Simon Beckett - The Restless Dead

‘So what’s happening now?’

He stirred his tea with a plastic spoon. ‘We’ve got the helicopter and marine unit out, and foot patrols searching where we can in the Backwaters. But you’ve seen yourself what it’s like in there. The tide was already going out by the time her dad found her car, so she could have wound up anywhere. Best chance is if the tide took her as far as the estuary, because then sooner or later she’ll wash up on the Barrows.’

He was talking about a body, not an injured survivor. ‘You don’t think there’s a chance she could still be alive?’

‘There’s always a chance.’

His tone made it clear how unlikely he thought that was. Even if Stacey had managed to crawl from the car rather than being thrown out, she’d have still had to fight against the tidal current in the cold water. I’d felt how strong its pull was when my car stalled on the causeway. That had only been knee deep, and I hadn’t been involved in a crash. Stunned and possibly injured, weighted down by waterlogged clothes and probably disorientated in the darkness, it wouldn’t have been easy for her to reach the bank.

The fact that we were having this conversation suggested she hadn’t.

‘How’s Coker taking it?’ I asked.

Lundy turned down his mouth, moustache bristling as he took a sip of tea. ‘As you’d expect. If he’s any sense, Jamie Trask should steer well clear of him.’

I hadn’t thought about that, but Lundy was right. Jamie hadn’t been directly responsible for the accident, but I didn’t think Coker would see it that way.

We fell silent in the echoing clatter of the cafeteria. I dutifully chewed my way through a limp cheese sandwich while Lundy tore the cellophane wrapper from a pre-packaged slice of fruitcake. He’d already eaten lunch but had decided he had room for a piece of cake. To keep me company, he’d said, smiling sheepishly.

‘Funny places, these,’ he said out of the blue, looking around the half-empty room. ‘Hospital cafés, I mean. Always the same, wherever you go. Everything seems normal, but nothing is, if you get my drift.’

I hadn’t really thought about it before, but then I’d once worked and trained in a hospital. That gave you a different perspective. ‘People have to eat.’

‘I suppose.’ He’d finished the cake, and now absently began snapping off pieces of polystyrene from the rim of his cup. ‘I’m here again myself tomorrow. The hospital, not this place.’

I looked across at him, wondering if this explained his odd mood. ‘Is everything OK?’

The DI looked embarrassed, as though he regretted saying as much as he had. ‘Oh, it’s just routine stuff. Endoscopy. They think I might have an ulcer. Lot about nothing, but you know what doctors are like.’

‘Pesky bunch, aren’t we?’

I’d noticed Lundy taking antacids but put it down to indigestion. He gave me a smile, acknowledging that he’d forgotten I’d been a GP myself.

‘How are you getting on with the body from the creek?’ he asked, moving off the topic. ‘Did you manage to look at the post-mortem report?’

‘I did, yes.’ The news about Stacey Coker had dominated our conversation until now, so I hadn’t had a chance to broach anything else. ‘There are a lot more broken bones than I’d expect.’

‘Couldn’t they be from being hit by a boat?’

‘They could, but it would have to have been travelling fast or be pretty big to do that much damage. Hard to see that happening in the Backwaters.’

‘We don’t know where the body came from. It could have been carried in from the estuary, or even further out.’

‘And then stayed afloat long enough to get tangled up in the barbed wire like it was?’

Lundy watched himself break more pieces from the top of the polystyrene cup. ‘I know. Doesn’t seem likely, does it? Hard to see anything other than a boat prop that could have caused those injuries to the face, though.’

‘Perhaps.’

His eyebrows went up. ‘Have you found something?’

‘I might have,’ I admitted. ‘It’s hard to see enough detail from the X-rays. I won’t know for sure until I’ve examined the actual skull.’

‘Well, keep me posted.’ Lundy already seemed distracted again. ‘I checked into Sir Stephen’s driver, by the way. His name’s Brendan Porter. Forty-nine years old, been driving for the Villiers for over twenty years. Bit of a bad lad when he was younger, but then joined the army at eighteen and straightened himself out. Got taken on as a stand-in when the normal driver was ill and wound up replacing him. Seems like an odd fit, but if he’s been there all this time he must have found a niche for himself.’

‘Why do you think he was quizzing me? Trying to ingratiate himself with his boss?’

‘Sir Stephen hardly needs his driver to tell him what’s going on,’ Lundy said drily. ‘I dare say he’d have reported back if he’d learned anything juicy but my guess is he was just fishing. Maybe he hoped you’d open up more if he badmouthed Leo.’

I thought about the man’s knowing smile as he’d insulted his employer’s son. Watching to see how I’d react. ‘Taking a chance, wasn’t he? What if it got back to Sir Stephen?’

Lundy snorted. ‘Would you tell him something like that?’

No, I had to concede I probably wouldn’t. Still, this Porter must be either very blasé or confident of his position to risk it. ‘What about him knowing we’d found a second body?’

‘Not much we can do about that. People are always going to talk, and the local press have picked up on it now anyway, which was always going to happen after Trask took his daughter to hospital. The official line is that the body’s an unknown male and pre-dates Leo Villiers’ disappearance, so they’re running with the idea it’s an accidental death unconnected to any other investigation. Which it still might be.’

I gave him a look. He smiled.

‘I know, I don’t believe in coincidences either. But it’s better not to make too many waves at this stage. Except for Sir Stephen, who’s still refusing to believe us anyway, everyone still assumes the body from the estuary is Leo Villiers’. We’d rather keep it that way, at least until we get confirmation from the DNA results. If Villiers is still alive, we’ve got more chance of finding him if he believes he’s safe.’

‘You think he could still be in the area?’

Lundy had gone back to snapping chunks off the edge of his cup. ‘I doubt it, but it’s possible. We’ve got the National Crime Agency looking into the possibility he’s abroad, but there haven’t been any hits on his passport. So if he’s left the country he didn’t cross any checkpoints. Not under his own name, anyway.’

That didn’t necessarily mean anything. Someone with Leo Villiers’ money and resources could always forge a new identity, and there was no shortage of isolated creeks and coves along this coast where boats could come and go unobserved.

But there was something else that had been bothering me.

‘If Villiers staged all this to make it look like he’d killed himself, he was taking a hell of a risk,’ I said. ‘He couldn’t know how long it would take for the body to be found, or even that it would be. It might have washed up in the first few days, when it still had fingerprints or before it lost its feet. We’d have known straight away it wasn’t him.’

‘We would,’ Lundy agreed, nodding slowly. ‘But we don’t know enough about the circumstances. Maybe Villiers wasn’t thinking clearly. Not many people do when they’ve just killed someone.’

That was true enough, and something I’d seen for myself before now. Few murderers have enough presence of mind — let alone the know-how — to plan for everything. In that heightened, adrenalin-stoked state even obvious details are overlooked.