villiers was, even he couldn’t muzzle this any longer. ‘This isn’t just about Emma Derby any more. He’s murdered three, no, four other people that we know of! He shot a police officer, for Christ’s sake!’

‘You think I need reminding?’ Clarke flashed back. Our raised voices drew looks from two CSIs on the upper gantry. ‘I’ve known Bob Lundy for fifteen years! I went to his granddaughter’s christening, so don’t think for a minute I’m not going to shift heaven and hell to catch the bastard who shot him! But it wasn’t Leo Villiers.’

I stared at her. Belatedly, I remembered the phone call Lundy had received earlier, how he’d explained that we had to go back. We’ve had this all wrong. All of it.

‘How do you know?’ I asked, my anger draining away.

Clarke glared for a moment, then turned away with a frustrated shake of her head.

‘Because he’s been in custody all morning.’