Graham Hurley: Western Approaches

Houghton was off the phone. Nandy wanted to know whether she’d secured a slot for the post-mortem.

‘Tomorrow morning,’ she said. ‘Half nine.’

‘Best they can do?’

‘Yes.’

‘Pathetic.’

‘I agree.’

Nandy headed for the door. He was off up to the local nick to commandeer a couple of offices where his team could camp out. The enquiry already had a name: Operation Constantine .

Houghton and Suttle paused a moment, then followed him out of the door. Nandy was halfway across the car park, heading for his Volvo. Houghton and Suttle exchanged glances. Houghton was a big woman with rimless glasses and a blaze of frizzy silver-blonde hair. She had huge hands, a live-in partner called Jules and spent a great deal of her spare time riding horses on the eastern edges of Dartmoor.

‘I’ll field the locksmith and liaise with Mark,’ she said. ‘I’ll bell you when we’re ready for the flash intel.’

‘And me?’

‘Talk to Ellie.’ She nodded back towards the office. ‘She likes you.’

Suttle did her bidding. He’d worked for D/I Carole Houghton for more than six months now and had developed a healthy respect. The steadiness of her gaze told you a great deal. This was someone you’d be foolish to underestimate.

Ellie offered him coffee. The kitchenette was next door. It wouldn’t take a second.

Suttle shook his head. He wanted to know more about Jake Kinsey. And about what he might have been up to last night.

‘That’s easy.’ Ellie was smiling. ‘He was in the pub.’

‘Which pub?’

‘The Beach. It’s just across the way.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Because we were there too. My partner and I.’

Kinsey, it turned out, had been in the middle of some kind of celebration. Saturday night the pub had been packed. Kinsey had turned up around eight with a smallish bunch of guys in tow. Ellie hadn’t recognised any of them but there had to be some kind of tie-up with the local rowing club because they were all in badged training gear, and Kinsey had made a big play of the silver cup he was carrying. Ellie was vague on the details but thought they must have been taking part in some competition or other and had won.

‘He bought champagne over the bar,’ she said, ‘and that doesn’t happen often in the Beach.’

Kinsey and his mates had stayed for maybe an hour. They’d all had a fair bit to drink.

‘What happened then?’

‘They left. Like you do.’

‘Where did they go? Do you know?’

‘Not really, but my guess would be home, Kinsey’s place. There was talk of phoning for a takeaway. I suppose Kinsey lived the closest so that’s where they went.’ She looked at the phone. ‘There’s a Mr Smart who lives in one of the flats below. Nothing gets past him. Do you want me to give him a ring?’

Suttle shook his head, making a note of the name. Organising the house-to-house calls would fall to D/I Houghton. He’d pass the intel on.

‘This rowing of Kinsey’s. How does that work?’

‘You get in a boat. It has oars.’ Ellie was flirting now. Suttle knew it. He was thinking of the badge on Kinsey’s singlet, the crossed blades.

‘Yeah. . sure. . so is there a club?’

‘Of course there’s a club. I just told you. ERC. Exmouth Rowing Club. Pride of the town. There’s someone else you ought to talk to. She’s the club secretary. Her name’s Doyle, Molly Doyle.’

‘You’ve got a number?’

‘I’m afraid not. Look on the website.’ The smile again. ‘Nice woman. Fun. Everyone calls her the Viking.’

Houghton kept her laptop in the back of her estate car. Still waiting for the locksmith, Suttle borrowed the keys, woke the dog up and made himself comfortable in the front passenger seat. It was raining again, harder than ever, and the CSI had draped Kinsey’s body with a square of blue plastic sheeting before taking cover in the Scenes of Crime van.

Suttle fired up the laptop and googled ‘Exmouth Rowing Club’. The website was impressive. The home page had an eye-catching banner featuring a crew of young rowers powering a boat towards some imagined line. This giant collective effort made for a great picture. Their mouths open, their backs straight, their faces contorted, these kids were exploring the thin red line between pain and glory, and Suttle lingered on the image for a moment, wondering how an experience like that might have triggered the celebration in the pub.

From the front of Houghton’s car, he had line of sight to the scene of crime across the entry to the dock. The warmth of his body had misted the windows but he wiped a clear panel with his fingertip, gazing across at the hummock of blue sheeting, trying to imagine the sequence of events that had linked several bottles of champagne to this inglorious death four or five hours later. Was the guy a depressive? Had he got so pissed he’d done something stupid and gravity-defying and just toppled off his own balcony? Or was the story more complex than that?

A keystroke took Suttle onto the contacts page. Molly Doyle’s number was listed under ‘Club Secretary’. He made a note and was fumbling for his mobile when Houghton appeared beside the passenger door.

Suttle wound down the window. The locksmith had arrived.

It was still barely nine o’clock by the time Lizzie got Grace washed and changed. Despite the weather, she knew she had to get out of the house. Jimmy had taken the car so the only option was yet another walk.

She watched Grace tottering towards her, then scooped her up, hugged her tight and strapped her into the buggy. During nearly two years of motherhood Lizzie had often wondered about this new role of hers, but there were moments when they seemed bonded, and this was one of them. She wouldn’t wish a rural winter on anyone, least of all her own daughter, but apart from the odd tantrum and a recent talent for ignoring the word no, Grace seemed to have weathered the discomforts. Lizzie put this down to her husband’s evenness of temper. She’d never met anyone so tolerant, so easy-going, and it had always been a surprise — back in Pompey — to talk to his mates in the Job and learn how relentless and proactive he could be. So why hadn’t some of this can-do spirit spilled into their own little lives? How come she still had to wrestle the back door open because the wood had swollen with the incessant rain?

She pushed the buggy along the lane, keeping to the right, splashing through the puddles in her wellington boots. One of the early lessons she’d learned about the countryside was how difficult it was to find anywhere decent to walk. From a car, or an armchair in front of yet another episode of Countryfile , it was all too easy to imagine a world of endless outings, mother and child spoiled to death by this magnificent landscape: crossing fields, pausing beside rivers or streams, watching the first of the spring lambs, glorying in the freedom and the fresh air.

The reality, alas, was very different. Everywhere you looked turned out to be someone else’s property. Everything was badged: PRIVATE, NO ENTRY, BEWARE OF THE DOG, TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED. And if you finally managed to make it through the long straggle of village and down to the river, chances were that the footpath was ankle-deep in mud from the last downpour.

The rain came often, blowing in from the west on the big Atlantic depressions. Early on, before Christmas even, Lizzie had learned to read the sky, recognising the telltale wisps of cloud that promised the arrival of yet another frontal system as the light died, and it wasn’t long before her battle with the weather became intensely personal. She hated the wet. She loathed having to dry everything in front of a one-bar electric fire. She spent hours every day trying to hoover mud from that horrible carpet in the sitting room. And night after night she lay awake, trying to distinguish between a multitude of drips. Water came in through the roof, spreading patches of damp across every ceiling in the house, and leaked from a crack in the back boiler behind the fireplace.