‘Yeah, well, sooner the better,’ Branson said bleakly, and disappeared.
Five minutes later Branson was sitting on one of the chairs in front of the Detective Superintendent’s desk, cradling his mug of coffee. Grace peered dubiously at his. ‘Did you put sugar in this?’
‘Oh shit! I’ll make you another.’
‘No, it’s OK. I won’t stir it.’ Grace stared at his friend, who looked terrible. ‘Did you remember to feed Marlon?’
‘Yeah.’ He nodded pensively. ‘Me and Marlon, we’ve bonded. We’re like soulmates.’
‘Really? Well, don’t get too close to him.’
Marlon was the goldfish Grace had won at a fairground nine years ago and the fish was still going strong. It was a surly, antisocial creature that had eaten every companion he’d bought for it. Although the six-foot two-inch detective sergeant was probably beyond even that greedy creature’s appetite, he decided. Then he quickly glanced back at the screen, noting a sudden update on the cars broken into in Tidy Street. Two youths had been arrested breaking into a car directly beneath a CCTV camera around the corner, in Trafalgar Street.
Good, he thought with some relief. Except they would probably be released on bail and be back on the streets again tonight.
‘Any developments in the Branson household?’
A few months ago, in an attempt to salvage his marriage, Branson had bought his wife, Ari, an expensive horse for eventing, using compensation he had received for an injury. But that turned out to have resulted in little more than a brief truce in a terminally hostile relationship.
‘Any more horses?’
‘I went over last night to see the kids. She told me I’ll be getting a letter from her solicitor.’ Branson shrugged.
‘A divorce lawyer?’
He nodded glumly.
Grace’s sadness for his friend was only slightly tempered by the realization that this meant Branson would be lodging at his house for a considerable time to come – and he did not have the heart to throw him out.
‘Maybe we could have a drink tonight and chat?’ Branson asked.
Much though he loved this man, Grace responded with a less than enthusiastic, ‘Yup, sure.’ His chats with Glenn about Ari had become interminable, always going over and over the same ground. The reality was that Glenn’s wife not only no longer loved him, but didn’t even like him. Privately, Grace thought she was the kind of woman who would never be satisfied with what she had in any relationship, but each time he tried to tell his friend that, Glenn responded defensively, as if he still believed there was a solution, however elusive.
‘Actually, tell you what, mate,’ Grace said, ‘are you busy this morning?’
‘Yeah – but nothing that can’t wait a few hours. Why?’
‘Got a body hauled up by a dredger yesterday. I put DI Mantle in charge, but she’s on a course up in Bramshill Police College today and tomorrow. Thought you might like to come to the postmortem.’
Branson’s eyes widened as he shook his head in mock disbelief. ‘Boy, you really know how to treat someone when they’re down, don’t you! You’re going to cheer me up by taking me to see a floater having a post-mortem, on a wet November morning. Man, that’s guaranteed to be a laugh a minute.’
‘Yep, well, it might do you good to see someone worse off than yourself.’
‘Thanks a lot.’
‘Besides, Nadiuska’s performing it.’
Quite apart from her professional skills and her cheery personality, Nadiuska De Sancha, the forty-eight-year-old Home Office pathologist, was a striking-looking woman. A statuesque redhead with Russian aristocratic blood, she looked a good decade younger than her years and, despite being happily married to an eminent plastic surgeon, enjoyed flirting and had a wicked sense of humour. Grace had never encountered any officer in the Sussex Police Force who did not fancy her.
‘Ah!’ Branson said, perking up suddenly. ‘You didn’t tell me that bit!’
‘Not that you are so shallow it would have made any difference to your decision.’
‘You’re my boss. I do whatever you tell me.’
‘Really? I’ve never noticed.’
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.