Horton said, ‘Do we know this garage owner?’
‘No. Officers at the station close to it might.’
‘Talk to them tomorrow, find out all you can about the proprietor.’
Walters took that as a dismissal for the day. Horton decided to followed suit soon afterwards, noting that Bliss had already left. As he headed along the busy promenade towards the marina where he lived on his yacht, he wasn’t surprised to see that the pebbled beach was still packed with sunbathers. It was a glorious cloudless evening, still hot but not with the intensity of the earlier heat of the day, and he toyed with the idea of getting a couple of hours’ sailing in before sunset. He might have done except there was hardly a breath of wind. Instead he ate on deck, enjoying the quiet of the evening and watching the sun set, trying to shut out thoughts of Woodley and work. But as the lights came on in the houses on the hill slopes across Langstone Harbour to the north, Woodley refused to budge from his thoughts. Below the lights, and bordering the harbour, were the marshes where Woodley’s body had been found.
Something nudged at the back of Horton’s mind. Was it something one of Woodley’s mourners had said in the interviews during the investigation? Most of it was lies, including the fact that Sholby, Hobbs and Reggie Thomas had all given each other an alibi for the time of the attack on Woodley. They’d been drinking at Sholby’s house and watching football on the telly. Had thinking about Sholby and Hobbs jogged at an elusive fact tucked away, which they’d missed in the investigation? Or perhaps it was something the chaplain had said during Woodley’s short funeral service?
The thought of funerals took him back to another he’d attended four weeks ago, that of former PC Adrian Stanley. It had been very different to Woodley’s. Horton had recollected it while in the chapel but had pushed it aside to concentrate on Woodley. Now he focused his full attention on it, or rather on what Adrian Stanley, the copper who had investigated his mother’s disappearance just over thirty years ago, hadn’t told him about Jennifer Horton’s disappearance. When he’d visited Stanley in April, the ex-copper could throw no light on why Jennifer had walked out of their council tower-block flat on a chilly November day in 1978 leaving her ten-year-old son to fend for himself. There had been no reports of her carrying a bag or suitcase and her clothes had still been in the flat. A witness, their neighbour, had claimed that Jennifer had been dressed up, wearing make-up, and had been happy. She never showed up that night at the casino where she worked, and no one had seen or heard of her again.
Horton sipped his coffee, feeling the familiar jag of emptiness in the pit of his stomach which the memory always conjured up. He tried to ignore it and instead thought back to Stanley’s last words to him, uttered from his hospital bed after suffering a stroke following Horton’s visit to his flat. They had been about a brooch, or at least Horton thought that was what Stanley had managed to utter before dying. It tied in with the fact that a photograph of Stanley’s late wife, wearing a brooch when her husband received his Queen’s Gallantry Medal for thwarting an armed robbery, had vanished, along with the brooch itself. But how that connected with his mother’s disappearance Horton didn’t know except he suspected Stanley had either stolen it from her belongings or had been given it as payment to keep quiet about something he’d discovered.
He’d questioned Stanley’s son, Robin, after his house had been broken into the day his father had died. Along with the family photograph albums, jewellery belonging to Robin Stanley’s family had been taken. It was the neatest burglary that Horton had ever come across. No prints, no mess. A double-glazed kitchen door lifted off its hinges, no witnesses, not even a report of a car or van. A highly professional job.
Robin didn’t remember the brooch and said he hadn’t really noticed it in the photograph. And so far Horton had drawn a blank tracing the missing photograph of Adrian Stanley’s wife wearing it. He wished he could remember what the brooch had looked like but he hadn’t realized its significance until too late. So with that line of enquiry a dead end, did he go back to the beginning of Jennifer Horton’s life and try to trace her movements from a young girl until the day she vanished in the hope that somewhere along the line he would find the answer? That would take months, though, years even and could result in nothing. Alternatively should he take up DCS Sawyer’s offer and work with the Intelligence Directorate who believed his mother had connections with a wanted criminal they’d codenamed Zeus? That would be far the quickest and easiest option. He’d already refused Sawyer’s offer twice, not because he was afraid of Zeus, but because he was afraid of what he might discover about his mother and what others, especially his colleagues, might learn in the process. Besides, he had told himself several times, if Jennifer had been involved with this Zeus then in all probability she was dead.
A police siren caught his attention but gradually it faded as it headed along the seafront westwards. It was still hot. What little breeze there had been had died completely. The flags outside the marina office hung limp. He swallowed the remainder of his drink and surveyed the marina a moment longer before going below. All was quiet. As he lay on his bunk Woodley’s funeral again came to mind and along with it that nagging thought that something he’d seen or heard today was significant but try as he might it refused to surface. Perhaps it would come to him in his sleep.
TWO
Wednesday
The trilling of his mobile phone woke him. Scrambling to answer it, he registered it was daylight and six twenty-three. A call at this hour could only mean one thing: work.
‘We’ve got a suspicious death, sir. PCs Somerfield and Seaton are at the scene.’
‘Where?’ asked Horton, fully awake and heading for the shower.
‘The former Tipner Boatyard.’
That was on the western shores of the city and the opposite side of town from his marina. It was a stone’s throw from the commercial ferry port, ten minutes from the police station by car, and about fifteen on the Harley before the rush-hour traffic. He remembered reading that the boatyard had been sold for re-development a couple of years ago and that a salvage operation had only recently begun. They were clearing a Second World War munitions barge from the seabed and he wondered if a skeleton had been discovered during the clearance operation. He asked for more details.
‘Sorry, sir, don’t have them,’ came the unsatisfactory answer. Horton didn’t waste time enquiring why.
‘OK, tell them I’m on my way.’
He ran an electric razor over his chin and was on his Harley heading there within ten minutes, mentally preparing himself for what he might see and hoping that it was a long-ago fatality rather than a recent one. He headed west and then north and soon was turning off the main road and travelling through the narrow streets of terraced houses, which reminded him of Daryl Woodley because this was where he had lived and where Reggie Thomas and the rest of Woodley’s associates still did. Again he considered what was nagging at the back of his mind about the Woodley investigation. It hadn’t surfaced during sleep. As he turned off by the allotments and rode under the motorway bridge onto the small peninsula that butted out on to the upper reaches of Portsmouth harbour, he again tried to conjure up the elusive thought but it refused to come. No matter. It might occur to him later.
He pulled into the boatyard and parked beside the police car. PC Kate Somerfield broke off her conversation with a suntanned, muscular man in his late forties standing beside a van, and headed towards him. There was a frown of concern on her fair face and he thought she looked paler than usual, which didn’t bode well.