Simon Beckett - The Restless Dead

‘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.