‘What sort of something?’
‘A big bundle, wrapped in plastic. According to our boys, it’s tied to a bag made of what looks like fishing net, filled with rocks.’
Sam grinned. ‘So what happens now?’
‘We’ll rope it, get airbags underneath then winch the lot up. Then we’ll take a look inside.’
The recovery process seemed to take forever. Sam tried to suppress his impatience, but he couldn’t keep still. He walked the shoreline, climbing up a low bluff from where he could get a better view of the boat a few hundred yards away. But he was too far away to see much of what was going on. At last, a black-wrapped lump the size of a Portaloo began to emerge, sluicing water in its wake. ‘Christ, that’s big,’ Sam said aloud, transfixed by the struggles of the dive team to get it on board without capsizing their boat.
The sound of their engine split the hush of the late afternoon and Sam hustled back down to the rough scree of the little beach they’d launched from. The boat nosed right on to the shore but Sam hung back, not wanting to ruin his shoes unnecessarily. It took five of them to manhandle the constantly shrinking bundle from the boat on to dry land, staggering up the beach to lay it down on the grass by the support vehicle. Water still leaked generously from all sides.
‘What now?’ Sam asked.
The dive team leader pointed to one of his men emerging from the support vehicle with a camera. ‘We take photos. Then we cut it open.’
‘You don’t take it to a secure area first?’
‘We don’t take it anywhere until we know what the appropriate destination might be,’ he said patiently. ‘It might be rolls of carpet. Or dead sheep. No point in hauling them off to the mortuary, is there?’
Feeling stupid, Sam just nodded and waited while the officer with the camera took a couple of dozen shots of the oozing package. At last he stepped back and one of the divers took a long knife from a sheath at his waist and slit the package open. As he peeled the plastic back, Sam held his breath.
The remaining water flowed away. Inside the black plastic, three packages were sheathed in polythene turned opaque by time and water, bound with duct tape.
Sam had been expecting Danuta Barnes and five-month-old Lynette. This was clearly more than he’d bargained for.
While Tony might not have appreciated Carol’s characterisation of him as a lost boy, it wasn’t so far off the mark. In the hour since Alvin Ambrose had delivered his hard-won bundle of papers, Tony had barely been able to string two thoughts together. The couple in the next room had concluded their blazing row with equally blazing sex. Through the other wall someone was listening to some sort of motorsport that involved throaty engines and squealing tyres. It was intolerable.
It almost made him believe in fate.
Except that he knew deep down that if it hadn’t been the noise, it would have been something else. After all, there was plenty to choose from. The poor lighting. The hardness of the bed. The chair that was the wrong height for the desktop. Any one of them would have justified the decision he was about to make. The decision he had, if he was honest with himself, made that afternoon when, as soon as he’d freed himself from the estate agent, he’d paid a visit to a firm of solicitors whose office was also within easy walking distance of the hotel.
Tony picked up the papers and slipped them into his still-packed bag. He didn’t actually check out. That could wait till morning. He got into his car and retraced the route he’d driven earlier, only making a couple of mistaken turns along the way. Hell, there were days when he made more errors than that between Bradfield Moor Secure Hospital and his own front door.
He parked on the street outside the house he supposed he could call his. Although that seemed too presumptuous. This was unquestionably Edmund Arthur Blythe’s house still. And yet, Tony imagined that if his benefactor had a ghost it wouldn’t mind his presence.
The keys the solicitor had handed over turned smoothly in the twin mortise locks and the door swung open without the faintest creak. Inside, it was blissfully quiet. Discreet double glazing smothered the traffic noise and not even the ticking of a clock disturbed the silence. Tony gave a contented sigh and made his way through to the drawing room he’d admired earlier that afternoon. Its deep bay window gave on to the garden, though at this time of day there wasn’t much to be seen through the growing dark. From upstairs, there was a view of the park, but at this level, the garden felt secluded and isolate, a private space for the house and its owner to enjoy.
He turned away and his eye caught a tall cabinet filled with CDs. As he approached, light flooded the shelves, startling him. He looked up and caught sight of a motion sensor on the front of the cabinet. ‘Clever,’ he murmured, casting an eye over a collection that encompassed nineteenth-century classical music and the more melodic twentieth-century jazz. He’d clearly enjoyed something with a tune, Tony thought. Out of curiosity, he turned on the CD player. Rich, smooth saxophone with a swing to its rhythm, the last music Edmund Arthur Blythe had chosen to listen to. A ticker display across the front of the CD player’s illuminated panel said, ‘Stanley Turrentine: “Deep Purple”’. Tony had never heard of the man but he recognised the tune and liked the way the sound made him feel.
He walked away and switched on a standard lamp, perfectly placed to cast its light over a high-backed armchair with a convenient side table next to it. The ideal arrangement for a man who wanted to read and perhaps to make the occasional note. Tony took the papers out of his bag and settled into the chair. For the next hour, he sat with the transcripts and unobtrusive saxophones, trying to get a feel for ZZ and to make sense of the fragmentary final session. ‘ur . . . ur real . . .’ he read over and over. ‘Your what? You are what? You are who? You’re really, what? Your real what?’ He puzzled over ‘. . . el u, show u.’ ‘Tell, that’s it. I’ll do more than tell you, I’ll show you. Of course, that’s it. You want to show her, don’t you? But what? What do you want to show her?’
He got to his feet and paced, trying to find some hypothesis that would cover those imponderable gaps in the conundrum. The more he could read into this exchange, the closer it might bring him to both victim and killer. ‘Tell you you’re really what? Show you you’re something . . . But what? What’s the secret? The secret she doesn’t even know she’s got? What kind of secret can we have that we don’t even know about?’
His prowling brought him face to face with a drinks table. Not the predictable heavy crystal tumblers that would have been of a piece with the slightly old-fashioned, comfortable furniture, but modern, stylish glasses that fit the hand in the most unassertive of ways. He picked one up and enjoyed the heft of it. On the spur of the moment, he poured himself a small Armagnac. It wasn’t a drink he’d normally have chosen, but the presence of three different varieties on the table convinced him that this had been the preferred tipple of Edmund Arthur Blythe. It felt appropriate to raise a glass of the old man’s favourite drink to his memory. Well, not to his memory as such, since Tony had no memory of him at all. Maybe to his attempt to make amends from beyond the grave. Even if it was a doomed attempt.
He sipped as he paced, mulling over everything he’d learned about Jennifer Maidment and her killer. Something stirred at the back of his mind. Something that had nibbled at the edge of his thoughts earlier. What had it been? He returned to his bag and took out the material Patterson had initially emailed to him. Crime-scene photos and the post-mortem report, that’s what he was interested in.
He studied each photograph carefully, paying particular attention to the shots of Jennifer’s mutilated body on the autopsy table. Then he read the original crime report again, taking particular note of the times. ‘The last confirmed sighting is quarter past four. The missing report comes in just after nine. And unless all the truckers are lying, you couldn’t have dumped her after half past seven, when the first two HGV drivers pulled in together. Really, you only had her for a couple of hours.’ He put down the report and paced again, coming to rest by the ornate wooden fire surround. He leaned on the mantel and stared down into the empty grate, trying to ease his way into the mind of Jennifer’s killer, trying to feel what he’d felt, know what he’d known.